by Ward Larsen
“Not related to the gunshot. I’d say he got punched pretty hard.”
“Prior to the bullet?”
“Long enough to swell and bruise a bit, yes.”
German went back to taking pictures.
Bausch wandered the room. He saw the usual accoutrements of a traveler: suitcase, phone charger, toiletry bag. He looked briefly in the closet and saw empty hangars and a fluffy hotel robe. A wallet in plain sight on the ornate writing desk held credit cards and a good amount of cash. His French driver’s license showed a Paris address, and his passport was also French, both in his true name. Moussa Tayeb, like his brother, was Algerian by birth, yet as teenagers they’d immigrated to the banlieues of Seine-Saint-Denis and eventually acquired French citizenship.
Bausch opened the passport and saw a photo of the man on the bed, albeit with better coloring, a straighter nose, and minus one hole in his head. He flicked through the other pages and saw nothing of note. Ten years ago, passport stamps might have given clues as to where he had recently traveled. Now, in the digital world, ink stamps had gone the way of flip-phones.
He went to the bathroom, noted a bloody washcloth and two pill bottles. Hanging on hooks on the door were a jacket and a dress shirt, both stained by what looked like blood. When he returned to the main room it was being backlit intermittently by German’s flashing strobe. Bausch stopped in the center, turned a slow circle with his hands on his hips. The pressure for results, he knew, was going to be high. All the same, he was glad he’d taken the case because it also brought opportunity.
He sank his hands deep into his pockets, and thought, Where to begin?
9
There were three beds in the safe house, and at eleven o’clock that morning all were occupied. Yosy and Anna had taken the bunked twins in one bedroom, while one of the 8200 men was racked out on a single in the other. Slaton, in what he was sure was a rigged game, had drawn the short straw and been forced to crash on the couch in the main room.
The second 8200 man was on duty—someone always took watch—and after receiving a message from headquarters he snapped the curtains open sharply in the main room.
The brilliant light of day flooded the apartment.
Bleary-eyed, Slaton rolled over and squinted against the sun. “What is it?”
“Get up, we have to move!” the watch said.
“Why?”
The thirty-something man handed over a secure phone and went to roust the others. Slaton read the message, and a minute later everyone was in the main room. They all looked at him expectantly, and Slaton shared the bad news that he himself was still digesting. “Moussa is dead.”
“What?” said Anna. “How?”
“The Office has it on good authority that he was murdered. They found him on the bed in his room, right where I left him, with a single gunshot to the head.”
“Shot by who?” Yosy asked.
Slaton shook his head. “I don’t know. He was alive when I left, but there’s no time to figure it out. Three of us were at the hotel last night, and Anna was seen leaving the bar with him. The Office wants us to abort immediately and get out of the country.”
This surprised no one. Mossad had suffered its share of embarrassments over the years, agents getting arrested and held for show trials after missions had gone south. Now, when an op showed the first signs of cratering, headquarters was spring-loaded to bail out.
“Do we sanitize the house?” Anna asked.
Slaton considered it. There were a number of options for an unscheduled egress. If time wasn’t critical, a team might take a full day to wipe away prints, minimize DNA, remove trash to a distant receptacle, and even plant misleading evidence. The other extreme was to grab your gun, phone, and passport, and run for the door.
“Twenty minutes,” he said. “Pack up, clean what you can, try not to leave anything behind. We have two cars, so we’ll split—I go with Anna in the Renault, everybody else in the Fiat. We’ll go north into Belgium. Yosy, you and the others head for Paris. I’ll give The Office a heads-up and they can make arrangements beyond that.”
Not another word was said. Everyone began moving.
* * *
The bartender came in before his scheduled shift on Bausch’s request. Bausch met the man in the empty lounge, and the interview commenced with his witness framed by rows of top-shelf liquor and branded beer taps.
“Yes, Mr. Tayeb was here last night,” said the lanky Belgian, whose name was Fellaini.
“Was he with anyone?” Bausch asked.
“Not when he arrived. He came alone, ordered his usual gin and tonic. Most nights he had one or two, but last night, after his second, he began socializing with a blonde.”
“Had you seen this woman before?”
“No, never. We have a small cast of girls who come regularly, but never this one. I would have remembered her—very striking, late twenties, wearing a tight black dress.”
“She was alone?”
“Yes. I saw one other man approach her, but she brushed him away. After that she began talking to Monsieur Tayeb and the drinks began to flow.”
“She drank as well?”
“Yes, but only one, I think. She took her time.”
“Did they leave together?”
“They did, and a good thing. Monsieur Tayeb had put down six or seven drinks by then—I can look up the bill, if you like. I’m not sure he would have found his room by himself.”
“Is it possible the two of them might have known each other?”
Fellaini chuckled. “I’ve been in the pit a long time, monsieur. Long enough to spot a professional girl … and not a cheap one. Such things happen at Le Cristal. Many wealthy men stay with us, mostly for business. Some bring their mistresses, but very few bring their wives.”
Bausch knew Fellaini was editorializing, but only just. “Have you ever seen Mr. Tayeb partake in such … socialization before?”
