Crusader One

by Brian Andrews

  “You don’t remember, do you?” The corners of her lips curled up just a smidgen, her first show of real emotion. She was toying with him and enjoying it.

  He narrowed his eyes at her and studied her face. A beat later, it clicked.

  “Brussels,” he said. “That brasserie with the fire engine–red facade on the cobblestone street.”

  She nodded. “Les Brassins sur la Rue Keyenveld,” she said in perfect French.

  “Now you’re just showing off,” he said, smiling.

  “Not really. When that happens, you’ll know it.”

  He chuckled politely, while cursing himself for not remembering her name. On that night six months ago, they’d only exchanged a cursory greeting before he and Harel had gone walking by themselves. If memory served, she’d stayed behind and talked with Grimes. Funny, he’d never thought to ask Grimes about their interaction. He’d assumed, obviously erroneously, that the woman had been a local Mossad asset in Belgium playing Harel’s sidekick for the evening for the sake of their cover. Clearly, she was much, much more than that.

  Her name started with an E, he realized. Was it Estelle . . . Evelyn? Shit, I can’t remember . . . Ah, probably just as well. I doubt she’s still using the same NOC.

  The woman led them down a hallway to another, much heavier metal door. Again, she punched a code into a keypad, but this time a panel opened higher on the wall, revealing a flat, greenish glass square. She placed her hand on the glass and leaned in toward the opening in the wall above it. The glass lit up as her handprint was scanned while, he assumed, the other device performed a retinal scan.

  Both panels slid shut with a loud click. A hiss signaled the opening of the final door—which turned out to be nearly a foot thick—and they entered the home of Israel’s Seventh Order. They passed through a short foyer, flanked by walls on both sides displaying black-and-white photographs of small groups of commandos, posing after what he assumed were successful and secret missions. The number of people in the world who had seen these pictures, Dempsey guessed, numbered fewer than a hundred. Next, his gaze was drawn to an emblem in the center of the mosaic tile floor depicting a human silhouette, head bowed and arms holding up two crumbling pillars, with angelic wings outstretched in the background. Beneath the image was a line of text written in Hebrew, which Dempsey assumed translated to Seventh Order.

  He strode across the emblem toward a pair of double doors that opened automatically on approach, revealing a Tactical Operations Center very much in keeping with the style and layout of the Ember TOC. The primary and marked difference was the fit and finish. The Seventh Order’s TOC looked like an architecture firm had had a hand in the interior design. The color palette, the materials, the lighting, all worked in harmony. The long table held pop-up screens in front of each chair, much like at home at Ember. A short podium stood alone at the far end of the table, and a bank of large flat-screen monitors hung on the facing wall. The center monitor held a six-way split screen with live security feeds of various parts of the museum and the grounds above, and the others were tuned to a variety of international news channels, with all sound muted.

  “Please make yourselves comfortable,” she said, gesturing to the empty task chairs around the table. “There’s coffee in the break room, as well as packaged snacks in the cabinet and fruit and water in the refrigerator. Our home is your home, for now. I’ll be back in a few moments.” And with that, she disappeared out a door on the far side of the room. Jarvis, who had not taken a seat, followed her without a word or glance at the team. The two other Israeli operators also wordlessly departed, but they headed for the break room instead.

  No introductions. No brief. What the hell?

  Dempsey looked at Smith, his eyes saying it all.

  Smith shrugged. “No idea, bro.”

  Irritated, Dempsey took a seat at the table, and the rest of the team fell in around him, all subconsciously taking seats in the places they routinely occupied at the conference table back at home . . . all except for Munn.

  “Well, I don’t say no to free coffee,” the doc announced.

  “You don’t say no to free anything,” Dempsey said with a chuckle. But then what Navy SEAL did?

  “I’m buying, so who needs one?” Munn asked, clearly enjoying himself.

  Four hands shot up.

  “Aw, come on, guys. I know I’m junior bitch, but seriously?”

  “And you best remember how we like them,” Wang fired back.

  “I’ll give you a hand,” Adamo said, getting to his feet.

