Never Again

by Harvey A. Schwartz

  The eight-foot-tall solid oak door to the Lincoln bedroom flew open with such force that its door handle dented the horsehair plaster wall. Catherine Quaid was so startled she dropped the towel she had just wrapped around her dripping body after stepping from the bathtub.

  Lawrence Quaid stomped into the bedroom and stared at his now-naked wife. He hesitated. It was some time since he’d seen Catherine naked.

  “What the hell did you think you were doing?” he screamed. She stepped back. “Catherine, don’t you realize that I am in the crisis that will define my presidency? There is an atom bomb loose somewhere in the country. It’s in the hands of madmen. They’ve shown us they’re willing to do anything to intimidate us, to intimidate me. I’m trying to galvanize the country and protect it, and there you are on the podium at an anarchist rally.”

  He walked toward the door but turned before leaving the room. “Don’t you have anything to say?”

  Catherine Quaid reached for a bathrobe, drew in a deep breath, collecting her thoughts, trying to control the angry words that were fighting to fly from her. She spoke softly.

  “I think, Lawrence, that you need to worry less about history and more about what you are doing to good people in America right now,” she said. “The wonderful man I’ve loved and admired all these years would not create—there is no other word for it, Lawrence—would not create concentration camps, would not tolerate torture, would not do away with laws that for hundreds of years have been the foundation for liberty and freedom.

  “Lawrence, I know you don’t think of yourself as a bad man. But—and I hate to use the analogy, but it is the only one that comes to mind—Lawrence, do you think Adolph Hitler thought of himself as bad either? Can’t you take a step back and look at what you are doing? Forget about history. Just do the right thing now. History will write itself.”

  Quaid’s head snapped back as if he’d been punched. His wife had equated him to the most evil man of the twentieth century. He felt wounded, shaken. Pundits could criticize him, but his wife, his most trusted advisor, his biggest supporter? He’d trusted her judgment throughout every moment of his political career. It occurred to him more than once that she would have made a better president than he could ever be.

  As Quaid paused in the doorway to the Lincoln bedroom, the image of the Washington Monument surrounded by a cloud of dust, tilting at an impossible angle, then falling like a timbered tree filled his mind.

  “Catherine, I’m no Hitler, and I resent the implication. It’s hurtful and it’s wrong. My job is to protect this country, to keep it safe. And, whether you want to believe this or not, our nation is under attack. This is not about persecuting Jews. It’s about saving America. The people at that march were hard-core and anti-American. They were being incited to commit violence—and they did.”

  Quaid strode from the East Wing and into the West, settling into his office and asking for an update from the march. Within minutes, key members of his administration were in the conference room.

  The final count on detainees from the march was around 420,000 people, the president was told. Seventy-four people taken into custody from the speakers’platform were driven to nearby Bolling Air Force Base, near Reagan National Airport, and flown to Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod. The assumption was that the people on the platform were organizers who could provide information about the coordination between the march and the bombing of the Washington Monument, and about the missing atomic bomb.

  On arrival at Cape Cod, they were turned over to the Echo Team interrogators.

  The big issue facing Quaid was what to do with 420,000 detainees. The Cape Cod facility, even crowded far beyond its holding capacity, could take no more than 25,000 people. Neither the Federal Bureau of Prisons nor the immigration service, two agencies holding the majority of federal detainees, could cope with an immediate population increase of that magnitude. Besides, this wasn’t a civilian problem. The marchers were military detainees, and Quaid wanted them held as war criminals.

  Even Guantanamo was briefly considered. And rejected. Too small.

  “What are we going to do with them?” Quaid asked. “We don’t even have a stadium large enough to hold this many people. If they start dying from dysentery or God knows what, we’ll have a humanitarian crisis on our hands. We need a solution.”

  Harry Wade, the Federal Emergency Management Agency director, leaped at this problem.

  “We’re clearing out all our mobile home parks from the hurricanes,” he said. “Take the trailers. String some razor wire around ’em, throw up some guard towers and you’re all set.”

