The Trials of Zion

by Alan M. Dershowitz

  This delighted the man. He put the tray down on her dresser right next to Mohammed’s beeper, which Emma had carelessly left there when she’d gone to bed the previous night.

  Inwardly she cursed herself for not keeping it with her at all times, as Mohammed had urged her to.

  She was sweating as she watched Yassir take in every detail of the little room: the dresser, the newspaper folded on the bed, the row of dresses hanging on a portable rack in the corner. She didn’t want to look at the beeper, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t see it.

  He stepped toward her then, filling the room with dread. “To keep you like this. Like you’re on vacation. It’s disgusting. They treat you better than they treat us.”

  Emma gulped and pressed into the window, but he kept walking toward her slowly. She became aware of how small she was. He could do anything to her at all, and she’d have little chance of fighting him off. Her only option was to run for the beeper.

  “For what?” he continued. “An American brat. You shouldn’t be here, but your Jew-loving friends Mohammed and Nawal don’t listen to me. Do you know what Israelis do to kidnappers?”

  Emma stood silently, too afraid to speak.

  He clapped his hands, and she jumped. “Answer me!” he barked.

  She couldn’t help it. A tear slid down her cheek and she stuttered, “N-n-n-ooo.”

  He pulled the waistband of his pants over his large belly, and her stomach pitched. “They send in the army. They send in the heavy artillery. Nobody survives. Nobody. But does Rashid listen to me?”

  When he paused, it was evident to Emma that she should answer. “N-n-no?”

  “He’s thinking with his heart.” Yassir was standing a foot from her now, and she tried to judge the distance to the dresser and the beeper but was too afraid to manage it. “I think I know what part Mohammed is thinking with.” He lifted a finger and drew it down Emma’s cheek. She recoiled with revulsion, and he laughed. It was the worst sound she’d ever heard.

  “Doesn’t matter anyway. That sham of a trial will end, Faisal will be put to death, and then so will you. Let’s just hope the Israeli army doesn’t find us first, right, American girl? Because if they do, you will be the first to die.” He braced his arm against the wall near Emma’s head, towering over her.

  “My father will win the case. I know it. He doesn’t need the Israeli army. Your leader promised to free me if my father wins.”

  “We will see,” Yassir said with a smirk. “Sometimes accidents happen. Sometimes promises must be broken. Sometimes hostages try to escape. We will see. Your fate is not entirely in the hands of your father. If he loses, you will surely die. If he wins, we will see. We will see.”

  He licked his lips and left. Emma ran to the dresser and clutched the beeper tightly, then collapsed on the bed and tried to control her crying.

  XXVIII

  Rendi

  HE’D HAD THREE DRINKS, and still Habash felt miserable. Wasn’t scotch supposed to dull your pain?

  The bartender at the small club at the top floor of the newly reopened American Colony Hotel took Habash’s empty glass and refilled it. When Habash had arrived at the bar after escorting Abe home, he placed a two-hundred-shekel note on the counter and told the bartender that he’d be there awhile. His plan was to stay until the image of Emma tied up in a dingy cell was erased from his mind.

  He was going to be at the bar a long, long time.

  The moment the trial recessed, Abe and Habash had run back to Pal-Watch and begun amassing a crew to help them examine the video footage. The two men never mentioned what they both feared to be true: that by gambling on Dr. Avigdor’s having lied to the judge, they were grasping at a straw that wasn’t there. But Abe was determined to pore over that footage and to find somebody—anybody—to dispute their client’s testimony about where the bomb was placed.

  Habash downed his fourth drink in one gulp and watched the rattling ice cubes slip around the glass. He had no doubt that Dr. Avigdor was lying. He’d encountered this sort of roadblock before. Government agencies were notoriously uninterested in truth and justice. They often decided who they wanted to pay for a crime, then put all their energies into making sure that person looked guilty.

  He was becoming jaded.

  “Penny for your thoughts.” A cool hand placed on Habash’s back made him jump. Rendi slid onto the barstool next to him and signaled her drink order to the bartender. “Bulletproof vest, eh?”

