by Nir Hezroni
Daniel pulled the handle to the right, and the steel covering slid along two rails across the closet floor to expose a small opening and a metal ladder leading down into darkness.
The team climbed down slowly, one rung at a time, taking care not to touch anything. Daniel, who went down first, aimed the beam of his head-mounted flashlight at the basement floor before stepping off the ladder to scan for possible tripwires or a switch that could detonate an explosive charge. The team then stood in the center of the basement and directed their flashlights around the dark expanse. Their gas masks emitted sounds of heavy breathing.
In the center of the basement stood a tall steel cage, which was empty. The cage door was open. One of the members of the team went in and looked around. There was something written on the floor of the cage, under a layer of dust. He retrieved a fine brush from one of the pouches in his vest and carefully brushed the dust aside to reveal words engraved into the concrete floor. Given the depth of the letters in the hard floor, someone had obviously gone to great lengths to scratch them into the concrete.
12/29/2005
The fucker got me
My name is ■■■■ ■■■■■■
I won’t get out of here alive
Notify my family
03 - ■■■■■■■.
The name and number had been thoroughly erased using a powerful mechanical stone-cutting tool. Recovering the details would be impossible.
The agent from The Organization returned the brush to its pouch and pulled out a small digital camera. He photographed the writing, put the camera away again and continued to scan the cage centimeter by centimeter with the aid of his flashlight.
At the same time, the second agent from The Organization looked over a large table with dishes that contained something that once was food. The plates and eating utensils were covered in a thick layer of dust. Bound to chairs at either end of the table were two decomposing bodies draped in dust-covered robes, with empty and dusty tubes still attached to the loose skin that remained on the bones of their arms. The flashlight’s beam followed the yellowing pipes leading from their arms to a large empty container, covered in dust too.
Their heads were slumped forward. Skulls with bits of dry skin still stuck to them. One scalp had the short hair of a man and the other, the long black hair of a woman, some of which remained attached to her head and some of which had dropped off into her lap and lay in a small pile on the robe she was wearing. Resting on the table, under a layer of dust, was an old piece of paper with writing on it. The agent cleaned it carefully with his brush and photographed it.
Up against the wall in front of the table stood a large aquarium filled with yellow liquid. Over time, some of the liquid had clearly evaporated, leaving bits of residue on the sides of the tank that were an indication of its original level. There was nothing in the liquid.
If the team members were not wearing their gas masks the unbearable stink of death in the basement would have made it impossible to focus on their mission. A mechanical-sounding voice interrupted the silence, which until then had been disturbed only by heavy breathing and the clicking of cameras. “Okay, guys, Rafi and I are going to scan the walls with the puffer machines; you check for tripwires or other booby traps. Slow and easy. We’re in no rush. Photograph everything.”
The two members of the police’s Counter-Terrorism Unit began charting the explosive devices while the two organization agents continued to document the basement, photographing the remains of the food and water and the ventilation and electrical systems. Now and then, one of the puffer machines would emit a series of short beeps, and its operator would carefully draw a circle with a black marker on one of the walls or the floor.
A sudden mechanical buzzing sound caused them to freeze and they all directed their flashlight beams at the ceiling, in the direction of the source of the noise.
A camera.
It was rotating slowly and scanning the basement from side to side in a one-hundred-and-eighty degree arc.
“Move it! Get upstairs now!”
The four of them dropped the equipment they were carrying and made a dash for the ladder, the beams of their head-mounted flashlights flickering frenetically through the dark interior of the basement.
09:40
Despite the drizzle, a crowd had gathered under umbrellas behind the police barricades. The tenants who had been evacuated from their apartments, together with curious onlookers from nearby buildings, were trying to figure out what was going on.
“Why did they close the street?”
“They say there’s a gas leak in that building over there.”
“A gas leak?”
“Yes.”
“Twenty police cars for a gas leak? It looks more like a police orgy.”
“Too true. And what are the CTU vehicles doing here?”
“Since when have you been such an expert? How do you know which ones are CTU vehicles?”
“Can’t you see the…?”
The conversation was cut short by an explosion.
The four-story building rose a centimeter or two off the ground for a moment and then caved in on itself like a house of cards. The powerful blast sprayed chunks of concrete and broken glass in every direction, injuring onlookers who were standing too close to the police barriers and shattering the windows of cars parked in the vicinity of the building. The structure disappeared in a large cloud of dust; and when the dust cleared, there was nothing left but a pile of concrete and brick, with twisted pieces of metal protruding from the rubble. Flames were coming from a burst gas pipe, ignited by the blast, and a fountain of water gushed from another pipe torn apart by the shockwave.
Everything went silent for a few seconds.
And then chaos broke out. The screams of the injured, ambulance and police sirens, and instructions to clear a path for the emergency vehicles blared through loudspeakers.
Covered from head to toe in a fine white powder, Avner stood across the street with his hands over his ears. Everything around him appeared for a while to be moving in slow motion, and then suddenly, as if someone had released the Pause button, the world began moving again.
