The Spear of Tyranny Page 8

  She heard nothing but the rapid pulse of her pounding heart.

  Sarah crossed to the kitchen and knocked the phone from its stand. With one hand curled around the Beretta, she dialed Shin Bet headquarters, then set the receiver on her shoulder.

  Melman was still in his office. “Director,” she began, dismayed to hear a tremor in her voice, “my home has been invaded.”

  A harsh sound rose from his throat. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Don’t go prowling around; wait right where you are. Are you armed?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll send a team right over. When they give the all-clear, call the police.”

  “All right.”

  She replaced the phone in its cradle, then stepped back to the wall and gulped a deep breath. Why wasn’t Isaac around when she needed him? If he hadn’t gone to Paris, he would be with her now. He would have driven her to work, so she would have avoided that unpleasant confrontation with the boys on the bus. And if someone had been watching the house, they would have known that a man lived inside. But no, Isaac wanted to be in Paris. He wanted to chase dreams of peace while she remained home alone . . .

  Convinced that neither the living room nor the dining room concealed an intruder, she slipped behind the bar separating the kitchen from the dining area. The kitchen had been ransacked, but no one hid behind the bar or the refrigerator. Stepping carefully over her broken china, she slid along the hallway toward the master bedroom, then methodically checked the closet and under the bed. She saw no one, but did see that her jewelry box had been emptied on the bed. Right away she noticed that her two most valuable pieces, a gold necklace and bracelet, were missing. Both had been gifts from Isaac and, aside from her wedding band, were the most precious items in the bedroom.

  As her heart beat in a staccato rhythm, Sarah moved toward the closed door that led to Binyamin’s room. Her grasping fingers touched the cold metal of the knob, then flung the door open. She thrust the pistol muzzle into the open space.

  Her heart had been numb; now it broke. The intruder had violated this room, too, slicing the mattress on Binyamin’s crib and decapitating his favorite teddy bear. With apparently fiendish glee, the person or persons unknown had gutted several other stuffed animals and flung the stuffing everywhere. Lumps of white fiberfill vibrated on the marble windowsill, stirred by the slow breath of an overhead ceiling fan.

  Sarah dropped her heavy arms on the railing of her baby’s bed as tears welled in her eyes. What sort of monster could take delight in destroying a baby’s room? No one would hide treasures in a child’s room—the treasure was the child. And her treasure had been stolen months ago . . .

  Sadness pooled in her heart, a deep despondency akin to nausea. She gulped a few frantic breaths, then pushed herself upright and dashed the tears from her eyes. She would weep later. She would think later. Right now she had a job to finish.

  After a check of the bathroom and the spare bedroom, she tucked her pistol back into its holster. The intruders had gone, probably some time ago. And the spare bedroom, which she and Isaac used as an office, appeared to be the least-disturbed room in the house. A few drawers stood open, one file had been riffled and emptied onto the floor, but apparently the burglars had realized that the couple kept nothing of monetary value in the desk.

  She walked to the computer and stared at the keyboard. Had the perpetrators left fingerprints behind? Had they tried to access her computer files?

  She heard the distant slam of a car door, then the crunch of boots upon glass. As a gruff voice called her name she stepped into the hall, her hands lifted.

  “I’m all right, and the place is empty,” she said, walking forward. The Shin Bet had sent an entire squad dressed in protective gear. Deputy Director Melman stood at the front of the pack.

  “It looks like a simple burglary,” she said, gesturing to the wreckage in the front room. “And they didn’t find much. Isaac and I never keep cash in the house. There’s a little television missing from the kitchen, and some jewelry from my bedroom . . .”

  She looked up and saw a thought working in Melman’s eyes. “Your computer?” he asked.

  “It’s still here, and it looks perfectly normal,” she said. “But I didn’t turn it on. You might want to dust the keyboard for fingerprints first.”

  “All your files were encrypted?”

