Free Exile: a novel by Richard North Patterson

hunched forward, her elbows resting on her knees, the fingertips of one hand touching her forehead. “A dream,” she said in a monotone. “Only a dream, one I’ve had many times before.”
    David sat beside her. “Tell me.”

    She stood in Saeb’s home, alone. Though in the dream the Phalange had not destroyed the house, its rooms were empty. On the wall were photographs of Saeb’s murdered family—his parents, brothers, sisters.
    Hana’s eyes were drawn to Aisha’s face.
    As Hana watched, Aisha stepped from the picture, her bodymaterializing from nothing. She was as Hana had known her, pretty and chastely dressed.
    “Could you bring me a glass of water,” the young girl asked politely. “Then please take me to my brother.”
    Hana went to the kitchen. But when she returned, Aisha had vanished. The place for her photograph was bare.
    Awake now, sitting with David, Hana shook her head. “The same dream, always. I never know what becomes of her.”
    It’s all right, David might have said to another woman. You’re safe here, with me. That he could not say this to Hana did not yet tell him that he, David Wolfe, was no longer safe with her.

9     

T he spectacle of Stonestown shopping center stunned Ibrahim with its opulence.
    He stood with Iyad in the vast parking lot, beside the rental car they would abandon there. A two-story monolith a quarter mile long, Stones-town contained a supermarket, a department store, several restaurants, and every imaginable purveyor of shoes, books, clothes, candies, cosmetics, sports equipment, compact discs, and artwork. Streams of cars and SUVs eased in and out of the lot. Ibrahim tried to grasp the vast entitlement of people for whom such opulence was second nature. He felt negligible; his birthplace—the refugee camp at Jenin—seemed as distant as another planet. He could not believe that those who drove the cars, women mostly, had ever conceived of such a place, or cared what their Zionist allies had inflicted on his sister.
    “It’s so big,” he murmured to Iyad.
    The derisive half-smile on Iyad’s face confirmed the banality of what he had just said. “Yes,” Iyad answered. “And Americans are so smug and pompous and stupid. They have no purpose, no soul, no values except to consume and pay someone to keep them amused. To them, the world is a video game. That is why we will win.”
    That was right, Ibrahim believed—the West was corrupt, and believed in nothing but preserving its privilege and power, and that of the Jews controlling the instruments of entertainment that consumed their money and drugged their minds. But Ibrahim envied Iyad’s grim serenity. There lurked within Ibrahim a tinge of envy: to shop and spend and go to movies sometimes seemed more blessed than the privilege of killing and dying with which Iyad had favored him.
    Iyad pointed toward a towering light, intended, Ibrahim supposed, to illuminate a section of the parking lot at night. “It should be there, ” he said.
    It was—a nondescript white van, parked at the base of the pole. As before, Ibrahim wondered at the invisible network that caused cell phones to appear, lockers to hold cash and credit cards and false identification, and, now, had materialized a van big enough to house two motorcycles. Opening the door, Iyad found the ignition key beneath the floor mat on the driver’s side.
    A second key, small and shiny, was taped beneath the seat.
    As Iyad held it up the key glinted in the sunlight. “Our key to paradise,” he said.

    The North Beach was a bright, well-appointed restaurant amid the bustle of the city’s historically Italian section. It was Harold Shorr’s favorite meeting place; the energetic maître d’ shepherded them to Harold’s corner table with a sense of occasion suitable to the children of a potentate. Beaming, Harold kissed Carole on the cheek, then took her face in his hands. “Our family goes on,” he said in a voice accented by his native Polish,