“But what about Khalid? He may have been compromised.”
“Precisely. As I said before, that is a local matter. Your news only makes me more certain it will be handled satisfactorily.”
Aliyah couldn’t take his smugness a moment longer. She pushed back her chair with a noisy scrape and stood so suddenly that she felt a bit wobbly. She had to get out of here—this bar, this hotel, this country. She had to reach Abbas.
“You will please excuse me.”
Her intention was to turn and walk away before the doctor could reply. But he stood, too, then reached across the table and gripped her tightly by the forearm. His smile didn’t waver, but there was no hint of amusement in his eyes.
“Our business is not yet finished, Mrs. Rahim.”
With his free hand he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket of his jacket.
“To show our good intentions, here is some cash to help finance the remaining days of your stay in Amman.”
Aliyah ignored the envelope and tugged at her arm, but his grip was firm.
“Thank you, but I don’t need your money. I plan on leaving as soon as I can.”
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”
He tightened his grip. Now it hurt. She tried to twist away, but to no effect.
“Not possible?”
“We would ask that you remain in Jordan a while longer, so as to prevent any complications in Washington. Given the behavior we have witnessed here, we worry that your sudden arrival there might cause, well, too much of a distraction.”
“You’re
forcing
me to stay?”
Several people at the next table looked over in apparent concern, then looked away when the doctor smiled back, as if to say, “Women—what can you do with them?”
He lowered his voice and leaned closer.
“Of course we are not forcing you. We only wish to do what is best for your husband. And we will do all in our power to make your stay comfortable. Do you see those men over there, Mrs. Rahim? The ones in brown suits?”
It wasn’t so easy turning around with the doctor holding her forearm, but she saw two rather large fellows dressed in brown. One stood near the elevators. The other was by the hotel’s main entrance.
“They will be available to you for whatever you need,” the doctor said smoothly. “They can escort you on walks. Drive you downtown. Even drive you back up to Jerash, if that is the way you would continue to pass your time. Then, when the time is right, we will arrange return transportation for you to Washington. You may try to leave earlier, of course. But I think you will find that due to the holiday all flights are quite booked up for the next several days. And beyond the weekend, there is the matter of how you will reach the airport. Your two escorts may not be able to arrange transportation for a while, and they will be greatly offended if you attempt to choose other means. Things will go much better for you if you just leave matters to them. Then, when all plans have been carried out to everyone’s satisfaction, you may return. In the meantime, I will of course be at your disposal. Just let those gentlemen know if you wish to see me. Farewell, Mrs. Rahim.”
He released her arm, dropped the envelope on the table, and walked away. She was furious, and a little frightened as well. She watched the doctor cross the room, half hoping that the men in brown would follow him out the door. Instead, they nodded as he passed and held their stations.
What an idiot she had been, placing so much hope in a passive strategy of avoidance and delay. Tiptoe off to Jordan rather than deal with Abbas directly, as if the whole foolish scheme might rot and decay in her absence. For all she had done to retake control of her life through grief counseling and prayer, she realized now that Abbas was the one who had seized the wheel of their fate, and he was steering them toward disaster.
She walked briskly toward the elevators, not even daring to glance at the posted “escort” as she pressed the button for her floor. Fortunately he did not board with her. Her mind was a jumble of wild thoughts as she rode to her floor. But she was not ready to quit, not nearly. And by the time she reached her door she knew that only two plausible courses of action remained.
One, no matter how many people the doctor had assigned to watch her, she had to get back to Washington as soon as possible, by any means necessary.
Two, even if she was delayed several days, she should make one last attempt to reach Khalid II. In trouble or not, he was her only hope for acquiring quick and dirty knowledge on dismantling a bomb. Perhaps before dropping out of sight he had found out what she needed to know. It was a scant hope, but as long as she was going to be trapped here for a while, sneaking out to Bakaa for one last visit was the only alternative worth pursuing. All her other contacts, she realized now, had been interested only in using her for some other purpose, and in the process they had made a fool of her.
The possibility that upset her most was that this was the way Abbas had planned things from the beginning. Maybe her treatment had been part of his agreement with the Jordanians: Keep my wife out of my hair while you send help. In exchange, you may employ her in whatever petty scheme you wish.
The thought made her so flustered that she had to slide her key card three times before the lock clicked open to her room. She heaved herself onto the bed with a groan of outraged agony.
