by Greg Iles
The house was a sanctuary run by the feminist group that provided new identities for battered women on the run with their children. We were installed in a bedroom at the back of the safe house, and after a brief wait, Mary Venable arrived. She questioned Rachel at length—she didn’t seem to trust me—then made arrangements for a car we could use to drive to New York the following day. She told us to leave it in the long-term lot at JFK, where it would be picked up by one of their New York “sisters.”
There was a television in the bedroom, and the Union Station shooting was all over the news. The temporary closing of the station seemed to have caused as much of an uproar as the gunfire. Early reports speculated that a bomb threat had forced evacuation of the station, but by the late-news broadcast, the story had changed. D.C. police sources had leaked that a potential presidential assassin had been tracked to the station. My name wasn’t given, but the anchor said that the woman who had done the shooting in the station, formerly believed to be my captive, was now believed to be my accomplice.
We slept little, and by morning The Washington Post had my name and photograph. In the article, a Secret Service spokesman characterized me as an idealistic physician who had snapped after years of grief over the tragic loss of my family. Driven by paranoid delusions, I had threatened the president’s life, and my appearance in Washington with a gun proved how dangerous I was. The identity of my female accomplice remained “unknown,” but several witnesses had seen her fire the shot that downed the federal officer. What frightened me most was that the article’s closing comment came from Ewan McCaskell, the president’s chief of staff, who had been reached in China:
“Dr. Tennant actually met the president in the Oval Office on one occasion,” McCaskell said. “The president admired his book on medical ethics. He regrets that this noted physician has apparently suffered some sort of psychotic break, and hopes Dr. Tennant can receive treatment before something tragic happens.”
I worried that Mary Venable would see the story and turn me in, but an hour later she dropped off our new passports, two Virginia driver’s licenses, and the keys to our “borrowed” car. She had seen the article, but her loyalty to Rachel was stronger than her belief in media stories. I lost no time in getting on I-95, headed for New York.
Having my name and face broadcast nationwide only strengthened my resolve to leave the country. The NSA believed I was planning to meet the president in Washington tomorrow, so leaving the country was the last thing they would expect me to do. Going through JFK airport would be risky, but if we made it, we would be far safer than in the United States.
Rachel hardly spoke during the first leg of the drive, and nothing I said seemed to register. By the time we reached New Jersey, she’d regained enough of herself to go into a mall with a list of clothing sizes and outfit us for our trip. Other than that, we stopped only for gasoline, and I never got out of the car. Just before we reached New York, Rachel telephoned Adam Stern and gave him a cover story I’d scripted to explain the doctor’s third-party reservations for us.
With the Easter crowds, Stern had been forced to book us on a midnight El Al flight, which worried me quite a bit. I wore a Yankees cap into JFK, praying that my “six-foot white guy” looks were generic enough not to attract attention. Things went surprisingly well at the El Al ticket counter, but I did most of the talking. My worry was the informal security interview. According to Stern, at some point before you boarded an El Al plane, one or two plainclothes security officers would strike up a conversation with you, to get a feel for your intentions. There was no way we would get through that without Rachel handling some of the talking.
“The chicken with broccoli looks good,” I said, pointing through a glass screen in front of the Chinese food counter. “What do you think?”
“Fine,” Rachel said in a dead voice.
I touched her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
She didn’t answer.
I stepped in front of her and ordered two chicken and broccoli plates. As I paid, I heard a man’s voice behind me.
“Hi, there. We were in line with you at the El Al counter. You going over for Western Holy Week?”
“Uh…no,” Rachel replied.
I glanced back and saw two dark-skinned men of medium height standing behind us. They had quick eyes and easy smiles. They looked like brothers.
“Visiting family then?” said the second man, who wore a gold chain around his neck.
“No,” Rachel said awkwardly. “It’s a private matter. A health problem.”
Concerned looks. “Oh. Sorry to pry.”
They’re looking for terrorists, I told myself. Not presidential assassins. I turned around and nodded to the two men.
The silence was uncomfortable, but suddenly Rachel straightened up and came to life. “I guess it’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” she said. “My OB-GYN is sending me over. I was just diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It’s advanced, but he has a friend at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. There’s a clinical trial for culturing your own T cells and reinjecting them to fight the tumors. My doctor’s an old friend. He made all the arrangements for us, thank God. Planes, the hotel, all of it.” She put her hand over her heart. “I’m sorry to run on. It’s just the first ray of hope I’ve had, and it feels better to talk about it.”
“Quite all right,” said the man wearing the chain. “I’m sure you’ll do very well. The doctors at Hadassah are the best in the world.”
