by Jay Deb
“But,” Doerr said, “the CIA did use two of its agents and staged the kidnapping. Isn’t that right?”
There was a pause and then Stonewall said, “Yes, that part about our agents going in and mimicking a jailbreak is true.”
“Then why wasn’t I told?” Doerr asked angrily. “Don’t you think I should be aware of the whole story before taking up my mission?”
“No, I don’t think so because it doesn’t make any difference to your mission.”
“In that case, I’m requesting you take me off the case. I resign from the agency.”
“Oh, don’t pull that resignation drama on me now. Both you and I know you can’t stay away from action for too long.”
“Maybe that was true before Gayle died. But now I don’t even know why I do this work. For who?”
“You work for the country, Max. Now go back to Italy and continue the search. America needs you.”
“I will only if you tell me everything that happened from day one and explain why it was done.”
“I will. But you have to promise me you’ll go back to Italy and continue your mission.”
“Okay,” said Doerr. “I’ll continue. Now tell me the whole story. Leave out nothing.”
“Fair enough. Here’s what happened.” Stonewall let out a sigh. “While Janco was in prison we had proof that some foreign agents were snooping around him right here in the USA. Before we could arrest them, the perpetrators were gone. We couldn’t figure out where they had come from or who had sent them. We at the agency came up with a plan to export Janco to someplace in Europe. We figured whoever was trying to contact him in America would be emboldened by the move and would contact Janco in Europe. So we could simply watch Janco and see who came to him. Then we would find out who had tried to get to him in America and also who else was looking for nuclear technology. We thought this way we would figure out not only who and which countries were after nuclear secrets but also their method of collecting secret technology. We came up with a plan where two of our own agents would go inside the jail, pose as agents sent by the Iranians, befriend Janco, take him out of the prison, out of the country and eventually place him in Italy. We thought this was the best plan to avoid various sticky legal and bureaucratic issues.
“As per our plan, once Janco was placed in Italy, we’d then release that info to the world by speaking about it on channels and wavelengths that we knew other countries such as Iran, Russia, and North Korea were listening on. Unfortunately, the plan ran into trouble right from the beginning. We’d made arrangements for the night our two agents were going to take Janco out of the jail. All the guards protecting the prison were going to leave their posts so that our agents could take Janco out. This was possible because the Nevada warden had decided to cooperate with us after some persuasive moves, the details of which you know now.
“But for some reason one of the guards came to work at the wrong time. When our agents saw him during the escape, they tried to incapacitate the man. But, unfortunately, the guard succumbed to the injury. We considered aborting our plan but finally decided to carry on. So Janco was taken out of the country, to Italy, where he was placed in a motel, and one of our best agents was safeguarding him, monitoring him. We wanted to wait for a while before releasing the fact that Janco was out there. But somehow one day Janco escaped. I guess we had become a little complacent and paid a heavy price. We searched for him for about a week, and that was when I called you for help.”
“I see,” Doerr said. “So what Warden Goodman said was true.”
“I don’t care what he told you. But now that I’ve just described everything, may I ask when are you heading back to Italy?”
“I don’t know.”
“But twenty minutes back you promised you’d go back to your mission.”
“Yes, I said I’ll continue, but I didn’t say when. Moreover, I don’t think the scientist is in Italy anymore.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Think about it. So much searching is going on for him in a country where he has no friends and can’t speak the local language. I’m sure he has somehow fled Italy.”
“Where do you think he is now?”
“I don’t know. We have to find out who could be helping him and what places he is familiar with and go from there.”
BOOK 2
Chapter 22 Tehran, Iran
Dinah Ariella, the thirty-one-year-old Kidon operative from Mossad, watched the van crawling through the congested Tehran downtown from the window of her second-floor hotel room. Days earlier, she’d glued a thin plastic tinting film on the road-facing window and put a dime-size hole in it, and then she’d placed a telescope right behind that hole. That way, no one from outside could see her, but she could watch everything.
Now, she put the tip of her telescope in the hole and watched the traffic pattern.
To the five-foot-three woman, the current project was the most important one in her seven-year-long career. Taking a man out in the middle of Tehran downtown was daunting for anyone, a place that the rest of the world mostly avoided. A small mistake, one phone call to an incorrect number, one phone call from the wrong place or one careless sentence into the wrong ear could break her cover, put her in jail, and place her life in jeopardy.
Her own life was way less important to her than the success of her mission, and she wasn’t unaccustomed to incarceration. She’d been thrown into a Syrian jail after an aborted operation in Damascus. After six months in prison, she had been freed as a result of a diplomatic effort led by the Israeli prime minister.
Her current project in Tehran had been headed by three planners who’d been working for the Mossad for thirty years. The groundwork for the operation had been going on for more than a year. For months, she had practiced wearing a loose, oversized burka and shooting through its cloth, never missing the bull’s-eye.
It had been just a week back that she’d landed at Tehran’s airport as the wife of a fake businessman from Saudi Arabia, an easy step compared to the one she was about to undertake.
She knew the exit process after finishing her job would be harder than the job itself, and if the Iranian police caught her, there would be no Israeli diplomatic mission to free her. A long residence in jail was a certainty.
