Pillars of Solomon - [Kamal & Barnea 02]

by By Jon Land

  “It goes back to that day we made sure Revkah Rossovitch would have a son,” he said, his voice weak and strained with fatigue. “Word spread of the service we could provide. Jews—Israelis—were desperate to have children. It was considered a sin not to.”

  Danielle swallowed hard and Wolfe’s eyes met hers knowingly before he continued.

  “We began preventing that sin from occurring, Chief Inspector. We filled a great need. We convinced ourselves we were doing nothing wrong.’’

  “But it didn’t stop there, did it?” Danielle challenged. “Levy wasn’t just doing great deeds, he was involved in the white-slave trade. He got mixed up with Al Safah, didn’t he?”

  Wolfe started to take a deep breath, then stopped in the middle. “Yes, I’m afraid he did. We were a young nation and funds were always short. It was sometimes difficult to obtain the goods we needed, especially guns. On these occasions we often relied on less than savory operators.”

  “The black market,” Danielle nodded. “Did the government know what you were doing?”

  “No. They never would have tolerated our actions. We crossed a terrible line, Chief Inspector, but that was nothing new for us. The stakes were everything. We were willing to accept the risks.”

  “Until it got out of hand.”

  Wolfe’s gaze was faraway. “Did you know that it was predominantly Jewish immigrants who brought the white-slave trade to America? It was strictly women in those days, imported for prostitution in the early 1900s. The original centers were New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, but it spread to other cities over the years.”

  “And eventually to Israel. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?” Danielle charged.

  But Wolfe remained calm. “With the settling of Palestine, some of these Jewish traffickers immigrated and brought their trade with them. A new part of the world, after all, meant new opportunities. The original Jewish white slave traders became more like middlemen, brokers, procuring the women—”

  “And children,” Danielle added harshly.

  “—from one country and placing them in another. They began to centralize the practice on an international level, taking over the trade of other traffickers all over the world.”

  “Monsters replacing monsters. How could you let them get away with it? How could anyone?”

  “I told you, Chief Inspector: because we needed the money,” Wolfe answered emotionlessly. “We used the profits to purchase the weapons Israel so desperately required.”

  Danielle shook her head slowly. “I don’t believe this. . . .”

  “No one ever did. No one even knew.”

  “The government included.”

  “We had gotten extraordinarily good at covering our tracks.” Wolfe took a deep breath. “Are you sure you don’t want to try another cigar?”

  Danielle realized the first one had made her a little sick. Her legs suddenly felt weak. “The white-slave trade is how you made your original fortune, isn’t it? That’s why you were already a wealthy man when you immigrated to America and became David Wolfe?”

  “There was plenty to go around, Chief Inspector, I assure you. I’m not proud of what I did but, given the same circumstances, I’m sure I would do it all over again.” His expression changed, became that of the storyteller, instead of the confessor, again. “But we needed a way to seize control of the trade everywhere, even from our fellow Jews who had opened the door for us. We needed to make people willingly give up the trade to us. So we created a myth, a monster, to terrify them.”

  “Al Safah,” Danielle realized. “You made him up.”

  “Not exactly. See, to create the effect we were after the legend had to be given credence, backed up in all the countries so it could spread. Many of the tales, even most, you have heard of Al Safah are actually true.”

  “So he did exist once. That’s what you’re saying.”

  “He still does, Chief Inspector,” Wolfe said, his expression utterly flat. “You see, I am Al Safah.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 70

  T

  he group of children reached the airfield without incident, Ben breathing easier as soon as he emerged from the woods onto the cleared ground at the edge of the strip. But his relief was short-lived.

  “Where are the others?” the surviving jailer demanded, storming toward Ben through the children. “You said they’d be here. What’s going on?”

  He started to bring his pistol up, eyes flaring. Ben fired his rifle first. Three quick shots, all of which found their mark. The jailer stood there for a moment, looking puzzled, then staggered forward a few more steps before he collapsed.

  The children screamed. Some backed away. Others began to run.

  “No! Don’t be afraid!” Ben called to them, angling himself to cut off the fleeing group. He hoped they could understand English. If not, he would have to rely on the power of his tone. “We’re all leaving. I’m getting you out of here, to someplace safe. Follow me!”

  And with that Ben waved a hand in the air and led a charge to the transport plane that was parked fifty yards before them in the center of the paved airstrip.

  The pilot had been checking off items on a clipboard when the shooting led him to duck for cover on the other side of the plane. Ben rolled under the nose and raised his rifle.

  “Don’t shoot!” the pilot pleaded, arms up in the air.

  “You’re flying us out of here!” Ben brought the rifle to his shoulder. “You’re going to fly these children off this island!”

  “What?” The pilot’s mouth dropped.

