“Never!” Elezar shouted, fully awake now and aware of Deker’s words. “I’d sooner have two states and keep the foreign dogs in their pounds.”
“See,” Deker said with a weak smile. “Our heads are up our asses too. So tell me, Hamas or Hezbollah or whoever you are. What do you want? More rockets? I can get them for you. More explosives? Just tell me how you want them delivered. The more you lob rockets, the more you secure the borders of a greater Israel and hurt your own. You are Israel’s secret fail-safe.”
The Jordanian was not amused. He was about to fire another burst of light when Deker’s hand reached out for the rod behind Elezar’s knees. In one smooth motion he slid it out from the chains with a yank and struck the Jordanian on the back of his head with all the force he could muster. As his captor, still conscious but dazed, put his hands up to his head, Deker reached down and pulled out the Jordanian’s sidearm and turned as the other one fired a shot. Deker used the stunned Jordanian as a shield for the oncoming bullet and returned fire, killing his captor with a bullet between the eyes.
Deker looked up to see Elezar, dangling in his chains with the rod removed.
“Get me out!” shouted Elezar, unimpressed by Deker’s latest feat.
Deker unchained Elezar. His superior officer fell to the floor and gasped as his bloody bare soles touched the ground as he rose to his feet.
“Thank you very much, Commander,” Elezar said tightly, and punched Deker in the face, sending another flash of light across Deker’s skull. “You think this erases what you’ve done? I warned the PM not to sign off on your crazy scheme to test the Waqf at the Temple Mount. You thought you were testing their defenses. It’s clear now that they were testing you—the IDF’s weakest link.”
Deker had to steady himself for a moment. Elezar’s weakened fist didn’t land all that hard a blow. But Deker felt as if there were some kind of splinter in his brain and found the sensation unnerving. “Your text alert calling me dangerous didn’t help.”
“I had to stop you before it was too late,” Elezar said. “Instead I find Stern dead at the wheel, and myself captured and tortured.”
“Who knows what you’ve told them?” Elezar went on. “Even you don’t seem to know. Our business isn’t over, Deker. You will answer for this failure in security.”
“What failure in security, Elezar? You getting captured?”
“No, fool. You’re the lowest in the chain of command with knowledge of the fail-safe. They’re going to use whatever you told them along with your breach of the Temple Mount tonight as a pretext for their own attack and pin the blame on us.”
It was bad, Deker knew, worse than he could comprehend at the moment. Still, they had to keep moving, and that meant ignoring the hot-blooded Elezar’s commentary second-guessing everything he did. He had grown used to it over the years. “Let’s go,” he said, grabbing his BlackBerry and explosives pack.
They moved quickly down the outside corridor, the hum of the air-conditioning heavy in the air, and slowed down at intersections with other hallways. But they encountered nobody else and reached a metal door. Deker slid the heavy metal bolt aside and paused. He eased the door open, heart beating as it scraped too loudly against the stone step, and they stepped out into the night.
The horizon was a moonscape dotted with squat, whitewashed concrete boxes, rooftop satellite dishes and minarets. But there was also the unmistakable silhouette of an old Byzantine church on a hill.
Deker’s heart sank. They were much farther from freedom than he had hoped.
“We’re in Madaba,” he told Elezar. “‘City of Mosaics.’”
“Jordan? How do you know?”
“The mosaic on the floor inside—they’re in half the old houses here. And St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church over there. It has that famous tiled mosaic map of Palestine on the floor. Most Christian town in Jordan. Very tolerant.”
“For Christians and Muslims,” said Elezar, “not for Jews like us. Not if bad elements of the GID are involved.”
“If we’re lucky, we can reach the border in twenty-five minutes,” Deker said, working his BlackBerry. “But I can’t get a signal on my phone, and the GID is going to know we’ve escaped in five, if they don’t already.”
Deker checked his pack for his Jericho 9mm, but it was missing. The memory of his last moments struggling in the service van flitted across his brain, and he realized his gun was probably back in that van. His zipped his pack closed with a yank of frustration, then set off down the stone steps toward the street, Elezar behind him.
Deker crept close to the wall, slowing at the end of the alley to motion Elezar to pause while he peered into the street. He felt naked without his gun, vulnerable and angry. And his head pounded. His eyes should have adjusted to the dark by now, but his vision seemed dull and blurry. When a car came down the street, Deker pushed his back against the whitewashed wall, squeezing his eyes shut tight as the beam of the headlights cut through the darkness and seared his brain. He waited for the car to pass, and for both the light and pain to recede.
Deker stepped cautiously into the deserted street and made his way down the sidewalk, concealing himself in doorways and behind hawkers’ stands closed up for the night. They hadn’t gone two blocks before he heard voices and smelled tobacco. Two men stood talking to each other, leaning against the wall of a darkened restaurant. And beyond them in the alley sat a black S-Class Mercedes.
“I’ve got the one on the left, you’ve got the one on the right,” Deker said, his body going cold as they moved forward, the iron discipline of the IDF kicking in. He hit the guard on the left with a blow to the back and then across the Adam’s apple. Elezar simply grabbed the head of the other guard and with a twist snapped his neck. Both men were on the ground without a sound.
Elezar lifted a phone off the driver and tossed Deker the car keys. “You drive!”
Deker threw open the driver’s-side door and jumped behind the wheel, Elezar sliding in shotgun. Deker gunned the engine and shifted into drive, running over an empty fruit cart on the way out of the narrow alley. He switched on the headlights and swung by the roundabout, onto the main road heading north out of town.
3
Deker blew past the turnoff to Amman a mile outside Madaba and cut across the desert in the opposite direction, anxious to avoid roadblocks. In order to secure extraction, they had to contact the Israelis before they reached the Allenby Bridge at the Jordan River. But so far Elezar had no luck finding a wireless signal.
“You’ve got to let our side know we’re coming,” Deker said. “No private vehicles are allowed to cross the Allenby. We’re as likely to die from Israeli bullets as Jordanian.”
“I would if this Arab piece of shit worked.” Elezar banged the phone he had lifted from the Jordanians against the dashboard. “Just drive.”
Deker’s mind, still a jumble of images from his torture, was racing faster than the stolen Mercedes. This mysterious Arab organization had penetrated the Waqf, perhaps now controlled it, and was planning to blow the Temple Mount. No doubt they would leave the Dome of the Rock standing and blame the failed attempt on Jewish extremists—specifically, him and Elezar. Riots would ensue and the Palestinians would declare Jerusalem, at least the Old City, as the capital of a new Palestine. Arab nations, and probably the Russians and Chinese, would instantly recognize the new nation, much as President Truman of the United States recognized the State of Israel in 1948. At that point, arms would flow into the new Palestine, further threatening Israel’s existence and making it even more of an isolated fortress than it already was.
Unless the Tehown was activated.
But the legendary fail-safe required an artifact Israel did not officially possess, one that Deker had buried beneath the Temple Mount. And so far as Deker knew, the Tehownwas more pedestrian than this cosmic gate or tunnel the Jordanian imagined. Now Deker was beginning to wonder if, in fact, he knew as much as he and his dead captors thought he did.
The speedometer showed 120 kilometers, but the Mercedes felt as if it was dragging. Or maybe it was the lingering effects of his torture. The flashes of light seemed burned into his retinas, as if he had stared into the sun too long. Even now, in the dead of night, he couldn’t blink the brightness away. The needle marks on his arm also concerned him, and he wondered what sort of chemical cocktail was coursing through his veins.
