by Ward Larsen
He returned to find everyone in character—the lawyer was studying the purchase agreement language with a furrowed brow, and the two councilmen were in a hushed argument with the mayor.
“Well?” Tuncay asked. “Have you reached a decision?”
All went silent, and everyone looked at the mayor, who after a lengthy pause said, “Yes, let’s do it.”
Their guest smiled.
Papers were signed and the deposit banked, effecting the transfer of the airframe known as CB68H to a Seychelles-based concern that no one in the room, including Osman Tuncay, had ever heard of before—Perseus Air Cargo.
The ersatz Italian was at the airport thirty minutes later waiting for his flight to Brasília, a scheduled 1:20 departure. The storm had subsided, but others were on the horizon, hinting at certain delays. As he waited in the boarding area, Tuncay pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number that was not listed among his contacts.
“It is done,” he said.
“When will it be ready?” the Israeli asked.
“For our acceptance flight? Two days, perhaps three. I will talk to our lawyer in Brasília this afternoon. The more errors he makes in the paperwork, the more time we will have. The maintenance contractors should arrive today, and I will get their opinion when I return. After that I’ll have a better idea as to when we can fly.”
“These mechanics can be trusted?”
“They are very capable, and have charged us accordingly. As long as the money flows, the aircraft will fly—it is only a matter of when.”
“But are they discreet?”
“I hired Spanish speakers in a Portuguese-speaking country. No one will question what they’re doing.”
“Even … the day after?”
A pause before Tuncay understood. “Especially the day after. The mechanics work for a reputable aviation maintenance, repair, and overhaul facility. For such companies, reputation is paramount. They will make every effort to distance themselves from what’s going to happen.”
“All right. I am trusting your judgment.”
“Where is my copilot?”
“Walid is on the way. Are you sure he’s the right man for the job? Does he not need special training for this aircraft?”
Tuncay said, “He needs a pilot certificate and a pulse,” and by the time he added, “just leave everything to me,” he was already dreaming of the sun-drenched Mallorcan sea.
EIGHT
Zan Ben-Meir.
The name came to Slaton as he crossed a narrow street with church bells ringing in the distance. Maddeningly, there was little else, but that was who he’d seen yesterday. He associated the name to Mossad’s training grounds, and perhaps the café and halls of the service’s headquarters building. But there it ended. While it was not a large intelligence organization, Mossad spanned thinly across the world, and so there were countless operatives Slaton had never met, let alone worked with. Zan Ben-Meir was in his mind as a name and a face, but nothing more. He pushed it away, and focused on his principal reason for coming to Valletta.
On first arriving in Malta, early last year, he had taken a succession of minor masonry jobs in the city with a specific purpose in mind. For Slaton it was an investment, the way other people might put money in a brokerage account. His first commission, a chimney in need of refacing, had proved unsuitable, as had the second, a terraced retaining wall near a gas station that had been marred by an auto accident.
The third job, however, had been ideal.
The wall, a standard two-meter affair no different from a thousand others in the city, bordered the playground of a private school. For two days Slaton had made repairs, refurbishing the edges and joints, and adding new mortar where necessary. He arrived each day at sunrise, stayed until dusk, and took special care that the school’s headmaster was happy with his work, going as far as to offer an unconditional guarantee of his work—in truth, less out of good business practice than to ensure that no other masons would be called upon if subsequent restoration became necessary. In the end, the two hundred euros he earned for his work was no more than an afterthought.
He approached the school now on a quiet midafternoon to find the recess yard mostly empty. There were puddles from recent rain, and a group of robust-looking children, raised on fish and goat cheese and the southern sirocco, sat circled under a tree with a teacher on the far side of the grounds. He rounded the outer perimeter on a little used sidewalk, and followed the wall to the end where it abutted an adjacent building. He paused long enough to isolate the correct section of wall, an acute alcove where the stone face was hidden from the street. Slaton scanned a half-dozen high windows on the far side of the street, and the only eyes he met were those of a listless cat on a ledge, presumably scanning the sidewalks below for mice it would never chase.
