by Nir Hezroni
The bathroom is filled with white smoke.
I wonder what will happen if I swallow one of these lumps. Would I spit it out as soon as it ignited or would I swallow it and then would it burn in my stomach? And if it were to burn in my stomach would I explode?
It’s interesting.
I record it later in my notebook so I don’t forget.
September 13th 2016
“It must be a mistake.”
The three angels on duty looked at the large gray wall, which was divided into hundreds of thousands of flat rectangles adjacent to one another, stretching as far as the eye could see in both directions. A red LED light was flashing furiously in the middle of one of the rectangles and the flashing quickly spread to the surrounding rectangles to create an increasingly large patch of thousands of red flashes in the center of the gray wall.
“When was the last system test conducted?”
“Just a week ago. Everything’s in order.”
By now a large part of the wall was covered with tens of thousands of blinking red lights.
“Okay, we’ve got no choice. We need to file a report. Which sector is it?”
“Take this down: 6-August-1945/Japan/Chūgoku region, San’in-San’yō / Hiroshima.”
“Got it. I still think it’s a mistake. How could eighty thousand units stop all at once within a few seconds?”
* * *
Carmit woke up and rubbed her eyes. The clock on the nightstand next to her bed displayed 1:30 a.m. in glowing green numbers. Even central London was quiet at this hour.
She remembered that dream. She couldn’t quite recall the faces of the angels, aside from their eyes, which were completely white, without pupils. Their wings were folded behind their backs. They spoke Japanese.
And she understood every word.
She got out of bed, went to the refrigerator and poured herself half a glass of cold water. She returned to bed after drinking it and tried to fall sleep, without success. She spent a few minutes tossing and turning from side to side before jumping out of bed and putting on a pair of gray sweatpants and a black tanktop. After opening the living room window and peering out for a moment she returned to her bedroom and put on a gray sweatshirt.
She took a key, left the apartment and quietly locked the door behind her. She didn’t take the elevator, she took the stairs instead, skipping down from the third floor two steps at a time until she reached the bottom and stepped out onto the empty street.
She looked right and left.
There was no one suspicious around.
Carmit started to jog.
NIGHT. JULY 2002
I sit up in bed and place my feet on the floor.
I feel a sharp pain on my right side.
I remove my shirt and see a large cut down the right side of my body, above my pelvis. The cut has been crudely stitched with black thread and there are knots at each end.
I turn on the light in the room and see a large blood stain on the sheet. A Stanley knife. Its exposed blade marked with dried blood lies on the floor next to me. Next to it is a pair of small scissors. They’re stained with blood, too.
I walk slowly to the kitchen to drink some water.
When I open the fridge there’s a closed jar with a kidney floating inside of it in oil. I must have performed surgery on myself in my sleep and removed one of my kidneys. I was extremely tired when I went to bed.
I lift the jar to my face and take a closer look at my kidney. The lid of the jar is stained with blood, smeared in the form of the fingers that were holding it when the container was placed in the fridge.
From the kitchen window I can hear the voices of 2 people.
One of them says, “The anesthetic will hold until tomorrow afternoon,” and the other responds, “He’ll find the kidney in the refrigerator, but not the one we transplanted in its place.”
They both laugh. Their laughter sounds inhuman.
They leave.
I wake at 1:30 and drink a glass of water in the kitchen.
Sigal wakes up, too, comes in and sits down in the chair across from me.
She rolls a cigarette and lights it. She gives it to me and rolls another for herself.
She runs her nails along the back of my hand and asks if I’d like to spend the night in her bed.
“Yes,” I say to her.
MORNING. AUGUST 2003
I receive a letter from The Organization to my flat in Tel Aviv. I moved back from Haifa 4 months ago.
They’ve called me in to take entrance exams.
I’ve been expecting the letter. Everyone who serves in my unit in the army gets one at some point while studying at university.
I complete a stack of forms and send them back. I receive a test date.
I prepare for the test. I read all the psychological studies conducted by the test creators and know what is expected of me.
On the day of the test I place 2 tacks in my shoes and walk with my feet arched. When I’m summoned to do the polygraph test I sit down, flatten my feet and allow the tacks to pierce my flesh.
They ask me if I’m studying at the Technion. I say, “Yes.”
They ask me where I served in the army and I reply.
They ask me if I have nightmares. I say, “No.”
They ask me if I’ve ever physically harmed anyone. I say, “No.”
They ask me if I’ve ever stolen anything. I say, “No,”
They ask me if I’ve ever used drugs. I say, “No.”
I get a call from them 2 weeks later. “Hi, this is Amiram from The Organization.”
We meet. He tells me that I’ve been accepted into The Organization, and that they see I’m studying computer science. He asks me to study additional subjects so that afterward I can find work that involves overseas travel.
He tells me he’ll be my operator and that we’ll be in touch after I finish my university studies and The Organization training after that.
