“To me, all the stuff about seeking paradise is overblown.” Briefly, Martel smiled. “Personally, I find the idea of deflowering seventy virgins both dreary and exhausting, and it utterly fails to address the sexual aspirations of female suicide bombers. But my central point is that suicide bombers are driven by hopelessness, anger, and the desire to free their land from some sort of occupation, real or perceived. In short, you should look for what happened to Jefar and Hassan—or what they hoped would happen—here on earth.”
“And their handlers?”
“Are a different breed.” Martel gave David a probing look. “I gather that, at one point in your life, you knew Hana Arif fairly well. Or, at least, thought you did. Obviously, I can’t speak to her personal attributes. But the ideal handler has a unique ability to project his or her ideology, and a keen understanding of how to motivate others to sacrifice themselves to achieve the handler’s ends. In three words: articulate, charismatic, and manipulative.”
“Only two of them describe Hana. Articulate and charismatic.”
“Not manipulative?”
David shrugged. “Not unless I’m being manipulated.”
Eyebrows raised, Martel turned to the water. “It takes a certain gift, David, to make an act of self-destruction seem rational, even desirable. One has to be skilled at identifying, and then ensnaring, those people who are susceptible. But as I say, I don’t know Hana Arif.”
For a time, David, too, gazed at the Pacific. Then he said, “Her husband claims she’s being framed.”
“Does he? That’s interesting. Did you ever read Bodyguard of Lies?”
“No.”
“You should. The book’s subject is an elite group set up by Winston Churchill and British intelligence prior to the Normandy invasion. Its entire purpose was to persuade Hitler and the Germans that the Allied invasion of Europe would begin not at Normandy, but Calais.
“Their tactics were quite inventive. As one example, they lifted the corpse of a young man from the morgue, put him in uniform, secreted supposedly classified information about the Calais invasion in his pocket, and floated him ashore in occupied France. In short, they painstakingly created a mosaic of lies for the Germans to assemble, creating the illusion of detailed military planning.” Martel’s voice changed tenor, becoming meditative. “Among the cruelest aspects of this deception was that the British fed their allies in the French resistance the same false information. So that when the Germans captured and then tortured them, some bravely died to protect a falsehood. And others broke, just as the British hoped, telling lies they thought were true in order that they might live.”
It took a moment for David to comprehend the story. “Ibrahim Jefar.”
“Yes. Why did Jefar survive, I keep asking myself.” Martel paused. “Perhaps he was just lucky, or unlucky. Or perhaps his unwitting role was to tell the ‘truth.’ Like the French, he can pass a lie detector test, or name your client if someone shoots him full of sodium pentothal. All he seems to know is whatever Hassan told him.”
David pondered this. “That leaves the fingerprints and the cell phone call.”
“It does.” Martel studied David closely. “You’re after the husband, I assume.”
“Of course. Who better to get a paper with her prints on it, or borrow Hana’s cell phone as she slept?”
“Does he suspect that?”
“I’m not sure.”
Martel laughed softly. “ ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘when first we practice to deceive.’ The question is, Who’s deceiving whom—or themselves?” Abruptly, all humor vanished. “How badly, David, do you want it to be Khalid?”
David did not flinch; nor did he answer. “You said this was the Middle East. The surface of this story is too neat—the one apparent defect in a flawless plot is that Jefar can give them Hana’s name, with just enough evidence to set her up for lethal injection. If she knows nothing, Hana becomes the perfect cul-de-sac.”
“Then you’ve also considered the other interpretation.”
“Yes. Saeb’s guilty, and so is she. The intimations of marital stress are just an act.”
Martel nodded. “With one more element,” he added slowly. “The suspicion, on her behalf or his, that you want to believe it.”
“There’s only one problem with that thesis, Bryce. For Hana to be guilty, she would also have to be inexplicably careless. Which brings me back to Saeb.”
