The Brotherhood of the Rose (18 page)

Chris never forgot. Rothberg turned so his back was to the corpse. He stood flat-footed, legs spread apart, holding his arms out, palms down, parallel to the floor. His assistant placed a coin on the back of each hand. the assistant counted to three. In a blur, Rothberg flipped his hands over and caught the coins.

But at the same time the corpse jerked back, its harness snapping against the hook that suspended it. Rothberg showed the coins he'd caught. He put them in his pocket and turned to the corpse, stripping the surgical tape, raising the skin flap. The ribs on both sides had been shattered. Not only had Rothberg flipped his hands to catch the coins with eyeblink speed. At the same instant, he'd also rammed his elbows back to strike the corpse, a movement so swift it was undetectable. The agility would have been remarkable in anyone, let alone a man in his sixties. As the other students murmured their surprise, Chris glanced around him, for the first time noticing Erika. "So you see," Rothberg explained, "if our friend were still alive, his shattered ribs would have punctured his lungs. He'd have died from asphyxiation due to foam produced by the blood and air in his lungs. Cyanotic in three minutes, dead in sixteen-plenty of time to inject a drug if called for. But most important, an irreparable wound that results in little damage to your own ability to defend yourself against others. For the three major weapons your body offers you, which do not lose their ability to function even under the most serious impact, are the tip of your elbow, the web of skin between your thumb and first finger, and the heel of your palm. In the future, you will learn to use these weapons with speed, coordination, and the proper stance for balance. But for now we'll adjourn to dinner. Tonight I shall demonstrate the proper use of the garotte and the knife. For the next few days, it's all show and tell." A "few days" turned out to be seven weeks. From dawn till sunset, every day except for the Jewish Sabbath, Chris and Saul went through the most intensive training they'd ever received, Special Forces included. Demonstrations were followed by practice sessions and then by grueling exercise. They learned fencing and ballet. "For agility," Rothberg explained. "You must understand the need for refinement. Endurance doesn't matter, nor does strength. It makes no difference how huge and sturdy your opponent may be in comparison to yourself. A well-placed blow to the proper spot will kill him. Reflex-that's the most important factor, hence the fencing and the ballet. You must learn to control your body, to feel at home with it, to make your mind and muscle one. Thoughts must be transmitted instantly into action. Hesitation, faulty timing, and misplaced blows allow your opponent the chance to kill you. Speed, coordination, and reflex-these are your weapons as much as your body. Practice till you're too exhausted to move, till your prior training-as brutal as it was-seems like a holiday. Then practice more.

When not in the classrooms or the gym, Chris and Saul spent hours in their room, developing their skills. In imitation of Rothberg, Chris held out his arms, Palms down. Saul put a coin on the back of each hand. Chris jerked his hands away and tried to turn his palms to catch the falling coins. Then it was Saul's turn to try. For the first week, they thought the trick was impossible. The coins would strike the floor, or Chris and Saul would catch the coins too low and awkwardly. "You just got killed," they'd tell each other. By the end of the second week, their reflexes had improved sufficiently for them to catch the coins in one smooth blur. The coins seemed suspended in the air, captured before they began to fall.

But the coins were merely a device, not the final purpose. Once the skill of catching them had been mastered, another difficulty was added. As Rothberg explained, they had to learn not only how to deliver blows backward, with their elbows, instantly-but also how to do it forward, with the heels of the palms, equally fast. Practicing this second method of attack, Chris and Saul put pencils on a table. When they jerked their hands from the coins, they had to jab the pencils off the table before they caught the coins. Again the trick seemed impossible. They failed to catch the coins, or they missed the pencils, or they moved so clumsily that again they told each other, "You just got killed."

Miraculously, by the end of the third week, they could manage both tricks at once. But jabbing the pencils wasn't the final purpose either. To their speed and coordination, they now added accuracy, spreading ink on the palm of each hand, then dropping the coins and striking at a circle on a sheet of paper tacked to the wall. At first they either failed to leave an inky palinprint in the circle or else failed to catch the coins, but by the beginning of the fifth week, they could study the well-placed ink stains, glance down at the coins in their hands, and congratulate themselves. "The other guy got killed."

