Twelve Days Page 4

  “It’s not just us. They hate all this.”

  “I don’t care who else they hate. Or who else they love. They hate me, that’s enough for me.”

  Etra’s phone buzzed with a text message.

  “He says fifteen minutes.”

  “But he’s here, right? In the house? You’re here, he’s here.”

  “I guess.”

  Not exactly a definitive answer. “And what’s keeping him? Casino business?” Of course, Duberman wouldn’t poke his head out and tell her himself. Billionaires rarely explained. And never apologized.

  A shrug.

  “Gideon. You probably know him as well as anyone.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Ever met his friends?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I mean, his real friends. People he grew up with.”

  Etra shook his head as if he couldn’t believe she’d had the audacity to ask the question. And walked out holding her bag of phones, leaving Salome to consider what she knew about her boss.

  —

  Duberman’s parents had arrived in the United States in 1946 and settled in Atlanta. After escaping the Holocaust, they dreamed no great American dreams. Or just one: to keep their heads down and survive. Nathan managed a rent-to-own store in Oak Knoll, a poor neighborhood southeast of downtown. Gisa taught kindergarten.

  After five years, they had scrimped enough money for a down payment on a fourteen-hundred-square-foot house in the city’s Midtown District. They quickly had three sons. Aaron was the youngest and by far the most ambitious. He attended the University of Georgia on a wrestling scholarship, majored in business, moved to Las Vegas to work for Hilton.

  I was tired of the South, he’d told Fortune for a cover profile a decade before. It had all this history that didn’t have anything to do with me. I liked Vegas from the minute I saw it. Empty space, blue sky. It seemed like anything was possible. He rose quickly at Hilton, but he didn’t stay. When you work for a company that has somebody else’s name on the door, you know there’s a limit to how high you can get. At the tender age of twenty-six, he and two other junior Hilton executives struck out, buying a scrubby hotel-casino in Reno called The Sizzling Saloon.

  Duberman had never fully explained how he came up with the eight hundred thousand dollars for his one-third share, though he hinted at the answer in Fortune. I had friends. The kinds of friends that the Nevada Gaming Commission looked down on. But they were always decent to me. If I paid on time. Besides, what’s the casino business without a little gamble? So he began his march toward fortune.

  He didn’t get far at first. The Sizzling Saloon’s blackjack tables were scorched with cigarette holes, its waitresses with stretch marks. After three years, his partners tired of the grind. They wanted to sell to the casino next door. Duberman refused. He bought them out instead.

  Now I owned the place, but my friends owned me. Duberman had a streak of Donald Trump in him, a natural talent for self-promotion. He dropped Sizzling from the casino’s name, calling it simply The Saloon: Where the West Comes to Play. He promised to take any bet. He put up billboards around Reno showing himself wearing a ten-gallon hat and holding a revolver in each hand. Can You Out-Gun The Saloon-Keeper? Take Yer Best Shot!

  The fact that the Saloon-Keeper was a Jew from Atlanta was part of the joke. And Reno laughed. Within three years, the casino was the city’s most profitable. Duberman branched out to Las Vegas, opening two more Saloons. They were miles from the Strip and catered to locals. They, too, were hits. He bought out his silent partners. Finally, I had the money to say good-bye to my old friends. Not cheap, but money well spent. He expanded to Iowa and Mississippi and took Saloon Gaming Inc. public. At thirty-seven, his fortune topped $100 million.

  Then Saloon started to lose ground. Its casinos couldn’t compete with the eye-catching attractions that its bigger competitors offered. Its Western theme seemed dated and cheesy. Still, its customers were loyal. Duberman could have milked them for years. Instead, he changed Saloon’s name to 88 Gamma. He mortgaged his fortune to redesign his casinos with a sci-fi theme. He installed oxygen bars, shark tanks, brushed aluminum tables, huge flat-panel screens dangling above the casino floor. He wanted to attract young Asians, who were often heavy gamblers. He succeeded wildly. By 2001, he was a billionaire.

