Squads of Israelis, specially chosen because they had been born and raised in Arab countries and could speak Arabic fluently, had been dispatched to shadow the targets, all of whom were short, heavy-set Islamic fundamentalists who had seen the inside of Israeli prisons. At the same time Elihu’s technical teams, equipped with small black receivers crystal-tuned to a single ultra high frequency and accompanied by members of the Palestinian Authority police, had begun crisscrossing the neighborhoods where the six lived and worked.
So far the only thing they had picked up was what Baruch, in less frenzied times, would have called the music of the spheres: static.
“Two of the six doctors,” Baruch told Elihu and Dror, “went to prison on my watch. I remember them both. The first one was the Hebron general practitioner—his name is Ali Abdel Issa. He was the ringleader of a Hamas intifada cell in Hebron which specialized in booby traps. After several of our soldiers were wounded, Abdel Issa went underground, abandoning his medical practice, altering his appearance, never spending two nights under the same roof. We finally nabbed him when a collaborator told us which of his wives he would be sleeping with that night. He served four years in prison before being released in the general amnesty that accompanied the signing of the Oslo accords with Arafat. Israeli doctors at Hadassah Hospital, using the latest laser techniques, managed to arrest the retinal degeneration, but they weren’t able to restore the lost vision. Abdel Issa resumed his medical practice in Hebron, where he consults at a local hospital.”
Dror, lounging against the window sill, said, “You said you remembered two.”
“The second one is Ishmael al-Shaath. He was picked up in the late seventies at the Allenby Bridge while returning home for Ramadan from his medical studies in Beirut. The Shin Bet had a collaborator who claimed al-Shaath belonged to a Lebanese-based terrorist organization. I was doing reserve duty at the time and happened to be a junior member of the team that questioned him; it was more or less my initiation into the mysteries of interrogation. I remember the chief interrogator, a reserve captain who was a psychoanalyst in civilian life, feeding al-Shaath the usual line about becoming completely dependent on his captors for creature comforts, for news of the outside world. The captain tried everything to break al-Shaath—he told him that he might resist this dependency at first, but that, with time, he would become grateful for every favor, for every kind word, for every smile, for every hour of sleep, for every crust of bread. We were interrogating two dozen Palestinians at any given moment back then. Al-Shaath stood out in the crowd. He had … something the others didn’t. It took me a while to put my finger on it.” Baruch swiveled in his chair to stare out the window. “I remember he was composed, serene, grave, even formal, but that wasn’t it. He had a sense of who he was; he had this fire curtain of dignity that protected him from all of our threats and all of our psychological blandishments. If there was a way to ruffle his feathers, we didn’t discover it. His eyesight was severely impaired, the result of a childhood malady, if I remember correctly, but you would never have known it talking to him—he conducted himself with unflinching tactfulness, almost as if he didn’t want to hurt our feelings by pointing our what brutes we were. He calmly denied the charge against him, he nibbled delicately on the crumbs we threw him, but he never allowed a trace of gratefulness to appear on his face or in his comportment.”
Dror wanted to know what had happened to al-Shaath.
“We had to let him go for lack of evidence, at which point he apparently discovered the identity of the collaborator who had fingered him and tried to strangle the poor bastard.”
Elihu raised his haunted eyes. “Seems as if you ruffled his feathers after all,” he said. “He just didn’t let you catch a glimpse of the psychological wound.”
Baruch nodded tiredly. “I suppose that’s so,” he said. “Al-Shaath spent twelve years in prison for attempted murder. I sometimes wondered what would have happened to him if we hadn’t picked him up, if we hadn’t violated his sense of who he was by imposing on him our sense of who we thought he could be.”
“It’s par for the course in this neck of the woods,” Elihu observed. “We all wind up becoming the persona the enemy thinks we are. It’s almost as if we don’t want to disappoint him.” He snorted and shook his large head and lowered his eyes and finished reading one of the sighting reports, then rolled the piece of paper into a ball and lobbed it into Baruch’s waste basket, which was overflowing with paper plates and cups. “You really think one of these six blind medical people could be Abu Bakr?”
Baruch’s patience was wearing thin. “You have a better idea?”
The two men eyed each other. Dror appealed to Elihu. “I don’t see what we have to lose.”
