“But your mother committed to come to the US when the baby is born. That was progress.”
“By then we’ll have a house with a room where she can stay.”
It was a very short drive from Reineh to the house in Nazareth where Anwar was staying. With Hana giving directions, Daud wound his way through the narrow alleyways until they reached an older home crammed against a row of houses.
“When he was younger, Uncle Anwar lived next to an olive grove,” Hana said. “He knew every limb of each tree. I remember him talking to the trees and blessing their fruit.”
“Did it work?”
“I’m not sure, but he always had money for fresh lemonade and treats for all the kids in the family.”
Once inside Anwar’s home, Daud could tell the great-granddaughter viewed Hana with awe as a sophisticated lawyer who lived in America. Hana asked the teenager several questions about school before they went in to see Uncle Anwar, who was in a bedroom on the main floor. He was lying down with a white sheet pulled up to his chin. His eyes were closed, and his breathing seemed shallow.
“Uncle,” the young woman said, “you have visitors.”
Anwar stirred and blinked as Hana and Daud came closer to the bed. His hand appeared from beneath the sheets and touched his head. His eyes opened wider. Daud could see him focus on Hana.
After a few seconds, he smiled. “Is it Hana or her angel?” he asked in a creaky voice.
“It’s me, Uncle.” Hana reached out and squeezed his hand. “I’m with Daud, my husband.”
Anwar barely cut his eyes toward Daud before he refocused on Hana.
“I’m going to have a baby,” Hana continued.
Anwar nodded slightly.
Hana leaned in closer. “I was just telling Daud how you would bless the olive trees in your grove,” she said.
“And I told you to be fruitful.”
“Yes, you did,” Hana replied in surprise.
“You’re a good olive tree,” Anwar continued. “I’ve been blessing you for a long time; the harvest is coming.”
Daud saw Hana wipe one of her eyes.
“Thank you,” she said.
Anwar slowly raised a gnarled index finger. “Give me your hand.”
Hana placed her right hand in the old man’s palm.
He closed his eyes and squeezed it gently. “Did you feel that?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“The Lord’s touch is just as real.”
Anwar fell back asleep. They quietly left the room.
“That was as good as he’s been for a while,” the great-granddaughter said when they’d returned to the living room. “Sometimes I think he’s already in heaven and comes back here for short visits.”
“Has he been praying for you and speaking words about your life?” Hana asked the teenager.
“Yes,” the girl replied shyly. “He wants me to be here as much as I can.”
“Believe what he says,” Hana responded. “From the time I was a little girl, he did the same for me. His words are still having a big impact in my life.”
After saying their good-byes, Daud and Hana drove away from Nazareth toward Jerusalem.
“It sounds weird, but I feel like your uncle is in the car with us,” Daud said after they’d driven a few kilometers.
Hana, who was staring out the window, turned toward him. “We’re still within the area of his authority. And because we’re family, there’s a link in the Spirit.”
Daud remembered what Anwar told him about possessing the gates of his enemies. Maybe it was the same kind of thing. If so, Daud wasn’t sure his spiritual authority extended much farther than the end of his nose.
During the drive back to Jerusalem, Daud called his mother in Beersheba and arranged to have dinner with her and his brothers at a restaurant not far from Avi’s house.
“Why didn’t you tell me you and Hana would be traveling to Israel?” she asked.
“The trip came up suddenly. We spent last night in Reineh, and we want to see you too.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, of course.”
There was a brief pause. “Is Hana pregnant?”
The phone was on speaker. Hana commented, “You are a better investigator than your son.”
“Hallelujah! I can’t wait to see you and give you a hug.”
Thirty minutes later they received a phone call from Aaron Levy. Letting Aaron know in advance, Daud once again placed the call on speaker so Hana could listen.
“They captured the man who blocked your car with the flock of sheep,” the Shin Bet official said. “He was a local who claims the intent was to rob you. He hasn’t given any information as to the men who fired the shots. Based on the bullet fragments taken from the car, the shooters were using homemade guns most likely manufactured in a metal shop in the West Bank.”
As terrible as it was, a robbery would be infinitely better than an unsuccessful assassination.
“So they could have been thieves?” Hana asked.
“Maybe,” Aaron replied. “The crude weapons explain why Daud escaped. Those types of guns aren’t very accurate except at close range.”
Hana whispered to Daud, “I believe God’s protecting angels saved your life.”
“What now?” Daud asked Aaron. “We’re on our way back to Jerusalem from Reineh.”
“You decided to go? Any problems?”
“No.”
“I’ll keep you updated on our investigation. Anytime a terrorist cell raises its head, we have a chance to cut it off.”
Chapter 37
Rahal finished his evening prayers. Sunni believers prayed five times per day with their heads touching the floor; Shia believers prayed three times a day with their heads touching a wooden plank or a clay tablet called a turbah. Covered with ornate calligraphy, Rahal’s turbah was made from soil that came from Karbala, a city in central Iraq that was the place where Muhammad’s grandson Husayn was beheaded in battle and buried. Rahal returned the tablet to a small cabinet and locked the drawer. There was a light tap on the prayer room door.
