by [Kamal
“What?”
“Well, once word gets around the camp of why she left, what her brother’s doing to help the police, it won’t be safe for her to return. Maybe we should just leave her there, maybe sneak you in for a visit.”
“Bullshit, cop! You get her out and make sure she doesn’t have to go back!”
“What happens when she gets out of the hospital? She needs a place to live.”
“Get her one!”
“We do have some subsidized apartments, but the waiting list—”
“Fuck the waiting list!” Radji blared as he stood up dramatically. “You want your killer, you get my sister a place to live!”
Ben leaned forward. “Can you identify him?”
Radji nodded demonstratively. “If my sister gets a place to live, yes.”
“You drive a hard bargain.”
* * * *
Chapter 37
O
ut of the question!” Commander Shaath roared, springing from his chair in the mayor’s office.
Sumaya calmed the big man with an open palm raised toward him, studying Ben the way a teacher might his prize student. “Let him finish, Commander.”
Ben cleared his throat. “My point is that an operation of this magnitude requires a lot of personnel and equipment. The equipment we plainly don’t have, and the personnel available have not been properly trained in surveillance techniques. That will make them easily recognizable on the docks in Gaza, even in plain clothes. Our only alternative is to make use of Israeli teams to provide surveillance and back-up.”
“Armed?” Shaath badgered.
“Considering the man we are going up against, yes.”
“And what would we tell our own men? That they are not good enough, not skilled enough, to handle such a complex operation?”
Ben fixed his attention on the mayor. “This entire operation was supposed to be about the benefits of mutual cooperation. I would say that accepting the offer of additional Israeli manpower toward making a joint arrest is not only the most effective approach, it also promises to generate tremendous positive publicity.”
The mayor’s eyes flickered at that. He straightened in his chair, seeming to ignore Shaath’s presence in the room. “A very persuasive argument, I must admit, Inspector. How would the logistics work?”
“The Israeli teams will be under Pakad Barnea’s direct command and control, while I remain with the boy at all times in constant communication with these teams.”
The mayor nodded. “I’ll have to call the President for final approval, of course. I’m assuming he’ll want us to move a few select teams of our people in as well to handle the task of arresting the suspect, if it comes to that.”
“I think the Israelis would prefer that, too, sir.”
“And you also think Pakad Barnea will have no trouble getting her superiors to go along with this, obviously.”
“Why not? We’re both on the same side this time, aren’t we?”
* * * *
M
oshe Baruch and Hershel Giott listened attentively to Danielle’s request, waiting until she was finished to express their reservations.
“I would prefer, Pakad,” Giott argued, “that we not act until there is stronger indication that the man we’re after can actually be found at the seaport. You’re talking about tying up considerable manpower, and we must have some degree of certainty that it will not be wasted.”
“Because of the ramifications of failure, you understand,” Baruch added, agreeing.
“If we’re going in there, you don’t want us to look bad,” Danielle interpreted.
“It is a concern,” Giott acknowledged.
“The possibility of failure always is,” from Baruch.
“And on the other hand, it’s important we catch this killer before the peace talks reconvene in six days,” said Danielle. “I agree that the pendulum of public opinion has swung our way, taking attention away from the murders. But if the Wolf kills again while we are on the job, we stand to lose everything we have gained. Can we take that chance when we are so close to catching him?”
The leaders of Shin Bet and the National Police grudgingly agreed to allow Israeli surveillance teams to participate in the operation. An hour later, Danielle arrived at the records department to pick up a stack of laser-printed checkpoint logs for the last year, hoping the name of a fisherman would appear on at least most of the days murders had been committed in the West Bank. She was paging through the stack when another thought suddenly occurred to her.
“Where’s the second batch of materials I requested?” she asked the technician on a whim. She couldn’t get Ben’s claims of a second killer “manufactured” by Israeli intelligence out of her head. Even though all the evidence seemed to dispel that theory, she too remained troubled by the evidence that supported it. There was only one way to satisfy herself once and for all.
“Second batch?” he replied, befuddled.
“Copies of the files of the cases that occurred before the withdrawal of our troops from the West Bank.”
The technician hit a few keys. “Those were already requisitioned.”
“Yes, for the Palestinians. Now I need copies for myself.” She hesitated briefly, eyes angling for the phone. “Call upstairs, if you like, for authorization.”
“That won’t be necessary for such a simple request.”
Danielle hoped the man didn’t notice how she had gradually repositioned herself in order to follow his hands across the keyboard. They moved fast, but she was able to commit to memory the log-on and access codes he plugged in.
