by Gary Haynes
The man, who’d come up to her shoulder, and was stocky, with fingers like fat cigars, opened the car door now, and she shuddered as he held up the same cellphone again with his free hand. He put the cell in front of her face.
“Look,” he said. “They are alive. They are safe. They are back in Tel Aviv.”
She started to weep, deciding that she would have to ensure that they were put into a form of witness protection programme, at least for a couple of months. The people who had taken them and had made the video were Arab Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, and they were over one and a half million in Israel.
As the man walked back to the Mercedes, she felt an almost overpowering sense of relief. But the American didn’t deserve to be where she’d sent him, she thought. They’d work on him for weeks, months even. He was an agent, and he knew things, things that they’d want to know. But in her heart she knew that she’d handed him to Ibrahim, and that was why they had wanted him so badly. They had even sounded excited when she told them who was coming to Gaza.
When they’d first found her, they’d told her that Major Rosen had given her up as he’d been tortured and they’d sent her a video of his final hours and his death. She’d heard him saying her name, so that she’d known they weren’t fakers. They’d said the same would have happened to her, except she had the chance to live if she’d give them something worthwhile. Tom had been it. She guessed they’d taken what was left of her family to ensure she wouldn’t back out at the last moment. But she knew that they would never let her go back to Israel alive, that now she was a traitor she would have to continue to be so, over and over again.
Sanaa took out a secure cellphone from a secret compartment beneath the dash above the passenger seat, where she also kept a Glock 9mm. She rang the Mossad and asked to speak with her boss, David Steinman. Through her tears she told him what she’d done and why. Then she told him about the GPS Tom had swallowed, but didn’t expect any sympathy.
She asked if he could ensure that Miriam and her husband’s parents could be looked after by the Mossad for a few months. Ibrahim had come back to Palestine, though, that much was assured, and he was still here, even though the American had been told he’d gone to Lebanon. Last, she asked for his forgiveness.
Steinman didn’t say a word on the other end of the line. She disconnected the call, put the cell back into the compartment, and took out the Glock. Without a moment’s hesitation she chambered a round, released the safety, put the cold polymer into her mouth and squeezed the trigger.
From a distance, the only thing visible was the flash of the muzzle blast, like a firecracker in the night.
Chapter 85
At Langley, Crane took a call on his secure landline from Steinman. Tom had been taken. But they’d located where he was via an internal GPS tracker. The one in his sandal was still functioning, too, and up until about ten minutes ago that had shown the same location in the north of the Gaza Strip. Crane knew that that meant Tom was either dead, or being held captive. Then Steinman confessed about the betrayal by one of his operatives and the reason for it, but Crane wasn’t interested in her, or, he had to admit, her family.
“What about Ibrahim?” he asked.
“We’ve pinpointed forty sites, using a network of assets and core collectors. All of them have been verified at least three times independently. We have to believe that our man is in one of them. Esther, known there as Sanaa, told me before she killed herself that Ibrahim was back in the Palestinian territories and she confirmed that that wasn’t a lie. I believe that to be the case. We will bomb the hell out of every house we know to be used by Hamas in the hope we might kill the bastard. We will send in Special Forces. We will call it retaliation for Hamas rockets targeting Israeli civilians.”
You always do, Crane thought, knowing there would be significant collateral damage, and that meant old men, women and children.
But he said, “Don’t waste any time.”
He wondered if one day he would pay a high price for his sins. He knew that day might be fast approaching. He’d made a decision instantly. He would meet with the director, and if she didn’t agree to it, he’d do it anyway. That would cost him his pension, maybe get him twenty years in a Federal prison, but it was something he had to do.
Chapter 86
Ibrahim had travelled to Egypt under his American passport and had been met by his brothers in Sinai as before. He’d kept his face clean-shaven there, but had dyed his hair a soft red. Some Palestinians, in common with others in the Arab world, especially in neighbouring Jordan, had this colouring, and those that did typically had paler skin and Caucasian features.