“The trial looks very promising,” I chimed in, not wanting to appear awkward. “The lead researcher did his training at Sloan-Kettering.”
“You sound like a doctor yourself,” said the shorter man, and I lost any remaining doubt that they were El Al security. Suddenly all I could think about was the $16,000 in cash in the money belts concealed beneath our clothes.
“Food, mister,” snapped one of the Chinese clerks.
“Thank you,” I said, glancing back at the plates. “Yes, I’m an internist.”
“You know about arthritis?” asked the shorter man. “They tell me I got psoriatic arthritis. You know about that?”
Answer him? I wondered. Act arrogant? “Well, there are five types. Some are relatively mild, others crippling.”
“What’s the bad kind?”
“Arthritis mutilans.”
The man grinned happily. “That’s not me, thank God. I got something about phalanges.”
“Distal interphalangeal predominant.” I lifted his hands and looked at his fingernails, which showed marked pitting. “It could be a lot worse.”
He pulled back his hand. “Good, good. Well, enjoy your food.”
“Good luck at Hadassah,” said the one wearing the chain. “You’re going to the right place for a cure.”
I put both plates on a tray and carried it to a vacant table. Rachel followed me, looking shell-shocked. I glanced back at the food counter and saw the two men walk away without ordering.
“You did great,” I said softly. “Academy Award caliber.”
“Survival,” she said, taking her seat. “Everybody has it in them. You told me that in North Carolina, and I didn’t believe you. Now I know better.”
I picked up my fork. “There’s no point feeling guilty about it.”
“They’d already talked to Adam. That’s the feeling I got.”
“No doubt. He must have given them the same story. If we make it onto the plane without being arrested, I’m going to send that guy a case of champagne.”
Rachel closed her eyes. “Are we going to make it?”
“Yes. Just keep it together for another half hour.”
The 747 was crowded despite being a late flight, but we were insulated from our nearest neighbors by two empty seats and an aisle, and that gave us some privacy. I sat by the window with my Yankees cap on, taking care not to make eye contact with anyone as I retrieved two blankets and covered us both to the neck.
We sat at the gate for what seemed like two hours, but it was
only forty minutes by my watch. While passengers around us talked excitedly about their upcoming visit to the Holy Land, Rachel and I pretended to sleep, holding hands under the blanket. At last the El Al jetliner taxied out onto the runway and lumbered into the night sky.
“Thank God,” she whispered as the wheels lifted off the concrete.
We would have to clear security at Tel Aviv in eleven hours, but making it into the air was half the battle, and I tried to focus on that small victory. “Are you all right?”
She opened her eyes, which were separated from mine only by the bill of my Yankees cap. In them I saw emotions I could not read.
“I need to ask you some things, David.” She sounded more like the psychiatrist I had known before we made love. “We’re going to Jerusalem, and I need to get to the bottom of why. I’d like you to treat this as a session.”
“No. If you ask me things, I can ask you things. And you have to answer honestly. That’s where we are now.”
She hesitated, then nodded. “Fair enough. You’ve told me you’re an atheist. You said your mother believed in something greater than humanity, but not in organized religion. What about your father? Was he a declared atheist?”
“No. He just didn’t believe in the conventional concept of God. A God who focused all his attention on man. Dad was a physicist. They’re a skeptical bunch, as a rule.”
“Did he believe in a supreme being of any kind?”
My father wasn’t the type to “get cosmic” very often, but on a few occasions—camping in the mountains under a star-filled sky—he had talked to my brother and me about what he’d really believed.
“Dad had a simple conception of the way things are. Simple but profound. He didn’t see man as separate from the universe, but part of it. He always said, ‘Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself.’”
“Have I heard that before?”
“Maybe. I’ve heard New Age gurus like Deepak Chopra say it. But my father was saying it twenty-five years ago.”
“What do you think he meant?”
“Exactly what he said. He always reminded us that every atom in our bodies was once part of a distant star that had exploded. He talked about how evolution moves from simplicity toward complexity, and how human intelligence is the highest known expression of evolution. I remember him telling me that a frog’s brain is much more complex than a star. He saw human consciousness as the first neuron of the universe coming to life and awareness. A spark in the darkness, waiting to spread to fire.”
Rachel looked thoughtful. “That’s a beautiful idea. Not exactly a religious view, but a hopeful one.”
“Practical, too. If we’re the universe becoming conscious of itself, we have a moral duty to survive. To preserve the gift of consciousness. And to do that, we have to live in peace. From that you can derive a workable set of laws, ethics, everything.”
