The Last Days (35 page)

Churchill's forces survived massive aerial bombardments inside the Rock's hundred-and-forty caves and underground bunkers. Eisenhower successfully directed the rescue of North Africa from these very same installations. Now the Brits and Americans maintained highly sophisticated electronic intelligence gathering facilities on the Rock, including a state-of-the-art Echelon listening station, linked by secure satellite ground stations and digitally encrypted fiber-optic pipelines run by the National Security Agency.

Gibraltar remained a source of contention between Britain and Spain as it had for nearly three centuries. The Spanish yielded control to London in the Treaty of Utrecht in July 1713, and had been moaning and complaining about the deal ever since. The dispute was a thorn in the flesh of both sides. But for the past three hundred years it had been largely political, not military in nature, so Gibraltar was now the peaceful, prosperous home to Muslims, Jews, and Christians, the homes and shops and houses of worship, not to mention Pizza Hut and Burger King franchises, increasingly ubiquitous among free and modern people the world over.

A disputed territory free from terrorism and war? What better place, thought Bennett, to seek a new peace and prosperity for the people of the Book. All they had to do now was keep it a secret.

Bennett finally got up at 5:00
A.M.
local time.

Another restless, fitful night was over. He'd been up three times since going to bed at midnight, checking his e-mails and scouring the Internet for updates about his mother, the hunt for the suicide bombers on their way to the U.S., and the latest developments in the West Bank and Gaza.

The news of the reward should have encouraged him. Five million dollars? Maybe he should double it, or match it himself. He had the money. McCoy would give everything she had to have her mother or father back. He should, too.

He tried not to think about where his mother could be at the moment. He tried not to let himself think about what she could be going through. But it wasn't easy. He'd seen some horrible things in the past month, and been briefed about even worse. Bennett knew what these people were capable of, and they made Al Capone look like Mother Teresa.

The thought of his own flesh and blood in the hands of these monsters almost made him sick. But what else could he do? He couldn't let it paralyze him. Somehow he had to stay focused. His responsibilities would consume his time over the next few days and weeks and demand his full attention. The full resources of the American government were doing everything humanly possible to track her down and bring her home safely. It would do no good to micromanage every move the FBI and the DHS made. He would have to trust them. He had no other choice.

That, of course, was easier said than done. For the past thirty-six hours—ever since they'd been airlifted out of Alpha Zone by SEAL Team Eight—he'd been a wreck. Unable to sleep. Unable to keep food down. Running a slight fever. Nightmares. Flashbacks. And early signs of dehydration. The chief physician on the
Reagan
put him on an IV the minute he arrived, and for the next twenty-four hours he was on forced bed rest. So were Sa'id and Galishnikov, it turned out. Bennett was almost relieved to hear it—not because he wanted them to be suffering, only because it made him feel slightly less guilty at not being strong enough to have sailed through Gaza unscathed.

Physically, McCoy, Tariq, and Nazir had weathered it best. But emotionally, the loss of Ziegler, Maroq, and Hamid was almost too much. Bennett's team wasn't on bed rest, per se. But they were being encouraged to rest and read and spend some time with the chaplains onboard. What they all needed was some serious R&R, a chance to get away for a few weeks, maybe longer, and take their time recovering. But such rest was not in the cards. Not for some time to come.

Bennett looked over at the half-empty bottle of sedatives he'd been prescribed to bring down his blood pressure and help him get some badly needed rest. They weren't helping much. But he certainly couldn't take any more. He had work to do, and time was of the essence.

He couldn't believe it was already the last day of the year. In many ways it was the day for which he'd been preparing for nearly an entire decade. He finally got out of bed for the last time and went over to the large desk in the guest suite to which he'd been assigned. The room, the very one used by Eisenhower, had no windows, as it was deep inside the Rock. But it was comfortable enough, with a spacious work area, multiline phone, cable television, broadband Internet connection and a small, round conference table and four maroon leather chairs.

Sitting down before his notebook computer again, he clicked onto the Internet and scanned the headlines where he found a little good news. Operation Palestinian Freedom was proceeding apace and racking up tangible victories, bit by bit. The Pentagon was now reporting that Bethlehem, Jericho, and their surrounding towns and villages were now securely in U.S. hands. So was the Jordan River valley, a two-mile security perimeter around the outskirts of East Jerusalem, and the main thoroughfare between Jerusalem and Jericho.

