THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller (4 page)

The three policemen spotted Seiden and stepped up to block his path. He flashed his identity card. The policeman closest to him gave it a cursory glance, then suddenly stepped back, dropped his cigarette to the ground, and issued a sharp salute.

Seiden saluted back. “Is Captain Rubenstein inside?”

“Apartment 2 B. Yes, sir.”

Seiden stared at the policeman with a level gaze. Then he glanced down at the cigarette still burning at his feet. “As you were.”

Seiden mounted the steps. As soon as he had disappeared into the lobby, the young lieutenant turned to his fellow cops and mouthed the word, “Mossad.”

Seiden took the stairs instead of the elevator. He didn’t like elevators. He’d always considered them a waste of electricity. Seiden couldn’t understand why people invariably took the elevator even when they were only going up one flight or two. And then they paid outrageous sums to join a health club or a gym. It made no sense. He was a man who disliked tall buildings, not from vertigo or fear of fire. He simply preferred things in human dimensions.

Captain Rubenstein was waiting outside apartment 2 B. The lieutenant downstairs must have alerted him to his arrival, Seiden thought, because he stood there poised and ready. Seiden shook the Captain’s hand. Rubenstein looked pale and ill at ease. His fingers were moist. Seiden had never seen him so distraught.

“Acting Chief Seiden,” the Captain said, and Seiden noticed how Rubenstein found solace in the salutation. Titles were settling things. They showed you where you stood. They rooted you.

“I’m sorry I had to bother you at this hour . . . ”

Seiden waved a hand and the Captain opened the door to the apartment. They were immediately assaulted by the acrid smell of smoke. Rubenstein moved ahead of him to lead the way.

Policemen and members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) crowded the living room. Near the sliding glass door that opened onto the balcony, Seiden spotted a dead, middle-aged bald man tied to a chair with his back to him. Beside him, kneeling on the floor, his hands handcuffed behind him, was a skinny Arab. He was dressed in traditional Arab garb, with a grey
aba
, and the red and white
keffiyeh
headdress of the Palestinian. Two soldiers stood above the suspect, their automatic weapons trained on the back of his head.

Two young boys, no more than ten or eleven, were lashed to another pair of chairs, perpendicular to the dead man by the windows. Seiden could see strange cuts, in the shape of Arabic script, slashed into their skin. They both appeared to be naked. It was difficult to tell. Their bodies were ribbed with glassy burn marks, gunpowder black.

Seiden turned toward Rubenstein and said, “Please have the room cleared, Captain.” Then he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pair of off-white latex gloves.

Rubenstein issued the order, and the soldiers and policemen filed out one by one without a word. Seiden walked over to where the Arab was kneeling on the floor. The suspect didn’t look at him. He didn’t even look up. He simply knelt there, facing the floor, as if in prayer. Seiden slipped on the latex gloves.

All of the victims were lined up in a row, with the middle-aged man facing the sea, and the children at right angles to him. A bloody carpet lay on the floor by the glass door leading to the balcony. Seiden approached the bodies of the boys. He touched the forehead of the nearest victim, tilting the head back. It lolled over to the side. No rigor mortis, he thought. He peered into the open mouth. The face was practically warm. He leaned over, taking a closer look at the wounds on the boy’s chest and stomach: carved Arabic script; and some kind of foliation, burned into the flesh. It appeared as if each of the victims had been tortured and then set ablaze with some kind of combustible material. Probably magnesium ribbon, Seiden thought, remembering a high school science class from years before, when he had set a magnesium strip on fire, acetylene bright, spitting and smoking like a sparkler. Around their arms. Around their necks and thighs.

Captain Rubenstein was calling him. “I think you’d better take a look at this.” He pointed toward a video camera set up on a tripod in a corner of the room. “He taped the entire . . . thing,” he added, faltering. “Shall I play it for you?” Rubenstein rewound the tape. It was one of those Japanese models with a mini-screen that popped out to the side. It whirred like a toy.

“Not now,” said Seiden. “Later. I think I can see what happened.” He turned toward the sliding door. “The suspect scaled the façade of the apartment building and climbed up over the balcony. The curtains were probably drawn at the time and they didn’t see him until he was in the room. By then, of course, it was too late.”

