They finally settled on a restaurant located on the main street across the park, and once they were seated next to the glass-enclosed wine room, ordered dinner. Alan seemed distant or preoccupied, and Jet let him have his space until the entrées arrived.
“This looks delicious,” she said when the waitress set a succulent filet with a drizzle of truffle reduction in front of her.
“Argentina is known for its beef. Let’s hope the trout is as good,” he said, nudging his fish with his fork.
Both dishes were heavenly, and as they ate, Jet broached the subject that had been nagging at her.
“How do you think Grigenko’s men found me?”
“Had to be the banking. It’s the only answer. Believe me, I was pulling out all the stops to get a lead, and I found nothing.”
“But how could he have gotten the bank info?”
Alan put his fork down and shook his head. “I know. It’s troubling. The most likely possibility is that there’s a leak in the Mossad. But whoever it is left no tracks. According to the logs, the only one who has ever accessed that information was David, who created the account, and later, me.”
“Can’t the system be fiddled?”
“I suppose anything can be, theoretically, but I can’t see how. It would be beyond my capabilities.”
“What about one of the system engineers?”
“Again, it’s sort of a question of what is possible versus probable. If someone got into it, they had insane levels of technical sophistication. The whole point of a log system is that it’s foolproof. Otherwise what good would it be? And remember, we’re talking one of the most secure systems on the planet.”
They finished their meals in silence, Jet considering his point. “I never told you about the mole we found. In the Mossad,” she said.
Alan gazed at her without expression. “Come again?”
“David and I. He figured that there had to have been a mole. Grigenko senior got access to the identities of all the team members, and the only possible way he could have done that was with a high-level Mossad contact passing him supposedly inviolate information.”
“What? Who is it?”
She shifted uncomfortably in her chair and waited for the busboy to take their plates. “One of the associate directors. I’d never heard of him, but David had. He worked on that side of the fence, so he knew the players. I was always operations, and as you know, we have no reason to know the names.”
“But there’s the answer. It must be him.”
“That’s what I was thinking. If Grigenko’s people got the information a while ago, it could have taken them this long to track my withdrawals.”
“Wait. Why a while ago?” he asked.
She dabbed at the corner of her mouth with the cloth napkin and then set it down on the table. “David and I took him out. The director.”
Alan leaned back, shock etched across his face. “You executed a Mossad associate director? Are you completely insane?”
“It was complicated. The safe house had just been hit. All the team members slaughtered. David had been wounded. We didn’t have time to screw around.”
“Who was it?”
“Eli Cohen.”
Alan shook his head. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”
“Like I said. It wouldn’t. He was part of the inner circle – their identities are one of the most closely guarded secrets. Supposedly. Then again, so were the team’s. But David, being the conduit and case officer for us, interfaced with him. When the dust had settled, David was convinced.”
Alan digested that information as the waitress returned with the check. Alan counted out a few bills and dropped them onto the platter. “I’ll have to go with David’s instincts, then. He was the best. If he thought there was a mole, then there must have been.”
They rose and exited past waiting couples. The wind had completely died down, and the air was crisp, but still.
“I always wondered about Eli, though. David said he had confessed to passing Grigenko information, but I never heard it myself. And we both know that anything extracted from torture is unreliable. That’s why witches confessed during the Inquisition and the witch hysterias. You’ll confess to anything at a certain point to make the pain stop...”
Alan stopped on the sidewalk. “Wait. David tortured him, too?”
“Before he killed him. Yes.”
They retraced their steps back through the park, passing teen lovers on the benches embracing and an occasional hippie vendor selling incense or leather goods. A random gust of freezing air chilled them, and Jet pressed closer to Alan and took his hand.
“It gets cold here, doesn’t it?”
“We’re right next to the mountains.” He didn’t pull his hand away. Hers fit comfortably in his, and he swung their arms a few times as children sometimes do, and then the grin on his face faded as they neared the far end of the park.
“We’re really in the shit, aren’t we?” he asked quietly.
She knew what he was going through. Since the attempt on her in Trinidad she had grown almost used to being in constant jeopardy, every moment bringing with it more danger, able to trust no one. And she knew how destabilizing it was – nothing was ever what it seemed. Jet had been operational for years, on constant missions, but it hadn’t prepared her for her life since Grigenko had found her. When you were in the field, at least you knew who the good guys and the bad guys were. Presumably, you were the good guys. But in their current predicament nothing was certain. It was chaos, and the only way she’d been able to deal with it was to simply accept it and focus on the tactical elements she could impact.
None of which she said. It wouldn’t help. He needed to figure it out for himself.
“Yes, we are, Alan. Yes, we are.”
When they got back to the hotel Alan announced that he wanted a drink, and she accompanied him to the downstairs bar, away from the ruckus of the casino floor. They ordered a half bottle of the local Malbec – just enough for one glass each. Alan didn’t say much, and Jet didn’t feel any need to make conversation.