The barkeep thought about it. “Not this week, but on previous visits … perhaps once or twice. I can tell you I’ve never seen him drink so much.”
Bausch didn’t know what to make of that, but he was sure it was no coincidence. A new girl showing up, Moussa drinking heavily. Also, the barkeep’s impression that the girl had ignored another approach. The Tayeb brothers had their share of enemies. A few might be criminals, but the majority were police, prosecutors, even a few intelligence agencies. It was the last group that stuck in his head.
He was about to pose his next question when his phone chimed with an email. He checked it and saw a message from the technical team. They had arrived an hour ago and were going over the security video in the room behind the office. They’d found something important.
Bausch told the bartender he would be back shortly. He went to the lobby, rounded the front desk, and walked into a maze of administrative offices. He found a tech named Astrid Lavelle waiting for him.
She led him to a tiny office where she’d set up a laptop. “We’ve been able to access the hotel security system,” she said as she began typing, “but there’s a problem.”
“What kind of problem?” Bausch asked, leaning in for a better look.
Footage began playing, and he recognized the lobby he’d just walked through. The scene was quiet. He saw an older couple walking toward the elevator, the man using a cane. A red-sweatered clerk at the front desk said something and gave them a hospitable wave.
“Note the time and date stamp,” said Lavelle.
Bausch read it aloud, “Eleven thirty-four last night.”
“Right. Now I’m going to play another file.”
She did, and Bausch saw the time as three hours later, 2:33 in the morning. He immediately saw the problem. The same older couple walked past. Same cane, same elevator, same wave from the red sweater at the desk.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “How can that be?”
“At some point yesterday evening—we haven’t nailed down the exact time—the network shut down and this loop was fed in
its place. So far, we’ve seen the same thirty-minute sequence sixteen times in a row.”
“Are you saying—”
“Yes. The hotel’s surveillance system has been hacked.”
Bausch’s grim expression deepened. Things were getting increasingly complex. Increasingly delicate. He was already convinced that the murder of Moussa Tayeb was no tryst-with-a-hooker gone bad. Everything he was seeing pointed to a well-planned hit. An operation that now included the ability to hack into security systems. In light of Moussa Tayeb’s background, with which he was loosely familiar, a state-sponsored assassination seemed the most likely scenario.
As if sensing his plunging thoughts, Lavelle said, “There is some good news. Based on the rough description of the mystery woman you distributed, this came up.” She began typing again, and images ran from what looked like a different security system. Bausch saw a long-legged blonde in a black dress climbing into a Renault.
“Where did you get this?” he asked.
“Parking garage three blocks away. As it turns out, we already had a warrant to monitor the place—there’s been a car theft ring working the area. Purely a coincidence, but one of my techs remembered. He checked last night’s footage and we got lucky. This system hasn’t been tampered with, so the time stamp is good. Twelve thirty-seven last night.”
“Outstanding work. Can you capture the best image and send it to me? I’d like to show the barkeeper to confirm it’s the right woman.”
“No problem. And it gets better.” Lavelle paused play, enlarged the image, and pointed to the back of the car. “With a little enhancement, I think we can pull this plate number.”
Bausch’s mood went on an upswing. He told Lavelle to prioritize the plate number, and minutes later he was outside the hotel’s front portico. He lit a cigarette, took a long draw, and pulled out his phone. On his first call, Bausch explained his findings to his supervisor, the regional commissioner, who agreed that locating the woman’s car was the priority.
His second call went to a number that was answered not at Grand Ducal Police headquarters, but in a derelict rooming house on the southern edge of the city. The man he spoke to there gave, almost word-for-word, an identical response. “I want you to find this woman.”
10
For all that was happening in Luxembourg, Anton Bloch could not ignore the never-ending battles on the home front. Hamas and Hezbollah were nothing if not persistent, and he was reading the daily summary when his assistant rang: the department head he’d summoned had arrived.
The staid presence of Rona Feldman filed through the door. A forty-something paradigm of sensible wardrobes and exhaustive briefings, she ably headed up the agency’s technology division. Directly behind her was a man Bloch had never seen, much younger than Feldman and cut from a very different bolt of professional cloth. His shaggy hair and rumpled clothes belonged in a university laboratory, and the patchy growths on his face didn’t come close to being a beard—more an abdication of grooming.
She introduced him as Paul Mordechai. Bloch had never met the man, but he’d heard the name. Feldman had personally plucked him from a PhD program at Tel Aviv University, convinced he was some kind of technical savant.
After greetings ran their course, everyone took a seat and Feldman got to the point—as she was prone to do. “We’ve been working all morning on the upload from Moussa Tayeb’s laptop. There is a great deal to go over. The financials are a gold mine, but that’s a long-term project. It will take time to connect the various accounts to individuals and map out the routings. Some other findings, however, are more time critical.”
Bloch said, “I know you and your team have had your heads down working on this, Rona. I called you here to provide an update. Moussa Tayeb was killed last night, shot in his hotel room.”
The two technicians exchanged an uncomfortable look. Rear-echelon employees were essential to intelligence gathering and analysis, but rarely did they venture near the life-and-death spasms of the operational side.
