Free The Devil's Light by Richard North Patterson Page A

repressed a smile, pausing to admire a tall blonde who sauntered by their table. Noting this, Ben admonished, “She looks too much like you. Diversify now, or your children will be idiots.”
    Brooke gave his friend a look of amiable tolerance. “Entrapping Aviva has made you smug. As for this forum, your world is shrinking. You sit peddling derivatives on the ninety-fifth floor, never noticing the inexorable shriveling of your soul. You need a break from lusting for excessive compensation.”
    Ben grinned sourly. “My father, the gravestone magnate, always said college professors lived in the ether. You’ll be perfect.”
    Brooke had never doubted that Ben would go with him.
    The auditorium featured bright lighting and theater-style seats that, as Ben pointed out, were lacking in soft drink holders. Settling in, he remarked, “We should have rented Lawrence of Arabia
. ”
    The forum had already started. One of the two speakers, a massive Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn named Jacob Sklar, was vigorously denouncing Arafat, the Palestinians, and the peace process promoted by President Clinton. Sklar’s older brother, it emerged, had emigrated to the no-man’s-land at the edge of Israeli settlements on the West Bank, inspired by the biblical God who had reserved it for the Jews. As Sklar finished, Ben tartly encapsulated the man’s worldview—Sklar’s personal Jehovah had stuck Palestinians on a lower branch of His evolutionary tree. As the landlord of a Greater Israel that included the West Bank, God wished no Arab to be His tenant.
    But it was the peace advocate who drew Brooke’s attention before she said a word.
    Her name was Anit Rahal, the program informed him, an Israeli takinga junior year abroad after four years of service in the army. In an offbeat but arresting way she was extremely pretty—small and wiry, with jet-black hair, dark crescent eyes, olive skin, sharp, well-defined features, and a somewhat sardonic grin. She listened to her opponent with a stillness and concentration that, for Brooke, accented her appeal. Yet he sensed a caged energy about her. It did not surprise Brooke to learn, as he later did, that at school in Tel Aviv she had excelled in track—as a sprinter, he guessed correctly. Everything about her seemed bred for survival.
    At last the moderator, a middle-aged professor, interrupted Sklar’s monologue. “How do you respond, Ms. Rahal, to the assertion that Jewish dominion over the West Bank is a biblical imperative?”
    â€œThat my God has never mentioned it,” she told Sklar briskly. “You see three million Palestinians as squatters. I see them as our Siamese twins. For centuries Jews had no country; now Palestinians don’t. There will be no peace until they do.”
    Her English was flawless. Though Brooke noticed the stray guttural enunciation that marked Hebrew as her first language, someone with a lesser ear would have taken her for a New Yorker—she had the directness of manner to match. Leaning closer, Ben observed, “Gets to the point, doesn’t she?”
    Clearly, her point was not lost on Sklar. “By a ‘country’ for Palestinians,” he retorted, “you must mean Greater Israel.”
    Anit waved a hand. “I call it the occupied territories—”
    â€œWhat you call ‘occupied,’” Sklar interrupted, “is the Jewish land of Samaria and Judea. You would mutilate it with borders of your own devising, telling God’s children where they can and cannot live. This is sacrilege.”
    Rahal gave him a thin smile. “Your synonym for sanity, it seems. But this much should be clear to anyone—Israel cannot incorporate the Palestinians on the West Bank and survive as a Jewish state. Unless you mean to deny them the right to vote, like the stateless Palestinians confined to refugee camps in