Martel squinted into the failing sun. For a long time, he did not speak. When he did, it was in the tone of a man continuing another conversation, one of far longer standing. “Your father,” he told David, “was good company, in his intellectual way. I became quite fond of him. But he spent his life observing the lives of others, until he became an observer of his own.
“In my own work, I’ve learned to keep a distance. But your father’s detachment was more innate. It had nothing to do with whether, as a son, you deserved better. Your father was a cold man because he was a frightened one—of himself, I always thought, and of facing his own emotions.” He turned to David, his face expressing more concern than he had ever allowed himself to show. “You have enough courage, it seems. But I never quite believed in the life I saw you living, not that you were bad at it.
“I don’t know what’s making you do this. But don’t treat this case like it’s a card trick you’re performing—an act of pride, or another chance to be clever and creative. Your reasons go way deeper than that.” Pausing, Martel rested his hand on David’s shoulder. “Whatever they are, David, learn from them. That may be all this very hard experience will ever have to offer you.”
15
That night, David could not sleep.
The world he had constructed so carefully for himself was disintegrating. He had received a curt phone call from Burt Newman, firing him as a client and pronouncing his career in politics “as dead as Adolf Hitler” ; that one he had expected. More difficult were the calls and messages over the past few days from friends of his and Carole’s, ranging from compassionate—“Are you okay?” —to condescending—“Have you thought about Carole?” —to shrill and self-involved—“How can you do this to us?” Equally depressing was the call from his law school friend Noah Klein, regarding his decision to defend Hana; though Noah tried to be tactful, he spoke to David as though he must have suffered a nervous breakdown. David’s only distraction from the telephone was the media onslaught, stoked by the White House, Israel, and the terrible consequences of the crime itself, exemplified by the Israelis’ systematic war against Al Aqsa. The weekly newsmagazines typified this: all three featured photographs of Hana on the cover, one bearing the caption “Professor of Terror?” ; all sifted her personal history at length—from her radical statements at Harvard to the mundane surface of her current life—for clues to why she might have become a terrorist. Newsweek’s sidebar traced the history of female suicide bombers; Time’s focused on David’s “inexplicable” decision to defend her, quoting anonymous “friends” and “acquaintances” regarding David’s stunning “fall from grace,” so bewildering in a man of “such obvious ambition.”
Lying awake, David wondered if Marnie Sharpe could be counted as a “friend” or merely an “acquaintance.” Time passed with merciless slowness—minutes, and finally another hour, marked by the red illuminated numbers of his alarm clock. Again and again he thought of Carole. But the absence of any sound in his bedroom confirmed that she had vanished from his life.
The next morning, while the private firm he had hired secured his office against wiretaps and surveillance devices, David met Angel Garriques and Marsha Kerr in the park near the Palace of Fine Arts.
The morning was cool but clear. They sat on the grass with croissants and a thermos of coffee, looking across the duck pond at the ornate dome, which reminded David of a bandshell built by Romans at the height of architectural decadence. Angel was a young ex–public defender whom David had hired three years before for his shrewd instinct
s and quick intelligence; Marsha, a fortyish professor at the University of San Francisco, was David’s former colleague from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, an expert in litigation involving foreign governments and classified information. As David’s only associate and the new father of twins, Angel was in no position to object to representing Hana Arif; Marsha, meanwhile, was intrigued by the complexities of extracting highly sensitive information from two governments, and she also liked the handsome hourly rate at which David would be paying her. In both cases, David reflected, the morality of lawyers, so counterintuitive to the rest of the population, was helpful: that the guilt or innocence of a client, or even the horror of what she might have done, was secondary to ensuring that the system worked for everyone. That this ethic also served to cloak ego and amorality was, in David’s experience, less remarked on by the tribunes of the law.
For a time, they dissected the case against Hana. Angel stroked the dark beard he had grown to age the sensitive brown eyes and round, lineless face he considered embarrassing for a seasoned trial lawyer. “We don’t have much to go on,” he concluded. “The usual defense is that the prosecution’s evidence is deficient. But that doesn’t seem like enough here. If we don’t come up with something more, like who did what Hana’s accused of doing, we’re in trouble.”
