Keepers of the Gate - [Kamal & Barnea 04] Page 6

  Najarian set his drink down on the wrought iron table top. “I wasn’t lying before. I do read those articles. I know why you left Detroit and what was waiting when you came back to Palestine. I know what you’ve been through. I figure maybe you stayed because you didn’t have anything to go back to. That’s what I’m offering.”

  Ben let himself think about the money, about living in more than three small rooms. About going after happiness for a third time. He’d had it once, and almost again. But it was never going to happen here; that had become abundantly clear lately.

  “I’m flattered, Mr. Najarian.”

  “Look around you, Ben. The Mideast is going to hell again. It’s inevitable; it always was. The dream’s finished, but that doesn’t mean yours has to be.” Najarian stopped, his point made. “I don’t expect an answer from you today. Take your time. I’ll give you my card. You can call me anytime, day or night. But I want you to promise you’ll think about it. Give it some serious consideration.”

  Ben looked at him noncommittally.

  “Hey,” Najarian said, leaning back and folding his hands behind his head so the hair on his chest sprouted from his terry-cloth robe, “it isn’t like you’d be leaving anything behind here.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 11

  H

  ow much do you know about me, Chief Inspector?” Paul Hessler continued:

  “I know you’re one of the ten richest men in the world,” Danielle replied, “even though you’ve given away a huge portion of your wealth to almost any charity that asks for it.”

  Hessler shrugged humbly. “All have their needs.”

  “Like Israel.”

  “I owe my life to Israel, Chief Inspector. It’s the least I can do.”

  “And, from what I understand, Israel owes a great measure of her life to you. Through your real estate and business investments, along with gifts from your charitable foundations.”

  “Do you have any idea,” Paul Hessler asked Danielle, “how meaningless all that seems to me now?”

  “A little,” she replied honestly.

  “I thought I had experienced the worst horrors, the ultimate degradations,” Paul Hessler continued. He shook his head sorrowfully. “I was wrong. None of those years could prepare me for this.” Danielle could see Hessler’s eyes glistening with new tears. “Ari was the only one of my children who cared about my work, who was capable of taking over the business. Now I feel I have done all this for nothing. All because Ari stepped in front of me.” Hessler’s gaze hardened. “Do you know why you’re here, Pakad?”

  Danielle leaned forward. “To find out why an attempt was made on your life.”

  Paul Hessler gritted his teeth. “The why is not important. There are many whys, many reasons why people want me dead. It’s the who that matters. The man at Ben-Gurion was not acting alone, Pakad. Someone sent him and your job is to find out who that is. Then you will turn that information over to me.”

  “With all due respect, sir—”

  “That’s not the way it works, is it? That’s not the way you were trained to do your job. But you often disregard protocol and channels, don’t you? Your reputation is well known to me. It is one reason I requested your assignment to this case.”

  Danielle started to stand up, then changed her mind. “Perhaps you have misjudged me.”

  “You are called ‘pakad’ when it should be ‘pakadet’— the feminine. Why?”

  “My name and title were misprinted on my original National Police identification. They corrected the name. The title stuck.”

  “Did they misjudge you as well? You see, Chief Inspector,” Hessler continued, before she could respond, “I knew you would never have been assigned to this case unless I had requested it. It was imperative for the powers-that-be to understand my desire. For obvious reasons, of course.”

  “You wanted me to know you could.”

  “I never spoke to Commander Baruch myself,” Hessler resumed, as if Danielle had said nothing at all. “I believe he received a call from the minister of justice. You’re right, I wanted you to understand that procedures and channels don’t matter here. What matters is I learn who sent the gunman to Ben-Gurion Airport today.”

  “You might not like what I find, Mr. Hessler.”

  Hessler’s eyes blinked rapidly, slowly losing their intensity, as if they’d tried to hold it too long. “And why is that, Pakad?”

  “It seems strange to me that an old man was sent to kill you. The kind of enemies you spoke of would have retained a more seasoned assassin.”

  “And this one wasn’t?”

  “He screamed something at you before he started firing, according to witnesses. He called you a murderer and drew attention to himself in the process. That’s not what I would call the mark of a professional killer.”

  “What would you call it, then?”

  “A crime rooted in passion, committed by someone who believed himself wronged by you. In business, perhaps. If that is the case, the why would explain the who. There would be no shadows out there for us to chase.”

  “I have many enemies, Pakad.”

  “I would look for a disgruntled employee, a bitter rival, someone who thinks he was wronged and has reason to hold a grudge.”

  Hessler smiled just wide enough for Danielle to see the gap between his front teeth. “When you’ve been in business as long as I have, that is very likely a lot of people.”

