The Nylon Hand of God

by Steven Hartov

“Possible. Using a decoy signature, perhaps. But I don’t think so.”

  “So, Ruth.” He was becoming just a bit annoyed now, keeping it in check. “Why don’t you tell me what you think?”

  “Sounds like Martina Klump to me,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Martina Ursula Klump, the German woman. Born in Argentina, emigrated to Europe. Frau Seafore, the bomb mistress of the RAF.”

  But Benni did not need a bio on Martina Klump. He had heard Ruth quite clearly, and her words sent a wild current from the base of his spine to the thick skull bones at the back of his bald head.

  “What makes you say Klump?” he whispered.

  “Modus operandi. In particular, a penchant for designing sophisticated explosive devices, which are then used in attacks for which no credible suspect claims responsibility. Let’s see . . .” She rubbed her forehead with her thumb and fingers, trying to picture her database file on Klump. “Fatherless, I believe. Seems to me he was a German scientist. Committed suicide, a definite impact on her psyche. She started out with Action Directe in the mid-seventies, then went with the Rote Armee Fraktion, perfected her skills there. I think she was captured, did some prison time in Germany, then escaped and went to ground in the early eighties. She was spotted in Lebanon, training Hizbollah suicide bombers.”

  Ruth looked up to see her father staring at her dumbly. The roses lay on a corner of the table, and he was unconsciously deflowering one with his left hand, rolling the petals like bloody flesh between his fingers.

  “Human suicide attack is still a rare terrorist technique,” Ruth continued. “In all our years of warfare, only a few Palestinians have ever done it. The only other such recent act was the killing of Prince Gandhi by a female Sikh separatist, and it was widely speculated that Klump was hired to prepare the attack. Don’t you read the papers, Abba? Or at least your own files?”

  “Mmm.” Benni had one elbow on the table and was holding his jaw. “I’ll have to think about that.” But he was already thinking about it, and his physical pose was an effort to suppress the shiver that would certainly show if he did not hold on to himself.

  He was thinking of Martina Ursula Klump, and why he had not immediately placed her on his list of potentials. Because he had denied the possibility, that was why. She might have crossed his mind, and he had sent her packing right out the other side.

  He was thinking of Germany in the autumn of 1981, when he and Eytan Eckstein had gone to Wiesbaden to inform the Bundeskriminalamt of an upcoming RAF rendezvous, during which Klump could be ambushed and taken alive.

  He was remembering a small town in southern Bavaria, the railroad tracks near Bad Reichenhall, himself and Eckstein watching through binoculars as a squad from Grenschutzgruppe-9 chased Martina Klump along the rain-soaked trestle, and she turned and stopped and dropped her pistol, her motorcycle jacket opening as she threw her hands into the air and the snarling Alsatians brought her to the ground.

  He was seeing her again, inside the isolation cell below the massive castle that was Bruchsal Penitentiary. Alone with her, an arrangement made by his good German friend Bernard Lokojewski. Just Baum and Klump together, sealed in a cocoon of concrete that held nothing but an iron bed, walls so thick that no one but God could eavesdrop. Martina wearing nothing but a canvas frock that could not possibly be torn to fashion a noose.

  He was seeing her face, the burning eyes made hollow by years of fugitive existence, the blond hair cropped close and boyish to her skull, the lips that would have proved, despite the canvas bag, that she was a woman, had they not been drawn so tightly into a thin line of distrust.

  He was living it again, that awful night in Munich after Klump’s escape. It is the last night of Oktoberfest. He and Eytan hurry to the Hauptbahnhof, hoping to be lucky against all sense of reason.

  There are twenty-seven platforms in a train station the size of five jumbo-jet hangars, the giant walls fitted with flickering neon ads for Panasonic, Überlinger, Süddeutsche Zeitung. The train to Berlin has come in late from Ansbach and is being held so wobbling revelers can make the already crowded yellow cars. The passengers are jammed into billets of red-upholstered seats and steel overhead racks, the windows curtained with soiled brocade. Pools of vomit smear the cobbled slate platform, and those too drunk to make the train are sprawled on wooden slat benches.

