The Blue Widows - [Kamal & Barnea 06]

by By Jon Land

  “It doesn’t. Not yet. That’s the problem. Why I wanted to come back here.”

  Danielle stopped and gazed across the room at al-Asi. He seemed to have aged significantly in the year since she and Ben had first found themselves in the United States. More salt and less pepper in his carefully groomed hair. His blazing eyes less lively, less playful, less sure. She knew al-Asi to be in his midforties, but he looked older than that now.

  She blamed it on the fact he was out of his element so much now, or, worse, had no element at all. He had worn one of his expensive Western suits two nights before at dinner in the King David Hotel’s restaurant, a brief reminder of the lifestyle he had prided himself on living before the bottom fell out of the Palestinian Authority and the various security satellites it operated.

  “Then tell me this,” Danielle said suddenly. “What’s my father’s connection here? Are you saying he knew Zanah Fahury?”

  “I suspect he did, Chief Inspector. But not as Zanah Fahury.”

  “What happened in Golda Meir’s office that day? What was Operation Blue Widow?”

  Al-Asi looked up from the contents of a drawer he had just opened and began to speak.

  “General Barnea,” Prime Minister Golda Meir continued, “I’m sure needs no introduction. He fought with the Haganah in forty-eight, was a hero in the Fifty-six War, and led the assault on Jerusalem during the Six-Day. He developed Operation Blue Widow in consultation with Mossad, which agreed jointly with him not to distribute any memos or briefings until everything was set in place. “

  “No disrespect was meant, sirs,” Barnea began, seeing the derision in the looks Moshe Dayan and Abba Eban were giving him, the soldier and the diplomat equally scornful. “But the operation was so precarious, so riddled with obstacles, that it never would have been approved based on a proposal. And even if it had been, the likelihood of success was so small as to offer nothing but futility and failure. “

  “Get to the point, General!” Dayan ordered.

  Yakov Barnea looked at one, then the other. “Sirs, infiltrating Saudi society had already been ruled an impossibility for a male operative, but what about a female?”

  “In a repressive society like the Saudi’s, what could a woman hope to accomplish?”

  “That depends on her placement or, should I say, their placement: One hundred women have been chosen for Operation Blue Widow.”

  “Chosen?” Eban challenged, aiming his words at Golda Meir. “You mean this plan is already operational?”

  “For two years now,” the prime minister said and looked back toward Yakov Barnea. “Go on, General.”

  “All one hundred are widows who lost their husbands to enemy fire,” he resumed. “Each and every one of them in their early twenties with no children or dependents. AH have stellar army records and the proper psychological profile.”

  “Psychological profile to do what.’’” Day an demanded.

  “Infiltrate Saudi society by marrying into it.”

  Eban and Day an exchanged a disbelieving glance. “You’re joking,” Dayan said for both of them.

  “Not at all,“ said Barnea. “The women worked for months adapting their looks, learning the language, studying Saudi culture and society so they would know exactly what was expected of them. “

  “And then what?” challenged Eban. “You just drop them in Saudi society and hope a man proposes or a marriage is arranged. This is absurd!”

  “Please, sir, let me finish. The women were never meant to take on the guise of Saudis, they only had to pass as Americans. American college students. “

  Eban and Day an looked at each other, dumbfounded. “A hundred, you say,” Dayan muttered.

  “That’s the number we inserted as students in America,” Yakov Barnea continued, “all at elite institutions attended in impressive numbers by children of the royal family and its offshoots. They have enrolled in the same classes, attended the same social events—that much we’ve seen to. The rest will require an element of luck, but our hope is that three or four might end up being of service. “

  “Unless their luck turns bad, “Abba Eban said grimly. “Tell me, General Barnea, are these women aware that success in their mission means they will likely never be able to return to Israel, at least not alive?”

  “Quite, sir.”

  “And did they also understand the embarrassment and disgrace Israel would face if they buckled under interrogation?”

  “The volunteers had only one contact,” Barnea explained, not bothering to mention that contact was himself. “And none of them knew anything about the larger scope of the plan. “

  “You should know, “started Golda Meir, “that four of the original group of women are already in Saudi Arabia.”

  “What about the other ninety-six?” Eban wanted to know.

  “Some are still in training, others are already in the United States, more are awaiting placement. Others have been recalled.”

  “And do we have reason to hope any of the four in Saudi Arabia now will yield something of promise?” asked Day an.

  “One whose cover is most firmly established,” Barnea replied.

  “And why is that, General?”

  “Because a few months ago she gave birth to her first child.”

  Danielle swallowed past the lump that had formed in her throat. “Zanah Fahury?”

  “I have no way of being sure yet, Chief Inspector, but I have my suspicions, yes,” al-Asi said from across the room, as he removed another drawer from the dresser.

  “Any idea how long she’s been living here?”