  “Thanks, shipmate,” Munn said and clapped a hand on Adamo’s shoulder. Dempsey saw the much smaller former CIA man grimace awkwardly, which made Dempsey chuckle as the duo headed off toward the break room.

  “I remember that chick,” Grimes muttered, her eyes ticking to the door that Jarvis and the Israeli female agent had just exited through.

  “Brussels,” Dempsey said.

  Grimes nodded.

  “Out of curiosity, what did the two of you talk about that night?” Dempsey asked.

  “Absolutely nothing. She wouldn’t slip her NOC at all. Pretended she was Harel’s daughter the whole time, acting like she’d never been to Brussels before. Talking about the food and sites they’d seen. I don’t know . . . a little too hardcore if you ask me. I mean, clearly, we both were read into the meet.”

  “She’s all business, huh?” Smith asked.

  “Yeah,” Elizabeth replied. “Must be a unit thing. They didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet for us. Coffee and snacks in the break room and have a seat. Pretty cold welcome.”

  “I think it’s fair for us to expect this,” Smith said. “Imagine the Brits sent a shit-hot unit to our home base, ready to kick some ass and take names. Imagine that same unit is operating out of Ember headquarters and we were supposed to be their hosts and provide support for an operation in our sandbox that we knew Ember was better suited to conduct. It would totally chafe. So maybe we should try to put ourselves in their shoes and cut our hosts a little slack.”

  “There’s only three of them, Shane,” she pressed.

  “And they sure as hell don’t look like Tier One operators,” Wang chimed in.

  Smith shot the cyber whiz kid a look who’s talking stare and then said, “Which is probably by design. IDF has commandos assigned to units across the Oz Brigade—the parent command for Israeli Special Forces. In my experience working with IDF, there’s a smoother and more seamless integration of clandestine tasking and operators across the board than what we have at home. You’re probably right that the team here at the Seventh Order are not door kickers. But that doesn’t mean they don’t kick ass in the field.”

  “You think so?” Wang said with swagger out of proportion for his stature, not to mention his role in the team.

  Dempsey smiled. He was pretty sure even a Seventh Order agent could kick Wang’s ass without breaking a sweat. In the dark web, Wang was a god, but in the field, the kid was meat. He followed Smith’s lead. “I hear ya, Wang, but Smith is right. This is their turf, so no point getting in a pissing match. We need to show them we’re team players. The time will come soon enough when we desperately need their support and expertise to pull off our operation. The Skipper wouldn’t have us here otherwise.”

  “And just what is our operation?” Grimes asked. “How long are we expected to sit on our hands and wait? For Christ’s sake, yesterday was a complete waste and today isn’t shaping up much better.”

  Dempsey sighed. She was right. It wasn’t like the boss to leave them in the dark this long, and he was wondering what the hell was going on just like everyone else. “I’m sure we’ll find out any minute,” he said with hollow conviction.

  Adamo and Munn returned with the coffees, passed them out, and then took their seats. A beat later, everyone else returned, too, with Jarvis stepping up to the low podium. Instead of the monitors flickering to life with satellite images, maps, or grainy photos, the news and security feeds continued
to stream silently behind him.

  “All right, guys, let’s get started. First, I’d like to acknowledge our host, Elinor Jordan,” Jarvis said, gesturing to the female Israeli agent. “Elinor is the acting Director of the Seventh Order. She’s going to introduce her team and brief us on how she sees us working together on this operation.”

  Dempsey forced himself not to gawk. Acting Director?

  Smith apparently couldn’t resist and raised his hand like a schoolboy, but spoke at the same time. “What, exactly, is the operation, boss?” he asked.

  Jarvis looked hard at his Director of Operations and said, “We’ll have more details soon.” Then, without segue, he stepped away from the podium and disappeared through the door at the back of the room.

