Vicious Circle (6 page)

At the side of the road in front of the Damascus Gate, Maali took leave of her husband. “We will lay again in the marriage
bed,” she declared fiercely. “It is written.”

“
Inshallah
,” he said. “God willing.” He touched the back of her hand with the back of his hand. On the spur of the moment, he whispered,
“If you need me, leave a message for Tayzir the florist with
the lame shoemaker across from the El Khanqa Mosque in the Christian Quarter. He is our
synapse
, where the cells approach each other but do not touch.”

“For Tayzir the florist,” she repeated, proud to be trusted with this information, “with the lame shoemaker across from the
El Khanqa Mosque in the Christian Quarter.”

Yussuf started toward the gate. When Maali saw him looking over his shoulder, she pulled off her scarf and shook loose her
long black hair and raised the hand with the Jew’s ring on the fourth finger in proud salute. Her husband waved back. Then,
tucking the end of his
kaffiyeh
under the headband so that the lower half of his face was hidden, he ambled past the Israeli paratroopers lounging under
the archway. One of the soldiers, with a whip antenna jutting from his backpack, spoke into a telephone. “Mobile unit four,”
he said, “at the Damascus Gate, seven thirty, nothing unusual to report.”

In a stairwell near the Israelis, Mr. Hajji, the stooped Palestinian who as far back as anyone could remember had been guarding
valises and changing money for tourists, was chalking up the day’s exchange rates on a black board. “Sorry, sorry,” he told
a Bedouin woman clutching two live chickens by their legs. Narrowing his eyes, he looked past her at the young woman outside
the gate whose features looked vaguely familiar. “I do not deal in rubles,” he mumbled, his mind elsewhere.

A
cross the Levant, Muslims were sitting down to the evening “break-fast.” Off the Israeli coast, the running lights of a tanker
clawing like a crab toward Haifa flickered in the dusk. Eight minutes later the ship’s bow wave lapped against the Jaffa shore
and trickled up the beach to the terrace of the seafood restaurant run by a retired general who free-lanced for the Mossad’s
Paha
, the department that tracked the daily movements of Palestinian terrorist groups. A billboard on the roof of the restaurant,
illuminated by two spotlights, announced the establishment’s name in Hebrew, and added in English: “One whale of a meal.”
The billboard wasn’t only there for publicity purposes; hidden behind it was a bank of short and medium wave antennas that
would have revealed, to anyone who spotted them, that fish weren’t the only thing being fried on the premises. The parking
lot at the side of the restaurant was filled to capacity, but not all of the cars belonged to clients. In the restaurant itself,
waiters in white aprons scurried between the kitchen and the crowded tables carrying trays filled with fresh mackerel, sea
bass and the day’s special, shark. Off the kitchen, a creaky wooden staircase led to a thick curtain that concealed a steel
door surveyed by a hidden security camera. In the narrow hallway beyond the steel door sat a burly former paratrooper armed
with a sawed-off pump-action shotgun. In a dimly lit room off the narrow hallway, half a dozen men in civilian clothing were
gathered around a large Sony television set. The image on the screen, grainy and slightly out of focus, showed Rabbi Apfulbaum,
his wrists handcuffed before him, sitting on a
heavy wooden chair in front of a bricked-in window. He looked pale as death, but those who had seen him in person or on television
talk shows knew that he always looked pale as death. Curiously, he didn’t appear to be frightened; what could have passed
for a faint smile of satisfaction played on his thin lips, as if what had happened to him proved that he had been right all
along. The left sleeves of his shirt and jacket were slit to the elbow; the loose cloth flapped around his wrist when he moved
his hand to brush away a fly. The Rabbi’s eyes, pressed into a permanent squint, stared out at the camera; stared out at the
men studying the image on the television screen.

“He’s squinting,” noted a voice in the darkened room, growling in slightly slurred Hebrew, “because he is unable to focus
without his eyeglasses, which were found at the scene of the kidnapping. Without glasses he is virtually blind; he can only
make out shapes and shadows. As for the sleeve, our people assume that the terrorists anesthetized him with an injection after
the kidnapping.”

“Notice the bruise on his forehead,” remarked Baruch, the detective from Mishteret Yisra’el, the national police force. He
combed his fingers through a mane of prematurely white hair; each hair, he would say on the rare occasions he talked about
it, represented a tear he had not shed. “In religious circles, it’s known that it comes from drumming his head against the
stone when he prays at the Wailing Wall.”

