Читать книгу The Spoils of War - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 8

Acco

It was after midnight when Rashid emerged from the tunnels under Acco. He left by way of new digs into the crusader city; they were unguarded and had opened new routes to the surface for him. One came up just outside the north walls, close enough to the sea that he had to wade the last few yards through water filthy with refuse in his wavering flashlight. He washed as soon as the water looked clean. Then he picked his way along the stone shoring intended to keep ancient Acco from washing into the Mediterranean until he passed the walls and entered the industrial zone to the north. There he climbed up into the over-lit modern night and squelched his way to a bus stop. By the time a bus came, he was nearly dry. Neither of the two passengers gave him a glance.

He was going to the apartment of Salem’s girlfriend. He didn’t like her, but he had nowhere else to go. She would tell him what had happened. She would know where to find Salem.

Even his feet were almost dry by the time the bus dropped him a few meters from her apartment, a heavy building with too much concrete and too little glass. From the street, he could see a paid security guard in the lobby. He had been here before, many times. Salem had virtually lived in her apartment after he met her.

He walked around the building, hungry, thirsty, and every time he slipped his side gave a pulse of pain like a knife-jab. Yesterday, or perhaps two days ago, he had had everything a man his age could want—a job, a place to live, a wonderful friend—

Before he could start crying again, Rashid pushed himself up the steps and into the lobby. The guard did not raise his head from his Koran, and Rashid went by. The building had elevators that actually worked. Rashid hit the up button and waited. When the doors opened, he entered, panicked briefly when he saw a man coming up from the garage with him, and then made himself press the button for sixteen. The man smiled at him and then frowned at his shoes, good American basketball shoes now caked with filth and still damp.

“I got lost,” Rashid said.

The words hung in the air between them. Rashid knew immediately that talking had been a mistake. The other man looked away. The elevator came to a stop on twelve and the man got out, looking at Rashid as he left and then at the digital floor display as if to check where Rashid was going.

Rashid felt his hands begin to shake. He clenched them.

The doors shut.

Rashid was sure that the man intended to call the desk when he reached his apartment. If Saida refused to see him, he would be taken, perhaps handed over to the police.

The doors opened on an empty corridor. Rashid stumbled forward, rattled and apprehensive. Saida was a hard woman, but she wasn’t bad.

A slut, his mother said.

He got to her door, still confused about what to say when she answered, and knocked. He should have called before he came, but he had little money, and in movies, people could be traced by their cell phones. He knocked again, put his ear to the door and knocked as loud as he dared.

The elevator departed behind him with a loud hum and whir of hydraulics and pulleys. He listened to it as it ran all the way down to the lobby without stopping.

He knocked again.

She wasn’t home.

The stairwell was locked on the ground floor, he knew. He didn’t want to face the security in the lobby by going down the stairs.

The elevator was coming back up.

He tried to turn the handle of her door. Locked, of course.

He tried again, as if strength could break a lock. Suddenly, his apprehension turned to panic at the approach of the elevator and he put both hands on the knob and wrenched at it, throwing his weight against the door.

The knob suddenly turned freely, and he stumbled through and the door slammed shut behind him. He tripped and fell sprawling with a crash as loud as the slam of the door. His flailing hands found paper, clothes, pans—

The balcony light shone through the sliding doors at the end of a short hall. The floor of the entire apartment, bigger than the place he shared with his mother, was covered in papers and trash. Every item in every drawer, every sheet of paper, had been rifled and tossed on the linoleum.

The lock had been forced. That’s why he had got in so easily.

Two thoughts seemed to occur to him simultaneously: that whoever had done this might still be there, and that the lobby security might be coming up in the elevator, might enter and assume he had robbed her. The association of the two thoughts froze him on the floor.

The elevator ran and ran, a pulse-like vibration allowing him to count the floors.

It stopped. The doors opened. It was this floor; someone got out and walked swiftly up the hall, and then back down it. Rashid held his breath, sure, sure that it was the guard. Unable to move. With nothing between him and arrest but an unlocked door. The man moved and stopped.

