South

by Lance Charnes

  Good. Whatever happened, the kids didn’t deserve to have it happen to them. “Your wife?”

  “She’s here. I need to get her, too. Can you arrange for your guys to not shoot me?”

  “I can do that.” McGinley noticed an ICE troop leading a bedraggled woman down the aisle. “But I reckon I don’t need to.”

  “What?”

  His man said “Sir?” and stopped a couple paces away. The woman was a mess, clothes all dirty, hands all bloody. But even though one eye was swollen shut and the other was bright red from the smoke and what-all-else, the open one had the same fire as the last time they’d met.

  “Evening, Mrs. Ojeda.”

  “You again?”

  Ojeda shoved past McGinley, scooped up his wife in his arms and actually picked her off the floor. McGinley waved away his man and retreated a few steps, giving them room to kiss and hug and all that. It’d been a long damn time since anyone had been that happy to see him, and he didn’t need to remind himself of it.

  Once the reunion had settled down, he rejoined them where Khaled lay. The husband sat next to her, crying, holding her hand. McGinley had never realized she was such a little thing. She’d seemed plenty big enough when they met.

  “She needs to be buried,” Ojeda said. “Within twenty-four hours, in the clothes she was martyred in. Can you…?”

  “How in the hell am I supposed to do that?” McGinley snapped. “I gotta take her body to prove I got her, I ain’t burying her. Besides, don’t she need to be in a rag cemetery or something?”

  “No, just not a Christian one.” Ojeda’s voice sounded like someone had let all the air out of him. “Never mind.” He waved toward the battlefield. “What’s the count?”

  “Out there? Don’t know.” Didn’t much care, either. The ones the gunship got, they’d be counting legs and dividing by two anyway. “In here, ten or so Zeta KIAs, the rest wounded. You promised me Esquivel, and I ain’t seen him yet. He get away?” Ojeda pointed toward the front wall. A pair of DEA troops headed out the door carrying a man on a sagging black tarp. McGinley noticed Mrs. Ojeda looked mighty pleased by this. “Well, thank you kindly for not killing him. We got Zambreño alive and Salgado and Casillas dead, which won’t help my promotion chances none, though I can’t say I’m sorry for it.” He’d have some more words with Alcala on the way home, maybe find out more about this Dominguez asshole who had the list Carla Jean’s name was on. “On the blue side, we got half a dozen KIAs and some State Department muckedy-muck who’s madder’n a wet hen.”

  Ojeda said, “How’s this work now, McGinley?”

  He wasn’t quite sure. Khaled’s husband was a fugitive. So was Ojeda, for that matter, and probably the wife, too. But given everything, that was pretty chickenshit. He watched his men going about their business at the end of the warehouse, lining up bodies, slinging out the wounded. “Well…I reckon the birds are gonna be full of casualties. And the prisoners. And I reckon we gotta move out those D.C. peckerheads. I expect we just ain’t got room for all y’all.” He pointed toward Khaled’s husband. The man looked plenty peeved. “I ain’t entirely sure he was even here. Looks like a Mex civilian to me. Don’t you think?”

  “Could be,” Ojeda said. He had a grim little smile on. “Janitor, maybe.”

  “That’s my thinking.” McGinley squinted through the last of the smoke into Ojeda’s eyes. “Tell me you’re out of this game, amigo.”

  “I am.”

  He turned to the missus. “Ma’am, you keep him to that, y’hear?”

  She snorted. “You better believe it.”

  “All right, then. I don’t reckon we’ll be meeting again.”

  Ojeda let his wife go and held out his hand. “Thanks.”

  McGinley considered the man and his hand. Oh, what the hell. He shook with Ojeda, nodded to the missus, and walked away.

  76

  The end of the paper-based newspaper and the broadcast news programme has posed new challenges for media companies… Internet-based news outlets have surpassed banks as the chief targets of both official and private hackers… Readers of publications such as The Guardian and the New York Times take a perverse pride in the frequency with which those websites are offline due to attacks by aggrieved groups or governments…

  — “Business: All the News That’s Fit to Hack,” Economist.com

  MONDAY, 16 AUGUST

  There came a time—between sunset and when the sky faded from purple to black—when the breeze off the Gulf slowed to a whisper, the lights in the windows matched the yellow fringe of sky behind the Belizean rainforest, and the day’s heat left the shore behind on its way west.

  This was when Luis liked to stand on the little beach a hundred yards from his sagging rented cottage and watch the water. It calmed him even if he didn’t get in it, which he did before work. The morning swim, the evening pause. Habits—rituals—he’d established quickly and clung to even as the undertow of the strangeness of this place and their new life sometimes threatened to suck him under.

  He could ride a bike to his work as maintenance manager at the resort hotel down the road. The GM, a U.S. Army vet from the Somalia campaign, had hired him on without a resume. Hard work, but good. Dirty physically, but clean otherwise.

  “Hey, there.” Bel’s voice behind him. A few seconds later, she snaked an arm around his waist. “Lost or something?”

  “Waiting for a pretty girl to come find me.” They kissed. “How was your day?”

