by Nir Hezroni
Grandpa rose from his chair. “I’m going home, Avner, but first promise me that you won’t leave here alone. I’ll call in a security detail for you. Just to be on the safe side.”
Standing in the doorway, Grandpa remembered something and turned around. “You have a visitor on her way over. Let her read the notebook when she gets here. She may find something you missed.”
Grandpa left the room before Avner had a chance to inquire as to the identity of his guest.
He picked up the flash drive that came with the notebook and held it between his fingers. He looked closely at the label which displayed handwriting he was now quite familiar with. Avner plugged the flash drive into his laptop. It contained just a single file labeled Doctor.mp3 and Avner played it through the laptop’s speakers.
- Click
- Click
- Click
- Click
- Click
- Close your eyes and listen to rhythm of the clicks.
- Click
- Click
- Click
- Click
- Click
- In a moment I will count to three.
- Click
- Click
- Click
- Click
- Click
Avner stopped the recording. He thought about Amiram.
Amiram was the one who had recruited 10483. Now he understood why Amiram was so agitated last night. Last night? An eternity seems to have gone by since eleven last night.
Avner clicked on Send and the Orion system, as efficient as ever, distributed the summary he had written during the course of the night to The Organization’s headquarters.
10483 could be outside right now. The thought sent shivers down his spine. He hoped Grandpa’s paranoia was overblown. He’s been in The Organization for too long.
The door to the office flew open suddenly.
“Where is it?—Quickly, go wash your hands—Don’t put your fingers in your mouth—I’ve got gloves—Call everyone who may have touched it and tell them to wash their hands, too—Who else has touched it?—Give it to me.”
“Excuse me? Who are you?” A bewildered Avner stared at the young woman motioning frantically in front of him. She was dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt. Peering at him from under her crop of black hair was a pair of blazing green eyes.
“Grandpa called me. Didn’t he tell you? I’m Rotem. I conducted a study of this agent ten years ago. I have to read it.”
Avner handed her the notebook and the stack of pages that were in it and Rotem pulled a pair of latex gloves out of her pocket and slipped them over her hands. “Wash your hands with a lot of soap,” she said. “I’m serious. You know who we’re dealing with here. He may have coated the pages in something.”
Avner went to the bathroom and Rotem picked up the notebook. “Amateurs,” she muttered to herself. She sat at the desk and flipped through the pages of the notebook from left to right, at the pace of a photocopying machine. She then did the same with loose pages.
“Fucking hell. It’s unreal!” Rotem placed the last page on the table.
She cast her eyes over the remaining items on the desk and spotted the handwriting on the label of the flash drive that was still connected to Avner’s laptop. She grabbed for the laptop, unplugged its communication cable, turned it over, removed the battery and caused it to shut down. “Double amateurs,” she muttered again.
“What are you doing?” Avner walked back into the room carrying two cups of coffee in his freshly washed hands.
“Do you have any idea what kind of viruses-worms-spyware and other devious things he’s put on here for you? Who knows what kind of worm you’ve just put into The Organization’s network!” She pulled out a cell phone and quickly typed a text message to the Computer Department’s Control Center. Check all the data transmissions from the Ganei Yehuda satellite and send someone from InfoSec here right now.
“Give me a second to think,” Rotem continued—and closed her eyes. The contents of the notebook flashed through her photographic memory; she arranged all the sentences, words and sketches on a large imaginary wall in her mind and began to draw lines between them, her fingers moving in the air in front of her face and closed eyes, mimicking her thought patterns that linked events on the imaginary map she pictured.
She continued for about two minutes and then opened her eyes and remained silent.
“Why don’t I know about that?” Avner asked.
He got no response. Rotem appeared to be somewhere else. She was looking straight ahead but her eyes weren’t focused on anything in particular.
“Why don’t I know about that?” Avner asked again.
Rotem gathered herself. “Know about what?” she said.
“About the study you conducted on him.”
“I did it for the European Ops division. They kept it to themselves. You know … the policy of keeping things separate.… What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” Rotem remove her gloves. “What’s on the flash drive?”
“Just the recording of the hypnosis—the one he used in Canada.”
“How exactly did you get hold of the notebook?”
Avner told Rotem about the law firm and the delivery instructions they received with the notebook and about his meeting with Amiram.
Rotem stood and started pacing back and forth in the room. “He had ten years to plan things. God only knows what he managed to come up with in ten years.”
Avner watched her as she moved agitatedly back and forth in the space between the desk and the door. I wonder how she came to work for them, he thought. The Operations Division had always had special privileges. Apparently some of their recruits don’t go through his department.
“Look at what he managed to accomplish in just a few days with each of the hits he carried out. He’s very creative. And now he’s had ten years. It’s a vendetta. There are no gray areas in his world; everything’s either black or white, good or evil. He’ll never forgive The Organization for what they did to him, for losing faith in him. From his perspective, going from good to evil in the eyes of The Organization is the end of the world.”