  Benni stands at the mouth of the platform and watches as Eytan searches every car, staring into the windows as the beer-soaked passengers watch him watch. Eckstein is wearing jeans and a cream-colored sweatshirt, but his green trench coat dissolves his intention to look like a concerned boyfriend.

  Eckstein surely knows that if Martina is aboard, she may be that man in the jeans suit with the curly brown hair, slumped behind Die Welt in a darkened compartment. Or she might be that old woman with the soiled beige pocketbook, who keeps her back to him and sips from a bottle of Pilse. Or if Lokojewski’s information is correct, she might be dead.

  Eytan’s distant figure jumps down onto the tracks and comes up on the other side. Finally, as his weary form approaches, Benni overhears two swaying teenagers wearing those enormous Oktoberfest felt hats. One juts his chin at Eckstein.

  “Er ist BKA. He’s a BKA agent.”

  Benni would smile, if not for the chasm of hopelessness in his gut. Good guess, he thinks bitterly. Right profession, wrong country.

  Revelers begin to yell their pleasure as the black-rimmed doors slam one by one, a final whoop as the party ends. The blue-uniformed conductor climbs aboard, and the train rolls out, all electric, no sound but the squealing bogie wheels. Two women on the platform wave white handkerchiefs as the caboose recedes.

  Eytan looks at Benni and says something in German.

  “Fort.”

  Gone . . .

  “Abba. I said think, not brood.”

  Benni snapped himself out of it. “Yes.” He forced a smile and touched a finger to his temple. “Well, it is a very intriguing idea.”

  “Would you like to see my files on the subject?” Ruth asked, trying to keep any hope out of her voice.

  “Certainly.”

  “I’ll show you my apartment.” She quickly pulled her book bag up onto her lap. “It’s two minutes from here.”

  Benni gathered up the surviving flowers. “Ruti,” he began hesitantly. “You know, I’m only here for three days. It’s not much time.”

  “Of course.” She was prepared, had expected it. The excuse, like the signature song of Groucho Marx: Hello, I must be going.

  “How about joining me?” Benni suddenly proposed. “I’ll be working, but at least we can be together.”

  Ruth looked at her father. This she did not expect. She would have to miss work. There was a paper to edit. But she could spend some time with him, as an adult, maybe even as a peer, living some reality. She would have to skip a couple of boring lectures.

  Her mouth spread into the wide grin that always made Paul Desmond’s heart hurt.

  “Okay,” she said warily. “But no secrets.”

  “It’s a deal. No secrets.”

  “Liar.”

  Benni laughed. He got up, bent across the table, and kissed her on the forehead. They left the Cosmopolitan arm in arm.

  Mussa Hawatmeh exited the coffee shop a minute later. It was cold, and it took a couple of nervous kicks to get the big Suzuki bike to turn over. But then he rode very slowly down Broadway, and he watched the man Martina hated, and the girl, as they crossed the avenue, went halfway down West 112th Street, and entered a small apartment building.

  He was shivering as he pulled the motorcycle onto its kickstand near a public telephone, dropped a quarter in, and waited a long time until his rings were finally answered.

  He smiled as he spoke.

  “I think I have just found a pearl in your ugly oyster.”

  Chapter 5: The East River

  Omar Bin Al-Wafa wanted out.

  To be transferred to another assignment, to be relieved of hi
s duties, even to be sent home in disgrace. It did not matter anymore. He was old, he had served his masters well, and enough was enough. He well understood that the role he played was a living lie, but even his duplicity had its limits. His last encounter with Martina Klump had shaken him to his core, for he sensed that he was being used to set her up for a fall, and he would not be able to face a mirror if they turned him into a murderer of courageous children.

  The tip of his cane clicked on the icy sidewalk as he descended with care along the last appendage of Forty-second Street between First Avenue and the FDR drive. His spectacles were coated by the fog of his own breath, and the tufts of white hair beneath his black beret completed the impression of an eccentric French tourist whose senility had led him to an area not meant for strolling septuagenarians.

  He appeared to be an inviting target, yet his dark mood had raised his blood pressure and sharpened his reflexes.

  He turned the corner down by the Robert Moses Playground, its high wire fences and empty courts black beneath a moonless night. The homeless under the causeway had not even made a fire, too cold to come out from their shelters of cardboard boxes and plastic sheets. He was alone, with the exception of the pair of ridged rubber soles he heard tiptoeing carefully behind him. Cars were darting intermittently along the drive, but Omar knew that in this satanic city they would not stop to help even if a killer was strangling a naked toddler.

