by Ward Larsen
Slaton remembered Director Nurin’s plan. It will tell you where and when to strike … a tactical opening that is ideal for a man with your gift. Use it. The director had set him up to die, and in doing so had put Christine at risk. Slaton had to understand completely. “How did it work? Was Nurin feeding the Iranians intelligence? Was he actively sabotaging his own strike teams?”
“Yes,” Hamedi said. “Behrouz told me he had an agent who gave accurate warnings—where and when the attacks against me would come. This agent was clearly planted by Nurin.”
“So good men were sent to the slaughter, sacrificed.”
Hamedi, his face riddled with angst, said, “Yes. This part filled me with sorrow, but clearly the director thought it necessary. I tried to consider things from his point of view. A military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would put at risk hundreds, even thousands of Israeli soldiers. Would that not be worse? Israel is desperate to stop Iran, and my importance to the program has been widely accepted. Clearly Nurin felt that if he did not make attempts against me it would only fuel Behrouz’s suspicions. He had to make it look as if Israel was trying to eliminate me.”
Fifty yards away Slaton saw two policemen scouring the base of the jetty, their flashlight beams scanning the water for survivors. In a matter of minutes they would reach the breakwater.
“But now,” said Sanderson, “Behrouz is gone?”
“Yes,” Hamedi confirmed. “Our friend here was quite innovative, but there is no doubt—he is dead.”
“And no one else in Iran shares his suspicions about your background?”
“I don’t think so,” Hamedi said. “Behrouz always retained a card-player’s mentality—something like this he would have kept to himself until he was certain. Others helped in his search, of course, but they were only low-level people with no understanding of his larger suspicions.”
“So,” Slaton reasoned, “if you were to turn up as a survivor tonight—you could still go back to Iran and carry through your plan?”
Hamedi thought about it. “Yes. With Behrouz eliminated, I’m sure there will be a fight for his position—one that will last weeks, if not months. For the time being all security will be focused on one thing—the imminent test. I am more secure now than I was an hour ago, and all I require is four more days. Allow me that, and I can give Israel her greatest victory since the Six-Day War.”
Sanderson drew a heavy sigh. “I’m not a political man by nature, but clearly the world could use a little more time with Iran. I could turn Dr. Hamedi in, say that I found him in the water. He’d be back in Iran tomorrow. And I have to confess this would also get me out of a rather deep professional hole I’ve dug for myself.”
The policeman and the scientist looked at the assassin.
With the gun still in his hand, Sanderson spoke for them both. “That leaves you, sir. Now that we all know the truth of what’s going on … is there any way this can end well for you?”
Slaton pulled the diving hood back off his head, and the cool night air washed over him. It didn’t help—he was drowning under too many variables and intricate angles. He was a Jew as well, and could not deny a desire to help the homeland—in spite of what Israel’s guardians had done to him. But more important was Christine and their child. In a crushing moment, Slaton felt his life in Virginia slipping away. Perhaps he’d been a fool to even imagine a normal existence, but if he let go now he was sure it would be lost forever.
Looking grimly at his odd bedfellows, a Persian-Jew scientist and a Swedish policeman, he said, “All right, gentlemen. Here is how we will do it…”
FIFTY-FOUR
The sorry state of Nurin’s psyche was certified when he looked down and realized that he was holding a lit cigarette in each hand. Hunched at the control desk in Mossad’s operations center, he discreetly doused one in an ashtray and took a long pull on the other.
There were three large video screens in front of him—one the direct feed from Veron’s Direct Action team, and the other two alternating between commercial news feeds, which had a tendency to loop the most spectacular clips. All showed the Armageddon-like scene that was the western reach of Lake Geneva. There was smoke and fire, and an army of first responders trying to cope with a maritime disaster—not a well-rehearsed scenario, Nurin supposed, for a traditionally neutral Alpine state.
“Still nothing?” Nurin barked.
