Never Again

by Harvey A. Schwartz

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I apologize. Tell us what you have in mind.”

  “I missed my meeting with my boss, my farewell meeting. I want to see him face-to-face, see what he’ll say to me,” she said. “I have loose ends to tie up. I have to find my nana. Somebody has to get down to that camp to find out what’s happening there. That’s still important, isn’t it?”

  “Do you really think they’ll let you into that camp, Judy?” Sarah asked.

  “They have to. I’m the lawyer for the organization that represents the detainees,” she said. “I may have to get a court order, but they have to let me in. These people have a right to be represented by an attorney, don’t they? They have rights. Don’t they?”

  “Do they?” Shapiro made a show of noisily rising from the table and walking from the room.

  Katz left to pack the few things she’d brought when she and Sarah left her apartment to meet Shapiro at the beach. She came down the stairs after several minutes. Shapiro asked her to step outside. He took her hand.

  “Judy, I’m worried about you,” he said. “The world’s gone crazy. It’s not like it was just a month ago. You push them now and they’ll lock you up. I’m worried that if you push too hard to get into that camp, you’ll get in, but you won’t get out.”

  She squeezed his hand, then threw her arms around him and drew him close. He stiffened. Then relaxed. His arms hung limply, wanting to hug her but unable to do so. After an awkward moment he stepped back and attempted to smile at her.

  “I have to try, don’t I, Ben?” she asked. “We can’t just stop trying. When we do that, they win. Right? Then they win?” She tried to smile.

  “Okay, be the lawyer,” he said. “Use my office. Tell my partners I’m off on a secret case. They’ll want to know more, but they won’t be surprised. One last thing, Judy. Be a lawyer, Judy. Sue the bastards.” He grinned for the first time since he arrived home from Washington.

  “I’ll sue their asses off, Ben,” Katz said. “I’ll do good, you’ll see.” She held both his hands in hers. “Ben, I haven’t been able to find words to tell you how horrible I feel about your son, and your wife. I know I wouldn’t have been her favorite person if she’d known about me, but they didn’t deserve what happened to them. To think that Jews did that. Ben, does that make you wonder what else we might do—who else will be hurt?”

  He did not respond.

  “Ben, what those people did at the mall, what Abram’s people did in Washington, how is that any different from what has been happening between Jews and Arabs for a thousand years?”

  “I haven’t stopped wondering about that, Judy,” he said quietly. “But what happens if we do nothing? They’ve shut off all our other options. All my life I’ve used the courts, the laws, to find justice. Now they say we can’t get into the courthouse. Congressmen, our so-called friends in Congress, won’t return phone calls. When the law won’t protect us, when the government turns on us, what options do we have? That’s what scares me the most. I know there is one thing we absolutely cannot do, Judy. We can’t do nothing. We can’t simply submit. That’s been tried. It didn’t work. We can’t do that.”

  He held a fist in the air, smiling.

  “Never again. Never again. Right?”

  She raised her face, leaned forward and placed her lips gently on his, then circled him with her arms and held him tightly. This time he gave in to his body’s need for comfort, his need to touch and be touched. The kiss deepened as they held each other tightly, their bodies merging, pain and comfort flowing from one to the other and back again.

  Finally, Katz stepped back. She gave Shapiro a light punch in the chest and walked to her car.

  Debra Reuben watched through the living room window. He just lost his wife, his son, she thought. How could he do that? The outrage she tried to summon refused to respond, replaced by another thought. He’s so alone. I just lost my Chaim. I wish somebody could hold me right now, could reassure me that Chaim died for a purpose, that it is going to be better.

  Shapiro returned to the house. Abram Goldhersh placed a huge arm over Shapiro’s shoulder and marched him to the living room. Debra and Sarah were sitting on the sofa.

  “Can we trust her?” Abram asked. “She knows everything, and until last week, she worked for the government.”

