by Gary Haynes
“Now you gotta big mouth, son. But I’d still have trouble shoving that chair you’re sat in down it, so cut the crap before I get real irritable. Just think compliant and we’ll get along. So here’s how it’s gonna be. When the time’s right you’ll make a call with your phone.”
“Who to?”
Crane took out a piece of paper with the cellphone number written on it, the number that Tom had taken from the Somali in Paris. Crane just hoped the Somali Tom had shot hadn’t been aware of the fact that Tom had taken a digital of it. Better still, the Somali would be a stiff in a Paris morgue. He slid the paper over to the Somali in front of him.
“You recognize that number?”
“I might.”
“Say you do or you’ll never see me again. Say it.”
“I do.”
“You say you’ve gone to ground because it’s getting heavy over here. You want to come back to Somalia. You want to meet up. You want to go on jihad again. Or maybe something else. I ain’t decided yet.”
“And if I don’t?”
“You can forget about ever getting intimate with ladies from Sierra Leone again. You can forget about getting intimate with anyone.”
But Crane hadn’t been honest with the Somali and for now he’d just keep him on ice. If and when he had to visit him again, the ground work had already been done, he figured.
“We will see,” Harrah said.
Crane stared at the Somali now. The man looked drawn and tired and ill. But he didn’t look scared, and that meant he knew something that he could trade. And that gave Crane just a flicker of hope.
Chapter 80
Back at his office at Langley, Crane was in communication with a Mossad chief via a secure video link. It was Esther’s boss, David Steinman, who had annoyed her at the underground facility. Crane knew the man quite well and there was a degree of mutual respect and trust between them. He said that Esther had fresh intel. Ibrahim had come home, getting the Sunni jihadists very excited. Crane said that the man they’d discussed would be sent to Tel Aviv. He was now the only man in the Western intelligence community who could recognize Ibrahim.
He rang Tom next, who had just been to see his father in Quantico. But he’d only been allowed in for a few minutes and he’d been unconscious throughout, he said. Crane said that he wanted Tom to go to Tel Aviv and then on to Gaza to meet up with a Mossad operative there. He knew Tom knew why. It was a long shot, but he would be a potential spotter for an Israeli air strike and ground assault. That was the only option left open to them, given the slipperiness of the terrorist.
“If you want me to go, I’ll go,” Tom said.
“Okay, Tom.”
But Crane knew that in reality it might take years to find him, and by then it would be too late. They still hadn’t been able to take out the master bomb maker in Yemen, who was training a new breed of suicide bombers, and they’d been after him for five years or more.
It was agreed that Lester couldn’t go with Tom. There was no way he could blend in over there and he didn’t speak Arabic, which meant he’d be a danger to himself and the mission. Tom would fly on the private jet to Tel Aviv in the next hour.
Three hours later, Crane got a call that he’d been expecting but had not wanted to hear. It was from Quantico, a surgeon commander.
“It’s bad news, I’m afraid.”
“ Let’s have it.”
“General Dupont died twenty minutes ago. Cardiac arrest. I’m sorry. Do you know his son’s number?”
“I do. Thanks, doc. I’ll tell him.”
“We did all we could.”
Crane sat back in his chair, riding it. It was a helluva blow. The man who’d saved his life had died, and he’d been deprived of seeing his son one last time before he had. He rubbed his eyes, felt nauseous. He should ring Tom, but that could cause a psychological shock to his system that would leave him even more vulnerable than he already was. But he had a right to know. There was no getting away from that.
He knew Tom was already being flown over the Atlantic. He clenched his jaw and dialled the number of the secure satphone.
“Tom, there’s no easy way of saying this nicely. Your father died of a heart attack some minutes ago.”
He heard Tom make a noise that sounded like a mixture of a sigh and a moan. Then he said, “Right.”
“You okay to continue?”
“Yeah.”
“And if you can, get that sonofabitch. You hear me?” Crane said.
“I hear ya.”
