Dark Waters (3 page)

H
addid followed Mansoor and disembarked in Yaffa. The stone walls quickly engulfed them as they wound their way west, moving from one narrow passageway to another. Near the water, they turned south and threaded their way through the maze of tourists who had come to see Yaffa, the “Bride of the Sea.”

Mansoor spat on the ground.
“Ignorant bastards.”

Haddid was twenty-eight, too young to remember Yaffa in the early days, before
al-Nakba
, the 1948 occupation. But his father had told him how, prior to the war, Yaffa had been a thriving seaport surrounded by citrus groves that scented the air. It was renowned throughout the world for its fish and oranges, and the people had prospered. The exports to Europe afforded fishermen and farmers the chance to live in magnificent houses lining the shore.

Now those same houses had been made into flats for rich Israelis or converted into restaurants, art galleries, and shops that catered to the throngs of visitors happy to erase the Palestinians from memory. Even the streets were given Hebrew names. Not one Arabic sign remained. History had been washed until there was nothing left.

All around them, the crumbling houses, their colorful plaster walls fading and cracking, were destined for destruction.
Haddid’s stomach roiled as they tromped past
GivatHaZevel
, the rubbish mountain, where the remains of the demolished homes festered. Israel’s intent had been to construct a knoll on which to build villas for wealthy Israelis. Instead, it ended with an unstable mountain—a mix of fetid water and crumbled asbestos. Here, iron gatherers worked, horses grazed, people were married, and children played. To view the sea, one had to climb
GivatHaZevel
.

Passing through the neighborhoods, Haddid eyed the laughing women uncovered in the sun, the playing children, and the old men lounging in the doorways, and he felt sorry. Like so many of mixed heritage, these people did not belong. Israel didn’t embrace them. Neither did Palestine. They were a people to be tolerated and used, cast off into the ruins of a brighter yesterday and expendable at the end of the day.

Mansoor tipped his head at the entrance to Najm’s apartment building. They climbed the stairs and knocked.

“Najm, it is Mansoor. Open the door.”

Haddid heard someone moving inside. A shadow crossed the peephole and then the door swung inward.

“Mansoor.” Najm held a beer in one hand. Mansoor swept through the door and gave Najm a hug.

“You remember Haddid.”

Najm nodded and closed the door.

Haddid glanced around the apartment and noted how nicely Najm lived. His was a spacious apartment, and he had furnished it well. The floors were tiled in Arab fashion, but he had covered them with authentic Persian rugs. A sofa with two matching chairs faced a state-of-the-art entertainment center, complete with a plasma screen television and high-tech stereo system. Not many young Arabs enjoyed these kinds of possessions. Only those who dealt drugs, had power through family ties, or had brains lived like this.

Mansoor looked around. “Where is Muatab? Tell me, did we succeed?”

Najm’s mouth twisted as though he felt pain. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

Haddid felt a twist of fear. This did not bode well.

Najm told them how Muatab had killed the man from the State Department.

“That deserves a celebration,” Mansoor said, again looking around. “So tell me, where is my brother?”

“He’s dead.”

“What?” Mansoor’s expression froze, a mask of disbelief, fear of the truth, and pain.

Haddid placed a hand on his shoulder, while Najm told them about the shooting.

“It was over so fast. There was nothing I could do,” he said. He started to reach out and then turned away instead, taking another slug of his beer.

“No!” Mansoor’s grief spilled out in torrents.

First had been denial, then anger, then bargaining with Allah. Najm and Mansoor drank beer while Haddid drank soda, pressing the frosted bottle to his cheeks, dispelling the heat. As day turned to night, they talked of Muatab, reveling in his childhood feats. They spoke of honor and duty and sacrifice—and a pledge for revenge.

“Tell me Muatab’s death was not wasted. Tell me you have the information for Zuabi.”

“It’s right here, Mansoor.” Najm picked up the computer sleeve. He turned on the tablet and pulled two USB drives from the zippered pocket.

“You have verified it?”

“During the exchange at the square.”

“Show me,” Mansoor ordered.

Najm set the tablet on the ottoman and slipped a pink-tinged memory stick into the USB port on the back. Working the mouse, he struck a key on the keyboard. Mansoor leaned forward in anticipation. Najm took a swig from his bottle. Haddid remained rooted in his seat. The content only meant trouble if placed in the hands of men who wanted to derail the peace process, and Zuabi didn’t want peace.

