Fuse of Armageddon (36 page)

Logic told Quinn he could not make any assumptions. The deepest fibers in his body knew otherwise. This was the man.

“Blue jeans and a red shirt,” Safady said. “Her precious little shoes were red too. She was holding a small backpack with a Barbie doll patch on it.”

The edge of the cliff began to crumble beneath Quinn. But it was worse than a nightmare because he was so frozen with the shock and horror of his memories that it seemed they were all that was holding him in place, keeping him from falling yet leaving him so helpless he was unable to flail.

“I was there,” Safady said. “At that coffee stand on the side of the road that morning. It was my first bomber, strapped with explosives, and I’d walked him to the bus stop and prayed with him as we waited for the bus to arrive. I remember you, because just when the door opened for my bomber to step onto the bus to martyrdom, I saw you standing inside, holding hands with the little girl in the red shirt with the matching red shoes.”

Safady’s continued smile showed he knew the effect he was having on Quinn. “And the woman behind you. Laughing at something you’d said. Wrapping her arm around your waist as the door began to close. I remember because you pushed open the door to get out just before it closed, and I was thinking that you didn’t know it, but you’d just saved your life. I watched you for a few seconds and saw why you left the bus. You wanted espresso and a pastry. I watched you order it, but I knew you wouldn’t even take the first sip.

“I was right. The bus was only three hundred yards away when it exploded. I watched you drop the espresso and pastry that had saved your life. I watched you run toward the fire. That filled me with joy. That’s when I knew I was doing what Allah had called me to do—destroy Americans.”

Quinn was doing all he could to breathe, sucking in quick sips of air, fighting off vertigo.

“So?” Safady said. “Now do you know I am who I say I am? The man you’ve been hunting?”

It was happening again—the shock, disbelief, guilt. As if Quinn were right there in the wreckage in the moments after it happened, searching for his daughter, telling himself that by some miracle she’d survived, because God wouldn’t allow a death like this to happen to someone so beautiful and so vulnerable and so loved. Until he found the one red shoe.

“The knife,” Safady said. “It’s right there. Pick it up. I’m here.”

Quinn had spent five years hunting this man. But he’d also spent five years rigidly holding himself together.

All he could do was blink.

“I didn’t think you were man enough,” Safady said. “That’s what I wanted to know. Someday I’ll kill you.”

He backed away and closed the door, sliding a bolt shut.

Quinn stared at the door sightlessly. He wept without tears. Finally he turned away too, leaving the Cokes on the dirt beside the knife. He was a dead man. Walking.

33

Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip • 16:55 GMT


Pats. Wake up. Time to move.”

Sleep felt so good. Patterson wondered if it was from the relief of surviving the firefight in the tunnels—some kind of physical release that had put him into the deepest, darkest sleep of his life.

“Pats!” The voice was a whisper from the cot beside him.

Patterson dragged himself out of the depths and squinted. The lights were still soft, but he was the last one sleeping.

“Pats! Check it out.” A soldier knelt beside him, now shaking his shoulder.

“
Unngh,
” Patterson managed to say.

“Look.”

Patterson shifted and found the energy to prop himself up on an elbow.

“It’s him,” the soldier said. “Unbelievable.”

Patterson’s eyes were still clouded with sleep. He blinked a few times to clear them, then focused across the room. “You’re making it sound like Jesus. Who is it?”

“You don’t recognize him?” Still a whisper. “Come on. It’s Silver.”

“He was kidnapped,” Patterson said. He was still sleepy, but the tall man across the room seemed younger than Jonathan Silver. “Someone freed him?”

“Not the old man. His son. Brad.”

16:56 GMT


“Hamer told me about your hand,” Kate said to Quinn. “How it happened. You went into Gaza because of that woman and her daughter.”

“Good, then,” Quinn said. “No need to discuss it.”

“I’m just trying to get a complete picture here.”

“Like you were when you invited me for dinner with an extradition paper in your pocket?”

