Three Envelopes

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Three Envelopes Page 11

by Nir Hezroni


  Carmit stopped on the street next to the most intimidating skinhead in sight.

  “Excuse me, but I’m terrified. Perhaps you could help me?” She blinked her eyes at him in total panic.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “That man back there, with the yellow shirt, he’s been following me now for the past hour. I don’t know what to do. Can you hold him up for a while so I can get away from him? Here’s a fifty.”

  “I won’t just hold him up. I’ll bury the motherfucker. Go.”

  Carmit continued down Oxford Street toward the Marble Arch as all hell broke loose behind her. She crossed to Hyde Park Corner, tightened the straps of her backpack, and broke into a sprint through the park as she gave the entire surveillance team the slip.

  MORNING. JANUARY 2006

  I land back in Israel and go through passport control. Someone’s on my tail from the moment I leave the airport. I take a cab to the health clinic.

  I walk into the clinic and request an urgent appointment. I tell the receptionist I’m suffering from dizziness and blurred vision and that the right side of my body isn’t functioning as well as my left side. The receptionist immediately slots me in to see a family doctor. I’m next in line.

  Truth is I don’t have any of those symptoms; I’m making them up. What I am suffering from is a constant buzzing in my head. I believe it’s a listening device that they planted in my head while I was sleeping and is now transmitting my thoughts. That’s why I’m making an effort to think only of petty things that don’t have any value as intelligence. The people following me must be enemies of The Organization. One of them is sitting just a few meters to my right down the hall outside the dermatologist’s door.

  The family doctor gives me an urgent referral to the emergency room. I can barely lift my right arm for her and my right leg appears lame. I speak strangely, too, as if my tongue is numb.

  On the way out I buy 2 packages of sleeping pills from an elderly man. I saw him buy them earlier from the clinic’s pharmacy; they’re mine now for 400 shekels.

  I leave the clinic. Someone new is following me, and I see the man who was following me previously approach the elderly man I bought the pills from. He must be questioning him now.

  I take a cab to the ER at Tel Hashomer Hospital and I’m rushed off for an MRI. I receive the results burned onto a CD within 40 minutes. I’m told to take the disc to the Neurology Department, but I leave the hospital. My limp is gone.

  I take a cab home. On the way I take my laptop out of my bag, turn it on and insert the CD. I take a close look at my brain through all the MRI scans, including the 3-D imaging. There’s no listening device in my head. The buzzing has stopped.

  I get home and go inside. I make sure not to walk straight in but turn immediately to the right toward the kitchen, and then left and left again toward the bedroom. Thus I avoid falling into the cage in the basement. I peer out the window and see the car that was following my cab parked a little farther down the street. Its windows are tinted and it’s impossible to see how many people are inside apart from the driver and the woman in the passenger seat.

  I go down to the basement through the bedroom closet.

  I turn on the light in the basement.

  The man in the basement is sitting down in the cage, with his back resting against the bars. His legs are stretched out in front of him. “Water,” he says. His eyes are closed. He’s become accustomed to the dark over the past weeks. The light blinds him.

  I see he’s out of water bottles.

  “You have to die now,” I say to him. “I have no need for you.”

  I take a bottle of mineral water and sit down in front of the cage. I take out one package of sleeping pills and crush them one by one into the bottle. The package contains 40 tablets. I shake the bottle well and throw it into the cage.

  The man in the cage is thirsty. He hesitates for a moment but his thirst overpowers him. He gulps down the entire bottle. Drinking and crying.

  “With your permission, I’ll perform a brief religious ceremony,” I say to him.

  I reach for a sheet of paper I prepared in the basement ahead of time and recite the Kaddish prayer out loud to him while he drinks the contents of the bottle:

  Yit’gadal ve-’yit’kadash sh’mei raba …

  Throughout the world which He has created according to His Will.

  May He establish His kingship, bring forth His redemption and hasten the coming of His Messiah

  In your lifetime and in your days and in the lifetime of the entire House of Israel,

  Speedily and soon, and say, Amen.

