by Nir Hezroni
We are pleased to inform you that you have won a vacation package that includes two air tickets to Rio de Janeiro and five nights at a five-star hotel.
Your prize can be claimed at the Holiday Geneva travel agency on Route de Saint-Georges.
Please hurry, as the tickets are last-minute vacancies. The flight (LX2815) departs Thursday evening!
I use Google to translate the letter into German and French and print out 1 copy in each language on sheets of paper bearing the Swissair logo.
I print the Swissair logo onto an envelope, insert the 2 folded pages and seal it, and mail the envelope to Adriana Karson.
I place a new order on The Organization’s website:
Order 10483-2:
Expenses
1. Commercial vehicle
2. Paint and logo for the vehicle
3. Domain name for Internet website
4. Painting equipment (brushes, paint, buckets, masking tape)
5. Ladder
6. Large hydraulic jack
7. Thick metal bar
8. Iso-Flex sealant
9. 200 tubes of silicone + dispenser
10. Rubber sheeting
11. Prepaid cellular telephone
12. Overalls + overalls logo printing
13. 5-night holiday package for 2 to Rio de Janeiro
14. 1 pair of shoes
15. Shirt + printing
16. Woolen hat
17. Coat
18. Miscellaneous printing costs
19. Boxes of matches
20. Short length of garden hose
21. Jerrycan
22. My salary
Required
1. 52,000 Swiss francs
2. 200,000 Canadian dollars
3. 400,000 Argentine pesos
4. Swiss identity card in the name of Alberto Lombardi (photo attached), country of birth—Italy
5. Visa credit card in the name of Alberto Lombardi with a withdrawal facility of at least $5,000
6. Swiss driver’s license in the name of Alberto Lombardi
7. Swiss passport in the name of Alberto Lombardi
I attach a photograph of myself with a full beard and brown contact lenses to the order. I’m not using the passport I received in the name of Peter Connor for now.
I design a website, “Alberto Lombardi, Painting and Carpentry,” and include various pictures of apartments that are undergoing renovations and paintwork.
I place an online order for business cards, receipt books, and 2 large stickers for a commercial vehicle that read LOMBARDI PAINTING AND CARPENTRY—UNCOMPROMISING QUALITY. They’ll be ready this evening.
I print out a work order for an apartment painting job and sign it “Adriana Karson.”
I browse the Internet to find a commercial vehicle for sale and check where I can buy all the items I need to kill the target.
I leave the office in the evening and return to the hotel in the rental car.
There’s an envelope waiting for me at reception. It contains a credit card in the name of Alberto Lombardi and a note. The note informs me that a locker has been reserved for me at the Gare de Cornavin in Geneva and that the credit card will open it.
I slip the card into my wallet go to the bathroom, where I tear the note into small pieces, drop them into the toilet, and flush.
I apply Alberto Lombardi’s beard and drive to the Gare de Cornavin, collect a large brown envelope from the locker, and go into the station’s public bathroom.
I’m not being followed.
I remove all the items I ordered from the envelope. Everything’s there—the passport, ID card, driving license and several bundles of cash. Swiss Francs, Canadian dollars, Argentine pesos. The Organization doesn’t ask questions. If a field agent requests something, he gets it. I’ll need the money to complete the mission in Canada and Argentina.
I take a cab to Rue du Stand near the river. There, Lisa sells me a Fiat pickup van.
Lisa has a flower shop and uses the van for deliveries and to pick up flowers and equipment from nurseries. She’s upgrading to a new Toyota. She asks me to be kind to the Fiat. “No problem,” I say. I pay her in cash. We manage to complete the ownership transfer before the Licensing Office closes.
I drive the pick-up to a large Carrefour shopping center and purchase equipment. Tins of white paint, a ladder, masking tape, and all the other items on the list I drew up in the notebook.
The shop assistant cocks his head and fixes me with a stare when I ask him for 10 large boxes of Iso-Flex sealant and 200 tubes of silicone. “It’s for a big sealing job, a swimming pool,” I explain. He also offers me a special kind of water-resistant paint. I buy that, too.
I buy a vehicle jack and a 60-centimeter-long metal rod in a different section of the mall.
I put all the equipment in the back of the van, cover everything with a length of tarpaulin I bought, and tie it down well.
I stop off at the print shop on my way back to pick up my order, and in a parking lot behind a gas station, after I make sure there’s no one around, I apply the stickers to the van. I park the van 2 blocks from my hotel and walk the rest of the way.
I’ll complete the first part of my mission this weekend, the first envelope. Then I’ll go back to Israel to kill the man in my basement.
MORNING. JANUARY 2006. FRIDAY
I park on the street outside the target’s building and begin offloading the contents of the van onto the sidewalk. It takes less than a minute for one of the security guards to come over. “What are you doing here?” he asks me.
“Is this 21 Rue de Délices?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says. “What business do you have here?”
“I have a work order here from someone named Adriana Karson,” I reply. “Seventh floor. Do you know her?” I show him the page I printed with Adriana’s name and the signature I scribbled.
