Hadassah Covenant, The (14 page)

Stepping into the sprawling, dimly lit room and glimpsing the
rows of faintly glowing display tables, awash in the special lighting that allowed study but did not deteriorate the document, she now felt thoroughly immersed in two time periods at once. She turned, half expecting her father’s warm, gruff presence to await behind her, only to find Meyer standing there.

But she kept turning toward him, for something about his body language caught her attention.

As still as he had stood before, now he seemed veritably carved of stone. The man, transfixed, stared at the documents lying before him. Even though she could not see his eyes, only the rows of ancient parchment eerily suspended in his lenses, intensity seemed to radiate from him in waves. After several seconds completely without motion, he bent down, removed the glasses, and whisked a viewing lens over one eye. He surely acted as though he was more in awe of parchment pages than a prime minister’s wife!

She now had seen his eyes for the first time. She peered at him further. She could be wrong—the dim light could be fooling her—but his deep-set, expressive brown eyes seemed to be shining with tears. This man was somehow emotionally overwhelmed. This simply could not be a routine document check. She shook her head slightly and stepped back.
Who is this man
?

Finally his eyes veered over to her face, and Meyer seemed to remember himself. A professional veneer claimed his features, and he instantly was the taciturn operative of before.

“Well, let’s see if we have a match,” he said, glancing down to a leather satchel at his side. He unlatched the flap and carefully pulled out several inches of ancient-looking documents.

Yes, to the business at hand
, she told herself, trying to shake off the strange impression. She turned and looked down at the spot where she had signed her own name to the end of the document. The signature linked her life to the long chain of women who had signed the ancient story of Queen Esther and this secret epistle to an unknown Jewish concubine named Leah—a young girl in a Persian court lost to history, who had nevertheless been her distant ancestor.

Just as on that first day, Hadassah felt a vast presence suck the present moment away with an almost palpable sensation. The enormity of time surrounded her, dwarfed her, caused her troubles to
seem trivial, even insectlike. Emotion like a surge of violins in some aching minor key swept through her. And despite being bittersweet, the storm of feelings felt bracingly fresh to her now, a welcome renewal from the stupor of the last few weeks.

She stepped toward Meyer and glanced down at his samples.

“So I hear you may have a companion text,” she offered.

He turned toward her as though surprised she knew that much. She sensed a complex personality—but a good one. A man of integrity.

“Yes,” he answered. “I believe what I found was written in Esther’s hand, but I had no other way to confirm it. Again, the Institute thanks you and your family for your . . . forbearance.”

“You’re quite welcome.”

“And also,” he said, as though once provoked he could not stop himself from talking, “you have my deepest sympathies in the loss of your father. He was a good man.”

She shook her head, perplexed at the tone of his reference. “You . . . you knew of my father?”

He glanced away, and she had a distinct impression that she had caught him in some imprudent disclosure.

“Just from the media accounts. I was captivated by the story of how he and his family members survived the
Shoah
.”

She nodded at that last word, the Jewish term for the Holocaust. Reminded of her Poppa’s familiar tale of escaping the Holocaust by hiking through Eastern Europe, she felt a reassuring warmth spread over her and gave Meyer another appraising look.
Weird . .
. Even while he stared at one of the ancient documents through a thick magnifying loop, his expression appeared strangely wistful. And despite his obvious competence, he also seemed unable to hide his reaction—a fact that intrigued her as much as any other.

At the very least, an unusual Mossad agent—although she had to remind herself that she had no other frame of reference.

He bent closer and once again, stillness overtook him. Finally, he straightened and faced her and the museum hostess.

“Clearly this is what scholars would call a cursory examination. Yet from what I can tell, it’s reasonably certain the two documents
are a match. My parchments were most likely written by Queen Esther herself.”

“Can you tell me to whom she wrote it?”

He shook his head. “We are most grateful, but I couldn’t tell you more without severe consequences. Maybe someday, when the urgency has passed and the proper releases have been authorized . . .”

“I understand.” She heard her voice and felt embarrassed at the tone of girlish disappointment it conveyed. “And yet, from what you say, it sounds like this comparison has some . . . national security repercussions to it. My husband said you were assigned to Iraq?”

He leaned in closer to her.

“We
are
grateful. Extremely grateful. Please convey the Institute’s thanks to your family members.”

“I’m the only one left,” she heard herself say.

She sighed and remembered the vague promises her husband had made to her—that helping the Mossad agent might result in some helpful contacts toward her own covert quest.

Now was the time to act.

Chapter Fourteen

H
adassah put a hand
to his shoulder, leaning in to whisper so as to avoid any prying attentions. He stiffened at her touch and warily glanced around for the hostess.

“Agent Meyer, might I have a . . . private word with you,” she said softly. “You see,” she continued, lowering her voice even further, “I’m engaged in a little fact-finding of my own. It concerns my father. Obviously, your confidentiality is assured. And of course my husband is aware of my curiosity.”

She said this with a gleam that conveyed a sense of expectation—
Now you know something you didn’t before, so it’s your turn to tell me something I don’t know
. . . . By helping her, he could acquire some political favor, was the implication.

She suddenly felt his eyes bore into hers with an intensity that shocked her.

“I ask”—she paused a moment to regroup—“I ask partly because you spoke of my father and his background. You see, without disclosing any privileged information on my part,” she let another moment pass, realizing that her informational trump card was about to be played, “I can tell you that the attack which killed him has not yet
been attributed to anyone. As unlikely as this may sound, it seems to have had nothing to do with my husband.”

