On that front, Unit 8200 was working miracles. They had terrifying Skype call intercepts of terrorists talking about “devastating” and “catastrophic” and “imminent” operations inside the American homeland. The attacks would come “soon” and “without warning,” the jihadists insisted. Yet there were no details, nothing definitive and actionable. And tensions were rising.
The intel and the accompanying analysis had been given to the prime minister, who passed it along to President Taylor and his national security team. The White House wasn’t showing any new interest in hunting down Abu Khalif, but the Israelis were determined to be good allies, passing along what they had, and not just to the American intelligence community but to Jordanian, Egyptian, and the Gulf state intelligence agencies as well.
The team was spent. We were eating and sleeping in the bunker. People’s nerves were raw. Tempers were short. Arguments were flaring. I hadn’t been aboveground since we flew back from Jordan, and I’m not sure the rest of the team had seen the light of day since Yael and I had departed for Egypt.
Now, responding to Yael’s request, I followed her into the corridor. Suddenly we were alone.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said.
The rain had stopped, and the grounds were surprisingly dry. Spring seemed to have sprung across Israel’s northern tier when we weren’t looking. The clouds had parted. The temperature was in the low seventies. A lovely breeze was coming in from the sea. Grass was starting to grow. Flowers were starting to bloom. Trees were beginning to bud. It felt amazingly good to be out of the bunker, breathing fresh, clean air.
“So what can I do for you, boss?” I asked, happy to be stretching my legs and walking with my friend, even if I had no illusions the conversation was going to be anything but professional. “And make it snappy, if you don’t mind. I’ve been chewing on a new theory I want to run past you.”
She took a deep breath, then stopped and turned to me. “I’m afraid there’s no easy way to say this. But I have to. It’s my job.”
“Why? What is it?” I asked.
“J. B. . . . Ari and I think it’s time for you to go back to the States.”
“What?”
“Don’t get me wrong. You’ve been an enormous help, especially these last four days. But Ari and I have been discussing what King Abdullah said, and the bottom line is the king is right. The risks to you and your family by you staying here in the region are way too high. Ari and I have been reviewing the intel over the last few days. The king was spot-on. The ISIS guys are gunning for you, and Khalif really has issued a fatwa calling for Muslims everywhere to find you and your family and kill you on sight. A spokesman for ISIS just released it on the Internet about fifteen minutes ago. By tomorrow, every radical Muslim on the planet will be looking for you.”
I didn’t say anything. I was hurt. Angry. But I knew there wasn’t anything I could say to change her mind, much less Shalit’s.
We started walking again, tracing the perimeter of the base along the interior fence. A jeep patrol rode by. We nodded to the security team and kept going. The final rays of the sun were slipping below the Carmel Mountains. Dusk was falling. The lights of the base were flickering to life.
“You’re not going to say anything?” she asked.
“What should I say?”
“I don’t know. I thought you’d at least make an argument to stay.”
“Would it help?”
“No.”
“So what’s the point?”
We kept walking.
“It’s probably best you call the Learjet company tonight,” she said after a while. “Let them know you’ll be ready to fly back tomorrow to wherever you came from. I don’t want to know, so please don’t tell me.”
I said nothing.
“We can chopper you out of here after ten tomorrow. You can say good-bye to the team. I think you can schedule a departure for noon or so out of Ben Gurion or Herzliya, whichever you’d prefer.”
Another five minutes passed, and I realized what a sprawling base this really was. We’d barely covered half of the perimeter, if that, but it was growing dark and even a bit chilly.
“Listen,” she said, “it’s getting late and I’m getting hungry. Can I drive us someplace and buy you a farewell dinner?”
I just looked at her. She wasn’t kidding. After all we’d been through together, this was really the end. I was going “home” to hide, without winning the heart of this girl, and Abu Khalif was still out there killing.
“Sure,” I said.
What else could I say?
85
It was a Friday night in Israel.
The Sabbath had just arrived. That meant no Jewish-owned restaurants would be open. So we climbed into her bright-red Jeep Grand Cherokee and drove to a little Arab restaurant in Nazareth.
“You really do hate me, don’t you?” I said as we parked and I realized where we were.
“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked, looking a bit hurt.
“The leader of ISIS just put out a fatwa on my head, and you’re taking me to an Arab hot spot for dinner?”
She smiled and lowered her voice. “Don’t let on that you know, but every diner in this place tonight is a Mossad agent. We’ll be very safe.”
“Seriously?” I said, looking out the window at the bistro and already enticed by the aromas wafting from the kitchen.
Yael shrugged.
“They’re here to keep me safe?” I asked, impressed.
“Well, technically they’re here to keep me safe, but they’re good guys—they’ll take a bullet for you, too. At least for one more night.”
We went in and were immediately shown to a table for two near the back by the kitchen.
The server was young and inexperienced and a bit harried and overwhelmed. But she brought us some water and finally came back to take our order. We didn’t get fancy. We didn’t have much of an appetite, so Yael simply ordered some plates of hummus and tehina and falafel and a couple of small salads and skipped the grilled lamb and chicken.
