Hadassah Covenant, The (19 page)

She took a deep breath and rose from the Gulfstream’s luxurious armchair. Nodding silently at the lead security man, she walked out of the plane and, seeing the vast hangar before her and the dozens of men arrayed to protect her, wondered what in the world she had set in motion.

Am I crazy to be doing this? Yet it’s all I know to do . . .
.

Chapter Nineteen

K
ENSINGTON
, L
ONDON—LATER THAT DAY

A
nek al-Khalid
, aged eighty-nine, shuffled through London’s Israeli Embassy at its banquet entrance with a scowl upon his lips, an invitation in his fist, and the jaunty sway of a boxer about to dodge a Joe Louis bolo punch.

It was his traditional game-face, and he wore it well.

That is, until he glanced around him, closed his eyes, and felt himself transported.

It had been twelve long years since he had last stepped inside these halls, ever since he had announced his intention to press a highly controversial claim before the World Court. On behalf of his own and thousands of other Jewish Iraqi families in exile, he had filed a massive lawsuit demanding reparations for all the wealth stolen from them. The amount of money was awesome, numbering in the tens of billions of dollars, and the destabilization it could potentially cause was enormous. But his motives had been neither gain nor disruption. Anek al-Khalid, as anyone who knew him could attest, was very wealthy, carried neither debt nor abiding need for more money. But he did carry within him a huge burden of grief, regret, and even rage—and relieving himself of that burden was his real reason for taking such action.

As he had anticipated, the contentious action had caused an immediate chill in his relations with the Israeli establishment—not to mention a permanent stamp of
persona non grata
within some of the more squeamish circles of London’s Jewish community. Add to that his Islamic-sounding last name, and he was a virtual exile in his adopted city.

Not that his quest did not boast many closet supporters. News of the legal claim seemed to have been kept purposely quiet by even the most raucous British tabloids. To put it succinctly, the concept of an Arab country paying reparations to Jews was far too fraught with issues for most folks to comprehend or accept. To the vast Jewish majority, it simply smelled like trouble. And for a twentieth-century European Jew, trouble was not something one provoked without extraordinary cause.

That’s all right
, he had always told himself.
You’ll invite me to your parties again when I single-handedly win back thirty billion dollars stolen from your brothers and sisters. That is, should I live to see the day . . .
.

Besides, he remembered wryly, the lawsuit was only round one. If they only knew what he had planned next. . . .

Despite the fact that he held his first embassy invitation in years, he had almost decided to stay home and let the other invitees finish the Brie and Cristal on their own. Yet something about the wording of tonight’s card, a slight nuance of tone within its text, had conveyed to him that the invitation was more than routine.

Mister al-Khalid, the pleasure of your company is most earnestly desired . . .
.

One didn’t often see “most earnestly desired” in this sort of communication. A curious itch had burrowed into his side and resisted his best efforts at extrication.

Now he was here, like it or not. As he breached the threshold, he breathed in the scent of burnished wood and brewing coffee, handed his coat and gloves to the butler, and peered around him with an even deeper scowl.

“I’m sorry, but you see I was sent this invitation here—I believed there was to be some sort of . . . function. A soirée.”

“Ah yes, Mr. al-Khalid,” the butler replied, pronouncing the last name so precisely that the old man immediately realized there had
been a briefing about him, and not long ago, either. “There is to be a gathering tonight, and you are most certainly a guest of honor. Would you please come with me?”

The pair started down a long, carpeted hallway. Looking about him at the familiar walls wainscoted in marble and hand-scrubbed oak, the old man sighed wistfully and allowed his mind to travel back over half a century.

Israel had been a young country in 1952, still desperately fighting off her Arab enemies and threats of being pushed into the sea. The ink was barely dry on the U.N. Partition Resolution which had recreated the tiny nation when the Israeli Embassy in London first opened its doors. The very notion of a State of Israel still seemed so miraculous to the war’s survivors that whole crowds of them had been content to just show up and stare at this physical embodiment of the miracle, their eyes welling up at the sight of an Israeli flag, a living, breathing Star of David in the breeze. And invariably stopping short before a gun-wielding guard, for no Jew of that generation would ever look upon a military uniform again without a reflexive, heart-stopping gasp. That is, until it sank in that these uniforms bore Hebrew markings—and then, as one, they would stand there, transfixed, and choke back sobs of raw, unalloyed emotion.

Now, all these decades later, al-Khalid coughed hard to give himself a chance to regather his composure. Then he blinked repeatedly and took another few halting steps, as his mind replayed more of the precious, luminous memories.

Those days now seemed like a long dawn after a decade of hellish night. And never more so than when he sat in some embassy antechamber on those mornings and looked out a window to watch the newcomers blink in the sunshine. Still just a few steps out of Kensington High Street’s Underground station, they would traverse these cobblestoned, treelined streets, a mere block from Kensington Palace and its luscious gardens, and enter the complex in thick clusters. He closed his eyes briefly and pictured them. How splendid they had been, how blessed. Their gazes always so wide, their voices ever hushed like schoolchildren on holiday, and, thank G-d, those death stares nearly always washed from their eyes, at least for the moment.

Yes, he usually would have scorned the pilgrims from his perch of world-weary jadedness, as he did most awestruck tourists—except he had recently learned of the horrors from which many of them had come. He read the newspapers enough to know that most were fresh from the refugee camps of Central Europe, and before that, the ghettoes and death camps whose photographs were beginning to sear themselves onto the world’s collective conscience.

