Vicious Circle

by Robert Littell

  On the screen the camera panned past a terrorist to the Rabbi’s secretary, Efrayim, sitting stiffly on another wooden chair, his wrists also in handcuffs, his eyes tightly closed, his lips and Adam’s apple working. The camera returned to the terrorist standing behind the two chairs immediately in front of a Palestinian flag tacked to the wall. A tight-fitting black hood with slits for the eyes covered his head. A Russian AK-47 with a folding stock hung from a sling across his chest. He tugged a slip of paper from the pocket of his short-sleeved shirt and, rolling his R’s, began to read in accented English. “In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate: the Islamic Abu Bakr Brigade has celebrated the holy month of Ramadan by capturing two Jewish prisoners of war. In exchange for E. Blumenfeld, we require the release of El Sayyid Nosair, a Palestinian patriot serving a life sentence for the 1990 killing of the Jewish terrorist Rabbi Meir Kahane. In exchange for I. Apfulbaum, we require the release of the one hundred and four patriots now being held hostage in the Jewish prison south of Beersheba. The Isra’ili government has five days to release El Sayyid Nosair, and until the Feast of the Breaking of the Fast, Id al-Fitr, to arrange for the release of the hundred and four patriots. There will be no negotiations, and no further contact between us. Failure to meet our legitimate demands will result in the execution of the sentence of death on I. Apfulbaum and his secretary, E. Blumenfeld.”

  “Id al-Fitr marks the end of the month of Ramadan,” explained Wozzeck, an Arabist on loan from a Shin Bet–financed think tank.

  “The first deadline doesn’t give us much time to find the hostages and free them,” observed Dovid Dror, a young lieutenant colonel on detached duty from the almost mythical General Staff commando unit.

  “What are we dealing with here?” asked Baruch as the retired general, whose name was Uri Almog, ran the cassette from the beginning. “The Abu Bakr Brigade is a new blip on our radar screen.”

  Altmann, a Shin Bet specialist on Palestinian terrorist groups, ticked off the various possibilities. “It could be a splinter group of frustrated Fatah Hawks, the armed wing of Arafat’s Fatah movement. Or some itchy warriors from the Ikhwan, the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood operating in Egypt; it wouldn’t be the first time the local fundamentalists got their Islamic brothers in Cairo to do their dirty work for them. It could be the Islamic Jihad or the Shiite Hezbollah militia working out of the Lebanon, or even some al Qaida survivors from Afghanistan. Or a new incarnation of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades, for that matter; according to intelligence reports the Qassam activists have been chaffing at the bit for weeks.”

  “Whoever they are,” Baruch, always the plodding cop, noted, “they’re not amateurs. Without negotiations, it’s going to be almost impossible to track them down. We’ve never caught kidnappers without some kind of contact between us and them.”

  “Freeze the image there,” ordered the man presiding over the inter-agency Working Group set up to deal with the kidnapping of Rabbi Apfulbaum. Know by the nom de guerre Elihu, he was a katsa, or handler, on temporary assignment from ha-Mossad le-Modiin ule-Tafkidim Meyuhadim, the institute for intelligence and special missions, better known as the Mossad. The katsa directed the Mossad’s Metsada, a top secret section that ran Israeli spies operating under deep cover in Arab countries. A living legend to the few who were aware of his existence—before becoming a katsa he had participated in some two dozen Mossad commando missions to neutralize Palestinian terrorists—he favored pinstripe suits and shirts with cuff links, which made him look more like a London City banker than a native sabra born and raised in the wilds of the Israeli Negev. He was lean and tall and ramrod straight, and wore the mantle of authority with the instinctive sureness of someone who usually exercised more of it than was written into his job description. Now, gazing at the television screen, he sucked on the stem of an unlit pipe as he spoke, which had the effect of slurring some of his words. “There’s a Palestinian flag on the wall behind the terrorist,” he said. “Can you give us a closer look at the lower right-hand corner, Uri?”

  The retired general who owned the restaurant and leased the second floor to the Working Group—none of the parent organizations were willing to let the katsa’s Group meet on the terrain of a rival organization; the general’s safe house was considered neutral turf—ran the tape back. He froze the image and toyed with some dials on the console. The camera zoomed in until the corner of the flag filled the screen. “There’s something on the wall next to the flag,” Elihu said.