  “How many times would you like me to repeat it?” Ben threatened.

  The pilot flapped his arms. “All right, all right!”

  “Then let’s go!” Ben urged, prodding him around the plane’s nose back into in the spill of the airstrip’s floodlights, where the frightened children had clustered into a tight mass.

  Shouts from the edge of the clearing made Ben swing around in time to see five armed men from the fortress running out of the woods with automatic rifles and submachine guns leveled.

  “Get down!” Ben yelled at the children.

  The ones who understood English dove to the asphalt instantly. It took the first barrage to make the rest follow suit.

  Ben fired over them into the night, felling a pair of the gunmen with his initial barrage as return fire dug pockmarks in the transport plane’s steel skin. Still clacking off rounds, Ben swung his eyes back on the pilot, who had ducked beneath one of the plane’s front wheels.

  “Get on board or I’ll shoot you next! I swear it!”

  Risking bullets, the pilot climbed quickly into the cockpit.

  Ben’s next spray took a third gunman in the leg and dropped him. The final pair held their positions at the edge of the woods and continued to fire, hoping for reinforcements.

  His sole clip almost exhausted, Ben switched to single shots as he zigzagged back and forth near the children hugging the asphalt for cover. Behind him the pilot had released a metal ladder that reached down to the runway from the center of the plane’s fuselage.

  “Go to the plane! Go to the plane!” Ben ordered, rousting his charges from the concrete. “Get on board!”

  The children didn’t have to know English to understand his command this time. They rose and rushed the plane en masse, the older ones helping the younger. Ben planted himself at the rear of the pack, firing toward the two remaining gunmen until his rifle clicked empty. Then he drew the pistol from his holster and clacked off sixteen shots in rapid succession, still in the open, daring the bullets to take him. He felt invincible, because these five minutes, at long last, belonged to him. This was the payback he had been waiting for.

  Backpedaling, he ejected the spent clip and jammed home the single extra stored in a slot on his gun belt. By then all but a few of the children were on board the transport, and he tried to hurry the rest along.

  A bullet took a boy high in the leg when he was halfway up the ladd
er. He screamed and dropped hard to the ground, clutching his thigh near the final two children waiting to climb aboard.

  “Go! Go!” Ben yelled to them, and moved to offer cover, firing eight rapid shots toward the gunmen left near the woods as the transport plane’s engines fired up.

  When the last of the children was through the hatch, Ben grabbed the downed boy with one arm while he continued pulling the trigger until the slide locked open. With enemy fire dappling the plane’s fuselage, he climbed half the rungs and then hoisted the wounded boy into arms dangling from the hatch. He lost his footing at the top of the steps, feeling the sting of bullets pulsing past him in the night. His legs dangled and he clutched the rung of the ladder for dear life.

  Strangely, in that instant the words of Zaid Jabral’s ghost fluttered through his mind. The revelation he had finally grasped, only to lose, on the Lucretia Maru returned to him, and this time he held tight to it, as tightly as his hands gripped the ladder.

  My God, that’s it!

  The truth had been there all the time, but it had taken a ghost to show it to him. Ben looked up toward the transport’s doorway.

  Zaid Jabral extended a hand to him, smiling.

  Ben stretched upward and squeezed his eyes closed. When he opened them, Jabral’s ghost was gone and a pair of the older boys he had freed leaned out the doorway, hands reaching down. They latched onto Ben’s shoulders and yanked him up into the plane.

  Intent on getting airborne, Ben shoved away the children around him, shouldered the door closed, and twisted the wheel into the locked position. Then he stormed forward into the cockpit, brandishing his empty pistol.

  The pilot gazed back at him fearfully. Through a corner of the cockpit glass, Ben could see the sweep of flashlights coming through the woods seconds before a large number of the compound’s guards rushed onto the tarmac. Muzzle flashes flared through the darkness, and gunfire he couldn’t hear over the rumbling sounds of the engine clanged off the plane’s skin.

  “Get going!”

  The pilot shoved the throttle forward and the plane began to move, picking up speed quickly. A bullet thumped into one side of the windshield, but the glass didn’t shatter, holding together through the spiderweb of cracks. The last thing Ben saw through the glass was the gunmen rushing to keep up as the transport gradually pulled away from them down the runway.

  It lifted into the air with surprising agility, a graceful bird rising toward the safety of the sky. Ben slapped the pilot gratefully on the shoulder, started to move to check on the children.

  “One thing,” the pilot said, and Ben turned back toward him. “Where are we going?”

  Ben smiled, realizing he had barely considered that question yet himself. “Israel,” he said. “Lay in a course for Tel Aviv.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 71

  D

  anielle stood looking down at David Wolfe, trying to picture this frail old man as the mythically brutal killer feared to this day in dozens of countries. The shock of his revelation had worn off, cold logic replacing it. Everything in David Wollchensky’s life, it seemed, made a twisted kind of sense, this included.

