Exile: a novel (31 page)

“That leaves the Israelis.”

“So it does, and they’re not talking. But there’s certainly precedent for it, and not only the assassination of Rabin. Do you remember the Colosio assassination?”

“Vaguely.” David fished out his sunglasses; the sun, attempting to penetrate the fog, had begun to hurt his eyes. “Wasn’t he a candidate for president of Mexico?”

Martel nodded. “Some people in his own party didn’t like him. For whatever reason, he was shot dead at a campaign rally, amid a crowd of more than a thousand people. A videotape showed that one of his security men stepped back, almost on cue, an instant before the assassin pulled the trigger. Somehow the shooter escaped in the chaos. No one was ever prosecuted—not the assassin, nor anyone in Colosio’s security.

“Israel isn’t Mexico—the Shin Bet and Mossad are all over this. But the possibility of a betrayal from the inside, and the vulnerability it suggests, is extremely sensitive—at least until the Israelis find out what really happened.” Martel brushed back a windblown forelock. “Whatever the answer, your Mr. Khalid is right about one thing. Even if she’s guilty, Hana Arif is merely one piece of an extremely complex puzzle—a meticulously planned, well-executed plot conceived by people with a sophisticated grasp of geopolitical cause and effect. People who understood the effect not only of killing Ben-Aron but of doing it on U.S. soil: that America would stop pushing the peace process to compensate for its own sense of responsibility to Israel.”

The more Martel explained, the more daunting David found his task, so far outside the normal reach of the legal system. “And who might those people be?”

Martel laughed softly. “The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, of course. Isn’t it obvious?”

“Not to you, I suspect.”

“Not to Al Aqsa, either. Two of their alleged leaders have denied it on the Internet—although given that the Israelis have killed a number of them, and driven the rest so far underground they can’t come up for air, it’s hard to know who speaks for them. So we’re left to conjecture why a group allied with Fatah, which is barely hanging on to the presidency of the Palestinian Authority, would do something so potentially fatal to them both.” Martel stopped, breathing in the seascented air as he surveyed the rolling hills around them. “Al Aqsa’s name is derived from the famous mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem, symbolizing the Islamic fundamentalism that scares the hell out of most Americans. But its genesis is really quite parochial—Arafat funded it so as to create a militant rival to Hamas, which was already threatening his authority.” Pausing, Martel lifted his eyebrows. “It’s not that Al Aqsa isn’t sincere— they’ve certainly carried out suicide bombings. But the first suicide bombing in America? Unless I’ve missed something, Al Aqsa has no infrastructure here.”

“Meaning?”

“That Jefar and Hassan may be Al Aqsa. Perhaps Arif, as well.” Turning to David, Martel stopped walking. “But if they are, they needed help from others—on the inside, breaching Ben-Aron’s security; on the outside, providing support and equipment for the assassins. Both are beyond Al Aqsa’s capacity.”

“Who then?”

Martel’s eyes glinted. “Well, it
is
the Middle East, and the victim
is
Amos Ben-Aron. There are Muslims, Jews, and even Christians who wished him dead—a rainbow coalition of hatred. As one example, are you familiar with a Jewish settler from Brooklyn named Barak Lev, and something called the Masada movement?”

David nodded. “I saw him on CNN, suggesting that God might want to kill Ben-Aron Himself.”

“People like Lev sometimes try to help God along. Which brings me to fundamentalist Christians. You’ve heard of the Rapture.”

“Vaguely.”

“The Rapture was concocted by a couple of fundamentalist preachers. They took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captured the imagination of millions in these lunatic times.” Martel shook his head in wonder. “Its outlines are simple, if bizarre. Once
Israel has occupied its ‘biblical lands’—meaning, among other things, your client’s erstwhile home—legions of the ‘Antichrist’—Muslims, we are to assume—will attack the Jews, triggering a showdown in the valley of Armageddon, an actual place on the West Bank. The Jews who have not ‘found’ Christ will burn; the true believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated at the right hand of God, they’ll get to watch their opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs for years of tribulation.”

“Are you sure this isn’t a documentary on contemporary American politics?”

