by Glen Craney
He shook his head. “I’m afraid he has a little higher pay grade than Lucky Luciano.”
“I’m not following.”
“Mossad.”
Her eyes flared. “Israeli intelligence? But why would … ?” She rested her head against the pillow and let her words trail off. She felt the thick bandage around her temple.
“Right. You suffered some hearing trauma in your left ear. I would guess from a close-range gunshot. But you should be out of here as soon as they run a few more tests.”
Her memory was slowly coming back. “You said the man’s name was?
“Isserle.” This time, his smile seemed odd. “But it’s a bit more complicated than that. Avram Isserle was born Joshua Silver in Brooklyn, the son of a secular Jewish doctor who was even less, shall we say, religious. When Silver turned sixteen, he launched into a rebellion, I guess you’d call it. He changed his name, turned Orthodox and, more or less, fled to Israel, as if, for some odd reason, to escape his well-heeled upbringing.” He looked down at his finely manicured fingers again. “Next thing you know, he joins the IDF and is recruited by Mossad.”
“You’re saying Mossad was out to kill me?”
He patted her hand to calm her. “Nothing of the kind. Isserle is a highly trained killer. He doesn’t waste his time on small-time break-ins. Frankly, my sources at the CIA tell me they don’t know what he might have been after.”
“When I let him into the apartment, he put some kind of jump drive into my computer.”
Looking troubled by that bit of news, he thought for a moment. “That would certainly explain taking you to Queens. The police found you not too far from a known Mossad safe house in Forest Hills. Well, it’s known to some people.” His rheumy blue eyes twinkled, and he waved his hand in the air as if to try to dismiss any information he was about to put out there. “Nobody wants to talk about Israeli spies tramping around American soil.” He leaned back in the chair and reclaimed his serious look. “My guess is that Isserle was using some sort of high-tech gizmo that connected your machine to a computer in Queens. He was probably planning to take you there while he had all of your data processed and ‘go over’ it with you.” He flicked his fingers in quotation marks.
“He also asked me about Star—”
Brady put his palms up to stop her from uttering the classified name.
Reminded of her nondisclosure agreement with NASA, she nodded, and suddenly it came to her. She glanced at the door, then lowered her voice. “He must have known something about the top-secret space project I worked on.”
“But you told him nothing, right?”
Truth was, she didn’t really know much at all about the classified NASA project, having spent only a couple of months among the hundred and fifty hand-picked scientists selected to work on the Stardust program. “I couldn’t tell him anything, even if I had wanted to,” she said, ruefully, “I was too busy trying to tear him apart.” She relived those tense few seconds, then remembered more of what had happened. “This man, though, this Joshua, Avram Isserle guy, or whatever his name is … he warned me that some maniac was out to get me.”
He looked skeptical. “Maniac? There’s a lot of those in his business. Did he happen to tell you whichmaniac, by any chance?” he asked, chuckling. “We have such a shortage of them, particularly here in New York.”
She rubbed her head, trying to squeeze out another memory. “He said a name. Cas something. Fell … Feld—”
“Not Fielding?”
“Maybe.”
He groaned. “This explains everything.”
She blinked, baffled. “Maybe to you it does.”
Shaking his chin ruefully, he explained, “Isserle has apparently gone flat-out bonkers. Now he’s running from ghosts. It’s an all-too-common symptom suffered by operatives. They develop paranoia from the stress. Sad, really.”
“But why would this Isserle guy choose me to warn?”
He tapped his fingers aimlessly on the bed railing. “He must have mistaken you for some hallucinated femme fatale in his past cast of underworld enemies. These guys troll campuses looking for recruits. He may have seen you around, and some disjointed synapse fired in his head. He’s really much too young to go to seed mentally, but it happens.”
“He seemed coldly sane to me.”
