Bloodline (39 page)

“Consent forms and such, so I can use his name in my paper about his medical condition.”

The prison officer raised a quizzical eyebrow.

“Just covering my ass so he doesn't sue me later,” said Yael as nonchalantly as she could muster. The officer waved her into the security room.

After she walked through an X-ray body scanner, had her bag thoroughly searched, and was examined in intimate places by a female security guard, she was allowed into the prison, leaving her bag and mobile phone in a locker.

Within a few minutes Bilal was led into the reception room by a massive Russian guard. The young man was surprised to see her.

“Dr. Yael. You're here again,” Bilal said in Arabic.

Yael looked at the guard to see whether he understood, but it didn't appear as though he did. But she had to test him out, and so she said in Arabic to Bilal, “My friend, I have something very serious to discuss with you and I don't want anybody to understand what I'm going to say. Does the guard speak Arabic? For this is a very private message . . .”

“No, Doctor, I speak to him in bad Hebrew. His Hebrew is as bad as mine.”

She winked at Bilal and looked around the room to see whether there were any television cameras or recording equipment. Satisfied that there were none, in a conversational voice,
looking at Bilal, she said in Arabic, “Hey, Russian guard. If you can hear me, your mother is a worthless slut and your sister is a cheap whore who sells her body to anyone with a credit card.”

Bilal looked at her in astonishment, but Yael saw that the guard didn't even blink, let alone react to the gross insult.

“Bilal, listen to me very, very carefully and say nothing. Don't react in any way. I have to get you out of here.”

Bilal's eyes widened but he remained silent.

“You are in very great danger. The authorities will do little and too late. You must do exactly as I tell you. Do you understand?”

Bilal nodded slowly.

“I am going to give you three tablets. Take them, and they will make you sick, very sick, but only for a short while.”

Bilal sat back from the table and a flash of fear showed across his face. But Yael reached out across the table and touched his arm. In that moment she feared the guard's attention would be drawn by such an action; she had very little time to make Bilal understand, but the guard was busy reading a paper.

Yael had compounded the tablets Bilal would have to take, doing it herself to avoid implicating any of the hospital pharmacists. She'd obtained the ingredients from the hospital, but asking different pharmacists on different occasions meant that they wouldn't put two and two together. And she'd checked, and double-checked, that Bilal's weight, height, and age meant that he could take the overdose without any long-term effect. Remembering that she'd had an intimate search the last time she came to the prison, Yael had placed the three anticholinergic pills inside the gap where a wire of her underwire bra normally fitted. It was unlikely that a search would find them. And she'd ensured that the hospital pharmacy had a good supply of parasympathomimetic drugs to reverse his illness when he was brought into the hospital.

“The doctor here at the prison will think you have been poisoned,
but he won't know how to treat you and he'll call for an ambulance. You'll be taken to my hospital.”

Bilal's eyes darted back and forth but he didn't move and Yael prayed that he was comprehending what she was saying and not planning to call for help.

“When you get there, I'll be waiting for you. And I'll give you a . . . um . . .” Yael's Arabic failed her and she struggled for the word. “I'll give you—”

“Antidote,” Bilal said softly. A palpable relief welled up inside Yael as he confirmed he'd understood the plan after she'd explained it as quickly as she could.

“So you understand what I'm saying to you?”

Bilal frowned but nodded.

“We can't trust anybody. Not any Palestinian, not any Israeli. Nobody. This is the only way. You have to trust me . . .”

Yael heard herself say this last word and thought to herself how absurd it all seemed. Why should he trust her? Only because he had no other choice.

“So you are getting me out. Yes? But why? What can I do outside? Escape to another country? What do you want me to do?”

“The reason you have to leave here is to save your life. Your imam and the man with white hair are plotting to kill you. When you're out, we will trap them and expose them. We don't know how yet, but we will. But if you stay here, Bilal, you'll die.”

“Why not tell the governor? If you tell him, maybe this time he will believe me. Maybe he will save me.”