  “As Director Jarvis said, my name is Elinor. My colleagues to my right, Daniel and Rouvin, would like to welcome you to the Seventh Order. We’re glad for your arrival and look forward to training together to achieve our mutual goals. I’d like to start by sharing some history about our organization. The Seventh Order is the evolution of what was originally the Shimshon Unit. Shimshon is Hebrew for Samson, a fierce warrior from the Torah. Like Samson, Shimshon Unit was a powerful tool against those who would destroy Israel. In the case of Samson, it was the Philistines; for Shimshon Unit, it was the militants in Palestine. The unit conducted undercover operations against the Palestinian terrorists in Gaza until it was ordered disbanded in 1995 by the Oslo Accords . . .”

  Dempsey felt Munn’s gaze on him but refused to look at his former SEAL teammate. He was no more interested in the history lesson than Munn was, but if they paid attention to the charter and capabilities of the Seventh Order, it might shed some light on the nature of their impending mission and how the Israelis planned to support them.

  “The unit was officially disbanded but functionally folded into a sister unit known as 217, or Duvdevan.”

  “The Assassination Unit?” Grimes asked. There was no judgment in her voice, Dempsey noted. Just an honest question.

  “The unit specializes in covert and undercover actions against our enemies. They infiltrate terrorist organizations, disrupt operations, and gather tremendous amounts of actionable intelligence to keep our nation safe. When the mission requires, they kill, but that is not the charter. These brave soldiers regularly and routinely sacrifice their lives in the service of Israel. Service in the unit is considered one of the most hazardous duties within the IDF.”

  The men beside her were nodding somberly. Perhaps thinking, as Dempsey was, of brothers and sisters they had lost. Elinor’s eyes, however, did not betray emotion like her teammates’. She was a machine at the podium, simply stating facts.

  “Like America,” she continued, “Israel sometimes finds itself paralyzed by bureaucracy. The Seventh Order was founded by Director Harel as a highly black operation—known only to a handful of people within our government. In America, Ember exists to keep your citizenry safe. In Israel, the Seventh Order exists to safeguard the very survival of a Jewish state.”

  Beneath her stoicism, Dempsey at last detected a spark of passion. He thought back to his first encounter with Elizabeth Grimes almost a year ago, and the supersize chip she wore on her shoulder then. Where Grimes was overt with her emotions, Elinor’s presentation was more guarded. She’d kept her brief clinical and academic. But a person did not make it to the table, especially at this level, without surviving some serious battle damage. Dempsey knew how to recognize a wounded kindred spirit. There was more to Elinor Jordan than met the eye, and maybe with time he’d catch a glimpse behind the curtain.

  She continued talking, elaborating on the relationships that the Seventh Order covertly maintained with other organizations within Oz Brigade, but Dempsey didn’t care about the details. He wanted to know the mission. He wanted to know how Seventh Order was going to help Ember. He wanted to know the DNA test results from the headless motherfucker they’d delivered over twenty-four hours ago. What was the holdup? Why were they still in the dark?

  Then, as if God himself were tuned in to Dempsey’s internal monologue, Elinor paused and checked her mobile phone. “Excuse me,” she said, glancing up at them. “I believe this is the call we’ve all been waiting for.” She turned and exited the room, answering the call as she did.

  Dempsey resisted the urge to sigh with exasperation. He took the lid off his still untouched coffee to check for foo-foo contamination and thankfully found the liquid inside to be a perfectly beautiful chestnut color. He raised the cup to his mouth, inhaled, and took a sip.

  Even their damn coffee is better than ours, he grumbled to himself.

  They didn’t have to wait long. A beat later, Elinor returned with Jarvis at her side. She gestured to the podium, giving him the proverbial honor of breaking the news.

  “I know it’s been painful waiting, but we just got the DNA results back on our headless tango. We have a match with ninety-nine percent confidence the body is Behrouz Rostami,” Jarvis said, gripping the sides of the podium.

  “I knew it,” Dempsey blurted. “I fucking knew it.”

  Anger welled up inside him, and he was suddenly furious that he had not been the one to kill Rostami. Ever since Frankfurt, when Rostami had corrupted, violated, and then gutted the German girl Effie Vogel, Dempsey had wanted to end that VEVAK bastard. God, it was stupid and selfish, he knew, but it gnawed at him that someone else had taken his prize.

