by Brad Taylor
Ezra said, “Israel has occupied East Jerusalem since the Six-Day War. Nothing we have done has altered their trajectory of settlements and consolidation. There is only one fault line that will generate the anger we need. Generate the absolute conviction. It’s Haram al-Sharif.”
Ezra used the Muslim name for the Temple Mount, driving his point home. “The holy site is the one thing that causes the most anger. Remember the intifada? That came about because the Israeli prime minister visited Haram al-Sharif. Remember the outrage at the metal detectors a few months ago? Even the king of Jordan became involved. Israel can’t slaughter all who protest, and that’s exactly what we need. Massive protests. You attack, and they’ll shut down Haram al-Sharif. That will be the catalyst for another intifada. And victory.”
“I think we need something more. Something greater than just an attack with guns. After the last attack, our strike might simply cause Israel to eliminate the Waqf and destroy the status quo. We might be giving Haram al-Sharif to Israel without something more. We need a tipping point, not just another shoot-out.”
Ezra kept his face calm but felt his control slipping. That was exactly what he wanted to occur. He said, “Maybe in the future. Maybe. One step at a time.”
Dawood considered Ezra’s words for a moment, then nodded, his face comically serious. He said, “Okay. What’s the next step?”
Ezra slid across another flip phone and said, “I have to coordinate for the transfer of weapons. Keep your men close. I’ll call when we’re ready.”
Dawood took the phone and said, “Don’t worry. They’ll be ready.”
Ezra smiled and said, “I would expect nothing less from a patriot.”
He left the back room, then exited the shop without saying a word to the brother, feeling his eyes on his back as he passed through the door. Once outside, he exhaled, letting loose some pent-up adrenaline.
He felt confident in the mission. Dawood thought an attack would generate an overwhelming protest that would cause Israel to cede control, but Ezra knew differently.
The Zionists he knew were sick of the so-called status quo. The Temple Mount was their birthright, and it was time for Israel to assert control. The entire country was centered on that piece of terrain, and every single Jew knew it. They had a country without a heart. It wasn’t like they were taking over Mecca. In fact, it was like Mecca being controlled by Jews, forbidding Muslims from worshipping there. And it was time for that to stop.
He trusted in his plan, knew it would work. His biggest fear was penetration from his own security forces. Many in Israel didn’t hold his unwavering faith, and if his plan were exposed, it would be defeated. But that was unlikely to happen. He was on the inside as the border police liaison to the Islamic Waqf. If anyone suspected anything, he’d know.
His confidence in his ability to learn of any investigation was absolute, but he failed to consider the second- and third-order effects of what he’d set in motion. As in the old Arabian fable, once one let the genie out of the bottle, it was hard to control the outcome.
3
It only took a few minutes of riding on the subway before I desperately wanted to get off. The train was littered with newspapers and fast-food trash, and the air held the faint wisp of urine. Having ridden light-rail systems all over the world, I was amazed at how pathetic New York City’s subway was. The closest competitor I could think of was Budapest, Hungary—but at least that one was clean. It was competing solely because it was a relic of the USSR, but the New York subway almost had it beat in archaic design.
I said, “I wonder how many tourists come to the Big Apple for their once-in-a-lifetime adventure and get on one of these dumps. They must want to ask their travel agent for a refund.”
Knuckles said, “You’re the one who asked for it. I didn’t want to come up here. I was happy training Carly.”
Carly was a CIA case officer who was attempting to become a Taskforce Operator. Before she attended Assessment and Selection, Knuckles had been tasked with getting her up to speed on the finer points of knuckle dragging. It was a little role reversal, because ordinarily our recruits came from the Special Mission Units of the Department of Defense. What they needed was some instruction on being James Bond, not Rambo. Carly was the exact opposite, so Knuckles had been detailed to train her. Well, he’d detailed himself because he’s the one who’d recruited her—along with the secret-but-not-so-secret fact that she was also sleeping in his bed. He’d always been a man-whore on my team, but now treated this relationship as if it didn’t exist. Nobody on the team bought that except him, but we let him live the fantasy. Sort of.
