Vicious Circle (7 page)

Baruch, who was odd man out in the sense that he was the only one in the room who wasn’t an Arabist of some sort, came back
to the question of the cars. “The Palestinian Authority let two of our people in to take a look at the cars. I happened to
be one of them.
The steering wheels and door handles had been wiped clean of fingerprints. The body of one of the terrorists, apparently wounded
in the kidnapping, was still in the back of the second Mercedes. The autopsy report that came through late this afternoon
confirmed what any idiot could have figured out. The
mechabel
’s left lung had been perforated, there was internal bleeding, but the immediate cause of death was a low-caliber bullet fired
into his brain behind the ear.”

There was a loud knock on the door. One of the young women working the night shift in the communications alcove came in carrying
a plastic tray filled with coffee mugs. She wore a mini skirt and walked barefoot because of a blister on her heel. “Eat your
hearts out,” she announced, noisily depositing the tray on the table. “We forgot to buy diet cream.” At the door she tossed
her head to get the stray strands of henna-tinted hair out of her eyes. “Nobody’s perfect,” she said. Before anyone could
agree, the door clicked closed.

“We were talking about the low-caliber bullet behind the ear,” Almog reminded everyone.

Elihu actually sighed. “We had to tackle this sooner or later.” He produced a small pad from the pocket of his suit jacket
and flipped through the pages until he came to the notes he had made that morning. “I managed to speak with the surviving
bodyguard as he was being wheeled into surgery at Hadassah Hospital. I was the last person to talk to him before he died.
He caught a glimpse of the Arab leading the attack. He described him as being on the short side, heavy set, with short cropped
hair, wearing a long white caftan under a suit jacket. The Arab knelt in the headlights of the Rabbi’s Nissan to examine the
body of the driver who was wounded by a grenade. He appeared to feel for his pulse, then bent over him and put his ear to
his mouth—”

“To see if he was breathing,” guessed Almog. “Under battle conditions we do the same with our wounded.”

“What you’re describing,” Baruch, always the cop who dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, remarked, “could be the professional
gestures of a medic or a male nurse.”

“The Arab must have discovered signs of life,” Elihu went on, “because he drew a small pistol from a pocket of his jacket,
felt with
the tips of his fingers behind the wounded man’s ear, then placed the muzzle to the spot behind the ear and pulled the trigger.
According to the autopsy reports, both the Rabbi’s driver and the Palestinian terrorist whose body was found in the abandoned
Mercedes died in precisely the same way—from a single .22-caliber bullet fired with surgical accuracy into the medulla, the
lowest part of the brain stem, which controls the heart beat and breathing. Death in both cases was instantaneous.”

“He murdered the driver because he was Jewish,” Wozzeck said, his slight Polish accent thickening as his voice turned nasty.
“He murdered his own
mechabel
because he didn’t want a wounded man to fall into our hands and identify his leader.”

Baruch put into words what everyone was thinking. “The method of execution—the single .22-caliber bullet fired directly into
the medulla—matches the
modus operandi
of the killer who first came to our attention when he assassinated our minister without portfolio several years back. Over
the years of the
intifada
, the same killer has executed eighteen Palestinians accused of collaborating with us. We had a psychological profile drawn
up on the murderer. It suggested he had a personal grudge against collaborators that goes far beyond any ideological rejection
of those who aid his enemy; it raises the possibility that the killer was once betrayed by a collaborator and may have spent
years in our prisons.”

“Any point of winding up the brothers Karamazov and pointing them in the right direction?” Altmann asked. He was referring
to the two defrocked Russian rabbis, known in house as Absalom and Azazel, who presided over several basements filled with
the old national police archives that, for lack of funding, hadn’t been scanned and put onto a computer.

Baruch posed a rhetorical question. “What would they look for? A short, heavy Arab who spent an unknown amount of time in
one of our Negev country clubs after being fingered by a collaborator? Come on! Absalom would laugh us out of town. That description
could fit thousands of Palestinians.”

Elihu closed his pad. “With the abduction of the Rabbi and his secretary, we must deal with a worst case scenario: the killer
and his
accomplices, who call themselves the Islamic Abu Bakr Brigade, are targeting Jews in order to shatter the cease fire and prevent
the Mt. Washington peace treaty from being signed.”