“We have limited resources,” muttered Elihu. “They could be deployed elsewhere.”
“Where?” Baruch demanded.
“Sweeney’s not in Aza,” Dror reminded the katsa.
“Sweeney’s body could be in Aza,” Elihu said, finally putting into words his darkest fears. His teeth ground in anguish on the stem of the mangled pipe.
A middle-aged woman peering through eyeglasses with bright red frames turned up with a handful of sightings she had torn off the teletype. She added them to the pile on Baruch’s desk. “Can I get anyone coffee?” she asked.
Baruch raised a finger in acceptance as he started reading through the new batch of sightings. Elihu nodded, too.
“With or without?” the woman said.
Elihu, staring out the window at the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, said absently, “With or without what?”
“Sugar. Milk.”
“He takes his coffee black, like his mood,” Dror told her.
Baruch skimmed another of the sightings. “Damn it! We drew a blank in Ramallah.” He looked up, his face frozen in a scowl. “We found out the pharmacist from Jalazun had been sneaking off to Ramallah for lunch every day, so we thought, what the hell, Ramallah is a hot bed of fundamentalism, this could be it. Twenty minutes ago one of our people spotted him talking to a woman in a restaurant who turned out to be his third wife. So much for his daily visits to Ramallah.”
The katsa, who kept in touch with the barefoot contessa in the communications alcove in Jaffa by satellite phone, said, “In any case, there was no joy from the black boxes deployed this morning in Jalazun or in Ramallah, so that more or less eliminates your one-eyed pharmacist and your anaesthetist from Chicago.”
Baruch glanced at the clock on the wall—he had the sinking sensation of watching sand flowing through the waist of an hour glass, with no way of slowing it down. He snatched another sighting off the pile. Maybe his hunch about formal medical training had led them up a dead end street; maybe Abu Bakr was still one jump ahead of them. “Ah—here’s my old friend al-Shaath. A pregnant woman turned up at his clinic in the Old City as it was closing. A nurse let her in and then locked the door. The doctor and one of the two nurses emerged an hour and a quarter later. The pregnant woman and the second nurse never came out. Tapping the ground ahead of him with a long bamboo cane, Doctor al-Shaath walked down the Street of the Chain, Bab El-Silsileh, and through the doors at the foot of the street onto the temple mount. He disappeared into the Dome of the Rock for seventeen minutes, then made his way back along Bab El-Silsileh to the Christian Quarter. Near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the streets filled with pilgrims and the doctor, mingling with them, vanished down a maze of alleyways. Our people nosed around—none of the shop owners near the clinic seemed to know where al-Shaath lived or how to get in touch with him in an emergency. The head of the surveillance team sent word to your boys with the black boxes, Elihu. He suggested they scrub the area between Christian Quarter Road and the New Gate, which is where the good doctor was last seen.”
Dror ducked out of the room to use the secretary’s phone; if Baruch was on to something, there would be precious little time to organize a raid. To cut corners, Dror had decided to bring forty-five members of the elite Ge
neral Staff commando unit into Jerusalem, but he wanted to do it without attracting attention. The last thing they needed was for some smart-ass journalist to realize a raid was in the offing. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out why. The men from the commando unit were stashing their weapons and uniforms and bullet-proof vests and night vision goggles in the trunks of private automobiles and filtering into the city in twos and threes, assembling at a movie theater in the German Quarter owned by the unit’s onetime executive officer. Dror rang through to his adjutant, who had set up a command post in the theater manager’s office. All but seven members of the putative raiding party had already turned up; the men were oiling their weapons, sharpening their knives, calling their wives or girl friends on mobile phones, playing gin, dozing. One had brought along a laptop computer and was working on his thesis for a master’s degree in art history. “We have a complete set of atlas slides of Samaria and Judea ready at hand,” the adjutant told Dror. “Any word on where we might strike?”
“It could be anywhere—or nowhere,” Dror said.
The secretary with the red-framed eyeglasses returned with a new batch of sightings, along with a tray filled with Cokes in paper cups and tuna sandwiches on dark rye bread. Baruch pored over the sightings before slipping them across the desk to Elihu. Two more of the six Abu Bakr candidates seemed to have been eliminated: the Israeli-Arab urologist with cataract-scarred eyes who lived in Nazareth had been tracked down to a sanatorium in Akko, where he was recuperating from a hip operation; the American-trained psychiatrist had been abroad since early January, giving a seminar on Palestinian teenagers at Alfred University in upstate New York. His lecture series was entitled: “Growing Up With a Chip on Your Shoulder.”