“But who?” David asked. “Unless we can name him, and back it up with evidence, we’ll lose the jury. And Hana may lose her life.”
“I assume,” Marsha said, “that the FBI questioned Khalid about all that.”
“Sure. What they got was ‘I don’t know about the slip of paper’; ‘I never touched her cell phone’; ‘I was watching CNN with my daughter.’ None of which, even if true, rules him out as a coconspirator with Hana. But that possibility doesn’t help us.”
Marsha brushed back a strand of graying hair. “Why would Hana disguise her handwriting by typing out her cell phone number, then leave prints on the paper she’d typed on? And why pass out an international cell phone number?”
“If the evidence is phony,” Angel added, “who planted it?”
“Have you talked to Munira?” Marsha asked David.
Pondering the question, David felt the last swallow of coffee jangling his nerves. “Not since the arrest. And it’s tricky. Saeb is even more protective than Hana, and Munira’s torn between them. Plus, she’s twelve years old. How do I ask if her father made a suspicious-sounding phone call while they were watching CNN?”
“Suppose you liked her answer,” Marsha said. “Arif ’s the client, not her daughter.”
“It’s not that simple,” David rejoined. “I can’t just put a twelve-year-old on the witness stand with half the world watching, hoping she’ll incriminate her own father. Do I explain that I want to nail Saeb before she’s sworn in? Or just exploit an already traumatized adolescent and hope it all works out?
“Either way, the jury would despise me. And if she takes down one parent, or both, how will she live with it?” David stopped himself, continuing in a softer tone. “If Munira blurts out something that convicts Hana instead of Saeb, I’d descend from callous to stupid.”
Marsha put down her coffee. “I don’t mind callous,” she said coolly. “Especially when the alternative is being stupid.”
He needed her expertise, David knew, and his internal conflicts were affecting his judgment. “As you say,” David agreed, “Hana’s the client. But I can’t imagine her wanting me to put Munira on the stand.”
“What do we need to go after Jefar?” Angel asked David. “If Hana’s innocent, he’s a liar.”
“Unless he’s just repeating what Hassan told him. As for what we know about either of them, it’s not much. In the end, I’ll probably have to go to the West Bank and try to track down more information.” Against his better judgment, David took another sip of coffee, hoping for a lift. “Part of our case has to be that Sharpe’s ignoring what matters most: who planned the assassination, and who supplied the equipment to carry it out? In particular, who leaked the change of route?”
“All good questions,” Marsha responded. “But we can’t just ask the government for everything they’ve got. All we’re entitled to is information that might exculpate Arif, or at least might be ‘material to the defense.’ If what we want is classified, they can also withhold the ‘sources and methods’ they used to get it, even if they’re helpful to us—otherwise, the argument goes, defense lawyers like us would dry up the government’s sources, maybe even get American agents killed. As for the Israelis, anything they give us is voluntary. Of course, they won’t volunteer a thing.”
“In other words,” Angel said, “we’re fucked.”
David glanced at Marsha. “Some of us, Angel, might consider that an opportunity.”
Marsha laughed softly. “You’re planning to blackmail the United States attorney, aren’t you? Or, more accurately, ‘graymail’ her.”
David shrugged away the phrase. “Hana’s entitled to a fair trial. At least in theory, that means we should get any information that could help establish her defense. If the United States or Israel refuses—for whatever reason—then they’re ensuring that Hana’s trial won’t be fair. That’s our bottom line: fair trial or no trial.”
Angel looked from David to Marsha. “Won’t Sharpe just give us whatever she has? Otherwise, it’s prosecutorial misconduct.”
