Saul stood. “Do you recognize it?”
Erika peered at the car and shook her head. “Do you?”
“The village is getting too crowded.”
The car stopped twenty feet away. Villagers watched suspiciously from open doors. The driver shut off the engine. Something wheezed beneath the hood. A man got out.
He was six feet tall, thin, his shoulders bent slightly forward. He wore a rumpled suit, the top button of his shirt open, his tie hanging loose. He had a mustache, a receding hairline. Saul guessed that he was in his late thirties, and sensed that his thinness was due to enormous energy held in check, constantly burning calories even when sitting at a desk, a position suggested by the stoop of his shoulders.
Grinning, the man approached. Saul had never seen him before, but the delight in the stranger’s eyes made it clear that the stranger knew him.
In a moment, Saul realized his mistake.
It isn’t me he knows.
It’s Erika.
Her eyes glinted with the same delight as the stranger’s. She smiled broadly, ecstatically, her voice an incredulous whisper. “Misha?”
“Erika.”
She rushed forward, hugging him. “Misha!” she whooped.
Saul relaxed when he heard the name. If his guess was right, the last name would be Pletz. He’d never met the man, but he remained grateful for favors that Misha—at Erika’s request—had done for his foster brother and himself three years ago.
He waited respectfully until Erika stopped hugging Misha. Then stepping forward, holding Christopher in his left arm, he extended his right. “Welcome. Are you hungry? Would you like some soup?”
Misha’s grip was strong. “No, thanks. I ate two bagels in the car. They gave me heartburn.”
“I often wondered what you look like.”
“As I did you. About your brother—I’m sorry.”
Saul nodded, retreating from painful emotion.
“Misha, why aren’t you in Washington?” Erika asked.
“Two years ago, I was transferred back to Tel Aviv. To be honest, I wanted it. I missed my homeland, my parents. And the transfer involved a promotion. I can’t complain.”
“What’s your assignment now?” she asked.
Misha reached for Christopher’s hand. “How are you, boy?”
Christopher giggled.
But Misha’s avoidance of Erika’s question made Saul uneasy.
“He’s a fine-looking child.” Misha surveyed the ruined building behind the small fire. “Renovations?”
“The interior decorators came today,” she said.
“So I heard.”
“Their work wasn’t to our liking. They had to be fired.”
“I heard that as well.”
“Is that why you’re here?” Saul asked.
Misha studied him. “Maybe I’ll have some soup, after all.”
They sat around the fire. Now that the sun was almost gone, the desert had cooled. The fire’s heat was soothing.
Misha ate only three spoonfuls of soup. “Even while I was in Washington,” he told Erika, “I knew that you’d come here. When I went back to Tel Aviv, I kept up with what you were doing.”
“So you’re the source of the rumors the captain heard,” Saul said. He pointed toward the officer who stood at a sentry post on the outskirts of the village, talking to a soldier.
“I thought it was prudent to tell him he could depend on both of you. I said he should leave you alone, but if you got in touch with him, to pay attention to what you said. I wasn’t trying to interfere.”
Saul watched him steadily.
“After what happened here today,” Misha said, “it was natural for him to get back to me, especially since the raid had its troubling aspects. Not just the pointlessness of attacking a village so far from the border, one with no military or geographic value.”
Saul anticipated. “You mean their fingernails.”
Misha raised his eyebrows. “Then you noticed? Why didn’t you mention it to the captain?”
“Before I decided how much to depend on him, I wanted to see how good he was.”
“Well, he’s very good,” Misha said. “Dependable enough to share his suspicions only with me until I decided how to deal with this.”
“We might as well stop talking around it,” Saul said. “The men who attacked this village weren’t typical guerrillas. Never mind that their rifles still had traces of grease from the packing crate, or that their clothes were tattered but their boots were brand-new. I could explain all that by pretending to believe they’d recently been reequipped. But their fingernails. They’d smeared dirt over their hands. The trouble is, it hadn’t gotten under their nails. Stupid pride. Did they figure none of them would be killed? Did they think we wouldn’t notice their twenty-dollar manicures? They weren’t terrorists. They were assassins. Imported. Chosen because they were Arabs. But their usual territory isn’t the desert. It’s Athens, Rome, Paris or London.”
Misha nodded. “Three years out here, and you haven’t lost your skills.”
Saul pointed toward the ruined building behind him. “And it’s pretty obvious, the attack wasn’t directed against the whole village. Our home took most of the damage. The objective was us.”
Erika stood, walked behind Misha, and put her hands on his shoulders. “Old friend, why are you here?”
Misha peered up sadly.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Erika, your father’s disappeared.”
4
The stability of the past three years had now been destroyed. The sense of peace seemed irretrievable. The constants of his former life had replaced it—tension, suspicion, guardedness. Escape was apparently impossible. Even here, the world intruded, and attitudes he’d been desperate to smother returned as strong as ever.
In the night, with Christopher asleep at a neighbor’s house and Misha asleep in his car, Saul sat with Erika by the fire outside the ruin of their home.
“If we were the target,” he said, “and I don’t think there’s any doubt that we were, we have to assume other teams will come for us.”
