The Blue Widows - [Kamal & Barnea 06] Page 24

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Am I?”

  “I think you were afraid of success. I think you were afraid it would do to you what it did to your father.”

  “It destroyed him. Turned him into a victim.”

  “Exactly. And you think by denying credit for what we accomplished, you can avoid che same fate.” She paused and held his gaze through the darkness. “You can’t, because other people know what you’ve done, what you’re capable of. Like John Najarian and this man from the State Department.”

  “The man from the State Department used me.”

  “You think it was any different when that man hired us to prove the People’s Brigade was holding his son? He knew the boy was dead; the FBI agent planted inside would have passed on the information. But he sent us after the People’s Brigade anyway, because he knew exactly what he was getting. And when the Ministry of Justice offered me the job of commander, they knew what they were getting.”

  “You’re blaming yourself for what happened over there.”

  “Because I let myself be manipulated by them, just like you let yourself be manipulated by this man Lewanthall. We’re too predictable, Ben. And we have our pasts to blame for it.”

  “I thought if we stayed here, in America, that maybe . . . Well, things could be different. I knew I could never go back, but you always had a choice, Danielle.”

  “I’ sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Turning your own people against you.”

  “They were turned against me long before I met you. You were the best thing that happened to me over there. But, at the same time, you made me realize I didn’t belong. That’s what I meant. I belong here; I always did.” Ben paused and held her gaze somberly. “You don’t. You never did.”

  Danielle had shrugged, laid her head on his shoulder.

  “You’ll go back when this is over,” Ben had continued, wrapping his arm around her “I know you will.”

  “Not this time. There’s nothing to go back to.”

  She’d hugged him tight, and they finally drifted off to sleep, together.

  The landing jarred Ben alert again. He looked from the outskirts of the airport speeding by beyond the window back to the armrest where Danielle was still squeezing his hand. He squeezed back.

  “We’re going to save your brother, Ben,” she assured him. “Whatever it takes.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 62

  T

  his is your first visit to the production facility since it’s been online, isn’t it?” Hazeltine said to Layla Aziz Rahani, as they began their tour of the processing plant.

  “It is,” Rahani acknowledged, amazed by the sheer scope of what lay beyond her through the observation windows. She only wished her father could have been here with her to see it too.

  “We continue to fine-tune the process,” Hazeltine explained. “In pharmaceutical production, being even the slightest bit off can destroy an entire lot. So we test, and we continue to test under the exact specifications until we’re sure we get it right.”

  The sight below through the glass was amazing, awe-inspiring. An assembly line stretching the width and length of two football fields side by side. One hundred-percent automated, controlled by the most sophisticated robotic technology in the history of manufacturing. No human walked the floor, all monitoring conducted and changes made from behind the same glass control room Layla Aziz Rahani stood watching from now. Nothing could be allowed to contaminate the production area, since contamination was one of the top causes of waste and spoiled runs in the industry.

  Layla stood behind the glass alongside Hazeltine, marveling at what she saw.

  “We’re producing three million doses per day,” Hazeltine narrated, “which means—”

  “You’ll be finished in just over ten weeks,” Layla Aziz Rahani completed.

  “Enough for every man, woman, and child in America.” Hazeltine turned from the production process below to look at her. “Your faith and your investment has been justified. You should be quite proud.”

  “I am, Mr. Hazeltine. More than you can possibly realize.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 63

  Y

  ou’re kidding, right?” the UN doctor assigned to the village of Kokobi said to Professor Albert Paulsen. He had a thick British accent that emerged through a set of dry, cracked lips.

  Paulsen mopped his brow with a rag he kept in the pocket of the sleeveless khaki vest he’d received from his driver in exchange for his bathrobe. He missed the robe already, couldn’t wait to buy a new one. “A hundred and ten degrees, flies the size of Volkswagens—no, Dr. Chastity—”

  “That’s Chastain.”

  “—I’m not kidding.”

  Chastain shook his head, clearly perturbed. “You really don’t know what happened here.”

  “Do I look like I came on vacation?”

  Chastain sighed, trying to ignore the splotches of sweat that had soaked through his white exam coat. “This village holds the remains of a major fuck-up.”

  “People looked fine to me.”

  “Oh, they’re fine, all right. That’s not the problem. What do you think of when you think of Africa, Professor?”

  “Heat and flies.”

  “Medically.”

  “AIDS and overpopulation.”

  Chastain leaned forward on his stool, as if his point had been made. “And if you could do something about the latter?”

  “No form of birth control has ever worked.”

