The Blue Widows - [Kamal & Barnea 06] Read online

  “My wife and kids have been dead a long time. Or did someone forget to update that part of my file at State, the part about the serial killer who targeted me when I got too close ten years ago?”

  “Of course we know. It was the reason you moved to the West Bank.”

  “Moved back. I was born there.”

  “Your niece and nephew weren’t,” Lewanthall reminded. “And your brother’s actions have placed them all under scrutiny, along with your mother. It would be a shame if any of their lives should be needlessly disrupted by being called in for questioning.”

  Ben did his best to ignore Lewanthall’s thinly veiled threat, and responded evenly, “America still had a Constitution last time I checked, unlike Israel.”

  “You’re right, of course. How silly of me. It’s just that, well, the indications we’ve accumulated about Latif are rather frightening. Cell phone calls traced to known Hamas drop points gaining frequency in recent weeks. Meetings with known al-Qaeda operatives who managed to slip off our radar. Now his disappearance.” Lewanthall paused, hoping for effect. “We believe he’s up to something that has Akram Khalil’s blessing.”

  “In the U.S. . . .”

  “To be launched against the U.S.”

  “And you want me to find him.”

  “The alternative is seizing all his known associates. . . and sponsors. Am I making myself clear?

  “Quite. How much of this did you tell Najarian?”

  “Nothing. I informed him I needed you for some surveillance work on a suspected terrorist cell in the Dearborn area. I didn’t mention anything about your family’s direct connection.”

  “My brother’s. And we’re not sure it’s direct.”

  Lewanthall twisted his paper clip tight enough around his own index finger to shut off the blood to the tip, the flesh going deep red. “I was trying to be discreet. These are difficult times for people of Arab heritage in this country, and I sympathize with that. Word of a relative’s involvement with Hamas could derail a career, even render a man unwelcome in his adopted country.”

  “I’m an American citizen, Mr. Lewanthall. So is my brother.”

  “I was speaking in generalities, Mr. Kamal. But look at it this way,” he added, leaning forward in his chair enough to deposit the mangled paper clip on the edge of Ben’s desk. “At least you have another country to go back to.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 4

  T

  he six women made their way down Teryet Street, the main thoroughfare in Deir al Balah. Located on the Gaza Strip mere miles from a host of Jewish settlements, Deir al Balah headquartered an office of Yasir Arafat’s Fatah group and remained home to a number of militants wanted by Israel.

  The women carried straw baskets of bread and supplies. Four wore the baskets slung from their backs while the remaining two toted them with both hands wrapped tight around the handles, exercising the same caution they would had the baskets contained babies instead of supplies.

  Head scarves obscured the lower portions of the women’s faces. Shapeless robes, called abaiyas, hid their bodies. It would have been easier to take the supplies by car. But moving vehicles made too inviting a target for the Israeli helicopter gunships that often cruised the skies high overhead. Furthermore, they required gasoline, an expensive commodity these days. So the women, along with most of the inhabitants of Deir al Balah, walked down the dirty streets pitted by disrepair and stray shrapnel, the residue of past attacks.

  The women ambled past the edge of a refugee camp and continued on to a nest of shops that stayed open despite little merchandise and few patrons. The barter system was used almost exclusively, no one having the money to trade or exchange for the goods. The women avoided the gazes of a pair of old Palestinian men sucking tobacco smoke up the long flexible tubes of water pipes and lugged their straw baskets down a narrow alley wet with mud and waste water. A fence lay before them, with a gate that opened to the inside.

  The gate was unguarded, the latch unhooked.

  “Wait for my signal to move,” Danielle Barnea said into the tiny microphone hidden by her head scarf. She tried to ignore the discomfort she felt at the absence of the guard her intelligence had indicated was always posted here.

  Almost to the open gate now, watching it sway slightly in the breeze . . .

  “Now!” Danielle ordered.

  In the next instant all six baskets were dropped, hidden weapons torn from the still-warm bread and other supplies. The women rushed the gate in single file, Danielle Barnea at their lead. She slowed only slightly at the gate, smashing it inward with a sandaled foot, twisting her Uzi round the compound’s courtyard in search of Akram Khalil’s guards.

  Intelligence indicated the Hamas leader would have six of them, including two here in the courtyard. Khalil’s men had staged a daring raid a few days before at the isolated Israeli settlement of Netzarim. Daring because they drove straight through the gate disguised as Israeli soldiers, their Jeep painted a slightly off-color shade of green, which should have alerted the posted guards but didn’t. The terrorists had killed eight and wounded twice that many before being cut down themselves.

  Danielle, now commander of Israel’s National Police, thought her plan of disguise and entry to be especially fitting, under the circumstances.

