And after the slaying, enemies always struck again. In seventy-five years of Israel’s existence, how many times did Israelis attack Palestinians? Who then retaliated against Israel. Which retaliated against Palestine.
Which then struck back. All in God’s name. Everybody killing in God’s name, Shapiro thought. So, now I’m doing God’s work, igniting an atom bomb over the nation’s capital, the capital of the country in which I was raised?
He wondered whether it was the same God who kept the Red Sox from winning the World Series when he was a kid, the God who let awful things happen to good people. Like Sally. Like Adam.
Did the man who killed Sally believe he was doing a righteous deed? Did he believe he was doing God’s work, Israel’s work? Or did he follow some other God and do that God’s work? Did he care that he was going to kill innocent people?
And children.
Adam. I’m fighting back for Adam’s sake, in Adam’s memory. Right? Did Adam’s murderer, too, think of himself as a righteous man?
He thought about the children in Damascus. How many children died from that bomb?
How will their fathers retaliate?
Ben flew the glider without conscious thought. His mind spinning. Thoughts racing. Then calm.
Like sunlight breaking between parting clouds, the realization struck Shapiro that he was just another bomber. Just one bounce of a ping-pong ball of perpetual retaliation in a match that had been playing for centuries. Longer.
I’m not a hero executing Hitler. I’m going to kill some other man’s wife, some other father’s son.
A coward murdered Sally and Adam. Not a hero. Not a tzadik.
Ben stared straight ahead over the airplane’s rounded nose. There was the White House.
Men on the roof spotted the glider.
Suddenly a streak of white smoke rose from the White House roof and flew directly toward the glider, then another streak next to it. Then another. And another.
They’re shooting missiles at me, he realized, strangely surprised. Will the bomb go off if a missile hits it?
The white trails behind the ground-to-air Stinger missiles twisted into corkscrews as the heat-seeking electronics in their noses searched ahead of the missiles for hot engine exhaust.
The sailplane, of course, had no exhaust.
Instead, the missiles locked onto the hottest object in the sky, turned upward, and climbed toward the sun, falling to the ground when their fuel was exhausted.
Ben pictured Catherine Quaid standing at one of the second-floor windows, staring at the strange airplane flying toward her.
Catherine Quaid. America’s royalty. America’s version of the king of Denmark, he thought. I can’t kill Catherine Quaid.
I can’t kill other fathers’Adams. I can’t do this thing. I won’t. I can’t.
Break the chain; stop the ping-pong match.
He pictured Catherine Quaid smiling at him.
The White House seemed to rush toward him, rather than he toward it. The National Mall was to his right, 2,500 feet below.
“Enough,” he said out loud. “Stop it.”
I promised I would do this, he thought. People are depending on me. Now is the time. He reached for the safety-belt buckle. Time for the bomb.
No, he thought.
“No,” he shouted. “I can’t do this. It isn’t right. It isn’t right.”
The red button remained covered.
He moved the control stick as far to the right as it would go, dropping the plane’s right wing toward the ground. His left leg straightened, swinging the plane’s nose to the left.
A perfect sideslip. Wish Willy could see this.
Ben turned his head, staring out across the length of the right wing, pointing toward the center of the Mall and the Capitol building.
Instantly, the silent flight was broken by the noise of air battering the side of the plane. The controls, the stick and rudder pedals, rattled. The glider dropped from the sky toward the grass below, flying wingtip first, sideways to the air.
At fifty feet above the ground, he swung the stick to the left and straightened his right leg, depressing the right rudder pedal. The wings leveled. The plane’s nose pivoted quickly to the right and pointed straight ahead, straight down the grassy Mall, straight at the spot where Shapiro had sat so recently facing a crowd of half a million people.
He skimmed just feet above the grass now. People turned and pointed. People directly in front of the plane threw themselves flat on the ground and felt the breeze from his wings on their backs.
