Exile: a novel (32 page)

“The reason being?”

“Reasons: the integrity of the investigation, fear of exposing internal vulnerability, and the political volatility of the question. Israeli political factions are sharply divided—depending on the answer, governments could rise or fall, and the course of Israeli politics change entirely. By raising this, you’ll be tossing matches on a vat of kerosene.” Martel spoke more quietly. “Having become a bit of a pariah myself, I can’t say I envy you. Your decision to defend this woman may have consequences that are as unpredictable as they are unpleasant.”

David silently contemplated his sudden isolation. “So here’s how what you’re telling me plays out,” he said at length. “I go to the judge and demand access to the fruits of our government’s investigation—
and
the Israelis’. Sharpe may have to give me what our government comes up with. But she has no power to make the Israelis give me anything. If they refuse, she’s stuck between me and them—I’ll claim that I need what the Israelis have to give Hana a fair trial, and Sharpe will say that she can’t get it.”

“What does that buy you?”

“Other than a lot of outrage? If I’m very lucky, a way into Israel’s investigation, or a possible way out of this for Hana.”

“Guilty or not.”

David shrugged. “Guilty or not. All I can do, as you say, is toss the match.”

Martel smiled faintly. “That’s why I’m savoring our talk. Lawyers and spies develop the same qualities: a deep curiosity, a passion for truth, an understanding of betrayal, and an appreciation of moral ambiguity. The elements of human nature.”

Even before this, David reflected, he could not imagine explaining such as conversation to Carole. “In any event,” Martel went on, “Avi Hertz is here to watch you, not help you. As you suspected, he’s ex-Mossad, as tough and resourceful as he needs to be. His only interest will be in protecting Israel—by keeping its secrets, if need be, while trying to help Sharpe pressure your client into a confession.”

“But if she doesn’t confess,” David answered, “his interests and Sharpe’s may not be quite the same.”

“The ‘keeping secrets’ part, you mean. You have some ideas, I suppose, about playing one side against the other?”

“Yes.”

With another smile, Martel considered this. “Let’s move on to the Palestinians,” he said after a time. “What do you know about Hassan and Jefar?”

“Very little.”

“They’re where you start, of course, along with the context that can move a normal-seeming man to become a human bomb.

“Generalizations are dangerous. But it’s almost certain that one, or both, will have a story. Though their families don’t seem to be talking, we know they’re both unmarried. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people they love deeply. In the lives of Palestinian suicide bombers, one often finds some humiliation—to them, perhaps, or a member of their family— that they attribute to the Israelis.”

Sadly, David thought of Munira, watching the Israeli soldiers shame her father at a checkpoint. “Quite often,” Martel continued, “there’s much more than shame involved. There’s a tragedy—perhaps the death of someone they loved, where they felt helpless to prevent it from occurring.”

David cocked his head in inquiry. “What role does Islam play?”

“It varies—every religion has the capacity to be used for good or ill.” Martel poured more wine. “Have you ever studied photographs of lynch mobs in the South?”

David shook his head.

“In many of them, the white men gazing up at the black men they’ve just hung are wearing suits. They’d just come from church, you see—in
their
minds, they were killing the sons of Ham, the inferior race mentioned in the Bible.” Martel paused, clearing his throat with a phlegmy cough. “In the case of these particular suicide bombers, religious passion can serve as glue for their more temporal frustrations: certainly Hamas invokes Islam in its various exhortations to violence. But few of us crash airplanes into buildings just to get to heaven that much quicker.

“To me, all the stuff about seeking paradise is overblown.” Briefly, Martel smiled. “Personally, I find the idea of deflowering seventy virgins both dreary and exhausting, and it utterly fails to address the sexual aspirations of
female
suicide bombers. But my central point is that suicide bombers are driven by hopelessness, anger, and the desire to free their land from some sort of occupation, real or perceived. In short, you should look for what
happened to Jefar and Hassan—or what they
hoped
would happen—here on earth.”

“And their handlers?”