  Wait a second, he thought, silently arguing with himself now. Rostami was murdered in the Iranian mission, which means it had to be an inside job.

  But why would Modiri order a hit on his Lieutenant?

  Maybe once Rostami pulled off coordinating the attack on the DNI he had become a loose end. But if that was the case, why whack the guy in DC? Why not wait until he was safely back in Iran to take care of business? Unless Modiri wanted Rostami’s body to be found . . . but then why work so hard to make the corpse unidentifiable? Dempsey rubbed his temples. This was exactly the sort of twisted spook shit that gave him a migraine. The John Dempsey of a year ago wouldn’t have even bothered trying to connect the dots, but thanks to Jarvis and Smith, his mind worked differently now. He looked at Jarvis, who was still standing at the podium. The boss looked tired and—if Dempsey didn’t know the man better, he’d be tempted to say—demoralized. Probably because Jarvis had already been thinking ten steps ahead. And now, with confirmation of Rostami’s identity, he was wrestling with scenarios Dempsey had not even begun to contemplate. That’s why they were here, after all, wasn’t it? So Jarvis and Harel could plan their covert retaliation. The Americans weren’t the only ones with a score to settle. The Israelis had lost their Mossad Chief in the attack. Over the past year, the Israeli Prime Minister had not been shy about condemning the nuclear treaty with Iran as both feckless and dangerous. Shamone had been waiting for an excuse to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, and now, with the evidence that a known Iranian assassin had been nearby when the bombing occurred, he finally had one.

  “All right, people, enough,” Jarvis said, his voice a megaphone silencing the din of heated conversation that had erupted in the room. “I know it’s going to be difficult, but I need your patience while we process this information and contemplate our response.”

  “What does that mean?” Munn asked. “Contemplate our response—I thought our response was already contemplated and that’s why we’re here. We got hit by VEVAK; now we need to hit them back.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Elinor replied, beating Jarvis to the punch. “There are serious geopolitical implications for any action we take.”

  “I disagree. It is simple,” Munn growled. “Eye for an eye. They took out our intelligence Chiefs; we need to return the favor.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” the male Israeli operator called Rouvin interjected, “because your country is ten thousand kilometers away. You don’t have thousands of enemy rockets and missiles trained on your capital. You hit VEVAK, then you retreat back to America an
d watch the aftermath on the TV from the safety of your living room. But not us—our lives, our families are at stake if this escalates into war.”

  Elinor held a stern finger up to the man beside her, silencing him, but not until after the point had been made. Rouvin is right, Dempsey thought. Jarvis had undoubtedly played out all the “what if” scenarios in his mind, which was why they were here. But if the plan involved Israeli support, then it meant that Israel was in the driver’s seat. Which begged the question, why did they even need the Seventh Order? Why did they need Levi Harel’s support? Because our DNI is dead, you moron, he thought to himself. The nuclear treaty with Iran had been brokered under President Warner’s watch. There was no way Catherine Morgan would jeopardize her ascent to the throne of the US intelligence community by authorizing a covert action mission in Tehran that implied Warner had made a mistake. Dempsey shook his head at the sour taste that had developed in his mouth.

  God, he hated the political shit.

  “So what do we do in the interim?” Munn asked, not backing down.

  “We train,” Elinor said simply. “Together.”

  “How, if we don’t even know what the hell we’re training for?” Grimes fired back.

  “I understand everyone’s frustration,” Elinor said. “But we need to trust the process. We are not the policy makers; we are the instruments of policy. So, while the bosses decide the response, we can go to the Kirya range and begin drilling. It will give us a chance to get to know each other and refine our methods.”

  “Our methods are battle tested,” said Grimes. “I can promise you that.”

  Elinor smiled. “Well, as we like to say in the Seventh Order, first we practice, then we promise.”

  Grimes rolled her eyes at this, but otherwise chose not to escalate.

  “When will we meet the rest of your team?” Wang asked.

  Elinor glanced at the two men beside her. “You’re looking at it,” she said, gesturing to herself, Daniel, and Rouvin.

  “Three of you?” Smith said. “That’s it?”