Now, through the telescope, Ariella watched the people on the curbside and the stores that lined the street. The kabob restaurant was next to a jewelry shop, both having glass doors. Ariella thought that would be the perfect spot to take the fatal shot.
Ariella took the telescope out of the window and moved to the kitchen, washed her hands, took a sip from her cold coffee, and glanced at the TV, where an old speech from a religious leader was being shown.
Ariella walked back to the same spot in the window and started watching through her telescope again. She studied the large red bus making its way through the road narrowed by parked vehicles. Her plan was to go down to the ground and take the fatal shot from the other side of the road, giving her the stealth she needed. If she took the shot right before a bus moved in, then it would make her getaway easy, but maybe a passenger sitting in the bus might see her and point at her – disaster.
She observed the buses were always followed by a number of motorbikes as if taking refuge behind the huge vehicle.
Ariella paid attention to every detail, and she continued to watch. She focused her telescope on the tips of the Alborz Mountains, but she saw nothing interesting, so she focused back on the road.
A truck was blocked by a stopped car whose driver was buying something from a street hawker. Ariella heard the truck’s blaring horn. The truck driver got out of his vehicle, approached the car’s driver, and said something that Ariella couldn’t hear, but from the wild movements of their arms, she could tell the drivers weren’t exchanging pleasantries.
Chapter 23 Washington, DC
MAX DOERR went back to DC and spent hours studying every document the agency had on Janco: all Janco’s emails and logs of phone
calls from the last five years, a list of his Facebook friends and connections on Linkedin.com and their emails and instant messages from the last two years.
Doerr tried to understand in which country Janco would feel most comfortable. He studied all of Janco’s papers that were available and the three books he’d written. He paid attention to the people Janco had worked with and where they were from. Doerr called all the airlines and asked if they had booked tickets for Janco in the last ten years. Most airlines didn’t keep records for that long, but some did. He contacted the three credit card bureaus and obtained all the transactions Janco had made in the last ten years.
From the entries, it appeared Janco had spent an extended amount of time in Switzerland, though it wasn’t clear what exactly he’d done there or who he’d met. Doerr knew that the headquarters of CERN – the European Council for Nuclear Research – was in Switzerland. Doerr went back to Janco’s white papers and the articles Janco had written for science magazines and drew up a list of Switzerland-based scientists who had collaborated with Janco.
One by one, Doerr called each of them and asked if they had any contact with Janco in the last few weeks. All of them politely said no. Some said they felt insulted and angry about what Janco had done.
One man said, “If I find that fucker, I’ll lock him up and then call the FBI.”
Doerr found no reason to suspect any of the scientists, and then he thought maybe Janco had a large amount of cash stashed in a Swiss bank. There had been rumors of a large payoff to Janco, but the cash had never been found.
Through proper channels, Doerr requested the NSA look for Swiss money transactions involving Janco.
“It’s impossible to crack the Swiss banks,” the NSA man said. “They use encryption technology that neither we nor NIST understands.”
“Who is NIST?”
“National Institute of Standards and Technology. They’re the people who come up with computer data encryption standards.”
“Okay, keep trying.”
Chapter 24 Tehran
It was Friday, a fine day except for the dark cloud that lingered, which, as per the Iranian IRIB TV3 weatherman, was to clear within hours. Ariella stood in front of the window from where she had done her reconnaissance for a week now. She’d written up a chart about the traffic pattern. Between six and eight a.m., mostly cars passed by. The buses’ frequency was more between eight and ten. At eleven a.m. every day, a bunch of trucks carrying vegetables arrived and brought the traffic to a standstill.
The strategic position of the window gave her a daytime view of about a kilometer and a half, the nighttime view – a quarter of that distance.
It was nine thirty in the morning, the road crowded. The car drivers poked their heads out of their windows and cursed at the drivers ahead. Zigzagging between the cars, pedestrians showed good skill in road crossing. Some cars had merchandise almost as big as the car itself tied to their roofs. It was a regular day for the Iranian citizens, for Ariella the D-day – the day of action. It was the day Sharif Golshan, the famous Iranian nuclear scientist, the architect of the country’s program, was going to be killed by Ariella if everything went as planned.
Golshan had been given extraordinary security. His vehicle was bulletproof and preceded and followed by six police vans. Intelligence reports indicated he wore bulletproof vests during his trip to work. Golshan used to stop at this location, near Ariella’s hotel, where he waited while a man from a nearby shop brought him fresh dates every Friday. Golshan used to lower his window to take the delivery.
Ariella had noticed last Friday the policemen had been a little relaxed, perhaps in anticipation of the coming weekend or maybe it was brought on by the happiness of performing religious duties on a Friday or maybe the cops met somewhere at night and went on a binge drinking alcohol. Though alcohol was illegal in Iran, its consumption was so widespread that Iran ranked number three in per capita alcohol consumption among the Middle Eastern countries.
Ariella’s plan was to use that time, when Golshan waited for the dates, to take down the chairperson of the Islamic State’s nuclear program, which was disguised as a civilian installation built for the purpose of producing energy, but its real purpose was to make the ultimate weapon.