A sudden chill ran through him. It was strange, in a way. Bennett had never been to Sunday school. He'd never read the Old Testament all the way through, and barely skimmed the New Testament during a college class on comparative religions. Yet somehow, just reading the names of these ancient biblical towns stirred something inside him. These were not just names of modern-day battlegrounds. They were keys to a lost world, metaphysically linked across space and time to the icons of Western civilization, men such as Abraham and Moses, Caleb and Joshua, Jesus and the disciples. These were ancient battlegrounds, where apocalyptic wars were once fought with Persia (now Iran), Babylon (now Iraq), the Assyrians (now modern-day Syria), the Egyptians, and with the Philistines of Gaza on the coastal plains of the Mediterranean. Now such cities were again front-page news.

It was surreal, and unsettling, though he couldn't precisely put his finger on why. It felt at once ominous and inevitable. Babylon was back in the news after three hundred centuries buried under the desert sands. Men were trying to blow up the Temple Mount and rebuild a temple laid waste nearly twenty centuries before. Philistines and Israelites were at war again, forty centuries after David and Goliath.

Why? What was happening? What did it mean? Bennett didn't know. All he knew for certain was that something was taking him where he did not mean to go. He was being drawn, against his will, into the epicenter of the world's darkest, cruelest conflict. Men and women were dying all around him. The destruction he'd seen just in the last few days were beyond his deepest fears.

But it seemed there was nothing he could do to resist or slow his journey. Unseen forces were forcing him further and further away from the safe and familiar. He was being driven out into dark waters, out into the shadow lands. No longer was he in control of his own destiny. He wondered if he ever had been. He was suddenly a branch being swept along by a raging river, a river that carried prophets and priests and poets before him, a river whose increasingly swift currents now threatened to consume him without mercy, without warning.

No other part of the world cast the same spell.

The more Bennett stared at the headlines on his computer, and the more he thought about the past few weeks, the more it seemed the world was hypnotized by the Middle East—obsessed with its oil, intoxicated by its mysteries, seduced by its tales of the supernatural. And so was he.

Even at the peak of the bipolar world—the East-West cold war clash between free people and the Evil Empire—the Middle East was the main event. The central battleground. The '48 war. The Suez Crisis of '56. The Six Day War of '67. The war of attrition. The Yom Kippur War of '73. The Arab oil embargo. The explosion of OPEC and petrodollars. The civil war in Lebanon in '75. The Israeli invasion of '82. The atheists armed the Muslims. The Christians armed the Jews. Thousands died. Millions more were maimed and orphaned. There were other skirmishes, other hot zones. But again and again the world's attention was drawn back to the Middle East, as it was being drawn again. Why?

McCoy didn't think the term
Middle East
quite fit. Nor did
Near East Asia.
Nor did the
Arab world.
Not precisely. She called it NAMESTAN—North Africa, the Middle East, and the Stans (Afghani
stan,
Paki
stan,
and the Muslim former Soviet Central Asian republics such as Kazakh
stan,
Uzbeki
stan,
Tajiki
stan
and the others). But by any name it smelled just as foul.

Without question, the region comprised the most fought-over real estate in the history of mankind. And it wasn't just over oil. That might partially explain recent times, but not the long arc of history. The Romans hadn't conquered the region for oil. Nor had the Ottomans. The Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Persians slaughtered each other for control of NAMESTAN for thousands of years before anyone knew of the black gold buried under its sands.

Why then did all roads lead to it, and to the jewel at its navel, the city of Jerusalem, the City of Peace? What were the mystical sirens that drew the kings and conquerors of history? Why were a few hundred reporters assigned to Beijing, but more than two thousand to Jerusalem? What was the narcotic that transformed rational men in this part of the world into bloodthirsty killers, willing to annihilate women and children and entire towns and villages to possess it? What was drawing him?

It was a question he couldn't shake. Bennett hadn't sought this journey. But something or someone was forcing him to proceed. Regardless of what he did, it refused to let go. And it scared him. It wasn't simply his fear of death that now kept him awake at nights. It was the certain knowledge that his fate was not his own.

Bennett logged into his AOL account to check his personal e-mails. He'd lost his Blackberry PDA somewhere between Jerusalem and Germany and there hadn't exactly been any spare time to buy a new one. He guessed the White House communications office would probably issue him one. But that, too, took time he didn't have.

“You've got mail.”

Too much, as it turned out. He scrolled through a 138 messages. A handful were from former colleagues at GSX worried about him and his mom. Most of the rest were spam—ads for weight loss programs, hair transplant treatments, laser eye surgery, special offers for Viagra, Russian mail-order brides. It was ridiculous, and infuriating. No wonder AOL was in trouble. He deleted everything in sight, except two new messages that caught his eye.

