See How They Run
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 1979, 1997 by James Patterson
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the US. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This edition is published by arrangement with the author.
Originally published as
The Jericho Commandment
.
Cover design by Steve Snider
Cover illustration by Gabriel Molano
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ISBN: 978-0-446-40931-5
First eBook Edition: May 1997
CONTENTS
RAVES FOR
SEE HOW THEY RUN
CREATOR
JAMES PATTERSON
BALTIMORE SUN:
“MR. PATTERSON IS A SKILLFUL PLOTTER.”
GRAND RAPIDS PRESS:
“ROBERT B. PARKER’S SPENSER, PATRICIA CORNWEIL’S KAY SCARPETIA, AND EVAN HUNTER’S 87TH PRECINCT DETECTIVES … IT’S TIME TO GET OUT THE PARTY HATS, WELCOME JAMES PATTERSON TO THE CLUB.”
PEOPLE:
“JAMES PATTERSON KNOWS HOW TO SELL THRILLS AND SUSPENSE IN CLEAR, UNWAVERING PROSE.”
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS:
“JAMES PATTERSON IS TO SUSPENSE WHAT DANIELLE STEEL IS TO ROMANCE.”
NASHVILLE BANNER:
“PATTERSON DEVELOPS CHARACTERS WITH BROAD STROKES AND FINE LINES. EVEN THE VILLAINS ARE MULTILAYERED AND BELIEVABLE.”
KANSAS CITY STAR:
“PATTERSON’S SKILL AT BUILDING SUSPENSE IS ENVIABLE.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY:
“PATTERSON KNOWS HOW TO KEEP THE POT BOILING.”
LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER:
“PATTERSON IS AN EXCELLENT WRITER.”
AND HIS LATEST
NEWYORK TIMES
BESTSELLERS:
HIDE AND SEEK
COSMOPOLITAN:
“THE STORY MOVES LIKE LIGHTNING.”
PEOPLE:
“A TWISTY NARRATIVE THAT BARRELS ALONG SWIFTLY … A HAIR-RAISING RIDE.”
BOSTON GLOBE:
“A NOVEL BUILT FOR SPEED.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY:
“GRIPPING.”
NAPLES DAILY NEWS:
“MASTERFUL … A RIVETING PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER. … PATTERSON GIVES HIS ADMIRERS A ROLLER-COASTER RIDE THROUGH A VIVID, EMOTIONAL TALE THAT LEADS INEXORABLY TO A TRULY SHATTERING CLIMAX.”
KISS THE GIRLS
LOS ANGELES TIMES:
“TOUGH TO PUT DOWN. … TICKS LIKE A TIME BOMB, ALWAYS FULL OF THREAT AND TENSION.”
Larry King, USA TODAY:
“A RIPSNORTING, TERRIFIC READ.”
SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER:
“AS GOOD AS A THRILLER CAN GET.”
HOUSTON CHRONICLE:
“BURSTING WITH SUSPENSE AND SURPRISE.”
DENVER POST:
“A WILD RIDE, FROM THE IVIED HAILS OF SOUTHERN ACADEMIA TO THE CRASHING BIG SUR SURF. ALEX CROSS IS TO THE ‘90s WHAT MIKE HAMMER WAS TO THE ‘50s.”
The novels of James Patterson
F
EATURING
A
LEX
C
ROSS
Cross Roses Are Red
Mary, Mary Pop Goes the Weasel
London Bridges Cat & Mouse
The Big Bad Wolf Jack & Jill
Four Blind Mice Kiss the Girls
Violets Are Blue Along Came a Spider
T
HE
W
OMEN’S
M
URDER
C
LUB
7th Heaven
The 6th Target
(and Maxine Paetro)
The 5th Horseman
(and Maxine Paetro)
4th of July
(and Maxine Paetro)
3rd Degree
(and Andrew Gross)
2nd Chance
(and Andrew Gross)
1st to Die
O
THER
B
OOKS
The Quickie
(and Michael Ledwidge)
Maximum Ride: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports
Step on a Crack
(and Michael Ledwidge)
Judge & Jury
(and Andrew Gross)
Maximum Ride: School’s Out—Forever
Beach Road
(and Peter de Jonge)
Lifeguard
(and Andrew Gross)
Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment
Honeymoon
(and Howard Roughan)
santaKid
Sam’s Letters to Jennifer
The Lake House
The Jester
(and Andrew Gross)
The Beach House
(and Peter de Jonge)
Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas
Cradle and All
Black Friday
When the Wind Blows
See How They Run
Miracle on the 17th Green
(and Peter de Jonge)
Hide & Seek
The Midnight Club
Season of the Machete
The Thomas Berryman Number
For previews of upcoming James Patterson novels and information about the author, visit
www.jamespatterson.com
.