These are not young people
, he remembered telling himself, disregarding their youthful appearances.
Their souls are older than time itself
.

In those days he had not been one of the wide-eyed wanderers. No, his was a different tale of woe—no less heart-wrenching yet still in progress, its final chapter as yet unwritten. In those days he had been known as a “case,” his identity forever linked with the persistent and volatile problem of his family’s disposition. He had lived through this period under an abiding sense that he was enduring the torments of the bureaucratically damned, waiting like some condemned man in a Kafkaesque succession of embassy offices and antechambers for the next chapter of his life to begin.

And now, being back in that same building revived that emotion a thousandfold.

The old man stopped in midcorridor, glanced to his right through a windowed door, and raised a trembling hand to his mouth. The butler sensed his pause and turned with a puzzled look.

This is the room
, al-Khalid told himself with a barely concealed surge of awe. The paint and the furnishings had changed, but some of the most indelible details had not—the peculiar arrangement of those fourteen-foot Renaissance windows, the intricate Restoration carving on the fireplace, the same gaudy, inaccessible chandelier. It was not the grandeur of the room that gave him pause. The rooms in his estates were far more opulent. No, it was the memories. This had been an office then, the domain of one of its most immovable, legalistic attachés, back before the embassy had grown large enough to separate its ceremonial from its administrative suites.

He stepped in, closed his eyes, and breathed in the past with deep draughts. “
You are not a Jew
,” he heard the British-accented voice roar in his ears once again, as clear and thunderous as if the words
had been uttered an hour ago. “
You cannot be a Jew, do you understand, my boy? The moment anybody knows, your whole family may die! Their fate rests on your shoulders! Now leave here and don’t come back until we call for you, or it will all be for naught!”

He blinked away twin eyefuls of tears and sent the drops down his cheeks.

“Let’s go, my man,” he said in an age-crackled voice to the butler. “What on earth do you people want with me?”

At that, the butler turned swiftly on his heels, proceeded barely twenty feet farther, and turned the handle of a dark wooden door. Al-Khalid nodded his thanks and stepped into a thoroughly traditional British library, complete with massive granite fireplace and hardwood fire, high-slung wooden beams, and from somewhere, redolent in the air, the tiniest whiff of scotch. In fact, the only signs that this was Israel’s embassy came from a wireframe Star of David over the fireplace and a large Israeli flag hanging from a pole in the corner.

Next he spotted the Israeli ambassador, a patrician dolt resplendent in his Savile Row pinstripe making his way across the intricately woven carpet.
The man at least deigns to offer a handshake
, al-Khalid noted as he took the proffered clasp with all the enthusiasm of a condemned man. In his mind, a competent ambassador was supposed to bring his native values to the country of his posting, not allow the new culture to transform
him
. And this man, once a decent Jewish
sabra
from Hebron, had scarcely set foot in London before promptly hardening into one long, crunchy bite of British upper crust. For his part, the ambassador merely considered al-Khalid a run-of-the-mill, loose-cannon crackpot. These opinions were hardly national secrets. The two men had leaked their mutual distaste to the London press, a rare show of Jewish disunity upon which the Fleet Street press had pounced with relish.

“Mr. al-Khalid, welcome to our embassy. Indeed, it has been too far long.”

“Yes, it has,” he replied with thinly veiled disdain. “Much as I would have expected. My pursuits have not been of the sort designed to win me friends in this place.”

The ambassador wrinkled his nose and directed a small wave at
him, as if to say,
Ah—what’s a little global controversy between friends . . .
?

“Well, much as I enjoy standing here and mending fences with you, I’m confused,” al-Khalid continued. “I received an invitation to what I thought would be a sort of official function. Yet you and I seem to be the only guests. Did I arrive too early? Too late? Or is this some sort of . . .
briefing
?” He could not manage to erase the contempt from his voice at the sound of that word. His younger years had been afflicted with such inane appointments.

The ambassador let out an accommodating laugh and shook his head.

“No, sir. You have been invited here for a purpose. A most singular evening, I would imagine. Would you care for a seat? Some single malt, or tea perhaps?”

“Thank you, no. As long as we’re taking our time . . .”

He fell into a parlor chair and leaned his head back, as though he had just finished some kind of marathon. The ambassador leaned over to pat his arm familiarly.

“You will know more about this meeting soon enough, my good sir.”

“Does that mean the security was for me?”

“What security?”

“Well, I detected helicopters above my car all the way from Notting Hill Gate, four camouflaged snipers above the front gate, at least another three along the courtyard, laser profiling and metal detection at the door.”

“Yes, you are quite correct, but you are also not being honest with me. It is physically impossible to have detected all of those things from the inside of a limousine.”

Al-Khalid smiled and nodded at the ambassador’s recognition of his little deceit. “I have a little security of my own, sir, as you certainly know. My life requires safety as much as yours. And somebody has assembled an array that far exceeds the normal retinue of this embassy. What exactly is going on?”

“Actually, it has to do with your guest. But after you’re finished with her, you’ll probably want even more security for yourself.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Perhaps the time has come for you to meet her.”

“
Her
?”

“Oh, absolutely.” The official raised his chin toward some unseen helper out in the hallway.

There was a small commotion at the door, and al-Khalid swerved around in his chair.

His face underwent a dramatic transformation, shedding its mask of scarcely concealed irritation so rapidly that those watching almost thought they saw the skin on his face physically drop. With all the huffing that accompanies old age, he began his typically prolonged struggle to stand.