Vicious Circle (37 page)

The Doctor frowned. “The circuitry could be transmitting a signal—”

“I checked the hearing aid with my meter,” Petra reminded him.

“It could be programmed to transmit in short bursts at intervals. If you failed to test it when it was actually transmitting
…” The Doctor had another idea. “Petra, fetch the otoscope from my medical valise in the corner. You can’t miss it, it’s an
instrument for looking into ears. You flick the switch in the handle to turn on the light. I want you to look in his bad ear
and tell me precisely what you see.”

As Petra approached Sweeney, he angled his head away. Azziz came over and jammed the muzzle of his AK-47 into Sweeney’s good
ear. Kneeling next to Sweeney, Petra fitted the end of the otoscope into his left ear and switched on the light. Leaning forward,
she closed one eye and peered into the instrument with the other. “I see three jagged-shaped holes in what looks like a membrane.
Two are big enough to pass a pencil through. They are rimmed with white scar tissue. The membrane itself is grayish-brown
and covered with crusts. There is a tiny pearl—white and glistening and hard—near one of the perforations.”

“That will be a subepithelial pearl of cholesteatoma. Continue.”

“Through one of the holes in the membrane I can see a small white bulb-shaped object—it looks not unlike the eatable end of
a spring onion. It seems to be floating—”

“That will be the head of the stapes,” the Doctor announced triumphantly in English. “It will have been detached in the Beirut
explosion you talk about, Mr. Sweeney. Which means your left ear is permanently dead—the hearing aid you wear is not there
to augment your hearing because, with a floating stapes, there is no possibility of sound being transmitted to the inner ear.”
The Doctor switched back to Arabic. “I blame myself—I should have thought of it before. His hearing device must be programmed
to send a signal.” He spoke again in English. “How often does it broadcast?” he asked Sweeney.

Sweeney drew a quivering breath. The Israelis would break through the outer door at any instant; his only chance was to respond
to the Doctor’s questions and hope he asked more of them. “I was told there would be five signals, each lasting a tenth of
a second, at eighteen minutes to the hour and eighteen minutes past.”

“What is the range of the signal?”

“Depending on whether it’s broadcasting from inside or outside, somewhere between two hundred and two hundred and fifty meters.”

“Excarnate him, excarnate him, for God’s sake,” the Rabbi whimpered, his feet dancing in agitation. “Betrayed us, deserves
death. Don’t spell his name right in the Book of Deeds. Ship him out to the burning fiery furnace, DOA in Gehenna.”

Sweeney, faint with terror, closed his eyes. His breath, suddenly sour, came in shallow gasps. Bile rose to the back of his
throat. He
was bone-weary and drained of energy. It had been a long hard road from Seattle to Beirut to Israel. His luck, which had been
running for him when the mortar shell landed next to his car in Beirut, had run out in a shabby bricked-in room on the third
floor of an abandoned Jerusalem bathhouse. The only thing really surprising was that it had lasted as long as it did.

“Shoot him,” the Doctor instructed Azziz.

Grabbing a pillow off the cot to dampen the noise, Azziz angled the AK-47 and flicked it onto single shot and motioned with
his chin for Petra to step away. As she backed toward the cot, the Rabbi repeated the order. “What are you waiting for? Excarnate
the son of a—”

He was interrupted by a series of muted dry explosions—it sounded as if a string of Chinese New Year’s firecrackers had gone
off in a distant room. The reinforced front door to the hideaway, blown neatly off its hinges and bolts, slammed inward onto
the tiled floor. Men grunted as they flooded in. Azziz sank to one knee behind Sweeney and sucked in his breath and flicked
his weapon back onto automatic and aimed it at the door. Petra plucked the Webley off the cot and flattened herself against
the back wall. The acrid stench of nitroglycerine seeped under the door. The Doctor, shaken, crouched next to the Rabbi.

“Do what you have sworn to do,
ya’ani
,” Apfulbaum goaded him. “Think of my death as my modest contribution to our vicious circle.”

Through the reinforced thickness of the door, a hard voice speaking through a bullhorn declared in English, “We know you are
in there, Doctor al-Shaath. If you want to save your life, as well as the lives of your comrades, do not kill the Rabbi, do
not kill the journalist. We will exchange their lives for yours and those of your compatriots who are with you.”

“The light bulb,” the Doctor whispered.

Azziz came around under the dangling bulb and, gripping it with a handkerchief, unscrewed it. The room was plunged into a
tunnel-like blackness.

