Last Instructions
Page 15
Zvika is happy to get half the money upfront—and in dollars, too. I offer them an additional $10,000 if they vacate the home as soon as possible because my time in South America will be coming to an end soon and I want to arrange and tie up the housing issue during the course of my current visit. They agree to vacate the house in 2 weeks; meanwhile, they will arrange to have their possessions stored and will live temporarily with Shlomit’s parents in Kfar Saba. I sign the rental agreement that Zvika produces and pay him in cash on the spot.
For the 2 weeks I’m going to be homeless I purchase a short-term gym membership card so that I’ll have somewhere to work out and shower. At night I sleep in the back of the van, and I spend my days picking up the items I still need to complete my shopping list. I buy the tools, webcams, blue overalls, roll of electrical wire, black piece of cardboard, adhesive tape, and bolt cutters at the Renanim Mall.
I order the servomotors, remote controller, and receivers from a store for model aircraft enthusiasts. I explain to the storeowner that I’m setting up a model aircraft club and expect to order additional equipment from him in the near future. I give him the address of the house where I’ll be in 2 weeks’ time and ask him to have everything delivered on April 14.
I go to South Tel Aviv to buy the lightbulbs and batteries at a wholesale electrical goods store, and I get the large cooking pot from a shop there that supplies kitchen equipment to restaurants. I visit a construction equipment store to purchase the small nails in 50 1-kilo packages. The vendor tells me I’ve cleared out his entire stock and wants to know why I need so many nails. I tell him that I’m an artist and plan to pour all the nails into a hollow cube of wood and then fill the hollow with a transparent epoxy glue—and then when I strip away the sides of the wooden cube, I’ll be left with a transparent cube filled with tens of thousands of nails. “I’ll call the piece, Death in a Box,” I say to him, and the vendor looks at me and takes the cash I hand him for the nails, a soldering iron, and some other items I purchase there.
I order 50 trashcans from the municipality’s supplier and give them the address of the house on Moshav Yanuv. “I need 50 trashcans just like the ones in Tel Aviv,” I tell them. “I want to sell them to the communities in the Sharon region as a trial run. If it goes well, I’ll be selling a lot more of them. Can you give me a special price?” I arrange for the cans to be delivered on April 14.
I purchase the sulfur in small quantities from various different chemical stores. I’m now a science teacher who’s planning to conduct experiments in his class to examine chemical reactions with various materials. To avoid arousing suspicion I buy other materials aside from the sulfur.
At the supermarket I explain that I need 250 1-kilo bags of sugar for the cotton candy machine I use at birthday parties.
I don’t have a story to tell when it comes to the potassium nitrate, which I steal from an agricultural warehouse in the south, on the road to Eilat. I cut through the lock at night and load 10 50-kilogram sacks into the van.
To keep the contents of the van that I’m driving around Tel Aviv and elsewhere hidden, I stick black pieces of cardboard on the inside of the vehicle’s back and side windows to compensate for the semi-transparent MASHANI—CARPET CLEANERS stickers. I leave only the front windscreen free of black cardboard.
04/14/2016–17 weeks and 6 days since waking
Shlomit and Zvika’s car pulls away and I wave good-bye to them. I have keys to the house now, and a series of phone calls to the various companies have left the electricity, property taxes, water, and gas accounts in my name—Roman Morozov. I ask the utility companies to send me bimonthly bills and tell them I will pay in person at the post office, politely refusing a direct debit arrangement or giving them my credit card number. “They always err in their favor,” I say to Zvika when we make the arrangements. “I always check before I pay.”
The items I’ve ordered will be arriving shortly. In addition to the model aircraft parts and the trashcans, I’m expecting deliveries of thick iron bars, sheets of metal, bags of cement, and various other building supplies. I don’t have much time and I have lots to get done. I 1st go to get the van, which I parked farther down the street, so the couple wouldn’t suspect anything. I move the van to the large front yard, pull up close to the front door, and transfer its contents into the home’s empty living room. I carry everything inside and arrange it all in neat piles.
Shlomit and Zvika have left their old refrigerator in the house. They told me that if I didn’t want it, I could give it to some charity or throw it away. I go back to the van to get the shopping I did that morning and I put everything in the fridge and the kitchen drawers. One of the shopping bags contains a small pot and a pan. I wash the pan and put it on the stove. I’ll make myself an omelet and tomato sandwich in a short while.
The deliveries start to arrive one after the other. I carry the building supplies down to the basement, the trashcans go in the living room, and I leave the electronic equipment in one of the other empty rooms. I go to IKEA later in the afternoon to buy a chair, bed, and table. The store is only a few minutes away.