And moved.

And stopped.

Rashid saw the guard’s feet under the door against the light of the outside hall. In his mind, he prayed. Inshallah, Inshallah, Inshallah.

Allah’s will was that the guard should walk on. He moved down the corridor a few more doors, stopped, and came back.

The elevator doors opened and closed again and the car began to move.

Rashid breathed.

What if she was here, dead? That was a foolish thought, born of fatigue and the alien landscape in which he suddenly found himself. It was like finding himself on the set of an American horror movie.

He couldn’t push it out of his mind. In movies, the dead person was always in the bathroom. The bathroom was the next room on the hall.

He wished he had a weapon. He forced himself to crawl to the light-switch and threw it. All the lights came on, revealing the destruction of Saida’s effects more cruelly than the hallway lighting had done. He peered into the bathroom and saw no body. Emboldened, he moved into the kitchen, found a clean glass on a paper on the floor, and drank her expensive bottled water from the refrigerator. He drank three bottles before he was done; then he ate a sandwich that was days old but tasted wonderful.

Saida’s absence left him with no options. No money, no place to go, no one to beg for help. But his brain began to run again, and the panic drew back to the edge of his consciousness.

He had to get out of this building.

He had to get money.

He had to find Salem, although it was increasingly clear to him that Salem was in deep trouble. Rashid knew he had found something—something wonderful. Salem could not hide his feelings from Rashid. And he had taken things from the dig—Rashid had seen them in a gym bag in Salem’s car.

The men beating Salem at the dig, pounding him with their fists and the flat of a shovel. Yelling abuse. Telling Salem he was a thief. And Rashid, Salem’s loyal friend, had run away and hidden in the old tunnels under the city.

He went into the bedroom. The epicenter of the apartment’s wreckage. He started to go through the piles of clothing the searchers had thrown on the floor.

Salem’s clothes were in a separate pile. Rashid dug into it for Salem’s Navy coat; he didn’t wear it in Gaza, where American sailors would hardly be popular, but he often wore it in Israel where the opposite was true. Up in the padding of the shoulders was Salem’s emergency stash. Salem had shown it to him, once, with a joke.

“It’s my fly-away money,” he had said.

A thousand dollars in American bills, crisp and neat. And a tiny hard rectangle that felt unfamiliar. Rashid pulled it out and tried to remember what it did. He took another swig of water and remembered. He was holding a flash card, the memory of a digital camera. And Salem had hidden it.

He pocketed it with the money. He took the peacoat, because it was warm and dry and it was Salem’s. It made him feel taller.

He still had to leave the building. He poked through the rubble of Salem’s life with Saida and found a pair of his boots, rubberized duck shoes that Salem had seldom worn because, he said, they hurt his feet and were too hot. They fit poorly, but with the peacoat they made him look like a young man of means. They gave him the confidence to take the elevator and face the man at the desk.

As the elevator descended, he found he was calm. Perhaps too tired to feel more fear.

“She’s not home,” the guard said when Rashid emerged. The tone was on the edge of accusation.

“I know,” Rashid replied, walking steadily to the doors. Whatever the guard might have wanted to ask, Rashid kept going, volunteering nothing, a tactic that seldom failed him, until he was out on the street in the cold winter rain. When the guard finally opened her apartment, he, Rashid, would be the obvious suspect. Then the police would join Hamas in searching for him.

His life here was done. He was going to find Salem, and the place to look was back in the occupied territory. So be it. Rashid felt the crisp bills in his pocket and headed for a bus stop.

Naval Criminal Investigative Service HQ, Naples, Italy

“Aw, shit!”

Mike Dukas was looking at a message directing him to do something—urgently—and his people were already stretched thin and he didn’t have time for Mickey Mouse. His hand hit the phone.

“Dick,” he growled, “get in here.”

“Your wish is my, mm, suggestion.”

