Keepers of the Gate - [Kamal & Barnea 04]

by By Jon Land

Danielle was spared considering an answer when a muffled voice speaking into a communicator gave the first of the ground-based gunmen away. She tucked the gun into her belt and moved on him from the rear, electing to use her hands. She willed her heart quiet, believed the beating of the baby’s growing inside her submitted to the same command.

  The first man never heard her, never turned. It was over very quickly, the muffled snap when Danielle broke his neck no louder than a branch cracking. She drew a knife from a sheath around his ankle and used it on the second man, positioned a hundred feet away from the first just as she had suspected. Danielle left the blade there, wiped her hands off on the brash and dirt.

  She returned to Mundt with the dead men’s guns. They divided the two tree-mounted snipers between them and agreed to reconnoiter in the same spot once they were finished. Danielle heard the sharp crack of Mundt’s gun an instant after a short burst from hers dropped a black-clad gunman from a tree.

  She found Mundt hovering over the second sniper at the foot of a tree fifty yards from their planned rendezvous. Mundt’s bullet had turned the man’s shoulder to gristle and the resulting fall had broken at least one of his legs.

  “We need to question him,” Mundt said, paying Danielle little heed. “What I do best.”

  It didn’t take Mundt long to get the information he was after and then to coerce the man into making the call Anna Krieger was expecting.

  Danielle watched the man dial and heard him say, “It’s done,” before Mundt finished him with a single gunshot.

  The stench in the tunnel had not been borne in Danielle’s imagination at all, as their clothes plainly exhibited. They stopped in the town of Leczyca to clean up and purchase fresh clothes before beginning the long journey that was currently delayed in Paris.

  “The truth won’t change anything now,” Danielle said, as they continued to wait in the departure lounge.

  “Satisfaction, then. That’s what we both want, isn’t it?”

  “You’re going to kill Paul Hessler, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

  Mundt stiffened. “He’s not Paul Hessler, remember? He’s Karl Mundt, the brave soldier who ran away from his wife and child. He sacrificed us to history.” He looked at her and his face wrinkled in displeasure at what he saw. “My father ran from his family, while yours ran to his.”

  “You don’t know that!”

  Gloating now. “It’s easier once you accept it.”

  “I’m telling you it’s not true.” Then, lamely, “I’d know if it were.”

  “How, Barnea? You think evil brands men with a different color or a different scent?” Mundt shook his head. “If that were true, policemen like you would have an easy job on their hands. But evil doesn’t look any different. It hides behind masks and false fronts that allow it to thrive and prosper. The real villains aren’t the animals the Gatekeepers exterminate like vermin. The real villains hide in the guise of men no one could possibly believe are anything but good. They are the most dangerous ones. They are the ones only true keepers of the gate can identify.”

  Danielle wouldn’t budge. “Your father. Not mine.”

  Mundt softened his gaze slightly. “Yours is dead anyway, sparing you the agony of a decision. The agony of knowing.”

  “Oh, I’m going to know all right,” Danielle said, resolvedly. “Just like you told me, I’m going to find out from the one man who can tell me.”

  * * * *

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 77

  P

  aul Hessler stood inside the sky-bridge connecting the two buildings of the Towers, looking out over the East River. A simple twist of his shoulders and all of Manhattan was before him. Normally he loved this view, especially from the only skybridge of its kind in the United States. It was his favorite feature of the building he had built and rented out at full capacity. The waiting time for office space in the Towers was estimated to be five years.

  But today was different. Today, as dusk descended on the city of New York, Paul Hessler took no enjoyment in this or in anything. Sitting shiva was done. Relatives and friends had stopped visiting and phoning. His grandchildren had returned to school, his ex-wife to her home in Palm Springs, his other children to the worlds they had made for themselves.

  Today Paul Hessler was left to face his son’s murder alone. To distract himself, he tried to focus on the miraculous success of Lot 461. No matter how many lives Lot 461 saved, though, it could not bring back his son.

  But something else plagued Paul Hessler as he stood in the skybridge in the last of the day’s light. Others would surely be able to figure out the same truth Sergeant Walter Phipps, the old soldier who murdered Ari, had. And that truth could destroy him as effectively as a bullet. The only question was which would strike him down first.

  “Mr. Hessler?”

  Startled, Paul turned to see one of his blazer-attired security guards standing at one end of the skybridge.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, sir,” the guard continued, “but there’s someone downstairs who would like to see you.”

  “I don’t have any appointments scheduled for this evening.”

  “I understand, sir. But this man is a policeman, a Palestinian policeman.”

  “Palestinian?”