“Did they waylay the first car to come along?” Altmann asked, thinking out loud. “Or were they gunning for Rabbi Apfulbaum?”

Baruch brushed the question away impatiently. “If they were going to kidnap the first Jew who came along they wouldn’t have
attacked two cars, one filled with young men armed with Uzis. No, no, we have to assume they were targeting Apfulbaum.”

“They knew he’d been invited to Yad Mordechai—the reunion there of Jews who’d been expelled from their Aza settlements in
2005 was announced in the newspapers,” Dror agreed. “They knew he would be returning home to Beit Avram at nightfall.”

“Why Apfulbaum?” Altmann persisted.

Elihu pushed back his chair and, tapping the bowl of his pipe in the palm of his hand, strolled over to the window. One floor
below three couples, the women’s arms linked through the men’s, were emerging from the restaurant. All six were tipsy and
singing Hatikva, a gloomy national anthem even when performed well. Smiling to himself, Elihu turned back to the room. “The
answer is to be found in the settlement Beit Avram, which is populated with religious extremists furious at the government
for trading holy land for a precarious peace. The answer is to be found in the rumors about the Jewish underground cell that
was created in Beit Avram. The terrorists kidnapped Apfulbaum because they think what we think—that for the Jewish extremists,
he is the keeper of the flame; that he must know the identity of the mysterious Ya’ir, the leader of the Jewish underground
who signs manifestos boasting about the assassination of local Palestinian leaders; that if Apfulbaum can be made to talk,
what he reveals could hurt the State of Israel more than any Hamas terrorist bomb.”

“For Ya’ir’s sake,” Baruch drawled from the table, “I hope Apfulbaum doesn’t know the answers to their questions.”

“For Apfulbaum’s sake,” Wozzeck said with a twisted grin, “I hope he does know the answer to their questions.”

“Have we touched all the bases?” Elihu asked.

“You left out the curious business of the missing finger,” Baruch said. Born and raised on a kibbutz in the northern Galilee
directly under Syrian mortars, he was the only one in the room not in awe of Elihu. “The coroner noticed something that our
people on the scene missed—the small finger on the left hand of one of the bodyguards, a Brooklyn boy named Ronni Goldman
who immigrated four years ago, was missing. At first they assumed it had been shot off during the attack. Then one of the
more experienced coroners took a closer look and decided it had been crudely amputated under the knuckle.” Baruch shook his
large head. “Don’t ask me what this means—I haven’t the foggiest idea.”

Dror, who had lived in America when his father was posted to the Israeli embassy and had earned a degree in literature from
George Washington University, joined Elihu at the window. They listened for a moment to the soft lapping of the surf against
the shore. Dror, a combat veteran with a livid shrapnel scar across his right cheek, said in English, “‘The heart can think
of no devotion greater than being shore to ocean.’” He added quickly, “That’s a line from the American poet Frost.”

Jamming the dead pipe back into his mouth, gnawing on the stem, slurring his words, the legendary Mossad
katsa
shot back, “This heart can think of a devotion greater than being shore to ocean. It’s the preservation of Jewish lives in
the Jewish state.” Embarrassed at the outburst, Elihu turned abruptly toward the others in the room. “Here’s where we get
to earn our pay checks,” he said. “We have to find the Rabbi and his secretary before this short, heavy-set killer fires .22-caliber
bullets into their brain stems.”

Baruch said, “Without negotiations, without contacts, it’s difficult to know where to start.”

Elihu said, “I may have something up my sleeve. It’s a long shot …”

An Excerpt from the Harvard “Running History” Project:

F
or obvious reasons I can’t give you much time today—the you-know-what has hit the fan here. How did I hear about it? As usual
I had one eye on CNN and saw the map of Israel come up on the screen. They had footage of the three bodies sprawled on the
road, the fourth bodyguard being rushed into the hospital on a gurney, the Prime Minister waving off the camera and calling
“No comment” in his accented English, the Palestinian leader condemning the breaking of the truce in English, as usual, as
opposed to Arabic. CNN had barely cut away from Israel when the telephone on my desk started ringing. It was the President’s
press secretary—he was a bit rattled and wanted guidance. I told him to say there would be no statement of any kind from me
or anybody else in the White House until the smoke cleared. I told him I would speak to the Israeli Prime Minister and the
Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, after which I would brief the President. Once the President and I had spoken, I told
him I’d get back to him to see how we were going to handle the press
.