Martel chuckled. “In a way, it is. The Rapture is one reason our fundamentalists have made common cause with Jewish settlers. For the craziest among them, a war with Islam in the Middle East is not to be feared but welcomed, with Israel as the canary in God’s mine shaft. None of which, as you’ll recall, warmed the heart of the late prime minister.”

David lapsed into silence, thinking again of Ben-Aron’s clarity of vision, and of his own moral confusion at defending the accused murderer of a man he deeply admired. “Granted,” Martel continued, “it’s hard to imagine these Bible-bangers carrying out his murder. But it does suggest the depth of unreason, from all sides, so uniquely attached to the Middle East—including the conflict between Palestinians and Jews.

“So let’s turn to the Islamists.” They began walking again, Martel’s eyes trained on the sparkle of distant waves. “As I said, I’m skeptical about Al Aqsa. I’m less so about Hamas, their rivals who now predominate the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority. They’re the ones bent on pushing Jews into the sea. And, unlike Al Aqsa, they have a presence in the United States—including so-called charities that, our best people believe, funnel money to their terrorists at home.

“As for what Hamas would stand to gain, we’re watching it happen. The peace plan they deplore has blown up. Their rivals for control of the Palestinian Authority, Faras and his Fatah party, have been destabilized and discredited. Their rival for street cred among the armed ‘resistance’ groups, particularly Al Aqsa—who both Faras and Ben-Aron were reaching out to—is being eradicated by the Israel Defense Forces—”

“Back up,” David interrupted. “Are you suggesting that Jefar might be Hamas?”

“I’m raising the possibility, David, that very little about Ben-Aron’s assassination is what it seems. So let me spin this out. In theory, Hamas could supply the infrastructure to support this suicide bombing; they have access
to a network of radical Palestinians, students and otherwise, who might be able to help lay the framework. Some aspects, like acquiring police uniforms, might be easy enough to do.” Martel turned to him again. “But consider the range of what the indictment suggests the assassins needed: false IDs, credit cards, explosives, stolen motorcycles, a van bought under an assumed name. One wonders if all that wouldn’t tax even the brightest students at Berkeley. Which, to me, squarely raises the specter of Iran.”

Despite himself, David managed to laugh. “The Iranians. How could I forget?”

“You shouldn’t. Ben-Aron didn’t—he was all too aware of Iran’s encouragement of Hamas and the Hezbollah, which led to the last conflict in Lebanon. And you no doubt saw that its new president suggested wiping Israel off the map. Unpleasant as that seemed to some, it was merely a restatement, in more unvarnished form, of Iran’s essential foreign policy—”

“But could they murder Israel’s prime minister in America? And would they? It seems like a terrible risk.”

“As to ‘could,’ yes. In Argentina, in the early nineties, the Iranians bombed the Israeli embassy and a Jewish day-care center—never formally proven, but a fact. And they have an extensive operation in the United States, including Iranian émigrés.”

Martel paused for a moment, staring out at the beach, strewn with driftwood and sea-worn rocks. “As to ‘would,’ ” he said finally, “I agree that it’s a risk. Their secret intelligence service would have to believe not only that they would succeed, but that their operation would prove to be impenetrable. A good start is their assumption that the two obvious potential sources of information, the suicide bombers, would, in fact, commit suicide. Or, at least, one would
think
the Iranians thought that.

“I’ll return to that conundrum in a bit. As for motive, Iran would need a truly compelling reason. But the radicals and mullahs who run the secret intelligence service are the keepers of the flame, the vanguard of the Islamic revolution. Along with Syria, it’s Iran that helps finance terrorist groups in the Middle East—including, we believe, Al Qaeda. It’s Iran that is developing nuclear weapons. It’s Iran that most despises Israel and that, more than any outside country, tries to instigate acts of violence that will force the Israelis to respond in kind.”

Reaching the edge of the sand, Martel stopped. “The Iranians,” he said, “are far more ambitious than the Syrians, who themselves blew up one of
their
antagonists, the former prime minister of Lebanon, by jamming a Beirut manhole with explosives. Why should America be immune, I can
imagine the Iranians asking themselves. But what perplexes me, among many other things, is this: how on earth could the Iranians penetrate Ben-Aron’s security?”

David’s mind was reeling. “A moment ago,” he told Martel, “you said that one would ‘think’ that the planners meant both assassins to die.”