He tells me Adriana has gone away and isn’t home. He saw her leaving last night with a suitcase.
“That’s right,” I say, “I’m painting her apartment, and she won’t be able to sleep there for the next two nights. She went to a hotel and left me a key to the apartment.”
I load the tins of paint in the meantime onto a carry cart. “Do you want to keep an eye on my gear while I take the paint up?” I ask the guard. “I’ll give you five francs.”
The guard looks at me. His eyes narrow. He lets out a snort, turns back toward the building and walks inside. Before reentering the apartment on the first floor he turns and says, “Don’t wander around the building and don’t make a mess in the lobby or elevator.”
“I work clean,” I say.
I take the equipment up to the 7th floor. I remove the jack and a metal rod from a large tool box. I have to open Adriana Karson’s door without making any noise, so as not to arouse the suspicion of the guards in the apartments below.
The door and frame are made of metal. The deadbolt lock looks new. I position the jack parallel to the floor at the height of the lock, surface pressed against the doorframe. I then position the metal rod between the other end of the jack and the opposite side of the doorframe, holding the rod parallel to the floor. I turn the handle of the jack and it takes no more than 30 seconds to widen the doorframe by 3 centimeters without making a sound. I push the door and it opens inward into the apartment. I return the jack and metal rod to the toolbox.
I offload the paint and go down to the van twice more to get the rest of the equipment. I then park the van in a nearby lot and return to the apartment.
I take a 10-liter tin of paint and empty it down the sink. I place the empty container under the faucet in the bath and turn the knob. It takes 72 seconds to fill up. I turn off the faucet and proceed to paint one of the walls.
I then spread a layer of Iso-Flex over the floor and cover it with plastic sheeting. I seal the windows with silicone and then cover them with rubber sheeting that I adhere to the walls with adhesive tape.
I accurately measure the dimens
ions of the apartment with measuring tape. I go through all the rooms.
And measure again.
One last time.
I wrap impermeable rubber sheeting around the toilet bowls and use plastic sheeting and silicone to block the drain openings in all the sinks. I collect all the empty tubes of silicone, paint containers, and Iso-Flex packaging in large garbage bags.
On the inside of the front door I stick a length of rubber sheeting that extends 5 centimeters beyond the doorframe on all sides.
At 11:30 a.m.:
I open the bathroom faucet and the tap in the kitchen,
Take the garbage bags and tools with me,
Widen the doorframe again,
Close the front door,
Return the jack and metal rod to the tool box,
Load all the equipment into the van,
Wave goodbye to the guard, who ignores me,
Drive to an empty campsite outside of town that’s close to the train station,
Torch the van,
Catch a train back to the city center,
Walk for 15 minutes back to the hotel,
Shower,
Drive my rental car to another day of work at the office of the client.
Everything has to be ready ahead of the system upgrade on Tuesday, and I’m planning on working late into the night.
January 15th 2006
Yasmin woke with a strange sense of apprehension. Something wasn’t right. She was aware of a dull rumbling noise all around her, the sound of metal snapping and bending, and loud booms one after the other that shook the apartment. She thought for a moment that she was dreaming. She glanced over at the clock on the bedside table. It was 3:40 in the morning. Albert isn’t next to her in bed. He went to speak at a conference in Stockholm. It must be an earthquake. She should go get the girls who are asleep in the adjacent room.
She sat up and the world came to an end.
The ceiling of her apartment gave way and came crashing down onto her bed, together with the five additional apartments above it and a huge torrent of water. Chunks of concrete and steel, furniture and household objects, bodies, drywall, clothes, and water. So much water.
The adrenaline in her body completely blocked out all sense of pain. Even when she felt the bones of her legs bend and break under the immense pressure of the concrete beam that fell on them. All she could do was try to cry out the names of her 2 daughters.
She couldn’t.
The pressure on her chest was enormous. She couldn’t cry out. Or breathe. The screams around her faded.
The last image etched in her consciousness before everything came crashing down, in a flash of light that sparked an electrical short, was the picture of a tree in shades of brown, orange, and yellow. The tree’s swirling branches that twisted and turned into spirals adorned with spotted geometric shapes. There was a signature at the bottom of the picture: Gustav Klimt.
January 15th 2006
The encrypted phone in Amiram’s home rang at seven in the morning. The department head for Western Europe was on the line. He didn’t sound happy.
“So this is the way you do things now? You turn an entire building into a pile of rubble just to take out one target? Do you have any idea how this is going to affect our relations with Switzerland? What do you think—that Switzerland’s DDPS isn’t going to guess who’s behind it? Who is the idiot you sent there? Do you have any idea what you’ve got us into?”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“Target six on the Bernoulli list—that’s what I’m talking about. She’s on your list and now she’s gone and so is an entire building. You blew up an entire building in Geneva—residents and all, that’s what I’m talking about. And I hear about it from the Public News Monitoring Unit who just caught it on a BBC newsflash.”
“Let me look into what happened there and I’ll get back to you.”
“You do that. Be in my office at eight. Come with preliminary details.”
