by Fritz Galt
“They have the security file. You have the personnel file. We need to keep this investigation quiet. Consider yourself part of the team.”
She was caught with her mouth open. “You mean I’m investigating Dean Wells?”
“And those associated with him…for criminal charges.”
For the first time, she saw Dean as a victim.
“And the IG?” She recalled that icky young man who was flipping through the security file in her office. “Will we be working together?”
Ron leaned toward her and pinched two fingers together. “Like this.”
She couldn’t wait.
Chapter 19
It was late afternoon when the unmarked government car bearing Dean and Ari approached Jerusalem on Israel’s Highway 1. He always felt growing excitement when he neared the city.
A wall still encompassed the old part of town, but most of the city was spread out over the surrounding hills. Every year there were more gleaming stores, apartments and office buildings. The roads were more congested and there were more traffic lights. Every year, it felt more like a European city.
But as they crested a hill, suddenly the Old City spread out before him. The sun reflected off flat, white rooftops and the golden Dome of the Rock on Temple Mount. It was like a scene out of the Bible.
Drama from the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible and the Koran seemed to come to life before his eyes. The City of David. King Solomon’s Temple. The Promised Land. King Herod’s reign. Christ’s death. Mohammed’s night journey from Mecca. The Holy Grail.
Too often only remnants were left to remember the past. Here, the entire city was a piece of living history.
He rolled down his window and breathed in the exhaust fumes, the smell of sweaty drivers and the distant scent of falafel frying for dinner. He listened to the familiar din of Arabic and Hebrew and English and French, a normal cacophony in a city that was holy to Christians, Muslims and Jews.
He felt the warm evening press against his face. In the complex crosscurrents of cultures, he felt entirely at home and reinvigorated to see his mission through.
The sedan took them past a dazzling, modern structure. From all angles, the Shrine of the Book was perfectly round, like a squashed onion dome, or a giant Hershey’s Kiss. In fact, it was designed to look like the cistern in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.
Dean had visited the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum before, but now it took on a whole new significance to him. In addition to the Dead Sea Scrolls, it housed the Aleppo Codex.
If only he were free to bring the missing fragments to Jerusalem. How pleased the country would be. Yet it would raise many inconvenient questions.
Who gave it to him? Under what conditions was it given?
It wasn’t yet time to bring the pages home.
Chapter 20
Carla dove into the job of finding the leak or mole who had compromised Dean’s mission and attacked Rachel Levy. She carried the folders for her pending cases out to her office assistant and told her to cancel that day’s appointments.
Then she closed her door and bore down on the information in Dean’s personnel folder.
She had glanced through the file before interviewing him, and now examined it more closely. What made him such a lightning rod for trouble?
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a father who taught international law at Harvard and a mother who lectured on Arab cultures, he suddenly came into focus for her. Dean was the product of a brain trust, as if built by design to tackle the problems of the Middle East.
When most kids were playing stickball in the sandlot, Dean was doing fieldwork with his family in Jordan.
At the tender age of 15, he was accepted into the undergraduate program at the Near Eastern Languages and Cultures department at UCLA.
So Dean knew both sides of the continent. He had been quite the cosmopolitan kid.
When other students his age were walking wide-eyed onto Harvard Yard for freshmen orientation, Dean was preparing to teach Arabic as a graduate student.
His familiarity with the Middle East led him to research stints at the American University in Cairo and the American University of Beirut. He narrowly missed being kidnapped in Lebanon, leaving several colleagues behind as captives of Hezbollah.
She made another mental note. Dean would be no friend of the militant Shiite sect that overthrew the government in Lebanon and launched missiles at northern Israel.
Dean then joined the Central Intelligence Agency and immediately took the cover of a State Department diplomat. She looked at a photo of his class of newly minted Foreign Service officers. Of medium height and generally handsome features, he stood out from the group only because of his youth. He was twenty-one years old.
His first assignment had been, naturally, Reykjavik, Iceland.
He gained proficiency in Icelandic and issued visas there among the hot springs and ice fields for two years. His required consular stint over, he popped up next in Tel Aviv. Henceforth, his employee evaluation reports were all written not by Foreign Service superiors, but by the CIA station chiefs of the various embassies and consulates in which he served.
The evaluations had the standard hyperbole used in rating and reviewing officers. One never wrote a bad report, only damned with faint praise if the officer was truly worthless.
Dean was complimented on his “intuitive grasp” of Israeli intelligence operations. Later, in Ankara, he contributed “phenomenal reporting” on the Kurdish terrorist group in the south of Turkey. A year later, a station chief was lauding his “dedication to tradecraft” in developing human intelligence in Jordan. He then took a cushy job in Greece for three years.
Then back to the trenches with half-year stints in Haifa, Jeddah, Sana’a and Doha. She needed to look the places up in her atlas. It sounded like his career was in the doldrums at that point. Or was it?
The performance evaluations were as glowing as ever. He was a “genius” in Damascus, “inquisitive” in Baghdad and “dedicated” when assigned to Cairo.