When he was finished, Danielle politely accepted the files and tucked them under the same arm holding the checkpoint logs. Rav Nitzav Giott had arranged for her to use an empty office to collate and study her material, one with a computer that was a virtual twin of the machine the technician used.
Danielle closed the door to the small, windowless office and sat down at the desk. Then she turned the machine on, keyed in the technician’s access code to get into the file bank, and typed in the log-on he had used to open the file containing the case reports she had left on the other side of the desk. With the file open, she clicked on the View window and asked to see the entire contents listed by name. They appeared instantly in alphabetical order, followed by the data history of each: that is, she reminded herself, when each had been updated, complete with notations of specific memory computations before and after.
The two complete and two partial case reports compiled by Shin Bet before jurisdiction was passed on to the Palestinian authorities were not next to each other alphabetically, so she pulled them out in order to study their data histories together. The most recent “update,” of course, had been just minutes before, when the technician printed them for her. Before that there was an identical notation from Monday, accounting for the copies she had handed over to Ben in Jericho. As expected, the Data columns were identical in terms of disk memory used in both occasions.
The case reports hadn’t enjoyed a particularly active history, especially since adoption of the second phase of self-rule and the subsequent Israeli pullout from most of the West Bank had left investigation of the murders wholly in Palestinian hands. In fact, there shouldn’t have been any activity between the time Shin Bet withdrew from the case and the beginnings of the cooperative effort just days before.
But there was one.
The entire scroll of information didn’t fit on a single screen, so Danielle jotted down the columns she was interested in for comparison purposes. The updates had all taken place on the same day, which in itself was hardly surprising. What had happened to the case reports was something else.
Danielle wrote it all down and then double-checked her work to be sure she was correct, feeling her breath shorten slightly. The numbers didn’t lie:
BEFORE AFTER
CASE 1: 25,621 21,395
CASE 2: 21,433 17,657
CASE 3: 32,907 29,350
CASE 4: 31,650 28,657
Danielle didn’t need to be a computer expert to understand that some of the data had been purged from each file when they were accessed several months before. The computer couldn’t tell her who had done it or why. Nor could it give her any inkling of what had been deleted. Only one fact was certain:
Someone had tampered with all four case reports well before she had passed them on to the Palestinian authorities in Jericho.
And something was missing.
* * * *
* * * *
Chapter 38
T
his is fun!” Radji said a few hours into their first day at the Gaza seaport overlooking the Mediterranean. He had been excited about the adventure from the very start when a pair of Israeli security cars had met their vehicle at the final checkpoint and ushered them across Israel into Gaza.
Ben shrugged, only wished he could have agreed. The heat was sweltering this time of year and the breeze provided little respite. The only saving grace was that the assignment allowed him to dress out of uniform, in comfortable clothes that made him blend into the scene on the docks.
As for their “cover,” Ben had little hope it would hold up under close scrutiny. For safety, they remained in each section of the docks only long enough for Radji to get a close look at all the men working the area in search of the man he had described to Ben the day before:
“He was very big, tall and broad. He had a scar on the left side of his face and he moved like a ghost. I know he didn’t see me, but I saw him in the moonlight when he cut across the street. I’ll recognize his face when I see it. . . .”
So far the only things that had grabbed Radji’s attention were a huge fish being displayed or a boat coming in with an especially large catch.
Even in these early hours of their partnership, Ben knew he was getting much closer to the boy than he had intended, responding to his vast need for companionship and love. When Radji’s hand began to fall too easily upon his shoulder, Ben’s first impulse was to shrug it off. But the fact was, he liked it there, liked the feeling of being needed by someone emotionally again. It seemed like another lifetime since he had felt that last.
He stopped with Radji at a filleting station where a long line of knife-wielding men stripped the bones from the carcasses rapidly and piled them in steel pans set before them. When the pan was full, another worker took it away and replaced it with an empty one.
“Nope . . . Nope . . . Nope . . .”
Radji’s intonation came softly as he passed by each one. His words were being picked up by the transistorized microphone Danielle had provided for Ben. He had seen her early in their rounds and not once since, even though he knew she was never out of plain view of him. So, too, no matter how much he tried, he could not spot any of the Israeli undercover personnel shadowing their every move, ready to pounce on a suspect at a second’s notice.
It was to Danielle, though, that his mind kept returning. He had been attracted to her from the first time they’d met in Mayor Sumaya’s office. It was impossible not to be taken with her beauty, perhaps even the allure of a relationship forbidden by culture. But it had become much more than that now.
