by Brad Thor
If she failed to do what she was told, she was beaten. If she failed to please the customers, she was beaten. If she was too ill to perform, she was beaten and starved.
On one occasion, Helena took so sick she almost died. If it had not been for the other girls sharing their food and nursing her, she never would have made it.
When one girl, a woman Helena deeply cared for, did die—that was her breaking point. The girl had been beaten to death by one of the customers—a wealthy but very drunk businessman. The pimps should have returned the favor. At least there would have been some semblance of justice done. Instead, they got rid of her body and blackmailed the man. With the money, they brought in two more girls. They were very young. Helena could still remember what it was like to be young. She had had enough. That was the night she snapped.
Because of the constant threat of terrorism, many Israelis carried concealed weapons. They were not allowed to bring them into the brothel, but customers who were known, trusted, and had paid a premium were allowed to.
There was a special area with small, pistol-sized lockers where they could lock up their weapons. Many of them feigned using the lockers or bypassed them altogether. One such customer was a client of Helena’s. He liked her, a lot. But it wasn’t reciprocal.
He often drank before arriving and then had a couple of drinks more before heading upstairs. He was a mean man who liked to get rough. Some nights, he would show up with a garment bag and word would quickly reach Helena. Those nights never ended well. Not that any of her nights trapped in that nightmare ever did.
Inside the garment bag was the wedding dress of the man’s wife. As far as the woman knew, it was safely in storage, waiting to be handed down to their eldest daughter. He made Helena wear it while he disparaged his wife in absentia for getting too fat to fit into it. He was a jeweler and completed his sick fantasy by placing a replica of his wife’s wedding ring on Helena’s finger.
The more he would talk about his wife, the angrier he would become. And as his anger increased, so too did the level of pain and abuse he heaped upon Helena—until the night she snapped.
As it always did, word spread when the jeweler arrived that he was not only downstairs but that he had brought the garment bag with him. By the time he made it upstairs, Helena was ready for him.
He was unsteady on his feet, his eyes glassy. More inebriated than normal. She could smell his putrid, alcohol-soaked breath halfway across the room.
Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out the small velvet box and threw it at her, telling her to put the ring on.
She did as he asked and waited for him to hand her the garment bag to put on the dress. She had everything planned. The request didn’t come.
Instead, the man unbuckled his trousers and told her to come kneel in front of him. When Helena asked him if he was sure he didn’t want her to change, the man barked obscenities at her.
He was making too much noise. If her pimps heard him this angry, they would step in, blame her, and she would take a terrible beating. She hurried to comply in the hope it would get him to quiet down.
The string of invectives continued until she was on her knees in front of him. Only then did he stop shouting at her.
He was a disgusting ape of a man covered in coarse, curly dark hair. The mere thought of him was enough to repulse her. The mere thought of any of the men that visited the brothel was enough to repulse her. She refused to judge any of the women who sought to escape the horror of their lives through the drugs the pimps provided. She herself had freely used the drugs throughout. But not tonight. Tonight she was sober.
It made doing her “job” even more difficult, but it was amazing what the body could be coaxed into doing if the mind was set upon a compelling goal.
Kneeling there in front of the jeweler, Helena prepared. He wobbled momentarily, unsteady on his feet. She paused, wondering if the man was possibly about to pass out. Mistake.
Angry that she was taking so long, the jeweler slapped her in the side of her head. The blow was so severe, blood began to trickle from her left ear.
She looked up at him half in anger, half in shock. When she did, the man punched her right in the face.
There was the crack of cartilage as he broke her nose, accompanied by a spray of blood.
He pushed her over backward with such force that her head struck the floor and she began to black out. She struggled to maintain consciousness.
Stripping off the rest of his clothes, the man then threw himself on top of her. He landed with his full weight, knocking the air from her lungs. It felt like being crushed under a collapsed, stone wall.
His coarse, wiry hair chafed against her skin like rough wool. She could feel his pawing hand searching her body for where her legs met. As she fought to breathe, and the air finally returned to her lungs, she struggled to move out from underneath the man. As soon as she did, he dug his teeth into her breast.
She began to scream, but caught herself. Instead, she felt for her weapon. It wasn’t much—an old razor blade taped to a toothbrush—but it was all she had.
Grabbing as much of his hair as she could, she pulled his head away from her chest and bent his neck backward, exposing his soft, fleshy throat. She didn’t think twice about what she did next.
Cutting as hard and as deep as she could, she pulled the razor from his left ear all the way across to almost his other ear before the toothbrush broke from the amount of force she was applying. It didn’t matter. The job was already done.
She let go of his hair and watched as his hands flew upward. He clutched desperately at his neck and throat. His eyes, which had been wide with surprise, were now white with fear.
