He could be really noble and wait until Israel itself was infected, and then tell them. Benefactor of Israel? He suspected the Izzies would never award him any medals.
Did he care? Let them all die!
Jameela. Every Izzie was not responsible for her death. Of course, not directly— but as much as the collective population of any nation is responsible for the acts of its soldiers. Richmond had killed— he managed to think the word— her.
Richmond was dead. Lessing found that he took no pleasure from that Every country had psychopaths and sadists like Richmond.
Did he care, then, about the Izzies? The commandos who had slaughtered his companions on Ponape? The sailors on this ship? The people of Israel itself?
The Izzies had always struck him as being tougher, harder, and less sympathetic to those who were not Jewish. They set their goals and then did what was necessary to achieve them. They’d go on this way until no one dared to oppose or even criticize them. The Israelis played to win. Mulder said that one day the Jews would rule the world if the rest of humanity was lazy enough to let them.
Were they so different from the Romans, the Mongols, the Russians — or, for that matter, the Nazis?
He doubted whether the Izzies would provide zombie pills to save their few remaining Arab “citizens,” even if they had a mountain of the stuff!
He temporized by asking the nurse, “How long will it take to get
to Jerusalem?”
His guard answered him instead. “In a hurry, Hcrr Hitler? They get you there, you wish you were some place else.”
“We’ll be around the island to Kolonia in an hour,” the nurse added. “The local government has given us permission to bring in cargo planes. We’ll reach Israel within twenty-four hours.” She sounded almost apologetic.
“The Ponapeans gave you permission to land?”
The guard chuckled. “Either we land or we turn Ponape into graveyard. They say, ‘No problem’”
Intimidation again.
“That man.“Lessing lifted his chin toward Richmond. “Do Ihave to travel with his ugly corpse? He killed my wife in cold blood!”
“Good.” The guard sneered. “Fuck your Nazi bitch. That man was good. We send him, you, others, by air. To Jerusalem. He get hero’s funeral. You, you just get funeral!”
So Richmond’s body bag would be opened in Israel and not shipped back to the United States. Lessing had to know whether the black cylinder was intact.
He fell to his knees beside Richmond, slammed his fists down upon the corpse’s plastic-draped chest, and went into a pretended paroxysm of grief and fury. “Bastard!” he choked. “Bastard!” He discovered that he wasn’t entirely pretending. “Murderer! You killed my wife!” He probed cautiously with one hand at the dead man’s side.
Inside the body-bag he felt the lump that must be the black cylinder of Pacov-2 in Richmond’s coat pocket. It still seemed solid, but the rounded, crumbling comers told him that it, too, was disintegrating. It wouldn’t be long.
Even if he started hollering right now, they were almost certain to die. He had expected it, but his stomach cramped up nevertheless. He fought to keep his sphincter muscles from letting go.
To tell the Izzies or not?
They weren’t all like Richmond.
Jameela. Bauer. Helga. Sami Abu Talib and his pretty, vapid Brazilian girlfriend. Possibly Mrs. Delacroix. Shrivelled, eyeless Arab faces crushed by tank-treads into the baking dust of Aleppo. The grey, still hand of a child protruding from under a fallen wall in Damascus. An old woman in rags hunched over the blackened corpse of a little girl in some nameless town in Syria.
Heretofore Lessing had been the ‘Empty Man. ‘ Now he was full. To the brim.
He realized that his mind was made up.
Death followed the Israelis wherever they went; now let Him catch up with them.
He wouldn’t tell them about Pacov. To hell with them. Literally!
“Gel up!” the guard commanded from behind him. “Up! Up!” He snatched at Lcssing’s shoulder and slapped at the back of his head with an open palm. The blow was a light one, yet Lessing’s wound made the pain blinding. Darkness swooped in.
“No! Stop that!” the nurse cried. She added more words in Hebrew.
Lessing saw the guard’s foot coming. He waited, caught it in his bound hands, and jerked. Off balance, the soldier stumbled and fell forward. Lessing used the man’s own momentum to break his ankle. For one glorious moment he had a grip on the guard’s rifle; then sailors and other guards wrested it away again. Fists, feet, and rifle butts pounded at him, and he went down, elbows up to protect his head.
It took two commandoes and three sailors a good two minutes to subdue him. Then they beat him for perhaps another three minutes while the nurse shrilled futile protests.
Lessing didn’t care. He hardly felt the blows.
At last they shackled him hand and foot to await transport to Jerusalem.
He was still smiling, faintly, when they arrived.
He will bring upon thee all the diseases of Egypt…. Also every sickness, and every plague… until thou be destroyed.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Monday, February 22, 2044
“O y now Lessing knew every crack in the floor and every flake in MJ the plaster of the corridor leading to Sonny’s office. The brick walls were painted a scuffed red-brown to shoulder height, then whitewashed the rest of the way up to the high ceiling. The floor was a muddy mahogany in color, daubed thick here and thin there, so that half a dozen older coats showed through. The building looked and smelled ancient, but it dated back only to the reconstruction after the expulsion of Israel’s Arab population some thirty years before. Lessing assumed his prison was part of some larger police complex, but no one ever said where it was. His guards, two dark-skinned North African Jews, had once spoken of Derekh Shekhem Street as being just outside; that meant northeastern Jerusalem, if memory served him right.
Inside this warren Sonny — the only name his interrogator ever used — occupied an office of relative splendor: beige walls, Venetian blinds, scarlet-and-blue Arab carpets, pictures of Israel’s bewhis-kered founders, a couple of landscape paintings, a decent desk (under an untidy mound of papers and files), a silver coffee service that had been “liberated” from a mansion in Damascus, a Japanese television set, a Taiwanese stereo, a Chinese VCR, and a Korean laser-disc player with all the frills. Sonny’s chair too was a wonder of chrome and fake lcopardskin. Even his “guests” got cushioned seats and their choice of soda, beer, or coffee.
Sonny himself was short, stocky, and mid-thirtyish. Like many Jews of Slavic extraction, his hair was short, curly-frizzy, and as blonde as a starlet’s bottle job. He wore open-necked, knit sport shirts, pastel pants (lime green last week), and expensive running shoes. He was an officer of ARAD, Israel ‘s intelligence service, an organization built upon the traditions of many that had gone before: the Mossad, the CIA, the KGB, the OSS, the Cheka…. Sonny was but a modem incarnation in a line of inquisitors that stretched all the way back to the dungeons of old Assyria.
Not that he had ever harmed Lessing. Indeed, he had never so much as breathed on him. To Sonny, Lessing was a rosh katan, a “little head”: small fry, a nothing, a nobody, a mere who had been unlucky enough to be on the wrong side when the shit came down. After establishing Lessing’s status in the Party of Humankind and discovering that he was almost apolitical, Sonny took no further professional interest. He did summon Lessing in occasionally, but mostly to talk about movies, food, clothes, slang, Banger pom-queens, and sports — anything modem, anything American. Sonny’s secret yearning, it seemed, was to share the joys of those sainted souls who dwelt in Beverly Hills, perhaps eventually to live in the empyrean realm of Malibu itself!