She cast his personnel file aside. There were no clues as to his personality or true allegiance. There were no tardy slips in the paperwork, no notes sent home from the principal. The CIA had given him generous step increases for his language abilities and promotions for his exemplary duty. Only one citation stood out, for bravery in some black operation in Saudi Arabia. There was a vague but impressive citation for acting “above and beyond the call of duty.” It could be for anything from paving the way for a presidential visit to preventing some Middle East conflict.
She would have to delve into his career through the eyes of real people, starting with his boss, the Gomez fellow Ron had mentioned.
It was lunchtime. She grabbed her bag and headed for the cafeteria. On the way out of the office, she stopped by her assistant’s desk. “Make an appointment for me to meet José Gomez at his office at one o’clock.”
Carla treated lunch as the major meal of her day and shared the time with an ever-changing circle of friends.
That day’s discussion centered on the bombing at Tyson’s Corner. The group of women had already circled the wagons around Rachel Levy, the victim.
“I heard about that,” Carla said, as innocently as possible. “What’s the latest?”
“Stable condition,” one woman, a longtime lunch companion said. “Praise the Lord.”
“For what?” Carla said. “Rachel was attacked by terrorists. Let’s keep religion out of this.”
“Who said anything about religion?” The woman looked confused.
An older woman leaned over her tray and whispered, “It’s Palestinians.”
“Since when?” Carla said.
The woman gestured at the television mounted on the wall of the cafeteria. “They just claimed responsibility.”
Boy. Carla hoped Dean made it home safely from the West Bank.
Knowing it was Palestinians could help focus her investigation. What had Rachel done
to them? Or did they try to kill her because she was working with Dean?
“So what do you know about the girl?” Carla asked the group at large.
“Rachel Levy,” a shrew-like friend from the Language Department said. “Sweet, pretty thing. I can’t believe she was on anybody’s hit list.”
“Does she have anything to do with Palestinians, or is it just because she’s CIA?”
That brought a bunch of helpless shrugs.
“Lord only knows,” the first woman said. “Levy sounds Jewish to me.”
They all looked at the mousy lady from Languages.
“Well, I don’t know for sure. It’s not like people wear labels.”
“What does she look like?” Carla asked, and assumed an attitude of indifference by taking a stab at her Virginia ham.
“She’s tall and slender, with long, dark brown hair.”
“Mmm hmm,” another woman said, and sat forward on her chair. “No wonder the Palestinians are after her. Rachel could be a Jewish name.”
“Yeah,” the first woman said. “The Jews and Palestinians have been at each other’s throats for centuries. It’s as old as the Bible.”
“That’s the Philistines.”
“Same difference.”
Carla thought about it. “That still doesn’t explain why they came to Tyson’s Corner to get her.”
The woman rolled her eyes at Carla. “Wrong place, wrong time, honey.”
As if fate explained everything.
The murder attempt seemed too deliberate to Carla. “What have the police come up with?” She could only hope other authorities were looking into the case from outside the agency.
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” The others shook their heads and bent over their food.
“It’s as if a dark veil has been pulled over the whole investigation,” one woman offered plaintively.
They were angry and they demanded justice for their wounded comrade. If Carla had it within her, she would discover the truth. She was beginning to develop empathy for Rachel Levy. Whoever she was.
“Carla?” a voice carried across the general noise of the cafeteria.
She looked up. “Oh, no.”
Barry Wiseman was slicing through the cafeteria toward her.
“I gotta go,” she told her companions.
“Mmm, mmm,” one woman said.
“It’s not like that,” Carla said under her breath, and left with her tray.
Barry intercepted her at the conveyor belt for dirty dishes.
“We have to talk,” he said.
“Where? Here?”
“Let’s talk outside.”
In the courtyard, they passed a sculpture that was ingenious at creating a sense of community and common purpose. It was a curving copper scroll that emerged out of petrified wood and contained a hodgepodge of letters and question marks that fell into no easily discernable pattern. It was called Kryptos and parts of it continued to baffle cryptologists decades after it was installed.
She was tackling just as baffling a case.
Barry stopped behind a stand of cedar trees.
Carla searched his eyes to try and read his intentions. He looked upset.
She went into empathetic mode. “What’s troubling you?”
“Okay. Stop right there,” he said. “I don’t need you. I don’t need a shrink and I don’t need your help on this internal investigation. But I’m stuck with you.”
“I’m not your shrink. I want to find this leak as badly as you do.”
“Listen. A fine young woman was targeted for assassination last night. And we have to find out why. This is no time for amateurs. I would call in the FBI, except they usually turn these things into witch-hunts. We have to be leery after the Robert Hanssen affair.”
Carla remembered the decade-long hunt for the person leaking classified information to the Russian Embassy. In the end, the culprit was Robert Hanssen, the very FBI agent assigned to find the mole.
“You’re right,” she admitted. “I’m no professional sleuth, and I don’t pretend to be one. But we do have to keep the investigation limited, and we’re stuck with each other. Who have you interviewed so far?”
