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

  Ben and Danielle stepped inside, finding themselves not in an office but in a hospital room, very large and capped by a cathedral ceiling that came to a perfect point in the center. They stopped directly beneath it, uncertain how to proceed. Tables covered the room on three sides, atop which lay scale models of what Ben and Danielle recognized as hotels, resorts, and water and theme parks.

  The one remaining wall contained a hospital bed surrounded by multiple whirring machines and occupied by a pale, emaciated figure with wires running from his fingers and under his shirt, a tube wedged through the corner of his mouth that snaked down his throat. The angle of the tube kept his face locked in a perpetually ghastly snarl. But the built-in shelves and elegant wood paneling told them this room had once served an entirely different function, as an office, probably.

  A woman, a nurse or an attendant, hovered over the man’s bedside. Dressed in black robes with a veil wrapped adroitly to cover all but her eyes, she placed a plastic catheter pouch into a disposal bag and then gently tucked in the sheet that covered the man up to the throat. The nurse never so much as looked at Ben and Danielle, going about her business as they stiffly held their ground.

  “Leave us, Marta,” a voice came from behind them.

  Ben and Danielle turned to find a tall, stunning woman standing in the doorway, dressed in a perfectly tailored suit.

  Layla Aziz Rahani. Danielle felt her heart begin to beat faster. For his part, Ben fought to show no reaction at all, though the resemblance between the two women was even more striking in person.

  Layla closed the double doors behind her and came forward as the nurse named Marta exited the room through a doorway neatly tucked into a recessed wall.

  “My father’s nurse,” she explained, drawing even with Ben and Danielle. “She’s been here ever since the stroke incapacitated him. I don’t know what I would do without her.” She looked toward Danielle, gesturing toward her head scarf. “You can take that off now, Commander Barnea. Yus iduni t-ta arruf ilayaka.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 87

  I

  can’t say it’s a pleasure to meet you,” Danielle retorted.

  “Masa a I’hayr, Inspector Kamal,” Layla said to Ben.

  “Good evening,” Ben offered lamely in English. He glanced once again at Layla, then back to Danielle.

  But for a few changes in features, they could be the same person. . . .

  They both looked like their mother. Layla Rahani was shorter than Danielle but had a similar build. Her hair was cut shorter to make it easier to conceal beneath a head scarf, but the color and waves were the same. The only major difference between them was their eyes, Danielle’s being darker and fuller—her father’s eyes.

  “Do you like what you see, Inspector?” Layla Aziz Rahani asked him.

  Ben hadn’t realized he was staring at her. “Only up to a point,” he told her.

  Layla turned her attention back to Danielle. “An interesting ruse you tried to pull off,” she resumed. “It might have worked, if I hadn’t been expecting you. I know you’re unarmed. Tell me, did you expect to come in here and kill me with your bare hands?”

  “Only if I have to.”

  “Not a wise idea,” Layla said, continuing toward the bed that the servant Marta had just been tending. “I have guards posted outside the door. I thought I’d introduce myself before I turn you over to them.”

  “You don’t want to do that,” Danielle told her.

  “Really? Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because of the woman you had killed in Jerusalem.”

  Layla Aziz Rahani nodded, clearly surprised by how much Danielle had been able to surmise. “Your reputation is apparently well earned. Please, proceed.”

  “You thought you were finishing the job you started as a little girl, convinced yourself that woman, Zanah Fahury, was your mother.”

  “With good reason.”

  “After all these years ...”

  “That seems to be of particular concern to you, this woman’s murder.”

  “How did you find her?” Danielle asked.

  “I came across a diamond ring at a jeweler’s during a business trip to London just over a month ago.” Layla Rahani Aziz stopped and for a moment her expression saddened. “My mother’s wedding ring, among the few possessions she had with her when she tried to take me out of London.” Her gaze drifted to her father’s hospital bed. “My father made her swallow many of her diamonds.”

  Danielle suppressed a shudder, recalling the many trips the woman who called herself Zanah Fahury had made to Glickstein’s jewelry store in Jerusalem.

  “I managed to remain calm long enough to inquire about the stone’s origins. The store’s proprietor proved most cooperative when I offered to pay double what the ring was worth.” Layla Aziz Rahani reached a hand into her pocket and emerged with the ring, holding it out for Danielle to see. “Money well spent, as it turned out.”

  “Not really; you made a mistake.”

  “I think not.”

  “Zanah Fahury wasn’t your mother. She was the governess Habiba who fled that night thirty years ago in London. She must have had your mother’s jewelry case with her. That was where the wedding ring came from.”

  Layla Aziz Rahani’s eyelids flickered as she weighed Danielle’s assertion. She started to speak, then stopped, thinking some more.

  “Habiba left London with your sister too,” Danielle continued. “Kavi.”

