Baksheesh (Bribes)

by D S Kane

  Wing fell to his knees. He wanted one thing more than any other. “Live, Syl.”

  * * *

  The next day, a huge snowstorm closed the office. It took another day before the roads were plowed enough for most of the staff to return to work. And it was noon before Judy Hernandez saw a disheveled William Wing walk into the office through the elevator’s doors. He waved at Judy as he swept through the office lobby. She saw the deep rings under his eyeglasses. The poor man hadn’t slept in days. She shook her head.

  The elevator doors opened again and she saw an old woman with double canes slowly ambling toward her. “Can I help you?”

  Two minutes later, Hernandez knocked on Shimmel’s office door. “General, there’s someone here to see you. She doesn’t have an appointment.”

  He looked up and asked, “What’s her name?”

  “Sandra Rubin. She claims she knows you.”

  His brows arched. “Please show her in.”

  Seconds later a broken woman walked with difficulty into his office. She moved slowly and carefully, using two canes to assist her. Her face triggered memories, but they were impossible to reconcile with what he knew. She wasn’t the beautiful and sexy Mossad lieutenant he’d worked with so many years ago. This woman was fat, old, and broken.

  But her hair was a mix of blonde and ash along with the gray of age, and her lips held the twisted grin that had captured his imagination so long ago. “The rumors of my death are completely accurate.”

  She took care lowering herself into a chair across his desk, settling with a slight sigh. “Avram, you haven’t changed much. As for me, well, this is preferable to what my assassins intended. Remember me? Ah, I see you do. It’s not pretty, what they did. My body was blown along with my cover. I was dead for almost three minutes. The emergency surgery saved my life, but my legs were badly shattered. I couldn’t walk for over a year. Took ten hours of hard work every day for me to be able even to waddle around.” She looked into his eyes. “Avram, I heard about your family. I’m so sorry.”

  He remembered the day Shula Ries died. Over three years ago. He’d attended her funeral, seen her coffin drop into a hole in the gritty dirt. But now, the dead walked. Ries had been given a new name by the Mossad, and here she was. Visiting him. His jaw hung open. “What? Are you really her? I, uh—”

  “Yes. I would never have come here except that something has happened and I need help. You and this organization are my best chance of getting that assistance. I can’t go to my Mossad handlers. Not without more intel. They’d laugh at my suspicions.” She shook her head.

  Now, he could smell the distinctive perfume, same as fifteen years ago. But the damaged woman showed her age. No longer beautiful. Shimmel’s face was pinched. “You are in trouble?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Avram. Trouble is what we do. When they buried that empty coffin, my career in Mossad as a covert operative in the Middle East ended. I couldn’t move my body very well. I was no longer attractive enough to gain intel using sex. But they had bigger plans for me.”

  She waited but he said nothing, asked no questions. His jaw hung open. She smiled. “With my new identity, ‘Sandra Rubin,’ I’m an executive vice president at Manhattan National Bank. I run non-credit services. Foreign exchange and funds transfer. I launder money for Mossad. And, well, I also track money movement to and from terrorist organizations.”

  He snapped his jaw shut. “Shula?”

  “Arggh! No. I’m Sandra now. God in heaven, man, hold yourself together.”

  He shook his head. “Yah. Sorry. What can we do to help?”

  “You have computer hackers, some of the best, I’m told.”

  “Yes.” He pressed the intercom button. “Judy, call William into my meeting.”

  Seconds later, Wing staggered in, looking as if he was asleep. He held a huge coffee mug in his left hand. Shimmel introduced him to Sandra. “William is the very best hacker on the planet. What do you need from us?”

  Sandra Rubin took a deep breath. She faced Wing. “I work for Mossad in deep cover, looking for financial transactions that fund terrorism. The call sign you will use in contacting me is Wipes.” She made a gesture as if her hands held a cloth and she was using it to clean Shimmel’s desk. “I found several transactions that bear similarity to those reported in the Ben-Levy leaks. One of my contacts is Jon Sommers, a former Mossad operative.”

