CHAPTER 12
They went down two floors and into a different wing of the hotel, arriving at a nondescript door by itself near the end of the hallway. Mordechai placed his thumb on a small metal plate on the door, a click sounded, and he opened the door, waving Ariel inside.
Inside was a glass barrier, behind which was a desk with a tough-faced young woman in a business suit seated at it.
She looked up. “Yes?”
“Zalman for Dr. Mendel.” Mordechai held a card up to an outline on the glass. A green light flashed, and a door opened in the barrier.
“Room 4,” she said as they stepped through. Mordechai made a motion like a salute, and stepped through a door at the back of the space. Ariel followed him, and found himself in a short hallway with two doors on either side. Mordechai opened the last door on the right.
Once inside the room, Ariel wasn’t surprised to find Rabbi Mendel waiting. There was a young man with him, though, that Ariel hadn’t met.
“Rabbi,” Mordechai said, “meet Ariel Barak.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Barak. Please hand your laptop to Yonatan, here. He will archive it and then scrub it. Is there anything on the hard drive you absolutely need to have?”
Ariel frowned for a moment. “I should keep the school work and study folders. I’ll miss most everything else, but I don’t need it. Except…would it be possible have the family photo folder stored somewhere? I don’t need it now, but in a few years…”
“Yonatan?” Mendel looked over his shoulder.
“I will go through your study files and anonymize them,” Yonatan said as he stepped up beside the rabbi.
“Even the PDFs?”
“Even the PDFs. We’re good at this, Mr. Barak.” Yonatan smiled at him. “When you get your new laptop next week, they will be in a hidden folder that you will be given a password for. As to the pictures, we can store those in a time vault here and release them to you in, say, ten years. Would that be long enough, Dr. Mendel?”
Mendel held Ariel’s gaze. “Ten years should be adequate, Yonatan.”
Yonatan gave a sympathetic smile to Ariel, and held out his hand.
Ariel hesitated for a moment. “What about the emails I need to be able to send for a few more days or weeks?
Yonatan handed him a small tablet. “That is a sanitized unit. The only thing it can do is handle your email account. Do not send emails to your family from anything else. Once that need is done, you’ll turn the tablet back in to us.”
Ariel took the tablet. He was reluctant to let the last link to his old life go, but after a sigh he slid the backpack strap off his shoulder and handed it to Yonatan.
“Headphones, too,” Yonatan said, holding out his other hand.
Ariel pulled them off his neck where he’d forgotten about them, and handed them over as well.
“And the picture of the girl,” Mordechai said.
Ariel stiffened, then slowly pulled Elena’s picture and the funeral program out of his pocket. He looked down at them and didn’t move.
“We will put these in a physical vault,” Mendel said softly. “In five years, you can have them back.”
It took Ariel a long moment to accept that, but he did eventually hand them over to Yonatan. Yonatan nodded at him, then turned and left through a door at the back of the room.
“Please, sit,” Mendel said.
Mordechai sat, and after a moment, Ariel followed suit.
“So, the first phase of this transition is done.” Mendel folded his hands before him. “Now we have to figure out what to do for the next phase.”
“I thought I would be going to school,” Ariel said. He titled his head as a knot formed in his stomach. “You said that you had things lined up for me.”
“We did,” Mendel said. “But that was before you insisted on an identity switch. We could make those arrangements quickly for an American student who had a transcript at a major university. Now you’re a brand-new person with no official US records to draw on. We can still do it, but it’s going to take a while to create all the pieces, much less pull them all together. Although we work with the government, we are not the government. We don’t have their resources, and we can’t just say ‘Shibboleth’ and make things happen.”
Ariel stared at the older man, whose face was showing most of his age right then. “All right. I guess I can see that. I wish you had said something about that earlier, though.”
Mendel shrugged. “We can do it, or rather, we can see to it that it gets done. But it will take some time, and we will have to call in some favors. It’s not going to be as easy as we had hoped.”
Ariel’s mouth quirked in a sour expression. “All right,” he repeated. “It is what it is. So what do we—I—do now?”
Mendel switched languages. “How is your ability to speak Hebrew?”.
Ariel gulped. “Not very good,” he began. “But my teacher in shul made us talk with it. He made us do more than just read scripture. And last summer I got bored and got one of the language learning apps”—he used the English term—“and played with it most of the summer. I can probably get around the city with it, but I doubt I could have an educated conversation.”
“How about writing?” Still in Hebrew.
Ariel shrugged. “I do better there, but my written vocabulary is very scripture oriented.”
Mendel looked to Mordechai. “Well?”