  May His great Name be blessed forever and to all eternity.

  Blessed and praised and glorified,

  Exalted and extolled and honored,

  Adored and lauded be the Name of the Holy One, blessed be He.

  Beyond all the blessings, hymns, praises

  And consolations that are uttered in the world, and say, Amen.

  He continues to cry. “Don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing,” I say to him.

  I go back upstairs to shower. On my way to the bathroom I look outside. The car with the tinted windows is still parked down the street.

  I thaw a frozen chicken breast in the microwave and cook it for dinner. It’ll be dark soon. I return to the basement. The man in the basement is in the same position, his back against the bars, the empty bottle of water lying on the floor next to him, his eyes open, his mouth open. He isn’t breathing.

  Fitted into a niche in the wall of the basement is a large aquarium I constructed before my trip to Geneva. It’s 2 meters high, 1.8 meters wide and half a meter deep. 4 LED lights add a blue glow to the tank.

  I unlock the side door to the cage and drag the man out. I wash him down with a hose and move him into the aquarium. He isn’t heavy. I fill the aquarium to the brim with cooking oil that I’ve stockpiled in the basement. It’ll stop the body from decomposing. Formaldehyde would have been better, but buying such a large quantity of formaldehyde would raise questions.

  I turn on the LED lights.

  To complete the picture I get a blank sheet of paper and stick it to the bottom right corner of the aquarium with 2 strips of adhesive tape. I write on the page in block letters with a black marker:

  TIME

  HAS FOLDED ITS GRAY WINGS

  AND WILL NO LONGER SPREAD THEM

  OVER YOU

  I take 3 steps back and look at the piece. Perfect. No need to add a thing.

  I clear away all the trash that accumulated in the cage while I was in Geneva, dump it all into large garbage bags, and wash down the cage with a hose and an entire container of bleach. I carry the bags up from the basement. I’ll throw them away in the morning.

  NIGHT. JANUARY 2006

  Tel Aviv.

  I’m standing at the entrance to a floor of offices.

  I press the button for the elevator.

  There are 3 elevators. The middle one comes down from the 8th floor and stops at mine. The 2nd floor.

  The doors open and a wave of water spills out and washes through the hallway.

  The flow doesn’t stop. It intensifies.

  The hallway begins to fill up with water. The level keeps rising. I swim in the water until it almost reaches the ceiling. I try to press my mouth to the ceiling to keep breathing. The water is almost touching the fluorescent lighting in the hallway. Sparks fly from the electricity. The hallway fills with a charred smell. I start to breathe water.

  I hear the sound of muffled bangs and wake up.

  The sounds are coming from below.

  From the basement.

  Someone is firing a gun.

  I go back to sleep.

  I’ll wake at 1:30 to check what’s going on down there.

  January 31st 2006

  Erez and Limor stood in the cage.

  They aren’t rookies; they’re burned field agents.

  A burned field agent is an agent who was caught on camera
while carrying out a mission abroad and whose face is now a target for facial recognition software in public locations around the world. The moment such an agent were to step foot in an airport somewhere, he’d be arrested on the spot. A beard or wig would be of no use. The software measures dozens of parameters, like the distance between the eyes, the shape of the nose, the chin line, and the circumference of the skull. It can’t be fooled. Even plastic surgery doesn’t help.

  The Organization looks after such agents and arranges work for them within Israel, at one of the intelligence analysis departments or in the form of easygoing and risk-free fieldwork inside the country.

  This was supposed to have been one of those jobs.

  Breaking in posed no problem at all.

  They planned to make their way to 10483’s bed and jolt him out of sleep with their guns to his face. They would explain that he no longer worked for The Organization, that he would be under surveillance, and that if he breathed even a single word, they wouldn’t bother waking him next time. They’d just put a bullet in his head.

