All three nodded in unison.
He took the stairs two at a time as visions of Cité Universitaire flooded his mind. Santini rushing past him, Leclerc helping him to his feet, the last sighting of Taleel. He felt the fireball singe his face, and his entire body jolted involuntarily. At every landing he paused. The rapid-fire patter of footsteps slapping the concrete far below rose to him. Glancing over the railing, he caught a fleeing shadow. A door opened two floors beneath him. A crescent of light lit the stairwell. Less than a minute later, Chapel emerged into the first-floor hallway. Four sets of glass double doors marked the hospital’s main entrance. A white lab jacket crumpled into a ball lay on the floor a few feet away. There were no stunned faces to mark the terrorist’s passage, only the ebb and flow of patients and physicians on a calm Wednesday morning.
On the sidewalk, Chapel rose to his tiptoes, searching for the clean-shaven scalp, the broad shoulders. He ran several steps up the street, then back the other way. The pavement teemed with pedestrians. He saw nothing to alert him.
Taleel’s associate had escaped.
Jeanette Bac sat on an examining table, a fellow physician dabbing at a wound in her chest, when Chapel entered the room. “Did you find him?”
Chapel shook his head. “He was too fast. He made it out the front doors before anyone could stop him.”
She smiled bitterly.
“You okay?” he asked.
“He wanted you.”
“I figured that.” Chapel looked at the angry weal contrasted against Dr. Bac’s milk-white flesh. “What happened?”
“He couldn’t do it,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I had just seen a patient. I turned and he was there. On top of me. He was smiling, but as he pushed the knife into me, his face changed. He grew frightened.” She pushed away the attending physician’s hand and showed Chapel the wound. “Look at the placement-between the second and third ribs. Perfect. All he had to do was push a little harder. The blade slips in very nicely and pierces the heart. I am dead even before I can scream. It takes practice to find this spot.”
“I’m sure he had plenty of it,” said Chapel.
“Then tell me. Why did he stop?”
Chapter 31
Mordecai Kahn was traveling north by northwest on a two-lane macadam road through the killing fields of Bosnia. A while ago he’d skirted Sbrenica, where seven thousand Muslims were led to slaughter inside of a week, their bodies dumped in shallow burial pits, sprinkled with quicklime and covered with just enough dirt to withstand a summer shower. Somewhere under the rolling hills ablaze with saffron, the tilled meadows, the dense pine glades, were more bodies-hundreds, thousands, maybe more.
Dropping his eyes from the road, he searched for something to eat. Candy wrappers and discarded soft drink cans littered the passenger seat. He rummaged through them quickly, finding a half-eaten bag of gummy bears. Deftly, he emptied the bag into his palm and brought the soft candies to his mouth. The tart cherry flavor made him smile. They’d always been his children’s favorite.
Kahn was tired beyond any normal measure. Forty-eight hours had passed since he’d enjoyed any meaningful sleep. It was a different exhaustion than he’d known before. He missed the aching joints, the grotesquely red eyes, the stiff neck that followed all-nighters in the lab or at the testing ground. This was a new, clear burning fatigue that brought clarity of purpose, a renewal of ardor for the task at hand, a confirmation of his moral rectitude.
“We must put an end to their indignant cries,” the man from Paris had said. “We must discredit them in front of the world.”
Kahn remembered the smiling eyes, the pained smile, the sense of purpose that flared inside the man like an oil fire. The two had met at a meeting of Kahane Chai in Bethlehem. Kahane Chai, or Kahane Lives, the messianic group founded by the survivors of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the man of God who preached the expulsion of all Palestinians from the land of Israel and foretold that the advent of the Messiah must be preceded by wide-scale bloodshed.
“It is time we pay attention to the Torah,” he had whispered. “As we all know, there are no human rights for goyim in the Torah. We must therefore deal with Palestinians the same way Joshua the Prophet dealt with their ancestors.”
“Kill them?” Kahn had asked, sharing the man’s zeal, feeding on his hatred.
“Kill all of them. But first we must discredit them.”
“How?”
“A single barbaric act.”
The words thrilled Kahn’s ear like a lover’s kiss. It had been three years since he had lost his son to a suicide bomber. The boy, an army conscript in the second year of his national service, was stationed at a checkpoint near Ramallah when the bomber struck. Afterward, they had sent a tape of the attack. Smiling crazily from the front seat of his car, the Palestinian bomber had offered a thumbs-up before crashing his vehicle into the iron shed and detonating over one hundred pounds of TNT, nails, studs, bolts, and washers, and obliterating every trace of Corporal David Kahn from the face of the earth.
A single barbaric act.
His daughter, Rachel, had died from a sniper’s bullet as she was bringing medical supplies to a family in a disputed settlement on the West Bank. Rachel, who played the violin like an angel and made her father kishkes and soup. Rachel, his baby.
A single barbaric act.
Mordecai Kahn knew the precise meaning of the words. Yet something bothered him. No more innocents, he’d said. I have suffered enough for all families.
Only the deserving will perish. You will not shed a tear. Can you help?
Yes, Kahn had said, and he remembered the moment as the beginning of his freedom. But I could never go back. There is a price.
“No price is too high for such an unselfish act.”
Kahn enjoyed the memory. He was only doing a citizen’s duty. Kahn and his father had turned a desert into a marveclass="underline" an agricultural, economic, military marvel. The fact that they had succeeded while Israel had been under near-constant attack made the accomplishment that much more satisfying. Wars had racked the country in ’48, ’67, and ’73. The past four years had been like a state of siege. Yet, every time, Israel had beaten back its aggressors. If the country had expanded its borders, all the better. It was but a temporal ratification of God’s favor.
Kahn was mulling over the justice of it all when he noticed the car behind him. It was a black Mercedes sedan whose caked-on mud was an affront even at one hundred yards. The headlights were mismatched; one yellow, one transparent. A rifle barrel lolled out of the passenger window.
Immediately, he consulted the GPS onboard navigation system. The nearest town was Pale, nine miles away.
“Pale,” Kahn grunted.
Population: 2,500. No UN garrison, only a local constabulary to adjudicate local disputes. He wondered if he’d been wise to exchange the safety of highway travel for the anonymity of back-country roads.
A moment later, a light truck rumbled into view, crossing his field of vision from left to right, braking hard in the center of the junction a few hundred yards ahead.
It was Tel Aviv all over again, and for a second, he dared to wonder if it might be the boys from the Sayeret. A look at the Mercedes in the rearview mirror killed the notion. The Sayeret moved as quickly and silently as a snake through the grass. You weren’t likely to see them coming. They certainly didn’t advertise with a beat-up sedan and an AK-47’s notched barrel.
Kahn’s eyes wandered the open landscape. Meadows of summer grass bled into gently rolling hills and untended countryside. There wasn’t another vehicle in sight.