I went first. Over the rail. Drop one leg. Drop the other. Hands on balcony lip. Slip down and then, oh-so-gently, let myself descend inch by inch until my feet touch the balcony railing, kick inside and drop another twelve inches (my fingers really straining now, burning with the pain of a hundred pull-ups) inch by fucking inch until (oh, God, that feels good) my Reeboks hit solid balcony floor.
I looked up and signaled for Wonder to lower Avi. There was no response. I stage-whispered a WTF. Finally, Avi’s legs appeared above me. They came over, and descended toward me. I grabbed him around the knees and eased them inside the rail. He dropped slowly, caught himself, and pirouetted onto the balcony. He wasn’t wearing the safety rope.
He shrugged as Wonder let himself down with the skill of a trapeze artist. “Time I learned how to do these things for myself,” the Israeli mouthed. “Don’t want to be a burden, y’know.”
0348. We examined the tall, narrow-paned French-door windows. There were three pairs of them. Each ran from the balcony floor to a height of seven feet or so. Each held a double-pane of glass. There was no sign of electromagnetic tape or other obvious entry devices attached. You could see inside to Lantos’s office. In front of the window was a desk on which, I could make out in the dim light, a laptop computer sat. The windows were simply secured from the inside by an old-fashioned cremorne bolt: a single knob mechanism that controls a. pair of vertical rods. When the knob is turned, the rods jam up and down like deadbolts into the head and sill, securing the windows shut.
That was the obvious stuff. Avi Ben Gal examined the leftmost window—the one closest to the wall—carefully. After fifteen seconds or so he waved me over. “Look—in the corner,” he whispered. “But don’t touch the glass.”
I scrunched my neck and followed his instructions. By executing a bodily contortion worthy of a circus performer, I saw what Avi was getting at: the telltale red light of a laser security system had been installed just below the window frame. Step inside, break the beam, and the cavalry is automatically summoned.
Wonder was paying close attention to the double windowpanes. “I think we have some kind of gas inside,” he said.
“They’re sealed in a way I’ve never seen before.” He pointed his nose at the bottom of the pane closest to him. “See that greenish stuff in the joint?”
I looked. I saw.
“Seems to me I read about that. If you cut the window, the gas between the panes reacts to air and sets off an alarm.”
“What about the locks?”
He shrugged. “No prob with them—they’ve gotta be fifty years old.” He retrieved a wide—bladed pick from the nylon sheaf in his back pocket. “Five seconds—no more, and we’re in.”
That was good to know. And puzzling.
I mean—there was a laser alarm system in place, and the old windows had been replaced with double-glazed, inert gas-filled panes. And here are the door locks—locks that haven’t been changed in fifty years.
If I were a suspicious type, my friends, I would guess that Monsieur Werner Lantos had created conditions that encourage me to come through the door locks. Why? Because Monsewer Lantos (as Wonder might aptly call him) has created a natural funnel. He has made my decisions for me.
It is a tactic as old as warfare itself. And it is effective.
Wonder had the pick in his hand. I tapped his wrist, and silent-signaled, Put that away.
He gestured wide-armed at me as if to say, Huh?
I used my hands to say, We’re going back. This is a fucking trap.
Back up to the troisième étage. I lifted Avi high enough so that he got good purchase on the balcony above, and he hoisted himself easily onto it. Wonder followed, and I brought up the rear.
The timer light had switched off as we crept up to the vacant apartment’s window. Softly, I tapped the single pane of glass in the French door and wiggled my index finger in Wonder’s direction. Oh, doorman …
0359. Inside. We crept around the furniture, and moved into the foyer. The front door lay directly ahead of us. I went to it, and put my ear up against it. No sounds from the other side. Gently, I turned the knob and pulled. Nothing happened.
Wonder tiptoed up to the door. He played with the knob, then examined the locking apparatus as best he could in the darkness, running his hands over the metal as if it were braille. “Dead bolts,” he mouthed. “Nonsequential, seven-pin, back-sprung, reverse-tumbled German dead bolts.” He extracted his nylon pick-lock wallet. “Youse guys take a load off.” He sighed. “This may take some time, because the fuckin’ springs on these things are killers—especially in the dark.”