Dick Triffler was the ASAC—the Assistant Special Agent in Charge, NCIS Naples. He was a tall, slender African American with an oddly high voice and a manner so precise that he seemed to be doing an imitation of somebody—Clifton Webb, maybe, or William F. Buckley. He had worked with and for Dukas off and on for years and had always been eager to transfer someplace else; Dukas had been astonished, therefore, when Triffler had requested to be ASAC when Dukas had taken over Naples as Special Agent in Charge. Asked why, Triffler, who had been running his own long-term investigation on the West Coast, had said, “I thought I needed a challenge.”

Now Triffler came in, buttoning a black blazer over a blueon-blue striped shirt and a thick silk tie that, in an office where Dukas was wearing an ancient polo, made it look as if the Prince of Wales was visiting a homeless person. “You rang?” Triffler said as he sat down, pulling one knife-creased pant leg over a knee.

“I got a Rummygram telling us we urgently got to get the closeout details on some poor ex-Navy bastard who died in Tel Aviv. What the hell, is this any way to run a war on terrorism?”

“What war on terrorism?”

“The one we’re waging twenty-four-seven throughout the universe. Isn’t that what all this paperwork is about? Jesus Christ, I’ve got five drunken sailors in foreign jails, three sex abusers, a phantom shitter on the Fort Klock, and we’re supposed to be looking under the beds for al-fucking-Qaida! Now I’ve got to scrape up somebody to do scut work in fucking Tel Aviv! Let the naval attaché do it!”

“You’re venting again. That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it—to listen to you vent. As you know, naval attachés have better things to do, like looking for a good place to have lunch, and dealing with dead sailors in foreign places is our charge.”

Dukas sighed. “Well—yeah, it’s our business—so who’s near Tel Aviv? The Jefferson’s already in the Canal. Athens office is too busy. We got anybody who can take a day and go?”

Triffler’s laugh was deliberately false. “How about Al Craik? He’s in Tel Aviv even as we speak.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Your wife told my wife.”

Dukas stared at him, stuck his lips out, raised an eyebrow. “That’s some network you got—two wives. You ever think of going into intelligence?”

Triffler stood—an impressive unfolding of long-boned limbs. “Am I done being vented at? You get in touch with Al.”

“You giving the orders now?”

“Somebody has to do it.”

Dukas scowled at his retreating back and then put out his hand for the phone and called Fifth Fleet, Bahrain, to ask where Commander Craik was staying in Tel Aviv.

Washington

In the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) mint-new Office of Information Analysis, the workday went on longer even than in the White House. The atmosphere of the place was that of a great business enterprise at the top of its game—buoyant, aggressive, determined, and overworked.

For a thirty-five-year-old named Ray Spinner, the place was salvation. He’d got bounced from the Navy for passing privileged information to his power-lawyer father; Dad had placed him in OIA to make it up. Now, Spinner reeled through his workdays in a frenzy half joy and half terror (Could he measure up? Could he be hardline enough? Did he dare to ape the bosses and wear power suspenders?). It was better than the Navy had ever been, but scary.

Sitting in a cubicle among twenty other cubicles, he was watching a message come up on his computer. New data came first to people like him; he knocked out the obvious bullshit and passed the rest up the line. The criteria had little to do with either authenticity or reliability and everything to do with usefulness to the office’s main goal—just then, getting something going in Iraq. He had already made the mistake of knocking out a report from a defector who said he had overheard a third party say that sarin gas was being manufactured nights and weekends in a Baghdad elementary school; it had been made very clear to him that this was precisely the kind of intelligence that was wanted, and if he made the same kind of dumb-nuts mistake again, he’d find himself handing out towels in the men’s room.

Spinner therefore really bore down now. The bit he was looking at struck him as a no-brainer—forwarding of a Tel Aviv police department memo about some dead A-rab.

Yarkov District police tonight reported death of Salem Qatib, Palestinian, resident West Bank. Held US student visa 1994-95, ex-US Navy reserve.

