Four

The Middle East
Almost Thirty Years Ago

Khalil Al Korshan met his cousin, Mahammad Alamour, as he did a few times per week, at a favorite teashop in the southern half of Rafah. The tea was good, but the cousins picked the shop because they could watch the new security wall and sentry posts being installed on the Philadelphi Road, which separated the Egyptian side of Rafah—their side—from the half of the city inside the Gaza Strip.

The Bedouin cousins had just come from the tailor shop that their families had operated for decades. Many of their best customers had lived in the denser, northern end of the city. But at the dawn of the 1980s, the year of the Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty, everything had changed now that the Jews and their damn wall had split the city in two.

The cousins ordered hot tea. They had just been down in the basement of the tailor shop, examining their newly excavated tunnel, which led straight north.

“It’s too small,” Alamour grumbled, keeping his voice low. “There’s barely room for the pallets, let alone for a worker to get them through to the other side. I’m telling you, the tunnel needs to be twice as wide.”

“And I’m telling you, ibn ’amm, that you worry too much. A wider tunnel would get spotted. Either by the police on this side, or the Israeli Defense Forces on that side. Either way: poof.” Al Korshan bundled his fingertips together and blew on them, as one might blow on a dandelion.

The larger, more populous sector of Rafah lay north of the checkpoints that split the city itself. All entry points into north Rafah, and the rest of the Gaza Strip, were heavily guarded by Israeli Defense Forces soldiers. The Jews watched all vehicles like hawks and all shipments were inspected. Reports of shortages on the Gaza side—from food to medicine to clothing—were rampant.

Which is why the Bedouin cousins, Khalil Al Korshan and Mohammad Alamour, had excavated their tunnel under the Philadelphi Road. Their family had known for years that shortages just mean profits for those with the will to make it happen.

But Alamour’s visual inspection of the tiny tunnel, with its long and frayed cable stringing together weak yellow work lights, had been vastly disappointing. There was no way workers could maneuver pallets of goods through the long, narrow tunnel.

Al Korshan sipped his tea, enjoying the sagelike flavor of the desert herb, habuck. “Ibn ’amm.” The term meant cousin. “I think I have a solution. Look behind you.”

Alamour turned in his aluminum chair.

An urchin stood outside the teashop, filthy face pressed up against the glass. He watched as a patron at another table stood and reached for the basket of week-old newspapers from Cairo, printed in Arabic, French, and English. As soon as the patron stood, the street child bolted. He was rail-thin, maybe six or seven years old. He dashed into the shop, grubby hands snatching the remainder of the patron’s breakfast roll, and was out the door before the patron turned or the teashop owner, smoking from a tin of Prince of Monaco cigarettes, could react.

The owner shouted a curse but the homeless boy was already out of sight.

“Fast, that one,” Alamour observed.

“I see him here most days. Feral, starving. And stronger than he looks. A patron caught him last week. The demon child fought like a Janissary. The Six-Day War would have lasted a lot longer than six days if the Faithful had had a few soldiers like him, let me tell you.”

Alamour turned back to their table. “There are plenty of starving orphans on the Gaza side. And there will be plenty more.”

His cousin smiled and gestured toward the grubby spot on the window where the urchin had leaned. “That,” Al Korshan said, “is our newest employee.”

Alamour almost choked on his tea. “That devil?”

His cousin corrected him. “No. That tunnel rat.”

*   *   *

The Bedouin cousins caught the homeless boy in an alley and paid him a single coin. In return for which, the boy climbed into the cousins’ tight, ill-lit, and almost airless tunnel. They had provided him with a snow sled from England, flat-bottomed, cherry red and plastic, with a twined rope that the boy tied around his waist so he could crawl on all fours. The first shipment for the snow sled was a stack of French cigarettes. Other cousins on the Gaza side received the boxes of cigarettes and sold them with a 100 percent markup. The entire shipment sold in a little under an hour.

The orphan pulled the plastic sled back to the Egyptian side. Caked in sweat and dirt, only his eyes shone beneath the grime. He rose from the tunnel, held out a dirt-caked hand, and said, “More!”

The boy worked ten-hour days, crawling with his sled stacked with canned food, spare parts for automobiles, cigarettes, and even American dollars, the only currency that some shops in the Gaza Strip accepted. The cousins waited two weeks to make sure the system was working, then added marijuana and heroin, which proved handsomely profitable.