  On the screen, what appeared to be the edge of a handbill or leaflet came into focus. “Looks like a poster,” said Altmann.

  “Hold on,” Wozzeck said. He knelt in front of the television screen. “Look here—the paper has been divided into squares. You can just make out the left-hand row.”

  “What we’re looking at is a calendar,” Uri Almog said from the console.

  “There’s writing down the side of the margin,” Elihu said. “Can you blow it up?” he asked the general.

  The screen filled with the blurred strokes of a typewriter, which suddenly spilled into focus. The six men in the room craned their necks to read the vertical writing down the side of the calendar. “It’s in Arabic,” Wozzeck said. He touched the screen with his finger tips as he read out the words. “‘The Ghazeh Central Import-Export Bank.’”

  Elihu nodded toward the general, who switched off the television set and turned on the naked bulb in the overhead fixture. The six men, blinded by the sudden light, settled into chairs around an oval table filled with ash trays and wine glasses from the restaurant, and bottles of mineral water.

  For a long while everyone stared at the table. Finally Dror, a combat veteran who had been Elihu’s second in command on the katsa’s swansong raid into Nablus, broke the ice. “The mechabel in the black hood is wearing a short sleeved shirt,” he said. “He’s dressed for Aza, which, remember, was sweltering from the freak khamsin that, for once, didn’t hit Jerusalem or the West Bank. If he were somewhere in the hills around Jerusalem or the Judean mountains, he’d be wearing a long-sleeved shirt, maybe even a sweater.”

  “The Rabbi is in Aza,” Wozzeck decided, “but not for the reasons you think.” He glanced around the table at the others. “In the end, it’s a very straightforward business: they obviously planted the calendar and the short sleeves, so it begins to look as if they want us to think the Rabbi is in Aza. But they’re not stupid; they know we’ll figure out they want us to think he is in Aza. Which means we’re going to take it for granted that he’s somewhere else. Which means the Rabbi must be in Aza.”

  “What we’re really discussing here,” suggested Baruch, a big man who looked people in the eye and said exactly what was going through his head, “is how smart we think the Palestinians are.” Baruch’s gaze settled on Wozzeck. “Somehow we always wind up thinking we’re smarter than they are. I agree that we must start with the assumption that they’re deliberately dropping hints that the Rabbi is in Aza, but I give them more credit for brains than you. I think they’re hinting at Aza because they’re one jump ahead of you, Wozzeck—they expect us to conclude he is in Aza for the reasons you explained. Which means the Rabbi must be somewhere else.”

  Wozzeck splashed mineral water into a wine glass and, holding it by the long stem, studied the liquid as if it were vintage wine. “Palestinians are not that subtle,” he decided.

  Almog shook his head. “You’re both being too cerebral. The tape we just looked at was mailed from Aza’s central post office.”

  Baruch, something of an amateur archeologist who specialized in tracing missing peoples of antiquity, tapped a forefinger against the side of his nose. “I could deliver an envelope to Tel Aviv tonight with stamps cancelled in Atlantis, which sank into the sea three thousand five hundred years ago.”

  From under the floorboards came the faint clatter of dishes and the distinct sound of someone shouting in Hebrew, “Two cognacs and a bill for table fourteen.” Elihu sucked loudly on the stem of his pipe. />
  “Do you ever light that thing?” Altmann asked irritably.

  Elihu mumbled something about having given up smoking for his forty-fifth birthday in order to have a fiftieth. After a moment he said, “I have to agree with Uri—we’re complicating things unnecessarily. Even if you dismiss the calendar and the short sleeves and the postmark on the tape, you still are left with the cars. The bodyguard who survived told the truck driver who arrived on the scene that the Rabbi and the secretary had been taken away in two Mercedes. We found tire tracks in the dunes at the side of the road where the Rabbi was kidnapped, so we know the bodyguard wasn’t dreaming up the two cars. We spotted the tracks again going cross country into Aza where the security fence was cut between two Israeli check points. The Palestinian police found the two Mercedes abandoned in a fruit warehouse near Aza City at a quarter to seven this morning.” Elihu tapped the bowl of the pipe in the palm of his hand. “Unless we come across evidence to the contrary, I think we have to assume the Rabbi and his secretary are in Aza.”