The subway blessedly stopped at Rockefeller Center, and I exited as quickly as I could, breathing in the fresh air. I said, “There was no way I could tell them no. I already feel bad enough about telling them I couldn’t go to the wedding. This would have made it look like I was avoiding them. They come all the way from Israel, and we can’t take a three-hour train ride from DC? Anyway, Carly didn’t seem to mind.”
Knuckles said, “She loves this city. She’d use any excuse to come here.”
We walked up the stairs to Sixth Avenue and I said, “Any excuse to come to New York, or any excuse to get away from your training?”
“Hey, she’s also loving the training. And she’s getting pretty damn good.”
We went north on Sixth Avenue, walking toward Del Frisco’s Steakhouse. I said, “Then why are we eating here? You saying she threw the match for a trip to New York?”
Knuckles grimaced and said, “Luck.”
I said, “Bullshit. I’m ordering the surf and turf.”
My partner, Jennifer, and I had been in DC yesterday, making a periodic check-in with my boss, something I did every once in a while just to make sure the Taskforce wasn’t forgetting about me and my team, when I’d heard Knuckles was out on the range in Virginia training his little prodigy, Carly. After receiving an update briefing from the Taskforce Commander, Colonel Kurt Hale, I’d taken Jennifer—my own prodigy—with me for a visit.
We’d found them conducting two-gun drills on the steel range, Knuckles decidedly not portraying a commando, with a T-shirt, jeans, long black hair, and a two-day growth of beard. He looked like a hippie, or some milquetoast Abercrombie & Fitch model, right up until you met his eyes. They definitely didn’t convey peace and love.
He was giving instruction to Carly, and it was a little comical seeing him tower over her. She was only about five foot four, and she always reminded me of a surfer, with freckles across her face and a cute little upturned nose. I have no idea why that was. I didn’t even know if she could swim.
We watched for a bit, and Carly was pretty good for someone who hadn’t breathed firearms on a daily basis for most of her life. Knuckles was on another planet in skill, which was to be expected. It was a planet we both lived on, since we’d both come from the most elite Special Operations units in the US arsenal. That sounds like bragging, but it wasn’t. It was just a fact. He was Navy, and I was Army, but at the end of the day, at that level, the service mattered not a whit.
They’d finished the drill, and we approached. Carly had immediately started talking up her shooting. I liked her a lot, and had worked with her on a couple of operations when she was working as a case officer for the CIA, but she did have a habit of letting her mouth write checks her ass couldn’t cash. I wasn’t sure if Knuckles had given her an overblown sense of her capability, or whether she truly believed it, but I put her in her place with some critique, and the next thing I knew, she was betting dinner on a competition with Jennifer and me.
Challenging us to a shoot-off was a sore mistake because I had a secret: I’d been working with Jennifer quite a bit in Charleston, and she could flat-out shoot under pressure. She took to it naturally, intuitively understanding the various vagaries of the ballistics involved in a multitude of situations, and she had become very good. Some
thing Knuckles should have realized after our mission in Norfolk. I was going to enjoy this.
Jennifer had initially refused the challenge—because as good as she was, she simply wasn’t competitive. She wanted to learn for our job, and that was it. Knuckles mistook her reticence and immediately pounced with good-natured ribbing about being scared. I, of course, accepted without hesitation, even with Jennifer’s scowl.
The bet was dinner at a place of the winner’s choosing. I’d conveniently left off that my choice would be in New York.
Knuckles reviewed the rules, which consisted of another two-gun drill, shooting on the move with a long gun at distances ranging from fifty to three hundred meters, with barricades and mag changes, then transitioning to a pistol, basically doing the same thing at much shorter distances, and ending with slapping down seven six-inch steel plates at a distance of fifteen meters.