“Were we responsible?” Mordechai asked, as if he himself had accidentally pulled a trigger.
“No, we weren’t. I don’t have much information, but the police are investigating his death and our team is pulling clear. I wanted you to know because it might have significance as you go over the laptop data. I’d like you to share this inside the working group, but don’t let it go beyond. And if you uncover anything that could be connected to his death, I want to know immediately.”
The two exchanged another look, and Feldman nodded.
“Actually, there is something,” Mordechai said. “When we began our search, we prioritized the most recent emails and messages. Some recent financial transactions stood out. As we all know, Moussa Tayeb is … or rather, was … the corporate manager of al-Qassam Front. The organization is supported by a handful of Arab benefactors, and this necessitates a measure of formality. Agreements have to be signed, accounts opened. Moussa has long served as the conduit. In recent days we’ve seen considerable cash withdrawals from certain accounts in Luxembourg.”
“How much are we talking about?”
“Roughly three hundred thousand euros. Nothing staggering, but it would be solid funding for an operation. We’ve found five similar draws in recent months.”
“You think he’s sending cash to the front line?”
“That’s what doesn’t make sense. In the past, both from what we’ve gleaned from other sources and by our initial take on the laptop files, Moussa has never tried to send cash using couriers. It’s notoriously risky for a number of reasons, and he’s always leaned toward electronic transfers—regional banks in the operating areas, hawala networks, that kind of thing.”
Bloch considered it. “What other reason could there be for cash withdrawals in Luxembourg?”
Feldman picked up, “We uncovered a chain of messages with a party we haven’t been able to identify. It’s not firm, but we suspect the contact may have been getting cash payments from Moussa.”
“Payments for what?”
“We can’t say for certain. It could be weapons, guns, or explosives to be delivered downrange. On the other hand, we came across a purchase agreement for a very nice villa on the Costa del Sol.”
The director straightened in his chair. “Are you saying Moussa Tayeb has been skimming from al-Qassam Front?”
“That remains to be seen. But if he was, it might explain what happened to him.”
While Bloch tried to make sense of it, Mordechai added, “There is one other thing you should know. I developed a program that analyzes various applications—things like calendars, messaging, and email accounts—to define correlations between them.” He digressed into a technical description of the software that went beyond what was necessary.
Thirty seconds in, Bloch interrupted with, “I don’t need to build it, Paul. Just tell me what you found.”
The scruffy little man appeared only mildly crestfallen, and Bloch suspected it wasn’t the first time he’d been admonished for assuming others were as enamored with technical details as he was.
Mordechai said, “We’re quite sure Ramzi Tayeb is in Luxembourg. He traveled under an alias and was scheduled to arrive last night.”
* * *
Slaton was driving, Anna beside him in the passenger seat of the Renault. They’d made good time, keeping to back roads through Sauel and Ospern, and the tiny Duchy of Luxembourg was fast falling behind them. The forest thickened as they entered the Ardennes, where eighty years ago the Nazis had made their last-ditch counter-attack. After initial successes, the campaign faltered and the war churned onward to its inevitable conclusion. The topography, however, with its dense woodlands and rugged terrain, seemed eerily unchanged, a long-dormant killing ground holding its secrets fast.
“When we get to Belgium, we’ll stop for food,” he said. There had been no time for such luxuries earlier.
“Do you think headquarters will fly us straight back to Tel Aviv?” she asked.
“Probably. With Moussa dead, there’s no reason for us to stay. I only hope the laptop will lead to his brother.”
She looked at him speculatively, a question held back.
“What?” he asked.
“Was Moussa really alive when you left?”
He glanced away from the road long enough to meet her gaze. “You think I shot him?”
“When I heard he was dead, and after what you told me last night … it did cross my mind.”
“No, Anna, it wasn’t me. He was sleeping soundly when I left. A little beat up, thanks to you, but nothing worse.” He shot another glance her way. “I’m actually glad you asked.”
“Why?”
“I was talking to Yosy last night, and he said you got back to the safe house only a few minutes before I did. You had a pretty big head start.”
Her ice-blue eyes fixed on him severely. “You think I went back and shot him?”
“It did cross my mind.” She grinned, and he added, “But given that you just asked me if I’d done it—that kind of lets you off the hook.”
“Maybe that’s why I asked—to throw you off the scent.”
Slaton couldn’t contain a laugh.
“What?”
“I guess this is why case officers can never date. Our lives are a lie and we both know it.”
Her smile was blinding, her perfect features lighting up, notwithstanding one minor black eye.
“The real reason I got back late?” she said. “I’d like to tell you it was because I was performing an extensive surveillance detection route on my way back to the safe house. The truth is, I know a store that sells a little of everything and stays open all night. I stopped for some makeup—figured I was going to have a pretty good shiner by morning. Of course, it was only in the name of tradecraft. If we get pulled over for speeding, I can’t have the cop thinking my boyfriend is beating me up.”
“Okay, I’ll buy that. And it does look better.”
He looked down at the gauges. “We’re going to need gas soon.”