  The guard nodded stiffly. “He says he has information about your son’s murder.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 78

  H

  e’s not answering,” Danielle said, pushing the end button on Mundt’s cell phone.

  The big man scowled. “You said that was the number Hessler gave you, that you could reach him at it twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Something has changed, obviously.”

  Danielle had already tried reaching Paul Hessler through his company’s switchboard, identifying herself and then saying she had turned up vital information about the murder of his son. But Hessler was unreachable, having left strict instructions that he was not to be disturbed.

  “We’ll have to wait, then,” Mundt said.

  “No,” Danielle insisted, “we can’t wait. The Gatekeepers must be on their way, if they’re not here already. We have to confront Hessler now. Tonight.”

  “How?”

  “We do what we do best, Mundt.”

  The long circuitous route Danielle and Hans Mundt had taken to reach New York City left Danielle Barnea limp and exhausted. She could tell by the coarse texture of her hair which always seemed to dry out when she overexerted herself. Her pregnancy made the strains of such overexertion show all the faster. But she tried to reach deep inside herself for the reserves she would need to see this through to the end.

  Following the attempt made on his life in Israel, Danielle knew, Paul Hessler would be extremely well guarded. Given this, along with the fact that she and Mundt lacked the resources needed to gain access to his home, they had no choice but to turn elsewhere. Danielle suggested Hessler’s corporate headquarters in the Towers he had built held their best hope. Find entry to the building and lie in wait for him to arrive the next morning. Not the best of plans, but their only viable option under the circumstances.

  A call by Danielle to the building maintenance department yielded the name of the cleaning company that provided janitorial services. The company’s parking lot in New Jersey was unguarded. The night provided the only camouflage she and Mundt needed to steal a van with the company’s markings and drive away unhindered. They changed into overalls on the way into Manhattan and parked near a service entrance of the Towers.

  They lacked the proper keys, of course, but that proved only a minor inconvenience. Danielle went to work on the door with some tools found in the rear of the truck. Nothing small and edged enough to allow for subtlety, but sufficient to assure them of an entry that would reveal a damaged lock only to the closest observer.

  She could sense Mundt behind her watching the street the whole time. Mundt, here to meet the father who had been living a lie for more than half a century after abandoning
him.

  And I’m here to learn whether my father lied to me my entire life, Danielle thought as the door finally opened with a click.

  “Hessler’s office is on the top floor,” Mundt announced. “There’s a private elevator that accesses it on the other side of the building.”

  “How do you know that?” Danielle asked, falling in step behind him.

  “This isn’t my first trip here, Pakad Barnea, but it is going to be my last.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 79

  B

  en Kamal had contemplated several means to help him gain access to Paul Hessler. In the end, though, he had settled upon the simplest: He simply walked into the lobby of the Towers and announced himself at the security desk.

  “You’ll have to do better than that,” the guard had said.

  “Just tell Paul Hessler what I told you. He’ll see me.”

  It took a number of phone calls back and forth, and some patient waiting under the watchful eye of additional guards summoned to the lobby, but in the end Ben was proven right. Those same guards eventually became his escorts in an express elevator ride to the forty-second floor where he was led down a hall marked with signs for the Towers’ skybridge.

  Paul Hessler, a man he had never met, stood there suspended between his twin buildings. In the dull light he looked sad and alone, the life sucked out of him. Ben knew the feeling well from Detroit, from the death of his own children. He wanted to tell Paul Hessler it would get better with time, that it would come to make sense. But he knew it wouldn’t.

  “Leave us,” Hessler order the guards who had accompanied Ben this far.

  The men did so reluctantly.

  Ben felt Hessler’s eyes lock upon him.

  “Please, Inspector Kamal, join me over here and enjoy the view.”

  Ben approached him hesitantly, feeling a rush of vertigo as he padded along the skybridge. When he gazed out over the water, his stomach quivered at the illusion of walking across open air.

  “My men have checked your credentials,” Hessler continued, as Ben drew closer. “I’m sorry it took so long. But with the time difference and everything...”

  “There’s no need to apologize, sir.”

  “You’ve come a long way to see me, Inspector.”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “Reasons none of your superiors were aware of, apparently.”

  “Were you able to reach Colonel al-Asi?”

  “We cannot confirm he even exists.”

  Ben managed a slight smile. “But you still elected to see me.”

  “Because you said it concerned my son’s murder. And your name is not unknown to me.”

  “Oh?”

  “It surfaced in my scrutiny of Chief Inspector Danielle Barnea of Israel’s National Police.”

  “You requested she be assigned to the case. Then, just as suddenly, you changed your mind.”

  “She took you into her confidence, I see.”