  She gave him a sour smile. “Everything except my personal financial records. My case files are encrypted, but if they got to my computer, they are probably accessing my bank account right now.”

  Melman gave her a smile of pure relief. “That’s OK; you can alert the bank. And you’re all right? You’re sure?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, but suddenly her knees seemed to turn to water. She thrust out an arm to steady herself, and Melman caught her.

  “It happens to the best of us,” he said, smiling as he led her to the sofa. “First you run on adrenaline, but when that evaporates, you’re left as limp as a noodle.”

  “Lovely.” She pressed a hand to her forehead, realizing that a dull throb had begun to pound behind her right temple.

  Melman cleared a space on the sofa for her, then gently pressed her down. “Did you call the police?”

  “Not yet.”

  “We’ll file the report. And I’ll have one of our techs look at your computer. Maybe they didn’t get that far.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, then reached up to pluck a strand of fiberfill from her hair. “You look beat. Hungry?”

  She nodded, then shook her head. “I don’t know. I think so, but I’m not sure I can eat anything. I brought things for dinner, but I can’t seem to remember where I dropped my shopping bag.”

  “Let me get you something. While we’re out, I’ll have a security team dust this place for prints. You come with me and try to forget about it, and we’ll make this all go away.”

  Sarah swallowed hard, then nodded slowly. She wanted nothing more than to make the world go away, and if she left now she wouldn’t have to face the sight of Binyamin’s desecrated room.

  Tomorrow, she’d close the door and concentrate on cleaning the rest of the house.

  In a hidden basement room of Romulus’s country chateau, Adam Archer bent over a sheaf of green-lined computer paper, his forehead wrinkled in thought. As someone flushed a toilet upstairs, the water pipes above Archer’s head began to sing, momentarily covering the soft sounds of copiers, computers, and printers that blended together in a technological chorus.

  “Are the files encrypted?” Archer asked the computer technician who sat before the mainframe.

  “Oui, monsieur. All except the personal bank account records you have in your hand.”

  “I’m not interested in the bank accounts of military people. I already know what I’ll find—a mortgage and not nearly enough income to recompense people who lay their lives on the line every day for the sake of national security.”

  The Frenchman ran his hands over the clattering keyboard. “I can break the code . . . but it will take time for me to find the proper keys. And there is no guarantee we will find anything interesting.”

  “What do you mean, keys?”

  The man tugged on his ear. “Most computer encryption relies on a two-key cipher—two long numbers, one known to the sender, one to the receiver. What one key encodes, the other key decodes. This is a symmetric key cipher, and I will most likely be able to find it in these computer files. It is merely a matter of time. But I shall have to search through a record of every keystroke for a series of digits and test them—”

  “I want you to break that code.” Archer thrust the financial records of Sarah and Isaac Ben-David away and stared at the computer screen. “We must have access to the computers at the Shin Bet station, and it’s a safe bet Sarah Ben-David has an access key on her home computer. Can you get me that key?”

  The Frenchman made a face. “Oui, monsieur. I can do anything, given en
ough time. It is merely a matter of breaking these codes, then finding the repetitive keystrokes entered before a file is opened. The Israelis undoubtedly have fire walls to prevent hacking, but with the proper key, anything can be unlocked.” He frowned. “Unless, of course, the Israelis are using double ciphers. That will be more difficult.”

  Archer drew a deep breath and crossed his arms. “Explain.”

  “For maximum security, each outgoing message might be encrypted twice—first with the sender’s private key, then with the receiver’s public key. When the message arrives, the receiver must decode the message twice, first using his own private key, then the sender’s private key. These double ciphers are extremely confidential. If this woman has hidden her key in such a file, we will be unable to read it, even if we have the public keys of the sender and receiver. The only way to crack a two-key cipher is to guess all possible key combinations, and, well . . .” He shrugged. “I would have to set a computer to the task. Trying all possible forty-bit keys would take hours, or possibly days, but governments and banks routinely use 128-bit keys. It could take the fastest computer on earth years to unlock such a code.”