Meaning that the informant thought the dead guy might be of interest because he had US connections. Wrong. The real question was, Was he a terrorist? Well, let’s see. Spinner brought up OIA’s own list, which was different from the CIA’s and the FBI’s and much longer, and he didn’t find Salem Qatib as a terrorist but did find him on the Purgatory list (“not in Hell, but nearby”) of people “tracked for conflate background”—that is, for combining at least two suspicious factors. Like being Palestinian and having served three years in the US Naval Reserve.

As a cryptologist.

Hey, whoa!

Cryptologists had high security clearances and were tracked for years after they left the service because they had had access to sensitive stuff—codes, for example, that might not be changed for a long time. So Qatib must have been tracked, and he appeared to be clean, but OIA still had him on the conflate list because Palestinian plus cryptology equaled possible spy, right?

So. It wouldn’t do to make another mistake. Which he could do either by bumping this one up the line (but the word was that the White House was tired of the Palestinian problem), or by killing it (but maybe there was a secret interest in Palestinians that he didn’t know about).

Naval Reserve. That meant that the Navy would have to do a red-tape write-off—certify that the guy was dead, close his files, tie up all the loose ends of debts and pensions and all the other petty crap that the bean-counter mind could think of. So who did that?

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service, that’s who.

Nearest office to Tel Aviv? Athens. He looked at the Athens roster, didn’t recognize any names—Spinner liked to deal with friends—and noted that Athens was actually under NCIS Naples, so looked there. And my God, Mary, look at that—the Special Agent in Charge, Naples, was an asshole named Mike Dukas!

Spinner grinned.

Mike Dukas had been the prick who’d got him read out of the Navy.

So Spinner forwarded the Qatib report to Michael Dukas, SAC NCIS Naples, blind-copied to his own boss at OIA, with the terse order, “Check implications anti-terrorism and terrorist connections and report back ASAP.” He put the name of OIA’s head at the bottom—a stretch, but permissible. He sent it Urgent.

Up yours, Dukas. He could just see the overweight, glowering, blue-collar Dukas hunched over the message, trying to figure out why he’d been told to jump, and to jump urgently.

Spinner grinned. He stood, stretched, looked over his cubicle wall at a guy going by wearing red suspenders. Yeah, he’d look drop-dead good in those.

Tel Aviv

Alan Craik was sitting on a hotel-room bed, a telephone in his hand. His wife, mostly naked, came out of the bathroom and turned, her back to him, to rummage in a suitcase. He grinned at her back. “Sexy buns.”

On the telephone, a voice barked, “Dukas.”

“My God, you mean I was holding for you? If I’d known it was you, I wouldn’t have waited.”

Rose ran back toward the bathroom, an irrelevant nightgown fluttering from her shoulders.

“I got a favor I want you to do me.”

“The answer is no.”

“No, the answer is yes. There’s nothing to it; it’ll give you something to do in Tel Aviv while Rose shops.”

“How the hell’d you know where I am?”

“Rose talked to Les a couple days ago. Les talked to Triffler’s wife. You can’t have secrets, man.” Les—Leslie—was Dukas’s new and pregnant wife; she and Rose were pals. “Anyways—”

“Yeah?”

“This is strictly routine—I gotta have somebody from the Navy get a death certificate. A guy died, ex-Nav. Find out what the story is, blah-blah-blah. Anybody could do it.”

“Get anybody.”

“There isn’t anybody! Look, the guy died; we gotta make it possible to close out his file, notify next of kin, all that. Just do it, will you?”

“Meaning what?”

“Piece o’ cake.” Dukas told him where to go in Tel Aviv—the main police building on Dizengoff Street—and the victim’s name—Salem Qatib.

“That’s an Arab name.”

“Palestinian.”

“Mike, a Palestinian who’s ex-US Navy?—in Tel Aviv—?”

“Just do it, will you? Fax me the death certificate and anything else you get. And don’t overdo it—forget you’re an intel officer and just be my errand boy. I’ll fax the dead guy’s paperwork to the embassy.”

He would have objected, but Dukas had hung up and his wife came out of the bathroom, and when she saw his face, she said, “Now what?”

