by Larry Bond
“It’s not far. Your agents can pick it up as soon as I give the order.”
“We must pick it up before I pay.”
“You have the money?”
“Jewels.”
“Yes, jewels. Forgive me. Do you have them?”
“I will get them as soon as the transaction is completed.”
“I’m afraid that is not how it works,” said Birk. “You will tell me where they are now. I will retrieve them. Then you will be directed to the missile.”
“You don’t have it on the ship?”
“It would clutter the deck. Now. Where are the jewels?”
Coldwell opened her bag. For a moment Birk thought she might actually have them with her, but she—or more likely the person she was working for—was not quite so foolish. She handed him a man’s wristwatch.
“The alarm screen has the GPS coordinates,” she said. “Don’t push the mode button more than once, or it will be erased.”
Ravid watched through his binoculars as the American woman handed over the watch with the coordinates for the small boat where the jewels had been stashed. It should not be more than a few minutes before Birk’s minions had them and cleared the rest of the transaction.
The gems were the real ones Khazaal had brought to Syria. Birk would never have been fooled with the fakes.
He had not counted on the Americans when he had made his plans, but their complications helped him in a way: their presence gave him a natural excuse to stay behind. Someone had to keep watch over the slippery Mr. Ferguson and his minions; even Tischler could not object to that.
After finding that the bodyguards had been waylaid, Ravid realized what was happening and acted without hesitation, a man desperate to obtain the means to his revenge. He already knew the general area where the CIA people were operating; he had only stumbled around for an hour or so before finally finding the proper hotel. Anticipating that he would be searched by the Syrians inside, Ravid had left his substitute jewels outside the hotel and picked them up when he excused himself to answer nature’s call. Swapping them in the boat when the others were taking him to Cyprus was child’s play.
Birk would make a radio or phone call soon, and the next phase would begin. The moment of ultimate decision was at hand. There could be no hesitation after this.
There would not be.
Ravid turned to the men in diving gear at the rear of the boat. “A few more minutes,” he told them. “Be ready.”
Birk answered the phone on the first ring. “Three million at least,” said his brother-in-law. “One or two are fake, but most are real. Small diamonds and a few rubies.”
Birk smiled. By this time tomorrow, he would have exchanged the jewels in Turkey. After taking care of a few odds and ends, he would head toward the Greek islands where he would have the leisure to plan a more distant voyage.
“Well?” said Coldwell.
“There is a barge at this location,” Birk told her, taking a piece of paper from his pocket. “Those are GPS settings. Use my phone to call your contact, and I will see you off.”
“I’ll use my own, thank you.”
“As you wish,” said Birk.
As she left the Sharia, Coldwell felt the muscles in the back of her neck relax. For the first time since she had heard of her brother’s death—for the first time in two years, really—she could relax. It was in the Mossad agent’s hands now. Her mission was complete.
The small speedboat rocked as the engine kicked to life. Coldwell gripped the railing and then her seat, but for balance only; she no longer had any fear. She gazed at the shoreline, a hazy shadow in the distance. When she returned she would have a long bath, then take a very long nap.
It was amazing how prescient the old religious writers had been. She was the woman clothed in the sun of chapter 12 in the book of Revelation, the Christian prediction of the new age. The dragon awaited her child, but the Lord God protected her.
Was it blasphemy to think of herself as holy as that? As she considered the question, something grabbed her around the neck. The man in the boat had taken a garrote from his pocket and pulled it tight around her throat.
For the first few moments, Coldwell struggled. She grabbed the wire with her fingers and tried to pry it off, instincts getting the better of her. And then she heard a voice that sounded like her brother’s whispering in her ear.
“Let it be,” it whispered. “We will rise again in three days time, the Temple rebuilt.”
Coldwell relaxed her arms. An angel appeared before her, his body a bright light that shone warmly, a fire of faith and reverence. Behind him stood the new world, the shining tabernacle where there would be no sorrow, no death, no pain. He held his hands out to her.
“My God!” she exclaimed. “Thank you for bringing me to this moment.”
She extended her hands toward the angel. As she did, his face tore in two. She saw that it was a mask covering the hideous aspect of a dragon: the Devil incarnate. She began to scream and back away, but the angel’s wings had turned to snakes and held her fast for the burning fire behind him.
The man with the garrote, sensing Coldwell was dead, replaced the wire with a thick metal chain weighed down by iron dumbbells, then pushed her off the side of the boat.
Having gotten up early to consummate the business deal, Birk found it impossible to go back to bed. He decided he would amuse himself by taking the wheel of the Sharia as he set sail northward. The yacht was a large vessel, but a fleet one, and as he laid on the power he felt a rush of adrenaline.
One of his regrets about leaving the area for an extended “vacation” was that it would deprive him of the most rewarding part of his business: meeting interesting characters such as Ferguson, the American agent who had so entertained him of late. What would life be like without such stimulation? Birk was not one to romanticize danger, but if truth be told he would miss that aspect of his business as well, or at least the elation he felt when the time of anxiety had passed.
