The prime minister had expected a reaction of anger. What he got was a strangely closed smile.
“You have nothing to bargain with, Mr. Prime Minister. Your hand is folded before you. I hold all the cards.”
“Not cards, Rasin, lives! Do you hear me? Lives!”
“You came to me. You came to beg me to unleash my weapon under your direction, with your charter.”
“And I hate myself for it.”
“It is done my way or not at all!”
“Madness! Listen to what you’re saying!”
“I’m listening to you instead. Words of desperation, of futility, of failure. They are the same words I have heard for years, decades. We are an island surrounded by a vast sea of sharks. Instead of learning to control those sharks, you have allowed them to multiply and grow stronger until they are in a position to control our island as well as their sea. There is to be no compromise.”
“Not compromise, merely redefinition,” the prime minister implored. “Our major problem is Hassani, so all I’m urging is that you limit the initial release of Gamma to Iran. The rest of the nations will fall in line as soon as they see the results. We can prevent the use of his superweapon and thus the invasion will be stemmed.”
“This invasion, yes. But what about the next and the one after? You, all of you, are so shortsighted. You accept a war every ten years so long as there is what you call peace in the interim. Releasing Gamma over a single country will make the others more militant, even more prone to the terror tactics that have torn us apart. Our enemy does not fear death, he cherishes it. All he requires is a reason to die, and your ‘redefinition’ would supply it. The moderates and radicals will join forces. We will accomplish ourselves what Hassani himself would have been hard-pressed to do.” He calmed himself. “So it must be all the nations where the murderers hide behind the guise of politicians and diplomats. It must be made clear that any threat to destroy us means they destroy themselves and their only chance for the continued survival we allow them.”
“You’re forgetting the Indianapolis,” Isser grasped. “The Americans sunk it to hide Gamma forever. They must have had their reasons, and now you’re going to release it in spite of that.”
“A risk I’m willing to take, just like you, as your presence here today indicates, Mr. Prime Minister. Our entire way of life has been at risk since our very inception. Only this time we are in a position to control our own destiny and destroy the Arab radicals who would otherwise destroy us.”
“And if they still continue their fight after you open your cannisters, what then, Rasin? Do you let half a country die for every hundred of us they kill? A whole country for every thousand?”
“If necessary, yes. Absolutely.”
“You’re playing God, Rasin.”
“As someone clearly must, as you have failed in your wisdom to dare. My terms are nonnegotiable. All my terms, including where and how my appointment to the cabinet will be announced to the country as Independence Day dawns.”
“As insurance, no doubt.”
“Precisely. Insurance against you changing you mind once I’ve done your dirty work for you. Rest easy, Mr. Prime Minister. I won’t need you long. The people will rally to me. They will embrace what I represent. I speak for the masses who are sick of living in fear, of living amidst the constant threat of death.”
“Better to live in hell, Rasin?”
“Better to live period.”
Chapter 25
“It’s about fucking time,” McCracken said to Wareagle when he heard the sound of a key being turned.
When they had arrived in Israel over twelve hours before, they were driven by Isser to a cluster of apartments in the Bayet-Gan section of Jerusalem that in actuality formed a Mossad safehouse. Blaine and Wareagle were stowed in a windowless basement apartment with a promise that Isser would return as soon as he sorted things out with the prime minister. They had begun to worry after six hours. After twelve had passed, the unseen Saturday morning sun was rising and the worry had evolved into a certainty that something had gone wrong.
Now at last they stood before the door. It swung open to reveal a stoop-shouldered, wizened old man.
“What’s the matter?” Isaac asked, noting their surprise. “You were expecting maybe Moses?”
“No,” McCracken answered. “Just the prime minister. Or the head of Mossad, at the very least.”
The old man waved a knobby hand before him. “Ach, you don’t exist to them anymore. Neither do we.”
“We?”
“I’m one of four. There’ll be plenty of time to tell you about it on the drive. Come,” the old man beckoned, “we’d better get going before your guards think twice about the story I gave them.”
“Sounds like we’re getting sprung from jail again, Johnny,” Blaine said to Wareagle. “Where to this time?” he asked the old man.
“To play some checkers and maybe save the world.”
Isaac settled himself uneasily behind the driver’s seat of the five-year-old Mercedes. He had parked hastily and the result was that the tires on the car’s passenger side straddled the curb down the street from the beige stone apartment house they had just emerged from. Each motion brought a slight grimace of pain to his features.
“I’ll drive, if you want,” Blaine offered.
Isaac waved him off. “Don’t worry, once I get going I’m fine. Besides, you don’t know where we’re headed.” He squinted his eyes for the ignition as he probed the keys forward. His hand was trembling and the keys jangled together. “Just let me get my glasses on….” When he had done so, he peered back at Blaine. “There, much better. You, I know. But I don’t know your friend,” he added, gazing at Wareagle in the backseat.
“He’s just my tour guide. He was showing me around Jerusalem when we took a wrong turn.”
“You would have been in that house a long time if I hadn’t shown up.”
“I was beginning to get that feeling. But it still doesn’t tell me who you are.”
“What’s the difference? A little this, a little that, but mostly,” he said with a proud thrust of his finger upward, “a soldier. Since maybe before you were born, Mr. Blaine McCracken.” With that, Isaac screeched the Mercedes into traffic against the protesting horn of the car right behind him.
“Haganah! You were Haganah!”
“Not were, Mr. Blaine McCracken, am. The names change but the symbols remain the same.”
“And your name …”
“Isaac, as of late. Symbolic again. I’ve been reborn, you see. All of us have.”
“Plural once more.”
“Because I’m not in this alone.” Isaac swerved the car suddenly to stay on his side of the road as they banked round a curve. He narrowly missed sideswiping a car parked on McCracken’s side of the narrow Jerusalem street and hunched forward behind the wheel. “And we’ve all been cut off, just like you.”
“Cut off from what?”
“Truth,” Wareagle said suddenly before the old man had a chance to respond.
Isaac gazed back at him and the Mercedes drifted once more across the center line to a chorus of horns.
“Very astute, Mr. Big Man.”
“Just obvious.”
“You mind explaining it to me?” Blaine demanded.
“Now pay attention,” Isaac told him as he joined the chorus of honking horns caused by the frustrations of an eternal Jerusalem traffic jam that spared not even the sabbath. “The young men in this country are meshuge. We tried to teach them what we knew, help them learn from our mistakes, but no, they’ve got better things to do. Still, we never stop watching, advising. We watched this Hassani plenty. Dangerous man. Stood for all the wrong things. We knew where the path he was on would take him. It was inevitable. So that gives us an idea. You listening?”