  Avram and William both smiled. “He’s one of our friends. Haven’t heard from him for over two years.”

  Wipes was silent for a few seconds. “Small world. His cover assignment is that he works for me at the bank. Jon confirmed my findings. We believe that whoever sent the funds used several intermediary banks before and after the money arrived at my bank, Manhattan National. Here is the list of negotiating banks for the funds transfers, many in the Middle East and other countries that don’t subscribe to the antiterrorism conventions we impose on banking in the United States and its allies.”

  She handed Wing a piece of paper. “I need your help to find the originating current account from which the funds came. Can you trace through the negotiating banks to the originating source bank and also to their subsequent destination after they left Manhattan National?”

  William smiled and looked at Avram, his eyes asking the question. When Shimmel nodded, Wing’s eyes closed to slits. “Yes, we’re equipped for this. Not just me, I’m a hacker. But my mentor was the best at one particular form of hacking. She taught me global banking systems. It’s too bad we lost her.”

  Sandra let out the breath she’d been holding when she asked the question. She nodded. “Lost who? How?”

  “She died,” Shimmel muttered. “But we can still help you even though we’re without our banking expert.” He thought how the list of people he knew that still breathed while “dead” was ever growing.

  The large woman shifted in her seat. “Good. Then we must set up a meeting with Sommers. He’ll be in Washington tomorrow and only for three days. You can—”

  “Why?” Wing and Shimmel both said the word simultaneously.

  “Because he’s one of our best experts in Middle Eastern banking. Different banking conventions from what you probably know.”

  “Oh.” They both replied together.

  “I’ll call him right now.” She pulled the cellphone from her purse. “We’ll need to work fast, though. I think something bad is about to happen, and very soon.”

  * * *

  Jon Sommers was the exact opposite of Sandra Rubin. It had been two years since he’d worked with both Avram and William, as a team. Avram thought Jon must have become a rogue if there was ever anyone who’d exemplified that word. Rail thin and almost six feet tall, slick smile, longish black hair with graying temples, Van Dyke beard neatly trimmed, and a British accent so thick it obscured one’s ability to guess whether he was telling you something true or just lying.

  Sommers sat. “Good to see you again, Avram, William. I’m now a stringer for Mossad Collections Department. Deep cover.”

  Here was something Avram had never known about Jon: “Where’d you get your knowledge of Middle Eastern banking?”

  “Ah, yes, straight to the point, we are.” He scratched his furrowed brow. “Learned first in business school, and then on the job, so to speak. Before we met, I was deep cover within the Bank of Trade.”

  “Bank of Trade? The Arab bank based in London. Right?” William was on thin ice here and Shimmel could tell from the expression on the hacker’s face.

  Sommers nodded. “Correct. I hacked into the bank’s trading and wire transfer ops center when I was inside. On the surface, they’re okay. But when you dig down, well, not so much. They’re the only bank with an ‘enforcement’ arm.”

  Shimmel’s brows arched. “What kind of enforcement does a bank need?”

  “Ah. Well, you see, these fellows make short-term loans to import-export businesses,”

  Wing’s face reflected his next assumption. “Drug cartels, arms dealer
s. Big money hitters.”

  “Zactly.” Sommers smiled. “And, as Sandra can attest, many of the transfers go through Manhattan National on their way to their ultimate destination.” He pronounced her name “Sondra.”

  Rubin nodded. “I see them in the nonrepetitive repair stations whenever I go sneaking through the area. I don’t want my subordinates to think I’m looking over their shoulders, but that’s exactly what I have to do to track these.”

  She faced Sommers now. “I didn’t know you’d all worked together. But that should make this an easier assignment. I first noticed their nasty little transfers about two years ago. Nothing too big and I wasn’t even sure if they mattered. But lately the funds movement has exceeded twenty million in US dollars per month, mostly amounts below ten thousand.”

  “Wow.” Wing scratched his forehead. “That’s too many one-offs to ignore.”

  Shimmel watched Sommers, deep in thought. “Tell me, what do you think the accumulated cash is for? And who is behind all this?”