  The last Hurricane Jack and Jill refugees were in the process of moving out of FEMA-provided travel trailers and emergency mobile home parks throughout Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

  “I can stuff 400,000 people into these trailer parks,” Wade told the president. “We’ve had more than 200,000 living in them for the past ten months, and they were comfortable. No problem doubling up. Just bring in a couple hundred thousand cots—no problem finding ’em—and we’ll have plenty of capacity.”

  The camps would be operating within days while the Jewish detainees and their sympathizers were transported there.

  “Do it,” Quaid ordered. “I’ll call the House and Senate leaders and get emergency funding. We’re at war.”

  Next, Quaid asked for his daily briefing on the Israelis held in New England.

  “Anything new?” he asked.

  The Echo Team interrogators were producing results. Few people could tolerate more than a week of high stress confinement. The detention cells were isolated from all outside contacts. The fluorescent ceiling lights were always on. The ceiling-mounted speakers were never silent; in fact, they were rarely at any volume less than that of a lawnmower. Music selections were at the option of each interrogator.

  Other techniques included forcing a detainee to maintain what was referred to as a “stress position” for hours at a time, positions such as holding arms straight out from the body. A favorite was to have a detainee squat on the floor while his wrists and ankles were chained to a ring bolted between his feet, his urine and excrement accumulating around him. More aggressive interrogation methods included the revived use of waterboarding and electric shocks to men’s genitals and women’s nipples.

  Detainees quickly disclosed the identities of the Israel Defense Force teams on the two ships. The soldiers said there was no central planning effort to place them on the ships. Each person said he or she made their own way to the docks and boarded the ships with whatever weapons they’d managed to save from their military units. As the interrogations intensified, detailed descriptions of vast hordes of nuclear devices, including mind-boggling killing machines and vast stores of chemical and biological weapons, were all disclosed.

  “Unfortunately, sir, some of the people we interrogated died,” the homeland security chief said.

  “Casualties of war,” Quaid responded.

  The briefing on the interrogations did nothing to calm Quaid’s concerns about the still-undiscovered nuclear device. Reports of stores of anthrax grenades and nerve gas agents in Israel’s arsenal created new nightmares for him. The scope of the Israeli weapons of mass destruction arsenal disclosed to the interrogators, except for the previously known nuclear weapons, was a complete surprise to the American military intelligence community.

  Detainees’talk about Israeli atomic machine gun bullets, anthrax spread by pressurized hair spray containers, and laser machine guns began to sound far too Buck Rogers to be believed. Eventually, all such information squeezed from detainees after torture sessions was discarded as fabrication.

  The government was left with its only credible information being what it knew almost from the beginning. Israel had smuggled some amount of U-235 into New England in a sailboat. Where that material was, who had the material, and whether it already formed the core of an operable bomb was still all unknown.

  CHAPTER 60


  The first night at the Portland house, Sarah let Shapiro and Katz decide sleeping arrangements. Shapiro said he’d be fine on the living room sofa. Katz settled into the guest bedroom.

  Katz lay in bed, stunned by the sudden turn her life had taken. Just a few weeks earlier she was happily chasing gangsters. Now she was hiding from her own government, hiding with a group of strangers who seemed unlike any criminals she had ever encountered.

  Worst of all, there was no answer at her grandmother’s house. She tried calling the few friends she knew her grandmother had. Nobody answered. Of course, her nana’s few friends were all Jews, all part of what they called their Canasta Crew. They’d all gone to Washington. It had been an adventure for them, chaperoned by their rabbi, joined by their entire congregation of elderly Jews.

  There was no word from them now. The Canasta Crew is in a concentration camp, Judy Katz thought. Where does that leave me? I’m an American. My government is doing this. Shit, a week ago I worked for that government.

  Katz thought about reporting back to work to help the office get through this emergency. Then she remembered the secret meetings before the arrests, the meetings she was excluded from. She lay in bed, eyes closed. She saw an image of her grandmother standing behind a wire fence, thin fingers poking through holes in the wire mesh, staring at her, wondering when her Judilah would take her away from this oh-so-familiar hell, a hell from her darkest, oldest memories.

