'Who knows?' David shrugged. 'Perhaps some kind of replica. Perhaps even,' he paused, 'something that points to something…some kind of chart or map.'
Uri found the hotel: Stone had spent two nights at the King Solomon Sheraton in Jerusalem. The suite had been reserved a month in advance through a Dallas travel agent.
David spoke to the manager and informally requisitioned a copy of Stone's bill. No log, of course, of his incoming calls, but Stone had phoned out four times. The first call was to Dallas. David dispatched Shoshana to the telephone company to track the other three. Then he recalled Micha from Tel Aviv, suggesting he meet Dov's plane and bring him up as well.
Half an hour later Shoshana was back with names and addresses. The first local call, to TWA's Jerusalem office, was made to confirm Stone's departure the following night. The second was to the Histadrut Street office of the Holyland Arts Foundation, and the third, made at precisely 11 A.M. the day of the accident, was to a public phone booth in front of the Alba pharmacy on Jaffa Road.
'That was the contact point,' David was. 'The meeting was prearranged.'
'So that's it,' Uri said.
'Not quite. It's still a theory.'
'Come on! He makes two sets of hotel reservations, then puts the one he cancels on his immigration form.'
'Pretty suspicious,' Shoshana said.
'Forget suspicious. We need something solid.'
Uri and Shoshana looked at one another. David wondered: Was Stone going to be another dead end like the van?
'Somehow they got him back to the Sheraton,' Shoshana said. 'Found a taxi or took a bus. Trouble is, no one would remember now.'
'But suppose they didn't get him back so quick. Remember: He was injured. Suppose they took him to a hospital first?' He could feel their excitement. 'Well,' he said, 'what are you waiting for?'
They called hospitals, spoke to registrars, checked the records of emergency treatment rooms for the day of the accident. Then, when nothing came of that, they started calling every private physician in Jerusalem. When Micha turned up with Dov, who was jet-lagged and blinking and longed for sleep, David put them on the phones too. At four o'clock Uri stood up.
'Okay, I got him nailed.'
Dr. Shmuel Mendler, interviewed in his Balfour Street consulting room, remembered his American visitor well.
'Oh yes,' said the middle-aged orthopedist when David showed him the TV-set photographs, 'this is the gentleman, Mr. Gerald Morris. No doubt of that. He came to me that day on an emergency basis, referred here by a friend. He'd been in a little automobile accident, he said, and he was in a good deal of pain.'
Dr. Mendler reviewed the patient's chart. 'It was his knee that was injured. I X-rayed it. Nothing shattered, nothing serious. I gave him a shot of Demerol and taped him up. He was flying out to the States that night. I advised him to see his own physician immediately on his return.'
'And who was this friend who had referred Mr. Morris?'
'A neighbor of mine actually. We live in the same building around the corner.'
'On Arlosoroff?' David asked.
'Yes, that's right.'
'A man named Ephraim Cohen?'
'How extraordinary,' Dr. Mendler said. 'How absolutely extraordinary that you should know.'
David entered Stone's name in the middle circle on the blackboard, then stood back and shook his head. 'Gati. Stone. Katzer.'
'So what does it add up to? You told us the middle guy would be the link.'
'They don't belong together, that's for sure,' Uri said.'
'Why not?'
'Two Jews and a Christian. That's some weird kind of match.'
'Yeah, but what kind of Jews are we talking about? And what kind of a Christian? Two Israelis, one a fundamentalist rabbi. And the Christian's a fundamentalist preacher too.'
'So what's Gati doing there?'
David thought about it. 'Maybe we've been looking at this wrong. Maybe Gati's the real link.' Silence. '… Three very different guys and all three claim great devotion to Israel. We've got right-wing Jewish politics and fundamentalist foreign money and in between we've got a military mind. Enough there, seems to me, for one hell of a conversation. And then we've got a half-blind old Russian paid off by Ephraim Cohen, fronting for Stone's Holyland Arts Foundation. He signs drawings of an environmental sculpture that no one authorized, no one cares about, and that's practically impossible to find. Whatever the hell's been going on, we ought to have enough now to put it together. So let's sleep on it, meet here tomorrow at seven, lock the doors, and brainstorm until we figure it out.'
That night he told Anna: 'I keep coming back to this: Ephraim Cohen was a flight commander in Gideon's squadron, and later he was detached to Gati's headquarters as a special aide. You see how it links up. This is just a guess, but suppose Ephraim wanted Gideon to perform some sort of unofficial military mission, the order coming down from the general. When Gideon killed himself, his flight group was out on a practice exercise, each plane fully armed. Then, when Gideon peeled off, no one chased after him or tried to call him back. Gideon was an expert in precision bombing. He'd been one of the sixteen pilots on the Iraqi reactor raid. Gati himself told me Gideon was one of the most talented pilots he'd ever had in his command. Suppose Ephraim told him to fly somewhere and use all those deadly armaments. Suppose that was the mission Gideon refused to perform – to fly someplace and drop his bombs.'
After she fell asleep, David thought about Gideon flying the reactor mission. Enough had been published about Operation Babylon for him to replay the mission in his mind. The planes had taken off mid-afternoon from the Etzion base, descended to less than a hundred feet off the desert floor, then had crossed the Saudi Arabian frontier, and flown for two monotonous hours barely skimming the sand. As they'd crossed into Iraqi territory and approached the reactor, the pilots had suddenly turned up into the sky. Focusing on the great dome of the Tammuz reactor, they dove for it, one plane at a time, each attacking from a different angle and direction. They unloaded their bombs, and screaming up again, flew very high in pairs until they reached Israel and home.
The dome, the great dome of the reactor-it was so thick, so strongly reinforced, that it required direct hits from every plane…
At five o'clock that morning he woke up in a sweat. At last the design was clear: The craters!
There had been no craters in the original drawings, or in the photographs taken just after 'Circle in the Square' had been completed. But craters were clearly visible in Rokovsky's Polaroids. They were what had excited Sokolov and sent him rushing to the foundation to try and extort extra money.
Craters meant bombs. Bombs meant a bombing target. The pilots who'd flown against the Iraqi reactor had practiced for months against a target carved out in the sand.
'Circle in the Square' was a practice target for bombers. And this time too the target was a dome.
He shook Anna awake.
Now I know,' he said. 'I know what they're going to do.' The Ninth! He reached for the phone.
'Rafi?'
He shook his head. 'Today's the Ninth of Av, anniversary of the destruction of our ancient temple. No time now to go through channels. I have to go directly to the minister.'
TO DIE IN JERUSALEM
After Targov woke up he lay in bed, eyes closed, breathing in the sweet aromas. These scents, released from the terraced gardens surrounding Mishkenot, seeped into his room each morning through the barred windows he left open to the breeze. Sometimes there was another smell too, dry and ancient, that came to him from the Old
