TWENTY
Jack kept Uziel moving at a leisurely pace. They paused at shops along the way to give him a chance to scan the crowds. It also helped the two of them to look like nothing more than a couple of tourists or shoppers. He didn’t want to look obvious to any potential threat seeking an easy terrorist target.
They made their way through some of the narrow connecting streets packed tightly with vendors or shops with their wares on display outside. Uziel occasionally glanced at the racks with hanging scarves, necklaces, and rosaries, or tables of fruits, pastries, and tourist trinkets, trying to look like an ordinary shopper as he watched the faces that continually streamed past him going in the opposite direction.
Uziel suddenly stiffened to a stop.
“What?” Jack asked, looking up.
“Faded green T-shirt,” Uziel said with a nod of his head indicating someone across the street.
Jack looked over and saw the older, heavyset man in the faded T-shirt. The faded T-shirt had what looked like a lifetime of stains. The man’s heavy jowls and hanging double chins were unshaven. He looked to be in a daze.
Jack just couldn’t picture the guy as a murderer, but then, he didn’t have Uziel’s ability and murderers were often quite unremarkable looking.
“Heavy, older man, faded green shirt, walking past the Jamin Jewelry store,” he said into the microphone under the collar of his shirt.
Two men in plain clothes emerged from the crowds, each grabbing an arm of the older man, bringing him to a halt. Two police officers immediately swept in and took over. The man twisted his head around, looking at the two policemen as he protested in Hebrew. He was still protesting as he was rushed away. People in the nearby crowd stared at the apprehension.
All the people in Jack’s team melted back into the crowds as people watched the police taking the man away. The whiff of danger in the air was palpable as people switched from a fun day to murmuring about the possibility of danger. It became clear rather quickly that it was a criminal arrest and not a threat of terrorism. Within a few minutes of the man being taken away to jail, people returned to enjoying their day out. They would have a story for the dinner table.
Uziel and Jack returned to their reason for being in the Triangle and were soon back to searching the crowds for trouble. With the sun high in the sky, it was becoming a hot day. Uziel and Jack stopped at a shop to buy a couple of bottles of water. For a time they sat on a bench, drinking water, engaged in the very ordinary act of people watching. Except their form of people watching was quite out of the ordinary.
In the early afternoon, Ehud came on over the radio. “The man we arrested is a murderer,” he said into Jack’s earpiece. “The police had been looking for him. He murdered his wife last night. Apparently, he has been wandering the streets since then.”
“Okay, thanks,” Jack said quietly toward the microphone.
“Well,” he told Uziel, “you were right. The guy you pointed out killed his wife.”
Uziel shook his head as he took in the news. “Doesn’t seem fair.”
Jack frowned. “Fair?”
Uziel tossed his empty water bottle in a trash can. “To have a wife you love taken from you, while someone else blessed with life doesn’t appreciate what they have.”
“I see what you mean,” Jack said. “Anyway, the guy wasn’t the kind of threat we’re hunting, so let’s get back to it.”
They walked on down the street to an area overlooking a plaza of sorts where several streets intersected. The area was filled with people going in all directions. They slowed as Uziel gazed out over the crowds below them.
As they stood in the river of people slowly drifting up the street, they suddenly heard screaming.
It was a soldier, pointing as he yelled.
“Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!”
Soldiers suddenly ran in from every direction, guns at the ready. They screamed orders for people to get back.
Jack stretched up to see over the heads of the crowd. He saw a man in the street not too far away, shirt thrown open, frantically jabbing a finger at what was clearly a bomb vest, trying to detonate it.
The word “bomb” had flashed through the crowd like wildfire. Almost instantly all the people in the streets started stampeding. What had been a quiet shopping afternoon turned into loud, screaming panic. All at once thousands of people began to flee the danger.
Uziel and Jack, standing at the end of a table in front of a shop that sold sunglasses, were sheltered from the crush of people racing past them trying to escape the danger. The mood of the shoppers had instantly switched from convivial shopping to mass hysteria.
Through gaps in the mob of people bolting past, Jack saw two soldiers dive in and grab the suicide bomber by his arms. They took him to the ground while preventing him from detonating his bomb. More soldiers rushed in to help.