  “No,” Layla Aziz Rahani insisted. “Kavi’s dead.”

  Danielle moved closer to the hospital bed, Ben trailing slightly behind her. “That’s right, she is. She died in London that night thirty years ago. Only she wasn’t shot or stabbed. Her life just started over again. In Israel, where she was raised as a Jew by Yakov Barnea.”

  In spite of herself, Layla Aziz Rahani drew in her breath sharply, fighting to remain in control.

  “I’m surprised you never figured it out for yourself,” Danielle continued. “My sister.”

  “You lie!”

  “You know it’s the truth,” Danielle said forcefully, watching uncertainty bloom in Layla’s eyes.

  Layla Aziz Rahani shook her head slowly. “I share no blood with you!”

  “Only half, because Yakov Barnea was my real father. That’s why he was so willing to raise me as his own, because that’s what I was.” Danielle paused to let her words sink in. “So how does it feel, having an Israeli for a sister?”

  “I’m not your—” Layla Aziz Rahani started to raise her voice, then broke her words off altogether, remembering some of her father’s final words to her mother, accusing her of having an affair. Could it be, was it possible that affair had been with Yakov Barnea?.

  “Yes, you are, and you know it. You can feel it just as I can. Look in the mirror and tell me who you see looking back.”

  Layla shook with rage. “It was your father who saved the whore’s life, wasn’t it?”

  “If you want to call whatever she had afterwards a life, yes.” Danielle stopped, gaining confidence. “So what’s the plan, you going to stone me now, maybe Inspector Kamal too?”

  Layla twisted toward Ben derisively. “A Palestinian who sleeps with a Jew. You deserve a worse fate than that.”

  “I’m also American,” Ben told her.

  “Which is more than our mother was,” Danielle followed. She waited for fresh surprise to display itself on Layla Aziz Rahani’s features before resuming. “She was Israeli. Her real name was Hanna Frank. Part of my father’s operation to save the state of Israel, and Abdullah Aziz Rahani fell right into her hands. So, my sister, your father was a traitor, and you never even knew it.” Danielle looked down at Abdullah Aziz Rahani’s inert figure once more. “Our mother never loved him. My father was her true love.”

  Layla Aziz Rahani, trembling with new rage, steadied herself with a few deep breaths. “Your father didn’t save his world, my sister, he only postponed its destruction. Just as he didn’t save our mothe
r’s life; he only prolonged her death.” Layla’s face flushed red. “I, on the other hand, should kill you now.”

  “Go ahead,” Danielle dared. “It won’t change why we’re here, the fact that we know what you’re up to, what you’ve got planned.”

  “You couldn’t possibly.”

  “Close enough. You tried to kill your mother . . . my mother,” Danielle added, having trouble forming those words. “You blamed the West because you couldn’t bear to blame yourself. Is that the reason why you’re so determined to destroy the United States?”

  “So you figured that much out. Congratulations.”

  “Why don’t you explain the rest to me?”

  Rahani nodded tightly. “I suppose I can. You, after all, have been through much the same thing.”

  “I think you’re confused.”

  “Am I? The plan it’s fallen on me to finish is the work of my father, conceived after I was raped at an American college. First my mother’s terrible betrayal, then that. He saw what he had to do, what needed to be done. I merely picked up where he left off.”

  “As a mass murderer.”

  “Is calling me that supposed to unnerve me? It doesn’t, you know. I threw the first rock when my mother was stoned, and I didn’t feel anything then either. I don’t think I’ve felt anything since, except to believe in my father’s vision. I’ve dedicated my life to seeing his work completed.”

  “So it was he who purchased Immutech Pharmaceuticals. Because of the smallpox vaccine.”

  Layla Aziz Rahani raised her eyebrows. “Very impressive, my sister. We must have the same blood in our veins, after all. Tell me, what else have you managed to figure out?”

  But it was Ben who replied. “You controlled Akram Khalil and his people, bankrolled them. His operatives in the United States stole the smallpox from the USAMRIID facility at Fort Detrick for you, then made sure some of it ended up in the hands of Hollis Buchert.”

  “Call it a sample,” Rahani acknowledged, “enough to show your country what could be coming.”

  “And trigger a mass inoculation. Then you killed Khalil for his efforts,” Danielle picked up.

  “A pity, since I set up the Israelis to do the job for me. But Khalil realized I had used him before your government responded to the information I made sure reached them. He threatened to expose me to the rest of his leadership, threatened my entire plan.”

  “To fulfill the prophecy of the Last of Days,” Ben said softly.

  “But only for America. That was the beauty of my father’s plan, hatched in the wake of my mother’s treachery and my own—” Layla stopped suddenly. “It doesn’t matter now. What’s done is done.”

  “How? What is it you’re going to do?”