“Two boats, small ones,” said Birk’s brother-in-law, coming into the wheelhouse area behind the helmsman.
Birk turned to look. The boats were small speedboats.
“Break out the weapons.”
The helmsman reached to his shirt to draw his.
“No, not you,” said Birk. “You take the wheel while I see what this is about. Probably nothing.”
As Birk turned, the man fired point blank into the back of his head.
By the time Ravid got to the Sharia, the shooting was over. Birk, his brother-in-law, and the two bodyguards loyal to him had been killed.
So had the American woman, strangled by one of the bodyguards Ravid had infiltrated among Birk’s men. Ravid had debated before deciding this. The woman had to be killed as a matter of operational security as well as tidiness. The fact that she was a fanatic and aimed ultimately at the destruction of Jerusalem weighed heavily against her as well. The world was better off with one less fanatic.
On the other hand, she had released something in him, allowed him to function again, allowed him to really work, he thought. This went beyond simply helping him obtain the missile. Speaking to her of his need for revenge had freed him somehow, and he felt real gratitude: a liability in his profession, but still he felt it.
He hadn’t wanted a drink quite so badly since that night either. Whether that would last or not, he couldn’t say. He wouldn’t count on it.
Coldwell’s pocketbook had been brought to him. Ravid examined it now. She had a few thousand dollars in Euros, less than a hundred American, four credit cards, and a passport which might be of some use in the future.
“Set the course south,” he told the others. “Weigh the bodies down and send them overboard at nightfall. Except for Birk; we will need his to make his ship appear as if it was robbed. Find a place where his body can be stuffed conveniently. Quickly. I must leave as soon as possible.”
3
LATAKIA
Ferguson had one indisput
able point of reference: the digital photo he had taken when they retrieved the case. He avoided looking at it—he avoided dealing with the problem at all—while he tried to psyche out who had killed Vassenka. Ras provided a semiuseful theory: the Syrian authorities believed Vassenka had tipped the Israelis off to the meeting at the castle and the incoming airplane, and this was payback.
The theory was wrong, but it told Ferguson that there were probably additional Iraqis and/or fanatics associated with Meles who had escaped Mossad’s revenge bombing. He and Thera spent the early morning hours placing new taps on the local police phones; the NSA already had a healthy operation harvesting information from the central authorities in Damascus. Sooner or later the rest of the scum would turn up in the net.
There was a legitimate question to be asked, though: how much of this effort was truly worth it? With all of the major players out of the picture and the rocket fuel about to be confiscated, the immediate threat had vanished.
Asking the question was another thing Ferguson didn’t bother with until he put Thera on the ferry for Cyprus. Unlike the yacht she and the others had taken the day before, this was a public vessel, a recent enterprise aimed at tourists but mostly used by Syrian workers who found they could earn twice as much on the island as they could in Syria. Which wasn’t saying much.
Thera held his hand at the dock, as if they were sweethearts.
“See you,” he told her as the small crowd began to press forward.
“When?” she asked.
“Probably tomorrow. But who knows?”
“You look like you need a vacation.”
“Think I can get a good deal at Versailles?”
“Ha, ha. I’m serious.” She looked up at him, as if expecting a kiss. “We’re done, right?”
“We’re never done.”
He held her hand for a moment. She had changed into Muslim dress to blend with the Turkish women going home; the comb she’d had in her hair the night before was gone.
Why would she have stolen the jewels? Ferg thought.
Besides the obvious reasons, like greed.
“We’re saying good-bye, right?” Thera told him in Arabic. That was the cover they’d worked out for the plainclothes police who watched the dock.
“Yeah,” he said, and he took her in his arms and flattened his lips against hers.
The taste of the kiss was still in his mouth an hour later when he showed some of the jewels to a pawnbroker in the old part of the city. The man closed his eyes when he saw the stones; Ferguson pulled them back across the counter.
“How about these?” he said, taking out two of the diamonds.
The man considered them. “Twenty Euros apiece.”
“Come on, they’re worth more.”
“Your accent is Egyptian,” said the man. “But your clothes tell me you are from Europe.”
“Ireland. I grew up in Cairo. Will that get me a better price?”
“Fifty Euros would be the best I could do. They are decent but not real.”
“What about this?” said Ferguson. He took out the bracelet that had fallen on the ground the night of the operation. The man’s eyes and greedy fingers told him immediately it was real.
“For this—” started the merchant.
“Don’t even tempt me. It’s not for sale,” said Ferguson, pulling it back.
Of all the covers Ferguson had ever adopted, playing a doctor had to rate among the best. It wasn’t just that people seemed to easily accept it; they became positively voluble, offering all sorts of information. And so Dr. Ferguson not only gained a great deal of insight into the autopsy procedures at the university hospital but was also treated to a full tour of the area where corpses were held. In the course of this tour, the assistant to the assistant head pathologist revealed that they had handled an important case just that morning, working on a body that had unfortunately met its demise by coming too close to a hand grenade.