R and B music erupted from the computer, and the three men jumped. Najm spit beer everywhere.

“What the fuck?” He set his bottle down on the end table and tapped a few more keys.

Using both hands, Mansoor gestured at the computer. “What is this?”

“It should be what Zuabi wants,” said Najm. “I verified it.”

“Could it be on the other one?”

“No.” Najm picked up the other USB drive and tossed it on top of his office ID badge in a bowl on the coffee table. “This one is the one with the plans. The one I was to give to the American. I put the information on it myself.”

Music blared from the tablet speakers.

Najm turned back to the machine. “Let me try a different file.”

More music.

Mansoor raked his hands through his hair. “What is this?”

Najm leaned in close to the screen. “Every one is a song.”

Mansoor pointed his finger at Najm. “You are a dead man.” He yanked the memory stick from the computer and flung it against the wall. “Zuabi expects us to return with usable information.”

“Maybe the music is code?” said Haddid.

Najm let go of the mouse. “No, the American gave me the documents.” He slammed his fist down on the table. The bowl in the center jumped. “I tried to tell Zuabi to make the trade over the Internet.”

“The American refused,” Mansoor said. “He didn’t trust our encryption technology to protect him.”

Haddid nodded. “He thought it safer to do this the old-fashioned way.”

“See how well that worked out.” Najm’s voice carried a note of bravado, but his hand shook when he lifted his beer. “Without the information, Zuabi has nothing. But we still have the plans Cline wanted. We still have something to trade.”

“With who? The Israeli police?” Mansoor said.

“Were the USB drives ever out of your hands?” asked Haddid.

Without warning, Najm pulled up his feet and kicked away the ottoman. “After Muatab was shot, I had them both. As I was running, I stumbled into this girl. She spilled the contents of her purse.”

“You think she has the drive?”

“It’s a possibility.”

Mansoor stopped pacing. “Where is this girl?”

“I don’t know,” Najm said. “But from something her father said, they often watch the fountain.”

Haddid’s hopes for an end to this mission faded. If they found the child, it would not end well for her. “But you don’t know for certain that we’ll find her.”

“It is our best lead,” Mansoor said. “Tomorrow, we will stake out the square. We will go and get what we came for. Muatab will not have died in vain.”

I
t was well into the night before they wrapped up the crime scene and arranged transport for Cline’s body. Jordan headed home for a shower and something to eat. The next morning, she went in early and beat a straight line to Daugherty’s office.

“Give me the rundown,” he said.

She talked him through the scene and then laid out her concerns about the judge. “He won’t come in.”

“So let it go, Jordan. You did your job. You offered.” Daugherty reached for the phone. “I’m more interested in knowing what Cline was doing out there. Bring me the answer to that question, and I’ll give you a gold star.”

Daugherty waved her off, and Jordan banged the door on her way out. Figuring out what Cline was doing in the square wasn’t going to be easy.

Plopping herself down in her chair, she flipped on her computer, typed in her user name and password, and waited for the machine to load. At this point, she had four possible leads—Cline, the Palestinian who’d killed him, federal judge Benjamin Taylor, and the unknown shooter.

Detective Weizman was working on identifying the Palestinian and the shooter. On that front, his databases likely would prove more effective than hers. But, to cover her bases, she sent a
picture of the dead Palestinian from her phone to her computer and started running it for facial recognition.

That done, she pulled up Steven Cline’s State Department dossier. She had skimmed the report on Cline the day she was offered his job. Nothing had caught her eye at the time. Now, with him knee-deep in whatever was going down, she hoped maybe she’d find something she missed.

The records detailed a family man with a wife and two kids who would soon be sitting Shiva in Tel Aviv. A Jewish funeral traditionally occurred within twenty-four hours of death, and seldom more than seventy-two. In Cline’s case, there would be some type of autopsy, and extended family would be given time to attend. Jordan figured it would be three days.

Focusing on the dossier, Jordan found that Cline—other than collecting a few parking tickets over the years—was as clean as you could get. A Stanford grad, he spoke both English and Hebrew, had studied Middle Eastern cultures in school, and had served at this Tel Aviv post for nine months before requesting an emergency transfer back to the states. Raised Jewish, he was the youngest of five from a family not known to be particularly pious, though he had spent one year in Israel between high school and college. Because of his DSS background check, the records were thorough, right down to his father’s eye color and his mother’s rosebud tattoo.

