by By Jon Land
While waiting for the Russians to arrive, Danielle busied herself by moving through different shops and cafés, always within easy view of Katz & Katz and never staying too long in any one to attract undue attention. Over the many coffees she consumed, Danielle did her best to put together the substance of the plot she and Ben had uncovered.
Couriers dispatched from Africa smuggled rough diamonds into Israel and traded them for finished ones which were then used to purchase weapons from the thriving Russian underworld. The weapons would be shipped to rebels engaged in brutal civil wars currently ravaging the African continent. Meanwhile, the Russians would then sell their perfectly legal finished diamonds at prevailing rates through the diamond exchange. And the original blood diamonds would then end up finished, polished, and on display in stores like Katz & Katz. Everyone in the process profited. Everyone got what they wanted.
Except for the millions of innocent Africans who had lost their lives or been displaced thanks to civil wars funded by blood diamonds.
Finally, an hour before sunset, the lights outside Katz & Katz flashed on. The younger Katz needn’t have bothered; Danielle had watched the dark, slack-jawed pair of men enter the shop and knew instantly who they were. They wore thin jackets that barely concealed the pistols holstered over their hearts. Bulky men with eyes like a rifle’s crosshairs. They had parked their car just down the street, and she watched them return to it carrying Ranieri’s suitcase with the Holocaust Torah scroll inside after they exited the shop.
Danielle put her car into gear and settled in behind them, as soon as the men pulled out from the curb. It was a typically busy Sunday, people enjoying a day out after the Sabbath, and the traffic was maddening. If nothing else, though, that simplified her task of keeping the Russians’ car in sight while she hung back at a safe distance.
Once on the highway, their destination became clear. They were heading straight for Little Moscow, a large settlement outside of Jerusalem on the very edge of the West Bank in the dry brown hills of Achelon. Danielle had only visited it once and recalled that Little Moscow was no different in appearance from the other Jewish settlements scattered throughout the West Bank. It had the same prefabricated bunker appearance shared by so many others. Small, functional homes squeezed together with narrow strips of dirt between them that promised grass someday. Schools built within the cover of fortified security walls complete with bunkers for basements in the event of an attack.
Steeped in controversy, this settlement had originally fallen to the Barak government’s determined peace efforts and become a sacrificial lamb before construction was complete. But one of the first orders of business of the new Israeli administration had been to order construction resumed with the express purpose of housing Russian immigrants there. Except for the different climate and background, Little Moscow could have been Russia, so unchanged were the inhabitants, determined to maintain their own culture instead of assimilating themselves into Israel’s.
The soldiers at an Israeli army checkpoint outside of Jerusalem accepted the papers Sabi had provided, but Danielle wondered how much longer they would hold up to scrutiny and how much longer her makeshift disguise would hold out. The first time a soldier told her to pull her car over or drew his gun, Danielle would know she was caught. So long as the contents of Anatolyevich’s freighter remained unaccounted for, though, she had to risk it. Dov Levy had died because of them. She owed him that much.
Almost to the end of the one road leading into Little Moscow, Danielle noticed a pair of civilians with assault rifles dangling from their shoulders checking the occupants of every car. She could see no simple way to get past them and doubted her papers would satisfy them as easily as they had the soldiers at the checkpoint, leaving her with an option she had hoped to avoid.
She checked her rearview mirror when the men waved her to approach and, thankfully, saw no car behind her. The fall of darkness added to the camouflage she would need. Danielle slumped forward and rested her head lightly against the steering wheel. Through a cracked eye, she could see the guards waving her on again, then approaching when she failed to heed their signal.
Both of them. Good.
They came to opposite sides of the car and peered in at her apparently unconscious frame. The one on her side reached through the open window and tried to rouse her. Failing, he said something in Russian to the guard on the passenger side and then jerked open the door.
Danielle tumbled out, hitting the ground with nothing to break her fall. She could hear the crunch of gravel as the guard on the passenger side scurried around the car. Felt the arms of the other man reach for her, but remained still until she was certain the second one was close.
Then she sprang.
It was over very fast. Flashes exploded before her eyes in the darkness, the sequence of events a blur that ultimately left both guards unconscious on the ground. Static prickled her senses, blows launched and connected at the edge of her consciousness like a memory unfolding in real time that stopped with the bodies of both guards lying at her feet.
Breathing heavily, Danielle dragged them one at a time into a nearby nest of bushes. Her heart thudded against her ribcage. One of her knees ached. A hand throbbed, the knuckles skinned and already starting to swell from a misplaced strike that was part of the blur. She could feel a knifing burst of agony in the ribs down low on her right side with every breath.
