“Then, we are all in trouble. What could we know? Somebody bought something expensive from men who used to make nuclear bombs. Then he killed them all. Our guess is that it was bombs, but we don’t know where they are or who is the buyer. That’s it. That’s what we know,” Danny said, sitting down opposite Bowman.
“One of the men who died was killed here in Tel Aviv. Shin Beth must have taken that case apart by now,” Ray replied. “And the sellers were all men who had worked with Israel on developing missiles and bombs. You know them.”
Danny Avidar threw up his hands. “We knew them. That was when I was in diapers, twenty-five years ago or more. We had nothing to do with them since then. Don’t try to shmear this on us, Raymond. You want to talk to the boys in Shin Beth, that I can arrange. But you know those guys are not refined and cultured like my outfit. No Chardonnay at Shin Beth. Beer maybe, if they like you.”
Ray moved to the edge of the couch and placed the half-empty glass on the coffee table. “Danny, cut the shit. You just told me that this is the top priority investigation from the Prime Minister, that it is about the continued existence of Israel. So don’t tell me you don’t know all the details of the Shin Beth and police investigation of the death of Dawid Steyn, right here in Tel Aviv.”
“Blunt as ever. Are you sure you’re not a Jew? Maybe on your mother’s side somewhere? That way we could give you citizenship and recruit you into the Mossad.” As Bowman scowled at him, Danny Avidar sat back. “You I am authorized personally by the Prime Minister himself to tell everything to, but under four eyes. Not yet for Washington, the CIA, the FBI, the National Zoo Police.” He looked at Mbali, who had perched on a barstool and was watching the back and forth between these alleged friends with fascination. “With all due respect to my new South African friend, you I am not authorized to brief.”
Mbali did not move or say a word. She continued to look at Avidar.
Bowman cut the silence. “This is a joint investigation, Danny, between the U.S. and South Africa. She knows more about the Trustees than you ever will. So she’s in. If you need to call the PM to ask permission go right ahead. We’ll wait, but we are doing this together or not at all.”
Avidar sighed. “Then it must go no further than you, miss. No reporting back to Joburg or wherever. And you, my friend, Raymond, will have to explain this personally to the PM when we see him.”
“With pleasure. I haven’t seen him since the Syrian reactor briefing,” Ray said. “Now, you first. What have you got?”
“Less than we would like, more than we had a week ago,” Danny started. “Dawid Steyn was murdered, of that there is no doubt. Pushed off the platform at the Haganah Station. We have it on the videotape. Who did it? Mr. Nobody.
“Mr. Nobody with a hat pulled low. He wore thick glasses. He had a mustache and light beard. He had a nose like an eagle. And all of that, the hat, the glasses, the facial hair, the nose, the police found in a dumpster three blocks away. So what use is the picture?”
Ray brightened. “Great, so you have his DNA, the assassin’s?”
“We do. This we now know. He was a man. He was white. His ancestors came from what was Poland or Russia. He is likely a Jew and he has a better-than-average chance of getting macular degeneration in his seventies or eighties, if he lives that long,” Danny said from memory. “Did we have that DNA on file? No. Does it help us at all that we have it now? A little, not much. Not yet.”
“And the place where he bought the kit?” Mbali asked.
“Actually, we thought of that,” Danny replied, looking at her. “Not in Israel is our conclusion, not even the hat. But it’s all stuff you could get all over Europe, even in the States some of it. No lot numbers. Now, it’s your turn, miss. Tell me something about the Trustees I don’t already know.”
Mbali poured herself another glass of the Yarden. “You know of course that Dawid Steyn became a Trustee upon the death of his father, of natural causes here in Tel Aviv two years ago. He quit his job and managed his share of the Trustee funds full time from his office downtown.”
“All this we know, of course,” Danny replied.
Mbali continued. “He attended eight meetings of the Trustees. We can give you the dates and locations. But he also met twice in Vienna with the late Karl Potgeiter and his son Johann.”
Bowman raised his eyebrows. This was all news to him.