  “Not bad.” She dangled her gym shoes from her free hand, had already rolled up the cuffs of her scrub pants. She worked five miles up the coast at a small hospital in the “big city” of thirteen thousand. “We’re getting more kids in for vaccinations before school starts, plus the usual stuff. Tourists are really dumb, you know that?”

  “I’ve noticed. They’re good at breaking things, too.”

  “Including arms.” She gave him a squeeze. “Did you see the news?”

  “Sure did.” The Guardian website’s home page: “U.S. FBI Files: White Militia Responsible for 10/19 Attack.” A full dozen stories, images of the most damning documents, the promise of an entire site dedicated to the huge dump of data Nora and Paul had smuggled out of Washington. Links to the stories they’d run in June about the aborted relationship with the Zetas. Nora’s picture, a snapshot with Paul. Luis had stalled out when he saw that, but for once didn’t flash back to her dead on the warehouse floor. He wondered how Paul and the kids were doing in England, what their lives would be like from now on.

  The story had already spread, to MSNBC and the BBC, to CBC and AFP, to AP and Reuters and Xinhua. Not to Fox, of course. The New York Times site was down mysteriously, but the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times sites had managed summaries and links to the Guardian before they, too, went down. Twitter was going nuts. Google News listed 5,281 related stories after only twelve hours.

  “She’d be proud,” Bel said. “It kicks those bastards right in the nuts.”

  “Yeah. Now we get to see if it makes any difference.”

  “I have to hope.”

  Even after so little time, it was hard for Luis to feel any connection to what happened up there. The FBI seized the house, which still pissed him off even though they’d never have squeezed any money out of it. Mom and Dad were driving his sister Lourdes crazy in Denver. There really wasn’t anything left to tie them to what used to be home.

  Bel dropped her shoes and wrapped her arms around his waist from the side. “Think we’ll ever be able to go back?”

  “Do you want to?”

  She watched the tiny waves splash the sand, a rhythmic swush. Luis held her against his side. They owned almost nothing—a bed, a little table, a couple chairs, a beat-up armoire that fit their few clothes, some thrift-shop dishes. He’d borrowed his bicycle from the resort. But the people were nice, no one here was afraid, and there were these moments—between sunset and when the sky faded from purple to black—when he could hold Bel and know, deep
in his soul, how lucky they were.

  “Maybe someday,” Bel finally said. “When it turns back into America.” She kissed his cheek. “I’m in no hurry.”

  Stars began to fill the black sky over the Gulf. “Neither am I.”

  About the Author

  Lance Charnes has been an Air Force intelligence officer, information technology manager, computer-game artist, set designer, Jeopardy! contestant, and now an emergency management specialist. He’s had training in architectural rendering, terrorist incident response and maritime archaeology, but not all at the same time. Lance tweets (@lcharnes) on shipwrecks, archaeology, art crime and scuba diving. South is his second published novel, after his international thriller Doha 12.

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  DOHA 12

  Jake Eldar’s and Miriam Schaffer’s names may kill them.

  Jake manages a bookstore in Brooklyn. Miriam is a secretary at a Philadelphia law firm. Both grew up in Israel and emigrated to build new lives in America. Neither knows the other exists…until the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad uses their identities in an operation to assassinate a high-ranking Hezbollah commander in Doha, Qatar.

  Now Hezbollah plans to kill them both.

  Jake, Miriam and ten other innocents in five countries – the Doha 12 – awake to find their identities stolen and their lives caught between Mossad and Hezbollah in an international game of murder and reprisal. Jake stumbles upon Hezbollah’s plot but can’t convince the police it exists. When his wife is murdered in a botched hit meant for him, Jake and Miriam try desperately to outrun and outfight their pursuers while shielding Jake’s young daughter from the killers on their trail.

  Hezbollah, however, has a fallback plan: hundreds of people will die if Jake and Miriam survive.

  Inspired by actual events, Doha 12 sweeps you from the suburbs of Beirut and Tel Aviv to a pulse-pounding climax in the wintry streets of Manhattan as Jake and Miriam race along the thin, faded gray line between good and bad, hero and villain, truth and lies.

  “Doha 12 will have you riveted from beginning to end… be one of the first discoverers of an exceptional writer.” — Seeley James, author of The Geneva Decision

  ENJOY THE FIRST THREE CHAPTERS OF DOHA 12

  ONE: 12 SEPTEMBER, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  Jake heaved the wheeled metal cart into the Religion section, rolled out his shoulders, then started reshelving the books the morning’s customers had left strewn all over the café and lounge. He smiled at the great cosmic joke this section told—Christian Inspiration across from Eastern Religions, Buddhism and Hinduism next to Islam. Nothing burning and nobody dying. Try that in the real world.

  He didn’t have to pull shelf duty—he was the manager, he could get one of the kids to do it—but it let him have some contact with the books as something other than entries on a spreadsheet. Even after six years of ten- or twelve-hour days, he still loved the smell of new books, crisp paper and glue promising new ideas or new worlds.

  His phone chirped. He pressed the switch on his headset. “Yeah?”

  “Jake, um, could you come down here?” Gwyneth sounded jumpier than usual. “Some kinda scary guys wanna talk to you.”