Crane felt numb. He’d wanted to say more, but he couldn’t find the words. What did you say to a man you liked and respected, whose father had just died and who you’d ordered on a near hopeless and highly dangerous mission to a place he’d never been before? he thought.
Chapter 81
Tom had arrived in Tel Aviv after a fourteen-hour flight. He’d spent the time reading information on Gaza in the CIA World Factbook on a tablet, and other informative notes that Crane had arranged to be emailed to him. He’d decided that he would have to grieve for his father when he returned to the States. He’d felt empty, but had managed to find strength in that emptiness, a form of single mindedness and stoicism that had verged on an obsession: see Ibrahim killed.
He’d been driven in a civilian SUV by two young men wearing jeans and aviator shades to a military installation imbedded into a rocky hill overlooking the coastal city in central-western Israel. He’d been taken by the Mossad to a secure briefing room. It was forty foot square, with steel-lined walls, and doglegged to a short concrete corridor and the entrance.
He’d been shown a photo of Esther, who’d only been referred to by her Arabic name of Sanaa, dressed in her hijab, and had been told he could carry a weapon in Gaza. When he’d been asked what he’d preferred, he’d said a SIG Sauer P229 chambered in 9mm. He’d been shown maps of the Gaza Strip and relevant satellite imagery. He’d been told it was just twenty-five miles long and seven and a half miles at its widest point. Nearly two million Palestinians lived there, which made it one of the most densely populated areas on earth. For a Westerner, it was also one of the most dangerous places on earth.
He’d asked how he would contact Sanaa and had been told that she’d contact him. Israel’s border with Gaza was over thirty-one miles long, controlled by the Israelis, and the problem, he’d been told, wouldn’t be getting in, but getting out.
Ten hours later, after three further briefings, he’d been transported in a white helicopter, without IDF markings, fifty miles down the Mediterranean shoreline to just beyond the northern edge of the Gaza Strip. From there an SUV had driven him west and then south to the semi-desert region of the Negev, whereupon he’d waited until dark and had passed over into the Gaza Strip via an unlocked gate at an entry point for Israel tanks along the patrolled fence. He’d been met on the other side by a Palestinian asset of the Mossad and they had trekked through sandy scrubland the short distance to the western outskirts of Gaza City.
Now, in a dark street, flanked by makeshift carports and closed retail stores, the asset pointed to a red Toyota saloon car, with rusted wheel arches and a dusty rear windshield.
With two days’ dark growth on his face, a black T-shirt on his back and sneakers on his feet, Tom walked over to the car, seeing the outline of a woman in a hijab in the driver’s seat. Sanaa, he knew.
As he got to it he opened the front passenger door. She didn’t flinch in the dome light and he guessed she’d seen him coming up from behind in the rearview. He sat in but she didn’t turn to face him. Instead, she fired up the car and drove off.
He could see even in profile that her photograph didn’t do her justice. Her skin was flawless, the corners of her eyes as white as alabaster, her nose exquisitely aquiline, her mouth full. He smelt a faint waft of coconut which he guessed came from a cream she used for her skin, or a shampoo for her hair.
After twenty seconds or so, she began to speak in Arabic, testing him, he knew. She asked him about the district of Nasser in
the north-west, and he said it was built in the 1950s and named after a former Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. She asked him what district was to the north of the Old City, and he said Sheikh Radwan, whose tomb was located within the district. Along the southern coast of the city is the neighbourhood of Sheikh Ijli, he added, without being asked. She said that his Arabic was good, but his accent would mark him out instantly, so it would be best if he was ever asked about it, he should say that he’d left Gaza twenty years ago to work in Cairo, but had returned before the Rafah Crossing had been sealed off.
Ten minutes later Sanaa stopped outside a two-storey sandstone house on a street without lighting. As she turned off the engine, she said, “I’ll cook you a meal.”
But to Tom it sounded like an invitation to a last supper.