  Habash only nodded.

  “I never pegged you for a big drinker,” she said evenly as the bartender served her a Diet Coke.

  “I never was,” Habash grumbled. He wished he could disappear. Emma’s stepmother was beautiful. But worse, her eyes were wise and calculating. Habash felt as if she could read his mind. She must have been a hell of a spy in her day.

  “Does Emma know how you feel?” she asked quietly.

  “What?” Habash again jumped.

  Rendi assessed him, staring at him for a long, silent moment. Then she smiled. “Of course she doesn’t. You don’t know how you feel.”

  Habash wanted to walk away, but he had never been a disrespectful person. Still, he couldn’t think of what to say to her. “It is my fault that she is going through this.”

  Rendi swirled the liquid in her glass. “It’s not. She’s the daughter of a very famous man. And she’s been interested in the Middle East for a long time. She lost a friend here, and since then she’s wanted to help. So she would’ve found a way here, with you or without you.”

  Rendi leaned forward and squeezed his arm. “I know you feel guilty, Habash. But when Emma comes home—and she will come home—be sure to tell her what she means to you.”

  She left without tasting her drink. Habash watched her go, and for the first time since the days together at Yale, he admitted to himself that he had strong feelings for Emma. Or was it guilt? He knew that his feelings toward her went beyond friendship or professional respect. They were stronger than he had ever acknowledged. But what exactly were they? Could he actually be in love with a Jewish woman who would want to live her life in America? His mind was a jumble. He couldn’t think clearly about Emma until and unless she was returned safely. Not only had he placed a friend in danger, but he’d also never had the courage to return Emma’s feelings. And now he might never have the chance.

  XXIX

  The Photographer

  RUN IT AGAIN— this time more slowly.”

  For three days Abe holed up in the lab of Danny Grossman, who had previously held Shai Avigdor’s position with the Shin Bet as chief forensic scientist for bombs and explosives but was now in private practice as a consultant. Rendi knew Grossman by reputation and recommended that Abe and Habash hire him. They quickly learned to respect Grossman’s attention to detail and his allegiance to nothing but the truth of what he saw. He might have loyalties to one side or the other, but Abe hadn’t detected them yet.

  The room, in a shabby, run-down building in the business district, was a cross between a movie-viewing room and a science lab. Its walls were lined in floor-to-ceiling equipment: sound analyzers, analog transfer machines, and computers.

  Habash was in charge of keeping Abe fully loaded with coffee as Grossman and he worked around the clock. Habash drank lots of coffee, too. The first day of work, it was to combat the headache he had from his long night of drinking. By the second and third days, he drank coffee to keep alert.

  At the moment they were viewing the two seconds’ worth of footage that contained the march to the stage by the three heads of state. “Now compare it to the next angle,” Abe ordered Grossman’s film technician.

  Abe, Habash, and Danny Grossman had now watched three sets of video, each shot from different places. Most of the hotel’s surveillance video had been destroyed in the explosion, but there had been two handheld camcorders retrieved from the debris that contained viable footage. The major source of video evidence came from a camera that had transmitted directly to an Isra
eli television studio. Although the camera had been destroyed and the cameraman killed, a studio video showed the instant of the explosion before going dark. According to Grossman, this footage seemed to confirm the source of the explosion as being behind the dignitaries.

  But this didn’t prove Faisal’s guilt. The videos showed several people standing in a row behind the heads of state, and Faisal Husseini, like everyone else, had seen the videos over and over again. If he were simply guessing about where the bomb had been planted, it was a smart bet that it had come from behind the dignitaries. It was also a smart bet, especially from someone as suspicious of Israelis as Faisal, that if his guess were plausible, it would be backed up by the Israeli “expert.” But Husseini had gone a step further and claimed that it had been placed in the briefcase of a specific person. Was it a guess? Or did he know because he put it in there?

  Husseini’s guilt or innocence would turn on the answer to that question—and so would Emma’s life. But how could Abe prove that Husseini was guessing, and guessing wrong?