  Jon scratched his beard. “Haven’t the tiniest. That’s what we need you to tell us.” Sommers’s expression was appropriately worried. “Must be something big, though. We think it’s terrorist related.”

  Shimmel nodded. “Yes, yes. I got that. But we don’t have unlimited resources. Who will pay for this?”

  Now, Sommers’s smile split his face. “Our friends in the United Kingdom will, up to a point. And so will Mossad, if you can tease them with intriguing results.”

  * * *

  Tobelov listened to the wind howling outside the warehouse on the wharf in Vladivostok. The draft blowing through the walls was cold and damp. With its space heater working furiously hard, the temperature barely crested fifty degrees Fahrenheit. He paced the room, worrying about so many projects that had uncertain outcomes. But when the phone on his desk rang, he trotted back and picked up the receiver. It was his brother.

  “Nicky, I have an errand for you. One that will please you.”

  Tobelov’s mouth opened but he stopped himself before he could say something he’d surely regret. “Brother, it has been difficult trying to reach you. And now, you call me. So tell me what you want.”

  “The American Vice President-elect just called me. So now I will make the suitcase nukes available. All forty-four of them. Call him back. You will use your identity as CEO of Rus Warehousen in Vlad. If he wants the bombs, charge him less than what the terrorists would pay. Moscow will gladly make up the difference. Okay?”

  “Da.”

  “Do svidaniya.”

  But Nikita had already made exactly this deal.

  * * *

  Avram Shimmel examined the photos he’d scattered across his desk. He picked one up, smiled, and set it back down. They were pictures he’d taken of his now-deceased wife and daughter. A scant few were taken by other people, with the three of them together. He reverently picked up one of these. In the past, whenever he’d done this, it brought tears to his eyes.

  He remembered sitting in a taxi on his way home when the cabbie told him his family had been exterminated by a Palestinian suicide bomber from the Gaza.

  But no tears formed today. All he felt was a tiny shiver of recognition. For over a year, their deaths had given meaning to his life. And now, for the first time since that day, he felt himself able to give up longing for their presence.

  A thought formed in his head. This feeling was a strange freedom.

  He gathered up all the photographs from their neat arrangement on his desk. He left two there. The rest he slid into an envelope and placed back into his desk. He picked up one of the two remaining photos.

  It was a two-year-old photo of Shula Ries, then twenty-seven years old, a blue-eyed blonde, muscled and rail-thin, tanned to a golden color. He smiled back at her gorgeous smiling lips. Ben-Levy had taken the photo the day before he’d run the operation that had left her “dead,” as far as Avram knew.

  The other photo was blurred black and white, taken just a few days ago by one of the security cams at Swiftshadow’s offices. Sandra Rubin, a twenty-nine-year-old partially crippled woman weighing nearly two hundred pounds. The same woman. He stared at the photos, recognizing the vibrant young woman within the damaged older one.

  He’d been damaged since the day his family was eradicated. She’d been damaged by her work as a patriot for Israel when they shared the same employer, the Mossad. He’d been responsible for setting the mission, as her handler. All the deaths were so similar. But Ries hadn’t really died. And so, different.

  He closed his eyes and rolled his head around, trying to loosen the tension from his thick neck. What he considered doing would change everything inside him.

  “Judy, please get me Ms. Rubin at Manhattan National.” He let his bulk sink into the leather chair and propped his feet up on the desk, a move borne of a bravado alien to the emotions he felt.

  “Ms. Rubin’s office.”

  “This is Avram Shimmel at Swiftshadow Group. Is she available?”

  “Please wait.” A few seconds passed.

  He tapped his fingers impatiently against his desk until he heard her voice. “Avram, is everything okay?”

  He smiled. “Shu— ah, Sandra, yes. I, uh, uh. I wanted to, uh, wanted, uh—” He sank into a fearful silence.

  “Something is wrong, isn’t it?”

  “No.” He steeled himself and gritted his teeth. Now or never. He’d already reached the point from which there was no possible return. “Have dinner with me. Tonight.”

