by By Jon Land
Ears ringing madly, Danielle shed Sahib from her. When she looked up she saw Tariq dragging Moussan back inside the warehouse. But Moussan stumbled and fell. Tariq had leaned over to help him when a fresh barrage from Danielle chased him into the half-light of the cluttered warehouse. Moussan rolled across the pavement, trying to regain his feet. By then, though, Danielle was upon him. She grabbed his collar and jerked him to his feet by the scruff of the neck, all the time holding her gun on the doorway in case Tariq reappeared.
Moussan looked at her with a mixture of hate and shock and spat out something in Arabic. Danielle smacked his temple with the butt of her pistol, just as Tariq lunged out from inside the warehouse. She fired, yanking Moussan backward toward his truck, keeping his body between herself and the sliding door. Tariq hesitated, got off a single wild barrage before Danielle heard the click of his magazine being expended.
She chose that moment to shove Moussan into the truck’s cab ahead of her. He lurched across the seat, trying to force her back into the street. Danielle fastened one hand tight on the steering wheel and struck Moussan with the pistol again, hard enough to knock him unconscious this time.
Moussan flopped against the passenger-side window, as she twisted the key and gunned the engine. Screeched into reverse, then ground the gears with a too-fast shift into first. The truck’s tires spun, then grabbed. She caught sight in the side-view mirror of Tariq charging after them, opening fire anew, and shoved her foot down on the accelerator. The increasing gap between them sent his bullets sailing harmlessly off target, and Danielle sped off into the heat of the Mogadishu day.
She had already memorized the routes of the back and side roads, just in case she needed to make use of them. The United Nations force to which she was supposed to report was stationed twenty miles to the north, expecting a simple intelligence briefing.
They were about to get much more, Danielle thought, gazing at the limp form of Sharif ali-Aziz Moussan slumped next to her in the front seat.
* * * *
* * * *
Chapter 6
T
he Israeli soldier slammed Ben Kamal against the side of the truck, holding him there while a second soldier frisked him roughly.
“Maybe you should check my identification again,” Ben said, as calmly as he could manage.
“The name would still be Arab.”
Ben turned just enough to look one of the soldiers in the eye. “Palestinian actually.”
“Even worse.”
“It’s a United Nations identification.”
“Worse still,” one of the soldiers said, and they both laughed. “We were told to expect you.”
“Told you used to be a detective in the West Bank.”
“Then you should have also been told to clear him through the checkpoint.”
The voice startled the soldiers and they swung to see a tall woman leaning against the side of a Humvee with United Nations markings. The sleeves of her shirt were rolled up past the elbows to reveal a pair of forearms once perpetually tan but now forever pale. Her dark hair shifted about her shoulders, tossed by the stiff crosswind that swirled over the hilltop.
“I’m Inspector Danielle Barnea, also attached to the United Nations.”
The soldier holding Ben let go and stepped away from the truck. “Yes, Ms. Barnea. We were told to expect you as well.”
“That’s Commander Barnea. I still retain my rank in Israel.”
“Of course, Commander,” the sergeant said, nodding sheepishly. “There’s an escort waiting for you at the top of the hill. He’ll lead you the rest of the way into the village.”
Ben joined Danielle at the Humvee. She opened the rear door for him and he climbed in ahead of her.
“I’m glad they didn’t ask what I was doing here,” Ben said, as their U.N. driver eased the Humvee past the soldiers and continued up the hill.
“I don’t know any more than you,” Danielle told him. She had arrived at an airstrip reserved for Israeli military and United Nations personnel less than an hour earlier, having been rushed by helicopter out of Somalia after turning Sharif ali-Aziz Moussan over to U.N. authorities north of Mogadishu. Based on what she knew about procedure these days, Moussan would already be on his way to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he would join the bulk of al-Qaeda and top Iraqi prisoners detained there. “A massacre in a Palestinian village, that’s all I was told.”
“But, of all people, why send us to investigate it?” Ben wondered, shoulders stiff against the seat back.
They’d been aching ever since his escapade at the school in Colombia. It felt as though he’d been in a car accident. Unlike Danielle, he had been whisked to the airport and placed on a commercial flight bound for New York City where he transferred to an El Al flight into Tel Aviv. The irony of traveling on Israel’s national airline was not lost on him; in his role as a Palestinian detective, just a few years before, it would have been unthinkable. Still, once arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport he’d been detained for three hours in a windowless cubicle while Israeli officials confirmed his identity and U.N. visa.
“Why bother sending any U.N. personnel?” Danielle added.
