Alpha and Omega Read online

  Ben Gurion Airport lay twelve miles east of Tel Aviv. The kibbutz where Rosie the red heifer of the apocalypse—Apocalypse Cow, Gabriela thought, as if ruining a movie title with one letter on Twitter—and Chaim Avigad lived was closer to the airport than the city was. She didn’t want to live on a kibbutz, though, even if Gabriela and Brandon had to film one. She’d grown up poor, but once was enough.

  She and her mob collected their luggage. They had enough to intrigue and even alarm the Israeli customs officers. Brandon’s jet-lagged temper frayed. “Good God!” he exclaimed. “Didn’t you hear we were coming?”

  “Easy,” Gabriela said softly. “Easy.” The scene back at JFK had warned her how prickly Israelis could be.

  “We didn’t expect all—this.” The customs official waved at the nylon sacks full of video gear.

  “You get Gabriela and Brandon, you get what goes with them.” Saul Buchbinder sounded proud. The customs man grabbed his phone and spoke in Hebrew. Gabriela glanced at Saul—did he follow? By his blank look, no. That was a shame.

  A supervisor ambled over. He needed a shave. His deodorant had quit for the day. He and the other customs officer yakked incomprehensibly. Then he switched to English: “You can go through once we make an inventory. You have to take everything out again, not sell it here.”

  “That’s fine.” Gabriela hid her exasperation. Brandon looked affronted at the idea that they’d part with anything. Without this stuff, he forgot he existed. Gabriela felt that way, too, but less than she had when she was younger.

  She would have been more exasperated if she’d known the inventory would take two hours. A production assistant had to call the two limo drivers waiting outside to make sure they stuck around. They wanted more money for sitting there. They’d have to get it, too.

  At last, the procession started. They were staying at the Alexander, on Havakook Street. Gabriela got the Superior Suite. The guests in the lobby gaped as she and her colleagues strode in. Those guests were a nebbishy-looking lot. Gabriela wasn’t the only one who thought so; Brandon asked the desk clerk, “Is a dentists’ convention in town or something?”

  “No,” she answered. “The Alexander caters to the diamond trade.”

  “Oh.” Brandon sounded nonplused. Gabriela knew she was. Those bad haircuts and off-the-rack suits were probably protective coloration. If you looked as if you made your living doing root canals, who’d knock you over the head and run for the closest fence with your briefcase?

  The Superior Suite boasted satin sheets. Gabriela’s mouth twisted. She’d had those on her wedding night—or were they silk then? Whatever they were, they’d kept her and César from getting much traction.

  She yawned. Lack of traction wouldn’t worry her now. It was still early evening, but she aimed to hit the sack anyway. Even flying business class, go seven time zones and someone might as well have hit you over the head with a rock. If she woke up too soon tomorrow, she’d go out and see what Tel Aviv looked like these days. She hadn’t been here for a long time.

  She closed the curtains, used the bathroom, and went to bed. Even with the curtains closed, the room wasn’t quite dark. That annoyed her—for about fifteen seconds. Then she forgot about it, and about everything else.

  * * *

  —

  Several floors below Gabriela, Brandon Nesbitt fumed. The bitch with the top billing got the Superior Suite. The second banana got…a hotel room. By American standards, it was on the crowded side and a little old-fashioned. He’d stayed in plenty of worse places—a tent in Somalia, for instance—but he didn’t feel like remembering that. He had resentments that needed nursing.

  Old-fashioned room or not, the WiFi worked and his phone had bars. He called Kibbutz Nair Tamid to let them know Gabriela and Brandon had arrived. Gabriela didn’t bother with that, no. She’d left it for him. What else was he but a hewer of wood and a drawer of water?

  Maybe the people at the kibbutz were too naive to understand that. They sounded happy to get some publicity. Yes, the show could film Chaim and Rosie tomorrow.

  “Maybe the day after,” Brandon said, yawning. “I want to lose some of my jet lag first.” Jet lag was the correspondent’s occupational disease, the way black lung was with coal miners. People kept coming up with what they claimed were cures. Brandon had tried them all. The next one that worked would be the first.