Avi crawled up behind Wonder on his hands and knees, and nudged him aside. He kneeled next to the door, extracted a penlight from his inside pocket, and rotated the rear ferrule. A narrow shaft of red light illuminated the lock apparatus.
The Israeli gave the light to Wonder and plucked three of the lock picks from his hand. “You hold—I’ll work. I’m probably more current on these than you are,” he said. “Besides—it’s about time I started earning my keep around here.”
0402. The corridor was as dark as the apartment. We used Avi’s red penlight to locate the minuterie—the timed light switch that sits at every landing. But we didn’t use it. Instead, I started down the narrow stairway, moving cautiously, step by step. The stairway was dark—but not, fortunately, blacked out.
We descended to the deuxième étage sans incident. The Lantos & Cie offices would be to our right. As I approached the landing, the hair on my neck stood up. Don’t fucking ask me why it stood up—it just did. I froze. My right hand balled into a fist and went level with my shoulder, then cupped and went to my right ear—the silent signal for “freeze and listen.”
We freezed and we listened. The first sense that got tickled was smell. The earthy, deep, rich afterscent of French tobacco wafted down the corridor. Then another of our senses kicked in: from somewhere in the darkness we heard someone breathing. I mean, in that dead-zone silence, it actually seemed loud.
I silent-signaled that I was going to take a look. First, I handed off my equipment. Then I raised my hands to my neck and made a choking motion. Wonder gave me a thumbsup. He started to slip the SAS cable saw into my gloved hand. I shook my head. I have no qualms about killing, but I want to make sure I kill japs—which is what I call bad guys—not some fucking rent-a-cop night watchman who’s being paid fifteen francs an hour to sit in front of a door. How do I know he’s a night watchman and not a jap? I don’t—not 100 percent. But the chances are good. First of all, if you recall, there is that security placard next to the front door. The one that reads PROTECTED BY SECOR, LTD if you know how to read French. The sign hinted that the surveillance cameras weren’t being monitored on the premises, but at a central station. Second, he was the only security we’d encountered tonight. Lack of personnel is another giveaway that it’s not bad guys. Bad guys like Werner Lantos or Andrei Yudin don’t mind providing lots of cannon fodder for people like me because they don’t give a shit about human life.
Okay, so I dropped low, then made the turn off the landing. Hugged the wall. Moved a few inches. Halted and listened. Moved. Halted. At times like this, you try to breathe so discreetly that you make no noise at all. I was having trouble doing that—all I could hear was the surflike sound of rushing air passing my ears, into my nose, and throat. I sensed each pumping thrust of blood in my neck and wrists and wondered why the hell the asshole sitting in the darkness didn’t hear those tom-tom sounds, too.
I drew closer—eight or nine feet. I knew that because I could smell the sonofabitch. Don’t laugh—we SEALs know from experience that, in the field, it is best to eat and drink the same foods as your enemy does, and follow the same sanitary habits as well because if you don’t, he’s gonna smell you out there. A gringo who eats MREs, slaps Aqua Velva on his puss after shaving, showers with Dial, and sprays the Sure under his arms, is gonna stick out like your proverbial sore dick in the boonies, where the op
position eats rice and nuoc mam fish sauce, or frijoles, or couscous, seldom shaves (and if he does, uses nothing more than cold water), and hasn’t seen a bar of Ivory or any other soaplike material in a month. Matter of fact, the opposition is gonna smell you half a mile away. Roy Boehm, the godfather of all SEALs, learned that lesson back in Vietnam—and he taught it to all his pups so they wouldn’t make mistakes and come back dead.
Now, this particular opposition wasn’t gonna sniff me. He’d put out too much effluvium himself. First of all, he needed a shower—did he ever. His unique, even piquant bouquet included a remarkable mix of sweat, b.o., garlic, unlaundered clothes, and grunge foot. That was another indication he was a rent-a-cop, so far as I was concerned. Y’see, rent-a-cops make minimum wage. So, there’s not a lot of cash to spend on dry cleaning.
