Chosen People

by Robert Whitlow

  Daud ordered a roasted rack of lamb dish for Hana and a beef entrée for himself. “How did I do?” he asked when the waiter left.

  “That was my number one choice,” Hana answered.

  Daud smiled and looked at her in a way that made Hana catch her breath. He reached out for her left hand, and she gave it to him.

  “Are you going to take me to Reineh to meet your father?” he asked.

  Hana knew that was the precursor to a marriage proposal. Daud would never propose directly until he was sure he had patriarchal approval. Hana felt her head about to nod and barely stopped it.

  “Is there anything else I need to know before I agree?” she asked. “I don’t want any secrets between us.” As soon as she said the words, she felt her own betrayal of trust about the video flash before her eyes.

  Daud spoke before she could continue. “Only when it comes to my work,” he replied. “There are things I do, people I meet, and places I go that I can’t discuss with anyone. If you don’t know, you’re safer than if you do.”

  “That’s understandable,” Hana replied. “And I have a confession to make.”

  Hana haltingly told him what she and Jakob had done. Daud listened impassively as she stumbled to a conclusion.

  “It was wrong, and there’s no way for me to make it right,” she said sorrowfully. “For me to ask you about secrets when I was hiding something from you was so hypocritical. I’m sorry.”

  “Let me ease your guilt,” Daud answered, leaning forward. “After I dropped you and Jakob off at the hotel, I made a few phone calls. We weren’t the first people to see the execution video. It’s not on any public forum, but it’s not a secret, either. There’s no risk of anything coming back to cause problems for Uri if the detective in America watches it or passes it on to their security services.”

  Hana felt tears of relief form in the corners of her eyes. “But that doesn’t excuse what I did,” she said.

  Daud shook his head. “That was Jakob Brodsky, not you. I do not blame you for failing to control him, even though you promised that you would. Your boss in Atlanta was right about him, and I’ll keep that in mind the rest of the time we’re together.”

  Hana took a sip of water.

  “Look at me again,” Daud said.

  Hana willingly obeyed.

  “Do you see any condemnation or criticism in my eyes?” Daud asked.

  Daud’s dark eyes were pools beckoning Hana to enter without fear. “No,” she sighed. “And thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” Daud said as a big smile formed on his face. “Making you happy is my number one job.”

  After eating, they lingered over dark coffee as the restaurant filled with other patrons and the lights of the city twinkled more brightly on the hill across from them. When they reached the hotel, Daud turned off the car’s engine and turned in his seat toward her. “You never answered my question,” he said.

  “Which one?”

  “About taking me to Reineh to meet your father.”

  “We will go before I return to America.”

  “Return temporarily to America?” Daud asked.

  “You know I love it here,” Hana answered easily. “America was never a final destination.”

  A large smile formed on Daud’s face for the second time. Hana prepared to open the car door and get out. Daud reached out and touched her arm. She faced him as he leaned close and kissed her. They kissed a second time.

  “I wish we could go to Reineh right now,” Hana said softly as they parted.

  Daud gently stroked her cheek.

  “When will I hear from you tomorrow?” she asked.

  “As soon as I’m on my way back to Beit Hanina from Deir Dibwan,” Daud answered. “Hopefully by midafternoon.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Always.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Jakob slept later than he had any other morning since arriving in Israel. When he rolled out of bed, it was eight o’clock, and the sun shone brightly around the edges of the curtains. After a quick shower and shave, he went downstairs to the courtyard. Hana was drinking coffee and eating a light breakfast. She smiled as he approached.

  “You look happy,” Jakob said when he sat down across from her.

  “I am,” she replied.

  “Which means you had a good dinner with Daud last night. I ended up ordering room service, which was better than I expected and worse than I’d hoped.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The entrée that I can’t pronounce was terrible, but dessert was delicious. Do you want to torture me with the details of your meal?”

  Hana told him about the food. “But I put something else on the table,” she said. “Isn’t that the way you say it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I confessed to Daud that you transferred the video file to my laptop and sent it to Detective Freeman.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Jakob replied and then let Hana explain without interruption.

