by By Jon Land
“All the time.”
“I thought so.”
And he kissed her deeply, losing himself in Danielle as he always did in these moments. The only time when he felt safe and secure, when the pain of the past didn’t blot out whatever good might lie ahead. He felt her mouth over his and felt himself floating in a pillow-soft world where nothing could hurt him, where the serial killer who’d killed his family vanished into a past from which he could at last turn away.
Then a sound like a car backfiring hammered Ben’s ears an instant before the room itself shuddered, and chunks of plaster rained down off the walls. A fire alarm began to wail, and Danielle rolled off Ben in the same moment he lurched off the bed. Both of them pulling their clothes on, charging into the hallway together.
The shrill alarm was more piercing in the corridor and guests had already begun to spill from their rooms. A pair of exit doors at opposite sides of the hall burst open almost simultaneously, Israeli soldiers flooding out along with plainclothes United Nations security personnel.
“Move away from the door, Inspector Kamal!” one of them shouted, freezing in his tracks when he saw Danielle. “Inspector Barnea?” he managed, eyes glassy with shock.
Danielle looked back at Ben; his untucked shirt, her half-buttoned top. “What’s going on? What happened?”
“The explosion, Inspector,” the U.N. man said to her, looking more relieved now, as others on both sides of him jabbered into their radios. “It was your room.”
* * * *
Chapter 20
N
o dude, you’re doing it all wrong,” Jake Fleming said to the freshman seated next to him on the couch. “You gotta hold the smoke in your lungs longer. Let an expert show you.”
Jake lifted the bong, purchased in Jamaica during spring break, off the coffee table.
“Now, watch,” he said to the freshman, whose name he’d once again forgotten. Tom, maybe, or Tim. Something like that.
Jake flicked the lighter and touched the flame to the bowl. Then he formed a seal with his mouth against the top of the bong’s glass chute and sucked in deeply. Instantly the bong’s central chamber filled with smoke. Jake kept sucking, as he pulled the slide from its slot. He felt the rush of smoke fill his lungs, fought down a cough, and squeezed his mouth closed. Finally, when he could hold it in no longer, he opened his lips and let the smoke out. Slowly, watching waves of it float upward toward the ceiling.
“Now that’s what I call a hit,” Jake said raspily, handing the bong and lighter over to Tim or Tom. “I think it might be kicked. Give it a try, Tim.”
“Tom.”
“Yeah, right. Whatever.”
Tom lowered his mouth to the bong and flicked the lighter.
“No, wait,” Jake said, pushing himself off the couch.
He moved to the door, certain he’d heard something out in the dorm hallway. Brown University police were usually cool about smoking pot, long as the smell didn’t filter out into the hallway. Jake made sure the towel was stuffed tight under his door, then checked the dead bolt.
“Okay,” he told Tom. Or was it Tim?
Tom tried again with much better results until he started coughing up a storm again and dropped the slide onto the floor, scattering the bowl’s remaining contents over the rug.
“Not cool,” Jake said, dropping to his knees to fish the slide from underneath the couch where it had rolled.
He’d just clamped his hand on the hot glass when the door burst open. His first thought was his drunken fraternity brothers coming back from the bars. But the sight of dark uniforms pouring into the room made him think it must be Brown cops on a serious mission. Only Brown cops didn’t carry guns and these dark shapes were wielding big ones.
“Stay down!”
“Let me see your hands!”
Jake tried to raise them and realized one was still lodged under the couch holding onto the slide.
“Let me see your hands!” one of the shapes repeated again and Jake realized the shape had no face. No, it was just covered in a ski mask or something.
Jake finally got his second hand out and cowered back against the couch, stretching both into the air. More masked shapes pushed into the room; there must have been a dozen of them, so many Jake couldn’t even see out into the hallway where a few more kept yelling, “Clear! Clear!” like a scene from some fucked-up movie.
On the couch, Tim or Tom was still coughing. Across the small dorm room a smaller masked shape was lifting Jake’s computer off his desk, not caring what he dragged with it. He bumped into another of the intruders who was busily emptying the contents of Jake’s drawers into a box marked evidence.
On the couch, Tim or Tom was still coughing.
“Oh, fuck,” was all Jake could think to say.
* * * *
* * * *
Chapter 21
B
en and Danielle refused to leave the hotel for safe refuge, insisting they be allowed to remain through at least the initial course of the investigation that stretched into the early morning hours.
Israeli army personnel secured the hotel and cordoned off the floor where the blast had occurred. Guests who had descended on the lobby had been rapidly evacuated to the hotel’s parklike entry area and kept back behind hastily strung crime scene tape to keep them from the path of emergency vehicles. Danielle heard that Commissioner David Vordi of National Police was already en route to take charge. She insisted on seeing the blast site and Ben accompanied her up the stairs, since the elevators were still being checked for more explosives.