Jack stepped behind Uziel, getting ready to shepherd him into the flood of people rushing past to get him away from the danger.
Jack just caught a glimpse of a cowboy hat beyond Uziel abruptly pause.
Uziel gasped in recognition.
Jack flicked open the blade of the knife in his right hand as he swept his left arm around Uziel’s waist to pull him back.
In the next instant, as Jack was beginning to yank Uziel back away from danger, the man slammed a knife into the center of Uziel’s chest so hard it toppled Uziel back on top of Jack.
In that fleeting instant, Jack saw the back of the killer disappearing into the mad dash of panicked people. All Jack could tell was that the man had short black hair and a beard. He never saw the attacker’s face.
Before Uziel and Jack both hit the ground, the assassin was already gone. Jack caught sight of the cowboy hat on the ground being trampled by the stampede of panicked people.
“Medic!” Jack yelled into the microphone. “We need a medic!”
In the mad scene, three of his team in plain clothes were already there, protecting Uziel down on the ground.
When Jack saw the wound in the center of Uziel’s chest and the amount of blood, he knew that the young man was beyond help. Two army medics rushed up, going to a knee on either side of Uziel, but Jack knew it was no use. The assassin had only needed to strike once.
Jack knew that Uziel’s heart had been torn apart by that knife. Uziel had been dead before he hit the ground.
Jack wanted to scream in rage. He wanted to get the man who had been wearing the cowboy hat, but he was long gone. Jack knew he wouldn’t even be able to recognize him—he had barely caught a glimpse of the hat and a beard.
Uziel, though, had recognized the man as a killer, if only an instant before the man had murdered him.
The assassin had obviously recognized Uziel for his rare ability.
Jack wanted to tell Uziel how sorry he was that he hadn’t protected him. He had promised that he would do his best to keep Uziel out of danger. He gritted his teeth in rage at himself for failing to stop the attack.
The medics had not given up, but Jack had seen enough killings to know that the man was beyond help. There was a lot of blood, but it was no longer spurting from the gaping wound. That was because the heart was too damaged to continue pumping.
Ehud rushed up, breathless. He stopped in his tracks when he saw Uziel on the ground in a spreading pool of blood, medics to either side. One started an IV as the other was doing CPR.
“What happened?” Ehud asked.
“That suicide bomber was meant to be a diversion,” Jack said. “The real target was Uziel.”
“How do you know?”
“As soon as someone yelled ‘bomb,’ the crowd started running. The killer was apparently in that crowd, using it as cover. He recognized Uziel for his ability before Uziel saw him. When he did, it was too late.
“I wish I would have gotten a look at his face, but I only caught a glimpse of a cowboy hat. I was under Uziel’s dead weight as he went down and tried to snatch a quick look, but the killer had vanished into the panicked crowd. I never got a look at his face.”
Ehud ran his fingers back through his wavy hair as he looked around, clearly frustrated and angered at the same time.
One of the plainclothes members of the team rushed in close. “We got the bomber before he could detonate his bomb vest,” he said to Ehud. Of course, they knew that, because there was no explosion.
People still rushing away from the scene gave a wide berth to the dead man in the pool of blood and the soldiers around him. Police officers had appeared and were already pushing the crowds back.
Jack stayed with Uziel as the medics worked on him. He could hear an ambulance in the distance. He felt useless. He felt sick.
These people had saved Jack’s life when he had been shot and was, for all practical purposes, dead, but he knew that Uziel’s wound was different. He was beyond the same kind of help. The assassin had known what he was doing, and he had not failed.
Jack stood back when the ambulance arrived, letting the medical people do their job.
Once Uziel was on a gurney and loaded into the ambulance, Jack turned to Ehud.
“I’m going with him.”
He could tell that Ehud wanted to object, but in the end he only nodded. “It’s not your fault, Jack.”
“I’m the one who recognized his ability,” Jack said as he hopped up into the ambulance. “I recruited him.”
It was a somber ride to the hospital in the wailing ambulance. Jack thought that he must once have looked as hopeless as Uziel did now when he had been the one riding in an ambulance. He wished that Uziel could have the same chance at life that had been given to Jack by the Israeli doctors. He held on to a thread of hope, even though he knew better.
