Assassin's Revenge

by Ward Larsen

  Mordechai sidetracked behind a wall and pulled out his phone. He called his own assistant, an ambitious young Viennese named Rolf, and gave very specific instructions. When the call ended, Mordechai waited a few beats before setting out. He governed his speed to arrive at Ingrid’s desk one minute later. As he neared, he noticed that the door to El-Masri’s private suite was open, although none of the lights inside were on.

  Ingrid was early forties, stout build and bosomy, with overmanaged blond hair. She noticed Mordechai approaching and smiled, perhaps more pleasantly than usual. She used a napkin to wipe a bit of mustard from one corner of her mouth.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Mordechai,” she said.

  “Hello, Ingrid. I’m sorry to disturb your lunch. The deputy director has some contracts on his desk that are due to be signed. I know he won’t be back for a day or two, so I’ll have to take care of it.”

  She looked at him questioningly. Ingrid was a classic nine-to-five soldier among the agency’s army of civil servants. In the course of his work, Mordechai had regularly come to see El-Masri in his office. Never before had he gone inside alone. Ingrid opened her mouth as if to say something, and Mordechai seemed ready to forestall her words, when the phone interrupted them both.

  She picked up the handset on her desk. Mordechai listened to half the conversation. Contracts?… Why, yes, he’s here right now … Let me write down the full list …

  Taking his cue, Mordechai gave a slight wave and walked straight into Tarek El-Masri’s office. He nudged the door partially shut behind him and turned on a light.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Mordechai didn’t bother booting up the desktop computer on the arm of the L-shaped desk—he was quite sure El-Masri already suspected cyber intrusions, which meant he likely had strong passwords and security measures.

  Not sure what he was even looking for, Mordechai began at the desk. He rifled through two drawers of paper files, stealing an occasional glance at the partially open door—Ingrid’s desk was fortunately around the corner, and he heard her still talking to Rolf on the phone. He went through standard personnel files, site visit plans, technical specification manuals—many were twins of files he kept in his own desk. The third stacked drawer contained the usual array of office equipment, a handful of radiation badges, and a disassembled Geiger counter.

  He moved on to the flat top drawer. Inside were the usual pens and pencils and Post-its, along with a handful of flash drives. Most of these had printed labels he recognized, deeming them as products of the agency’s internal IT department. The only exception were three generic plastic sticks. One was white, another black, and the third was red with a sticker depicting the Egyptian flag. The three were labeled respectively in black Sharpie: CV, OFFICIAL PHOTOS, INSURANCE.

  CV, he was sure, stood for curriculum vitae. In this age of career instability, no scientist was without one. The others seemed obvious enough, and equally useless.

  He closed the drawer and moved on to the closet. There he spent three minutes rummaging through shelves, and finally two cardboard boxes on the floor. Still he found nothing. Desperation set in. Mordechai was feeling through the pockets of a suit coat hanging on a hook in the closet when he heard Ingrid say, “Yes, I will … And you have a good afternoon as well.”

  He watched the door, expecting her to come through at any moment and see his hands deep in the pockets of her boss’s emergency dinner jacket. Then he heard the crumple of a sandwich wrapper, followed by something else being unwrapped.

  He still had time.

  Mordechai spun a slow circle, his eyes taking in the room. A picture of the Great Pyramid graced one wall, a diploma from Cairo University another. Next to the diploma was a small decorative mirror engraved with the IAEA logo. His eyes kept moving. A long bookshelf might have been promising had it not been stocked with thick technical treatises with mind-numbing titles. He was walking tentatively toward the shelf when a single word echoed uninvitedly in his mind.

  Insurance.

  He looked again at the desk. Mordechai returned, opened the top drawer, and pulled out the flash drive with the Egyptian flag. The one labeled INSURANCE. It seemed a long shot, yet something about the title seemed odd. Who keeps their insurance information in a drawer at work? He looked at the image on the stick.

