by Nir Hezroni
A deafening noise and a powerful gust of wind caused her to jump backward. An Israel Air Force Apache helicopter appeared just beyond the edge of the building a few meters from her, and the force from its rotor felt like physical blows. Its Vulcan rotary cannon fired a split-second burst of 20mm rounds in her direction, creating a rapid line of small explosions on the roof of the building, just centimeters from her feet. Carmit zigzagged in leaps and bounds as fast as she could toward the concrete cube that was the elevator room and the opening to the building’s stairwell, raced through the door and jumped down the entire flight of stairs in a single leap. Just as she landed, using the palms of her hands against the stairwell wall to brake her momentum, the structure above her was riddled with a hail of Vulcan rounds that penetrated the concrete wall—but she was safe by then. When it came down to it, they were trying to kill her, too. She wasn’t surprised. She knew it was only a matter of time. They needed her and she needed them, but that equation no longer held true, and she had become a threat again. The data in her head, her knowledge, was a danger to the Organization. She would have done the same if she were in Grandpa’s shoes.
10483’s shattered body was sprawled on the ground in the plaza between the Azrieli buildings, his arms stretched out to the side. The helicopter, which was done with turning the elevator room on the roof into a heap of concrete rubble and dust, swooped down in a steep dive and hovered over him. After observing him for a few seconds, the pilot turned sharply to the left and flew off through the space between the towers in the direction of the Ayalon Highway.
Carmit struggled to her feet. All her energy was sapped. She shook off the small bits of concrete that had rained down on her from above, allowed herself a few seconds to catch her breath, and then started bouncing quickly down the stairs. The chaos at the bottom would be at its peak and it was her only chance to disappear. On the fortieth floor, she ran into a SWAT team and soldiers who were on their way up to the roof. “Someone’s shooting up there in the restaurant!” she yelled to them.
“Are you okay?” One of the soldiers looked at Carmit. The right side of her head was covered in blood sprinkled with a layer of cement dust, and the upper right portion of her shirt was stained with blood, too. No. She’s not okay. She felt as if she’d just killed a part of herself. She felt the knife she’d thrown strike her, felt the fall. The impact with the ground. Her heart was racing out of control. If those feelings weren’t secondhand, she’d be dead, too.
“I was cut in the head by a piece of glass while lying on the floor of the restaurant.”
“Get downstairs quickly. It’s dangerous here.”
“Okay.”
She continued to leap down the stairs at a quick pace. The high-pitched tone in her head wasn’t as intense now, and her heart had slowed and was returning to its normal rhythm. She stopped to rest for a while on the second floor of the mall downstairs and grabbed a bottle of cold water from a deserted McDonald’s. The series of explosions from the roof of the building and the unrelenting siren outside had left everyone in the shelters and secure areas of the mall, and there was no one else around. Carmit drank down all the water in the bottle in long gulps, removed her bloodstained shirt, threw it on the floor, and went into the restaurant’s kitchen. She gave her head and face a good wash with the dishwashing hose in the kitchen, grimacing in pain as the detergent came in contact with the laceration above her right ear. She gritted her teeth and washed the deep gash well with the soap. Twenty stitches, she thought to herself. The back of her head, which had taken a blow from the submachine gun 10483 threw at her, was swollen and sore, but at least there was only a small cut there that wasn’t bleeding much. After leaving McDonald’s, she went down to the first floor of the mall, walked into a Super-Pharm drugstore, opened a package of cotton swabs, drenched them in half a bottle of iodine, cleaned her cuts again, and dressed the wound above her right ear and her left arm with a pad of gauze and several adhesive bandages. It’ll hold for now. On the way out the drugstore, she sprayed herself with a little perfume from one of the shelves and then went into the nearby Castro clothes store where she put on a black T-shirt and replaced her dusty and bloodstained jeans with a pair of new ones.
She looked at herself in the mirror. “Not bad at all,” she said to the mirror, noticing that she reverted to English without any Israelis around, and also that she needed a hat to conceal the large dressing over her disinfected wound. She grabbed a colorful woolen hat off one of the shelves and also put on a new jacket on the way out. She ignored the loud protests of the antitheft sensor that started beeping when she walked through the open doors of the empty store and then made her way to the Mega Sport store where she replaced her dirty shoes and socks with a clean pair of socks and a pair of black Nikes.
She wouldn’t be able to get the cut seen to here in Israel. After questioning the Apache helicopter pilot, who would tell them she was hurt, the Organization would definitely be staking hospital emergency rooms. She’d get it seen to at a private clinic back in London.
Before flying back she had to pay one more visit to the house 10483 was living in up until just a few hours ago. She’d take one of the cars outside that had been abandoned by drivers who fled and sought shelter, and she’d drive to Moshav Yanuv. The only people there now would be a handful of Organization security guards, and with the temporary tag that they gave her to gain access to the main base that she transferred to the pocket of her new jeans along with her wallet, she’d be able to have a look around.
