MOSES BRISCOE, THE IRISH JEW WHO RAN ONE OF THE SHIN Bet’s flagship divisions, was fuming. Baruch, who had a passing acquaintance with Briscoe—they had crossed swords before when both were assigned to investigate back-to-back Hamas suicide bombings—could hear him biting off his words over the phone. “Let’s scramble this conversation,” Briscoe, nominally higher in the security apparatus pecking order than a cop from Jerusalem, snapped. The Irishman came back on the line breathing fire. “I’m calling about the American journalist Sweeney—”
“What’s Sweeney have to do with—”
“I had his phone tapped—”
“You had author—”
“I have a blanket authorization to tap the phone of anyone who might lead us to terrorists.”
“Last I heard, Sweeney was a journalist.”
“This guy is an Arab lover.”
“That doesn’t make him a Jew hater.”
“He got a phone call from an Arab speaking in English—”
“How’d you know it was an Arab if he was speaking English?”
“An Arab can speak Mandarin Chinese, I still know he’s an Arab. He told Sweeney to come down to Aza for a scoop—we figure he was being invited to interview the man himself.”
For once Baruch didn’t respond.
“Did you hear me? The man himself is Abu Bakr, the mechabel who kidnapped I. Apfulbaum! According to the article Sweeney wrote after his trip to Aza, Abu Bakr may also be the celebrated Renewer.”
“I don’t see—”
“Sweeney was supposed to find a welcoming committee on the Palestinian side of the Erez crossing point into Aza. I had some assets spotted around waiting to tail him once he made contact with his Palestinian driver. Sweeney must have parked his car in the lot on the Israeli side of the Erez crossing because we found it there. But he never showed up on the Arab side. He vanished into thin air.”
Baruch’s pulse was pounding in his temple. “Listen carefully, Moses,” he murmured icily into the phone. “Whatever you do, don’t interrupt me. When I finish saying what I’m going to say, I’m going to hang up. Then I’m going to put in a call to the katsa. Elihu will phone up the director of the Prime Minister’s military affairs committee, a son-of-a-bitch named Zalman Cohen. Within fifteen minutes, you will receive a personal phone call from the Prime Minister. He is going to tell you exactly what I am telling you now, only less politely. Get off Sweeney’s case. Don’t tap his phone, don’t waste assets keeping track of him, don’t ask questions, don’t argue. You’re walking on the katsa’s toes. Back-pedal before you get pulverized in the katsa’s grinder. You mention the name Sweeney once more, you’ll be out on the street hunting for a job. In another country.”
Briscoe could be heard breathing hard, as if he had run across a back lawn to take the call. When he spoke he seemed to be wrestling with his rage. “I resent your tone, not to mention—”
Baruch cut the connection with his forefinger, waited for a dial tone, then punched in a Jaffa number. The barefoot contessa in the miniskirt who forgot to buy diet cream put him through to the katsa. They scrambled and Baruch quickly explained the situation. “I’ll get through to the Prime Minister’s office right away,” Elihu said.
Baruch said, “We had assets spotted around the Palestinian end of Erez too—they didn’t notice Briscoe’s assets, they didn’t notice Sweeney, either.”
“There were twelve thousand Palestinian workers returning to Aza when Sweeney came through. The Abu Bakr people timed it so he would be lost in the shuffle.”
Baruch knew the katsa well enough to understand that he was trying to convince himself, and not succeeding. “It’s been almost twenty-four hours,” Baruch said. “Our antennas should have picked something up by now.”
“Aza is a big place,” Elihu said softly, and he hung up.
Baruch ordered in a sandwich and a beer, and reread the most recent letter from his son, who was hiking with friends through the Himalayas to celebrate the completion of his three-year stint in the Army. “If we can buy bottles of oxygen from the sherpas,” Ami had written, “we’re going to try to get up to six thousand meters. Otherwise we’ll stay at four thousand and enjoy the view, which is almost as good as the one from our Mt. Hermon. For god’s sake don’t worry. I won’t do anything you wouldn’t have done at my age. (That leaves me a lot of leeway!)”
Baruch had to smile. At Ami’s age, he’d taken part in one war and half a dozen raids across the Jordan, then had worked his way around the Horn on a tramp steamer to spend six months hiking through Thailand and Laos. He had left Israel vaguely thinking he might never return. (Almost every Israeli who went abroad toyed with the idea of staying abroad, though very few actually did.) Who needed to spend his life in a pressure cooker? Foreigners, Baruch told himself, not for the first time, didn’t understand the strain that’s put on Israelis from the day of their birth. Israelis are born old and age fast. They feel the weight on their shoulders while they’re still crawling around a crib. Baruch swiveled a hundred and eighty degrees and gazed out the window at Jewish Jerusalem; from his office, which was on the fourteenth floor, he could make out the black scar on the pavement where a suicide bomber had blown up a number eighteen bus, killing twenty-six Jews and wounding half a hundred others. We live on the edge, Baruch thought, surrounded by dozens of millions of people who would exterminate us if they could. It is this aspect of the conflict that the world doesn’t grasp, but we understand in our gut; it is drummed into us from the moment we are taught, in kindergarten, to duck under our desks and cover our heads when the siren sounds. My daughter understood it when she was waiting for her bus at Beit Lid; my son understands it when he climbs higher and higher in the Himalayas and tries, for a day or two, to leave the world behind him. Our enemies don’t want to conquer us. They want to obliterate us. Which leaves us no margin for errors: in the wars, in the fight against terrorism, in weapons procurement, in budget allocation, in the endless diplomatic haggling. Every day we make thousands of choices, and they must be the right choices if we don’t want to wind up victims of a second Holocaust. By the time a young Israeli finishes his Army service, he is fed up with making choices that absolutely have to be correct; he wants the luxury of making a mistake now and then, and then doubling back on his tracks and casually correcting it.
