by E. L. Pini
She flinched slightly, expecting retaliation. It never came.
Instead, Imad laughed. “You’re smarter than a good woman should be,” he said, smiling, and added that in several days, he would head out to Riyadh to meet the sheikh and inform him that he was retiring from the global front. “I’m getting back to the real work. The real cause,” he said, explaining that his new goal was not only attainable but slowly gaining recognition by the West as well—taking back Palestine.
“What?” asked Anna. “How?”
Imad rose to his knees and his eyes bored into her. “I need you with me.”
Anna nodded in agreement.
“A good friend of mine, Dr. Taissiri, should be arriving at any moment,” said Imad. “He’s a great guy, a physician and chemist. He’ll need to use your operating room for an hour or so, maybe longer. I’ll let you know.”
He offered her his fist. Anna giggled and awkwardly bumped her fist against his. Imad left. She remained there for a while, trying to come up with plausible explanations for this Dr. Taissiri’s sudden need of her operating room. She could think of none.
She returned to the hospital, disinfected her hands and put on her white coat. A loud knock on her office door startled her. Imad walked in, followed by an older man in a wrinkled gray suit whose disheveled hair failed to conceal an expansive bald spot. Behind him stood a quiet, withdrawn adolescent, about seventeen years old.
“Dr. Anna von Stroop, Dr. Taissiri.” They shook hands.
Anna smiled at the boy and went to shake his hand. He shied away from her.
“I… would be happy to help. What does the patient suffer from?”
Dr. Taissiri shot a wary glance at Imad and mumbled, “It is… a personal matter. A family matter. He… we prefer… I thank you for your good intentions, but this must remain within the family… extremely personal matter…”
“Okay, of course. What do you need?”
“Elementary surgical instruments… local anesthetic only, an efficient nurse to assist, a sewing kit. Most importantly, I require antiseptics and a clean, hygienic environment, which to my understanding are much more achievable in your hospital than in our usual clinics…”
They followed Anna into the modest, but impeccable, operating room.
“As you can see, Dr. Taissiri, it’s no Mount Sinai, but…”
Taissiri briefly scanned the room. “It’s more than adequate for my needs, much more than adequate. My compliments, Dr. Anna.”
“Thank you.”
“Thirty minutes and you’ll have it back. I only need local anesthesia and an X-ray after the procedure.”
“An X-ray, after the procedure?” Anna repeated, surprised.
Taissiri looked up at Imad questioningly, receiving only a glare in return. “I’m not a doctor, I don’t know what’s going on,” Imad said. “Just let him use the X-ray machine, please.”
“When?”
“Right now,” said Imad bluntly.
“Sure thing, boss. Nurse Hamid is unfortunately missing. Will you manage?”
Taissiri eyed the machine, concealed behind a screen at the corner of the room, and nodded. He began to unpack a small heating tank from his bag, plugged it into a power outlet and spilled a large bottle of paraffin oil inside.
“Good luck,” said Anna and left for the staff room. Imad hurried after her.
“What the fuck was that?” she snapped at him once they were outside.
Imad laughed. “You know I don’t know anything about this stuff. It’s a family thing, let him do what he wants. Now, can I get you a cup of coffee?”
She looked at her watch. “Too late. I have a staff meeting,” she said. But the paraffin emulsion Taissiri prepared, along with the odd request for a post-op X-ray, caused her to stay and observe through the one-way mirror.
The patient—Abdullah, Taissiri’s younger brother—was already anesthetized on the bed. Imad walked back into the operating room. “Turn his head to the side and hold him there.”
Imad held Abdullah’s limp head as instructed. Taissiri made a long incision across his lower abdomen. “Imad, hold his head! And insert this tube—suction, suction!”
Imad moved the suction tube to remove the pooling blood. Taissiri spread the warm paraffin around the incision, lining the pocket he’d created in Abdullah’s gut. He waited several seconds, applied another coat, and repeated the process several more times. After the fifth layer of paraffin had dried, he ran his finger along the incision. “Good, good separation with the emulsion,” he said.