Erika repeatedly jabbed a stick at the fire.
“It wouldn’t be fair to allow our presence to threaten the village,” he added.
“So what do we do? Put up a sign—the people you want don’t live here anymore?” The blaze of the fire reflected off her eyes.
“They’ll find out we’ve gone the same way they found out we were here.”
“But why did they come at all?”
Saul shook his head. “Three years is a long time for the past to catch up to us. And my understanding with the Agency was if I stayed out of sight they’d pretend I didn’t exist.”
“That’s one thing we did, all right,” she said bitterly. “We stayed out of sight.”
“So I don’t think this has anything to do with the past.”
“Then whatever the reason for the attack, it’s new.”
“That still doesn’t tell us why.”
“You think it’s coincidence?”
The reference was vague, but he knew what she meant. “Your father’s disappearance?”
“Yesterday.”
“And today the attack?”
“Bad news always seems to come in twos and threes,” she said, “but …”
“I don’t believe in coincidence. The obvious shouldn’t be ignored. If a pattern stares you in the face, don’t turn away from it.”
“So let’s not turn away,” she said.
“You know what it means.”
She poked the stick harder at the fire. “It’s another reason to abandon our home. What’s left of our home.”
Saul thought about the irrigation ditches he’d worked three years to construct and improve. “It makes me angry.”
“Good. This wasn’t worth having if we give it up easily.”
“And we don’t have a chance against whoever we’ll be hunting if we go after
them indifferently.”
“I’m not indifferent about my father. One of the sacrifices of living out here was not seeing him.”
The fire crackled. Erika suddenly stood. “We’d better get ready. The men who attacked us did us a backhanded favor. What’s left of our possessions we can literally carry.”
“To find out what happened to your father.”
“And pay back whoever drove us from our home.”
“It’s been three years.” Saul hesitated. “Regardless of Misha’s compliments, are we still good enough?”
“Good enough? Hey, for the past three years, I’ve just been resting. The people who took my father will wish to God they’d never messed with us when they find out exactly how good we are.”
THE PENITENT
1
South of Cairo, west of the Nile. The Nitrian Desert. Egypt. It wasn’t a mouse this time but a lizard he was watching, and it didn’t do tricks as Stuart Little had. It didn’t tug Drew out of his self-denying shell. It didn’t make him miss the company of others—his friends, or even strangers. All it did was crawl from its hole beneath a rock and bask in the sun for a few hours just after dawn. At dusk, it stretched out on a slab, absorbing radiant heat. Between times, during the full destructive blaze of the day, it hid. A foot-long, squat, wrinkled, yellow, unblinking, tongue-flicking testament to God’s perverse creative whims.
Slumping in the dark at the back of the cave, Drew watched the monster assume its regular morning position at the tunnel’s entrance. He hated the thing and for that reason tolerated it, because he knew that God was testing him. The lizard was part of his penance. As the sun rose higher, sending rays into the cave, Drew surveyed the rocky contours of his cell, comparing their bleak austerity to the relative luxury he’d known for six peaceful years in his simple quarters in the Carthusian monastery in Vermont. Again he compared the lizard, which he alternately called Lucifer and Quasimodo, to Stuart Little, the mouse that had been his companion for the last two years of his stay at the monastery. But the mouse had been killed, assassins had attacked the monastery to get at Drew, and he’d been forced to leave his haven, a sinner confronting a sinful world. The resulting events—his war with Scalpel, his reunion with Arlene, his encounter with the Fraternity of the Stone—had paradoxically redeemed him and yet damned him again, compelling him to seek out this hole in the rock in the desert where Christian monasticism had first begun, here to strive once more for purity through penance and the worship of God.
He’d done so for a year now. With no change in seasons, each day tediously the same as the one before, time seemed strangely extended and yet compressed. The year could have been an eternity or a month or a week. His only ways of measuring how long he’d been here were checking the growth of his hair and beard and watching his food supply, which gradually dwindled until he had to trek across the desert to the nearest village, a day away, and replenish his simple provisions. The villagers, seeing this tall, lean, sunburned man with haunted eyes, his robe in rags, gave him distance and respect, conferring upon him the status of a holy one, though he refused to consider himself as such.
Apart from that interruption, his routine was constant—exercise, meditation, and prayer. Lately, however, he’d felt too weak to exercise and lay at the back of the cave, intoning responses to imaginary masses. He wondered what the lizard thought of the Latin that sometimes made it cock its ugly unblinking head toward him. Or was its reaction due to nothing more than stimulus-response? If so, what purpose did this monstrous creation serve? A rock, though unthinking, had a beauty to be appreciated. But the lizard could not appreciate the rock, except for the heat its ugly yellow skin absorbed. And no conscious being could appreciate the obscenity of the lizard.
That was the test, Drew thought. If I can appreciate the lizard, I can save myself. I can show that I’ve opened myself to every aspect of God.
But bodily needs disturbed his meditation. He had to drink. A spring—one reason he’d chosen this spot—was not far away. As usual, he’d postponed slaking his thirst, partly to increase his penance, partly to increase his satisfaction when he did at last drink. This balancing of pain and pleasure caused him great mental stress. He finally resolved it by concluding that the pleasure of drinking had been intended by God as a survival mechanism. If he denied himself that pleasure, if he didn’t drink, he would die. But that would be suicide, and suicide was the worst sin of all.