“Come in,” he said.
“Have you finished your prayers, sir?” Khalil asked. “If not, I don’t want to interrupt.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve spent much of the afternoon with Yemenites. It is three months until Hasan’s wife speaks at the interfaith event in Atlanta. If we send then now, they can seek political asylum and find work based on forged identity cards.”
“How confident are you they will be granted asylum?”
“The situation in Yemen is dire. At the least they will be able to stay while a hearing is pending on their application, which will be more than enough time.”
“And the identification cards are high quality?”
“The best. Hezbollah currently has operatives working in the US using the same type of documents while waiting for orders to strike appropriate targets. American employers are looking for cheap labor and aren’t careful with background checks. Once in Atlanta, the Yemenites will find work at the hotel where the event is going to be held. That will give them easy access to carry out an attack.”
“What sort of jobs will they try to get at the hotel?”
“Our preference would be food service, which would enable them to be in the large ballroom as part of their regular job duties.”
“Will they use explosive vests?”
“Yes—and position themselves for maximum damage before detonating. Nails and ball bearings will be easy to purchase once they’re in the US. The Americans would provide the explosive material.”
“How?”
“From here,” Khalil replied. “Our contractors working at Al Udeid can move about the facility. I’ve already performed reconnaissance while posing as a cleaning supervisor and know where blocks of C-4 are located. Because it is so powerful and stable, that is the best material to use. We will prepare a dummy block. I will return to the base and swap—”
“No,�
� Rahal interrupted with a sharp wave of his hand. “The risk is too great. Find another source of explosives or give the Yemenites the funds to buy what they need once they reach the US. Trust me in this. My instincts have never failed me.”
“The Yemenites are brave and willing to die in jihad. But they don’t have the level of sophistication to do that without help.”
“Surely they can purchase another type of material that is easier to buy in the US, perhaps something used in mining or clearing land.”
“There is another way.”
“What is it?”
Khalil took a deep breath. “I can go with them myself to oversee the operation.”
* * *
After the dinner with Daud’s mother and brothers, Hana and Daud returned to Avi’s house. The art dealer had spent part of the day working on the arrangements to send the Ivanov artifacts to the US.
“Do you think there will be a problem?” Hana asked over a cup of tea.
“The documentation links Mr. Ivanov’s claim all the way back to the Ottoman era. That should be sufficient.”
Before going to bed, Daud and Hana spent another hour alone in the interior courtyard. It was as sweet as the previous time.
“I want to do this when we return to Atlanta,” Hana said after Daud turned off the music and they sat quietly for several minutes immersed in the presence of the Lord.
“Then look for a courtyard in the middle of a house built with Jerusalem stone,” Daud answered.
“That’s not possible.”
Daud smiled and didn’t speak.
“Okay, okay,” Hana continued. “The house in Abu Tor didn’t have a courtyard either.”
“But it had a rooftop.”
When she woke in the middle of the night, Hana stayed in their bedroom and positioned a chair so she could look out the window at the neighborhood. She kept her thoughts and prayers silent and didn’t write anything in her journal. Instead, she filled her heart with the peace she’d experienced in the room following the attack in Al-Bireh. That was the most important thing she could pack for the flight to Italy and take back with her to America.
* * *
The following morning they took a taxi to the airport. Once in Rome, Daud would stay behind at the hotel while Hana was at her meeting with the shipping company’s risk management group. Armed with her laptop loaded with a PowerPoint presentation, Hana put on her most conservative business suit.
“How do I look?” she asked Daud.
“What do you want to accomplish?” Daud replied.
“To persuade a room full of men that they need to strike the right balance between risk and profit.”
“You can do that regardless of your outfit.”
Hana kissed Daud. After she left, he typed a detailed memo for himself about the attack near Al-Bireh while it was fresh in his mind. As part of the process, he transferred every text message and email between himself and the man who called himself Hosni Chatti to a secure file. The website for the plastics company in the UAE had been taken down. The business was a ruse with only one purpose—to lure him into a deadly trap.
Whether the Chechens were behind the attack was unclear. They always had the latest weapons and acted with a high degree of sophistication. Nevertheless, it still might have been a Chechen mission. The group had been significantly weakened as a result of Daud’s efforts, and perhaps this had forced them to use more primitive weapons and tactics.
The other option was a connection between the Al-Bireh attack and what happened in Sharm el-Sheikh. The images captured at the seafood restaurant in Sharm el-Sheikh had blown Daud’s cover. And anyone connected with the man he’d apprehended at the Kolisnyks’ villa might be motivated by revenge. Daud paced back and forth across the hotel room. He should have handled the situation at the seafood restaurant differently. Stopping, he shook his head at the vanity of trying to undo the past. His focus needed to be on how to navigate the future.