In the ten months she and Ben had been working for the U.N.’s Safety and Security Service, neither had investigated a single murder, never mind a massacre. The service was normally called into action when serious crimes were committed on territory either controlled or administered by the U.N. Most often these crimes involved U.N. peacekeeping troops or relief workers, either as victims or perpetrators. And the investigations were inevitably contentious, riddled by jurisdictional squabbles with host governments. What had been proven so true at the local level seemed equally true on the international level: nobody likes a cop.
Danielle looked at Ben and smiled tightly. “I heard about Colombia.”
“I heard about Somalia. Nice work.”
“Likewise. It’s good to see you out from behind that desk.”
“If they’d assigned you to Baghdad with me . . .”
“Then they wouldn’t have listened to either one of us, instead of just you.”
“No one ever considered the possibility I was right, what that might mean Saddam’s regime was storing beneath the U.N. compound when it was still the Canal Hotel.”
Danielle’s eyes scolded him gently. “The United Nations has no power, Ben. You were assigned there as window dressing, a respected name to use in photo captions.”
“That didn’t come with the job description.”
“It never does. Now tell me about Colombia.”
“Window dressing was better.”
Danielle looked at Ben quizzically, waiting for him to continue on his own.
“I’ve never walked into that kind of situation knowing how it was going to end before,” Ben said, once the tale was complete.
She shook her head. “You’ve lost me.”
“I entered that school knowing I was going to start shooting.”
“You didn’t like the feeling.”
“Not at all.”
“I’d like to say you get used to it, that it gets easier with time. But I can’t, because it doesn’t. You do what you have to do—that’s all,” Danielle said, thinking of her own experience in Mogadishu. “You did what you knew you had to, just like Baghdad.”
Ben thought of the look on Pablo Salgado’s face when his son emerged from the building. All the while he embraced the boy, he kept his eyes locked gratefully on Ben’s. Ultimately they nodded at each other and Salgado led the boy off out of the reach of the authorities and Colonel Riaz. Ben, too, was hustled away before being questioned, and at first he blamed the U.N.’s desire to avoid a diplomatic incident.
Then an attaché had delivered the emergency orders that had brought him back to Palestine. He felt a welter of mixed emotions since he had resigned himself to never again seeing his homeland after he departed two years before. He had not missed it as much as he thought he would. Just the smells mostly, except
for the now all-too-common stench of gunpowder.
“This is your first time back, too,” Ben said, running the calculations in his head once more. “What’s it been, a year?”
“Eleven months.” She sighed. “You wouldn’t know I left here commander of National Police.”
“Maybe they think you’ve come back here to collect your pension.”
Danielle forced a smile. “My name has probably been expunged from every database in Jerusalem. When I found out they were sending me here, I tried to think of people to call and couldn’t think of a single one. Sad, isn’t it?
Ben shrugged. “A way of life for me.”
“Sorry.”
“No need to apologize.”
He reached out and squeezed Danielle’s hand. They’d spent barely a week together in the past six months at the London apartment they shared. Strange, since they had accepted the U.N. Security Chief Alexis Arguayo’s offer because they thought it would afford them more opportunity to be together. That hadn’t proven the case yet, though, and they both found it painfully ironic to be brought together now in the part of the world they had been forced to flee.
“Do you know anything about this village?” Danielle wondered.
“Bureij consists of olive farmers mostly,” Ben told her. “A thousand hilly acres of the finest groves in the West Bank. Lots of problems with water, though. Accusations a few years ago they were stealing from a pipeline that ran through a neighboring Israeli settlement.”
“True?”
“Probably. But the pipeline rerouted a supply deeded to Bureij after Oslo.”
“Lots of things have changed since Oslo.”
“Including the village’s population, as I recall. Down to less than a thousand, I think.”
“To farm a thousand acres of olive trees?”
Ben stared at her flatly. “The settlers burned half of them just over a year ago. Could be they’re the ones to blame for the massacre. These things have a way of getting out of hand.”
“If this were a settler issue, the army would have assumed jurisdiction. The U.N. would have sent observers, not investigators.”
“Meaning?”
Before Danielle could answer, their Humvee braked to halt on the crest of a hill alongside a cream-colored Mercedes SUV. The Israeli soldier behind the wheel cocked his head backward.
“They will take you the rest of the way,” he offered simply and turned away again.
Ben and Danielle climbed out of the Humvee and approached the Mercedes, watching the rear left window slide down.
“Why us?” Ben repeated. “That’s what I still can’t understand.”
“Then permit me to explain,” greeted Colonel Nabril al-Asi, as he threw open the door.