Taissiri picked up a large Tupperware box with a blue lid. Inside was a grayish gel-like substance. PETN—a liquid explosive, a gel version of which had been developed in Dr. Taissiri’s laboratory in the outskirts of Kabul—had already been proven both effective and invisible to Western scanning equipment: in Rome, Saudi Arabia, Paris and Riyadh.
Abdullah mumbled incoherently and tried to turn his head. Imad tightened his hold, forcefully pressing the boy’s head to the sheet. His other hand stroked Abdullah’s forehead. Taissiri filled the pocket with the gray gel. Layer after layer, he patted them down to compact the substance and remove any trapped air, then piled on more. When the pocket was full to the brim, he began to close up, sewing the flesh back over the gray gel.
“It looks fine.” He stroked his younger brother’s head and kissed his forehead.
“Forgo the X-ray so the German doesn’t get curious. This’ll work, no question.”
There was a knock at the door. Taissiri shot a glance at Imad, who failed to react in time. The door opened and Anna peeked inside.
“I assume you’re finished by now, Doctor,” she said to Taissiri. “Has everything gone smoothly? Does your patient require anything?”
Taissiri shook his head adamantly. “Thank you, Doctor. We’re done here. Thank you, again, for your help.”
Back at her office, Anna downed her glass in a single gulp. The surgery she had just witnessed had stretched the borders of human viciousness to new lengths. Lengths unheard of since, perhaps, Dr. Mengele—and Auntie Hannah, as well. Avner was the only one she knew capable of analyzing and containing such evil. Back during her training, in a London basement, they had spoken of the shahid bombers, and he’d explained: “These terrorists have no country, no air force, no tanks. They have people, though, in abundance. Under these conditions, using these people is an extremely reasonable strategy.”
Imad owed her an explanation. Anna calmly pressed 1 on her phone to start a recording and placed it in the lower shelf of the letter tray on her desk, along with the patient release forms, just as Imad came into the room and approached her. It was the first time Imad had ever appeared without warning, and she was not afraid, and she did not shudder, and no cold sweat ran down her spine. Just the slight tremble of her right eyelid, the subtle myokymia she’d had since she’d arrived in Shabwah.
“Why my operating room?” she asked him.
Imad circled around, pushed aside the letter tray and sat on the edge of her desk.
“His Kabul clinic blew up. A work accident. Or maybe not. There are Jewish doctors in Kabul, too, right? Who knows?” He smiled.
Anna tried to smile back. “The manager in Kabul is a Pakistani, Hisham, and he’s every bit as much of a terrorist as you are, possibly more so. I heard him say that it if were up to him, he’d slit the throat of every single infidel—barring the blond female ones.”
“Aren’t you going to ask why I need a clinic? First in Kabul, now here? Aren’t you curious?”
“I’m not the least bit curious about Kabul. But I would like to know what you’re planning on using my clinic for.” Imad smiled understandingly, and Anna added, “And I won’t ask you about that, either, for two reasons—”
“I’m all ears,” he interrupted.
“The first step in keeping a secret is to hide
the fact you have a secret.” She was expecting a response, but he seemed to be waiting for her to explain. “If you tell me about the secret, it means you no longer want to hide it.”
“I told you, you’re too smart.” Imad sighed. “What’s the other reason?”
Anna smiled. “That I’m about to find out anyway.” She lightly kissed the tip of his nose.
“You’ve heard of the recent bombings? In Rome? Paris? Riyadh?”
“I’ve heard, yes. I haven’t been following it too closely, to be honest.”
Anna didn’t know what was coming, but she knew it was big. She knew it would be something Avner would appreciate. She placed her hand on the letter tray and casually pushed it closer to Imad.
“Wait, did you have anything to do with that?”
Imad nodded. “And that was just the beginning.” He went on to talk about the decades of humiliation and the tens of thousands of casualties, and Nasser, and Baba. “The Jews have their tanks and fighter jets and missiles and submarines,” he said, “and we have people. The people are our weapon.” She was momentarily thrown by the resemblance to Avner’s explanation but quickly asked, “And what’s all this have to do with my clinic?”