  Downstairs, Shapiro didn’t know what to make of the other woman he was introduced to at the house in Portland—Debra Reuben, the Israeli cabinet member. She seemed to live in a void filled by staring out the window at the busy street, and by alcohol.

  Shapiro quickly recognized in Reuben an emptiness that he shared. She, too, seemed to be waiting to see somebody walk through the front door, somebody her conscious mind knew would never arrive—somebody her emotions had not yet accepted as gone forever.

  The second night after his arrival, Shapiro sat on the living room sofa late into the evening, alone in the room with Debra Reuben. Earlier, Shapiro and Abram Goldhersh had worked their way through the remaining half bottle of Lagavulin. Shapiro enjoyed the warm feeling good single malt left him with, crediting the distillers on the long ago and far away island of Islay off Scotland’s foul southwest coast for the magical effect of their concoction.

  Sarah and Abram Goldhersh had long since gone to bed, as had Katz, leaving Shapiro and Reuben in the living room, him on the sofa, her in an overstuffed armchair.

  “My wife used to tease me for being a Pollyanna,” Shapiro said, trying not to let any hint of a slur slip into his speech, despite the Scotch warming his stomach like a peat fire. “That’s what I would always say—don’t worry, it will turn out for the best. That was me. ‘Pollyanna Shapiro’she used to call me. She should hear me now. I don’t see any hope, any way this situation is going to turn out for the best.”

  Reuben had taken an instant liking to this attorney. Hearing how he escaped from the FBI agents at his home, she’d sensed the same self-confidence that had attracted her to Levi. Ben Shapiro did not seem like a man who would give up easily. That he sounded so despondent now was either an indication of the desperation of the situation or a result of his tragic loss, she concluded.

  “My whole life has been devoted to solving problems—other peoples’problems, sure, but taking on what they thought were impossible battles and fighting them. Sometimes I won.” He looked up, directly into her eyes. Smiled. “I won a lot more than I lost, you know. I was pretty good. I was a damned good trial lawyer.

  “I believed in the system, the legal system, even the political system. The Rule of Law, that’s what they called it in law school. This country is built on the Rule of Law, the professors told us. I used to believe that, you know.

  “I believed in the first ten amendments to the Constitution a lot more than I believed in the Ten Commandments. And I even believed that politics was like a pendulum. Sometimes it swung my way, sometimes the other way. But it always swung back, and always toward the center, never too far one way or the other.”

  “And now, what do you believe now?” Reuben asked, drawn into his story as he’d drawn so many hundreds of jurors into his way of seeing the facts of a case.

  “You heard him on TV, didn’t you?” Shapiro said, angry. “You know, I voted for the guy, Quaid. I liked him—moderate, not too liberal to get elected. Never in a million years would I have expected him to give in to . . . to . . . I don’t know, to the dark side this way.”

  Reuben unconsciously echoed his emotions, angry when he was angry, smiling when he smiled. That was the effect a good trial lawyer giving a good closing argument hoped for from a jury.

  “I can’t accept that all those people, all those hundreds of thousands of people who stood and sat and cheered and clapped right in front of me in Washington, all those people are now behind barbed wire in some sort of American concentration camps. The man has lost his mind.”

  “But don’t you think there are people who will stop him?” Reuben asked. “There are people in the Senate, in Congress, who won’t stand for this, aren’t there?

  “Evidently not,” he replied bitterly. “You saw on TV, you saw what Congress did. Suspended habeas corpus. My God, maybe because I’m a lawyer, but I know what that means. It means they locked the doors to the courthouses and handed Quaid the keys.”

  They sat silently in the living room, Shapiro exhausted both by the Scotch and the depth of his despondency.

  “I know what you mean. I’ve lost my country, too,” Reuben said softly. “Both countries, actually, but especially my adopted home. My friends, my neighbors, the baker I bought my loaf of bread from every few days, the librarian who put each new Creighton book aside for me. All those people. I don’t know if they’re dead or alive. Maybe some of them are in camps, detention camps over there. I don’t know which would be worse. Maybe a quick death would be more merciful.”

