"Christ, after getting smeared by that hysterical miz?"
"Fanatics take a lot of killing," Engels shrugged. "He apparently ran out while a gaggle of reporters were trying to learn how to pull a trigger, and he had some woman waiting in a getaway car. By the way, the Vercours woman was anything but hysterical. Maybe you haven't seen a tai kwando offense used in anger, but I have. Vercours is foxy."
"Damn' right," Everett grinned, remembering the way those long legs moved, the strawberry sheen in the honey-blonde hair. "But she's just a trifle butch for my taste."
"Not foxy looking; foxy smart," Engels said, corraling a speck of chicken. "A pretty hard target. And she'd better be, leaving that Chaim character loose somewhere with his nuts in a splint."
"I thought that's what I heard." Everett frowned. "Chaim isn't Arabic, it's about as Hebraic as you can get. I mean, what the hell?"
"Some Jew you turned out to be," Engels chuckled, glancing at his watch. "Immigration photo and prints on the weapon checked perfectly. The young guy was one Chaim Mardor. He's Israeli, all right, from some religious order so strict it doesn't even believe there is an Israel. Even though he was born there. Don't ask me to justify it, pal; I can't."
Everett watched Engels signal the waitress, reviewing old tales his mother had spun with friends from Tel Aviv. Natural? Something to do with nature? "Neturay Karta," he blurted; "right?"
"Something like that," Engels agreed, then switched to his frail imitation of Yiddischer speech: "God forbid I should have to keep all those momzers straight."
"One of these days you're gonna give offense," Everett beamed at his departing friend. "But not this time."
"Because I let you beat me at handball," Engels guessed.
"Let me's rickety ass. No, because you bought lunch." They exchanged grins, like most middle-aged American males unable to say what they felt: our competition is trivial; our affection is not. Everett watched Engels filch mints near the cash register, then let his smile slowly fade as Engels walked out.
He lingered at his table, reflecting on the irony of an orthodox Jewish sect so conservative it could find common cause with Third-World radicals. `Neturay Karta,' his sabra mother had said, meant 'guardians of the city.' In the orthodox quarters of some Israeli cities lay houses and attitudes musty with a hundred generations of tradition. Old Testament Hebrew scriptures insisted that ha-messiach, the Messiah, would come one day—but at a time when He was most needed; a time when there was no Israel.
The strict fundamentalist Neturay Karta sect argued that, since the scriptures were scrupulously exact, the Messiah would not come so long as Israel existed. Therefore, they reasoned, they must abet the Coming of ha-messiach by destroying the State of Israel. If young kibbutz women strayed into Neturay Karta haunts in short sleeves or worse, shorts, they risked being stoned by fundamentalists who would rather have a dog carcass putrefying in the street than have it removed by a girl in such scandalous garb. Everett had heard of retaliatory raids by kibbutzim to break a few heads in the old quarter. Until now it had seemed a joke to Everett, albeit a bad one. But Chaim Mardor was no joke; he had shot down a passerby as if eradicating vermin. To Mardor it had to be a sort of holy war; an Arab's jehad. And there could be no greater glory for some than to die in a jehad.
To a true believer it all made sense. Everett finished his coffee and headed for the heliport, wondering.
He wondered just how retired David Engels was.
He wondered how much money Gina Vercours made—assuming that money was her motive.
He wondered if he would ever have time to visit Frontierland.
Deplaning at Denver, Everett went immediately to the Hertz people. His own Mini-Cooper 'S,' a tiny British racing sedan with the look of an unsanforized golf cart, was undergoing an operation. In his enthusiasm Everett had permitted a specialist to shave the head too far. Now it was being replaced for reliability. The Mini was a rolling joke, but the laugh was on the other fellow. Despite their boxy shapes the Minis had thrashed Porsches in Alpine road-racing. Like Everett, his Mini was getting older; and like him it had attained scruffiness without losing much stamina.
Hertz had the compact Zephyrs; nothing smaller. While he waited, Everett idly took note of the little man in the dark jeans and zippered turtleneck who stood nearby. The man's identification did not suit the Hertz girl too well, but she would let him take a big Mercury if he could provide cash plus deposit in advance. The little man paid in Canadian currency and made a notation in his Hewlett-Packard calculator. Everett took the Zephyr's key and his credit card, nodded to the man, and walked away wondering.
He wondered where he had met the little man's combination of accent and gesture before; the face was wholly unfamiliar.
MONDAY, 6 OCTOBER, 1980:
Late on a Monday afternoon, Talith swooped past her mail slot en route from the experimental psych lab to a seminar. Graduate students did not rate locked boxes, but at least they did not have to sort through a stack. She glanced at the cubbyhole above her name, passed on, then abruptly checked her progress and fished out the small perfumed envelope. From a woman?' Probably the letter had been placed in the wrong slot. It was addressed to Leah Talith, Department of Psychology, California State University, San Jose, CA 95101. The letter bore a Denver post-mark.
Her slender calves aching from several flights of stairs, Talith hurried to the seminar, pausing only at the coffee machine. The class was popular and eighteen students were too many for a seminar, but after Talith slit the envelope with a razor-edged fingernail, she was glad to be one among many. The letter purported to be a partiallisting of towns containing Friends of the Kibbutz members. It was a long list.
Talith knew her fingers trembled on the coffee cup, knew young Jamie Hilborn was watching her. He did that a lot. She folded the letter away, inched her left hand downward, began to stroke the flesh of her thigh just above the knee as though unconscious that Hilborn's gaze had followed her hand. Presently she stretched her legs, exercising the calf muscles. Jamie Hilborn would not be taking many notes this day, or thinking about her letter.
Talith did not return to the seminar after its intermission, but hurried to her apartment near the park on South Sixteenth. It was typical of Fat'ah to disguise even the envelope, and as she locked her doors she was giddy with anticipation. She drew the massive zip-code book from a shelf and started to scribble numbers next to the towns listed.
Grand Rapids, North Dakota did not matter except that it provided its five-digit number: 58446. Virgin, Utah and Maryville, Missouri were equally insignificant. The numbers were all that counted.
Leah Talith felt hunger pangs before she had all two hundred and thirty numbers. It was a long message, the longest she had ever received. Her instructions in July, before the Phoenix attempt, had been much more succinct. She ignored the growl in her belly and, from her tampon cassette, took the one-time pad.
The one-time pad is not the only unbreakable code system, but it is easily the simplest to use. Talith's pad was written in washable ink on the backs of postage stamps in a stamp roll, and had to be kept absolutely dry. Each stamp carried twenty of the five-digit numbers, and somewhere one of Hakim Arif's Fat'ah men had an identical grouping of numbers. The groupings they coded and sent were not precisely the same; indeed, the difference between a given zip-code and the next number on Talith's one-time pad varied between one and twenty-six. The twenty-six variations made letters in English, the language used because it employed many terms that ill-suited Arabic. Despite the brilliance of cryptanalysis techniques, they fail before the one-time pad. In the message to Talith, the vowel e occurred seventeen times. It occurred as seventeen different five-digit numbers, so that a frequency count was not possible—or, at any event, nonproductive. The one-time pad was not as sophisticated as indeterminate quadratics. It did not have to be. Talith licked twelve stamps that evening, erasing the sequences after their one-time use. Then, for the first time, she read the message for its content.