Meyer grew perfectly still for a second. Then she saw his head lower. He was moving to meet her exact eye level; she had definitely seized his attention.

“Is there any way,” she asked more confidently, “through your associations, your briefing—that you could imagine my father being a valid target for assassination?”

His pupils darted around quickly. He could not resist the challenge; he was thinking hard. Finally, his eyes returned to her.

“Have you considered,” he said, matching her hushed tones, “that the actual target might have been
you
?”

Like a sheet of ice water poured from a bucket, a cold bath of shock rushed over her head and through her being. The room’s corners reeled slightly, tilting her vertigo.

Truly she had never considered the possibility—at least not consciously. As she quickly thought back over the last few weeks, she realized that the notion had floated somewhere around the periphery of her mind, always just out of sight, never close enough for her to deal with head-on.

Perhaps she had not faced the idea because she could not bear the thought of her father dying as a result of something directed at
her
. The obvious theory of a politically motivated attack on her husband was at least predictable. Yet how could she
not
have faced this other possibility? She felt stupid and naïve, like a schoolgirl trying to insinuate herself into the world of grown-ups.

Then, without warning, the faint hallway lights blinked out. One overhead light and the dim glow from the glass cabinets was the only illumination.

Meyer glanced up at the ceiling in a sudden movement that whisked her back to the present. “Now that I’ve mentioned that possibility,” he muttered as he grabbed his handheld. “Perimeter one, status?” he whispered into the device.

He released the button and waited. Nothing came.

“Perimeter one? Perimeter two?”

She could sense his every muscle tighten in the ensuing pause. His scholarly demeanor had vanished—in its place came a coiled
poise and an endless vigilance. The silent throb of alarm seemed to hover between them, awaiting his signal. The wait must have lasted only ten seconds, but it was still time enough for her mind to run through a thousand dire scenarios.

He gritted his teeth and muttered something under his breath. He swerved around to find their hostess.

“How secure is this room?”

“If I close this door, it’s everything-proof,” she answered quickly but sounding surprisingly calm. “We can wait inside indefinitely, but of course we can’t get out, either. There’s no other exit. And if power goes out, we may start running out of oxygen.”

He shook his head. “We have to have an exit route,” he said. “Are there any video monitors, hidden security?”

“In a room down the hall. Not here.”

“How much radio interference and signal obstruction does this building put out?”

“Ultra-thick walls and insulated wiring, but we’ve always been able to radio out. . . . ”

Meyer raised the handpiece and adjusted its settings.

“Dark Wing, Dark Wing, Lebev 12 here. I have a shattered eyeglass at the Shrine of the Book. Possible broken bones. And Ladybug is with me. Repeat Ladybug is in the mix. Please respond at once.”

He exhaled tensely, reached to his waist, and pulled out a large, gleaming machine pistol which seemed to fill the room with import and menace. His other hand reached over to the gun’s action and pulled it back with a ratchet sound that rang out in the quiet of the room. His eyes swept their surroundings, and for a moment, she caught a bit of the moment through his eyes—
No real cover, just a bunch of delicate, priceless antiquities—hardly a great place for a shootout . . .
.

“Ladies, please sit down over there,” he whispered, pointing to the corner just inside the room’s entrance. Hadassah saw his thinking—the narrow space behind the open metal door was a perfect place to take cover. She hurried over and crouched behind the thick wedge of steel, the other woman huddled behind her.

Wincing at the hardness of floor beneath her and the insult of rigid wall at her back, she was finally struck with the realization that
here was the possibility of mortal danger. This excursion had never been considered high-risk and had therefore been unscheduled, executed with unmarked, inconspicuous vehicles and minimal protection. The one Shin Beth bodyguard inside, several more possibly outside. Now with an intruder possibly inside the Shrine and the bodyguard apparently bound—or worse, she thought with a shudder—only this Mossad agent stood between her and the threat.

She found she could hardly get enough air into her lungs. Her chest began to heave with deep gasps, her vision spinning with a new wave of vertigo.

Flattened against the wall on the doorway’s other side, Meyer made a single rapid lunge, reached up, and flicked the light switch. Then he looked around and grimaced. The room’s brightness level had hardly changed—clearly, overhead lighting was kept at minimum levels to protect its documents. Now the room’s main light still came from the recessed purplish glow within the displays themselves.

“Can we turn
those
off?” he whispered to the hostess half-obscured behind the open door. The urgency was obvious—as long as light was giving them away, especially with so many reflecting glass tables, any attacker in the darkened hallway would have a good chance of spotting their hiding places.

Her eyes now wide with terror, the museum hostess could only reply by nodding emphatically toward a bank of controls behind him, at the end of the room’s longest wall. The agent gripped his weapon harder and grimaced again—it was a spot completely exposed to the hallway.

Hadassah peeked around the corner to see if it was possible to help him. She could make an unexposed dogleg through some of the back tables to the control panel. But her lower body would still be visible and completely vulnerable under the tables’ legs. And during that split second of reaching up to flip the lights off, she would be totally out in the open.

She looked in Meyer’s direction for guidance and gulped back a scream.

A bright red laser sight-target was trembling across the wall, midway between his position and the controls. Furthermore, she could see that even though Meyer had spread himself flat against the wall,
a two-foot span of mirrored glass table was about to reveal both Ari and the attacker to each other.