Chapter 3
Ben’s main job was to keep good relations with the secret services of the United States and Canada, while exchanging information about common enemies. On the other side, he also gathered information about those very same allies.
Like all other Mossad agents, he had to coordinate the network of the sayanim, the Jewish word for foreign collaborators. They were mostly made of Jews of the Diaspora who were loyally serving both their homeland and the country of Israel, that vowed to act as a last resort shelter for all the Jews of the world. And Jews knew all too well that fleeing your homeland on short notice could never be disregarded.
Ben was constantly trying to get as much information without exposing his sayanim to the threat of espionage charges from their home country. However, the FBI and the Homeland Security Agency were making it increasingly difficult.
The call from Yaakov came through Ben’s secure mobile line.
Yaakov explained the full story he had learned from Eyal, except the detail about the biodrone research, as Ben did not need to know about it and there was always the possibility of someone else listening in on the call.
At the end of the briefing, Ben took initiative and sketched out a plan of action.
“Alright, we basically have three concerns.
First, make sure that George and Sean are the same person. Then, if this is confirmed, we have to find out what Sean-George is really doing. And last, who are the guys he is working with.
I would use the sayanim and some light surveillance to resolve the first issue, and depending on what we find out, we work out a strategy for the second and third ones.”
“Good idea. Now, do you have some ideas on how to go about the first part?”
“We have several sayanim on the West Coast, some of them are active in Silicon Valley venture capital firms, others in the movie industry in Hollywood. Maybe we are lucky enough that some of them already got in touch with George and might have direct access to his relatives. The idea is to grab some of George’s stuff from which we can extract DNA samples.
I do not think it will be an issue to get some bio samples from Sean, just with some basic shadowing. You have thousands going on every day in New York City alone. FBI and Homeland Security won’t notice anything at all.”
“Sounds reasonable, I want you to report back to me in two weeks or so, as soon as you have some news. We have four weeks to get started.”
Once Ben had hung up, he started browsing through his list of contacts on the West Coast, sorting out who to call in the late afternoon.
After just two calls, it turned out that one sayan called Aaron Kahlberg, was a very close friend to one of the partners of George in his mobile phone venture. Aaron was used to giving some advice or answering some questions for Ben. He knew this was helping the cause of Israel and there was nothing wrong with that.
This time the request was strange, though. For some reason which Ben could not disclose, he was searching for any objects that had come in contact with George McKilroy. Aaron asked if they were looking for some DNA samples, but all he got as a response was that they would be returned exactly in the same condition as they were, in no time.
A few days later, Aaron went to his friend’s home for a party and he purposely commented on one of the big phones that was sitting on the memorabilia shelf in the lab room. He asked his friend if he could borrow it to show to one of his grandsons that phones without screen really used to exist.
The plan worked and the very next day the hefty car phone was taking off from Los Angeles, headed to Tel Aviv.
Sean was easier to manage since he was still alive, but there were constraints as well. Intruding into Sean’s house, even in his absence, was out of the question until they had more evidence on his double life. What if a policeman or a neighbor intercepted the agent?
Ben decided to leverage Sean’s on-the-go lifestyle by contacting someone of the sayanim at United Airlines who had access to the global reservation system. With some luck, Sean would pass through an airport in the New York area, since he belonged to the frequent flyer club.
The very same day he received the full list of Sean’s past and future reservations, from a private email address. Sean had started flying exactly after George passed away. This confirmed Ben was onto something.
Once he had called the Mossad operative to organize the sample collection on the next flight, he noticed the pattern of his visits to Singapore.
The sample collection was scheduled to be taken on his next flight from New York to Paris. As Sean always booked the same aisle seat, it was easy to assign the agent to the window seat next to him. The mission seemed very simple, but Ben insisted on having an experienced agent carry it out.
It was much better to annoy an expert operative than to risk a small failure and delay the collection of information. Two days later, he chuckled when Shlomo slammed a plastic slip with a small strand of hair down on his desk, shouting threats to move back to Africa where at least there was some action.
The slip flew to Israel that day, in the official packaging of the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations.
By the time the lab analysis report arrived, twenty-four days had passed since the call between Ben and Yaakov. The report stated that the dandruff samples found trapped in the telephone receiver had a ninety-seven percent probability of belonging to the same individual from which the hair had been taken. The holes of the telephone receiver had shielded the dandruff microsamples from the heat and light that would have irremediably damaged the DNA, and luckily not many other people had used this phone.
This meant there was an American agent operating undercover in Israel and dealing with advanced biotechnology research.
Eyal and Yaakov decided to raise the case priority to high.
The Last Enemy - Parts 1,2 & 3 - 1934-2054 Page 14