  “No more than what was done to me. The decadence of that country, the animals who inhabit it, stole my womanhood, condemned me to a life alone. I bless my father for acting on his rage and I thank God for the strength to finish his work when the stroke struck him down. Surely it was fate, because I must have been meant to be the one to see the plot to its conclusion all along.”

  Layla Aziz Rahani stopped, as if expecting Danielle to respond, then started again when she didn’t.

  “I could have released the smallpox we stole, yes, to poison their world, but that wouldn’t have destroyed their society, their way of life. They would endure, rise to fight another day as they have done before. War unfolds in an instant. Fate can take a lifetime, several lifetimes. I couldn’t destroy their world, my sister, but I could end it.”

  “How?”

  Layla smiled slightly. “You disappoint me, my sister. I’m surprised you haven’t figured that out too. Then again,” she added bitingly, “it wouldn’t have affected you.”

  “Affected me? What are you talking about?”

  “No,” Ben muttered, shuddering as he realized.

  “So the Palestinian has figured it out. Tell her what I meant. Tell her why my plans for America wouldn’t have touched her.”

  Danielle looked at Ben, then back at Layla Aziz Rahani before he could speak.

  “Why don’t you tell her yourself?” Ben told Rahani

  “Very well.” Layla nodded and turned again to Danielle. “I said you’d been through the same thing yourself, my sister, because you’ve lost two children to miscarriages. The last one, I understand, was thanks to a bullet that left you unable to conceive another.”

  Danielle swallowed hard, stung by the strike at her own personal misery as a larger picture of Layla Aziz Rahani’s terrifying vision took shape before her. “Conceive,” she repeated.

  Layla Aziz Rahani smiled ever so slightly. “RU-18, a birth control drug designed by Immutech Pharmaceuticals to quell rampant population growth in the African continent. And it did, my sister ... by rendering the women of an entire town irreversibly sterile. The same thing it is going to do to America.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 88

  W

  hite House operator.”

  Professor Albert Paulsen shifted the telephone from his right hand to his left. “I’d like to speak to the president, please.”

  “We only take messages, sir.”

  “See, I lost the private number I had for him and the general.”

  “The general?”

  “General Bayliss, head of homestead security. If you could just put me through to the Oval Office.”

  “As I said, sir, we only take messages.”

  Paulsen squeezed the receiver between his shoulder and ear, so he could take out his notepad. “Okay, tell them the village of Kokobi was the key.”

  “Kokobi?”

  “In Africa,” Paulsen said, and spelled the letters out. “An experiment was conducted on the villagers to test a new birth control drug, something called RU-18. The drug introduced an antigen into the women’s bloodstream that kept them from ovulating by forming a protein shield around the egg, effectively killing it. Are you getting all this down?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Paulsen heard the sound of computer keys clicking on the other end. “Ever been a member of the Girl Scouts?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good. Now, this antigen was only supposed to work for thirty days or so. Perfect for African countries where the birth rate was out of control. Think about it. As things turned out, though, the antigen’s effects were permanent. Underline that.” Paulsen waited briefly, then continued. “The antigen, once introduced, renders the eggs permanently dormant. Turned out the damn thing is self-replicating. Chokes off every egg produced forever. Forever. You know what that means?”

  “No, I don’t, sir.”

  “No babies ever again. The end of procreation and Girl Scout cookies forever. And here’s the kicker: RU-18 was produced by Immutech, the same pharmaceutical company that’s manufacturing the smallpox vaccine. Get it?”

  “Er—”

  “Doesn’t matter. General Bayliss will. Tell her to put two and two together and then call me.”

  “What’s your number, sir?”

  “That’s right,” Paulsen remembered, “I don’t have one right now. No problem. Just tell the general to leave a message.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 89

  Y

  ou’ve contaminated the smallpox vaccine with RU-18.”

  “A version of the drug, yes,” Rahani said, smiling broadly.

  “A secret shared until now by only my father, myself, and a few select others. It feels good to speak of it, to be able to celebrate the work of my father with others who can appreciate it. Imagine, my sister, just imagine a society no longer able to procreate.”

  Danielle felt suddenly light-headed. She teetered briefly, feeling faint, until Ben grasped her arm and held her steady.

  “The vaccine will spare no one, my sister,” Layla Aziz Rahani continued. “The disease would have spared far too many.”

  “Then the effects...”

  “Won’t be known for years, decades, generations. America
won’t die quickly but she will die completely. I won’t be here to witness that final end; I don’t have to be. The satisfaction of knowing its inevitability is enough for me.”

  Layla Aziz Rahani saw Danielle’s eyes darting about, searching the area of her father’s bedside. “Go ahead, my sister. Search for a syringe, some sharp object, a weapon of any kind your deadly skills can make use of. His work is finished now.”