He quickly went to work, happy he’d had the forethought to conceal a short pry-bar behind the inset mounts of a rain gutter. It took twenty seconds to retrieve the bar, which was red with rust, and far less to remove the keystone. Slaton reached his hand into the fist-sized gap, curled his wrist, and found the small package. He pulled it clear and stuffed it under his shirt, the plastic covering he’d so meticulously wrapped still in place. He repositioned the stone and tapped it into place with the bar. There was a fleeting urge to seal things properly with mortar, which made him wonder—had his profession of the last year made such deep inroads? No, he decided, it was only the other profession clawing back into his life. If anyone saw a problem with the year-old repair, it might give reason to recall the light-haired stonemason who’d performed it.
Slaton dropped the bar in a shadowed corner and made his way back to the main street. There he turned left, and walked purposefully in the direction of the harbor.
* * *
There is no better place to find a private moment than in a church. And with over three hundred to choose from, there is no better place to find a church than on the island of Malta.
Slaton slipped silently into the Chapel of St. Phillip. He ignored the timeless stonework and mosaic portraits of saints, and solemnly took a seat in the pews three rows from the front. A pair of women were kneeling at the head of the nave, while a nun tended candles at the foot of the holy altar. The silence was overwhelming.
As a child Slaton had worshipped regularly, albeit in a very different house and, as with most children, under a degree of duress. Over the years, however, somewhere between a sun-hewn kibbutz in Wadi Ara and the deep-shadowed campuses of Mossad, he had lost his way. Perhaps it wasn’t his belief in God that had faltered, but rather the concept of faith itself, gone skidding into oblivion under the weight of what he had seen. Under the weight of what he had done.
Slaton kneeled devoutly and bent his head, and with his hands hidden from sight he extracted the plastic-encased package from under the tail of his shirt and opened it deftly. Everything was still there. On first arriving in Malta, old habits still intact, he had set up the drop and filled it with the essentials of a quick escape. While murmured prayers bounded softly between the cavernous walls, Slaton counted eighteen thousand euros in mixed denominations. There were two passports, one of which was accompanied by a credit card. He’d considered adding a weapon to his get-well kit, but even assassins have morals, and the idea of concealing a loaded weapon in a playground wall violated his low-slung threshold of decency.
The first passport was a throwaway item bought locally from a known purveyor of gray identities, a man whose usual clientele were of two sources—either salt-encrusted Africans who’d survived the Mediterranean, or desperate Maltese fugitives about to tackle it. That document would never hold to close scrutiny, yet might stand in certain circumstances, allowing the other to be kept in reserve. The second document, as far as Slaton knew, remained pristine, and he’d kept the credit card in that name active.
He had purchased the identity in Marseille from Henri Faber. A hound-faced man—and a jewelry engraver if one went by the sign in his shop window—Fabe
r was, in Slaton’s opinion, the preeminent forger in western Europe. For fifty thousand euros the officious Frenchman, who attributed his illicit leanings to a vein of Corsican blood, had presented to Slaton a perfectly legitimate E.U. passport. It was written in the name Eric Risler, who was in fact a young Austrian tragically institutionalized in a clinic near Lienz following a motorcycle accident that had left his spine severed and his brain damaged. This was Faber’s preferred strategy, situations he harvested by spending weekends in cafés poring over regional dailies and tabloids, reviewing the lesser misfortunes of greater Europe. Car crashes, equestrian tragedies, ski-slope falls, stroke victims. In a world of pixels and metadata, Faber was a well-grooved disciple of newspaper clippings and word of mouth. He kept an extensive file on every candidate, and most critically a photograph, as he insisted his clients bear a reasonable likeness to the original identity-bearer.