“I think that will work,” he responded in English. “Ariel”—he shifted a shoulder back and looked directly at him—“we need to find something for you to do while Rav Avram, here”—he jerked a thumb back across the desk—“is running all the behind-the-scenes things to get you into a school. So, here’s what I propose.
“As an oleh…”
“A what?” Ariel asked.
“An oleh…an immigrant who has made aliyah to Israel,” Mordechai explained.
“Ah. I know what aliyah is, but I hadn’t heard the oleh term before.”
“Well, we’ve already established that your Hebrew needs some work.” Mordechai’s smile was a warm one, not his cutting razor smile. “Anyway, as one of the olim, you won’t be conscripted and you are not obligated to make the service commitment to the IDF that sabras are. However, if you volunteer, it would provide some opportunities you might not otherwise have available to you, or not as easily.”
Ariel said nothing; just waited for Mordechai to continue.
“To do the work I do as one of the Gibborim, you need some additional training. This is as good a time for it as any.”
“So, I need to be a soldier?”
“You need some of the same training as a soldier, but actually, it would make more sense for you to serve with the Israel Police, at least for a time.”
“What, be a cop or a sheriff?”
Mordechai shook his head. “No. Or not exactly. You need to remember that Israel is not much larger than America’s state of New Jersey both in geography and in population. In America, they have at least three levels of local police organizations: the city police, the county sheriffs, and the state police, which may or may not include the highway patrol troopers and the state investigative body. Then at the national level there is the FBI, and several other agencies with various levels of policing authority. So America has an absolute smorgasbord of policing available. Israel is too small to allow that amount of duplication, dilution, and misuse of resources. They can’t afford it. There is one civilian police agency: the Israeli Police. Granted, they handle everything from traffic control to street policing to criminal investigations to counterterrorism, but they are one agency. There is a certain amount of overlap between the police and the IDF in the Border Police, which has police command officers but a lot of IDF conscripts in their ranks, because the Border Police works in parts of the country where open combat can occur.
“So not army, and not what you’re thinking of as police. No, the counterterrorism and hostage rescue group, the Special Police or Yamam, would be who I would align you with first.”
Ariel thought seriously about that. Is this what he wanted to do? Is this what he really wanted to do? Did he want to commit a Methuselah’s lifetime to violence, to death, even? What would it do to him? On the other hand, given what had already happened to him, would it be so bad? He didn’t know. But then, how could he know?
He looked Mordechai in the eye. “Is this righteous?”
Mordechai nodded. “How can it not be righteous to protect haShem’s chosen ones—His children—from the evils that men do?”
“No,” Ariel said. “Is this righteous for me?”
Mordechai paused for a moment. “I can’t answer that for you,” he eventually said. “I can tell you that I would not have permitted you to set your feet on this road if I didn’t believe it is fundamentally righteous for you. We do not use the word Gibborim lightly.”
Ariel considered that, then made a choice that he knew would be irrevocable. He also knew he would probably regret it from time to time. He nodded. “All right. Can I do this without having gone through the army?”
“Ordinarily, probably not, but there are occasional exceptions. I’ve already laid the groundwork for it.”
“Is that who you work for?”
Now Mordechai’s razor smile appeared. “Not as such, no. I am actually paid a consultancy retainer by Mossad, the foreign intelligence agency, and most of my commissions come from them. They do upon occasion lend me to either Yamam or to Shin Bet, the internal security organization, usually for some kind of counterterrorism operation.”
“So the Special Police?”
“Eventually, yes.” Mordechai tilted his head. “I had thought of signing you up first with the IDF and running you through their initial training, but the dietary issues—both your need for blood and you not eating with the company mess—would just cause too much difficulty. So, I think what we’ll do is get you the firearms training you need by way of the police, which will probably take you between four and eight weeks. Then at roughly the same time we’ll probably run you through a concentrated language school to get you up to some level of conversational ability, at least to the point where you can give and receive orders reliably. That might take another couple of months beyond the firearms training time. That will keep you busy while Rabbi Mendel is working to get your college program straightened out. If it takes him longer than that, a few more weeks or months in police service wouldn’t hurt you any.”
Ariel started to open his mouth to complain about the waste of time, but then he remembered how old Mordechai really was. He closed his mouth without saying anything, but an upturned corner of Mordechai’s mouth told him that Mordechai probably knew what he was thinking.
“Fine,” Ariel said in Hebrew. “So when do I start?” His speech was slow, but he thought he had the words right.
“Soon,” Mordechai replied in Hebrew. “Soon.”