  “She’s a bit confused,” Shapiro said. “It might be my fault, or some of it. She might think I led her on about, well, about my feelings. I might even have led myself on, come to think of it. But after what happened to Sally, to Adam . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “She’s angry and she’s frightened,” Reuben said. “She told me about her dreams; they’re all nightmares. She’s in a camp, hair shaved, striped clothes. Did you know her grandparents were in Warsaw? Her father was actually born in the Ghetto during the Uprising. She won’t let that happen, not again, she said.” She turned to speak directly to Ben Shapiro.

  “Ben, don’t compliment yourself that it’s all about you not sleeping with Judy. She’s a Jew. Like the rest of us, she had to decide for herself what that means. She’s decided. She’ll be all right. We’ve been doing a lot of talking, Judy and I. Trust me, she’s okay. There’s a reason each of us is here, including Judy. Including you, Ben. Including you. Just give her a little time.”

  “A little time is all we have,” Abram murmured. “Nonetheless, can we agree to keep an eye on our own federal prosecutor while we decide what to do with our own atomic bomb?”

  Katz had told them about the data mining capabilities of the National Security Agency. She scared the group so sufficiently that they agreed no telephone calls would be made or answered, not from any phone in the house, not from any cell phone, not even from a pay phone. As Katz described to them, the NSA did not tap individual phone lines. Instead, it monitored every telephone switching center, every location in the country through which every telephone call traveled.

  “They have unlimited money behind them,” Katz had warned. “The bottom line is that these programs work. I know. We found bad guys based on leads from the NSA—bad guys we had no idea were even bad.”

  Nonetheless, Shapiro called her cell phone the day after Katz left, worried whether she had arrived safely.

  “Where are you calling from, Ben?” she asked. When he told her he was using the Goldberg’s phone she immediately hung up.

  Her warning forced them to become electronically isolated. No email. No telephone. Not even any Internet browsing. The result was that this group of two men and three women was cut off from all contact with the greater Jewish community. Perhaps their isolation protected them from discovery, but it also left them with an operable nuclear weapon in their possession and nobody but themselves in a position to decide what to do with it.

  Days passed. They watched news coverage of emergency evacuations of Akron, then San Diego, after what turned out to be false threats to detonate nuclear bombs. Dozens of people died in those frantic evacuations.

  The government tried to calm the nation by reporting extensive efforts to locate the bomb—roadblocks, SWAT team raids on suspected Jewish terrorist cells, airborne radiation monitoring. Those reports may or may not have made the general public feel better. They terrified the four people huddled in the house in Portland.

  “It’s only a matter of time before they find us,” Abram said after dinner one night. They were gathered in front of the tiny television brought down to the living room. CNN murmured in the background. “They’ll find us. Judy knows everything. She’ll talk, or they’ll capture her and make her talk.”

  The others nodded. They’d discussed this. They all heard the same clock ticking. They all waited for the doors to be knocked down, for the SWAT team to storm the house.

  “One phrase keeps running through my head,” Abram continued. “One of those 1950s sayings about the Cold War. You know what it is. I’ll tell you what it is. Use it or lose it. Get it? Use the bomb or lose the bomb. Back then it meant that America had to stri
ke the Russians first because if the Russians hit us first, they’d wipe out our bombers and missiles on the ground.

  “I stay awake at night picturing the SWAT team kicking in our doors and them carting off our bomb in a big truck. That’s what will happen soon. They’ll find it. They have ways. They’ll get more and more desperate. They have ways that they’ll be willing to use.”

  No one doubted that.

  “Use it or lose it,” Abram intoned. “We’d better use what we’ve got or we won’t have it anymore. We may be Israel’s last hope. Think about that, will you?”

  Reuben nodded in agreement. Like the Maccabees, she thought, Israel’s first terrorists, we may be Israel’s last defenders. Abram is right; he’s so right. What choice do we really have? They killed Chaim. They killed Ben’s wife and son. They’ve locked up Judy’s nana. They want to kill us.

  “I hear the same clock ticking,” she said. “I agree we can’t wait forever. I say we issue a threat, make a demand, do something. Something besides sitting here watching television, for God’s sake. At least let’s do that much.”

