Bloodline (36 page)

And now he was treating Yael as a source. In the beginning, when they'd first met at the museum and he was doing a color piece about the seal that she'd taken from Bilal's hand, he used his charm and looks to coax her into meeting him for a feature. But from the moment he'd seen her on the podium, he'd been captivated by her beauty, her intelligence, her confidence, her poise. And he knew he'd used his position as an American television reporter to inveigle her into meeting him again—and again.

Now he was smitten. Not in love, not like some hormonal schoolboy, but he'd go to bed thinking of her and wake with a smile on his face. He'd count the hours before meeting her. She fascinated him, and he wanted her—badly. But unlike so many women who'd become easy prey for him, Yael had resisted his blandishments, and her resistance had encouraged him to push the boundaries.

And yet, despite his desire to hold her, to feel the softness of her skin and hair, he was preparing to use her to get to the heart and soul of a major story. A wave of embarrassment swept over him as he drove away from the center of Jerusalem. Could he?
Would he allow his professional interests to infiltrate what could be a potentially serious romantic relationship?

Nope. He'd open himself up to her, tell her the reasons he wanted information, and ask her permission to continue. He nodded to himself and smiled.

Love: 1. Journalism: 0.

And how often was a reporter such an integral part of his own story? Woodward and Bernstein had used informants to smash Watergate and bring down an American president, but they weren't involved in guns and car chases. He was a reporter, not a soldier. But what choice did he, or Yael, have? The circumstances were dead against them.

He was thinking through this dilemma while driving toward his apartment in Ramot Alon, his route taking him through the bustling center of the metropolis, within sight of the illuminated walls of the Old City. It was so different from New York, where he'd grown up. He loved Brooklyn—he always would—but no American city could hope to match the insane blends of antiquity and modernity, of popular and classical, of religious and secular, of Jerusalem.

No matter how long he lived in the capital of Israel, nor how familiar he was with its surroundings, he never failed to be moved when he saw the towering fortifications. But this time he barely noticed them, he was so lost in his thoughts. What was Eliahu Spitzer up to? If he was close to, or had even become, a member of the Neturei Karta, then working deep within Israeli security was a scandal of the highest order. One part of Spitzer was dedicated to the salvation of the state, the other part to its downfall.

But how to prove it? And what was the link to the imam who had sent Hassan to murder Yael? With all his digging, Yaniv found virtually no information on the imam from the village of Bayt al Gizah. He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere just a few short years ago. To mastermind a nearly successful bombing attempt on the Western Wall, he must have resources and
support. But there was no trace. Yaniv's contacts in the police, Shin Bet, and the antiterrorist agencies told him that the imam wasn't on anybody's radar.

Even if Yaniv did go to the head of Shin Bet and lay the information about Eliahu in front of him, without the evidence of Bilal's phone, it was all hearsay, speculation, and innuendo. And even with the photo of the three men together, Spitzer would probably be able to explain it away. Yaniv knew that he might do some temporary damage to Eliahu's reputation, but any investigation would prove groundless; a man like Spitzer would have covered his tracks meticulously—of that, Yaniv was certain. And worse, if Eliahu realized that he was being investigated, he'd withdraw, resign from Shin Bet, or just disappear.

Yaniv drove slowly in the congested early-evening Jerusalem traffic past the King David Hotel toward the north of the city and casually glanced in the rearview mirror to check the traffic behind him. There were a dozen cars and a helmeted motorcyclist.

Ahead of him, the traffic stopped for lights and the motorcyclist drew up beside his car. Yaniv could see him out of the corner of his left eye. The man suddenly bent down as if to tie his shoelace, but his helmet must have connected with Yaniv's back car door, because he heard a small click. He thought nothing of it, and when the lights changed, he drove on. He switched on the radio and listened to the six o'clock news, but as he left the frenetic traffic and approached the more suburban part of the city, he was able to speed up.