“So listen,” she said after several minutes of awkward small talk. “I’ve been trying to find a good time to tell you this.”
Every muscle in my body tightened. Now what?
“Yes?” I asked as calmly as I could.
“Well, the thing is, I . . .”
She couldn’t get the words out. She asked a passing server for more water and more pita. She shifted in her seat. Clearly she was stalling. I couldn’t decide if I wanted her to spit it out or change the subject. It turned out not to matter, because before she could continue, our meal came.
We waited until the waitress had served us everything and departed. Then Yael tried again.
“So, look, J. B. . . .”
“Just say it, Yael,” I said quietly. “Whatever it is, I can take it. Just say it, please.”
“Okay. What I’m trying to say is . . . I’m . . . well, anyway . . . I’m sort of . . .”
“Sort of what, Yael?”
“Well, I’m sort of . . . engaged.”
The word just hung there in the air. I heard it. I just couldn’t believe it. “Engaged?” I said, trying to force my brain to process the meaning of this perfectly simple English word.
“Yeah,” she said, not meeting my eyes but staring at her food.
“To be married?” I asked like an idiot.
“Yeah.”
“You’re really engaged.”
She finally looked up at me. “Yeah.”
“To whom?”
“You don’t know him.”
I stared at her. “I don’t understand.”
“I know; it seems weird to me, too.”
“Two months ago you weren’t even dating anyone. In fact, I seem to recall you kissing me rather passionately in Istanbul.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“And I remember asking you out at the peace summit in Amman. And I seem to remember you saying—what did you say?—oh, t
hat’s right, you said yes.”
“That’s all true.”
“So were you engaged then?”
“Of course not. Look, J. B., I’m sorry. I mean, I know this must seem kinda sudden—”
“Kinda?”
“Okay, very sudden, but I’ve actually known him a long time.”
“How?”
“We dated in high school, before I went to the army, before I met Uri.”
“Uri was your husband.”
“Right.”
“The one who was killed by Hezbollah.”
She sighed and nodded. “What happened was that Moshe—his name is Moshe—anyway, he’s a doctor. Specializes in physical rehab for trauma victims. I didn’t know that. We broke up my senior year, and I lost track of him after high school. But it turns out he became a medic in the army and then he went to medical school, and the next thing I know, I’m lying there in the hospital after Alqosh and Moshe walks through the door.”
“He was your doctor?”
“Yeah.”
“And you thought, what a small world.”
“Well . . . I guess, yeah.”
“And you got chatting, and one thing led to another.”
“When I was released, we went out a few times, nothing serious. I was still thinking about you.”
“Oh, gee, thanks.”
“But then I got offered the job in the PM’s office, and I wrote to you, asking whether I should take it. I thought you would . . . I don’t know. But you just wrote back saying I should take it and made a stupid joke about getting a raise, like you couldn’t care less what I did. I was a little hurt, okay? And maybe a little angry.”
“A little?”
“Okay, a lot. And I started thinking about my life, and what I really wanted, and it was a life here, in Israel, in my world. Then Moshe started getting more serious, and yes, one thing led to another. He asked me, and I said yes.”
I stared at the untouched food before us, trying to process her words and silently berating myself for not coming clean about my feelings. For not bombarding her with flowers and letters and gifts. For not jumping on the first flight to Israel after being released from Walter Reed and tracking her down and telling her how much I liked her. I never imagined the window would close so fast. Now I was hurt and angry. But I forced myself to stay calm. There was nothing I could do to change any of this. She was engaged. In the movies, people try to break up engagements, but I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t going to fight for a girl to love me. Not after all I’d been through with Laura. If it didn’t happen naturally, it wasn’t meant to be. I wouldn’t force it. I couldn’t.
Finally I looked up. “I guess congratulations are in order. Mazel tov.”
“Thanks,” she said, her eyes moist and red.
Then we were silent again. I looked around the packed restaurant. Everyone was talking and laughing. It was so joyous and raucous and loud and festive, it almost made me forget for a moment that this was all fake. These weren’t random residents of Nazareth. They were all Mossad agents. They were pretending to be unrelated to us. But we were—or more precisely Yael was—the entire reason they were in this place tonight.
“So,” Yael said after a while, breaking the awkward silence. “You wanted to tell me something too, right?”
The last thing I wanted to do at this point was talk about my new theory of how to find Abu Khalif. I just wanted to pay the bill, excuse myself, and get out of there. I didn’t want to be with her for another moment. I couldn’t breathe. Not sitting here like this. I needed to be alone. I needed to think, to pray, to call my brother and see how he and Annie and Katie were doing. Talk about a fish out of water. I was a long way from home. I had no idea where home was. But it certainly wasn’t here.
I loved this girl, I realized. If there had been any doubts in my mind, they were all gone the moment she told me she loved someone else. Now it felt as if someone had hit me in the chest with a two-by-four.
“Okay, fine, yes, there is something I’d like your take on,” I said, forcing myself to go forward with the conversation, completely against my wishes, only because I knew it was the right thing to do for Matt and his family.