Eventually Rothberg judged them skilled enough to practice on cadavers. But the last week he insisted on the final test. "Put the coins in your pocket. Slip on these padded vests," he told them. "Practice on yourselves." Chris lay on the sofa in the cottage, watching sunlight glint off the window. The Potomac whispered along its bank. A breeze nudged branches. Birds sang. He remembered, on that kibbutz in Israel there'd been no birds. Only heat and sand and seven weeks of sweat and concentration and pain. But when his killer-instinct training had been completed, he'd been as close as he would ever come to the goal of perfection. Eliot constantly recommended-among the chosen few, the best, the most disciplined, capable, deadly, a world-class operative about to begin his career. In 1966, he thought. When I was young.

Now after successes, defeats, and betrayals, Chris mused on the years that had intervened. The agency, the monastery, the agency again, his probation in Rome, the Church of the Moon, the grave he'd dug in Panama. The pattern seemed predetermined. At the age of thirty-six, he considered everything he'd learned. He analyzed those seven weeks in Israel, recalling what Erika had said-that the description of the men who'd hunted Saul in Atlantic City also matched Saul and himself-men affiliated with Eliot but trained by the Mossad. Still, as hard as Chris tried, he couldn't remember any other, Americans at Rothherg's school. The implication made his stomach sink. Had Eliot lied about that as well? Had he sent others to Rothberg at different times, even though he'd promised Chris and Saul they were unique? Why would Eliot lie about that?

Chris remembered something else. As Erika moaned in sexual climax beyond the closed door of the bedroom, he relived the moment sixteen years ago in Israel when he'd first seen her. Shortly afterward, Saul had been taken from Chris's group and put with Erika's. Despite the intensive schedule, they'd somehow found the time to become lovers. Chris felt a weight on his chest. In those days, his need to please Eliot had been so great he'd denied all emotion except loyalty to his father and his brother. He'd purged himself of any wish for gratification and fulfillment- unless his father permitted it. Sex was allowed for therapeutic purposes. But a love affair was unthinkable. "It compromises you," Eliot had said. "Emotion's a liability. It prevents you from concentrating. In a mission , it gets you killed. Besides, a lover might turn against you. Or an enemy might hold her hostage to force you to turn against the agency. No, the only people you can love and trust and depend on are myself and Saul." The weight pressed harder on his chest. Bitterness scalded him. For despite his conditioning, Chris had eventually experienced emotion-not love for a woman, but guilt for the things he'd done, and shame for having failed his father. Confusion tore at him. He'd sacrificed what he now realized were basic human needs in order to please his father. Now his father had turned against him. Among his deceptions, had Eliot lied about love as well? Chris seethed with regret for the life he might have known, a life his shame and guilt would not allow him now. If not for his need to help Saul, he'd have killed himself to stop the agony of self-disgust. The things Eliot made me do, he thought. He clenched his fists. And the normalcy I was never granted. Incapable of anger toward Saul, he nonetheless felt envious, for Saul had managed to stay true to Eliot and yet find self-fulfillment. He felt capable of rage toward Eliot, though. He shuddered, squeezing his eyes shut, wincing with regret. If things had been different, he wondered, rigidly shaking his head, if he and not Saul had been put in Erika's group in Israel-his throat clamped shutwould he now be the one to hold her as she shuddered?

Erika studied herself in the dressing room's mirror. Through the louvers in the door, she herd two saleswomen talking. She'd arrived at ten, as the department store opened. Few customers had been waiting to get in, so her grimy skirt and blouse hadn't attracted much attention. Walking quickly through the women's department, she'd chosen bras and panties, a corduroy jacket, a paisley blouse, jeans, and high leather boots. She changed in the dressing room.

Clutching her discarded clothes, she opened the door and peered out cautiously, seeing no other customers. The saleswomen turned as she approached.

"Don't ever try to change a flat tire in a brand new outfit," Erika said. "I should have called Triple A."

