A few dabs of makeup, which she normally eschewed, and the facial bruising was toned down to an acceptable level. She packed up her belongings, carefully stowed the dye materials in an empty plastic clothes bag, and was ready to go.
Jet spent a few minutes wandering around the block where the bus station was located, on the alert for anyone suspicious watching the departures. Other than the usual miscreants that were for some reason drawn to bus depots, she didn’t spot anyone. She approached the ticket counter and bought a ticket – the next coach left in forty-five minutes and would take the rest of the afternoon and much of the evening to get to Caracas, a city of almost seven million and the capital of Venezuela. The international airport there would have flights to almost everywhere in the world, so she would be unlimited in her options.
Which brought her up short. So far, she’d been driven by an imperative to get as far from her pursuers as possible. But then what? She hadn’t formulated a plan yet, preferring to react rather than try to steer events.
That couldn’t last. As she browsed the newspaper rack, part of her mind was mulling over possible next moves.
She glanced at her watch and asked the magazine vendor whether there was an electronics store anywhere nearby. She needed a cell phone. With ten hours to kill on the bus, it would be helpful to be able to get on the internet and research things such as flight schedules. The young woman nodded and pointed to a shop across the street.
Jet was quickly able to find a Nokia with web-browsing capability, which she bought, along with several airtime cards. A late-model bus pulled into the station, and she scooped up her purchases and ran for it. The last thing she wanted to do was miss her ride and spend another day in Carupano. It was too close to Trinidad for comfort.
The door opened, and she stood in line with the other passengers. Thankfully, her seat was only a few back from the driver, so she wouldn’t be sitting by the bathroom for the whole trip. Her luck didn’t completely hold, though, when a mother and three small boys took the seats behind her. One immediately began crying when the other smacked him, and Jet turned around and gave the oblivious mother a dark look. The woman got the message and shifted the little squawker across the aisle then took the seat behind Jet herself.
As the bus bumped along the streets leading to the highway, Jet stuffed tissue in her ears and settled in for the long trip. She had nobody sitting next to her, at least for now, so she closed her eyes and reconciled herself to thinking through her situation and devising a plan.
In order to do so, she needed to understand how whoever was targeting her had located her.
And to do that, she needed to go back down a rabbit hole she thought she’d sealed off forever.
Chapter 11
The bus swayed around a gradual curve then straightened out, the steady rumble of its wheels on the weathered asphalt blending with the muted roar of its diesel engine. The odor of spicy food pervaded the cabin as several of the passengers who had made the long trip before opened containers and ate lunch. The driver announced over the speaker that they would be making a ten-minute stop within two hours and that vendors would be selling food there, but the regular travelers preferred to bring their own – for reasons that would shortly become obvious.
Jet opened her eyes and stared at the passing landscape, her mind churning over the ramifications of the attack.
When she had disappeared in a ball of flame in Algiers, her existence had ended. Nobody knew that she was still alive except for David.
Who was also the only person who knew what her final destination had been.
She’d chosen Trinidad because it was far from her stomping grounds in the Middle East. There was basically zero chance on the island of being recognized by someone from her past life. She’d also considered Indonesia or Brazil, but didn’t speak the native tongues so communicating would have been a barrier. Trinidad’s official language was English, although she discovered after arriving that most spoke a Creole mixture in daily life. Jet spoke perfect English without an accent, thanks to her parents – her mom, born in Israel but of half Japanese and half Dominican heritage, had spoken Spanish as well, but always communicated with her father and her in English.
Nobody but David knew she was going to Trinidad, which left three possibilities: he had knowingly betrayed her, or had unknowingly done so…or they had slipped up somehow and someone had found out. The third scenario was impossible – Jet’s knowledge of craft was such that there was no way she could have been followed or traced.
Besides which, as far as the world was concerned she was dead.
That David would breach her confidence was hard to believe. He had no reason to give her up. And she believed that, in his own way, he loved her. Even if much of their attraction had been physical, over time, she had developed powerful feelings for him, and she knew it was mutual.
Then again, he lived in a no-man’s-land of fluid ethics and constant duplicity, where allegiances could shift in a heartbeat and nothing was sure. It was the spymaster’s life, which defined moral ambiguity. Could he have run into a situation where he’d had to divulge that she was alive? Sold her out? Was she nothing more than a pawn in some unknown game he was playing?
Nothing would have surprised Jet after the things she’d witnessed, but the idea of David betraying her didn’t make any sense. Not for the least reason that once she was dead, she was off the board, of interest to no one. That was the whole point of staging the explosion.
No, it didn’t fit.
But she couldn’t be a hundred percent certain that David hadn’t sold her out. And ninety-nine percent wouldn’t cut it. She needed to know for sure.
Her other problem was that she had no idea who had targeted her, or why.
