Bloodline (54 page)

It was a building of love and peace and harmony, where the Jews gathered every evening and many mornings before work to pray to the Lord God Almighty.

Rabbi Shimon sighed as he looked down at the amity and accord of the village. Perhaps this is what God wanted for His people Israel. Jerusalem had been nothing but a thousand-year dream, one that would be inhabited by the Romans for another thousand years. And when their empire came to an end and died, as had the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek empires, Jerusalem would be inhabited by another invader. Or maybe the Jews who had been exiled would return and rebuild the temple. Who knew?

But in the meantime the Jews of Peki'in, and those Jews adjusting to their new lives in distant lands, would carry the Temple of Jerusalem in their hearts. And a part of the Temple of Jerusalem would be in every synagogue where they gathered: to pray, to do, to be.

Y
ANIV FELT HIDEOUSLY
uncomfortable in the synagogue. He didn't want to return to Peki'in, to relive the horror, to remember the smell of bullets and hatred and death. But Yael had insisted. She had to reclaim her memory of that terrible day, and no matter how much Yaniv told her of what had happened, no matter that he related the incidents minute by minute, it didn't satisfy her. She had to return to recall, to re-create, to reexperience, to
fix the day in her mind: the time between arriving in Peki'in and waking up in the hospital to the sound of beeping monitors and the expectant faces of nurses and doctors.

They walked into the synagogue and Yael's gaze was immediately drawn to the blood on the floor. After the police and forensic experts had departed the place and the synagogue was no longer a crime scene, attempts by caretakers and cleaners to remove the stains had been valiant but ultimately unsuccessful. Where once bright red blood had pumped from the still-beating hearts of three men mortally wounded, now the luminous sheen had become a dark brown ominous stain. It was as though the lives of three vital men had oozed through the floorboards and drained into the ground, invisible, veiled, and eternal.

She looked at the stains and wondered whether the good or the evil had leached out of their bodies into the ground. Troubled, Yael reached for Yaniv's hand and their fingers intertwined not in affection but for protection.

“Bilal was there.” He nodded toward a stain on the floor where once a congregant's bench had sat. “Over there”—he nodded to a spot nearby—“was where Hassan fell. And there”—he nodded again, this time toward the front of the synagogue—“was where the imam's body ended up. For some reason, when he fell, he seemed to fall furthest from you.”

She couldn't take her eyes off the stains, knowing that once they were parts of human beings. She felt absolutely no emotion. She was a doctor and very used to blood, and in the years since she'd become a surgeon, she'd trained herself not to feel revulsion, empathy, or compassion. She would just get on with her job of saving lives. But this was different. This was a wooden floor, blemished and inanimate, and despite what her intellect told her, she couldn't feel any association with pain or grief or loss.

Yet, she couldn't take her eyes off the stain on the wooden floor where Bilal's blood had been spilled. His blood; her blood. They'd come from the same bloodline. Perhaps their lines had
been joined when the Muslims were exiled from Circassia in the middle of the nineteenth century; perhaps when the Jews were expelled from Israel by the Romans in the first century. It was a history she'd never be able to uncover. But in the end, what did it matter? What difference did it make that she was a Jew living in Israel and Bilal had been an Arab living in the same country but wanted to call it Palestine. What did it matter? They were all human beings. And trace everybody's ancestry back a couple of million years and they all had the same mother, a four-foot-nothing apelike creature living in the Great Rift Valley of Africa. What did it all matter in the end?

She turned to Yaniv and said softly, “Let's go.”

Half an hour later, they were standing on the ledge outside the cave, high above the village of Peki'in, where legend had it that a famous rabbi and his son had hidden for fourteen years from the Roman invaders. In that time they were supposed to have eaten from the fruit of the massive carob tree that had spread over the entire hillside, and drunk water from a spring inside the cave; but a landslide sometime in history had closed off the cave and all that remained was the entrance.

Yael and Yaniv sat on a bench that the local authorities had placed nearby for the thousands of religious tourists who came to say prayers at Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai's cave.

