The First Hostage: A J. B. Collins Novel

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  So when we’d talked back in Amman last week, we’d talked theology. What else? He explained the prophecies about the future of Jordan. He’d said it was possible the prophecies might come to fulfillment sooner than anyone could imagine. It made me wonder what he thought of Khalif’s eschatology. Did the Bible say anything about Dabiq? Did it give any clues about the rise of an Islamic caliphate? And what really was the difference between what the Qur’an had to say about the End of Days and what the Bible had to say? I had a feeling Matt knew a lot about this subject. It actually might make an interesting story for the Times, especially given Khalif’s video message. But that would have to wait for another day.

  “Are you still there, Colonel?” Matt asked.

  “Yes, I’m still here,” Sharif said. “I’m just waiting for your brother to reply. He doesn’t seem to remember. And you’ve got to admit what he’s said already could only have been known by him.”

  “No, he could have told you those things under duress,” Matt said. “But I’ll give you—or him—a hint.”

  “Okay.”

  “It was something Katie said.”

  I looked up and scribbled a note.

  “She just turned four,” Sharif said.

  “Keep going.”

  I wrote another note.

  “She’s in a Sunday school class,” Sharif told him. “She loves it. Can’t wait to get there every week. And she loves memorizing the Bible. There’s some sort of game if you memorize verses.”

  “What were the last verses she memorized?”

  I scribbled down a single sentence—less than that, actually; just a phrase.

  “Something from 1 John.”

  “What was it?”

  I winced and shook my head.

  “Come on, Dr. Collins, that’s enough,” Sharif said. “We’re running out of time.”

  “The verse, Colonel,” Matt pressed. “I want to hear him say it.”

  This time I closed my eyes and put my head down on the table. But try as I might, I couldn’t remember. Instead, the most horrific images from the last few weeks flashed through my brain.

  Abdel and the mine in Homs.

  Omar and the car bomb in Istanbul.

  Khachigian in the café at Union Station.

  The beheadings in Baghdad.

  The sarin gas test in Mosul, which I now realized had actually happened in Alqosh.

  The kamikaze in Amman.

  And the children. All those precious children.

  Suddenly I sat bolt upright. I reached for my notebook and wrote two sentences as fast as I could. My handwriting was so illegible I couldn’t imagine how Sharif could decipher it. But he did, and he read it, and I was right.

  “‘And the testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life.’”

  51

  “That’s it,” Matt exclaimed. “That’s my brother!”

  Just then there was a knock on the door. It was Ari Shalit.

  “Colonel, His Majesty is asking for you,” the Israeli said.

  Sharif thanked him and said he’d be right there.

  “It seems he needs you right away,” Ari added. “It’s fairly urgent.”

  Sharif nodded but turned back to the call.

  “Dr. Collins, you’ve got one minute,” he told Matt. “If you’ve got something to say to your brother, now’s the time.”

  “One minute?”

  “Fifty-four seconds.”

  I handed Ari a note explaining who was on the phone. He looked impatient but waited by the door.

  “Okay, right, well, it’s about the video,” Matt stammered. “The video that Abu Khalif made, with the president in the cage—you know the one?”

  “Of course,” said Sharif. “What about it?”

  “I know where it was shot.”

  “How?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “Where?”

  “Nahum’s tomb.”

  “Where?”

  “They shot the video next to Nahum’s tomb.”

  “Nahum who?” the colonel asked.

  “You know, the Hebrew prophet, one of the minor prophets, wrote the book of Nahum in the Bible?”

  “I guess,” Sharif replied, not exactly tracking with Matt’s train of thought and not exactly having the time to pursue it.

  But Matt kept going. “Okay, well, Nahum was a minor prophet only in the sense that his contribution to the Scriptures was small. His book isn’t very long. But it was enormously consequential because he prophesied the coming judgment of the city of Nineveh.”

  “Nineveh in Iraq?”

  “Yes, precisely,” Matt said. “You see, God told Nahum to warn the people that their wicked city would be utterly destroyed, but tragically they refused to listen. They didn’t repent. And Nahum’s prophecies of cataclysmic destruction all came to pass in 612 BC.”

  “So where is Nahum buried?”

  “In a little town, a village really, in northern Iraq, on the plains of Nineveh,” Matt explained. “It’s a place called Elkosh. Have you ever heard of it?”

  I looked at the colonel and then at Ari. They were as stunned as I was.

  “Alqosh, you say?” Sharif clarified.

  “Yes—have you heard of it?

  “We’ve heard of it,” Sharif said. “Tell me more—but make it fast.”

  “Well, Nahum was Jewish, but he was born and raised in exile, far from the land of Israel, in what was then the Assyrian Empire,” Matt explained. “The Bible says Nahum was an ‘Elkoshite.’ He was born there, and he was buried there as well. There’s a mausoleum at the site with Hebrew writing on the walls dating back twenty-five hundred years. I was there a number of years ago with some colleagues from my seminary.”