  “I have a confession, too,” he said when Hana finished. “I misjudged Detective Freeman. He ran a facial comparison analysis and confirmed that Tawfik is the one who lifts his mask in the execution video.”

  “That’s good,” Hana began. “It means—”

  “And he sent the video without my authorization to a friend who works for Homeland Security. Daud is right. The video isn’t secret. Homeland Security identified the Caucasian man with the laptop. He’s an American named John Caldwell who converted to radical Islam a number of years ago and now goes by the name Latif Al-Fasi. He’s a professional videographer who works for terrorist groups. It’s likely he edited the execution video.”

  Hana’s eyes widened as Jakob talked. “What else did he tell you about Al-Fasi or his contacts? If he works for known groups, it might be a way to tie them to the Zadan brothers.”

  “Not much except that he has an ex-wife and teenage daughter who live in a town called Payson near Phoenix, Arizona. The information about Al-Fasi’s contacts was redacted from the dossier Freeman received.” Jakob paused. “But while you were eating your fancy lamb dish, I researched John Caldwell, aka Latif Al-Fasi, through software I bought to track down deadbeat defendants. When I entered the name Caldwell for Payson, Arizona, I received a couple of hits, one for a woman named Valerie Caldwell, formerly married to John Caldwell. She has a sixteen-year-old daughter. Valerie’s employer is a film production studio with offices in Los Angeles, Berlin, and several other European cities. Apparently, she’s in the video business, too. Maybe that’s how she and John connected in the first place.”

  Hana took a sip of coffee. “It’s hard to imagine her providing information to us about her ex-husband,” she said.

  “The key word in your sentence is ‘ex-husband.’ If Al-Fasi is as radicalized as he seems to be, she may be willing to talk negatively about him.”

  “Unless she lives in fear,” Hana replied. “Maybe Daud can find out who Al-Fasi works for.”

  “Ask him, but I’m not waiting.”

  “We should coordinate our efforts,” Hana said quickly. “Daud is going to call me when he’s on the way back to Jerusalem from Deir Dibwan. Let’s discuss it then.”

  Jakob grunted noncommittally. He returned to the buffet and brought back a plate filled with fruit, cheese, and pickled fish.

  “This should drive the memory of last night’s supper from my mind,” he said.

  “I’m staying with my memories,” Hana replied as she nibbled a piece of melon.

  They sat in silence for a few moments. Jakob ate a piece of cold herring followed by a bite of sharp cheese.

  “What’s on our agenda while we wait for Daud?” he asked.

  “I can take you anywhere you want to go in Jerusalem.”

  Jakob sampled the salmon, which was milder than the herring. “You’re the expert,” he replied. “Let’s check out one of your favorite places.”

  “I’ll think it over and let you know.”

  H
ana left. After Jakob finished his meal, he returned to his room and continued his research into Latif Al-Fasi. This time, he focused on the Russian internet. Not surprisingly, there were multiple hits that included what he’d found before along with similar projects. The videographer was an active participant in the preparation of Islamic fundamentalist propaganda and figured prominently in photographs with groups throughout the Islamic republics of the former Soviet Union.

  Hana stood in front of the mirror brushing her hair and thinking about where to take Jakob. Visitors could spend a month in Jerusalem and barely dent what the ancient city had to offer. Planning an outing with Jakob was also a way to keep her from worrying about Daud.

  She checked on Leon, who was happily playing with two other puppies at the doggie day care center, and then composed her daily email report to Mr. Lowenstein, bringing him up-to-date on the events of the past twenty-four hours. As she typed, she was struck by how much had happened. The past day had covered a rapid series of ups, downs, and unknowns. The hectic pace they’d been keeping gave her an idea of where to take Jakob. When she stepped out of her room to the courtyard, he was waiting for her.

  “Do we need a driver?” he asked. “If so, I’d like to use Wahid, the concierge’s cousin.”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  “Where are we going?” Jakob asked.