“Are a different breed.” Martel gave David a probing look. “I gather that, at one point in your life, you knew Hana Arif fairly well. Or, at least, thought you did. Obviously, I can’t speak to her personal attributes. But the ideal handler has a unique ability to project his or her ideology, and a keen understanding of how to motivate others to sacrifice themselves to achieve the handler’s ends. In three words: articulate, charismatic, and manipulative.”

“Only two of them describe Hana. Articulate and charismatic.”

“Not manipulative?”

David shrugged. “Not unless I’m being manipulated.”

Eyebrows raised, Martel turned to the water. “It takes a certain gift, David, to make an act of self-destruction seem rational, even desirable. One has to be skilled at identifying, and then ensnaring, those people who are susceptible. But as I say, I don’t know Hana Arif.”

For a time, David, too, gazed at the Pacific. Then he said, “Her husband claims she’s being framed.”

“Does he? That’s interesting. Did you ever read
Bodyguard of Lies
?”

“No.”

“You should. The book’s subject is an elite group set up by Winston Churchill and British intelligence prior to the Normandy invasion. Its entire purpose was to persuade Hitler and the Germans that the Allied invasion of Europe would begin not at Normandy, but Calais.

“Their tactics were quite inventive. As one example, they lifted the corpse of a young man from the morgue, put him in uniform, secreted supposedly classified information about the Calais invasion in his pocket, and floated him ashore in occupied France. In short, they painstakingly created a mosaic of lies for the Germans to assemble, creating the illusion of detailed military planning.” Martel’s voice changed tenor, becoming meditative. “Among the cruelest aspects of this deception was that the British fed their allies in the French resistance the same false information. So that when the Germans captured and then tortured them, some bravely died to protect a falsehood. And others broke, just as the British hoped, telling lies they thought were true in order that they might live.”

It took a moment for David to comprehend the story. “Ibrahim Jefar.”

“Yes. Why did Jefar survive, I keep asking myself.” Martel paused. “Perhaps he was just lucky, or unlucky. Or perhaps his unwitting role was to tell the ‘truth.’ Like the French, he can pass a lie detector test, or name your
client if someone shoots him full of sodium pentothal. All he seems to know is whatever Hassan told him.”

David pondered this. “That leaves the fingerprints and the cell phone call.”

“It does.” Martel studied David closely. “You’re after the husband, I assume.”

“Of course. Who better to get a paper with her prints on it, or borrow Hana’s cell phone as she slept?”

“Does he suspect that?”

“I’m not sure.”

Martel laughed softly. “ ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘when first we practice to deceive.’ The question is, Who’s deceiving whom—or themselves?” Abruptly, all humor vanished. “How badly, David, do you want it to be Khalid?”

David did not flinch; nor did he answer. “You said this was the Middle East. The surface of this story is too neat—the one apparent defect in a flawless plot is that Jefar can give them Hana’s name, with just enough evidence to set her up for lethal injection. If she knows nothing, Hana becomes the perfect cul-de-sac.”

“Then you’ve also considered the other interpretation.”

“Yes. Saeb’s guilty, and so is she. The intimations of marital stress are just an act.”

Martel nodded. “With one more element,” he added slowly. “The suspicion, on her behalf or his, that you want to believe it.”

“There’s only one problem with that thesis, Bryce. For Hana to be guilty, she would also have to be inexplicably careless. Which brings me back to Saeb.”

Martel squinted into the failing sun. For a long time, he did not speak. When he did, it was in the tone of a man continuing another conversation, one of far longer standing. “Your father,” he told David, “was good company, in his intellectual way. I became quite fond of him. But he spent his life observing the lives of others, until he became an observer of his own.

“In my own work, I’ve learned to keep a distance. But your father’s detachment was more innate. It had nothing to do with whether, as a son, you deserved better. Your father was a cold man because he was a frightened one—of himself, I always thought, and of facing his own emotions.” He turned to David, his face expressing more concern than he had ever allowed himself to show. “You have enough courage, it seems. But I never quite believed in the life I saw you living, not that you were bad at it.