  Omar suddenly halted. Then he turned and faced his attacker squarely. The junkie also stopped, just five feet away, smiling through a short beard. He was very large and wore a woolen watch cap, some sort of worn field jacket, torn blue jeans, and combat boots. Omar lifted the walking stick and shifted it to his left hand, gripping it at the middle of the shaft.

  The junkie was amused by the old man’s defensive posture, but did not much feel like getting rapped on the skull by the cane’s ivory pommel. He pulled out a six-inch switchblade, held it near his leg, and pushed the button. The blade clanged as it flipped down and gleamed.

  “I’m twice your size and half your age, grandpa,” he whispered. “So just give me the cash and we’ll skip the fucking dance.”

  Omar reached over with his right hand, gripped the cane head, twisted, and pulled. And then he was holding a very long, tempered steel sword as he dropped his little body into a fencer’s stance.

  “En garde,” he said, in an alarmingly controlled tone.

  The junkie instinctively leaped backward, landing in an awkward crouch that sent a flush of rage to his face. He raised the knife to eye level.

  “Okay,” he snarled. “I can dig it.”

  Yet before he could make his first probing lunge, Omar extended the sword, and a web of bright-blue lightning, accompanied by a wicked crackle, arced across the concealed prongs near the point of the blade.

  The junkie froze. Oh, shit, he thought. Not this again. Just a week ago a young woman had stunned him with one of those fifty-thousand volt pocket zappers. One second he was reaching for her necklace, and the next thing he knew, he was sprawled on the sidewalk in a puddle of his own urine.

  Omar suddenly yelled like an enraged baboon and lunged forward, driving the flashing épée toward the junkie’s throat. But the young man was already sprinting away, and he disappeared through a white cloud of his own breath.

  Omar stood still for a full minute, watching the streams from his lungs curl through the air, the fading footfalls of his assailant echoing in his brittle ears. He nodded to himself, and had he not been overburdened by his broodings, a smile of satisfaction might have spread his frozen mustache. He had not had a physical confrontation like this in perhaps twenty years, and he was pleased to discover that his hands were still steady. He inserted the blade into the wooden scabbard and slammed it home with a flourish.

  He looked up at the sky, the low ceiling of midnight clouds hued amber by the lights of a city that never rested. For a moment, he closed his eyes and replaced the bitter wind from the black river with the warm breezes of a khamsin skipping off the Sea of Galilee. He did not care for the cold, but he could endure it, as he had done in many winter capitals of the world. For always in his mind was the promise of the Middle Eastern climate, waiting to embrace his bones at the end of every journey.

  “And I will again return there soon,” he whispered. “But not as a Judas.”

  At that moment, warmth arrived in a form more immediate and practical. A dark-blue Lincoln Continental slid down the street alongside the United Nations compound. It turned the corner, its brights flashed once, and Omar stepped forward. The rear door opened, and he slipped inside.

  “Lailtak sa’idi.” A voice bade him good evening from the darkened corner of the compartment. “Kif halak?” It asked after his welfare in a Farsi-accented Syrian dialect.

  “Ilham’ dilla mashruh. Thank Allah, well,” Omar answered as he settled back into the leather cushion.

  “Shai?” A hand extended a glass of dark tea, and Omar understood why the interior of the limousine seemed bathed in a low fog. Yet he declined the refreshment.

  Omar’s host leaned forward, his face appearing in the dim light from a door panel. Ali-Hamza Asawi had soft and unlined features, short black hair, and a narrow jaw covered by a manicured beard. Although his vision was perfect, he often wore plain metal spectacles to further enhance the academic appearance he cultivated. His black wool three-piece suit was typical of Iranian diplomats, a white, collarless shirt was buttoned at his throat, and the only bow to Western decadence was a taupe cashmere scarf draped around his neck.

  Asawi’s diplomatic cover was as a press attaché and assistant to Mohammed Ayatollahi, Iran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency. He held full credentials as a professor of journalism from the Sharif University in Tehran, and he actually lectured there on occasion, but his tenure had little to do with higher learning.

