Blood Rules (44 page)

“Thirty seconds noisy, one minute quiet.”

Shlomo nodded. “Night attack. Anyone disagree?”

The other three shook their heads. Each of them had independently reached the same conclusion.

“Half an hour after sunset Uri comes down that wall, landing beside the cave. Thirty seconds noisy; better make that twenty. By then, two of us have worked our way back down the watercourse, crossed it someplace where no one looking out that cave could see us, and come back up to within ten meters of the target. And we’ve done all that very, very quietly. Yes?”

This time the men nodded.

“Uri’s one second ahead of us. He goes in with two stun grenades, flattens himself, we sprint. Questions?”

“You’ve left out one man.” It was Ben Allon, the fourth member of the party, who spoke. Shlomo wasn’t surprised, for Ben loved detail to the point of pedantry, loved to request information in the second before his officer was about to provide it anyway.

“Right. Gabriel, you’re going to work northward up the ravine, going deeper in. Not too far, mind. I want you to take care of anyone who comes out of that cave and starts following the wadi inland. If they turn back the way they came, toward where the helicopter crashed, they’ll run into us. If they go the other direction, they’ll meet you.” “Who’s legitimate for me?” Gabriel asked. “The woman. Try not to hit the boy.
Don’t
hit Sharett. Any more questions?”

While he waited for them to think it through he damned Raful Sharett to hell and back, wondering why they wanted him in Tel Aviv so much, who was paying off debts, what they would say to him if they did succeed in getting him home. A maverick, Sharett: in Shlomo’s book
he
was “legitimate"; that is to say, a permissible target. Sharett was the most legitimate of all, in fact, because it was thanks to him that he, Shlomo Stern, was here and not at his wife’s bedside, holding her hand. …

“Radio contact?” Uri Vered interrupted Shlomo’s unquiet reflections.

“No,” he answered. “Silent routines throughout.” He glanced up at the sun, then unstrapped his Rolex. “Synchronize. Upon my mark …”

Colin’s mouth was dry as bleached bone. Pain … it wasn’t exactly pain, now, more a sense of extraordinarily dangerous illness hovering around the corner. Terminal illness. Death by thirst.

He knew it to be the cruelest death. Worse, some said, than being burned alive. He wanted to help his son. Now he was too weak and scared to do anything but lie against the rock and watch the fuzzy images uncurl in front of him. His throat had all but closed. It burned. His eyes burned. Sickness knotted his intestines, and there would be no more liquid to dissolve it away.

“He lied.”

Through the burning came recognition of Robbie’s voice. His mother’s gift of water had revived him.

“Halib lied, lied, lied. He
used
you, Mum, why couldn’t you
see
that?”

“I don’t know.”

Robbie, deprived of the resistance he’d expected and craved, remained silent.

“My brother never played straight.” Leila’s voice was hushed, appalled. “Nor did your Grandfather Feisal. It wasn’t their way.”

“So you threw us away, Dad and me.” Robbie coughed. The cough turned into a spasm. Leila reached for the water flask, her expression undecided. At last the coughing stopped, and her hand released the flask.

Robbie spoke again. “You threw us away and you became a terrorist? Great. All because Uncle Halib asked you to.
Stupid.”

“There were other reasons.”

“Yeah? What?”

She had no answer for him. The boy’s foot lashed out, sending a pebble cascading against his mother’s thigh. She checked her anger. Then she said, “Blood won out, Robbie. It usually does.” She glanced at Sharett. “Right?”

“Oh, yes,” he replied, in a faraway voice. “Blood rules everything.” “Crap!”

Leila stiffened. So did Sharett. Only Robbie and Colin stayed relaxed. They knew this territory.

“I should have been firmer with you,” she said, mildly enough. “This is Christianity for you, then.”

“Christians don’t murder.”

Leila smiled.

“You wanted to know why I left in 1982,” she said after a pause. “All right, I’ll tell you. I’d taken an oath to be revenged on the man who’d murdered—if you like the murder topic, let’s discuss it—murdered my grandfather Ibrahim. An Israeli killed him; that’s important.”
“Why
is it important?”

“Because it made all other Israelis in the field my prey, Israelis like the ambassador to the United States. I’d … I’d taken part in operations. So I was wanted by the Mossad, and Halib would only protect you and me if I obeyed him in everything.
Only then would he help me!”