  Quite literally, a flag.

  A flash of movement near the door.

  Without even time to put the drive in his pocket, Mordechai pressed it between the knuckles of two fingers. He was nudging the drawer closed with his thigh when Ingrid appeared.

  * * *

  “Have a nice afternoon, Mr. Mordechai,” said Ingrid as she watched the Israeli leave.

  Having returned to her desk, she held her smile until he disappeared down the hall. When he did, she waited just a bit longer, then got up and went to the open office door. There she paused at the threshold. She scanned the room with her secretary’s eye, and wondered what he’d taken.

  When Mordechai first asked to go inside, it had struck her as odd, although not particularly suspicious. Her curiosity was piqued, however, when his own assistant called with an obviously pointless chore. That was when Ingrid began watching the mirror.

  Dr. El-Masri had asked her to mount it on the wall last year after receiving it as a longevity award—because what else could you do with something like that? Ingrid had done so dutifully, but taken the liberty of placing it at a perfect angle between his desk and her own. She supposed it was rather nosy, but it made for an engaging diversion—shift in her chair slightly, and she had a perfect view of her boss. Today, however, it hadn’t been Dr. El-Masri. In the reflection she’d seen Mordechai rifling through desk drawers, and later she’d heard him going through the closet. At the end, she saw him quite clearly snatch something from the top desk drawer.

  Ingrid stared down the hall.

  She knew she ought to report the incident to security. Then again, she had nothing against Mr. Mordechai. He was actually rather attractive, in a rumpled sort of way, and single, or so she’d been told. He had always treated her kindly, which was more than could be said for her boss. She supposed it was cultural, an Egyptian thing, but El-Masri treated her like dirt.

  Ingrid went back to her desk and sat. She wondered if Dr. El-Masri might himself be in hot water. That wouldn’t be so bad, she reasoned. It might even give way to a new deputy director, one from a place where women were treated with respect. A Swede, or perhaps an Italian. Oh God, yes … an Italian.

  That thought swimming in her head, she went back to work on an interoffice memo: she would let Mordechai’s indiscretion pass.

  Ingrid Hoff would never know the consequences of that decision. Never understand how, if she had made the call to security, the course of world events in the coming days might have spun in an entirely different direction.

  * * *

  Mordechai was back in his office within minutes. He pulled the flash drive from his pocket, closed the door behind him, and inserted the stick into his personal laptop. He fully expected to find a security screen staring back at him, some rock-solid encryption algorithm that might take weeks to break.

  What he saw was nothing of the kind.

  After opening the main file, he saw a menu of the holdings of the drive. The first file was a text document. He opened it and read an astonishing three-page letter. It began with an overview of the entire uranium-skimming scheme. More critically, it explained why El-Masri had gotten involved. A revelation Mordechai could never have imagined—and one that made perfect sense.

  After reading it, he navigated back to the file menu. He saw names that implied an array of useful information, and clicked on the most promising: HEU.INVENTORY.

  He stared in disbelief as detailed reports blossomed to the screen. It seemed too good to be true, and he found himself scrolling through spreadsheet after spreadsheet. He half expected a puff of smoke from his laptop, a laughing cloaked cartoon to take over the screen while everything disappeared—it was simp
ly too easy a victory. The file was as damning as it was comprehensive, a complete list of the suspect shipments El-Masri had been assembling for over a year. Everything in one document, completely unprotected. And then, all at once, Mordechai understood—the name scrawled on the plastic cover.

  Insurance indeed.

  He was looking, for all intents and purposes, at Tarek El-Masri’s confession. The kind of mother lode a man in very deep waters leaves with a trusted lawyer. To be opened in the event of my untimely demise. Only in lieu of a lawyer, El-Masri had simply left the trove in his top desk drawer. Mordechai wondered if he’d been planning to give it to someone. Or perhaps he’d had second thoughts.

  Or maybe the drive was exactly where he intended it to be.