“We don't know who will come after you, Bilal. That's why you have to become very sick immediately, and we'll get you out of this place.”

Bilal looked deep into Yael's eyes and said, “When I'm better, can I return to my home and my father and mother?”

She shook her head, feeling sorry for him. “No, Bilal. There's no way I can get you home. You have to pay for your crime.” His face was stony and silent. “But we can make things better
for you. For your family . . .” Yael felt as if she were lying, but her seemingly honest response, free of false promises, gave him confidence.

“Give me the tablets,” he said.

She looked over at the guard, who had turned to glance in their direction. “Not yet, not until he looks away. Just keep talking. I'll keep my eye on him and the moment he's not looking directly at us, I'll slip them to you. Put them in your trouser pocket. Take them tomorrow morning immediately after breakfast. Don't take them when you get to your cell because the guards might not look in for hours. If you take them with lots of people around, you'll suddenly feel horribly ill. They'll get immediate help. Do you understand?”

Bilal nodded.

“You cannot trust anyone, Bilal. Neither of us can . . .”

A
T HALF PAST TWELVE
on the following afternoon, two things happened in nearby parts of Jerusalem. The first was a prison van driven at breakneck speed toward the hospital. The governor had radioed ahead to police headquarters requesting a police escort for a van carrying a dangerously sick prisoner. They were to meet the van as soon as it had climbed out of the valley of the Dead Sea, and lead the way through Jerusalem's frenetic traffic to the city's main hospital's accident and emergency facilities.

And at precisely twelve thirty in the afternoon, just two and a half miles from the emergency department where a nervous Yael worked and waited, a worried Yaniv Grossman walked into the offices of the ultrasecretive Shin Bet and asked to speak to Deputy Director Eliahu Spitzer.

The prison van screeched to a halt, and nurses and paramedics, already alerted, ran out with a gurney, an oxygen cylinder, and a crash cart. Bilal's comatose body, still twitching and as
cold and pallid as death, was carried to the gurney and he was wheeled inside.

The Palestinian surgeon, Mahmud, stood waiting. He had known Bilal was coming and knew this was now his part to play.

Yael had been nervous, almost shaking, when she drew him aside and asked him if he'd be willing to assist her in saving Bilal's life. He agreed, although she could sense there was great reluctance. She told him what she wanted him to do. He could tell from the rhythm of her voice that her speech had been prepared, rehearsed. She had no idea how he'd respond and she was desperate.

Mahmud had tried so hard to fit into hospital work life while knowing full well that he might always be an outsider. He ignored the jokes and offhand comments, the passive but invasive prejudices that were normalized around him. And he tolerated the angry looks from his own people who saw him as a traitor. This was the burden he carried. And to shoulder the load, Mahmud had ardently sought to give no quarter, provide no space for the criticism or the glares or the mistrust. He worked longer, he worked harder. He smiled more and laughed more and let nothing be taken as offense. This was his defense mechanism, and it gave him place and purpose and solace within the fraught state of being an Arab-Israeli caught between two worlds.

But when Yael Cohen asked him to help Bilal escape from the hospital, escape from imprisonment for murder, Mahmud knew that if he assisted, then nothing would ever be the same again. There were no normal circumstances that would have made him agree to assist a terrorist—Jew or Muslim—escape from lawful custody; but Yael had explained very dramatically that the boy was a political prisoner, and that her own life was in danger. Reluctantly, he'd agreed to assist. No longer passive or apolitical, this would now be the moment when he crossed a line.

As he stood and watched the gurney carrying the comatose
body of Bilal toward him, he was still not sure why he had agreed to help Yael. A dormant loyalty to his people's cause? The righting of an injustice? No, these were not things that compelled Mahmud. What compelled him was the notion that in another time and another place, it could have been him, not Bilal, on the gurney, a gullible young Palestinian seduced into committing an atrocity and now paying for it with his life.

Bilal's body was drawn up in front of him and he reached for the clipboard notes from the prison doctor, seeing that adrenaline had been administered two hours earlier. Mahmud squeezed only half of the syringe into the boy's arm, running alongside the gurney as it was wheeled into the emergency cubicle that had been made ready.