“Well?” said Yaniv. He sounded diffident, almost reluctant to ask.

She shook her head. “Nothing. There's no memory. I just can't picture a thing. I remember the synagogue because I've been there before, but I have no memory at all of Bilal and Hassan and the imam being there. It's as if my mind is a slate and somebody has rubbed out the words.”

Yaniv nodded and, deep in thought, continued to look over the town. The terra-cotta roofs, the bright café awnings, the cars negotiating the narrow lanes—it was like a picture postcard. Yet, just weeks ago, half a mile away, a murderer called
Eliahu Spitzer, a willing servant of a crazed ultra-religious Jewish sect called Neturei Karta, had killed three people and almost succeeded in killing Yael and him. And, of course, it had all been hushed up by the government, who'd told him that if he had hard, concrete evidence to show them of Neturei Karta's involvement in the murders or the plots to bring down the government, then show them; if not, keep
schtum
and don't cause trouble between the secular and the religious communities. And in return for them not making waves, no charges would be brought against either Yael or him for abducting Bilal from lawful custody.

So Eliahu's suicide had been put down to grief. The murders of the imam, Bilal, and Hassan, for want of evidence, had been earmarked as the work of a new and violent Islamic terrorist group. And the wounding of Yael had been an accident of proximity: wrong place at the wrong time. A senior executive of Shin Bet had visited the mosque in Bayt al Gizah and spoken to the community leaders, telling them that the imam's coterie of young terrorists would be disbanded immediately or certain young people would be arrested. It was all so neat.

Yaniv felt Yael's closeness, her warmth, and thanked God that she was alive and well and that her wound would heal and leave her with only a small scar on her chest. He reached over and kissed her on the neck, then the cheek. With a shock, he realized that he'd never kissed her before. Not properly. She had beautiful skin.

But she didn't seem to notice. She was miles away in thought. He heard her exhale long and hard, as if she were venting her body of the last evil breath, the last evil thought, before returning to her peaceful world of trauma surgery, where she was in charge and nobody except for the fortunes of nature was ordering her about.

As though she were talking to herself, she asked softly, “One thing I still don't understand. How did Spitzer know that we'd
be in the synagogue? Why did he come up from Jerusalem? Who told him?”

Yaniv thought hard how to respond. Just as softly as Yael had asked, he replied, “Perhaps the imam, and Spitzer used it as an opportunity to take him out. Perhaps it was Hassan playing a double game. Or perhaps he followed one of us using satellite tracking and blew away the only people who could connect him to the attempt to destroy the temple and expose him as a member of Neturei Karta.”

He instantly regretted saying it. Her mind was dazed, and he knew he shouldn't be specific. He held his breath, hoping that his answer would be the end of her questions.

She rested her head on his shoulder. He put his arm protectively around her waist. It was so peaceful up here. Below her in the valley was laid out a history of people wrought in the landscape, in the streams and rivers, in caves and villages. A history of rulers and religion, of power and corruption. Of love and loss and hope.

People had survived here when war, disaster, and persecution were bent on destroying them. People had been trapped here when their neighbors refused to harbor them. People had fled here when they had nowhere else to go.

And yet, despite all the blood that had stained the soil in the valley below her, to Yael it seemed so very peaceful.

“This is the only country in the world that has more trees at the end of the year than it does at the beginning,” Yael said softly, almost to herself. Yaniv's only response was to smile and draw her closer.

Looking down at the peaceful village of Peki'in, she thought for a moment how pleasant it would be to live in a tiny community and do menial work close to nature and to whatever passed in her mind for a deity.

Just weeks ago evil had visited that village, pierced the
sanctity of its synagogue with bullet holes, and spilled blood in the place where men, women, and children worshipped an invisible deity. An imam corrupting a boy to strap a bomb to his body; a rabbi manipulating the pain of a soldier to make him a weapon.