This is the weight on our shoulders that we cannot shrug off.
Baruch took a deep breath, and a second. Then he shook his head and laughed under his breath and opened the slip of paper that Sa’adat had found in Yussuf Abu Saleh’s wallet. He was completely mystified by the small number seven inked in on the top right. Was this page seven? Or the seventh copy of the same page? One of the bright young Arabists down the hall had given Baruch a rough translation of the document, which appeared to be a textbook description of a cell in the human nervous system. There is the body of the cell, where all the cell’s activity originates. Then come the dendrites, which branch out from the cell body. Then the axon, the long single fiber that snakes out toward other nerve cells and along which instructions to the other cells are carried. There is no actual contact with the other cells: the messages from one cell to another are transmitted at a gap called the synapse, where the cells approach each other but do not touch.
If Sa’adat’s guess was correct, if the document was a coded message, there was little the Israelis could do to decipher it; the Islamic fundamentalists had mastered the use of the primitive but unbreakable one-time pad system, which involved enciphering and deciphering from a random substitution key, of which only two copies existed, one in the hands of the person who originated the message, the other in the hands of the person who received it. To make the code even more unbreakable, the key was used only once and destroyed.
Baruch read the document again. It suddenly struck him that this paragraph out of a biology textbook offered an uncannily accurate description of a fundamentalist terrorist cell. Orders originated in the heart of the cell. Dendrites or activists branched out from the cell to carry out these orders. Instructions to other cells were passed along the axon, which snaked out in the direction of other cells but, for security purposes, never actually made contact with them. The messages were passed across a gap called the synapse. If Yussuf Abu Saleh could be described as a dendrite—perhaps he was dendrite number seven!—then the lame shoemaker across from the El Khanqa Mosque in the Christian Quarter of the Old City was clearly the synapse, the gap across which messages between cells were transmitted without the cells touching. If I’m right, Baruch thought, if this document is really an Abu Bakr Brigade organizational chart, it certainly wasn’t the handiwork of Yussuf Abu Saleh, who had been a plasterer before becoming a Muslim activist. Which left the man himself, as Briscoe put it: Abu Bakr! Abu Bakr, the almost blind fundamentalist with the mark of prostration on his forehead. Abu Bakr, the vigilante who had personally executed twenty-four collaborators with .22-caliber bullets fired, so Elihu had reported at the first session of the Working Group, with surgical accuracy into their medullas, the lowest part of the brain stem, which controls the heart beat and breathing and brings instantaneous death. What you’re describing, Baruch had remarked when Elihu reported how a short, heavy-set man with short cropped hair, listening for signs of life, had pressed his ear to the mouth of the wounded Jew lying on the road during the kidnapping, could be the professional gestures of a medic or a male nurse.
The telephone on Baruch’s desk rang shrilly. He resented the interruption and considered not answering it. With a fatalistic shrug, he lifted the receiver.
“That you, Baruch?” a man asked.
Baruch recognized the voice and sat up straighter. “It is, Prime Minister.”
“Scramble this conversation.”
Baruch hit the scramble button, then said, “Go ahead.”
“I don’t know if what I am about to say can help you. I just received a secret cable from Sawyer, the President’s Special Assistant for—”
“Sir, I know who Sawyer is.”
“Yes, well, his note was short and to the point. He said he has reason to believe that Abu Bakr is a medical doctor.” When Baruch didn’t say anything, the Prime Minister asked, “Did you hear me, Baruch?”
“I did, Prime Minister.”
“Is this detail useful?”
“I think it may be. Thank you for calling.”
The line went dead. Baruch leaned back in his chair. Of course! Not a medic or a male nurse but a doctor! “Why didn’t I think of it sooner?” Baruch said out loud. The sound of his own voice startled him. Who else but a doctor would be familiar enough with anatomy to execute people with a low-caliber bullet fired into the medulla? And familiar enough with biology to model his terrorist cells along the lines of human cells?
Baruch snatched a sheaf of eighty-weight bond and scrawled “From, To, Subj:” on the top left. Then he addressed it to the brothers Karamazov in the research department, and wrote: “The short, heavy-set nearly blind religious Muslim who spent time in Israeli prisons after being denounced by a collaborator at some point in his life had formal medical training. Does that narrow it down for you?”
Baruch signed the work order and set it on Absalom’s desk under a plastic flower pot filled with a plastic geranium. Wandering back into his office, he felt physically and mentally drained—he was so exhausted he doubted he would be able to fall asleep. He filled the small crystal glass, which his late father-in-law had brought with him from Vilnius when he immigrated to Israel, with three-star brandy from the Golan Heights and, setting the phone on the floor within arm’s reach, stretched out on the couch. If his wife had been there she would have made a sardonic remark about his shoes. “Just because terrorists are kidnapping Israelis is no reason to put your dirty soles up on a clean couch,” she would have groaned, as if one thing had anything to do with the other. She would have untied his laces and slipped the shoes off his feet, and covered his feet with a blanket. She would have put one of the late Beethoven string quartets on the new compact player his daughter had bought him for his last birthday, and settled into the rocking chair to stand guard against evil spirits while he lay there, his eyes wide open, trying to close the gap between possibilities and probabilities.