  “Just do it.” Archer rapped on the desk with his knuckles, then backed against the wall and crossed his arms, watching the little man work. The Frenchman was supposed to be a computer genius, one of the best in the world, and it had cost Romulus a small fortune to install him in this hidden fortress of advanced computer technology. But what good was this expensive genius if he could not break into an Israeli housewife’s home computer?

  “Send word to me the moment you are successful,” he said, turning to leave. “Romulus is very concerned about the Israeli operation, and I want no surprises. If the Shin Bet plans to put any roadblocks in our path, I want to know about those plans as soon as possible.”

  The little computer gremlin did not answer, but merely tugged on his earlobe and stared at the flashing screen.

  TEN

  SARAH STEPPED FROM THE BUS ONTO JAFFA ROAD AND wavered for a moment in the blinding sun. Her father’s small apartment complex, which had been built on a hillside, rose before her like an ivory wedding cake. A pair of children played on the flat roof of the first apartment, and the sound of their laughter cascaded down toward her, reminding her of days long ago.

  She was no longer a child, but when her father called, she answered. He was of the old school and she of the new, but she could not shake the age-old tradition of respect for parents.

  She moved up the walkway, stepping aside to let an elderly lady pass. The woman didn’t speak or even look up in gratitude, but lumbered ahead, her purse tucked tightly beneath her arm. Sarah shook her head and walked on by, understanding the woman’s fear. Crime had escalated to alarming proportions in the past few months, and few elderly people felt safe venturing onto the streets even in daylight hours. If she did not have a gun resting in the holster beneath her jacket, Sarah might not have felt safe, either.

  She wandered across a strip of grass bordering the apartment complex, then entered a shaded alcove before a bright red door. Even without the brass nameplate that read Rabbi Aaron Lerner, the mezuzah on the doorpost notified one and all that a religious Jew dwelt therein. There were many mezuzahs in this quarter, almost as many as one would find in the Mea She’arim, the quarter inhabited by the ultra-Orthodox. Her father considered himself to be modern Orthodox and often found himself torn between the values of the black-hatted haredim who clung to ancient traditions and the practicalities of the secular Jews who controlled the government and business.

  She tugged on her skirt, then took a moment to run her hand through her hair. She could not appear before her father looking unhappy or sloppy—he would know in a moment that something was wrong, and what would she say? He knew, of course, that Isaac had been in Paris for three weeks. He knew about the break-in and that she had changed all the locks in the house. But he did not know about her nightmares or the late hours she’d been keeping at work. She had taken great pains to ensure that he would not know that she and Isaac had become as distant as strangers long before he left for Paris.

  She pasted on a smile and knocked on the door. Her father answered almost immediately, then greeted her with an embrace. “My Sarah,” he said, his dark eyes sweeping over her form as he pulled away. “You look tired. Are you working too hard?”

  “No harder than usual, Papa.” She rose on tiptoe to plant a kiss on his cheek, then moved inside. An elderly man sat at the large table occupying most of the living room space, and she recognized him as one of the elder members of her father’s congregation. As always, several thick books lay on the table. She knew without looking that the men had been searching through Torah studies and thick commentaries.

  “Sarah, you remember Yusef Levison?”

  “I do.” She smiled at the elderly man and inclined her head as a sign of respect. He lifted his hand in an absent gesture, then gently touched the edges of his white beard.

  Sarah turned to her father. “You seem to be working hard.”

  “No harder than usual,” he parroted, his tone light. He pulled out a chair for her, then paused behind it, as formally as if he were an old friend instead of her father. “Can I get you a cup of tea?”

  “No, Papa, please sit down. I don’t need anything.” She waited until he took his chair, then she gently asked the question that had bothered her all morning. “I am curious, though, about why you needed to see me.”

  He leaned back and gave her a troubled smile. “I need to know something, and I hope you won’t mind giving your father and Yusef Levison an honest answer. I don’t want the story Shabak gives the public, Sarah. I want the honest truth, as much as you are able to tell us.”