  The gate had barely banged up against the stone wall when she almost tripped on the downed body of one of the compound’s guards, blood running beneath his white robes from a half-dozen bullet holes. The body of a second guard lay facedown amid the courtyard’s overgrown brush, halfway between the main building and entrance. An assault rifle lay just out of his grasp, lost when a spray of bullets felled him.

  The five female commandos lunged into the courtyard behind her and fanned out as planned, as Danielle stooped enough to touch the blood pooling beneath the nearest guard’s body.

  Still warm.

  She felt the prick of the unexpected unnerve her and rose swiftly.

  Fifty feet ahead, her commandos had reached the entrance to Akram Khalil’s refuge. She drew up even with them, steadied her Uzi, and gave the signal to breach the doorway.

  The commandos on the immediate left and right of the heavy wood door shot their way through, kicking the door in ahead of them. Danielle could feel the muffled spits in her stomach, an echo of vibration rather than sound. The stench of cordite and sulfur burned her nostrils as she surged through into the murky, half-lit haze.

  The bodies of three more dead Palestinian guards lay before her. A fourth had slumped against a doorjamb across the floor, assault rifle bracketed and standing straight up between his legs. He had tried to retreat, perhaps to warn or protect Khalil, before the invaders’ bullets had caught him.

  Very professional. Handled just the way her team would have handled it. Neat and clean.

  Someone had gotten here ahead of her. The army, perhaps, or Mossad. Unlikely but not unheard of in the annals of jurisdictional overlaps in Israel. Her intelligence, though, had been secure and exclusive. Of that much, she was certain.

  Who, then, had done this?

  Danielle smelled the smoke when she was halfway to a door that had been splintered by bullets. Flames crackled, their glow illuminating the interior of the room beyond.

  Danielle found the body of the terrorist leader inside. Akram Khalil had collapsed near a spilled trash can still coughing flames. Perhaps he had knocked it over when he was shot down, spewing its smoldering contents across the scratched tile floor. The remains were a charred, smoking mess, yet salvageable. Danielle stamped out the remnants of the flames with her boots, hoping to preserve as much of the pages as possible.

  “Commander,” came the voice of one of the commandos posted in the compound’s front through her earpiece, “we have movement at the head of the alley.”

  “Pull back for evac,” Danielle ordered.

  “You better have a look at this first, Commander.”

  Danielle moved to an area of the floor where anothe
r of her commandos was inspecting one of the pages spared when the contents of the spilled trash can had been extinguished. Danielle hovered over her, submachine gun at the ready.

  “Can you read Arabic, Samal sheni?” she asked, addressing the woman by her rank of corporal.

  “Not this dialect,” the woman replied.

  Danielle took the scorched page from her, noting it was covered with Arabic letters, when the three commandos she had posted beyond this room rushed inside in a blur.

  “Enemy approaching, Commander,” one blurted, nearly out of breath.

  “We take all this with us,” Danielle said, gathering a handful of charred pages from the floor. “Bag everything you can.”

  The commandos looked at each other. The sound of voices echoed not far away.

  “Do it!” Danielle ordered. “Now!”

  * * * *

  Chapter 5

  I

  got the feeling there was something our friend Mr. Lewanthall wasn’t telling me,” John Najarian, head of Security Concepts, said to Ben after the man from the State Department had left.

  “There was: He suspects my brother is involved in some plot. He held that over my head to convince me to take the job.”

  “You should have told the bastard to go fuck himself.”

  “I will. . . after I prove him wrong about my brother.”

  Najarian folded his forearms. They were covered in dark, coarse hair, as were his chest and legs. That had been the first thing Ben noticed when they’d first met at the Jericho Resort Village in the West Bank. Najarian had been among the resort’s only guests when he came to recruit Ben three years before, and he would be among its last. The resort had closed its doors for good a few months later, a victim first of Israeli blockades and a crumbling Palestinian economy, and later of punitive Israeli shelling when it was mistaken for the police academy.

  Najarian’s office was three or four times the size of Ben’s, complete with a sitting area and wet bar that was more for show than use. The angle of the windows hid all of Logan Airport from view while showcasing the water from all sides.

  “You understand why I agreed to this, of course,” Najarian said.

  “Business.”

  “We could do worse than government contracts. I asked Lewanthall if he wanted to discuss the fee for your services.” Najarian smiled broadly. “He just told me where to send the bill.”

  “So how much am I worth?”

  The head of Security Concepts started to smile again, then stopped. “There’s something else you should know, Ben. He asked about Danielle Barnea.”

  Ben felt the skin prickle along his spine as he did every time Danielle’s name came up. “And what did you tell him?”

  “That she was employed here for two months prior to her return to Israel to take over as commissioner of National Police.”