He’d put green contact lenses into his eyes and covered them with steel-rimmed eyeglasses. He’d risked a shorter tunnel, closer to the Egyptian side of Rafah city, convincing himself that he’d overcome his phobia.
But he’d trembled with fear with every hunched-over step. The tunnel had been lower as well as shorter, and an Israeli air raid had knocked out the lights. Calf-high, foul-smelling water had seeped through the support beams, and rats had crawled up his legs. If it hadn’t been for his prayers, he’d known he would have passed out.
He’d planned to meet up with fellow jihadists in Brussels before moving on to Hamburg. He’d planned to prime them, but that wouldn’t happen now, due, primarily, he believed, to the actions of his fellow American, Tom Dupree.
As he travelled though the familiar back streets of Gaza now, past the old cars and corrugated roofs, past the bomb damage and signs of a shattered infrastructure, he thought about his life before Islam. It was as if he’d been a different person, a shell of person, a person out of sync with all he’d surveyed.
He had never known his parents, or any of his kin. He’d been given up, he’d suspected. He’d been brought up in various children’s institutions, where he’d been physically and mentally abused. He hadn’t been subjected to sexual abuse, but what he had suffered had left emotional scars.
He had drifted after that, although he’d been a keen reader and had had an inquiring mind. He had explored the various religious traditions, including those from the East. But it’d been Islam that he had been drawn to, the self-discipline and importance of family, at first, which contrasted with his whole experience of living in the West.
He hadn’t joined a mosque, not because there hadn’t been that many in the state in which he’d lived, but rather because he’d felt uncomfortable about going into what he’d perceived as being an alien environment. An outsider, then, even among the people of faith.
He’d begun to teach himself Arabic so that he could study the Holy Qur’an without turning to a translation, and after he’d gotten a job as an insurance salesman, he’d earned enough money to rent an apartment and had taken private lessons from a foreign student at Columbia University in New York, who’d been from Saudi Arabia. That had changed his life.
Now, as he came upon the house where another Saudi man was, a sick and dying man, he knew that Allah had brought about this human symmetry. For here his life would change again, for eternity. He knew, too, that Allah had brought the American, Tom Dupree, here, so that his men might smite him when it was time.
He’d ordered that Dupree be taken into Lebanon. The Jews didn’t go into Lebanon. Not any more. Yes, he thought, Allah had been good to him. Allah had allowed him to smite all of his enemies since he’d given his life to him.
The Amir met him at the bottom of the staircase that led to the isolation room where the Saudi was dying. The Amir was still being held aloft by his bodyguards, as he’d been the first time he’d seen him.
“I’m ready,” Ibrahim said.
“And Allah is ready to receive you, brother.”
He followed the Amir up the steps, watched again as the old man used his digit to secure entry. He knew a row of empty glass phials lay on a yellow cloth in the lead-lined safe in the corner of the room. The virus was spread via blood, urine, sweat and spittle. There was an incubation period of ten days
. Ten days before he would wreak havoc. Others would come here over the next few days. The Silent Jihad has begun, he thought.
There was no mystery to this. He had been like many thousands of Muslims who’d given their lives willingly. Some had died in the hope of killing a single enemy. Now, he knew, he could kill countless numbers.
The only other difference was that he was white.
The sun was white too and at ten o’clock when Ibrahim and two bodyguards emerged from the house. He’d chosen to inject the Saudi’s blood into his own bloodstream rather than use any other method. But he knew that when he got to the US he only had to brush a sweaty hand on someone, or mix his spittle with food or drink to start an epidemic.
He heard the first explosions about a mile away, when the car they were travelling in was a hundred yards or so from the house. The second explosion was much closer. Agitated, he turned and saw the billow of black smoke above street where the house stood, or had stood, he thought.
Three assault helicopters came out of the sun and hovered above the dissipating smoke ball. Ibrahim ordered the driver to stop. He watched helpless as the Israeli Special Forces fast-roped down, knowing they would surround the building and, despite a firefight, secure it, and gain entry and search every inch.