Seiden walked over toward the balcony and gazed down through the sliding door at the street below, the stores and small apartment buildings just across the way, the tranquil sea . . . the naked woman lying on the broken light blue Fiat. Without turning, he added, “He probably threatened to kill the children, the two boys, unless she killed herself, sacrificed her own life for theirs.” His voice was slow and steady, emotionless. “Eventually she agreed, and slit her own wrists.” He turned and looked at the immolated figures in the chairs. “Then he stripped the children of their clothes and lashed them to the chairs. Once their ankles and wrists were secured, he used what appears to have been a long, sharp knife or razor blade, flaying the skin on their backs into those tiny curved strips.” He shook his head. “Although he was faced the other way, I’m sure the father knew exactly what was happening to his children. Then the suspect pulled out a roll of metal ribbon and trussed the bodies up in silver coils – first the boys, and then the man – wrapping them up like . . . like presents at Hanukkah. He set them on fire, while they were still alive. You can see that from the soot in their throats. They were still breathing when their skin began to burn.”

Seiden paused for a moment. “Then he took the body of the woman – wrapped in that carpet over there – and tossed her from the balcony onto the car below.” He looked over at Rubenstein. He smiled a flat thin smile. “Well,” he added, “am I right?”

Rubenstein nodded. He closed the side of the video camera, removed it from its tripod, and dropped it into a large clear plastic bag. “I’m sure you know what this means,” he said.

Seiden walked over to the man lashed to the chair by the sliding door. Sheer white cotton curtains wafted around his body like the wings of an angel, a shroud newly thrown. They shivered on the breeze. The dead man’s face looked tattooed, a mask of petrified terror. His brown eyes bulged as if the magnesium ribbon – which had been wrapped, again and again, around his neck – had constricted slowly as it burned, strangling him with fire. He had bitten his tongue off at the tip. It hung like some organic growth from his lower lip. His entire body was covered with burns, bright black, like the carapace of some gigantic beetle.

“Call in the forensics team,” said Seiden. “And have the IDF take the suspect to police headquarters. I’ll have a car pick him up from there.”

“It’s him, isn’t it?” Rubenstein continued. “Isn’t it, sir?” His voice was filled with awe. “Who else would . . . ” He could not finish. He pointed at the boys. “This is his trademark, isn’t it? This kind of writing with fire. I thought he was dead. That’s what I heard. Killed by a rocket strike in Lebanon three years ago.”

“Call your men please, Captain.”

Rubenstein stepped forward and yanked the Arab to his feet. He was still praying. He was still mumbling underneath his breath as the soldiers returned and ushered him away.

Seiden pulled off his latex gloves, wiped his hands across his trouser legs, and glanced down at his watch. His daughters were probably on their way to school by now. Dara would be driving them, along the open and defenseless roadways of the city. And, at home, the blankets and sheets would still be warm from their small bodies, would still retain the memory of dreams.

Seiden looked over at Captain Rubenstein who hovered expectantly by the hallway. Seiden knew only too well what this trademark torture meant. The thin, rather nondescript Arab in custody was the infamous El Aqrab, one of Israel’s most wanted terrorists, responsible for dozens of bombings, thousands of innocent deaths, affiliated with both Hamas and Hezbollah, leader of the Brotherhood of the Crimson Scimitar, with shadowy ties all across the Middle East and Europe, and beyond.

“He didn’t even try to run,” said Captain Rubenstein. “He was waiting when my men arrived, in the center of the room, just waiting like that, on his knees. It doesn’t make sense, sir. Why throw her body from the balcony, alert the world? It’s like he wanted to be caught. As if he’s given up.”

Seiden glanced once more at the two boys in the chairs, their anguished immolated faces, the script tattooed across their flesh. “No, Captain. I’m afraid he’s only just begun.”

Chapter 3

Friday, January 28 – 1:06 AM

La Palma
, The Canary Islands

Giles Pickings pulled at the cord above him and turned on the naked light bulb overhead. Then, with a sigh, he shuffled down the narrow wooden staircase and began to rummage around in his storm cellar. After a few minutes, he found the box that he was looking for. He opened it and there it was. He pulled out the wine-colored blanket, draped it across one arm, and patted it lovingly. It had belonged to his wife, Layla. The blanket had covered up a thousand memories along the years, and they all came spilling out now as he pushed the material to his face. He could still smell her. Pickings spun about and rushed back up the stairs.

