No good would come from her remaining there. She needed to leave. Leave the street with its burning wreckage, and leave Yemen as soon as possible.
Get back to base.
The sign had been clear, there to warn whoever Rain had been working with.
Jet’s mind churned furiously, trying to remember where base had been for the Yemen operation. It had been a while ago, but the memories came back to her. Base had been a small home on the outskirts of Pardes Hanna-Karkur in Israel, near Netanya. One of a number of safe houses David used – he’d told her that he had dozens at his disposal and moved between them depending upon what operation was active at the moment. When he didn’t have anything on the board, he simply disappeared. Nobody knew where. It was during those down times that he and Jet would rendezvous, but never in the same place twice.
After a mission went sideways, the likelihood was that he would be at the designated house to collect the pieces and debrief anyone who made it out. Jet had no idea how large a group was now working the Yemen assignment, but after three and a half years, it had to be more than just Rain. An asset wouldn’t have been kept in place for that length of time if it wasn’t important, which meant that the intelligence he was gathering was critical. And operations rarely came apart like this, so when one imploded, David would need to know why.
Which was the opportunity she’d been hoping for.
After the cab dropped her off at her hotel, she veered down the street to an internet café she’d spotted the prior day. Within ten minutes, she had confirmed she could get a flight out of Yemen the following morning to Jordan, and then take a bus across the border. It was a long and circuitous route to get into Israel, but she knew from experience that it was the only practical way to avoid the facial recognition software the Mossad used at airport immigration.
With any luck, she could be at the safe house by tomorrow afternoon. Then, hopefully, she would get some answers.
~ ~ ~
Jet’s trip to Israel was long and uneventful, with the border crossing a tedious marathon – crowded and chaotic, barely controlled pandemonium as three busses arrived five minutes apart, the passengers all rushing to get to the head of the line to avoid the long wait in the heat.
When she arrived in Jerusalem, she rented a car. Once clear of the city, the trip to Pardes Hanna-Karkur took only an hour and a half. She pulled into town at four o’clock in the afternoon, the sun’s relentless roasting almost over for the day.
Jet had been to the safe house only once following her insertion mission in Yemen, doing her mandatory debriefing before leaving to take a welcome three-day hiatus in nearby Netanya with David. Even though it had been three and a half years, her recollection of the area was fresh – her memory for geography a skill she’d honed in her training.
A soldier stopped her as she pulled onto the small cul-de-sac where the house was located. She rolled down the window as he peered from under the brim of his hat.
“I’m sorry. Street’s closed. You need to turn around.”
“Oh. Why? What happened?” Jet batted her eyes and tried a tentative smile on the young man.
“I really can’t say. You just can’t drive any further. I’m sorry. Those are my orders.”
“Damn. I mean, I wanted to see if my friend was home, but I suppose that’s out of the question now?” Her eyes darted to the dwelling at the end of the little street. Two of the cars in front of it were riddled with bullet holes, and a third had burned to a husk. The entire perimeter of the lot was cordoned off with yellow tape and was swarming with police and military.
“You could try calling.”
“She doesn’t like to use the phone. Never answers it, so trying would be pointless. Are you sure I can’t just sneak by?”
The young soldier stiffened. “I think you should turn your car around and leave. This is a crime scene. The street is closed to all traffic, pedestrian or otherwise, for at least the rest of the day.”
So much for charming her way through.
“Okay, okay. I’m going.”
She’d seen enough – obvious evidence of an assault on the house. If David had been there, he wouldn’t be any more. The house was blown. But she needed to find out what had happened. Had he been inside? Had he been killed? Wounded?
Jet reversed and executed a three-point turn, then drove out of the neighborhood and kept going until she came to a market. She pulled into the lot and parked, needing time to think. This was all unraveling too quickly – and now her one lead to David was gone. All the effort, the trip to Yemen, the trek into Israel, in vain. But none of it made sense. Who would dare attack a Mossad safe house on Israeli turf? What was the objective? She couldn’t recall anything even remotely like it happening before, and a buzz of anxiety started in her stomach. This was uncharted territory, and as far as she knew, there was no precedent. Which was bad, because in her travels she’d thought there was nothing she hadn’t seen. And that meant that there could be more surprises lying in wait. Deadly ones she might not see coming.
She didn’t know too many ways she could get more information other than trying to hack into the military’s computers to get information on the attack. Even with her skills, the Mossad’s would be impossible to breach, and the military’s wouldn’t be that much easier – which left the police. Local cops were likely to have only meager security on their servers – child’s play for someone of her abilities. Judging by the number of police at the scene, it wouldn’t be that hard to find any report that had been filed. She would just need a good system, a fast internet connection, and time.
She drove half an hour to Tel Aviv and found a large electronics store, and within twenty minutes was the proud owner of a new state-of-the-art laptop. A nearby specialty coffee shop advertised free wireless internet; she found a quiet corner away from the boisterous teenagers hanging out by the entrance and plugged in her new toy.