“More!” the boy would shout, emerging on the Egyptian side of the border. “Canned food. And cigarettes. And lighters. And hashish, if you can get it.”

As the Bedouin sons and nephews scoured South Rafah for the goods, the homeless boy tore into a bowl of lentil soup and a wedge of stale bread. They paid him a pittance.

Alamour made more money in those first three weeks than he had in the previous six months. But he still looked askance at the manic tatterdemalion devouring his food.

“How do you even understand the little hellion?” he asked. “What language is that?”

Al Korshan laughed. “A stew. Some of it is Arabic, some is Hebrew. A little French and English, too. Some I don’t recognize. Yiddish, I think maybe.”

Alamour looked stricken. “Hebrew and Yiddish? Are you saying the child is a Jew?”

Al Korshan shrugged. “I don’t know and I doubt the boy himself knows. That is God’s business. Ours is commerce. That brat could be the cousin of the Pope in Rome for all I care. So long as he can work the tunnels.”

Costa Rica

On board the Belle Australis, off the Nicoya Peninsula, a Jamaican porter made strong coffee for two of the guests, weaker green tea for two more, a Coke Zero with a wedge of lime and no ice for the fifth, and the Captain’s Blend (two-thirds Nescafé, one-third Glenfiddich). He put all the drinks on a tray, along with tablet computers for each guest, preloaded with their newspapers and magazines of choice and a bowl of fruit. Finally, he added small crystal vases, large enough for one short-stemmed rose for each guest.

He hoisted the tray with the beverages, fruit, computers, and flowers, and began distributing them around the megayacht, which sat so serenely in the Pacific waters they might as well have been in the George V Hotel in Paris.

The sun had not yet risen. The palm trees were black against the indigo horizon, the white beaches empty except for colonies of seabirds standing asleep vertically.

The steward headed for the long, claret-carpeted guest corridor and gingerly knelt before each door to leave a breakfast, a tablet, and a flower. His knees popped each time he knelt. He paused at the door of the long-legged beauty; the translator with the indeterminate accent. The steward smiled.

As with the morning before, he again heard the sounds of moaning coming from her room. The sound was ghostly, throaty, rising in crescendo. The steward smiled and shook his head, leaving the morning treats, as the moaning behind the wooden door gave way to a howl, poorly silenced by a pillow.

“Jeune fille de bon chance,” he observed, clucking in appreciation. He was glad someone was having a good time aboard the floating palace.

*   *   *

Daria awoke under the bed, moaning.

As she did so many mornings.

She was bathed in sweat, her eyes alight, flowing from within a Molotov cocktail of pain and betrayal and pure distilled terror. She was a little girl. An orphan. A child war veteran.

No! She forced her brain to scramble through the morning time travel terrors. Not a little girl. Not the Gaza Strip. There were no bombs, no blood. No callused adult hands, torn and bloody, reaching for her. No diggers above her, screaming for more help. No fire dying in a woman’s eyes. No lips silently breathing apologies.

She was aboard the Belle Australis, off the shore of Costa Rica. The sweat-sodden sheets were rucked around her hips; she had dragged them down off the bed with her. Daria grabbed a fistful and shoved the sheets over her mouth and screamed in panic/hate/pain.

Her morning began much as usual.

*   *   *

Daria made reservations for a Wednesday sortie of flights—two puddle jumper hops and one crossing the Western Hemisphere—culminating in New York City. That left her free to accept the dinner invitation from the yacht’s first officer, a Moldovan woman with lush blond hair and the body of a distance runner.

She and the first officer sat in the Tango Mar seaside café with glasses of crisp Italian prosecco. The music turned out to be 1950s jazz. The first officer wore a polka-dot dress—quite a change from her well-pressed white uniform with blue button-down epaulettes and sensible, rubber-soled shoes. She had exceptionally fine calves. Daria registered the thought that one doesn’t necessarily expect naval officers to be runners. You expect them to have other skills, like knot tying. Sure enough, a few hours earlier, the first officer had proven most proficient at that, too. But to have exceptional calves? And in flat sandals? Remarkable.

Daria sipped her sparkling wine.

“You seem distracted,” the first officer observed in French, which was their common tongue.

“I am. By you.” Daria smiled and leaned forward to touch the woman’s hand. “Let’s order some food.”

Actually, Daria was distracted. Within one week, she had been unlinked to the FBI, and she had been contacted for an urgent meet with Colin Bennett-Smith, an old British friend from her predefection days.

Coincidence? Daria hated that word.