  “Our records, limited as they are, indicate thirty years.”

  “Nineteen seventy-three.”

  Al-Asi stuck his hand inside the dresser and began to feel about in the area behind the drawer. “Yes.”

  Danielle watched al-Asi’s expression change as he twisted his body to better his angle, probing deeper into the dresser.

  “I think I’ve found something, Chief Inspector,” he said.

  * * * *

  Chapter 39

  D

  arkness fell while Ben sat in his car inside a long-term-parking garage at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, waiting for John Najarian to call him back with instructions. He had contacted his brother and warned him that the risk he and his family faced was even greater now. And they wouldn’t be safe so long as Lewanthall’s killers remained at large.

  Sitting in the car, Ben felt numb with dread. The familiar bottleneck of breath, the thickness in his muscles, the tension in his shoulders. He thought of Danielle, looked at his watch, dialed her number in Israel.

  “Hello,” she answered sleepily.

  “What time is it over there?” he asked.

  “Late.”

  “I’m sorry if I woke you.”

  “I wasn’t asleep,” she said, her neck and shoulders stiff from slumping over a table for hours, studying what Colonel al-Asi had uncovered in Zanah Fahury’s dresser:

  A photograph, tattered and warped, its fading colors giving a painting-like quality to the faces of the two young girls pictured, their ages difficult to discern. Danielle guessed three and five. Both were smiling. Same white shiny teeth, heavy-lidded eyes that looked strangely adult, dark wavy hair. Something about the faces was familiar to Danielle but she couldn’t identify what exactly.

  She had tried inspecting the background with a magnifying glass, but it was too faded to yield any clue as to where the photo had been taken or how many years back. Could it be that Zanah Fahury had given birth to the girls in her guise as one of the Blue Widows, as Colonel al-Asi’s tale suggested? Were the children distant, pained memories of a lost life?

  But why bother hiding the picture?

  Then again, perhaps it had belonged to the chest of drawers’ previous owner. Maybe the explanation for the photo’s placement was innocent, simply the result of an overstuffed drawer being yanked out, this one picture stripped from an album and left stuck to the wood.

/>   Danielle abandoned that possibility as quickly as she had considered it. Colonel al-Asi believed that Zanah Fahury was one of her father’s Blue Widows, part of his plan to infiltrate the Saudi government thirty-six years before in the wake of the Six-Day War. The rest of her life remained a mystery Danielle was determined to solve, because she had been murdered by the same one-eyed man who had been identified as one of the executioners of terrorist leader Akram Khalil.

  What was the connection?

  “The end of all things is real,” Ben said, shocking her back to the present. “A rogue State Department operation gone bad, a major fuckup.”

  “Please tell me I’m dreaming this.”

  “I’d like to, believe me. But somebody’s got enough smallpox to infect half the world, starting with the U.S.”

  “Khalil’s dead, remember?” she said after a pause.

  “But the operation isn’t. Listen to me, Danielle. Khalil was killed because he was part of something the American government created and then lost control of. They were trying to trap terrorists but something went wrong.”

  “Someone started killing the terrorists,” Danielle concluded, making it sound obvious.

  “And whoever it was set this whole thing up. They’ve got the smallpox now. Latif delivered it to them. The plan must have been to deflect blame off Hamas or any Arab terrorist group for its release.”

  “A witness claims Khalil was arguing with his killers before the shooting began.”

  “Those killers are the ones behind this, Danielle. That’s who we’ve got to find. Are you any closer to identifying them?”

  “No,” Danielle said, thinking once more about the one-eyed giant.

  “Keep trying. Najarian’s setting me up with someone at the State Department who can help from this end. Unless it’s too late. That’s what I’m worried about. That it’s already too late.”

  Ben’s phone rang just seconds after he had said good-bye to Danielle.

  “Are you safe, Ben?” Najarian’s voice demanded as soon as he answered. “Are you all right?”

  “John, I can hardly hear you.”

  “I’m in my car, heading toward Logan so I can meet you in Washington.”

  “You reached someone,” Ben said, feeling his chest relax.

  “They’ll have further instructions for me when I get down there. Everything’s fuzzy right now. I’ve been on the phone since I got off with you. I’m told to hang up, then somebody calls me right back, doesn’t identify himself. I keep telling the story, starting over every time.”

  “They believe you. . . .”

  “I can tell from their voices, Ben: They’re scared.”

  “So am I.”

  “I’m sorry I got you into this.”

  “Just put it on the government’s bill, under pain and suffering,” Ben told him, surprised he had settled down enough even to attempt a joke.

  “Well, they don’t know it yet but they’re paying for your plane flight too. I booked you on the nine o’clock out of Detroit Metro into Dulles. I’ll be waiting at the gate,” Najarian finished. “With friends.”

  They almost didn’t let Ben board the plane. A single man traveling without luggage on a one-way ticket.