The cellar door opened up onto the side of the house overlooking the Atlantic. It was a cool and windy night on the island of La Palma. The stars glared down through inky clouds, behind the sloping shoulders of the Cumbre Vieja ridge just to the south, illuminated by a crescent moon. No wonder astronomers from all over the globe had set up domed observatories on the top of the Caldera de Taburiente National Parque, 2,400 meters above sea level. Pickings staggered around the house, buffeted by the wind that swept across the Canary Islands chain, and made his way inside.

At the center of the living room stood a Sound Leisure Beatles jukebox, half buried in a crate. Pickings draped the blanket over the veneered marine ply cabinet, the polycarbonate tube pillers, the plastic periscopes, the cartoon figurines – John, Paul, and George, and Ringo, inside their Yellow Submarine. He had purchased the jukebox in Leeds, back in the ‘70s. Surely, I have time for just one more, he thought. He plugged it in, turned on the jukebox, and made a selection.
Help
began to play. Listening to the music for the last time, Pickings was sad to see it go. But hard times had driven him to sell off most of his belongings. He hadn’t had a choice. The Sound Leisure had fetched almost five thousand pounds. Besides, he was better off without it. The jukebox was a memory machine.

Pickings was a retired Housemaster from Wyckham College, an English boarding school in Winchester, Hampshire, England. He was fifty-six years old, with a heart-shaped face, thin gray hair and gold wire-rimmed glasses that constantly descended down his pudgy nose. An expert in Papal history, he’d been married to Layla Pickings for almost thirty years, before she had disappeared one day, never to return. Layla was Lebanese; they’d met years before in Beirut, while he was doing research on a book about the Crusades. He used to travel quite a lot in those days, going from school to school across Europe to teach, like some ancient troubadour. But now all that was finished. Pickings stumbled about the house, listening to the music. The house had once belonged to his great aunt, Jane Chilvers, who had recently passed away and left him this property between the towns of Buena Alta and Tigalate, plus a modest inheritance.

Layla had vanished before, of course. In fact, it had been a regular feature of their marriage. Every four months or so, she would simply disappear for a few days. At first Pickings had thought she’d taken a lover, but when he confronted her, she denied it. “Sometimes,” she said, “I just need to be alone. It isn’t about you. But with the children and your work, sometimes I need some time for me, just for myself. To be alone. To just be me.” And, for some strange reason, he had believed her. He had wanted to believe her. And she’d always returned, revitalized, almost rejuvenated.

One time, at the beginning of their marriage, he had tried to follow her, but she’d spotted him with ease and they’d had a terrible row. “You have to trust me,” she had said. “If you love me, just let me be.” So he had given up his sleuthing. It was only for a few days anyway, at most a week, and, after a while, he found himself enjoying her departures. It gave him time to be alone as well, to work, to bond with their two children. And she always came back. Until the last time, anyway.

After a fortnight of worrying, he finally called the police. They made a half-baked effort to locate her, to no avail. Pickings ran advertisements in the local papers and in the
London Times
. He even issued a reward. But the months rolled by without a word. Layla had simply vanished. Then, a new nightmare began. The police, frustrated by the disappearance, began to ask him questions that could only be interpreted one way: They thought
he
was responsible, that
he
had murdered his own wife, and then buried her somewhere. For weeks, they kept him under surveillance. He would leave the College House and see them parked across the street. He would see them after class, or in town when he went shopping. They kept bringing him down for questioning. They grilled him for hours and hours, to no avail. He was innocent, after all, and – in the end – they’d been forced to let him go. His alibis were immaculate. He had never run afoul of the law, never been violent, never argued with Layla in public. And they could see he was an exemplary father.

Pickings winced as he remembered. It was the children who had suffered most of all. They could not understand how their mother could simply leave like that. Pickings had always made up excuses about her previous disappearances: She was visiting her sister in Paris; or friends in London; or her extensive family in Beirut. And they’d never doubted him. In the end, the mere uncertainty of it, the fact that they knew nothing, had worn the family down. They began to blame themselves. They wracked their brains trying to imagine what they’d done wrong, or what they’d said to drive her off. But, for the life of them, they could not remember anything. Even after all this time, he still couldn’t.