Last Instructions

by Nir Hezroni

  The Barber hung up and put the phone back into his coat pocket. He looked at Marcus, who was on the verge of passing out, and after a long pause returned the pistol to his coat. “It was interesting talking to you. Don’t judge people by their looks. What’s inside is what matters.”

  “Certainly, sir! I mean I certainly won’t judge, sir.”

  “Here’s a fifty-dollar bill. I’ll take two bottles of apple-flavored Snapple from the refrigerator here and gas with the rest. I’m parked next to the pump. Open it for me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  December 25, 2016

  “We know where he’s living. You should come here and see everything on the screens and decide what you want to do. He’s done a whole lot of strange things that you need to see.”

  “We’ll be with you shortly,” Grandpa said, hanging up and turning back to the group in the briefing room, where Carmit and Rotem were sitting with a large team of field agents. “Talk about timing,” he said to them. “The operators at the AngelFire facility say they’ve found him and have seen several of the things he’s been doing. Let’s all go there now and see what we’re up against. We have to get our hands on him as soon as possible; it’s essential. We don’t have much time left before the first of January.”

  “AngelFire? Who came up with that name?” Rotem remarked, closing her laptop and putting it in her bag.

  “The Americans.”

  * * *

  “Hi there,” Meital said. “I’m Meital and this is Dafna. What happened to the team we were working with before?” She and Dafna made sure the doors to the facility were locked and then began working on the system’s settings.

  “Hurt in the line of duty. We’re taking over. What have you found?”

  “Okay, I’m turning out the lights and activating all the screens. I just want to remind everyone here that no one must breathe a word about this facility to anyone else. Even in-house. We’ll start running through everything quickly and you can stop me if you have any questions. If anyone feels a little dizzy, just close your eyes and sit down for a while on one of these armchairs. Ready?”

  Meital didn’t wait for a response and activated the room.

  “Switching to Kinect.”

  The room dimmed, leaving only the glow from the sky blue lighting on the ceiling. Arms to the side, palms facing downward, palms turned upward, Meital caused the green LED lights to blink on and the walls slid up to reveal the circle of screens.

  “We went back an entire year,” Meital began. “There’s nothing beyond that. You have to understand the limitations of the system. Clouds get in the way, and at night we can only track a vehicle if it’s pretty much alone on the road. If a vehicle drives into a tunnel and is in there with numerous other cars around it, we aren’t able to pinpoint the specific vehicle when it emerges again. We can track people only if they aren’t in a crowd. And don’t forget we haven’t had much luck in the Shfela region over the past two weeks—cloud cover and rain almost continually. One would think we were living in Scotland. Unbelievable.”

  Dafna was sitting on the raised platform at one of the computer stations, entering commands into the various systems, and Meital filled all the screens around the room with a set of images with routes marked on them in different colors. Hands to the sides, a half twist of the wrists—and all the content began moving between the screens, creating the illusion that the room itself was spinning.

  Stop.

  “We’ll show you what we have on him from December 2015 through to today. Keep your eyes on the screen right in front of us. To avoid messing with your heads, I’m running everything forward to the present and not from the present backward in time. Look here. This is the building on Ibn Gvirol before the blast. We ran back on it until we found the first time he’s seen leaving through a window in the morning. The thirteenth of January. From here we tracked him riding around on a bicycle to various places, going into malls, returning to the building, nothing special. He continues in the same manner until the ninth of February and then disappears on us, from all locations, until March twenty-ninth.”

  “That’s the period he spent abroad.”

  “Makes sense—we didn’t see him anywhere at all. Not in Ganei Yehuda, not at the building on Ibn Gvirol, and not around the house on Moshav Mazor. We haven’t been able to figure out what he’s been doing over the last few days either. We keep losing him under the cloud cover. Your previous team saw it for themselves when they were here last time. But we kept running back on the three locations you gave us and we found him for you. Eyes on screen two.”

