The Mirage: A Novel (5 page)

“What do you think?” Amal said.

“I think this redhead may be the one who smashed the camera. And if I’m counting empty glasses correctly, I think I know why he overlooked the memory card.”

“But do you think these are our guys? The rest of the cell?”

“It’s possible,” Mustafa said. “Though I’m frankly stunned that even drunk crusaders would be this stupid. This room that they’re in . . .”

“A rat cellar,” Amal said. “Rafi’s checking with Halal to see if they can identify it.”

A rat cellar: an illegal bar catering to foreign guest workers, primarily Europeans. There’d be home-brewed beer, misappropriated Sabbath and communion wine, and probably hard liquor as well, though not the good stuff. As for the location, it might be a literal cellar or an aboveground structure like a warehouse—any place the local cops could be bribed to turn a blind eye to.

“Those blond guys in the back,” said Samir. “They look like Germans, don’t they?”

Mustafa smiled. “I suppose they might be German, or Austrian. But I don’t know, Samir—they could be Scandinavian.”

“Scandinavian terrorists? Mustafa, please!”

“As long as their faces are clear enough for a computer match, what difference does it make whether they’re German or Scandinavian?” Amal asked. “Shouldn’t ICE have them in the system either way?”

“ICE should, which doesn’t mean ICE will,” said Mustafa. “But if they’re German, Samir has an excuse to call in our friend Sinbad.”

“And who is Sinbad? Naval intelligence?”

“Mossad,” Samir told her.

“There’s an Israeli named Sinbad?”

“It’ll make sense once you’ve met him,” said Mustafa.

T
HE
L
IBRARY OF
A
LEXANDRIA

A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE

Israel

This page is currently
protected
from editing to deal with
repeated acts of vandalism
. To suggest changes, please
contact an administrator
.

The modern
State of Israel
is a country in
Central Europe
. It is bordered on the north by the
North Sea
,
Denmark
, and the
Baltic Sea
, to the east by
Poland
and the
Czech Republic
, and to the west, in part, by
the Netherlands
. The rest of its western and southern borders are officially defined by the courses of the
Rhine
and
Main
rivers, but since the
1967 Six-Day War
Israel has occupied most of
Bavaria
,
Swabia
, and the
West Bank
of the
Middle Rhine
. Israel’s capital is
Berlin
 . . .

HISTORY

Following the defeat of the
Third Reich
, the
UAS
spearheaded a plan to partition
Germany
into two states, one
Jewish
and one
Christian
. . . The same 1948 act of Congress that officially recognized Israel’s sovereignty also established a new
religious district
in
Jerusalem
,
Palestine
and guaranteed Israeli citizens access to the holy city through special visitor visas. (In the aftermath of the
11/9 attacks
, new security restrictions were placed on these visas; see the
2002 Arafat-Abbas Amendment to the Law of Return
. . .)

Both Israel’s existence and its geographical location remain controversial . . .
British Prime Minister
David Irving is only the most recent of Europe’s leaders to call for the Jewish state’s destruction . . . Meanwhile, many
North American evangelical Christians
would like to see the Jews permanently relocated to the site of the historical
Land of Israel
, believing this to be one of the necessary preconditions for the
End of Days
 . . .

Despite recent tensions, the UAS continues to be Israel’s closest political and military ally, with the two countries operating as partners in the
War on Terror
 . . .

S
inbad’s real name was David Cohen. He was a twenty-nine-year-old Mossad agent who’d done two tours as a commando in the Israel Defense Forces—a good man to have around, Samir joked, if you needed to kill a roomful of bad guys using only a rolled-up newspaper. Or if you needed to seduce a roomful of women—for in addition to his combat skills, David Cohen had been blessed with the good looks and charisma God usually reserves for pop stars.

Mustafa and Samir had met him several years ago at an international security conference in Cairo. Samir, who was in the midst of a divorce, had gone clubbing with Cohen every night in hopes of being a secondhand beneficiary of his attractiveness; Mustafa had skipped the discotheques but listened dutifully to Samir’s tales of their adventures.