The first was from Mordechai. He'd be arriving at the “Mount of Olives” on Sunday, just after noon. It was about time, Bennett thought. The good doctor was absolutely, positively supposed to have been there overnight. Now he was going to be a full four days late. Bennett read further. First came an apology, followed by an explanation. It was cryptic, to say the least. But reading between the lines, and knowing the old man as he did, he basically figured out what was going on. Storms had grounded all flights out of Ben Gurion for nearly forty-eight hours. The FedEx jet he was using for cover had apparently then taken him to Istanbul, then to Rome, then on to London. It was the best he could do without taking the risk of flying on standard commercial aviation.

Every intelligence service in the world, after all, knew who Dr. Eliezer Mordechai was. They knew he'd been the director of the Mossad's Arab Desk from '76 to '84. The director of the Mossad's Nuclear Desk from '85 to '87. Full director of the Mossad from 1988 to 1996. They knew he'd helped plan the rescue of Israeli hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. They assumed he'd helped plan the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirik in 1981. And they suspected he'd personally ordered the assassination of Khalil al-Wazir, the PLO terror master, in Tunis on April 16, 1988.

Thus, even if he used a false passport, facial recognition software recently installed at every major airport in Europe was sure to pick him up and identify him. He'd be tagged. He'd be followed. And he'd lead them to Doron and Sa'id. It was a risk none of them could afford taking. So McCoy had suggested flying him on a series of FedEx planes. It was a technique the CIA used from time to time to move NOCs—nonofficial cover operatives—around the globe with the least chance of them getting picked up by Interpol or foreign spooks. Jack Mitchell loved the idea, as did Mordechai.

It was the last line of the e-mail that intrigued Bennett the most. “Looking forward to seeing you. I bear gifts from afar.” He read it again, then a third time. “
Gifts from afar
”? What in the world was that supposed to mean? Bennett had had enough surprises for one lifetime. He didn't need any more. He hit the reply button, typed three lines—“Skip the gifts. I just have one question. Did you follow the money?”—then hit send.

The second e-mail was from Marcus Jackson at
The New York Times.
The guy was relentless. He refused to give up. He said he felt bad about Bennett's mom and hoped the FBI found her safe and sound. But he was hunting Bennett down. He was determined to do another story, the inside story of the firefight in Gaza. He knew some of the details already, and his information was eerily precise. Jackson knew what absolutely no one else had reported yet—the code name, Operation Briar Patch. He knew Bennett was no longer in Palestine. He knew McCoy was with him, and he suspected Sa'id and Galishnikov were, too.

Bennett felt another twinge of pain shoot through his stomach. Where was Jackson getting all of this? And if he'd gotten this much, how soon would it be before he got the rest? After all, this wasn't even Bennett's official White House e-mail account. Jackson had that address and they wrote back and forth from time to time. But this was Bennett's personal e-mail account. How had Jackson gotten that?

Bennett clicked off his computer. He shut his eyes and tried to breathe deeply. Then he headed to the private bathroom, just off the large master bedroom. He needed to clear his head and get focused. He shaved quickly and jumped in the shower.

Twenty minutes later, he was ready to go, dressed in fresh blue jeans, a white T-shirt, black cotton sweater, and brown leather loafers. All of his clothes had arrived safely from the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. There were power suits and power ties he could wear if he wanted. But despite the imminent commencement of “formal” peace talks between the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers, Bennett wanted the atmosphere to seem anything but formal.

 

At precisely 7:00
A.M.,
there was a knock at the door.

It was McCoy, and she looked incredible. Nothing glamorous or overtly sexy, just light makeup, blue jeans, a brown wool sweater, her hair pulled back in a scrunchy, and brown leather boots.

“Hey, Point Man, how'd you sleep?” She smiled, her eyes dancing with life.

“Don't ask,” groaned Bennett. “How 'bout you?”

“Slept like a baby.”

“Woke up and cried every few hours?”

She laughed.

“No, actually, I feel pretty good, considering. You ready?”

“I don't know.” He sighed. “I guess.”

They sat down at the round conference table in Bennett's suite and went over the plan. In less than thirty minutes, they'd meet Doron and Sa'id for breakfast. No aides or advisors were with them. None had been allowed to come.

It would just be the two prime ministers, McCoy and himself, and a small cadre of Israeli and American security agents outside the doors. President MacPherson had been insistent on the basic framework of the negotiations, and Bennett and McCoy had readily agreed. This had to be the work of two men who truly wanted to make peace, and who personally understood the high price of failure.

