“Tonight.”
“Okay, tonight, but just to test it, not to take anything.”
“Deal. We don’t take anything. Not tonight.”
CHAPTER 30
Levi and Reuben sat on the cottage’s porch overlooking the water, watching the parade of lobster boats, sailboats, motor yachts sailing past, traveling from one end of Eggemoggin Reach to the other.
“I feel better that the boat is gone,” Levi said. “And that thing is hidden until when, or if, we need it.”
Levi had noticed a low wooden door in a basement wall and was curious to see where it might lead.
The door was locked. Ten minutes of yanking and prodding with a crowbar and the door opened. An overhead light revealed a twenty-foot-long chamber with walls, floor and ceiling of solid granite, a tunnel blasted into the bedrock. Lining the sides of this tunnel were wooden racks, from floor to ceiling. The racks held wine bottles, hundreds of them. The air inside the tunnel was moist and chilly. There must be twenty feet of granite above the far end of this fancy wine cellar, he thought.
Levi walked to the workbench where the nuclear device rested. It had an aura about it—the souls of thousands of innocent people, available for the taking at any instant. It is an evil object. It deserves to be locked away in a cave, he thought. He was about to lift it when he paused. Perhaps I’ve been too cavalier with this thing.
He looked around the basement and found a pair of thick gloves covered in hard rubber tossed into a plastic milk crate containing the mixings for epoxy resin. They were bright orange and came halfway to his elbow. The label identified them as Nitrile Chemical Gloves.
“Just in case,” Levi said to himself, donning the gloves before he lifted the bomb and carried it to the far end of the wine cellar.
Later, sitting with Reuben on the porch waiting for sunset, Levi sucked down his third Tanqueray and tonic so quickly that Reuben stared at him questioningly.
“Something bothering you,” she asked. “Or just thirsty?” She was used to outpacing him, two drinks for each of his.
“Nothing special,” he answered, looking out at the water. “This place is so peaceful I sometimes forget why we’re here and what we left behind.” He pointed at the water, at the horizon to the east.
“I know what you mean,” Reuben said. “I forget sometimes, too, but not for long. Not when I turn on the television and see what is happening in Israel—I mean, I guess, in Palestine. Do we have to start calling it that?”
“Never,” Levi retorted.
Reuben looked closely at the man in the wooden rocking chair. I’ve hardly been out of his sight for two months, yet I know almost nothing about him, she thought. Nothing except that he carried me across the ocean and that I feel safe when I am with him.
“Tell me about what you left behind,” she said softly.
Levi turned toward her, startled. Despite all the weeks they’d been isolated with only one another for company, Levi had barely opened up about himself.
Maybe he is just shy, she’d thought. Maybe, perhaps, when you’ve lost everything in life, it’s too painful to think about, much less to talk about loss.
“My eema—my mother—and my abba, my father, met on a kibbutz in the Galilee. They were both orphans, their parents were killed in the 1948 war. They never talked about their childhoods. I used to wonder why they never spoke. Now I know why. The dead are dead, gone. Speaking about them won’t bring them back.”
“Are you sure they are dead?” Reuben asked, desperate to keep him speaking.
“Sure? I don’t know. I had breakfast with them a week before the bomb, before I returned to duty. I saw a photograph in a news magazine in Spain. It was taken from an airplane. It showed the bomb crater in Tel Aviv. It showed the shorefront. It showed rubble where my parents’hotel had been.”
“Do you have brothers, sisters?” she whispered.
“My sister, Leah, was supposed to visit them that week, with her baby, with six-month-old Aaron.”
“Maybe they survived,” Debra said, looking at Levi, struggling to see if he held any hope.
“No. I know they are gone, all of them. I hope it was fast for my sister. She would not do well in a camp. She would not have done well being raped by Arabs, watching her son being slaughtered. I am all that is left of my family, and I am alone in a strange land.”
Debra had been so consumed by her own guilt over Damascus that until that moment she had not thought about Levi’s loss. He was so strong, so impenetrable. Suddenly, his loss put a face for her on what all Israel had lost. She shot from her chair and turned her back on him, then spun around to stand facing Levi.
“I get so fucking angry at America I can hardly control myself,” Reuben screamed. She turned her head from side to side, then hurled her glass. “Look, this is where I was born, where I grew up. For as long as I’ve been alive, America sent soldiers all over the world for the dumbest reasons imaginable. What the hell do we have to do to convince this goddamn government to do something to put Jewish people back in control of the only place on this entire planet where we can be absolutely certain we’re safe? One little tiny bit of real estate on the face of the whole planet is all we want. What the hell is wrong with those idiots in Washington?”
“Evidently, even that one place was not safe,” Levi said. He turned when he heard a car on the dirt drive leading up to the cottage. He walked to the end of the porch. “Sarah and Abram,” he said to a worried Reuben. Her face cleared. “I expect they’ll have some ideas about how to attract the attention of the president of the United States.”
“A march,” Sarah said. “Just about every congregation in the country will be sending people, some of them busloads. There are six million Jews in America. It’s beginning to seem like an awful lot of us are going to be in one place at one time. I can’t tell you how excited I am.”
THWACKA-THWACKA-THWACKA-THWACKA.
“What’s that?” Levi asked, interrupting Sarah. He looked up. A helicopter hovered directly overhead, then disappeared from sight. “I don’t like that. There have been airplanes and helicopters flying around the past few days. Something is happening.”
“It can’t concern us,” Abram said as he joined them on the porch. “I don’t see how it could.”
“I don’t either,” Levi said. “But it is odd. Maybe I’m just imagining.”
CHAPTER 31
The White House Situation Room was in the basement of the West Wing. The president sat in the middle of the long cherry table that dominated the room.
“Here is what is troubling me the most, keeping me awake through last night, to be perfectly frank,” Quaid said. He reached into his jacket pocket and dropped a handful of gold-colored objects on the table. Each was a flat metal plate, two inches wide by four or so inches long, containing a Star of David, the letters IDF and some writing in Hebrew.
“These are twenty Israel Defense Forces dog tags. Divers salvaging the two Coast Guard boats that sank in Boston Harbor recovered these from the bottom of the harbor underneath where those two freighters were anchored,” the president said. “Quite obviously, they were thrown overboard by people on those ships, military people, almost certainly the people who fired the rocket-propelled grenades that sank our two Coast Guard boats. Twenty Israeli military commandos—special forces, probably. And they are in this country. Somewhere. We have no idea what weapons they took with them off the ships.”