  Tiny warning bells rang in her brain, but she fixed her father in a steady gaze. “Go on.”

  “It’s about the Universal Network’s identification chip.” He paused and ran his hand over the open text on the table before him. “The haredim won’t take the chip, you know. A few may be persuaded to accept an encoded identification card, but they would never agree to accept a chip implanted beneath the skin. Most of the people in my synagogue will also refuse.”

  Sarah tilted her head, a little surprised. Her thoroughly modern father, a leader among the Orthodox movement, had walked a dangerous tightrope to combine the nationalistic values of Zionism with the tenets of Orthodoxy. He kept a kosher kitchen, prayed three times a day, and always wore a kippa, or skullcap. Israeli tour guides were fond of telling tourists that the larger the kippa, the more Orthodox the wearer. Her father’s kippa was not of the small knitted variety worn by men for whom religion was only a token exercise, nor did he wear the large black skullcap and black hats of the ultra-Orthodox. In all things he sought the middle road, so she had been certain that a tiny computer chip wouldn’t violate his sense of ethics.

  “For what possible reason would they refuse?” she asked, searching her brain. At times like this, she wished she had paid more attention to her Torah studies.

  “Let me show you.” Yusef Levison held up his arm, then tugged on his black sleeve. As he turned the flesh of his arm in her direction, she saw the inked numbers . . . and understood the reason for his reticence. He had been but a small boy when the Allies liberated the death camp at Auschwitz, but the scars still remained.

  “With all due respect, Mr. Levison,” she began, choosing her words carefully, “this is not a Holocaust. The captives in concentration camps had no choice but to accept those tattoos, but—”

  Her father interrupted. “They were forced to accept those identifying marks, true. And yes, the Holocaust might have something to do with the resistance I sense among our people. But the real reason for our objection is rooted much deeper in history. Our sages have always looked upon marking or cutting the skin as an abomination. According to Maimonides, marking was the custom of the Gentiles who inscribed themselves for the worship of false gods. He implied that anyone who takes a mark is a slave enlisted for i
dol worship.”

  Sarah gave her father a look of utter disbelief. “Father, you’re talking about an ancient culture,” she said, a reproving tone in her voice. “No one is worshiping idols today. And the Americans and Europeans have used the identification chip for years.”

  “But now Adrian Romulus is taking it a step further,” her father insisted. “He is insisting that our people follow the rest of the world like sheep.”

  “He’s not insisting. It’s voluntary.”

  “If he is not insisting now, he soon will be. History assures us that he will. Look at our past and consider the tyrants who have persecuted us. One after the other, they prove that the hunger for absolute power is insatiable.”

  Sarah bit back the argumentative words that rose to her tongue. She must be patient. The people of her father’s and Yusef Levison’s generation would never forget the Holocaust. They tended to regard every strong international leader as Hitler incarnate.

  “Father,” she began, speaking slowly, “the Jews of the Holocaust had no choice. But no one is forcing our people to take this identification chip. It is only a convenience.”

  “Look around you, girl!” Yusef Levison’s thin hand slapped the table. “We cannot buy groceries at Sorek’s market without the Universal Chip. Sorek is trying to win favor with the authorities, and no one without the identification chip is welcome to do business there. We cannot cash checks at the bank without the chip. If we cannot handle money without the chip now, how long will it be before we cannot buy and spend without it?”

  Out of respect for her elder, Sarah remained silent, but she had to admit the old man had a point. The government directly deposited her paycheck into her bank account, and she paid for groceries with a debit card, so she had not stopped to consider that people like Yusef Levison still dealt with coin and paper currency. Many of the older people of her father’s congregation still clung to the familiar shekel, yet within a few months the banks would not honor them without an implanted Universal Network identification chip. And it was only natural that merchants had begun to identify themselves with the Universal Network, for that organization offered exceptional incentives to businesses that joined.