  Three steps into the apartment, and the floor gave way beneath them. The six-meter fall left them stunned for several minutes. After getting back on their feet, Limor switched on a small flashlight to see where they were.

  The beam of the flashlight shone directly on the aquarium in which a naked body, arms outstretched and eyes and mouth wide open, appeared to hover before them in a yellowish solution. An involuntary scream escaped Limor’s lips and she aimed her pistol at the tank, but Erez stopped her.

  “There’s no point, it’s a corpse.”

  “What is this place?”

  “I have no idea. Shine the light here for a moment.”

  “They’re bars; we’re in a prison cell! How could there be a prison inside a residential building in the heart of Tel Aviv?”

  “Let’s have a go at shooting this bar out. Maybe we can break it. Move back a moment; I’m going to fire my weapon.”

  NIGHT. JANUARY 2006

  I leave the dentist’s office and get into my car. I run my hand over my left cheek and realize that he pulled my left molar instead of my right one.

  I start the car and drive off.

  There’s a pair of sunglasses on the seat next to me. They aren’t mine. I realize that the car isn’t mine either. The color of the upholstery is different. Strange that my key opened it.

  I have a slight sense of déjà vu. I remember that I left the kettle on the stove, and then remember that I have an electric kettle.

  It’s like déjà vu backward. As if I remember having been in this place yet I know I never was. Or I was, but I didn’t do what I’m doing now.

  I reach up to my shirt pocket for a cigarette and realize that my shirt has no pocket. Then I remember that I don’t smoke.

  Had I taken the pill in the small box on the bookshelf in my safe room, I might have been able to remember everything.

  Then I remember that I don’t have a safe room.

  I wake at 1:30 and go down to the basement.

  I peer into the darkness from the bottom of the ladder. A shot fired from a pistol flies by—mere centimeters from my face. It’s hard to aim in the dark.

  I get a glimpse of 2 figures in the cage. I pull back.

  I assume the shots I heard earlier were their attempts to break out the cage. They don’t have a hope in hell. Not even with an M-16 assault rifle would they be able to pierce or cut through 2-centimeter-thick steel bars without killing themselves first with the ricochets. They must have realized this and stopped shooting pretty quickly.

  “You missed,” I call out to them.

  “It was an accident,” a woman’s voice replies. “We just want to talk. We’ve been sent by The Organization to update you about the mission.”

  “Then throw your weapons out of the cage,” I reply. I don’t believe a word they say.

  Nothing but silence from the basement. I don’t hear the sound of weapons falling.

  “You’re both going to die anyway,” I say to them. “I can’t afford to let you live. If you throw out your weapons, I promise it’ll be quick and painless.”

  The man responds with a torrent of curses. He spits out, “So you can put us in your exhibit, too? You’re sick in the head! We’ve contacted the home base; the entire organization is on its way over.”

  These enemies are trying to deceive me. They’re lying. First of all, the basement is fitted with a cellular signal jamming device. No cell phone is going to work down there. And surely they can’t be from The Organization. The Organization wouldn’t send armed individuals in the dead of night to its best agent, and certainly not right after an operation as successful as the one I carried out in Geneva.

  But they’re familiar with the home base. Someone in The Organization must be collaborating with them. I’ll leave a message about it on The Organization’s website before I fly out to complete my next mission.

  “See you in twenty-four hours,” I say, and return to my bedroom via the floor of the closet. I have a few errands to run. I use the control panel next to the ladder to turn off the dim light and ventilation system in the basement.

  I open the Lufthansa website and book a flight to Frankfurt in the name of Peter Connor.

  I browse the net for information on Instituto Balseiro and find out that it’s an academic institution, located in Bariloche, Argentina, chartered by the National University of Cuyo and the country’s National Atomic Energy Commission. The institution offers studies in physics, nuclear and mechanical engineering.

