54

“Hey,” Yigal suddenly whispered.

Startled, both Marcus and Kailea turned toward him. Neither had heard the Israeli say anything since being taken prisoner. Marcus was not comfortable with him saying anything now, either. But Yigal motioned them to lean closer, and they both did.

“That speech,” he said so quietly they barely could hear him. “That was the leader of Hezbollah.”

“Yeah,” Marcus whispered back. “We know.”

“Know what he said?” Yigal asked.

They both shook their heads.

“You know, if you two plan on spending more time in the neighborhood, you really might consider learning some Arabic.”

Yigal almost laughed at his own joke, then caught himself. Still, he smiled for the first time. His mouth was covered with blood, and two of his teeth were broken. Marcus recalled that Yigal had told them he was fluent in Arabic and French, as well as Hebrew and English.

In a voice barely above a whisper himself, Marcus cautioned the Israeli not to say more than he needed to as they could not afford to draw the attention of the guards.

The smile faded. A wave of annoyance washed over Yigal’s countenance. Apparently he had things to say, and he was going to say them whether Marcus liked it or not.

Yigal made it clear that he had no intention of giving them a play-by-play of the speech. His point was simply that while Sheikh Ja’far ibn al-Hussaini had taken credit for their capture, Yigal wasn’t buying it.

“Why not?” asked Kailea.

“Something’s wrong,” the Israeli whispered back. “There’s no way this is a Hezbollah operation.”

“What are you talking about?” she pressed. “You saw the guys out there. They were ecstatic when al-Hussaini spoke.”

“That wasn’t happiness; it was relief.”

“Meaning what?”

“Look, the guards have no idea that I speak Arabic. Plus, they think I’m just a kid. So they’ve been talking, whispering—griping, really—around me from the moment they grabbed us. Okay, I’ve been unconscious at times, I admit. But not always. Mostly I’m just pretending to be out of it. And I hear things.”

“What things?”

“They keep saying al-Masri is only the deputy commander of this unit, and that he’s Egyptian, not Lebanese. They want to know where their commander is. ‘Where’s General Ali?’ they keep asking. ‘When’s General Ali coming back? Why would he not be here for such a critical mission?’ Then they ask why al-Masri ordered them to bring us here. Apparently we’re on an old Hezbollah base along the coast, about ten klicks north of Tyre, that was abandoned after the 2006 war. They keep saying al-Masri should have taken them to Beirut by now. And there’s something else.”

“What?” Kailea asked.

“Al-Masri might be Egyptian, but his accent isn’t.”

“You’re saying he didn’t grow up in Lebanon? How in the world did he become a senior operative inside Hezbollah?”

“I’m sure he grew up here,” Yigal clarified. “Most of the time he speaks Arabic with a colloquial Beiruti dialect. But I keep hearing him say words and phrases that are distinctively Libyan.”

“How would you know?”

“Our family has lots of Libyan friends.”

“Jews or Arabs?”

“Jews, but the dialects are the same,” Yigal insisted. “When al-Masri curses—you know, when he goes on those tirades, those rants—he’s often using language that’s native to Libyan tribes, and not those along the border of Egypt, but those who live along the border of Algeria. And it’s not just me. At least two of his men have picked up on it. I heard them talking about it. They were also complaining about al-Masri ordering them to hand in their mobile phones and not letting them be in touch with their families. They don’t come right out and say it clearly, but they think something isn’t right with this whole operation.”

“You know, now that you say that, I heard some of them complaining about their cell phones too,” Kailea added.

“Wait a minute,” Yigal said. “When we were driving up to Haifa from the airport, you told me you don’t speak Arabic.”

“I don’t.”

“Then they were speaking English?”

“No, Russian—that’s what really caught my attention.”

“Russian?”

“Weird, huh?”

“Very.”

Now Marcus asked a question for the first time. “Yigal, you said the men were relieved by the Sheikh’s speech—what did you mean?”

“Like I said, all day I was picking up so much unease,” Yigal explained. “Yes, when they heard the speech, they erupted in applause, but I was watching the men who had been guarding me. They were whooping and hollering, but they were also glancing at each other. It was subtle. Nonverbal. But it was like they were shrugging their shoulders and saying, ‘Guess we were wrong.’”

“Maybe they were wrong,” said Kailea.

Yigal said nothing. But after a moment, Marcus did.

“No, they weren’t wrong,” he told them. “This can’t be a Hezbollah operation. If it were, we wouldn’t simply have been mentioned on that broadcast. The Sheikh would have paraded us out before the cameras.”

“You think al-Masri has gone rogue?” Kailea asked.

“Yes, but not his men,” Marcus replied.

“So who’s al-Masri working for, if not the Sheikh?”

Marcus shook his head. “I don’t know,” he conceded. “But we’d better find out quick.”

“And how exactly do you propose we do that?” Kailea asked, glancing down at their chains.

Again Marcus shook his head. “I have no idea.”