Keepers of the Gate - [Kamal & Barnea 04]

by By Jon Land

  “Such as ...”

  “I don’t want to say until I’m sure. You say the dead man was in his seventies?”

  “Yes, probably an American veteran of World War Two. Or the Korean War, both even, but from the age of some old scars the pathologist felt almost certain he fought in World War Two.” Danielle tried to gauge his reaction. “But what does something that happened back then have to do with this?”

  Bain’s expression remained stoic, stonelike in its rigid cast. She was about to press him when her cell phone rang. Thinking it might be Ben she snatched it quickly to her ear.

  “Hello.”

  “Pakad Barnea?” A woman’s voice.

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “It’s Layla Saltzman—Michael’s mother.” The words emerging between uncomfortable breaths.

  “Yes, Mrs. Saltzman?”

  “I don’t mean to bother you. It’s just that, well, I found ... something in Michael’s room and I, well, I don’t know who else to call.”

  “What did you find?”

  “You need to see it, Pakad. Trust me, you need to see it.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 36

  M

  y daughter is ready to speak with you now, Inspector,” Abdul Ashawi said finally, leading his daughter out from an inner room after she had taken several moments to compose herself. “She will answer any questions you may have.”

  Zeina looked thin and pale, reluctant to leave her father’s grasp. She let her dark brown hair tumble freely over her shoulders, a western style Ben thought she might have picked up at the cooperative school. Her eyes of the same dark shade were jittery and evasive.

  “Come, Inspector,” Abdul Ashawi told him, “over here.”

  Ben had decided not to rush the girl into talking. Instead he busied himself with getting to know the family better, earning their trust. This house in the Aida refugee camp belonged to Abdul’s brother. It was three small, dark rooms which made for a tight squeeze even for the two adults and three children who normally lived here, never mind the five guests who’d been hiding out for a week now. The women moved into the tiny kitchen to prepare tea and pastries, relieved Zeina was not being taken into custody. What Ben had not figured out yet was how to guard against the probability that more men, dispatched by those who had sent the fake policemen, would be coming back for her.

  A half hour later the teenage girl was finally ready to tell her story, sipping warm tea from a paper cup because her aunt had run out of the few ceramic and glass ones the family owned. Ben noticed none of them matched.

  “It is all right if I join you?” Abdul Ashawi asked.

  “I insist that you do,” Ben said, even though nothing currently in Palestinian law provided for parents being present during the questioning of minors.

  A place was made for the three of them on small chairs squeezed before an ancient soot-colored stove that smelled of rust.

  “Did you enjoy the school for Palestinians and Jews you attended last semester near Abu Gosh, Zeina?”

  She smiled slightly, relieved by the nature of his question. “Yes. Very much. It was a good school. I learned much.”

  “I understand you made some very good friends.”

  Now she stiffened slightly. “A few.”

  “Michael Saltzman, he was one of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Beth Jacober?”

  A nod this time.

  “And Shahir Falaya.”

  Another nod.

  “What about Yakov Katavi?”

  Zeina Ashawi turned pleadingly to her father.

  “Is this really necessary?” the man asked Ben.

  “You moved your family here without telling a soul,” Ben replied, focusing on him. “Why did you find that suddenly necessary, Abu Ashawi?”

  The man said nothing.

  “I believe you came here to hide after three of your daughter’s friends died within a week of each other.” Ben looked at Zeina Ashawi again. “I’m sorry to report that Yakov Katavi was added to the list yesterday.”

  “Mish mumkin!” Zeina moaned. “That can’t be!”

  “It was not made to look like an accident or suicide this time. The boy was murdered in his home, shot, along with his parents.” Ben leaned forward, and the tiny chair creaked under his weight. He looked to Abdul Ashawi. “If I hadn’t arrived when I did, those men pretending to be policemen would have taken your daughter and you never would have seen her again. I want to protect her, Abu Ashawi. I want to protect all of you. But I need to know why four of your daughter’s classmates—and friends—are dead.”

  Abu Ashawi looked at his daughter and nodded.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with it!” she pleaded to Ben. “I stopped being friends with them, I swear!”

  “I believe you,” Ben said. “Just tell me what was going on.”

  Zeina Ashawi nodded and began to speak.

  * * * *

  L

  ayla Saltzman opened the front door as soon as she saw Danielle coming up the walk of her house in the Jerusalem suburb of Har Adar.

  “If I’ve done something wrong by calling you ...”

  Danielle thought of her supervisor, barely in his twenties, reporting her disappearance to Commander Moshe Baruch. “You’ve done nothing wrong. Just show me what you found.”

