The Blue Widows - [Kamal & Barnea 06] Page 15

  When the haze finally passed, she had found Karim Matah of the Saudi intelligence service hovering over her bedside. Her father had dispatched him to bring her home and deal with the American authorities.

  It was decided best for all concerned not to pursue matters further. Hence, there was no investigation. On Matah’s instructions, Layla had not cooperated with the police or campus officials. Instead she withdrew from a school she had never wanted to attend in the first place.

  She had begged her father not to make her go to the world of her mother, a world that still terrified her from afar. But he had insisted, explaining that Western education would be vital to her involvement in the family business. So she had gone, closeting herself in her room between classes. Eating at odd hours so she could avoid crowds and attention.

  Halfway through her second year she had settled into a routine comfortable enough to allow her to relax. She made friends with other Saudi girls, who had adopted far more of the Western social life than she and agreed to accompany them to a party without realizing the kind of party it would be. Alcohol flowed freely. Layla was shocked to see the Saudi girls swallowing glass after glass and dancing with Americans in a suite room that had been cleared of furniture.

  Layla had clung to a corner until a young man brought her a soft drink. She took it and thanked him shyly, but he didn’t leave. There was a mirror across from the chair where she sat, and Layla had been studying herself in it when he came over. She almost didn’t recognize the figure in the mirror with the long, dark hair tumbling past her shoulders. The girls dancing in the other room didn’t have hair nearly as nice or eyes as deep and piercing. At one point Layla had risen and studied the curves and lines of her body in the mirror, only to quickly return to her chair in embarrassment over her sudden selfish awareness of her own physical beauty.

  I look like my mother.

  The very notion of that terrified her, and she was on the verge of rushing out of the party when the boy appeared with the soft drink. Layla liked the way his eyes responded to her, liked the way he gently touched her wrist and shoulder. She thought his touch would make her stiffen, but it didn’t. She watched her image and that of the boy in the mirror and at once enjoyed seeing herself this way.

  He offered to walk her back to her dorm and halfway there her mind stopped working. She was dimly aware of lying in a room she had never seen before and then the smell of him was on her. She remembered thinking of her mother, that this was her world, the world she had wanted to drag Layla into fifteen years before.

  A world she hated. A world of nothing but pain.

  The pain was worse by the time Matah had gotten her back to the family palace outside Riyadh. Even her father was cold toward her, so much so that Layla had told no one about the pain until it grew unbearable, leaving her sweating and feverish. They brought her to the hospital, and an hour later she was in surgery.

  When she awoke the pain was gone but an emptiness rose in its place. Layla had been unable to define it until in her father’s presence the doctors explained they had been forced to remove her uterus. She would never be able to bear children, but for some reason Layla didn’t care. It was apt punishment for what she had let happen the night of the assault. Two terrible events had now come to define her life: the rape and, fifteen years before that, the death of her mother by stoning. In that sense the West, America, had killed both of them.

  For her father, Layla’s rape had been the last straw. First her mother had betrayed him and now this. Hate became his passion, an unfathomable desire to see the world that had nearly destroyed both him and his daughter destroyed too.

  He had come to Layla’s hospital bed after the operation, knelt and grabbed her hand, pledging to her and her alone what he planned to do.

  They will pay. They will all pay.

  Layla remembered taking great solace in those words, that vow, never imagining it would fall upon her to complete. But she embraced the opportunity with the kind of passion that had been forever snuffed out that night long ago in the dormitory room.

  Layla’s trip to take her father’s place at the venture-capital meeting marked her first return to the world she was now committed to destroying. And she had found it unchanged, the men and women seated at the conference table before her nothing more than grown-up versions of the young college student who had stolen her womanhood. She had looked across the room and saw them as they would soon be, having fallen victim to her plot of assuring the destruction of their society.

  Her brother Saed was in for a surprise once she returned home. Their father had promised Layla her due. Once the stroke had incapacitated him months ago, she had taken over and run the company flawlessly. Keeping the truth of his condition, and prognosis, a secret even from members of the royal family. Using a computer to forge his signature on memos and checks. Picking up his work so seamlessly that the world accepted the great Abdullah Aziz Rahani had become a recluse. She knew how much he detested Saed, embarrassed to have a drunken playboy as his oldest son.

  The lines of traditional succession were going to be broken. Rahani Industries was going to be hers, to remake within the new shape of the world that was coming.

  * * * *

  Chapter 37

  B

  en sat on the bench of the fairgrounds midway, waiting for Alan Lewanthall to arrive. The pungent smells of fresh popcorn and cotton candy permeated the air. He could hear the excited, high voices of children, the occasional complaint of a boy or girl begging for another ride on the ancient merry-go-round or Ferris wheel. The music blaring from the rides as they spun and twisted provided the background to all the festivities.