Once a match was made, the simplest method was to steal the original, oft-forgotten passport. Faber kept ties to a good thief, a man who could be relied upon not only to do a dishonest day’s work, but to do it with discretion. Once a targeted passport was acquired, the most straightforward path was to renew the document if it was near the expiration date. Otherwise, Faber saw to it that enough physical damage was done to justify a replacement, paying particular attention to the watermarks and embedded electronic chips that authorities so heavily relied upon. Faber worked with the utmost caution, and all attendant paperwork was handled through a series of accommodation addresses. Properly done, the scheme left little chance that the families, let alone the victims, would ever catch on. All the same, Faber monitored each of his unfortunate principals for death, legal proceedings, or miraculous recoveries for the term of what he referred to as his “standard warranty”—five years.
The original Eric Risler, before his accident, had been very near Slaton’s height and build, and within two years of his age. When a passport renewal laced through the system, bearing a marginal photograph of the man born as David Slaton, not an eyebrow was raised, this in one of Europe’s most rigorous bureaucracies. It was time to put Faber’s work to the test.
The nun went about her duties, her black habit flowing as she lit fresh candles on behalf of the ill and downtrodden. One of the kneeling women stood and made the sign of the cross before shuffling to the side exit, the clipped echo of coins clinking in a metal tray as she passed the door. Slaton pulled an assortment of coins from his own pocket and folded them neatly into a twenty-euro note. He divided the rest of his cash evenly and placed it in his two back pockets, then separated the passports and slid them into the two in front, Eric Risler on the left. The tough plastic bag he discarded in a seat-back holder next to a dog-eared book of hymns.
Slaton heard a shuffle of fabric from the nun’s habit in the still, virtuous air, and outside the distant thrum of a passing bus. He remained still for a long moment with his head bowed reverently—in truth, filled with thoughts that were little removed from prayer. Unlike the others here, he did not petition for divine intervention, but rather something along the lines of inspiration. The question that had dogged him since last night continued to weigh heavily.
Who is hunting me?
The mere fact that he had been found was troubling enough. What concerned him more was his family. If someone had tracked him to this remote corner of the earth, might they also know about Virginia? Slaton’s life in Malta was distilled to one theme—he had abandoned the two people he loved in order to protect them from his troubled past. Yet by erasing his existence, even to them, he had effectively rendered himself helpless, unable to protect his wife and child if things went wrong. It had always been a gamble—one that now appeared lost.
But what to do about it?
Going to America himself was not an option. He didn’t know whom he was dealing with or if he’d eluded them, so a straight line back to his family was out of the question. There seemed only one course—he needed help. It had to be someone he trusted, someone capable, and most restrictive of all, someone who knew he was still alive. That cross-referenced list came to a single name.
Slaton rose quietly, made the sign of the cross at the aisle, and walked to the side portico. Not even the nun looked up when the muted sound of coins wrapped in a banknote touched the offering tray, nor moments later when the big door swung open to expose the brilliant light of day.
* * *
Slaton paid cash for a throwaway phone at a small grocer, and made his call from a bench overlooking Valletta’s Grand Harbor. The western sun was touching the flagpole in front of him, the Maltese Cross snapping smartly in a crisp onshore breeze as he dialed the number from memory.
On the fourth ring, “Hello.”
The voice was familiar, perhaps more subdued. “Hello, Yaniv. Is this number safe?”
There was a long pause as Yaniv Stein contemplated first the voice, then the question.
“As safe as any these days.”
“How are you?” Slaton asked. The question was more than polite chatter. Sixteen months ago he had pulled a delirious Stein from the Iranian desert, a torrid patch of sand where he’d been stranded and left for dead after a botched Mossad mission. The man’s leg had been mangled, and the next day when Slaton put him in the care of a doctor in Kazakhstan there had been talk of amputation. He’d not seen Stein since.
“I still have the leg,” Stein said, “only it’s not worth much. I walk with a cane and they gave me a medical retirement—as if they were doing me a favor. Nobody cared that I could still shoot straight.”
