The Fourth Assassin

Chapter 30

Colonel Khatib slouched through the entrance of the General Assembly. He caught the eye of Khamis Zeydan, who was standing in the doorway, and grinned with a sardonic malice. From his seat a few rows away in the public gallery, Omar Yussef detected some kind of understanding between the two policemen in the grim, curt nod with which Khamis Zeydan responded. Khatib lumbered down the steps and settled into a seat directly behind the president in the back row of the Assembly. He gathered his black leather jacket over his paunch, rubbed his square, bald head, and surveyed the chamber with a surly detachment.

Khamis Zeydan followed Khatib down the steps, his pale blue eyes glaring around the Assembly. He came to the barrier between the public gallery and the delegate area in front of Omar Yussef, leaned over, and whispered: “Your boy Ismail is here, right?”

Omar Yussef’s eyes tracked along the ranks of desks, as he quietly recited the English alphabet to be sure he wouldn’t pass over the Lebanese delegation. Ismail was in his seat, sharing a joke with his boss. “I see him,” Omar Yussef said.

Khamis Zeydan followed Omar Yussef’s gaze. “The president’s due to speak in a few minutes, and that boy’s sitting there laughing like a baby playing with a rattling gourd. Maybe you’re wrong about him.”

I’ve never wanted so much to be mistaken, Omar Yussef thought, biting the knuckle of his forefinger.

Khamis Zeydan took up a vantage point beside Colonel Khatib and leaned forward, whispering to the president. Omar Yussef’s throat was dry; but when he fingered the UN identity card in his pocket, it became slippery with sweat. He extended his neck to check that Ismail was still in his seat.

The door of the public gallery came open with a sudden burst of shouting. Shoving past a white-shirted guard, four young Americans ran down the short aisle. One of them, wearing a blue sweatshirt with the Israeli flag across the chest, unfurled a banner: President of the Murderers, it read. The others called out insults and charged at the Palestinian delegation. The president dropped low in his chair, the shoulder pads of his suit nuzzling his ears.

“Terrorist Jew-killer,” one of the protesters shouted. “Worse than Hitler.”

Khamis Zeydan and Colonel Khatib came to their feet, grappling with the protesters. Khatib took a slim girl in her early twenties and slammed her to the floor. Her heckling became a wail of shock and pain. Khamis Zeydan slapped the youth who held one end of the banner and shoved him so that he tumbled over the girl. The president’s bodyguard wrestled with the other two demonstrators as a pair of UN security guards hurried down the steps to help.

Omar Yussef looked away from the melee toward the Lebanese delegation. Just then, Ismail rose and, with a smile, whispered to his boss. He went down the aisle and headed for an exit near the front of the hall.

Behind the turquoise marble of his desk on the podium, the chairman glanced nervously toward the fracas as he gabbled through the day’s agenda. The president would be the second speaker, after the Jordanian foreign minister’s introductory remarks. Omar Yussef stared at the exit Ismail had used. Above it, tired green lights flickered in the translators’ galleries. He turned toward Khamis Zeydan, but the police chief was on the floor, pinning one of the protesters.

Omar Yussef checked his watch. The president was scheduled to speak in less than ten minutes. He hurried out of the hall. To his left, a security guard barred the entrance to the delegates’ area. Omar Yussef wiped the sweat from his UN I.D., flashed it at the guard, and entered a long corridor, which sloped down along the side of the General Assembly. At the far end of the passage, he saw Ismail dodge around a corner.

The corridor was silent as Omar Yussef limped over the thin carpet. The pain in his ankle lanced through his shin. What would he tell Ismail when he caught up with him? That the president’s speech would be nothing but empty rhetoric? That it would be foolish to sacrifice oneself only to prevent this man making promises he could never keep? Omar Yussef had tried the previous day to dissuade Ismail. He could think of no new arguments with which to reason against a boy determined to kill for his god-and he was certain that Ismail had risen from his desk to commit murder.

At the bottom of the corridor, it split into a staircase and a gallery that curved behind the stage of the General Assembly Hall. Omar Yussef assumed that, if Ismail wanted to shoot the president, he would position himself as close to the stage as possible. Omar Yussef went into the gallery. His loafers tapped on the bare, whitewashed floor, echoing in the empty quiet. On the other side of the wall, the world was gathered, but Omar Yussef felt profoundly alone.

As the gallery rounded the back of the hall, Omar Yussef realized that it had no outlet onto the stage. He came to a few small windows with a view of the plaza behind the UN building. The bare trees cowered in the wind, and rain splattered from a massive tubular steel sculpture like blood spitting from a body under the volley of a machine gun.

Omar Yussef doubled back. Applause rattled through the wall from the Assembly, and he knew the president was making his way to the stage. He clicked his tongue: the detour through the gallery had wasted time. With a hissing intake of breath and a grimace at the agony in his ankle, he mounted the stairs.

Two flights up, he was sweating with pain and exertion. Beside a heavy door marked TRANSLATION, a red light flashed in a black pad mounted on the wall. Omar Yussef swiped his UN I.D. across the pad and jerked the door handle. It didn’t move. He was flushed with adrenaline. He felt sure that Ismail must be behind this door.

