The Devil's Banker

Chapter 31

Mordecai Kahn was traveling north by northwest on a two-lane macadam road through the killing fields of Bosnia. A while ago he’d skirted Sbrenica, where seven thousand Muslims were led to slaughter inside of a week, their bodies dumped in shallow burial pits, sprinkled with quicklime and covered with just enough dirt to withstand a summer shower. Somewhere under the rolling hills ablaze with saffron, the tilled meadows, the dense pine glades, were more bodies-hundreds, thousands, maybe more.

Dropping his eyes from the road, he searched for something to eat. Candy wrappers and discarded soft drink cans littered the passenger seat. He rummaged through them quickly, finding a half-eaten bag of gummy bears. Deftly, he emptied the bag into his palm and brought the soft candies to his mouth. The tart cherry flavor made him smile. They’d always been his children’s favorite.

Kahn was tired beyond any normal measure. Forty-eight hours had passed since he’d enjoyed any meaningful sleep. It was a different exhaustion than he’d known before. He missed the aching joints, the grotesquely red eyes, the stiff neck that followed all-nighters in the lab or at the testing ground. This was a new, clear burning fatigue that brought clarity of purpose, a renewal of ardor for the task at hand, a confirmation of his moral rectitude.

“We must put an end to their indignant cries,” the man from Paris had said. “We must discredit them in front of the world.”

Kahn remembered the smiling eyes, the pained smile, the sense of purpose that flared inside the man like an oil fire. The two had met at a meeting of Kahane Chai in Bethlehem. Kahane Chai, or Kahane Lives, the messianic group founded by the survivors of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the man of God who preached the expulsion of all Palestinians from the land of Israel and foretold that the advent of the Messiah must be preceded by wide-scale bloodshed.

“It is time we pay attention to the Torah,” he had whispered. “As we all know, there are no human rights for goyim in the Torah. We must therefore deal with Palestinians the same way Joshua the Prophet dealt with their ancestors.”

“Kill them?” Kahn had asked, sharing the man’s zeal, feeding on his hatred.

“Kill all of them. But first we must discredit them.”

“How?”

“A single barbaric act.”

The words thrilled Kahn’s ear like a lover’s kiss. It had been three years since he had lost his son to a suicide bomber. The boy, an army conscript in the second year of his national service, was stationed at a checkpoint near Ramallah when the bomber struck. Afterward, they had sent a tape of the attack. Smiling crazily from the front seat of his car, the Palestinian bomber had offered a thumbs-up before crashing his vehicle into the iron shed and detonating over one hundred pounds of TNT, nails, studs, bolts, and washers, and obliterating every trace of Corporal David Kahn from the face of the earth.

A single barbaric act.

His daughter, Rachel, had died from a sniper’s bullet as she was bringing medical supplies to a family in a disputed settlement on the West Bank. Rachel, who played the violin like an angel and made her father kishkes and soup. Rachel, his baby.

A single barbaric act.

Mordecai Kahn knew the precise meaning of the words. Yet something bothered him. No more innocents, he’d said. I have suffered enough for all families.

Only the deserving will perish. You will not shed a tear. Can you help?

Yes, Kahn had said, and he remembered the moment as the beginning of his freedom. But I could never go back. There is a price.

“No price is too high for such an unselfish act.”

Kahn enjoyed the memory. He was only doing a citizen’s duty. Kahn and his father had turned a desert into a marvel: an agricultural, economic, military marvel. The fact that they had succeeded while Israel had been under near-constant attack made the accomplishment that much more satisfying. Wars had racked the country in ’48, ’67, and ’73. The past four years had been like a state of siege. Yet, every time, Israel had beaten back its aggressors. If the country had expanded its borders, all the better. It was but a temporal ratification of God’s favor.

Kahn was mulling over the justice of it all when he noticed the car behind him. It was a black Mercedes sedan whose caked-on mud was an affront even at one hundred yards. The headlights were mismatched; one yellow, one transparent. A rifle barrel lolled out of the passenger window.

Immediately, he consulted the GPS onboard navigation system. The nearest town was Pale, nine miles away.

“Pale,” Kahn grunted.

