12
The Pegasus Airways A320 blasted through the skies at its economical cruising speed of eight-hundred and forty kilometers per hour. It was going to take a little under four hours to fly from Istanbul, over Greece, North Macedonia, Albania and Italy, before making it to Barcelona on Spain’s eastern coast.
Ethan had never actually visited the famed European city––home to the incomparable and unmistakable architectural wonder that was Gaudi’s Cathedral of La Sagrada Familia––and was trying to get familiar with the place via the in-flight Internet he’d purchased.
The DIA didn’t have a designated safehouse as such in Barcelona, but they did have a hotel they partly owned through one of their many front companies. This particular front company, Ariadne Logistics––which, if anybody fancied spending the hours required to untangle the insanely convoluted ball of yarn that made up its financing, deeds of ownership, trusts, and revenue streams, could be linked back to the DOD––was used by Sam to acquire stakes in buildings that could be used as safe locations when needed. How they differed from a conventional safehouses was that, for the majority of time when they were not occupied by contractors like Ethan Galaal and his team, they could be used to generate income for the DIA to help offset their purchase.
The Pegasus flight was passing over the island of Corsica and the team had just ordered a round of very ordinary, very overpriced sandwiches and coffee, when there was the sharp sound of someone clearing their throat. Then a very cool, very calm female voice, sporting a light Hebrew accent, said, “I thought I’d do the decent thing and break the tension, hm? Nice to see you again, Death Angel. It has been a while, no?”
Ethan’s head snapped up from the sandwich that he had been trying to winkle out of its plastic wrapper. He recognized the name Death Angel, knew that it had been Bretta’s alias when employed by the Mossad. She had told him this one morning when they had been lying in bed, listening to the gentle sound of the surf breaking into Teague Bay, Saint Croix.
A woman was standing, leaning casually against the bulkhead near Bretta. She had an athletic, close-knit frame that was mostly obscured by the large hooded sweatshirt that she was wearing, the hood of which was pulled up. Most of her face was hidden behind a surgical mask of her own and a pair of Ray Ban Aviator sunglasses. As he watched, the stranger pulled the mask down to reveal a pair of sensual, full lips. She had an impressive bruise spread across one side of her face, coming down out of the edge of her hood and under her glasses to finish about level with the corner of her mouth, where a scabbed-over cut resided.
Ethan looked at Bretta, and recognized the utter shock shining through her mask. It was the face of someone who looked upon someone they assumed was dead, or believed they would never see again––relief mingled with disbelief and mixed with more than a little pain. It was, he realized, a look that he had never seen on Bretta’s face before.
The familiar sweeping prickle of adrenaline streamed through every fiber of Ethan’s frame. Air passages dilated and blood vessels contracted, redirecting blood to his heart and lungs and major muscle groups. His fingers twitched, itching to take hold of a weapon.
Of its own accord, his right arm stretched out to take hold of Kiana’s wrist.
The woman standing by the bulkhead seemed to be completely unaware of the effect that she was having on Ethan and––though he did not turn to check––William. In fact, she seemed completely unaware of their existence. She had eyes only for Bretta.
“Ce––Celeste?” Bretta said, her voice hoarse. She cleared it.
Ethan looked from one woman to another, from the stunned face of his colleague––usually one of the iciest, enigmatic operators he had ever met––to the mostly unreadable features of the woman looking down at her.
“Celeste,” Bretta repeated, her words seemingly coming from far away. “What are you––what are you doing here?”
The other woman smiled at this question. It was not a nice smile, cold and hard. More of an expression you might expect to find on something circling below an unsuspecting surfer waiting for a wave.
“Well, now that you mention it, I am lucky to be here,” she said, and she touched almost subconsciously at her bruised face. “What am I doing here, though?” she asked, cocking her head. “I think the more pertinent question is, what are you doing here? What are you doing with these Americans, these tayars?”
Though Ethan didn’t recognize it, the word meant “tourist” and was one that Israelis sometimes used when describing Americans in a slightly derogatory fashion.