  “Sure.” Jake sighed, wrestled the overloaded cart out of the aisle, parked it next to the endcap. What set off Gwyneth this time? To her, “scary” meant someone wearing a tie.

  He spotted them the moment the escalator brought him within sight of the register counter. Two men, dark suits, safe ties, short hair, watchful eyes. Cops, he figured. What did they want? Gwyneth cowered behind her register a few feet to the right of the cops, wrapping herself tight in her black knit cardigan, as if waiting for the men to bite her.

  Jake closed with the men, gave each of them a scan. One fair-haired white, one semi-dark Latino, clean-shaven, thirties, serious. “You looking for me?”

  The white one returned the examination. “Jacob Eldar?”

  “Yeah.”

  The cop pulled a flat leather folder from his inside coat pocket, let it fall open. “Special Agent Johanssen, FBI. This is Special Agent Medina. There someplace we can talk?”

  “Uh, sure, come on.” Jake led them upstairs to the edge of the mostly-empty café. Why would the FBI want to talk to him? Subversive books? Sure, like those would make the buy list.

  They sat at a red laminate two-top next to the windows overlooking the street, Jake on one side, both the agents crowded around the other. Kelli, the new girl on coffee duty, took one look at the three of them and skittered to the café’s far end to wipe down tables.

  Medina started before Jake could think of anything to say. “Do you still hold dual citizenship, Mr. Eldar? American and Israeli?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you in contact with anyone in Israel? Other than your parents.”

  Something scurried around Jake’s gut. The FBI knew about his parents? “Couple friends, an army buddy. Why?”

  “Have you been approached by anyone with the Israeli government, or, say, an Israeli company?”

  He hadn’t had any contact with the Israeli government since he’d dragged Rinnah here to get away from the place. He hoped he never would. “No, nobody. What’s this about?”

  Johanssen leaned his forearms on the table. “Read the paper, Mr. Eldar?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You see about that terrorist guy got killed in Qatar couple weeks back?”

  “I saw it happened. Didn’t spend a lot of time on it.”

  “Well.” Johanssen tapped the table with two fingers. “Someone using your passport and your name may have been involved. You lend your passport to anyone, Mr. Eldar?”

  Jake glanced between the two agents, wondering when they’d break out laughing and the guy with the video camera would pop out from behind the espresso machine. “Are you serious? Why would I do that?”

  Medina pulled a paper from inside his coat, unfolded it, smoothed it on the middle of the table. “Do you know this man?”

  A man in his forties stared back at him from the grainy, blown-up passport photo. Triangular face, broken nose, straight black hair, moustache, sober glasses. Darkish skin; he could be any kind of Mediterranean, even Latino. “Never saw him before.”

  “According to Qatari Immigration, that’s Jacob Eldar of 475 18th Street, Brooklyn.”

  Shit. Jake looked into the fixed dark eyes in the photo. His name, his address. But why him? What else did this guy take? “Who is he really?”

  Johanssen shrugged. “Don’t know. Smart money’s on Mossad right now, you know, the Israeli CIA.”

  “I know who they are.” And wished he didn’t, but the Feds didn’t need to know about that. “Can’t help you. Sorry.”

  The two agents exchanged “are you done?” glances. Medina flashed Jake a polite smile, snapped a business card down on the table. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Eldar. If you think of anything, please call.” They stood; so did Jake.

  He shook hands with them both, said, “Buy some coffee while you’re here. We need the business.”

  Jake drifted back downstairs to the customer service desk while the agents confused Kelli with their orders. He slumped
on the stool, stared at the company screen saver bouncing across the computer monitor. Mossad used my name? Why? It couldn’t be random; Mossad didn’t do random.

  Payback?

  He braced his elbows on the green laminate desktop, lowered his face into his hands.

  Mossad did payback.

  TWO: 12 SEPTEMBER, TEL AVIV, ISRAEL

  Refael Gur’s morning coffee hadn’t yet kicked in when he got the call to report to the chief’s office. This, he didn’t need. He needed to dedicate his first day back at Mossad headquarters to his expense vouchers and the mission report. The accountants probably already flagged him late with his receipts.

  He threaded his way through the narrow hallways, returning nods, ignoring the whispers as he passed. Komemiute was a small operation; it didn’t take an intelligence analyst to figure out who’d done the Doha job. At least he was finally rid of that damn moustache.

  Chaim Orgad glanced up from the paper he was signing when Gur knocked on his doorframe. “Raffi.” He pointed to the chrome-framed chair in front of his desk. Gur didn’t have to be told to close the door behind him.

  Orgad tossed the morning’s Yediot Aharonot in Gur’s lap. Gur already knew what the front-page headline said; the same as every other newspaper in Israel that morning. He skimmed the story to see if this bunch knew anything more than Haaretz.

  DOHA, Qatar – The Qatari National Police revealed today that Masoud Talhami, who was discovered dead of an apparent heroin overdose in his luxury hotel room on August 30, may have been killed by an Israeli assassination squad.

  Talhami, 53, a ranking member of Hezbollah’s military committee, was one of the instigators of the second Palestinian intifada…