Exile: a novel by Richard North Patterson

white-jacketed waiters were already setting six round tables for eight in the spacious room she reserved for events of particular importance.
    Entertaining with a purpose was central to Carole’s life, and the apartment she had chosen served it well. Eighty years old, the brick building carried an elegant flavor of the 1930s, with a doorman, a generous foyer, and an old-fashioned elevator, which, although it wheezed a little, had carried David smoothly to Carole’s door. Her apartment had the hardwood floors, crown moldings, and high ceilings more common to a time of luxuriant construction. The rooms were spacious, and the furniture carefully chosen and arranged, creating space for guests to mingle and more intimate places for them to sit in small groups. The living and dining areas shared the same floor-to-ceiling view across San Francisco Bay to the gold-brown hills of Marin County; as David watched, the last glow of sunlight faded on the deepening blue water, and sailboats had begun tacking toward their moorings.
    He heard the click of Carole’s heels behind him, and then she put her hands on his waist. “Meeting okay?” she asked.
    “Good enough. My defendant the doctor has some problems. But that’s what expert witnesses are for.”
    “Some days,” she admonished him with a smile, “you sound a little cynical about your clients.”
    David turned to her. “Just not sentimental. That’s a lawyer’s big mistake.”
    “I’d just hate you to be sentimental,” Carole rejoined. Giving him aquick kiss, Carole went to the dining room and began arranging the place cards.
    David glanced at the television, tuned to CNN. “At this hour,” Wolf Blitzer was saying, “Israeli prime minister Amos Ben-Aron is arriving in San Francisco, the last stop on a trip aimed at rallying American support for his highly controversial peace initiative . . .”
    On the screen, Ben-Aron was disembarking from a jumbo jet, surrounded by men in suits who appeared to be security guards. Though the camera was far away, Ben-Aron was easy to spot. Silver-haired and erect, he was slighter than the others, and his brisk, purposeful stride bespoke the general he had once been. David felt a keen anticipation: he looked forward to meeting this man and hoped they could talk in private.
    The picture changed to an angry, chanting crowd of demonstrators, one of whom, David saw, carried a placard showing Ben-Aron with Adolf Hitler’s mustache. “Earlier today in Jerusalem,” the anchorman continued, “an alliance of Orthodox Jews staged a massive protest against Ben-Aron’s new proposal. At stake, they believe, is the future of Jewish settlements on the West Bank, the putative site of a Palestinian state advocated by Ben-Aron. For many Israelis, a Palestinian state is necessary to a lasting peace; for some, like these demonstrators, it is a betrayal of God’s grant of the West Bank—the biblical Judea and Samaria—to the Jewish people...”
    Since when, David remembered Hana inquiring, did God become a real estate agent? He could not help but smile at the memory.
    On the screen, a bearded man appeared against a backdrop of rocky, barren hills, accompanied by Wolf Blitzer’s voice-over. “A few extremist settlers, like Barak Lev, the American-born leader of the controversial Masada movement, centered in the Israeli settlement of Bar Kochba, are making some very troubling pronouncements...”
    David stopped smiling. Lev was young and lean, with the black gaze and slow, insistent intonations of a prophet pronouncing judgment on the unrighteous. “Like Adolf Hitler,” Lev said to the camera, “Ben-Aron wants our biblical land to be Judenrein —free of Jews. His Palestinian partners, Hitler’s heirs, have no identity beyond the hatred of Jews, no culture beyond the murder of Jews. This ‘homeland’ he proposes for them is the base they will use to exterminate the Jews of Israel . . .”
    In close-up, David saw, Lev’s eyes seemed