Last Instructions_A Thriller

by Nir Hezroni

- Tuvian was very quick to talk. Too quick perhaps. Maybe it was all an act to get us to go to Bolivia.

  - I don’t think so.

  - Tell me, now that I think of it, before you went to Nepal to pick up the box with the yak hide for Herr Schmidt, you went to Quebec for two days to take care of some business for him, right?

  - Yes. Someone I had to question on another matter. Unrelated to what we’re busy with here now.

  - And was he quick to talk? Just for the sake of argument, how did the interrogation go?

  - He was uncooperative at first. He was tied to his bed and said nothing. So I went to a nearby store and bought a bottle of drain cleaner and poured a little onto his stomach to begin with and told him that he had better not sweat because when the substance gets wet and comes into contact with organic material, it eats away at it.

  - And what did he do?

  - He started to sweat of course from the stress, and the drain cleaner started to work and left him with a nice burn on his stomach—but still he didn’t talk. He was a very stubborn man. And he wasn’t scared of ants or anything like that.

  - How do you know?

  - There was nothing in the file on him about that.

  - So maybe he was afraid of something but you simply didn’t know? I’m just saying, for argument’s sake.

  - Maybe. For argument’s sake—yes, could be.

  - And he started to sweat just like that, from the stress? There are some people who don’t sweat, even when they’re stressed; and there are some who sweat all the time, even without being stressed.

  - I had the heat in the room turned up to thirty-eight degrees Celsius.

  - And how did you get him to talk eventually?

  - I showed him another six bottles of the same type of drain cleaner. I told him I was going to empty one of them into his mouth and another one into his eyes, half a bottle for each eye. The other four, I said, were going down his shorts.

  - And then he started talking?

  - Yes. He gave up a few names of significance. I set him free afterward.

  - Free of the shackles of this world?

  - No. I released him. I let him go.

  - Why?

  - Herr Schmidt asked me to. He said he needed him for various things.

  - What things?

  - I didn’t ask.

  - For the sake of argument, I still think that Tuvian was too quick to talk.

  - I don’t think so.

  - You know something, in the late 1940s in Idaho they rounded up beavers and released them again all across the state.

  - Why would they want to do that?

  - To create dams along several of the rivers and also to thin out some of the beaver population, so they wouldn’t all be concentrated in a single location. The state wanted to cut costs and beavers do a good job—and free of charge. So they put the beavers in wooden crates with air holes so they could breathe, and attached a parachute to each crate, and an old propeller-driven plane flew above the rivers and released a crate every few minutes. Two flights in total, with ten beavers dropped each time.

  - And did they get the job done?

  - Yes. They threw all the beavers out of the plane.

  - I’m talking about the beavers. Did they do their job and build the dams?

  - I guess so.

  - And what made you think about that just now?

  - It’s on my mind now because they filmed it, the flight and the parachutes and everything, and the film disappeared more than sixty years ago and no one has been able to find it until just recently. Someone found it by chance not too long ago in the garage of a house he’d purchased, in a cardboard box with a whole lot of other crap, and passed it on to the Idaho Historical Society. The chances of someone suddenly finding that fucking film that had been buried in that box for all those years must have been one in a million. That’s what I’m saying.

  - You didn’t answer my question.

  - What question?

  - What made you think about it now?

  - I’ll tell you why it’s on my mind now. It’s on my mind now because the woman in the picture we received from Herr Schmidt is sitting here at this restaurant just six tables away from us. The chances of that are one in a million, too. That’s what made me think of the story about the beavers.

  - I think the beavers died.

  - What makes you think that?

  - If the crates failed to open, then they all starved to death inside their boxes. If the crate hits the ground hard, the mechanism that opens it could jam.

  - But we’re talking about beavers. If they got stuck in their boxes, for argument’s sake, perhaps they could gnaw their way out through the wood?

  - Yes, that could be true. If they can gnaw through a tree trunk with their teeth, they can surely do the same to a wooden crate. On the other hand, if they could do so, why didn’t they gnaw through their crates and escape while they were still on the plane and before they were dropped out?

  - Maybe they started to do so but didn’t have enough time. It can’t have been a particularly long flight within Idaho.

  - Perhaps.

  - About the young woman sitting here six tables away from us.

  - What about her?

  - We’ve been instructed by Herr Schmidt in no uncertain terms not to kill her before she tells us all she knows. If you get a sudden urge to throw her out the window or push her head into the toilet for a few minutes or put a pillow over her face and sit on it, restrain yourself.

  - And what if she annoys me or pisses me off?

  - Then focus on breathing deeply; meditate and think happy thoughts. Herr Schmidt said that she and the man in the second picture he sent us were the two assassins that Israel sent to Argentina, Switzerland, and Canada to take out the scientists who were working with Iran. She could be dangerous.

  - If you have a scientific background.

  - I beg your pardon?

  - The woman—she’s dangerous if you’re a scientist. Do you think she knows where the bomb is?

  - Herr Schmidt thinks so.

  - We’ll get it out of her. She’d better know where the bomb is. It’ll all be over quickly if that’s the case.