“That’s certainly why she’ll want to,” Marsha answered. “But Sharpe’s interests may differ from those of the intelligence agencies of either country, whose own interests may be at odds with each other’s. The debate over ‘who lost Ben-Aron’ is central to Israel’s leaders, and to ours. At least for now, Israel doesn’t want to reveal that Ben-Aron’s security detail may have included a traitor. So the Americans may be monitoring—to put it bluntly, spying on—Israel’s internal investigation.” Pausing, Marsha tossed the last scrap of her croissant to the duck that had been circling her. “The United States wants to redeem itself in the eyes of the Israelis, not to mention the world, by convicting Hana Arif—and, through Arif, by cracking open the conspiracy. But the president and our intelligence agencies have another interest, which is very different from Israel’s. So if David can show that an Israeli mole set up Ben-Aron, the White House, in contrast to Sharpe, might consider that a favor. The Israelis won’t.”
Watching Angel try to absorb this, David sympathized: in a week he had morphed from a prospective congressman to the lawyer for an alleged terrorist, pitting his own government against an ally that had lost its leader in the bombing David had witnessed. He turned again to Marsha and said, “Tell Angel about the Achille Lauro.”
Marsha smiled faintly, a cynical crinkling of her eyes. “The Achille Lauro,” she began, “was a luxury liner boat-jacked by a terrorist network run by a man named Abu Abbas. The CIA was pretty sure Abbas was hiding out in Egypt—though Mubarak, Egypt’s president, assured them that he was moving heaven and earth to find him. The CIA had doubts. So the CIA and the Israelis redirected their intercept capacity and overheard our friend Mubarak’s aides arranging Abbas’s departure. Instead of expressing our government’s disappointment, we simply forced Abbas’s plane to land in Sicily.” Marsha took a final sip of coffee and poured the remnants on the grass. “Now our intelligence people may be doing the same thing to the Israelis, hoping to learn whether someone in Ben-Aron’s security detail helped kill him.
“If our intelligence agencies succeed, David may be entitled to know. Then it’s the Americans who have a problem—they may not want the Israelis to know that they have this information, or how they got it. How that gets resolved is well beyond Sharpe’s pay grade.”
Angel looked bemused. “How would it all play out?” he asked Marsha.
“Hard to say. In 1988, Congress passed a law requiring the CIA to name the former Nazis it had recruited. But for a good while the CIA interpreted that law to exclude disclosure of the fact that its payroll included five associates of Adolf Eichmann, who planned Hitler’s exterminatio
n of six million Jews. I suppose they thought that a bit sensitive for public consumption. There may be several reasons why our intelligence agencies won’t just drop their files in David’s lap.”
“But in the media,” Angel argued, “Hana Arif is the new face of terrorism. If I were Sharpe, I’d claim that the government knows nothing that discredits its case. Then I’d accuse us of jeopardizing national security to free a terrorist assassin, and David of being her sleazebag leftwing lawyer. She’ll prejudice the judge, turn the media against us, and poison the jury pool.”
Angel, David saw, had begun to perceive the hidden costs of defending Hana Arif. But what made his prediction so depressing was its prescience. “That’s why I want that hearing closed. But just as an exercise, try assuming Hana’s innocence.”
“I am,” Angel said defensively.
“Good,” David responded. “Then she’s been framed. She’s the victim of a conspiracy about which the Israeli and American governments may have information we can’t get. And both governments have a bewildering variety of interests that trump any deep concern that Hana may be executed precisely because she doesn’t know who plotted the assassination.” David looked intently at Angel. “We’re Hana’s lawyers. So we may have no choice but to make our government—and the Israelis—choose: give Hana what she needs, at whatever risk, or risk Judge Taylor throwing out the case.”
“How could she?” Angel said. “The victim is the Israeli prime minister.”
David felt fatigue fraying his equanimity. “It’s a long shot, I agree.” He paused, and when he spoke again to Angel he was also speaking to himself. “And it’s certainly not a crowd-pleaser to make Sharpe fight for Hana’s rights, or put at risk the pleasure of facilitating her execution. But if we lose, it’s Hana who will do the dying. We only have to live with the result.”
Exile: a novel Page 25