  She looked up from the floor, where she directed her words, and noticed that Shapiro’s eyes welled with tears.

  “I hoped coming here I could change things. I hoped Chaim and I could make it better. Now he’s gone and my hope is gone, too.”

  “You came to America with more than hope,” he said. “You brought something with you.” He gestured toward the window. Outside was the swimming pool, its cover still in place. “You must have had something in mind when you brought that.”

  “Honestly, I didn’t have any plans for it,” she said. “At first, all we knew was that we had to get it out of the country. We couldn’t let the Arabs get their hands on it. That was reason enough. Later, once I got it away from Israel and the boat took me to Spain, I wasn’t prepared to dispose of it. It’s not something that you can leave in a trash can, is it?”

  “I suppose not,” Shapiro said.

  “I wanted to get back to America. That was all I knew then—as much planning as I was able to do. I found Levi and that boat he had and it made sense to bring the thing with me. I even thought I might turn it over to the government for safekeeping. Once we got here, though, and I saw that America was not going to be Israel’s white knight, that America was not going to make everything better again, I realized that maybe I was here, with what I had with me here, for a purpose. You know, Ben, I truly believe that there is a reason why I’m here, why all of us are where we are right now, and that reason also includes what we have out there in the pool.”

  “Have you thought of what that one bomb can do?” Shapiro asked.

  Reuben did not answer. Instead, she stood up slowly from the chair and took a step toward the sofa. She leaned down toward him and softly kissed him on the right cheek.

  “I hurt too much to talk about the bomb now. Good night, Ben,” she said. “I enjoyed talking with you. I think we’ll both sleep better tonight.”

  She took two steps toward the stairs, then stopped and turned toward him.

  “Ben,” she said, a new sadness coming to her voice. “Be
n, I know better than anybody else in the whole world what that bomb can do. I’ve lived, in a way, with what that bomb can do. You’re right, it would change everything. Everything. I just don’t know how it would change—if one more bomb, a third bomb, can possibly make better what the first two bombs made so terribly wrong. All I know is that what is happening in this country has to be stopped. I have no doubts about that. And I suspect that it is us”—she gestured upstairs, toward where Judy Katz, where Abram and Sarah Goldberg-Goldhersh were sleeping. “It is this group who will be making that happen.”

  “If they don’t arrest us first,” Shapiro said flatly, aware they were in the house of a woman who’d been on the speakers’list for the march, a woman the government knew had escaped that day.

  “Yes, that clock is ticking isn’t it?” she answered, then walked up the stairs. Shapiro laid his head back against the pillow and, fully dressed, without bothering with sheets or blanket, fell instantly into a deep, healing sleep.

  Shapiro prepared omelets for the collection of former strangers sitting at the kitchen table— Katz, Reuben, Abram and Sarah Goldhersh. I didn’t know any of them a month ago, he thought. Now they are all I have left.

  “I’m going back to Boston,” Katz announced. “They have no idea I’m involved with anything. I’ll be safe. Besides, I’m the only defense committee lawyer with a security clearance, so I’m the only one who can visit our clients on the cape.” She gave Shapiro a probing look. “Somebody still has to act like a lawyer, right, Ben?”

  “Judy, as soon as I show my face you’d be visiting me at that camp,” Shapiro said. “I didn’t please those FBI agents. But if you feel you can still play at being an attorney, well, go for it.” He paused. Looked at the floor. “Those days are over for me.”

  “I’m not going to play at being a lawyer, Ben. I still am a lawyer.” Katz was angry. There was no need for him to put her down. “Look, Ben, I understand your pain. No, I know I can’t begin to understand your pain, but I recognize that horrible things have happened to you. But, Ben, I’m in pain, too. We all are. My grandmother, my nana, is in some detention camp somewhere since that march. So why do you have to act like an asshole now?”