Bretta seemed to regain some of her composure at these words. Her eyes lost their dazed quality and narrowed a little. Her mouth drew into a hard line.
“What am I doing with them?” she hissed her retort in a barely audible voice. “I’m doing the job that I’ve been hired to do; namely, to stop you and your friends from killing this innocent woman.”
Kiana shifted beside Ethan. Squirmed, really. Ethan tightened his grip on her wrist.
The woman snorted slightly at these words. “Your job. I wonder, do you even realize how Americanized you sound? The fact that this sort of work is a job to you now, rather than an obligation shows just how far you’ve fallen.”
“Your obligations have made you blind, Celeste,” Bretta retorted. “Blind to the simple distinction between right and wrong. Good and evil.”
Celeste shook her head and gave Bretta another one of her wolfish grins; all teeth and no humor whatsoever. “You were never that naïve. You know as well as I do that there isn’t good and bad, just bad and worse.”
Those words triggered a memory of a conversation Ethan had once had with Bretta.
I've been through enough to know by now that good and evil are only a matter of perspective. The men we fight, they believe we are the evil ones. How do we know they're not right?
The two women eyed each other for several long seconds. Then Bretta, in the usual no-nonsense tone that Ethan recognized, said, “You’re looking a little worse for wear, sheifale. You and your team didn’t have quite such an easy time as you expected with the tourists, hm? What happened?”
With careful slowness, as if even just removing her sunglasses was far from painless, Celeste slipped the Aviators off of her face. The black eye she revealed was one of the best Ethan had ever seen, and he had, unsurprisingly seen his fair share. He had had more than a few shiners himself, but this woman looked like she’d taken a lump hammer to the front of the head.
If Bretta’s eyes were the piercing, crystalline blue of pure glacial ice, then Celeste’s were the clear, fathomless grey of the sunlit Atlantic Ocean.
“I know you’ve a hot head on your shoulders,” Celeste said, “but surely even you don’t make such a habit of hitting people in the face with kettles that you can’t recollect doing this to me?”
To Ethan’s surprise, Bretta’s face went a shade paler than it was already.
Privately, watching the Kidon member with a critical eye, Ethan thought that it probably would have been better if Bretta’s pistol hadn’t misfired.
“Why are we even talking?” Bretta asked. “Have they relaxed their protocols at the good old Mossad? I don’t remember approaching your target for a cozy little tête-a-tête was SOP.”
Celeste regarded Bretta closely. Grey eyes gazed searchingly into blue.
“I think you’re the last person that should be giving advice on standard operating procedures,” she snarled. “But you can attribute this talk to…sentimentality. I wanted to give you this one last chance,” Celeste said. There was no trace of a smile on her face now. “Give up the scientist now, and you can all walk away from this with your lives. Including you.”
Bretta stared her down. “Go fuck yourself.”
A muscle worked in Celeste’s jaw, as if she was fighting to control herself.
Then Celeste straightened from where she slouched against the bulkhead, slipped the sunglasses back over her eyes and pulled up her mask. “This is only
going to end badly for you. You’re a traitor to Israel. The Mossad does not deal gently with traitors.”
Celeste started to walk away. Before she could leave, however, Bretta’s hand shot out and grasped the other woman by the wrist in an adamantine grip.
Shit, here we go, Ethan thought.
He saw Celeste tense. In an instant she was wound up tight, like a spring that needed only the slightest provocation to unwind all at once.
“I pity you,” Bretta told her.
Celeste wrenched her hand free. “Save your pity,” she said, venom coating every syllable. “You’ll need it for yourself.”
With that, she walked away.
“I almost killed her,” Bretta said, her voice so low Ethan barely heard it over the noise of the plane. She did not look at him. She seemed to be staring through the plane and into the past. Her face was more haggard than Ethan had ever seen it, and they had been in some dire situations together.
Funny thing to say. For a woman in her line of work.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s too bad for us.”