He had to find another way in. He was about to continue to the floor above, when the entrance opened and a middle-aged Asian woman emerged. She smiled at Omar Yussef and held the door for him. Premature aging has its advantages, he thought.

He entered another curving gallery, but this time there were doors along the left-hand side. He opened the first one and saw a low-lit booth with two seats. Its window fronted onto the General Assembly Hall. Before each seat, a microphone on a long black neck reached out of a desk. An olive-skinned woman, enunciating clear, loud French, turned quickly to Omar Yussef, then looked away. Below the window, the president was at the podium, organizing his papers. Omar Yussef spoke no French, but he heard the woman use the words “Mesdames et Messieurs.” The speech is starting, he thought.

He went along the corridor, pushing open the doors. Beyond them, translators with Arab features transformed the president’s words into Russian, Spanish, Chinese.

The last door stuck when Omar Yussef turned the handle. He shoved with his shoulder, groaning as he pushed hard off his injured ankle. He took a breath. Inside the room, he heard a familiar voice. With another effort, he forced the door back a few inches and edged around it.

He stepped on something soft that resisted his weight. Looking down, he saw a young Arab man in a white shirt and blue necktie, his wrists tied to his ankles behind his back. He shifted his stance, and the man rolled beneath him. Omar Yussef came down on his elbows as the door slammed behind him.

Ismail sat in the translator’s seat. He held a pistol in his left hand, training it on Omar Yussef.

“Keep still, ustaz,” he muttered, his hand cupped over the head of the long black microphone.

“Ismail, don’t be foolish.”

The man on the floor beside Omar Yussef nudged him with a twitch of his neck and whimpered in a frantic falsetto. “By Allah, don’t say a word. Can’t you see he’s got a gun?”

Ismail read into the microphone from an English text on the desk before him. “We, the Palestinian leadership, have shamefully abused our people. We have allowed corruption to reign in Occupied Palestine. We have murdered our heroic Islamic fighters, even as they struggled toward martyrdom against the Zionist Occupation Forces.”

The boy glanced at Omar Yussef and smiled as he read on. From the discarded headphones on the desk, Omar Yussef heard the familiar uninspiring drone of the president’s voice.

Ismail’s doing his own mistranslation of the president’s speech, Omar Yussef thought. This fellow tied up on the floor must be the real English translator.

“Worst of all, we have involved ourselves in a scandalous sham called the ‘peace process,’” Ismail continued, “which surrenders the Islamic land of Palestine and our people’s birthright to the Zionist Occupation, in return for the vague promise of a slave state.”

Omar Yussef gripped the corner of the desk and pulled himself up slowly. He looked down at the Assembly Hall. The president seemed small at the podium. Khamis Zeydan was at the side of the stage, scanning the room. Most of the delegates lounged in their seats, but there was more motion on the floor than Omar Yussef would have expected. Those are the ones listening in English, he thought. This speech isn’t what they bargained for.

The Israeli delegate came to his feet, shouting. The Americans rose and hesitated, before walking out.

The president paused, adjusting his spectacles and peering after the Americans. Ismail halted his deviant translation, covering the microphone again. “This’ll make some headlines, don’t you think?”

“Put the gun down, Ismail. Stop this.”

“The speech isn’t over yet, ustaz.”

The president stumbled through another paragraph. Ismail used the opportunity to plug Islamic Jihad’s backers in Beirut and Tehran. By then the hall was chaotic. Confused and angry, delegates stared toward the translators’ gallery. Khamis Zeydan mounted the dais and ushered the president toward a door beside the stage. As he left, the president dropped his speech. The pages spread across the floor. His sweating young aide gathered as many as he could before following his boss.

Ismail turned his pistol toward the ceiling and whistled across the barrel, as though blowing away gun smoke after a fine shot.

Omar Yussef watched the president disappear, shielded by the body of his friend, the police chief. “You’re not going to shoot him?”

“You sound disappointed, ustaz.” Ismail lifted the translator into the spare seat and ruffled his hair. “Thanks for behaving yourself, pal.”

The translator kept his pleading eyes on the gun in Ismail’s hand. His mouth was open and he made feeble moaning noises.

“Nizar warned us about an Islamic Jihad assassin,” Omar Yussef said. “Where is he? When’s he going to hit the president?”

“Nizar was right. But I’m the one.”

“Then what was this all about?”

Ismail watched the delegates gather in excited groups on the floor below. “I was never the best student in your class, ustaz. Still, I always listened to you. Nizar was your favorite, yet can you say the same of him?”

Omar Yussef flexed his injured ankle, balancing with his hand against the window. “You chose not to kill?”

Ismail flicked the safety catch on the gun and caught his bottom lip in his teeth. “I wanted to do something to make you proud of me.”

Omar Yussef felt tears coming. Perhaps my teachings weren’t as useless as I feared, he thought. But he was still a teacher, and he suppressed his emotions with a rough clearing of the throat. “You think I’m proud of what you said into that microphone?”

Ismail’s eyes glistened. “Proud that I decided not to murder the president. Proud that I made my protest peacefully instead.”

