Vicious Circle Read online

  If Sa’adat’s guess was correct, if the document was a coded message, there was little the Israelis could do to decipher it; the Islamic fundamentalists had mastered the use of the primitive but unbreakable one-time pad system, which involved enciphering and deciphering from a random substitution key, of which only two copies existed, one in the hands of the person who originated the message, the other in the hands of the person who received it. To make the code even more unbreakable, the key was used only once and destroyed.

  Baruch read the document again. It suddenly struck him that this paragraph out of a biology textbook offered an uncannily accurate description of a fundamentalist terrorist cell. Orders originated in the heart of the cell. Dendrites or activists branched out from the cell to carry out these orders. Instructions to other cells were passed along the axon, which snaked out in the direction of other cells but, for security purposes, never actually made contact with them. The messages were passed across a gap called the synapse. If Yussuf Abu Saleh could be described as a dendrite—perhaps he was dendrite number seven!—then the lame shoemaker across from the El Khanqa Mosque in the Christian Quarter of the Old City was clearly the synapse, the gap across which messages between cells were transmitted without the cells touching. If I’m right, Baruch thought, if this document is really an Abu Bakr Brigade organizational chart, it certainly wasn’t the handiwork of Yussuf Abu Saleh, who had been a plasterer before becoming a Muslim activist. Which left the man himself, as Briscoe put it: Abu Bakr! Abu Bakr, the almost blind fundamentalist with the mark of prostration on his forehead. Abu Bakr, the vigilante who had personally executed twenty-four collaborators with .22-caliber bullets fired, so Elihu had reported at the first session of the Working Group, with surgical accuracy into their medullas, the lowest part of the brain stem, which controls the heart beat and breathing and brings instantaneous death. What you’re describing, Baruch had remarked when Elihu reported how a short, heavy-set man with short cropped hair, listening for signs of life, had pressed his ear to the mouth of the wounded Jew lying on the road during the kidnapping, could be the professional gestures of a medic or a male nurse.

  The telephone on Baruch’s desk rang shrilly. He resented the interruption and considered not answering it. With a fatalistic shrug, he lifted the receiver.

  “That you, Baruch?” a man asked.

  Baruch recognized the voice and sat up straighter. “It is, Prime Minister.”

  “Scramble this conversation.”

  Baruch hit the scramble button, then said, “Go ahead.”

  “I don’t know if what I am about to say can help you. I just received a secret cable from Sawyer, the President’s Special Assistant for—”

  “Sir, I know who Sawyer is.”

  “Yes, well, his note was short and to the point. He said he has reason to believe that Abu Bakr is a medical doctor.” When Baruch didn’t say anything, the Prime Minister asked, “Did you hear me, Baruch?”

  “I did, Prime Minister.”

  “Is this detail useful?”

  “I think it may be. Thank you for calling.”

  The line went dead. Baruch leaned back in his chair. Of course! Not a medic or a male nurse but a doctor! “Why didn’t I think of it sooner?” Baruch said out loud. The sound of his own voice startled him. Who else but a doctor would be familiar enough with anatomy to execute people with a low-caliber bullet fired into the medulla? And familiar enough with biology to model his terrorist cells along the lines of human cells?

  Baruch snatched a sheaf of eighty-weight bond and scrawled “From, To, Subj:” on the top left. Then he addressed it to the brothers Karamazov in the research department, and wrote: “The short, heavy-set nearly blind religious Muslim who spent time in Israeli prisons after being denounced by a collaborator at some point in his life had formal medical training. Does that narrow it down for you?”

  Baruch signed the work order and set it on Absalom’s desk under a plastic flower pot filled with a plastic geranium. Wandering back into his office, he felt physically and mentally drained—he was so exhausted he doubted he would be able to fall asleep. He filled the small crystal glass, which his late father-in-law had brought with him from Vilnius when he immigrated to Israel, with three-star brandy from the Golan Heights and, setting the phone on the floor within arm’s reach, stretched out on the couch. If his wife had been there she would have made a sardonic remark about his shoes. “Just because terrorists are kidnapping Israelis is no reason to put your dirty soles up on a clean couch,” she would have groaned, as if one thing had anything to do with the other. She would have untied his laces and slipped the shoes off his feet, and covered his feet with a blanket. She would have put one of the late Beethoven string quartets on the new compact player his daughter had bought him for his last birthday, and settled into the rocking chair to stand guard against evil spirits while he lay there, his eyes wide open, trying to close the gap between possibilities and probabilities.