When they raced into the ambulance bay at the hospital, there was already a team of doctors and nurses waiting. Uziel’s lifeless body was rolled in through double doors, surrounded by a medical team running beside the gurney.
Jack hoped against hope they could perform a miracle, the same as they had done for him.
He waited all alone on a bench in a hallway, wishing he had never found Uziel. Wishing he had never told him that he might be able to save lives. Uziel had wanted to do it, though. Jack wished he had said no and left Uziel to live his life.
But finding those rare people with Uziel’s vision was Jack’s calling in life. It was what he could do that none other could.
It was late that night when the doctor came out to see Jack. As he expected, there was no saving the young man. Jack nodded and thanked the doctor. With no sense of urgency, the doctor went back in through double doors, leaving Jack all alone on the bench. People rushed up and down the hall, past the green-painted walls, past Jack sitting on the lonely bench.
He didn’t know what he was going to do. He felt lost. He missed Kate, and at the same time hoped that she had vanished off the grid and that a killer hadn’t found her as well.
Sometime in the night, as he was sitting on the bench, mourning Uziel, lost in his own thoughts, Ehud arrived.
He sat down on the bench beside Jack.
“Any word?”
Jack stared at the floor. “He didn’t make it. The doctor said there was nothing they could do.”
Ehud nodded. “I’m really sorry, Jack.”
“It was planned out, you know. That suicide bomber was a distraction. Uziel had been the real target. At least no one was killed by that bomb. We’re lucky it was defective.”
“It wasn’t defective,” Ehud said.
Jack frowned. “What do you mean, it wasn’t defective? I saw the guy pushing the detonator over and over.”
Ehud arched an eyebrow as he leaned in. “That wasn’t the detonator he was pushing. It was the arming switch. He kept hitting the arming switch over and over, thinking it was the detonator. The bomb was live. If he would have instead hit the detonator it would have gone off. He would have been a martyr.”
Jack leaned back and folded his arms. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Nope. The guy was probably panicked that he was about to die, panicked that the bomb strapped around his body was about to blow him apart. In the confusion of that wild emotional state he kept hitting the arming button instead of the detonator.”
“Do you really think so? That seems pretty odd. That kind usually want to die.”
“Yeah, but right at the last instant, it has to be traumatic. I imagine the human mind doesn’t think clearly in that last moment when it knows it is about to die.”
“I suppose. What did the guy have to say for himself?”
“That’s the weird part,” Ehud said.
“What’s the weird part?”
Ehud glanced up and down the hall, making sure no one was standing within earshot.
“The weird part is that he doesn’t speak Arabic, Farsi, or Hebrew, or any other Middle Eastern language or dialect.”
Jack made a face. “What does he speak, then?”
“Spanish.”
Jack leaned in a little more. “Spanish? He’s from the ETA?”
Ehud shook his head. “No, he’s not part of the Basque separatist movement. He’d never heard of them.”
“Who, then?”
“The only thing we could get out of him is that he’s from Santiago de Querétaro, in Mexico.”
“Mexico!” Jack looked up to make sure no one nearby had heard him. “He’s from Mexico?” he asked in a lower voice.
“That was about all we could get out of him. He’s here from Santiago de Querétaro, in Mexico.”
Jack heaved a sigh. “So he’s a Mexican suicide bomber?”
“It appears so.”
“Did you find out anything else?”
“Just that his name is José.”
“José. Why was José from Santiago de Querétaro in Mexico trying to blow himself up all the way over here in Jerusalem?”
Ehud shrugged. “All he would say was that he wanted to martyr himself for God. But I’ve got to tell you, Jack, the guy is dumb as a rock.” He tapped his temple. “I don’t think he’s all there.”
It suddenly made sense. Terrorists often recruited the mentally handicapped and convinced them that it was the right thing to do, that it was the right thing to do for God.
Jack rubbed his aching knees. “Do you think that maybe he was recruited because he’s easily persuaded?”
“Possibly.”
Jack sat back against the wall and folded his arms again. “A Mexican suicide bomber. I don’t get it.”
“I don’t either,” Ehud admitted as he stood. “How about I give you a lift home.”
Jack stood and went with Ehud. “A Mexican suicide bomber?” he muttered to himself as he walked down the hallway.