MORNING. MAY 2004
Toward the end of the second stage of core training they send a group of 15 of us to perform our first surveillance mission outside of Israel. We are supplied with Australian, Canadian, and French passports and new names. I look at my passport. My name is James Wilson and my picture appears on it. I also have a new MasterCard that I got from The Organization with the same name. James Wilson.
At the briefing before the exercise they explain to us what needs to be done. Each one of us receives a target to follow in Greece. They are scattered over a few cities. We need to arrange everything alone. Each one of us will need to independently purchase the airline tickets, book a hotel, build a cover story, and trace a target for one week. We get the target’s details and are told that our grade will be based on the accuracy and detail of the surveillance report we submit at the end of the training mission when we get back in exactly 7 days. We’ll need to reach the training base by ourselves. We are not allowed to work together or contact each other during this week.
I am following Nikos Demetriou, a Greek Palestinian citizen living in Rafina, a 40-minute drive from Athens. I leave my suitcase in the hotel room and I pass the next 3 days sitting in coffee shops, walking the streets, and bathing in the sea. I found Nikos’s house easily using the Internet on the first day of my mission and since then I am following him around from the minute he leaves his house in the morning until the time he goes to sleep. I prepare a well-documented surveillance log, for example:
• 12:56—meets 2 people and has lunch with them. One of them looks Greek and the other European (blond hair and a lobster tan)
• 14:13—comes back to his accounting firm office and sits by his desk (seen from the second-floor window)
• 15:20—descends to the street and hands a package to a woman with curly hair. He returns to the office and I follow her until she enters a car parked 2 streets away from the office. The car’s license plate is ICL-5835.
The training mission is not that interesting but we were told to notice every deta
il. It is important.
On the 5th day my target goes beyond his habit of eating lunch. He walks on foot for a few blocks, with me at a safe distance behind him, wearing shorts and a white T-shirt. He enters a large warehouse-like building with 2 open doors. I take a look around before following him inside. On the ground, not far from the warehouse entrance I spot a crumpled empty pack of cigarettes that I identify as the Israeli Noblesse brand. I understand that the situation I am in right now is the actual exercise I need to pass, and I walk into the warehouse.
Before my eyes can get used to the darkness something hits the back of my head and the world around me siwils and disappears.
I wake up later unaware of how much time has passed. My neck hurts, I try to touch it but I can’t. I remember that I’m in the warehouse, the doors are closed now and I do not know if it is day or night. Maybe they have moved me to an internal room inside the warehouse. It is dark. I am lying on my back strapped with my arms and legs to a metal base of a bed with no mattress. I can’t move. Tucked in my mouth is a small towel that tastes and smells like garlic.
I hear a switch click and a small lightbulb above fills the room with yellowish light. 3 men are standing above me. One of them is Nikos. He pulls the towel out of my mouth and says something in Greek. I answer him in English, telling him I don’t understand what he says.
He switches to English “you are following me.”
I say “would you happen to know if there is a Hertz car rental place somewhere around here? I have been looking for it for hours and could not find it.”
One of the men throws his cigarette at me and punches my stomach.
Nikos asks again why I was following him. I explain him that I am a tourist who got lost. I am searching for a car rental agency in order to rent a car for the day and drive to a nudist beach that another tourist told me about yesterday. I do not know who he is and what he and his 2 friends want from me. I tell them that I have heard that the Greeks are a very hospitable nation and that they should adhere to this norm.
They slowly insert a needle below the nail of my right index finger. I lie in the metal bed focusing on the pain making its way in fast pulses from my finger to my hand, then to my brain, then it explodes all over my body.
A couple of hours later my kidnappers are tired of abusing me. 2 of them speak Arabic. I understand them. I learned Arabic in the first stage of core training.
“Are you bringing the syringe?”
“Yes, get rid of his body at sea, put it on the yacht and tie him to a diving belt with weights, dump him at least five kilometers from the beach, we don’t want him surfacing at the shore before the fish finish eating him.”
In the corner of the room there is a small trash can made of some kind of gray metal netting. I saw it when one of them opened a door to a different room and a bright light briefly exposed its contents of a few cramped papers and a crushed green pack of cigarettes, same as the one I saw outside.
One of the men goes out of the room and returns a moment later with a syringe full of pale white liquid. He bends down and injects it into my arm above the place where I’m tied to the bed frame. I feel dizzy. The 3 men look at me and laugh. Nikos says “James Wilson, you are going to live with the fish.” I black out.
I wake up again. I am not on a yacht with diving weights on my waist on the way to the bottom of the sea. I’m lying on the roadside. I check my pockets. My wallet is not there. It’s a good thing that I left my passport with most of my money in the hotel room safe. I enter a nearby restaurant, go to the restroom and wash my face. My finger hurts and the nail color has turned purple. It will probably fall off in a couple of days. Besides that, the damage is relatively minor. I drink some water from the bathroom tap and take a cab to the hotel.
