Bloodline (37 page)

“We'll demand that it's kept a secret until he's arrested and put away,” she said, but her words were sounding thinner and thinner with each statement.

“And you'd risk your life on something being kept secret? In Israel? I'm a reporter, Yael. I can get to see most everything. I'm
not going to take that risk. We have no idea how wide or deep this bastard's contacts go.”

“So who can we tell? Who can we go to?” asked Yael in frustration. “Christ, Yaniv, this is Israel, not some Arab country. We're a democracy. We've got separation of powers. Jesus, we've got a fucking ombudsman.”

“We can't tell anyone until we have a way out” was Yaniv's flat reply.

“Bullshit. There must be somebody we can get to help us.” In her frustration, she repeated quietly to herself: “This isn't Syria or Iran or Egypt. Nobody's that powerful.”

Yaniv looked at her in concern. And his silence was eloquent testament that they were indeed on their own.

“Then how can we fight him?” asked Yael.

“You're a doctor. Not a soldier,” replied Yaniv.

“In Israel, everyone's a soldier.”

It might have seemed a mock retort, but in a country with compulsory national service for men and women alike, and besieged on all sides by hostile armies, it was not an empty boast. Yaniv just shook his head and flopped into a chair.

Yael reached into her handbag and drew out a small black object. She held it up for Yaniv to see. It was a black smartphone with a wide reflective screen.

“I'm not sure I want to see what's on this,” she said.

Yaniv stood from the chair and grabbed the phone from Yael's hand. “Where was it?”

“In the secure bag with Bilal's belongings at the hospital,” she replied matter-of-factly.

“And you were just able to go and get it?”

“He was my patient, so I told the security guy at the hospital that I was looking for some pills that Bilal had in his pockets. I said I needed them for analysis. And then I just slipped it into my pocket when the security guy wasn't looking. He was too busy with the soccer game on TV to notice.”

Yaniv's eyes told her that he wasn't elated.

“Something's not right. Why wouldn't Shin Bet take the phone? Why wouldn't they confiscate all his belongings as evidence?” He let the question hang in the air as he contemplated all possible answers. His gaze returned to the room and he looked at Yael. “The only reason Spitzer wasn't bothered with it is if he didn't need it.”

He fiddled with the phone until a tiny drawer opened in its side. “They've removed the SIM card; they must have thought . . .”

Yael looked at him quizzically, not following his train of thought.

“Most people think that all the information is stored on the SIM card, but it's not. Lots of good stuff is stored on the phone, even with the memory card removed. The goons thought that by removing the SIM card, they had all the evidence it contained. They obviously think that they don't need the evidence if they—” His eyes opened wide, and then in a sudden flurry of energy he quickly depressed the switch and brought the phone to life. Swiping fingers briskly across the touch screen, he found his way to the phone's folder of video clips and photos.

Banal photos of feet and a steering wheel, the accidental images of a new user of a new technology. He flicked past them. A video of a pretty, young Arab girl smiling shyly at the camera. He flicked past once more to a grainy image pixelating in the near darkness of a dimly lit street. The shuffling staccato movement and rattling as the phone camera was repositioned in the hand of the user. Finally it came to rest, moving in a gentle arc to survey a street, a wall, a window . . .

As the camera changed its auto exposure, three silhouetted figures came into view. The camera jerked up and then forward before settling again. The silhouettes became more distinct, more in focus. And the light changed again, the dark image brightening as the camera adjusted.

Yaniv's finger tapped the pause button on the screen, freezeframing the image. Yael wondered why he was smiling.

He turned the camera around so Yael could see. She leaned forward.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“That's him. That's the imam who came to the hospital,” said Yael. “And the guy with the white hair next to him is Spitzer.” She looked closer at the screen and nodded. “But who's the other man? The Hasid.”

“Rabbi Shmuel Telushkin of Neturei Karta,” replied Yaniv. “I interviewed him in Tehran at that Holocaust denial conference.”

Stunned, she looked at him and said softly, “Dear God.”

Yaniv repeated his question from earlier, holding up the phone as if the answer was the phone itself. “Why didn't Shin Bet take this phone? Why haven't they confiscated all Bilal's belongings as evidence? Because they didn't need to. Because they knew everything that he was going to do—the bombs, the Wailing Wall . . .”

Yaniv pointed at the three men on the phone screen. “They set it up.”

Yael wanted to protest the absurdity of it all, but the events of the past few days made the words stick in her throat. After what she had been through, anything was now possible.

“I think I know how to stop them coming for us.”

Yael didn't respond; she just stared at him.

“But to do it, to draw them out, we have to get Bilal out of prison.”

M
ARCELLUS
G
RATUS
S
ECUNDUS
lay facedown on a towel while a Nubian slave woman carefully scraped the dead skin and aromatic oil from his back, arms, buttocks, legs, and the soles of his feet. Once she had finished, she picked up a sponge from the bucket of warm water, wrung it out so that it was not more than damp, and wiped the noble Roman knight's body from his balding head to his ankles. It was a delicious feeling, and Marcellus Gratus was aroused by the heat of her naked body so close to his and the way in which she paid attention to the small of his back, his bottom, and his thighs.

Marcellus Gratus glanced over to where his wife, Aurelia Juliana, lay facedown on a nearby couch, being scraped by a tall, muscular naked Nubian. He noted with a smile that her slave had been ordered to spend an extra amount of time in massaging her buttocks and all of her that lay within reach of his fingers. He also noted with some disquiet that her slave had the biggest male appendage he'd ever seen. Not even erect, it was twice the size of
that which belonged to his employer. Noticing what he was looking at, his slave girl smiled and whispered in his ear, “I have had that thing inside me, master, and it hurt me. Very badly.”