“Nobody. I spent the night at the hospital with Rachel.”
Carla was impressed by his speed and dedication. “How did you learn about the bombing so fast?”
“I was there.”
“You saw it happen?”
“Yes. Rachel and I were on a date.”
She stared at him. He was hitting on beautiful Rachel of the Language Department? It gave Carla a whole new concern for the girl.
“Does that bother you?” he asked.
“Only in so far as that makes you a witness.”
“Okay then. Interview me.” He crossed his arms and waited. The needles of a tree brushed against his shoulders in a slight breeze.
Slowly she dug into her bag and pulled out a pen and notepad. “Why were you dating her?”
“It was my idea. It was a first date.”
“Did she agree to it willingly?”
“Hold on a minute. I’m not asking you to delve into my personal life.”
“You asked me to interview you, so I am. Do you have a problem with that?” She threatened to shut her notepad.
“No. Go ahead. I’ll have to clear my name before we go any further.”
She clicked her pen. “Why did you invite Rachel on the date?”
“Because I was interested in her personally.”
She wrote slowly to draw out the man’s embarrassment. “P E R S O N A L L Y.”
“And was she interested in you personally?”
“I can’t say.”
She gave him a dubious look.
“Well, if you saw the way she dressed…”
“Exactly how did she dress?”
“Provocatively, I guess.”
She paused to think it over. Provoke him sexually? That was hard to believe.
He seemed to perceive her skepticism. “I think she was making fun of me.”
“So did she reciprocate your personal feelings?”
“I can’t say she did.”
She wrote slowly in her notepad. “N O.”
He had turned red long ago. Now he was unable to look her in the eye.
“Why did she go on the date?”
He nodded, finally admitting something to himself. “I said I had to transact business with her.”
“And did you?”
“Yes. As part of my investigation into the murder in Aleppo, I wanted to know where Dean Wells was headed.”
That threw her. “Why didn’t you simply ask her at work? Why the whole date thing?” Was he abusing his power on the inspector general’s staff to take advantage of her?
“It’s not what it looks like.”
“Okay. I’m willing to listen. Explain away.”
“You see, I’m Jewish, right?”
She nodded. It came as no surprise.
“So I have a vested interest in Mideast relations, right?”
She turned her attention to her notepad and let him talk.
“So a major player in Washington is AIPAC. Do you know who they are?”
She was aware of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington funded by neo-conservatives, Zionist Christian groups and American Jews. They had their fingers in all things military and diplomatic. Their approval was necessary before the Defense Department purchased new weapons systems and they thoroughly vetted each State Department diplomat before his or her posting to Israel. They patrolled the halls of Congress with as much bluster as the NRA.
“So what about AIPAC? Are you saying you’re a member?”
“No. By law I can’t be. But I do have some ties to them. They’re personal friends. Heck, we all worship at the same synagogue.”
“So you’re saying your ‘friends’ wanted to know where Dean was headed next?”
“Naturally, since he’s a
diplomat, his travels should be a matter of public record, right?”
She didn’t know about that, but let him continue and took notes as he spoke.
“Furthermore, they might be interested in the Aleppo Codex.”
“The what?” she said.
“It’s an ancient Hebrew bible. Dean brought lost pages of it back from Syria for Rachel to validate.”
“Go on.”
“Some members of AIPAC were in the booth behind ours to overhear Rachel talk about Dean, the codex and his going to Hebron. That’s all I’m saying.”
“And you can claim you didn’t leak the information to AIPAC. It was all Rachel’s fault.”
“Of course she didn’t know they were there.”
“That’s treason,” she said. “You’re the cause of the leak.”
“Maybe, but I didn’t blow up her car.”
The whole, morally ambiguous nature of his actions was beginning to infuriate her. “So you’re saying AIPAC attacked Rachel?”
“Not at all. Look. Being Jewish and working for the CIA makes me a certain target. So I travel with a bodyguard. The Palestinians can’t blow up my car.”
“So instead of killing you, the Palestinians went for her?” She stared at him accusingly.
He was looking tenser than she had ever seen him.
“You don’t know how much pressure I’m under,” he said.
Okay. Maybe he made a mistake. Maybe he shouldn’t have lured Rachel into a dangerous situation. But what situation wasn’t dangerous where he was involved?
She slipped the notepad into her bag. “Let’s keep walking.”
The interview was turning up great information, but she remembered Ron’s admonition to keep the investigation under wraps. She sought out a place where there were no people and headed for an open field. Through young leaves, she could see the Potomac River far below. It roared from recent snowmelts in the mountains of Maryland and West Virginia. Perhaps the sound would drown out their voices if anyone tried to record what they were saying.
“I see why you and she were at the restaurant,” she summed up. “I even see why AIPAC and the Palestinians were there. What I don’t understand is why Dean’s boss, who should know these things, blamed al-Qaeda, not the Palestinians, for the attack. Now the news is reporting that Palestinians have claimed responsibility. It doesn’t add up.”