Imad patiently explained, with unbridled pride, the chemical process and operation which could turn a fighter into a human bomb, capable of safely passing any security screening. He spoke of Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and mostly about himself, soon to become the first man in all of history to unite the millions of Arabs into a single, unified force.
He stopped, then, and closed his eyes.
Anna noticed a tear sliding down his cheek and kissed it away.
Imad slid off the table, grabbed her shoulders with both hands and held her close.
“I need you with me,” he said.
Anna nodded, raised his hand to her lips and kissed it.
“I have to go,” he said. “Taissiri will perform several more operations. During the evening, of course, only after you’ve finished with the operating room for the day. After that he’ll leave for Riyadh, and you’ll go with him, and from there to wherever you like—just return to me happy, with a shiny new ultrasound machine.” He kissed her eyelids.
Anna pushed the letter tray into place and was surprised to “finally” find her phone as it clanked in the bottom shelf. She slipped it into her coat pocket, relief washing over her.
A loud, whining growl—the type usually associated with a cat in heat—suddenly sounded, startling both her and Imad. She removed the phone from her pocket, and the whine grew louder.
“That’s Francesca’s ringtone—the friend I told you about,” said Anna, answering the phone and almost dropping it when Avner’s voice asked how she was. She told “Francesca” she’d call her back.
“Should I be worried or jealous of this kitten?” asked Imad, smiling.
“Worried? No. Jealous? Absolutely.”
Anna pressed against him and hugged him at length. She wondered whether—and to what extent—she would miss him.
“Well,” she said eventually, “I’m going for a run.”
When Imad left, Anna changed into sweats and wore the armband with the running calculator. The recording she had just made should find its way to Avner; too partial, and in dire need of clarification. She was well aware of technology’s occasional failure in dealing with obstacles such as bad weather and magnetic fields.
When she was done stretching behind the large mound near the farm, she punched in the code for the departure of an “extremely large” convoy in two to four days. It was inaccurate—Imad had mentioned more missiles coming in, but Anna had no code to convey arrival, only departure. It was the best she could do under the current conditions. She badly wanted to speak to Avner, apologize for the mess with Dr. Patrice and tell him about the gruesome operation. She was certain that when she revealed the information about the operation, the Kabul clinic, and the other operations about to take place in her operating room, Avner would forgive her.
26.
Anna’s stunt with Dr. Patrice had been so unexpected, so empathic and selfless, that I couldn’t even bring myself to be angry. We relocated Dr. Patrice to Karmia, a kibbutz in which we’d found some distant relatives of his. The icing on this clusterfuck of a cake was that, though it demanded some creative thinking and a quick response on Froyke’s behalf, if she hadn’t pulled said stunt and remained there—thereby strengthening her already-intimate relationship with Imad—we wouldn’t know about the source of these stuffed shahids, or how they seemed to completely ignore any known scanning equipment. I’m close, Froyke, so close to serving you these assholes on a fucking platter, just like you asked.
But first, there was the matter of the missiles, and the Russian antiaircraft batteries. Neutralizing the Shabwah nest had just climbed back to the top of the EEI—the operational priority list dictating the actions of the entire intelligence community. In order to make sure this operations went as smoothly and quickly as possible, Bruno and I took a borrowed coast guard chopper to the Pissed-Off Saudis meeting with O’Driscoll and bin Nayef. Bruno had already heard about the attack on the US Sixth Fleet destroyer, which had killed seventeen Marines, including Lieutenant Eric O’Driscoll Jr., John’s only child. After a brief mourning period, John had left his post as head of the Marines’ guerilla training center and started the Bureau of Counterterrorism. The USS Mount Whitney became his base of operations, from which he coordinated the war on jihad throughout the Arabian Peninsula.