“No sir,” replied the female communications manager seated to his left. “The DA team is searching on foot now, but no sign of Hamedi.”
“Dammit! Where the hell is he? Send the directive again—if they find him I want absolutely no contact. He is to be turned over to the Swiss authorities.”
“Sir, I’ve already sent that order twice—”
The woman stopped in midsentence, perhaps feeling Nurin’s stare. She began typing.
Nurin turned and saw Veron still squeezed into a narrow chair at the back of the room—the wood looked like it might splinter under his bulk. Thirty minutes ago the shooter from his DA team in Geneva had been fighting off an Iranian counterattack. When Veron tried to send in the rest of his team to support their comrade, Nurin immediately countermanded the order. Now the director would have to defend his actions, and it wouldn’t be pleasant. They had all been listening to the tactical channel audio. They’d heard the shooter as he engaged the Iranians, his dialogue cool in the chaos of a gunfight. Then he went down, pleading for help. Other voices picked up, the rest of the handpicked DA unit screaming for permission to engage. Nurin had ordered them to stand down.
Now the tactical channel was quiet, and Veron sat sulking at the back of the room. He looked like a human balloon that might burst at any moment. Nurin walked over and sank heavily into the chair next to Veron.
“Tell me, Oded,” he began in a quiet voice. “Through all your years of command in the field … was there ever a time when you sent a man into a bad situation, one you knew he wouldn’t come back from, in order to get a vital mission done?”
Veron didn’t answer directly. Instead, he asked, “The others this summer? Tehran and outside Qom? They were sacrificed as well?”
Nurin braced, not sure how a type-A soldier like Veron would handle that answer. But he gave it anyway. “Yes. I sent six men into situations that were guaranteed to fail. Six men, Oded. I know that number exactly, and their names and faces are burned into my mind. You don’t know how this has weighed on me.” When Veron turned to stare at him, Nurin added, “Or maybe you do.”
“But why?”
“Hamedi is one of us, Oded.” Nurin finally broke his secrecy, explaining Hamedi’s plan to ruin Iran’s nuclear program in a single moment.
Veron considered it for some time. “Yes, then I see why Hamedi must survive. But was it necessary to throw away so many lives?”
“In our limited contact, Hamedi told us that Farzad Behrouz had become suspicious of his background. He was raiding synagogues and interrogating old friends to find proof. The entire plan was at risk. To the world’s eye, Hamedi had become the driving force behind Iran’s nuclear weapons program. If we did not make attempts against him? That would have fed the suspicions Behrouz was harboring.”
They both watched the three video screens, the most impressive being a feed from one of the local Geneva television stations. In a segment that had been running repeatedly for twenty minutes, Entrepreneur lay broken in the water, the lake boiling around her like a frothing fire. Thick smoke, black in the city’s footlights, swirled wildly into the sky.
“But now…” Nurin said in a hushed whisper, “Hamedi has disappeared. Slaton has ruined everything.”
Veron stiffened—ears that had been assaulted by the thunder of a hundred battles were still sharp enough. “Slaton? David Slaton?”
“You know him?”
“I know of him—the kidon. He was a legend. But he was rumored to have been killed in England.”
Nurin shook his head. “No, Oded. He lives.”
Veron l
ooked up at the monitor and stared at the incredible scene of destruction. “Then God help us.”
“No,” Nurin countered. “God help Ibrahim Hamedi.”
* * *
As Gardien de la Paix, intern level, Daniel Kammerer had been with the Geneva gendarmerie for a mere eight months. As a consequence of his junior status on the force, he was without fail given the most tedious and uninteresting assignments. At soccer matches he was relegated to standing at turnstiles to usher away the most blatant hooligans. At the recent wine festival he’d been assigned latrine duty, making sure the tipsy crowds relieved themselves in an orderly Swiss manner—lines respected, and no men allowed to appropriate the women’s portable toilets. And tonight, with a calamity of unprecedented drama playing out less than a mile away, Kammerer was stuck playing traffic cop, or more succinctly, shunting traffic away from the cordoned Quai du General Guisan toward Rue du Rhone and the safety of central Geneva.
