Exile: a novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

communications were through phones with local numbers, avoiding the American spy agencies that monitored international calls. Every two days, she would order him to discard the phone and direct him to a new one, purchased for cash by one of her faceless helpers. Only she would know the cell phone number; she would call Iyad on the new phone, giving him fresh instructions and the number of her latest unregistered phone. Her system, Ibrahim knew, was that used by drug dealers and arms smugglers—or, under the Israelis, by the Palestinian resistance. She was clever, Iyad conceded, or at least well schooled.
    Ibrahim tried to imagine their conversations. By a strange mental trick, Ibrahim sometimes fantasized that it was his sister—whose mind, in reality, was as dark as ruined film—who issued such precise instructions. Perhaps the stress was eroding his own reason.
    Ibrahim shivered, miserable in the cold, against which his polo shirt provided no cover. In the distance, Iyad flipped his cell phone shut andshoved it in his pocket. For a moment, he, too, gazed at the water, as if absorbed by what he had heard. Then he walked toward Ibrahim.
    Standing close, Iyad spoke in Arabic—softly, as though his words might carry in the mist. They would drive to the Greyhound station marked on the map. Taped to the back of a men’s room toilet in the last stall to the left would be a key to another locker. Inside they would find a new phone, a last safeguard against detection, for the instructions that would bring about their deaths.
    “God willing,” Iyad said in the somber tones of prayer, “the enemy will die with us. Tomorrow.”

    The telephone rang in David’s office, startling him from the past. This time the voice was Carole’s, and he understood how completely a single phone call had effaced the thirteen years since Harvard.
    “Dad wants to take us to lunch. To celebrate.” Her voice was a fusion of warmth for Harold Shorr and concern that David understand. “I told him you’d love that. Is it okay?”
    David did not exactly love it. Outside of politics, he avoided lunch dates—he did not like to fall behind, losing control of his day. Glancing at his watch, he realized that an hour had already been lost to memory. The day remaining was a full one: a meeting with United States Attorney Marnie Sharpe—who loathed him—to discuss a high-end bank robbery carried out by his patently guilty client; a conference with a medical expert in a complex, and regrettably fatal, case of medical malpractice. Carole knew these things, even as she knew that his workday would be cut short by her dinner for Prime Minister Ben-Aron, for which she had extracted David’s pledge to arrive a half hour early.
    So he was mildly annoyed that, whatever her excitement, Carole had placed her father’s enthusiasm above the pressures of his own workday. But knowing this made him feel petty. And though he could never replicate Carole’s deep bond with her widowed father, he understood it. In his own more restrained way, David loved and admired his father-in-law-to-be and, he was forced to admit, suspected that the attachment of father and daughter exposed an emotional deficiency in David himself.
    Like Carole, David was an only child. There the similarities ended. He rarely examined his own past or spoke of his now-deceased parents— indeed, he avoided it. But Carole’s childhood, intertwined with her fierce love for Harold Shorr, was such a richly remembered presence in her life that, to David, it seemed more vivid than his own.
    Some memories he knew by heart. That every Sunday Harold, a gracefulskater, had taken her for ice-skating and hot chocolate. That he could fix any toy she broke—the doll’s arm might be funny, but now she could scratch her back. That father and daughter learned Hebrew together. That her parents never argued over Carole except once, in Polish, about whether she could watch TV past nine o’clock.
    But there were