  The team from the Organization tensed. Everyone leaned forward a little for a better view. The screen displayed an aerial image of the entire central region of the country with a green dot on it.

  “Take note, the dot here is the house in Ganei Yehuda. The date is the twenty-first of November—a little more than a month ago.”

  Right hand slowly forward. Left remains outstretched. The dot becomes a green line that extends gradually and then comes to a halt. A second line starts to emerge from the dot and runs adjacent to the existing one. It stops, too, and another line begins and stops, and then another emerges from the dot and continues this time past the previous ones and farther toward the north. The cameras zoom out and the line continues to grow in quick jumps—click—click—click.

  “We looked for irregular traffic patterns and movements around the house in Ganei Yehuda and there was a week in which a commercial vehicle of some kind parked several times along the surrounding streets and someone got out and wandered about. He made sure not to enter the street on which that house of yours is located, so at this stage you won’t find an image of the vehicle itself from the cameras you must have there. He surveyed the location for about a week and then stopped. The broken lines that you see here are from the times the vehicle disappeared on us under the clouds. On the one occasion when there were no clouds, you can see the long line that leads us straight to his house. Eyes on screen three.”

  The green line remained frozen on screen two, and screen three displayed an image, zoomed in to the maximum, of 10483’s current residence, with both a green and a red dot.

  “The green one is the endpoint of his route from Ganei Yehuda. He parks there and then heads to the house on foot, a two-minute walk—look at the dot moving here.” Click—click—click—a small dot leaves the vehicle and enters the house on Moshav Yanuv.

  “This is the house he’s living in and that’s the address. But before you send in the cavalry, let us go through this with you for another half an hour. I’m going to jump back a lot and begin running forward and backward. Ignore the times, you’ll only get confused, just keep an eye on the lines that form. His house is the reference point now and we’re going to show you another set of routes.”

  Lines started to appear on all the screens around them—extending, being cut short, quickly reappearing in color again, until all the movements stopped and all the screens showed routes in various shades.

  “He’s been a very busy man this past year. Look at screen nine. It shows almost an entire month in which he drove around Tel Aviv, parked in various locations, and fiddled with something along the street—it looks like he’s doing something with the trashcans on the sidewalk but you’ll have to check that from up close.”

  “Show us one for a moment zoomed to the maximum,” Rotem said, leaning forward and gazing intently at the screen.

  Click—click—click—click—“Stop. Look. I’m almost sure that that small dot is one of those metal trashcans you find along the sidewalk, and that he’s replacing it with one he’s carried there with him. Can you see? He dismantles one and replaces it with another from his vehicle. That’s why we weren’t able to figure out the nature of the devices used in Savyon. The two trashcans near the house were the bombs. We received a report that he had hidden the bombs in trashcans, but I think that each trashcan itself is an explosive device.”

  “Look at screen fourte
en. He spends the entire day following a gas tanker all the way to the depot in Rishon, and then drives back.” Meital ran the images in reverse and then forward again, mapping out a route of twisting and turning lines. “That was May twenty-fourth,” she said.

  Grandpa leaned back against the desk behind him. “Reminiscent of what he did in Argentina,” he said. “The same MO. What’s this here on screen sixteen?”

  “He wandered around here for close to a month and a half. Rumor has it that this is the location of your main base.” Meital smiled. Dafna looked up from the system’s control screens. “Beginning on May twenty-fifth, he hung around here for almost a month and a half, pulling over for hours sometimes relatively far away. He must have been surveying the scene from inside the vehicle with binoculars because he rarely got out.”

  “Can your images give us a make on the vehicle?”

  “No. We can see its roof only. Based on its size, it must be a van of some kind, but we haven’t done any cross-referencing with other sources aside from our own cameras. If you have more time, we can start to cross-reference his routes with speed cameras, cameras at traffic lights, banks, and more, but it’ll probably take a day or two to get a good picture.”