I slipped closer until I could pick him out clearly. He was sitting in a wood chair, its two front legs tilted back, its top rail leaning up against the wall. His ankles were wrapped around the front chair legs.
Goddammit, be quiet out there. No, no—you shut the fuck up, I’m trying to work.
Sorry for the interruption, gentle reader, but it’s that dweeb of an editor again making a bloody racket. He what? He wants to know how I can make the fellow in the corridor out so clearly when the corridor is dark.
A good point—and so, I’ll take the time to explain. The fact of the matter is that the human eye is a remarkable, and highly adaptable instrument. You put it into total darkness (we’re talking relative, here—not absolute), and the retina will open up sufficiently to allow you to make out shapes. Try it yourselves. Sit in a darkened room for half an hour, and after a while you’ll be able to pick out all the furniture, the very configuration of the room itself—even somebody sitting in the chair across from you.
Same principle applied here. My night vision was at its peak, and thus I could make him out. And I liked what I perceived: there was no discernable movement, except for the gentle rise and fall of his chest. His breathing was so regular that I guessed the asshole had dozed off. I moved to within a yard or so of striking distance.
That was when he gave a start. I froze as he shook his head and snorted like a fucking ox, then settled down again. I waited, not even daring to breathe as his head lolled back against the wall, and his chest rose and fell, his breathing steady again.
Even better, he now began to snore—loudly. It took half a dozen snores until I’d finally edged to where I felt I had to be to get the job done.
I pounced. My left hand came up and caught his mouth to choke off any scream (or other sundry alarum, as Shakespeare liked to write). He tried to twist away from me but I was having none of that—I gut-punched him to take his breath away, then moved round in back of him, swiveling my body and his, so that the crook of my right arm trapped his neck just above his Adam’s apple. Then I flexed my arm, an action that shut off all the air to his windpipe. This highly effective choke-hold maneuver, incidentally, is known as an LAPD caress. Almost immediately, he went limp—it didn’t take more than nine or ten seconds.
I relaxed my grip and let his body slouch back into the chair. Then I taped his mouth, ankles, and knees with the roll of ductlike tape I carried in my pocket. I rolled him onto his stomach, and bound his arms behind him. Then I retrieved the penlight and played it over him. He wore a blue security uniform that bore a SECOR patch on the right shoulder. He was unarmed—except for a long chain clipped to his belt. Attached to the end of the chain was a ring of keys the size of a medieval mace head. In his pockets, he carried the normal assortment of gear—wallet, two house keys, pocket change, cigarettes, and a cheap butane lighter. I unfastened the humongous ring of keys and handed them off to Wonder, who’d crept down the corridor.
“Light,” he whispered.
I handed him the penlight. He played it on the single, dead bolt door lock on the double doors to Lantos’s office, and then on the two dozen keys he held in his left hand. He began to sort the keys, mumbling to himself as he rejected one after the other. “I think we have a winner,” he whispered after thirty seconds. He took the key he’d selected and quietly inserted it in the dead bolt. He nodded. “Fits.” Slowly, Wonder twisted the key counterclockwise.
Nothing happened. “Sorry.” He went back to perusing. A minute later, he tried again. This time the lock turned easily—and silently—one revolution, then another, then a third.
“We’re in,” he said.
I shook my head. “No,” I said, “we’re not in yet—you simply got the door open.”
Wonder gave me a dirty look. “You’re so fucking literal,” he said.
0407. Wonder turned the handle and eased the door inward. I moved inside, creeping inch by inch.
The foyer was clear and unprotected. No lasers, no motion detectors—as far as I could tell. That made sense, too. It allowed the man standing watch to come inside if he wanted to. Once I’d determined that it was all right, we brought the inert rent-a-cop and his chair through the door and put them next to the wall.