Marcellus Gratus decided not to tell his wife; she could find out for herself. He looked around at his slave girl and saw that she was very beautiful, her shining black skin reflecting the light of the candle. If he had the time, he would enjoy her body before the evening meal, because he knew for certain that while he was engaged on official duties in this backward region of the empire, Aurelia Juliana would be taking full advantage of her Nubian.

He still didn't understand why Rome needed to control this regressive part of the world. He'd advised senators that Rome should be looking toward Gaul and Britannia, which were rich in ores and minerals, in wood and tin and slaves. But because of the wealth of Egypt and the grain it produced for bread, the Romans looked south and east, and so Marcellus Gratus had been asked to come take charge of the provincial capital of Jerusalem.

He shuddered when he thought of where he was and how different this land was from the epicenter of Rome's life and culture. Hundreds of years ago, the Jews had been exiled in Babylon but had returned to rebuild Jerusalem; then they'd been conquered by Alexander of the Greeks, at the same time as the Gauls again threatened Rome but were destroyed by the greatness of the Roman legions. And now he was in Jerusalem, the city that the Jews called their capital!

Marcellus Gratus Secundus could barely stop himself from laughing. Compared with Rome or Alexandria, Jerusalem was a hovel. Since the return of the Jews from their exile in Babylon, it had had many conquerors and kings. He'd been told the history since the Persians had released the Jews from their Babylonian exile, but it was all too complicated. Alexander the Great had conquered the Persian Empire, and that meant that Jerusalem and Judea came under his control; but the Greeks wanted to place one of their gods in the Jewish temple, and that had caused
some war or other and the land fell to the Ptolemies. But they lost it, and it fell to the Seleucids and Antiochus the Great; but the Jews objected for some reason he couldn't understand, and so they revolted and it fell to the Maccabees. But the offspring had quarreled and asked Rome to intervene, and now . . . oh, it was all too confusing, and he couldn't be bothered remembering what had happened in the past. All he was concerned about was ruling for today, handing over tributes to the Senate in Rome, and returning to a higher office in a civilized land.

Shortly after Marcellus Gratus arrived in Judea with Aurelia Juliana, they had come to an easy accommodation with each other. In Rome, it would have been unthinkable for a knight to have indulged his carnal desires with a slave woman in the knowledge of his wife, and unimaginable for a male slave to have access to the body of a Roman matron of rank. These trysts were usually carried out in discreet
lupanaria
, where men and women clients entered the brothels through a series of guarded alleys to avoid a scandal. But in these far provinces, where the eyes of Rome couldn't see and gossiping voices couldn't be heard, things became much easier, and the desires of Marcellus and Aurelia were openly gratified as many times as they wished.

As his slave was rubbing down his body with a warm towel, Marcellus Gratus pondered, as he often did, the differences between this place, Judea, the most extreme region of the eastern Roman Empire, and Rome itself. This hot, fractious, empty, and miserable desert of a land held a few charms, but compared with Rome it was the land of the barbarians. The people were warlike and fanatical in their allegiance to their absurdly invisible god, simple in their needs, their cities little more than hovels, without any great civic buildings or baths or forums or temples; nor was there a single hippodrome of any decent size for the amusement of the soldiers, and the roads between places were nothing more than tracks hewn out of the ground by the feet of countless camels and asses.

Yet, there was a certain attraction to being here. In Rome he was a nobleman, a knight, and respected, but he was fairly low down in the imperial hierarchy and was rarely invited to the residence of Caesar. But things had changed for the better after he fought alongside Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius in Gaul. After the civil war in Rome, Marc Antony assumed control of the eastern empire and he had asked Marcellus Gratus to join him and assist in the administration of Judea.

In the two years since he'd been here in the hillside village of Jerusalem, he'd barely seen Marc Antony. The noble Roman spent all of his time in Egypt in the company of their queen, Cleopatra VII, who gave him ready access to her body, as she had done to Julius Caesar some years earlier. And knowing the Egyptians, she probably gave her body to her mother, brother, and father as well.

It was all very strange, and had it not been for Marcellus Gratus's sense of duty and responsibility, without a firm ruler the place would have become lawless. But as de facto proconsul, Marcellus Gratus kept a firm hand on the different competing factions, the priesthood, the Israelite hotheads who wanted Rome to quit the province, those who wanted closer ties to Syria or to Egypt, and worst of all, the innumerable people who called themselves Messiahs, who seemed to be springing up all the while. Only last week he'd crucified three of them who had tried to foment a revolt among the Jews outside the temple, yelling and screaming that this god of theirs had spoken to them and told them to rise up against the Sadducees in the temple and to all go and live in the desert or something.

He'd been warned by other knights in Rome that Judea was a land full of madmen, religious zealots, hermits, and a strange people who revered only this single god called Adon or something, a god who was invisible yet was perpetually sitting down in the little temple they'd built to him on the top of one of the hills.

These madmen—and there were dozens of them—called themselves
Messiahs, which apparently meant those who had been sent by their god, and all came with visions of some beauteous heaven and salvation and forgiveness of sins. They were of little account, often wandering in the desert, wearing just a loincloth, speaking to bushes and the stars, and rarely bothering anybody; he usually crucified those who gathered a following, which scared the rest of them into staying in the desert.