But Danielle welcomed the pain. She had felt nothing for so long it was good to feel even this. Years ago, during her tenure with the Sayaret, it was moments like these that had made her feel the most alive. To do that job you had to more than accept violence; you had to welcome it. After Beirut that had all begun to change, culminating sixteen months ago when pregnancy took away her taste for the very work that had defined her. Her own mortality had suddenly become an issue.
Right now, though, she felt free, as if a great burden had been lifted. Not quite a happy feeling, but no longer the feeling of hopeless misery that had dominated every waking moment since she’d lost the baby and her job. She felt renewed, restored, reborn. And not angry, neither at her herself nor Ben.
Ben . . .
He would be in Russia by now. Danielle found herself missing him, worried about him. As if now that she had finally forgiven herself, she could forgive him, too.
Danielle saw headlights coming up the slight hill and hurried back to her car, hoping the guards’ absence would go unnoticed at least long enough for her to interrogate the Russians who had picked up the Torah scroll at Katz & Katz. Get them alone and discuss their world for as long as it took her to find out where the scroll filled with blood diamonds was going. The next rung on the ladder.
No cars were permitted on the settlement’s central promenade and she parked in a lot on the outskirts under the watchful eye of well-armed civilians. Walking toward the town center, she realized the Israeli army presence here was nonexistent; the residents of Little Moscow must have preferred to secure and police the settlement themselves. It was true to form. This most recent wave of Russian immigrants had isolated themselves and transplanted their own culture here—a fact more than borne out by the promenade itself.
Russian music blared from storefronts where older men played cards beneath bright outdoor lighting and younger men drank in bars and cafés that dominated the street. Women were not much in evidence and none, Danielle noticed, were alone. No way she could blend in casually here, while she waited for the opportunity to get the two Russians she sought alone.
Aware of the sharp and suspicious stares cast her way, she saw the men she recognized from Katz’s jewelry store enter a bar dominated by a tight cluster of bodies dancing uncoupled on the floor to the tune of a Russian ballad. Danielle sat down at an outdoor café table in direct view of the bar. She wasn’t sure yet what her next move would be. She could enter the bar and take her chances, or wait here to follow the two men again when they emerged, make her move as soon as they reached the first dark space offering concealment.
Since she was clearly a stranger, it took almost no time at all before an older Russian man with a thick, white pompadour hairdo and an apron approached and folded a pair of flabby forearms in front of her.
“I don’t know you.”
“Speak Hebrew. Or English.”
The man chose English. “I don’t know you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Nobody here does.”
“I don’t expect they do.”
“Explain.”
Danielle leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I’m from National Police, here on official business. So get the fuck away from me.”
“You have no business here,” he growled, leaning close to her. “We take care of ourselves.”
Danielle tried to catch a glimpse of the two men when the bar door opened again. “Not well enough, apparently.”
The proprietor chuckled, laughed, then just shook his head as he walked away. Technically, National Police did maintain jurisdiction over all settlements. But Danielle had never come across one report of an investigation undertaken here in Little Moscow.
No one came to take her order. Patrons at several nearby tables moved to others farther away. Their whispers buzzed at her ears.
Minutes passed. The two men she had followed here from Tel Aviv didn’t emerge from the bar. Danielle began to debate whether she should trail them inside after all, make sure they hadn’t left through another exit.
She twisted her chair slightly away from the table, enough to see a man approaching from the center of the promenade, making no effort to disguise himself. His boots clip-clopped atop the fake cobblestones as he walked. When he removed his sweat-stained cowboy hat Danielle saw that his finely chiseled features were framed by shaggy, overly long hair that had gone a little gray at the temples. Beyond that, and some deep creases dug by a long-worn tan, he looked exactly the same as he had a dozen years before.
James Allen Black reached the table and flashed Danielle a smile. “Mind if I sit down, ma’am?”
* * * *
Chapter 50
B
en took a second bus back to the airport where he rented a car, a small clanky Russian model stripped of all amenities. The weather was typically chilly for spring, but he still left the window rolled down part of the way through most of the drive north to Dubna.
Although he could speak Russian, he couldn’t really read it, so the local papers were useless to him in determining what sort of crisis had occurred in Dubna. He was fairly certain the city was not mentioned in any of the prominent headlines, and the rental agent did not hesitate or warn him when he asked for directions to the city from the airport. Instead of the computerized variety Ben remembered from rental stations in the United States, the woman recited the instructions and he jotted them down on the side of a map she provided.
During the drive north across roads almost as poorly kept as those in Palestine, Ben reviewed the little he knew about Dubna, a city mired in mystery since its very birth. Its isolated location, acceptable climate, and convenience to Moscow led Stalin in the wake of World War II to clear a thick pine forest near the Volga and build the Soviet Union’s first nuclear research laboratory there. The city itself, which for many years appeared on no map, was built around that and other scientific facilities located nearby.
