by By Jon Land
“That’s all it is, Colonel: a theory. It doesn’t tell us anything.”
“One of your U.N. victims was here in the guise of someone else, Inspector. That tells us something.”
The real David Lister was waiting for them in what passed for a lounge inside U.N. regional headquarters. The furniture was covered in faded and worn brown fabric, wrong for the region and ill suited to the room. Obviously surplus from another U.N. facility.
Lister paced the room nervously, buzzed on the caffeine from a half dozen Diet Cokes that littered various tabletops and armrests. He had learned of his apparent death through a U.N. memo to all relief workers advising caution in the rest of the region. Tall and lanky, he seemed to talk with his elbows more than his hands, his narrow face drooping between words.
Ben handed him the file on the massacre victim who had taken his name. “Recognize this man?”
Lister kept shifting the pages from hand to hand. “His face, no. His background, yes. Because it’s mine. Everything in this file is mine, except the picture.” He handed the pages back to Ben. “How could this happen?”
“Where were you posted prior to Palestine?” Ben asked him.
“Guatemala. For the past five years.”
“The man posing as you took your identity because he thought it would be safe. Forged the transfer documents and showed up for assignment in the West Bank.”
Colonel al-Asi turned away from the window. “Having no way to anticipate that the person he was impersonating would end up being sent to the same region himself.”
Lister popped open another can of Diet Coke and chugged a hefty swig. “And the anomaly doesn’t show up in anybody’s records?”
“Different regions, different databases,” Ben explained. “It may have been caught, or would have been soon, except the anomaly probably would’ve been blamed on poor record keeping, not identity theft.”
“After all,” said al-Asi, flashing the slightest of smiles, “people are more apt to want to sneak out of this area, not in.”
Lister drained the rest of the can and laid it down on the table between them. “Man must have had his reasons.”
Ben glanced at the real David Lister’s file. “You’re here to supervise a construction crew.”
“Reconstruction, actually. Of a hospital the Israelis blew up. It hasn’t been easy, let me tell you.”
“Because of the Israelis?” from al-Asi.
“Because of the language. I speak fluent Spanish, not a word of Arabic.”
“Our victim spoke fluent Arabic,” Ben recalled to al-Asi.
“Man must’ve done his homework,” Lister said, and reached for yet another can of Diet Coke.
“Interesting,” al-Asi noted, after he had closed the door to the room behind them. “Because if the U.N. worker murdered in Bureij wasn’t David Lister . . .”
“Then who was he?” Ben completed.
* * * *
Chapter 18
D
anielle Barnea soaped up a second time and let the steaming hot water gush over her. The first washing had been to cleanse her of the grime from the road and the long hours of travel. The second was to wipe away how she felt.
Dirty at returning to her home country as something other than an Israeli. She had missed Israel more than she had ever confessed to Ben in their months with the U.N.’s Safety and Security Service, avoiding the issue since it was abundantly clear he had left far less behind. Whenever Danielle grew nostalgic, though, she simply summoned the memories of how her last days had been riddled with betrayal and isolation. Israel would always be her home, but there was nothing left here for her anymore. She had seen too much, knew too much. The very attributes that should have made her a great asset had turned her into a tremendous liability. Those who should have embraced her experience and loyalty instead chose to see her as a threat. Too powerful and visible to go quietly into a life of political exile, even if she had been willing to. Too stubborn and headstrong to play by their rules, even if she remained in the system.
Now she was home, carrying a United Nations visa instead of an Israeli passport. She had become, in the mind of her country, part of the enemy.
The United Nations . . .
She had hated the organization herself for all its hypocrisy. Now, instead, she felt like a hypocrite herself. She never believed in her work for the U.N. the way she’d believed in her work on behalf of Israel. In becoming a pariah, an outcast, though, that belief had been stripped away, leaving her with . . .
With what?
Nothing.
It hurt to form the thought, the reality of it dawning hard and fast. Danielle finally reached up and turned the water off, then grabbed for the towel she had slung over the shower rod.
For nearly a year she’d been able to run from her past, the pain and anguish that dominated it. Returning had brought it all back, confronting her all at once with an undeniable reality: whatever conclusions her investigation reached would lack credibility to both sides. To the Palestinians because she was Israeli and to the Israelis because she had fled the country as a fugitive. The Israelis had agreed to her participation because it provided the government with an excuse to deny everything in the event they didn’t hear what they wanted. She had been duped. Again.