He left the hotel for a long walk. He’d been in Rome before, and their hotel wasn’t far from the Baroque-era Trevi Fountain. He mingled with the crowd and drank coffee at a sidewalk café before returning to the hotel for an aerobic workout in the exercise room. Hana had returned earlier than expected and was waiting for him in their room.
“How did it go?” Daud asked as he rubbed his head with a towel.
“Time will tell,” Hana replied. “I pretended to be Mr. Lowenstein giving a PowerPoint presentation.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Starving.”
“Me too. I found a quiet restaurant not far from the hotel.”
They enjoyed a leisurely meal capped off with a dessert of tartufo di pizzo, two flavors of ice cream molded together with cherries inside and covered with cocoa.
“This is delicious,” Hana said after the second bite.
“Just like us,” Daud replied. “Two flavors of ice cream pressed together into one piece with fruit in the middle and a sweet coating on the outside.”
“Roma makes you a poet.” Hana laughed. “Is our baby the sweet fruit in the middle?”
“However you want to interpret it. Once I release a metaphor, I don’t try to control it.”
The following morning they were up early for the return flight to New York, then on to Atlanta. Once on the ground, Hana checked her phone.
“Anything going on at the office?” Daud asked.
“No,” she said, moving her fingers across the screen. “I was looking at the house on Berkdale Drive. It’s still on the market.”
“Any changes?”
Hana closed the screen. “Not that I can see. I was checking to see if it was built with Jerusalem stone and had a courtyard.”
“No flat roof?”
“Or a view of the Old City wall.”
“On fee simple land that would allow us to own it for generations.”
Hana looked directly at him. “Why are we talking like this if we told Avi we weren’t interested in the house in Abu Tor?”
It was a question Daud was ready to answer. He’d thought about it during his walk in Rome and on the flight over the Atlantic Ocean. He just didn’t expect the issue would come up on an airplane a few minutes before they disembarked.
“Because we don’t want the dream to die, but we know it may be a long time before it can become a reality.”
“That’s it,” Hana said as she leaned back in her seat. “For now, America is our promised land.”
* * *
Six weeks later Hana parked in front of the office for the real estate lawyer who was preparing the closing papers for the Berkdale Drive house. Daud hadn’t arrived. He was coming from a meeting with the CEO and CFO of an Atlanta-based company interested in hiring him to help them open an office in Beersheba. The southern Israeli city in the Negev region was booming and growing at a rapid rate. An extra perk of the job would be the chance for Daud to spend time with his mother and brothers. He pulled up beside her and got out.
“Excited?” he asked.
“A little. But more importantly, I’m at peace. How did your meeting go?”
“They’re going to hire me, which will pay four months of our new house payment.”
“Is that how we’re going to measure things from now on?”
“Until we start buying diapers and baby wipes.”
Hana had been getting bigger so fast that she questioned the results of her initial sonogram, which revealed one baby, not two.
“Are you sure there isn’t a second baby hiding behind the first one?” she’d asked the technician.
The woman had moved the wand over Hana’s abdomen again. “Another baby wouldn’t be able to hide from me without revealing an arm or leg. Based on what I’m seeing today, either you’re going to have a big baby or you were pregnant earlier than you thought.”
“My doctor has moved up the due date twice.”
Daud was a solidly built man, and the idea of producing a child influenced by his gene pool was dauntin
g.
“Everything looks great,” the technician had continued. “The doctor will go over the details. Next time I see you, we’ll likely be able to tell you whether you’re having a boy or a girl.”
* * *
Hana shifted her weight several times during the house closing, which was over in an efficient forty-two minutes.
“Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Hasan,” the paralegal said when they finished and she handed them a thick envelope containing their copies. “Enjoy your new home.”
They left with the envelope and two sets of keys.
“Do you want to swing by Jakob’s office for a few minutes?” Hana asked Daud. “It’s just around the corner.”
“Sure, but I have something to show you first.”
Daud went to the rear of the Land Rover and opened the gate. Lying on the carpet was the original oil painting Avi Labensky had given them as a companion to the print he sent for their wedding gift.
“Do you like the frame?” Daud asked. “I know it was a risk choosing it without your input, but I wanted to surprise you.”
He’d selected a tan frame with a raised design.
“It looks like Jerusalem stone,” she said.
“That’s what I wanted. If we can’t have the real thing in our new house, at least we can surround the painting with a good imitation.”
Hana held the painting at an angle so that the natural light accentuated the sunlight in the picture.
“I love it,” she said. “And we need to find a place to hang it so that the natural light makes it come alive.”
“In the master bedroom upstairs?”
“No, I want it downstairs where more people can see it and ask questions.”
They arrived at Jakob’s building. His office was on the second floor and took up a large space because he didn’t have a full-time secretary or an administrative assistant.
“You look like you’ve been in court,” Jakob said to Daud. “I hope you didn’t get a traffic ticket.”
Jakob led them to a corner where they could sit around a small conference table.
“We just came from the closing on the new house,” Hana said. “The attorney was nearby.”
“Congratulations. When can Emily and I come over?”
Promised Land Page 31