  After hours of watching the same two seconds and comparing the differences between the three sets of video, Grossman pushed his chair away from the desk that contained the playback machinery and pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration.

  Abe asked, “What’s wrong?”

  Grossman replied, “The problem is that to prove where the bomb was planted, you’re going to have to get access to certain pieces of evidence. Evidence that is in the custody of governments who aren’t going to give it to you.”

  Grossman wasn’t saying anything that Abe hadn’t suspected. Habash, who was pouring himself a cup of coffee from the plug-in pot on the floor, asked Danny, “What kind of evidence?”

  Grossman swiveled in his chair to face him. “To discover where a bomb has been planted, there are certain steps you have to take. First, you examine the videos, if there are any, to give you a rough sense of the location of the bomb.” He gestured to the large white screen at the opposite end of the room. “We’ve done that. If there is no video evidence or if the videos are inconclusive, you have to rely on eyewitnesses, who are often wrong.”

  Habash walked to where the two men sat. “Arad claims he’s given us all the eyewitness accounts. In the preparation phase of the case, my investigators canvassed as many of the people who survived as they could, and we have accounts that aren’t in the public record. But nothing is conclusive.”

  Grossman continued, “In that case you’d look at the point of impact of the explosion—the dead bodies, the damaged buildings. You look for telltale fragments, as well as physical evidence of direction of the impact.”

  “Fragments,” Abe repeated, staring at the screen and thinking aloud. “If the bomb had been in the secretary of state’s briefcase, there would be fragments of that briefcase—bits of leather—in the bodies of some of those killed. Right?”

  “Probably. More likely in those very close to the impact.”

  Abe now turned to Habash. “After the explosion what happened to the bodies of the president and the prime minister?”

  Habash sat in a chair next to Grossman. “The United States government immediately took control over the recovery operation for the president’s body. They flew it to a military hospital in Germany for autopsy and then to Arlington for burial.”

  Abe fired questions at Habash and Grossman as he worked out his next move. “Well, we can’t get our hands on the president’s actual body. Would the autopsy result show the source of the explosion?”

  Habash shook his head. “Pal-Watch tried to get the autopsy report. We can’t. The only people who have it, besides the CIA and the FBI, are the pathologists in Berlin who prepared it, and they weren’t exactly willing to share. But, Abe! The Secret Service probably has it, too.”

  Abe reached for his cell phone, which was in the pocket of his briefcase. “I’ll have Rendi call Dennis Savage. See what he can do for us. As for the reports on the bodies of the Palestinian president or prime minister, I think I know a way to get a copy of some of those, too.”

  Habash was about to ask Abe how he could possibly get access to those—Shin Bet and Mossad probably had them, but they were as uncooperative as the Americans. However, as Abe held the phone in his hand, it began to ring. Habash jumped in his seat. The two men both hoped it was Emma but were careful not to say anything to that effect in front of Grossman.

  “Hello?” Abe asked cautiously. Habash slid his chair closer to him.

  A voice came over the line—a man’s voice. “Mr. Ringel. My name is Tom Ashe. I’m an American.” Abe shook his head to let Habash know that it wasn’t Emma. Habash’s face crumpled in disappointment.

  The caller continued, “I know you from television. I may have something that could help you.”

  XXX

  The Confetti

  TOM ASHE WAS an American photographer living in Israel. When he knocked on the door of Danny Grossman’s facility, both Abe and Habash felt a mixture of hope and fear. People were always volunteering information during a case like this—Habash had an entire team of legal students sorting through false claims. Since Abe Ringel had joined the case, the number of “firsthand” accounts had nearly tripled. But Tom Ashe got Abe’s private number from a mutual friend—a video technician for a Boston TV station—and that was how he found himself sitting in the darkened viewing room mere hours after Abe had answered his call.