He didn’t blame Allah. He didn’t blame himself. He blamed the Jews. Now he was the only vessel, and he would survive, no matter what.
Chapter 87
Crane was sitting in the secured conference room at Langley. The director had her leg up at twenty-five degrees, her right foot resting on a pulled-out drawer.
“Tough day, ma’am?”
“Sciatica. But that’s just between us. Feels like a hot poker is stuck in my leg. Did it working out at the gym. Ironic, huh. Felt something pop. It’s called the piriformis muscle,” she said, pointing above her thigh. “A trauma, the physio says, that inflames the nerve. Got me doing Pilates. Popping more pills than a goddamned junkie. You say that to anyone, Dan, I’ll send you to Kazakhstan. You got that?”
Crane nodded. “Upside, I’m no longer your biggest pain in the butt.”
“Don’t ride your chair, it makes me nervous and tell me something nice.”
Crane said that the Israelis had raided a house in Gaza, well, the remnants of it, anyway. Beneath the rubble they pulled out a lead safe with phials inside. Among the dead was a man tested as being a carrier of an unknown virus, which had strains of MERS and SERS.
“Ibrahim?”
“Could be they got him. But it’ll take days, maybe weeks before they can test what DNA samples they got from the corpses against the hair found at the mall, even if they come up with a match. As yet the word is that there were no obvious Caucasians among the dead or wounded.”
“So it’s not over?” she asked.
“No, it’s not over, ma’am.”
“How can we be sure that nobody has been contaminated by it?”
“We can’t. Not one hundred per cent. And Ibrahim went back to Gaza for a reason. Now he either got there before the Israelis went in or he didn’t.”
“I want your people to keep looking for him.”
Crane pinched his jowls. “I’d like to leave Dave Perkins in charge here for a couple days.”
“I don’t need to ask if this is important to you, Dan. But is it the right time?”
“It’s connected, ma’am. And Dave’s a good man.”
She arched her fingers. “And if I say no?”
Crane sighed. “Then, ma’am, I will have to do something I’d regret. I’ll resign.”
Crane saw her looking at him. They knew each other too well for her to spout off about doing his duty at a time of emergency. And he knew that his job could be done just as well by Dave Perkins. Sitting behind a desk and sending young men and women to kill and die wasn’t exactly brain surgery, he thought.
“I want you back at Langley by the end of the week tops,” she said.
Crane nodded slightly. “Thank you.”
“Anything you’re not telling me?”
“The late General Dupont’s son, Tom Dupree, the special agent who found the Secretary of State, has gone missing in Lebanon.” Crane had received an update from the Mossad. Both GPS signals were showing that he’d been taken over the northern Israeli border.
“I don’t want to know any more, Dan. But don’t do anything – well, you know what I mean.”
Crane stood up, turned and walked towards the door.
“Dan.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said without turning back around.
“So you’re going to Kazakhstan after all.”
He left without saying a word, knowing that the director had just covered her traumatized and ambitious ass, but he didn’t blame her.
Halfway along the corridor to an elevator he took out his cellphone. “Jet. Now. And get me Gabriel and his team.”
The men he’d sent to pick up the general in Ankara had been in Gaza for the past week and were the toughest and, it had to said, the most ruthless in Department B.
When he was asked his destination, he said, “Lebanon.”
He’d vowed never to go back, and the CIA had been fastidious to ensure that he didn’t even have to control missions there from his office. He knew he might just find a mangled corpse there. But he had to believe Tom was still alive, just as the general had believed he was still alive all those years ago.
If there was a hell on earth, he thought as he stepped into the elevator, he was going to it.
Chapter 88
Lebanon, officially in Western Asia, was known to be both a land of great beauty and a land of great tragedy. It was bordered in the east by the shores of the Mediterranean, and to the south by Israel, a country it had been invaded by on more than one occasion, and had had a full-blown war against in 2006. That conflict followed the Lebanese civil war, principally between the Christian groups, the PLO and Muslim militias, which had begun in 1975. It had been a brutal and merciless conflict that had lasted sixteen years, causing over one hundred and fifty thousand deaths.
