League of Night and Fog Page 5

  "Son, I'm fine. I just..." Sorrow cramped his throat, choking his voice. Erika's strong arm hugged him. "What's wrong, Saul?"

  "I..." Wiping his eyes, he struggled to explain. "We killed them all.

  But if..." He mustered his strength. "If I'd run here right away, if

  I'd looked out only for us, for you and Chris, then everything I tried to teach those kids in the village... every principle about the group being more important than the individual... would have seemed a lie.

  The next time we were attacked, they'd have looked out for themselves instead of..." In the dark, Chris nuzzled against him. Erika hugged him tighter. "You're a dope." Surprised, he stifled his emotion. "What?"

  "We're professionals. Or used to be. We both know what combat means.

  Personal needs are a luxury. If the group doesn't defend itself, no family has a chance. The minute the shooting started, I grabbed Chris with one hand and this Uzi with the other. I told myself that if you were still alive, you'd do what the rules required--and so would I.

  Which in my case meant hiding our son and protecting him. And which in your case meant doing your best to protect the village. There's no need for tears. I dearly love you. My job was to guard the family, yours to defend the group. I've got no complaints. If anything, I'm proud of you. We did it right" Saul had trouble breathing. "I love you."

  "After the village calms down, when we organize a sentry schedule and it gets dark and we put Chris to bed, I'd be glad for you to show me how much."

  Twenty minutes later, an Israeli combat helicopter circled the rocky fields around the village, checking for other invaders. Two trucks filled with soldiers jounced along a potholed road and stopped at the outskirts. Their eyes reminding Saul of hawks, the soldiers scrambled down, scanned the devastation, and snapped to attention while a captain gave them orders. Well-trained, strongly disciplined, they established defensive positions in case of another attack. A squad searched the pockets of the enemy corpses. A hot wind blew dust.

  The captain, his face like a shale slope furrowed with gulleys, came over to Saul. "Your radio team said the attack had been subdued." He gestured toward the bodies. "Isn't 'crushed' more accurate?"

  "Weir--Saul shrugged--"they pissed us off."

  "Apparently." The captain lit a cigarette. "The way I hear it, the last thing anyone should want to do is piss you off. It's Grisman, right? Saul Grisman? American? Former CIA?"

  "That gives you a problem?"

  "Not after what just happened.

  This must be Erika." Saul turned. He hadn't heard Erika come up behind him. "Christopher's next door," she said. "He's still afraid, but he promised he'd close his eyes and try to sleep. He's being watched." She faced the captain. "You were with the Mossad," the captain said to her.

  "I'm surprised this village isn't boring for you." 'Today it certainly hasn't been." The captain cocked his head toward the teenagers holding

  M-16s. "Where are the men?"

  "In the military," she said. "Or Jerusalem, or Tel Aviv. This is a village of widows, orphans, and deserted wives. It was barely hanging on when we got here."

  "But that's what we wanted," Saul said. "A place on the edge of the world. So we decided to improve the civil defense."

  "You're telling me these kids, with some help from you, took care of this team?"

  "All they needed was a little encouragement." Grinning, Saul hugged the two nearest teenagers. "My source says that you" the captain told Saul,

  "had a reason for wanting to get away from it all."

  "Did he say what my reason was?" The captain shook his head.

  "Allergies."

  "Sure. My source also said that you" he told Erika, "could have stayed in Israeli intelligence. Your record was clean. So you didn't have to come here."

  "Wrong," she said. "I had the best reason possible."

  "What?" 'To be with him." She gestured toward Saul.

  The captain drew on his cigarette. "Fine. What happened here--I have a few problems about it"

  "I know," Saul answered. "So do I."

  "For starters, this team wasn't just a bunch of amateurs. They're well armed. Soviet weapons. It wasn't impromptu--they'd planned the attack, six approaching this side of the village, the other six the other. That number of men, it isn't easy, it takes a lot of determination, and a damned good reason, to try to sneak past our border defenses. A village in contested territory, I could see them trying for it. A strategic target--let's say an air base, a munitions site--a risky surprise attack would make sense. But a village of widows, orphans, and deserted wives?

  Fifty miles from the border? What's going on?"

  "Don't think it hasn't worried me," Saul said.

  At sunset, a dusty sedan arrived. Outside the ruin of what had been home, facing a small fire fueled by the wreckage he'd carried out, Saul heard the engine as he ate rehydrated chicken noodle soup and watched

  Erika spoon the broth to Christopher's mouth. Glancing up, he saw soldiers step from cover and gesture for the driver to stop at the edge of the village. The car was too far away, its windshield too dusty, for

  Saul to see who sat behind the steering wheel. The soldiers spoke to someone inside, examined the documents they were handed, and turned toward the village, pointing the driver in Saul's direction. The car approached. Saul stood. "Do you recognize it?" Erika peered at the car and shook her head. "Do you?"

  "This 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, (he 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.

  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 a us 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

  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 robes 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 creat
ion 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