  “A place with as much history crammed into it as anyplace in the city. Today, it’s mostly peaceful, but it hasn’t always been that way.”

  “Surprises are fine. Where is Daud by now?”

  “Probably near the checkpoint on the road to Ramallah.”

  Thinking about Daud made Hana’s heart pound. When Wahid arrived, Hana greeted him in Arabic. Their small talk back and forth took Hana’s mind off her worry. After several moments, both she and Wahid laughed.

  “I want to be part of any jokes,” Jakob said. “Especially if you’re talking about me.”

  “No, no,” Hana replied. “Not you.”

  “She’s teasing me about my New York Arabic,” Wahid replied. “And she sounds Lebanese to me.”

  Wahid pulled the taxi into traffic. They made their way along the edge of the Old City to the Damascus Gate and turned onto a side street.

  “There’s the bus station for the Arab part of the city,” Hana pointed out. “The road we’re on still goes to Damascus. It’s been that way for thousands of years.”

  Wahid pulled to the curb and stopped. Hana and Jakob got out.

  “You brought me to see a bus station?” Jakob asked as Wahid drove away.

  “Follow me.”

  They walked along a narrow sidewalk with a high wall to their left. After less than two hundred feet they reached a line of tour buses parked close together. Joining a group of twenty or so American tourists, they turned into a narrow alley and approached a group of men and boys selling postcards, tiny olive-wood camels, and other Holy Land trinkets. Multiple tourist groups from other parts of the world were waiting to enter through a small door in the stone wall.

  Mingling with the tourists, Jakob looked for the older man he’d met at the Newark Airport but didn’t see him. The noisy sounds of the bus station receded.

  “Here we are,” Hana said. “This is one of the sites where Jesus may have been crucified and buried. It’s called the Garden Tomb or Gordon’s Calvary, after a British general who made it famous in the 1800s.”

  “One of the sites?” Jakob asked. “How many are there?”

  “Two primary possibilities. There is a traditional site that was identified in the fourth century by Helena, the Roman emperor Constantine’s mother. And this one. No one knows for sure where the historical events actually occurred, but I like this place.”

  “I’m not sure the historical events happened here or anywhere else.”

  “Just listen and see what you think. I came here the first time on a field trip with my school when I was six years old.”

  Jakob felt duped. He grumpily followed Hana to the window where she paid an admission fee. The entrance reminded Jakob of something from a county fair in upstate New York he’d attended when he was a kid.

  “We’ll hear the lecture with this group,” Hana said, pointing to the Americans who had arrived at the same time.

  “Will there be a test?”

  Hana smiled in response. Once past the entranceway, they entered a pleasant, enclosed garden without any religious trappings. Interspersed through the greenery were narrow paths. An older man with a British accent introduced himself to the group and began to speak in a matter-of-fact way about the garden. Archaeologists had excavated an enormous cistern, which was common for watering gardens in first-century Jerusalem. The guide then strung together a series of verses from the New Testament, which were completely unfamiliar to Jakob. Most of the people in the tour group followed along on their Bible apps.

  “Do you believe everything he’s saying?” Jakob asked Hana as the guide led the group along a path to a different part of the property.

  “It makes sense based on what I’ve read and studied.”

  Now that he was inside the walls, Jakob could accept Hana’s nostalgic attachment to the idyllic spot in the midst of the noisy city. The guide stopped at a spot that overlooked a small rocky cliff to the left and the raucous Arab bus station to the right. He began to explain the preferred method of execution among the Jews over two thousand years ago.

  “They stoned people to death,” the man said. “Most of the time they pushed the condemned individual off a high place or cliff and then threw rocks on the body until they were satisfied that the person was dead. This place was a quarry, so there were a lot of rocks available, which made it a logical place of execution.”

  The guide pointed to the rocky cliff. “Some believe the configuration of the caves looks like a skull. That means this could be Golgotha, which means ‘the place of the skull,’ referred to in Matthew 27:33 and Mark 15:22.”