  THIRTY-TWO

  MOSES BRISCOE SNATCHED THE PHONE OFF THE HOOK WHILE the first ring was still echoing in his ear. The Prime Minister must have dialed the number himself because Briscoe could hear his cranky growl coming down the tube. “That you, Moses?”

  “Sir.”

  “As far as the Shin Bet is concerned, the journalist Sweeney does not exist. No phone taps, no surveillance, electronic or otherwise. Nothing. Period. Am I coming across loud and clear?”

  “You certainly are.”

  “A messenger will deliver a formal written finding to this effect within the hour. If your division disregards any part of it, don’t waste time with explanations—draft a letter of resignation and send it to my office. It will be accepted before it arrives. Questions?”

  “I have an endless list of questions, but I know better than to ask them.”

  The Prime Minister relaxed for the first time. “How’s your family?”

  “Fine.”

  “Your son still in that sapper unit?”

  “Yes.”

  “You must be worried.”

  “You bet I’m worried—I’m worried sick about my son, I’m worried sick about Rabbi Apfulbaum, I’m worried sick about his secretary, Efrayim.”

  “Me, too, Moses. Me, too.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  TIME HAD RUN OUT ON THE RABBI’S SECRETARY. “WHERE ARE you taking me?” Efrayim sobbed under his hood as Azziz untied his feet and prodded him toward the door. “I don’t have to urinate. For God’s sake, Rabbi, don’t just sit there, say something. Ask them where they’re taking me.”

  The hood-muffled voice of the Rabbi could be heard. “So where are you taking him?”

  “There is no reason for him to be alarmed,” the Doctor said soothingly. From somewhere over the rooftops came the recorded wail of the muezzin summoning the faithful to evening prayers at the El Khanqa Mosque. “He stinks,” the Doctor explained. “There is an old Arab public bathhouse under us. We’re taking him downstairs for a shower.”

  “Oy, oy,” Efrayim groaned. “The Nazis told the Jews at Auschwitz they were being taken to the shower.” His fingers found the knob on the door. He dug his Reeboks in on the floor and clung to it for dear life. “For God’s sake do something, Rabbi!” he pleaded.

  Behind him, the Rabbi’s curiously detached lament drifted across the room. “‘There is a time for being born and a time for dying …’”

  Azziz pried Efrayim’s fingers from the knob and half dragged, half pushed the prisoner into the outer room. Azziz’s brother, Aown, armed with the Webley, had taken Sweeney up to the attic crawl space over the safe house to cat nap until the Ramadan break-fast and the session with Apfulbaum. Azziz kicked the door to the inner room closed behind him, then shoved Efrayim roughly against the wall so that his cheek was glued to it. The Doctor came up behind Efrayim. He grasped his pearl-handled revolver in his right hand, with his left he probed under the hood for the distinctive knob of bone behind the ear. “‘In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compass
ionate,’” he intoned in a brittle voice. When his fingers discovered the knob he felt a surge of elation. “‘O unbelievers, I serve not what you serve and you are not serving what I serve.’”

  Stony faced, Petra stood by with a large towel to blot up any blood before it stained the floor.

  Efrayim’s shoulders shuddered uncontrollably. From under the leather hood came a long, muffled moan of terror. Then he gasped and began reciting the only words of the Torah he could recollect. Each word emerged from his throat as a whimper of despair. “‘Shema … yisro’el … adoynoy … eloheynu … adoynoy—’”

  The Doctor cut him off with one of his favorite verses from the Qur’an. “‘To you your religion, to me my religion!’” He brought the pistol up and jammed the barrel against the hood behind Efrayim’s ear and, sliding his left hand free, squeezed the trigger. The phffffft was barely audible. Then the executioner did something he had never done before at one of his executions: as Azziz caught the dead Jew under the armpits and lowered him to the floor, the Doctor giggled uncontrollably.