As she stepped out of the mall and onto the street, the undulating air-raid siren tapered off and went silent.
She didn’t have much time.
* * *
“Hmmm … as dead as can be.”
The moment he saw the live television broadcast from the center of Tel Aviv, he suspected it had something to do with that couple Herr Schmidt had asked him to find. He went quickly to the scene, followed the developments, and saw 10483 fall from the roof and the helicopter hover over him and then fly away.
The Barber took off his hat, held it against his chest for a few seconds in a gesture of respect, placed the hat on the chest of the body for a few seconds, then put it back on his head.
He saw him fall off the roof and was the first person to get to him, with the siren still wailing and everyone hiding like mice. Like moles in their burrows underground. He hadn’t eaten anything in quite some time. The thought of earth gave him an appetite.
He looked at the knife still stuck in the body’s neck.
“Hmmmm … dying twice can’t be very pleasant.”
He removed a small kit from a pocket in his long coat and lifted fingerprints off the handle of the knife. He looked at the perfect print. “Excellent,” he said, placing the strip of plastic into a small paper envelope. This place would be crowded with people any minute now. He didn’t have much time.
He opened the protective suit in which the body was dressed and quickly rifled through the clothing. No wallet or documents. No bone that isn’t broken either. Well, fifty floors or so. He looked up again toward the roof from which the body had fallen without a parachute.
“Hmmmm … I think I’m done here.”
All he needed to do now was to wait for her. She was the one who had chased after him and she was the one who had sent him tumbling off the roof with a knife in his throat. He liked her. He’d wait down here for her and then follow her to her house. He was intrigued by her now, on a personal and not just a professional level. He could kill her the moment she came down from the roof of the building, after first getting her to tell him everything Herr Schmidt wanted to know, but that wouldn’t be very interesting. He wanted to get to her bed while she was sleeping at night, unsuspectingly. It wouldn’t be as exciting as it would be if he were to kill her now. It wouldn’t be poetic. It would be plain rude. He adjusted the hat on his head and waited at a point from which he could observe the entrances to the building.
EPILOGUE
I fell from above
There’s no way out of here
It’s impossible to climb smooth walls
My stomach hurts
Hunger is eating me up inside
Must find it
Must eat it
That smell is driving me crazy
That smell and that flavor are a place inside my head
Can’t stop
Chewing on that airy, soft, thin, transparent material
It’s so dark
My coat is no longer sleek and shiny
It’s falling out
And my hunger can’t be satisfied
Won’t let up
Everything here is wrong
Must get out of here
Must find something else
To eat
Must get out
Out
Out
December 26, 2016
Detective Jason Cooper scratched his head. Twenty-two years as a police officer in Washington yet he had never seen anything like this. The light in the storage unit itself was off, with only the hallway lighting casting a soft glow into the open storage space and revealing its contents. Hanging from the ceiling in place of a lightbulb was an electrical cable that ran down from the empty lightbulb socket and hooked up to several pieces of electronic equipment and appliances, one of which was a particularly noisy vacuum cleaner that was running uninterrupted.
In a wooden frame wrapped in plastic lay something that looked like an open missile warhead with two small red lights aglow inside.
The vacuum cleaner was attached to the plastic over the wooden frame and was trying to suck the air out of the space in which the warhead was lying without much success due to several large holes in the plastic wrapping.
“Should I turn off the power? We thought it best not to touch anything until now.”
“No. You did well not to touch anything. Don’t cut the power.”
The vacuum cleaner persisted and Detective Cooper turned on his flashlight and examined the contents of the storage unit. On either side of the perforated plastic over the frame was a vase containing plastic flowers that were covered in a thin film of dust. Scribbled in black marker on the outermost layers of plastic on the top of the frame and the side facing the door of the unit were words in the strange letters of a foreign language. The remaining layers of plastic wrapping were stained with something that looked like drops of dry blood.
Something here is very fucked up.
“I was doing my regular rounds this morning among the rows of storage units, you know, to check that everything’s okay and that there aren’t any water leaks or something like that, and that’s when I heard the noise coming from this one. We don’t allow people to play around with the power supply. Each storage unit has just the single light, but the person who rented this one removed the bulb, left the light on, and hooked up other equipment to the power supply. It probably started running yesterday. It must have been connected to a timer or activated remotely. When I heard the noise coming from inside I tried to open the unit with my master key, only to discover that the person renting the unit must have changed the lock without permission. It’s a violation of our policy. The contract states explicitly that for fire-safety purposes, no locks are to be changed. I bored through the cylinder and broke open the door, and immediately called the police on seeing all this.”
“Who rented the unit?” Detective Cooper continued to shine his flashlight into every nook and cranny of the unit.
“Oscar Salstrom. A Swedish citizen. I have a photocopy of his passport here. He paid for the unit upfront. His RV is parked outside here, too. He left it here for long-term storage and paid for a year upfront.”
“Do you have any idea where he is? An address or phone number he left with you?”