Forty-five minutes later, she was in the police network and reading the preliminary report on the house.
A call had come in at four forty-two a.m. from a frantic neighbor. Gunfire, explosions, screaming. All units scrambled, the first arriving in seven minutes to find the house empty and four unidentified males dead outside. A car was burning, its gas tank ruptured, and tire tracks suggested that a vehicle had driven off at high speed. One of the other neighbors reported that his dog had lunged at the back door and gone crazy when a figure ran past. He’d caught a quick glimpse; it was the man who owned the house that had been attacked. Forensics later found blood droplets consistent with a wound of some sort. Then the military had taken over the case, and the Mossad arrived shortly thereafter. End of report.
So David had been there, had been hurt, but had escaped.
And the Mossad was in the mix and had clamped a lid on it.
Which they could effectively maintain for as long as necessary by claiming national security interests were involved.
Now Jet had even more questions than answers.
Who had attacked the house? What did they want? If it was to kill David, as Rain had been killed, then why? Was it the same group? Terrorists? Or someone else? And was David okay? Wounded, yes, but how badly?
Whether she liked it or not, she needed more information than the report offered. It would mean hacking the military network to scan for any admissions to military hospitals in the last sixteen hours. That was too big a project for her to bite off – she could do it, but she didn’t have the tools or the time to devote to covering her tracks and doing nothing but trying to hack her way in.
But she knew someone who did.
She typed in a series of keystrokes and sent an e-mail to an account she had committed to memory. Moriarty – a hacker she had never met, but who had come in handy in the past on delicate assignments where discretion was required. David had given her the contact years ago when she had needed specialized computer work done on one of her missions, but wasn’t in a position to do it herself. Since then, she’d used the hac
ker three times, and each had been impressive.
But not cheap.
Moriarty replied to her ping within two minutes. A dialog box popped up on her screen.
[What’s shaking? Long time no talk.]
[Yup. Got a gig. You busy?] Jet typed.
[For you? Never.]
[I need you to track and report to me admissions at every military hospital in Israel for gunshot, trauma, stabbing or other wounds. I don’t need routine admissions for illness. Just trauma.]
[Are you serious?]
[Yup.]
[Gonna cost.]
[Figures. How much?]
[When do you need it?]
[Now.]
Twenty seconds dragged out.
[Fifteen grand. I’ll have it within an hour, two, tops.]
[OK. Banks are closed. Wire tomorrow?]
[Sure. You’re cool.]
[Good luck.]
[Luck has nothing to do with it.]
The dialog box disappeared, the discussion over.
Jet closed the computer and powered it down. She didn’t want to linger there on the off chance someone from the police had noticed the breach of their network and somehow traced the IP address.
She drove to the water and found a restaurant she hadn’t been to in years. Looking at her watch, she saw that she had an hour and forty minutes to kill, so she ordered dinner and settled in, forcing herself to be patient.
The sun set, and the city’s lights twinkled off the sea as she digested the day’s events.
David attacked at a top secret safe house.
Injured.
Whatever this was, she’d never heard of anything like it in her life.
Chapter 13
“I have good news and bad news, sir.”
Grigenko sighed. “Give me the bad news first.”
“The Mossad case officer got away. But he is wounded. It is just a matter of time until we find him. I’ve got all our contacts working on it, and you know we have pull in the Mossad,” Yuri said.
Grigenko considered that.
“You say that you wounded him?”
“Yes, sir. And we are monitoring the police communications, the military hospitals and the civilian hospitals. It shouldn’t be long until he turns up, then we’ll finish him.”
“Why is it that every time you go up against one of these operatives you have excuses instead of results?” Grigenko demanded.
Yuri said nothing for a few seconds. “I’ll call as soon as I have something to report.” Grigenko hung up. What was it about this group that they were having so much trouble killing them? He’d never had so much difficulty. Usually he told Yuri who to target, paid him whatever he asked, and the target disappeared. Simple. Effective. No surprises.
Then suddenly the woman destroys one of the most lethal wet teams on the planet, and now a desk jockey escapes a straightforward hit?
None of this was complicated.
Find them. Kill them.
Easy.
Only apparently not.
A part of him wanted to crush his enemies like bugs, but another part told him not to worry about the details. The plan was far bigger than these two minor nuisances. And Yuri was right. Nobody could hide forever. They would turn up, and when they did, they would be eliminated.
Grigenko rubbed his face, feeling the stubble on his chin, and realized he had been in his penthouse office for ten straight hours.
Enough. It was time to relax, unwind, get something to eat. He buzzed his assistant and told her to have the car ready.
Yuri could handle the loose ends. And if he didn’t, there were more Yuris out there.
~ ~ ~
Jet found another wireless hot spot after dinner and checked back in. Moriarty had delivered, but the result hadn’t helped. There had been no hospital admissions that matched David.
She was now fifteen thousand dollars poorer and dead in the water.
The hacker agreed to keep monitoring and alert her if anything surfaced, but her longshot had just gotten way longer, and she wasn’t hopeful.