Kate ignored the remark. “Hamer says you’ve walked into the lion’s den more than once.”

“If Hamer knows so much, you should have this discussion with him.”

“I’ll be taking you back to face a grand jury and a possible death sentence. Before all of this, the thought gave me satisfaction. Now . . .” Kate looked away, then back at him. “I like compartments. Less messy that way. But it’s tough to keep you in one compartment when things I see put you in another.”

“Once I’m back in the United States, you’ll be done with me.”

“Are you kidding? I’ll be one of the key witnesses for the prosecution unless you can give me something to work on to clear you. I’ve seen who you are. I want to help.”

”I did hunt down those men that were found dead,” Quinn said. “I located them, identified them. But I did not kill them. My goal was to have them arrested so that they could provide information to have more of them arrested.”

“Help me prove it.”

“I’ll deal with the future when I get there. In the present, I need to focus on the next phone call from Safady. To make sure the choppers get in and the hostages get out.”

“Is that how you deal with the past, too? By staying in the present?”

“You have no business in my past,” Quinn said steadily. He was far angrier than he was going to show. “Stay out of it.”

“Yeah,” Kate said with a small smile. “I should. But I don’t want to. Maybe you were right; maybe this is some kind of reverse Stockholm syndrome. Being stuck with you in an intense situation makes me want to get to know you better.”

Quinn said nothing.

Her smile tightened slightly. “Come on. Talk to me.”

Quinn remained silent.

“You’re trying to stone-face me until I walk away from this conversation, aren’t you?”

“Exactly.”

She didn’t, however, make a move to leave.

Quinn put out his left hand and pulled off the bandage, showing the knife wound in the center of it and the neat stitches from the surgery just the day before. “I was on a trip in Canada once. Read a short newspaper article with a headline that said ‘Man Dies Trying to Save Son.’ His six-year-old had gone onto the ice and fallen through. He crawled out there to reach for his boy’s hand and fell through the ice himself. His clothes and boots were too heavy for him to swim and hold the boy out of the water. But it was shallow enough that he could stand with the boy on his shoulders, his own head underwater, and keep the boy’s head in the air. People nearby got to the boy in time. But not the dad.”

Quinn looked Kate squarely in the eyes and spoke with no emotion. “Every night I sang songs to my little girl when I tucked her into bed. She was afraid of monsters. Every night I promised that her daddy would save her from all the monsters in the world. I would have crawled onto the ice to save her. But I didn’t have that chance. I read that article and wept with envy for the father who was able to drown himself to save his little boy. I didn’t have that chance. I lived. She didn’t. I lived and found her shoe with her foot in it.”

He kept his defiant stare on Kate. “Try to imagine what that feels like. You want to know why I go into the lion’s den? Because every day I hope I don’t get out.”

She blinked back tears.

“Satisfied?” he said with quiet savageness. “Or is there anything else you want to suck out of my soul?”

“You’ve made your point,” Kate said. “But let me tell you this: you fight dirty.”

She opened the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Anywhere that’s away from you.”

She left the van without another word.

16:58 GMT


Patterson stood in a line near the back of all the Freedom Crusaders. All were armed with submachine guns. Brad Silver and Del Saxon faced them. They were at the base of another set of stairs that led up to a door in the ceiling.

Saxon spoke, with Silver nodding, as if Saxon would not be allowed to address the Freedom Crusaders without Brad Silver’s permission.

“You know who this man is.” Saxon gestured at Brad.

Most of the platoon applauded.

“Men,” Brad said, “I expected to be here earlier. But I had to find a way to escape hotel surveillance and become just another tourist going into Gaza. It took me longer than I wanted.”

Saxon got the nod from Brad to continue. “He’s the general behind all of this. From the beginning. Today the world thinks he’s holed up in a hotel. Tomorrow morning the world will see him in glory, and all of us will be hailed as heroes.”

More applause.