Chapter 82
Esther, now only to be known as Sanaa, had cooked Tom a meal called zibdiyit gambari, which meant “shrimps in a clay pot”, with a dessert of pomegranates and sour plums. They’d eaten it at a small table in her kitchen, which had pots hanging on nails driven into the blue walls, and a copy of the Holy Qur’an on a wooden shelf. Afterwards she’d made him coffee.
“So you are the only man alive not close to the jihadist who can identify him?”
“I guess,” Tom said.
He couldn’t help himself from looking into her eyes, which were deep and brown and intoxicating. The artificial light, coming from two gas lamps, brought flecks of gold to the corners of her eyes, and he couldn’t remember seeing a woman as physically beautiful as her.
“He will have taken on a new disguise now,” she said, “thanks to the incompetence of the French.”
She asked Tom to describe the man he’d seen and he did so.
“It’s not much to go on,” she said. “You could be describing yourself, except you look strong and you say he looks thin.”
Sanaa stood up from the table and walked over to one of the wooden shelves. She lifted off a tin box about three inches in diameter, and he saw the outline of her breasts against her light brown, long-sleeved dress. She brought it over to the table and placed it down. She eased off the lid and, after removing a sewing kit, removed what he knew to be a false bottom. She took out a small object, which Tom thought looked like a gelatine protein pill.
She looked down at the pill. “It won’t dissolve inside you,” she said. “It’s a GPS sensor. Just don’t eat any prunes until we are finished.”
“Finished? Do you have some information?” he asked.
Ignoring him, she said, “The GPS is wrapped in an insoluble membrane. Take it. Swallow it.”
He hesitated at first, without really knowing why, except that from that moment on he could be tracked, which had never been something he’d been keen on. He’d made sure his charges back in the States wore GPS trackers, and the Secretary of State, of course, but never an ingested one. But he took it from her, took a mouthful of coffee, and swallowed it.
She got up again and went to a drawer beside the sink. She took out a thin and folded light blue towel. Unwrapping it as she came back to her chair, she placed the towel down on the table. There were four sachets there.
“Antidiarrhoeal drugs,” she said. “They taste like hell so take them with your coffee. They will prevent what nature intended for at least four days.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said.
She looked hard at him. “Remember that I am a woman here and you are a man. Your American manners may be regarded as unseemly if you think like you do back home.”
Tom nodded.
He thought the membrane GPS was a simple but good idea. Unless the armed wing of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, or any other terrorist group in Gaza did full body X-rays, which he doubted they would, nothing could detect it. He knew that the bomb makers in Yemen were developing surgically implanted devices and non-metallic, low vapour ones known as AEDs, or artful explosive devices, but they wouldn’t expect a Westerner to go to such lengths, or rather he hoped they wouldn’t.
“When we go out later, don’t carry your weapon. It’s too hard to conceal, and someone will think you are what you are, especially since you are a stranger. Tom Dupree. Do you have French ancestry?”
“Yes,” he said, knowing that the Mossad back in Israel had known his name and had passed it on.
She ducked down under the table and brought up a pair of leather sandals. “But these could save your life,” she said, handing them to him. “There’s a detachable heel for another GPS. If they find it, they’ll think you’re off the radar.”
Tom thought that was sound reasoning.
Unabashed, she held up the hem of her dress. “Mine,” she said. “Now we must go.”
“Go where?”
“To meet an asset. Be nice to him. He doesn’t trust anyone. You will see his bodyguards drinking coffee at nearby tables. He may even have a couple of snipers on the flat roofs. Ignore them. He says he has information on where Ibrahim is staying.”
Chapter 83
Sanaa drove Tom along Gaza’s main street, Omar Mukhtar Street, and onto the main coastal road, Ahmad Orabi/Rasheed Street, to the Rimal district, which meant sands, roughly two miles from the city centre. She stopped in Southern Rimal beside a small square made of grey paving stones, surrounded by narrow cafés, restaurants and qahwa, or coffeehouses, with concrete apartments above.