  “But this man knew he was going to die himself when he started pulling the trigger. And he must have had some reason for calling you a murderer. Or...”

  “Or what?”

  “Have you considered the possibility that your son may have been the target?”

  “You said—”

  “I said the gunman yelled out ‘Murderer!’ and started shooting. I never said it was demonstratively clear which of you he was aiming at.”

  Hessler pushed himself out of his chair and lumbered to the suite’s bar. He grasped its edge so forcefully the blood was flushed from his knuckles, leaving them visibly white.

  “We would have celebrated tonight back in New York,” he droned, his back to Danielle. “The missile defense system we built for Israel is being deployed. This morning we witnessed the second consecutive successful test.” Hessler cleared his throat and resteadied his thoughts. “In any case, my son was new to the company. Don’t waste your time, Pakad. Ari wasn’t the target.”

  “But you said yourself that he would have taken over Hessler Industries someday.” Danielle walked across the room and faced him from the other side of the bar. “That is reason enough why we must consider the possibility that your son was the real target.”

  Hessler dropped his hands from the shiny wood. “Because killing him would be worse than killing me.”

  “Yes,” Danielle nodded.

  Hessler looked at her contemplatively. “I selected you for another reason, Pakad. I wanted someone who knows what it feels like to lose a child.”

  Danielle tried very hard not to react. “That’s irrelevant.”

  “Is it really? Maybe you don’t understand the point I was making.”

  “That you know just as much about me as I do about you.”

  “Very good.”

  “I think you chose me for the wrong reasons, Mr. Hessler.”

  “That remains to be seen, Pakad, doesn’t it?” Hessler again grasped the edge of the bar for support, suddenly unsteady on his feet. “When you find who was behind my son’s death, then we’ll know I was right.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 12

  B

  en Kamal walked between the adjacent playing fields built in the shadow of the soccer stadium where he had shot a man earlier that day. Two games were going on simultaneously, school boys rushing up and down the field in the steaming air, dueling for the ball. The youth soccer league was new to the West Bank and not terribly well organized.

  Despite this drawback, Ben was impressed by the skill level th
e nine- and ten-year-old boys were displaying, especially those on one of the teams playing on the field to his right. Their coach stood serenely in his green Nike warm-up suit on the sideline, barking an occasional order. As Ben approached him, a perfect cross resulted in an elegant header and another goal for his team. The coach clapped and sent in some subs to relieve the starters at midfield, then turned when he saw Ben approaching.

  “I would have thought you’d had enough soccer for one day, Inspector,” said Colonel Nabril al-Asi, head of the Protective Security Service. One of fourteen separate police-type Palestinian agencies, it was easily the most feared since it functioned under the direct authority of President Yasir Arafat. As such, al-Asi was answerable to no one else.

  “Believe me, I have.” Ben paused and watched several excellent touch passes.

  “Impressed, Inspector? My Israeli counterpart at Shin Bet arranged for the captain of their national team to help out, give the boys some pointers.”

  Ben watched al-Asi’s team setting up for a comer kick, continuing their dominance. “Apparently, they listened.”

  “We’re undefeated, Inspector. Normally I wouldn’t care about such a thing, but it was hard enough convincing my son to let me coach as it was.”

  “He doesn’t trust your soccer skills?”

  “He didn’t believe I actually intended to show up for the games.”

  The corner kick sailed well wide and the opposing team readied a goal kick.

  “This is unusually visible of you, Colonel.”

  Al-Asi turned from the game long enough to give Ben a piercing look with his dark, heavy-lidded eyes. His thick, salt-and-pepper hair didn’t so much as stir in the breeze. He looked just as good in his stylish warm-up suit as he did in the expensive European attire Ben was used to seeing him wear.

  “Most of my enemies are now in jail, Inspector. The rest are under constant surveillance. I thought it was time to give my children at least the pretense of a normal life.”

  Ben smiled and said nothing.

  Ai-Asi frowned. “But now my daughter asks me when there will be a team for her to play on. She watches the World Cup on television, kicks the ball around in the yard like she’s an American soccer star. But she doesn’t understand our culture is not progressive enough yet to allow for women athletes. I tell her someday it will be and she cries. Children are not too interested in tomorrow.”

  “In any case, they must be glad to have you around more.”

  “We’re living in a real neighborhood with other children now. They like that, too.”

  The referee blew the whistle, signalling the end of the game. Al-Asi walked toward his players, clapping dramatically.

  “You did a splendid job this morning, Inspector. Tell me, how is the officer who was wounded?”