Shoving him backward with every ounce of strength she possessed, she toppled him sideways and quickly moved to get away from him and the blood that was spurting from his fatal wound. Even if help could be summoned, there was no saving him. He was a dead man.
She had hidden extra clothing in the room. After quickly cleaning herself at the sink, she got dressed.
She went through his pockets and took his wallet, his watch, and jewelry. She took his cell phone though she didn’t have a soul in the world she could call to come rescue her—it might have maps or access to other information she might need. She also took his gun.
She had no idea what caliber it was or what company had manufactured it. All she knew was that it was loaded, and that the man also travelled with a spare magazine. As best she could tell, she had somewhere around thirty rounds total. More than enough.
She had only fired a weapon a handful of times in her life. She had an older cousin who had been a soldier. Sometimes, when he was home visiting, he liked to get drunk and let the younger cousins fire his sidearm.
She had enough experience to know that she had to pull the slide all the way back in order to seat a round from the magazine into the chamber. The pistol was already chambered, though, and as she did that, the existing round was ejected.
It rolled somewhere, maybe under the bed. She didn’t have the time to worry about it. If everything she was about to do hinged on one round, she was destined for defeat anyway.
Holding one small towel against her nose to help stanch the bleeding, she wrapped another towel over the pistol and exited the room.
The back door was locked and only led to a small courtyard anyway, surrounded by an eight-foot-high wall topped with barbed wire. The only way out was through the front door. The only way to the front door, though, was through the salon.
Helena had long ago given up on God. No matter how badly she begged Him to save her, He had never come to her rescue. She had resigned herself to having been abandoned. This night, though, felt different.
Now she prayed like she had never prayed before. She prayed all the way down the stairs and into the salon. She felt the eyes of clients and of the girls on her. They were say
ing things to each other, whispering at first as she passed with the bloody towel clamped to her face and blood trickling down her neck from her left ear.
It was a spectacle, but nothing those who worked at the brothel hadn’t seen before. Girls were beaten up. It was part of the business.
What they hadn’t seen before was one of the girls crossing the salon, walking up to the muscle at the door, pulling a semiautomatic pistol, and shooting him in the chest. Whispers turned to screams.
Helena stood frozen, unsure what to do. When the door to the office opened, something took over. Her arm came up and she watched, almost detached, as the pistol fired. The man fell dead, as did the man behind him as she fired again.
There was a rush behind her and she spun to see clients running to the lockers to get their guns. One after another, she shot them.
There were shouts from the back of the brothel as the last two pimps ran into the salon with their fully automatic rifles, convinced they were under some sort of terrorist assault. Helena changed magazines, hid the weapon behind her back, and waited for them.
When they saw her and her battered face, they immediately disqualified her as the threat. She nodded toward the lockers.
That was all the pimps needed. They charged in the direction she had indicated. As soon as they had passed, she shot both of them in the back of the head.
Her bloodlust not yet sated, she walked back into the salon. Four men cowered along the wall near the bar. She shot each of them before heading upstairs.
She could read which girl was in each room, and she knocked and called them to come out. She told them it was safe. Once all the doors were open and everyone was in the hallway, she separated the girls off, and shot each of the remaining men. Then without a word, she turned and walked back downstairs.
The door was ajar, and she could see the lights of the town. Freedom. But with no passport and no one to help her, what exactly was she escaping to? At the moment, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she get out.
As she was stepping toward the door, her foot got caught between two of the bodies. Or so she had thought.
Looking down, she saw one of the pimps. Half of his lower jaw was missing and blood was pouring from a hole in his chest. Even so, he still had enough strength remaining to grab her around the ankle. In his other hand was the small pistol he kept in his pocket and had used in the past to pistol-whip unruly clients and even one or two of the girls.
Helena brought her weapon up to finish him off only to see that the slide was locked back and she was out of ammunition.
Jerking her ankle from the man’s grasp, she stomped on his opposite wrist, causing him to let go of his gun. She picked up the pistol and pulled its trigger again and again, emptying the magazine into him.
She then left the brothel. The bloodbath was over. But everything else was just beginning.
CHAPTER 10
* * *
When Ben Mordechai found her, she was holed up in a cheap Jerusalem hotel near the Chapel of the Ascension. The jeweler’s phone had acted like a beacon, leading his team right to her.
He had been with Shin Bet at that time, Israel’s internal security service. And though he had seen the carnage at the brothel firsthand, and had been told by all the girls what had happened, he still couldn’t believe it. It was incomprehensible to him that a single, untrained woman could kill that many men and walk away unharmed.
They were treating the murders as a terrorist attack. When they hit the hotel, they hit it at three in the morning and hit it hard. A bag was thrown over Helena’s head and she was spirited away in a waiting van to an off-the-books safe house for interrogation.
Mordechai knew within three minutes that Helena had not been trained by some radical group and smuggled in to massacre Israeli citizens. She was not a terrorist. She was, though, a murderess and this presented its own special set of problems.