  Ricardo reached for his beer glass and raised a toast to Lorenzo. They both took a long swig from their beers and went on eating their lunch, arguing about various issues and making sure that Carmit didn’t leave the restaurant unnoticed.

  December 20, 2016

  “Fucking rats!”

  Chris Martinez growled to himself and threw his large set of keys onto the desk in his office. He then went to the adjacent storeroom to retrieve a large clear plastic bag filled with traps and a container of rat poison.

  When he opened the main door to the building a few minutes earlier and stepped inside, a gray rat bounded over his shoe and almost gave him a heart attack.

  That’s all he needed now, for a customer to show up to collect something from one of the storage units and to see a rat scurrying gleefully about the place. It could kill his business. He had to deal with this crap every few months. And it’s all because of all those lunatics who took a storage unit and decided to keep food there, without thinking at all about what happens, for example, to a package of sausages after a few weeks left at room temperature. Ewww. Disgusting.

  He recalled the storage unit he leased a few months ago to someone who filled it with old freezers and didn’t bother to check that they were all empty. One of the freezers was full of meat. The entire building ended up smelling like a corpse. He called the man and barked at him that he had twenty-four hours to get there and get that shit out of the storage unit before he called the police. Ever since then, his lease contracts include a clause that strictly forbids people from keeping food in the storage units.

  Chris picked up his large bundle of keys and started going from one storage unit to the next. In some of the units he laid traps with small bits of cold cuts to lure the rats, and in others he scattered rat poison that looked like
tiny sawdust sausages.

  He wasn’t able to open unit No. 24, and his master key didn’t work either. There’s probably something wrong with the lock cylinder; I must remember to take care of it, he thought.

  And then forgot all about it five minutes later.

  I approach the parking lot. My shoes leave tracks in the deep snow. It’s quiet here early in the morning and there are no vehicles around. I pass the sign that reads:

  Welcome to Niagara Falls. Attention! The site’s management disclaims all responsibility for any injury or harm—frostbite, lung damage, cold illness, or other—suffered as a result of your visit to the falls. You enter the site at your own risk. Entry without suitable clothing is strictly prohibited. We encourage you not to leave valuables in your vehicles. The site’s management disclaims all responsibility for thefts from vehicles in the parking lot. We wish you a pleasant visit.

  The parking lot is empty and I cross it on foot and approach the entrance to the site. I pass by the unmanned booth at the gate and head toward the falls. My high-top shoes no longer leave tracks in the snow, which has become a thick layer of ice. I walk past a group of children skating gracefully across the ice that was once a parking lot for visitors to the site.

  The silence deepens the closer I get to the falls, and I reach the point where you can lean over the safety railing and look out at the frozen falls. The water that turned into ice years ago remains permanently frozen in place. The area closest to the falls, the coldest spot, is completely silent. The cold seems to be coming from the frozen water itself. A large digital thermometer fixed to the falls shows –53 degrees Celsius. A maintenance vehicle fitted with a scoop passes by in the distance and shifts a layer of snow to the side onto a grayish white heap. I walk a little farther, taking care not to slip on the ice, until I get to a point where I can touch the frozen river. I run my hand over the ice. It’s warm.

  I see him standing downriver and touching the ice, too.

  I approach him.

  I touch his shoulder and he turns to face me.

  We start walking down a straight pathway that seems to go on forever. The path turns from ice to snow and then into dusty white dirt. The sun glows orange like just before a sunset and its light catches the blackened fields of grain on either side of the path. Fields of black tar. We walk without a single word between us; our footsteps are soundless, too. Absolute silence.

  After a few minutes, he turns his head to the right. “You know something,” he says, “following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, studies were conducted in the United States on the mechanism and procedure for launching a nuclear attack. They wanted to be able to prevent the president from being able to personally order the Joint Chiefs of Staff to launch a nuclear strike without some kind of additional control measure in place. Everyone thinks that there’s a red mushroom-shaped button that gets pressed to launch the missile, but that button exists only in the movies and not in real life. In reality, authority lies with the president and he can place a call on an encrypted phone line to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, read out a code that only he knows, and thereby launch a nuclear strike on Russia or China for example.”

  I tell him it sounds too simple.

  “Yes,” he says, “and that’s why the committee was set up. A committee tasked with designing a mechanism that would prevent the president from making a rash decision before reading out the code to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

  I ask him what the committee decided.

  “A group of Harvard professors sat down together and deliberated for a month before finding a solution.”

  I ask him what the solution was.

  “The solution was to have someone with the president at all times. Twenty-four hours a day. And for him to be in possession of the code.”

  I tell him they didn’t need a group of Harvard geniuses to come up with something like that.

  “Just a moment. The individual in question wouldn’t have the code in his hand or his pocket or even in his head. The code would be inside a capsule, and the capsule will be fixed to his aorta. From the inside. To get to the code, you have to slice him open, get to his aorta, rip it away from his heart, and pull out the capsule, which is fixed there with two metal sutures.”

  I tell him that it would kill the guy.