* * * *
Chapter 7
I
t’s been too long, Inspector,” al-Asi said, hugging Ben tightly. “And you, Chief Inspector,” he followed, turning to Danielle, “it looks like working for the U.N. has agreed wonderfully with you.” He kissed her lightly on the cheek and held her hands briefly before stepping back so he was centered between the two of them. “Just like old times, eh?” he quipped.
Al-Asi had once headed the powerful Palestinian Preventive Security Service, the equivalent in its heyday of Yassir Arafat’s secret police. In that position he had been among the most feared and respected of any Palestinian official, until a combination of Israeli incursions and Palestinian Authority impotence destroyed his organization and stripped him of his power. From a hunter, the colonel became the hunted, especially when his antimilitant stand ran him afoul of just about all his former enemies and allies alike.
But the transitional process that had begun with the appointment of a Palestinian prime minister brought al-Asi back into the government as minister of the interior, giving him the unenviable task of organizing the Palestinian Authority’s twelve disparate security agencies into a coherent whole. The only correspondence Ben and Danielle had had with him was a Christmas card featuring the colonel with his wife and three children, together again and all smiling. There was no return address. Ben still wondered how the colonel had managed to track down theirs in London.
“Now I know why we’re here,” Ben said, looking at Danielle.
“I don’t,” she followed. “U.N. detectives called in to investigate a massacre in a Palestinian village?” She shook her head. “The Israeli government would never allow it.”
A familiar sparkle appeared in al-Asi’s deep-set, hooded eyes. “Unless they had no choice. Unless two of the victims of the massacre were U.N. relief workers.”
Ben and Danielle glanced at each other. The UNRWA, United Nations Relief and Works Agency, was one of the primary factors in the festering and increasingly contentious relationship between Israel and the United Nations. Ever since a U.N. resolution had effectively created the State of Israel in 1948, the common thinking among Israelis was that the organization had evolved into nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Palestinian viewpoint, lacking in both credibility and objectivity. And those here under the auspices of the UNRWA were believed to be the prime offenders, offering up a biased and one-sided view of both Israeli-Palestinian relations and the Palestinian predicament.
“In that case, finding two detectives to represent the United Nations who were both qualified and reasonably acceptable to both sides would be a virtual impossibility.” The colonel’s thick hair was now evenly mixed black and gray, and Ben noticed his mustache had begun to gray as well, making him look older. But his cool demeanor, so quashed during his period in effective exile, had returned. “I thought immediately of you, of course,” al-Asi continued. “Who better suited to conduct such a sensitive investigation? Besides, it gives us the chance to work together again.”
“Of course, Colonel,” Danielle started, “since we’re here on your recommendation, it assures your continued involvement in the investigation.”
Al-Asi’s eyes flashed devilishly. “That thought did cross my mind, Chief Inspector. Now, let us review the facts.”
He moved toward the edge of the hill, Ben and Danielle quickly falling in behind him. Below lay a rolling expanse of green olive groves amidst which rested the village of Bureij. Almost directly across from them, on a twin hillside, stood the sprawling Israeli settlement of Nabokim.
“We know that yesterday morning,” al-Asi continued, “an Israeli troop detachment stormed the village in search of a suspected militant named Rahim Naddahr. In the process of searching for this militant, many of the village’s residents were rounded up and herded into the street under great protest. We know at some point these protests became heated and shots were fired. When the firing stopped, thirty-two Palestinians and two UNRWA teachers were dead.”
“What does the Israeli army say?” asked Danielle.
“They categorically deny everything. Claim they had no movements in this area yesterday and that all their troops were accounted for.”
“A rogue unit?”
“They claim to be looking into that possibility. I don’t believe it will lead anywhere.”
Danielle followed al-Asi’s gaze across the olive groves, considering the prospects. If true, Bureij would rival the infamous 1948 massacre in Deir Yasin, a Palestinian village just outside Jerusalem, as a dark blotch on Israel’s history that would haunt the nation for years to come. The international outcry would be catastrophic, further isolating Israel from the international community and severely straining relations with even the United States.
But that was nothing compared to the Palestinian response, which could incite unprecedented levels of violence and require an equally unprecedented Israeli response, negating the slim progress achieved over recent months.
Ben drew up alongside the colonel, ignoring the valley beyond. “You think the Israelis are covering up?”
“It is something they are very good at, Inspector.”
”Not this time,” Danielle insisted flatly. The harshness of her tone surprised both a
l-Asi and Ben, and they looked at each other before turning toward her. “I still have some sources in Israel, Colonel, and they claim the IDF is as baffled by this as everyone else.”
Al-Asi shrugged. “I’ll grant you the fact that your countrymen haven’t circled the wagons, as the Americans say; nor have they paraded out a slew of officials to offer the typically alternate version of events. That says we’re facing a very complicated scenario here.”