Mahmud trusted Yael Cohen. He trusted her as a surgeon; he trusted her words. He knew if he was caught as part of this criminal deception against the State of Israel, the authorities would be merciless; but he also knew from Yael how endangered this young man's life was in the prison, and so he'd agreed to join with her in effecting his escape. So for him this would be no political statement or act of irrationality; it would be the act of a doctor saving the life of a patient.

He examined Bilal's pupils, listened to his heart, searched his lips and mouth for the typical discoloration of orally administered poisons, and looked over his entire body with care and precision while he instructed the ward nurse to take samples of blood and have them sent up to the pathology laboratory immediately for fluid, electrolyte, and other tissue analysis. He also wrote and signed forms for an MRI, chest X-ray, EEG, and nuclear medicine to identify what was happening in the patient's internal organs. While these were being prepared in other parts of the hospital, he stuck receptors all over Bilal's body for an ECG to monitor his heart.

Mahmud knew full well what was happening to Bilal and didn't need the battery of tests he had just ordered to bring
him back to consciousness. But he played the part he knew he needed to play, to make the ruse plausible and his involvement invisible. It strangely ran against his instincts as a doctor to pretend at being unable to heal when the power to save was right before him.

He said to the nurse, “This is the kid who had the angiomyolipoma.” The nurse looked at him blankly. “Dr. Cohen's patient.” Still the nurse registered nothing. Finally Mahmud said, “The terrorist who tried to blow up the temple wall.” The nurse suddenly nodded in recognition. “We need to prep him for an exploratory op.”

“Shouldn't we wait for the test results?” said the nurse.

“I really don't want to wait and have him bleed out internally. Dr. Cohen will want to operate immediately. You know what she's like.”

The nurse gave a curt nod and for a second Mahmud doubted whether he had been convincing enough. But he was given no time to ponder as Bilal was set in motion again toward the surgical ward. There, Mahmud knew, Yael would be waiting.

Y
ANIV
G
ROSSMAN WAITED
for a response from the man who sat opposite him. But instead of reacting, Eliahu Spitzer simply stared back at Yaniv, the slightest trace of a whimsical smile on his face. Yaniv was tense before going in, but Eliahu's cold and calculating manner unnerved him even more as the great gamble played out in front of him.

It was an odd situation for Yaniv. Professionally, he was always calm and in control when he was reporting on television or interviewing a recalcitrant subject. He was known internationally for his incisive yet polite demeanor interviewing politicians or reporting from battle zones. His tall body and intelligent
approach gave viewers confidence, and his ruggedly handsome face attracted a bevy of Israeli girls who were regular followers on ANBN's Facebook page.

But sitting opposite the Shin Bet operative in his private office, the reporter's eyes darting nervously from the view of the Old City through his window, to the ornaments on his desk, to Eliahu sitting smugly and comfortably in his chair, Yaniv was a picture of uneasy anxiety.

“And why should I do what you ask, Mr. Grossman?” Eliahu said quietly.

“Because I can help you put an end to this Bilal problem,” he said.

“And what problem precisely is that? And why do you think that I have a problem?”

“He's identified you as the man he saw in an intimate conversation with the imam of Bayt al Gizah, and it won't be long before the police work out that he's the brains behind what Bilal tried to do.”

The ghost of a smile now broadened to a grin masquerading as a sneer. “I speak to many Palestinians, some imams, some mullahs, some governors, some mayors, and some street sweepers. Why is it unusual for me to have had a meeting with this imam?”

“Why did you try to kill me?”

“Me?”

“A motorbike delivering a car bomb in traffic? We've seen that move before.”

“To kill an Iranian nuclear scientist, perhaps, but not a reporter. That would be a waste of resources,” said Spitzer, masking a grin. “And not Shin Bet's resources either. That's the sort of thing that Mossad does, quietly and efficiently. It sends a rather strong message.”