Bayt Da Border Crossing, Gaza

Rashid spent the bus drive across Israel handling his papers and his Israeli passport, and imagining how he might handle the border crossing. He was dirty—even his eyes felt dirty—but the other passengers going to Gaza weren’t much cleaner.

When he had worked on the site, it had been easy, because he had been in Salem’s car and Salem had a work permit—bogus, in that it mis-stated Salem’s reasons for being in Gaza, but real enough and issued under the seal of the Palestinian Authority. Salem knew how to get such things.

In two hours of tired worry, Rashid concocted a simple story to cover his visit; a girl he had met in Acco, the need to see her again. True enough, if he substituted Salem for the girl. He rehearsed his story to himself, staring at his passport and his travel documents, until the bus slowed to a stop in the morning line at the border crossing. The bus was half empty. Rashid felt alone, and his anxieties were pushed into his stomach and his limbs. He had to put the passport down because it showed the trembling of his hands.

The bus inched forward in the line, surrounded by barbed wire and graffiti-covered concrete, steel reinforcement rods rusting away in long brown streaks. The stink of leaded gasoline fumes filled the air around him, came in through his open window and bit at his throat.

Before they reached the checkpoint, armed Palestinian Authority security men came on to the bus. One of them took the passenger list from the driver and read through it. Another, younger, officer checked through the documents that passengers had; passports, work permits, sometimes only letters from a possible employer and an identity card.

The man with the passenger list made a call on his cell phone. The bored young man with an AK on his back flipped through Rashid’s Israeli passport.

“Where do you live?” he asked.

“Acco.”

“Purpose of your visit?” he asked, looking carefully at Rashid’s travel documents.

Rashid hadn’t seen him ask anyone else these questions, and he started to tremble again. “I’m—I’m going to see a—girl.”

The man laughed. He was only a little older than Rashid.

Rashid relaxed a little, and then the man with the passenger list pointed at him. “Rashid Halaby?” he said.

The younger guard nodded, held up Rashid’s passport.

“Take him.”

Tel Aviv

Dressed and waiting for his wife, Alan Craik was thinking not of her but of how thoroughly their world had changed since September eleventh. He was not thinking in sequence, not being rational or logical, rather letting his mind leapfrog from idea to idea; in fact, there was no logic, only the sequence of time itself, certainly no meaning. September eleventh obsessed his world, but he was oddly not quite of it: he had been on an island in the Gulf of Oman on September eleventh, miles from a television set, and he had not seen those images as they had burned their way into the world’s consciousness. He saw them later, to be sure; he had been shocked, saddened, angered, but he had missed the raw outrage—and the fear—that had gripped so many people. The difference was that he had not seen the horror live on television:

The island was rocky scrub and sand. There were goats, lots of them, many apparently wild. People walked into and out of this landscape as if passing from another reality into his and then out again. The sky came down like gray, hot metal and the sea, a smell wherever he went, was rarely visible. He was doing the red tape on the setting-up of a Navy sonar station, a job that could have been done and done better by a lieutenant with some sonar experience, but he was out of favor at Fifth Fleet, out of favor with the new flag and the new flag captain. The flag captain had said that there was no place for him there anymore and they’d expedite a new duty station for him but they didn’t want him as their intel, didn’t want his kind, whatever that meant. But he knew what it meant: a risktaker, a man who thought that out on a limb was where intel was done best.

He was out at the site, watching the goats, the odd Bedouin. Nothing was happening. He was thinking that they didn’t need him there at all. Right at that moment, they didn’t need him anywhere. Then his cell phone rang and the world changed. It was Sully, a CIA security thug who was a bully but the right man to have if people started shooting at you. Sully pushed people around verbally by saying the things that you didn’t say when the dynamics among people were fragile or explosive—sex, politics, religion—and now he said, the very first thing he said, “Al-Qaida just re-elected George Bush to a second term.” Then he had explained that a jetliner had crashed into the World Trade Center and other passenger aircraft were missing and bad shit was going down.

