Swenson thought about her lecture. You could take all kinds of measurements of deep water, get to know something pretty well, across multiple dimensions, only to discover that you didn’t know it at all. You miscalculated the inundation, the currents of the heart. “What are you going to do?” asked Swenson. Having lost her mother to cancer, she was all too familiar with the hardships of the caretaker.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let this be a lesson to you. Academia is a political cesspool, with no financial return. I should have left and gone to work for some oil company years ago. Now it’s too late. Look at me. I’ve got nothing left. I’m as dead as Doris.” His voice broke. “But you,” he continued, clutching at his scuffed brown leather case, “you still have a chance to get away. Get away, Emily,” he stammered, leaning close to her, his brown eyes bulging, a drop of spittle on his lips, his breath unbearable.
Just then, there was a soft knock on the door. White and Swenson both looked up. The door swung open with a creak, revealing a small, Middle Eastern-looking man in the doorway. “Dr. White,” he said in English as he glanced about the hall. “It is getting late.”
Dr. White brushed past the desk and headed for the door. His dark companion had already disappeared. As he pressed his briefcase to his chest, White turned and said, “Don’t forget what I told you. Please, Emily. Don’t wait. Get away. Get away before it’s too late.”
SECTION II
Jami
Chapter 5
Seiden sat in his office at Mossad headquarters, re-reviewing El Aqrab’s file. After a preliminary study, no one could come up with a plausible explanation as to why the infamous terrorist had come back to Israel to kill this particular family. According to neighbors, Ariel Miller managed a furniture store. His wife was a secretary in an advertising agency. Miller was a drunk, fat and unfaithful. Harmless, really. Except for a brief stint, years before — when he’d served as a guard at Ansar II prison in Gaza, during his compulsory conscription — Miller had never done anything that would remotely connect him to Islamist terrorists. And El Aqrab had never been in prison, not even as a boy.
Perhaps it was just a random act of violence, just as the words El Aqrab burned into his victims’ flesh were random snippets from the Qur’an. Or some kind of killing for hire, or for a friend who had been in prison. Seiden was mystified. One thing was clear though: El Aqrab had positioned his victims in a particular way. Miller had been facing north-northwest, directly away from Mecca, as if in a kind of anti-prayer. And the boys perpendicular to him, at right angles to the Muslim holy city.
Seiden stood up, picked up the file, and headed out the door, down the long green corridor toward the holding cells.
“Hello. My name is Saul Weinstein,” he said, as he entered Interrogation Room B. It was a small cell, barely five meters long, and three and a half meters wide, with a mirror running the entire length of one wall, and a small desk by the door. In the far corner, the prisoner stood chained to the ceiling by his wrists, facing the other way. “This won’t take long, perhaps an hour or two,” Seiden continued. “I need to update your file. Your… interrogator has been delayed.”
He took a DVD from the folder under his arm and slipped it into a player on the desk connected to a nearby television set. Seiden turned the screen so that it was visible to both himself and El Aqrab. Then he dropped the folder onto the desk, sat down and flipped it open. “It says here you were born Mohammed Hussein, on February Third, 1963,” he began in an off-hand kind of way. “In a town called Rihane in Jezzine. It’s your birthday soon. Congratulations.”
El Aqrab did not respond.
“The son of Jusef and Fatima Hussein,” Seiden continued. “Your father was a… ” He glanced down at the file, although — of course — he already knew the information intimately. “… part-time electrician and handyman who moved north to Beirut to work in the various stores and office buildings owned by wealthy business mogul Hanid ben Saad.” He looked up at El Aqrab but the terrorist remained impassive. He did not even turn around.
“You began to work with your father,” Seiden continued, “in one of Hanid ben Saad’s many properties when you were just eleven. Your parents were killed by the Israeli Army in Rihane in March of ‘78, when we attacked PLO positions in south Lebanon. This was in retaliation for the murders of some thirty bus riders by Palestinian guerrillas. They were not alone, your parents. I believe fifteen hundred Lebanese were killed in that engagement.
“After your parents’ death,” Seiden continued, “you joined Imam Musa Sadr’s Movement of the Deprived, Harakat al-Mahrumin, the precursor of Amal and Hezbollah. That was the same year that Musa Sadr ‘disappeared’ in Libya, no doubt at the hands of Colonel Khadaffi. It was around this time that you acquired the street name El Aqrab. How did you get that name?” Seiden asked. “I’m curious. You look very little like a scorpion, Mohammed.”
El Aqrab turned around for the first time. He was a slight man with narrow shoulders and even narrower hips. His face was thin, almost haggard in its appearance, with high cheekbones framing a beak-like nose. He had a wispy black beard, thin as an adolescent’s. In fact, he looked much younger than his forty-two years. Were it not for his eyes, large and deeply set, obsidian and glassy, he could have passed for thirty.
The terrorist grinned, lending his face a lupine quality; his canines were unnaturally large. Then he spoke for the first time. “I know you,” he said in Arabic. “You were at the apartment. Your name isn’t Saul Weinstein. It’s Seiden. Acting Chief Seiden. What time is it?” It was a pleasant voice that served to mollify his predatory gaze.
Seiden looked at his watch. “Why?”
El Aqrab did not respond. He simply stared at Seiden.
“Almost five,” said Seiden.
The terrorist nodded, smiled and turned away.
El Aqrab remembered the day that he had taken on the street name El Aqrab — the little creature of the spider, the scorpion. An Israeli commando unit had infiltrated across the Green Line to kill a particular Harakat al-Mahrumin commander. It was a sunny morning and, typical of the arrogant Zionists, they’d mounted their mission in broad daylight. After assassinating the commander in his bed, the 101 commando team was traveling back by jeep, east of the Green Line, just past the Military Hospital near the Arab University, when, without warning, they came upon two teenagers wandering across the road — Ibrahim and Jamal ben Saad. Ibrahim saw the jeep barreling down on them and pushed his older brother to the side. Just then, a rocket-propelled grenade exploded underneath the vehicle. The jeep tipped over, spilling the commandos onto the street. Two of the five Zionists were killed immediately, their bodies crushed and torn to pieces. The other three wormed their way along the street, taking heavy fire from an adjacent building and a vacant lot. Ibrahim and Jamal ben Saad were both caught in the crossfire. They threw themselves to the ground, uncertain of which way to turn. They watched as yet another of the commandos took a bullet in his chest. He somersaulted backwards, opening like a pomegranate. Then, as if from nowhere, out of a cloud of smoke, Mohammed Hussein appeared.