Blood Rules (40 page)

Sharett nodded again. “Did she get away?”

“They all got away.” Aliza looked at him. “Raful,” she said, and her voice had turned soft. “It was never part of any deal that you, anyone, should gun Stepmother down in cold blood in front of witnesses.” She shook her head. Then suddenly she screamed at the top of her voice,
“What possessed you?”

Raful looked at her and saw something worse than anger in her eyes; he saw disappointment. Betrayal.

Aliza went out. Shortly afterward, a detective came into the room leading a man Sharett knew from photographs, although he’d never met him: Colin Raleigh.

“Can you identify this guy?” the detective asked Colin, who shook his head. “Not one of the men in the limo who tried to take your kid?” “Definitely not.”

“Sheess.” The detective shook his head. “I never saw nothing like this before.”

“So, Raleigh.” Sharett made a great effort. “They didn’t get your boy? I’m glad. They got your wife. Years ago, they got your wife.”

Colin stared at him. “What did you say?”

“Leila Hanif. Terrorist. Killed my daughter, Sara. On your wedding night.”

Colin and the detective stared at Sharett. Their silence was broken by a voice outside, hollering, “Lieutenant!”

“Wait. Now look, fellah—”

“Loo-fen-ant!”

“All
right!”
The policeman glowered at Sharett. “Don’t move till I get back.”

“I look like a man who can move?” Sharett grinned at Colin, did a Raful, watched the Englishman’s face crack into a reluctant smile, watched it freeze.

“What were you saying about my wife? Who are you?”

“Me? Who am I? Ever hear of an organization called the Mossad?”

“Israeli intelligence?”

“Right.” Another Raful. “Only tonight, not so intelligent.”
“Is
my wife a terrorist?”

“A brilliant one. Truly wonderful.” Sharett squinted at him. “Seems like none of this surprises you much.” Colin said nothing.

“She blew up my daughter, in London, on your wedding night.” “Can you prove it?”

“Not in a way your courts would understand. But—I know, let’s say that. And she shot a good man in Beirut. You were there.”

For an instant, Colin was too startled to catch the reference. Then: “The summer of 74?” He laughed and seemed on the point of saying more, but changed his mind.

“On my wedding night I was in bed with Leila,” he said at last. “Surprised?”

Sharett laughed, not kindly. “You don’t know as much as I do, my friend,” he said. “One other thing I know is this. Someday, you’ll come to accept my version. And on that day, there’ll be no one to help you protect your son except me, Raful Sharett. That’s my name. Remember it. You phone the nearest Israeli embassy and ask for the military attaché; tell him who you are, say you want to speak to me. He’ll do the rest.”

He fell silent. Colin sensed a presence behind him and turned. A young man with a bandaged shoulder had come to stand on the threshold. He was breathing heavily, as if he’d been running.

“They shot Argov,” he said tersely, ignoring Colin.

“Who’s he?” Colin said.

“Shlomo Argov, our ambassador in England. They shot him, outside the Dorchester Hotel, in London, an hour ago.” Neeman wiped his forehead. He was smiling. “A double operation, America and England. Two ambassadors. But they only got one and he’s wounded, not dead. Raful, maybe they’ll let you keep your pension after all.”

Raful stared at him. His jaws began to grind, soundlessly. Neeman was laughing openly now, relief plainly written across his face. But Sharett’s rage expanded inside him, a scalding pitch of blackness that entered his bloodstream and festered there, until at last the medics came with a stretcher to take him away, silent but with his jaws still grinding; and Colin found him merely pathetic, under his blanket: a balding, ineffectual man on the brink of old age who tried to mess with other people’s lives as a substitute for coming to grips with his own. A spy, in other words.

What followed seemed unreal. Whenever Colin looked back on the time that followed David Katz’s
sendah,
that was what struck him even more than the pain, the emptiness, the horror. It was a period of total unreality.

Dannie Neeman had been right: Halib failed in New York and only half succeeded in London. Yet oddly enough, his actions provided Tel Aviv with an excuse to do something they’d been yearning to do for years: clean the PLO out of Lebanon. So for them, Halib was a murderous terrorist on the record and a godsend off it.