  “Do so after we leave and send us what you find. Okay?”

  “No problem, just leave me an email address. But bear in mind that it could take even longer. Have a look now at screen eight. It’s getting even worse. Look what’s he doing in Rabin Square.”

  “Holy fuck!” Rotem exclaimed. “Stop it a moment. Go back. Just a sec. Now forward. Wait. Back until he first arrives there. Good. Now forward to the end. Stop. What the fuck? They allowed him to simply dig a huge pit in front of City Hall in the middle of Rabin Square and nobody said a bloody thing. Do you have feed here from the cameras in the square?”

  “Sorry. Like I said earlier, we’re limited to our material only. You’ll have to coordinate with our boss and go to another facility for ground-camera footage.”

  “He killed someone there.” Carmit, who had been quiet until then, pointed at screen eight. “If you run it again, you’ll see another dot approaching him and then turning into a short line and disappearing into the pit. He killed someone and buried him there in the pit.”

  Click—click—click. The images, jumping ahead in time at two-second intervals, showed someone being dragged quickly across the ground and disappearing into the hole in the square.

  “Okay, that’s clearly what he meant by ‘a very powerful explosive device will be detonated in a public place’ in his letter of demands. We can neutralize it now,” Rotem said, turning to Meital and Dafna and adding: “And let me remind you, too, not a word to anyone about whatever’s been said here. Is that clear? Meital?”

  “Clear.”

  “Dafna?”

  “Clear.”

  “Tell me,” Rotem then said, “would you mind if I were to operate the room for a few minutes?”

  Meital looked at Dafna. Dafna looked at Rotem. “It’s not exactly standard procedure and it will take you a while to learn the interface. I can show you how to work with the mouse and switch between the screens. Maybe that…”

  “I’ll manage,” Rotem said, skipping over to where Meital was standing. “Help me out if I get stuck, okay? Should we do a small test run?”

  “Okay, start with your hands like this and…”

  “It’s okay. I’ve been watching you a little and have seen how you control the screens.”

  “Okay,” Meital said, stepping aside and sitting down next to Dafna.

  Rotem held her arms out to the side and then spread her hands and moved them both to the right at the same time. The displays on all the screens started spinning clockwise, creating the illusion that the room itself was moving in the opposite direction.

  “I think we should…” Dafna tried to help.

  “It’s okay. Don’t worry,” Rotem responded. Each and every one of the twenty-four screens was now a part of her. A continuation of her brain and eyes. It was amazing. She started to run each of the screens backward and forward, conveying instructions to the screen in front of her with the knowledge she would see it again a few seconds later because everything was spinning constantly. Forward. Forward. Back. Forward. Stop. Forward. The members of the team in the room lost their sense of balance and sat down on the floor one by one. Carmit closed her eyes. Grandpa sat down on a chair and kept his eyes fixed on one of the small computer screens at the control station in an effort to fight off the nausea that gripped him.

  Rotem was over the moon. The facility was like an extension of her brain. What a wonderful and intuitive human-machine interface. She turned her hands over and twirled them in opposing directions, and the entire display flipped onto its head and then upright again, created the illusion that the room had performed a somersault. One of the ops-team members turned a little green and closed his eyes.

  She mapped twenty-four different routes simultaneously each time, closing one circuit every time 10483 left the house and then returned, and every time a vehicle pulled up at the house or stopped nearby. And then another twenty-four circuits. And then another twenty-four.

  Hands to the side and then waved to the right. The room spun faster to the left. Everything was revolving and flying around at breakneck speed, and the lines were splitting and joining rapidly, with Rotem conveying instructions to the system with both hands simultaneously, and each hand conveying a separate series of instructions to the control interface. An ongoing series of dates boomed from the system’s speakers. Meital stared wide-eyed at Dafna, and Dafna stared back at her with an expression that said: “What I’m seeing here isn’t really happening.” They were the only ones aside from Rotem who still had their eyes open.