It really could be anyone. Another intelligence service that she’d crossed during one of her missions. Terrorists. Criminal syndicates. A rogue government – she’d operated all over, including missions against Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya…
The possible list of enemies was considerable and included her own country. The Mossad couldn’t be completely trusted not to have reasons to want her silenced. The team she had belonged to had carried out operations that were in clear violation of international law and would have severely embarrassed anyone associated with it, had all facts become known. Even a hint of the team’s existence would have been political dynamite.
The truth was that trying to figure out who wanted her head was going to be impossible without knowing how they had discovered she was alive, and then how they had found her.
And that led back to David.
As did all roads.
Which didn’t help her much.
Because like her, David was a ghost. Untraceable. His official existence was top secret, and he moved around constantly, never staying in any one place for more than a few weeks. He was ultra-paranoid and cautious – all the same enemies who would have danced in the streets to kill Jet would have also delighted in getting David…and in truth, the list was probably longer.
So it wasn’t like she could knock on his door and confront him. He could be anywhere, although he tended to stay within Israel’s borders. Which didn’t narrow it down much. There were a lot of places to hide if you were motivated and knew how.
And David was an expert at it.
Other than staying alive long enough to understand who wanted her dead, her number one priority would have to be finding David so she could discover the truth.
Whatever it was.
As the bus slowed to negotiate a series of hairpin turns, the child in the seat across the aisle vomited on the floor. The horrified mother rushed to clean it up, but the smell lingered and permeated the cabin. Jet considered stuffing tissue into her nose as well as her ears, but ultimately reconsidered. She was just going to spend a day in hell. There was no way around it.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t spent plenty there before.
She returned to the question of how to find David, but the more she
thought about it, the more difficult it seemed.
The only way she could see was through another member of the team. They always had some way of getting in contact with him. They had to in case a mission blew apart. How she would convince a former teammate to divulge David’s contact information would come later – her biggest hurdle wasn’t how to get that piece of info, it was how to find any of them. They, like Jet, lived like nomads and were invisible. None of them had homes. She didn’t even know their real identities, just code names nobody would ever admit existed. Even if she could hack into the Mossad servers, which was nearly impossible, there would be no trail to follow – David made a point of ensuring that nothing could lead back to headquarters. It was part of his cautious personality and the nature of the team.
The bus rolled into the next station a few minutes later. Taking her backpack with her, Jet descended to stretch her legs, relieved to be out of the toxic atmosphere, if only for a brief while.
The food the vendors were selling was so questionable that she bought some potato chips and a bottle of water instead, resigning herself to saving her digestive system until they arrived in Caracas.
When the bus lumbered back onto the highway, an idea came to her with such suddenness it surprised her.
There was one place she could probably find one of the team.
The operative known only as Rain had been in deep cover during the Algerian mission, preventing him from joining them. It was a long-term penetration that had taken him out of the active team for years. She’d connected the dots when she’d been told that Rain wouldn’t be part of the Algiers operation – she’d been part of the insertion group that had set up his cover in Yemen, and had later been sent in for a sanction of a member of the cell he’d penetrated, who Rain had been afraid was suspicious of him. The man in question had suffered an apparent heart attack a few days later, and the problem had been solved.
She might be able to find Rain again if he was still in Yemen. The Mossad wouldn’t pull him out unless it absolutely had to after all the work it had spent on his insertion and cover. Depending on what his assignment was, he might still be there.
It wasn’t much to go on, but it was a place to start.
Jet powered on the cell phone and busied herself searching for flights to get her to the Middle East from Caracas. It looked like her best bet would be through Germany – Frankfurt, then on to Riyadh, then finally to Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. She’d have to spend a day or two in Frankfurt to get a Yemeni visa, but that wouldn’t pose a problem – as the poorest country in the region, any tourist dollars at all were welcomed.
Jet’s memory of the last time she’d been in Sana’a was less than pleasant. The place was a verifiable shithole, filthy and crime-ridden, run by crooks, where misogyny was institutionalized and barbarism was the national pastime.
But if Rain was still there, she could use him to get in contact with David. What happened from there was anyone’s guess.
For the first time in the last forty-eight hours, she felt proactive. It wasn’t standing in the middle of the street with a Heckler and Koch MP7 laying waste to her adversaries, but it was something.
Right now, she’d take it.
Chapter 12
Present Day, Sana’a, Yemen
Jet peered through the window of her hotel at the glowing minarets of the Al-Saleh mosque, amazed that such beauty could exist in such a squalid place. The whining buzz of motor scooters and badly abused car engines from the street below had none of the charming musicality of some cities. The traffic sounds here were more akin to buzz saws and tractors – ugly and strident, as if to complement the foulness of the high-altitude desert metropolis.
Getting into Yemen had proved simple – a quick trip to the consulate in Frankfurt had produced a thirty-day visa to travel as she required, although there had been dire warnings about the rebel factions who were in possession of large tracts of the country, and admonishments to stay in the major cities, preferably with a male escort.