The Institute for Nuclear Studies was not made public until Khrushchev unveiled it in 1956. Within the original facility lay the world’s first atom smasher. Later, plants and factories sprang up to make aircraft, guidance systems, satellite components, and parts for the nuclear reactors that supplied energy to much of the former Soviet Union. The nation’s collapse in 1991 led to the closings of many of these facilities and inadequate security at the rest. The population of Dubna shrank significantly with the loss of the preferred status the city had so long enjoyed. It survived, Ben had read, by converting some of its well-kept facilities into centers for medical treatment and research that had become a symbol of hope for Russian advancement and progress.
If it could be done in Dubna, the saying went, it could be done.
But something must have happened that changed that.
Further north, the forest swallowed the roads and Ben found himself enveloped by woods on both sides. The late afternoon sky was dark and he rolled up the window, trying to switch on the heat before remembering the car was stripped to the absolute basics, which apparently didn’t include a working heater.
A light mist began to fall thirty minutes into his drive, and Ben switched on his lights and windshield wipers. The wipers hesitated at first, then scratched across the glass in long choppy swipes. He tried his high beams to better see the road, went back to the regular setting when they only made things worse.
Ben had somehow strayed onto a back road that continued to narrow, then began to bend and dip. He thought of pulling over to better check his map, but there was no shoulder on which to do so safely so he kept driving, trying to trace the map as best he could to find where he had gone wrong.
The tiny car had trouble clinging to the corners, and Ben had just slowed a bit for the next curve when a crack sounded and the car listed wildly across the road. He realized he was spinning and fought with the wheel to pull out of it. Out of control, the vehicle veered off the side of the road and spun down a steep embankment covered by the forest’s thick canopy.
Ben’s head rocked upward, smacking against the roof and slamming his teeth together. He felt himself jolted against the confines of his seat belt and shoulder harness which locked against his collar bone. Branches raked and scratched at him. A window burst. He felt cold glass coating his skin like slivers of crushed ice, as the world dipped and darted. The nose of the tiny car ultimately turned straight down in the final moment before a wrenching thud that tore Ben’s consciousness away.
* * * *
Chapter 51
B
et you thought I was dead,” Jim Black said, as he stuck a tooth-pick into the side of his mouth and clamped down on it.
“Not after Dov Levy’s body was found this morning in
Gaza,” Danielle said bitterly. “I knew that was your work.”
“He wasn’t bad for an old guy. Put up a hell of a fight.”
Danielle felt the blood racing just beneath the surface of her skin. She caught the scent of a mildly sweet aftershave drifting from across the table, the scent inappropriately soft for the cowboy. “Before this is over, I’m going to kill you, Mr. Black.”
The cowboy leaned a little forward, seeming to like the prospects of that. He had a relaxed, easy manner about him, but wasted no motion. The kind of man who could control every blink and breath. “No need to wait when I’m right here now. I imagine you paid a visit to Mr. Katz.”
“That’s right.”
“Means that scroll those two boys carried out of his place in that suitcase is empty, I guess.”
“Right again,” Danielle confirmed. “I’ve got the blood diamonds you’re looking for.”
Black looked pleased. “Figured as much.” His eyes twinkled. “Like the souvenir I left on Katz’s face?”
“Easy to inflict when the subject isn’t one to fight back.”
Black leaned backwards in his chair. “That old guy—he fought back.”
Danielle felt something heavy in her throat and swallowed down some air. “Lucky you didn’t meet him twenty years ago.”
“Guess I’ll have to settle for you.” Black tilted his head to the side, sizing her up. “You up for a go?”
“That’s your call.”
“Right now we’re just a couple of pros shooting the shit, enjoying each other’s company.” He kept staring at her. “I saw what you did to those guards back there.” He whistled softly, blowing air through his pursed lips as he shook his head. “Man, oh man, you’re good. You get a chance to work with your hands these days, you gotta take it. Everything’s guns now. Not much opportunity to settle things man-to-man anymore.”
Danielle l
et him see her sizing him up, too. “Or man-to-woman.”
Black winked at her. “Know why you’re so good? ‘Cause you enjoy what you do.” Black tipped an imaginary drink her way. “It was a pleasure watching you work.”
“I wish I could say the same,” Danielle said, not bothering to disguise the anger simmering under her voice.
Black smirked. “That’s right. You seen me work, too, didn’t you?”
Danielle tried to hide her surprise that he had figured that out.
“You musta watched the whole thing on television back there in Beirut. Good show, wasn’t it?”
“It would have had a different ending if I’d been inside with the others.”
“I figured as much when I checked out your background after things went bad at the jail,” Jim Black told her. “Figured you were something special and sure enough I find out you’re about as good as it gets.” He looked her over again. “Least you used to be. That old guy I offed, he was your boss. You got a lot of loyalty to a man who bounced you out of his command.”