  Then Duberman made his biggest bet yet, a $2 billion casino in Macao. The only other casino mogul to invest in Macao at the time was Sheldon Adelson, who like Duberman was an outsider in the gambling industry. MGM and other, more established companies avoided the territory. It had a reputation as a lawless place dominated by Chinese gangs called triads. But Adelson and Duberman saw opportunity. The big companies were afraid of the crime, the triads, the Chinese government, Duberman told Fortune. They were doing risk analysis, hiring consultants, blah blah blah. Me, I’m a simple guy. I didn’t get an MBA from Harvard. I had a simple theory. I said, wait a minute, you’re letting me build a casino across the border from a billion people who love gambling more than breathing? And who can’t do it legally anywhere else? Uhh, sounds okay to me.

  It was. 88 Gamma Macao did not have an empty seat or slot machine for nine months after it opened. By then, Duberman had broken ground on an expansion that tripled its size. Two days before his fiftieth birthday, his fortune reached $10 billion, putting him in one of the world’s most elite clubs. It now topped almost $30 billion.

  For a while, Duberman’s public profile grew with his fortune. He became the largest individual donor to Israel, a supporter of close ties between the United States and China. He gave cheeky interviews like the one with Fortune. But in the last couple of years, he had fallen almost silent, and cut back on his charitable spending.

  Meanwhile, he had become the largest political donor in American history, putting up $196 million to help reelect the President. Investigative reporters had tried to tear down the veil of secrecy and expose why Duberman had spent so much. What Does Aaron Want? The most popular theory was that Duberman needed White House access to lobby for better relations between Washington and Beijing.

  “He’s worried if we make China mad, they retaliate, close the border with Macao,” one analyst told The New Yorker. “His stock falls eighty percent overnight.” Salome had laughed out loud when she’d read the article. Them that know don’t tell, and them that tell don’t know . . .

  —

  She’d met Duberman while she was working for Daniel Raban. He was a right-wing member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, who had won a silver medal in the pole vault. The achievement made Raban an instant hero in a country short on successful Olympians. He was a perfect television politician, tall and handsome, with an adoring wife and three young sons. Off camera, reality was less appealing. Raban was infamous for sexually harassing his female staffers. Inevitably, Israeli political journalists called him the Pole.

  He had hit on Salome more times than she could count, always unsuccessfully. She put up with his antics because he served on the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Every member of the committee could pick one aide to sit in on classified briefings from the Mossad and the IDF. Raban had chosen Salome, giving her access she would otherwise have needed decades to achieve.

  Plus, though she disliked him personally, she agreed with his politics. He had won his Knesset seat with the slogan Peace Last! The Palestinians and the Arab states had to accept Israel’s right to exist before negotiations on a permanent peace deal could begin, he said. Give up trying to kill us, we’ll talk. Peace Last!

  At the beginning of Raban’s second term in parliament, Duberman invited Raban to a private lunch at his villa in Jerusalem. The offer was not a surprise. Duberman visited Israel regularly and cultivated young right-wing politicians. Naturally, Salome came along. She served as Raban’s personal Wikipedia, memorizing the facts he couldn’t be bothered to learn.

  Duberman r
ecognized Raban as an empty suit by the time his waiters had cleared away their salads. He focused questions about Israeli’s strategy in the West Bank to Salome. He seemed genuinely interested in her answers. She liked him immediately. More than liked. He wore his brown hair slightly longer than was respectable for the chief executive of a major company. Though he was well past fifty, his eyes radiated enthusiasm and energy. His body was solid under his suit, his hands thick and powerful. Salome had never been attracted to older men, but she found it easy to imagine those hands around her. He was the most self-assured man she had ever met.

