“Khaled al-Khalifa bombed our embassy in Rome,” Gabriel said with certainty.
“Anything else?”
Yes, he thought. Yasir Arafat had personally ordered Tariq al-Hourani to murder his wife and son.
11 JERUSALEM: MARCH 23
GABRIEL’S BEDSIDE TELEPHONE RANG AT TWO A.M. It was Yaakov.
“Looks like your visit to the Mukata has stirred the hornet’s nest.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m outside in the street.”
The connection went dead. Gabriel sat up in bed and dressed in the dark.
“Who was that?” Chiara asked, her voice heavy with sleep.
Gabriel told her.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know.”
He bent to kiss her forehead. Chiara’s arm rose from the blankets, curled around the back of his neck, and drew him to her mouth. “Be careful,” she whispered, her lips against his cheek.
A moment later he was buckled into the passenger seat of Yaakov’s unmarked Volkswagen Golf, racing westward across Jerusalem. Yaakov drove ludicrously fast, in true Sabra fashion, with the wheel in one hand and coffee and a cigarette in the other. The headlamps of the oncoming traffic threw an unkind light on the pockmarked features of his uncompromising face.
“His name is Mahmoud Arwish,” Yaakov said. “One of our most important assets inside the Palestinian Authority. He works in the Mukata. Very close to Arafat.”
“Who made the approach?”
“Arwish sent up a flare a couple of hours ago and said he wanted to talk.”
“About what?”
“Khaled, of course.”
“What does he know?”
“He wouldn’t say.”
“Why do you need me? Why isn’t he talking to his controller?”
“I’m his controller,” Yaakov said, “but the person he really wants to talk to is you.”
They had reached the western edge of the New City. To Gabriel’s right, bathed in the silver light of a newly risen moon, lay the flatlands of the West Bank. Old hands called it “Shabak country.” It was a land where the usual rules did not apply-and where the few conventions that did exist could be bent or broken whenever it was deemed necessary to combat Arab terror. Men such as Yaakov were the mailed fist of Israeli security, foot soldiers who engaged in the dirty work of counterterrorism. Shabakniks had the power to arrest without cause and search without warrants, to shut down businesses and dynamite houses. They lived on nerves and nicotine, drank too much coffee and slept too little. Their wives left them, their Arab informants feared and hated them. Gabriel, though he had dispensed the ultimate sanction of the State, always considered himself fortunate that he had been asked to join the Office and not Shabak.
Shabak’s methods were sometimes at odds with the principles of a democratic state, and, like the Office, public scandals had damaged its reputation both at home and abroad. The worst was the infamous Bus 300 Affair. In April 1984, bus No. 300, en route from Tel Aviv to the southern city of Ashkelon, was hijacked by four Palestinians. Two were killed during the military rescue operation; the two surviving terrorists were led into a nearby wheat field and never seen again. Later it was revealed that the hijackers had been beaten to death by Shabak officers acting under orders from their director-general. A series of scandals followed in quick succession, each exposing some of Shabak’s most ruthless methods: violence, coerced confessions, blackmail, and deception. Shabak’s defenders were fond of saying that interrogations of suspected terrorists cannot be conducted over a pleasant cup of coffee. Its goals, regardless of the scandals, remained unchanged. Shabak was not interested in catching terrorists after blood was shed. It wanted to stop the terrorists before they could strike, and, if possible, to frighten young Arabs from ever going the way of violence.
Yaakov applied the brakes suddenly to avoid colliding with a slow-moving transit van. Simultaneously he flashed his lights and pounded on the car horn. The van responded by changing lanes. As Yaakov shot past, Gabriel glimpsed a pair of Haredim conducting an animated conversation as though nothing had happened.
Yaakov tossed a kippah onto Gabriel’s lap. It was larger than most and loosely knitted, with an orange-and-amber pattern against a black background. Gabriel understood the significance of its design.
“We’ll cross the line as settlers, just in case anyone from PA Security or Hamas is watching the checkpoints.”
“Where are we from?”
“Kiryat Devorah,” Yaakov replied. “It’s in the Jordan Valley. We’re never going to set foot there.”
Gabriel held up the skullcap. “I take it we’re not terribly popular with the local population.”
“Let’s just say that the residents of Kiryat Devorah take their commitment to the Land of Israel quite seriously.”
Gabriel slipped the kippah onto his head and adjusted the angle. Yaakov briefed Gabriel as he drove: the procedures for crossing into the West Bank, the route they would take to the Arab village where Arwish was waiting, the method of extraction. When Yaakov finished, he reached into the backseat and produced an Uzi miniature submachine gun.
“I prefer this,” said Gabriel, holding up his Beretta.
Yaakov laughed. “This is the West Bank, not the Left Bank. Don’t be a fool, Gabriel. Take the Uzi.”
Gabriel reluctantly took the weapon and rammed a magazine of ammunition into the butt. Yaakov covered his head with a kippah identical to the one he’d given Gabriel. A few miles beyond Ben-Gurion Airport he exited the motorway and followed a two-lane road eastward toward the West Bank. The Separation Fence, looming before them, cast a black shadow across the landscape.
At the checkpoint a Shabak man stood among the IDF soldiers. As Yaakov approached, the Shabak man murmured a few words to the soldiers and the Volkswagen was allowed to pass without inspection. Yaakov, clear of the checkpoint, raced along the moon-washed road at high speed. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder and saw a pair of headlights. The lights floated there for a time, then receded into the night. Yaakov seemed to take no notice of them. The second car, Gabriel suspected, belonged to a Shabak countersurveillance team.
A sign warned that Ramallah lay four kilometers ahead. Yaakov turned off the road, onto a dirt track that ran through the bed of an ancient wadi. He doused his headlamps and navigated the wadi with only the amber glow of his parking lights. After a moment he brought the car to a stop.
“Open the glove box.”
Gabriel did as he was told. Inside was a pair of kaffiyehs.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Cover your face,” Yaakov said. “All of it, the way they do.”
Yaakov, in a practiced motion, bound his head in the kaffiyeh and tied it at his throat, so that his face was concealed except for a thin slit for his eyes. Gabriel did the same. Yaakov started driving again, plunging along the darkened wadi with both hands wrapped around the wheel, leaving Gabriel with the uncomfortable feeling he was seated next to an Arab militant on a suicide run. A mile farther on, they came to a narrow paved road. Yaakov turned onto the road and followed it north.
The village was small, even by West Bank standards, and gripped by an air of sudden desertion-a collection of squat, dun-colored houses crouched around the narrow spire of a minaret, with scarcely a light burning anywhere. In the center of the village lay a small market square. There were no other cars and no pedestrians, only a flock of goats nosing amid fallen produce.