  “That will be all right, too,” Chaim’s uncle told him, and hung up. The uncle was Yitzhak…Avigad. Brandon beamed at remembering the last name. He was the guy who’d decided Rosie was red enough and holy enough to die for religion. Gotta interview him, too, Brandon reminded himself. Maybe in front of the barn or wherever they keep the cow. Good visuals that way.

  But that could wait. Even thinking about it could wait. He wanted food, he wanted to wind down a little, and he wanted sleep. He checked the room service menu. No bacon and eggs for breakfast. No sausage or ham and eggs, either. Damn! Now he wanted dinner, though. He ordered lamb and eggplant. It felt Biblical, or maybe just Mediterranean.

  While he waited for it to come up, he turned on the TV. The laminated channel guide was in Hebrew and English. The local channels were in Hebrew, too, of course. But the international ones were in English, sometimes with Hebrew subtitles or crawl, sometimes not. Feeling worn out and brainless, Brandon went to ESPN.

  It turned out to be ESPN Europe, full of soccer news and highlights even if the Brit doing the broadcasting called it football. Brandon cared more about soccer than he did about suicide, but not a whole lot more. He was also so brain-damaged from the flight, he watched the guys in short pants run around till room service knocked on his door.

  The little fellow who wheeled in the cart was a Thai, not an Israeli. Like most developed countries, they used cheap Third World labor for scut work here. He spoke just about enough English to get by. Brandon tipped him—American money, because he hadn’t changed any yet—and sent him on his way.

  He ate. The lamb and eggplant was pretty good. Not great, but you couldn’t expect great from room-service cooking. When Brandon finished, he wheeled the cart out into the hall. A maybe diamond merchant was doing the same thing a few doors down. They nodded to each other and disappeared back into their rooms.

  Brandon left the TV on. It gave him something to look up at every so often when he wasn’t staring at his phone. He remembered how things had been before you could carry the whole world in your pocket, but only distantly. The generation coming up behind him wouldn’t remember at all.

  North Korea was acting stupid. So was Iran. So was the President. That was how things went these days. With everything else so crazy, wouldn’t the red heifer and the dream of rebuilding the Temple seem more like comic relief than real news?

  That Brit talked about the Mexican wave. It just looked like the wave to Brandon. He noted differences between British and American English. That was a new one for him. The driving seat was another, and so was the finishing line. They were close to American usage, but differed from it. Fixtures and ties had to do with the schedule, and the Brit said table when he meant standings. But Brandon needed to Google breaking your duck to learn it meant the same as getting off the schneid.

  After a while, he couldn’t stay interested in either the dumb sport or the funny phrases. The TV made a faint popping noise when he killed power with the remote. He dug a plastic vial of pills and a pill cutter out of his Dopp kit. He cut one of the small round white tablets in half. After a moment’s thought, he cut one of the halves in half again.

  He nodded to himself as he washed down the quarter-pill with water from the bathroom sink. You had to be careful with roofies. A whole one would leave you out of it for almost a day. He couldn’t afford that now. He judged even a half here would be too much. A quarter, though…A quarter and he’d turn off, sleep deeply till morning, and be ready to do whatever needed doing then.

  W
alking back to bed, he nodded again. Roofies had other uses, too. He’d never done that with them, but he knew how. He had done some other things, things he wished now he hadn’t, not because they weren’t fun but because people remembered them too well. In this age of Weinstein and Lauer, Wynn and Ailes, that wasn’t so good. He’d drawn too much of the wrong kind of gossip.

  He muttered as he pulled back the sheet. He would have been a much bigger deal in the business if not for that stupid goddamn chatter. He wouldn’t have been junior partner to a Mexican bitch who’d blown her own shot at glory, that was for sure.

  He slid into bed. The mattress was squishy. He hated squishy mattresses—one more reason to take some Rohypnol. Out went the light. The smoke detector’s little red eye glared down at him from the ceiling. He glared up at it till the quarter-pill started to kick in. Then he rolled from his back to his side and floated away.

