by Allan Topol
Now Moreau began silently to count. If the director's tirade didn't stop by the time he reached twenty, he would turn in his badge and gun and seek a job in industry as a private security chief in some big company, where he'd make a lot more money.
Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen...
The director stopped. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's more than losing our only witness. I hate the idea of the Israelis operating freely on French soil. The Jews should stay in their own country, where they belong. All of them. Let them fight their battles with the Arabs somewhere else."
"I couldn't agree more," Moreau said.
"All right. Let's get down to business."
"How certain are you that this Jack Cole, with an American passport, is operating as a Mossad agent?"
Moreau had explained this to the director before he had gone to Montreal. Wasn't the asshole paying attention? He hated wasting time repeating it again. "In Jean Pierre's interrogation, all he said about the man who recruited him was that he was in the wine business. Someone who spoke French with what he thought was an American accent. Before I went to Montreal I searched every trade list of people in the wine business at the time. Jack Cole is not only the best candidate; he's the only one. Is that clear enough?"
"But now you're back to square one."
"Not quite. I've been busy since I got back."
The director leaned forward in his chair and put his elbows on the desk with anticipation. "Really, what do you have now?"
"Remember the explosion of Khalifa's car in Marseilles?"
The director's face lit up. "Yeah."
"I checked flight manifests in and out of Marseilles around the time. Jack Cole flew down from Paris a week before the incident. He returned home hours after it happened."
"That's pretty good work," the director said grudgingly. "Where do you go from here?"
"Back to Marseilles to try to find a witness who can testify against Jack Cole."
Chapter 15
Michael Hanley and Vladimir Perikov flew from Moscow to Volgograd on Volga Airlines in a plane scheduled to leave at 6:15 a.m., that took off four and a half hours late with no explanation. It was an old Russian plane, a discard from Aeroflot, that was filled to capacity. They separated to avoid having someone who recognized the famous physicist report that he was traveling with an American.
Perikov was in the second row during the choppy flight, while Michael was in the rear of the plane, sandwiched in a narrow seat between a wizened old Russian man with garlicky breath who kept taking slugs from a bottle of vodka, and a woman with two small, red-faced, runny-nosed children. They cried the whole way, while she alternated between slapping them and feeding them bread smeared with a greasy coating that looked to Michael as if it were a combination of butter and lard.
Midway through the flight the plane, buffeted by strong winds, lurched and dropped without any warning through several thousand feet before the pilot regained control. Everyone in the plane was terrified. Some gasped. Others cried out in panic. Was this it? The end?
The pilot managed to get the tired old plane under control.
At the airport they rented separate cars. Anyone watching them would have no idea they were together. Driving through Volgograd, Michael looked up at the sword-wielding statue of Mother Russia, seventy-two meters tall, that dominated the landscape, a memorial to those who died in the battle of Stalingrad, one of the most decisive of the Great Patriotic War, where the Germans lost 350,000 soldiers. But Stalin fell out of favor, and, like many other places in Russia, the city had been renamed.
For nearly an hour Michael followed Perikov along a winding road that skirted the Volga River. Dodging the huge potholes was a challenge. It was late afternoon, though still daylight, when they reached the remains of what had been a plant to manufacture farm machinery, operated by the government during the Communist regime, on the edge of a small factory town. The company had been privatized with the advent of capitalism. It operated three years in that mode until corruption and theft forced it into bankruptcy, to the chagrin of the American investment bank that had put up millions to back the purchasers in the expectation of reaping a huge windfall from the new Russia. The last tractor had been made four years ago. Since then the plant sat rotting and decaying at one end of the town, whose inhabitants suddenly found themselves without their main source of employment. Not surprisingly, the sale of vodka became the town's leading business, while the more ambitious young people drifted away to larger cities in the north.
