Last Instructions_A Thriller_Agent 10483

by Nir Hezroni

  “Tell me, do we know the IP addresses of the computers applicants use to complete our online forms?”

  “Of course. It’s one of several checks we run on the forms, to make sure they come from legitimate places, and we save the information with the metadata of the application. Do you have the application’s serial number?”

  “Yes,” Maya said, and she promptly read out a long number to him. Alex entered the serial number into an admin application and added the IP address he found to the Notepad document that was still open on Avner’s computer. He then logged into the Organization’s Intranet and entered the IP address he had just recorded. It took just a few seconds for a street address to pop up: HaHarzit Street, Savyon.

  “This form was filled out near where the photo was taken. In the same place,” Alex said. “Or someone could have doctored the image file and planted the location. That’s also a possibility.”

  Avner stood up. “We need to go there now,” he said. “He may have bought or rented the house there and could be keeping them there in the basement.”

  “It could be a trap,” Rotem responded, getting to her feet.

  “We’ll take two teams from Operations and approach with caution. We’ve got no choice. They could be down there now with their time running out. If he wants to do all he has planned for the first of January, he may want to kill them first then so they don’t interfere with his plans. Call Rafael and tell him to bring his team, and I’ll speak to Grandpa and ask him to give us another team from Operations.”

  I slide the tip of my finger across my iPhone screen and unlock the device with a 4-digit code. I look at the 2 shortcuts I’ve defined in the Safari browser.

  203 Ibn Gvirol Street Blast

  McLean Blast

  I slowly move my finger toward to the McLean Blast label, touch it gently, and turn on the television, selecting CNN. Nothing out of the ordinary transpires on the news for the 1st 2 minutes or so, and the sports reporter continues to question some NBA player about his 3-point shooting average. But then the interview is interrupted and the transmission switches to the newsroom, with an anchor behind the desk. He appears to be on edge and flustered. “We have a special newsflash for you from Washington,” he says. “It appears, according to reports that have just come in, that there’s been a major explosion in the Washington, D.C., area. I’m about to go to our camera in Washington; but please note, we will be airing unedited and graphic footage and some of the images may be harsh and offensive.”

  The newsroom is replaced by a somewhat shaky shot of a huge mushroom cloud. The voice of the reporter next to the camera can be heard in the background. “We’re bringing you the first live images from the scene here in Washington,” she says. “You can see people running through the streets. We’re broadcasting from North Bethesda, Maryland, the blast here felt like an earthquake and you can see that the streets are full of broken glass from the windows that simply shattered and crashed to the ground from buildings around us. If this is what has happened here, I don’t even want to think about what is happening now in downtown Washington, D.C., about 7 or 8 miles from where we are. You can see the huge mushroom cloud that Patrick, our cameraman, is focusing on now; and although I’m no expert on the subject, of course, I have to say that what I’m seeing now looks like a nuclear explosion. What you are seeing now as a black mushroom cloud was previously a giant ball of fire, like a small sun. It’s still too early to say what has happened in Washington, but the devastation must be immense. Immense.”

  The reporter’s voice trails off and makes way for a cacophony of sounds from the scene—people screaming as they run aimlessly through the streets, sirens of rescue and emergency vehicles and alarms of cars and stores in the area. The camera focuses on them for a minute and then moves back to the black mushroom cloud that hovers over Washington like an enormous jellyfish. The broadcast jumps back to the studio and catches the anchor straightening his shirt; and then it switches again, this time to camera footage from a helicopter of the same mushroom cloud and the burning city below it.

  08/11/2016–34 weeks and 6 days since waking

  I wake at 1:30 in the morning and look at my iPhone that’s charging on the bedside table. I slide the tip of my finger across my iPhone screen and unlock the device with a 4-digit code. I look at the 2 shortcuts I’ve defined in the Safari browser without touching them. I turn on the television, to CNN, and watch a report about the arrest of an American tourist in North Korea. The reporter is interviewing his parents, who live in Champaign, Illinois.

  My dream seemed very real. I lock the iPhone screen and wait patiently for the final stage in my plan against the Organization. The plan must be implemented one step at a time.

  I call a military supply store and order 7 bulletproof vests that offer protection against shrapnel as well as 9mm and .44 Magnum rounds. I ask them to add ballistic plates to the pockets of the vests so as to enhance their protective capabilities against 5.56mm rounds from an M-16 and 7.62mm rounds from a Kalashnikov. The vests are made of Kevlar fiber covered with Cordura fabric. I also order 7 protective helmets against shrapnel and gunfire. The guy who takes the order from me asks what I need all the equipment for, and I explain to him that I’m making preparations for the arrival of a team of Japanese journalists. They’re coming to cover various aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and will be wandering around the territories. “Do you know that they refused to provide them with insurance coverage if they didn’t go about their business dressed in bulletproof vests and helmets all the time? And they certainly won’t be able to hide from the insurance company. They’ll be documenting themselves on camera all the time.”

