Land, Jon

by [Kamal

  Joshua Tice never saw them; his attention was riveted on Atturi as the Arab approached the truck. But it was not Tice the men were after. They too headed for the truck, their eyes, Danielle was certain, fixed on Atturi. She felt her pulse quicken and fought to remain calm.

  “Go Red,” she said into her nearly invisible microphone, using the signal for imminent danger.

  She couldn’t see the other agents posted along the street, yet knew they were in motion even now, heading toward her position as relayed by Commander Levy.

  Tice had brought a hand to his ear, slowing as he listened, eyes darting about in befuddlement.

  Danielle continued to push through the crowd toward him, straining to maintain at least a partial glimpse of the jacketed figures. She caught three in her field of vision again, hands ducked inside their coats now. Still in motion. Taking their time.

  Danielle shoved some bystanders aside and drew her Beretta nine-millimeter pistol. She caught sight of Tice holding a twin of her gun low by his hip forty feet from her. The jacketed figures were hidden from his view by the knotted crowd.

  A man jostled Danielle from the back. A soccer ball ricocheted off her leg, bounced off a car fender, and rolled straight toward Atturi as a sliver of space appeared briefly in the crowd. She saw two of the jacketed men raising their own pistols. A third pulled a sawed-off shotgun from under his coat and leveled it straight at Atturi’s back.

  Tice turned and took a step sideways to kick the soccer ball aside, placing him directly between the shotgun’s barrel and Atturi.

  Danielle registered the boy chasing the ball about to cross that path as well. At that instant her instincts took over. She had raised the pistol in her hand and fired before she even knew her finger had moved. The sound reverberated inside her head, as she pulled the trigger again and again.

  One of her bullets struck the shoulder of the man wielding the shotgun and spun him just as he fired, causing him to miss the boy, who had frozen in place. She was dimly aware of Tice twisting violently and clutching for his face, staggering—his gun useless. The next gunfire she heard belonged to two of the other jacketed men. Their twin fusillades slammed Ismail Atturi into his truck, spraying blood all over the hood and windshield, as Danielle launched herself through the now-panicked crowd.

  She chanced a fresh series of shots at the jacketed men through an opening, angling herself to cover Tice, who was writhing on the pavement. She realized the boy in the soccer uniform was still in the line of fire too, and shoved him to the ground as she squeezed off fresh rounds toward Atturi’s slayers.

  The fourth man! What happened to the fourth man?

  No sooner had Danielle realized she had lost track of him than the familiar click-clack of submachine gun fire made her twist to the right, hearing screams erupt on that side of her. The fourth man was trying to escape, firing wildly on the run, his bullets felling a pair of pedestrians who had ended up between Danielle and him. Before she could swing her Beretta on the assassin, three more of the Shin Bet team charged into the street firing, one mounting the hood of a car and another a merchant’s cart to improve their aims. The fourth man managed to turn away, then simply keeled over, riddled with bullets. Danielle ejected her spent clip, reached into her pocket for a fresh one.

  The roar of an engine made her whirl back toward the truck as she jammed the new magazine home. One of the two final gunmen writhed in pain on the pavement, while the other stumbled toward her. His left shoulder oozed blood through his jacket; a pistol trembled in his right hand.

  “Suka!” he screamed at her, trying his best to steady the gun and fire.

  Danielle dove behind a pair of cars for cover and heard the windows of the nearer one explode as she chambered a round. She peered cautiously over the fender of one car in time to see the big truck screech from its berth in the warehouse. A violent lurch carried it into the street, where it plowed through stalled traffic and crashed into the final gunman, tossing him aside.

  Danielle noted insanely that its ancient wipers were struggling to wipe the contents of Ismail Atturi’s skull from the windshield as the truck smashed through another pair of cars and slammed them into the one she was perched behind, pinning her in place.

  The truck bore down on her like a dragon spewing hot, gasoline-scented breath. Danielle could do nothing but angle her barrel upward and fire. Glass spiderwebbed around the three neat holes she drilled on the driver’s side of the windshield, blood splattered on the inside now as well as the out. At the last instant before it was upon her, the truck turned into a line of parked or abandoned cars, coming to a halt with its ancient horn blaring.

  Danielle climbed out from the twisted steel around her and sprinted over to the truck behind four of the team members, led by Commander Levy. Another pair had rushed to Joshua Tice, one pressing a handkerchief against Tice’s face, while the other fought to hold him still. Guns steadied on the truck’s covered rear from all angles. Levy nodded to the man closest, who leaped up on the sill. In one swift motion he drew the burlap flap back and the team braced, ready to shoot.

  “Refrigerators,” Danielle heard the first one say. “Fucking refrigerators.”

  “What the fuck?” another blared, climbing into the rear of the truck.