Dr. Ferguson recalled experiences with mines in Bosnia as a young intern volunteering his time. This pressed the cover story to the limit—Ferguson was actually too young to have been there in the time frame when it would have taken place—but the assistant assistant wasn’t keeping track of dates. Ferguson moved on to a discussion of plastic surgery, a specialty he had not indulged in but often wondered about. The conversation flowed a crooked road of techniques and wounds and reconstruction, until at last Ferguson found himself staring at the face of Jurg Vassenka, who was not Jurg Vassenka.
They’d been had. The Russian had managed to slip away.
4
THE PERSIAN GULF, SOUTH OF IRAQ
The U.S. Navy had special teams trained to board and inspect ships on the high seas, and Rankin was content to ride shotgun with one as it approached the Chi Lao. Guns chafed a bit at the seamen’s haughty commands when they went up the ladder from the rigid-hulled inflatable boat, but then the whole idea of sailors doing what by rights should have been a marine job didn’t sit well with the leatherneck anyway.
The freighter had started its journey not in North Korea as Ferguson had originally suspected but the Philippines, where it had docked not far from one that had recently come from North Korea. This was all documented in the papers the captain presented to the ensign in charge of the boarding party, as were the stops it had made in the Middle East. It hadn’t docked in Tripoli or Latakia, but Rankin already knew from Thomas’s work that there was enough slack in the ship’s itinerary for it to have lingered a few hours offshore, presumably to get a payment or for instructions. In any event, the papers weren’t what he and Guns had come to see.
“We want to look at the cargo,” he told the ensign.
The ship captain’s English, which just a moment ago had been perfect, suddenly became strained. He managed to communicate that he had nothing but televisions and cooking oil aboard, and was already overdue.
“Then you better help us take a look quickly,” suggested the ensign, “or you’ll be even later.”
Rankin gripped his Uzi as they went down the ladder to the forward cargo spaces. There were shadows everywhere, and while the destroyer they’d come from sat less than a hundred yards away, the boarding crew was very much on its own amid the shadows and cramped quarters below deck. They went to the stacked boxes of cooking oil; the crew directed one of the skids to be opened for inspection. The captain asked if they wanted it done there or above on deck.
“Neither,” said Rankin. “Where are the televisions?”
The ensign shot him an odd look. The captain’s English once more failed. The boarding crew, however, had already located them in the next hold; the crates were arranged so that they would be easily unloaded.
When they finally reached them, the captain began to protest that an inspection would make them even later.
“Tell you what then,” said Rankin, raising his Uzi, “I’ll just fire at random through them. What do you say?”
Guns grabbed the captain as he jerked away and threw him to the ground. The sailors who jumped on him grabbed a small pistol from his pocket.
The first set of boxes they opened contained thirty-two-inch televisions manufactured in South Korea. The second set seemed to as well, until the picture tubes were examined more closely. The flimsy cardboard that protected the rear of the TV sets covered a large plastic piece at the back of the picture tube. The first sign that it was different from that on the legitimate sets was the fact that it screwed off rather than pulled. The second sign was the kerosenelike stench that quickly spread through the hold when it was off. Rankin put the cap back on gingerly.
“Better get this place vented,” Rankin told the ensign in charge of the boarding team. “This stuff catches fire pretty damn easy.”
5
CYPRUS
Thera got back to the hotel just as Monsoon and Grumpy were taking their gear out to the van that would run them over to the British military airport at Akroti. A jet there would take them to the States, where they would have a few da
ys off before rejoining their units. Surprised and disappointed that they were leaving, Thera tried not to show it. She kissed Grumpy, which surprised him, and then kissed Monsoon, which didn’t.
“I hope I see you again,” she told him.
“That’d be nice.”
“You have an e-mail address?”
“Sure.”
Upstairs, she tucked the address into her wallet, then went to take a shower. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she undressed, she saw a woman with drooping eyes and a puffy mouth: an old, tired, lonely woman.
Exhausted by the last several days, feeling the aftereffects of the pill she’d taken to keep herself going last night, she burst into tears.
6
TEL AVIV THE NEXT MORNING …
“The problem with you Americans is that you think you don’t have to get your hands dirty. You think you can deal with a problem by talking about it rather than taking action, when only action will solve it: strong action, eradicating action. You would have kept Khazaal and Meles alive, risking their escape. We have dealt with them efficiently. We have provided you a solution to the problem which you did not have the stomach to take.”
Ferguson sipped his coffee in the secure room beneath the Mossad building as the Israeli’s rant continued. One thing surprised him: the lecture was coming not from Tischler, who sat stone-faced across from Corrine, but from Aaron Ravid. The slime had not only made good time getting back to Israel but also put the effort into polishing up a speech.
Corrine listened impassively. She didn’t have a lot of experience as a courtroom litigator; most of what she did had come from pro bono work in local courts representing poor people accused of very minor crimes. But she knew how to act during a prosecutor’s summation: nonplussed, occasionally sipping from her water, once in a very great while taking the time to look incredulous.