Jordan wondered what she was missing.

She pulled up his wife’s record. Born Tamar Kaufmann, Cline’s wife had attended a Jewish school in Chicago. She had met Cline during a study year in Israel shortly after their high school graduation. They had returned to the states, attended college, married, and had two kids—Hannah and Martin, ages two and four.

They’d been back in Israel less than a year. Then, one month ago, Cline had asked to be replaced. He claimed that his mother was ill and that he and Tamar needed to go back to the states to
care for her. A lie. Instead, he’d arranged a leave of absence from his new post in Washington, D.C., and stayed. Why?

Digging a little deeper, Jordan discovered that Tamar Cline attended the Ida Crown Jewish Academy. Opened in 1942 as the Chicago Jewish Academy, it was conservative—ultraconservative—and ultrareligious.

Glancing at the clock, Jordan factored in the time difference and then placed a call to the school’s administration offices. She found herself stonewalled by a chipper-sounding woman with strong nasal overtones who claimed she was unable to reveal information about any student, past or present. An official request could be made in writing.

Jordan hung up and put a call in to the DSS office in Chicago. The local field agent said he would dig around and call her back.

While she waited, Jordan skimmed the State Department files on Ben and Sarah Taylor. There was the same old information—where they were born, who their parents were, whether or not they liked broccoli, and when their divorce was finalized. But two interesting facts jumped out. One, Sarah Taylor was a junior senator from Colorado who served on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Not a reason to go after her family, but interesting nevertheless. The other involved Judge Taylor’s service record. He had done one tour as a Navy SEAL before heading back to school and the bench.

A Google search on the senator turned up a few recent articles. One pulled from the
Rocky Mountain News
archives revealed that Senator Sarah Taylor had been a key player in crafting Title IV of the Patriot Act, which paved the way for retroactively disallowing foreigners with ties to terrorist organizations entry into the United States. A reason for someone to go after her, but not for someone to target her ex-husband and daughter.

The second article, published in the
Denver Post
, chronicled the trial in which Judge Taylor had ruled to freeze the Palestine Liberation Committee’s U.S.-based investments. That might have triggered an assassination attempt by the Palestinians. It had definitely triggered the incident in Denver.

Jordan knew all about the case. She’d been the one to flag the false passports identifying the terrorists who had holed up in the Lebanese consulate. Their target: the federal courthouse in downtown Denver. One of the terrorists died that night, along with the Lebanese consul’s daughter. The other sat in a maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado, refusing to talk.

But the scene today had been different. The gunman—or woman, rather—in the square had put a bullet through the Palestinian’s head before firing a shot that barely missed the judge. It made no sense for the shooter to play both sides of the fence.

Her phone rang, and she picked up. “Jordan.”

“Dirk Walsh, Chicago DSS, here. I have the records on Cline’s wife. What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

Jordan could hear him rustle pages. “Of note, it says here that her family is ultra-Orthodox and that she was
shomer negiah
.” Observant of touch.

“Meaning she didn’t have physical contact with any members of the opposite sex?”

“Affirmative. No holding hands, no hugging, no arms around her shoulders at the local movie theater.”

“Is that normal?”

“Odd for most,” said Walsh, “but common enough among ultra-Orthodox Jews. Especially ones raised in the West Ridge suburb of Chicago, locally referred to as the Golden Ghetto.”

“If that’s the case, why the notation in the file?”

Another page turned. Agent Walsh hummed into the phone and then said, “It seems Tamar ran into trouble with some of her fellow students.” More pages crinkled. “She filed several reports stating that ‘violations were made against her.’”

“What kind of ‘violations’?” Jordan envisioned kids poking her, tapping her on the shoulder. Counting coup.

“It says that a group of boys trapped her in the stairwell between classes one day and took turns fondling her breasts. Shortly after that, her parents showed up with Rabbi Tiran Marzel. He demanded someone ensure her rights.”

“Marzel? How do I know that name?” Jordan keyed the letters into the search tab on the browser.

“He has ties to a known terrorist group.”

On cue, her computer pulled up a picture and several articles.

“Anything else I can do for you?” Walsh asked.

“Can you forward me a copy of your notes?”

“Will do.”