Abuse of Power

19

Tel Aviv, Israel

“Welcome to the city that never sleeps,” the Reb said, as they exited the highway.

Traffic was light on the new express lane into Tel Aviv and the drive in from Ben Gurion International Airport had taken them only twenty minutes. Rabbi Mel Neershum had come in from San Francisco on an earlier flight-to make the appropriate arrangements for Jack’s arrival-and had picked up his friend in an old family heirloom: a ’66 Ford Anglia he’d borrowed from his cousin Ohad.

Jack had known Neershum for many years now. They’d met through a mutual acquaintance, Bill Hicks, a private detective. Hicks and Hatfield frequented the same restaurant, a place on Columbus, the North Beach Restaurant, where they both liked to eat at the bar as they watched the crowd coming and going while they talked what they called “the unholy trinity”: sports and politics and religion. The city’s ruling elite still ate there. Pelosi, Brown, the former mayor. All the known and hidden power brokers.

One night Hatfield brought up his disenchantment with the Catholic church (echoing his father’s own discontent), and complained that it had lost its edge and become too pacifist-no fire, no brimstone.

“If you’re looking for fire and brimstone,” Hicks said, “you should check out my old friend Rabbi Neershum. Toughest Jew I know.”

The more he heard about this “rebellious rebbe”-hence, the Reb-the more curious Jack got. Although he’d been raised Catholic, he’d always been attracted to his mother’s history and culture, so a few days later he set up a meet with Neershum, discovered a kindred soul, and the two became instant friends. And when the Reb found out Hatfield had Jewish blood, he insisted Jack join him and his friends on Friday nights for prayer, vodka, and a home-cooked meal-an invitation Jack had accepted more than once.

Hicks had been right. Neershum was a tough old Jew.

The product of an Orthodox day school, the Reb had fallen out of love with Judaism in his late teens and, much to his parents’ dismay, decided to rebel.

He was a hippie in the sixties. Later a boxer. Then, in his middle years, he rediscovered his roots with a fierce passion and spent five years studying Jewish law at a rabbinical seminary in New York. This was followed by a year in Israel, before returning to San Francisco as an ordained rabbi. He soon married the love of his life, Miriam, and fathered two sons and three daughters, all now grown.

The Reb was a “black hat,” a Chabad-Lubavitch Chasid, who often spent weeks at a time in Tel Aviv.

Jack himself hadn’t been here in years. The last trip was with his mother, who was seventy years old at the time, and they’d come to visit family that Jack hadn’t even known existed-and hadn’t spoken to since.

The first thing he noticed now was how much the place had grown. Comparisons to New York were no longer as laughable as they’d once been. Tel Aviv was a thriving metropolis perched on the edge of the Mediterranean, and everything about it screamed big city.

“So where are we headed?” he asked Neershum as they took the exit.

“First, we do something about those clothes.” Jack was wearing jeans and a suede leather jacket. “You want to blend in with us, you’ll have to look the part.”

The Reb himself was wearing a traditional dark suit and black felt fedora, although he’d substituted a more manageable suit coat for the kapote. The longer coats were reserved for Shabbat, the day of rest and reflection.

Hatfield had once asked him why Chasidic Jews always wore dark clothing, and Neershum explained they were more concerned with what was on the inside rather than what was fashionable. In fact, these Chasids wore nineteenth-century Polish business garb. They were stuck in a fashion time warp.

“I’m not so sure about blending in,” Jack said. “If I dress like you, I’ll probably look more Johnny Cash than Menachem Schneerson.”

The rabbi smiled. “Bring a guitar, you’ll get all the girls.”

Jack’s decision to come to Tel Aviv had grown out of necessity.

Logically, as he told Tony, he should have followed the trail to London. But Tony had brought up the obvious sticking point.

“How do you plan on doing that, genius? Last I heard, you were still on the home secretary’s hit list.”

“Rules are meant to be broken,” Jack told him.

“And why London?” Tony asked. “I understand about the consulate connection-”

“It’s more than that,” Jack said. “This guy Swain had MI6 all over him.”

“And you know that how?” Tony asked.

“Those boys worked the Gulf War,” Jack told him. “I saw a lot of them. They’ve got big personalities because they’ve got the international beat. They’re not like MI5, quietly and discreetly keeping eyes and ears on the home front. MI6 has to bully their way into places where they might not be welcome.”

“Fair enough. That still doesn’t explain why you need to go there.”

“Whether Swain is British intelligence or an independent contractor, whoever got to him and his team is back there. I need to follow the trail. Lift the rocks. There isn’t time to wait for them to come to me. Besides, I’d love to find the one honest person in the Home Office who had the courage to say I wasn’t a terrorist, that I never incited violence, and that the whole banning thing could backfire.”

“Who said that?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “It was in an e-mail my London solicitor uncovered. Written anonymously by someone in the Brown government. I’d like to find that person to prove I’m innocent of the charges.”