“You never shot straight.” Slaton was sure there was a smile behind the ensuing silence. “Where are you?” he asked.
“Tel Aviv. I have a small room in Holon—on a clear day I can almost make out the sea. I won’t bother to ask where you are.”
“Actually, that’s why I’m calling. After I last saw you … I tried to find a quiet place where no one would bother me.”
“Tried?”
“It worked for a while, but somebody tracked me down yesterday. It wasn’t a happy reunion, and it’s put me in a position where I need help.”
“Me help you? On principle I’d be happy to repay you for pulling my dehydrated ass out of the Dasht-e Kavir. But realistically? I’m a gimp who’s been dumped into retirement.”
“I know exactly what you are. Same thing you always were. One bad leg? That’s only an inconvenience.”
A hesitation, then, “What do you need?”
“Two things. First of all, did you ever know a guy in the service named Zan Ben-Meir?”
“Not well, but yes, I remember him. He was Metsada, a former army officer. I remember he got in trouble for something a few years back.”
“Any idea what?”
“I can’t remember, so it must not have been anything spectacular. But I do think he was forced out. Did you run across him?”
“You could say that.” Slaton explained what had happened in Malta.
“You were lucky to survive.”
“Maybe so.”
“Any idea why they came after you?”
“None at all. If Ben-Meir isn’t Mossad anymore, he may have gone soldier-of-fortune … which means he could be working for anybody.”
“I suppose…” Stein hedged. “Then again, you know the new Mossad director. I’ve heard he tries to bring back operators after they’ve fallen off the radar.”
“Tell me about it,” said Slaton, who was himself the victim of director Nurin’s first clawback scheme.
“Sorry I can’t tell you any more,” Stein said. Then after a pause, “You said you needed two things.”
Slaton explained his overriding reason for calling.
Stein took a long time to think it through. “I never knew you got married.”
“Mistake on her part.”
“Big mistake. But yeah, I can do that for you.”
“I’m not sure how long it will take.”
“Time is something I have a lot of these
days,” said Stein.
“And there is one complication.”
“What’s that?”
“My wife, Christine—she has no idea I’m still alive.”
NINE
Dr. Christine Palmer saved the stroller, but at the price of falling on her backside in an entirely graceless flop. Davy, her eleven-month-old, overwrapped bundle of boy, gave a gurgly chuckle.
“I’m glad to see you have a sense of humor,” she said, sitting waylaid on the icy steps at the threshold of her front door. Christine reasserted her balance, one hand on the door handle and the other on the umbrella stroller, and pulled herself upright on the slippery stone landing. “I suppose I’d have laughed at you for the same thing—but you have a diaper to cushion your fall.”
Her son looked at her hopefully, as if waiting for mom’s next trick. She disappointed him by moving carefully, and they reached the sidewalk uneventfully. Two right turns later she was sinking the doorbell of the house next door.
Almost immediately the door swung open, and Davy chirped when he saw the sixtyish woman in a flowered housedress with a steaming cup of coffee in her hand.
“It’s my Wavy-Davy,” the woman exclaimed in her best singsong voice.
“Hi, Annette. Be careful on your steps—mine were frozen solid.” Christine pushed the stroller inside, and as soon as the door closed she began to unwrap Davy. When he was down to a sweater and pants she plopped him on the floor amid a circle of colored blocks.
“Yes, it was a hard freeze,” Annette said. “Davy and I are definitely going to stay inside today. Can I get you a cuppa?”
“Sorry, maybe when I pick him up. I have to get to work right away. One of the other doctors has the flu and I have to help cover. But the good news is I should be home early, in time for dinner with any luck.”
“It’s nice that you have such flexibility. Are many doctors working part-time these days?”
“Only the poor ones,” Christine answered dryly. “But it’s getting more common. My practice has two other women in my … well, in similar situations. We look out for each other.”