Chapter 14

“I think I’m ready to return to work.”

Yael blinked. “Are you sure? Your shoulder -”

“Still healing. But it doesn’t need to be fully functional for what I do.”

“Okay.” Her voice sounded uncertain.

“Before I start, I need your help. Something I’ve been putting off for far too long.”

“The families?” she asked. I nodded. “They’ll understand. That it’s taken you awhile.”

“Every day that goes by, without...”

“Joshua. You have nothing to feel guilty for. You didn’t kill those men. Those animals did.”

I sighed. My lingering sense of responsibility for the attack was a well-trod discussion between us; no new insights would grow if I continued down that path.

“Anyway. I’m having Shin Bet contact them. I’m inviting them here over the next two weeks: I hope that’s okay.”

She nodded. “Of course.”

“And I could really use your support. During the meetings.”

“Of course,” she repeated, hugging me. “I’ll be here for you.”

It was hard. The first few times especially. But I also found an immense relief when I discovered that they didn’t blame me for the death of their sons. Not one. I never even had to use my voice.

“We understand,” Yael explained. “We’re soldiers, every one of us. We follow orders.”

After I’d sat with the three Israeli families, Yael felt that I was able to handle the rest on my own, and left me to meet with the Palestinians. She didn’t speak much Arabic anyway.

“Bos. The tailor is here.”

“Thank you, Liam. Show him in, please?”

Yael had returned to work. I had four hours.

“Buenos días, Senor Rojas.”

“Buenos días, Mr. Hendrickson.” The trim, dapper Columbian entered the living room carrying a very large flat case under one arm. “I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance.” He shook my hand. I felt a palm with a touch like lambskin, neatly manicured nails.

“The pleasure is mine. Thank you for coming at such short notice. Did you have a pleasant flight?” I indicated the sofa against the wall.

“Very good, thank you.”

I sat, then leaned forward in my chair. “I’m sorry, my manners. Would you like coffee? We have some excellent Columbian.”

“No, thank you,” he smiled.

“To business, then.”

He nodded gratefully. “If you don’t object. I understand you were attacked recently. Can you tell me a little of your last incident, so that I might have a better idea of your threat level?”

“An RPG. Three Kalashnikov rounds. And a car bomb.”

Emmanuel’s eyebrows rose fractionally. “To be clear, Mr. Hendrickson: we offer personal protection against bullets and edged weapons. Not acts of God.”

I smiled. “I’m sure that’s the way my attackers would have characterized their attempt too.”

Emmanuel’s mouth twitched. “Level IV, then. That typically makes the fabric heavier, and rather less flexible: more difficult to drape and cut. You have the build to carry it well. But we have also developed an approach that uses a grapheme-reinforced polymer...” He opened the large case and brought out a sample: an Oxford pinstripe cloth with a white, flexible backing no thicker than the fabric itself. “Twenty times the strength of steel, by weight. Impervious to knives and bullets. And we can make it any color.”

I rubbed the fabric in my fingers. “That will do nicely.”

“Very good, sir. Your desired clothing?”

“The entire range.”

“Excellent. If you would please stand...” Emmanuel withdrew a yellow tailor’s tape from his pocket. “I will take your measurements, and we can discuss fabric and style.”

Liora never followed up after my birthday, and her bold flirtatiousness towards me disappeared. She was never cold or unkind, just a little distant. We never spoke about it directly: I didn’t want to appear that I was pushing by bringing it up, and she always avoided the topic.

I guessed that she was embarrassed by how much her raw craving had been exposed that night, how vulnerable she had been in that moment. For her it was acceptable to be that way with Yael, but never with another man ... most especially Yael’s man.

We remained friends, but it was never quite the same after that.

One of the few advantages of being forced to physically recover after my injuries is that I could engage my mind. Working on the assumption that my voice would return, I had used the opportunity to find new points of leverage in government. Angelina’s notebook was rarely consulted now: not only did I know it by heart, but many of its projected timelines and proposed paths of influence had been made obsolete by changes in the last few years.

I started back slowly, recruiting old contacts in Israel and installing fresh commands before returning to the West Bank. I was driven in a fully armoured personnel carrier to and from any location Shin Bet deemed threatening, with never less than 16 heavily armed guards.

Creaking and groaning, the machine of government started up again. Legislation started moving through committees; projects came back up to speed.

Five months after I returned, the world witnessed a stream of singing refugees pouring out of Gaza, driven in Israeli school buses. Captured from the air, the column along Highway 25 was five miles long.

Turning through Be’er Sheva, the convoy made its way north into the West Bank. When the pine forests of the Green Line came into view, the singing turned ecstatic.

At the 1967 border, the buses were waved through into the tiny village of Khirbet Zanuta, where an immense crowd had waited all day. Doors opened, and refugees walked into the arms of family they had not seen in over 40 years.

The photos and video taken by international press that day instantly became iconic: grandmothers, sisters weeping in each other’s arms; knots of people forming and reforming, dancing with joy. Palestine was whole again.

But still separated by miles. Two year’s more work. Commanding two hundred politicians, a thousand bureaucrats. Meeting with a dozen Israeli political parties and a half-dozen new Palestinian ones, the editors and journalists from newspapers, radio and television in five different countries, hundreds of rabbis, imans and priests.

There were public protests, of course. But protests were powerless when politicians from every party were compelled to only provide lip service to the crowd’s demands; when protest leaders suddenly turned to compromise and accommodation the day after screaming for blood and bullets in the public square. No opposition gained momentum; nothing ever built up that I couldn’t take down with a few well-placed commands.

The largest protests were planned in response to the formal ratification of Israel’s new constitution, a document that had been delayed for 60 years. Packaged with bills that brought the occupied territories into Israel proper and made their residents citizens, the constitution was the culmination of Angie’s plan for the entire region.

I’d learned from my attack: it was vital to allow some public expression of mass discontent, even from the most radical of voices. Too many commands and too much repression would increase public frustration and the likelihood of rogue events. But that didn’t mean the protests couldn’t be messed with.

Tonight’s protestors were the hardest core, the nut inside the flesh of Israel’s body politic. They were loud, energized fanatics on the fringes, those willing to ignore their rabbis, TV pundits and political leaders. But they weren’t unreachable.

Planned as a massive, coordinated protest across the country, I’d seeded enough political differences between the affiliated groups to distribute the event across several days. Whether this made the protests more or less politically effective was immaterial; breaking them up allowed me to visit each one on different nights.