The event had jerked him from the job at Fifth Fleet to one as a Temporary Additional Duty case officer at Central Command, Qatar. He had been twice to Afghanistan since then, three times to Kuwait, once to Pakistan, once to Iran, all in the four months since that remarkably, perhaps fantastically, lucky, successful, outrageous al-Qaida hit. He had gone from vengefulness to resignation, then to a kind of skeptical sadness.

“Penny?” Rose said.

He took her hand. “I was thinking that al-Qaida did things right, and we’re going to do things wrong.”

“Still chewing on it.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I don’t want to go rushing back to a squadron to throw myself at bin Laden, if that’s what you mean.”

She’d been really hurt, he knew, by bailing out of the astronaut program. The Navy had lost some of its zest for her; he thought that it was that loss that had let her get pregnant again, driven her, maybe, back on her kids and on him. “There’ll be plenty of time to go to a squadron,” he said. “Years.”

“Another war, you think?”

“Oh, yeah. Lots of them.” He stood up, kissed her. “Bin Laden has arranged our futures for us.”

“We make our own futures.” She believed in self-determination.

“I thought so until this happened, but now—” He shook his head. “I keep wanting to look up to see who’s jerking my strings.” He straightened his clothes, pulling on himself as if he were rearranging his body, and they went to the elevator. He told her, in a different, heavier voice, that he was going to run Dukas’s errand while she shopped for presents for their kids. “I’m going there now and I should be done by two, and we’ll have a late lunch and then I’ll mosey over to the embassy and arrange to have them send the stuff to Mike.”

“I want to see a movie. Let’s go to a movie.”

“In Hebrew? Anyway, I’ve seen Harry Potter as much as I can stand.”

“It might be more interesting in Hebrew.”

On the street, he warned her for the third or maybe the fifth time of what to look for to avoid car bombs; he told her to duck if anybody started shooting, because half the crowd in any given spot would be armed; he told her to be careful of the baby. She told him he was a fuss-budget and she loved him and she’d see him at two o’clock.

He was back to thinking about September eleventh. “Everybody’s scared here,” he said. “Scared people scare me.”

Naples

Mike Dukas flicked a paper across his desk to Dick Triffler. “What the hell is an Office of Information Analysis?”

Triffler studied the paper. “It’s a secret office in DoD to do an end run around the intel agencies.”

“What the hell?”

“Folks who don’t like it call it the Office of Intellectual Paralysis. Folks who do like it think it’s the latest thing in what they call ‘intelligence reform,’ which means doing the Alley Oop around worn-out old shitkickers like the CIA, the FBI, and the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. We are, and I think I quote, ‘tired, old, liberal, and nitpicking.’ It’s do-it-yourself intel.”

“How come you know all that and I don’t?”

“I read The New Yorker.”

“Some secret.”

Triffler looked up over the rims of his reading glasses. “The New Yorker has an excellent track record. You should read it.”

“I don’t have time to read. So why the hell is this secret bunch of bureaucrats sending me a message to do what I already did anyway, namely get things moving on this guy who died in Tel Aviv?”

Triffler took off the glasses. “You’re a bureaucrat, too, after all.”

“That’s the worst thing you’ve ever called me.”

“No, it isn’t. You just didn’t hear the others. Done with me?”

“I smell fish. Rummy’s errand boys don’t send me messages by name. Somebody’s after me. Well?”

“Sounds right.”

“Check it out, will you?”

Triffler sighed. “If I say ‘Why me?’ will you do it yourself?”

“No time.”

Triffler sighed again. “The black man’s burden,” he said. He went back to his own office and got on the phone to a friend who taught public policy at Howard University. The woman was deep into Washington’s Democratic political scene, a good bet for elective office if she ever wanted it. “I need some information,” he said.

“Are you the Dick Triffler who’s tall, thin, and a dynamite dresser?”

“My word for it would be ‘elegant.’”

“Your wife is so lucky.”

“Tell her that.”

“Information is my middle name, honey; what d’you need?”

“There’s a new office in DoD called Information Analysis. I want to know who works there.”

“This administration’s pretty tight in the ass, hon.”

“You’d win my undying gratitude.”

“That your best offer?”

