Blood Rules
RULES
JOHN TRENHAILE
FOR TERI LIN MAO LONG
WITH SILENCE AND TEARS.
AND WITH LOVE.
20 JULY 1984: 0010: OXFORD, ENGLAND
20 JULY: 1600: SUSSEX, ENGLAND
21 JULY: DAWN: AL MAHRA, SOUTH YEMEN
21 JULY: LUNCHTIME: BEIRUT, LEBANON
21 JULY: EVENING: AL MAHRA, SOUTH YEMEN
21 JULY: EVENING: BEIRUT, LEBANON
22 JULY: MORNING: AL MAHRA, SOUTH YEMEN
22 JULY: AFTERNOON: DAMOUR, LEBANON
22 JULY: EVENING: AL MAHRA, SOUTH YEMEN
22 JULY: EVENING: AL MAHRA, SOUTH YEMEN
23 JULY: AFTERNOON: MT. CARMEL, ISRAEL
23 JULY: EARLY EVENING: AL MAHRA, SOUTH YEMEN
24 JULY: NIGHT: AL MAHRA, SOUTH YEMEN
24 JULY: NIGHT/DAWN: AL MAHRA, SOUTH YEMEN
ONE
C
OLIN
Raleigh looked at the big hand with awe: brown, hair-covered, adult, this was the hand of love. His father’s hand. The boy’s own white fingers lay tucked inside it, serene and trusting.
They were flying. Light filled the cabin. Asia lay somewhere below, to the left. He turned so that he could see out through the Skymaster’s porthole. He knew it was a Skymaster, but Rose, the stewardess, told him that the plane was called “How Easy Uncle,” after its registration letters, HEU. When you were seven years old and still timid about flying, that was a nice thing to know.
Another plane was flying alongside. Not a Skymaster, not How Easy Uncle. Cream-colored, with a big red star painted on its side and a red nose. Colin smiled, waved with his free hand.
But the other plane had gone.
Colin wanted to say something to the owner of the big brown hand. Before he could speak, however, the flower appeared. It grew in the side of the hull, by his feet. First a black circle, then the petals opening outward from its heart.
Boom!
went the flower. Next to it, a little higher, another flower sprouted.
Boom, boom!
The noise in the cabin suddenly grew louder. Voices. One voice, shouting: “Mayday! Mayday! Losing altitude, engine on fire!” Crying now. He was suddenly, violently, tilted forward, as if on a swing gone out of control. More flowers, flowers everywhere, in the ceiling above him, beside his seat, huge leering flowers that filled the plane with an acrid scent.
Something dark and heavy rose up before Colin and he opened his mouth to scream, but this dreadful thing smothered his breath—
Mayday! Mayday!;
out of the corner of his eye, before the light finally died, streaks of flame were snatching at the wing, almost vertical now—
Ditching! Ditching! Ditching!
As the black shape crushed him, Colin screamed out his soul.
OXFORD, ENGLAND
T
HIRTY
years later, Colin Raleigh sat bolt upright in bed. Three great thumps of the heart, bile in his mouth: bathroom, quick!
He rested his weight on the basin while he tried to vomit and failed. Water, lots of it, on the face, in the mouth. Cold seawater?
No, no, no!
He groped for the string that operated the light above his shaving mirror. Oh, God: eyes shot through with red, with terror. Haggard, sunken cheeks. Jesus, help me,
someone help me!
Slowly, so slowly, the dream faded. He took deep breaths, swallowed more water, cleaned himself up. Harsh light boosted by gleaming tiles did him no kindness, but at least it told him where he was. Not on a plane, high over Asia. Not seven years old. Colin Raleigh, law lecturer, stared at his own reflection, watching it steady into something recognizable.
He went back to the bedroom and threw open the curtains to look out at a fine, moonlit July night. Somewhere in the middle distance a motorbike hammered away to silence, leaving Iffley Road silent as a cemetery.
Colin tiptoed along the corridor to the second bedroom. At first he could see nothing; then, as his eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom, a hunched, shadowy shape came out of the darkness to meet him with its familiar old warmth of welcome.
Colin crept to the side of the bed and brushed Robbie’s forehead with a little finger that trembled slightly. The boy’s skin was moist, his breathing scarcely audible. Colin felt as if he were looking down into a deep narcotic pool, at the bottom of which his son lay asleep, at peace.
Soon, now, the world must break in on that peace and dismantle what he, Colin, had humbly sought to build. Last week, washing the sheets, he had noticed the irregularly shaped stain, pale in the center, darkened at the edges, and for an instant he’d stared at it unbelievingly… then he’d laughed out loud. Fourteen, yes, of course: probably a late developer. Fourteen. Already.
A sigh forced its way through Colin’s lips and he shook his head, amused as ever by the futile search for a fresh start through another’s soul. A search made by every parent since Adam first bit fruit.
He had meant to go back to bed once he’d reassured himself that all was well with his son, but somehow here he was sitting on the floor, unaware of how he’d got there, his little finger still stroking Robbie’s brow. Clicks in the boy’s throat heralded a cough; he arched his back, coughed again, and allowed his limbs to seek their natural place on the bed, all in the same deep slumber.