  The store assistant laughs. He says everything will be ready in about a week and asks if I want to give him a credit card number now. I tell him I’d rather go to one of the chain’s branches and pay in cash. “They’re paying me in cash so I’d prefer to simply pass it on. And you can make out the invoice to Roman—Group Tours,” I tell him. I arrange to pay for my order at the factory store in Petah Tikva and I go there and pay in cash and take the invoice. I check with the Orders Department to make sure that the payment has been recorded and that the equipment will be delivered on time to the Moshav Yanuv address I’ve provided.

  Meanwhile, I purchase a professional sewing machine and very strong yarn that I leave for now in the living room of the house. I’m in much better physical shape already. I’ve set up a gym in one of the rooms of the house and I train for at least 2 hours every day.

  Since I have so much time on my hands, and a good jackhammer, I dig a tunnel from the basement of the house to the grove of trees across the street. I reinforce the tunnel with lengths of lumber that I fix together to form T-shapes and then place along the length of the structure at 2-meter intervals to support a corrugated steel ceiling, like Hamas does in its tunnels. I calculate my daily excavation rate and expect to complete the tunnel in 2 months’ time. When I’m done, I’ll keep my carpet van parked across the street close to the opening of the tunnel, and then, when they get to me one day, I’ll slip out through the tunnel, make my way to the van, and flee. When the tunnel is complete, I’ll cover the end across the street with a piece of corrugated steel and then a thin layer of earth on top so that the opening can’t be seen from the outside.

  The work in the tunnel creates a lot of dust and I wear a protective mask on my face. I scatter the excavated earth around the house and in the nearby fields, carrying it out through the basement. In conjunction with my excavation work, I also plant parsley, mint, and citrus tree seedlings in the garden. The parsley grows slowly, but the mint plants are quick to flourish.

  08/17/2016–35 weeks and 5 days since waking

  The doorbell rings and I suspend my digging and ascend from the basement. I wash my face and neck and go outside. My order of bulletproof vests and helmets has arrived and I sign for them and take the packages. “I’ve been working in the garden,” I tell the delivery guy. “That’s why
I’m covered in dirt. Would you like something to drink?” The delivery guy thanks me and walks back to his vehicle. He has more deliveries to complete and is pressed for time. “Everyone’s buying bulletproof vests these days because of all the stabbing attacks,” he says.

  I open the packages in the living room, pull out the vests, ballistic plates, and helmets, and get to work. In order to be able to work with both hands free, I dress the backrest of a chair in a long black sweatshirt and place one of the bulletproof vests over the sweatshirt. I sew the 2 items together with a needle and thread. It’s a lengthy process that takes several hours. When I’m done, I take the rest of the vests, dismantle them, and use some of their pieces to fortify the sweatshirt’s long sleeves, too. I do the same with a pair of black jeans. I use pieces from the vests to fortify the denim fabric from top to bottom, sewing everything together by hand. I use the sewing machine I bought only to secure the edges of the pieces of Kevlar before I sew them by hand to the sweatshirt and jeans. I take the pair of trekking boots that I also purchased from the military supplies store and fortify them, too. When I’m done, I’m left with an armored suit that I will use if the Organization figures out my location. The chances of them doing so are very slim, but I need to be prepared for any and every eventuality. I hang the suit on a hook I’ve fixed to the living room wall, with the helmet suspended above it. It looks like a robot. I take my iPhone out of my pocket and take a picture of it as a memento.

  I thread a strong belt through the loops of the jeans to hold them up. The jeans weigh about 4 kilos and I decide to sew them to the sweatshirt to create a one-piece suit that can be put on in a hurry and won’t fall off me. I detach the vest from the front of the sweatshirt, cut a slit down the front of the black fabric, and sew on Velcro pads that I’ve removed from the other vests, thus allowing me to dress and close the suit quickly. My protective suit is heavy. It weighs close to 15 kilograms after I’ve inserted the ballistic plates into the pockets of the vest; but it will do its job well.

  Night has fallen. I go into the garden, pick a few mint leaves, and make myself a cup of hot tea. Then I shower, eat a dinner consisting of a chicken breast and broccoli, and go to sleep.

  December 22, 2016

  Grandpa came to the end of the letter that 10483 had sent to the inner circle via his fictitious application—and the conference room fell silent. The large stretch of lawn, under the gray light outside, was visible through the room’s glass walls. Heavy gray clouds hung in the sky, but the rain had yet to come.

  “Do you think he’ll go through with it?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. We’ve learned thus far that he was in a coma for nine years before disappearing from Lowenstein Hospital about a year ago. We also know that he spent a little less than two months abroad. From the ninth of February to the twenty-ninth of March. We have an updated photograph of him from the hospital and he was caught on camera at Ben Gurion traveling to Spain and returning from Frankfurt. Since then, he’s had eight and a half months to prepare, and we all know what he’s capable of.”

  A gray-haired woman rested her intertwined hands on the table. “Clearly we aren’t going to go to the news with this psychotic text,” she said.

  “Clearly,” Grandpa said, and continued. “If we don’t get to him before he kicks off his New Year’s party, we’ll simply have to wait for the first of January and keep all our eyes, and those of Unit 8200, trained inward rather than outward, and join forces with those of the Shin Bet to see how he detonates the explosive devices and from where, and to wait for him to make a mistake that gives us a chance to get to him. We won’t have much time.”