It was there that he saw three young men, all ultra-Orthodox Jews dressed in their eighteenth-century clothes, arguing with a young woman dressed in a miniskirt, high heels, and a top with a plunging neckline. As their numbers grew through a high birth rate and their security became more and more assured due to their ability to wield political pressure on the Israeli government, the people of the Orthodox communities were becoming
increasingly militant in their dealings with secular Israelis. And for the past few months they had targeted young Jewish women who wore revealing clothes.

It was obvious that these young men were berating the young woman about her immodesty, probably calling her a whore and immoral. She looked terrified as the three were ridiculing and taunting her. They blocked her path so that she couldn't escape them, even though they weren't touching her.

Yaniv Grossman had spent a career as an observer, a commentator, reporting on but not being a part of world events. But he was also an American, raised in a society of freedom and excess. Seeing archaic misogynistic attitudes like this infuriated him. Yaniv pulled his car over, got out, and ran across the road.

“Hey, you!” he shouted. He knew their preferred language was Yiddish, but he didn't speak it, so he continued in Hebrew. “Leave her alone. Get away from her.”

One of the young men, surprised by the sight of the tall, athletic man running at them, called to him, “Mind your own business. You don't understand. God commands women to dress modestly. He said to Eve to cover up her nakedness. But this girl . . .”

It had never left him; it was buried deep in his muscle memory, still strong and potent. Yaniv moved toward them like a soldier on a mission. The boys, all of whom came from
yeshivot
, the religious schools where students studied morning, noon, and night, knew nothing of confrontation short of nonphysical harassment, and they immediately drew back.

“I don't give a fuck what God commands. You live your lives and let everyone else get on with theirs,” Yaniv said, moving closer to the girl to shield her.

One of the boys, braver than the others though a head shorter than Yaniv, walked closer to him and said, “People like you call yourselves Jews, yet you have no understanding of what God has comman—”

Suddenly, a shock wave of boiling air, like an oven door opening, enveloped them; then the roar of the explosion, then a massive invisible hand pushed them toward the wall. It was a colossal blast from the other side of the road. Yaniv turned in horror to look across the street and saw his car catapulted into the air, high off the road, as though some giant had hoisted it off the ground. Then a ball of yellow flame and black smoke erupted from the panels, blowing off the hood and the front and back doors. The car flipped over onto its side, landing with a scream of metal, just clipping a taxi heading northward, the driver swerving to avoid being crushed by the falling metal. But the taxi hit another car traveling in the opposite direction head-on.

In all the chaos, when the blast wave hit the group, the boys screamed and the girl was pushed to the ground, covering her face. The explosion was too distant to hurt them because the heat and force of the blast dissipated in all directions, but the effects shocked and immobilized them. The three boys, shaken but still alert, recovered quickly and ran away for all they were worth. Yaniv looked at his car, now on its roof, with a massive hole where the driver's door had once been, surrounded by snakes of twisted metal. The taxi and the car with which it had collided came to a halt amid broken glass and columns of steam from ruptured radiators, hoods raised, horns screeching. The girl on the pavement burst into tears and moved across to hug Yaniv's legs for security. But all Yaniv could think about was the motorcyclist and the click he'd heard at the traffic lights minutes earlier.

P
ROFESSOR
S
HALMAN
E
TZION
was driving out of the museum's parking lot toward the road that led south and east to the Dead Sea. Because he was in his car with his iPod playing Wagner's
Götterdämmerung
at full volume, he didn't hear the distant explosion of Yaniv's car from the other side of Jerusalem.

He drove quickly toward the east for his appointment with the director of antiquities at Masada, the winter palace of King Herod. But before he arrived there, he'd pop in and visit some friends at the ancient archaeological site of Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea.

Like many Israelis of German origin, he adored Wagner's operas, even though he knew that he was an anti-Semite and a favorite of the Nazis. And like many Germans, when he listened to Wagner in the privacy of his car, he drove too fast, but he was a busy man, and there were places he had to get to.

In his haste, he didn't see that he was being followed by a large black Mercedes four-wheel-drive. He accelerated to beat traffic lights, the Mercedes following; drove too quickly around bends, the Mercedes in his wake.