  “You still haven’t told me what I’m doing here,” she said finally.

  “You stated it pretty well yourself before.”

  “I’ve been discredited, disowned. My career’s finished. You want me to do your dirty work because I’m the perfect fall guy.”

  “Close enough.”

  “How did you get Hyram Levy’s journals?”

  “That doesn’t matter, believe me.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “That doesn’t matter either.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  “To prevent another death before it’s too late.”

  “Max Pearlman?”

  Wolfe shook his head. “Not Pearlman.”

  “Why did Levy call you two months ago?”

  “To tell me something he had decided to do. Something I could not let him do.”

  “But Pearlman must have listened. That’s why they spoke so much.”

  “Pearlman was on his side.”

  “Meaning you were on the other? But these men were your friends!”

  Wolfe looked away from her. “And so they will always be. But we came to a parting of the ways.”

  “Over what?”

  “The past . . . and, even more, the future.”

  “I can’t help you if you don’t start making sense.”

  “Try to remember the date of Levy’s first phone call to Pearlman. What happened that day, or the day before? Think!”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Neither did Levy. Neither did Pearlman,” Wolfe said more softly, somberly. “That was the problem. They had forgotten the greatest pledge we had ever made, the pledge that bonded us together with a secret forever.”

  “To honor the memory of a dead friend.” Danielle nodded. “To be there for his wife and child. You told me all that.”

  “Not all of it, Chief Inspector. There is still one part of the story left to tell. . . .”

  * * * *

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 72

  W

  e’re approaching Israeli airspace now.” The pilot glanced behind him toward Ben. “They’ll never let us land.”

  “So you keep telling me.”

  Ben had spent much of the flight back in the hold, making sure his young charges were as comfortable as possible. With the help of a first-aid kit on board he managed to stanch the flow of blood from the leg of the boy who’d been shot. Then he again checked the cluster of still-fearful and uncertain faces one by one until he came to that of a teenage girl cradling her knees with her arms. He felt a great surge of warm excitement go through him before he spoke, forcing the words past the clog in his throat.

  “You are Leila Fatuk.”

  The girl looked up at him, eyes suddenly bright with hope.

  “I’m going to take you home,” Ben told her. It all seemed worth it now, everything he had done.

  Back in the cockpit, though, the pilot was less than optimistic about their chances. “The Israelis will shoot us down if we keep going,” he insisted.

  “Maybe.”

  Seconds later a pair of advanced F-16s appeared on either side of the transport, seeming to have dropped out of nowhere. Then the radio began to squawk.

  “Attention identified aircraft, you have violated Israeli airspace. Repeat, you have violated Israeli airspace.”

  The pilot snatched the microphone off the instrument panel. “Israeli control, this is Navistar seven-one-seven Roger Tango.”

  “Attention Navistar, please divert from your present course or our fighters will be forced to shoot you down. You have thirty seconds to comply.”

  “Israeli control, we are low on fuel and declaring an emergency. Request immediate clearance for Ben-Gurion Airport.”

  “Twenty-five seconds, Navistar. State the nature of your emergency.”

  Ben grabbed the microphone from the pilot’s grasp before he could continue. “Israeli control, this is Inspector Bayan Kamal of the Palestinian police.”

  “This is who?”

  “Please be advised that we are low on fuel and carrying sixty children on a rescue mission. If you shoot us down, you will kill them all.”

  “Ten seconds, Navistar.”

  The F-16s dropped off to firing distance.

  “Israeli control,” Ben said, “we are on direct approach to Ben-Gurion. If we turn off now, we will crash at sea. So shoot us down if you must. Let the deaths of these children be on your conscience.”

  There was no response, the ten seconds gone.

  “Navistar, this is Israeli control. Change your heading to four-zero-niner and descend to five hundred feet. Be advised that our fighters are holding at your rear.”

  Ben clamped his free hand on the pilot’s shoulder and handed him back the microphone.

  “Acknowledged, Israeli control. That’s f
our-zero-niner at five hundred feet. We’ll see you on the ground.”

  * * * *

  A

  fter landing, the transport was directed to a separate, isolated part of the airport, where it was surrounded by a brigade of troops and vehicles. The frightened children were ushered off under heavy guard, weapons trained on them the whole time. They were loaded onto the back of trucks and taken away; to what destination, Ben had no idea. The only exception was the boy who’d been shot back on the island, who was carted off in an ambulance. Leila Fatuk stared at Ben from the final truck’s rear as it pulled away, and he lifted a hand for a slight, reassuring wave from the doorway of the plane.