Knuckles gave us five rounds to check the zero on the spare rifles he had, fire a few rounds with a Glock, and we were off.
Knuckles went first, and he was moving as fast as a scalded cat, firing controlled pairs so rapidly there was barely a pause between targets. He ended on the plates, shooting his Glock so fast that if someone had just listened, they would have thought it was an MP5 on automatic.
Carly went next, and she did a pretty good job. She obviously wasn’t as fast as Knuckles, but she could shoot. She lost time changing mags, having to slow to a walk to do so, and took more than one round at both the two-hundred- and three-hundred-meter targets, but she ended strong on the plates, only having to aim a split second before breaking the trigger.
She finished with a huge smile, and Knuckles patted her on the back, proud, before turning to me and saying, “You’re up, commando.”
I was a little more rusty than Knuckles, as he’d been shooting for three days straight, and if there was anything more prone to decay than shooting skill, I don’t know what it is. I moved pretty fast, trying to match Knuckles’s speed, but I was on the ragged edge, going faster than I should have.
I knew I was slightly slower than Knuckles when I reached the plates, but it was literally a split-time’s worth of difference. I started shooting just like him, knocking the plates down like I was mowing grass, and had a stovepipe jam. I cursed, cleared it immediately, then finished the plates. In the end, I was a second and a half off of his time. Which was the size of the Grand Canyon in skilled shooting.
But I had an ace in the hole.
Knuckles grinned and said, “Koko, you’re up.” He was now convinced they were getting a free dinner. We were about to crush that hope.
Jennifer kitted up, getting everything situated, press-checked her pistol, then racked a round into her long gun. She pulled her blond hair into a ponytail, then glanced at me, and I saw in her eyes what the hell she was about to do.
I went to her and leaned in, whispering, “You had better not throw this.”
She understood on a visceral plane the inferno that Carly was about to go through, attempting A&S as a female. Jennifer had been the first and only female to try, and she didn’t want to undermine the second. She wanted to give her confidence. Instill in her that she could win. Which was bullshit when it was false.
She looked at me with her puppy-dog eyes and I said, “This will drive her to be better. Don’t give her false confidence. You’re not crushing her. You’re making her what she needs to be. Trust me, she’ll do whatever it takes to do what you’re about to. Don’t sell her short.”
She nodded, understanding the truth behind my words and trusting my judgment, but not liking it. Not liking the fight between Team Pike and Team Female.
Knuckles had heard what I’d said, and I knew he realized he was toast. I smiled and winked. He shook his head, stood behind her and said, “Shooter ready.”
The buzzer went off, and Jennifer shot off the line like a greyhound at the track, pinging steel every step of the way. She was slower than both Knuckles and me, but only a trained shooter could tell. She transitioned to the pistol, and the speed continued, her ringing every bit of steel on the course. She hit the plates, and they sang just like they had with Knuckles and me. She cleared her pistol on the last shot and looked at Knuckles for her time.
He didn’t give it. He simply said, “Holy shit, Koko. What happened to you?”
She smiled and said, “I do more than just climb walls. I’ve been working with Pike.”
Far from being upset, Carly was in awe. She said, “You couldn’t do that before?”
Jennifer laid her weapons down on the range table and said, “No. I wasn’t even as good as you at this stage in your training.”
Carly nodded, a new understanding of what was possible coming to her mind. To no one in particular, she said, “I’ll be that good.”
Jennifer glanced at me, and I winked.
Knuckles said, “Okay, so you sandbagged me.”
I gave a look of innocence and said, “Hey, I didn’t ask for this. You did.”
“So where’s dinner?”
I looked at Jennifer, who knew we were leaving on a train for New York City in three hours. I said, “Del Frisco’s Steakhouse.”
Knuckles said, “The new one? Downtown DC?”
“Uh, no. The one in New York.”
“What?”
“Hey, you made the bet, and the bet was dinner at the winner’s choice. My choice is the Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse in New York City.”
“Are you fucking with me?”