“He is succeeded by his wife, Rachel, the first woman on the Trustees. She continues to live in Herzliya, but no longer works at Google,” she said. “I want to talk to her.”
“That last part we knew,” Danny mumbled. “Rachel we are listening to, watching, very closely. There is nothing to indicate that she knows anything. Shin Beth talked to her. She admitted to being a Trustee now. Says it’s secret but, it’s just an international charity, says she had never seen the books before her husband died, doesn’t know why there was a big deposit in the accounts in Cyprus and Dubai earlier this year. But when she sneezes, we know.”
Mbali continued her account. “What Dawid Steyn’s father, Jacob, had worked on for the Apartheid regime at the Circle lab was the nuclear triggering mechanics in the missile warhead. His Israeli counterpart was the nuclear weapon designer Avraham Reuven.” She stopped to get a reaction.
Danny Avidar looked at Ray Bowman. “You’re right. She knows her stuff, this woman.” He smiled and looked at Mbali. “But here we are getting into sensitive areas for us. We must tread lightly on that bad bit of history where we and the whites in Joburg did things together, It was a different era, the Cold War. We needed each other. Maybe we made mistakes then, but it is history.”
“‘Maybe’?” Mbali asked.
“All right, we shouldn’t have done some of what we did, but that was then and this is now,” Danny said, punching the air with his hand for emphasis. “We cannot help each other as much as we need to now if there is any risk of us getting blamed again for what happened then or if it means people talking about our alleged nuclear weapons, which we may or may not have, and drawing connections between our alleged weapons and the loose nukes that might be out there.”
Mbali walked toward Avidar. “Nor do we want to draw attention to the fact that somehow we missed the fact that South Africa produced more nuclear weapons than the whites admitted to, if that turns out to be true. Both of our governments have a shared interest in finding these bombs before anything happens, destroying them and then making sure no one ever knows any of this happened. Agreed?” She thrust out her hand to shake.
“Zeman,” Avidar said. “Agreed.”
“Lovely, you have a deal. Great. Everybody’s learning things. Can we get to work now?” Bowman said, standing up. “We want to go see Avraham Reuven.”
“Always sarcastic you are. This Reuven, he’s still alive?” Danny asked.
“Alive and living in the hills above the Galilee,” Bowman replied. “In Livnim. And I want to talk to him.”
Danny Avidar shrugged. “All right. You, miss, we will have someone take you tomorrow to see Rachel Steyn in Herzliya. I don’t need to go with you, I will hear the whole conversation anyway.” He turned to Bowman. “Raymond and I will go visit an eighty-one-year-old man on the hill of the Beatitudes and try not to interrogate him so hard he has a heart attack.”
“Beatitudes?” Bowman asked.
“Heathen,” Avidar replied. “You know, like ‘Blessed are the Cheeze Markers.’”
As Ray Bowman wondered at that, his iPad beeped.
14
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23
FREEPORT, GRAND BAHAMA ISLAND
THE BAHAMAS
Because of the direction of the wind and the helicopters’ low altitude, the crew of the MV Indira had not heard the motor of the Customs and Border Protection Black Hawk until about the same time that its xenon light cut the dark and lit the conning tower of the freighter brighter than a tropical sun ever had. Simultaneously, Law Enforcement Detachment fast-roped down from a Coast Guard Black Hawk onto the darkened
stern of the ship.
The Law Enforcement Detachment of Coasties, carrying M4 automatic weapons, moved quickly past the containers stacked on the deck and up to the helmsman. They arrived before the ship’s captain managed to come up from his state room. There was no resistance.
Twenty minutes later the Fast Response Cutter Margaret Norvell bounced through the waves at twenty-eight knots, flashing red-and-blue lights like a police cruiser. A second LEDAT and ship handlers from Norvell boarded the Indira and turned the freighter east, toward the Bahamas.
By late morning, the freighter was being off loaded in the state-of-the-art container terminal at Freeport, where thousands of containers were switched from ship to ship every day. The immense crane towering over the Indira took the containers off the deck and piled them three high in an open area in the dockyard.