  The house looked and felt unchanged from two days before. The same smells hung in the air, a bit staler now.

  “I thought it was time to start going through Michael’s things,” Layla Saltzman explained. “Nothing else helped me. I hoped that might.”

  They reached a doorway to a bedroom and Layla Saltzman flipped on a light, revealing the room of a typical teenage boy. A stereo and television battled books for space on the shelves. A Fender guitar and a set of Alpine skis leaned against each other in one corner. A pair of jeans with one leg turned inside out lay on the floor just in front of the closet. A tropical fish tank rested close enough to the window to capture a portion of the afternoon light, its filter humming softly.

  Layla Saltzman moved to her son’s twin-sized bed, the covers rumpled and the mattress still holding a faint impression from where the boy used to lie upon it. A storage drawer built into the bed’s underside was open, revealing a clutter of what must have been Michael’s shirts and jeans.

  “The drawer was stuck,” his mother explained, voice cracking. “And when I yanked it, it came all the way out. I put it back as soon as I saw.”

  “Saw what?”

  Danielle watched as Layla Saltzman pulled the drawer forward off its runners, on purpose this time.

  “That,” was all she said, indicating what was revealed behind the storage compartment.

  Danielle crouched low and shined her pocket-sized flashlight into the darkness. Blinked rapidly, unable to believe what she was looking at.

  * * * *

  I

  wanted to be friends with them,” Zeina Ashawi said, looking mostly at her father instead of Ben. “I liked them and they liked me. They knew I was smart, good with a computer. They had this ... plan.”

  Ben remained silent, letting the girl tell the tale at her own pace.

  “I don’t know whose idea it was—Shahir’s, I think,” she continued finally. “But it had to do with money. They were going to make a lot of money.”

  Ben was taken aback by the revelation. He had assumed the students had been innocent victims of something they stumbled upon or become involved in coincidentally. The possibility that their own actions had precipitated their deaths, as their friend’s assertion seemed to indicate, was the last thing he had expected to hear.

  “Go on,” Ben prompted, hiding his surprise.

  Zeina Ashawi gazed at her father again before resuming. “I don’t know everything. I don’t even know a lot. I stopped hanging around with them when I realized what it was all about, what they were really up to.”

  “Which was?”

  * * * *

  D
/>
  anielle reachedinto thedarkness under Michael Saltzman’s bed and pulled the backpack toward her, confirming what the glimpse of its contents her flashlight had revealed:

  The backpack was full of money. Neatly wrapped stacks of American twenty dollar bills were packed into it, spilling out from the top. So much the bag couldn’t even be zippered closed. Between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars, Danielle judged.

  “I’d like to tell you that was Michael’s Bar Mitzvah money,” Layla Saltzman said, but the joke failed miserably. “I thought maybe it had something to do with his death. I never believed it was suicide. I told you that.”

  There was a strange hint of hope in her voice, in search of some minor consolation that her son’s death had been something truly out of her control.

  “When was the last time you looked into this space?” Danielle asked her.

  “Oh, years. Probably not since the bedroom set was delivered.” Layla Saltzman’s eyes teared up and she swiped at them with her sleeve. “Yes, years. And there’s something else,” Layla Saltzman told her. “That backpack-it’s not Michael’s.”

  Danielle noticed the initials on it were BKJ.

  Beth Jacober.

  Danielle tried picturing the four classmates as a kind of adolescent crime ring. Up to something that had led to their deaths. Drugs were the first thing that came to mind. An increasing business in Israel, she knew.

  Yet the killers she and Ben had encountered in the Golan Heights yesterday did not behave at all like drug dealers. And those involved in the drug trade never resorted to the kind of subtleties whoever killed these high school students had initially exhibited. A suicide and a car accident in Israel. A random carjacking in Jericho. Only the killings in the Golan had been different. But if she and Ben had not shown up when they did, who knows what the killers would have painted the scene to look like? A Syrian raiding party, perhaps.

  Not drugs. No.

  What then?

  * * * *

  B

  lackmail,” Zeina Ashawi said after trying to settle herself with a deep breath. “They were going to blackmail people. Big, powerful, important people.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. I told you I didn’t get involved after I found out. I stopped hanging around with them. But I didn’t tell anyone else. It was none of my business.” The girl sat back, as if she was finished.

  “What else?”

  “They were planning to make a lot of money. I know that.”

  Ben recalled the missing hard drive from Shahir Falaya’s computer.