The office was a lot smaller than I’d expected. I would have thought Werner Lantos’s company would have appropriated the entire floor—or at least the entire front of the building. Instead, we discovered a modest, four-room suite. There was the foyer, which had one desk that looked as if it had been outfitted for a receptionist/secretary, with a three-line phone and a fax. There were two small, impersonal, windowless offices. Each had a desk with a minitower computer, a phone, a small credenza, a desk chair, and two chairs facing the desk. And then there was the master office—the one I’d seen from the balcony—which was, in fact, the only room facing the street.
Making sure to stay well clear of the laser alarm under the window, I examined Werner Lantos’s office carefully. The surface of his desk was polished—it looked as if it had never been used. Atop it, dead center, sat the computer I’d seen from outside—a Toshiba laptop, just waiting to be opened and purloined of its files.
I reached toward the machine to flip up its cover.
“Dick—No!” It was Avi. “Don’t go near it,” he stage-whispered.
I backed off, my hand in midair. “What’s the problem?”
“Your old pal Ehud Golan is the problem,” Avi said. He took the penlight and shone it around the Toshiba. “Mossad’s technical operations division built thirty-six explosive devices to go into Toshiba computers—same model as this one—on the prime minister’s directions. It was about the same time they got permission to reconfigure a bunch of cellular phones.”
“Oh?” It was obvious what he was talking about. But for any of you who haven’t read the news lately, the Israelis are the masters of the fine art of booby-trapping such items as phones and computers, and slipping them into the offices or homes or cars of the folks who wage war against the civilians of the Jewish State. These days, they use Semtex-A3, a Sabra mutation of the venerable Czech plastic explosive that cannot be detected even by the most sophisticated airport sensors. Indeed, once a bomb has been built, the deadly item can even be taken aboard a plane and flown to its final destination without fear of discovery.
There are various ways of setting the device off. The computer bomb generally explodes when the laptop is opened. The phone can be detonated either by voice (using a chip that has been programmed with the voice frequency of the target), or remote control, in which a radio-controlled firing button is pressed by an agent on-scene, or someone on the other end of the phone who transmits the “fire” order electronically. Either way, the phone goes ka-boom and blows the head off the unfortunate tango who’s holding it.
“They were made up for operations against Hizballah and the Islamic Brotherhood,” Avi explained, as if I needed to be told.
I try not to play with other folks’ improvised explosive devices unless I absolutely have to. They are unfamiliar and dangerous. “Can you disarm it?”
“If this turns out to be one of our devices, sure I can. The computer demolitions were designed so that the e
xplosive component could be installed or removed in a matter of seconds.” The Israeli pulled the PCMCIA slot cover open, and focused his light on the double-width modem card inside. “This is one of ours,” he said decisively.
He extracted the device and examined it critically. “Biduke—absolutely.” He held it up so I could see it in his penlight beam. “The explosive is sandwiched in here,” he explained, pointing at what looked like normal circuitry. “That way they could be shipped, then passed to our undercover agents who don’t have to do anything technical.”
“How do you keep the computer from blowing before you want it to?”
“Oh—our people in Tel Aviv reconfigured the electronics inside the card to arm the device as the modem or flash memory card was inserted in its slot, and disarm it when it gets pulled out. That way I can use any computer, demonstrating to the target that it’s safe, then close it, switch the cards—and when the bad guy turns it on, b’bye-b’bye. Gram for gram, it’s a big charge—” Avi swept the office with his eyes. “More than enough to level this whole place. Hell—one of these devices brought down a whole villa in Lebanon.”
Avi slipped the modem card into his pocket. Then he flipped the Toshiba’s cover up and turned the machine’s switch on. “See—ready to go. Just like every other computer.”
Now the easy-to-crack window lock made perfect sense to me. Mon-sewer Lantos had created a natural entry—pointing me (or whoever broke in) directly toward the computer on his desk. The sequence was KISS: go through the window, set off the laser alarm, grab open the computer, it goes ka-boom, the office—maybe the whole fucking building—goes b’bye-b’bye. And the blame? Hell, blame the same fucking anonymous tangos who’ve been blowing targets all over Paris lately. End of story.
Designation Gold Page 30