He was diverting a delivery truck toward a side street, and enduring no small amount of honking and fist-shaking, when the event that would keep him writing reports until early the next morning began. The first thing that drew his attention was a shout. The words made no sense to young Kammerer because they came in a language he did not understand. The strident tone and volume, however, were enough to warrant a look. He right away saw three men standing midway along the Pont des Bergues footbridge, the second of the numerous spans connecting the left and right banks of the Rhone, and just west of the troubled Pont du Mont Blanc crossing where, according to the captain on the radio, more senior officers were searching for a missing Iranian diplomat in the aftermath of the spectacular attack.
Kammerer watched for a moment and heard more shouting. Two of the men, one dressed in black, were standing close to the bridge’s eastern side, backed against the hip-high metal railing. The third was ten steps away, centered on the bridge’s width and pointing an accusing hand at the others. In his short tenure on the force Kammerer had already witnessed his share of altercations, most involving alcohol. Yet there was something about this scene that seemed very different. Something that troubled him.
He abandoned his intersection, leaving the delivery truck at odds with a stalled motor scooter, and began closing the gap. He was twenty yards from the foot of the bridge, fifty from the rising dispute, when he realized that the man in the center of the bridge was not pointing his hand, but rather a gun. He also saw that one of the men backed to the rail was restraining the other with an arm wrapped around his throat.
Kammerer went for his radio, but the frequency was momentarily blocked by someone’s long-winded traffic narrative. He broke into a run, and shouted, “Police! Arrêtez-vous!”
The three men ignored him.
Kammerer finally heard a break on the frequency, but in the heat of the moment, with his heart thumping in his chest, the proper radio conventions and protocols escaped him—just as his instructor in training had said it would. But he remembered what she’d said next: If you forget the correct way, just screw the procedures and say something.
He did exactly that.
“Pont des Bergues, the footbridge!” Kammerer shouted into his microphone. “Officer needs help! I see a man with a gun, possible hostage situation!”
Thirty yards from the trouble, Kammerer slowed his pace and drew his service weapon. Before he had a chance to shout anything more, things began to happen in what seemed like slow motion. The man holding the hostage, the one clad in some kind of black suit, pushed his captive away and produced what appeared to be a gun of his own. Before he could raise it, the man in the middle of the bridge fired once, and then kept firing, a hail of shots that Kammerer would report as ten, but later be proven by ballistics evidence to be six. The man clad in black rocked once, twice, and then twisted back and flipped over the metal rail, disappearing into the river.
Kammerer pointed his weapon at the shooter, and screamed, “Drop the weapon!” He said it three times in all, once in each of the languages he spoke—French, English, and Swiss-German. One of them, he wasn’t sure which, seemed to work. Or perhaps it had more to do with the volume and situation. Whatever the impulse, the shooter set his weapon on the asphalt, backed away three steps, and very slowly dropped to his stomach and went spread-eagle.
“I’m a policeman!” the man shouted in English.
This Kammerer knew better than to take for granted. He kept his gun trained on the shooter as he closed in, kicked the gun a bit farther away, and cuffed the man, all while keeping an eye on the third man who was standing by the guardrail and looking very relieved. Help soon arrived in the form of three other officers, and things began to organize. Kammerer told the senior man, a captain, what had happened.
“Where is the other?” the captain asked. “The one who was hit?”
Kammerer led him to the rail and they both looked down. Fifteen feet below they saw nothing but the black Rhone rolling slowly westward, her rippled surface cold and empty.
FIFTY-FIVE
For the second night in a row Evita Levine rose in the elevator of the Isrotel Tower Hotel in Tel Aviv. Tonight the call from Zacharias had come late, and indeed caught her by surprise.