He thrust the stick fully forward and felt the single wheel bounce onto the grass. He reached down with his left hand for the wheel brake and lifted it, pulling hard.
The plane slowed to a halt. The left wing dropped to the grass, the right wing pointed at the sky.
Shapiro reached for the lever that unlocked the canopy, then lifted the clear plastic over his head and swung it open. He twisted the round buckle on his chest to release the ends of the safety belts, then used both hands to lift himself from the seat and climb out of the glider.
He stood on the grass, next to his sailplane, next to an atom bomb, and slowly raised both hands over his head, watching as a park service police officer cautiously walked toward him, gun in hand.
Shapiro smiled. Content. Proud. I just saved the lives of a million people. I’m a hero, he thought. A tzadik. A righteous man.
EPILOGUE
Abram Goldhersh drove the Nissan Pathfinder into his driveway in Portland. Exhausted. Emotionally drained. Dejected. He’d driven from the glider field due east, toward Washington, waiting to see the flash.
It never came.
He listened on the radio for news of the bomb.
He heard nothing.
Fox Radio News reported that a glider landed on the National Mall in Washington. Nothing was known about the pilot, the reporter said. Park police and the Secret Service had surrounded the plane and quickly removed it, saying nothing about it.
That was all he learned.
He parked the SUV and entered his house. It was after eleven. Sarah ran to the door. She opened her arms for her husband and attempted to surround the huge man with herself, unsuccessfully. Home, with his wife, he finally let loose. Sarah felt his body shaking and heard his sobs. After five minutes of silently holding her husband, she released him and walked him into the living room.
“He lost his nerve,” Abram said. “He let us down. He let Israel down. Why does God do this to us?”
Sarah led him into the living room.
“Abram,” Sarah said to him. “Debbie has something to tell you.”
“I don’t want to hear anything more. Israel is lost. Who knows when there will be another chance like this one?”
Reuben stood in the living room, next to the fireplace, watching him and Sarah. He looked at her sadly, the tracks of tears still on his face. He looked at her and said nothing.
“Abram,” Reuben said, sounding excited rather than despondent. “There’s another bomb, Abram. A bigger bomb. In Africa. In Ethiopia. I sent the other pilot there to wait.
“Judy is going to the pilot. She had to get away from what we were doing. I told her to take a message to him. But I didn’t tell her about the other bomb—just to find the pilot and deliver my message. That’s why she left.”
Reuben walked to the table where she’d left her drink, poured more vodka into the glass and downed it in a long, desperate gulp.
Goldhersh stared at the woman for a long moment, smiled, then walked to the closet he used as an office. He powered up his computer and started typing.
“Dear President Quaid,” he wrote. “We showed we can deliver a bomb to your doorstep. Now let me tell you about our other bombs.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Never Again came about as a result of my visit to the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where I represented two young Saudi Arabian men. I interviewed them while they were shackled to a ring on the floor. I
heard screams from the next room, but my clients comforted me it was just a recording meant to intimidate me. Or them. Guantanamo shocked me to the core (although it didn’t stop me from buying Gitmo T-shirts, refrigerator magnets and coffee mugs at the gift shop. I did wonder whether Dachau, too, had a gift shop or whether that was just an American thing.)
I flew home through Miami, where I visited my father. He had been captured two weeks after landing on Omaha Beach and held in a German prisoner-of-war camp. After I described Guantanamo to him he was silent, then said, “Imagine that, Americans are treating their boys worse than the Nazis treated me, a Jew.”
Imagine that. Americans acting worse than Nazis. My father’s comment inspired me to come up with a plausible scenario in which something like the Holocaust could happen in the United States. Thus, Never Again.
I’m not saying these events would happen in these circumstances, only that, you know, they could happen.
After all, ask yourself, if I were a character in this book, what would I do? Would I do nothing? How far would I go? There’s no right answer, I know. But there are right questions to be asked.
HARVEY SCHWARTZ
IPSWICH, MASSACHUSETTS
Never Again Page 41