“Of course he did. But believe me, this has all the classic symptoms of a mental breakdown. He’s definitely got some marbles lose.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“The only Cas I know ever in the snoop business was a guy named Fielding. But he was captured and killed by the Saudis over a decade ago. They don’t publicize this sort of thing in the newspapers, for obvious reasons. I attended a posthumous ceremony in his honor at the Pentagon at the time. Isserle would definitely have known of Fielding’s death. The only sensible explanation is that Isserle has slipped into some sort of delusional fog. … Of course, I don’t need to tell you how confidential all of this is, Marly.”
She nodded to reassure him that she’d keep his trust. “What did this Fielding do that would make a man like Isserle hallucinate that he was after him?”
“Fielding had been an operative for us in the Middle East, until the Saudis swooped in and exposed his mission. He probably had a couple of unpleasant run-ins with Isserle. You know, stepping on toes, crossing territories and unwritten boundaries. Mossad isn’t exactly a fan of our DIA boys. The Israelis have closer ties with the CIA. It’s all one big frat-house testosterone fight.
“Sounds like an academic committee.”
He nodded, enjoying a chuckle. “Fielding went by a different name back then. Can’t remember it. But he’s as dead as the Sphinx now, so you can relax. Isserle’s obviously gone over the bend if he’s breaking into the homes of American citizens and claiming that Fielding is after them. I’ll tell Langley to advise our friends in Tel Aviv that they’ve got a sleepwalker on the loose around town here. They’ll pick him up soon enough.” He looked inward and enjoyed another private chuckle.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“Sorry, but I was just thinking about Fielding. I met him only a couple of times. As nuts as he now is, Isserle pegged him pretty accurately. I guess it takes one to know one. Certifiably insane. Loose cannon. A cold-blooded killer.” He pressed a hand to her palm to say goodbye. “You get some rest. I promise that Isserle will never step within a mile of you again.”
She smiled, and felt the throbbing pain return.
As Dr. Brady walked from the room, he tried to cheer her up with a last salvo, “Lindsey strikes again!”
She laughed, despite the pain in her ribs, and waved him out of the room.
A little private joke between two academic colleagues. They shared a professorial crush on Dennis Lindsey, their favorite chaos theorist. Most people would have seen some nefarious conspiracy in such a bizarre kidnapping so out of the blue. But she took comfort in the knowledge that two objects could easily collide randomly in orbit without there being any intelligent design behind the meeting. This Isserle fellow had simply gone off course, flying around the nucleus of his own paranoia. And she, unfortunately, had been the nearest proton in his path.
* * *
CHAPTER TEN
Manhattan, New York
THE IRANIAN-AMERICAN WAITER SAUNTERED over to the back booth in Tom’s Restaurant and angled the front pocket of his pants at Marly. “You’ve been away for a couple of days, Rock Lady. Fall off a cliff reaching for that stone just out of reach?”
Marly turned the left side of her head away from him, trying to hide the bruises from her run-in with the Mossad loon. “I had a little accident in my apartment. But I’m fine now, thank you.”
The waiter lifted his hand from his pocket and opened his fist to reveal what appeared to be a lump of asphalt. “This one is from Mars, Rock Lady.”
Marly sighed with exasperation as she looked up again from the article she was trying to read in the Journal of the Meteoritic Society
. Ever since word had gotten out that she ran a tidy little side business selling meteorite samples to schools and laboratories, the slackers who roosted at this student hangout constantly pestered her with offers for anything from chunks of concrete broken off the curb outside to chondrite shards that undergrad geology majors stole from the Schermerhorn lab. Six years of studying astronomy, astrophysics, geology, mineralogy, petrology, chemistry, metallurgy and biology—all to become known as the local street junkie for stone freaks.
“Very valuable.” He fondled the asphalt clod lovingly, as if it were the Hope Diamond. “But for you, I give a deal.”
She thought about pointing to the cotton ball in her battered ear and acting as if she couldn’t hear him, but she couldn’t just ignore her favorite waiter.