“Nope. Jennifer and I have tickets on the express train in three hours. You’ll need to purchase yours.”
He said, “No damn way am I going to New York. That wasn’t the deal. We have training going on here. I can’t leave.”
I saw Carly’s eyes brighten at the mention of the city. She said, “Hey, wait a minute. A bet’s a bet, and we lost. I’ll pay my way.”
Jennifer grinned, knowing how this would go, because she’d managed to manipulate me like that since we’d met. Knuckles said, “Jesus Christ. What the hell is better about the Del Frisco’s in New York?”
I said, “Nothing. But that’s where I’m meeting Shoshana and Aaron. For dinner.”
4
Knuckles and I jogged across Sixth Avenue, then passed by the Fox News building, one block from Del Frisco’s. He said, “Did Shoshana pick this place? Was this a setup from the get-go?”
I laughed and said, “You know me better than that. No 3-D chess moves. No, she said she was in the US and asked to see us. She set the place, but you set the payment.”
“Worst mistake of my life.”
I said, “Hey, come on. It isn’t that bad. Carly and Jennifer got some shopping in. And Carly got some serious time under Jennifer’s wing. Make no mistake, they’re discussing the Taskforce.”
He chuckled and said, “Always the team leader.”
I glanced at him and said, “Yeah, that’s my job.”
He said, “So what’s that little demon doing here now? Going to kill the head of CAIR?”
I chuckled and said, “No. She and Aaron are here with the Antiquities Authority of Israel. They’re doing something at the United Nations, working with UNESCO on some sting that was conducted in Jerusalem.”
“What’s that got to do with them? Sounds like they’re trying to take your cover.”
I said, “They’re just providing protection for the Israeli bigwig. It’s an easy gig. They drop him at his hotel, and they’re free.”
We reached the entrance and he held open the door, saying, “Well, if you’d have told me she was involved, I would have waved off on the entire bet. She’s fucking loco.”
Aaron and Shoshana were a couple of Israelis who used to work for the Mossad, but were now freelance contractors with one foot in the civilian world, and one foot still in the nebulous world of intelligence. I’d run across them a few years a
go on a Taskforce operation, and our initial introduction hadn’t been roses and mutual respect. I’d tried to kill Shoshana, believing she’d had a hand in the death of a teammate, and Aaron had intervened.
Since then, we’d bonded in a weird sort of way, with Jennifer taking to Shoshana like a protective big sister, which she needed because Knuckles was right: Shoshana was a few bricks shy of a load.
She’d had an incredibly hard life, orphaned at a young age when her parents were killed in a terrorist attack. Then the Mossad sunk its teeth into her, using her desire for vengeance until it had warped her to the point where normal became assassinating anybody she was directed against.
She’d been on the verge of a complete breakdown, the stress of her life and the pressure from the Mossad grinding her apart, when Aaron had taken her on his team, and had saved her. I’d thought it was because he felt it was his duty, but on a mission together in Poland, I’d seen the darkness in Shoshana come out in him. They were connected on some plane beyond man and woman, and I wasn’t going to question it, as Aaron was the only thing keeping Shoshana in check. She was an amoral predator who had no more compunction about killing than a lion on the hunt. If Aaron hadn’t pulled her back from the brink, she’d have been planted long ago.
They’d eventually left the Mossad and opened up a company as partners, Aaron no longer the team leader and Shoshana no longer the subordinate. They’d started dating—which was using that term loosely—with Shoshana completely out of her depth. Every time we were together, Shoshana would study Jennifer’s relationship with me like it held some deep secret, wanting to copy what we did, which would have been cute if it wasn’t a little bit psychotic.
Two months ago, Aaron had asked Shoshana to marry him, which surprised the hell out of me, because I was pretty sure he’d have to sleep with one eye open and a knife under his pillow for the rest of his life, but what do I know? They were flip sides of the same coin, not unlike Jennifer and me, so I suppose it worked.