I install the cameras—5 on the outside of the house and 1 in the basement, which is focused on the area in which I will construct the new cage. I rest the additional cell phone I purchased in a spot that offers the best reception, before connecting it to its charger and turning it on. I use it to access the webcams, for which I also set up an internal home network. I run communication cables to the points at which the cameras are located outside, threading the cables through to the video devices through holes that I drill in the walls of the house. On the kitchen table I place a glass of water with 4 roses that I picked from the garden outside.
I install a large television screen on the wall facing the soon-to-be cage and plug it in.
I eat my lunch and then return to the basement to continue organizing all the materials and equipment I’ll be using to construct the cage. In the evening I check the status of my bank account. Afterward I build a 150-piece jigsaw puzzle. I lay out all the pieces on the table and study them for an hour without touching any. I use my eyes to work out which pieces fit together, and only after putting the puzzle together in my head do I activate a stopwatch and quickly join all the pieces. It takes me 76 seconds to complete the puzzle.
December 14, 2016
Herr Schmidt sat in his office and reviewed the encrypted emails in his in-box with a look of satisfaction on his face. Two individuals had entered and left each time—before and after the assassination of the three scientists. But they hadn’t arrived or left together. The man was first to arrive each time, and the woman then followed on a different flight and from a different location. A two-person team only. Highly efficient. If it was the Israelis, then they must have learned something from that fiasco of theirs when they burned a whole bunch of agents all at once, like meat at an Argentinian barbecue, just to kill a marginal Hamas figure. And if it was the Americans, then they’d have to take them a little more seriously from now on. We’ll know soon if it was the Israelis, he said to himself.
He took a long look at the two images on his computer screen—one of 10483 before the series of operations he underwent some nine years ago, and the other of Carmit, nine years younger than today. The photographs were old but of good quality. There was no reason why he shouldn’t be able to find them now, too. He needed to check first with his friends in Israel and the United States if the two had entered or left either country of late.
Herr Schmidt selected one of the speed dial buttons on his mobile and pressed it. A voice answered after three rings. “Hello, boss,” it said.
“Ricardo. How are you two?”
“Waiting for instructions, boss. It’s boring here.”
“I’m sending you two images. These are the two agents who eliminated the Iranian cell working with Shariri. Find out if they’ve been there and what they were doing. Go from home to home in the town if you have to until you find something.”
“We don’t know yet. We’re looking into it now.”
“No problem, boss.”
Herr Schmidt hung up and then called another number from the list of contacts in his mobile. “Hello?” said a woman’s voice after a few rings.
“Lena, you’re up. Check your mail,” he said.
The call ended.
December 14, 2016
Leora Lipman was late for work. She always left home early in the morning so she’d arrive on time, but the traffic was getting heavier by the day. It was harder to get out of Tel Aviv in the mornings, and the daily bottleneck near Airport City was getting increasingly worse. It was 8:30 by the time she made it to the employees’ parking area at Ben Gurion Airport, pulled into one of the last remaining vacant spots at the far end of the lot, grabbed her bag with her laptop and her cup of coffee and hurried out the car. As she was locking the vehicle, the coffee cup slid out of her hand and dropped to the ground, causing the plastic lid to fly off and drops of coffee to splash onto her favorite jeans. What a wonderful start to the day; I wonder what the rest is going to be like, she thought as she hopped up the stairs to the office two at a time. If she were to rub her jeans now with a clump of wet tissue, she may be able to wipe away some of the brown dots on the blue denim.
“Good that you remembered to come to work,” Victor, her team leader, said as she tried to quietly slip by his cubicle unnoticed.
“The traffic was terrible.”
“Get up earlier.”
“I…”
“Check what’s happening with the backups from the weekend. Go through all the logs and rerun everything that failed. Prepare the tapes for offsite storage for Med-1, because they’ll be sending a car to pick them in an hour or so, and then replace them with a new set. Another two hundred new tapes have arrived and their numbers have to be entered into the system, so get onto that when you’re done with Med-1; and then I need you to review the open calls for additional storage and see if we need to add more space or can delete old material. We can’t keep on adding and adding. They think that disks grow on trees.”
“But we arranged for Dima to deal with the storage so that I have time to work on the new server.”
“Dima’s sick.”
Yeah, right, Leora thought to herself. She remembered seeing him tagged last night on Facebook downing tequilas with a bunch of friends at a pub. He must have woken up a wreck and decided to call in sick. Sneaky bastard. She sighed, went into her cubicle, plugged her laptop into the docking station, and turned it on, then headed to the bathroom to clean the coffee stains off her jeans. From there (with the stains now a little lighter and a lot wetter) she went to the kitchen to make herself a cup of instant coffee with milk and two sweeteners. It was a poor substitute for the cappuccino she’d spilled in the parking lot, but it was better than nothing. She just sat down at her desk in her cubicle to read through some emails before going to the computer room to deal with the backups when her cell phone rang. “Hello?” she said.
“Lena, you’re up. Check your mail.”
The call ended.