  He grabbed hold of one of the refrigerator doors and pulled. The latch resisted at first, then came free when he yanked harder.

  A cache of automatic rifles, both American M16s and Israeli Galils, spilled outward, clacking against each other as they tumbled to the pavement.

  “Elloheem!” one of the Shin Bet agents exclaimed.

  “Holy shit!”

  The second agent’s use of English made Danielle think of what the last gunman had screamed at her, the word and the language:

  He had called her a bitch. In Russian.

  * * * *

  Chapter 3

  W

  hen Ben steppedout ofthe PalestinianAuthority building, Commander Omar Shaath, the district of Jericho’s chief of police, was waiting behind the wheel of an ancient Peugeot. His thick fingers gripped the steering wheel so tightly they seemed about to split the leather.

  Ben had no doubt Shaath could do just that. He was a bear of a man with thick black hair, a bushy mustache, and the trace of a beard where he had shaved just hours before. A black patch strung around his head covered the socket of an eye lost to an Israeli bullet years before during a protest. Unlike the vast majority of high-ranking police officials in the West Bank and Gaza, Shaath had not been recruited from the ranks of Palestinian guerrillas from other nations. Instead, he was a native of the West Bank city of Hebron and former Fatah activist who had been trained in Egypt specifically to take on this command position.

  He didn’t look over once as Ben got in and closed the door behind him.

  “Good morning, Commander,” Ben tried, after Shaath had lurched the Peugeot into traffic.

  A grunt was all he got in return, not another sound from Shaath until they approached the Baladiya Square on Jaffa Street minutes later.

  “The mayor is a fool for doing this.”

  “Reinstating me or agreeing to work with the Israelis?”

  “Take your pick. He thinks you’re better than the rest of us, thinks the Israelis are better too.”

  “He thinks I’ve had more experience, just as he thinks they have, and he’s right.”

  “No one will work with you anymore. No one will talk to you or them. You have no chance.”

  “Thank you for your confidence, Commander.”

  “You’ve earned it.”

  Ben had been out on a supervisory patrol four months before, when the report of a man’s body being found in a drainage ditch by children on their way to school came over the radio. He went straight to the scene and didn’t need a medical examiner to tell him the victim had been tortured before being killed. The killers had used a knife to carve a single word onto the victim’s forehead in his own dried blood:

  Ameel . . . collaborator
.

  The victim turned out to be a cabdriver who drove the popular Jerusalem route and as such would have known many Israeli soldiers and checkpoint guards by name. It was often easy to confuse congeniality for collaboration. With their presence dwindling in the West Bank, the rumor was that the Israelis were going all out to recruit an army of informants to be their eyes and ears. The cabdriver’s killers had obviously wanted to make an example and a point, whether justified or not.

  As was often the case, Ben probably would never have found these killers if a trio of Palestinian policemen hadn’t gone around boasting about being responsible. Taking a small detachment along, he arrested them himself, picked them right off the street without consulting Shaath or the mayor. His investigation had confirmed that the cabdriver was not a collaborator at all and, even if he had been, the three policemen had violated every rule associated with their uniform. Like them, Ben had wanted to make a point.

  And his, too, backfired.

  Officers already suspicious and resentful of him had the excuse they needed to disregard his orders and training. Ben had come back to Palestine to help modernize a force wholly lacking in investigative technique and procedure, to help make detectives out of the best and the brightest the West Bank had to offer. Unfortunately, his own zeal had rendered him incapable of fulfilling that role.

  Yielding to popular demand, and for what he insisted was Ben’s own safety, the mayor ordered that his recommendations be passed down strictly in writing. All direct contact with the officers he had previously been charged with training was forbidden without authorization. Committed to building a new life here in Palestine, Ben had managed to convince himself it would all blow over, at least improve.

  It hadn’t improved, would never blow over. Shaath had gloated and was still gloating today as he snailed the car on, honking the horn to disperse the mounting crowd that had gathered down from the Baladiya near the Hisbe, or shopping district, where the smells of fresh produce would soon fill the air as merchants opened up shop for the day. Ben knew he would have to work fast, or risk having the entire crime scene compromised, if it hadn’t been already.

  At last the swell of people became too much to deal with and Shaath simply brought the car to a halt, half a block from the alley where the latest body had been found.

  “Go ahead, Inspector.”

  “You’re not coming with me?”

  “It’s better I stay with the car. Besides, this is your case now, isn’t it?”

  Ben threw open the door and stepped out into the street, tightening his beret. His green police uniform and gun belt allowed for swift passage through the crowd. A few recognized him from the stories that had run in the newspapers. Some of these lifted a finger his way.