In his weakened state, his thoughts began to free-associate. Pleasure, pain. Arlene, and being separated from her. If things had been different, he could imagine nothing more rewarding than to have stayed with Arlene for the rest of his life. But the Fraternity of the Stone had made that impossible. To save Drew’s life, Arlene’s brother had killed a member of the Fraternity, and to save his savior, Drew had made himself appear to be the guilty one, running and hiding. Craving love, Drew had sacrificed himself for love of a different type.
He tried to move, to get to the spring, but couldn’t. His lips were blistered from thirst. His body was ravaged by his failure to eat. His mind began to swirl. The lizard raised itself, repelled by the heat of the day. It scuttled beneath its rock. Time became even more fleeting. A shadow hovered over the entrance to the cave. Was it sundown already?
Or am I hallucinating? Drew wondered. For the shadow became the silhouette of a human being, the first such silhouette Drew had seen here since he’d occupied this cell. It couldn’t be.
But the shadow, growing longer, did indeed become the silhouette of a person.
And the person impossibly was—
2
When she saw the lizard scuttle from the mouth of the cave, Arlene muttered, “Shit.” More forcibly, she felt a stab of suspicion that she’d been given wrong directions. After all, would the lizard have chosen that vulnerable spot in which to soak up heat if the cave were occupied? The way the squat ugly reptile had jerked its head toward the clatter of the rock she’d dislodged as she climbed the slope, the way it had tensed and fled as her shadow fell over it told her unmistakably that the lizard had been frightened by her alone, not someone in the cave. Did the corollary follow, that the cave was deserted?
She paused, discouraged, but the heat of the sun on her back thrust her forward. Exhausted, so dehydrated that she’d stopped sweating, she needed to get to shelter. She plodded the rest of the way up the slope, her shadow stretching toward the cave, and strained to see within the darkness. The silence from inside reinforced her suspicion that she’d been misdirected.
The question was, had the misdirection been an honest mistake or a deliberate deception? Yesterday morning, two hours after she’d left the nearest village, her rented car had stopped, its engine coughing into silence. An experienced mechanic, she’d lifted the hood and tried to diagnose the problem, but she couldn’t find what was wrong. She’d debated returning to the village, but the distance she’d traveled by car was a half day’s walk, almost the same amount of time it would take to continue forward and reach her destination. She’d filled her canteen before she left the village. Familiar with desert survival, she knew that if she conserved her body’s moisture by resting in shadow during the heat of midday, hiking at dusk and through the night, she’d have enough water to reach this cave in the morning, with enough left over to return. Provided she rationed her intake.
But when she’d made camp just before noon, anchoring a thin canvas sheet across the space between two boulders, crawling under to shield herself from the worst of the sun, she’d heard the faint crunch of footsteps—from behind her and to her right. Their stealthy approach had told her everything. She’d been unwilling to risk using her handgun, the reports from which would have carried for miles across the otherwise silent desert and perhaps have attracted other predators. So she’d pretended to be alarmed and defenseless when the two Arabs, each wearing a sun-bleached cotton headscarf and robe, confronted her with pistols, gesturing for her to take off her clothes. Distracting them with a glimpse of her bre
asts, she’d pivoted, kicking, disarmed the nearer gunman by breaking his wrist, continued spinning with the blur of a dervish, kicked the second assailant’s gun-hand, again snapping bone, and killed them in rapid succession with fists to the throat, cracking their windpipes. It happened so quickly that they died still leering. She hid their bodies among rocks where the scavengers of the desert would dispose of them. Proceeding to another campsite, again erecting the thin canvas sheet, she wondered whether the men had found her by accident or whether they’d followed her from the village where she’d asked directions. If the men who’d tried to assault her were indeed from that village, if they’d sabotaged her car, it wasn’t surprising that this cave was abandoned—she’d been given false information simply to lead her deeper into the wilderness.
Again she despaired. Having come all the way from New York City, only to find that her search was not yet over, she wanted to raise her fists and curse at the sky. But she needed to escape the sun. The thought of rinsing her dry swollen mouth with tepid water from her canteen compelled her. A tall, limber, green-eyed, auburn-haired, sensuous woman, in her mid-thirties, wearing a wide-brimmed canvas hat, a knapsack, khaki shirt and pants, and hiking boots, she aimed her handgun against unseen dangers and entered the cave.
3
It smelled vinegary, like carbon dioxide. Beneath that odor was another—a musky animal smell that made her conclude that the cave had recently been used for a den.
Standing just inside the entrance, blocking out the sunlight, she stared toward the darkness. Though the cave was by no means cool, it was much less hot than the outside inferno. Handgun ready, she held her breath, straining to listen for sounds.
“Drew?” Her voice was tentative, uneasy. After all, if he were here, he’d have spoken to her by now. Unless, like the lizard, he’d noticed her coming and scuttled to a hiding place. In which case, her quest had been useless, her hope that he’d welcome her a cruel tease.