  The annual Homecoming celebration had been a tradition in Dearborn for over twenty years now, although it had grown considerably in size and scope since he had brought his own children to Ford Field. Ben remembered brushing the popcorn from his son’s shirt and looking at the cotton candy leave sticky, pink trails down his daughter’s face. The ancient rides and games had remained virtually the same, outfitted with new names and a fresh coat of paint but unchanged underneath.

  They looked similarly unchanged today, but Ben now saw them for the rusted relics that they were. An insurance claim waiting to happen. He had asked Lewanthall to meet him here at Ford Field not just because of the sprawl and clamor, but also because it was a place that still made Ben feel safe and secure. He had taken a stroll about the grounds when he first arrived, which brought him face-to-face with many carny hawkers and workers he felt certain he had seen on his last visit here over a decade before. The face painting and temporary-tattoo parlors were new, the fortune-teller and guess-your-weight stations as ancient as time itself.

  But Ben had other things on his mind as well. Old and foreign feelings gnawed at him, raw in their unfamiliarity. He was scared in a way he hadn’t been in longer than he could remember, for he had come to realize he had something to lose. He had fled this world after the murder of his family into one of self-loathing and doubt. He had ended up in Palestine in search of purpose when all he really wanted was peace. It could have been anywhere, Ben realized now; the results would have been the same. And, in the process, distance had blurred links to the family he had left, as if they too had fallen prey a decade before.

  That family was now in hiding, protected by soldiers to whom his brother had given his support and sponsorship. But how long could they stay there? How long could Sayeed’s associates offer sanctuary from a shadowy force that had grown all-powerful before the witness of government watchdogs now powerless to stop it?

  The idea of losing his family brought the cold grasp of fear down on him hard and fast. And, sitting there on the midway, Ben realized the only person he had felt anything for in those ten years was Danielle Barnea.

  A woman he knew in his heart he could never have, rendering her safe from the same emotions that had already betrayed him. Was that why he hadn’t tried harder to talk her out of returning to Israel? Through his first years in Pa
lestine he’d had nothing to lose. Meeting Danielle had changed everything, taught him he could care again, but even that came with a price, as he learned the only thing harder than being apart from her was being together.

  Ben crossed his legs, then uncrossed them, wincing as he used his hands to lower the banged-up left one to the concrete. Lewanthall was late. There had been no call to Ben’s cell phone alerting him that the plan had changed, so he had to assume the man from the State Department was still coming. Finally, when his tardiness reached the half-hour mark, Ben plucked the phone from his jacket and started to dial Lewanthall’s number.

  “Put that in your pocket,” a voice said from just behind him.

  Ben turned and saw Lewanthall with his foot propped up on the section of the bench facing the opposite direction, pretending to tie his shoe.

  “Stand up and walk away,” the man from the State Department continued, reeking of cigarette smoke. The stench hugged his body like a wetsuit. “Don’t turn around. Whatever you do, don’t look at me.”

  “What’s wrong?” Ben asked, rising.

  “I was followed here. Now start moving. Walk.”

  Ben did. “Who are they?”

  Lewanthall fell into step slightly behind him. “Whoever’s behind this. Whoever wiped out the terrorists we lured together.”

  Ben started to turn around. “How could—”

  “Face forward! Don’t look at me, for Christ’s sake! They make you and neither one of us gets out of here alive.”

  They were nearing the end of the midway, the smells of popcorn and cotton candy drifting away as they passed the ancient collection of rusted, clanking rides.

  “Latif,” Ben said.

  “What?”

  “Latif told us he’d completed his delivery.”

  “I couldn’t confirm that.”

  “That must be who’s here now, the group that has the smallpox, after us.”

  “Not us—me. Just keep walking.”

  “I’ve got a phone. Let me—”

  “Call who? Don’t you get it, Ben? There isn’t anyone out there who can help us.”

  “Us.”

  “That’s right. Now. I’ve got to get back to Washington. Try to convince my superiors just how badly I fucked up. You’ve got a car?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bring it around to the exit we’re heading toward. I’ll be waiting. Maybe I can lose them.”

  “Don’t bullshit me.”

  “One of us has to get out of here, Ben. We can’t walk out together. Now, go.”

  Ben quickened his pace, widening the gap between them. He fought the urge to look back, see what Lewanthall was doing, where he was headed.

  A plan to bring on the end of all things. . .

  It was all laid out, fashioned by the madmen Lewanthall and others from the State Department had drawn together and then lost. All being killed now by some unknown force. Khalil, Latif—who knew how many others.

  The bait had been taken, the trap set and sprung.

