by Lavie Tidhar
But then I found that there was no way to get back to Tel Aviv. The police blocked all the roads leading to it and the army guarded its borders, such as they were, and didn’t let anyone in. Aerial transport was out of the question, of course — no one dared fly even a kite in a twenty- kilometre radius around the city. Months went by, and I was becoming desperate.
However, no one considered the train.
All the train lines to and from Tel Aviv were cancelled, of course. It was hard to imagine someone being stupid enough, reckless enough, thoughtless enough to, say, hijack a train.
Which is exactly where Yehuda Rainbow came in.
The first time anyone had heard of him, Yehuda was an assistant in some archaeological dig near Tiberias. He became slightly famous when, after a night probably spent getting drunk on alcoholic relic cleaners, he tied up every member of staff, filled the main dig with water from the Kinneret, and went to swim in it. He claimed to have been influenced by an alien artefact he found at the dig, but which was never seen by anyone else. The book he wrote about this, after the police released him, sold quite well, I’m sorry to report. What a phony.
You can bet all you want that he wasn’t born with that family name, either.
Some of my so-called colleagues weren’t as sceptical as myself, regarding this. Yehonatan Atzil, in particular, published several articles about the significance of what he called “The Rainbow Connection,” in which he claimed that all this was proof of a government conspiracy to withhold information about UFOs. Which just goes to show.
In recent years Yehuda Rainbow tried several more stunts of this sort, but nobody paid him much attention anymore. Which is probably why I found, in one of the numerous Internet forums dedicated to the occult, a message written in a very familiar style — an open invitation, to those ready to face the unknown, to find the truth lying behind the mundane, etc., etc., to take a train trip to Tel Aviv. Nobody in the forum seemed to believe it, which was fine by me. I knew Rainbow was just unhinged enough to try this. And I was coming along for the ride.
*
The train, which was registered as going to Herzelia, left Haifa just before midnight, the last train of the day. Yehuda Rainbow was driving the engine, but I couldn’t see into it. In fact, I’d never even met him in person. He asked that no one tried to enter the engine, and I couldn’t think of any reason not to obey. I wasn’t interested in him, after all.
During the ride to Haifa, one morning the year before, there was no room to sit anywhere on the train, but now there were only three people in the car except for me, and it was eerily quiet. The train stopped at every station on the way, but nobody came on board and nobody left. There was no talk, no radio playing, no sound but the distant hum and vibrations of the engine far ahead. When we got to Herzelia, the last stop before Tel Aviv, it was past midnight, and very dark. I tried to look ahead but the windows wouldn’t open and all I could see was a sort of dark brown fog. I got up and walked towards the front of the train, thinking that I could find a better position to look out. I got to the door between the cars when one of the other passengers spoke.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he said.
I turned around, quite slowly, and stared at him. A thin man, wearing a shabby overcoat, which was ridiculous in this weather, and a broad-brimmed hat, which was ludicrous, period.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“We’re going into uncharted territories,” the man said, a little pompously. “There’s a high chance that the train will stop abruptly, or get off the tracks, or do something improbable altogether.”
Like rise in the air, I thought. I’d seen the last footage from Tel Aviv before the cameras died. I suppressed a shudder. “That may be so,” I said with more bravery than I felt. “So what?”
“So whatever’s going to happen, the nearer to the front you are the stronger it’s going to be.”
That did sound reasonable.
“That does sound reasonable,” I said, and — being a reasonable person, after all — I turned and walked back towards my seat.
There was a whining noise, coming from far ahead, a tremendous screech, and then a crash — there was a two-second pause, in which I tried to turn around — then everything flew backwards like a film in reverse as I flew through the door and into the next car, and through that car’s open door to the next, and probably the next, which was tilted up, or maybe it was the next one that was tilted, but after passing through the final door I flew high in the air, as if shot by a catapult, and in a split second I was going down, and then there was darkness.