  An Arab.

  Despite all the frisks and pat-downs, it took a call to an airline supervisor, who interpreted a code provided by whoever had reserved Ben’s ticket, before he was waved on last and allowed to take his seat, watched intently by every passenger he passed down the aisle.

  The flight seemed interminably long, Ben’s tension having resulted in a splitting headache no amount of aspirin could relieve. He sat squeezed into a middle seat, acutely aware of every engine sound, every minor course change, every flight attendant call bell that went off. He drank black coffee. Used the men’s room four times, stood in line for three of them, glad to be on his feet in the relative open space of the cabin. The middle seat made it seem as if the world were closing in on him, the battle for the armrests long lost, leaving his elbows jammed against his body.

  He kept shifting about, trying to stretch out his legs, searching futilely for comfort. He concentrated on the second hand sweeping across the face of his watch as time crawled. Made out the low din of the Walkman the passenger next to him had on. A baby cried. Someone laughed.

  Then, at last, the flight was over. The plane’s taxi to the gate was equally slow, followed by another delay as the flight crew waited for their slot to open up.

  Ben saw himself bolting up the aisle as soon as the plane was stopped. But the hiss of the engines idling down was accompanied by a flight attendant moving to the aisle directly before him, impeding his exit.

  He held his ground with the others, took his turn in line, and filed off the plane down the jetway toward the gate at Dulles. John Najarian would be waiting along with officials from the State Department. Ben would share what he knew with them, and they would take over. Sort out the mess they had inadvertently created.

  Ben walked briskly up the jetway exit and into the artificial air of the terminal, fighting the lingering pain in his hip from the beating he had taken the night before. He saw John Najarian, huge frame stuffed into a tan overcoat, standing rock-shouldered before him. He slumped that way when he was nervous. He noticed Ben and forced a slight smile, trying to look reassuring. Ben tried to pick out the operatives from the State Department amid the crowd around Najarian.

  A pair of men springing out of nowhere grabbed both Ben’s arms simultaneously. Ben saw the wall an instant before his face slammed into it, his lips mashed into the tile so he couldn’t cry out if he wanted to. He winced in pain, tasted blood instead of stale coffee. An arm pressed against the back of his neck held him there, while someone’s hands dug around his belt and pockets. His bad hip flared with fresh agony.

  “Hey,” he heard John Najarian say from nearby, “this wasn’t part of the deal!”

  “We’ll have to ask you to stand back, sir,” a new voice said with a modicum of politeness.

  “But—”

  “Stand back, sir!” An order this time.

  Ben felt his hands wrenched cruelly together, something cold and tight fastened around them an instant before he heard the click of the handcuffs locking home.

  * * * *

  Chapter 40

  Y

  ou are not welcome here,” Layla Aziz Rahani said, as soon as she saw her brother Saed admiring the artwork that adorned the foyer of the palace.

  “I came to see our father,” Saed said, his blue eyes blinking rapidly. He was short and awkward-looking, prematurely bald, which exaggerated the billiard-ball shape of his head. Layla could smell the alcohol on his breath. Scotch, she thought.

  As always, she had slipped into the private jet’s shower during the final leg of her journey. Recoiffed her hair so it could more easily be concealed by a head scarf and pulled the robe worn by all Saudi women over her Western dress and jewelry.

  The car had brought her straight to the Rahani palace from the airfield. In regal majesty it was the equal of any palace in Saudi Arabia, a lavish assemblage of excess layered with pools and fountains, both inside and out. Exquisite paintings adorned a museumlike entry foyer, above which stairs encased in priceless Persian carpet wound upward toward two dozen bedrooms and as many baths.

  The palace had been designed on the grand scale of those long lost to the ages, gilded lavishly in twenty-karat gold that was reflected in the twin pools bracketing a walkway of polished red granite. Abdullah Aziz Rahani himself had once tended the gardens that enclosed them, his hand so unsteady in the weeks before his stroke that the family’s gardeners had to clean up after him, repairing the damage to flowers and shrubs.

  As a girl, Layla had walked these grounds often with her father, listening to him speak of their vast holdings. Having borne no sons, Abdullah Aziz Rahani had already resigned himself to passing his wealth and power to his daughter and bore no regrets over that fact. But, after the death of her mother, he had taken a
second wife, who bore him three sons, Saed being the eldest.

  “I’m asking you to leave,” Layla said to her brother. “Don’t make me call the guards.”

  “You should watch your tongue, my sister.” Saed smirked, his speech slurred slightly. “Otherwise, I will rethink my decision to let you remain here once our father has passed on.”

  Layla felt a surge of heat move through her and stripped off the robes that covered her Chanel suit. “You should leave, my brother. I trust you’re not driving. It would be most embarrassing if a patrol found you intoxicated behind the wheel.”