Danielle yanked back the curtain and stepped from the shower, a cascade of water trailing her across the tile. The phone rang and she padded quickly into the bedroom for it, expecting it was Ben with a report on whatever he and Colonel al-Asi had found in Nablus.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Ms. Barnea?” A female voice. “Danielle Barnea?”
“If you’re a reporter—”
“I’m not. I’m a sister. Matthew Henley’s sister.”
“Never heard of him,” Danielle said, stopping just short of hanging up the receiver.
“You know him by another name, Ms. Barnea. David Lister—one of the U.N. personnel massacred in Bureij.”
Victoria Henley sat at a corner table in an overstuffed chair in a tiny area set off from the rest of the hotel lobby that featured Starbucks coffee. The trays of danish, muffins, and cookies were free and, for the most part, uneaten. Victoria Henley was alone and, Danielle noticed, positioned as far as possible from sight of anyone passing near while still keeping the hotel’s main entrance and lobby in view. She held a mug of coffee in her hands, paying little attention to Danielle’s approach.
“Ms. Henley?”
The woman smiled slightly. “I wasn’t sure it was you. I didn’t know what you looked like.”
“But you knew my name, that I was here.”
“Because you’ve been assigned by the U.N. to investigate my brother’s murder.”
Danielle sat down in a matching overstuffed chair but left it discreetly away from the table. “Something not commonly known.”
“I have sources.”
“In the U.N.?”
“Several places,” Victoria Henley said, and took a sip from her coffee.
Danielle guessed her to be in her late twenties, a young woman who could have been very attractive if she had worked at it at all. Instead her hair hung limply past the baggy blazer draped over her shoulders. She wore no makeup and her eyes drooped from fatigue. Danielle noticed her coffee showed no trace of steam, evidence she had been nursing the mug for some time.
“My brother was the reason that massacre happened,” Victoria Henley continued, looking down into her cooling coffee. She uncrossed her legs and Danielle noticed she was wearing worn, faded jeans. “They found him, somehow they found him. . . .”
“The Israeli army?”
The woman frowned at her. “If you’re half as good as I’ve heard you are, you’ve already figured out it wasn’t the Israelis.”
“Assume I have. Why would this other party stage a massacre just to assassinate your brother?”
Victoria Henley took a deep breath, didn’t finish it. “Matthew was a linguistics expert, one of the foremost in th
e world. Pioneered software programs designed to translate one language into another contextually using rudimentary principles of artificial intelligence.” Victoria Henley stopped, perhaps anticipating a question. When Danielle remained silent, she continued. “That’s why they killed him.”
“Because of something he translated.”
Henley leaned forward and jarred the table slightly. “I don’t know who they are.”
“I didn’t ask you that.”
“They killed my father too. That’s where it started. And I’m next now, as soon as they find me.” She spoke matter-of-factly, as if resigned to her fate.
“What do you want from me, Ms. Henley?”
“Vicky. Please.”
“Vicky.”
Victoria Henley stretched her elbows farther across the table. “I want you to believe me, Inspector Barnea. I want you to believe that my father and my brother aren’t the only victims. There are at least a dozen others, probably more by now. All members of my father’s unit in World War Two. Because of something they found, something they found sixty years ago in Buchenwald.”
* * * *
Chapter 19
B
en lay next to Danielle in the double bed of his Jerusalem hotel room, two floors down from hers.
“How long has it been?” she asked softly, pressed up against his side, her head resting on his chest.
“Six weeks, no seven. And then only for a night.”
Originally he had been booked in a room one floor down. But twenty minutes after checking in, he had called down to request a room change on the chance that the one he’d been given was wired with more than cable television. Given the animus between the U.N. and Israel, Ben expected as much, especially since he was Palestinian. He could only imagine how much it irked Israeli authorities to have him staying in Jerusalem in the block of rooms on permanent reservation by the United Nations. Still, since the odds of his movements being tracked were better, it was easier for Danielle to come to him.
Ben stroked her hair, enjoying the scent of her drifting softly upward. Something sweet, like lavender. She’d purchased it during a trip to Geneva, he remembered.
“When are you meeting this Victoria Henley next?” he asked.
“We’re both meeting her first thing tomorrow morning.”
“You believed her, didn’t you?”
“I haven’t had time to check out her story.”
“But you believed her.”
“I believe she was terrified. That’s enough for now.”
“Terrified of what?”
Victoria Henley hooked a strand of her long hair behind one ear. She laced her fingers together to still their trembling.
