“What happened?” asked Rajiv. “You guys okay?”
“We’re fine,” said Erin. “I’ll explain later. Right now I need some help.”
“Of course,” said Rajiv. “What do you need?”
“Two things,” Erin explained. “First, I need you to track down everything the agency has on a guy named Abdullah Farouk and get it to me overnight.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line.
“Who is Abdullah Farouk?” Rajiv finally asked.
“I’m not sure,” Erin conceded. “It might be a rabbit trail, but I need to follow it for a bit and see where it leads.”
“Okay,” Rajiv said, an edge of reluctance in her voice. “Let me see what I can do. Was there something else?”
Now Erin paused. She had just asked one of her closest friends to break about six different federal laws by giving her classified information on Farouk when she was no longer working for the CIA. Was she really about to ask for more? She had no choice. Someone was hunting for them, and she needed to regain the initiative. She swallowed hard and said to Rajiv, “Yeah, actually there is.”
Exasperated, Bennett ran his hands through his hair.
“I don’t believe you,” he said at last. “I really don’t believe you.”
“I know it looks bad, Jon, but I—”
“Looks bad? Erin, are you crazy? Have you completely lost your mind? You’re going to send us all to prison for the rest of our lives!”
“That wasn’t my first concern,” she said.
“What was?”
“Surviving.”
Bennett was beside himself. He wanted to scream at her, but he couldn’t afford to wake up Natasha or the rest of the house, much less the neighborhood.
“So let me get this straight,” he said, his mind still reeling. “You actually asked Indira Rajiv to log on to a secure CIA satellite account, zoom into Jerusalem, map out a secure route from the apartment where we’re staying to Dr. Mordechai’s house and back, and then feed that imagery to a password-protected Web account that we can access on our BlackBerrys?”
“Pretty much,” said Erin.
“So despite the fact that we have a warm bed to sleep in, and a family willing to protect us, and access to friends in the White House and CIA who can help us out of this thing, you’re actually proposing that we leave this house, sneak back through the Moslem Quarter, and find our way to Dr. Mordechai’s house?”
“Right.”
“Because you have a death wish?”
“No,” Erin shot back, “because someone has one for us.”
“And what exactly are we supposed to find at Dr. Mordechai’s place?”
“I don’t know,” said Erin. “Not exactly.”
“Oh, great, that’s helpful.”
“Look, Jon, I’m exhausted. We both are. But we don’t have a lot of choices right now, do we? We’ve got a lot of pieces to this puzzle, but I can’t seem to make them fit. Can you?”
Bennett said nothing, so Erin continued. “When the sun comes up we’re going to be pinned down here for another night unless you want to go traipsing through the Moslem Quarter in broad daylight.”
“Not with what tomorrow’s headlines are going to bring,” he said.
“Precisely my point,” said Erin. “If we’re going to make a move, we have to make it now. I’m just hoping that if we can hack into Mordechai’s files, we might come across something helpful, something we can use to figure this all out, before it’s too late.”
31
An hour later, they were standing outside Mordechai’s house.
Officially, the house was under investigation and would be until the circumstances of Mordechai’s death had been thoroughly studied, but most of the detective work here had been done already. The question now was whether there remained any clues to Mordechai’s death that may not have been obvious to the Mossad or Shin Bet.
Bennett followed his bride up the cobblestone path and realized this might very well be the last time they visited this remarkable home. He wondered how much this house carved into the hills would sell for — six, eight million? Ten?
He recalled how intrigued he’d been the first time he visited. He’d been struck at the time by an almost overpowering sense that the house was a reflection of the man inside, eclectic and unconventional, shrouded in mystery, infused with a hint of magic. Tonight was no different. For old times’ sake, he wished they could ring the doorbell and once again hear the chimes echoing through the valley, as beautiful as those in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre not far away. Instead, he punched in the nine-digit security code Mordechai had taught them. To their surprise, it was still active, and they entered the front door. But this time they were not greeted by armed Mossad agents. They were greeted, instead, by an eerie silence.
As they climbed the circular staircase into the great room — its walls covered with Jackson Pollock paintings, its shelves adorned with archeological relics from all over the Near East — Bennett thought he could still pick up the faint smell of the curry and coriander and turmeric with which Mordechai so often cooked, and the memories began to well up within him. It was on these very couches that he’d first heard the Ezekiel 38 and 39 prophecies. It was out there on the stone porch overlooking the Old City that Erin had first shared her faith in Christ with him. Below his feet were the thick Persian rugs once covered with the blood of Iraqi terrorists who had come in the middle of the night to hunt them down. And when he closed his eyes he could still see the chalk outlines around the bodies, all these years later.
Erin made a right toward the kitchen and Mordechai’s bedroom and private study. Bennett, on the other hand, turned left to look through the guest rooms where they had so often stayed. The beds were all made with fresh linens no one would ever use. Clean bath towels and washcloths were stacked neatly in wicker baskets at the foot of each bed, and as always, each room had a collection of small soaps and bottles of shampoo, along with new toothbrushes and unused tubes of toothpaste, always prepared for another guest, though no more would ever come.
He stopped over the section of hallway where his friend and colleague Dietrich Black had been killed, and where he had almost been, as well. So much had happened since that night, yet the memories were still vivid, still painful, and he wondered when, if ever, they would begin to fade. He wondered, too, how Deek’s family was holding up. He’d set up a scholarship fund for the girls and helped Katrina land a job outside of Philly as the executive secretary to a bank VP he’d known from Harvard. But it had been way too long since they had all seen each other. Erin and Katrina still e-mailed each other occasionally, but less often than they had, and less often than Bennett wished. They had sent Katrina an invitation to their wedding but had never received a reply. He made mental note to give her a call when he got back to the States.
Since the day he had been hired by the president of the United States to help bring about an Arab-Israeli peace treaty, he had known personally fifty-three people who were now dead. Funny how the mind kept track of the details. Most deaths he had witnessed firsthand. But of all of them, Mordechai’s was by far the most painful. Already Bennett missed him more than he had thought possible, more even than his own father, and though he knew with great certainty that he would see his old friend once again one day, it wasn’t the same, and there was no use pretending that it was. There would be no more talks late into the night about politics and prophecy, no more marathon Scrabble tournaments that Bennett would always lose and Erin would sometimes win. All that was over, and over too quickly. The only way to redeem it was to figure out why.