“I know you can hear me, Doctor al-Shaath. We are all soldiers
here. Let us talk soldier to soldier. We can respect a soldier who fights on the opposing side as long as he doesn’t execute
defenseless people.”

“They are putting explosives on the door,” Apfulbaum warned. “For God’s sake, Ishmael, shoot me before we both lose our nerve.”

In the perfect darkness, the Doctor started to feel for the knob of bone behind his prisoner’s ear. “I have lost my way,”
he breathed. “I can no longer distinguish the straight path.”

“I will lead you down it,” the Rabbi told him.

“Rabbi Apfulbaum, Mister Sweeney,” the voice of the bullhorn called. “Call out if you are still able to.” Someone else shouted
over the bullhorn in Arabic, “If you want to live, do not harm the Rabbi and the American journalist. If you kill them, make
no mistake about it, we will kill you.”

“What did you do to my brother?” Azziz screamed.

“The one who came down the stairs surrendered without a struggle,” the voice answered in Arabic. “He is alive and well and
has been taken prisoner.”

“You lie through your teeth!” Azziz screamed through tears of rage.

“Ishmael, I can tell you now,” the Rabbi confided urgently. “I’m not the spiritual leader of the Jewish underground group
Keshet Yonathan
. I am
the
leader. It’s me who tried to blow up the Dome of the Rock Mosque. It’s me who sent those letter bombs to Arab mayors. It’s
me who excarnated those Arabs at Hebron’s Islamic College. It’s me, Ya’ir!”

“I do not believe you,
ya’ani
. You are saying this in order to provoke me into shooting you.”

“I swear it, as God is my witness.” Apfulbaum’s voice broke with emotion. “Only bring me a stack of bibles, I will swear it
in a way that will convince you.”

Sweeney’s brittle words echoed through the dark room. “I believe him.”

The Rabbi’s fingers wrapped themselves around the Doctor’s wrist. “Ishmael, kinsman, cousin, brother, let us collaborate on
my death,” he pleaded, his mouth bone dry, his voice taut. “Let us, you and me together, shipwreck this stinking peace treaty
before the crazy
politicians can sign it.” He had difficulty finding the right words, difficulty spitting them out once he found them. “Don’t
you see it? The Messiah alone, the Renewer alone are less than blades of grass in a pasture. But together we can generate
a windstorm that will destroy the peace process. My God, the
khamsin
from the furnace of hell will be nothing compared. Think vicious circle, Ishmael—kill me and my people will take revenge
for my death, then your people will take revenge for the revenge.” Apfulbaum bared his teeth as a giggle made its way up from
his gut. He could feel the Doctor wavering. “You abducted me, you brought the goy journalist here in order to back yourself
into a corner. You invited a witness so that your identity would be known; so that the story would end in martyrdom. For me.
For you. It’s the ultimate
hejira,
the ultimate retreat from unbelief. Ishmael, Ishmael, even with tunnel vision you ought to be able to see the straight path.
If you can’t live in an Islamic state governed by Islamic law and the example of the Prophet, if I can’t live in a Jewish
state governed by the Torah and the example of our prophets, let’s seek religious asylum together in Paradise and sit with
the Prophets and Kings and Caliphs. Let’s join the martyrs at the right hand of God. You and me, Ishmael, the Islamic Renewer
and the Jewish Messiah, side by side. A real
simcha
, a real joy.”

And still the Doctor could not bring himself to shoot his friend. “I cannot take your life, Isaac. You are a
kafir
, an infidel who rejects the message of Islam. You will be condemned to everlasting hell, where the bodies of the damned are
doused in sheets of fire, where their faces are scalded with molten copper.
How can I do this to you?
”

“Doctor al-Shaath, your time is running out. Open the door and step out with your hands over your head and we will treat you
as prisoners of war. No harm will come to you.”

When another voice repeated the message in Arabic, Azziz said in a savage whisper, “My only wish is to kill many Jews before
I die.”

“Ishmael, I have the solution to our little problem,” the Rabbi said quickly. “Because of our common belief in one God, the
Epistle on Martyrdom
of the Rebbe Moses ben Maimon permits Jews to save their lives by converting to Islam. How could it have
escaped me! If a Jew can convert to Islam to avoid death, he can convert to avoid life!”