As Tom got out, the smell of roasting beans and fried garlic assaulted his nostrils. Besides the fixed structures there were a few makeshift stalls, selling kebabs and Arabic candy. They walked to a plastic table and chairs on the cracked sidewalk, where Tom saw a man sitting alone.
He was wearing a cheap, threadbare dark grey suit and smoking a cigarette. Before him on the table were a glass of Arabic tea and bowls of humus, chillies and chickpeas. He was unshaven and balding. He had spindly arms and his shoes were scuffed. When they got to the table, he got up to greet Sanaa. His front teeth, Tom noticed, were black and yellow and worn down.
He gestured for them both to sit down at the two empty chairs but he didn’t acknowledge Tom, who looked around, noticing that there were about twenty men sitting outside the establishments, some of whom were looking in their direction. He didn’t know whether they were wary of him, or drawn to Sanaa. Some were, no doubt, the asset’s bodyguards.
The man stubbed out his cigarette in a china bowl but immediately lit up another one. He hunched over towards Sanaa, and Tom could tell that she disliked the man, although she was masking it as best she could.
“Some of the fighters, the younger ones, it has to be said, are saying that he has come to rid them of the Jews. That he will bring a plague from Allah upon them. Their American weapons will not be able to help them. Not even the Iron Dome will help them,” the man said, referring to Israel’s missile defence system. “But he’s not here. He was, but he’s gone. He’s gone over the northern border to Lebanon via a tunnel.”
“Are you sure?” Sanaa said.
“Oh yes. Very sure. He was only here for a day. No more.”
“Why didn’t you tell Sanaa before?” Tom said.
He saw the man’s bloodshot eyes look at him with barely concealed disdain. He turned and addressed Sanaa.
“I found out ten minutes ago.” The man put his hand into his inside jacket pocket and took out an old-fashioned cell. “On my cellphone. Do you want to see the text?”
“Yes,” Tom said, reaching over to it.
But Sanaa gently put her fingers on the top of Tom’s hand and he withdrew it.
“That won’t be necessary,” she said.
The man got up. “I have drunk too much tea,” he said, heading for the nearest doorway, with thin blue and white strips of plastic hanging down to keep the night insects out.
“How much are you paying him for that?” Tom asked.
“Now we have to leave,” she said, ignoring him. “You can catch a taxi to a hotel along the coast here.”
Tom nodded. He had twenty thousand Israeli Shekels in his poc
ket, a little fewer than six thousand US dollars, and had been told that he couldn’t stay in Sanaa’s apartment. It would be noted and it would be frowned upon and her life would be at risk because of it.
Tom watched her take out her car keys. She looked at him. Her mouth started to form a word but she swallowed it. She put out her hand to touch his fingers but withdrew it halfway across the table.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“For your wasted journey.”
She got up and walked over to where her car was parked and Tom watched her all the way. As she ducked in and pulled away, he sensed the atmosphere change. He stood up and looked around. Old men nodded sagely, as the younger boys were shooed away.
Six men got up in his sphere of vision; men who had a certain look and gait and demeanour that he was more than familiar with. He knew them to be killers.
With that a truck came from a side alley to the left, another up the street from the right, and both slowed to a stop, blocking Tom’s exit points. A few other men got up silently and walked away. The six men drew handguns and tightened the circle.
They’re not bodyguards for the asset, Tom thought, they’re Hamas, or some other terrorist outfit, and I’ve been played. It’s happening again, he thought. It’s happening again.
Chapter 84
Three blocks away, Sanaa pulled up at the kerb after a black Mercedes behind her had flashed its headlights. She was sitting ramrod straight, he hands gripping the wheel, her jaw clenched. She heard the footsteps on the tarmac road and glanced at the side mirror. It was the man who had contacted her in a market outside a fruit stall just yesterday.
He’d showed her a video on her cellphone then. It had been Miriam and her dead husband’s mother and father. They had been cowering in the corner of a room, their mouths taped, their limbs bound. When a masked man had walked into view, a knife in his hand, she’d seen the fear in her daughter’s eyes, and she’d vomited beside the stall.