“Why does he reveal everything in the notebook? He could have exacted his revenge without it too.”
“It’s pretty simple,” Rotem sighed. “Everyone who’s seen it during the course of the night is going to die. So he doesn’t really care about all this exposure. To the contrary, he wants us to know that he’s always been good, that we were all wrong. After he kills you, Amiram, Grandpa, me and anyone else in his sights, he’ll destroy it. The material in the notebook is genuine; he hasn’t fabricated anything. It fits the pattern to a degree that can’t be faked. The basement’s a trap. He’s probably sitting there with night-vision goggles like Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, finger around the pin of a grenade. Or there’s a motion sensor that will set off an explosive device to bring the whole building down the moment anyone steps foot on the ladder. Forget the basement; it’ll only end badly down there. Evacuate the building and issue a demolition order. He’s relishing this now. Don’t give him the pleasure.”
“The pleasure?”
“Yes. The pleasure. His plan was set into motion last night. After ten years of planning. He’s loving every minute. He enjoys a good plan kicked off and running even more than the idea of hurting the organization that betrayed him. For him it’s all about the planning and the execution.”
“Amiram was his operator. I’m responsible for recruiting agents, Grandpa is part of the inner circle. Why kill you?”
“Because I know him better than anyone. I’m sure he’s aware of that. He knew Grandpa would call me in, just like he knew Amiram would bring the notebook to your home, just like he knew that you’d come here within half an hour of starting to read it. He may be paranoid and a sociopath and suffer from crippling OCD, but he’s not stupid. In fact, he’s a genius of sorts in his own insane way.”
“So why did he deposit the notebook a deca
de ago with instructions to send it now?” Avner continued. “If he’s alive, he could have held on to it and sent it whenever he chose.”
“He set himself a deadline. He knows himself and knows he could have devoted twenty years to planning this, too. He simply provided himself with a time constraint when he gave the notebook to the law firm. He WANTED to impose a time restriction on himself.”
“You know, the three people on the Bernoulli list that he took out all had something in common. They were all nuclear scientists. Yasmin Li-Ang was a nuclear engineer who worked at the CERN particle accelerator, Professor Federico Lopez headed the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Instituto Balseiro and played a major role in Argentina’s nuclear program, and Professor Bernard Strauss led the SLOWPOKE mini-reactor project in Canada. Doesn’t it seem just a little too coincidental that all three nuclear scientists ended up as his targets? The remaining scientists on the list were physicists too, but none were involved in the nuclear field.”
“I don’t know how or why it turned out like that, but it certainly doesn’t sound like a coincidence. I don’t think he picked out the nuclear scientists on the Bernoulli list himself. Whoever arranged for him to receive the three envelopes had a definite agenda.”
Rotem finally sat down again. She removed her shoes, rested her feet on the table and wiggled her toes. She sipped from the mug of coffee Avner had returned with. “I’m not leaving here until they show me his head on a platter. And we should call in more security.”
December 12th 2006
A young man paced quickly down Tel Aviv’s Ibn Gvirol Street. There was something different about today. He was sure. The sun warmed his short black hair and a pair of sunglasses shielded his eyes.
- You won’t let yourself become him -
He was carrying two shopping bags from the Super-sol at 157 Ibn Gvirol in each hand. Had the supermarket been on the other side of the street, at 156, its street number would be divisible by three with no remainder. But it’s not. That’s why he doesn’t really like shopping at that supermarket, but its business hours are more convenient.
- You won’t let yourself become him -
He needs to get home to continue working on the basement. He moved into the new apartment some seven months ago and it would be another seven months before the new basement would be ready. He torched his previous apartment.
It struck him at once.
He knew exactly what he had to do today, the day on which the doors to heaven open once every one thousand years. He waited on the sidewalk for a bus to come speeding by. With the bus just two meters away, he jumped into the road in front of it and spread his arms, still holding the bags from the supermarket.
The bus driver stared at him, eyes wide, and didn’t even have time to slam his foot down on the brake pedal. The look on the driver’s face reminded him of the look on the face of someone he once pushed onto the tracks of the Metro in Amsterdam.
The bus and the man in front of it unite momentarily and then separate. Vegetables, bread, and bags of frozen food scatter over the road in front of the stunned onlookers. The bus comes to a stop.
The tall thin body of 10483 lies sprawled on the road. His jeans are ripped at the back, where his hip bones—displaced due to the two open fractures caused when the vehicle’s bumper slammed into his pelvis—have pierced through the fabric. The pieces of bone are covered in shredded bits of muscle. One of his ribs is protruding from his side, too, through a tear in the black T-shirt he is wearing.
He tries to close his eyes but isn’t able to. Fragments from his broken sunglasses are keeping them from closing.
10483 lies on the road, eyes open, smiling broadly. He can’t remember the last time he’d smiled.
He can’t remember ever smiling.
He feels light, as if a load has been lifted from his mind and disappeared.
He’s free at last.