  “Use it or lose it, Abram?” Shapiro asked, shaking his head in disbelief. “You sound like the Jewish Barry Goldwater, or was he Jewish? Are we going to kill thousands of people because of a slogan?”

  Shapiro turned to Debra.

  “Tell me, Debbie. Is that the same level of reasoning that went on in that bunker in the desert? Did you and the generals kill a hundred thousand Syrians, Syrians we now know were totally innocent, because you had to use your bomb or you feared you would lose it?”

  Her eyes widened as her cheeks were drawn in. They could see Reuben struggling to hold her composure, not to answer his accusation with tears. She struggled, but lost. Instead of crying, Reuben stood and walked quickly from the room. The sound of her pouring something into a glass could be heard, followed by the clunk of ice cubes. Shapiro turned to face Abram.

  “Make a threat? And if they call our bluff?” Shapiro asked. “What do we do if they call our bluff?”

  Debra Reuben returned to the room, drink in hand.

  “What bluff is that, Ben?” she asked.

  CHAPTER 61

  “Mr. President, I have some good news, sir,” Attorney General Harrison said. “I would like to come right over and show you something.”

  “Be here in thirty minutes. The Saudi ambassador can cool his heels a bit. I’m getting awfully tired of his pep talks to stand firm about not intervening in the Middle East. Don’t give in to the terrorists, he tells me. Don’t be intimidated by threats, he says. As if his country’s threat to pull the plug on oil isn’t intimidation. I don’t dare tell him that it isn’t his oil that’s keeping our troops home. I just don’t know that I could persuade our boys and girls to board the planes to fly over there and get blown to pieces by one army or the other. American parents are not in the mood to let their children die defending Jews.”

  “Yes, sir.” Harrison did not know how to respond. The president sounded as if he was badly in need of good news. “I’m on my way as we speak.”

  Harrison stepped into the Oval Office without a word and placed a large manila folder on the president’s desk.

  “Cut the guessing games,” President Quaid said wearily. “If you have something to show me, then show me, dammit.”

  “Yes, sir.” Harrison removed a set of eight-by-ten photographs. The first photograph showed an attractive young woman wearing short white pants and boat shoes. Her thick Patagonia fleece sweater seemed out of place. She stood on a wooden dock. Dozens of sailboats were behind her, some sailing, most tied to moorings or at anchor.

  “Okay, she’s a babe,” President Quaid said dryly. “Are you engaged? Congratulations. Now get back to work.”

  “Uh, no, sir, no, I don’t know the woman.” He glanced at the photo. “Wouldn’t mind meeting her. But that’s not the point. Sir, this photo was taken six weeks ago. In Maine. Brooklin, Maine. A harbor where a magazine is published. The FBI flooded the area with agents after coming up with suspicious activity, Internet searches, at the local library.

  “They can be awfully thorough, the FBI, sir. Turns out that boat magazine runs a boat school. People come for a week and do boat stuff. All very obscure. Not the way I’d want to spend my summer vacation, sir. Seems the agents got a list of everybody who attended the school that summer, then searched for personal websites for each of them. Lots of them had little postings about ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation,’complete with photographs. This photograph was posted on one of those sites, sir.”

  “Get to the point or send in somebody who can.”

  “Yes, sir.” Harrison placed the photo on the desk. He removed a pen from his jacket pocket and pointed at a sailboat tied to a mooring float. It was to the right of the smiling woman’s shining blonde hair. A man and a woman were in a rubber dinghy, rowing away from the boat.

  “See that sailboat, sir? The FBI identified it. It’s a kind of boat called a Hinckley Bermuda 40 yawl. Expensive boat. Supposed to be pretty nice, if you’re into boats.” Harrison removed another photo and placed it on the desk. “If you look closely at this photo, sir, you can read the boat’s name. It’s painted on the back of the boat.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me what it says.”

  “The boat is named Swift, sir. Is that at all familiar, sir?” he asked.

  President Quaid drummed his fingers on his desktop.

  “Sir, the boat the Coast Guard recovered about thirty miles from where this photo was taken, the boat with the hidden storage compartment, the compartment that screamed of radiation from U-235. That boat was a Hinckley Bermuda 40. It was named Swift. This is a photo of the same boat, sir.”