On the screen the camera panned past a terrorist to the Rabbi’s secretary, Efrayim, sitting stiffly on another wooden chair,
his wrists also in handcuffs, his eyes tightly closed, his lips and Adam’s apple working. The camera returned to the terrorist
standing behind the two chairs immediately in front of a Palestinian flag tacked to the wall. A tight-fitting black hood with
slits for the eyes covered his head. A Russian AK-47 with a folding stock hung from a sling across his chest. He tugged a
slip of paper from the pocket of his short-sleeved shirt and, rolling his R’s, began to read in accented English. “In the
name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate: the Islamic Abu Bakr Brigade has celebrated the holy month of Ramadan by capturing
two Jewish prisoners of war. In exchange for E. Blumenfeld, we require the release of El Sayyid Nosair, a Palestinian patriot
serving
a life sentence for the 1990 killing of the Jewish terrorist Rabbi Meir Kahane. In exchange for I. Apfulbaum, we require the
release of the one hundred and four patriots now being held hostage in the Jewish prison south of Beersheba. The Isra’ili
government has five days to release El Sayyid Nosair, and until the Feast of the Breaking of the Fast,
Id al-Fitr
, to arrange for the release of the hundred and four patriots. There will be no negotiations, and no further contact between
us. Failure to meet our legitimate demands will result in the execution of the sentence of death on I. Apfulbaum and his secretary,
E. Blumenfeld.”

“
Id al-Fitr
marks the end of the month of Ramadan,” explained Wozzeck, an Arabist on loan from a Shin Bet–financed think tank.

“The first deadline doesn’t give us much time to find the hostages and free them,” observed Dovid Dror, a young lieutenant
colonel on detached duty from the almost mythical General Staff commando unit.

“What are we dealing with here?” asked Baruch as the retired general, whose name was Uri Almog, ran the cassette from the
beginning. “The Abu Bakr Brigade is a new blip on our radar screen.”

Altmann, a Shin Bet specialist on Palestinian terrorist groups, ticked off the various possibilities. “It could be a splinter
group of frustrated Fatah Hawks, the armed wing of Arafat’s Fatah movement. Or some itchy warriors from the Ikhwan, the fundamentalist
Muslim Brotherhood operating in Egypt; it wouldn’t be the first time the local fundamentalists got their Islamic brothers
in Cairo to do their dirty work for them. It could be the Islamic Jihad or the Shiite Hezbollah militia working out of the
Lebanon, or even some al Qaida survivors from Afghanistan. Or a new incarnation of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades, for that matter;
according to intelligence reports the Qassam activists have been chaffing at the bit for weeks.”

“Whoever they are,” Baruch, always the plodding cop, noted, “they’re not amateurs. Without negotiations, it’s going to be
almost impossible to track them down. We’ve never caught kidnappers without some kind of contact between us and them.”

“Freeze the image there,” ordered the man presiding over the
inter-agency Working Group set up to deal with the kidnapping of Rabbi Apfulbaum. Know by the
nom de guerre
Elihu, he was a
katsa
, or handler, on temporary assignment from
ha-Mossad le-Modiin ule-Tafkidim Meyuhadim
, the institute for intelligence and special missions, better known as the Mossad. The
katsa
directed the Mossad’s
Metsada
, a top secret section that ran Israeli spies operating under deep cover in Arab countries. A living legend to the few who
were aware of his existence—before becoming a
katsa
he had participated in some two dozen Mossad commando missions to neutralize Palestinian terrorists—he favored pinstripe
suits and shirts with cuff links, which made him look more like a London City banker than a native
sabra
born and raised in the wilds of the Israeli Negev. He was lean and tall and ramrod straight, and wore the mantle of authority
with the instinctive sureness of someone who usually exercised more of it than was written into his job description. Now,
gazing at the television screen, he sucked on the stem of an unlit pipe as he spoke, which had the effect of slurring some
of his words. “There’s a Palestinian flag on the wall behind the terrorist,” he said. “Can you give us a closer look at the
lower right-hand corner, Uri?”

The retired general who owned the restaurant and leased the second floor to the Working Group—none of the parent organizations
were willing to let the
katsa’s
Group meet on the terrain of a rival organization; the general’s safe house was considered neutral turf—ran the tape back.
He froze the image and toyed with some dials on the console. The camera zoomed in until the corner of the flag filled the
screen. “There’s something on the wall next to the flag,” Elihu said.