“Two hundred dollars. My brother sent this precious gem to me from Tehran. My ancestors prayed to it. They were Zoroastrian Fire Worshippers.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes.” Holding the asphalt cluster under the table, he rotated it like a craps player about to throw dice. “Your collection is incomplete without it.”
“That’s astounding,” she said.
The waiter’s eyes lit up. “This ancient jewel is indeed a rarity.”
“No, I mean it’s amazing that you’re descended from fire worshippers.”
He beamed with pride. “My family still tends a temple light in our village. The flame has remained burning for two thousand years.”
“Now that’s really hard to believe.”
He looked confused by her skepticism. “Why do you think so, Rock Lady?”
She aimed her mug at him. “Wouldn’t such an illustrious descendant of fire worshippers be able to keep my coffee warm?”
His sales pitch deflated, the waiter grinned at her cleverness. “I will return with a refill, and we will complete our transaction, no?”
“Next time, Ahmad. Right now, I’m late for school.”
She gathered up her books and threw them into her bag. Waving goodbye to the boys in the kitchen, she headed up Broadway toward Fairchild Hall, where her small, temporary office had, she suspected, been converted years ago from an old janitorial closet.
Tuesdays, she hated Tuesdays. That afternoon, she would have to endure another weekly glimpse into the Hell known as Advisor Hours. Part of the extortion demanded for her fellowship required her to counsel sniveling students on all manner of tragedies and emergencies, from missing menstrual periods to muggings in Riverside Park. She followed the drab wave of students through the arched columns of College Walk and climbed the steps past Low Library.
She entered Fairchild Hall. The third-floor hallway was lined with the usual queue of haggard-looking refugees from the dorms. She nodded glumly to them as she passed and glanced at the sign-in sheet on her door. The first name, Malachy Rubenstein, had been crossed out. Over it was written: Clark Kent.
Great. A smart-ass to start off the day.
She knew the drill. The jokester would ask her where to find the nearest source of Kryptonite—as if she had never heard that line at bars and cocktail parties a thousand times. As the new adjunct professor, she had learned that hazing wasn’t limited to the fraternities and sororities.
This time, she was determined to make an example of the jerk. If she let one student get the run on her, the sheep would quickly take over the barn. As part of her teaching degree, she had taken Psych 405, Motivation. Shame was the best method for handling these situations, she remembered from a lecture; it functioned as a kind of psychological inoculation against tomfoolery. And forced infantile regression worked wonders, too.
She threw open the door to her office. Without even looking inside, she screamed with insincere alarm, “Help! Oh, Superman, help!”
The students lined up against the wall outside her office traded perplexed glances. They clustered around the door, eager to see what was happening.
She waited at the threshold for this Clark Kent jackass to come out of her office. When he didn’t appear, she decided to end the juvenile joke before it had any chance of gaining traction. All she wanted now was to grab the prankster by his ear and yank him out of her space.
A voice from behind the portable chalkboard cried, “I need a phone booth!”
Okay, so it’s going to be like this. Turning his nonsense back on him, she went into a damsel-in-distress act. “Oh, no, Superman! There’s no phone booth! You’ll have to strip off all your clothes and slip into your cape right there!”
The other students buzzed with excitement and formed a tighter half circle around her. A few moments passed. Nothing happened.
She knew she had to call the comedian’s bluff; time to get to work. “You can come out now, young man. You have already forfeited your half-hour.”
A scruffy-looking guy in his early fifties stepped from her closet wearing only a black Speedo. He flexed his impressive biceps for the ogling students, who exploded in laughter.
Before she could recover from the shock, the intruder picked her up in his arms like a super-groom and carried her inside. He kicked the door behind him and yelled over his shoulder to the gawking students, “Don’t worry, Lois! Clark was called away on a breaking story! You’re in good hands now!”
She thrashed at the brute until he put her down in the seat behind her desk. Red-faced, she screamed at him, “What the hell!”
The man curled an infuriating smile of conquest. “Howdy.”
Mortified, she just glared at him.