Today, rather than Israel, it was its northern and western borders that concerned Lebanon most, where the schism in the Islamic faith between Sunnis and Shias had created mayhem in Syria and Iraq respectively. Incursions from Sunni Islamists across these borders had already begun, and everyone believed they were only going to intensify. Added to which Lebanon was on the verge of imploding, too, due to the internal conflicting political and religious groups that made up its population: Sunni al-Qaeda, Shia Hezbollah, the Maronite Christian militias, and the war-hardened Alawites.
Tripoli, the northern coastal city, the second largest city behind the capital, Beirut, had already suffered badly. The fifty-thousand strong Shia-based Alawite community was packed tight on a hilltop called Jabal Muhsin, and was surrounded by ten times as many Sunnis. The gold-coloured apartment blocks were peppered with bullet holes and damaged by mortar fire and RPGs. Random sniper fire was rampant from both sides. On the frontlines, they lived within a few yards of one another, the stony streets wet with both seeping sewerage and the blood of the martyrs.
Besides the main combatants, hundreds of splinter groups made up of local militias had appeared, protecting small patches of ground. Young men dressed in jeans, undershirts and short-sleeved shirts carried AK-47s openly and drove around in rusted cars. The Lebanese army in their armoured trucks did what they could to quell the violence, but, in truth, they were as ineffectual as the Iraqi army had been in defending the northern cities against the Islamic State group.
In one of the cramped backstreets encircling Jabal Muhsin, a Sunni fighter walked under a concrete doorway into a courtyard, the crumbling pillars of the ancient colonnade enwrapped in poison ivy. He was carrying a brown-paper package that contained a pair of sandals, which, he’d been told, had been taken from a foreign spy and needed to be examined immediately.
Shaded from the butter-yellow sun by the now corrugated roof, dotted with the dense nests of swift
s, he reached the end of the corridor. He stopped outside the wooden door that led to a small room used as a workshop and knocked. After being told to enter, he saw the grey-haired man, his narrow shoulders hunched over a wooden worktable, which was strewn with all manner of instruments and appliances. He had a small pair of tweezers in his hand and was examining a radio with a magnifying glass.
“They are a priority,” the fighter said, placing the package down on the worktable.
The old man placed down his tweezers and magnifying glass without complaint and proceeded to undo the package, which was tied with string in a bow. He took out both sandals and, pushing the paper aside, immediately checked the heels.
After just a few minutes of manipulation and fiddling around with a scalpel, he slipped open the detachable heel. He prized the sensor out with the scalpel gently and let it drop into his free palm. The fighter saw that the object was the size and shape of a watch battery. The old man lifted it up with the tweezers and turned on a desk lamp, so that he could see it clearly.
“GPS?” the fighter said.
The old man nodded.
“Are you sure?”
“Eighty per cent.”
“Be one hundred per cent,” the fighter said.
The old man nodded and placed it back onto the worktable and used the tweezers and scalpel to open it. He examined the two pieces in the desk lamp and then did so again, using his magnifying glass.
He placed the second piece back down, together with the glass. “One hundred per cent,” he said.
“Now put it back together and put it back into the sandal.”
A few minutes later and halfway down the dusty corridor, the fighter knew he had to head up the hill to a narrow side street where a barricade marked the demarcation line between his people and his enemies. Beyond the barricade the snipers hid behind sandbags in what remained of the concrete apartment block.
Just yesterday, he knew, a boy of nine had been shot in the head after he’d gone to retrieve a soccer ball. He would toss the sandals over the wall from the safety of one of the buildings that abutted it. Those who would be tracking the foreign spy would believe he had been taken to Jabal Mohsen, and they would suffer the same fate as the boy. Even those dogs have a use, he thought.