Negotiating one of the sharp twists in the road, a precipitous drop descending from the heights of Jerusalem to the lowest place on earth, the Dead Sea, Shalman glimpsed the Mercedes close beside him—too close. Why so close? Why was he driving like a
meshuggeneh
on a road notorious for its crashes? What? Was he a maniac?

The car behind flashed its lights; Shalman was momentarily distracted from concentrating on the road, glancing up into his rearview mirror.

Foot on the brake, Shalman tried to slow his descent before taking the long right-hand bend, but the Mercedes suddenly accelerated and overtook him, and just as he was about to correct his wheel, the four-wheel-drive swerved just enough to nudge the front of Shalman's aging Ford. The other driver knew the pressure point of Shalman's car. The old man yelped as the wheel was wrested from his hands from the jolt of the car beside him. He grabbed it back, correcting the steering from his right-hand turn to negotiate the bend, but the front of the car was shoved by the much more agile Mercedes on its right. It was an almost imperceptible move, unnoticed by other drivers coming up the hill,
but with the wheel wrenched out of Shalman's hands, the old man was unable to steer, and the car headed toward the barrier.

The Mercedes accelerated past the old Ford, which veered with a life of its own. Shalman tried to wrestle it back, but the steering wheel stubbornly stayed to the left. He lost his grip on the wheel a second time and struggled to retain control. But it was bucking out of his hands as the car's front suddenly veered in a different direction, the front tires fighting against the direction of the curve.

He instinctively slammed his foot on the brake—precisely what he shouldn't have done—and the rear wheels skidded around, turning his car full circle. The elderly man screamed “No!” as his car crashed into the barrier, turned around again, and hit the barrier once more, two wheels leaving the road and tipping it onto its roof. The old car rolled over once and then vaulted the barrier. In horror, Shalman looked into the depths of the valley three hundred feet below as his car careened downward.

He screamed a single name: “Judit!” In that second, he saw her face as his car smashed into the rocks and dirt at the bottom of the cliff.

Drivers behind him saw what was happening, and when they got out of their cars, they looked in horror at the old Ford far below, upside down on its roof, crushed, with steam and smoke rising up the rock face. There was utter silence, broken only by the music that rose up the cliff face. It was Wagner's Brünnhilde swearing eternal vengeance. A shocked American tourist screamed as the car suddenly burst into flames. The music stopped.

Nobody noticed the big black Mercedes continuing to drive sedately toward the Dead Sea. Soon the driver would turn the car around using an exit road and climb the hill toward Jerusalem. The driver didn't even look at the four cars that had stopped, their occupants standing on the edge of the road, looking
downward, but he was gratified to see smoke billowing upward in a satisfying column. He had to drive quickly to a private garage and have the dented front fender fixed. Then he'd return to his office in Shin Bet.

“I
DON'T BELIEVE YOU,”
she said, sitting down on the tiny bed of the dingy hotel room. Still shaken, Yaniv stood there, shocked by what had happened to him.

“He tried to kill you? You? Why? This is unbelievable. How does he know about you? This is ridiculous. Enough! You . . . we . . . have to go to the police. You have to go to Shin Bet and call this bastard to account. You have to . . .” She was too stupefied to continue for a moment. “You have to . . . do something.”

“You don't get it, Yael. We've stumbled right into a shitstorm. They've been tracking us. They know who I am now. They know who
you
are.”

“I don't believe the whole Israeli security force is in on some conspiracy!” said Yael.

“No. But we have no idea who Eliahu Spitzer is in contact with or who he controls or who reports to him. We can't tell the police, the Shin Bet, Mossad, the army, or anybody else.”

“Bullshit! This isn't Iran. This is Israel. Only religious madmen would be part of this. Nobody else. We have to go to the authorities. The police, surely!”

“And that's half the problem: because if we go to the police, it'll be in a report, and reports are seen by people. We can't take the risk.”