“Sure, what is it?” she asked.
There was no point waiting. I might as well get it out and get it over with. The sooner I did, the sooner we could head back to the base and the sooner I could go to my small apartment and be alone. “Khalif earned his doctorate in Islamic studies in Medina, right? That’s when he fell in love. That’s when he got married for the first time and all that, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, for the past few days we’ve been looking at his wives and where they once lived, thinking maybe if we could find them, that’s where he probably is.”
“And?”
“And that’s bothering me—I think that’s the wrong premise.”
“What’s the right one?” she asked.
“We shouldn’t be looking for the wives any more than we should be looking for the couriers,” I said.
“Then whom should we be looking for?”
“The mentor.”
“The what?”
“Khalif’s mentor—the professor that had the most impact on him in Medina, the one who converted him from Palestinian nationalism to apocalyptic Islam.”
“And who’s that?”
“His first wife’s father—Dr. Abdul Aziz Al-Siddiq.”
She wasn’t following, so I explained that for the past several days, I hadn’t been looking at any of the intel regarding Khalif’s wives. Instead, I’d been studying Aisha’s father, Dr. Al-Siddiq. Aisha, it turned out, was the man’s youngest daughter. Now seventy-one years old, Al-Siddiq was arguably one of the most prominent scholars—and advocates—of apocalyptic Islam in the entire Sunni Muslim world. He’d written nine books on the topic, I told Yael, including a textbook on eschatology that was required reading in most of the world’s Sunni colleges, universities, and seminaries.
What intrigued me was that Al-Siddiq had overseen Abu Khalif while the future ISIS leader was researching and writing his doctoral thesis in Medina. The thesis, a five-hundred-page treatise on why the Mahdi would come back to earth to establish the caliphate sometime in the period between 2007 and 2027 if Muslims were faithful to prepare the way—starting with genocide against Christians and Jews and “apostate” Shia Muslims—was as convoluted and downright bizarre as anything I’d ever read.
“You actually read it?” Yael asked.
“Every page—what do you think I’ve been up to the last few days?”
“Not that.”
The thesis was the essence of everything Khalif believed, I explained, and Khalif believed it for one simple reason: because Dr. Al-Siddiq had convinced him of it. Just as Al-Siddiq had later convinced Khalif to marry his youngest daughter. What’s more, it was under Al-Siddiq’s influence that Khalif had returned to al Qaeda in Iraq and persuaded the AQI leadership to distance themselves from bin Laden and then change their name to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham—ISIS.
“Forget the couriers and forget the wives,” I argued. “The person we should be looking for is Abdul Aziz Al-Siddiq. He isn’t just Abu Khalif’s father-in-law. He’s Khalif’s spiritual, political, and strategic mentor. And as we move closer and closer to the final battle and the cataclysmic End of Days—at least in Khalif’s mind—who would he want at his side more than his professor, his mentor, his father? Find Al-Siddiq, and I guarantee you’ll find Abu Khalif.”
86
RAMAT DAVID AIR BASE, ISRAEL
To my surprise, I slept soundly for the first time in months.
When the alarm on my phone went off at 6 a.m., rather than roll over and rest for another thirty minutes or so, I got up, threw on a pair of jeans, a sweater, and some sneakers, and went for a long walk around the base.
Despite all that had happened the previous evening, despite all that Yael had said and how hurtful it had been, I wasn’t angry or bitter.
I felt oddly rested, strangely peaceful, and truly ready to get back to my family.
There was no need to pack my suitcase. I had never unpacked since arriving on the base. I couldn’t watch television; the apartment I was using didn’t have one. Nor a radio. Nor anything to read.
I guess I could have checked the headlines on my phone. That was certainly how I normally started my day, but on that morning I had no desire to hear more bad news. I knew what our entire team knew: more ISIS attacks inside the U.S. were not only coming, they were imminent. The pope was still heading to the U.S. any day. Despite the credible warnings the Mossad and other intelligence agencies were picking up, the Vatican refused to call off or even postpone the recently planned trip.
Meanwhile, large numbers of college students were heading south for spring break, even as the chatter concerning impending attacks inside the homeland—and particularly against resorts and theme parks and amusement centers—was growing exponentially. For all I knew, the attacks had already begun. If not, they would likely commence over the next few days. What was the point of torturing myself by tracking every threat in real time on Twitter or other social media? There was nothing I could do to stop the attacks. I’d been summarily removed from any such role. It had been made abundantly clear my services were no longer needed, and thus I was heading back to St. Thomas.
Hoping to pass the time and enjoy a final view of the Israeli countryside—as this was very likely the last time I would be here—I strolled the grounds of the base in the morning dew and fog. I watched several F-16s take off and bank toward the Syrian border. A number of Sikorsky helicopters also lifted off and headed northeast as well. I couldn’t help but wonder if their pilots were embarking on training missions or routine patrols, or heading into harm’s way. But there was no one around to ask, and no one would have told me anyway. I didn’t exist. No one on the base outside of Yael’s team knew my name. I was just “the new guy,” and by tomorrow I wouldn’t even be that.