“I’m sure,” Tony said. “But it’s still moot. The minute you step on British soil they’ll deport you.”

“That might not be a problem,” Jack said. “What if John Samuel Hatfield never goes anywhere near England?”

“I’m confused.”

“What if Hatfield takes a vacation in Israel and Jacob Samuel Heshowitz makes the trip to London instead? Flies right out of Ben Gurion International?”

Tony was silent a moment. “You have a way of arranging that?”

“I’m pretty sure I know someone who does.”

It hadn’t taken much convincing to get Rabbi Neershum involved. The Reb was rumored to have connections to both Mossad and the Israeli mafia, and while he wasn’t a violent man he’d never shied from a good fight. He was also known to quote Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the radical Jewish Defense League who was assassinated in a Manhattan hotel room in 1990 by persons unknown.

“Every Jew a twenty-two,” the Reb had said more than once.

A staunch proponent of the Second Amendment, the Reb had always supported a well-armed citizenry, which he believed was the only way to keep another Castro or Stalin or Hitler or Chavez from rising in America.

“The one thing that stops an evil government from seizing total power,” he once told Jack, “is fear of millions of armed citizens. The Brits learned that lesson a couple hundred years ago.”

Yet despite this tough talk, the Reb was genuinely a kind and friendly man. He acted as a missionary to fallen Jews he met in the streets of San Francisco, trying to bring them back to God. He’d saved many a drugged-out soul over the years, and they loved him for throwing them a spiritual life preserver when they were drowning.

In some ways, Jack was in need of a life preserver himself. And once he told his story, the Reb was all too happy to help.

“Try to look more serious,” the man behind the camera told him. “When was the last time you saw someone smile in a passport photo?”

Jack put on his best poker face. Hadn’t even realized he was smiling. He certainly didn’t feel much like it, standing there stiffly in his new suit with a black fedora perched atop his head. It didn’t help that the Reb had supplied him with a fake beard made by a wigmaker so that Jack could blend in with the rest of the Lubavitchers. The beard was surprisingly realistic, using human hair woven into a special netting, but the glue they’d used to secure it with was itching his skin like crazy.

He thought of Bob Copeland and the man’s love of cloak and dagger. Jack did not share that love.

The flash went off, Jack certain he looked appropriately dazed, then the man behind the camera-a Russian Jew named Falkovsky-popped out the data card and crossed the small room to a computer station.

“Your timing is good,” he told them. “Two years from now, who knows if I’m still in business?”

“Why is that?” the Reb asked.

Falkovsky, who worked out of a camera store, was an old-school documents forger who found the advent of computer technology a godsend. What had once taken him hours of precise work using special inks and printing presses could now be handled by a standard PC in about a third of the time.

“Biometrics,” he said. “The government is pushing for biometric passports and working on a slow roll-out to establish a database over the next couple years. There’s no final decision on whether they’ll implement, but some intelligence experts are worried that if they do, it’ll compromise their ability to operate. And I don’t need to tell you what it will do to me.”

Jack had heard about this. The “e-passport,” as it was called, used smart card technology to store standardized biometric information, including facial, fingerprint, and iris recognition. And intelligence agencies had a right to be worried. If these types of passports were adopted universally, they’d not only be virtually impossible to forge, but any leaks of biometric data could potentially put an agent traveling under a false identity in danger of being discovered by the enemy. All the phony beards in the world wouldn’t disguise them.

Fortunately, this wasn’t a concern for Jack right now. Jacob Samuel Heshowitz would be traveling with what, to the naked eye, looked like a standard-issue Israeli passport, properly distressed and carrying several travel stamps.

His cover story was simple. Heshowitz was a Borough Park Lubavitcher who had moved to Tel Aviv a year ago and sought citizenship under the Law of Return. A frequent traveler, he applied for and received an Israeli passport shortly after his arrival in the country.

The Reb had assured Jack that the passport would be flawless. Falkovsky-whom he’d met through one of his Mossad contacts-was very good at what he did.

The Russian pushed the camera’s data chip into a slot on his computer, then sat down.

“Give me about two hours,” he said, and waved them away.

Several hours later, after dinner had been served and the dishes cleared away, Jack and the Reb sat at Cousin Ohad’s dining table, admiring Falkovsky’s handiwork, Jack happy to be rid of the beard for the time being.

“What did I tell you?” Neershum said. “The man’s an artist.”

“He should be, for the price I paid. You sure you don’t have any qualms about all of this?”

The Reb gave him the look he always gave when Jack asked stupid questions. “Do you?”

“Not really, no.”

“Good. We’re at war, my friend. It may not feel that way sometimes and that in itself can be a problem, but it’s real, and real people die as a consequence-something you know better than most.”

“I can’t argue with that,” Jack said.