  He realized that if anything happened to El-Masri, his desk was the first place any investigator would look. Mordechai returned to the file menu. By the time he closed the fifth folder, he was convinced—everything necessary to prove the plot was now in his hands.

  He checked the clock. Four in the afternoon. A bit earlier than his usual quitting time, but not unreasonable. He had to get in touch with Slaton. Mordechai shut down the computer, locked his office door, and headed outside.

  The late-afternoon air was crisp and clear. Traffic was building on the nearby autobahn, yet as was his habit, Mordechai headed for the nearby U-Bahn. Arriving on the platform with five minutes to wait, he took one look around before sending his two most important messages of the day. He selected the first contact he wanted, pecked out two words, and launched them on a cyber route toward Europe. Keep moving. Where exactly those words would land he couldn’t say.

  He then fired off a two-part text to Slaton. The first segment alerted him that El-Masri would return home late that night. In the second verse Mordechai explained he’d uncovered a significant cache of information.

  His train arrived within seconds of sending the final text. Mordechai pocketed his phone and boarded. The train shot out of the terminal toward the river and his flat in Landstrasse.

  Mordechai had no expectation of a reply to either of his messages. In fact, none came, although for reasons more intricate than he could have imagined.

  The two-part text sent to Slaton completed its course on the strength of two advantages: the handsets, by chance, were tied to the same carrier, and the message was routed locally. The text sent to Mallorca, on the other hand, did not reach its anticipated address—at least, not in its intended form. That missive was relayed to a secondary server where it passed through virus-infected switching software. Flagged, isolated, and shunted to an altogether different destination, the message made its electronic landing on a computer in the lower level of a cinder-block building on the frontier of Mongolia.

  At a basement workstation, the same technician who had earlier received diverted messages from Tarek El-Masri, and who was unknowingly situated above a flourishing population of marmots, performed his customary translation. These results he forwarded, like the others, to some unknown recipient at headquarters.

  Riding in the back of his staff car, the severe-visaged General Park smiled for the first time in a month when the intercept from Bureau 121 came through. It was a thread they had not before captured—and one he very much wanted. After a thoughtful moment, he dictated a reply that suited his own needs: Stay where you are. I’m coming for you.

  The electronic diversion continued, first to Bureau 121, then running through the usual series of commercial routers and relays. Twelve minutes after Mordechai’s original text had launched, the subverted message was pinging across eight time zones toward its intended destination.

  * * *

  As it turned out, the burner phone the message was meant to reach lay next to a canopied bed in a seaside retreat in Mallorca. A long-limbed woman, whose auburn hair was streaked by the sun and whose eyes were an emerald green, lay propped by pillows beside her son on the bed. He, in turn, sat transfixed by her reading of his favorite Dr. Seuss story. Christine was just turning the page to reveal Thing 1 and Thing 2 when the altered message arrived at its destined server.

  It did not, however, make the final leap to the handset on the nightstand, and for the simplest of reasons: as had been the case for two days, the phone was turned off.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Passage through the Tsugaru Straits was uneventful. Boutros had planned their arrival carefully to traverse the narrows in the small hours of the morning. It seemed to work. He’d made a good nighttime survey of both islands, and they appeared quiet. A constant stream of ships had passed uneventfully, clusters of amber drifting off the port beam that invariably faded. Best of all, there had been no radio calls, no curious patrol boats silhouetted under the clear half-moon.

  Now, with sunrise imminent, Honshu had disappeared, and Hokkaido was but a jeweled string of topaz on the aft quarterdeck. Ahead lay the Pacific, calm for the moment but thick with menace in the season of ice and darkness.

  With the Straits behind them, Boutros turned off the VHF radio. There had been no option but to monitor radio traffic in the busy corridor. Now, with open sea ahead, security became the priority. He shifted his gaze to the other electronics. They weren’t the best money could buy, but typical of what one would find on a vagabond purse seiner from a developing nation—Boutros knew because he had boarded more than his share of such boats while policing the Persian Gulf.

