at those Swiss grunts, eyeballed over where the doc and his friend were, then he just kept going. End of story.” There were times when Chavez wished he'd opted to remain in the Army. He would have had his degree and his commission by now instead of cramming in night courses at George Mason while he played bodyguard to Ryan. At least the doc was a good guy, and working with Clark was… interesting. But this intelligence stuff was a strange life.
“Time to move,” Clark advised.
“I got the point.” Ding's hand checked the automatic clipped under his loose shirt. The Israeli guards were already moving up the street.
Ghosn caught them just as he'd planned. The Swiss had helped. An elderly Muslim cleric had stopped the squad sergeant to ask a question. There was a problem with translation, the imam didn't speak English, and the Swiss soldier's Arabic was still primitive. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.
“Excuse me,” Ghosn said to the imam, “can I help with translation?” He absorbed the rapid-fire string of his native language and turned to the soldier.
The imam is from Saudi Arabia. This is his first time in Jerusalem since he was a boy and he requires directions to the Troika's office.'
On recognizing the seniority of the cleric, the sergeant removed his helmet and inclined his head respectfully. “Please tell him that we would be honored to escort him there.”
“Ah, there you are!” another voice called. It was obviously an Israeli. His Arabic was accented, but literate. “Good day, Sergeant,” the man added in English.
“Greetings, Rabbi Ravenstein. You know this man?” the soldier asked.
“This is Imam Mohammed Al Faisal, a distinguished scholar and historian from Medina.”
“Is it all I have been told?” Al Faisal asked Ravenstein directly.
“All that and more!” the rabbi replied.
“Excuse me?” Ghosn had to say.
“You are?” Ravenstein asked.
“A student. I was attempting to assist with the language problem.”
“Ah, I see,” Ravenstein said. “Very kind of you. Mohammed is here to look at a manuscript we uncovered at a dig. It's a scholarly Muslim commentary on a very old Torah, Tenth Century, a fantastic find. Sergeant, I can manage things from here, and thank you also, young man.”
“Do you require escort, sir?” the sergeant asked. “We are heading that way.”
“No, thank you, we are both too old to keep up with you.”
“Very well.” The sergeant saluted. “Good day.”
The Swiss moved off. The few people who'd taken note of the brief encounter pointed and smiled.
“The commentary is by Al Qalda himself, and it seems to cite the work of Nuchem of Acre,” Ravenstein said. “The state of preservation is incredible.”
“Then I must see it!” The two scholars began walking down the street as rapidly as their aged legs would carry them, oblivious to everything around them.
Ghosn's face didn't change. He'd shown wonder and amusement for the benefit of the Swiss infantrymen now halfway down the block, themselves with a trailing escort of small children. His discipline allowed him to sidle off to the side, take another turn, and vanish down a narrow alley, but what he had just seen was far more depressing.
Mohammed Al Faisal was one of the five greatest Islamic scholars, a highly-respected historian, and a distant member of the Saudi royal family, despite his unpretentious nature. Except for his age — the man was nearing eighty — he might have been one of the members of the troika running Jerusalem — that and the fact that they'd wanted a scholar of Palestinian ancestry for political reasons. No friend of Israel, and one of the most conservative of the Saudi religious leaders, had he become enamored of the treaty also?
Worse still, the Swiss had treated the man with the utmost respect. Worst of all, the Israeli rabbi had done the same. The people in the streets, nearly all of them Palestinians, had watched it all with amusement and… what? Tolerance? Acceptance, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. The Israelis had long ago given lip-service to respect for their Arab neighbors, but that promise had not even been written on sand for all the permanence it had carried.
Ravenstein wasn't like that, of course. Another scholar, living in his own little world of dead things and ideas, he'd often counseled moderation in dealings with Arabs, and handled his archaeological digs with Muslim consultation… and now…
And now he was a psychological bridge between the Jewish world and the Arab one. People like that would continue doing what they had always done, but now it was not an aberration, was it?
Peace. It was possible. It could happen. It wasn't just another mad dream imposed on the region by outsiders. How quickly the ordinary people were adapting to it. Israelis were leaving their homes. The Swiss had already taken over one settlement and demolished several others. The Saudi commission was set up, and was beginning to work on restoring land parcels to their rightful owners. A great Arab university was planned for the outskirts of Jerusalem, to be built with Saudi money. It was moving so fast! Israelis were resisting, but less than he had expected. In another week, he'd heard from twenty people, tourists would flood the city — hotel bookings were arriving as rapidly as satellite phone links could deliver them. Already two enormous new hotels were being planned for the influx, and on the basis of increased tourism alone the Palestinians here would reap fantastic economic benefits. They were already proclaiming their total political victory over Israel, and had collectively decided to be magnanimous in their triumph — it made financial sense to be so, and the Palestinians had the most highly developed commercial sense in the Arab world.
But Israel would still survive.
Ghosn stopped at a street cafe, set down his bag and ordered a glass of juice. He contemplated the narrow street as he waited. There were Jews and Muslims. Tourists would soon flood the place; the first wave had barely broken at local airports. Muslims, of course, to pray at the Dome of the Rock. Americans with their money, even Japanese, curious at a land even more ancient than their own. Prosperity would soon come to Palestine.
Prosperity was the handmaiden of peace, and the assassin of discontent.
But prosperity was not what Ibrahim Ghosn wanted for his people or his land. Ultimately, perhaps, but only after the other necessary preconditions had been met. He paid for his orange juice with American currency and walked off. Soon he was able to catch a cab. Ghosn had entered Israel from Egypt. He'd leave Jerusalem for Jordan, thence back to Lebanon. He had work to do, and he hoped the books he carried contained the necessary information.
Ben Goodley was a post-doctoral student from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. A bright, good- looking academic of twenty-seven years, he was also possessed of enough ambition for the entire family after which the school had been named. His doctoral thesis had examined the folly of Vietnam from the intelligence side of the equation, and it had been sufficiently controversial that his professor had forwarded it to Liz Elliot for comment. The National Security Advisor's only beef with Goodley was that he was a man. Nobody was perfect.
“So, exactly what sort of research do you want to do?” she asked him.
“Doctor, I hope to examine the nature of intelligence decisions as they relate to recent changes in Europe and the Middle East. The problem is getting FOI'd into certain areas.”
“And what is your ultimate objective? I mean,” Elliot said, “is it teaching, writing, government service, what?”
“Government service, of course. The historical environmental demands, I think, that the right people take the right action. My thesis made it clear, didn't it, that we've been badly served by the intelligence community almost continuously since the 1960s. The whole institutional mindset over there is geared in the wrong direction. At least”—he leaned back and tried to look comfortable—“that's how it often appears to an outsider.”
“And why is that, do you think?”
“Recruiting is one problem. The way CIA, for example, selects people really determines how they obtain and analyze data. They create a gigantic self-fulfilling prophecy. Where's their objectivity, where's their ability to see trends? Did they predict 1989? Of course not. What are they missing now? Probably a lot of things. It might be nice,” Goodley said, “to get a handle on the important issues before they become crisis items.”
“I agree.” Elliot watched the young man's shoulders drop as he discreetly let out a deep breath. She decided to play him just a little, just enough to let him know whom he'd be working for. “I wonder what we can do with
