Vicious Circle (32 page)

A
BSALOM SLUMPED IN THE OTTOMAN THAT THE HOUSEKEEPER’S inventory listed as Victorian and Azazel, with his rabbinical mindset,
described as antediluvian.

The heavy lids on his eyes were shut tight but twitching, evidence of a dreadful dream or an inability to doze off while he
waited for his sidekick to emerge from the dungeons with the residuum. Damn Azazel and his phobia about elevators—he was no
doubt
walking
up the six flights and stopping on each landing to catch his breath, no matter that Absalom, not to mention the entire Israeli
intelligence community, was anxiously (and sleeplessly) waiting to see the results of the search that had been based on the
tip from the American Sawyer. Absalom had heard on the grapevine where Sawyer had unearthed the detail that the blind Redeemer
with the mark of prostration on his forehead was a bona fide medical doctor. Sawyer’s “secret” trip to Paris had not gone
unnoticed. Israeli Mosad operatives had been watching the Palestinian agents who were watching the woman Lamia Ghuri. Not
that it mattered—one
passionaria
less wouldn’t seriously distress the Palestinian diaspora—but Absalom wondered how long she would remain among the living
now that Sawyer had attracted attention to her.

Wheezing, Azazel pushed through the fire door and shambled across the room to stand over Absalom. “How you can catnap at a
time like this is beyond me,” he said breathlessly.

Absalom permitted his lids to open lazily as he sat up. “Question of the purity of one’s heart,” he murmured. “And what pray
tell have
we here?” he demanded, blinking at the wad of brown index cards clutched in Azazel’s soft fist.

“Five.”

“Five?”

“Correct. What we have here is five.”

“Five what?”

“Easy to see you’ve been getting forty winks. Wake up, Absalom. Focus. We have narrowed the list down to five, count them,
five prime suspects who were all short, heavy, ardently Islamic
medical doctors
.”

“You might have said so in the first place.”

“I thought I did.”

Absalom sniffed at the index cards. “Baruch, bless his copper’s soul, will be tickled fuchsia.”

T
HE
KATSA
DIDN’T PUT MUCH STOCK IN BARUCH’S LEAP OF IMAG-ination. Even if you managed to swallow the notion of a doctor who was
blind
, to assume that a blind man could direct a terrorist cell and organize an elaborate kidnapping operation defied reason. Still,
with Ramadan drawing to a close, Elihu was ready to clutch at straws. He picked up Dror in front of the Israeli “Pentagon”
in Tel Aviv and made it to Baruch’s Jerusalem office in forty minutes flat. “His tires never touched the ground,” quipped
Dror, who was dressed in faded Army fatigues with tarnished lieutenant colonel bars and had an Uzi with a folding metal stock
slung under his shoulder and several spare clips tucked into the pouch pockets on his legs. Baruch, slouched over a desk heaped
with the dross from a dozen ordered-up meals, was leafing through a sheaf of sightings. Working from the Brothers Karamazov’s
latest list, he had set in motion—with the
katsa
’s reluctant accord—surveillance of the targets: the one-eyed pharmacist in Jalazun; an Israeli Arab urologist with cataract-scarred
eyes who had moved to Nazareth after serving out his sentence in one of Israel’s Negev prisons and now lectured in Nablus
when the border was open and his son-in-law was available to drive him; a nearly blind American of Palestinian extraction
who had retired after a career as an anaesthetist in a Chicago hospital, returning to live off his pension and American social
security checks at his family home in Ramallah, not far from where he’d been denounced and arrested as a teenager; a Hebron-based
general practitioner who had been released from an Israeli prison halfway through an eight year sentence
after being diagnosed with retinal degeneration; a nearly blind doctor who had served twelve years in Israeli prisons for
the attempted murder of a collaborator and now ran a free clinic in the Old City of Jerusalem; an extremely near-sighted American-trained
Palestinian psychiatrist who had made use of his own time in Israeli prisons to publish a seminal study on the effects of
incarceration on teenage Palestinians.

Squads of Israelis, specially chosen because they had been born and raised in Arab countries and could speak Arabic fluently,
had been dispatched to shadow the targets, all of whom were short, heavy-set Islamic fundamentalists who had seen the inside
of Israeli prisons. At the same time Elihu’s technical teams, equipped with small black receivers crystal-tuned to a single
ultra high frequency and accompanied by members of the Palestinian Authority police, had begun crisscrossing the neighborhoods
where the six lived and worked.