The guy snapped the elastic band on his Speedo briefs and leaned against his elbows on her desk, his face only inches from her nose. “You must have climbed the affirmative-action ladder fast, getting a large office like this one.”
“Get your clothes on! Now!” She fished around in her rucksack for her cell phone. “I’m calling the campus police!”
The man seemed in no hurry to comply. “I’m not sure how that would look in the papers. Female professor orders man to strip, then calls the police when he obeys her.” He licked his lips. “I might have a lucrative sexual-harassment suit here.”
She cradled the phone. “Who are you?”
He looked around the office. “You wouldn’t happen to have a wet bar in this penthouse suite, would you?”
Her voice pitched higher. “I know karate!”
“Really? I thought kickboxing was the new fad. But then maybe you’re too old for that.” The guy settled into the chair across her desk and plopped up his feet. He began picking sand from his cracked toenails. “I’m told you know your way around a meteor. Or is it meteoroid? Or meteorite? I get confused.”
She picked up a stapler and threatened to nail the guy’s Achilles heel if he didn’t move his feet. “I make it very clear on my eBay seller site that I don’t accept local pickups for winning bids. You pay for the stones with Paypal. I ship them to a verified address. No exceptions.”
The lunatic reached into the rear of his Speedo and fished out a crumpled pack of Djarum 76-16 cigarettes and a rusty Zippo. He smacked out one of the unfiltered death sticks, lit up, and filled the room with a clove-scented cloud.
Marly was intrigued by the exotic packaging—of the cigarettes. Recovering her outrage, she insisted, “There’s no smoking in this building.”
“They’re Indonesian.”
“What?”
“The cigs. I saw you staring at them. At least, I thought it was the cigs you were staring at.” He took a long drag and blew another fragrant whiff at her. “College kids love these things. Forty-some bucks a carton.” He tapped ashes onto her desk and leaned back into his chair. “Marly McKinney. Short for Marlene. Your grandmother’s middle name. You were her favorite. She used to take you to Mammoth Cave to see the stalactites. Or is it stalagmites? I get those confused. Anyhow, that’s how you got so interested in getting your rocks off, so to speak. Then there was that little mine thing with your ex.”
“What is this? Some kind of demented This Is Your Life stunt?”
He
tapped more ashes and whisked them to the floor. “I’m sorry about that, seriously. But you should be proud.” His smile cemented his insanity. “Anyhoo, it’s no wonder the boys thought you were a little”—he twirled his index finger around his temple—”whoo-hoo. Guess they still do.”
She asked him again, this time slowly, as if trying to communicate with a child. “Who … are … you?”
He switched the cigarette to his left forefinger and thumb and reached out his right hand. “Cas Fielding.”
That name hit her like a blow between the eyes.
Wasn’t that the Middle Eastern agent that Paul Brady had said was dead?
Her mind raced, trying to make sense of what was happening. Mossad must have gotten word about Isserle’s meltdown and sent another goon to shut her up about the break-in and kidnapping. But why would they have him use a dead American agent’s name as an alias? Was every spy in the Israel intelligence brain-sotted?
She glared at the guy, this time resolving not to be taken away, even if she had to claw his eyes out. “You’ll have to kill me right here. With all those students outside as witnesses.”
“Take it easy, Lois. No one’s killing anybody. Superman’s the good guy.”
She glanced nervously at the door. “What do you want from me?”
He borrowed an emery board on her desk and began working on the cuticles around his toenails. “The IRS gave me your name.”
“Wrong acronym.”
“What?”
“I think you mean ‘DIA.’”
He blinked hard, unable to hide his surprise that she knew of his spook background. “I’m a civilian now. I work for a private headhunting firm.”
“Really? And after you find the heads, do you shrink them and hang them on your loincloth when you swing around the jungle?”
“Hey, that’s cute. I like your style. Anyway, it’s nothing that serious. These days, I get paid for cleaning up government messes.”
Forcing a smile to keep him occupied, she reached under her desk and rifled around in her purse. “Can I confide in you, Mr. Fielding?”