  Leaning over the corpse, Petra pressed the towel to Efrayim’s neck to soak up the trickle of blood oozing from under the hood. Working quickly, she and Azziz rolled the corpse in an old carpet. Without a word, Azziz hefted the carpet over one sturdy shoulder and started down the flight of steps and across the roofs toward the alleyway and the van with “Fine Bedouin Robes and Carpets” printed in English on its sides.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  KEEPING A HAND ON THE BUTT OF THE WEBLEY IN HIS BELT, Aown pushed open the door to the inner sanctum with a toe and stepped aside to let the American journalist past. Sweeney discovered the Rabbi swaying back and forth in his chair in the windowless room illuminated by the naked bulb hanging from the braided electric cord. Puffing on one of his thick Farids, the Doctor hauled the leather hood off of Apfulbaum’s head. The Fiddler on the Roof looked as if he had aged twenty years since Sweeney had last set eyes on him; his hair had thinned and started to turn gray, his eyes had enormous bags under them, on the back of his hands the wrinkled skin seemed to hang in folds off the bones. His voice rising and falling like a tired tide, Apfulbaum prayed under his breath as he worked a set of silver worry beads through his skeletal fingers.

  The Doctor tugged gently on the slit sleeve of the Rabbi’s rumpled suit jacket. “You have a visitor, Isaac,” he announced, settling onto a chair facing the prisoner, motioning Sweeney to the stool that Aown was dragging in from the other room.

  The Rabbi’s prayer trailed off. “Are we night or are we day?”

  “You know very well, ya’ani, that I always come to you at night.”

  Apfulbaum opened one eye and squinted at Sweeney without bringing him into focus. “So who is this visitor?” he asked huskily.

  “It’s me, Rabbi. Max Sweeney. I interviewed you the day you went to Yad Mordechai, just before—”

  The Rabbi’s other eye flicked open. “Say it, say it. Just before my convoy stopped to lend benzene to some stinking haredim. You probably think the episode slipped my mind but it hasn’t. It’s still fresh in my memory—I can hear the tall Jew speaking Hebrew with a funny accent, I can feel the hypodermic needle pricking my arm.” Apfulbaum angled his head in the direction of his secretary’s chair. “Damn it, Efrayim, I specifically told you I wasn’t going to grant him a second interview until I saw what he’d written about me in the first.” The Rabbi snorted in displeasure. “You’re going to have to shape up or ship out, Efrayim.”

  The Doctor cleared his throat. “I’m afraid Efrayim has … shipped out.”

  “Efrayim’s shipped out,” the Rabbi repeated dully. He ran the fingers of both hands through his hair. “So where has my amanuensis shipped out to?”

  “With any luck, heaven.”

  Sweeney scratched the Doctor’s answer in his copy book before glancing at the empty chair. The sight of the strips of cloth that had bound the secretary’s ankles to its thick wooden legs turned his stomach. For a moment he thought he was going to throw up. He swallowed hard and breathed deeply through his mouth.

  Apfulbaum wrestled with the meaning of the Doctor’s words. “Efrayim’s gone to heaven?”

  “There is a time for dying, ya’ani,” the Doctor reminded him.

  The Rabbi’s brow filled with creases, his eyes bulged in their sockets. “Ah, I see. Why didn’t come right out and say it without beating around the burning bush? You excarnated Efrayim!” When the Doctor remained silent, Apfulbaum, shaking his head in agitation, began forcing the worry beads through his fingers. “I’m not surprised. A deadline’s a deadline. Question of maintaining one’s credibility. So poor Efrayim has shipped out. Which means I’m next in line for excarnation. Ha! I’m ready when you are! Contrary to the conventional wisdom on the subject, people who are dying want to talk about their deaths. Everyone avoids the subject out of embarrassment. But you and I, we’re way past mundane things like embarrassment. Talk to me about my death, Ishmael. Tell me how you’re going to excarnate me.”