Population: 2,500. No UN garrison, only a local constabulary to adjudicate local disputes. He wondered if he’d been wise to exchange the safety of highway travel for the anonymity of back-country roads.

A moment later, a light truck rumbled into view, crossing his field of vision from left to right, braking hard in the center of the junction a few hundred yards ahead.

It was Tel Aviv all over again, and for a second, he dared to wonder if it might be the boys from the Sayeret. A look at the Mercedes in the rearview mirror killed the notion. The Sayeret moved as quickly and silently as a snake through the grass. You weren’t likely to see them coming. They certainly didn’t advertise with a beat-up sedan and an AK-47’s notched barrel.

Kahn’s eyes wandered the open landscape. Meadows of summer grass bled into gently rolling hills and untended countryside. There wasn’t another vehicle in sight.

“Turn right in two hundred meters,” commanded the baritone voice belonging to the onboard navigation system, and Kahn flinched.

Flipping open his glove compartment, he removed a nine-millimeter pistol. His officer’s side arm had last seen action in the Sinai in 1967. Come to think of it, he hadn’t fired it then. He’d been too busy mustering his men, directing a counterattack against Egyptian tanks that had cracked the Israeli line. Kahn considered his options. If he could get around the intersection, he could easily outrun the hijackers’ two vehicles. And then? He had a feeling the men would phone ahead. There would be another roadblock, maybe one manned by the Pale constables themselves. A man in a gold BMW was easy to find. He’d underestimated the region’s poverty.

He asked the navigation system for an alternate route.

None.

Well, then, he mused, stealing the pistol into his lap and chambering a round.

Two men were climbing out of the truck ahead, waving their arms across their faces, signaling for him to stop. Kahn braked. Using a turn signal, he brought the car to the side of the road, coming to a halt a hundred meters from the junction. He waited for the Mercedes to pull up behind him, his eyes trained on the rearview mirror. He was shivering and had to clench his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering.

The Mercedes’s doors opened lazily.

Kahn slipped the gear into reverse.

Feet swung onto the ground. Combat boots. But, of course.

His heel rammed the accelerator. Tires squealed. The BMW rocketed backward. Metal crumpled as the car shuddered violently.

The two men rolled on the side of the road, having thrown themselves clear of the BMW.

Scared out of his wits, but acting with a bloodied soldier’s calm, Mordecai Kahn stepped from the car, raised the pistol, and shot one of the men in the chest, pulling the trigger twice in rapid succession. Walking toward the jackknifed trunk, he spotted the second man struggling with his assault rifle, banging the clip into the stock, clumsily knocking the fire control with his fist. He was swearing, his dark eyes flitting desperately between the weapon and Kahn.

Kahn fired twice, and the Slav twisted about his waist as if his feet were nailed to the blacktop.

A single barbaric act.

The words played over and over again in his mind, a violent and cacophonous symphony, as he climbed back into his BMW and accelerated toward the pickup truck. Kahn would show them a barbaric act.

Directly ahead, one of the men was frantically rummaging for something in the front seat of the truck. The second man was shooting at Kahn, but either he was a poor shot or he had a weak pistol, because none of the bullets were finding their mark.

The speedometer read thirty kilometers an hour.

A hail of iron rained on the car. For a second, he made out the driver firing from his hip with a machine gun, but then the front and rear windshield disappeared in a downpour of glass and he couldn’t see anything.

The needle hit fifty. Kahn struck the rifleman, crushing him, and plowed into the truck. The momentum sent the vehicle tumbling off the road and rolling down a berm into the field. The BMW’s front axle thumped once as the car ran over the second man, then lumbered to a halt, its airbag inflated.

Kahn knocked away the air bag and opened the door. Steam hissed from the engine. The hood was a mess. He opened the back door and retrieved an overnight bag. He had no need to check its contents. The package would be in perfect working order. It had been engineered and constructed to withstand radical impacts and violent changes in velocity up to three thousand g’s.

Sliding into the front seat of the Mercedes, he checked his watch.

He had twenty-four hours to get to Paris.

He would travel to Belgrade and purchase a new car. From there, it was ten hours to Frankfurt, and five more to the French capital. It would be tight.