“You guys were bold little bastards,” he said aloud. The report was finished. He drove the last period on the paper with purpose. Carol would pick that up, as she always could. His anger or frustration always manifested itself with deeply embedded punctuations in his writing. She would tell him to stop stressing himself out, then pinch a fleshy cheek. Carol reminded him of his grandmother, who had died many years before. She was a sweet and gentle old woman, originally from Boston, who had moved south to Alabama early in life. Later she raised Art when his mother left. He was only three at the time, hardly old enough to remember what she looked like. That was a step up on his father, who hadn’t even stuck around for his birth. By all rights he should be in prison, or himself an absentee father. But he wasn’t. His grandma taught him fairness, and right from wrong. Some people might take those lessons for granted, figuring that it was a given that all children were taught similar lessons. Maybe most were, but in the South when Art was growing up the lines between these beliefs were sometimes foggy, and often nonexistent. Learning violence and hate by example would have been easy had it not been for her.
He smiled to himself, still staring at his legal pad and remembering. She had pushed him hard. Oh, so hard! Hard with words, and pointed fingers, and sometimes, with a switch. She had made him work hard in school, and play with equal energy with his friends. And when it came time to think about college her words were simple, poetic, and straightforward. “Arthur,” she had said, “I have never told you you were ugly, but you are certainly not pretty. And I have never, ever called you stupid, but most assuredly you are not a genius. No one is going to make your way for you.”
That old lady, Art thought.
The phone buzzed. “Yes. Thanks, Carol.” Art pushed the finished report aside. “Eddie, g’morning.”
“Ungodly hour to say something like that. Get some sleep?”
The lack of it reminded Art that he felt like shit. “Not enough. I don’t know if there is such a thing as enough right now.”
“Well, boss, it’s my turn. Bingo! Shari came through. We’ve got a whole new barrel of pickles now.”
“Lay it out, Ed.”
“Harry Obed is one Mamir Khaled, a Palestinian. And we’ve ID’d his partner: little bro Nahar Khaled. Shari faxed photos of both and we ran the pictures by the rental agency clerk. Let me tell you, boss, she was not a happy camper being roused out of bed at one A.M. Anyway, she confirmed that Nahar was the second guy.”
“So that puts them together at the airport.”
“And the motel,” Eddie added. “The desk clerk was certain it was both of them.”
“I guess we can expect confirmations from the airlines in Paris, here, and New York on the second ID. But what about before that?”
“Nothing. Interpol, Brits, Frenchies…zippo. Israeli intelligence had to go through their national police.”
“Huh?”
“Punks, boss. That’s what Shari called them. They were picked up a few years back for throwing stones and shit during the West Bank uprising. Intifada, they called it. They weren’t real troublemakers, just followers. Lots of kids were doing it. It just happened the Israelis decided to come down hard on the protests that week, so it was a quick trip across the border to Lebanon.”
Art tapped the desk. “Deported. That could piss one off.”
“Yep. So we’ve got two young brothers forcibly removed from their family and their home. Shari says the latter is sometimes more devastating to the West Bank Arabs than having to leave their families. It’s the same thing the whole Palestinian culture has been subjected to. You know, that Israeli friend of yours is a smart fella. He looks at reasons for what he’s supposed to help prevent.”
It was good info, but not enough for a complete picture. “It’s more than we had before, but aside from America being responsible for all the world’s ills, what was their motive? Hell, there are hundreds of people — whole families — deported every month since the Intifada began. Why attack us? Why not do something against the Israelis? They could have done more damage in a suicide attack there. I saw a tape a while back of a suicide attack in southern Lebanon. The terrorist had his car filled with five hundred pounds of TNT and another hundred pounds of nails. So this guy had his pals film him with a video camera from a rooftop as he drove by an Israeli army truck loaded with troops and blew himself up.”
“Boss,” Eddie interjected.
Art paused. “Yeah?”
“They had a motive. Remember the picture?”
“Sure.” No…
“The little girl. About a month after the Khaled brothers were deported there was another protest… a big one. An American cruiser made a port call at Haifa and a whole slew of demonstrations broke out. Some were pretty violent, Shari said. American ships have stopped at Israeli ports before, so who knows why it was that one to cause an uproar. The West Bank, Gaza, even Jerusalem. Anyway, the Khaled boys’ mother and little five-year-old sister just happened to be near one of the demonstrations near their home when the Army moved in to break it up.”
“Oh Jesus,” Art said softly.
“The troops used rubber bullets to break up the crowd. One of them hit the little girl right in her mother’s arms. She was trying to get out of the middle of the thing, but there were too many people. The bullet caught the kid in the head. Killed instantly. How’s that for a motive?”
“In their minds, yeah. Okay, where from here, Ed?”
“Well, like you said before, these guys were the trigger pullers, but someone put them up to it.”
Art wasn’t sure about that. “Exploited their grief would be a better way to put it. Now we’ve got to pick up the hot trail.”
“Jackson,” Eddie said.
“Right. He is the link. I don’t know. Maybe the trail in Paris can be picked up, but our best shot right now is trying to find Jackson and figure out what he did to help the shooters. Then we can find the head of this monster.”
“I better put a push on Jackson’s trail.”
“Yeah, that’s what we’ve got to do.” They were moving, Art knew, but there was a long way to go. “Is there anything new on him yet?”
“Not much,” Eddie answered, no discouragement whatsoever in his voice. “His neighbors confirmed that he does have some relatives in Chicago, but the employment records don’t jibe. According to them he’s an only child or an orphan, but then he filled them out. It’s not like he had a security clearance.”
This end of the investigation, only two days old, was already reaching its peak, a reality that convinced Art that the conspiracy had tentacles of as yet unknown length. There was little left to do in the Los Angeles area without some information from or about Jackson. Or was there? “Ed, I’m going to finish up here and step out for a while. You at the Hilton?”
“Yeah. Where are you going?”
“Out and about.”
It was Herb Landau’s turn to visit Bud’s office.
The hastily called NSC meeting had just wrapped up after two hours of discussion and analysis of the situation, and fifteen minutes spent viewing excerpts, prompted by a National Security Agency official, of real-time satellite imagery.
“How long until we can get some enhanced stills?” Bud asked.
“An hour… maybe,” Landau answered.
Bud grimaced. “We’ll have to go to the boss before that.” He looked at his watch. “Fifteen minutes. So, you thought we should talk alone. I don’t know, Herb. You sprang a doozy on me the last time we did this.”