  * * *

  —

  Gabriela woke in darkness. She looked at the glowing digits of the clock on the nightstand. The clock said it was 4:28. “Mierda,” she said, not that she was really surprised. She’d sacked out early, so of course she’d get up early. Much as you wished you could, you didn’t slot into a distant time zone right away.

  She thought about sleeping some more, but not for long. She’d got eight hours and then some. She was awake, even if out of phase. She turned on the bedside lamp, then checked her phone. There was a text from Brandon saying they’d film at Kibbutz Nair Tamid the next day. He’d dealt with it. That was good. And they’d all be happier and able to work better after an adjustment day.

  Her stomach growled. It wanted breakfast, or possibly lunch. She checked the little hotel guide on the dresser. It told her room service went into action at 0630. “Mierda,” she said again, louder this time.

  She jumped in the shower. Then she put on jeans, a knit cotton top, and Adidases and went downstairs. Her footfalls echoed in the deserted lobby. She got some local money at an ATM, then went to the front desk. The clerk behind it was yawning as she walked up.

  “Where can I get some breakfast?” Gabriela asked—beating around the bush had never been her style.

  The clerk frowned. “It’s so late, it’s early,” she said, which was either bad English or very good, depending. She went on, “All the clubs are closed, and the morning things, they aren’t open yet.”

  “But I’m hungry now,” Gabriela said. Her body might not know what time it was, but it was sure she needed food.

  “Let me think.” The clerk didn’t yawn again, but plainly needed an effort not to. After a moment, she brightened. “You can try down by the bus station. That’s open all the time. I think you can get something inside, and places around it may be up, too.”

  “How do I get there?” Gabriela demanded.

  The clerk reached under the desktop and pulled out a city map. “We’re here; it’s here.” The hotel was almost on the beach; the station lay farther inland and a bit south. “It’s a couple of kilometers, more or less. You can take a taxi, or it’s not even a half-hour walk.”

  “Is it safe to walk alone in the dark?”

  “Oh, yes. All the thieves, they are asleep at this time. And Tel Aviv is a pretty safe place anyway.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” Gabriela had the map. She had her phone. The bus station looked big and important. She figured she could find it.

  But she hadn’t gone far before she wondered if this was a good idea. Tel Aviv was muggier than Los Angeles, but at least as warm. And, like L.A., it had homeless people sleeping or shooting up wherever they could. No one bothered her, but she didn’t feel safe, either.

  The bus station was in a pretty gritty part of town. Gabriela had to clear security to get inside. More druggies found odd corners to nod off in. Hookers—Asians, Africans, blondes who came from Russia or Poland—strutted along the corridors, looking for business even before sunup.

  Even before sunup, the huge terminal bustled. Signs in Hebrew, English, and (in smaller letters) Arabic directed travelers where they needed to go. Almost all of the people ignored both prostitutes and homeless folk. Gabriela made her way to a food court. Stores that sold clothes or books or tchotchkes were closed, but not the restaurants. There was always a demand for coffee and food.

  Gabriela gulped two espressos from paper cups and got some fuul beans, which seemed to be the preferred Israeli breakfast. They weren’t quite Tex-Mex refried beans, but they came close. She ate them at a small, beat-up plastic table with something in Hebrew scratched onto the top.

  No one paid her any special attention. Her black hair, brown eyes, and light-brown skin made her look more normal here than she would have in, say, Wichita or Des Moines or St. Paul. She blended in. Her looks would have let her do the same thing in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the cultural divide was far wider in places like those.

  She chucked the cardboard bowl and plastic spoon, grabbed another slug of espresso for the road, and headed out. Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, English, and other languages in the background reminded her of every international airport she’d ever walked through. So did the bland coolness of the air-conditioning.

  Then it was out into muggy reality again. She glanced at the security men and women screening people before they let them in. They looked like combat soldiers, not ordinary guards. They had helmets and body armor and rifles. You saw a lot of rifles in Israel, more than you did in the States. People here didn’t shoot each other nearly so much, though. It made you wonder.