The smell struck her as she was climbing the stairwell a good half flight before the closed-off floor. Sour and smoky at the same time, something like metal singed in a microwave.
Semptex or C4, she concluded. Some form of high-tech plastic explosive.
A guard at the top of the stairwell reluctantly let them pass through the door. Harsh acrid smoke continued to drift down the hall with thin ribbons of cloudy mist. It thickened along with the smell as Ben and Danielle drew closer to the blast site. Their feet kicked past debris in the form of chunks and shards torn mostly from the ceiling. A white flourlike dust permeated the air, sticking to their skin and leaving its chalky residue across the walls and doors.
As they neared her room, Danielle saw a pair of Israeli paramedics carrying out a single black body bag, an all-too-familiar sight in Israel. They placed it atop a dolly and started to wheel it down the hall until Danielle stopped them, reached for the zipper.
“I wouldn’t do that if I—”
Danielle’s hardened gaze froze the paramedic and she returned her attention to the body bag, opening it just enough to see a face not recognizable as Victoria Henley at all. Still, Danielle reached down and parted the corpse’s charred lips enough to peer into the mouth. Then she closed the bag up and continued toward the jagged hole blown out where her door had been. The blast had collapsed a good portion of the walls on either side, while inside the room itself there was . . . nothing. Just blown-out remains and an overheated stench rising off the residue of burnt fabric and glowing fibers of mattress stuffing dancing in the air like fireflies. Nothing was recognizable, save for the television, which lay perfectly straight on the floor with a spiderweb crack down the center of its screen.
“It was the mattress,” Danielle surmised from the blast pattern. “The explosives must have been packed into or under it.”
She wondered if Victoria Henley had been lying atop it when the blast erupted. It would explain the nature of her wounds. Sometimes those closest to the center of a blast were actually left most whole, an anomaly that had long confused Danielle.
“You’re not safe here,” Ben said softly.
“Henley was the target, not me,” Danielle insisted.
“You gave her your key card and she was up here what, an hour later? The room was always occupied until you came down to my room. How could anyone have set the explosives?”
“You should have lo
oked into her mouth, Ben.”
“What?”
“Victoria Henley’s mouth. There was no charring.”
“Meaning . . .”
“She was dead before the explosion. They killed her and covered up the truth by staging the explosion.”
“To make it appear as if you were the target the whole time.”
“Exactly.”
“Inspectors,” an Israeli captain called from just behind them, “I have an urgent call for you.”
He held a satellite phone forward, ignoring Ben in favor of Danielle. “Barnea,” she said. Several seconds passed before she spoke again. “We’ll be waiting.”
Ben looked at her, as she handed the phone back to the captain.
“That was Alexis Arguayo,” Danielle told him. “He’s on his way.”
* * * *
Chapter 22
I
was in Germany when word reached me,” Arguayo said, as soon as he closed the office door behind Ben and Danielle. Once powerfully built, most of his muscle was now covered in dense layers of fat. His face carried a sheen of sweat and splotches of it had bled through the white dress shirt beneath his blue suit coat.
Arguayo, head of the United Nations Safety and Security Service, was Peruvian by birth but had spent most of his life in Venezuela where he eventually became a citizen. An army veteran, he had taken over as police chief of Caracas when that city was infested with crime. Six years into his tenure, crime had decreased eighty percent and Arguayo had moved on to politics, becoming Venezuela’s delegate to the United Nations. He returned to personally take charge of the army’s brutal crackdown on the rebels who had brought Venezuela’s economy to a standstill. Both Ben and Danielle wondered if he had trouble reconciling the legendary ruthlessness that ultimately helped bring the rebels down with the far more bureaucratic position of head of the U.N.’s security division.
In that capacity Arguayo had personally recruited Ben and Danielle, impressing them with both his organizational skills and surprisingly pleasant demeanor that belied his reputation. But Arguayo seemed neither pleasant nor gentle today. He looked from Ben and Danielle to David Vordi, who sat pensively behind the hotel manager’s desk.
“I like to think my people are safely under the protection of the host country,” Arguayo said accusingly. “Apparently I thought wrong.”
“You insisted on your Security Service conducting its own investigation, General,” Vordi shot back, “instead of letting us do our jobs.”
“Your jobs? And if we can’t trust you with the simple task of keeping a hotel in the middle of Jerusalem secure, how can we trust you with anything else?”
“Perhaps if you stopped ignoring the terrorists operating from the refugee camps you administer, things would improve.”