And now Ariella was about to deliver a big blow to those ambitions. This wouldn’t stop them from making the bomb, which eventually they’d have, but it might set the program back, as per the Mossad’s estimation, by two to three years, hopefully more, giving the Israelis some breathing room.
Ariella checked her silenced Beretta one last time before putting it in the holster sewn inside the black burka she was about to put on. She gave the suppressor a turn, making sure it was tight enough. She checked the magazine and smiled – ten cartridges, of which she’d need just one, maybe two maximum. There wouldn’t be time to shoot more than two.
She put some black makeup on her face that made her look older. Her burka had pads inside, making her appear like a typical middle-aged, overweight Muslim woman though she weighed barely sixty kilograms.
Minutes later, burka-clad, her entire body covered with the black cloth, only her two eyes visible through the net on her burka, she walked through the hallway and exited the shabby hotel, never to return again.
She started sauntering down the roadside and glanced at her watch – 10:05 a.m. She could see Golshan’s car approaching and the police vehicles accompanying it. She’d had perfect timing.
Ariella paced slowly to make sure she’d reach that shop at the same time as Golshan’s car would. She sauntered for thirty or forty seconds and reached the desired spot a second or two early.
She wittingly dropped a coin on the ground and picked it up, losing a few seconds, and now the time was synchronized perfectly. Golshan’s car stopped five feet ahead of her. She saw the owner of the fruit shop walking, a bag in his hand, toward Golshan’s window, which was now down, and Ariella could see fifty-five-year-old Golshan’s temple clearly – his skin wrinkled, more than half his hair gray, salt and pepper beard, and lips dry.
Ariella dropped the coin again and crouched. Pedestrians were passing her by. Without bothering to touch the coin, Ariella started raising her head, and inside the burka, she pulled the silenced gun out of the pocket and pointed it at Golshan’s temple, just like she’d practiced hundreds of times.
It was a method the Mossad’s strategists had vehemently opposed. ‘It won’t work,’ one had said.
After Ariella had demonstrated the shooting seven times, only then had the strategists approved the plan with a little bit of head shaking.
She pointed the barrel at Golshan’s temple and took the shot. She knew Golshan’s skull was hit, but she didn’t look at him. She stood up and watched some people converge toward the chairman’s car, some stood there with mouths agape, and some started running away, conceivably to avoid possible questioning by the police. She wanted to scamper and then wondered if there was a local law against women running on the street. Ariella started walking away fast, not running. If the cops caught her and found the gun under her burka, that would be a disaster.
Barring something like that, she knew the policemen would never suspect that the murder had been a woman’s work. They would be interrogating the folks inside those glass-covered shops that stood next to Golshan’s car. The cops would perhaps break a few men’s arms and teeth, but they would never suspect initially that the assassination was committed by the fat and elderly woman who had stooped to pick up a dropped coin.
The cacophony receded as she trudged away from the murder scene. She took a right turn into another road, and then she turned left into a narrower road where a Toyota pickup truck was waiting. As she approached it, the passenger door opened, and the male driver welcomed her inside the vehicle.
“Everything okay?” the driver asked in Hebrew.
“Everything’s done,” she said. “Let’s move.”
The vehicle started moving slowly.
Feeling suffo
cated, Ariella took the top of her burka off and placed a headscarf around her head.
Ten minutes later, the vehicle left the narrow road and drove into a wider one, picking up speed.
She was sure the scientist was dead, her mission complete, and now came the harder part, how to get out of the country where every corner of the city would now be overrun by three hundred thousand savage cops looking for Ariella. She wasn’t sure if there were surveillance cameras on that road, but she had to assume the cameras were there, so by now the police most likely knew the killer was a woman of heavy proportion. They would soon start asking around, first the shop owners and eventually the hotel clerk, about a woman in a black burka.
How long would it take for the hotel clerk to put two and two together and figure out the murderer was one of his customers? Ariella wondered. And how long would it take for the police to bring in a sketch artist and have a rough picture?
Two to three hours, she thought.
“Can’t you drive a little faster?” Ariella asked and immediately realized the foolishness of the question. She had two hours or so to get out of the city.
“Driving faster might bring trouble,” said the driver, a Mossad man who had been living in Tehran for a month, learning the traffic patterns, the level of policing, and waiting for this day.
The vehicle was moving at a leisurely speed of forty-five kilometers an hour on the Tehran-Qom highway.
The getaway plan had been discussed by Ariella and the Mossad planners in detail. In a hit-and-run situation like this, hitting was the easier part.
Everyone had agreed taking an airplane out of the country would be suicidal. Driving a car to reach the Turkish border was out of the question. An elaborate plan had been chalked up to plant Ariella in a Turkey-bound transport truck carrying fruits, where Ariella would be disguised as a male cargo hauler.
As the Toyota truck crawled along the pot-hole-infested road lined by street hawkers shouting and advertising the superiority of their goods, Ariella took her burka off completely, put on a white tunic a typical man in the area wore, and started putting a black beard and moustache on her face.