On the last day of the conference, Mustafa and Samir were called away to a terrorist incident unfolding just blocks from the conference site. Cohen tagged along.

The “terrorist incident” turned out to be a robbery gone bad. Five masked men had held up a bank, only to be caught in traffic as they tried to make their getaway. When police surrounded their stalled car, the men had opened fire, and in the ensuing gun battle one cop and two of the robbers were killed. The three surviving bandits had retreated on foot into a small movie theater, taking the patrons hostage. Homeland Security had been alerted after the bandits, claiming to have explosives as well as guns, threatened to blow up the building unless their demand for safe passage was met.

When Mustafa, Samir, and Cohen arrived on the scene, they found the local AHS chief, Hamid Darwish, poring over a set of blueprints. Darwish, a political appointee who’d gotten his job through party loyalty rather than strategic acumen, had decided to end the standoff by pumping gas into the theater’s ventilation system.

“Tear gas?” Mustafa asked.

“No, something much better,” Darwish replied. “Something I’ve been wanting to try . . .” He pointed to a pair of his subordinates who were unloading several large canisters from the back of a van. Each canister was stamped with a lengthy chemical name and bore numerous warning labels.

Mustafa wasn’t familiar with the chemical, but David Cohen was. “It’s a sleep agent,” he said. Looking at Darwish, he added: “You’re an idiot.”

“Who is this person?” Darwish demanded.

Cohen introduced himself, then explained why the plan was madness: Even if the bandits and their hostages all weighed the same amount and shared identical metabolisms, there was no way to ensure that they’d inhale the gas at the same rate. “Some will pass out while others are only numb—and if you pump in enough gas to make sure they all lose consciousness, you’ll kill some of them.”

“We know what we’re doing,” Darwish said. “Besides, we have no choice—these men are desperate, and they say they’ve wired the building with dynamite.”

“They’re lying. Why would they have dynamite?”

“You ask that, and yet you call
me
an idiot?”

“The whole point of robbing a bank in the daytime is that the vault is already open. These men don’t have explosives . . . and gassing them is stupid.”

“Get this fucking
Israeli
out of my face,” Darwish snapped.

“That was diplomatic,” Mustafa said to Cohen, after he had, with difficulty, convinced him to back off.

“That man’s as dangerous as those bank robbers,” Cohen said. “You have morons running things here.”

“Yes, welcome to Egypt,” Samir said smiling.

“The thing about morons,” said Mustafa, “is that they don’t respond well to being
called
morons.”

“Ah, he wouldn’t have listened even if I’d been polite. He wants to use his stupid gas.”

“And what would you suggest we use? Is there something better, something we can control the dosage of, maybe?”

“Yes,” Cohen said. “Bullets.” He looked up the block, to where the Cairo SWAT team were cooling their heels around their own van. “Give me a minute . . .”

The crowd of local and federal cops around the theater was growing, as more men from the security conference wandered by to see what was happening. Mustafa searched the crowd, trying to find someone reasonable who outranked Darwish.

Samir tapped Mustafa on the shoulder. “Look up.”

David Cohen, wearing a SWAT jacket and with a rifle slung across his back, was standing on the roof of the department store next to the theater. A broad alleyway separated the two buildings. Cohen took a running start and leaped across the gap. It was then, seeing how gracefully he sailed through the air, that Samir gave Cohen his nickname: “Hah! Sinbad the Jew!”

Having landed safely on the theater’s roof, Cohen vanished from view. Moments later, gunfire erupted inside. The real SWAT team members came alive at the sound, but before they could do anything, Cohen called out on a walkie-talkie to announce it was all over.

Two of the bank robbers were dead and the third had surrendered. None of the hostages were harmed. Darwish was furious. He had Cohen arrested as soon as he came out of the theater, and would have shot him if he could have gotten away with it.

But within hours the situation changed, as the news spread that one of the freed hostages was Diala Mahfouz, the grandmother of Cairo’s mayor. The old woman had a weak heart, and while the excitement of Cohen’s impromptu commando raid hadn’t been great for it, gas would have been far worse.