Dugout landed at Freeport just after noon, aboard Coast Guard One, a Gulfstream executive jet that he was surprised to learn was based in a hangar at National Airport fifteen minutes from his office in Foggy Bottom. He was accompanied by a Coast Guard Admiral and a senior uniformed officer from Customs and Border Protection. They had pressed him on the flight down, trying to find out why the White House had been so concerned about the MV Indira. He said only that there had been a tip that it might have radioactive materials on board.
As they pulled into the huge dockyard, they were met by another U.S. CBP officer, George Martinez, one who was stationed in Freeport. “We got your suspect cargo all quarantined off over there and Blue Man is standing by to scan it. We put your cargo ahead of everything else we plan to scan today. Just need your go ahead.”
Blue Man looked like a robot from Star Wars. On eight wheels, each taller than a person, the device towered 120 feet above the dock. On top, a driver sat in a small compartment, looking down at them. Unlike the even larger cranes throughout the port area, Blue Man did not lift containers, it rode over stacks of them. The space between its two towers was slightly wider than a container and as it slowly straddled the steel shipping boxes, Blue Man shot X-ray, gamma ray, and neutron flux beams from its right tower, through the containers, to receivers on the left tower.
“What if the material in the container is shielded, like with lead?” Dugout asked the CBP man, Martinez.
“Doesn’t matter,” Martinez replied proudly. “We can still usually detect. If not, at least we will know there is shielding and that is a tip to open the container. With Blue Man we can do hundreds of containers a day, without ever having to open them, swab them, or use our Geiger counters.”
It took twenty minutes for Blue Man to creep over the long row of containers, three high. When the wheeled tower reached the end of the line of containers, Martinez checked with Blue Man’s operator on a walkie-talkie. “Got a hit on one container. The one from Maputo. Naturally it’s the one on the bottom. We’ll pull it out and pop it open, once we get our guys into their space suits, just as a precaution.”
The one from Maputo was the container that the Minerva program had flagged. Now, Blue Man was also flagging it. Dug felt his pulse accelerate. As they waited, Dugout asked Martinez what he had wanted to know for the preceding hour. “Isn’t the Bahamas like a country of its own now? How is it you guys run around in uniform with guns and badges, and giant robots like this was the U.S.?”
“Our Coast Guard protects their waters. We in CBP do preclearance of cargoes here so when they show up in the States they don’t have to wait around. It’s a lot faster for shippers. This port is all automated. It goes quick here. It makes money for Freeport and it creates a lot of jobs here.”
“And they let us divert cargoes here that might have like nuclear bombs in them so that our giant robot detector thingee can find them here rather than in Miami? What if it goes off here?” Dugout asked. “Doesn’t the Bahamas mind being our nuclear detonation area?”
“If we ever find a nuclear weapon or an improvised nuclear device, a dirty bomb, we secure the area and call in Delta Force from North Carolina. They can be here in under three hours. They’re trained in what to do to render the weapon safe. We aren’t,” Martinez explained. “So far, hasn’t happened. Maybe we’ll get lucky with your tip today.”
Dugout watched through binoculars as a team of four CBP agents in chem-bio-radiation suits with oxygen masks, broke the seal and the lock on the suspect container and swung the door open. Two of the agents, carrying lights and handheld detection gear went inside the container. Almost immediately there was chatter on the walkie-talkie, but Dugout couldn’t understand what was being said.
“Red granite, pretty rare,” Martinez said to the three men from Washington.
“Huh?” Dugout asked.
“It’s a container of red granite from Africa. Granite almost always sends off the alarms. Most people don’t know their countertops are slightly radioactive. Anyway, false alarm. We get them a lot.”
The Coast Guard Admiral and the CBP man from Washington both looked at Dugout, silently. They could have been golfing or doing a dozen other things on a Sunday.
Dugout didn’t want to give up. “You do hundreds of containers a day with this Blue Man. What percent of containers entering the U.S. are scanned with Blue Men before they arrive?”
Martinez smiled with pride, “This is the only operational Blue Man in the world. We get less than one percent of the containers going in to the U.S. to scan here in the Bahamas. Most just sail right in to Newark or Norfolk, Miami, Seattle, LA Long Beach. Scary, huh? You guys want to hit the casino for lunch before you fly back?”