Colin suddenly found himself at the mercy of uncomfortable memories. This tall, gangly adolescent had been a baby, once. A certain evening, Colin’s turn to bathe him. Robbie would not stop crying; his face red and ugly, he responded neither to caresses nor the bottle. Colin, ragged tired, tried everything he could think of to quiet his child. Nothing worked. Until at last he began to shake this ugly red doll, shouting, “Stop it!
Stop it, d’you hear?”
And the doll, surprised, had stopped in mid-cry….
The memory shafted its way into Colin’s guts, as well as his mind; he bit the back of his hand, hard, wanting to cause himself pain as blood payment, which is what every father did when drawing back from the brink of violence perpetrated against a beloved child. What every father ought to do…
That day, the day he’d shaken the poor doll, Leila had come in, seen everything at a glance, and had comforted not Robbie but Colin, who needed comfort more. That was when Robbie had a mother. And in those days Colin still had a wife, instead of unquiet affairs to tide him over.
He stood up from Robbie’s bed, making more noise than he’d intended but somehow anxious to be away, by himself, beyond the reach of the tangled emotions given off by this adolescent boy who stained his bed sheets: his son, whom he loved.
Should he make that telephone call now? No. Still too early…
As he lay down on his own bed he reflected that soon they would be airborne, on the first leg of their odyssey to Australia. Soon he would have to make himself go along the jetway, strap himself in, and wait for the terror to start. He could do that. He could do it for Robbie. Just for him.
About an hour after Colin had drifted back to sleep, a Green Line coach drew up at some traffic lights on the outskirts of Staines. It contained a single passenger who sat in an aisle seat halfway down the bus on the left-hand side. Next to him lay a gray canvas bag, on which had been stenciled the words child’s life raft.
The Green Line ran a service between Gatwick and Heathrow airports. It operated on a twenty-four-hour basis, but during the night the number of buses was reduced to one an hour, on the hour. Because the passenger, Halib Hanif, had been watching this service for over a month, he knew that of the one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, and four o’clock buses, two were guaranteed to be empty. Always. But they ran them nonetheless, presumably because they needed the empty coach at the other end if they weren’t to foul up their schedules.
The route they chose was interesting.
Rather than drive three-quarters of the way around Heathrow’s perimeter, these coaches were allowed to cut across the airport’s secure area, entering by the cargo bays and leaving alongside Terminal One. When the projected M25 motorway was in place all that would change, but for now the bus had to traverse taxiways, duck through a tunnel beneath one of the two principal runways, and finally weave a path among aircraft parked on the apron outside Terminal One. Depending on the driver, this took five to five and a half minutes: the period of time between one red-and-white security gate at the entrance lifting and another closing as the bus once more accelerated into the airport’s public sector.
No one ever checked these coaches or their passengers. A wave from the driver, up went the barrier, through they went. Just like that.
So the only thing left was to find the right driver. Which was not difficult, because these men weren’t paid much. And when Halib had chosen his man and taken him to one of the clubs in the Edgeware Road where, for a thousand pounds, you could buy a bottle of scotch and rent a table by the stage and a couple of whores thrown in for laughs, at that point life became easy. Boringly so.
Halib had long been wrestling with this boredom thing. He was forty-two now, but when he was younger and resident in Beirut he would sometimes sell his Lebanese pounds in exchange for U.S. dollars; then arrange a little incident, a car bomb, perhaps, just enough to flush the world’s press out of the Hotel Commodore’s bar for a taste of their much-loved “bang-bang,” as they liked to call it; then, next day, when the Lebanese pound had gone through the floor in response to the bang-bang, he’d sell his dollars and buy back those pounds; and he did all this because there was nothing else to do and he was bored out of his mind.
Greed, other men’s greed anyway, got so tiresome after awhile. There were no nuances in greed.
He had one more problem to overcome: it was necessary to ensure that “his” driver operated an empty service; Halib must be the only passenger. But experience taught that once the driver had taken the bait he would find a way around any awkwardness of that kind.
“Easy,” the driver had said. “I’ll see I’m rostered for the one o’clock. If another passenger turns up, I’ll fiddle me wiring and kill all me interior lights. Police won’t let me operate without interior lighting, see? But the dispatcher’ll still send me to Heathrow, to get the repairs done and make sure I’m in the right place to take out the four-thirty back to Gatwick. I’ll pick you up a mile down the road. Easy as pie, squire!”
But there had been no other passengers. From his seat Halib could watch the driver hunched over the wheel as he waited for the traffic lights to change. He studied the man’s shadowy reflection for signs of conscience, reluctance, fear. Nothing. Of course it was possible that he’d tipped off the police, but Halib didn’t think it likely.
The lights changed. Another mile, and Halib could see the red-and-white airport perimeter gate. Ah, already opening, even before the driver could wave…. He stared out the window through vacant, tired eyes, a very early passenger or a late one, depending on your point of view, but in either case no one so weary, so evidently depressed, could pose a threat.