Halib Hanifs men shot Ambassador Argov in the middle of London on June 3, 1982. The Israeli government proclaimed this a PLO-inspired outrage and labeled it the last straw. On June 4, the Israeli air force bombed south Lebanon and west Beirut; June 5 saw no less than fifty Israeli air strikes; by June 11 all of Beirut was encircled. Some fourteen thousand people, mostly civilians, died in the first fortnight’s fighting. Analysts agreed that the shooting of Ambassador Argov was one of the few genuinely effective political assassinations of modern times, a provocation having consequences far beyond the immediate event; and the fact that the victim lived was seen as incidental. Bullets fired in a peaceful London street provoked a bloody war. Not even the butchers of Sarajevo, in 1914, could claim so firm a causal link.

Sharett sold himself to his masters as the man who’d simultaneously saved the life of their ambassador to the United States and provided them with the long-sought excuse to invade their northern neighbor; when the going got tough he simply did a Raful and kept on doing it until the opposition cracked. And the greater the flak coming out of Washington, the more that opposition dwindled.

Colin Raleigh was interrogated by innumerable men, some genial, some less so, some identified, some anonymous, one with a lie detector. He struggled to keep Robbie out of it, with partial success. In the course of these various “interviews,” as they were euphemistically termed, he acquired odd snippets of knowledge: Leila and Halib had gotten away from the United States, a news blackout shrouded the events at the Katzes’ house, various propaganda machines were working around the clock to make the world believe that relations between the United States and Israel were at an all-time high. Once he’d managed to overcome the initial skepticism, Colin found that his story was not only given credence, it even achieved a certain measure of respect. Whatever Sharett might be telling them back home, it seemed obvious to the U.S. State Department that Colin Raleigh had saved the Israeli ambassador’s life. He’d recognized a code that would have meant nothing to an outsider and kept his head long enough to lead the police to the Katz
sendah.
For which he ought to be receiving credit in Tel Aviv—and would have done, had not Sharett been fighting his own corner so well.

No matter how many questions Robbie asked, Colin could not bring himself to talk about Leila. The authorities helped him there. No splashy headlines, no profile of terrorists on
60 Minutes;
simply a prolonged, soothing silence that enabled him to sell Leila’s absence as desertion by an errant mother. “She’s gone away, son,” he said bitterly. “She wanted to go away. Let’s not talk about her.”

And after a while Robbie did stop talking about Leila. He became silent, withdrawing into a world of his own where he would not let Colin enter. So his father did not know of Robbie’s constant, anguished search through his memory for that moment when he’d broken up his parents’ marriage with a tantrum or an ill-considered word.

The unreality endured until the night they returned to their old house at Oxford. On the hall table Colin found mail neatly graded according to size of envelope, with the largest at the bottom; his mother must have been in to tidy up. After they’d unpacked and Robbie had gone to bed, Colin, dog-tired though he was, skimmed through the pile. Nothing caught his attention until he came to the very last item: a cheap brown envelope without a stamp but bearing his name. The handwriting was familiar.
Leila.

Inside was a single sheet of paper, and here the hand-writing lost its character. Capitals, childlike in their ugliness, had been scrawled with a leaky ballpoint pen; this, he thought, is what a poison-pen letter must be like.

The message was short but abundantly clear. I’LL GET HIM BACK.

Colin went down to the kitchen and poured himself a scotch. He sat at the table for a long time, deciding in what order to do things, how to explain the situation to the local police, whether he ought to involve his college or his mother at this stage, before the rumor mill cranked up.

But what kept intruding was the memory of Sharett’s words.

Someday, you’ll believe. And on that day, there’ll be no one to help you protect your son except me, Raful Sharett. That’s my name. Remember it.

I
don’t like it,” Shlomo Stern whispered.

“Why?”

Shlomo wanted to reply, It’s too quiet, but that way he’d have sounded like some gook out of the movies working from a lousy script, and then his deputy, Captain Uri Vered, would have him by the balls forever after, so he improvised. “No lights; how can they guard the passengers without lights?”

Stern and Vered lay up behind a small hill a thousand meters or so from NQ 033, sharing the night scope. On a moonless night like this the scope could identify a camel as a camel two thousand yards away, and both Israeli Defense Force officers were convinced that the plane’s auxiliary power unit must have failed.