“At this distance, I’m afraid so.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

What she did was call a grossly overweight but unpredictably vain man in the office of a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. He had been an aide for a decade, knew where bodies were buried and who had held the shovel. He loved information, which he hoarded and then dealt like cards in a game of cutthroat stud.

“What’re you offering, chickie?”

“Well, I was just offered undying gratitude, how’s that?”

He laughed. “For gratitude, I don’t even give out the correct time.”

She cajoled, joked, reminded him of her usefulness in promoting legislation for his member.

“You promoting my member, sweetie? You haven’t set eyes on my member yet!”

“Spare me the Clarence Thomas jokes. You going to get me what I want or not?” She let an edge show in her voice; he got it. Business was business, after all. He’d need her, she was saying—each in his turn. He sighed. “You one tough lady. I’ll get back.”

The fat man slicked his wavy hair back—shiny, very like Cab Calloway’s, he thought—and checked his reflection in a window and called a guy he knew at the Pentagon. “Whose dick I gotta lick to pry loose a list of folks in some shithouse called the Office of Information Analysis?” he said.

Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv is a city of beautiful women and ugly architecture; the first make up for the second. Craik found it a pleasure to walk.

The police station on Dizengoff Street was on a par with the city’s other buildings, but at least it looked as if being a cop was a good thing—clean, solid, windowless. The entrance didn’t invite you in but announced that going in, with the right credentials, would be easier than getting out with the wrong ones.

He showed his passport and his part-timer’s NCIS badge. “Commander Craik, US Navy. About the death of Qatib, Salem.”

The policewoman at the inquiries desk spoke better Hebrew than she did English, but she wrote some things down and got on a telephone. Meanwhile, a plain-clothes detective was looking Alan over and probably realizing that he wasn’t armed—Alan, like most of the men in Tel Aviv, was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and slacks—while Alan was looking him over and deciding that the extra tuck on the right side of his shirt covered an in-the-waistband holster, and his slightly cocked left foot might suggest an ankle gun.

People went by as if they were heading for a somber event, heads down, moving fast. The space was big, harshly echoing, lighted with banks of fluorescents overhead; the noise of footsteps was like some sort of clattering engine. Move, move, the noise, the atmosphere seemed to say; get in and get out, don’t linger, we’re serious here.

“Commander Alan Craik?”

The man was blond, chunky, purposely likable. He had a Browning nine-millimeter in a very visible shoulder holster and he smiled as if he really was glad to see Alan. Maybe he was simply glad to see anybody who would allow him to strike an item off his to-do list. “Detective Sergeant Berudh.”

They shook hands. Berudh led him toward a bank of elevators, one hand behind Alan’s left arm; he was chattering about the building—how big it was, how many different offices it housed, how many crimes they covered a day. “You’re US Navy,” he said abruptly. “Not from a ship, I think.”

“No, not from a ship.” Habit kept him from saying where he was stationed just then. Which was absurd, of course, because the Israelis would already know. And they were allies. More or less.

Berudh was silent in the elevator, surrounded as they were by worried-looking people who were certainly not police. The elevator smelled of nervousness, Alan thought. Then two young women got on, smiling, bouncy, and chattered as the elevator rose. They worked there and seemed to say, “What is there to be nervous about?”

“Only the police are at home in a police station,” he said when they got off.

“And why not? Everybody’s guilty about something.” Berudh led the way down a corridor. “Most of them are here for permits, licenses, getting papers stamped, but they feel guilty. Actually, it makes the job easier.” He held a door open. “You’re NCIS?”

Alan explained that he had a badge but it was left over from earlier duty. “The special agent in charge of NCIS, Naples, asked me to do this for him.”

“Scut work,” Berudh said and gave him the smile. Berudh spoke American English with a slight accent, clearly knew American slang. “We work with NCIS when there are ships in Haifa, stuff like that. Sailors come down here, get in the usual trouble sailors do, we have to arrest them, blah-blah-blah. But we’re all friends.”

