The flash of light faded and Deker woke up to a nightmare of pain and confusion. His head was being knocked to and fro by the butt of a gun. He blinked his eyes open to see his superior officer, Uri Elezar, handcuffed and hanging upside down on a Nazi-style "Boger swing" with a rod behind his knees, his mouth open in agony. But Deker couldn't hear anything. Then another whack to the head opened his ears, and something like the whine of a jet engine filled his head before it faded into an irritating ring and Elezar's screams filled the room.
"We are the Jewish people!" Elezar shouted. "We came to this land by a miracle! God brought us back to this land! We fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land!"
Deker watched a large figure standing next to Elezar strike the soles of his blackened feet and his back with a truncheon. Elezar cried out, and Deker saw drops of blood from Elezar's cut forehead hit the tile floor. The floor was covered with white powder, possibly salt, and underneath Deker could see a Byzantine mosaic.
"We are the Jewish people!" Elezar again rasped loudly. "We came to this land by a miracle! God brought us back to this land! We fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land!"
A large face with dark hooded eyes appeared in front of Deker, and a hand reached out and snatched the silver Star of David hanging around Deker's neck and dangled it before his eyes. The IDF insignia in the center came in and out of focus. Then a hand snapped his head back, thick fingers pulled his eyelids apart and a hot beam of light blinded him.
A voice in English with a thick Arab accent said, "Still with us, Jew? Maybe we'll have better luck with you."
The accent of his torturer, the farruj-style beating of Elezar and the mosaic on the floor suggested to Deker that the enemy in the room was the General Intelligence Department, or GID, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan's powerful spy and security agency. All of which didn't make any sense, as Jordan was at peace with Israel and a proven ally of the United States in the war on terror. But it told him was that he wasn't getting out alive.
It's over. Now the game is to go out without compromising Israel.
Deker blinked his swollen eyes open again and saw that he was inside a dark stone chamber-a basement of some kind. A second man with long black hair stood over a small bank of medical equipment.
"Before the sun rises in a couple of hours, a large portion of the Temple Mount will collapse, and it will look like you two here did it on behalf of the Orthodox Jewish fanatics," the Jordanian said. "Palestinian rioters will overrun Jerusalem, raise the Palestinian flag, and Israel won't be able to stop the world from recognizing the capital of the new nation of Palestine."
"That could work," Deker said. "But it won't. Or else you would have already killed me and Elezar."
Like Stern, Deker thought, heaping more guilt upon himself. He remembered how his driver had been jumpy about the mission from the start-for good reason, as it turned out. Then his thoughts turned to Stern's young wife, Jenny, and their eighteen-month-old son, David. He had failed to protect them, like he had failed to protect Rachel. But he would not fail Israel now, he vowed to himself. He could not. It was all he had left to live for and to die for.
"The Tehown," the Jordanian said, using the Hebrew code name for Israel's top-secret fail-safe. "Tell me about this so-called gate of the deep or tunnel of chaos that will save the Jews but kill the Arabs. We need to know what kind of Jewish physics we're dealing with."
Deker now understood what this was about. He was one of only three Israelis besides the prime minister who knew the secret of the Tehown. Not even his superiors in the IDF knew its details, including Elezar, for fear they would use it before its intended time as Israel's last resort.
Elezar began to shout, "I'll kill you myself if you break, Deker! I swear it! I'll kill you myself!"
The Jordanian nodded to the guard next to Elezar, who shoved an electric prod into the IDF veteran's groin and delivered enough blue voltage to knock him out and create a thin wisp of smoke.
"Your superior officer is rather annoying, don't you think?" the Jordanian asked. "He is certainly no friend of yours. Look what he sent out earlier this evening."
The Jordanian held up Deker's BlackBerry so that Deker could read a Twitter alert from the Jerusalem Highway Patrol, complete with his picture.
Deker looked at himself on the small screen. The stone-faced expression made Deker himself wonder if a heart could still be beating inside this man. Only the dark, half-dead eyes revealed the faintest smolder of a passion snuffed out by life a long time ago.
12:43 a.m. Male. 26. 5'11". Brown hair. Gray
eyes. Armed and extremely dangerous. Shoot if
subject resists arrest.
"That last order seemed completely uncalled-for," the Jordanian said in a flat voice, thick with sarcasm. "And these are supposed to be your people."
That Elezar and the Shin Bet never wanted him to succeed in persuading the Waqf to acquiesce to an electronic surveillance net didn't surprise him. If anything, after a botched assassination attempt in Dubai a couple of years back that caught Mossad agents on camera, his superiors preferred to avoid a repeat the next time they had to storm the Temple Mount and kill a few Waqf guards.
Nor was he surprised that the Jordanian attempting to break him now would use Elezar's APB to divide his Israeli captives.
But Deker was indeed surprised by the shoot-to-kill order.
I'll deal with Elezar and the IDF once I escape, he vowed to himself. But first he would have to escape. To do that, he'd have to kill their captors and see just where on earth they had been taken. If they were in the basement of the GID HQ in Amman, he and Elezar were finished. But Deker didn't think so. They were probably still close to Jerusalem, perhaps in some safe house in Jericho or the West Bank.
If so, we still have a chance.
Without warning, the Jordanian struck him on the side of the head. A flash of light exploded before his eyes.
"The Tehown fail-safe, Commander!" he yelled with a maniacal growl. "What is the nature of the fail-safe?"
As the howls echoed in his ears, and the flash of light dissipated, Deker could see a glowing cord extend out from a bank of computer screens. It traveled straight toward his head, just above his eye, where it seemed to bore into his skull.
What the hell? This experiment had gone beyond anything in the GID playbook-or anything else he had ever experienced.
Pure panic now overwhelmed him as he realized with horror that there was a shunt in his head with a thin intravenous line attached, some sort of fiber-optic cable pulsating with a neon purple light.
Deker winced as the Jordanian pressed on a button and suddenly another blast of lightning flashed before Deker's burning eyes. The unbearable pain lingered like a mushroom cloud inside Deker's head. When the overexposure finally lifted, he could see the ghost of its outlines.
Deker struggled to catch his breath. Terror tore his conscience as he sensed whatever human resolve was left in him was beginning to wither. "I'll tell you how to wipe the Zionist state off the map," he said desperately, gasping. "But you won't like it and you won't do it, because you all have your heads up your asses."
"I'm listening," said the Jordanian, for once without the threat of imminent violence in his voice.
"Call their bluff," Deker told him, aware of Elezar beginning to stir in his chains. "Lay down your arms. Ask to be fully recognized citizens of Israel. Israel is already ten percent Arab, the West Bank almost ten percent Jewish. Two states side by side is apartheid. Nothing changes. One state with an Arab majority risks Israel losing its Jewish identity."
"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."
Stern, thought Deker as another wave of guilt washed over him again.
"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.