Both men could and should consult with their governments back home, of course, and the U.S. had secure communications facilities that would be made available to both sides. But naysayers and meddlers, particularly those from the U.N., the E.U., and the rest of the Arab world, need not apply. Indeed, they wouldn't even be told of the existence of such negotiations unless the talks began to bear fruit.

What was needed now was privacy, secrecy, and the time to get to know each other. This would begin with a casual, friendly breakfast. It would be their first meeting ever. It would be time for two men to shake hands, break bread, and get comfortable. Bennett would brief them on the progress of Operation Palestinian Freedom, and both men would have an opportunity to compare notes and offer feedback, concerns, and suggestions. If necessary, they could hook up a videoconference with the president and the National Security Council, though the chance of such a move leaking was high enough that Bennett wanted to avoid that if possible.

McCoy would then brief the two leaders on the progress of the international effort to track down the terrorists on their way to the United States. Countries throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America were providing tremendous assistance over the past twenty-four hours, and the president wanted Doron and Sa'id—particularly Sa'id—to see themselves as part of an international antiterrorist coalition, not simply as two warring parties trying to reconcile their seemingly irreconcilable differences.

The key was keeping expectations low. They needed to baby-step their way from areas of wide agreement to areas of serious contention. They would begin, therefore, by focusing on something to which both sides were now firmly committed—waging a war on terror. They'd finish by 9:30
A.M.
local time, 10:00 at the latest. Both leaders would then have a few hours to consult with their governments. Then they'd reconvene for a working lunch and begin the long pilgrimage to peace.

It was Friday, the Muslim holy day, but Sa'id insisted they not wait. Too much was at stake. Too many Palestinians were dying. Doron quickly agreed, and offered to continue the meetings on Saturday, despite the fact that it was the Jewish Sabbath.

“The Psalmist urged us to never stop praying for the peace of Jerusalem,” said Doron, not much of a religious man himself. “If we can pray for peace on the Sabbath, I think in this instance we can work for it as well.”

It was a good sign, and Bennett hoped a good omen for what lay ahead. And thus, at MacPherson's directive, Bennett would begin to lay out the administration's “oil for peace” proposal. Friday he'd focus on oil. Saturday he'd focus on peace. No real negotiations of any kind. Not at first. He'd simply make the president's case and answer any initial questions the two leaders had. Day one and two weren't about haggling over the price, just about viewing the merchandise.

 

It was a somewhat awkward beginning.

But perhaps that was to be expected. Bennett made proper introductions and the two prime ministers shook hands and made some chitchat. Doron seemed comfortable enough, but it was Sa'id who struck Bennett as unusually reserved. It could have been the lack of sleep, or the traumatic events of their stay in Gaza and narrow escape. It might also be the fact that Sa'id was just beginning to get used to the role of being the Palestinian prime minister and careful not to give his Israeli counterpart the impression this was going to be easy. They had some very tough days ahead of them. Perhaps Sa'id was just lowering expectations.

Either way, it wasn't exactly warm and cozy in the opening minutes, but soon enough they were seated for fruit salad, bagels, and Turkish coffee. It was a round table, purposefully chosen for the occasion, with place cards written in black calligraphy for each principal. In the center of the table were three small flags—American, Israeli, and Palestinian. Sitting in front of each prime minister was also a small wrapped gift, framed illuminations of Psalm 122:6, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem,” the very verse Doron quoted earlier, hand-painted by Nancy Warren, the White House artist-in-residence.

The four gathered in the private, paneled dining room of Marty Kunes, the tall, lanky, fifty-six-year-old commander of Echelon Station and a twenty-eight-year veteran of the U.S. National Security Agency. Kunes was a legend in the American intelligence community, nicknamed Magic Marty. He and his team routinely scored some of the most valuable electronic intercepts of any U.S. or British station, and were known for their quick turnaround and accurate translations. They weren't showboats, never sought attention within the NSA, just kept their heads down and turned out consistently impressive work.

But none of the four were likely to meet Kunes or his team on this trip. On direct orders from his superiors in Ft. Meade, Maryland, Kunes had completely cleared out of his living quarters, as had his senior officers. They'd basically cleared three entire floors for their VIPs, though only Kunes himself knew who their visitors actually were.

Doron and Sa'id had each arrived separately under the cover of darkness and surrounded by small security details. Fifteen Shin Bet Secret Service agents were protecting Doron, while Tariq, Nazir, and thirteen Gold members of SEAL Team Eight were tasked with protecting Sa'id. Bennett, McCoy, and Galishnikov had entered the Rock the same way, guarded by fifteen members of ST-8's Red Team.