The satellite phone in the katsa’s pocket purred from time to time as the barefoot contessa checked in with more no-joy reports. Hebron had been swept from one end to the other at eighteen minutes to and eighteen minutes past the hour. All told, four transmission cycles had been covered without detecting a squeak on the appropriate ultra high frequency.
The atmosphere of cranky irritability in Baruch’s office must have been contagious. Staffers strolling past in the corridor talked in the muted undertones reserved for hospitals and cemeteries. Somewhere on the floor a telephone shrilled and a voice could be heard bellowing, in English with a heavy Israeli accent, “This is not the Jewish gay rights league, this is Mishteret Yisra’el, the national police.” A woman cried out in Hebrew: “Sheket—quiet.” Oblivious to everything, Baruch read and reread the most recent batch of sightings. He talked on a scrambled phone line with a field coordinator in Hebron, then swiveled to stare out the window. The sky had turned raw and a cold rain squall had begun to pelt the city. He watched the buses and cars crawling soundlessly through the downtown streets. Focusing on the drops trickling like tears across the dirty window pane, he decided that the weather fitted the mood in Israel perfectly: everyone he knew was depressed. With or without a peace treaty, Israelis had grave doubts about the Palestinian Authority’s ability to police its own fundamentalists, and were ready to settle for something as simple and as invigorating as spring, though even that seemed a world away. The memory of the acacias bursting golden, the wild anemones bleeding red seemed to belong to a Jerusalem on another planet, and not the city in which they waited out the waning of winter and the advent of the ominous Ramadan deadline.
Just before midnight, the night-shift secretary came in with a single sighting hot off the teletype. Baruch actually groaned as he read it. “Ali Abdel Issa, the Hamas organizer from Hebron who specialized in booby traps, was rounded up by the Authority’s cops after the bus bombings last year—he’s been in one of Sa’adat’s Jericho cells for the past eight months. That eliminates him.”
Dror said, “There’s still that blind doctor—”
“Al-Shaath.”
“—who disappeared in the back streets of the Old City early this afternoon.”
Elihu waved his pipe. “The last place they’d stash a hostage is under our noses in the Old City.”
“The last place is often the best place,” Baruch noted, but he wasn’t able to muster much conviction in his voice.
Dror shrugged. Technically speaking, the prospect of launching a surprise raid on short notice in the narrow labyrinthine streets of the Old City didn’t appeal to him; getting the troops into position without attracting the attention of the kidnappers seemed almost impossible.
At twenty-two minutes after two, the satellite phone in Elihu’s pocket purred. The katsa lifted the receiver to his ear. Dror was dozing on a couch. Baruch raised his head off the desk. He could hear the sharp buzz of the barefoot contessa’s nasal whine coming through the telephone, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. Suddenly Elihu’s lidded eyes flicked open. He plucked the stem of the dead pipe out of his mouth. “Tell them to triangulate,” he ordered very quietly. Then he killed the connection. “I owe you one,” he told Baruch. “They picked up the signal at eighteen past the hour—a single two-hundred-meter vector. It was coming from the maze of buildings north of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate Road and east of the Hospice on Casa Nova.”
“It fits!” Baruch exclaimed. “From the top floor of one of those buildings, Yussuf Abu Saleh could have seen the green shirt hoisted by the lame shoemaker across from the El Khanqa Mosque.” He melted back into his chair, drained of everything except hope, and let his eyes roam over a map of the Old City. “Finding the Rabbi was the easy part,” he muttered.
FORTY-FOUR
AT THE MOVIE THEATER IN THE GERMAN QUARTER, DROR conferred once again with his second in command and the officer in charge of planning, then hefted himself onto the stage and gazed out at the intent faces of the young soldiers who would soon be going into combat. They had stacked their array of assault rifles and sniper rifles and submachine guns, along with the cartons filled with all manner of grenades and plastic explosives, against a wall, and settled onto the old folding wooden seats in the front rows. The officers among them had pistols fitted with silencers tucked into webbed shoulder holsters. All forty-five members of the General Staff commando unit were battle-hardened veterans, and had undergone paratrooper and special forces training. Within the Israeli Army, they were the elite of the elite.