CLOCK HOTEL
JAFFA/TEL AVIV, ISRAEL
Danny Avidar walked into the little gym carrying a bouquet of flowers. Mbali Hlanganani stopped running on the treadmill in astonishment. “For me?” she asked.
“I didn’t feel that we welcomed you appropriately on your first trip to the Holy Land,” he said. “The girl at the front desk said you were down here, working out.”
“That’s so nice of you. I must say your hospitality has been superb,” she said, stepping off the machine and grabbing a towel and water bottle. “I look forward to working with you.”
“Well, that’s the thing. We haven’t worked closely with your service before,” he shrugged. “I guess because we had been close to the anciene regime, but that was when I was a young man, when I was just a recruit in the paratroopers.”
“And when I was still in school,” she added. “I don’t blame you, I don’t blame Israel, for all of this. It was, after all, South Africans who made these bombs and, I am pretty sure, South Africans who just sold them.”
“True, but Israel helped the Apartheid government with its defense and intelligence needs. In some ways they helped Israel. It is not something we are proud of,” he said and opened a water bottle for himself. “Of all peoples, we should not have supported Apartheid and we didn’t, but we did support the government, against the Communists, but nonetheless.”
“Danny, may I call you Danny?” she asked. “Let us put it behind us. We face a common challenge. These people, whoever they are, who have the warheads now, they could use them against either of our countries, we don’t know which one is the target. We have to work together.”
“The Americans think it’s al Qaeda and they are going to bomb New York and Washington again,” Danny Avidar observed.
“The Americans always think it’s about them,” Mbali said.
“And they always think they can solve the problem with money and technology,” Avidar added.
“This time it’s going to take more than that, and less,” she agreed. “It’s about people, getting to the right people, and getting them to reveal what they know.”
“I promise you, Miss Mbali, I will tell you everything I learn about this case as we develop it, if you will do the same with me,” Avidar said, offering his hand to shake.
“Then, Danny, we have an intelligence partnership of our own.”
15
MONDAY, OCTOBER 24
LIVNIM,
GALILEE
ISRAEL
“Call it Lake Kinneret. That’s its name,” Avraham Reuven scolded.
“I told you Mr. Avidar, my father is sometimes not good with guests. His mind, well, it wanders.” Benjamin Reuven looked to be in his fifties. He had explained that he lived on the nearby kibbutz Hokuk, where he ran a specialty plastics factory. He came into town almost every day to see that his father was all right.
The kibbutz had not been “comfortable” enough for Avraham. To be near his son and his grandchildren on the kibbutz, Avraham had moved to a villa in nearby Livnim, complete with a pool and a great view of the Sea of Galilee. Now, the grandchildren were at university in America, but he didn’t mind, Avraham said. “This view from this restaurant is like the view from my house down the street. I love it. Lake Kinneret.”
They sat outdoors at the Roburg, the gourmet restaurant in Livnim, the Sea of Galilee glistening in the near distance. “Lake Tiberias, the Romans called it, after their perverted emperor, but it’s Kinneret in the Torah, not Galilee. The Galilee is the region,” Avraham insisted.
“We came to talk about South Africa,” Danny Avidar began.
“Operation Peace for Galilee, that’s what they called it when they invaded Lebanon the last time,” the elder Avraham went on. “A piece of the Galilee for the Army, but peace for Galilee didn’t happen, of course. No peace. Peace in Galilee, that would be a real miracle.”
“Dad, Mr. Avidar wants you to remember about your time in South Africa,” the son tried. “He’s from the Mossad, high up.”
“The Christians think miracles occurred in the Galilee, of course. Over there in Capernaum. Down the road in Cana. That was a good one, the one in Cana. They claim a Jew made water into wine there, in Cana, not just wine but high-quality wine. No high-quality wine in Cana now,” Reuven Avraham said looking at Bowman. “Not bad here though, at Roburg’s.” He sipped his glass of dark red wine.
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