  His mind was equally appealing. He understood a truth that many Israelis still disliked discussing aloud. In the last sixty years, the Jews had carved a modern state from the desert. Israel could boast a strong economy, with first-rate hospitals, universities, and highways. It had a powerful army, free elections and media. Meanwhile, its Arab neighbors plunged deeper into tyranny and filth every year. In Iraq, the Shia and Sunni blew each other up as fast as they could. In Egypt, the elite lived like pharaohs while tens of millions of their subjects barely survived. The Saudis married their cousins and stoned women to death for adultery. And in Gaza and Lebanon and Jordan, the Palestinians bred like rats in their pathetic refugee camps. Like if they made themselves miserable enough, Israel would have to accommodate them.

  Anyone who looked at the situation rationally could reach only one conclusion. Israel couldn’t trust its Muslim neighbors. Not now, not ever. It would simply have to manage them, so that Jews could hold on to their birthright, the land they had settled three millennia before. The Bible was filled with myths. But the Zionist claim to Judea and Samaria was real. Jews had prayed on the Temple Mount a thousand years before Muhammad drew breath. When the Arabs drew maps that erased Israel, they weren’t just spitting at Jews today but at every Jew who had ever lived.

  Salome didn’t say any of this at that first lunch. Neither did Duberman. He didn’t have to. She knew he understood. He discussed the Palestinians with a certain briskness, like a warden dealing with an unruly cell block. When they were finished, he took her hands and promised to call the next time he came through Jerusalem.

  —

  “Don’t know why you were trying so hard,” Raban said after they left. “He likes them way prettier than you.”

  “You’re only jealous because he saw you for what you are. A baboon in a suit.”

  “I should fire you.”

  “Who would keep you from embarrassing yourself?” They’d had this conversation before.

  Over the next couple years, Salome saw Duberman whenever he came to Israel. They had breakfast at his villa, or he picked her up on his hour-long drives between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. She wondered if they would become lovers. But when she suggested they meet for dinner instead of breakfast, he told her he was too busy. Even before he began dating Orli, Salome saw the truth of Raban’s barb. Duberman preferred his women as conventionally gorgeous as his cars. She wanted to think less of him for his shallow taste, but in reality his unreachability only made him more attractive.

  To make sure she didn’t betray her feelings, she kept their meetings as academic as think-tank seminars. She briefed him on the secret operations and strategic analyses that the IDF and Mossad disclosed to Raban’s committee. The information was classified, of course, but Salome never worried about telling him. Duberman believed in Israel as much as any sabra.

  On the surface, Israel’s position seemed stronger than ever. With jihadis focused on fighting the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel was enjoying a peaceful period. It had walled off its Palestinian enemies in Gaza and the West Bank. Its strike on a Syrian reactor in 2007 had left Bashar al-Assad with no hope of building a nuclear weapon.

  Yet, quietly, it faced increasing danger from Iran. After the United States invaded Iraq, Iran’s leaders had made the bomb their top priority. The mullahs aren’t fools. They can read a map. Armies of American soldiers to the west and east. I think mainly they want nukes to keep the Americans out. But once they get them, who knows what they’ll do?

  Salome worried that her focus on Iran might bore Duberman. She was wrong. Their moment of truth came over breakfast on a winter morning in Jerusalem, on the glassed-in patio of Duberman’s villa. A faint dusting of snowflakes coated the Old City, frosting on a golden cake. Snow here was rare but not unprecedented. Jerusalem’s hills rose a half mile above sea level, and winter winds from the north swept down cool air from the mountains around the Sea of Galilee.

  In keeping with the weather, Duberman’s chef had prepared bowls of oatmeal heaped with brown sugar and raisins. “Don’t know where he found it,” Duberman said.

  Salome fluffed the oatmeal with her spoon. “I’ve never had it before.”

  “Never?”

  “I’ve only been to the United States and Europe in the summer.”

  “Mount Hermon, skiing?”

  “Not for me.”

  “I think you have to grow up with it.”

  Salome tasted the oatmeal, put down her spoon.

  “You don’t like it,” he said.

  “It tastes like paste.” She had never much cared for polite fibs. “Anyway, I have a briefing in an hour. A new program they want to tell us about. Rumor is it’s good.”