  “So? We’ve assumed that before the boat sank, it was able to float, haven’t we?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll get to the real news.”

  Harrison placed another photo to the side of the others stretching across Quaid’s desk. It was an enlargement of the dinghy. The faces, although somewhat distorted, were recognizable. Harrison pointed his pen at the man rowing the boat.

  “That is Lt. Chaim Levi, Israeli Navy lieutenant, sir. The guy we shot in New Hampshire.” He placed one final photo on the desk, an enlargement of the woman at the back of the dinghy, facing Levi.

  “The FBI identified her, sir. Debra Reuben. The name ring any bells, sir? No? Not for me, either. She used to be a local newscaster, television, in New York City.”

  The president was clearly interested now.

  “She left New York and moved to Israel—Tel Aviv, Israel. She did quite well there, too. Became a well-known television personality for a while, sir.”

  “And then?”

  “And then she joined the government. She was a member of the prime minister’s cabinet of the last government to govern the State of Israel. As far as we can tell, sir, if Debra Reuben survived, as she apparently did, she is the most senior living member of the Israeli government. And she was in Maine on the sailboat that carried the bomb. And the strangest thing is she seems to be keeping her presence a secret. Her mother thinks she’s traveling around Europe with a new boyfriend. I strongly suspect that if we find Debra Reuben, we’ll find that bomb.”

  “Good work, Harrison. Now go find that terrorist.”

  The trailer park detention camps deteriorated rapidly. And the military was going broke maintaining them. Guantanamo Bay, at its maximum, held 775 enemy combatants. It cost the military $900,000 per year. For each detainee. The entire federal prison system held 216,000 people. It cost $7 billion per year. Holding more than 400,000 American Jews, and adding more every day, was an impossible task.

  “Mr. President, something—something else—has to be done with these people,” General Cruz said at a hastily called cabinet meeting. “We can’t continue to hold this many people in giant trailer parks. We can’t feed them, and clothe them, and provide medical care for them, for old women, infants, school-age children. Here’s a fact for you. I was told to exp
ect thirteen births every day among the people we’re holding. This can’t continue.”

  “We’re not releasing one of them,” President Quaid said. “Who knows what they’d do. Suggestions?”

  Attorney General Harrison broke the uncomfortable pause.

  “We can do with them what we did with every other criminal group we didn’t want. We deported Mexicans, South Americans, Chinese, Africans. Even illegal Irish. Trump deported babies. So deport the Jews. All of them.”

  The suggestion was met by silence. No objections. Just silence.

  “But these are American citizens. How can I deport them? And where would we send them?” President Quaid asked.

  “Citizens, yes, but they are enemy combatants, sir. Each and every one of them. You declared them to be enemy combatants and you were fully in your power to do so. Plenty of precedent for making US citizens enemy combatants.”

  “Don’t they still have rights? Wouldn’t some judge stop us from deporting them?”

  “Can’t happen,” Harrison said. “Enemy combatants have no right to go to any court in the country. You make somebody an enemy combatant and no judge has jurisdiction to even hear a legal complaint from him. That’s the law. It’s a pretty slick legal doctrine.”

  “Where would we deport them to? I’m not turning 400,000 American Jews over to the Palestinians.”

  Gen. Cruz interrupted. “Had the same problem with Guantanamo. Even when we wanted to release people, we worked our tails off finding countries to take them. Had to twist a lot of arms. Spend a lot of money. But it worked.”

  Harry Wade, the FEMA head who came up with the trailer scheme, recognized a problem to solve. And he solved it.

  “Africa,” Wade said. “Between AIDS and Ebola, Africa lost 25 percent of its population. We can send our Jews to Africa. Grease the skids with a few billion dollars to a dozen countries there. Problem solved. The Brits came up with a scheme to relocate their Jews to Uganda a hundred years ago. Too bad they didn’t do it. Jews would be running the place by now. Our Jews will probably take over and make their fortunes in Africa.”