For my grandparents, Charles and Isabelle Morris
Like most of my novels,
See How They Run
comes right out of my worst nightmares rather than real life. Obviously, the United States boycotted the Moscow Olympics in 1980. I ask the reader to follow my alternate entry in this story.
See How They Run
couldn’t have been written without the help of a former Israeli soldier now living in New York; without the vivid stories of a survivor who had made the pilgrimage to every concentration camp site in Europe—who had also made contact with the radical group known as DIN. Most of all, the book couldn’t have reached its present form without the nagging help of the son of a Brooklyn rabbi, who, more often than I would have liked, reminded me to get it down right.
J.P.
The King David Hotel, Jerusalem.
October, 1979.
Five months before the beginning.
A benevolent midaftemoon sun spattered golden streaks over the historic domes and needle spires, up and down the gray-yellow stones of the ancient Holy pity walls. A bottle of Schweppes Bitter Lemon, a pot of English Breakfast tea, and a cold Maccabee beer were brought to the three old friends sitting on the pretty hotel terrace.
It is a fact recorded in several news correspondents’ notebooks—though not as yet in their newspapers—that a sacred and very secret Jewish brotherhood had existed in Western Europe, America, and Israel since the end of World War II. The group was composed of workingmen and women; of farmers, entertainers, taxi drivers; of wealthy doctors, solicitors, merchants, rabbis; of important government leaders and elite army officers.
No matter how these men and women earned their livings, however, the sworn purpose of the cabal thrust another task on them.
They were to remember the terrible Holocaust—every last abhorrent detail. They were to protect against another unholy conflagration with their lives if need be. They were to relentlessly hunt down those responsible for the first abomination against the Jewish people and against mankind
.
Two of the three friends clustered together on the hotel terrace were the secret brotherhood’s original leaders—the third was a woman, a wealthy contributor from America.
Seated as they were in view of the gates of Old City, the three made a curious and memorable portrait—a noble picture worthy of exhibition in the Jewish Museum.
Benjamin Rabinowitz
.
Michael Ben-Iban
.
Elena Cohen Strauss
.
A combined age of 226 years.
All survivors of the Nazi death camps thirty-five years before.
The previous evening, Elena Strauss and Ben-Iban had jetted to Jerusalem after receiving an urgent message from Rabinowitz:
THE TIME HAS COME TO REMEMBER OUR SACRED PLEDGE. … THE FOURTH REICH IS ABOUT TO RISE. IT IS TIME TO CONCLUDE THE DISCUSSION STAGE OF OUR PLAN TO ONCE AND FOREVER STOP THE ENEMY.
Hector Berlioz’s
Symphonie Fantastique
—then a BBC news broadcast—served as civilized background for the several private conversations progressing in grunts and murmurs on the grandly elegant hotel terrace. The clean smell of almonds and oranges was everywhere in the air.
Out on the streets of Rehavia, Arab cabdrivers could be heard mischievously blaring their Mercedes taxi horns. Out there, too, Hasidim tourists trudged along in their broad hats and stiff beards, pointing at Moses Mantefiore’s windmill, acting as if the Ba’al Shem Tov himself were standing at every cross street.
In the beginning of their meeting, the three old friends merely chatted.
The most casual talk possible under the circumstances.
They sipped their drinks, and they offered opinions on a recent Black September bombing of a children’s school bus in Bayit Vegan. They spoke of a best-selling book from England, which had documented that the PLO was receiving huge sums of money from neo-Nazis living in southern France. They gave Freudian interpretations of Teddy Kollek’s grand reconstruction dreams for Jerusalem.
Eighty-two-year-old Elena Strauss managed to smile a few times.