She had talked in a hushed voice from the kitchen and made the usual arrangements, yet on hanging up Evita thought she sensed something new in his voice. Or perhaps something that wasn’t there. His panting enthusiasm? In any event, she dressed quickly and told her husband, who was nodding off in his decrepit chair behind a television that was running, of all things, an ad for an aerobic exercise video, that her mother was ill and she was going across town to tend to her. Evita had always tried to avoid outright lies, but seeing her liaisons with Zacharias clearly drawing to an end, she tonight allowed herself the expediency of deceit.
The elevator opened, and she walked down the hallway wondering if it was time to break things off. This was a speech Evita had long rehearsed, and one that varied, based on her degree of disgust at the given moment, from a curt letdown to screamed accusations of sexual inadequacy. As she reached the familiar door, however, it all went out of her head. As good as that might feel, there was still reason to be cautious.
He answered her knock immediately, and the first thing she noticed was that he did not have a drink in his hand. The second thing was the way he backed away from her. His usual leer was replaced by a decidedly grim expression that seemed completely out of character. Evita felt the first pang of fear.
“What is it, darling?” She stepped into the room, closing the door behind her. She moved closer and put a soft hand around the nape of his skinny neck. “It’s not your wife, I hope. Has she found out?”
“Evita Levine,” he said, “you are under arrest for treason against the State of Israel.”
She stepped back with wide eyes and a slack jaw. Before she could respond two men appeared from nowhere and pulled her hands roughly behind her back. Evita had no doubt that life as she knew it had just ended, but as was often the case with those in the process of being handcuffed, the question that came to her lips was, “How did you find out?”
Mossad’s director of operations gave her a subdued smile. “Don’t you see, my dear? I’ve known all along.”
Evita stared at him dumbly. She thought of the nights they’d been together, the things she had done. How she had controlled him. She closed her eyes tightly until a vision of Saud came to mind, her forever-young sculptor with his strong hands and liquid gaze. Evita kept her eyes shut as if to hold that picture, and soon cold tears were streaming down her cheeks.
Six minutes later, and one hundred miles north of Tel Aviv, a second group of Mossad agents, these more tactically oriented, burst into a hotel room where the Hezbollah agent known as Rafi was sleeping off a daylong and well documented bender. The man stirred and, it would be later claimed in the after-action report, made a threatening move toward the nightstand drawer. Perhaps because of this, or more likely since the Mossad team was operating on Lebanese soil, no handcuffs
were produced.
Forty nine-millimeter rounds later, the bloody body of Rafi looked as though it had been stapled to the splintered headboard.
* * *
Christine had spent the evening at Anton Bloch’s bedside in Saint Göran Hospital. She told the police it was because he was an old friend. Bloch, whose rapidly improving condition the doctors found encouraging, knew otherwise.
“It’s getting late,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t want me to turn on the television? There might be something new.”
She shook her head.
He had prevailed an hour earlier, and for ten minutes they witnessed the bloodshed in Geneva. The police gave few details, and the speculation by reporters was rampant, neither of which calmed Christine’s restless imagination. The few facts were damning enough: an attempt had been made on the life of Dr. Ibrahim Hamedi, leaving one assailant and a significant number of bodyguards dead. The scientist was missing. At that point, Christine had turned the television off.
Now she was pacing back and forth at the foot of Bloch’s bed, head low and arms crossed over her chest, and trying her level best to find hope.
“Sit down,” he said. “Can I order you some food?”
“I thought I was here for your sake.”
“I’m worried too, Christine. But I’ve had many nights like this. You simply can’t dwell on the worst-case scenario. Even if they’ve identified the shooter, they won’t release the name any time soon. Tomorrow is probably the earliest we can expect any good news.”
She stopped circling and went to his side. “Good news? From this?”
“It might not have been David,” he said. “Nurin could have sent another kidon to do the job.”
She probed his eyes. “Do you really believe that?”
His pause was too long for a lie. “No. But until we know something more accurate there’s no sense in—”