A light rain, a damp, dreary mist, was falling from a foggy sky when Perikov came to a stop at what had been the front entrance to the factory. The lock on the gate of a rusty chain-link fence had been broken months ago by thieves who ransacked the old plant for items that had value on the open market. While Perikov got out and kicked open the gate, Michael looked around. The fence had numerous holes that someone had made with wire cutters.
Back in his car Perikov turned right, passing through the gate and into the plant grounds. Behind him Michael glanced in the rearview mirror to make certain no one was tailing them. Driving slowly on the road, which was slick with water and oil, he followed Perikov into the grounds of the deserted factory.
They drove past two cannibalized plant buildings to a brown wooden shed roughly the size of an airplane hangar. Michael recognized the Russian word for warehouse painted on the side in letters that had once been white, but were now a faded and peeling gray.
There was a single guard in front of the locked main entrance—an old Russian soldier who sat on a stack of pallets with a rifle on the ground leaning against the warehouse. He had a stubble of a gray beard, and the dark green coat that covered his uniform was stained with mud. To Michael, staring through the open car window, he seemed to be of some indeterminate age north of fifty. It wouldn't have surprised Michael if he had fought against Hitler in the battle for Stalingrad. Though he was facing the two cars that were parking close to him, he didn't react. His eyes had a dead, glazed look.
Michael got out of his car and stood next to it, while Perikov approached the soldier, carrying his briefcase. Straining his ears, Michael listened for any signs of life. All he heard was the cawing of a bird. He walked in the direction of the sounds, through mud laced with chemicals that created a sheen, while cursing his stupidity for not wearing a pair of heavy boots.
Twenty yards away, around the corner of the warehouse, he saw about a hundred drums of waste chemicals scattered about, rusty and leaking onto the ground. A bird had apparently landed on one of these drums. Its tiny legs sank into sticky goo from which it couldn't extricate itself.
Michael walked over and gently lifted the bird from the top of the drum. It made an effort to fly, feverishly beating its tiny wings for about ten yards until it collapsed and fell pitifully to the ground, landing on a rock. By the time Michael reached the bird, it was dead.
When he returned to the front of the warehouse, he saw Vladimir handing the guard a fistful of rubles and a quart of vodka, which he had been carrying in his briefcase. The old soldier stood up with an effort, extracted a ring of keys from his pocket, and unlocked the rusty padlock on the door to the warehouse.
Perikov waved to Michael to accompany him through the door, while the guard retreated to his seat on the pallets and unscrewed the top of the vodka bottle.
"What's his story?" Michael asked Perikov.
"Boris is his name. The government hired him about a year ago to guard the warehouse. They haven't paid his salary in four months, but they keep promising. I gave him one month's salary and a bottle of vodka. He doesn't care what we do in here or what we take."
Michael shook his head in disbelief. "You're not serious."
"Unfortunately, I am. Until a month ago, there were twelve soldiers assigned to this location, but right now he's it."
Michael was stunned. "My God, this can't be real. What happened to the others?"
"Someone came and paid them off to disappear."
"One of Suslov's people?"
"Probably. Anyhow, Boris was visiting his sister about twenty miles away at the time. Otherwise he'd have taken the money as well. Then there wouldn't be anyone here."
The warehouse was dark inside. Perikov groped around on the wall until he found a light switch.
"Holy shit," Michael blurted out once the lights came on. To his amazement and horror, he saw that the warehouse was filled with nuclear weapons and delivery systems. There were long-range and intermediate missiles, row after row, menacing-looking long black tubes. There were piles and piles of tactical nukes, short-range weapons such as torpedoes, depth charges, artillery shells, and mines.
Perikov wasn't surprised. He had known what they would find. He led Michael on a tour of the warehouse, pointing out in detail what was there. They had been brought here from several locations in the former USSR.
"I may never sleep again," Michael muttered under his breath.
"If you want to feel even worse, then I'll tell you that there was never any inventory prepared of what was placed in this building."