  Ben kept pace alongside the colonel. “He’ll recover.”

  “Al hamdu lillah,” al-Asi said, his voice unusually reverent. “Praise God.”

  “Luckily, we recovered the disc and, because of it, we now know Mahmoud Fasil’s network.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Mayor Wallid told me—”

  “The mayor told you what I told him, Inspector. But I’m telling you the truth: The disc is gibberish. Makes no sense at all.”

  “Encoded?”

  “No,” said al-Asi. “Just nothing that seems in any way associated to the terrorist network we were hoping to identify. It’s also in English. Maybe you could take a look at it sometime, tell me what you think.”

  “So what was Fasil doing with it?”

  “We’re hoping the incarcerated soccer star Abdel Sidr can tell us that, but he hasn’t talked yet. I’m going to see him first thing tomorrow. Then I think he’ll change his mind.”

  “Maybe we screwed up somewhere,” Ben said, wondering himself. “Maybe you shouldn’t have passed Fasil on to us, Colonel.”

  “You think I made a mistake by trusting your men with the assignment?”

  “Only because your men are far more adept at handling such situations.”

  “You didn’t believe my cover story?”

  “Not for a minute.”

  Al-Asi stopped. “I thought it would be good for you, Inspector. A real assignment instead of more training. Following cops around like they’re school children.”

  “One of them almost ended up dead because I wasn’t clear enough with my orders.”

  Al-Asi shrugged the statement off. “I understand you emptied your clip at Fasil. Fifteen shots. Three hits. Not bad, under the circumstances. Someday we’ll go to the range. I’ll give you some pointers.”

  “I’m here for something else right now.”

  ‘What can I do for you, Inspector?”

  Ben hurried after al-Asi onto the field. The grass was soft and full, brown in only a few stray patches thanks to the Israeli irrigation experts who had designed an underground sprinkler system to compensate for the lack of rainfall.

  “I have a computer in my car,” Ben said. “Its contents have been erased. I was hoping your office could help me reconstruct them.”

  “And whose computer might this be?”

  “A teenage boy, the victim of an apparently random street crime.”

  Al-Asi slapped palms with his players as they passed him in neat, single file. “When you use the word ‘apparent,’ I get worried. You don’t think the crime was random, do you?”

  “The boy’s mother doesn’t.”

  “I imagine my wife wouldn’t either, if it helped her deal with things.”

  “The mother insists her son had been acting strange for a week or so. Something had frightened him.”

  “Where was he killed?”

  “On his way to Israel. He was going to his job.”

  “The boy worked in Israel?” al-Asi asked, surprised.

  “In Tel Aviv, I think. The job was arranged by the experimental Israeli-Palestinian collaborative school he attended outside of Abu Gosh.”

  “I looked into that school for my oldest son. Decided I had enough trouble keeping him safe from other Palestinians, never mind Israelis under the circumstances. I thought it had been shut down.”

  “Not yet. The school supplied the victim with his computer as well.”

  Al-Asi stopped in the middle of the field. “Is this an official investigation, Inspector?”

  “What do you think?”

  Al-Asi slapped Ben’s shoulder, regarded him fondly. “You know what I could really use? An assistant coach. There are so many plays to practice and teams to scout. I find myself strapped.” The colonel’s son ran up and hugged him briefly before dashing off to rejoin his teammates. “Especially now that I have taken on these added responsibilities. Are you interested?”

  “I don’t know much about the game.”

  “I can teach you.”

  “It’s a lot to learn, the rules and all.”

  Ben and al-Asi started walking off the field together.

  “My team plays on a number of fields. You adapt according to the size and circumstance. Sometimes you don’t know what to do until you get there.”

  “I’ll have to think about it. There’s something else, Colonel. The mother of the murdered boy has another son. He’s being held in a Palestinian jail.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Farouk Falaya.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Good, because I would like to see if his release can be expedited.”

  “Why?”

  “So he can go home to his mother.”

  “A good reason.” Al-Asi veered toward the parking lot where his team clustered outside a trio of dark SUVs, each manned by one of the colonel’s bodyguards wearing matching warm-up suits. “Come join us, Inspector, we’re going for ice cream.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 13

  A

  t night the city of Old Jaffa south of Tel Aviv burns with harsh naked light shed from buildings otherwise ensconced in their colorful past. Shoppers and s
trollers abound, moving through the famed flea market better known as Shuk Ha-Pispheshim, ignoring most merchants’ calls while paying keen attention to others. Out for bargains instead of the bare necessities of years past. Using their American Express cards to pay merchants selling out of rickety storefronts and pushcarts.