*
I woke up lying on my back in a huge puddle, perhaps a crater filled with water. It probably saved my life. My back and neck hurt terribly, but I was alive and was able to — after several failed attempts — walk. I got up and looked around me. I was at the bottom of a makeshift hill, and above me I saw the Tel Aviv University train station. The train was in the station. This expression now had a new meaning, as the station’s reception bay, which is basically a huge piece of concrete parallel to the tracks, was now positioned over them, and the train was stuck in it in quite a literal sense. The engine, which looked rather shorter than I remembered it being, was on fire, and so were the remains of several of the front cars, which were mostly stacked above it at various angles.
I stared at the scene in silence for several moments, then shrugged. Well, I thought, at least that’s the last we’ll hear about The Rainbow Connection.
The rear cars were relatively undamaged, except for being one on top of the other, some of them creating the slope, down which I probably flew. I started to climb up, but about midway there was an unexpected explosion and I was buried in dirt. It took me forever to get out of that, and by the time I got to the train nothing was burning anymore.
I managed to enter the car in which I spent most of the trip from Haifa, which now felt as if it had happened a month ago. The door was broken, the windows were broken, but the seats looked as if nothing had happened, except for two dead people sitting on them. One, I saw immediately, had a broken neck, and the other looked extremely pale, as if all his blood had drained away, though I could see no blood on the seat. I didn’t bother to check elsewhere.
There was no sign of the man in the brimmed hat.
I got off the train on the other side, the right side, and started to walk. I was in Tel Aviv now, and there was plenty of work to do.
I N T E R L U D E
The old man watched something amazing, and he sucked on his teeth, which weren’t sitting right in his mouth, somehow. He had seen the train arrive, and for a moment time was rolled backwards, and he remembered that day, when he was waiting at the station, and the announcement came over the PA system that the train would arrive in fifteen minutes. He waited, and didn’t even notice the strange noises and the spreading darkness, he just waited for Tali to come on the train from Haifa, come to visit her old father in Tel Aviv, and in his mind he made a mental list of things to do together — she loved going to the market, and to eat falafel in that one stand they’d gone to ever since she was a little kid — but he was also anxious, because he wanted her to meet Mrs. Pepper, the next-door neighbour who had recently become more than just a good neighbour. After all they were both widowed now, but he worried how Tali would take it, and so he waited.
But the train never arrived. And there were no more announcements on the PA system, and no more trains, and he remembered the things that appeared, out of nowhere, like winds that weren’t winds, that tore and broke and ripped apart, but somehow he lived. But he couldn’t know — was Tali all right? Did she stop outside Tel Aviv? Was she safe? Or did her train come into the city and was . . .
So now he searched for her (there was no more Mrs. Pepper), wandering the streets like a ghost, his special Welcoming-Tali-Home clothes dusty and torn and bloodied now, but he kept them on, walking the city, eating from the rubbish other living people left, looting when he could, but it was har
d to loot: every gang had a part of the city and didn’t tolerate freeloaders. He respected that, respected order, so mostly he ate things he found in the street, and if not he went without. It was all right. He was old and didn’t need much food. And for a moment there he thought he had seen something amazing, a train coming into the station, but then he shook his head, trying to clear it. There were no more trains. “When you get here we’ll go eat the best falafel in town,” he said to Tali, and she smiled. “And then I’ll buy you ice cream on the promenade and we can watch the people on the beach, you remember how much you liked that?”
Tali never answered but she smiled and that was enough for him. He shuffled forward and found a pool of not-too-dirty water that had collected in a hole in the road. He bent down on his knees, painfully, and licked the water until he wasn’t thirsty any more, and then he went, looking for her in the maze of quiet streets.
SAM: ONE
It started early the previous morning, in Jerusalem, when I woke up from not enough sleep with the phone ringing and my sister’s nephew shouting, “Sammy, it’s for you!”
I hate when people call me Sammy. It smacks of one of those old cheesy movies with Ze’ev Revach, like Snooker Party. But I have to put up with the kid. As well as my sister. And her husband. And their two other kids. All crammed into my shoe-box apartment because of — well, you know.