Yes, that’s what you do if you want to stay alive in this town: you “handle” the press
.

I put in calls to both the Palestinian and the Israeli leaders. Their keepers tried to palm me off on deputies so I went into
my “Old Rough-and-Ready” act—I let them know I wouldn’t settle for deputies, I didn’t want spokesmen or spokeswomen, I wanted
principals, I wanted the horse’s mouth. If for some reason they couldn’t come to the phone to speak to the representative
of the President of the United States, I suggested it might be in their best interests if someone brought the phone to them
.
Needless to say, I was put through to both of them but I got the impression that, like me, they were getting their information
from CNN. I received assurances from both that they would say nothing and do nothing to make matters worse for twenty-four
hours. Which is to say, everyone was going to take a deep breath. I briefed the President, then I put a call through to the
Director, CIA, and asked him to have his people supply me with updates every half hour—I didn’t come right out and say it
in so many words but I was asking him if he could tell me more than CNN. I instructed my secretary to assemble the usual suspects
in the operations center. We were going to hunker down and go into a damage control mode. Then I settled back into my chair
and shut my eyes and took a deep breath myself
.

As a matter of fact, I did see the piece on the Mt. Washington negotiations in the
New York Review
. He asked for an interview but I politely declined—I subscribe to the theory that the best Presidential advisers are the
ones who are neither seen nor heard. Yes, some of what he wrote was accurate, though by no means all of it. The business about
our getting off to a slow start misrepresented what actually happened. The opening sessions at Mt. Washington weren’t slow,
they were excruciating. At the first meeting the two sides wrangled over everything under the sun: the shape of the negotiating
table, the level of representation, whether the Americans should be seated at the table or standing by in the next room to
break stalemates, whose maps would be used when it came to discussing actual frontiers, whether the United Nations ought to
be involved, how contacts with the press would be handled. It took five days of intense negotiations just to fix the number
and composition of subcommittees that would work out compromises on which settlements would be dismantled and what the status
would be of those that remained inside the new Palestinian state, water rights, Palestinian access to Israeli ports, control
of the air space over the Palestinian state, the size of its militia and what arms would be permitted, how many Palestinian
refugees would be allowed back into Israel, what compensation would be offered to the others. When, after three weeks, the
negotiations stalled, the President personally intervened. Everyone today remembers the speech in which she declared the day
was long past when America would permit lunatic fringes on both sides to drive policy; and
she went on to lay out, for the first time, the general guidelines of an American-sponsored plan for peace—a seismic departure
from the previous American position, which supported only a process designed to produce just such a plan
.

It’s true that I wrote the chunks of the speech dealing with America’s support for a peace plan instead of a peace process,
but the President deserves the credit for delivering it
.

Behind the scenes, we upped the ante: we let it be known that unless the Israelis and the Palestinians agreed to our plan,
the United States would suspend economic as well as military aid to the Middle East and refuse to veto UN Security Council
resolutions calling for interposing United Nations peacekeepers between the two sides. One by one the differences between
the negotiating teams where whittled down until they fitted into the President’s “General Guidelines.” The work in the final
inch, to use Solzhenitsyn’s memorable phrase, was agonizing for both sides, not to mention for us. The Authority reluctantly
abandoned its insistence on the right of return of millions of Palestinian refugees to Israel and the Israelis, in turn, promised
to provide compensation for those who had been obliged to flee their homes in 1948. The Israelis also agreed to evacuate most
of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, and cede Arab east Jerusalem and half of the Old City to the new Palestinian state
in return for a solemn declaration from all Arab states in the region acknowledging Israel’s right to exist within internationally
recognized borders. A last hurdle—Israel’s insistence on keeping a security zone along the Jordan River—was cleared when I
convinced the Pentagon to agree to guarantee Israel access to real-time US satellite surveillance of the entire Middle East
.