  With a little imagination, Jakob could see a misshapen skull face in the rocks.

  “It makes sense that the Roman occupiers would adopt the Jewish execution site for crucifixions,” the guide continued. “However, the Romans wouldn’t have crucified criminals or Jewish patriots on top of a hill. No, those crucifixions were performed along busy thoroughfares as a deterrent to anyone else thinking about defying their rule. The Damascus Road below has always been a major artery into and out of the city. Thousands of people would use it every day. The Romans would line posts alongside the road and use them over and over again to crucify condemned men, who were forced to carry a crossbeam to the place of their death. It says about Jesus in the Gospel of John that ‘many of the Jews read this sign, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and the sign was written in Aramaic, Latin and Greek.’ Many archaeologists believe the city walls at that time were located less than two hundred yards from where we’re standing.”

  Something the man said caught Jakob’s attention, and he leaned over to Hana. “Was Jesus a Jew?”

  “Yes.”

  Jakob thought about his time at the Western Wall. “But you’re an Arab—”

  “Who believes in the Jewish Messiah, just like the people from the United States, Asia, South America, and Africa you’ll see here.”

  “How is it possible for you to believe this?” he asked Hana.

  “It’s by faith—”

  “No, I mean if Jesus was Jewish—” Jakob stopped, not sure where his mind was going.

  “Along with all the initial first-century believers in Jesus, including almost every writer of the New Testament,” Hana said. “For them and me, he is the king of our hearts.”

  The guide spoke: “And Jesus wasn’t crucified up high on a hill, as is often depicted in paintings or movies. His feet were less than a meter above the ground, which made the contact between those suffering on the cross and their loved ones watching them die more intensely personal.”

  As the guide described the scene, Jakob saw it all�
��the dirty, awful stench of death and suffering and unwashed humanity, the cruelty of one of the most brutal execution methods ever devised by evil men, the unfathomable mockery of those who taunted Jesus and demanded that he perform a miraculous sign, and the anguish of the condemned man’s friends and family, who saw a person they loved and respected dying, along with their hopes, before their very eyes. Jakob’s own chest tightened as the guide described the slow, suffocating death experienced as a victim’s ability to force air into his lungs painfully slipped away. He winced when he learned that a soldier thrust a spear into Jesus’ side, causing a mixture of blood and water to gush forth.

  Symbolically carrying the dead Jesus with them, the tour group silently followed the guide past the enormous cistern to an open area that overlooked an excavated hole in the natural rock. It was a tomb.

  “This tomb is old enough to be from the first century. John 19:41–42 says that ‘at the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid . . . They laid Jesus there.’”

  While the man talked about other Bible verses, Jakob watched people stoop to enter the tomb, stay for a few moments, and leave.

  “We don’t know if this is the actual tomb,” the man said in an understated British manner. “But one thing we do believe is that the tomb of Jesus Christ was empty on the third day, and it’s been empty ever since. Jesus rose from the dead and offers new life to everyone who repents and puts their faith in him.”

  The group moved down some steps and lined up for a chance to enter the tomb.

  “Do you want to leave?” Hana asked. “That’s the end of the lecture.”

  “No, I want to look, too.”

  He and Hana joined the line. Jakob didn’t speak. For some reason it didn’t seem right to do so. When it was their turn, she motioned for him to precede her.

  “You first,” he replied.

  Jakob waited at the bottom of two wooden steps that led to the entrance. Hana emerged.

  “I’ll wait for you near the exit,” she said.

  Jakob lowered his head and entered the tomb. He found himself in an antechamber neatly chiseled out of the soft rock. To his right there were two parallel burial slabs with about three feet between them. It was a simple yet profound scene. Not wanting to stay too long because other people were outside waiting to enter, he stared for several more seconds at the empty slabs. Turning around, he saw a sign on a wooden door that read “He Is Not Here, He Is Risen.” Stepping into the bright sunlight, he slowly climbed the stone steps away from the tomb.