He was leading Alan through a room that had half a dozen desks in it, fluorescent lights overhead, a computer on each desk and a man or woman working at each one. More guns were in evidence here, some hung in their holsters on chairbacks.

“Okay.” Berudh sat behind the only empty desk, pulled a metal chair over for Alan. He offered coffee or tea or soda, told a quick joke, surprised Alan by asking to see his ID. “I know you ID’d yourself at the door and at reception, but it’s a rule. Death is serious business, isn’t it?” He looked over the passport and the badge, made some notes, and sat back. “Okay.”

He had a thin pile of photocopies and computer printouts. He began to hand them across the desk, naming each one as he did so—“Initial contact sheet—log sheet—physician’s report—death certificate—telephone log, that’s only to show when we notified your embassy—” The pages were clean, all typed, neat, efficient, but in a language Alan couldn’t read. Berudh explained that Qatib, Salem, had begun his police connection as an unidentified corpse in Jaffa, another of Tel Aviv’s sub-districts, then been logged in as a homicide, then identified from missing-person calls placed by his family.

Alan could have taken the papers then and left, but a perverse sense of duty made him ask questions he wasn’t at all interested in. “How come if he was found in Jaffa, you’re handling it here?”

“Question of internal politics.” Berudh made a face. “Yarkov District claims control over all cases of wrongful death. Not that we handle them all. Our homicide people are very territorial.”

“How long had he been missing?”

“Unh—” Berudh half-stood and leaned over to look at Alan’s pages. “You’ve got a page from our missing-persons log—it’s small type, very dense—” Alan held up a page; Berudh squinted at it and said, “I think the first call came in about eleven p.m.” Berudh rattled through a translation of the missing-persons page: a woman’s voice had made the first call, identified herself as a girlfriend; the victim hadn’t turned up for dinner at his cousin’s. They looked at the physician’s report. The man had been dead an estimated seven to twelve hours when the doctor had examined him.

“But no autopsy,” Alan said.

“No, no, no. Arabs are against that.”

“Can I see the body?” He hoped the answer was no.

“We released him to the family pretty much as soon as the doc was through with him. Off to the West Bank.” Berudh raised his hands. “Coffin was closed.”

Something pinged in Alan’s brain but didn’t quite connect, and he said lamely, stalling until the connection was made, “You don’t have a suspect.”

“At this point, no. Mugging? Girlfriend? Palestinian infighting?” He shrugged. “This guy was in your Navy, but a Palestinian can be into anything. Hamas, Fatah—he could have had a suicide belt stashed someplace, chickened out, got punished. They’re all fanatics.”

Alan signed a paper that said that he had in fact received all the stuff in his hand, and Berudh, smiling again, gave him a dark blue plastic folder with something in Hebrew on it and TLVPD in English in white letters. “It’ll keep them neat; they blow in the wind, you know; we always have a breeze, it’s the sea—that’s Tel Aviv, my friend, the Fort Lauderdale of the eastern Med—” He was seeing Alan to the elevator, explaining twice how to get out of the building, assuring him that if there was anything, anything he could do—and was gone.

In the vast lobby, assaulted again by the clatter of echoes, Alan crossed among the worried people heading for the elevators and looked with relish at the thin slice of the outdoors that showed through the guarded entrance. Guilt. Even when you weren’t guilty of anything, you felt it. He thought of September eleventh: Yes, it’s guilt, as if I could have stopped it. Which was nonsense.

It was at that point that his brain made the connection he’d missed earlier. According to the two-page file Dukas had faxed him—Qatib’s short personnel record and an ID sheet—he had had family in the States. But the body, Berudh had said, had been sent to the West Bank. Maybe the family had moved back? Or the parents had divorced and one had come back? Or—?

Instead of leaving the police building, ignoring Dukas’s plea not to be an intel officer, he went to the information desk and said to the same young woman, “I’d like to talk to somebody in Homicide.” Why hadn’t he asked to see Berudh again? he wondered. Because you check one source against another. He pointed at the signature on the first page in the blue folder Berudh had given him. “This person,” he said, figuring that one way in was as good as another.