13
Barcelona, Spain
March 5th 2020
Local Time - 17:17
Ethan had been in some uncomfortable situations in his time. In fact, there were moments when he felt as if his entire life was merely a string of interconnected uncomfortable moments, the only question being; how goddamn awkward would the next one be? And more importantly, would he pull through this without any losses?
The Airbus thumped to the earth at one-hundred and fifty-five kilometers per hour, its Safran Landing Systems landing gear––the solid steel struts of which could support around five-hundred metric tons each, plus the force of the aircraft landing––compressing as the great bird touched down.
He glanced at Bretta, who still seemed shaken from the earlier encounter.
“You all right?” Ethan asked her.
Bretta didn’t deign to reply to his question, not with words. Instead, she gave him a glance that, brief as it was, somehow managed to convey that she had neither the time nor the inclination to explain something he probably wouldn’t understand anyway. She accompanied this look with a noncommittal grunt.
“Yeah,” Ethan said. “Right.”
This time, when it came to the debarkation of the aircraft, Ethan chivvied his team through the half empty plane. Bretta led the way. He watched with a slight feeling of guilt as she, obviously in no mood to be trifled with after the run-in with her former Mossad colleague, actually forcibly sat a young man down who was trying to make his way to the front of the exit line. After he was rudely shoved back into his seat he looked up, his beetling brows contorted in an affronted V. Ethan couldn’t see Bretta’s face but, whatever it was that the young man saw there, it was enough for him to hold his tongue and settle the hell down. No doubt he thought a torn rotator cuff was too high a price to pay just to debark a plane first.
Ethan kept an eye out for the Kidon team. Kiana was just behind him, followed by William. The closest person after William was a good two meters down the aisle, an older woman wearing glasses. But that didn’t mean one of the as of yet unidentified Kidon members wasn’t lurking in one of the aisles on either side.
They left the plane without incident, and walked quickly up the ramp that led from the aircraft to the Aeroport de Barcelona-El Prat. Ethan had Kiana’s hand clasped tightly in his.
“Stay as close to me as you’re able,” he said to her out of the corner of his mouth, while his eyes scanned the area in front and around him as ceaselessly as a sweeping radar.
As they sped past the baggage carousel and into the main customs area, Ethan continued searching for signs of the Kidon. Though he didn’t see them, he knew they were there.
“Where are those bastards?” William commented.
“They’re out there,” Bretta answered. “Waiting. They won’t blow their load early.”
“When we leave the airport, they’ll attack,” Ethan agreed. He glanced at Kiana. “Be ready.”
Kiana bit her lower lip and nodded her head stiffly.
As he strolled briskly along, Ethan thought back to the I2P message he had fired off to Sam while using the bathroom in Istanbul. Specifically, the request he had made at the end for a company car to collect them from the Barcelona airport. He was unsure just how many resources Sam had in Western Europe, but he was banking on her having at least a few people on the ground to help his team shake the Kidon threat and get their package to the relative safety of El Hotel Arintero: the DIA’s working front in the Spanish province of Catalonia.
While waiting to be let through customs, Ethan and Kiana stood in the most orderly customs line he had ever been in his life. It was as quiet and disciplined as any parade ground formation. The travelers were silent, somber. Almost everyone was wearing surgical masks, disposable gloves or both. People travelling together were permitted to stand by one another, but there was a generally observed gap of one and a half meters between everyone in the queue.
Ethan made a mental checklist of their known adversaries in his head: Celeste, Bedouin and Boots.
His eyes moved about the customs hall. Flicked from impassive masked face to impassive masked face.
Still one more of them hiding in plain sight...
Rather than have all four of them standing together in a huddle, Ethan had instructed William and Bretta to stand at the prescribed one and a half meters behind Kiana and himself. Using his two colleagues as a buffer might have seemed coldblooded to some, but the safety of the package––of Kiana Avesta––was paramount. At least with William and Bretta at his back, he could be relatively certain that no trouble would come from his six. That meant that all he had to worry about was one of the Kidon making a move from out of the snaking, well-spaced line ahead of him, or from the side.