  So what had gone wrong? Where had the plan, what Lewanthall called Operation Flypaper, broken down?

  Ben’s breath shortened as he cleared the grounds and hurried across the street into a grassy field that doubled as a parking lot today, trying to remember which row he had parked the car his brother had provided. Swing it around the front, throw open the door so Lewanthall could jump in. After that. . .

  After that, what!

  Ben found the car, climbed in, and slammed the door behind him. He turned the key, thinking of a bomb in the last moment before the engine whirred to life. His heart steadied. He took a few deep breaths and backed up.

  A horn blared. Tires screeched.

  In the rearview mirror Ben glimpsed a woman with a minivan full of children screaming at him. He was so jumpy he had forgotten to look first. He waited for the minivan to pass, then started to reverse again.

  He had parked just fifty yards from the entrance to the festival grounds, but heavy traffic, combined with cars parked on both sides of the streets beyond, made the process of getting there agonizingly slow. Finally he squeezed past a car that had stopped to drop off its load of kids and neared the main entrance set between a pair of booths offering tickets to the rides and attractions.

  A crowd had gathered, murmuring among themselves. Ben edged the car closer, saw a Dearborn policeman crouched over a man who looked to be sitting down on the pavement, his back against one of the ticket booths.

  Lewanthall!

  Ben caught a glimpse of his face as he approached behind the line of cars, not daring to stop and knowing already there was no reason to. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of Lewanthall’s mouth. One of his eyes had locked open. The cop jostled him, and he slumped over, revealing a bloodstain on the cracked wood of the old ticket booth.

  A head shot, Ben figured, they had taken Lewanthall with a head shot, very likely from up close.

  Ben pulled around the two cars remaining before him and accelerated. He wondered if one or more in the mingling crowd had been watching for him, seen him, even.

  It didn’t matter. Only escape mattered now.

  Back on the road, Ben waited to make sure he wasn’t being followed before collecting his thoughts, contemplating his next move. He drew the cell phone from his pocket and held it briefly before hitting the first number programmed into its memory.

  “John Najarian’s office.”

  “It’s Ben Kamal, Helen,” he said to Najarian’s assistant. “I need to talk to John.”

  “He’s in transit, Mr. Kamal.”

  “This is an emergency. Patch me through.”

  It took a minute before Najarian came on the line, his voice raised slightly over the blare of engine sounds. “Ben, what’s wrong?”

  “Lewanthall’s dead.”

  “Our Lewanthall, from the State Department? How?”

  “Shot. Murdered. He put us on to something much bigger than a simple fugitive hunt. He used us, John. He goddamn used us.”

  “Slow down, Ben. I’ve got to think this out.”

  “There’s nothing to think out. You need to reach someone in the State Department. We’ve got to come in and turn all this over.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  “With good reason,” Ben told Najarian. “Lewanthall made a mess and hired us to help him clean it up before it was too late. He went rogue and he dragged us, the company, with him.”

  A pause.

  “Are you still in Detroit, Ben?”

  “The general area, yes.”

  “Can you get to Washington? Is it safe for you to fly?”

  “I’ll get to Washington,” Ben assured him. “You just get us a meeting with the highest-ranking official you can get your hands on.”

  “That kind of thing takes time.”

  “We don’t have it. Tell them you know what’s missing from USAMRIID.”

  Ben could feel the tension through the silence on the line.

  “That’s the army’s biowarfare headquarters,” Najarian said finally.

  “That’s all you need to know. Tell whoever you reach at State to check Lewanthall’s file and look for something called Operation Flypaper. It’ll all be there for someone with the clearance to read it.”

  “What do I tell them about you?”

  “That Lewanthall told me everything before he died,” Ben said. “And none of it’s good.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 38

  W

  hat is it we’re looking for exactly?” Danielle asked al-Asi as they methodically searched Zanah Fahury’s apartment in Umm al Fahm, each strangely respectful of the dead woman’s possessions. On the drive north from Jerusalem they had heard heavy gunfire coming from the village of Jenin and had to stop for a time to allow a convoy of Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers to cross the road. Danielle still found it strange how the constant sights of such war machines and the sound of gunfire had so easily melted into the backdrop of Israel
i life. She remembered once thinking how sad that was. Now it just was.

  “Good question, Chief Inspector,” al-Asi said and closed another drawer. “Let’s start with what we don’t see. An old woman’s residence— it’s fairly clear what’s missing.”

  “Pictures,” Danielle noted. “Memorabilia of any kind.”

  “An old woman without any family, perhaps,” the colonel followed, not sounding convinced by the words. “Without family or memories.”

  “Or perhaps trying to hide them. But how does that explain her connection to whoever killed Akram Khalil, Colonel?”