Killing the client who had regularly abused her could very likely be defended in court. Killing the pimps who kept her as a sex slave could also likely be defended in court. Killing every other male in the brothel, even in an uncontrolled fit of rage, would be much more difficult. Compounding the issue was the fact that two of the businessmen she had gunned down were somewhat prominent.
Helena was an incredibly sympathetic figure. With all of the evil Mordechai had seen in the world, her story moved even him. He wanted to help her, but there was only one possibility. He left her in the interrogation room to make some phone calls.
When he returned an hour later, he laid out his offer and told her he was sorry, but that she would have to decide right then and there. They didn’t have the luxury of letting her sleep on it. If she was to be spared a trial, multiple wheels would have to be immediately set in motion.
She agreed to the offer.
As soon as Mordechai had left the room to relay her decision, she broke down. She was free from the horror of the abuse and the beatings and the starvation. But she had traded one form of bondage for another. Looking for some sliver of hope, she focused on the fact that her family would be taken care of. If that was the only good that came out of this, it was better than nothing.
She was taken from the safe house to a private hospital where she was treated for her injuries and allowed to rest.
Mordechai visited her daily. She had been checked into the hospital under what would become her code name, Yael. It meant “to ascend” in Hebrew. He had chosen it because of the chapel near where he had found her. It was also a figure from the Bible who saves the Jewish people by destroying an enemy general. From the beginning, Mordechai put much more faith in her than she did herself.
Once she was rested, she began a series of transformations. As Michelangelo could look upon a block of marble and see the statute inside, Mordechai could see the goddess beneath her Slavic features.
A team of plastic surgeons refined and sculpted her nose, her breasts, chin, lips, and cheekbones. In the process, they noted that she had suffered an array of facial fractures, undoubtedly at the hands of the men who had held and abused her during her perilous journey to where she was now.
He brought her family to come see her and put them all in a home near the sea for a week. The father, who was a raging anti-Semite, blamed the Jews for the entirety of his daughter’s traumatic experience. He chose to ignore that his own fellow citizens had abducted her in his own home country.
On Mordechai’s advice, she had not told her parents that she had been forced into the sex trade. While they might have suspected she had been used sexually, he recommended that she explain that she had been abducted and forced to work in a factory. When she misbehaved or displeased the slavers, she was beaten. Her enhanced appearance was due to the grace of the Israeli plastic surgeons responsible for her facial reconstruction. Neither parent asked about her breasts.
She told them that she had been too ashamed to come home. She needed to heal from the trauma, emotionally and physically. During that time, she had met Bentzi. He ran a human rights organization focused on stopping human trafficking. She had been offered a job with the organization and intended to remain in Israel.
Her father was beside himself. Her mother cried for the rest of the visit. Helena cried too. The lies were difficult to tell, but they were necessary and the more she repeated them, the less painful they became.
When her parents returned home to their village, her training began in earnest.
Helena learned fast and she learned well. When Ben Mordechai moved from Shin Bet to the Mossad, he took her with him. She was far too valuable an asset to ever turn over to someone else.
But now, as he approached the white Ford Transit van here in Geneva, he was questioning her value.
Before he could reach for the handle, the door was opened for him and he climbed inside.
Two young Mossad agents sat monitoring a bank of electronics
. Next to them was a chesty redhead in her late fifties.
“You heard everything?” Mordechai asked as he removed the wireless transmitter and placed it on the counter.
She looked at her two young agents and said, “Go get some coffee.”
When the men had exited the van, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Mordechai. He shook his head.
Lighting up, she took a deep drag and then exhaled the smoke toward a small vent in the roof. “I’d say we’ve got a serious problem.”
Nava Itzik was an assistant director in the Mossad’s Special Operations Division or “Metsada” as it was known. Under their dark umbrella fell some of the Jewish State’s most dangerous assignments. In addition to paramilitary operations, sabotage, and psychological warfare, they were also charged with carrying out assassinations. When Nava Itzik found something to be a “serious problem,” she usually brought some particularly nasty force to bear in order to get it out of Israel’s way. That was what she was paid to do. And as her deputy, Mordechai was paid to do whatever she told him to.
“If I had seen this coming,” he said. “I never would have put her on this job.”
Nava took another drag on her cigarette. “I saw it coming,” she replied as she blew another cloud toward the vent. “I know more about Pierre Damien than she does, and I’d still probably go to bed with him.”
“But that was her assignment. She was supposed to sleep with him. What she wasn’t supposed to do was fall for him.”
“I think she fell for you first.”
Mordechai was taken aback. “Me?”
“You rescued her. Took her away from that brothel. You gave her stability. Some hope.”
“I didn’t give her any choice.”
“She chose to trust you.”
“What she chose was to not go to prison,” he corrected.