“You have to keep this under wraps,” he shouted to The Organization official standing next to him. “The media will be here any minute. Sell them a gas-leak story. This has to be covered up. Get everyone in the picture as quickly as possible.”
“Did the team get out?”
“No,” Avner sighed. “No one must be allowed to see the rescue teams bringing the bodies out from the basement when they get to them. Erect a large canvas tent over all this shit and make sure our teams handle the evacuation.”
Avner sipped from a bottle of water someone handed to him. “I’m going to the main base. Make sure they retrieve the memory cards from the cameras and recording equipment—when they eventually get to the bodies.” Avner glanced at the smoking pile of rubble that was once a building. “It’ll take some time,” he added.
09:53
Efrat woke and stretched in bed.
By the look of the sheets and blankets on Avner’s side of the bed, she could tell he hadn’t come to bed at all during the night.
He must have fallen asleep in the living room again, she thought.
She got up, went to the bathroom, washed her hands, and brushed her teeth.
Then she went downstairs. She glanced at the living room and vacant couch and realized Avner wasn’t there. He’d left a message for her on the magnetic board on the refrigerator. He’d gone to The Organization once again.
It really is getting a bit much, she thought to herself. She resolved for the thousandth time to persuade him to find a job in human resource management and quit selling his soul to the ungrateful organization he currently worked for. He’d earn twice as much and work half the amount of time. That’s it. She’d speak to him about it this evening.
She went into the kitchen, took out a bottle of orange juice from the refrigerator and was pou
ring herself a glass when the doorbell rang. Perhaps it’s Avner, she thought. But why would he ring the bell if he has a key?
She opened the door.
Standing in a brown rain-soaked uniform was a UPS messenger.
“Hello,” he said.
“Good morning.”
“I have a package for Avner Moyal. Are you his wife?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll leave it here with you then. It’s important. You should call him and tell him to come and get it.”
Efrat’s first instinct was to tell him to go to hell, she doesn’t like being told what to do. On second thought, the messenger seemed a bit off, so she decide not to mess with him.
“Do I need to sign something?”
“Yes, here’s a pen. Sign here, please.”
Efrat signed the form and the messenger turned around and left.
She turned her attention to the package.
10:05
“Hi, sweetie!”
“Hi, honey. You bailed on me last night. Work again? You’re crazy.”
“Sorry, sweetie. I had to. Someone brought me something very urgent last night. I had to check a few things at work. I’ll make it up to you.”
“A package just arrived here for you. I was about to open it.”
Avner could feel his heart start to race. He broke into a cold sweat. “Put it down right now!!!” The scream tore from his throat.
Startled by his reaction, Efrat placed the package on the table. “What’s up?”
“It could be a bomb. Get out of the house. There’s a psycho on the loose who has it out for me. Go to Rona’s place. Now. I’m on my way. Place the package gently on the floor and don’t touch it. Keep an eye out on your way to Rona’s and let me know if anyone’s following you.”
“Avner! You’re scaring me!”
“Just do as I say. I’m on my way to Rona’s place now. I’ll meet you there. What did the messenger look like?”
“I dunno … thirty-five, forty, or so. With cropped hair and a short beard. And a strange voice. Like a robot.”
Avner screeched into a U-turn and began heading toward home.
Messengers are usually young guys.
It must have been him.
Avner floored it. He was completely unaware that there was a black device, the size of a thick book, which had been fitted into that very spot under the floor of his car while it was parked outside the satellite office where he had spent the night.
10:15
The large glass wall enclosing the den offered a view of well-manicured stretches of lawn. The room’s walls were lined with bookshelves and the floor was dark hardwood. Several logs ablaze in a fireplace in the corner of the room dispelled the chill of the winter morning. The lights in the room were off; the early morning sunshine filtering through the glass wall was enough to illuminate the expanse.
Breakfast was laid out on a table on one side of the room—bowls of salad, fresh bread, several types of cheese, smoked salmon, omelets, hard-boiled eggs, fresh orange juice in a pitcher, and a selection of breakfast cereals. Neatly arranged next to an espresso machine at one end of the table were plates, glasses, mugs, and sets of cutlery. The person who had arranged the spread left the room, closing two large doors behind him.
In the center of the room was a heavy wooden table, four corners adorned with black metalwork. There were eight people seated at the table—five men and three women.
“Good morning everyone,” the host began.
“This meeting will be held entirely off the record and is not a part of The Organization’s ongoing activities. I’ve called this urgent session because the agent who carried out the operation in Canada in 2006 has surfaced.”
Drops of rain trickled down the large glass wall.
“Are you certain? It’s been ten years since then,” one of the men said.
“Yes. He’s alive. He managed to slip under our radar for ten years. He surfaced in Israel yesterday. I’m guessing he’s kicked off a plan of action against The Organization. He knows he was played. He’s known it for ten years.”
“That the notion of a mass killing was planted in his mind?”
“No, I don’t believe he’s onto that yet. No one outside this room knows that we assumed control of Bernoulli and used Canada to divert the United States off the bad road it was on. The U.S. was the primary objective; Canada was secondary; and the Bernoulli project was merely the facilitator. The bottom line is it worked.”