“You would actually convert—”

The Rabbi began rocking back and forth in his chair in the traditional Jewish posture of prayer as he recited the
shahada
, the Muslim confession of faith that is said when converting to Islam and at the moment of death: “
Ash’hadu an la illahu ila Allah wa’ash’hadu anna Muhammadan rasulu Allah
”—“
I bear witness that there is no God besides Allah, I bear witness that Mohammed is the messenger of Allah
.” Apfulbaum bent his head as if bowing to God. Tears of ecstasy flooded his eyes. “My Lord has guided me to a straight path,
a right religion, the creed of Ibrahim … my living, my dying belong to God.”

Sweeney whispered, “You are both loony.”

“Doctor al-Shaath, this is your last warning—”

The Doctor’s fingers, working furiously, located the knob of bone behind the Rabbi’s ear. He brought the Beretta up and breathed
twice on the tip of the barrel to warm it, then touched it to the spot under the bone. “If you had been born into the Qur’an,”
he murmured in Hebrew into the Rabbi’s ear, “you would have been my brother.”

The Rabbi, his sightless eyes burning with fever, responded in Arabic. “If we had read Torah together in Brooklyn,” he moaned
in a child’s voice, “you would have been family.”

The Beretta coughed up its bullet. The Rabbi, instantly brain dead, collapsed into Abu Bakr’s arm. The Doctor accepted the
weight as if it were a gift from God. “Before the day is done,” he whispered, “you will be in the holy of holies of the Third
Temple, you will pronounce the unpronounceable name of God that only the most pious are permitted to—”

I
N
THE WAR ROOM OFF THE
P
RIME
M
INISTER’S OFFICE, THE WELL
of conversation had long since run dry. The clock on the wall read twelve minutes to the hour; two floors below, half a hundred
journalists were gathered for the press conference due to start on the hour. The Prime Minister, a cigarette bobbing on his
thick lower lip, was rereading the two versions of his remarks for the dozenth time when the red telephone purred. Zalman
Cohen had the receiver pressed to his ear before the ring faded.

“Cohen.” He listened. “Hold on,” he said testily. He held the phone out to the
katsa
. “It’s Baruch. He says he’ll only speak to you.”

The
katsa
walked over and accepted the phone. “Elihu here.”

He listened intently, nodding slightly once, twice, a third time. Then he said, “Thank you, Baruch.” Then he set the phone
back on its cradle and stared at it for a long moment.

Cohen bleated, “Well?”

“How did it go, Elihu?” the Prime Minister asked gently.

“My man Sweeney is alive. He was tied to a chair, in the darkness he tipped it over when they blew open the door. He’s got
a splitting headache from his head hitting the deck, and two bullets in the fleshy part of his shoulder, but he’s going to
be all right. The vests saved the boys who came through the door. Two of them were wounded, one in the neck, one in the hand,
but neither seriously.”

“And Apfulbaum?”

“Dead.”

“Dead how?” Cohen demanded. “How dead?”

“He was killed by a small caliber bullet fired at point blank range into his brain while he was tied to a chair.”

Cohen beamed. “Abu Bakr killed him!”

“What about Abu Bakr and the others?” asked the chief of the general staff.

“Abu Bakr fired at the flashes with his pop gun. The first man in was Dror. As all revolvers pull to the right, he had the
good sense to plunge to
his
right, which may have saved his life. He put a bullet through Abu Bakr’s eye.”

“The bastard was already blind,” cracked Cohen, but nobody smiled.

“The night vision glasses gave our boys the edge,” Elihu continued. “A second terrorist was almost decapitated by a burst
of soft-nosed bullets from an Uzi. When the smoke from the explosion cleared, they discovered a young woman cowering against
a wall with the barrel of a pistol in her mouth. Before they could shoot her, she pulled the trigger.”

“Everything came up roses,” exalted Cohen. “The Renewer shot to death a helpless Rabbi tied to a chair. Our people shot the
Renewer. Tit for tat. Who could ask for a better denouement?” Several of the Shin Bet people murmured in agreement.

“I can think of a better denouement,” Elihu said with quiet intensity. The room fell still; he could feel the eyes of the
Prime Minister and the generals and the Shin Bet mandarins on him. “We’re back to square one,” he said. “We’re back to where
we were when I was running raids into occupied Palestine and shooting terrorists in their beds.” He remembered quoting a passage
from the Torah to his commandos on his swansong raid into Nablus and dredged up the words now. “‘
Life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand
.’ The Abu Bakr Brigades live by the same creed. One of them will exact vengeance, then we’ll exact vengeance for the vengeance.”