“You weren’t so peaceful when you tried to run me down with that Jeep.”

Ismail licked his lips. “Ustaz, I placed my faith in people who took advantage of my weaknesses. They made me into a machine. Even so, I felt awful when I was tailing you, threatening you. Once you spoke to me, it was as though I had become human again.”

Omar Yussef caressed the side of Ismail’s neck and laid his hand on the boy’s chest.

“I saw you in Ala’s apartment-just a glimpse,” Ismail said. “You looked dreadful. There was blood all around you. I wanted to console you, but I knew I had to get away. You must’ve heard me, because you came to the door. I thought you might identify me to the police, so I’m sorry to say that, in my fear, I tried to put you out of the way.”

“I see.”

“When you said you would forgive me, I felt all the hatred in me collapse. All I could think of was the memory of my school days and the faith you placed in me back then. I failed you, and I tried to destroy you as though that would erase my failure. But when you spoke to me, I thought that perhaps I could give myself another chance.”

“But what a risk you’ve taken.”

“I’m prepared to pay the price for all this.” Ismail examined Omar Yussef’s face, as though seeing a dear friend for the last time. “Just as I was ready to pay with my life if I had assassinated the president.”

“I’m glad that you chose this way instead. But I’m afraid you’ll go to jail here in America for what you’ve done.”

“I’ll manage.”

“Once you’re released, Islamic Jihad will try to track you down,” Omar Yussef said. “I’ve forgiven you, but I doubt they will. They expected you to kill the president, not to play a joke on him.”

“It’s true. They’ll come after me.”

“Could you disappear like Nizar did?”

“The Jihad always catches up with you. They’ll find Nizar in the end, too, just as I tracked down Marwan Hammiya for them.”

“It was you who forced Marwan back into drugs?”

“I blackmailed him into running a drug operation for us. I connected him with Nizar and Rashid. I ran the whole thing. Unfortunately I didn’t pay attention to Nizar’s-distractions.”

Omar Yussef heard a hammering on a door down the corridor. “The girl?”

“I only found out about her after Nizar committed the murder.”

“Which murder? He killed Rashid and Rania’s father.”

Ismail shook his head. “I was waiting for Nizar outside the cafe the night Rania’s father died. I thought he might need money and try to get some from Marwan. But he didn’t go to the cafe.”

“Then who killed Marwan?” Omar Yussef said. “Did you do it, Ismail? Had he double-crossed Islamic Jihad somehow?”

The boy let his head dip from side to side in good-humored supplication. “Not guilty, ustaz.”

Heavy boots beat along the gallery. The door opened, and Colonel Khatib stepped inside. He lifted a Colt Python, massive even in his big hand, and trained it on Omar Yussef. “I knew you were a stupid bastard, schoolteacher,” he said, “but not this stupid.”

Omar Yussef stared into the broad barrel of the gun. It seemed to dilate like the angry nostrils of the man who held it. His mouth was dry. He felt a sudden cramp in his bowels.

“It’s me you want.” Ismail laid his pistol on the desk and lifted his hands.

“You’re the fucking translator?” Colonel Khatib’s voice was hoarse, as though he had spent the previous night yelling in a crowded bar.

“No, I’m the translator.” Khatib swept his big revolver toward the young man bound in the chair. The man became shrill. “No, really, I’m only the translator.”

“He wasn’t doing the translation for the president’s speech,” Omar Yussef said.

Khatib spoke through his bared teeth. “Who did that?”

“That was me.” Ismail held himself straight. “I’m thinking of making translation my new career.”

“Translation? You bastard,” Khatib said.

Omar Yussef went toward Ismail. “When Nizar showed me the ad in the newspaper, I remembered the Assassins’ phrase about ‘he who bears in his hands the death of kings.’ I couldn’t stand to think that the happy boy I once knew had become that man. I’m glad you changed your mind.”

Ismail took Omar Yussef’s hand and rubbed the bones along his wrist affectionately. Omar Yussef smiled and squeezed back, but the boy went pale as he looked over his old teacher’s shoulder. He whispered the declaration of faith: “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.”

Omar Yussef followed Ismail’s eyes and saw Colonel Khatib stepping forward with his Colt raised. The blast was tremendous. Ismail’s hand wrenched out of Omar Yussef’s grip as his body lurched back onto the desk, shot through the chest, slamming against the window of the booth. A few delegates in the hall looked up at the smear of blood on the glass. Ismail pitched to the floor, spraying his papers under his body.

“Allahu akbar.” Colonel Khatib sneered at the corpse. “Translate that, you son of a whore.”

“Allah is most great,” Omar Yussef murmured. He went to his knees and took Ismail’s lifeless hand. Trembling, he averted his eyes from the boy’s wounded torso. His breath caught in his throat. Is any speech, any political declaration, worth this death, O Ismail? he thought.

“He’d surrendered,” he said to Khatib. “Why did you shoot him?”

Khatib shoved the big Colt into his shoulder holster. “Unlike your friend the Bethlehem police chief, I don’t take chances.”

Blood seeped into the pages from which Ismail had read, strewn across the carpet. Omar Yussef looked down at them. The paper was soaked, and the words were all illegible.