Once they were back in the room they prepared for bed, and when Jet crawled under the covers wearing her oversized T-shirt and running shorts, she pressed up against Alan. He seemed to understand her need to be held, and put his arms around her.
For a brief moment everything felt safe.
Her last thought as they drifted off to sleep, his warm breath on the back of her neck, was that the brothers were so very different, and yet each had his strengths. In a weird way, she felt lucky to have Alan, now that David was gone. Perhaps he had known what he was doing, after all – always scheming, trying to control events; maybe his final gift to her, his concession and unspoken apology for his betrayal of her, was to offer up his brother to comfort her in his place.
Chapter 20
Jet woke early, restless and jittery. Alan was still asleep, so she pulled on a different shirt and took the elevator to the lobby. After a few minutes of stretching she began her run through downtown, which was largely deserted at dawn.
She pushed herself relentlessly, but noticed that her endurance seemed down a little, until she remembered that she was at a higher altitude, so there was less oxygen.
An hour later, she returned, her sense of the city improved. It really was like a little bit of Europe dropped into South America, much like Uruguay, which made sense given the heredity of the population – mostly European. When all of this was over she would need to take a hard look at Mendoza as a possible resettlement spot for herself and Hannah. It seemed far removed from the big-city insanity of Buenos Aires, with its attendant crime, crowding, fuel and energy shortages, and periodic civil unrest.
When she returned to the room Alan was in the shower, so she turned on the news and searched for any coverage of the Uruguay killings, but didn’t find any. Outside of the country it would be considered a local problem specific to Montevideo, and like most news, within a few days, with nothing to keep it alive,
it would drop to the second page, and then the back page, and then be quickly forgotten.
Alan came out wearing a towel and motioned to the bathroom door. “It’s all yours.”
“You need anything else out of there?”
“Nope. I’ll pack my gear while you clean up. We need to be out of here in fifteen minutes if we’re going to get the bus. Anything on TV?”
“No. Looks like what happens in Uruguay stays in Uruguay.”
The water felt good on her skin, its needle-like pulsing stinging her skin, refreshing her. Conscious of the time, she hurriedly pulled a brush through her hair as she exited the bathroom. Alan was just finishing up with his computer.
“I charged it. So you should be good for all the research you can stomach on the ride to Chile.”
The bus station was better than most she’d been to, and she made another mental note about Mendoza. So far, all strong positives. They bought tickets and waited twenty minutes, and then the vehicle’s door opened with a hydraulic hiss and the waiting passengers tromped sleepily aboard.
As the bus climbed into the Andes the scenery was breathtaking, but Jet was focused on devouring everything that Alan had downloaded on the Russian. She sat by the window poring over the reports, noting that the son looked arrogant in the photos – not surprising given that he’d inherited a vast web of holdings worth many billions of dollars. Twenty-five years old, single, now living in a villa in the most exclusive area of Moscow, protected by a security team of ex-Spetsnaz GRU commandos in his employ. Prior to his father’s untimely demise, he had amassed a respectable amount of money after quitting university at nineteen – he’d entered at seventeen, skipped ahead a grade in high school due to academic achievement, but hadn’t fit in well once in higher education.
Speculations were that he’d grown bored with academia and had actively developed a crime syndicate dealing drugs to his fellow students, and then rapidly branched out into all the usual ugliness, assisted by his father’s network of Russian and Chechnyan mafia cronies. He had disappeared from sight at nineteen, then suddenly re-emerged into the spotlight at twenty-three, the rumored head of a powerful new arm of the mob that specialized in arms dealing, drug trafficking, and violence, including murder.
“This guy’s a real piece of work. He’s filthy rich now, so he doesn’t need to be involved in any of the illegal crap,” she commented to Alan as they skewed around one of seemingly countless hairpin turns.
“Some people have a hard time giving up the life. For them it’s the kick, the charge of being outside the law. Sounds like your boy is one of those. A sociopath who views himself as the center of the universe and everyone else as objects or things to be toyed with, existing solely for his amusement. I’m familiar with the psych profile workup. Read that next. He’s a beauty.”
“I’ll say. But aside from the fact that he’s going to be dead within a week, he’s also remarkable in the sense that he’s not at all what you would expect from someone willing to do business with terrorists – especially high-risk business like supplying them with weapons of mass destruction. There aren’t a lot of things that pretty much everyone agrees is off-limits, but that would be one of them.”
“That’s why I said to read the profile. Our shrinks’ consensus is that he’s a thrill junkie willing to risk everything for another adrenaline jolt. It fits. He didn’t need to get into the crime game – he could have gone to work for Dad and made his fortune that way, or just waited for his papa to die. Instead he got into the most dangerous possible game, and flourished. It takes a special kind of person to turn his back on billions and willingly wallow with the worst humanity has to offer. That’s what he did.”
She continued studying the materials, flipping to the layouts of his villa and his office building after reading the exhaustive detail on his personal life.