“I don’t know what’s making you do this. But don’t treat this case like it’s a card trick you’re performing—an act of pride, or another chance to be clever and creative. Your reasons go way deeper than that.” Pausing, Martel rested his hand on David’s shoulder. “Whatever they are, David, learn from them. That may be all this very hard experience will ever have to offer you.”

The world he had constructed so carefully for himself was disintegrating. He had received a curt phone call from Burt Newman, firing him as a client and pronouncing his career in politics “as dead as Adolf Hitler” ; that one he had expected. More difficult were the calls and messages over the past few days from friends of his and Carole’s, ranging from compassionate—“Are you okay?” —to condescending—“Have you thought about Carole?” —to shrill and self-involved—“How can you do this to us?” Equally depressing was the call from his law school friend Noah Klein, regarding his decision to defend Hana; though Noah tried to be tactful, he spoke to David as though he must have suffered a nervous breakdown. David’s only distraction from the telephone was the media onslaught, stoked by the White House, Israel, and the terrible consequences of the crime itself, exemplified by the Israelis’ systematic war against Al Aqsa. The weekly newsmagazines typified this: all three featured photographs of Hana on the cover, one bearing the caption “Professor of Terror?” ; all sifted her personal history at length—from her radical statements at Harvard to the mundane surface of her current life—for clues to why she might have become a terrorist.
Newsweek
’s sidebar traced the history of female suicide bombers;
Time
’s focused on David’s “inexplicable” decision to defend her, quoting anonymous “friends” and “acquaintances” regarding David’s stunning “fall from grace,” so bewildering in a man of “such obvious ambition.”

Lying awake, David wondered if Marnie Sharpe could be counted as a “friend” or merely an “acquaintance.” Time passed with merciless slowness—minutes, and finally another hour, marked by the red illuminated
numbers of his alarm clock. Again and again he thought of Carole. But the absence of any sound in his bedroom confirmed that she had vanished from his life.

The next morning, while the private firm he had hired secured his office against wiretaps and surveillance devices, David met Angel Garriques and Marsha Kerr in the park near the Palace of Fine Arts.

The morning was cool but clear. They sat on the grass with croissants and a thermos of coffee, looking across the duck pond at the ornate dome, which reminded David of a bandshell built by Romans at the height of architectural decadence. Angel was a young ex–public defender whom David had hired three years before for his shrewd instincts and quick intelligence; Marsha, a fortyish professor at the University of San Francisco, was David’s former colleague from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, an expert in litigation involving foreign governments and classified information. As David’s only associate and the new father of twins, Angel was in no position to object to representing Hana Arif; Marsha, meanwhile, was intrigued by the complexities of extracting highly sensitive information from two governments, and she also liked the handsome hourly rate at which David would be paying her. In both cases, David reflected, the morality of lawyers, so counterintuitive to the rest of the population, was helpful: that the guilt or innocence of a client, or even the horror of what she might have done, was secondary to ensuring that the system worked for everyone. That this ethic also served to cloak ego and amorality was, in David’s experience, less remarked on by the tribunes of the law.

For a time, they dissected the case against Hana. Angel stroked the dark beard he had grown to age the sensitive brown eyes and round, lineless face he considered embarrassing for a seasoned trial lawyer. “We don’t have much to go on,” he concluded. “The usual defense is that the prosecution’s evidence is deficient. But that doesn’t seem like enough here. If we don’t come up with something more, like who did what Hana’s accused of doing, we’re in trouble.”

“But who?” David asked. “Unless we can name him, and back it up with evidence, we’ll lose the jury. And Hana may lose her life.”

“I assume,” Marsha said, “that the FBI questioned Khalid about all that.”

“Sure. What they got was ‘I don’t know about the slip of paper’; ‘I never touched her cell phone’; ‘I was watching CNN with my daughter.’ None of which, even if true, rules him out as a coconspirator with Hana. But that possibility doesn’t help us.”

Marsha brushed back a strand of graying hair. “Why would Hana
disguise her handwriting by typing out her cell phone number, then leave prints on the paper she’d typed on? And why pass out an international cell phone number?”