However, just as the air parted smoothly around the glider, the electronic waves from the search radars passed through the plastic skin of the sailplane as easily as light penetrates window glass. Shapiro entered the capital city’s airspace undetected.
He could see the White House straight ahead, off in the distance. At just more than 3,000 feet altitude, he was well above the highest buildings, but close enough to the ground to begin to attract attention.
A few people pointed at the strange aircraft, its long thin wings distinguishing it from any other type of airplane except, oddly enough, from Cold War U-2 spy planes, which had been nothing more than jet-powered sailplanes. The silent flight of the glider allowed it to slip over most people unnoticed, however.
Calm enveloped Ben—the calm he felt as he rose from the attorney’s table in court to give his closing argument to a jury. Too late for doubts in the righteousness of his client’s cause by then. It was all a matter of winning.
Or losing.
This time, though, doubts persisted. Has there ever been a bomb-throwing tzadik? he wondered.
He could make out individual cars, people below him. They have less than ten minutes to live, he thought. I’m going to kill a lot of children.
Like Adam.
Adam. Tears filled his eyes. He wiped them abruptly. Not now. Focus. He turned his head to glance again at the bomb. He’d yanked Goldhersh’s jacket off the device. The cold, shiny cylinder was bathed in sunlight coming through the canopy, illuminating the cover over the final button. The red plastic pulsed in the sunlight.
A panicked thought. I haven’t made sure I can reach the button.
Ben twisted his body and strained behind him in the narrow cockpit. His right hand stopped six inches from the red cover. He slapped his left hand to the round buckle on his chest holding the ends of the safety straps and gave it a savage twist, freeing the straps.
His right hand rested on the red cover. He lifted it slowly.
Strange, he thought. The button is red, too.
He carefully lowered the cover over the button and twisted back into his seat, then reattached all the safety straps. He could no more fly an airplane with his straps unbuckled than he could drive a car without a seat belt. That was not procedure.
Another thought came. I should have worn a yellow star.
He pictured Lawrence Quaid, a brush of a Hitler mustache under his nose. I’m going to kill today’s Hitler. Stop today’s Holocaust.
That picture was replaced by a memory of Catherine Quaid pinning a yellow Star of David to her blouse. He smiled as he recalled telling her about the king of Denmark.
She is a tzadik, he thought. She knew right from wrong. She did right, rather than wrong. There’s a person who took a personal risk for a cause in which she believed. She’s probably in the White House now.
Am I a tzadik if I kill a tzadik?
He looked at the ground. This low, the plane’s speed was exhilarating. He liked flying low and fast. Nobody is looking up at me, he thought. They don’t know I’m here. Nobody knows what I’m carrying. The Angel of Death is passing over their houses and they don’t know it.
The Angel of Death. Like in Egypt. At Passover.
Can the Angel of Death be a tzadik?
The Angel of Death freed the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. That was the Passover story. That rabbi, at the march, had said that God sent the Angel of Death to slay the enemies of Israel. The Angel of Death, or God himself, was the world’s greatest terrorist, the rabbi said.
Is that what I am, the world’s greatest terrorist?
And after the slaying, enemies always struck again. In seventy-five years of Israel’s existence, how many times did Israelis attack Palestinians? Who then retaliated against Israel. Which retaliated against Palestine.
Which then struck back. All in God’s name. Everybody killing in God’s name, Shapiro thought. So, now I’m doing God’s work, igniting an atom bomb over the nation’s capital, the capital of the country in which I was raised?
He wondered whether it was the same God who kept the Red Sox from winning the World Series when he was a kid, the God who let awful things happen to good people. Like Sally. Like Adam.
Did the man who killed Sally believe he was doing a righteous deed? Did he believe he was doing God’s work, Israel’s work? Or did he follow some other God and do that God’s work? Did he care that he was going to kill innocent people?
And children.
Adam. I’m fighting back for Adam’s sake, in Adam’s memory. Right? Did Adam’s murderer, too, think of himself as a righteous man?
He thought about the children in Damascus. How many children died from that bomb?
How will their fathers retaliate?
Ben flew the glider without conscious thought. His mind spinning. Thoughts racing. Then calm.
Like sunlight breaking between parting clouds, the realization struck Shapiro that he was just another bomber. Just one bounce of a ping-pong ball of perpetual retaliation in a match that had been playing for centuries. Longer.
I’m not a hero executing Hitler. I’m going to kill some other man’s wife, some other father’s son.
A coward murdered Sally and Adam. Not a hero. Not a tzadik.
Ben stared straight ahead over the airplane’s rounded nose. There was the White House.
Men on the roof spotted the glider.
Suddenly a streak of white smoke rose from the White House roof and flew directly toward the glider, then another streak next to it. Then another. And another.
They’re shooting missiles at me, he realized, strangely surprised. Will the bomb go off if a missile hits it?
The white trails behind the ground-to-air Stinger missiles twisted into corkscrews as the heat-seeking electronics in their noses searched ahead of the missiles for hot engine exhaust.
The sailplane, of course, had no exhaust.
Instead, the missiles locked onto the hottest object in the sky, turned upward, and climbed toward the sun, falling to the ground when their fuel was exhausted.
Ben pictured Catherine Quaid standing at one of the second-floor windows, staring at the strange airplane flying toward her.
Catherine Quaid. America’s royalty. America’s version of the king of Denmark, he thought. I can’t kill Catherine Quaid.
I can’t kill other fathers’Adams. I can’t do this thing. I won’t. I can’t.
Break the chain; stop the ping-pong match.
He pictured Catherine Quaid smiling at him.
The White House seemed to rush toward him, rather than he toward it. The National Mall was to his right, 2,500 feet below.
“Enough,” he said out loud. “Stop it.”
I promised I would do this, he thought. People are depending on me. Now is the time. He reached for the safety-belt buckle. Time for the bomb.
No, he thought.
“No,” he shouted. “I can’t do this. It isn’t right. It isn’t right.”
The red button remained covered.
He moved the control stick as far to the right as it would go, dropping the plane’s right wing toward the ground. His left leg straightened, swinging the plane’s nose to the left.