  “How long ago?”

  “I don’t remember exactly—five or six years, I guess—but I actually have pictures of me standing at the exact spot where Abu Khalif was standing, just a few feet to the right of the tomb.”

  “Can you send me those pictures?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then text them right now, Dr. Collins. Please—time is of the essence. We have to go.”

  “Wait, Colonel; my mom wanted to say hello to—”

  But suddenly he was gone. For a moment I thought the call had been dropped. But when the colonel jumped up, headed out the door, and told Ari to follow him, I realized that he’d actually hung up on him, and I was now sitting by myself. But at least I’d gotten to hear Matt’s voice. He’d just come through for me in a huge way, and I was grateful.

  What were the chances that my brother had ever been in Alqosh? On the face of it, it seemed preposterous. But of course it wasn’t. This was a guy who was in the middle of a yearlong sabbatical in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan studying the ancient prophecies of Ammon, Moab, Edom, Bozrah, Mount Seir, and who knew how many others. This was a guy who had taken his wife to Iraq—to the city of Babylon, to be precise—for their honeymoon back in the late 1980s, during the reign of Saddam Hussein, to visit the ancient ruins and see the beginnings of the rebuilding of Babylon—including the famed Ishtar Gate—that Saddam had ordered. It was nutty stuff like that that had caused the rift between us. Now it seemed my brother’s nutty ideas were paying off big-time.

  I just sat there, closed my eyes, and tried to catch my breath. I was exhausted and the pain in my left arm was growing. I pulled a bottle of pills from my pocket, the ones given to me by Dr. Hammami, and swallowed one without water.

  As I worked the pill down my throat, my thoughts turned back to Alqosh. The evidence that Abu Khalif and the president had been there was now almost ironclad. The case that they were still there was intriguing yet merely circumstantial. What if Khalif and his men had taken the president from the compound after filming the video? Could they have slipped out of the village during a gap in the Israelis’ drone coverage?

  It wa
s possible, I had to admit, but was it likely? And even if they’d managed to leave Alqosh, had they really gone all the way to Dabiq? Wasn’t it more likely they were in Mosul, a city of more than a million and a half people, a city completely controlled by ISIS forces? The Iraqis and Americans had been talking about retaking it for months, but they still hadn’t. If I were the head of the caliphate, wouldn’t I be in Mosul? It was the wrong way to think, of course. I was thinking like a Westerner. Abu Khalif wasn’t living in the twenty-first century. He was living in the seventh. He wasn’t trying to protect himself. He was trying to follow the path of the Qur’an.

  But did that make it more likely that his base camp was next to the tomb of Nahum in Alqosh than in Mosul? So far as I knew, Nahum wasn’t a prophet mentioned in the Qur’an or typically recognized by Muslims. So where did that leave me? I had no idea.

  “Hey, need some company?”

  That was a voice I knew. I opened my eyes and found Yael peeking through the door with a somewhat-shy smile on her face.

  “Absolutely,” I said, standing. “You didn’t go in with them?”

  “I think my work in there is done.”

  Reaching behind her, I closed the door to the break room, and for the first time since Istanbul, we were alone.

  “How’re you doing?” I asked, standing only inches away from her.

  She shrugged.

  “Yeah, me too,” I said.

  We just stood there for a few moments, looking into each other’s eyes, neither saying a word. It wasn’t that we didn’t have anything to say. It was because there was too much to say, and we had no idea where to start. That was my excuse, anyway. I couldn’t really read her. I didn’t know her well enough. Not yet.

  “I’m sorry,” I said finally.

  “About what?” she asked.

  “Danny . . . this . . . all of it.”

  She nodded and leaned toward me. I could feel her breath on my face, minty and sweet. My pulse quickened, as did my breathing. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to kiss her right then. But I knew I shouldn’t. It wasn’t my place. She was wounded and vulnerable. She was as exhausted and in as much pain as I was. Maybe more. Probably more. I could see it in her eyes. And we hadn’t talked, not really. She didn’t know how I felt about her. I certainly didn’t know how she felt about me. I thought I did. I hoped I did. But that wasn’t the same as knowing for certain. The only way to know was to ask, and I didn’t know how to ask right then. What if it was all wishful thinking on my part? What if none of it was real? What if it had all been an act? That was her job, wasn’t it? To deceive people. To get things out of them. To get you to give her what she wanted and make it feel like you were doing it because you wanted to, not because she was manipulating you.

  Yael Katzir was a spy. I was her mission, or part of it anyway. In Istanbul, she’d needed to get my attention and hold it and win my trust and get me to talk, and she’d done it beautifully. What a fool I’d be if I really fell for an act, no matter how convincing. What an idiot I’d feel like when I was rebuffed, as I surely expected to be.