I pass another day at the hotel and decide to go back to the building where Nikos works, wait for him on the roof and drop a brick on his head when he enters the building. But I change my mind thinking The Organization will not be happy with me killing one of their trainers and instead I relax in the swimming pool and drink straight tequila. To those who wonder what the bruises all over my body are and why my finger is bandaged I explain that I fell down the escalator at the airport minutes after I got out of the airplane but I would not let this ruin my vacation and I intend to have fun.
On the 7th day I leave the hotel, take a cab to the airport and fly back home. I drive to the training base at the rendezvous hour. In our training class there are only 3 students. Myself, a man named Zohar and a woman named Keren. 12 did not arrive. All 3 of us have our fingers bandaged.
Our instructor comes into the class. He tells us “usually two or three out of fifteen pass this stage, you stand nicely within the statistics but don’t get too excited, you have more to go. We have had courses that ended up with zero certifications.”
Keren asks him what happened to the others.
“Some broke the minute they got captured, some broke at the finger phase and the rest lost it when the needle approached their arm. You have a week off now, use it to rest and recover. The next stage is the hardest. You’ll need to use your brain.” The instructor laughs. He has bright white teeth and a face with the marks of chicken pox that he got when he was a kid.
I ask him where to place the well-written and organized surveillance notes I made.
He points at the trash bin.
MORNING. SEPTEMBER 2004
I get a job with a company that develops software for pharmaceutical firms. It’s software that centralizes quality-assurance and manufacturing-control data.
Most of the company’s customers are in Europe and North America.
Just like The Organization wanted.
I write a small program and remotely install it as a rootkit on both my manager’s computer and on her boss’s computer.
The software saves a screenshot in a hidden directory on their computers every 30 seconds. When they’re connected to the company network, the hidden directories are emptied onto my laptop once an hour.
My manager’s name is Nurit.
I discover that she spends a few hours a day browsing through chat forums on the Internet.
She’s also in love with Assaf from the accounting department.
She writes him an email: “My husband is out of town tomorrow. Come over at 11 p.m. after the kids are asleep. I can’t wait any longer.”
Yaron is my manager’s boss.
He’s a department head.
He likes to give us speeches about the dire state of the market and why we won’t be getting bonuses again this year.
He also enjoys a certain kind of pornography and submitting inflated travel-expense accounts to the company.
I save their screenshots onto an external hard drive every month as back-up.
September 19th 2016
The doors of the Underground train opened at Hammersmith station and the rushed human contents of the cars spilled out onto the platform. Carmit hurried to the Way Out escalator and walked quickly up its left side, passing by the commuters who were standing on the right. The escalator took her straight into the shopping center that formed part of the station and she headed for a small bookstore adjacent to a noodle bar.
“Good morning, Mr. Chong,” she called out to the owner of the eatery who was busy preparing to open for the day.
“Good morning, Jennifer. Is the new J. K. Rowling in yet? My son told me to ask you.”
“I don’t know … maybe. I have a stack of packages that arrived yesterday evening just before I went home and now I have to open everything and do some sorting. I didn’t have the strength to deal with it yesterday. If I see it’s arrived I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks, sweetie. Have a good day. Come in at noon, we’ll have lunch together.”
Carmit opened the door to the small store and deactivated the alarm system. She removed her backpack from her shoulders and placed it on the counter, and then turned on the light and the heat. “Brrrr, it’s freezing in here,�
�� she said to herself.
She walked to the small alcove at the back of the store, filled the white electric kettle with fresh water, turned it on, and then went over to the stack of cardboard boxes at the entrance to the shop. She opened the packages and sorted the books. Every book got scanned with a barcode reader to update the computer’s inventory. Some books went directly onto shelves and others went to the storeroom. After finishing with the box marked Before I Go to Sleep, she opened another brown cardboard package. It contained rows of small glass bottles with white labels bearing tiny writing:
Halorhodopsin (NpHR)
Enhanced halorhodopsin (eNpHR2.0)
Enhanced halorhodopsin (eNpHR3.0)
Archaerhodopsin (Arch)
Leptosphaeria maculans fungal opsins (Mac)
Enhanced bacteriorhodopsin (eBR)
Carmit removed the bottles from the package and recorded their contents in a notebook she kept in one of the drawers under the register. She took a red pen out of the same drawer and wrote the date on each bottle. She then locked the front door from the inside, hung up a sign that read RUNNING ERRANDS, BACK IN 10, on the glass, and went to the alcove at the back of the store. This time she removed a set of keys from her pocket and opened two locks on a heavy metal door that squeaked slightly on its hinges. It opened inward into a darkroom.
She left the door open, collected the bottles, and arranged them all on a shelf labeled Optogenetics—Silencers. Under that shelf was another labeled Optogenetics—Neural Exciters, also laden with rows of small glass bottles.
She retrieved her backpack from the counter, went into the darkroom and closed the door behind her, leaving herself in total darkness for a moment before flipping a switch. The interior of the room was illuminated with the weak glow of blue LED lights. In addition to the shelves of bottles, the room was packed with other shelves bearing various types of materials, medical equipment, and small cages.