  Baruch, who was odd man out in the sense that he was the only one in the room who wasn’t an Arabist of some sort, came back to the question of the cars. “The Palestinian Authority let two of our people in to take a look at the cars. I happened to be one of them. The steering wheels and door handles had been wiped clean of fingerprints. The body of one of the terrorists, apparently wounded in the kidnapping, was still in the back of the second Mercedes. The autopsy report that came through late this afternoon confirmed what any idiot could have figured out. The mechabel’s left lung had been perforated, there was internal bleeding, but the immediate cause of death was a low-caliber bullet fired into his brain behind the ear.”

  There was a loud knock on the door. One of the young women working the night shift in the communications alcove came in carrying a plastic tray filled with coffee mugs. She wore a mini skirt and walked barefoot because of a blister on her heel. “Eat your hearts out,” she announced, noisily depositing the tray on the table. “We forgot to buy diet cream.” At the door she tossed her head to get the stray strands of henna-tinted hair out of her eyes. “Nobody’s perfect,” she said. Before anyone could agree, the door clicked closed.

  “We were talking about the low-caliber bullet behind the ear,” Almog reminded everyone.

  Elihu actually sighed. “We had to tackle this sooner or later.” He produced a small pad from the pocket of his suit jacket and flipped through the pages until he came to the notes he had made that morning. “I managed to speak with the surviving bodyguard as he was being wheeled into surgery at Hadassah Hospital. I was the last person to talk to him before he died. He caught a glimpse of the Arab leading the attack. He described him as being on the short side, heavy set, with short cropped hair, wearing a long white caftan under a suit jacket. The Arab knelt in the headlights of the Rabbi’s Nissan to examine the body of the driver who was wounded by a grenade. He appeared to feel for his pulse, then bent over him and put his ear to his mouth—”

  “To see if he was breathing,” guessed Almog. “Under battle conditions we do the same with our wounded.”

  “What you’re describing,” Baruch, always the cop who dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, remarked, “could be the professional gestures of a medic or a male nurse.”

  “The Arab must have discovered signs of life,” Elihu went on, “because he drew a small pistol from a pocket of his jacket, felt with the tips of his fingers behind the wounded man’s ear, then placed the muzzle to the spot behind the ear and pulled the trigger. According to the autopsy reports, both the Rabbi’s driver and the Palestinian terrorist whose body was found in the abandoned Mercedes died in precisely the same way—from a single .22-caliber bullet fired with surgical accuracy into the medulla, the lowest part of the brain stem, which controls the heart beat and breathing. Death in both cases was instantaneous.”

  “He murdered the driver because he was Jewish,” Wozzeck said, his slight Polish accent thickening as his voice turned nasty. “He murdered his own mechabel because he didn’t want a wounded man to fall into our hands and identify his leader.”

  Baruch put into words what everyone was thinking. “The method of execution—the single .22-caliber bullet fired directly into the medulla—matches the modus operandi of the killer who first came to our attention when he assassinated our minister without portfolio several years back. Over the years of the intifada, the same killer has executed eighteen Palestinians accused of collaborating with us. We had a psychological profile drawn up on the murderer. It suggested he had a personal grudge against collaborators that goes far beyond any ideological rejection of those who aid his enemy; it raises the possibility that the killer was once betrayed by a collaborator and may have spent years in our prisons.”

  “Any point of winding up the brothers Karamazov and pointing them in the right direction?” Altmann asked. He was referring to the two defrocked Russian rabbis, known in house as Absalom and Azazel, who presided over several basements filled with the old national police archives that, for lack of funding, hadn’t been scanned and put onto a computer.

  Baruch posed a rhetorical question. “What would they look for? A short, heavy Arab who spent an unknown amount of time in one of our Negev country clubs after being fingered by a collaborator? Come on! Absalom would laugh us out of town. That description could fit thousands of Palestinians.”

  Elihu closed his pad. “With the abduction of the Rabbi and his secretary, we must deal with a worst case scenario: the killer and his accomplices, who call themselves the Islamic Abu Bakr Brigade, are targeting Jews in order to shatter the cease fire and prevent the Mt. Washington peace treaty from being signed.”

  “Did they waylay the first car to come along?” Altmann asked, thinking out loud. “Or were they gunning for Rabbi Apfulbaum?”