“As you are well aware, the U.N. does not administer them, we merely feed the population of these camps. At least we did until your government began obstructing the movements of our relief workers.”
“The restrictions are necessary for our own security,” Vordi insisted. “Your drivers are almost exclusively Palestinian.”
“Were, Commissioner. We’re using truck drivers supplied by the Swedish government now, a fact apparently lost on your military patrols.”
“I’ll pass the word along.”
“And you might also mention that our relief agencies are now feeding over a million Palestinians, up from a hundred thousand when the most recent conflict began.”
“We did not start this conflict, General.”
“But you are determined to finish it, through any means at your disposal, Commissioner, even if that includes the murder of innocent villagers.”
Vordi held his expressionless gaze on Arguayo. “Apparently Inspector Barnea has not yet briefed your office on her findings, that the Israeli Defense Forces were not involved in this massacre,” he said, ignoring Ben altogether.
Arguayo swung toward Danielle. “Is this true?”
“Indications point to that, yes,” Danielle acknowledged, not wanting to elaborate any further in front of Vordi.
“I see. But you’re not certain.”
“Not yet,” Danielle told Arguayo. “Not conclusively.”
“Still quite a bit accomplished in only twenty-four hours. Unfortunately, Inspector Barnea, Inspector Kamal will be left to complete the investigation on his own.”
“I don’t understand, General.”
“A woman was killed in your room last night, in an explosion clearly meant for you.”
“I’m not convinced of that.”
“You believe this other woman was the target?”
“She had information that may have proven vital to the investigation.”
Arguayo narrowed his gaze. “Why was I not apprised of this earlier?”
“We’d only spoken once. I haven’t had the opportunity yet to substantiate her claims.”
“And yet you gave her your room.”
“She believed she was in danger.”
“And assuming she was correct. . .”
Danielle exchanged a glance with Ben. “It may take the investigation in another direction.”
Arguayo continued to stare at Danielle. “Inspector Kamal, do you concur with Inspector Barnea’s findings?”
Ben didn’t hesitate. “Yes, General, I do.”
Arguayo frowned. “I’d hoped you would’ve learned your lesson.”
“In Baghdad or Colombia?”
“Take your pick. I’m still waiting for your report on Colombia.”
“I wasn’t sure anyone read the one I wrote on Baghdad.”
Arguayo glared at Ben. “You wanted us to blame the Russians for orchestrating the bombing of the compound.”
“It was a hotel before the U.N. appropriated the building, General. And the evidence I gathered indicated KGB and GRU documents were stored there following the collapse of the former Soviet Union.”
“Documents indicating what exactly?” Arguayo challenged.
“I wasn’t given an opportunity to find out.”
“Toward what end? Embarrassing the Russian government at a time we can least afford to?”
Ben held his ground. “Someone in Russia ordered the bombing once the hotel was turned over to the United Nations because they couldn’t take the risk something they had hidden there would be uncovered.”
Arguayo shook his head in mock disbelief. “Someone? Something? You really should listen to yourself, Inspector.”
“Feel free to banish me back to my desk, General.”
“Oh, I’d like nothing better.” Arguayo turned toward Danielle. “But that would leave me with no one to coordinate this investigation, since Inspector Barnea is being recalled.”
Danielle’s eyes bulged. “If I may, General—”
“No, Inspector Barnea, you may not. Instead you will be driven to an Israeli military airfield where you will board a jet that will take you back to London. Consider yourself on leave. You can use some time off. Your plane’s waiting. I want you in the air in thirty minutes.”
Arguayo had his private car, a Mercedes, drive Danielle to the airfield. Ben followed her there in a U.N. vehicle and joined her on the Tarmac near a small jet sitting on the runway, its engines revving.
“Arguayo wants you out of here very badly,” he noted.
“I don’t care. What I’m looking for now isn’t in Israel anyway.”
“He’ll be monitoring calls in and out of my phone,” Ben reminded, “to see if we speak.”
“Then we won’t, at least for a few days.”
“This might all be wrapped up by then.”
“You really believe that, Ben?”
“Not for a second.”
They hugged briefly, then Danielle walked off to the jet alone. Ben watched her climb on board, shielding his eyes from the sun. As soon as the door closed behind her, he drew his phone from his pocket and dialed Colonel Nabril al-Asi.
“So glad to hear you weren’t injured last night,
Inspector,” al-Asi greeted.
“How’d you know it was me, Colonel?”
“I figured I’d be hearing from you as soon as Chief Inspector Barnea exited Israel.”
Ben watched the small jet begin its taxi down the runway. “You never cease to amaze me.”