By nightfall Cohen had been sprung from the holding cell Darwish had put him in and was up on a stage with the mayor and other officials, being hailed as a hero in front of dozens of news cameras. Mustafa and Samir stood near the back of the auditorium where the press conference was held, Samir beaming as if he were the one onstage.

“What did I tell you, Mustafa?” he said. “Is this guy cool, or what?”

As they waited for Sinbad outside the Israeli embassy, Mustafa suffered an attack of vertigo. He couldn’t remember when these spells of dizziness had first started, but he’d had them off and on for at least the past few years. They came most often during moments of idleness: He’d be staring at the city skyline, or contemplating some perfectly ordinary street scene, and suddenly be struck by a powerful sense of dislocation. The last time, he’d been in Riyadh, about to step into a crosswalk, when he happened to notice that all the cars lined up at the red light were driven by women.

This time it was the embassy flag that set him off. He heard it snapping in the breeze overhead and glanced up. The Star of David, fluttering proudly above Al Kindi Street, somehow made him aware of the earth’s rotation beneath his feet. He staggered backwards and might have fallen, if not for the support of a concrete barricade.

“Are you all right?” Amal asked.

Mustafa fingered the bandage on his neck. “I still need a bit of rest, I guess.”

“Here he comes!” Samir said.

Amal turned to look, and Mustafa, imagining he saw something in her expression, said, “Ah, you’ve been talking to Umm Dabir.” Umm Dabir was Farouk’s secretary. She’d met Sinbad during one of his visits and developed a not-so-secret crush.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Amal said.

“I understand many of the women in the office are in love with him.”

“Not just the women, apparently.” Amal nodded towards Samir, who’d already run up to embrace Sinbad and was now walking alongside him with an arm slung over his shoulders.

“Hey, man, good to see you!” Samir was saying. “But what’s this about you already being in town and not calling us?”

“No time to party this trip,” Sinbad said. “I’m due on a redeye to Berlin tonight . . . Hello, Mustafa.” He flashed a smile at Amal. “And you must be Mustafa’s new bodyguard.”

“Yes, she protects me from Christians, and the lions of my own foolishness,” Mustafa said. “Amal bint Shamal, meet David Cohen. Sinbad to his many admirers.” As they shook hands, Mustafa took note of the attaché tucked under Sinbad’s arm. “You have something for us?”

“I do,” Sinbad said.

“Let’s find a place to sit, then. I’m feeling a little lightheaded today.”

They went to a tea shop around the corner from the embassy. The proprietor greeted Sinbad as warmly as Samir had, and Mustafa felt his vertigo flaring again. But he felt better once he was seated with a steaming glass of tea in front of him, listening to Sinbad explain that Samir had been right—the two blond men in the photograph were German.

“Peter and Martin Hoffman, of the Lutheran National Socialist Brotherhood,” Sinbad said, producing two Interpol files from his attaché. “Both alumni of the Munich Polytechnic. Peter is a chemist, Martin an engineer—but their main occupation, since graduating, has been organizing attacks on Jewish settlements in the Rhineland. Last year Peter was captured at a car-bomb assembly site in Koblenz. He killed a soldier and escaped. We think he and his brother fled to Turkey on forged guest-worker visas. From there . . .”

From there, sneaking into the UAS would have been a relatively trivial exercise. Despite millions of riyals spent to secure the Turkish-Syrian border, it remained a popular route for undocumented European immigrants.

“This is helpful,” Mustafa said. “But if they are in the country illegally, finding them won’t be easy.”

“Ah, but there’s more,” Sinbad said. “I also ran a check on your dead suicide bomber, James Travis . . .”

“Interpol has nothing on him.”

“No, but Mossad does. Two summers ago, Travis was part of a humanitarian mission in the Rhineland that was detained, briefly, on suspicion of providing aid and comfort to terrorists.”

“What sort of humanitarian mission?” Amal said.

“Medical,” Mustafa guessed. “He was a student doctor, remember?”

“Yes,” Sinbad said. “And one of the other doctors detained with Travis was an American named Gabriel Costello.” He opened up his attaché again. “I think you’ll recognize him.”