Unsurprisingly, Ethan and Kiana edged to the front of the line without any of the three Kidon they knew of making a move for them. Ethan finally spotted Boots in the line, though standing some way back. Boots still retained his air of unruffled boredom, not looking in their direction, eyes glassy, one foot tapping as if he was listening to some music in his head. Still no sign of Bedouin and Celeste.
Ethan and Kiana waited for the person before them to have her passport checked––a blonde-haired, blue-eyed young woman wearing what Ethan considered to be the new uniform of the successful middle-class, a complete set of Lululemon exercise clothing topped with a Gucci hooded sweatshirt, an outfit ruined only by the surgical mask she wore. While they waited, another customs agent directed Ethan and Kiana to thoroughly scrub their hands with hand-sanitizer. Once this was done, they were allowed to advance to the booth and hand over their passports.
The brief interaction between himself and the customs agent was enough to convince Ethan that Spain was taking the threat of COVID-19 extremely seriously. The customs officials not only wore goggles and facemasks, but they were also behind newly erected Plexiglas barriers. The masks were not the standard surgical varieties that almost everyone else in the queue wore, these were N95 respirator masks, custom molded to the individual wearer’s face––the number in the name referred to the percentage of small particles that the masks were capable of filtering out. The fact that these masks were being used by airport staff told Ethan it was no longer about putting on a show of avoidance, as it had been in Iran where the staff had been wearing standard surgical masks––masks that actually had no chance at filtering out something as minuscule as a virus. It was now about genuine prevention. Then again, it was also probably that the Iranians hadn’t had enough N95s for its essential workers.
Christ, at this rate they’ll be shutting down airports, ports, public transport…
That virus could make getting Kiana safely out of the country and back to the States a lot harder.
The distracted demeanor of the customs agent did nothing to assuage the feeling of impending calamity that seemed to hang over the airport. The mood was grim. The agent behind
his Plexiglas barrier barely passed comment on the fact that Ethan and Kiana had both handed over Spanish passports and yet neither one of them could speak anything that even resembled fluent Spanish. Then again, it wasn’t entirely an unknown phenomenon, considering how many migrants the country had accepted in recent years.
“Nuestras madres son Españolas,” Ethan explained. Our mothers are Spanish.
It was hard to tell what the customs agent might have thought about this, his face mostly inscrutable behind the mask and safety goggles. Ethan braced himself for a tirade of skeptical and incomprehensible Spanish but instead the man grunted, said something that gave Ethan the impression he had bigger fish to fry, then stamped the passports and slid them back under the opening at the bottom of the Plexiglas barrier.
“Just remember,” he said, as Ethan made to collect the fake travel documents, “you must quarantine for two weeks, yes? Fourteen days you must stay––where is it you are staying in Barcelona?”
Ethan recited the address of a private residence on the opposite side of town from the El Hotel Arintero.
“Si, well, you must stay for fourteen days,” the official said. “No going out, no seeing of the sights, yes? No stopping for groceries on the way home. Understand?”
Ethan nodded. He put the passports into his back pocket, gave the man behind the Plexiglas a smile that was more grimace than anything else, picked up his bag and ushered Kiana towards the exit.
As they left customs, Ethan continued to keep an eye out. Every glance concentrated in their direction was potentially hostile. He would protect Kiana at all costs.
The two of them waited just inside the arrivals area, their backs to the wall, while Bretta and William made their way through. To Ethan’s trained and critical eye, there was nothing wrong with the scene in front of him, well, nothing that he would consider suspicious within this bizarrely altered reality that people seemed to be living now. With the masks, there were no visible facial clues as to what people were thinking, where they were from, how old they were, how fit they were, how alert; all things that Ethan’s subconscious was hard-wired to look for and analyze. He had to rely on body language and clothing.
Boiling Point (An Ethan Galaal Thriller Book 4) Page 11