Leora froze momentarily in her chair, pulled herself together, redefined her cell phone settings to log into her jane.webber.277@gmail.com mail account, and checked the contents of her in-box. A one-line email was waiting for her.
Check if either one of these came through there these past few weeks.
The mail came with two photos attached, one of a man and one of a woman. Leora plugged her mobile into her laptop, copied the two image files onto her hard drive, and logged into the airport’s Security System servers. They worked with a replica of the production database that wasn’t monitored or permanently logged. She uploaded the two images into the system and ran a search dating back two months.
A single hit.
She replied to the email:
December 13 (yesterday), 03:15, the woman entered Israel.
Leora deleted the Gmail account from her cell phone and restored her regular email settings. She erased the images from the laptop and her phone, cleaned up the system log, left her cubicle, and went to the computer room to deal with the backup tapes.
December 16, 2016
“Hola, señor, I’m Ricardo and this is my partner, Lorenzo. If it’s not too much trouble, would you please take a look at these two photographs? They may look like an innocent couple but they’re accused of the abduction and murder of dozens of children. They fled the United States and were last seen here in Uyuni. They’re probably posing as innocent tourists. Have you seen them?”
“Sorry, I haven’t. They weren’t guests here at my hotel.”
“Have you run into anything else? Someone acting strangely, something suspicious, something out of place and not the norm in town?”
“No. Nothing. It’s business as usual around here—tour packages to the Salar and groups of travelers staying for a night or more. Aside from the recent accident—a head-on collision involving two Jeeps in the middle of the Salar and resulting in the death of several travelers—there’s been nothing out of the ordinary around here. Go figure how two Jeeps choose to drive head-on into one another on a dry salt lake of more than ten thousand square kilometers and burst into flame simultaneously with all their passengers inside. Esto es una locura!”
“Thank you, sir. If you see or hear of anything unusual, please call us at this number.” Ricardo took out a business card and handed it to the hotel owner. “By the way,” he added, “there’s a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to their capture.”
Lorenzo and Ricardo left the hotel and returned to their rented car. They had already visited around twenty hotels. There weren’t many left.
- The woman looks pretty hot actually.
- Herr Schmidt said they’re both equally dangerous. They’re responsible for the assassination of three people on three different continents. They entered and left without being caught and caused some serious damage. Clean work. Smoothly done.
- She looks like she wouldn’t hurt a fly. The man looks pretty normal, too.
- The biggest nutcases usually do.
- Okay well, when we get to them and interrogate them both, we’ll find out what they did with the bomb.
- Speaking of interrogations: Let’s say you were caught and interrogated for the purpose of extracting information from you. How would you choose to move your eyes—up and down, or from right to left?
- What do you mean if I was caught? No one has ever caught me and no one ever will. I’m uncatchable.
- Let’s just say you were caught. Theoretically. Just for argument’s sake.
- So let’s say you’re caught then, for argument’s sake. Not me.
- But you don’t know the point I’m trying to make. I have to be the one to explain it to you. I ask you the question and you say right to left or up and down and I keep the discussion going.
- So you can answer and I’ll keep the discussion going. No one lays their hands on me even in theory.
- If I answer the question, will you be able to tell me if I’m right? Let’s say I say: Sideways. Would you be able to tell me if I was right?
- I could guess.
- Lorenzo, I’m pleading with you to simply imagine it. Just imagine it. Let’s just assume—in theory only, and solely for the purpose of our discussion—that someone were to catch you. Not really catch you. Just for argument’s sake. Let’s say you were caught and they were trying to get information from you. How would you choose to move your eyes?
- Assuming, in theory, that my hands were tied?
- Okay, let’s assume so.
- Then I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll move my eyes like so, like I’m squinting, and when the person who has caught me moves closer to see what’s happening to me I’ll whisper something to him very, very softly, and when he bends over to hear what I’m saying I’ll lift up my head and bite into his throat until I snap his windpipe. That’s what I’ll do.
- So what should I do then?
- If you were caught?
- Theoretically. How should I move my eyes?
- Up and down. You focus on the eyes of the person in front of you and then his mouth, and then the eyes again, and then back to the mouth. Just like that—constantly, small movements.
- And what good will it do?
- Humans have natural instincts. One of them is to care for their young. When a baby stares into the face of his mother or father, he focuses on their eyes and mouth, his eyes jumping back and forth between the two. Parents are wired to love their babies and there’s a mechanism in their brains that causes them to love that particular eye movement. If you are ever caught, it would be better for you to move your eyes like that and not from side to side. Sideways conveys cunning and being on the hunt for something. That’s no good.
- Are you trying to tell me that supposing someone catches you and beats the shit out of you and stands in front of you with a chain saw, Nightmare on Elm Street–style, to get you to start talking, you’re going to move your eyes up and down like that and he’s going to drop the chain saw and hug you and look for a pacifier to stuff into your mouth?