  She giggled. “What?”

  He gritted his teeth. He’d have to say it again. “Please let me take you out to dinner.” Seconds passed like hours as he waited. He felt perspiration drip down his arms in the cold office.

  “Well! Avram, what a nice offer.” He waited for her to continue, ravaged by a fear greater than anything he’d ever experienced in battle. “Yes, I’d like that. Very much. Do you have a restaurant in mind, or would you like me to choose one of my favorites?”

  “No. We go somewhere new to both of us. I’ll have my office manager make a list of her favorites and send it over. Please pick one you’ve never been to.”

  “Ah. Yes. And thank you.” She terminated the call.

  He called Hernandez. “Judy, please send a list of your three favorite restaurants to Ms. Rubin’s email as soon as possible.” Avram smiled. The tension in his body was gone, like a light turned off. He felt like he’d jumped off a high edge and reveled in freefall. He had nothing to guide him now. This was all new territory.

  CHAPTER 15

  January 4, 2:31 p.m.

  The Swiftshadow Group headquarters,

  2099 K Street NW, Washington, DC

  Shimmel scanned the single piece of paper, nodded, and handed it back. “I agree to do this. In return for the favor.”

  “Let me understand this, Avram. You’ll perform a critical mission for me and what you want in return is for Mossad to work a wedding-security detail? Just how dangerous will this wedding be?” Yigdal Ben-Levy grinned as he scratched his short-cropped beard, his eyes slits.

  Shimmel nodded. “Don’t know how much danger she’s in now, but ever since I met her, there’s always been a risk for anyone in her vicinity. To me, she’s as much my family as the wife and daughter I lost. And as dear to me. So I’ll mount the operation for you if you’ll work the wedding. I spoke with the men. They’ve agreed to this execution. I had many volunteers. All see this as a wedding present for Sashakovich. It’s her last day with that name.”

  “I’d assumed as much. And they’ll be disappearing from the planet, correct?”

  “Yah. No one will know who they’ve become or where they’ll live. Except for me.

  Ben-Levy shook his head. “What will she do? This woman isn’t the type to sit at home with a teenaged daughter and a bored husband.”

  Shimmel shrugged. “I dunno. She’s bright enough to think of something.”

  “She’ll be bored to death. And how will she run
Swiftshadow when she’s so far away and permanently dark?”

  Shimmel smiled sadly. “She’ll be selling the consulting group to me. We’ll be available for missions whenever you need them. Lee and Cassandra have little money, so selling Swiftshadow will get them enough to get started again.” He remembered his agenda and pointed to the page Ben-Levy now held. “For the wedding assignment, I’ll need twenty men, Mossad, armed and serving as waiters. Plastic guns with hollow-core plastic bullets. Ceramic knives. And ten more, snipers with conventional sniper rifles and gear. Your choice of manufacturer. Night scopes with heat-tagging lasers and cartridges with a ‘follow’ function.”

  Ben-Levy nodded and waved one arm, changing the subject. “For the pending mission, how do you intend to execute the target?”

  “If I can, we’ll not execute him at all. I want to bring him back to you, alive, for interrogation. We’ll have to go in full bore. Let’s just say that this mission is simple and relatively safe. It may result in the deaths of more than just the target. But if it works according to plan, few, if any, of my mercenaries will be at risk.”

  “I see. Good luck then. When can you divulge the location of the wedding?”

  “She hasn’t made a decision as yet. Figure by the time I’ve had the target rendered.”

  * * *

  Time passed slowly in the dark seclusion of the submarine. Their destination was Vladivostok, the Russian mafiya’s eastern headquarters. Three years ago, Shimmel had sworn he’d never return to the piss-hole of a city. This was a promise he now broken twice. The ancient sub wended its way from Washington DC around Cape Horn and past Hawaii.

  The sub was World War Two vintage, well-maintained and working, but cramped and smelling of oil that leaked from its ancient mechanical tubing. They’d been traveling about ten days now, and only his wristwatch tracked the time.