Michael stopped to rub his hand along a slick black warhead. "Which means that some items could already have disappeared, or..." He was thinking aloud. "Dmitri Suslov could come here and easily remove any of these toys he arranged to sell."
Perikov snorted. "Sounds to me like you don't have a lot of respect for Boris."
"That isn't funny."
"It wasn't meant to be."
They spent almost an hour inside the building. On a pad Perikov had in his briefcase, he made a list of the weapons he could identify. Michael followed along making his own copy, writing down the items Perikov called out and taking pictures with a small digital camera. He planned to report directly to Joyner as soon as he got back to Moscow and a secure phone at the American Embassy. Later he would transmit a report and the photographs.
When they were finished, Perikov turned out the lights and they exited together. Neither of them was surprised by the sight that was awaiting them. Boris was lying on the ground passed out. The empty vodka bottle was next to one of his hands.
Perikov shut the door to the warehouse. He closed the padlock, then dropped the keys next to Boris's body on the way to the car.
"Can you get someone on your staff down here?" Michael said to Perikov. "A man you trust who can pretend he's a tourist in Volgograd? Have him keep his eye on this building and let you know if anything moves out of here."
"I'll take care of it.... You figure that Suslov's next shipment might be coming out of this warehouse?"
Michael thought about what Irina had told him at the Inn. "I know it, and I sure as hell had better find a way to stop that from happening."
Chapter 16
Jack finished reading the Mossad file on Major General Nadim and closed his eyes. From the other side of the living room in Jack's Paris apartment with its high ceilings and huge windows, which opened to the narrow street below, Avi sipped a glass of Jack's 1945 Chateau de Laubade and puffed on a Partagas from Jack's humidor.
"Well, what do you think?" Avi asked. It was the ultimate rhetorical question.
Jack looked down at the photo of Nadim that Avi had clipped to the inside cover of the folder. "He's a piece of work. Kills people by day. A womanizer and a high liver at night. Charming."
"That's an understatement. Now that you've read the profile, does that put our visit to Syria in perspective?"
"Like the target on a rifle scope."
"The question is, How do we get close to Nadim?"
Jack looked down into the glass of Armagnac on the table in front of him. "There's the answer," he said, pointing to the glass.
"Sorry. That's a little too cryptic for me."
"The profile says he's a connoisseur of wine; that he's a regular at the top Paris restaurants. Before all of this arose I accepted an invitation for tomorrow evening to a dinner with a vertical tasting of Latour that the owner of the chateau is giving at L'Ambroise. It's a tough ticket to get."
Avi puffed on his cigar, wondering where Jack was going with this.
"Anyhow, I'm good friends with Hubert, the manager of the chateau. Suppose he was willing to send an invitation to Nadim, claiming he had a last-minute cancellation?"
Between puffs, Avi said, "Then what?"
"At the dinner I'll be able to approach Nadim casually. I'll introduce myself as an American. Maybe he'll think that I'm with the CIA, and the wine business is a cover. Who knows where it'll lead, but it may be a way for me to get started with Nadim."
Avi saw the intensity in Jack's face. "Okay, let's give it a try."
Jack was on a roll. "I'll not only get an invitation for Nadim, but I'll fix it so he can bring a guest. Getting close to the woman with Nadim may be another way of moving up on him."
Jack's enthusiasm had lit a fire under Avi. "While you're doing that, I'll go see Yudi, one of Moshe's people working out of the embassy in Paris. He owes me a favor. I'll ask him to begin monitoring airplane reservations and manifests in and out of Paris. If our friend Nadim decides to take any sudden trips, I want to know about it."
"What are you looking for?"
Avi shrugged. "I have no idea, but I'll know it when I see it."
"You're very good at this intelligence work," Jack said in admiration.
"Thanks."
"So what happened with you and Moshe last year, if you don't mind my asking?"
Avi put the cigar down in an ashtray and drained the rest of the amber liquid in his glass. "I'm happy to talk about it. He forced me out."
"Because of Aqaba."