But Bruno didn’t know the rest. Six months after the attack on the destroyer, one of our agents in Yemen had spotted Abu al Hariti, who had planned it. I was a young, unfamiliar officer at the time. I landed on the Mount Whitney without invitation or warning, in a fashion some might describe as “violent,” and handed the intel over to O’Dri. That November, al Hariti and five of his men were killed by a missile fired at their vehicle from a Predator UAV, sent by O’Dri from a concealed CIA facility in Djibouti, and I sent my agent in Yemen to fetch al Hariti’s DNA for confirmation. In this business, you need as much credit as you can get.
“And we’ve been drinking bourbon together ever since,” I told Bruno as the helicopter approached its goal.
“No shit!” he said. “Wow.”
This reaction made me unusually talkative. I told Bruno about the anniversaries of Eran and Eric Jr.’s deaths, which we usually spend together. I told him how, on the first anniversary, I brought a twenty-four-year-old Macallan, and O’Dri offered his Kentucky straight bourbon in its place, calling the Macallan a “whiskey for British homos.”
Bruno, who was openly gay, laughed until he nearly choked. When he’d recuperated, he placed a hand on my shoulder. “It’s a wonderful thing, that you helped him find closure. Amazing… how small this world is, sometimes.”
“Small, round, stupid world,” I mumbled, knowing that this supposed closure supplied John with no comfort or consolation whatsoever. That he lived on the brim of a deep abyss, and as the days elapsed, the abyss only grew deeper and darker. Just like mine.
“Oh,” said Bruno, “I almost forgot.” He passed me his phone. The video on the screen showed three men from Bruno’s task force, in a large gray warehouse. They were changing into GES coveralls. Froyke, the sneaky old bastard, entered the frame along with Bruno. They cuffed the men and blindfolded them before unceremoniously lowering them to the ground. There was some laughter and scattered profanity, and white camera flashes as the “media” snapped some photos. The video ended.
Good people. Good people.
The pilot pointed down at the water, where the Mount Whitney shone brightly upon the waves, and we began to descend. The smell of the salt air was invigorating, and I was feeling uncharacteristically optimistic. All things considered, O’Driscoll and bin Nayef had plenty of good reasons to cooperate. After the latest attacks at the Saudi Royal Ministry of the Interior
and the American embassy in Riyadh, it felt safe to assume that they’d both be nice and pissed.
The helicopter tilted down and we hopped out like two young, strapping infantrymen, which neither of us were anymore. Bruno waved a kind of two-fingered salute at our pilot, who waved back, smiled, and soared back into the sky.
A young Marine officer in a spotless blue dress uniform saluted us as we arrived, and we followed him into the bowels of the ship. We reached a heavy steel door, and he lowered his head toward a biometric eye scanner. The steel door clicked open, and we walked into an operations room equipped with plasma screens, lots of electronics and a vigilant staff. We crossed the room quickly, forced to return the salutes of the sentries securing each door and turn in the ship’s intelligence deck. At the end of a long hallway, the swanky Marine officer finally stopped and rang a doorbell.
“Mr. O’Driscoll,” he said, “this is… Mr.…?”
I awarded the master of ceremonies with a bone-rattling smack on the shoulder.
“Mr. Big. Thank you,” I said.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” drawled O’Driscoll.
The Marine saluted and closed the door behind him. O’Dri was dressed impeccably, as usual, in a three-piece suit and a gleaming tailored shirt. Whenever we meet, I’m overcome by the need to fix my rebellious shirt, which always seems to sneak out of my pants. I stared at him, unable to ignore his resemblance to Eran. Tall and wiry like a capoeira dancer. He held out his hand, and I grabbed it and pulled him into a hug. He placed his hand on Bruno’s shoulder, who seemed to be feeling left out.
“Let’s get to work. Hungry?”
“Always,” I replied, placing my left foot at the heel of my right shoe and popping it off. Its sister soon joined it.
O’Driscoll pulled over a serving cart and unveiled a tray of ham and cheese sandwiches and three Budweisers.
“Strictly Kosher,” he said, pointing at the sandwiches. I removed the cheese and ham from two sandwiches and wrapped them in a slice of bread. Bruno stared at me, amused. We clinked our beers. O’Driscoll let out a “l’chaim,” and I responded with, “saluti,” leaving Bruno with “cheers.”