“This is a bad man. A really bad one, Alan.”
“You’re singing to the choir. But the one thing we don’t have him for, dead to rights, is the arms trafficking. We haven’t been able to make any firm connections to the terrorists other than indirect links.”
“Fortunately, for me to put him out of his misery, I’m the only judge and jury I need to convince. And I’m already sold. This piece of shit is history. And I thought his father was scum. The son took after the other twin – you know I terminated him, too, right? He was in the arms business as well. Nasty. And also surrounded by impenetrable security. Didn’t do him much good, did it?”
“One of our biggest positives is that he’s not expecting you to come after him. As far as he knows, you’re hiding under a rock somewhere in Uruguay. If you’re lucky, you’ll already be in and out of Moscow by the time anyone figures out you aren’t the hiding type.”
“You really think he could have done his research on me and not know I would come after him?”
“I don’t think he cares. Remember – this is a sociopath and a narcissist. It’s all about him doing things to you, not you doing anything to him. Sounds like he’s taken on a blood feud, an oath to kill you as payback for executing his father. Even though nothing ever surfaced officially, you were spotted by enough of his dad’s security team on his boat that night that it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who took Daddy down. But the notion of you penetrating his defenses and coming for him? Not a chance. That’s what we have going for us. He considers himself invulnerable.”
“So did his father, as I recall. Smug, snide, sure of his own superiority. Funny, because he died just like anyone else.”
“That’s always what seems to happen to those that take you on, isn’t it? Just remember that his greatest weakness is his arrogance. It makes him overconfident.” Alan’s unspoken message was clear – don’t make the same mistake.
She debated firing back at him, but then decided he had a valid point. Very much like David in that regard – always cautioning prudence and humility. They were right, of course. She had seen it time and time again operationally – her targets thought they were insulated from the world, safe from danger. From her. And eventually, that certitude was one of the elements of their undoing.
Two hours later the bus entered the frozen pass near the summit, the Andes towering around them, and it slowed to a crawl as a blizzard hit, snow blowing sideways, blinding everyone on the road to anything more than a few yards ahead. They crawled along in the sleet, the driver being especially cautious – he knew the road well and understood where the worst of the dangers lay.
The lesson slammed home as she took a break from her review of the Mossad’s materials. Even though he had traveled the road a thousand times, the driver was wary of the unexpected and was taking nothing for granted. That, in turn, would keep them all alive, and ensure that he lived to drive another day.
Not a bad idea, she reasoned, and filed it away for whenever she felt too cocky.
The afternoon dragged on, and eventually they were over the mountains and descending into Chile, only a few short hours left to go before they arrived at their destination. It had been time well spent for Jet, because now she felt she had a full understanding of the target’s habits and motivations.
“We’ll hit him at the house. Hit him where he lives, when he least expects it. That’s where he’s most vulnerable,” she announced on the outskirts of Santiago.
“I thought you’d say that,” Alan remarked, and then took the laptop from her and packed it away, her research finished for the moment.
They watched the countryside turn into city as they made their way into the coastal nation’s capital, ready to depart almost immediately after they arrived, their stay limited to a few hours in a hotel before they flew out on the first flight of the following day.
Chapter 21
Moscow, Russian Federation
The streets around Grigenko’s ultra-expensive villa were empty at midnight. Located a few blocks from the Christ the Savior church on the Moskva River in the most exclusive neighborhood in Moscow, the quiet area was inhabite
d by only the wealthiest of the immensely rich, and the sidewalks were jammed with parked Mercedes, Bentley, and Lexus sedans, for those unfortunates who didn’t have a private garage area like Grigenko did.
He had bought the villa two weeks after his father’s death, upgrading from his prior condominium digs to a residence befitting one of the city’s richest new oligarchs. No sooner had he signed on the purchase agreement than he sold his father’s nearby home and surrounding residences, rejecting anything that was a reminder of his detested iron rule.
A Porsche rolled down the silent street in front of the villa, stereo blaring, and the security team watched it warily as it sped up and turned the corner at the end of the block.
“Looks clear,” Alan said into the ear bud after he had turned down the music, the German sports car purring at his coaxing.
“I’m going to get into position then. I figure it’ll take half an hour. I have to contend with the locks, so I need to allow time to disable them and deal with any other unexpected surprises,” Jet responded from a doorway four blocks away. She scanned the empty street, then shouldered the black rucksack she was carrying and moved to the manhole cover she’d spied on the sewer plan Alan had gotten from his local contact.
Another glance confirmed that she was still alone, and she wasted no time in prying the cover up with a long steel manhole cover pick she’d retrieved from her bag, sliding the heavy metal disk to one side and then lowering herself down the ladder into the pitch black. Alan would be along in a few moments to heave it back into place, as agreed, while she wasted no time moving though the sewers. The fetid stink of the air caused her to gag involuntarily, and she struggled for control as she breathed through her mouth, focused on slowing her heart rate and limiting the instinctive nausea.
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