Avi nodded. "It was a total fuckup. We had good info, or so we thought, that the San Remo sitting in the Jordanian port had arms for Hamas terrorists. We were told, also on supposed good info, that the Jordanian government preferred to have us destroy the ship rather than confiscate the arms and have a public brouhaha. Moshe told me to do the job, but it was to be off the books... in case it went south on us."
Jack remembered Moshe using the same expression when he authorized Jack to undertake the Khalifa assassination.
Avi continued. "So I blew up the San Remo. When it turned out to be loaded with nothing but steel for construction, the Jordanians screamed bloody murder. To placate the prime minister and the public, Moshe made it look like I was flying solo. I took the hit. Firing me was what it took to placate the Jordanians and our own politicians. Nice, isn't it?"
Jack was appalled. "That stinks."
Avi was seething as he thought about the session with Moshe when the director had told him he'd have to clean out his desk. "I know it's a part of the business, but I don't have to like it. I also don't like the double standard Moshe has applied over the years."
Jack had no idea what Avi was talking about. "What double standard?"
"The three girls he recruited, Leora, Yael, and Sagit, could get away with anything. Falling in love with Americans. Going to bed with targets. Getting pregnant. And he always forgave them. For the rest of us, bam, one mistake and you're out." Avi made no effort to conceal the bitterness in his voice.
* * *
The next morning Jack made the call to Hubert, told the Frenchman what he wanted, and held his breath.
"Impossible," Hubert said with the tone of finality that French people use when they don't want to do something that they are perfectly able to do. "The invitation list has been set for weeks. L'Ambroise can't hold one more person. It's quite impossible." He paused and cursed under his breath. "This is what you call me on my cell phone about in the middle of breakfast?"
Jack wasn't deterred. "If you're worried about space at the restaurant, I'll call Monsieur Pierre, the sommelier. He and I are good friends."
"I am in charge of the invitations," Hubert said, making clear it was his decision alone.
"Have I ever asked you for a favor before?" Jack was talking in the most plaintive French he could manage. He visualized the roly-poly Hubert next to the breakfast table in his hotel suite in
the Crillon with a huge basket of pastries in front of him, butter and orange marmalade lavishly spread on a croissant ready to be savored. "When you told me I had to take a full quantity of the 'eighty-four to get the 'eighty-five, did I argue? In fact, every time you have a less than perfect year, I take a full supply."
Hubert chuckled. "Ah, you Americans. You're always trouble. Give me a name and address. I'll have an invitation delivered."
There was one more hurdle. Hubert didn't like foreigners—any foreigners—although he was willing to tolerate some Americans, like Jack Cole, and some Brits who had big money to buy his wines. Jack waded in slowly. "He's an important diplomat. A connoisseur of wine and food."
"Give me a name and address."
"Major General Nadim, Syrian Embassy, rue Vaneau in the Seventh."
"What, an Arab? I like the fucking Arabs about as much as the Jews."
"Your tact is admirable," Jack said sarcastically.
"Do you want to tell me why you're trying to suck up to this Arab?"
It was a tough question for Jack to answer without arousing suspicion. "We've been friends a long time, you and I, Hubert. I'm asking you to do it as a favor for me, no questions asked."
Jack heard a deep sigh of resignation at the other end of the phone that signaled Hubert's capitulation.
"Okay," the Frenchman finally said. "In return, you'd better come up with two tickets at center court for the men's finals in the French Open."
"They're yours. I'll even toss in the women's as well."
"No, make it the men's semis. The good-looking women never make it to the finals these days. If that Russian dish gets there, I'll be after you for the women's then, just to look at her. Otherwise it's the men's semis and finals."
Jack laughed. "It's a deal. And please, Nadim can't know I am responsible for the invitation."
"As you wish. Play whatever games you care to. That's not my affair."
Jack was relieved. "I can't thank you enough. I'm sure that Nadim and his guest will enjoy the tasting."