She picked up the phone, then realized that at this hour all the travel agencies and local airline offices would already be closed for the holiday and might not reopen for several days. Officially, Eid al-Fitr was a three-day celebration. But she’d be damned if she would simply take the doctor’s word on how difficult it would be to get a quick flight home. For starters, she might be able to secure a ticket online through the computers in the hotel’s business center. With any luck it would still be open.
She made it as far as the elevator, then realized that the man downstairs would follow her. So she ran down the hall to a stairway at the far end. Maybe he wouldn’t see her emerge, and she could reach the business center, which was tucked into a back office in the opposite direction.
Aliyah got there just in time, and no one followed. The clerk on duty seemed anxious to leave for the holiday, but Aliyah had the advantage of being a regular visitor. She had been checking daily on the computer terminals for local news from back home, in case the senator died or took a sudden turn for the worse.
Soon after logging on, however, she discovered that the doctor had been correct. Every flight out of Amman was booked solid for the next several days. She vowed to try again later, in case something opened up. But for the near term she was stuck.
Aliyah then checked for any news update on the senator. Thankfully, there was nothing. As long as he held on, she would be all right. For now, then, her only option was to find some way to arrange another audience with Khalid II. Her efforts might well be fruitless, but she had to try, if only to do
something.
Her entire world was on the verge of being consumed by a needless act of vengeance, and she was five thousand miles away from being able to stop it.
28
P
eace between Jordan and Israel was supposed to bring harmony to their border.
It didn’t. Crossing from Amman to Jerusalem is still a three-hour ordeal of overpriced taxis, flyblown buses, and meticulous body searches. A trip that should be a leisurely one-hour drive through the desert is instead an armed transit between warring tribes, especially in the tender zone astride the River Jordan, with its coiled razor wire, tank traps, and helmeted soldiers peering from the slits of bunkers.
Somewhere in the middle of this ride, the tires of your bus thump briefly on a tiny bridge, and the more vigilant passengers glimpse a narrow brown creek as it passes fleetingly below. This is the River Jordan, the most overrated body of water in the history of time.
Officials on the Jordanian side always seem more relaxed, probably because a lot fewer people are trying to blow them up. They never do much searching or scanning, and the customs men are as bored as tollbooth attendants. Just keep the line moving.
This time they weren’t quite so accommodating. Of the twenty people on my bus, I was the only one whose passport prompted the attendant behind the glass to place a phone call. It caught me by surprise, so I wasn’t paying close enough attention to see if he had checked my name against any sort of watch list. He punched in a number with the Amman city code. Then he nodded, said a few words I couldn’t hear through the glass, and summoned a supervisor from out front who had been relaxing in the shade with an orange soda.
The boss took the receiver. Then he, too, spoke and nodded while writing something in a large black notebook, which he had pulled from a locked drawer. He glanced my way a few times, causing the people in line behind me to shuffle nervously and turn away. He hung up, walked to the window, and briskly stamped my passport as if nothing were out of the ordinary.
“Everything all right?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said curtly, already nodding past me toward the next customer.
The security regime on the Israeli side was as elaborate as ever, presided over by young men and women equipped with a dazzling variety of sidearms and big automatics, which they had stuffed into their belts and slung across their backs. Like everyone else, I slipped into bovine submissiveness as I stepped through blowers, scanners, detectors, and dust analyzers, as if being processed for some terrible fate.
Everyone’s luggage disappeared into a back room and emerged on the other side, presumably having been searched and x-rayed.
I breezed through passport control while the Palestinians from our bus inched along in a long line reserved just for them. A pretty young woman asked me a few intrusive questions before she sent me along.
At last I was on my way out the door through a cloud of flies toward the taxi stand, where I slumped into the front seat for the half-hour ride to Jerusalem.
We climbed into the bleached Judean hills. Here and there were still the occasional Bedouin tents with their goats and their inevitable Toyota trucks, although far fewer than I remembered from previous years. Where had the others gone, and what had driven them away?
I soon got my answer when I spotted the newest fringes of the Israeli settler exurbs, impressive neighborhoods that gleamed atop ridgelines. Like burbs the world over, these were growing fast, and each new rooftop was a further claim on disputed land.
None of that prepared me for the shock of the wall. We topped a rise overlooking several Arab villages and the distant outskirts of Jerusalem, and there it was, running across the undulating countryside. I had seen Berlin’s infamous wall before it came down. In many ways this one wasn’t nearly as imposing, but on the barren landscape it stood out like a line of stitching on a fresh wound. And for all its forbidding appearance, what it conveyed most powerfully was the fear within.