Martel gazed at the water, mica flashes of sunlight on blue waves. “That troubles me,” he finally answered. “If you know what you’re doing, it’s hard to botch a suicide bombing. The plastique should have blown Jefar to paradise in little pieces.”

“And so?”

Martel drew a bottle of red Bordeaux from his knapsack, nodding toward a weathered log wedged into the sand. “Describing the labyrinth,” he said, “is the easy part. Let’s have some wine and try to figure out where you are. A lot more may depend on that than the future of Hana Arif.”

“Start with the breach of Ben-Aron’s security,” Martel said. “It’s remotely plausible that the breach was not internal—that someone working with the assassins intercepted a communication about the change of route. But that would have required luck and equipment of considerable sophistication, and there seems to be no evidence of the latter. So you have to assume a leak on the Israeli side.

“That means more than angry extremists like the Masada people—the plotters would need someone on the inside whom the Israelis, an extremely careful lot, mistakenly believed to be reliable. But the suicide bombers were ordinary Palestinians.” Martel paused to sip his wine, savoring the conundrum. “So how do you connect such seemingly irreconcilable elements? And who’s capable of doing so?”

“Guilty or innocent,” David responded, “Hana’s not the answer to your question. Whoever set this up is watching from the shadows. Meanwhile, I’m starting with two threads: a possible leak on the Israeli side, and the certainty that the assassins were Palestinians. All I can do is try to pull each thread and see what I unravel.”

Martel nodded. “One thread at a time, David. The security team for Ben-Aron had an inner circle—the detail leader of our Secret Service and the leader of the Israeli team. They would have met well in advance, exchanging information about threats to Ben-Aron, carefully mapping out a city-by-city itinerary that allowed them to put the security in place well
before his arrival—leaving flexibility, however, for last-minute changes of route.”

“Who would have made that decision?”

“The American detail leader, minutes before it happened. He’d tell the Israelis and the head of Dignitary Protection from the SFPD, and they’d communicate with their respective people. Which means that someone on the inside would have had to tip off the handler, who then called Iyad Hassan, in an extremely short period of time. All without being detected.” Martel turned to David. “Which is why the FBI questioned Arif so closely about her whereabouts, and why her responses are so problematic.”

David studied an abalone shell, its shades of variegated pearl. “So the change of route was transmitted to a small group of Americans and Israelis. All of whom were in San Francisco, and none of whom knew in advance.”

“Yes. So there actually are two threads—the Americans and the Israelis. But our interests and theirs are different. The Israelis want any breach to be our fault; we want it to be theirs. And while we’re clearly to blame for letting two phony policemen join the motorcade, an Israeli may be to blame for enabling them to assassinate Ben-Aron.”

“Just how far will we, and the Israelis, go to find out what happened?”

Martel pondered this. “Ordinarily, our intelligence people would consider dipping into their antiterrorist bag of tricks. Given a free hand, we’ve ‘rendered’ terrorist suspects to countries like Egypt to be tortured—one time, we put a suspected Al Qaeda operative in an airplane at Guantánamo and flew him around for a while, threatening to land in Cairo until he started talking. Or we might use ‘black sites’ maintained by the CIA in places like the former Soviet Union, where suspects just disappear.

“But none of that works here. The ‘suspects’ would be well-placed American and Israeli security officers—we can’t just torture or ‘disappear’ them. And if our government used something overtly untoward to extract a confession and you didn’t like its contents, you’d be complaining that it was...” Pausing, Martel shrugged. “What’s the metaphor?”

“Fruit of the poisonous tree.”

“Exactly. So given that, and the worldwide scrutiny attendant to this particular assassination, our government will proceed with care. Though Jefar might not have believed that with respect to him. Which may help explain his confession.”

“And the Israelis?”

“May be more ruthless. Though they’ll certainly have limits—Israel
has a contentious press, and considerable respect for law. The problem for the prosecutor, and for you, is that the Israelis will proceed in secret. The day-to-day investigation will be run by their attorney general’s office, an extremely professional bunch. They’ll utilize Shin Bet and the Mossad, of course. And they will
not
be sharing leads and raw intelligence with our government, and certainly not with you. Particularly if it suggests that one of their security people is tied to the assassination . . .”