“I’ll be your eyes”
I’m lying on my back, a blinding black light all around me.
The noise of a respirator.
“I’ll be your eyes”
She repeats the words.
“Don’t be afraid”
“Fifty-three to control, we have an attempted suicide with multiple-system injuries, sedated and on a respirator. We’re on our way to Ichilov. Ready the ER. ETA two minutes.”
“Got you. Relaying to Ichilov. Do you have an ID for him?”
“No. He’s not carrying identification of any kind.”
“What’s the condition of his face?”
“It’s a mess. He jumped off the sidewalk in front of a bus. He doesn’t have a face. His mother wouldn’t recognize him. I’ve given him twenty milligrams of morphine and he’s on oxygen. They’re going to need plenty of units of blood. He’s lucky we were nearby in the ambulance when we got the call. Five more minutes of blood loss and he would have needed the coroner.”
“Tali, are you coming by control after your shift?”
“Believe me; you don’t want to see me now. I look like someone who works in a butcher shop. I’m covered in blood. All I need is that butcher’s hat on my head and a meat cleaver in my hand. I have to take a shower. Let’s catch up tomorrow.”
“Cool.”
Today, December 4th, 07:30
The loud banging on the door startled Galia. She placed the sandwich she was preparing on the kitchen counter and went to the door.
“Who’s there?”
“Police. Open up please.”
Galia left the security chain in place and opened the door. She peered out through the opening and saw two uniformed police officers. One of them flashed his police ID.
“You need to leave the building,” one of the officers said to her.
“What happened?” Galia asked alarmed.
“There’s a gas leak. We don’t know where it’s coming from, but it appears to be from the building’s main line. We’re evacuating all tenants. Is there anyone else at home with you?”
“Yes. I have two children. I’ll be out with them right away.”
“Quickly. Don’t turn on any electrical appliances and no open flames, of course.”
Galia rushed back to the kitchen. Yonatan had left for work earlier that morning and Romi and Ido were finishing their breakfast of cornflakes with milk.
“Come, sweeties, we need to leave. Don’t forget your bag, Romi.”
“But I haven’t finished eating!”
“There’s no time, sweetie, we have to go right now. You can have some more cereal when you get back from kindergarten.”
“Mom, was that a real policeman?”
“Yes, he came for a visit.”
“Why?”
“To make sure that we’re okay. The police look after us, and they came here to make sure that we leave the house right away because there’s a gas leak and all the neighbors have to leave quickly until it’s fixed.”
They hurried out and Galia locked the door behind them. Parked across the rain-soaked street in front of the building were police cars and ambulances, a large fire truck and several additional unmarked vehicles with civilian license plates flashing blue lights.
“Wow! Did you see, Mom? Look how many of them are looking after us.”
With Romi and Ido in tow, Galia quickly moved away from the building. She strapped the children in the car and got into the driver’s seat. A policeman in a yellow raincoat pushed aside a barrier at the end of the street and allowed her to drive out.
Something was troubling Galia, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
It wasn’t all the vehicles parked outside the building.
And it wasn’t the dozens of emergency services personnel and various other official-looking individuals who were waiting downstairs as the tenants left the building.
Then she figured it out. It was simple, really. There was no smell of gas.
09:00
“No matter what, you’re not to touch a thing down there. In one of the bedrooms ther
e’s a closet, something in its floor leads down to the basement. The light switches are booby-trapped; use only your flashlights. There’s supposed to be a large steel cage down there in the middle of the basement, and a large aquarium, two bodies, and God knows what else. No matter what you find, you’re not to touch a single thing; you’re only scanning for explosives with the puffer machines and marking the walls. You’re going to go through that basement little by little until everything’s been marked, and then you’re going to drill into the walls to locate the ignition fuse wire next to each block of explosives so they can be disconnected from the detonation mechanism. Scan the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the bodies, the aquarium, but don’t touch a thing.”
The man giving the briefing looked tired but he repeated the same instructions over and over again.
The leader of the team, Daniel, already had his gas mask on. He would go in accompanied by two agents from The Organization and two sappers from the Counter-Terrorism Unit. He nodded, then motioned slightly with his head in the direction of the building. They went in.
The door on the right on the ground floor was already open. The family had left in a hurry.
First, a quick scan of the apartment. It was an ordinary residential apartment with two children’s bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a master bedroom with a large closet. They removed all the clothes from the closet and placed them on the bed. Then they disassembled the shelves and leaned them against the wall.
“There’s no trapdoor here.”
Their voices sounded mechanical through the gas mask filters. Like robots.
“Keep looking. Knock on the floor of the closet until you locate a hollow area.”
“There’s something here.”
“Let me see.”
Daniel knelt down in front of the open closet and examined the floor. It looked like the left side of the wood floor was covering something. Using a cordless screwdriver he inserted two large screws into the wood floor and then used them to grip and lift the wood. Underneath the flooring was a steel trapdoor with rubber sealing around its edges. Welded to its left side was a U-shaped steel handle.