  “A couple of them were good with computers. Could it have something to do with that?”

  Zeina Ashawi shrugged. “Maybe. Or...”

  “Yes?”

  “Maybe it had something to do with Shahir’s job in Israel.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The way he talked sometimes. About how this after-school job was going to make him rich. I didn’t pay attention. I thought he was kidding. You know how boys talk.”

  “Of course. Do you know what this job was?”

  “The school got it for him. I know that. It must have been with some big company. I think he found something out while he was working there. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “That’s all you can tell me about who your friends intended to blackmail?”

  She stiffened again. “They weren’t my friends anymore. I told you.”

  “And it was just these four.”

  Zeina Ashawi hedged a little. “I think there may have been someone else.”

  “The others never mentioned a name?”

  “No, but they said things. I don’t know. I can’t be sure. But I think another student was involved. Not right away— later.”

  “So you severed your friendship with the murdered students before they actually got started,” Ben concluded.

  “I don’t even know who they intended to blackmail. Or how they found out whatever it was they knew. Or how much money they made. After a while, right up until the term ended, they didn’t bother with me anymore. It was like I wasn’t there; the whole rest of the class wasn’t there. It was just the four of them and now they’re dead!”

  Zeina Ashawi lurched off the chair into her father’s arms. The chair toppled over and clanged against the stove.

  “They came for me!” she sobbed. “Those awful men came for me!”

  Abdul Ashawi stroked his daughter’s hair, his eyes finding Ben’s. “You saved my daughter’s life. For this, my family and I are forever in your debt.”

  “Then let me protect you,” Ben said, rising. “All of you.”

  “Inspector?”

  “You need to be hidden someplace safe where they can’t get to you. They’ll come again otherwise.”

  Abdul Ashawi hugged his daughter tighter. “But she told you everything she knows. She can’t hurt them, whoever they are.”

  “They don’t know that.”

  The man’s pockmarked face reddened. “Who murders children, Inspector?”

  “Someone who believes they have a reason, Abu Ashawi, and now I have to find out what that reason is.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 37

  W

  hat’s thematter?” AbrahamVorsky asked Hans Mundt. “You don’t like the food?”

  Mundt stared at the hummus platter with pita, falafel, onions, and pickles set before him. The restaurant Abu Shukri was located a few hundred yards from Damascus Gate, on the left as the Via Dolorosa breaks to the right in Jerusalem. The restaurant was too crowded and noisy for Mundt. Bare wood tables packed on top of each other with conversations drifting into the air to join the cigarette smoke, caught by the ceiling fans and spun lazily about. Mundt found himself wishing he had told Vorsky to choose a simpler place.

  “I thought you would approve,” the old man said.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “I was talking about the setting. Plenty of activity and people.” Vorsky glanced around in search of their waiter. “I don’t know what’s happened to our next course___”

  “I assume the men whose names I provided you have been dealt with.”

  Vorsky continued to look for their waiter. “That is no longer your concern.”

  “Since you wanted to see me, though, I take it you were satisfied with the reliability of my information.”

  Vorsky stopped looking for their waiter and looked across the table at Mundt. “I am not satisfied with what it forced me to do.” He munched on a pickle, crinkling his nose as if it tasted bitter.

  “But you would still like the rest of the names, wouldn’t you?”

  Vorsky swallowed the last of his pickle and leaned across the table. “I would like to know how you came by this information, Herr Mundt.”

  “The same way I came by the other names I’m sure you’d like to have in your possession.”

  “Might it have something to do with a trip you made to Poland recently, to an area outside the city of Lodz, I believe?”

  Mundt knew the statement was a veiled threat, meant to emphasize the resources and capabilities Vorsky still possessed. “That is not your concern.”

  “And I should take your word on that?”

  “If you want the rest of the names, yes.”

  “Have you brought them with you?”

  “Have you brought the database you promised I could access? Quid pro quo, remember?”

  “How many more names are there?” the old man asked, scratching his thin beard.

  “You will get none of them until you live up to your end of the bargain.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  Mundt remained expressionless. “Certainty.”

  “A difficult commodity to come by these days.”

  “Do you want the rest of the names or not?”

  “What would you do with them if I said no?”

  “The international press would be most interested in this story.”

  “You be
lieve I would allow you to do that?”

  “Maybe it’s already been done. An e-mail programmed to be sent at a certain hour unless I’m there to cancel the command. If I’m dead, I wouldn’t be able to do that. And you wouldn’t kill me and risk leaving the rest of the men on my list out there in your country.”