Rachel reflected on this. “Do you subscribe to his view of the universe?”
“I did until a couple of weeks ago. My latest visions don’t exactly fit into it.”
She laid her hand on my knee. “We don’t know where they fit, all right? And I don’t think your father’s view precludes the existence of a creator. Do you still have anxiety that you’ll die if you don’t reach Jerusalem before you dream of the crucifixion?”
The immediate threat of capture by police had distracted me from this concern. “I still feel some urgency, but not like before. The fact that we’re going there seems to have eased the pressure a bit.”
“If you do dream of the crucifixion, you shouldn’t worry about it. A dream never killed anybody.”
I wasn’t so sure. “Let’s talk about you for a minute. You say you believe in God. What exactly do you believe?”
“I don’t see how that relates to what we’re doing.”
“I think we’re both on this plane for a reason. And I think what you believe matters.”
A look of ineffable sadness entered her face. “I came to God very late. As a child I was never taken to synagogue or church.”
“Why not?”
“My father turned his back on God when he was seven years old.”
“Why so young?”
“He turned seven inside a concentration camp.”
Something inside me went cold.
Her gaze became unfocused, as though she were looking years into the past. “My father saw his father murdered in front of him. It wasn’t a normal event, even by camp standards. The Allies were approaching, and the SS guards were liquidating the prisoners. One guard invented a game with his small work detail. He killed one prisoner a day. He tried to get the starving prisoners to kill each other and offered them survival if they would. My grandfather refused, of course. He’d been a surgeon in Berlin. He’d met Freud, corresponded with Jung.”
My mind spun as Rachel’s career choice came into perspective.
“The guard beat my grandfather to death in front of his little boy—my father. My father decided then that a God who allowed what he’d seen deserved curses, not prayers.”
I wanted to say something, but what words would mean anything?
“He was one of the lucky ones allowed to emigrate to America. He was taken in by distant relatives in Brooklyn.” Rachel smiled sadly. “Uncle Milton was a locksmith. My father’s refusal to worship angered him, but Milton knew the boy had been through a lot. When he came of age, my father changed his name to White, moved to Queens, and stopped seeing his family, though he did send them money. He married a gentile who cared nothing for religion, and they raised me in a secular house.”
I listened in amazement. You saw a face on an American street, or in an office, and you had no idea that a tragic epic lay behind it.
“I always felt like an outsider because of that. All my friends went to church or synagogue. I got curious. When I was seventeen, I sought out my Uncle Milton. He told me everything. After that…I embraced my heritage.”
Many small mysteries of Rachel’s personality suddenly made sense. Her severe dress, her professional distance, her abhorrence of violence…
“The thing is,” she went on, “I think I became Jewish more out of emotional and political identification than a desire to do God’s will.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Of course there is. If you ask me what I really think about God, it has nothing to do with the Torah or the Talmud. It has to do with what I’ve seen in my own life.”
“What do you really think?”
She folded her hands on her lap. “I believe that to create means to make something that didn’t exist before. If God is perfect, then the only way he can truly create is to make something separate from himself. So by definition, his creation must be imperfect. You see? If it were perfect, it would be God.”
“Yes.”
“I believe that for human beings to be distinct from God, we must be able to make our own choices. Free will, right? And unless bad choices resulted in real pain, free will would have no meaning. That’s why we have such evil in the world. I don’t know what religion that adds up to, but whatever it is, that’s what I believe.”
“That’s a good explanation for the world as we find it. But it doesn’t address the central mystery. Why should God feel compelled to create anything at all?”
“I don’t think we’ll ever know that.”
“We might. Our sun is going to burn for another five billion years or so. Even if the universe ends by collapsing inward on itself—the Big Crunch—the earliest that could happen is about twenty billion years from now. If we don’t destroy ourselves, we’ll have plenty of time to answer that question. Maybe all questions.”
She smiled. “You and I will never know.”
Looking into her dark eyes, I realized just how little I knew about her. “You’re not nearly as conventional as you pretend to be. I wish you could have talked to Fielding.”
“What did he believe about God?”
“Fielding had a b
ig problem with evil. He was raised a Christian, but he said that neither Judaism nor Christianity had ever faced evil head-on.”
“What did he mean?”
“He’d recite three statements: ‘God is all powerful. God is all good. Evil exists.’ You can logically reconcile any two of those statements, but not all three.”
Rachel nodded thoughtfully.
“Fielding thought the Eastern religions were the only truly monotheistic ones, because they admit that evil flows from God, rather than trying to blame a lesser figure like Satan.”