  Equipment, of course, had advanced since those days. The VMS tracker he’d already disabled, yet he was aware that certain nav and comm units, when left on, initiated regular electronic handshakes. Boutros had no reason to suspect anyone would be searching for them in the coming days. All the same, there was nothing to be gained by giving their position away cheaply. From this point forward, aside from the occasional satellite message or weather forecast, everything would remain powered down.

  He looked out ahead and was struck by the desolation. Everything around him seemed unfamiliar. There was something bleak and endless about this northern sea. Even the waves appeared to lift and break in a different manner. Visibility was good in the gathering dawn, and he was happy to see no sign of precipitation on the horizon.

  Boutros heard a clatter from the companionway. He saw Rafiq topping the stairs, his cheeks gone dark with two days’ growth of beard. They’d all shaved in order to travel, but after arriving in North Korea Boutros had told his men there was no longer any need to keep it up. Saleem was winning the contest.

  Rafiq looked aft. “So it is done—we made it through.”

  “One more step behind us in our journey. Did you just wake up?”

  “An hour ago. I’ve been in the workroom going over the assembly sequence. When the final pieces arrive, we must be ready.”

  Boutros nodded. “Good. And Sami and Saleem?”

  “They are sleeping.”

  “No doubt dreaming of the things young men dream of.”

  Rafiq looked suddenly uncomfortable, and Boutros imagined he was thinking of a woman. He wasn’t married—commanders had to know such things about their men—but certainly a young girl somewhere had stolen his heart. He considered asking, but then thought better of it.

  “Would you like me to take over?” asked Rafiq.

  “Yes. It’s been a long night, but we are in the clear now.” Boutros stepped away from the helm. Rafiq moved in and got his bearings.

  Boutros referenced the electronic map. “The sea opens up here. It’s time to steer a new course. Make the heading one hundred and eight degrees.”

  Rafiq turned the wheel, and the bow swung gently to the right. “How long will we remain on this course?” he asked.

  “Until our next stop.”

  Rafiq looked at him with a raised brow.

  “It’s that easy,” Boutros said. “For the next four days we will bide our time, prepare.”

  “And then?”

  “And then things will happen very quickly.”

  * * *

  Surveillance ops run by intelligence agencies we
re typically months in the making. Safe houses with prized overlooks were procured, staffed, and provisioned. The latest electronics were installed to capture every acoustic signature, the slightest electronic emanation. Targeted individuals were monitored by teams who rotated on a strict schedule, while distant analysts pored over the flow of information, combing data for vital details and returning updates to those doing the watching.

  Slaton stood alone behind a garbage can in the shadows of Tarek El-Masri’s garage. The luxuries of surveillance he’d enjoyed in the past were all but a distant memory. He had no electronics, no analysis of what he saw beyond his own. His only backup was the stolen Glock in his jacket pocket. With nothing more than that, he was determined to seize the last thread that might lead to his family.

  The message from Mordechai had come late that afternoon: El-Masri was expected home shortly after midnight. Slaton arrived an hour early, and he saw few changes from his earlier reconnaissance. His position was less than ideal, but it seemed the best option in line with his objectives. The darkened recess lay between the detached garage and a small garden shed. The space was no more than two feet wide, and Slaton was forced to blade his body to make it work. There were spiderwebs and an old rake to push aside, and his feet were mired in mud. The garbage can at the top of the channel provided decent cover if he kneeled, although it was hardly necessary in nearly complete darkness. For all Slaton’s advanced training in special tactics, he knew what any experienced operator knew: that in the real world, plans often digressed into something little removed from a common house burglary.

  On this night, that was what the situation demanded.

  The back of the house was roughly thirty feet away. From where he stood he could see the back door and every rear-facing window, and was close enough to hear two muffled voices engage in sporadic conversation—unfortunately in Arabic.

  His position did have notable drawbacks.