  It was getting light outside. A star still shone in the east. Venus? Jupiter? Something bright, anyway. Not bright enough to be the Star of Bethlehem, though. Bethlehem, these days, lay in the West Bank, in territory Israel had occupied years longer than Gabriela’d been alive.

  She walked a couple of blocks west, toward the Mediterranean, then turned right to go north. Traffic was picking up. Israelis drove with the suicidal machismo that prevailed everywhere in the Middle East. Even so early, car and truck horns played a cacophonous symphony. Lanes and traffic lights were matters of opinion, not the gospel they would have been most places in the States.

  A big van roared past on the wrong side of the road and made a screeching left as it raced toward the station Gabriela had left a few minutes before. She turned around to stare after it. Even by Israeli standards, that was insane driving.

  Unless…Hardly thinking why, Gabriela spun ’round and started back the way she’d come. The story-detector light every good reporter needed came on inside her head. Something wasn’t right.

  She hadn’t got to the corner when she heard the sharp stutter of automatic weapons. Gunfire never sounded like anything else, not after you’d heard it a few times. She’d just had time to realize that when the world blew up.

  The office building she hadn’t rounded shielded her from the worst of the blast. Car bomb, she thought dizzily. Big fucking car bomb. She didn’t realize she was picking herself up off the sidewalk till she’d already done it. Her palms were all scraped. Her jeans were out at the knees. One knee and one palm bled with some enthusiasm. Pain reached her a little at a time. Her butt hurt along with everything else. She must have landed on it before rolling or being blown over.

  She’d worry about all that later. She dug her phone out of her pocket, then swore. Protective case or no protective case, the screen was smashed. She held a useless piece of electronic junk.

  But she still had her eyes and her ears. She knew how to take notes, a skill younger reporters had mostly lost. And she was on the spot for something big. She wouldn’t let it go to waste. She hurried back around the corner, and straight into a vision of hell.

  The worst thing was, it was an all too familiar hell. She’d seen such things before in Baghdad and Falluja, in Kabul and Kandahar. She’d smelled them, too: gasoline and explosives and charred paint and charred flesh that reminded her too much of a pork roast forgotten i
n the oven. Razor-like glass shards had scrunched under her shoes before, as well. Her disgrace and exile to the safety of the USA had let her forget things like this existed. But here they were again, as if they’d never gone away. And they hadn’t. She had. She was back with them again, though.

  Also far too familiar were the bodies and pieces of bodies and blood of the dead and wounded splashed across streets and sidewalks and walls, burning cars sending pyres of filthy black smoke into the sky, buildings on fire or in rubble or leaning crazily, and all the people who hadn’t been killed outright shrieking and screaming and ululating at the tops of their lungs.

  Men and women who hadn’t got badly hurt rushed to help those who had. The Israelis handled that better than Gabriela remembered from her days in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of them had gone through the military and knew how to give first aid. But the disaster and the toll were plainly enormous. The front of the bus terminal was a crumpled, shattered mess. How many inside the building had flying glass and metal fragments scythed down?

  Ice tingled along Gabriela’s spine. If she’d lingered in the shower or at her breakfast, she might have still been in there when the car bomb went off. If she had been, they might have had to clean her out with a push broom—or with a hose.

  You couldn’t think about things like that, not if you wanted to keep doing your job. But you couldn’t not think about them, not when the iron stink of blood clogged your nostrils, not when you were bleeding yourself, not when the howls of police and ambulance sirens threw new notes into the chaos all around.

  A man grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the carnage, shouting in Hebrew. “I don’t understand,” she said. When he heard English, odds were he’d leave her alone.

  Only he didn’t. He shifted to that language himself, saying, “Come on. We have to do what we can.” He had a cut under one eye. His left ear had been half Van Goghed, and dripped blood onto his powder-blue polo shirt. He had other damage, too—about like Gabriela’s, maybe a little worse. He didn’t seem to realize he’d been hurt.