“When we fire the Qassams over the fence, the Israelis cancel all the VIP cards and the chiefs can’t go to Tel Aviv to fuck their Russian whores. We’ve got a bunch of Qassam s in a warehouse right here in the camp. You want to buy one?” Khaled pushed his chair back and stood. “We’re going. You’ll make sure the UN doesn’t come looking for anyone in Gaza City, right? Rafah’s where all the strings have been pulled. It’s them you want.”
Omar Yussef remembered what Odwan had told him about the key to Wallender’s freedom being held by the head of the Saladin Brigades in Rafah. “Okay, but you have to get me a meeting with Abu Jamal.”
There was a long silence. Sami picked up the remaining half of his falafel and tapped its crust against the edge of his plate. Khaled eyed the green center of the falafel angrily.
“Sami will hear from us about that,” Khaled said.
“This afternoon?”
“Go to Rafah. I’ll be in touch with Sami on his cellphone and I’ll tell you where to meet Abu Jamal.”
“We’ll go there right away.”
Khaled swallowed hard. “Don’t be in a hurry. Abu Jamal isn’t that easy to reach. Sami will hear from us.” He walked backward to the metal door. Walid mumbled a farewell and followed. Khaled leapt up the concrete steps three at a time and Walid trotted after him, pulling the door shut with a heavy clank.
“What they said about the Revolutionary Council isn’t true, Sami. You told me yourself that no one mentioned James’s murder at that meeting,” Omar Yussef said, excitedly.
“That’s what Abu Adel told me.”
“He was present at the meeting. We can trust what he said.”
Sami smiled and shrugged. “Of course.”
“Yasser Salah must have told these guys that Husseini had promised to arrest them, so that they’d assassinate Husseini. But why? Yasser Salah wanted Odwan killed for murdering his brother, and Husseini did exactly that: he killed Odwan in his prison cell.”
Sami gestured toward the door through which Khaled and Walid had left. “Those two are pretty scared. They realize that this is something bigger than they expected. They also see that it reaches high up, and they don’t know who they can trust, in the Saladin Brigades or the security forces.”
“But why would Yasser Salah want Husseini dead?”
Sami ate the second half of his falafel ball. As he swallowed, he lit another cigarette and dropped three five- shekel coins on the table. “Let’s go and ask Abu Jamal,” he said.
Chapter 25
When Omar Yussef and Sami returned to the Jeep, a layer of dust an eighth of an inch thick covered the black paint. Omar Yussef pulled the door shut behind him and blinked the dirt from his eyes. “This storm is going to break tonight, Sami. It’s thicker than it has been,” he said.
Sami glanced at him as he turned the key in the ignition.
“We might be in Rafah late and you’re only wearing a shirt,” he said. “I’ll stop at the hotel for you to pick up a sweater on the way south.”
“If you’re so worried about my health, perhaps you ought to get me a bullet-proof vest.”
“So you don’t want to be a martyr?”
Omar Yussef gave a choking laugh. “If the food in that restaurant didn’t kill me, nothing can.”
Sami leaned forward over the wheel, swung the rear end of the car around and propelled the jeep back through the refugee camp.
Omar Yussef braced himself against the door and closed his eyes. A faceless man appeared behind his eyelids, dressed in the stocking cap and black vest of a gunman, prodding Omar Yussef with a Kalashnikov. The gunman was gone when he opened his eyes. They stung from the dirt in the air. These eyes have no rest, he thought. Open, they fill with the filth that floats around Gaza; when I shut them, they’re prey to deadly nightmares.
An order was out to kill him. Would it be a gunman in a stocking cap who pulled the trigger on him? Would it be quick? Humiliating, like the death of Moussa Husseini, in the street with his underpants full of crap? Terrifying and long, like Bassam Odwan’s torture? Was he next, or was he only holding a number in a long line of victims? How much time did he have?
Sami took a right off the Saladin Road and up through the souk to Omar al-Mukhtar Street. He leaned on the horn when a service taxi stopped in the road to pick up a couple of women laden with bags of vegetables.
“This order to kill me, Sami,” Omar Yussef said. “If it succeeds-”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Abu Ramiz.” Sami hit the horn with three short bursts. “Let’s go,” he shouted, shaking his head.
“Just if. I would like you to be in touch with my family in Bethlehem.”
Sami smiled as he lit a cigarette. “You want me to tell your wife you loved her?”
“Just say that I liked the website very much.”
Sami frowned. “What website?”
“They’ll know.”
The taxi moved off slowly, and Sami edged along less than a yard behind its rear fender, waiting to overtake.
“Abu Adel says that sometimes it’s a mistake to tell you what’s really going on, because you overreact,” Sami said.
Omar Yussef wondered what else Khamis Zeydan had told Sami about him. “You said there’s an order out to kill me, so how am I overreacting?”
“There’s always someone who wants to kill you, whoever you are, Abu Ramiz.”
“So now you’re like Bassam Odwan, who believed he would die when Allah determined his time had come?”
“Well, was there anything Bassam Odwan could have done about that moment? Maybe it’s better to accept that death is coming and that it’s in the hands of someone else, whether that’s Allah or General Husseini or those two guys we just met back in the camp. It might be unknown when and how death comes, but in Gaza there should be no surprise that it’s on its way.”
“Is there someone who wants to kill you, Sami?”
“Only this fucking taxi driver.” Sami leaned on the horn again. He swung the car into the opposite lane and roared past the long yellow taxi, making a few pedestrians jump onto the sidewalk. “Abu Ramiz, I’m not as old as you and I don’t have your wisdom, but there’re things that I’ve had to learn fast-things which perhaps you’ve never known, working in your classroom at the school.”
“You’ve had many hardships, my son, I know.”
“If there’s one thing my life has taught me, it’s that killing is easy and dying is easier. Suffering is hard.” Sami looked at Omar Yussef and, for a moment, his face rearranged itself into that of a much older man, deeply lined and sagging with the weight of troubling experience. Omar Yussef wondered if Sami would live to be that old.
As they rounded the traffic circle on the beach road, the dust storm was thicker than ever. The sea was barely visible beyond the Salaam Fish Restaurant. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, but Sami had the headlights on. He turned onto the beach road and rolled past the Deira Hotel toward the Sands. Omar Yussef stared into the gloom.
A jeep’s red brake lights punctuated the dust cloud ahead. The back door flew open. A man dropped out of the jeep, stumbled and fell. Omar Yussef strained forward. The jeep was at the entrance to the driveway of the Sands Hotel.
“Sami?”
“I see it.”
Sami accelerated.
The man struggled to his feet, lifting himself without the use of his arms, which seemed to be cuffed or tied behind him. He took a few quick steps toward the perimeter wall of the Sands Hotel, halted and looked in both directions. Confused, he moved to his left, then to his right, and turned to face the jeep. He crouched, poised to run,