So I took the phone from the kid and I said, “Hello,” and it was Y., my boss. And Y. said, “Sam, we need you to come in.”
So I said, “Sure,” and he told me where to go. Our old headquarters was in Tel Aviv, of course, but afterwards whatever was left of the Service had to move into temporary accommodation near the Knesset building. There was talk of Y. becoming the new Head, but in the event it was K. who got the job, which just goes to show, it’s all politics, even national security. I got dressed, and shaved, and had to kick my sister’s no-good husband out of the shower before he finished all the hot water. When I stepped out of the apartment the streets were as full as always. You’d think with everything that’d happened there would be less people around, not more, but of course everyone who got out in time, or was outside of the city when it happened, all those people suddenly without homes and shops and offices and jobs — they all came to Jerusalem. So there were a lot of beggars out that morning, and people sleeping rough outside the shops, but they knew not to hassle me by now.
I was a bit surprised, to be honest, because Y. didn’t tell me to come to the Service building. He told me to go to the Prime Minister’s office. I wondered what could be so important. Maybe they needed me back in London, or Paris. I wouldn’t have minded that. Things were a bit rough in the country, as you can imagine. And I always saw myself more as an overseas operative. Well, it figures, doesn’t it? I mean, the Service isn’t supposed to operate within the country’s borders. Which, if I’d only thought about it then, should have given me a warning.
I didn’t have to push my way through security. Y. himself was waiting for me outside and he whisked me straight in through a side entrance. “What’s going on?” I asked him.
He just shook his head and said, “Follow me.”
I followed him through the corridors and over to an unmarked door and Y. pushed it open and we went in. Behind the desk sat the Prime Minister.
“Please,” the Prime Minister said. “Sit down.”
“Sir?” I said. The Prime Minister looked tired. Before him on the table was an open file. I saw my name on it.
“Prime Minister,” Y. said, “this is Sam. You remember the Sheikh Al-Nazim incident in Amsterdam — ”
Cyanide capsule. Simple and effective.
The Prime Minister nodded. “ — and the case of the Hezbollah financiers group in Kuala Lumpur — ”
An explosive device hidden inside a laptop computer. Elegant.
“ — and that potentially very embarrassing situation with M.?”
“I remember that,” the Prime Minister said.
So did I. M. was one of ours. A honey-trap specialist. Until she decided to quit and sell her story to the British tabloids. That one was delicate. It took all of my powers of persuasion to get her to change her mind.
I still get a Rosh Hashana card from her once a year. She lives in Cannes now, and she’s married, but . . . some things you never forget.
“One of my best men,” Y. said, and I smiled a sort of modest smile, and the Prime Minister said, “We want you to go into Tel Aviv.”
I said, “What?” and the smile kind of melted away from my face.
“Tel Aviv,” Y. said. “It has been decided that an experienced agent must be deployed on a penetration and surveillance mission into the — ”
“But Tel Aviv is within borders,” I said, interrupting him.
“That,” the Prime Minister said, “is open to interpretation.”
I said, “What?” again. The Prime Minister reached into a drawer and returned with two sheets of paper. “These are satellite images,” he said, “from before we lost contact. Take a look. This one’s from earlier on — ”
He pushed the nearer one towards me. I scanned it. A large, sprawling urban area, bordered by sea. A turbulence of some sort on the water, like a gathering storm.
“ — and this one from the moment just before we lost contact. Go ahead, take a look.”
It wasn’t the same picture. Or rather, it looked like a second picture had been superimposed over the previous one. There was a . . . for one thing, there was a great big mountain rising in the middle of the urban sprawl, like something that had hatched out of the ground and pushed everything away as it grew. And beyond it were . . .
I said, “What is that?”
“That’s what we’re hoping you’ll find out,” Y. said.
Beyond the mountains, barely discernible but there, were other mountains, impossibly tall, and a vast plane, and rivers, and —
If you believed the image, beyond Tel Aviv was a new, alien world.