  Ben nodded. “And now I am taking you into mine. You should know that Pakad Barnea never really stopped investigating your son’s murder at all.”

  “So what are you, her messenger come to tell me what she uncovered?”

  “No, Mr. Hessler. What I uncovered I learned myself. Pakad Barnea is not aware of it. No one in Israel is aware of it.”

  Hessler’s eyes narrowed in concern. “Is that important?”

  “Very, because it is something you do not want revealed under any circumstances. Believe me.”

  Ben watched Hessler’s eyes grow cold. The old man’s long, skeletal fingers fastened into trembling fists.

  “So that’s what this is about,” he hissed. “Another person comes dragging my past with him. Congratulations, Inspector.”

  “This isn’t about you, or the past,” Ben said, trying to stay focused. “As I told the men downstairs, it’s about your son.”

  Hessler looked confused now, even disoriented. “My son,” he said, as if hearing it for the first time. “So you came all this way with information about his murder.”

  “Not exactly,”

  “Should I summon my security guards back, Inspector?”

  “You don’t want to do that. Really.”

  “But if this isn’t about his murder, what does this have to do with my son?”

  “Lot four-sixty-one,” Ben said, and watched Paul Hessler go ghost white.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 80

  T

  he twelve gatekeepers accompanying Anna Krieger into the United States flew into three different northeast airports. Since they were unable to bring any weapons into the country, Anna’s instructions were to rendezvous with an American contact in a Connecticut hotel parking lot just short of the New York border. There, the Gatekeepers would meet up with her and three American drivers, then proceed well-armed into New York City to execute Karl Mundt, better known as Paul Hessler.

  Anna had obtained some intelligence on Hessler. Not enough to form a concrete plan of attack, but sufficient to enable her to choose from a number of alternatives equally fraught with risk. It was quite by accident upon reaching Connecticut that Anna learned from her source that Hessler had been unexpectedly detained at his office this very night. She had counted on at least the night for planning, but the opportunity to go after Hessler under cover of dark was too much to pass off. A full frontal assault as he left the building later this evening might be the best, and only, option available.

  For Anna the long trip had been difficult. She was not used to being among people, even less used to traveling. Worse, the dry atmosphere in the plane had caused her thick pancake makeup to crack, leading a number of the other passengers, she was certain, to look at and notice her. She hated the stares that made her feel like a freak, at the same she welcomed them for strengthening her resolve.

  Her face, after all, was a constant reminder of what men like Karl Mundt had done to her and her parents. Whenever she weakened or began to doubt, Anna needed only to recall hearing the terrible screams of her parents even as the pain from the flames ravaged her. She would never forget the stench of her burning hair or sound of her flesh sizzling like bacon before she threw herself from the flames out the window, landing in the moist dirt of the garden below. She was still screaming when some neighbors found her, as much to drown out the cries of her parents as to drown her own pain.

  She had become a freak that night; friendless, orphaned, and outcast. But the hate in her had been ignited as well, and no amount of fruitless plastic surgeries could quell that. It was purpose that drove her in the years following. Finishing the work her parents had begun. Wiping out the last of those who had embroidered swastikas on their coats and in their hearts.

  The Gatekeepers’ targets, though, were dwindling. Just a few old harmless men scattered here and there. The late Abraham Vorsky had been right about that much: Anna’s time, and her reason for being, were just about past. She had to let go, move on.

  But first there was Karl Mundt, a man who had parlayed his murder of a Jewish boy into a multi-billion-dollar fortune. The reputed benevolence and generosity of Paul Hessler, the man Mundt became, could change that truth no more than Anna could change the face that looked back at her in the mirror as she applied her makeup.

  Karl Mundt embodied the very reason why her parents had decided to become keepers of the gate and ultimately died horribly for it. Anna might die in New York City tonight. Even if successful, she might be caught and arrested, forced to finish her life as the prisoner she had long been anyway.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 81

  W

  hat I have to tell you,” Ben resumed before the color could return to Paul Hessler’s face, “isn’t going to be easy to hear.”

  “My son is dead, Inspector. It can’t be any harder than that.”

  “Maybe.” Ben continued to struggle for words. “Ari was involved in something you know nothing about.”

  “I know about Lot four-sixty-one now,
” Hessler reflected sadly.

  “So did four high school students in Israel and Palestine, all murdered in the past month. I imagine your son believed he had no choice.”

  “No choice? What are you talking about?”

  Ben hesitated. “He had them killed.”

  The old man’s expression began to fill with anger. His lips quivered. “High school students? That’s ridiculous! Why would Ari possibly do such a thing?”