  “Do we have any idea what he was doing while abroad?”

  “No.”

  The mood in the room was gloomy, and one of the men sitting at the table spoke up: “He can cause us tremendous damage,” he said. “Seeking assistance from the Shin Bet and army exposes us. We can’t let anyone else in on this. Using a cover story and pointing a finger at Islamic State, Tel Aviv can be placed under a curfew the moment he detonates the first bomb. That should minimize the number of casualties. But he also talks about a strike against a strategic facility the following day. He could be referring to the Electric Corporation’s Orot Rabin power station near Hadera, or the reactor in Dimona, or the Weizmann Institute, or something like that. We’ll have to up the alert status ahead of the first of January to give everyone time to prepare. We can say that our source in Islamic State has informed us of plans to carry out such an attack in Israel, and thereby give the army, the Tel Aviv Municipality, the reactor, Ben Gurion Airport, and every other strategic installation time to get organized. I don’t think he will try to take a shot at the army. It would be too difficult. We have to get our hands on him before he manages to put his plan into practice.”

  Grandpa continued. “We have yet to come up with a single lead,” he said. “He hasn’t been caught on camera anywhere and he appears to have assumed an identity we are unaware of. He hasn’t touched the credit cards he still has from his time in the Organization. He’s using a bank account we don’t know about. Cash only probably.

  “I’ll be demanding immediate access to the Shin Bet’s AngelFire facility. 10483 poses a greater threat than the issues they’re working on now. We may not have been able to demand priority before this, but we certainly can now. With the same cover story about an Islamic State threat. I’ll be contacting the prime minister’s bureau to arrange the priority issue immediately after this meeting.”

  “I suggest we come to a decision now in this forum to put an end to the business of the transformations,” said the gray-haired woman. “We are playing here with things whose long-term consequences and effects we know nothing about. It began with the mess of your Grasshopper Project and has only worsened now. Let me remind everyone here that two years ago I barely managed to quash an idea raised here in this forum to perform a transformation on the prime minister’s wife.”

  “Grasshopper Project?” one of the members of the inner circle asked with a puzzled look on his face.

  Grandpa took a sip of his coffee. “If you’d like to discuss a little bit of history, then yes, the initial transformations were performed on grasshoppers.”

  “Grasshoppers?”

  “Yes. Because the first experiments were conducted on flies, we moved forward in relatively small steps. While studying the technology, we came up with the idea of performing a dual transformation on the grasshoppers. One transformation was designed to cause them to identify the smell of plastic as the smell of a gourmet meal such as corn leaves or wheat, and the second transformation involved altering their built-in guidance system from electromagnetic to radioactive. This was before we began incorporating sound and video into the transformation process.”

  “What?”

  “It’s very simple. We didn’t want them to plot their flight courses based on their inherent guidance system, which takes the structure of the electromagnetic field around the Earth into consideration. Instead, we wanted them to be drawn to radioactive radiation, gamma radiation.”

  “What for?”

  “So we could send them off to Iran. So they’d be drawn to the nuclear reactors there and land in droves—I’m talking about several swarms we were planning to raise, with millions of grasshoppers in each one—and start to gnaw away at all the plastic insulation around the electrical wires and circuits at the reactors, thus leading to an endless number of electrical shorts and system failures followed by reactor meltdowns at all the facilities.”

  “How?”

  “When the power systems go down, the cooling systems stop drawing water to cool down the reactor’s core. Just like in Fukushima. Everything explodes. It would knock them back twenty years in terms of their nuclear aspirations.”

  “I have to say that that has to be one of the most outlandish ideas I’ve ever heard. Why didn’t you go through with it in the end?”

  “We did. We had already started to set up the grasshopper
breeding facility in one of the bunkers on Mount Hermon, but the transformations weren’t able to generate the precise level of attraction to radiation that we required. Every time we released several thousand for a trial run, those fucking grasshoppers flew off in the opposite direction, to the south, even though we released them on Mount Hermon with the idea that they would be drawn north through Syria. We were forced to deploy crop-spraying aircraft to exterminate the swarm—and even then, several dozen grasshoppers managed to get to Dimona and do some damage there.”

  “Dimona?”

  “Yes. The radiation from the reactor in Dimona proved to be more of a draw than the radiation from the Iranian facilities. Apparently the radiation coming from the Dimona reactor is so strong that it hampered everything we were trying to do. We had more success with people than with grasshoppers.”

  “It’s good that you did a trial run,” said the woman with the gray hair. “I don’t even want to think what would have happened if all those swarms had landed on the Dimona reactor. I propose that we come to a decision now concerning a ban on all future use of transformations and the shutting down of the department responsible for the matter. Who’s in favor?”

  Everyone around the table aside from Grandpa raised their hands.

  “Motion passed.”

  The rest of the inner circle members nodded their heads in agreement. Grandpa stood up. “I’ll keep you posted on our progress in the investigation.”

  “Just a moment, one last question before we end this meeting,” one of the participants said. “How did you prime him for mass killings? What mechanisms did you trigger?”