*
The landscape changed the farther away I got from Jerusalem. I drove the jeep down the old Bab el-Wad road, with the remnants of shelled vehicles lying by the side of the road, still remains from the war for Jerusalem all that time ago. The air turned warmer as the altitude dropped. There was little traffic going in the same direction. These days north and south were almost independent entities, with little movement of people or cargo between them. As I drove down the lonely highway towards Tel Aviv I thought of all the times I’d followed this road before, coming in at Ben Gurion Airport, as the plane doors open and you step out into the hot Mediterranean air and the smell of Israel hits you. It has that kind of smell . . . hot and a little angry and still beautiful, like a woman who is no longer quite young but still desirable. It is a smell made of the memory of oranges, and diesel fumes, and smoke and traffic and brewed coffee and imported perfume. I used to come in to land from some foreign assignment and take the car and drive into Tel Aviv and to the Service building for a debrief. Now the Service was badly hit and I was being sent not to Paris or Rome or Islamabad but Tel Aviv, at least what was left of it.
The farther I drove into Tel Aviv the stranger the land became. The highway here was deserted. There were no cars, no people. In the back of the jeep I had an Uzi and a GPS and some clever toys the boys from R&D gave me just before I left. On my belt was my Desert Eagle .50. I was wearing Ray-Ban shades. I tried the radio but got only static. It made my head hurt and I switched it off.
I began to see the city as I drove. Before, it wasn’t quite there. You could look directly in that direction and not see anything, or rather, see the absence of something, but it was more than that: it was like your eyes couldn’t fasten onto what was there and just kept moving away, not registering. But now as I entered it I encountered no resistance.
Driving along, burned traffic signs and places where the road had been jolted out of place. On my left the foundations of a house, filled with water, and dark shapes darting in the depths. I pressed on t
he accelerator. Tel Aviv’s cityscape was lower. The few tall buildings remaining were broken, deformed things. I saw something huge fly high in the sky, swoop once and disappear. As I followed its path I realized the ground had risen towards the centre, and then it was as if I had passed an invisible boundary and —
I saw the mountain.
It rose in the middle of the city like an enormous, impossible island. I could not see the summit. I had the sense of something immense and alien, thought I saw snow-covered peaks in the haze, though that could have been just my imagination, the mind supplying details in an incomplete picture. It was then, while not paying attention to the road, that the wheels all failed at once and the jeep skidded and I lost control of the steering wheel. The jeep swerved and I felt myself rising in the air with it as it overturned, the impact jarring my body, once, twice, and on the third time it stopped. I was afraid it would explode. I unhooked the safety belt and half-fell half-slithered out of the seat onto the hot asphalt, dragging myself away from the jeep. My whole body was in pain.
That was when the attackers found me.
I N T E R L U D E
There is no more government. There is no more Prime Minister, no more Chief Rabbi, no more rabanut to marry you or a chevra kadisha to bury you, no more army reserves to call you to duty, no more taxes, no more voting, no more by-laws, no more in-laws. There is no more television. There are no more newspapers. In the ruined coffee shops the tables are empty and filmed with dust and worse. There is no more money, not as it was, not shekels, and there are no more banks. There are no more trains, no more buses, no more shared taxis. There is no longer a Jerusalem, a Haifa, there are no longer weekend holidays to Turkey, no more shopping in London, no more trips to New York. They do not exist for you. There are no more post-army-service backpacking trips to India and Thailand. No more hiking to remote Laotian villages. No more getting stoned in Phnom Penn or Bangkok. There are no more girls to chat up and woo because the girls that remain carry knives and trust no one; no more old ladies to help crossing the road with the shopping, because the old ladies will shoot you if you come too close. There are no more barbershops, no more florists, no more wedding-dress stores. There are no more afternoon walks by the Yarkon river because you are likely to get shot, raped, or captured for the copper-wire mines if you walk there. There are no more letters to arrive, and all the post boxes are quiet and empty. There are no more phones, no familiar voices on the other end, only silence.