An orange ribbon of light burned on the far horizon, but here all was darkness. The driver turned, following a sign to the tunnel beneath the runway. Halib looked back. They were out of sight of the security checkpoint now. A glance forward showed the road curving away to the left where the tunnel mouth yawned.
He stood up and made his way along the bus, lugging the canvas bag.
They had almost reached the tunnel.
Halib placed a hand on the driver’s shoulder and squeezed gently. “Now,” he murmured.
The driver pressed a switch and the passenger door slid open. The brakes went on. When they were traveling at a bare ten miles an hour, Halib heaved the gray canvas bag into space. Standing on the step, he caught a glimpse of a figure emerge into the sodium glare, saw it stoop; then the coach was swallowed up in the descent to the tunnel, cutting off his vision, and he knew that things were, literally as well as metaphorically, out of his hands.
“You did well.” He spoke softly to the front, not looking at the driver. “Keep going.”
His hand dipped into an inside pocket and emerged holding a fat envelope, along with something else. He put the envelope on the ledge where more conventional passengers deposited their fares. The driver glanced sideways, avarice alight in his squinting eyes; then the coach swerved dangerously, for he had seen the other thing Halib held.
“We have a contract.” Halib continued to speak to the windshield, his voice carrying no farther than the driver’s ear. “A contract confers rights.” The muzzle of his Makarov PM pistol waved in a gentle arc. “It also imposes obligations.”
The driver was breathing in short gasps. He nodded.
A second red-and-white gate materialized ahead of them. By the time they reached it, Halib was once again sitting halfway down the bus, staring out of the window through vacant eyes.
The maintenance engineers would be changing shift soon. One of them, a Muslim Brother, which is shorthand for someone who can be made to believe in a cause and then die for it, would have the gray canvas bag marked
child’s life raft
in his holdall as he walked out to the apron. But not for long.
Halib looked at his watch, calculating times. In London, just before two, so in Bahrain, four…. Leila would already be awake. It was early, but he knew his sister’s habits as well as his own. She never slept well before an assignment. And today she would be taking a plane that contained her only son, a son she had not seen for more than two years. So Leila would be awake.
Rafael Sharett muttered encouragement into the phone, endlessly repeating the message that he knew his caller longed to hear: It will be all right, it’s going to work, it is. Really. Trust me.
Finding the right words was hard, however, because he didn’t want the other occupant of the room to pay too much attention to this phone call. It came as a relief when at last he was able to replace the receiver and take his seat opposite Yigal.
The two of them sat in a simply furnished hotel room that smelled of ancient cooking and furniture polish. This establishment—cheap, clean, and in a quiet Bloomsbury thoroughfare—was much patronized by visiting academics, but it did not naturally lend itself to business meetings, and in any case Rafael (or Raful, as he was mostly known) liked to spread himself.
He opened a small tin and popped a white tablet into his mouth, letting it dissolve under his tongue. “Gas,” he said, as he patted his stomach.
The word was accompanied by a quick uplift of the right shoulder and the ghost of a wink: Raful Sharett’s trademark. Honestly, he didn’t need to know the daily code words to identify himself; no one “did a Raful” like Raful himself. That’s what they called it, the Mossad seniors who knew and the puppies who wanted to impress, “doing a Raful”: “Memuneh was in a rage; never did you see such a temper.” “How did Benny handle him?” “Oh, he just did a Raful.”
The tablet dissolved slowly; it tasted vile, but after years of living with an ulcer Raful scarcely noticed anymore. Taking medication served to distract Yigal from the recent telephone call, and anyway, the taste was better than the pain, that much he knew. He was fifty-eight, this clear London summer’s night, and just as he cared about fewer things than when he was in his twenties, so he worried about even less. The stomach he patted was at long last starting to bulge out of his shirt and it wasn’t as hard as it used to be; the mustache he absentmindedly stroked was white, rather than gray; his face had become a map of broken veins and wrinkles: and much he cared about any of it. Much he gave one good goddamn.
But he cared very much that the man sitting opposite, who was half his age, should not know about the ulcer. Raful Sharett was director of the Mossad’s Operational Planning Division, and he still had something to do before they put him out to pasture. So he schooled himself to keep pain off his face, he ate lightly and exercised daily, and because he was an emotional man he made an effort to hold himself in check, to kill the gut feelings and the heartburns that were nothing at all to do with his ulcer; because revenge is a dish best enjoyed cold, and that was the thing he had to do before they found out he was past it, and sick, and they retired him: he had to take revenge.
“So,” he said lightly. “Stepmother. You be a good boy, Yigal, you tell me all about her.”
The younger man opened a cardboard file but did not look at it. “Leila Hanif, code name Stepmother, most recent alias Susannah Duclerc, last known whereabouts Bahrain. Highly successful female terrorist, having rare combination of controlled methodical planning coupled with daredevil execution. Fearless and courageous. I like this woman, Raful.”
“I
love
this woman, Yigal, so you get in line.”