“It’s very odd. He was around for a day or two to organize the contents of the unit and then disappeared a little more than eight months ago. Sometime around March if I remember correctly. He left a business card here with his details; but when we called a short while ago, someone by the name of Nellie Salstrom answered. And when we asked for Oscar, she started yelling at us. Apparently, the Oscar Salstrom on the business card he gave us was an American citizen who lived in Thompson, Iowa, and died from a stroke two months ago. He was seventy-six years old, so he definitely wasn’t the man who was here at the storage facility. The guy who was here looked to be in his late thirties, going on forty, and I guess he must have simply used the other man’s name.”
“Don’t touch a thing. I’m going out to my patrol car for a moment.”
Detective Cooper left the storage facility and got into the driver’s seat of his MPDC patrol car. He reached for the radio. “Twenty-six here. Responding to a 10-89 call, potential bomb threat, at a long-term storage facility in McLean. I get the feeling that something terrible was supposed to happen here but something went wrong. Send everyone you possibly can from the Bomb Disposal Squad.”
December 26, 2016
“Does this fucking rain have no intention of stopping?”
The members of the inner circle had convened for breakfast in their conference room. Raindrops trickled down the large glass wall that formed a barrier between the warm comfort of the large conference room and the gloomy gray skies and wet stretches of lawn outside.
Grandpa was standing next to the buffet table and making himself a cup of coffee. “Forensics on his devices is complete. Laptop and cell phone. And we found three letters he wrote in a drawer in the house. It doesn’t look good but we may be able to minimize the damage. I’ll elaborate: There was nothing on his laptop. Apparently he wasn’t using it to store any material other than the files he sent to us. As for his cell phone—that he left on the roof of the Azrieli building and didn’t have time to deal with, or simply didn’t care any longer because he didn’t even try to throw it off the roof. We went through the phone. There were two shortcuts defined in the browser—one labeled McLean Blast and the other 203 Ibn Gvirol Street Blast. And we all know what happened on Ibn Gvirol. The Ibn Gvirol link must have led to a smart electrical system that activated a detonator connected to a series of military grade blocks of plastic explosives in the basement, and the link to the second system pertains to the blast in Washington that failed to materialize for some reason. He did use the phone to activate the system designed to detonate the warhead in McLean, but it didn’t happen.”
One of the participants put his fork down on the table again. “McLean’s what I think it is, right?” he said. “CIA headquarters?”
“Yes. Exactly. A suburb of Washington, D.C. We haven’t touched the activation mechanism again, of course … but we tracked the address of the site it’s linked to and the IP address of the smart electrical control system and they confirm what we found in the phone. A Washington-area IP address.”
“Did you manage to get into whatever’s sitting on that address?”
“No. It’s password protected and we didn’t want to play around with it. He has a background in computers and probably incorporated defenses to trigger the warhead or erase the system from the Internet completely if someone tries to mess with it remotely. We need to keep the URL active to be able to find it.”
“And you’re sure he managed to get his hands on the warhead, smuggle it into the United States, and leave it in the CIA’s backyard?”
“We had to assume the worst-case scenario and apparently it is indeed the case. The three letters he wrote prove so. The letters were in a drawer in the kitchen. It’s actually the same letter in triplicate that he planned to send at some stage to the White House, the CIA, and the FBI. Listen to this. ‘Dear Sirs, I am writing this letter to you with a heavy heart because there will be no way back for me the moment I send it—for me or for my handlers. But the truth has to be told.…’”
Grandpa read out the contents of the letter, and the room fell silent when he was done.
“We have to send a team there. Now!”
“Without doubt. An
d we will. They’ll have to scan the area of the IP address until they come within range of the Wi-Fi network it’s on, assuming he didn’t have time to order and set up a fixed infrastructure. McLean isn’t a very big place and I expect the IP address can be found within a few days if we deploy several teams working in conjunction and equipped with suitable tools.”
One of the members of the inner circle sipped from the white mug in her hand. “And what about his cell phone?” she asked. “I hope you’ve destroyed it.”
“Yes. It’s been destroyed. I, too, wouldn’t want us to have the trigger for a nuclear bomb somewhere in Washington resting in the palm of our hand.”
“I think we’ve had more luck than brains on this one,” said the woman with the white mug. “Had he decided to detonate the warhead in Washington and send those letters first, and only then carry out his attack here in Israel, it would have spelled the end for the Organization.”
“I believe you’re right,” Grandpa responded before taking another sip of his coffee. “When our teams find where he’s hidden the warhead, we’ll have to find a way to elegantly remove it from U.S. soil. Under no circumstances can a word of any of this ever be allowed to get out, and no one in the Organization aside from us is to know about it.”
The woman at the table sipped from her white mug again. “Did you find another notebook in the house? Another journal like the first one?”
“No. Nothing in the house that can shed more light on what we know already. If he kept another journal, he got rid of it before we got to him.”
“And our subcontractor? Where is she? She can’t be allowed to wander around freely with everything she has in her head. We can’t afford the risk of her knowledge being compromised.”