So far the only thing they had picked up was what Baruch, in less frenzied times, would have called the music of the spheres:
static.

“Two of the six doctors,” Baruch told Elihu and Dror, “went to prison on my watch. I remember them both. The first one was
the Hebron general practitioner—his name is Ali Abdel Issa. He was the ringleader of a Hamas
intifada
cell in Hebron which specialized in booby traps. After several of our soldiers were wounded, Abdel Issa went underground,
abandoning his medical practice, altering his appearance, never spending two nights under the same roof. We finally nabbed
him when a collaborator told us which of his wives he would be sleeping with that night. He served four years in prison before
being released in the general amnesty that accompanied the signing of the Oslo accords with Arafat. Israeli doctors at Hadassah
Hospital, using the latest laser techniques, managed to arrest the retinal degeneration, but they weren’t able to restore
the lost vision. Abdel Issa resumed his medical practice in Hebron, where he consults at a local hospital.”

Dror, lounging against the window sill, said, “You said you remembered two.”

“The second one is Ishmael al-Shaath. He was picked up in the
late seventies at the Allenby Bridge while returning home for Ramadan from his medical studies in Beirut. The Shin Bet had
a collaborator who claimed al-Shaath belonged to a Lebanese-based terrorist organization. I was doing reserve duty at the
time and happened to be a junior member of the team that questioned him; it was more or less my initiation into the mysteries
of interrogation. I remember the chief interrogator, a reserve captain who was a psychoanalyst in civilian life, feeding al-Shaath
the usual line about becoming completely dependent on his captors for creature comforts, for news of the outside world. The
captain tried everything to break al-Shaath—he told him that he might resist this dependency at first, but that, with time,
he would become grateful for every favor, for every kind word, for every smile, for every hour of sleep, for every crust of
bread. We were interrogating two dozen Palestinians at any given moment back then. Al-Shaath stood out in the crowd. He had
… something the others didn’t. It took me a while to put my finger on it.” Baruch swiveled in his chair to stare out the window.
“I remember he was composed, serene, grave, even formal, but that wasn’t it. He had a sense of who he was; he had this fire
curtain of dignity that protected him from all of our threats and all of our psychological blandishments. If there was a way
to ruffle his feathers, we didn’t discover it. His eyesight was severely impaired, the result of a childhood malady, if I
remember correctly, but you would never have known it talking to him—he conducted himself with unflinching tactfulness, almost
as if he didn’t want to hurt
our
feelings by pointing our what brutes we were. He calmly denied the charge against him, he nibbled delicately on the crumbs
we threw him, but he never allowed a trace of gratefulness to appear on his face or in his comportment.”

Dror wanted to know what had happened to al-Shaath.

“We had to let him go for lack of evidence, at which point he apparently discovered the identity of the collaborator who had
fingered him and tried to strangle the poor bastard.”

Elihu raised his haunted eyes. “Seems as if you ruffled his feathers after all,” he said. “He just didn’t let you catch a
glimpse of the psychological wound.”

Baruch nodded tiredly. “I suppose that’s so,” he said. “Al-Shaath spent twelve years in prison for attempted murder. I sometimes
wondered what would have happened to him if we hadn’t picked him up, if we hadn’t violated his sense of who he was by imposing
on him our sense of who we thought he could be.”

“It’s par for the course in this neck of the woods,” Elihu observed. “We all wind up becoming the persona the enemy thinks
we are. It’s almost as if we don’t want to disappoint him.” He snorted and shook his large head and lowered his eyes and finished
reading one of the sighting reports, then rolled the piece of paper into a ball and lobbed it into Baruch’s waste basket,
which was overflowing with paper plates and cups. “You really think one of these six blind medical people could be Abu Bakr?”

Baruch’s patience was wearing thin. “You have a better idea?”

The two men eyed each other. Dror appealed to Elihu. “I don’t see what we have to lose.”

“We have limited resources,” muttered Elihu. “They could be deployed elsewhere.”

“Where?” Baruch demanded.

“Sweeney’s not in Aza,” Dror reminded the
katsa
.

“Sweeney’s body could be in Aza,” Elihu said, finally putting into words his darkest fears. His teeth ground in anguish on
the stem of the mangled pipe.

