“What are you looking at me for?” Whalid took an anxious gulp of his whiskey. “Get yourself a drink. Celebrate. We won. The Israelis must be moving out of the West Bank right now. They’ll probably announce it tonight.”
Kamal remained as immobile as an actor caught in the concluding freeze frame of a police serial on the TV set his legs concealed.
Whalid lurched to his feet. “We got to get going.” He looked at Laila.
“Your things ready? We’re going home. To Jerusalem.”
He started toward the door. Kamal didn’t budge. Whaled turned back to him.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” he demanded. His face was flushed, his voice beginning to thicken under the impact of strain and whiskey.
“Why didn’t the bomb go off, Whaled?”
“Kamal, you damn fool.” Whalid swayed in the doorway like a sapling hit by a gust of wind. “Can’t you understand anything? That bomb was never meant to go off. You knew that. Qaddafi knew that. It was just a threat, a way to right a wrong, to get us justice.”
His brother glared at him with sullen probing eyes.
“And you wanted to be sure of that, did you?”
“The trouble with you, Kamal, is you’re still back there in your training camp in Damascus playing with your chunks of plastic.” Whalid was beginning to shout. “You thought this was going to be like ambushing a bus full of kids, or hijacking some people in a plane, didn’t you? But this is five million people. We can’t go home to Palestine over the bodies of five million innocent people, you damn fooll There has to be another way.”
Whalid grasped at the top of the sofa for support. “I didn’t build a bomb to kill five million people. I built it to make us even with the rest of the world. The Jews have it. The Americans have it. The French have it. The Chinese have it. The Russians have it. The English have it. Now, thanks to me, we have it. And we’re going to get our homes back with it. They must be finishing up their agreement right now. That’s why we haven’t heard anything.”
“Oh no, Whalid. I don’t believe that’s why we haven’t heard anything.” The words were as soft, as gentle, as a kitten’s purr. “I believe Qaddafi wanted that bomb to explode and the reason it didn’t is you did something to it while we were up on the roof Sunday fixing the aerial. That’s why you’ve been so relaxed since then. That’s why you started to treat your ulcer with whiskey again, isn’t it?”
Whalid was silent. His breath was coming in shortening bursts, an oil slick of nervous sweat beginning to clot the pores of his temple.
“You’re a traitor. A drunk and a traitor!” Kamal rose, each of his limbs seeming to follow his action individually like the legs of a folding bridge table snapping out one by one. “What did you do, Whalid?”
Whalid stood immobile before his younger brother’s advance. His lower jaw trembled slightly as he tried unsuccessfully to give sound to the words fear had trapped in his throat.
“What did you do, Whalid?”
Kamal’s right hand flicked out like a rattlesnake’s tongue. The calloused ridges below his little finger, the ridge of flesh that had chopped the life from Alain Prevost in the Bois de Boulogne, crashed against his brother’s cheekbone. Whalid shrieked in pain as the bone cracked. His scream was choked off by the fingertips of Kamal’s left hand driving a wedge into the recess of his solar plexus. The breath burst from Whalid’s mouth as air explodes from a punctured balloon. He tottered backward, hit a chair, then crashed into the maple table the house’s owner had once used as a desk. Dishes, his whiskey bottle, the framed portraits of the dead banker’s grandchildren cascaded to the ground in a clatter of breaking glass and splintering wood.
“You know what’s happening now because of you? The Americans are preparing to destroy Qaddafi. They’re going to wipe him out because he’s at their mercy, because of you, because of whatever you did to that bomb.”
Whalid was choking, trying almost to bite the air in his effort to bring the breath back to his lungs. He gagged.
“I want to know what you did to it.”
“No I”
Kamal’s foot drove with crushing force into his brother’s crotch. Whalid screamed in agony as the tip of Kamal’s shoe crushed his testicles against the flesh of his groin.
“Kaman” It was Laila. “For God’s sake, stop it. He’s your brother!”
“He’s a traitor. He’s a filthy dirty traitorl” Kamal’s foot lashed out once more, a swift vicious stroke to the base of his brother’s spine. “Tell me what you did to it, you bastard.”
“No.”
Again the foot smashed forward, this time into the kidneys of the figure crumpled in the fetal position on the floor.
“Tell me!”
Kamal hadn’t seen his sister pick up the whiskey bottle. Yet, instinctively, he sensed the swish of air as it descended toward him. He moved forward enough, just enough, so that instead of smashing it against his skull she crashed it down onto the vertebrae at the head of his spine.
He buckled under the blow, then, off balance, stumbled back against the sofa.
Whalid rolled over, reaching for his pocket. He had his gun in his wavering, untrained hand as his brother flung himself at him. His first shot exploded just over Kamal’s shoulder. There was no second. The fingers of Kamal’s right hand, pressed together into a wedge of flesh and bone, smashed against his trachea just below his Adam’s apple, forcing it backward against the bone of his neck until its delicate membranes snapped apart like elastic bands stretched beyond their breaking point.
A look of surprise melting swiftly into horror spread over Whalid’s face.
His mouth and jaws contorted in a grotesque and futile effort to inhale the air that would never again reach his lungs.
Kamal stood over him, rubbing the ridge of his right hand almost meditatively in his left palm. Laila was transfixed, her mouth agape with horror, still not quite comprehending what had happened.
“What did you do to him?” she gasped.
“What a traitor deserves. I killed him.”
Kamal knelt down beside his brother. Whalid’s face was grayish purple, his eyes bulging, whites protruding from their sockets, imploring them silently for some stay of the death he realized was overtaking him.
“It takes a couple of minutes for them to die,” Kamal announced matter-of-factly. With a quick heave, he rolled his brother onto his stomach as a calloused vet might turn over the still-warm body of a dog. “I want the checklist.”
He patted the hip pockets of Whalid’s trousers. There was something hard in the left one. Kamal reached in and thrust the object he pulled out up to his sister. It was a thirtyminute BASF tape, and both of them recognized instantly the tiny red crescent in its upper righthand corner.
“That’s why it didn’t go off. The bastard put another tape in there while we were up on the roof.”
Furiously, Kamal rolled his brother back over onto his back again. His face was bluish purple now, the eyes slightly less protruding, the hysteria of a moment ago replaced by a fearing resignation to the death that was only seconds away. Kamal bent down and pressed his lips against his brother’s ear, shouting to make sure his dying brain would record the message, would send the angry curse spinning around him as he stumbled toward the void.
“Your bomb is going to go off!” he yelled. “Because I’m going to set it off. You lost, traitor!”
Dorothy Burns had been about to leave for the Tuesday-afternoon tea of her Aquinas discussion group when she thought she heard a shot. Never, except on the television programs that comforted the lonely nights of her widowhood, had Dorothy heard a gunshot. Anxiously she rushed to her bedroom window and stared at the house next door. She was about to turn away again when she saw the man, almost pulling the woman behind him, burst from the front door and run to the garage. Then she saw the car back recklessly down the driveway and go careening off up the street.