Yawning, she realized that she needed to get a room somewhere. There wasn’t anything more she could think of doing that night, so all that remained was to wait and see what surfaced the following day.
One of the motels near the highway looked clean enough, and the manager didn’t seem to be interested in niggling details like identification – he was just happy to take her cash. She tromped up the stairs to her room overlooking the parking lot and quickly unpacked, then took a long shower and tried to decompress. There was no point staying up all night, worrying at the situation. After a decent night’s sleep, maybe something would occur to her.
It only took five hours.
She sat bolt upright in the bed and stared at the clock, heart trip-hammering as her mind raced, sure that she’d had a breakthrough. She reached across the end table and grabbed a bottle of water, mulling over the best way to proceed. Whether or not she was right, it was too late to do anything about it until daylight.
The rest of the night went by slowly, and she found herself tossing and turning, trying to get comfortable, frowning at her watch’s minute hand as it inched toward morning.
~ ~ ~
Rani Stein scratched his head as he exited his modest home in Haifa, moving like a man far older than his thirty-eight years. The son of an accountant and a seamstress, he’d spent his life in sedentary pursuits, and the lack of exercise was evident in his weight as well as his energy level. Rani was over three hundred pounds, none of it muscle. His main problem was that he liked to eat. A lot. More than almost anything in the world. This had interfered with his social life, resulting in his remaining a bachelor long after most of his peers had tied the knot.
“Mrs. Veldt! Good morning!” he called agreeably to his neighbor, a feisty seventy-year-old, who was already out in her front garden trying to coax life into her sickly collection of plants.
“Good morning to you, too, Rani. And how are you this beautiful day?”
“Never better, Mrs. Veldt, never better.”
Rani trundled to his sensible sedan and opened the door, tossing his briefcase into the passenger seat before wedging himself behind the wheel.
“You go cure someone today, do you hear?” the old woman called to him.
“I will. You can count on that!” he replied with false cheer, then shut the door and started the car.
He backed out of his driveway with customary care, slowly, methodically, as he did everything in life.
Rani didn’t notice the car a hundred yards down the street as it joined him on his eight-minute journey to his office building. Even if someone had pointed it out to him, he wouldn’t have been concerned. Rani was a man who bore nobody a grudge, and who had gone through life without making any enemies. The last thing he would have believed possible was that he could be in any sort of danger.
He made it to his office parking lot in good time. As he closed his door, he sensed a presence immediately behind him, and turned as quickly as his girth would allow. Facing him was an extraordinarily beautiful woman with a neutral expression on her face.
“Rani?”
“Hmm. Yes? And who do I have the pleasure of speaking with?”
“Do you have a moment?” she asked, ignoring the question.
“Well, hmm, actually not. I have patients waiting…”
“Then I’ll be brief. I need to know when you last saw David, and where.” Jet spoke softly, eyes roving over the other vehicles in the lot to confirm they were alone.
Rani had a terrible poker face.
“David? I…I don’t understand. What are you talking about?” he stammered.
“Rani. I know David. We’re…close. I know he’s hurt, and I know you’re his friend,” she explained. “And I know you’re a doctor.”
He blanched. “There’s no law against being a doctor…”
“True. But David’s in trouble, and I need to find him.”
“I told y
ou I have no ide–”
“Cut the shit, Rani. You went to university together, and he was your roommate. He told me about you. That’s how I know,” she explained.
He seemed surprised, but relaxed a little.
“Oh, that David? He – he told you about that?”
“Like I said. We’re close.”
Rani swallowed, his fleshy throat bobbing in a walrus-like manner.
“He warned me not to tell anyone, under any circumstances.”
So Rani did know where he was.
“David didn’t realize I was going to show up.”
He eyed her warily. “Look, assuming I knew how to get in touch with him…let’s say I could call him or something. Who would I say was asking for him?”
She debated forcing him into the car, but thought better of it. Perhaps a little gentle persuasion would be more effective. She could always use more drastic methods later if he didn’t cooperate.
“Tell him ‘his angel’ is looking for him. Describe me to him.” She debated saying more, but decided against it. “I’ll see you later, Rani – have an answer for me when I do. I’d hate for this to deteriorate into something unpleasant, but it will if you don’t tell me where to find him. You have one hour.”
He nodded, beads of sweat beginning to form on his brow.
Jet turned and walked away, Rani staring at her as she left. He shook his head and muttered to himself, then felt in his jacket for his cell. He dialed a number then spoke in a hushed voice as he slowly approached his office.
Chapter 14
Terry Brandt swiveled his Herman Miller Aeron chair around and leaned back, rubbing his face with both hands before groaning softly and rising, his prosthetic leg making a small clicking sound as he did so. He needed to get it adjusted again, he decided as he surveyed the maudlin decorations of his office. The linoleum under his feet popped in the loose spot that always annoyed him, and he made his one thousandth mental note to have it repaired, then scooped up a folder on his desk and pulled his tie tight before setting off for the meeting room.
9 More Killer Thrillers Page 11