A middle-aged woman peering through eyeglasses with bright red frames turned up with a handful of sightings she had torn off
the teletype. She added them to the pile on Baruch’s desk. “Can I get anyone coffee?” she asked.

Baruch raised a finger in acceptance as he started reading through the new batch of sightings. Elihu nodded, too.

“With or without?” the woman said.

Elihu, staring out the window at the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, said absently, “With or without what?”

“Sugar. Milk.”

“He takes his coffee black, like his mood,” Dror told her.

Baruch skimmed another of the sightings. “Damn it! We drew a blank in Ramallah.” He looked up, his face frozen in a scowl.
“We
found out the pharmacist from Jalazun had been sneaking off to Ramallah for lunch every day, so we thought, what the hell,
Ramallah is a hot bed of fundamentalism, this could be it. Twenty minutes ago one of our people spotted him talking to a woman
in a restaurant who turned out to be his third wife. So much for his daily visits to Ramallah.”

The
katsa
, who kept in touch with the barefoot contessa in the communications alcove in Jaffa by satellite phone, said, “In any case,
there was no joy from the black boxes deployed this morning in Jalazun or in Ramallah, so that more or less eliminates your
one-eyed pharmacist and your anaesthetist from Chicago.”

Baruch glanced at the clock on the wall—he had the sinking sensation of watching sand flowing through the waist of an hour
glass, with no way of slowing it down. He snatched another sighting off the pile. Maybe his hunch about formal medical training
had led them up a dead end street; maybe Abu Bakr was still one jump ahead of them. “Ah—here’s my old friend al-Shaath. A
pregnant woman turned up at his clinic in the Old City as it was closing. A nurse let her in and then locked the door. The
doctor and one of the two nurses emerged an hour and a quarter later. The pregnant woman and the second nurse never came out.
Tapping the ground ahead of him with a long bamboo cane, Doctor al-Shaath walked down the Street of the Chain, Bab El-Silsileh,
and through the doors at the foot of the street onto the temple mount. He disappeared into the Dome of the Rock for seventeen
minutes, then made his way back along Bab El-Silsileh to the Christian Quarter. Near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the
streets filled with pilgrims and the doctor, mingling with them, vanished down a maze of alleyways. Our people nosed around—none
of the shop owners near the clinic seemed to know where al-Shaath lived or how to get in touch with him in an emergency. The
head of the surveillance team sent word to your boys with the black boxes, Elihu. He suggested they scrub the area between
Christian Quarter Road and the New Gate, which is where the good doctor was last seen.”

Dror ducked out of the room to use the secretary’s phone; if Baruch was on to something, there would be precious little time
to
organize a raid. To cut corners, Dror had decided to bring forty-five members of the elite General Staff commando unit into
Jerusalem, but he wanted to do it without attracting attention. The last thing they needed was for some smart-ass journalist
to realize a raid was in the offing. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out why. The men from the commando unit were stashing
their weapons and uniforms and bullet-proof vests and night vision goggles in the trunks of private automobiles and filtering
into the city in twos and threes, assembling at a movie theater in the German Quarter owned by the unit’s onetime executive
officer. Dror rang through to his adjutant, who had set up a command post in the theater manager’s office. All but seven members
of the putative raiding party had already turned up; the men were oiling their weapons, sharpening their knives, calling their
wives or girl friends on mobile phones, playing gin, dozing. One had brought along a laptop computer and was working on his
thesis for a master’s degree in art history. “We have a complete set of atlas slides of Samaria and Judea ready at hand,”
the adjutant told Dror. “Any word on where we might strike?”

“It could be anywhere—or nowhere,” Dror said.

The secretary with the red-framed eyeglasses returned with a new batch of sightings, along with a tray filled with Cokes in
paper cups and tuna sandwiches on dark rye bread. Baruch pored over the sightings before slipping them across the desk to
Elihu. Two more of the six Abu Bakr candidates seemed to have been eliminated: the Israeli-Arab urologist with cataract-scarred
eyes who lived in Nazareth had been tracked down to a sanatorium in Akko, where he was recuperating from a hip operation;
the American-trained psychiatrist had been abroad since early January, giving a seminar on Palestinian teenagers at Alfred
University in upstate New York. His lecture series was entitled: “Growing Up With a Chip on Your Shoulder.”