“They were all members of an Evacuation Hospital unit. Do you know what that is?”
“The first generation of mobile army surgical hospitals,” Danielle said.
Victoria Henley nodded. “Yes, a whole new concept for the battlefield. My father’s unit was the 121st. They’d barely set down in Germany when they were sent to Buchenwald.”
Danielle’s eyes coaxed Victoria Henley on.
“They were among the first Americans, the first people, to set foot inside a German concentration camp. Two hundred and forty of them, all men. The women, nurses, had been temporarily reassigned to spare them the—”
“I know about the heroic work done by the liberators,” Danielle interrupted, not wanting to further rehash this painful part of Jewish history.
“The 121st weren’t liberators. They were . . . Never mind, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that twelve of these men have died in the past two months, including my father.”
“Old men in their eighties, seventies at the very least. I don’t see what—”
“They didn’t just die, Inspector. Like I told you, they were murdered,” Victoria Henley insisted. “Sixty years after the fact.”
The conviction in the woman’s voice made Danielle rethink her initial judgment. “What was it they found in Buchenwald?”
“I don’t know. I overheard my father talking on the phone a few times, once to Matthew. He cursed the day they dug it up. He always repeated that.”
“How did you learn about Matthew’s death?”
“A colleague of his, one of the teachers in the village school who survived, contacted me. Told me.”
“That means he knew who your brother really was. Matthew must have confided in him.”
Victoria Henley hedged. “In me, actually. This teacher and I had been . . . together for a while years ago. He knew how the U.N. relief bureaucracy worked. I asked him to help. He set up the entire ruse, just to help my brother. Not that it did him much good,” she added, almost too softly to hear.
“When was this ruse set up?”
“After my father’s funeral. Three weeks ago.”
Danielle gave her a few seconds to compose herself. “How did your father die, Vicky?”
“He was shot outside an ATM.”
“What did the police say?”
“What do you think? They called him a victim of random street crime, never seemed particularly bothered by the fact that the surveillance tape for that period was mysteriously damaged.”
Victoria Henley fished a five-by-seven photo from a worn leather shoulder bag and handed it to Danielle. The photo was contained within a folding cardboard sleeve, and Danielle opened it to find a photo of a smiling older man with his arms around a young man and woman on either side of him.
“That’s the last picture taken of the three of us,” Henley explained. “About six months ago.”
Danielle studied the picture some more, comparing the radiant face of the young woman pictured to the haggard expression that claimed Victoria Henley now.
“I haven’t slept in two days,” she said. “I close my eyes and all I see is what’s left of my father’s face and skull.”
Danielle gave her a few more seconds, looked at Henley’s fingers for the first time and saw no wedding or engagement ring. A woman in her late twenties, early thirties maybe, losing the only family she had left.
“I’m going to find who killed your brother, Vicky. I promise.”
“Unless they kill us both first.”
“I’m pretty good at this sort of thing.”
“So are they.”
Danielle waited for Victoria Henley to drain the rest of her coffee before resuming. “What was it your brother translated?”
“Something my father—”
She stopped suddenly, eyes widening at the sight of something across the lobby. Danielle turned in that direction and saw a plainclothes Israeli security detail making a routine sweep.
“It’s all right,” she said calmly.
“No,” Henley told her, clearly unsettled. “I can’t talk anymore right now. I’ll tell you the rest later. Tomorrow.”
“Where are you staying?” Danielle asked. Victoria looked utterly exhausted, barely able to keep her eyes open.
“I keep moving around, so they won’t be able to find me.”
Danielle slid one of her room’s access cards across the table. “You can use my room tonight.”
Victoria Henley reached down for the card but didn’t take it. “What about you?”
“I won’t be needing it.”
“Okay,” Ben said, fitting the story together in his head. “These twelve old men, members of an Evacuation Hospital unit, were murdered because of something they found in a concentration camp sixty years ago.”
“Something Victoria Henley’s brother must have translated.”
“Did she say anything else about him?”
“Only that he was here hiding out from whoever killed his father.”
Ben chuckled softly.
“What’s so funny?” Danielle asked, raising her head to try and see his face.
“Only that someone would come to Palestine to hide.”
“You did once,” she reminded.
“I was lucky; you found me.”
/> Danielle lowered her head to his chest once again. “Like somebody found Matthew Henley. His sister’s terrified the same thing is about to happen to her.”
Ben reached over her to switch off the light and drew Danielle closer to him. “Did you adopt stray animals as a child?”