  “Kha’in!” he heard aimed at him by voices rough in their hate. Ben was careful not to seek out their eyes for the confrontation it might provoke. He thought he recognized a familiar figure among the pedestrian clutter, but when he looked again it was gone, and he pushed on, making his way to the crime scene.

  Luckily for Ben, the vast bulk of attention was riveted on the alley he was approaching. The body lay at its edge, the blood reaching out like tentacles toward the early morning sun striking Jaffa Street, visible as soon as he stepped from the crowd into the cordoned-off area.

  The three police officers standing guard over the scene went rigid when they saw him, offering no greeting even though he was a superior. Ben could tell from their attitudes that they had been forewarned of his coming, so he simply nodded as he moved past them toward a bulbous shape hovering over the corpse.

  “Good morning, Duktur.”

  Bassim al-Shaer, Jericho’s medical examiner, stood half in and half out of the alley, peering intently at the body. He looked up when Ben spoke with a mixture of shock and disdain.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve been assigned to the case.”

  The fat man’s eyes rolled upward. “Then I’d better hurry. I’d hate to get hit by a bullet meant for you.”

  “It would take more than a bullet to make you hurry, Doctor.”

  Al-Shaer snickered and returned his attention to the corpse. He always looked to Ben as if he was wearing yesterday’s clothes. Today a wrinkled khaki suit hung shapelessly over his huge frame. A thirty-five-millimeter camera dangled from a strap round his neck.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Long enough,” al-Shaer replied tersely. He steadied the camera in his hands, but made no effort to raise it.

  “Long enough to determine the cause of death?”

  The medical examiner spoke while resuming his mobile inspection of the body. “Stabbed. Lots of times.” He brought the viewfinder to his eye, focused, and snapped off two shots.

  “Al-Diib?”

  The camera thumped against the fat man’s chest. He tried to stifle a belch born of bad tea or coffee, and failed. Then he backed off and angled himself for a fresh series of shots.

  “See for yourself.”

  Ben turned his attention to the corpse, which lay twisted on its left side, one leg stretched out and the other folded up toward the buttocks. The right shoulder was propped up in the air, the right arm extended behind the dead man’s back as if to scratch it. The victim’s head flopped heavily atop a neck crimped enough to cast his dead stare upside down toward the other side of the alley.

  That and the shadows spared Ben sight of the face until he leaned further over, closer to it. The sight made him suck in his breath. The victim’s face had been shredded, mangled. One eye had been ripped from its socket and hung obscenely over the cheek. The other was covered by torn strips of flesh and dried blood.

  Just like the other seven . . . This made five in the West Bank now in as many months, the most recent two in Jericho.

  Ben straightened up.

  “I’ll want a detailed report on the condition of the face,” he told al-Shaer.

  The fat man chortled. “You can’t see for yourself?” His expression fell into a scowl marked by slabs of excess flesh. “It’s the Wolf, all right.”

  “I want to be sure of that before proceeding. That means comparisons with past victims to confirm we’re dealing with the same killer here.”

  “Their faces were all shredded too. That’s not proof enough for you? You haven’t learned yet, have you? Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t give a shit whether you ever do, but when it affects my job, I don’t have a choice.”

  “You’re right: you don’t.”

  Al-Shaer squeezed the camera between flabby hands that almost swallowed it. “What are you doing here?”

  “I told you; my case.”

  “I meant still. I meant in Jericho, in Palestine.”

  Ben kept his eyes on the body and his voice steady. “How long has he been dead?”

  “Several hours. As many as eight, even nine, I would say. Since midnight, would be a fair estimate.”

  “And you’re certain death resulted from these . . . stab wounds.”

  The medical examiner was shuffling around again, firing off shots with his camera. “As certain as I need to be at this stage.

  “You’ve called for the Cleaners, I assume,” Ben said, referring to the van used to transport bodies, called that since it had originally been used by a pair of brothers who cleaned rugs for a living. The van had been renovated into an ambulance but was still driven by the same brothers.

  “On their way.” Al-Shaer pulled the camera from his eye. “This is my second roll. You can never be too careful.”

  “No.”

  The medical examiner tilted his head toward the corpse. “He wasn’t careful.”

  “Any identification?”

  “None,” the medical examiner said, fighting off a cough. “As usual.”

  “Who reported the body?”

  “Anonymous. Figures, doesn’t it?”

  Al-Shaer finished the roll and let the camera fall to his chest with a thump of finality. He had started to ba
ck away when Ben fastened a powerful grip on his elbow.

  “You are not done yet, Doctor. There are samples that must be taken.”

  Al-Shaer looked down at the hand holding him in place and then up at the cold stare of Ben’s blue eyes. “Samples?”

  Ben’s gaze shifted toward the crowd which continued to swell. “Before the scene is contaminated, starting with the gravel in this alley. Six different patches, cataloged according to grid.”