“You should understand that,” Sharett said, and his voice contained such unexpected sympathy that Robbie tried to turn around and look at him. When the iron grip on his neck and waist did not relax he struggled, briefly, and was still.

“Why did you save Tim?” he suddenly flared. “You, the mighty terrorist, out for revenge, why so merciful all of a sudden?” And when she didn’t answer he sneered, “Aren’t you worried about your image?”

“I saved Tim because you asked me to.”

“No other reason?” he scoffed. “Humanity? Compassion?”

“Not … after what happened in 1982.”

“Yeah, well, we know all about that, don’t we?” He added another word under his breath:
“Bitch!”

Leila heard it. Sulfur flowed through her veins. She had a sudden vision of herself leaning forward to pick up a stone and fling it at her son, saw, saw
vividly,
how it struck him on the lip, causing the blood to run, bringing astonishment and fear into his eyes. …

No.
He was her son.
Slowly, slowly, the rage burned itself off, evaporating into the hot, moisture-sodden air; but its odor remained in her nostrils for a long time, and it was a while before she trusted herself to speak.

“In 1982 I believed I’d seen you for the last time, Robbie.” Leila’s voice was pleading now. “But your uncle offered me one hope, if I worked for him. He promised the minute you left England he’d take you back. He couldn’t do anything while you were in England; you were being watched, you must see that. … He swore to help me.”

“Help you?” Robbie tried to laugh. “He betrayed you!”

“After New York I had no place to rest.” Leila murmured the words as if she had not heard her son speak. “No place to call my home.”

“Good. I hope you went hungry and thirsty, and I hope you were scared, every day. I hope you goddamn
suffered!
You …
terrorist!”
Robbie’s voice had sunk to a level scarcely audible in the cave, but he spat out the last word with a venom that made his hearers shudder.

“Why do you call me a terrorist?” she asked in wonder. “I didn’t feel any fear, delight, or grief when I killed. I felt nothing. I just wanted to have you back. Why do you call it terrorism?”

Sharett, looking from face to face, knew it was only conflict that kept them going, conflict and desire. Leila Hanif wanted her child more than she wanted life. He, Raful, lusted for revenge. Colin would sacrifice anything to save Robbie from the hateful virus spread by Hanif genes. But now energy came only in fits and starts, each surge weakening them, sapping will and the ability to fight. Conflict, desire … dead things.

The entrance to the cave had ceased to be a glaring white shape. He could see the watercourse floor in its natural colors. Soon it would be dusk.

His life was drawing to an end. Tongues of acid were consuming his stomach wall as the tide devours a child’s sand castle. First the outriders, rippling wavelets that reconnoitered the lower ramparts; then rollers, bearing down on the soft barriers, smoothing them flat, consuming them, until there was no longer a castle standing proud on the shore but only that seething, heavy force of nature called the sea.

Sharett eased his cramped legs a fraction. He would have liked something to deaden the pain. Not a tablet or an injection. No, he wanted something of
theirs.
One of Esther’s embroidered hankies, with her scent on it—what agony they’d been in the aftermath of her death, and how he longed for them now! Sara’s locket. Things old men clutch to make their deathbeds tolerable.

He could have sat at a café table overlooking the Mediterranean, with the taste of apple jam on his tongue, and had chosen to turn his back on all that. Why? Around that corner—
there,
see it?—lay the rationale and justification for Raful Sharett; give him a moment, it would come....

There were no more moments. In Tel Aviv, in Jerusalem, they’d have learned the truth by now. Too late to change anything. The sand castle was almost flat. Sunset, the beach emptying, children and parents alike, tired and tranquil, heading home. A last look, and then a turning of the back for eternity.

He must fight on. The woman would fight.

“What do you think will happen?” he said suddenly. “Leila Hanif, it’s you I’m asking.”

She looked at him but did not reply.

“Your water’s almost gone. Not enough to get back to the plane. And if you did … what then?” A spasm of pain made him tighten his grip on Robbie, and the boy cried out.

“Stay where you are!” Sharett shouted.

She had risen to a crouch but, seeing that Robbie no longer struggled, she slowly relaxed.