  “It’s good to meet you,” Abe said, shaking the forty-something man’s hand. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Tom lifted a large leather case onto the table and retrieved three photos. “I was photographing some goats not far from the American Colony Hotel at the time of the explosion. As soon as I heard the blast, I started clicking away. Smoke, debris, I even managed to shoot a piece of wood flying through the air. I was uploading the photos the other day and thought you would be interested in something I found.” He spread the three photos on the table. “Do you see this?” Tom pointed to one of the pictures; a black-and-white that looked as if it was covered with tiny pieces of torn paper.

  “Looks like confetti from a parade,” Habash said.

  “That’s what it looks like to me, too,” Abe agreed. “But it’s the confetti of death—the residue of the worst terrorist bombing in our history.”

  Tom returned to his leather portfolio and took out three more pictures. “I enlarged them—as big as I could. It’s a technique I often use for dramatic effect. But when I did it to these, I noticed something. Look. The confetti has print on it. English letters, but I can’t read all of them, because the more I enlarge it, the blurrier they get. The first letter is an o, then a d. But I can’t make sense of it.”

  Abe took the enlarged photos from Tom and placed them next to an empty pad. “Let’s try,” he said. He wrote down the letters he could read: od cr. Grossman took a magnifying glass out of his jacket pocket and added a couple more: t, e. All four men stared at the paper for several minutes, puzzling over what the letters might mean.

  Suddenly Abe shouted, “I think I’ve got it! Thank God for Hebrew school. It’s the first page of the Bible! ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ It’s small fragments of a Bible.” Abe looked to Habash, to see if he understood and agreed.

  Habash ripped a page from the pad and wrote down the letters in his own hand. Adding in the missing letters to make up the text, he decided that Abe was right. The confetti was made from a Bible.

  After Abe and Habash thanked Tom and gave him their word that they wouldn’t sell the photos to any media outlet, Abe sat down with Grossman and Habash. Grossman, upon Abe’s declaration that the fragments were biblical, told them that this evidence suggested the bomb was probably in the same case as the Bible.

  “Was the secretary of state a Muslim or a Christian?” Abe asked Habash.

  “A Muslim and a very religious one. He would not be carrying a Christian or Jewish Bible in his briefcase.”

  Grossman paused the video on
a frame that showed all the people who were standing on the stage the day of the bombing. “Who would be carrying a Bible, from among those behind the dignitaries?” Abe wondered. “Maybe the president’s minister? Where was he? I don’t see him there.”

  Habash said, “He survived the explosion, so he must have been at the back of the crowd.”

  Abe walked toward the screen, so that he could get a better view of the men. “What about the president himself?”

  Grossman said, “He’s not holding anything, look. And I doubt he carried a full-size Bible in his pocket.”

  They proceeded to identify everyone who was in proximity and behind the dignitaries. None of the men had anything in their hands. In the back of the picture, though, stood a tall, blond man wearing an earpiece.

  “Who’s he?” Abe asked, pointing to the man, who stood off to the side of the second row.

  “Secret Service,” Habash replied. “What’s that in his hand?”

  “That is the football,” Abe said excitedly. “The box with the nuclear codes. It’s always near the president in case he has to authorize a nuclear attack.”

  Habash looked at him, surprised.

  Abe shrugged his shoulders. “What can I say? I’ve been to parties with a few presidents. I know about the football.” He turned to Grossman. “Can you get some footage of earlier presidents—Clinton, Bush, Obama—and their footballs?”

  “Sure, but why?” Grossman wondered.

  “I have an idea, probably far-fetched, but let’s see.”

  “Far-fetched” was one of Abe’s favorite words. It sounded almost like Yiddish and reminded him of his maternal grandmother, who would use words like farklempt, farbissen, farshvitzed, farblondzhet, or farshluggeneh. Abe never understood the precise meanings of these alien words, but they sounded so quintessentially Yiddish that it brought back warm memories. For the first time in many days, he smiled. Habash noted that he paced excitedly while Grossman brought up photos of presidential footballs on the Internet, and this made Habash feel hopeful that maybe this wasn’t a losing effort. Maybe Emma would be saved, and he’d have a chance at something with her.