  I read through background material on the nuclear engineering projects in Bariloche that started after World War II. German scientists who’d worked on nuclear projects in Nazi Germany fled Europe after the war. Some found a partner in the continuation of their nuclear endeavors in the form of Juan Domingo Perón, who was in power in Argentina at the time. Huge sums of money went toward setting up a secret project on Huemul Island, off the coast of Bariloche, where they constructed nuclear laboratories with the purpose of producing controlled nuclear fusion using cheap materials. The project failed, but the structures that were once the reactor and laboratories remain scattered and crumbling on the island as a reminder.

  Instituto Balseiro, on the other hand, remains active to this day. I’ll fly from Frankfurt to Buenos Aires and get a connection from there to Bariloche.

  I reserve a room for 2 weeks at Bariloche’s Hotel Premier. It’s a small hotel located 200 meters from the lake.

  I save a map to the institution on my laptop, along with its operating hours and pictures of the buildings and academic staff members. I see based on the photograph in my possession that my target is Professor Federico Lopez.

  It’s 3 in the morning. I go back to bed to sleep for a few more hours.

  MORNING. FEBRUARY 2006

  I get up at 10 in the morning and call the municipality to report a car with tinted windows that’s parked illegally in a place reserved for vehicles belonging to Tel Aviv residents. The car doesn’t have a Tel Aviv resident tag.

  I clean the house well and scrub the plate, fork, and knife I used yesterday.

  I go out to the mailbox and retrieve a stack of letters that have accumulated there. Outside I see the car being loaded onto a tow truck. There’s already a citation on its windshield.

  I browse through the mail at the entrance to my building. The junk mail goes into the trash bin and the letters and bills remain in my hand.

  I return to the apartment and open all the envelopes. I pay my water, municipal tax, electricity, and gas bills online with a credit card. I then throw out the trash, which includes all the bags I filled from the cage after I washed it.

  I head off to the gym, then go for a long run.

  At night I sit in the living room and watch the video feed on my laptop from the camera in the basement. The camera’s infrared beam allows me to see in the total darkness down there.

  I see them sitting in the cage. After leaving them for 24 hours
without water, in complete darkness and without fresh air, I check to see if they’re willing to cooperate.

  My laptop’s microphone is connected to a powerful speaker in the basement, and a microphone in the basement is connected to the speakers of my laptop.

  “Hello again to you down there,” I say. They jump up in fright and point their weapons in the direction of the ladder to the bedroom.

  “I advise you to throw your weapons out of the cage so that we can move forward,” I say to them.

  “Okay. We’ll cooperate.” He says and takes a Zippo lighter from his pocket and throws it through the bars of the cage. The lighter makes a metallic sound as it falls to the floor.

  “What about the second gun?”

  “Come on, throw yours out, too,” the man says to the woman; and she wraps a belt with a large metal buckle around her wallet and throws it out through the bars. It too makes a metallic sound when it hits the floor.

  “There you go,” says the man, “we’ve thrown out our weapons. Now let’s talk.”

  “You’re very thirsty. You also must have noticed, that the oxygen level in the air down there is dropping and it’s getting harder for you to breathe. That’s because I turned off the basement’s ventilation system. I don’t need your lighter or your wallet. See you in twenty-four hours. If you’re still alive by then.”

  They both throw their weapons out the cage and scream for water.

  I go to my bedroom, open the closet, lift up the floor panel and climb down the ladder. I collect the guns off the floor and throw 2 bottles of mineral water to the couple in the basement. They drink them. I turn on the ventilation system and sit down on a chair in front of the cage.

  The woman remains silent. The man looks panicked. “Don’t you understand?” he says. “Amiram sent us. You mistakenly received three envelopes instead of one. You have to suspend the missions. We’ve been sent by The Organization to explain it all to you. Geneva was your only mission, and there, you killed too many people.”

  I don’t believe him. Amiram has to be notified. The mission has been exposed. I can’t allow myself to be confused by the enemy. There must be a mole in The Organization. Someone from the very heart of The Organization is relaying information about the most confidential missions. I can’t let them stop me.

 

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