Amiram left his half-eaten breakfast on the kitchen table and got up. He’s responsible; he’s the one who gave the mission to 10483. But who could have imagined that he’d take down an entire building? And where did he get the explosive material? He would have needed at least 100 kilograms to cause such extensive damage.
We’ll have to throw him out of The Organization. But he knows too much. Who can guarantee his silence?
And why did the micro tracking device that was fixed to him and the cell phone he gave him indicate that he was in Thailand? What was he doing in Thailand before the mission in Switzerland?
I’ll send two agents over to his home when he returns from Geneva to intimidate him a little. They’ll tell him to look for another job and that he best keep his mouth shut.
* * *
So that’s how he brought down the building! Avner marveled at the simplicity. They never figured out how a single agent without access to explosives had managed to flatten a seven-story building on top of a target. Or more precisely, on top of the target and her family and an additional thirty-eight residents, who were all killed in the collapse of the building at 21 Rue de Délices.
Avner recalled seeing a page of figures and calculations in the bundle that he hadn’t been able to figure out. He looked for it again among the pile of papers and reviewed it carefully. The page showed a sketch of a small apartment. It read:
First measurement—83 square meters
Second measurement—83 square meters
Third measurement—83 square meters
Area of apartment: 83 square meters
500 kilograms per square meter = 83 × 500 = 41,500 liters = 41.5 tons
Filling rate per liter = 7.2 seconds
Total 7.2 × 41,500 = 298,800 sec = 4,980 minutes = 83 hours
2 taps simultaneously:
83/2 = 41.5 hours
To achieve a load of half a ton per square meter at 5 in the morning on Sunday, the taps need to be opened 41.5 hours prior to then = 11:30 on Friday morning.
It’s an old building. It won’t hold up under the pressure of half a ton per square meter.
Avner needed to get some fresh air. He left the small office he was in, locked the door behind him, and went out through the door to the basement.
“That’s it? Done for the day?”
“No. Just going upstairs for a while to get some fresh air. I’m leaving all my stuff here with you, okay?”
“No problem.”
It was a little after three in the morning and it felt cool and pleasant outside. It smelled like winter, narcissus in bloom. He could hear the dull hum of a jet taking off from Ben Gurion International Airport in the distance, but all else was quiet. A sudden movement behind a row of bushes caught Avner’s attention, and he reached instinctively for his gun, remembering as he did so that he’d left it downstairs with the guard. He crouched down and waited.
A cat emerged from the bushes. Avner stood up and stretched. He went back down to the office. Had he thought to look back, he would have seen a black shadow moving silently toward his car.
The black shadow sped through the section of yard normally covered by the malfunctioned camera, taking care not to stray into view of the rest of the cameras that covered the villa. First he dealt with the camera, now he’d take care of the car. The shadow crawled under the white Mazda, retrieved a screwdriver and cordless power drill from the small bag he carried, and went to work.
Back in the basement of the villa Avner went through the screening process in front of the glass wall one more time, returned to the small office, sat down, and picked up the notebook again.
January 4th 2006
The wheels of the plane touched down on the runway at Heathrow and the large Boeing shuddered a little and slowed on the tarmac. Carmit woke up and stretched. She peeked out from under the thin blanket she’d covered herself with during the flight, and scanned the interior of the plane. Everything appeared to be in order, except for the passenger who sat a fe
w rows behind her and was making an unnatural effort to avoid eye-contact with her. Now he was pretending to be asleep. So transparent, she thought to herself. The assholes dispatched someone to keep track of her. Really?!
The doors opened and passengers began streaming out of the plane. Carmit decided she wanted to have some fun with the man sent to follow her. She tucked her head under the blanket again and waited.
When the plane was completely empty a flight attendant gently touched her shoulder. “We’ve landed,” she said, smiling. Carmit smiled back and stretched again. The only other passenger still on the plane was the man she’d suspected earlier. Carmit moved the blanket aside and slowly put on her sneakers. She took her time retrieving her backpack from the storage compartment above her. The man made his way out the plane. Carmit smiled at him as he passed by. He realized she had him. They both knew he was out of the game.
Carmit exited the aircraft and walked through the terminal toward the baggage claim area, taking careful note of all the people she could see on the way. She went into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. In addition to what one normally does in the bathroom after a flight, she removed her iPod and laptop from her bag and shut them down completely so they couldn’t be used as tracking devices.
Although she was traveling with only the backpack she carried, Carmit stopped at the baggage carousel and waited. Slowly but surely the passengers from her plane all headed off with their luggage and were eventually replaced by passengers from the next flight. Carmit spotted one passenger who’d stayed behind, seemingly waiting for a suitcase that never showed up. She looked at him and smiled until he cracked and headed off. Follower number two burned.
She spent the next few hours traveling through the various London Underground stations, buying lingerie at Victoria’s Secret, visiting the London Zoo (she didn’t skip over a single exhibit, and acquired two stuffed animals—a giraffe and a lion—in the process), eating fish and chips at a street stall, and constantly messing with the people who were following her. New faces kept replacing old ones. The last one was a curly-haired man who looked Middle Eastern, wearing a yellow shirt.