“The time has come for me to tell you about the next phase of our operation.” Saxon motioned to the door above them. “Through that door is the orphanage where thirty of our brothers and sisters are being held hostage. Once we penetrate, there will be no shooting unless absolutely necessary to preserve life. We don’t want to jeopardize the lives of the hostages or the children.”

Saxon paused. “There are hostiles in the orphanage, but they should already be neutralized. We do not expect resistance during our deployment above. Maintain silence at all times. Those of you appointed for cleanup have five minutes from when the hostiles are secured to complete your task and rejoin the rest of us. There will be no communications between any of you as we guard the hostages. No indication that we are not Palestinians. Any questions?”

There were none.

“Good.” Saxon scanned the Freedom Crusaders one final time, then nodded. The first man in line began to climb the stairs toward the orphanage that held terrorists and kidnapped Americans.

At the top, he pushed open the door and stepped into a brightly lit room. One by one, the members of the advance team joined him.

Patterson noticed that Brad Silver waited until nearly all of them were up the stairs before falling in line.

The guy was only a leader, he thought, when convenient.

34

Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip • 17:01 GMT


Quinn was still alone in the van when his cell rang. He’d been thinking about Kate, remembering part of the background report that Hamer had supplied him as part of his earlier demand. He remembered most the psychological assessment, impressed that the Mossad could dig up something that confidential on such short notice. He was appalled at the circumstances that Kate had dealt with in her childhood. A father, often drunk and occasionally abusive in the most horrible ways possible. The assessment had suggested that her belligerence and bulldog determination to close police cases were part of an ambivalence toward authority.

Thinking of this and of how savagely he’d just treated her, Quinn let the cell phone ring twice before answering.

“The choppers will be there just after dusk,” Hamer said. “Let’s hope this works.”

Quinn hung up without responding.

Yeah,
he thought.
I’m helping him escape to Jordan. But when this is done, nothing is going to stop me from finding Safady again.

17:02 GMT


“You are very close to freedom,” Safady announced to Jonathan Silver and the rest of the hostages. “Listen.”

When Safady interrupted, Silver had been on his bunk bed, meditating on the words of Jesus as if for the first time, thinking about what Esther had said about the true kingdom of Israel. It had always bothered him that modern Israel was such a secular society, with a minority of Jews of faith. By extension, it had bothered him that these unbelieving people should be rewarded with a divine promise of the land around them. But he’d answered these doubts by telling himself that the end justifies the means, that it didn’t matter if the Jews had faith in the Old Testament God who’d promised the land as long as they regained it so that a Third Temple could be rebuilt to usher in Armageddon. But what if Esther was right? What if all who followed Jesus became spiritual descendants of Abraham by relationship with God, not by ethnic heritage?

“Helicopters are on the way,” Safady continued. “If you want to live, you will follow instructions. No questions, no hesitation in obeying commands. When the lights go off, my men will have flashlights to guide you. Once we are all aboard the helicopters, our destination is Jordan. We have been promised safe passage. Once we are in Jordan, if the ransom money is released, so too will all of you.”

Safady gave an encouraging smile. It was eerie after all of his previous threats. “You can trust this. I am telling you because I don’t want any problems getting you on the helicopters. This is a military operation run by the Israelis. You should be encouraged by the fact that we are going to Jordan. It means that my men and I can escape—something we could not do from Gaza. And the fact that we can escape means that you are important to us alive. It guarantees our freedom when this hostage taking has ended.”

Safady surveyed all the Americans. “You will see that my men are masked to hide their identity from the Mossad. Take that as encouragement too. They do not want to become martyrs. So neither will you.”

17:08 GMT


In the hidden room beneath the orphanage, Joe Patterson led the red and black heifer to the bottom of the stairs. He was surprised to see Saxon with a bucket of soapy water and a towel.

“Hold the heifer,” Saxon told Patterson. “I’ll go slow with this.”

With what?
Patterson wondered. But he obeyed silently.

Saxon dipped the towel in the water, then used it to begin gently rubbing the black spots on the heifer’s hide. Immediately the towel began to blacken.