The fear was contagious. A few miles later, well inside the barrier, I flinched noticeably when a small boy ran toward our taxi at a stoplight. I was momentarily convinced he was about to throw a bomb or pull a knife. Instead he held out an empty hand, begging.
Hans had asked me to meet him at a friend’s place in an Arab neighborhood on the Mount of Olives, just around the corner from the apartment I’d had during the intifada. I had fond memories of the place, having rented from a garrulous Palestinian who didn’t care who his tenants were as long as they paid on time. After I moved out, the place was taken over by a sect of Christian evangelicals from Indiana, who prized its picture-window view of the walled Old City. They flew in true believers from America whose only job was to watch the skies above the Old City for signs of the Second Coming. That was Jerusalem for you, a religious shopping mall where every vendor, large and small, had its own sturdy kiosk of faith.
Hans spotted me from an upstairs window and called out as the taxi pulled away.
“Good God, man. Come on up!”
I climbed the stairs to a whitewashed room furnished traditionally, with colorfully embroidered cushions thrown on the floor around a large Oriental rug. A brass pot of coffee was steaming on a tray, and there was a plateful of pastries and a bowl of almonds.
Hans grabbed me by the hand and pounded my back.
“You’re still skin and bones!” he shouted, the Bavarian accent as pronounced as ever. “Thank God Ramadan is over so we can actually be civilized. Sit down and eat!”
He had always been a big fellow, and at first glance he had changed as little as any of us. But on closer inspection I saw that all the years in the sun had given his skin a look of desiccation. It was as if he had been covered in parchment and might crumble beneath your fingers.
But the bigger changes were inside, as I was soon to discover. Hans had once been almost unbearably upbeat, ever ready to counter any sign of brooding darkness in his colleagues. Now he more often resorted to a mordant wit tinged by hopelessness.
“So you’re still in the business of trying to patch things up?” I said.
“With the same old lousy results. You know how it goes. They killed three, so we must kill six. You’ve been to places like that. It’s just that everybody else finally gets it out of their system. Even the Bosnians gave it a rest. But these people?” He sighed and threw up his hands. “The engine doesn’t always overheat, but it never stops running.”
“Why don’t you leave?”
“Too many of them still want to make it work. Besides, I don’t know Europe anymore, especially not Germany. What would I do, work for Siemens? But what about you, working for Omar? Can’t say I would have predicted that.”
“His charity for Bakaa. It’s why I wanted to talk to you. I’m interested in seeing how he’s thought of around here. His reputation on the street, assuming he has one.”
“Does he know you’re doing this? Asking about him?”
“No.”
“Then who are you working for?”
“He calls it the Bakaa Refugee Health Project.”
“No. Who
else
are you working for? Why all the questions?”
“What if I said it was to satisfy my own curiosity?”
He laughed.
“That answer is not even worth a nod and a wink. There are two types of people around here, Freeman. Ones who ask questions and ones who simply let events roll by as they will,
inshallah,
and take each day as it comes. Nine times out of ten the ones who ask questions are working for someone other than who they say they are.”
“So you don’t want to help me?”
“I just want you to level with me. Within reason, of course.”
“There are some interested Americans who want to know.”
“That’s all I needed to hear.”
“And that’s acceptable?”
“It’s neither here nor there. It simply is. I only wanted to know your perspective. If you were working for the Israelis, for example, or Hamas—not that I’d expect you to work for either—then I would have had a problem. I have to stay out of those kinds of partisan matters, as you can well understand.”
“The Americans aren’t partisan?”
“Of course they are. But their interest is once removed. They’re the rich uncle who sends gifts to one nephew and only scorn to the other. Which earns him resentment from both, if for different reasons. But any way you look at it, he’s still just a rich uncle. So what’s your worry about Omar? He hasn’t gone radical on us?”
“Not in my opinion. I’m not so sure about some of his friends, though.”
“You could say the same thing about me. It’s one reason to be careful while you’re in Jerusalem, especially if anyone knows you’re seeing me. And believe me, someone will know.”
“They watch you that closely?”
“That’s the nature of being an underground peacemaker. I’m a go-between, which makes me useful to both sides. It means almost anyone will talk to me. Which, of course, makes everyone all the more determined to find out who I’ve been meeting. So here’s hoping you haven’t made yourself radioactive before coming here. The last thing I need is to have some of that poison rub off on me.”
“What about Omar? What kind of a jolt would he put into an Israeli Geiger counter?”
“Not much, I’d imagine. His friends over here aren’t particularly dangerous. Just nuisances.”
“How so?”