  Baruch brushed the question away impatiently. “If they were going to kidnap the first Jew who came along they wouldn’t have attacked two cars, one filled with young men armed with Uzis. No, no, we have to assume they were targeting Apfulbaum.”

  “They knew he’d been invited to Yad Mordechai—the reunion there of Jews who’d been expelled from their Aza settlements in 2005 was announced in the newspapers,” Dror agreed. “They knew he would be returning home to Beit Avram at nightfall.”

  “Why Apfulbaum?” Altmann persisted.

  Elihu pushed back his chair and, tapping the bowl of his pipe in the palm of his hand, strolled over to the window. One floor below three couples, the women’s arms linked through the men’s, were emerging from the restaurant. All six were tipsy and singing Hatikva, a gloomy national anthem even when performed well. Smiling to himself, Elihu turned back to the room. “The answer is to be found in the settlement Beit Avram, which is populated with religious extremists furious at the government for trading holy land for a precarious peace. The answer is to be found in the rumors about the Jewish underground cell that was created in Beit Avram. The terrorists kidnapped Apfulbaum because they think what we think—that for the Jewish extremists, he is the keeper of the flame; that he must know the identity of the mysterious Ya’ir, the leader of the Jewish underground who signs manifestos boasting about the assassination of local Palestinian leaders; that if Apfulbaum can be made to talk, what he reveals could hurt the State of Israel more than any Hamas terrorist bomb.”

  “For Ya’ir’s sake,” Baruch drawled from the table, “I hope Apfulbaum doesn’t know the answers to their questions.”

  “For Apfulbaum’s sake,” Wozzeck said with a twisted grin, “I hope he does know the answer to their questions.”

  “Have we touched all the bases?” Elihu asked.

  “You left out the curious business of the missing finger,” Baruch said. Born and raised on a kibbutz in the northern Galilee directly under Syrian mortars, he was the only one in the room not in awe of Elihu. “The coroner noticed something that our people on the scene missed—the small finger on the left hand of one of the bodyguards, a Brooklyn boy nam
ed Ronni Goldman who immigrated four years ago, was missing. At first they assumed it had been shot off during the attack. Then one of the more experienced coroners took a closer look and decided it had been crudely amputated under the knuckle.” Baruch shook his large head. “Don’t ask me what this means—I haven’t the foggiest idea.”

  Dror, who had lived in America when his father was posted to the Israeli embassy and had earned a degree in literature from George Washington University, joined Elihu at the window. They listened for a moment to the soft lapping of the surf against the shore. Dror, a combat veteran with a livid shrapnel scar across his right cheek, said in English, “‘The heart can think of no devotion greater than being shore to ocean.’” He added quickly, “That’s a line from the American poet Frost.”

  Jamming the dead pipe back into his mouth, gnawing on the stem, slurring his words, the legendary Mossad katsa shot back, “This heart can think of a devotion greater than being shore to ocean. It’s the preservation of Jewish lives in the Jewish state.” Embarrassed at the outburst, Elihu turned abruptly toward the others in the room. “Here’s where we get to earn our pay checks,” he said. “We have to find the Rabbi and his secretary before this short, heavy-set killer fires .22-caliber bullets into their brain stems.”

  Baruch said, “Without negotiations, without contacts, it’s difficult to know where to start.”

  Elihu said, “I may have something up my sleeve. It’s a long shot …”

  An Excerpt from the Harvard “Running History” Project:

  For obvious reasons I can’t give you much time today—the you-know-what has hit the fan here. How did I hear about it? As usual I had one eye on CNN and saw the map of Israel come up on the screen. They had footage of the three bodies sprawled on the road, the fourth bodyguard being rushed into the hospital on a gurney, the Prime Minister waving off the camera and calling “No comment” in his accented English, the Palestinian leader condemning the breaking of the truce in English, as usual, as opposed to Arabic. CNN had barely cut away from Israel when the telephone on my desk started ringing. It was the President’s press secretary—he was a bit rattled and wanted guidance. I told him to say there would be no statement of any kind from me or anybody else in the White House until the smoke cleared. I told him I would speak to the Israeli Prime Minister and the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, after which I would brief the President. Once the President and I had spoken, I told him I’d get back to him to see how we were going to handle the press.