“This man you seek, I can assure you he has no qualms about breaking laws to further his goals. He’d just as soon see people like you and me buried under a pile of rubble.” The Reb absently stroked his beard. “No matter what a man’s ideology or religion may be, when he’s faced by a fanatic with a knife in his hand he should cut him down. No amount of reasoning will dissuade the true believer.”

“There are people who would disagree.”

The Reb leaned forward in his chair now, his gaze intense. “Then they deserve to die. They look at terrorists and genocide as abstract notions, lessons in history that fall on their ears like some ancient melody that no longer has any relevance. They comfort themselves with trivial entertainments, but how do you think they’d feel if that knife was pressed to their throats?”

“Ready to fight back.”

“Yes, then. Then, when it’s too late.” The Reb paused, leaned back again. “So I think God will forgive us for breaking a few rules for the greater good.”

He got to his feet, grabbed his glass from the table and drained the last of his potato vodka from the Ukraine. Clean. No hangover.

He let loose a satisfied sigh as he set the glass down again. “To bed,” he told Jack. “Tomorrow is a big day and you need rest. I only wish I were going with you.”

Jack finished his own glass. “You still can.”

The Reb shook his head. “This is a one-man job. I’d only be in your way.”

“I doubt that,” Jack said, getting to his feet. “But I understand. Are you heading back to San Francisco tomorrow?”

“Ohad has invited me to stay a while. I think I’ll stick around, enjoy the family.” He smiled. “Thank you for the holiday, my friend.”

Jack nodded and shook his hand. “Good night, Rabbi.”

“Lailah tov.”

Jack traveled with a group of ten, all Lubavitchers who were flying to Bristol, U.K., for a week-long sojourn-friends of the Reb who were happy to have Jacob Heshowitz’s company, no questions asked.

Despite knowing that he blended in, Jack felt conspicuous. The fake beard didn’t help, especially since it was itching twice as much as the day before. He caught a glimpse of his reflection as he moved with the others past a phalanx of armed guards to the airport terminal doors, and what he saw made him feel naked, like a high-school kid in the halls without pants.

He half expected one of the guards to pull him away and interrogate him, but they merely glared. That was the first line of security: to look intimidating and see who started to perspire. Jack couldn’t afford to; the spirit gum holding his beard would come loose. Fortunately, to them, Jack was part of a group of men no different from a thousand other such groups that would pass through these doors in the coming weeks. They dismissed him as harmless.

The group’s flight wasn’t scheduled to depart for three hours. Jack had been warned that airport security measures at Ben Gurion International were quite different than they were in the U.S., and he and the Reb had spent much of the previous night going over how Jack should act and what he should say.

As they moved into the check-in line, Jack was approached by a pleasant-looking woman in uniform. The Israelis called this second line of security, somewhat jokingly, “the Fisher of Men.” The surly-faced guards made you uneasy. This was the one who reeled you in.

She spoke Hebrew. “Passport and ticket, please.”

Jack’s facility with the language was limited to a few brief phrases he’d learned from his mother and grandfather, and a couple the Reb had taught him last night. But he’d been assured that Tel Aviv was a melting pot, that most Israelis spoke English, and a relocated American with limited knowledge of the native tongue wouldn’t raise too much of a red flag. He could easily be a drifter who had only recently rediscovered his faith.

Taking his ticket and the forged passport from his inner coat pocket, he handed them to her, telling her he preferred to speak English.

She glanced at his suitcase, carry-on, and passport, then directly at him. “Where did you live before you moved to Tel Aviv, Mr. Heshowitz?”

“Brooklyn,” he said. “Borough Park.”

“I have family there. What area did you live in?”

“Near Eighteenth Avenue,” he told her. “Although I only spent about three years there. I was raised in California.”

As he spoke, she didn’t stop looking into his eyes. He knew he was being profiled, that she was trained to search for any signs of distress, and he did his best not to show her any.

His biggest concern was the beard. The wigmaker’s artistry was nearly as flawless as Falkovsky’s, but he couldn’t help worrying that this woman could see right through it. He just hoped his concern wasn’t showing in his eyes.

“Are you traveling alone?” she asked.

He gestured to the other Lubavitchers around him, grateful for the momentary break from her gaze. “We’re all together.”

She gave the others a cursory glance, then looked at his ticket and said, “I see you’re flying to Bristol today.”

“Yes,” he said.

Back to his eyes again. “And the reason for your travel?”

“Worship. We’ll be visiting the Bristol Chabad.”

Her gaze was unwavering, as if she wanted to find something suspicious-was just looking for an excuse to pull him into a back room somewhere and have him more thoroughly interrogated.

“And your luggage. Has it left your side today?”

“No.”

She stared at him a moment longer, Jack imagining the worst, then she suddenly handed him his documents.

“Have a pleasant trip,” she said with a warm smile.

When she moved on to the next person in line, Jack felt relief wash through him. There was still baggage screening and other checkpoints to get through, but the toughest test had been passed.

Now, if only he could get his chin to stop itching.