  “The Ethiopian government tried a new one a few years back. Major breakthrough. Simple pill. They even made it chewable. They tested it here in Kokobi. Totally against protocol, I know, but this is Africa, so who would ever know?” Chastain leaned back again. “Apparently no one. It’s why I’m still here, why they haven’t let me leave. So no one ever will find out.”

  “Except me.”

  “You really want to hear this?”

  “Can’t wait.”

  “You can, Professor. Believe me, you can.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 64

  I

  t’s called Twenty Mile Point,” Ben told the clerk behind the Hertz counter, after Danielle had finished signing the agreement for their car.

  The clerk tapped the location into her computer and smiled politely. “Nothing under that name in our database. I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Try Port Hope. Or Saginaw Bay. That’s it, try Saginaw Bay.”

  The clerk tried again, nodding this time at the results. “That did it. Here we go.”

  Ben leaned closer to Danielle. “We always used to stop at Port Hope on the way to the cabin. If we can find Port Hope, I can get us the rest of the way there.”

  But Danielle was looking back at the clerk, as their directions rolled out of her laser printer. “We’re supposed to meet someone there,” she said. “I wonder if they’ve been through the airport already.”

  The clerk smiled obligingly. “If you have their name ...”

  “Sorry.” Danielle shrugged. “I don’t know whose name the reservation would be under. But they would have asked for the same directions we did. Could you check, see if anyone else has?”

  “Port Hope again? Saginaw Bay?” The clerk started typing without waiting for a response. “As a matter of fact, a party requested directions to Saginaw Bay at another Hertz terminal just ninety minutes ago. Sorry, I don’t have their name. . . .”

  “No problem,” Danielle said, backing away from the counter. “That’s all we need to know.”

  “Shit!” Ben yelled when they caught a third consecutive red light after pulling out of the rental lot.

  “Stay calm, Ben. We’ve got time,” Danielle said, watching him pound the wheel in frustration.

  “They’ve got a ninety-minute head start on us, for God’s sake.”

  “That doesn’t mean they know the exact location of the cabin, like you do. Besides . . .”

  �
��Besides what?”

  “You said this cabin was isolated. Nothing around for miles.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then they won’t come until nighttime.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  Danielle held Ben’s gaze. “Because that’s the way I would do it.”

  “Could be it’s not People’s Brigade soldiers anyway. Could be it’s State Department personnel on my brother’s trail.”

  “It’s the People’s Brigade, Ben.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because the name on the rental agreement was Heydan,” Danielle told him. “The name of the lake where their Idaho compound was located.”

  They made good time, hugging the Michigan coast for a long stretch along Lake Huron before moving inland onto a less traveled freeway. To save time, Ben elected not to head back east toward Port Hope, believing he could recapture the route to Twenty Mile Point on Saginaw Bay once the freeway spilled back onto a coastal road farther north.

  “We don’t have any weapons,” Ben said, stating the obvious.

  “We’ve got something better: ourselves.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Whoever Buchert’s sending won’t be expecting us to be there. He figures he’s tracking a college professor, his wife, and two kids. That means they’ll come at the cabin the same way they came after that house outside Dearborn: fast and hard.”

  “And how do we stop them without guns?”

  “Leave that to me,” Danielle said confidently.

  The route to Twenty Mile Point came back with surprising ease. Ben found that strange, since the family had only gone there three times prior to his father’s return to Palestine. He remembered, as a first grader, counting the days until school was out in June because his father had promised they would return to the cabin the final afternoon. Pick up Ben and Sayeed at school and drive straight from there.

  He also remembered the night in June his father sat transfixed in front of the television watching the coverage of the Arab attack on Israel that would later become known as the Six-Day War. Not realizing then that Jafir Kamal had been expecting this and knew what it meant for him.

  Ben couldn’t have known at that point he’d never see the cabin again until today, so many years later. How often he had thought of it at night after Jafir Kamal had left, recalling how his father had taught him and his brother to fish from the skiff they kept moored against a tiny dock nestled up against the rear of their property.

  It was all as clear to him now as it was then. The clean scent of wood that permeated the cabin, especially strong every time they first stepped through the door. The old, heavy furniture that was uncomfortable to sit in. The water that was always cold, fresh, and much better tasting than the water in Dearborn. At night the surrounding woods had been alive with the sound of insects, replaced at dawn by birds and the quiet lapping of the bay currents against the shore.