  “Correct. And he will be at the president’s side all the time. Just a few seconds away. Sometimes you have to make a decision about a nuclear strike really quickly—if the Russians attack first, let’s say. And the designated individual would be by the president’s side. All the time. And if they spend all that time together, he’ll probably become the president’s best friend, too. How could the president kill his best friend? That was the idea. To kill a single individual before issuing an order to kill millions. It sounds pretty simple, but the act of taking a knife and slicing open and killing your best friend so that you can get to the code will make you think very, very carefully about launching a strike. Butchering someone is a lot more real than simply reading out a code.”

  I tell him that I don’t think it will work because they won’t find someone to volunteer to have a capsule fixed to his aorta.

  He unbuttons his shirt. There’s a tattoo of a light blue triangle on his chest, a little to the left of his collarbone and two ribs down. “This is where you need to insert the knife to get to my aorta. I volunteered; the capsule has already been implanted and I start work at the White House tomorrow. I’m going to be the president and the First Lady’s best friend. I’ll be with them on the golf course and in the White House and on their family vacations and in every godforsaken place he goes around the world. We’ll be like brothers, and I’ll make the decision to kill me the hardest decision he’ll ever have to make in his entire life.”

  I ask him why he volunteered and he tells me it’s because he doesn’t approve of nuclear weapons. He tells me that in his bag he has a sharp knife that he received from his new employer, the government of the United States, and asks me if I want to see it. I thank him and say there’s no need.

  “I’ll be going on from here alone,” he says, buttoning his shirt again. “Nuclear detonation devices are made for a purpose. Keep looking for one and you will turn to vapor when it goes off. Leave me alone.”

  He turns right into the field. There’s nothing here but a huge field of the blackened grain. He walks into the field and is swallowed up by it. Gray clouds block out the sun and the white path turns black and blends with the black fields around it. I continue to follow him from a distance.

  It’s going to rain soon.

  December 21, 2016

  Bzzzzzzzzzz

  Bzzzzzzzzzz

  Bzzzzzzzzzz

  Carmit’s iPhone vibrated under her pillow and she woke immediately and silenced it. She looked at the iPhone screen. Three fifteen in the morning.

  Someone is standing outside her hotel room. The small motion sensor that she stuck above the doorframe the day before has a Bluetooth connection to her cell phone and sends an alert to the application whenever someone passes by her door too slowly or stops outside it.

  Carmit hopped out of bed in absolute silence, arranged the blankets and pillows to look like she was still cuddled under them somewhere, quickly grabbed the two knives that were on the bedside table, and slipped into the clothes closet by the door to the room, dressed still in just a T-shirt and panties.

  Carmit made sure her phone was on silent and then reopened the application for the motion sensor, which came with a tiny camera. Two figures in black were fiddling in complete silence with the lock of the door to her room.

  Carmit slowly removed the knives from their plastic sheaths.

  The door to the room opened slowly and the two men walked in without making a sound. They closed and locked the door behind them and walked slowly toward the bed, with one of them signaling something to the other with his hand.

  The two burly men who’d entered her room didn’t stand a chance.

 
With her hands gripping the two knives, the closet doors opening from the inside, her silent cat steps across the carpet, a leap from behind, the blade of one knife slicing through the carotid artery of one, a sudden drop to her haunches, balancing on the balls of her feet, a particularly low half turn, as the other knife cut through the Achilles tendons of the second in a circular scythe-like movement. The first is disabled. He collapses clutching his throat, the second drops to the carpet beside the bed. A leap onto him, a knife thrust at his throat. He’s very strong. He shakes off the shock, grabs her wrist, and twists it, she screams and the knife slips from her hand, her free hand reacts quickly, plunging the second knife straight into his heart. And again. And again. And again. And again.

  Carmit rolled off the man she was on and lay on the carpet next to him, catching her breath and examining her right hand. Painful, but nothing was broken.

  Agitated knocking on the door made her jump to her feet again. She went back to the closet, retrieved her iPhone from the floor, and looked at the image of the hotel guest from the adjacent room standing outside her door. Carmit poked her head out of the door, hair disheveled and still breathing heavily.

  “People are trying to sleep here!” said a middle-aged woman in a French accent, fixing Carmit with an angry stare.

  Carmit smiled at her. “I’m terribly sorry. We didn’t think we were being so loud. We’ll try to keep it down.”

  The woman muttered something about an unruly generation, turned around, and went back to her room, and Carmit closed the door and locked it. It’s a good thing she stuck only her head out. The rest of her body was covered in blood.

  She turned on all the lights in the room and looked at the two men on the floor. She didn’t recognize either of them. She searched through their pockets. No identification papers at all. Only a few lengths of strong nylon rope on one of them and several 200 shekel bills on the other. She took the money and put it next to her backpack. She removed her T-shirt and panties and placed them in one of the plastic bags provided by the hotel’s laundry service. She put the plastic bag next to her backpack, too. She went into the bathroom, washed the knives in the sink, and then stepped into the shower, opening the tap to produce a hot stream of water. The blood washed off onto the white floor of the shower swirled in circles around the drain cover before disappearing. Soap. Shampoo. Conditioner. Soap again. Why do they put such small bottles in the bathroom? Mean bastards. She dried herself off, stepped out of the steam-filled bathroom, got dressed, packed her bag, and checked to make sure she didn’t leave anything behind.