“In legal ways. Telling their poor illiterate brethren all about their property rights, and then helping stand up for them.”
“His friends are lawyers?”
“Property people, actually. Diggers and designers. Archaeologists and architects. Like Basma Shaheed. Omar is supposedly one of her patrons.”
“Never heard of her.”
“She’d like that. She works quietly. Goes into homes in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City whenever someone is thinking about moving out, or giving up, or just can’t keep their place in repair. She shows them how to shore up the walls or the ceiling and hold their ground, then finds them help, so they can stay. That way, no Jewish settler moves in to paint a blue Star of David on the door.”
“Sounds benign enough.”
“Nothing here is benign when it involves land. She has begun to attract the attention of the authorities.”
“So you think her days are numbered?”
“That’s where it gets interesting. Apparently she’s about to go public. Open an office, hire a staff. Expand her base of operations beyond the walls of the Old City. The Palestinian Authority is going to come up with some sort of award for her, and she suddenly seems to be spending a lot of money.”
“I thought she liked secrecy.”
“You know how it goes. Start getting some heat and maybe you’d be better off out in the open. That way if anyone tries to take you down, the whole world will know it.”
“And Omar is a patron?”
“Him and a few others, mostly Jordanians. Some sort of property baron named Sami Fayez, too. There’s also a stockbroker, Rafi Tuqan. People who’ve scored big in the recent boom.”
“Good Lord, the whole crowd.”
“You know them?”
“Met them all. At Omar’s house, in fact.”
Hans grinned.
“Well, there you are. Right under your nose, and you didn’t even know it.”
“Hardly sounds like anything illegal.”
“Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it doesn’t make people nervous. Especially if the latest is true. She supposedly has a new base of operations right by an archaeological site, a very sensitive one. Next to the City of David dig, outside the Dung Gate. One of the biblical diggers on the Israeli side is convinced he’s found the wall to King David’s palace. His answer to all those people who’ve been saying for years that the Old Testament is just glorified mythology.”
“Exactly the sort of claim that drives the Arab archaeologists crazy, I gather.”
“Of course. Which brings us back to the age-old struggle. If the Israeli right can show that Jerusalem in fourteenth-century B.C. was the glorious metropolis the Bible says it was, then they’re that much closer to claiming the West Bank as part of the Promised Land.”
“Only in their own minds.”
“When five percent of the vote can swing an election, their own minds are all that matters. And who knows, put another hard-liner in office and you push the Palestinians that much closer to Hamas. Believe me, people are going to be shocked next time the Palestinians vote.”
“What’s all that have to do with this dig?”
“Because if a few Arabs on the edge of the property hold on to their homes, they could stop the dig in its tracks.”
“Well, if that’s what Omar is up to, backing a few homeowner holdouts, why hide it?”
“Who says he’s hiding it? Unless he’s helping on a scale that no one can even imagine.”
I thought of the envelope Norbert Krieger gave Omar in Athens, and the archaeological connections of Yiorgos Soukas.
“Maybe he
is
helping on that kind of scale.”
Hans eyed me carefully.
“In that case, he’s being more than just a philanthropist. Underwrite an entire movement and you’ve become an agitator, a political force.”
“An enemy?”
“Do you really have to ask?”
So, just when I was beginning to put my mind at ease on Omar’s motivations, now I was worried again. Could this be what the Americans really wanted to know—the depth of Omar’s involvement in a scheme to help Arab homeowners? And if he was using the hospital charity as cover, then wasn’t he duping me in the bargain?
“Tell me, has the name Norbert Krieger ever come up in any of this?”
Hans laughed.
“Never.”
“What’s so funny?”
“Norbert Krieger of Munich? He must be in his sixties by now.”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“He was once a patron of mine. A real peacenik. Ten, eleven years ago. A little too pro-Arab for my tastes.”
“You’ve hung out with worse.”
“Not when they’re German. With any German that pro-Arab you’ve always got to assume he’s more of an anti-Jew.”
“Spoken like a truly guilty German. Still worried if you’re
betroffen
enough?”
“That’s part of it. But I haven’t heard from him in years. I think he knew I didn’t trust him. Why? Is he another friend of Omar’s?”
“Possibly.”
“Well, he’s no bomb thrower. That much I know. Unless he has gone off the deep end. But I wouldn’t be tossing his name around if I were you, even now. Remember, Freeman, people here take
everything
seriously, no matter how small or insignificant. Be careful who you talk to, and what you ask. Not everyone keeps a secret as well as me.”