The commando unit’s former XO, who owned the theater, sat beside Elihu and Baruch in the first row of the balcony, his large hands folded pensively on the low brass rail in front of him, his unshaven chin on his hands. He was still fit from daily stints of bicycle riding and would have traded the deed to the theater, not to mention his soul, for a chance to take part in the raid, but he knew better than to ask. Behind him and to the left sat two lean lieutenant generals from the General Staff and the paunchy civilian in charge of Shin Bet field operations. Peering down from the last row in the balcony was Zalman Cohen, the director of the Prime Minister’s military affairs committee, with his famous arid smile draped across his round lecherous face.
Dror tapped a finger nail on a microphone to make sure it was alive. “Gentlemen,” he said. The word “gentlemen” echoed back from two enormous wall speakers. Dror fiddled with the gain knob, then tried again. “We’ll be going into the Old City as soon as it is dark, so we have twelve hours to prepare this raid down to the last minute detail.” He cleared his throat; public speaking was not his cup of tea. “We’ll begin with an overview of the operation. Then we will take it apart and examine it piece by piece and put it back together again. We’ll take it apart a second time, and a third. We’ll keep taking it apart until the components are as familiar to us as the thirty-seven bits of metal in an assault rifle. Then we’ll load our weapons and go out and get the job done.”
Dror nodded at a corporal sitting behind the slide projector set up on a table. The first slide, an aerial view of the Old City, appeared on the overhead screen. “We have reason to believe that Abu Bakr, almost certainly accompanied by several terrorists, we’d be asses to think otherwise, is holed up in a safe house
here,” Dror said, tapping the screen with a long pointer. “We have no way of knowing for sure, but we expect—we hope to God—that the hostage, I. Apfulbaum, will be there, too. We know for sure that the American journalist Sweeney is in this building. Okay. The target building, which is forty meters off Greek Orthodox Patriarchate Road, is situated in a maze of alleyways and courtyards and passages, some of them on ground level, some of them over rooftops.”
The livid shrapnel scar across Dror’s cheek burned like a neon sign. The soldiers hung on his words. Many of them had been on raids with him before; along the Litani River, to the Bekaa valley, to Iqlim el Tuffah in southern Lebanon. The others knew him by reputation; it was said he’d been the second in command on the katsa’s fabled swansong raid into Nablus at the time of the second intifada. “Abu Bakr and the people with him are hardcore fundamentalists and terrorists,” Dror continued. “They slaughtered four Jews when they ambushed the Rabbi’s convoy, they murdered the Rabbi’s secretary in cold blood when the first deadline expired. So I don’t need to tell you this will be bloody. The purpose of this briefing is to make sure any blood shed comes from their bodies, and not ours. If you’ll give me the second slide … the target is the large building in the center of this cluster of buildings. It is an Arab bathhouse that was abandoned when we occupied the Old City after the Sixty-seven war. In this old photograph, you can make out the back door and the loading port. I’ll take the next slide. Okay. What we have here is a rough sketch of the building based on a description of it in a nineteen-fifties guide book, as well as the recollection of one of the officers whose unit secured the area in Sixty-seven. As you can see, there are four floors. The ground floor is a warren of corridors and changing rooms, along with the reception room and an inner office. These spaces are likely to be deserted. There are two staircases—I should say there were two staircases the last time anybody looked—leading to the tiled baths on the second floor. In the back of the building, there used to be a narrow flight of stairs leading to the third floor and several furnished two-room apartments which were used by important Arabs visiting Jerusalem. We’re going on guesswork now, but we believe that Abu Bakr will have barricaded himself into one of the apartments on the third floor, mainly because the only toilets, aside from the ones in the changing rooms on the ground floor, are there, and he will have to use a toilet from time to time.” This drew a nervous laugh. “There is a crawl space above these offices and apartments which can be reached only by a ladder leading to a trap door. We have no idea what’s up there, but we will assign two men to cover the trap door, and three others to secure the crawl space once the raid has gone public, not a moment before.”
Vicious Circle Page 25