  Ali-Hamza Asawi was chief of psychological and counterintelligence operations for the Western Hemisphere division of SAVAMA, the Iranian Revolutionary Secret Police. After the fall of the Shah, SAVAMA had been quickly organized to replace the SAVAK, whose American- and Israeli-trained agents had all been executed or exiled. The new intelligence organization could now hardly be distinguished from the old, even surpassing it in fanaticism and cruelty, although its political bent was the polar opposite of its predecessor’s.

  Although just forty-two years old, Asawi had risen rapidly to one of the most powerful posts in SAVAMA. AS an infantry captain in 1979, he had virtually no intelligence background when he volunteered for the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fledgling secret police, which was sorely lacking in trainers and advisers. Asawi proposed a simple plan, rapidly approved. He imprisoned the former head of SAVAK’s PsyOps and Counter-Intel program for a full year, promising a pardon and redemption before God if the agent would reveal the secrets of his trade.

  He spent nearly every day of twelve months with his former enemy, culling the arcane arts of false flag operations, populace subversion, disinformation, communication interceptions, and technical acquisitions forbidden by international law. When the interrogation was finally completed to his satisfaction, he thanked his “mentor” and had him executed in a public hanging.

  For the past few years, Asawi had appeared to be engaged in an effort to support Mohammed Ayatollahi’s contention that Iran had the same right as any other nation to improve its lot through technological advancement. The small research reactor at Sharif was, he insisted, nothing more than that. And even though Iran’s enormous oil supply could keep its lights aglow for a thousand years, who but Allah could say that she did not deserve the benefits of peaceful nuclear power?

  However, Asawi’s talents lay in deception rather than scientific enlightenment. He flooded the U.S. Department of Commerce with requests for purchase approvals: an ES/9000 computer from IBM, circuit boards from Textronix, timing devices from Rockwell. And while he kept FBI, Treasury, and Customs agents busy battling with industrial lobbyists on Capitol Hill,
he sent his agents out to acquire vacuum pumps and balancing machines from Leybold and Schenck in Germany, supermagnets from Thyssen, beryllium from Semipolotinsk, and M-9 missiles from North Korea.

  A few American components did make it through to Sharif. And thanks to the lack of oversights, many crucial European items were shipped to Ispahan, the sealed Iranian city of mosques and minarets, where the efforts to create a nuclear weapons capability were in full swing. But at this rate, Asawi and his masters knew that they would enter the next century without seeing a mushroom cloud blossom over the sands of Dasht-e-Lut.

  Asawi finished his tea and replaced the glass in a holder of the limousine’s liquor bar, which held only mineral water, a few bottles of Snapple, and a brass finjon sitting in an electric warmer.

  “Be on your vey,” he instructed the driver, in an accent that often caused Americans to mistake him for an Indian. There was no partition between the compartments, but he felt secure that the black chauffeur would not comprehend a Syrian dialect. The car belonged to the Iranian mission and was electronically swept each day. The drivers were switched every week, hired through an American cutout.

  The limousine made a right turn onto Forty-first Street and headed west into midtown. Omar did not bother to inquire about its destination, for he had accompanied Ali-Hamza Asawi on a hundred seemingly aimless meanderings. He had strolled with Asawi through the streets of Paris and nearly frozen with him on a chairlift in the Alps. Once, they even hired horses in the south of Spain and trotted off onto the beaches near Málaga to be assured of distance from prying ears. In fact, Omar realized that in all the years he had been working for SAVAMA, he had never once met Asawi in any building that remotely suggested the People’s Revolutionary Government of Iran, or in any office that was more than a transitory cubicle rented by his control for the occasion.

  Omar had arrived in Tehran in 1968, when thousands of disenfranchised Palestinian Arabs had sought refuge throughout the Middle East, hoping that their exile would be temporary. Being of partial Iranian descent, he had felt comfortable with the people and their culture, although his birthright was not forgotten as he became a street policeman, rose to the rank of detective sergeant, and gained a professional reputation regarded as apolitical by Iran’s new mullahs. His fervor for the Palestinian cause put him in good favor with the revolutionary government, and although he was about to retire, a recruiter for Asawi swept him up. At the time, one did not refuse an offer to aid in the resurgence of fundamentalist Islam.