Danielle and his dead wife, Jenny, had become intertwined in his psyche, especially in the haunting dreams where Jenny kept becoming Danielle. He felt when he was with her the same joyous sense that he remembered feeling around Jenny, the same pangs that came whenever they had to part. He wasn’t sure whether he had forgotten that feeling or merely repressed it. Either way, suddenly, he couldn’t think of one without the other popping into his head. More than just the bond this case had forged between them was responsible. Surviving that gun battle in Jerusalem’s Slave Market had clarified his feelings for her, but instead of feeling relieved he felt frightened. After all, was this case all they really had between them? When it ended, would they go their separate ways as if they never had met?
Worse than that, Ben felt as though he had something to lose again. His own life had meant little to him since he had found the Sandman in his home. Now he was struck by the uncanny feeling that the first woman he had felt anything for since then would find herself in similar jeopardy because of al-Diib. Thinking of it that way made Ben shiver, left him wondering if these monsters were destined to haunt him forever.
“Nope . . . Nope . . . Nope ...” Radji was still saying as they came to the end of the table. “Where do we try next?”
“We start from the beginning of the dock again. The people keep changing, the boats too.”
“And tomorrow?” he asked, disappointed.
“We start even earlier. Plenty of peddlers are here and gone by seven a.m. They have to be early to have their daily supplies ready when the people want to shop.”
Ben watched as iced tubs of the freshly filleted fish were placed in the back of vans, deals having been closed and the merchants eager to be on their way. What they could not sell would be lost, especially in this heat. Time lost was money wasted. Everyone hurried.
Ben led Radji further down the sprawling complex of piers connected to the long dock toward another brigade of Palestinians hoisting fresh catches from boats to dock.
“Inspector Kamal, can you hear me?” Danielle’s voice called.
Ben pressed the concealed transmitter tighter against his ear and spoke into the mouthpiece. “I can hear you.”
“Meet me at the front of the quay right away. Something’s happened.”
* * * *
Chapter 39
D
anielle hadn’t mentioned anything to Ben yet about the case files having been altered. She decided there was no point in bringing that up until she knew what had been deleted. It could have been superfluous or redundant information purged routinely. Since she had violated the rules by logging on, she was in no position to bring it to anyone’s attention anyway.
Nor, though, was she willing to forget it. She knew how Israeli intelligence operated well enough to believe that nothing was beyond them. If they were behind the existence of a second killer, as Ben had believed, they were sure to have left nothing that might implicate them.
But how could they have pulled this off?
She waited for Ben at the head of the quay, a long narrow outdoor market located beneath a pair of docks, its location shifting every day depending on the Mediterranean’s tides. Here, residents could buy their fish direct at bottom-line prices. But on the quay, merchants were considerably less discriminating about the quality of the fish they sold; virtually anything that swam was for sale. A novice buyer might end up losing money by saving it.
She watched as Ben approached anxiously, Radji right by his side.
“What is it?” he asked her.
“Some of the locals are on to the presence of undercover Israelis here. Word is spreading through the crowd fast.”
“Dammit! How?”
“You tell me.”
“Shaath,” Ben guessed.
“Why would he want to sabotage our work?”
“So we would have to replace your teams with Palestinian police who’d be spotted in a minute. Or . . .”
“Or what?”
“He wants us to fail—wants me to fail.” Ben gazed about the quay, half expecting to find Shaath glowering at him. “Can you come back tomorrow with new personnel?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll speak with the mayor about this, let him handle Commander Shaath.”
“Will he?”
“Unlike Shaath, he has not forgotten the larger ramifications of what we’re doing here.”
“It’ll be even easier to forget us if we fail.”
“Then we’ll have to make sure we don’t, won’t we, Pakad?”
* * * *
T
he first day of surveillance ended just like that, and Danielle was glad for it. She was uncomfortable with the way they were following through on their pursuit of the Wolf. The need for a rapid solution to this case had taken them away from accepte
d, more methodical procedures. They should have come down here with a picture of the killer instead of a boy who might recognize him. They should have a name to question regulars on the dock about.
Danielle had not bothered to make a formal request to check the records of Israel’s Ansar 3 detention camp, because she knew her superiors would never approve it. So too, she had not made the trip down to the camp’s Negev Desert site, because she was certain the authorities at the camp would not be cooperative. But she was growing equally certain that the Wolf had been born amid the squalor and torture of the camp’s confines. His name and background lay somewhere inside. But how to find it?