Everyone around the table nodded in agreement.
“The mass killing factor was there in his personality. We strengthened it in the transformations he received causing him to do bigger and more extensive collateral damage without his being aware of it. To him it was just plans he made and carried out. We needed someone who was screwed up to begin with so I personally neutralized the screening mechanisms during his recruitment. He failed his polygraph test and half his CV was fabricated, but we needed someone with his profile. As you are all well aware, no agent would have agreed to carry out the operations he did.”
“How many transformations did he undergo?”
“In addition to the four infrastructure transformations he underwent during the basic agents’ course, we also had to carry out three operational transformations in the field, of varying intensity and over a relatively short period of time, in order to steer him in the direction we wanted.”
“Is that why he was given three targets?”
“That’s one of the reasons.”
One of the individuals at the table, a large man, scratched his chin. “Are we certain about the effectiveness of the transformations? If I’m not mistaken, we’ve been using an outside contractor to perform them for us—a woman who used to work for us and then quit. It’s costly, and doesn’t always work that well. His last transformation involved the implanting of a self-termination date. He was supposed to commit suicide at some point, wasn’t he? What went wrong?”
“Let me fill you in a little. Look, the brain of a fly is slightly smaller than a grain of sand. It contains approximately two hundred thousand neurons. Relative to its size, it’s an amazing brain. It controls the fly’s motor functions, survival and reproduction, and does it all with a minimalistic learning mechanism of just twelve neurons in total. Researchers at the Department of Molecular Neurobiology of Behavior at Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany, successfully caused flies to smell light. I guess you could say they ‘reprogrammed’ the flies’ sensory system. We were quick to recognize the potential it held for us. We came across the study completely by chance. In fact, the contractor you’re referring to is the one who stumbled across the information when she was studying abroad, while she was still a part of The Organization. It’s safe to say that the world’s leading experts in the field are sitting today in our offices in Ramat Hasharon, only no one knows about them because they don’t publish articles in scientific journals. They apply their trade in the field.”
“A fly’s brain is not a human brain.”
“Remarkably, the basic learning mechanisms, the building blocks, are not so different. What we do with the transformation is simply on a larger scale. The difficulties and high cost are related to the creation of precise transformation files, rather than the cost of the outside contractor who applies them to the subject. A transformation file for a person has to be tailored to his or her specific brain. The wavelengths, the illumination, and the sound synchronization have to be combined perfectly, and the creation of each transformation file, based on its level of complexity, costs anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of shekels in computing expenses. But it’s effective. Very effective. Don’t forget that half of those released in the Gilad Shalit prisoner-exchange deal were subjected to transformations of intense paranoia and anxiety during their time in prison, and are just waiting for a trigger to activate them remotely. We’ve already tried remote activation on some of them, and the results were excellent. This is more than just planting an
idea. This is programming. This is making someone act and do very precise things without being aware that they’ve been manipulated. That’s the beauty of this method, we are not making the patient more psychotic than he already is, we just channel this behavior to specific activities we want him to do. But there is a price. We have seen that undergoing transformations eventually may speed up Alzheimer’s, raise the chance of a brain tumor, speed up dementia. It’s not a free ride.”
“And what’s the story with this agent, specifically?”
“As for the agent in question, he certainly knows all the particulars of the Bernoulli Project and he’s aware of the fact that he received three targets, not just one. I assume he dug through The Organization’s network and found all the Bernoulli material and the addresses of our doubles who are supposed to absorb any attempted hits on members of this inner circle. He did the math and realized that there was no mistake and that he received the three targets intentionally. That’s the least of my concerns. More troubling to me are his exceptional analytical skills and the fact that he’s had more than enough time to prepare something big for us now. He can do a lot of damage to The Organization’s outer layer. The last transformation did indeed include the implanting of a self-termination date. He was supposed to commit suicide on December 12, 2006. For some reason, however, he didn’t and we’ll have to figure out why, but that’s less of an issue right now.”
An elderly woman, gray hair tied up in a bun, stubbed out a cigarette in an ashtray on the table in front of her. “I’m assuming you’ve deployed a clean-up team to locate him?” she said.
“Yes, the same team that was assigned to him for the three Bernoulli hits that he carried out. They know him well. We have several decoys that he’s bound to go after. They’re all under surveillance.”
“Are you going to allow him to get to them?”
“I don’t think we have a choice. We need to limit the collateral damage.”
Everyone around the table nodded in agreement.
“Yasmin Li-Ang, Federico Lopez, and Bernard Strauss all worked for the same Iranian intelligence cell. We learned of this only in 2010, from Majid Shariri, the nuclear scientist who was taken out with a car bomb in Tehran but is alive and well today in Holon with a wife and three sons. Before interrogating him, we could only surmise why out of the twelve physicists, only the three nuclear scientists were under guard. Shariri confirmed our suspicions; he knew the names of all three. They were part of just one of six Iranian cells that were trying to get their hands on an old bomb from the former Soviet Union. A lot quicker than trying to develop a bomb yourself.