  “Let’s not cross bridges—”

  Sweeney was amazed to see that the prisoner seemed to have turned the tables on his kidnapper. It was the prisoner who was eager, and Abu Bakr who hung back, obviously ill at ease.

  “Knock off the clichés about crossing bridges,” the Rabbi burst out angrily. Then he shouted, “I want you to describe my excarnation.” He calmed down and elevated a quivering chin and spit whispered words through clenched teeth. “Give me details, for God’s sake!”

  The Doctor scraped his chair closer to the Rabbi. “I do it myself,” he confided.

  The Rabbi sighed. “I’m relieved it will be you and not some dirty Palestinian.”

  “I can say, speaking from a medical point of view, that if it comes to that—I hope with all my heart it will not, but if it does—the end will be utterly painless. I insert a small caliber bullet into the lowest part of the brain stem, which regulates the beating of the heart and the breathing. Death is instantaneous.”

  “You’re not trying to comfort me? You’re not saying that so I won’t lose my nerve?”

  “Allah is my witness, Isaac. I give you my word as a Muslim.”

  Apfulbaum accepted this with a nod. Turning to Sweeney, he said impatiently, “I’m going to tell you something. Hang on my every word. You can take notes but remember to spell Apfulbaum with an f after the p. As long as you spell my name correctly, resurrection is guaranteed or I get my money back. Here it is: in another incarnation I could have liked this guy. He’s one of the chosen; he’s one of us.”

  Sweeney looked up, bewildered. “I don’t follow—”

  “What Isaac is trying to tell you,” the Doctor picked up where the Rabbi had left off, “is that a sort of affinity has developed between us during the long and difficult hours we have spent together.”

  “It’s not the usual bull shit of the kidnappee falling head over heels in love with the kidnapper,” the Rabbi explained quickly. “Nothing as banal as that.”

  “It is simpler,” the Doctor said, “and at the same time more complex.”

  “On this disputed land,” Apfulbaum continued, “we have discovered a common ground besides the no-man’s land of English.”

  “Common ground?” Sweeney asked, totally mystified.

  “Looking back,” the Rabbi rambled on, “I can see it was more or less inevitable. I mean, there is an abundance of superficial affinities. We’re both circumcised. We both write from right to left—”

  “Without vowels,” the Doctor interjected.

  “Without vowels,” Apfulbaum repeated. “We both refuse to eat pork. We both pray to the same God at frequent intervals during the day, me three times, Ishmael here, five. We both believe that holy scripture is the word of God. But that only scratches the surface.”

  “There is much more to this affinity than meets the eye,” the Doctor agreed. “The quintessence of the Jewish faith is Deuteronomy 6, the shema, which is recited in the morning and evening liturgy.” He
removed his spectacles and massaged his eyes with his thumb and third finger as he murmured, “‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.’ Did I get that right, Isaac?”

  “The essence of Islamic faith,” explained the Rabbi, his tongue tripping over the words as they spilled through his dry lips, “is the recitation of the shahada, the witnessing; the testimony that begins with ‘la ilaha illa ‘llah, no god exists but God.’” Apfulbaum would have come flailing out of his chair if his ankles had not been lashed to it. “For God’s sake, do I have to write it on the wall in capital letters? You have to be blind to not see it. We’re both children of Abraham.”

  “This being the case,” Sweeney said, “how can you bring yourself to kill him? And how can you, Rabbi, bring yourself to be excarnated without hating the person who excarnates you?”

  Rolling his head from side to side, the Rabbi snickered. The Doctor chuckled. Soon they were both shaking with quiet laughter.

  The Doctor was the first to catch his breath. “He does not comprehend,” he told the Rabbi, “what you and I comprehend, Isaac—that killing people is not that far removed from curing them. Death and life are two sides of the same coin.” He turned back to Sweeney. “To be absolutely frank, I hope with all my heart that the Jews will give me something—anything!—so that I will not be obliged to go through with my threat and excarnate Isaac here who, like Ibrahim, is a man of pure faith, and no idolater.”