“Out of fuel, Shlomo.” Vered was, of course, aware that Stern held the rank of lieutenant colonel, but these men were strictly on first-name terms. “Airline predicted that.”

“No torches? Power packs?”

Shlomo handed over the scope and rolled onto his back, suddenly aware of hunger and fatigue. A mouthful of chocolate solved the first of these problems, but four years in Lebanon had worn the edges off his stamina. Too much had happened since he’d lifted the phone earlier that afternoon and found himself talking to Avshalom Gazit. First, hours spent waiting for independent confirmation that Sharett was on the plane; then, after it had come, apparently from a source in Bahrain, more hours in the air, a parachute drop into the Gulf of Aden—they’d had to go into the sea, to avoid Yemeni air defenses—a long swim followed by a longer spell on the inflatables … these things left their mark even on the fittest. There were thirty of them in all: five groups of six, five Masada long-range desert units seconded from the Paratroop Brigade, and they were the fittest troops in the IDF, but Operation Landmark, as the storming of NQ 033 was to be known, represented one long quintessential strain.

There were no lights aboard the aircraft and it was too quiet and Shlomo wanted to think. So he closed his eyes, letting every muscle in his body relax, while in the darkness around him and Vered, twenty-eight young men silently prepared for the fray.

The plane was blacked out. They had foreseen it might be, they’d foreseen every damn thing, and the order was specific: no lights on NQ 033 equals no attack before dawn. Storm a darkened plane and watch the body count rocket. Each man carried photographs of the flight crew and of the Mossad men aboard, but much use those would be in dead of night.

So. Take up positions, stand by thirty minutes before sunrise, sprint across the sands through half-light, diversions one and two and in, just at the moment when targets would begin to show up. Difficult. Hellish.

Stern’s meditation was interrupted by a finger prodding into his neck: Vered’s signature. The senior officer rolled over onto his stomach.

“Movement,” Vered said softly. “Cockpit.”

Shlomo groped for his radio, put it on whisper. “Gabriel, to me.”

Fifteen seconds later a third shadow joined the two on the knoll overlooking the plane. He carried a long-barreled version of the British L4A1 sniper rifle mounted with a Trilux night sight.

“Cockpit,” Shlomo murmured. “Human. Assess.”

Gabriel took a long, careful look through the night sight. “Negative.”

Shlomo let silence do the work; Gabriel heard the question Why? as clearly as if his commander had shouted it.

“TriStar windscreen’s one point five inches thick. Laminated glass interfaced with plastic. Good for an impact of fifty tons. At this range standard seven-point-six-two-mm ammo won’t drill it. Star it, maybe.”

“Shit.”

“Round’s too light, Shlomo. Muzzle velocity seventeen seventy-two mph dropping to less than twelve hundred by target. No go.”

“Right. Reposition.”

Gabriel withdrew as silently as he’d come. Shlomo took the scope from Vered and studied the cockpit. Someone definitely was moving in there.

After ten minutes during which nothing else happened he put down the scope and rubbed his eyes. Bad timing, he thought glumly. He and his men had been rushed from deep in the Negev. They’d been exercising around Israel’s top secret Jericho missile bunkers. Not planned; just their turn, just lucky, that’s all: they were the ones on standby this month, at maximum fitness, drilled in the latest antiterrorist techniques. But they were also at the end of their tour and due for leave.
Luck,
he reminded himself bitterly. Shlomo was forty-one. His wife, Rebecca, the same. The day before Southern Command brought them to Condition One, she’d entered the Hadassah Medical Center. She went in whole; next week she’d come out minus one breast. If she came out at all.

No conspiracy. Just luck.

The same probing finger touched his neck.

“Door,” Vered hissed.

Shlomo snatched the night scope from his captain. What he saw made him forget to breathe. A figure stood at the top of the slide extending down from the forward door. Its face and hands glowed white in the lens. Without lowering the scope, Shlomo reached for his radio.

“Gabriel,” he breathed.

A red light on the handset flickered twice in acknowledgment.

“Target,” Shlomo said. And then: “All units stand by.”

Colin’s foot dislodged a stone, but Robbie didn’t look up. He continued to sit on the boulder with his chin resting in his hands, staring at the limestone wall. He did not turn even when his father put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Did you sleep?”