On the screen, what appeared to be the edge of a handbill or leaflet came into focus. “Looks like a poster,” said Altmann.

“Hold on,” Wozzeck said. He knelt in front of the television screen. “Look here—the paper has been divided into squares. You
can just make out the left-hand row.”

“What we’re looking at is a calendar,” Uri Almog said from the console.

“There’s writing down the side of the margin,” Elihu said. “Can you blow it up?” he asked the general.

The screen filled with the blurred strokes of a typewriter, which suddenly spilled into focus. The six men in the room craned
their necks to read the vertical writing down the side of the calendar. “It’s in Arabic,” Wozzeck said. He touched the screen
with his finger tips as he read out the words. “‘The Ghazeh Central Import-Export Bank.’”

Elihu nodded toward the general, who switched off the television set and turned on the naked bulb in the overhead fixture.
The six men, blinded by the sudden light, settled into chairs around an oval table filled with ash trays and wine glasses
from the restaurant, and bottles of mineral water.

For a long while everyone stared at the table. Finally Dror, a combat veteran who had been Elihu’s second in command on the
katsa
’s swansong raid into Nablus, broke the ice. “The
mechabel
in the black hood is wearing a short sleeved shirt,” he said. “He’s dressed for Aza, which, remember, was sweltering from
the freak
khamsin
that, for once, didn’t hit Jerusalem or the West Bank. If he were somewhere in the hills around Jerusalem or the Judean mountains,
he’d be wearing a long-sleeved shirt, maybe even a sweater.”

“The Rabbi
is
in Aza,” Wozzeck decided, “but not for the reasons you think.” He glanced around the table at the others. “In the end, it’s
a very straightforward business: they obviously planted the calendar and the short sleeves, so it begins to look as if they
want us to think the Rabbi is in Aza. But they’re not stupid; they know we’ll figure out they want us to think he is in Aza.
Which means we’re going to take it for granted that he’s somewhere else. Which means the Rabbi must be in Aza.”

“What we’re really discussing here,” suggested Baruch, a big man who looked people in the eye and said exactly what was going
through his head, “is how smart we think the Palestinians are.” Baruch’s gaze settled on Wozzeck. “Somehow we always wind
up thinking we’re smarter than they are. I agree that we must start with the assumption that they’re deliberately dropping
hints that the Rabbi is in Aza, but I give them more credit for brains than you. I think they’re hinting at Aza because they’re
one jump ahead of you, Wozzeck—they expect us to conclude he is in Aza for the reasons you
explained. Which means the Rabbi must be somewhere else.”

Wozzeck splashed mineral water into a wine glass and, holding it by the long stem, studied the liquid as if it were vintage
wine. “Palestinians are not that subtle,” he decided.

Almog shook his head. “You’re both being too cerebral. The tape we just looked at was mailed from Aza’s central post office.”

Baruch, something of an amateur archeologist who specialized in tracing missing peoples of antiquity, tapped a forefinger
against the side of his nose. “I could deliver an envelope to Tel Aviv tonight with stamps cancelled in Atlantis, which sank
into the sea three thousand five hundred years ago.”

From under the floorboards came the faint clatter of dishes and the distinct sound of someone shouting in Hebrew, “Two cognacs
and a bill for table fourteen.” Elihu sucked loudly on the stem of his pipe.

“Do you ever light that thing?” Altmann asked irritably.

Elihu mumbled something about having given up smoking for his forty-fifth birthday in order to have a fiftieth. After a moment
he said, “I have to agree with Uri—we’re complicating things unnecessarily. Even if you dismiss the calendar and the short
sleeves and the postmark on the tape, you still are left with the cars. The bodyguard who survived told the truck driver who
arrived on the scene that the Rabbi and the secretary had been taken away in two Mercedes. We found tire tracks in the dunes
at the side of the road where the Rabbi was kidnapped, so we know the bodyguard wasn’t dreaming up the two cars. We spotted
the tracks again going cross country into Aza where the security fence was cut between two Israeli check points. The Palestinian
police found the two Mercedes abandoned in a fruit warehouse near Aza City at a quarter to seven this morning.” Elihu tapped
the bowl of the pipe in the palm of his hand. “Unless we come across evidence to the contrary, I think we have to assume the
Rabbi and his secretary are in Aza.”