  “So why don’t you look happy?”

  “They’re trying. But there are things they won’t do.”

  “Such as.”

  “Attacking those European parasites who sell the Iranians their equipment.”

  Duberman’s steward appeared to refill their coffee. “Leave us, please.” The steward vanished. “Tell me.”

  “We’ve traced several. A machine tool factory outside Hamburg, a software company in Singapore that specializes in modeling fluid dynamics—”

  “Fluid dynamics.”

  “To understand what’s happening inside the warhead as the chain reaction takes over—”

  “Wait, please. Understand who you’re talking to. I run hotels. I don’t even know what it means to enrich uranium.”

  So Salome explained. Uranium existed naturally in several different forms, called isotopes. When it came out of the earth, newly mined uranium ore consisted of 99.3 percent of the U-238 isotope, 0.7 percent U-235. U-235 could be used in a bomb. U-238 could not. The two kinds of uranium had to be separated. Nuclear scientists called the process enrichment.

  “Like oil,” Duberman said. “You can’t run your car on crude oil, you have to refine it.”

  “Kind of. Anyway, during World War II, the United States figured out how.” American scientists had come up with several ways to enrich uranium. One still in use today combined uranium with fluoride to make it a gas. Then the gas was injected into spinning tubes called centrifuges. The lighter molecules spun out against the centrifuge walls. The heavier molecules stuck to the center. Because U-235 was lighter than U-238, the gas against the wall held more U-235 than natural uranium did. The gas was vacuumed into another centrifuge, where the process was repeated. Slowly but surely, the amount of U-235 increased. Until, finally—

  “You have enough of the good stuff. And boom.”

  “There are other steps, too, but yes. But the centrifuges need special parts. High-strength steel. Perfectly round bearings because they spin so fast. The fluorine gas is corrosive. All this takes advanced equipment that the Iranians can’t make themselves. They have to buy it. Mainly from Europe.”

  “If we stopped the suppliers, would we stop the program?”

  “Not necessarily stop it. But slow it down, sure.”

  “But isn’t it illegal, what the suppliers are doing? Violating sanctions?”

  “Yes. We’ve told the Germans, the French. And so have the Americans. But what we know isn’t always the same as what we can prove. The Iranians are smart. They use front companies from China and Russia to buy the stuff. The Euro
peans say they can’t be responsible for what happens if they sell equipment to a legitimate buyer in China and then that company sends it to Singapore and then to Dubai and then Iran. And the Chinese won’t listen, they don’t care.”

  “But these European companies know?”

  “Oh yes. It’s a very specialized business.”

  “The Mossad won’t stop them?”

  “They’ve said no to attacking the suppliers directly. They’re worried what the Europeans will say. But they’re making a mistake. Someone needs to hit these people.”

  “Someone.”

  “It wouldn’t be that hard. They aren’t government officials. No bodyguards or police looking after them.”

  Duberman pushed back from the table, scratching his chair against the tile floor. His villa sat atop one of Jerusalem’s highest hills, with a view over the gold-encrusted Dome of the Rock and the Mount of Olives. The snow had stopped. The winter air was crystalline, the city’s buildings etched against the gray sky. He stood, looked at the Old City, the narrow alleys where Jews and Muslims and Christians had fought and mingled for fifteen hundred years.

  “Whatever I want, it’s mine. Too much money to spend in ten lifetimes. No wife, no family.” At this point, he hadn’t met Orli. “Even if I did. One percent of what I have would be enough for my children and their children and their children, too. What do I do with a fortune like this?” He turned to her. “What is it you’re saying? Clearly, now.”

  Until this moment Salome hadn’t been sure herself. She’d been thinking out loud. Writing letters to the stars, as her high school boyfriend said. But the words came to her. She knew they were true. Her legs trembled under the table, but her voice was steady.

  “For a few million dollars, we can do this.”

  “Men from the Mossad? The IDF?”