  A few times when Ben woke early, he’d spied his father standing alone on the edge of the dock looking out over the morning mist lifting off the bay. Jafir Kamal relaxed and at peace. Thinking back, that was probably what Ben had loved about the cabin more than anything. Now he tried to remember if his father had kept a gun in the cabin.

  “Stop at that store!” Danielle said suddenly, pointing to a combination general store, gas station, and snack bar with a huge OPEN sign twisting in the wind.

  “We’re almost to the cabin,” Ben told her. “Just another ten miles, I think.”

  “A few things we need to pick up before we get there,” she explained evasively.

  Ben jerked the steering wheel to the right and the car veered into the sparsely filled parking lot, causing bells to ring when it rolled over the signal wire laid before the gas pumps. He killed the engine and looked across the seat at Danielle.

  “Like what?”

  “You’ll see,” she said, and threw open her door.

  Ben followed her up and down the narrow aisles, pushing one of the store’s three wagons. It had a stuck wheel, which made it a challenge to keep headed straight, a fact lost on Danielle, who continued to scan the rows, piling items in as they went.

  “I think I get the idea,” Ben realized, starting to catalogue them for himself.

  She barely seemed to be paying attention to him. “In the Sayaret you never know what weapons will be available to you for a mission,” she explained finally. “The idea is to be able to create them from whatever you have available.”

  Ben checked the contents of the cart again. “Very industrious.”

  She turned and faced him, putting her hands on his shoulders. “I liked your mother very much.”

  Ben looked down at her hands, the way they were touching him. “She liked you too.”

  “Did she approve? Of us, I mean.”

  “She wanted me to be happy. After you left to go back to Israel, she called me ahmaq for letting you go.”

  Danielle lowered her hands back to her sides. “Ahmaq?”

  “Stupid,” Ben translated.

  “You didn’t explain.”

  “About Pine Valley? I couldn’t.”

  “I understand.”

  “No, you don’t. I couldn’t tell her what happened there because I didn’t know how to tell her what you did. I was afraid.”

  “That she wouldn’t approve of me, of us, anymore? That she’d know me for what I was, what I am?”

  Ben could only look at her.

  “I told you I understood,” Danielle said.

  * * * *

  Chapter 65

  I

  n the end it was the smells that told Ben they were close. He couldn’t say what they were exactly—something piney and sweet— but they drew his mind back to a past he had thought was long gone.

  The road wound round a rough protrusion of land called Twenty Mile Point, the bay coming alive briefly in glimpses captured through the woods, just regaining their springtime fullness. The road felt the same, lined with ruts and dips the midsize rental took no better than the Ford station wagon Jafir Kamal had bought used from a fellow employee at the Ford plant in the early months of 1967. It was narrow, with barely enough room for two cars to pass side by side, although in his previous trips here as a young boy Ben could never remember seeing another car once Twenty Mile Point was behind them.

  Danielle asked him to pull over. She got out and crouched over the road, smoothing the dirt with her hand.

  “I don’t think any other cars have been by here in the last few hours.”

  “But you’re not sure.”

  “The road’s dry. The signs aren’t clear enough to be sure.”

  “We’re only a few minutes from the cabin now,” Ben offered. “I’m pretty sure of that.”

  She looked at her watch, then glanced into the backseat crammed with brown shopping bags. “Three hours before dark. We’ll have to work fast.”

  Ben had never felt closer to Danielle than he did in that moment. The two of them standing alone in the middle of a desolate road, the scene a microcosm of their relationship. He saw Danielle in her element, a soldier doing a soldier’s work. Capable of losing herself in it while never losing track of the greater picture.

  Ben’s hopes that her skills would be put to good use rose when he found the entrance to the private road, long lost to overgrowth. The rental clawed past it, stubborn branches scraping against the windows on both sides. Then his heart sank when the cabin came into view.

  It was nothing like he remembered. Smaller, lighter in shade, and not nearly as sturdy in appearance. Not much more than a shack, really. Hardly worthy of a place where so many boyhood dreams had been born.

  Worse, it looked utterly abandoned, surrendering to the woods that had encroached on its very being. The front steps were lost to weeds, the roof barely discernible amid the overhang of trees growing out toward the bay waters beyond. The cabin had always been well shaded, Ben recalled. Today darkness enveloped it. No car was in view either, no evi
dence of anyone having come or gone, making him fret that his brother, for some reason, had disregarded his plan.

  Ben pulled the rental to a halt and climbed out. His heart pounded, the fear that Sayeed and his family, Ben’s only true remaining living relatives, were lying dead somewhere else far away from here very real now.