  “Commander,” Ben corrected.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Commander, or nitzav. The job of commissioner is still open.”

  “But that job was promised to her after a year’s time, wasn’t it?”

  “Under certain conditions.”

  Najarian sighed. “Politics.”

  Ben closed his hands into fists atop each thigh. “That’s what Lewanthall asked you about?”

  Najarian stretched his arms out over his desk. “Actually, he was more interested in whether or not the two of you had lived together over here.”

  “Briefly.”

  “I told him that.”

  “He must already have known the answer.”

  “I know,” Najarian said with a grin. “That’s why I told him.”

  “Did Pine Valley come up in the conversation?” Ben wondered.

  “Lewanthall didn’t ask about it, and I saw no reason to tell him.”

  “Good.”

  Najarian’s face squared off in concern, his jaw seeming to protrude forward. “You’ve got to stop blaming yourself for what happened there.”

  “Men died at Pine Valley, John. One of them was an FBI agent. You could have been ruined.”

  “But I wasn’t, you and Danielle got out safely, and there were no repercussions.”

  “There were for the Rantisi family; their son was later found buried on the property.”

  “The two of you had nothing to do with that. And the offer for her to become the first female head of Israel’s National Police was on the table before Pine Valley.” Najarian cleared his throat, shifted his thick shoulders. “What now?” he asked Ben.

  “I fly to Detroit this afternoon and see how cooperative my brother wants to be in helping me find Mohammed Latif.”

  The phone on Najarian’s desk buzzed, and he snatched up the receiver in a beefy hand. “Yes?” He found Ben’s gaze from across the desk. “No, just tell her to hold for a moment.”

  Najarian switched the receiver from his left hand to his right. “You should take this in your office, Ben.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Danielle Barnea.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 6

  D

  anielle Barnea had stopped in the doorway of the commissioner’s office on the fourth floor of National Police headquarters in Jerusalem as she always did on her way back to her own. The spacious office reserved for the rav nitzav had been vacant since the interim replacement for the slain Moshe Baruch had been summarily reassigned upon Danielle’s appointment to serve as nitzav, or commander, ten months before. She had painstakingly refurbished the office to look exactly as it had in the years it had been occupied by her mentor, Hershel Giott; she had even found Giott’s old desk down in the basement. Someday soon she would sit at that desk, though she’d never be able to fill it as he had.

  “Is that you, Commander?”

  The voice coming from the darkened rear of the office startled her, and Danielle turned to see Deputy Minister of Justice David Vordi standing by the window.

  “Good evening, Minister.”

  Vordi smiled slightly at her. “We’re alone. It’s permissible to address me by my first name, Danielle.”

  At forty, Vordi was a few years older than Danielle, young to have achieved such a high position in the government. His hair was still full and thick, though slightly graying at the temples. His intense eyes retained the same piercing brown Danielle recalled from fifteen years earlier, when Vordi had served as one of her trainers in the elite commando force of the Sayaret. He had kept close tabs on her career ever since, ultimately leading him to offer her the job of commissioner of National Police upon attaining his current position nearly a year before.

  “I was hoping we could talk,” Vordi said quietly. He had a boyish look to him and was undeniably handsome. “When I didn’t find you across the hall, I couldn’t resist coming in to see what you’ve done with Commissioner Giott’s office. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” Danielle told him, still in the doorway.

  Vordi gazed about the office, then slid a hand almost reverently across a lamp table Danielle had recovered from the trash room in the basement upon her return. “Did I tell you he brought me into the Ministry of Defense?”

  “No, Minister.”

  Vordi seemed perturbed by Danielle’s formal address. “I had just completed my last active mission with the Sayaret when I received a call from Commissioner Giott. He said the Ministry of Defense was looking for someone like me to serve as a liaison with the police agencies. That was what, five years ago?”

  “Six,” Danielle corrected.

  Vordi looked at Giott’s desk again. “It doesn’t seem like he’s been gone that long. I learned a lot from him, Danielle. The first thing he did when I came to the ministry was warn me not to take unnecessary risks. My reputation had obviously preceded me.” Vordi’s eyes flashed warmly toward Danielle. “As yours did, I assume.”

  “And then some.”

  “I didn’t always listen at first, of course.” Vordi sighed. To Danielle, the gesture seemed forced, meant to mak
e him seem warmer, more a man and less a superior. “Commissioner Giott called me into this office each time. A few times he just stared across his desk, didn’t say a word. Sound familiar?”

  “Quite.”

  Vordi moved from the desk closer to Danielle. “How do you think he would feel about your actions this morning, Danielle?”

  “He would trust my judgment. He wouldn’t have believed my actions this morning constituted an unnecessary risk.”