  Rotem was turning on the spot herself by then, in the opposite direction of the spinning screens, marking the final circuits and weeding out the less interesting ones; and then she raised both her arms at once and everything stopped. She came to a halt, too, and closed her eyes, her mind running through the data she had seen on the screen thus far and sorting it out.

  Rotem stood there with her eyes still shut. “In formation—structure yields knowledge,” she said, keeping her eyes closed. “Information. Break that word into two and put a hyphen in the middle and you get the true meaning of information. In-Formation. Data is valuable when it is structured in an orderly fashion. Look here at screen five now. He makes a series of trips to Haifa, to the Bay area. Beginning June fifteenth, and for almost a month thereafter. He drives around the entire area here.” The screen displayed a network of lines, stretched out like a spider’s web, around the petrochemical plants in the Haifa Bay area. “This is the strategic facility he was talking about. I wonder how he plans to carry out his strike there. To all those who thought that his letter was simply hot air and idle threats, we have the answer for them right here. I followed everything that left and arrived at his house aside from him. Look at screens seventeen to twenty-three—he ordered construction materials from various places. Screens five to eleven—electronic equipment from various other places. Screen four—a delivery of several boxes from a military supplies store. What does he need from a military supplies store? He has also done some excavation in the basement of the house, screen twenty-four—you can see the ground outside the house changing color over time. He’s pouring earth of a different color outside, earth that he’s probably removing from under the house. He may have fortified the house he’s living in. I’d be very surprised in fact if he hasn’t done so. By the way, he’s at home right now. Look at screen twelve; it’s a current feed, footage from his house two seconds ago.”

  Rotem went silent, opened her eyes, and looked at the rest of the team.

  “Please tell me you’re a real person and not a robot,” Dafna said. “I’m going to get a knife for you now and have you play that finger game for me like that android, Bishop, in Aliens. That was out of this world. How did you do that? You crammed two weeks of work into fifteen mi
nutes. You’re not real. I have to call the facility’s commander and you have to show him what you just did. Want to work for us on a regular basis?”

  “Despite the fact that I’m totally in love with your facility, I’m going to politely decline. Do you have the name of whoever designed it? I’d love to have a chat with him. Or get into bed with him for a few hours.”

  “We’ll get it for you,” Meital said, trying not to laugh but failing somewhat.

  “Excellent!” Grandpa said, slowly getting to his feet. He was still a little dizzy and off balance and was careful not to make any sudden movements. “At least we know where he is now and can apprehend him?”

  “Are you crazy?” Rotem exclaimed, hopping down from the raised control station and pacing quickly back and forth across the floor below. “If we go there now, he could detonate his explosive devices. We have no way of knowing if the bombs have been primed to go off by means of a cellular signal. If we have an edge over him now, why waste it? We have to work slowly and dismantle everything he’s put together in Tel Aviv and Haifa before we pay him a visit at home. Grandpa, think…”

  “That’s not going to happen. We’re picking him up today from home. We’ll dismantle everything he’s prepared afterward. First things first, I want him in our hands. And don’t forget that Avner’s wife and Amiram are imprisoned there in that house you see on screen twelve, and God knows what will happen to them if we don’t act immediately.”

  “There are one or more things that he’s prepared that we haven’t seen,” Rotem responded. “And that’s what’s troubling me more than anything else we’ve seen here. Not that I agree with you about having to get to him right away. I think you’re mistaken.”

  “What haven’t we seen?”

  “What he did outside the range of our cameras. What he did for almost two months abroad.”

  Besides one member of the team who remained at the facility, the rest of the group stood up to leave. They thanked the facility’s operators and Rotem skipped over and hugged Meital and Dafna. The door to the facility opened with an electronic buzzing sound, and on the way out they stopped for a while to allow one of the team members who was still feeling nauseous to go to the bathroom and throw up.