To some, such acts would encourage and inspire; to others they would create outrage, fear, and distrust. As for Yael, she might never remember how Bilal shielded her from the bullets, never remember the sacrifice she would not be able to repay. But she remembered Bilal, his face and the bloodline connection she was yet to understand. Rather than despair, she felt a strange kind of calm. That bloodline was a part of the country in which she stood.

When she was a child, Yael's family had taken a vacation to America. They had traveled through the great national parks and in South Dakota she had visited the huge carved mountain memorial of the Native American chief Crazy Horse. His immortal words had stayed with her all these years: “My lands are where my dead lie buried.” Yet, it was only now, as she gazed out over the valley, that she understood what they meant. The country wasn't hers; she didn't own it. She belonged to it. The land owned her and all who lived here—it always had and always would. And it would never let her go.

She turned to Yaniv and said quietly, “I wonder when . . . when in our family history Bilal and I became joined?”

He didn't answer. It would always remain one of the hidden secrets of human history. Just like the seal that Bilal had discovered when he accidentally blew the detonator in the tunnel and brought a small part of the roof down. Her late grandfather Shalman had been thrilled by the discovery, but for Yael and for Yaniv it was one of the mysteries of a life that other people had once lived. Unknowable, undiscoverable, and eternal. And now, regardless of the fate of the people who had made it and then
discovered it millennia later, the seal would sit for all time on a museum shelf, behind glass, looked at by countless generations of people. And in the end, what did it all matter?

She nuzzled further into his neck, feeling warm and secure. As the sun began to set over the distant Mediterranean, they stood and slowly walked back to their car.

And then they drove back to Jerusalem.

In the time of Austen, Fielding, and Dickens, authors invariably worked alone, isolated until the sunlight of publication. Today this is no longer the case. Authors work with a team of unseen but hugely talented people to turn their ideas into the reality of a book.

Without Harold Finger and his eagle-eyed wife, Rebecca, there would have been no Heritage Trilogy. Their support, contacts, and advice in every facet of the work's creation has brought it to life. It was Harold who instigated this project, and to him go special thanks. And to my coauthor, Mike Jones, whose innate understanding of plotting, structure, and characters is extraordinary, my admiration and gratitude.

My wife, Eva, and my son, Raffe, were instrumental in helping me edit this work, and to them go my deepest gratitude.

My most sincere appreciation and admiration go to the team at Simon & Schuster in Australia and the USA. Lou Johnson, managing director of Simon & Schuster in Australia, has an incisive understanding of how books today have had to change to meet the challenges of a digital world, and her brilliance puts her head and shoulders above the rest. Larissa Edwards, head of publishing, is the bedrock of its publication, the ideal colleague in such an enterprise, tough but always understanding; Roberta Ivers brought a wonderfully perceptive and critical eye to this manuscript and her advice and suggestions were invaluable, as were those of Jo Butler and Jo Jarrah. No book will be a success
unless marketed and sold professionally, and there is no more professional group in the Australian book industry than the wonderful Anabel Pandiella, Greg Tilney, and Kate Cubitt and her remarkable team. In America, my thanks go to the president and publisher of the Atria imprint of Simon & Schuster, Judith Curr, and my editor, Daniel Loedel.

And to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob goes my reverence, because without them, where would I (or Western civilization) be? The world's three great Abrahamic religions have an intimate, if strained, alliance in Israel. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—father, son, and grandson—live there in the closest proximity; yet, tragically, at times they could not be further apart. From this benighted land has sprung the most profound philosophies, literature, and poetry; yet for thousands of years its peoples have been torn apart by hatred, jealousy, and violence.

So will there ever be peace among these three faiths? God knows!

Alan Gold

A book is no easy thing to write. It's a titanic wrestle of words and endurance. And it's not an endeavor one can face on his own. To that end there are many to thank.

First and foremost, to my collaborator, Alan Gold, whose energy and enthusiasm know no bounds. Thank you for having me along for the ride. Thanks also to our producer, Harold Finger, who saw the vision and wanted to back it.