Her Belgian cover ID was that of a freelance journalist. She had long ago discovered that nobody really understood or cared what freelance journalists did, and therefore their travel requirements and lifestyles weren’t questioned too closely.
Jet spoke flawless Arabic, which had been a requirement when qualifying for the team. She’d always been fascinated with languages and had spent her childhood and teen years collecting them, as she thought of it. Yet another trait that had made her an attractive candidate for the team – young, angry, multilingual, with a significant physical edge due to martial arts study. It was no wonder that the Mossad had snapped her up when their recruiters had gotten wind of her.
While waiting for her visa in Frankfurt, a city with a substantial Muslim population, she’d been able to get her hands on an abaya, niqab and hijab, the black full body robe, veil and headdress worn by many Yemeni women. She’d worn mannish slacks and a button-up safari shirt for the trip, in keeping with what most would guess a freelance journalist would favor.
Rain had been staying in a building with eight flats near the 26 September Park, and had one that faced onto the street. She had no way of knowing whether he was still there, but she was hopeful that, if he was still in Yemen, he’d kept the one-bedroom apartment.
It was late afternoon by the time she cleared customs and checked into her hotel. It had been over three years since she’d been in Sana’a, but she still remembered the layout of the city well enough to navigate the streets on her own – a dangerous proposition amid the civil unrest that had plagued the capital for the last few years.
Sana’a was even worse than the last time she had been there. The atmosphere was anxious, the stress level palpable. In spite of the façade of cursory civility, this was a city at war, where violence could erupt without warning at any time. There was a substantial military presence on most corners, but instead of being reassuring, the sight of soldiers toting machine guns added to the sense of imminent chaos that seemed a constant. She debated going to Rain’s building that evening, but decided to err on the side of prudence – being out after dark was an invitation to disaster in the current environment.
She’d start early tomorrow and reconnoiter the apartment, taking up a watch, if necessary, until she could be confident that Rain either did or didn’t still live there. It could take days to know definitively, but it was her only lead, and she had few choices – and nothing but time.
Dinner in her room was barely edible, which was not unexpected based on her memory of her prior trips. Fine dining was only one of the many civilities that seemed to have bypassed the grim nation.
The air-conditioning groaned like an old drunk throughout the night, but it kept the room cool enough to sleep so she considered herself lucky.
First thing the next morning, she decked herself out in the abaya and veil and studied her image in the mirror. There was only one more thing to do before she went out. She carefully placed brown-colored contacts in her eyes so that their natural startling green wouldn’t be a giveaway. Doing so was second nature after years in the field.
She walked for three blocks before flagging down a taxi on the dusty street, then had it drop her at the park, opting to walk from there to Rain’s last known apartment so she could reacquaint herself with the area. She approached it from across the street, paying no particular attention to the building – to a casual observer.
As her eyes drifted up to the window on the second floor, the hair on the back of her neck prickled. A cardboard box sat on the table just inside, by the sill – and the shade was pulled halfway down. She kept moving to the end of the block then stopped at a little cutlery store, pretending to study the offerings while she scanned the street more thoroughly. A VW van sat parked fifty yards from the apartment; she could see the driver’s outline but nothing else. All the other cars were empty. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not.
The box was a metaphor from her past. She remembered all of the emergency signals c
learly. A box in the window with a half-drawn shade meant danger, abort, return to base.
Then again, it could also have just been that the tenant had left a box sitting on the kitchen table. Not everything was sinister. And she didn’t even know whether Rain still lived there.
The sun baked down on her as she struggled with conflicting impulses. Two sorry-looking pigeons scurried down the gutter, dodging empty soda bottles and food wrappers, the male strutting, ruffling feathers in a mating dance as the uninterested female tried to slip past it and into the allure of the shade.
Getting out of the heat wasn’t a bad idea, she reasoned. She needed to do something. She couldn’t stand there all day.
She was just talking herself into taking another walk past the building, this time on the same side of the street so she could see the names on the battered mailbox slots, when the front of the flat disintegrated in a blast of stone and glass. The concussion from the explosion rocked her – she clutched the wall for support, ears ringing from the detonation. She shook her head, attempting to clear it as she watched smoke belch from the smoldering cavity, where moments before she’d been looking at a window.
A window with a box.
The van’s engine roared, and it barreled down the street at her. As it approached, she caught a glimpse of two men. Thin, both obviously natives, hair closely cropped, bearded. The van passed her vantage point, and she noted that it didn’t have plates – not unusual in a city where nobody paid anything they could avoid, but to her, a telltale.
A crowd gathered as rubberneckers emptied out of the surrounding dwellings to survey the damage and watch the show. Another woman edged next to her and asked in a soft voice what had happened. Jet shook her head, feigning ignorance.
9 More Killer Thrillers Page 10