  And even if it was true—even if she really did have some feelings for me and I wasn’t completely misreading the situation—then what? Ari and the colonel would be back any second. Did I really want them to burst in on us making out? Did I really intend to go back into the war room having discredited Yael in the eyes of everyone in there? It was one thing to contemplate chucking my career out the window to run away with this girl and start a new life. It was another thing to jeopardize everything she’d spent a lifetime working for.

  So I stood there and stared into her eyes and forced myself not to kiss her. But then she surprised me by putting her arms around me and leaning her head against my chest. I didn’t know what to say. So slowly, hesitantly, I put my arms around her, too, and closed my eyes again.

  I forgot where I was, forgot who might be coming through the door at any moment. All the arguments swirling around in my head evaporated, and all I could think about was how warm her body felt against mine and how her hair smelled like strawberries.

  I had a thousand questions and finally the privacy to ask them. But I kept quiet. I didn’t want to ruin the moment. I just stood there in the break room under the harsh fluorescent lights and held this young woman I’d become so fond of. There was nothing romantic about the setting, nothing nostalgic, nothing personal. It wasn’t how I’d imagined it.

  But as I held her in the silence, she began to cry.

  52

  After a few minutes, she pulled away.

  She said she was embarrassed. I told her not to be.

  “This isn’t like me,” she said, fishing a tissue out of her purse and wiping away the tears. “I should know better.”

  “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  She wasn’t amused. Well, a little. But only a little. She took a small mirror from her purse and checked her makeup.

  “You took a couple of nice shots,” I said.

  “You too.”

  “At least no one can see mine.”

  “That’s true,” she said. “I saw you noticing the makeup.”

  “Was I that obvious?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’d never seen you wear makeup before.”

  “I usually don’t.”

  “How bad is it?” I asked.

  “The bruising?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Could be worse.” She shrugged. “You should see the other guy.”

  I smiled for the first time in days. “I did.” A pause, then I asked, “You on meds?”

  She nodded. “Are you?”

  I nodded back.

  “How bad is yours?” she asked.

  “I’ll live.”

  “Me too.”

  “Good,” I said. “I hope so.”

  “Not all of us have been so lucky,” she replied, a sadness coming over her again.

  “Danny?”

  She nodded and looked away.

  “Unreal.”

  She walked to the other side of the room and stared out the little window in the door to the hallway.

  “How’s Miriam doing?” I asked of the prime minister’s wife.

  “She’s a mess.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “I was there,” she said, “with her, at the hospital, when she got the news.”

  I said nothing.

  “The shriek that came out of her mouth . . . the grief . . . the anguish . . . I’d never heard anything like it. Just total . . . total despair.”

  Then she said something that surprised me.

  “And I knew just how she felt. . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. I wanted to ask her what she meant. But I held back. She wasn’t really talking to me. She was talking to herself. I just happened to be in the room.

  “The kids are worse,” she said, staring at the crumpled tissue in her hands. “They’re in shock, all of them . . . except little Avi.”

  “The two-year-old?” I asked.

  She nodded. “He’s oblivious,” she said, her voice quiet and distant. “Doesn’t understand what’s happened, just playing with the nanny like he hasn’t a care in the world. I mean, he knows Mommy is sad. He can see that. And he was so precious holding her hand and drawing little pictures for her. He just doesn’t know what’s happened. I’d like to be like that. . . .”

  We were quiet for a while.

  “Do you have kids, J. B.?” she asked, looking up, completely out of the blue.

  The question startled me, but I shook my head. “No.”

  “Did you want them?”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  The questions were suddenly so personal. But I didn’t mind. “Laura didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged. What else could I do? I didn’t know then. I certainly didn’t know now. Not really. Not for certain.


  “Do you regret it?” she asked.

  “All of it.”

  “No, not the marriage. I mean . . .”

  “I know,” I said and looked down at the floor and thought about it more. “Yeah, I regret it.”

  “You’d have liked kids?”

  I nodded but didn’t say anything for almost a minute. I didn’t know what to say. It seemed like an odd conversation to be having under the circumstances. Strange. Unexpectedly intimate. But surreal. We’d never really had time to talk personally. I realized I knew hardly anything about her.

  “What about you?” I finally asked.

  “What?”

  “You want to be a mom someday?”

  “More than anything,” she said, still looking out the little window.

  Again she’d surprised me. I’d thought of Yael Katzir as the consummate professional. She was completely immersed in her work. She’d labored incredibly hard to get to where she was. She was working among the most highly respected experts in the world in her field and was one of the few women to reach such heights in the Israeli intel community—or in any intelligence, especially since she was only thirty-four.

  “Really?”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “A little, yeah.”

  “Why? You don’t think I’d be a good mom?”

  “No, I’m sure you’d be great. I just . . .”

  “Just what?”

  “I don’t know. You seemed like . . .”