“Even if you made it back to the plane,” Sharett croaked, “what then, eh? You’re going to die, but before then you’re going to watch your boy die too. Of thirst. Or shall I break his neck in mercy? Eh?”

He wrenched Robbie’s head backward. This time, Leila did not react openly, she just became still. She became one with the stone around her.

“What were you doing in New York that evening?” Sharett asked. “The lost hours, between synagogue and
sendah …
how did you spend them, hmm?”

Her stillness did not lessen, but its quality changed; it was as if a cat were preparing to attack.

“You were with Halib,” Sharett jeered, “your beloved brother, listening to him tell you that Robbie had been taken safely away, was in hiding, was
yours.
Whereas all the time—”

The bullet whined off the rock face an inch from Sharett’s left ear and he winced, but his grip on Robbie did not slacken.

“Do that again,” he whispered, “and the boy’s dead.”

She continued to kneel in the same old position, with her gun aimed at what she could see of Sharett, but her eyes glittered, and to Colin, hallucinating somewhere on the borders between life and its extinction, it seemed that those glowing eyes mingled with others.…

A day of infernal heat, dust, flies, stink, but not in Yemen. In Beirut. A day of his youth, or so it appeared now, though in 1974 he was no longer young. End of holiday. Traveling fast and hard toward the airport, arrows of white light reflected off car paintwork, a noisy air-conditioner fan, reek of after-shave from the driver’s neck, red where the hairs had been razored down to the roots.…

He could hear Leila talking, as if in a far-off room of the same house. Playing with Robbie.
Not far to go now, darling.…

Then, violent acceleration. Eyes in the mirror. Eyes everywhere. Robbie sniveling with fear, Leila gripped by panic, clinging to her child as if he might save her. Alf, Robbie’s stuffed crocodile, cartwheeling around the car as it skidded to a halt; Alfs eyes close to his own, replaced by another pair of eyes, bored at having to do this work, bored but not distressed, as the killer walked toward the BMW to finish what he’d begun.

Leila cowered in the far corner, holding Robbie to her breast. The boy’s eyes were closed. He was sucking his thumb, trembling. Sacrificial victims, calmly awaiting the knife: No,
by Christ, no!

His flight bag bouncing here, there, everywhere except into his hands. A whimpering sound—ah! it came from him—smash, smash,
smash,
the case flying open, the gun in his hands and an almighty pain lancing up his backbone, his hands refusing to steady, the gun seemed so heavy and his arms seemed so stiff … but he was lifting it.

They’d meant to get the gun back to Celestine somehow, but events always conspired to frustrate them. That last morning, they’d agreed to leave it in a side pocket of the car when they reached the airport and not say anything. God had arranged it this way. God’s will.

The eyes, those dreadful eyes, coal black circling furnace-red, floated toward the car. Colin remembered that guns had safety catches. His thumb came into contact with something that moved, and he moved it. Snatching one last glance at the pale, tear-streaked faces of his terrified wife and child, he heard a noise, the door was open, and he turned, tensing his finger around the trigger while he prayed....

An explosion. His hands hurting like hell, his eardrums burst, silence, the noisy kind of silence that deafens you with its weight. A blank. Being pulled around, and pushed also, stood up against an army truck while brutal hands scraped the insides of his legs raw, and eyes, hostile eyes, curious and greedy, consumed him like fire, hotter than fire. …

Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Ditching! Ditching! Ditching!

Fire on board. Flames snatching at the wing, the plane almost vertical now. Plunging down toward the sea. …
Boom!
went the flowers that grew out of the hull.
Boom, boom!
Something black rose up to smother him, he was choking, couldn’t breathe, because the horrible black smothery thing was so heavy. It had eyes, now: terrible flaming orbs of death that scorched his face, and there was blood everywhere, rich, red, and tantalizingly fragrant: a fresh-air smell, a come-on wake-up it’s a lovely morning smell that got you going, blood
everywhere
—on the car’s paintwork, on the upholstery. “Did I do that?” he kept asking the Phalange officer in charge. “Did
I
do it?” Because there was so much blood everywhere.
See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
It was
blood
that was suffocating him, while the flowers spoke:
Boom!

His father’s blood. Father, son, and holy ghost:
“See, see. …”