"Or your boyfriend," the younger woman said, apparently noticing Erika didn't wear a wedding ring. "I just broke up with him. To tell the truth, he was useless."

The saleswomen laughed. "I know what you mean," the younger one said. "My boyfriend's useless too. Except for-" They laughed again. "I wish I had your figure," the older one said. "Those clothes fit you perfectly."

"After the flat tire, something had to go right. Would you mind taking care of these?" She held up the grimy slacks and blouse. "I've got just the place." The younger woman dropped them in a wastecan behind the counter. While the older woman cut off the tags on the new clothes, Erika paid for them, smiling to herself at the name on the receipt she was given. Goldbloom's. Might as well stay kosher, she thought.

In the men's department, she glanced- at the paper on which Saul and Chris had written their sizes, choosing poplin slacks, a tennis shirt, and a lightweight windbreaker for Saul, a tan oxford shirt and pale blue summer suit for Chris. Her timing was perfect. At precisely ten-thirty, she paused at the pay phone near the lost-and-found counter by the exit. She told the Alexandria operator the Washington number, inserted the proper coins, and listened as the phone buzzed once before a woman's voice replied, "Good morning, Israeli embassy."

"Ma echpat fi?"

In English, the phrase meant, "I should care?" It corresponded with the Hebrew lettering on a poster of a Jewish washerwoman with her arms raised in either surrender or disgust that hung on the wall directly above the switchboard in the embassy's communications center. The operator knew at once to relay the call to an emergency switchboard in the basement.

Misha Pletz, a harried man of thirty-five with a mustache and a receding hairline-chief of logistics for the Mossad on the United States eastern seaboard-plugged in his jack. "One moment please." He turned on a meter next to his desk and watched a dial. The device measured the electrical current on the phone line. If the line had been tapped, the drain of electricity would have caused the dial to veer from its normal position. The needle showed a normal current. "Shalom, " Pletz said.

A woman's attractive husky voice spoke slowly to him. "Don't take any outside calls. Fourteen-thirty-11 A bell rang abruptly, indicating the line had been disconnected.

Pletz unplugged his jack. He drew his finger down the index on the wall to the left of his switchboard. Pulling out this day's card, he stared at a list of numbers. The call had come through at ten-thirty. Beside that number, he found the name of the operative assigned that time for checking in during emergencies. BERNSTEIN, ERIKA.

Pletz frowned. For the past thirty-six hours-since the attempted assassination at her apartment-no one at the embassy had known where Erika was or if she was still alive. The police had come to the embassy early yesterday morning, explaining what had happened, wanting information about her. They'd been greeted by the personnel director, who expressed dismay at the killings and offered to help in every way. His help amounted to showing the police the embassy's file on Erika, a carefully edited document that established her cover as a clerk and completely obscured her actual function as a colonel in the Mossad. She kept to herself, the personnel director explained. She had few friends. He provided the names. Having learned a lot but in effect nothing, the detectives left, dissatisfied. Pletz assumed they'd watch the embassy in case Erika showed up, though his informants had told him last night that the investigation had inexplicably been terminated. Since then, Pletz had waited. Because she should have called him as soon as possible, her thirty-six hours of silence suggested she was dead.

But now she'd made contact. Pletz's relief changed quickly to alarm. She'd told him, "Don't take any outside calls," a code phrase instructing him to abandon all collaboration with any foreign intelligence service, even the United States. She'd mentioned "fourteen-thirty," military time for 2:30 P.m., the signal for when she'd call back, presumably from a safer phone. Four hours from now. Pletz hated waiting.

What the hell was going on?

"They'll stay together," Eliot said. "Both of them with the woman."

"Agreed," his assistant said. "Together they'd have a better chance to protect themselves."

"And use her contacts." For security reasons, Eliot avoided his office as much as possible. Using his greenhouse as a distraction, he studied the hint of blight on an American Beauty Rose. "We have to assume she'll call her embassy. Its scrambler system's too sophisticated for us to intercept her conversations."