Ishmael Covenant

by Terry Brennan

  A fan for the other team must have brought a drum. Very unusual for a soccer game, but this fan was pounding on that drum for all it was worth. Boom … Boom …

  Like he was coming to the surface from the depths of a dark lake, Brian Mullaney broke out of his dream to the sound of the drum.

  He was stretched out on the sofa, still dressed but his shoes off. The pounding in his heart, remembering the crushing pain of Abby’s letter, was replaced by a more urgent pounding on his front door. He was two strides from the door when Tommy Hernandez pounded once more. “Brian!”

  Mullaney pulled open the door for Hernandez, then went looking for his shoes.

  “The ambassador got a phone call. They’ve got Mrs. Parker and they want the box,” said Hernandez.

  “We need proof of life first.” Mullaney tied his shoelaces and pulled on his suit jacket. As he started toward the door, he stopped and turned to look at Hernandez. “No, Tommy,” Mullaney said as he placed a hand on Hernandez’s shoulder, “the first thing we need to do is pray. Will you pray with me?”

  Ambassador Cleveland was pacing the floor in his study, from window to bookcase and back again, when Mullaney and Hernandez knocked on his door. The prayer he had been lifting up in his mind leaped to his lips. “Lord, please keep her safe,” he whispered. Then he lifted his head and his voice. “Come in.”

  “You got the call, sir?” Mullaney was barely through the door when the questions started without any preamble. “What did they say? What demands?” Protocol and etiquette were often casualties in crisis. Cleveland didn’t care. There was only one priority.

  “Short and to the point,” said Cleveland. He rested his hand on the back of a high-backed arm chair. He felt like he needed the support. “They’ve got Palmyra, and they want the box. I told the caller we need proof of life. The call ended.”

  Mullaney and Hernandez stood in the middle of the room. Cleveland could tell they felt the same nerve-stretching level of anxiety that was stoking every one of his fears.

  “Did you learn anything else from the call?” asked Mullaney. “The voice … any sounds in the background? Anything we can give to Levinson?”

  Cleveland drew in a deep breath. Oh, how he wished …

  “I know you want facts, Brian. Something that would help us find Palmyra. But I’m sorry, all I have for you is …” Looking at the floor, Cleveland shook his head. This was going to be no help. “It was a man on the phone, I believe. He spoke in English, with an accent. He spoke three sentences … ‘You know what I want.’ I said, ‘Or what?’ ‘You know the answer to that, also.’ I said we would need proof of life. And his last words were ‘That can be arranged.’ Then the call ended.”

  Part of him felt foolish. Part of him felt violated. He looked up. “But what I remember most is that I felt his voice enter into my being. Beyond my body, it entered deep inside of me. And it was putrid, decaying. Like the spirit of death polluting my blood and searching for my heart.” A shiver rattled his body. “We need to find her, Brian. We need to find her fast.”

  26

  Rehovot, Israel

  July 20, 2:22 a.m.

  The cold penetrated both her bones and her blackness. Something wet was lying across the back of her neck. Two hands rested against her cheeks.

  “We have stopped the bleeding, Mrs. Parker.” It was slithery voice. “Saved your life, I believe. Now, we need your cooperation for just a few moments.”

  He switched to Turkish. “Remove the gag from her mouth. But be careful untying it … we don’t want her bleeding again. And we need her alert.”

  The aroma of lilac and orange tricked her mind into an orchard of green trees and orange fruit, purple bushes in the distance. She breathed in then stiffened as clumsy fingers tugged at the restraint that was holding the cloth inside her mouth. The restraint fell away. One hand cupped her chin while a second gently extracted the wadded up cloth from her mouth.

  Palmyra Parker stuck her tongue out, into the cold, and breathed through her mouth. She sucked in her cheeks, pulling saliva from her throat and tried to wash clean the inside of her mouth. The many thoughts in her mind wrestled for position to become words.

  “You will regret this.” Her voice was a raspy whisper, speaking into a darkness she knew was not empty. “They will find you. And you will die.”

  “Perhaps someone will die,” he said. “But not right now. We have your phone. What is your code?”

  A cough came out of her throat instead of the words she wanted to say to this beast. Parker took a breath. “I’m not helping you in any way.”

  “Very well,” said the voice in front of her. “But if you want to see your father, we need your code.”

  See my father? Her mind was slow connecting the dots. FaceTime! “Four-seven-four-seven,” she said.

  Four beeps then silence.

  There was a rattling vibration near her face. “See for yourself,” said slithery voice, now in English.

  “Palmyra?”

  Her father’s voice.

  Tears moistened the inside of her blindfold and her chin quivered for a heartbeat, but Parker pulled in a breath and focused intensely on her words. Her time would be short, her opportunity limited.

  “Palmyra … are you hurt?”

  “Extraordinarily cold here,” she raced through her words. “Low flying aircraft. Traffic hum …”

  They tried to shove the cloth back into her mouth and she chomped down her teeth, biting deep into the fingers holding it. A cry and, for an instant, the cloth dropped away.

  “Two men speaking Turkish …”

  The slap across her face reverberated into the minefield at the back of her skull. Parker’s mind spun and she grasped to hold onto her consciousness. A heavy hand pulled down on her chin and the cloth was forced back between her teeth.

  “You have heard her,” said slithery voice. “You see the date and time on the phone. She is alive. For now. If you cooperate.”

  Something clattered to the floor. Then a stomp and the crunch of glass. “Strip the phone,” slithery voice said in Turkish. Then fingers grasped her throat. Iron-gripped, they began to squeeze her windpipe closed. “Such a clever infidel,” said slithery voice, his fingers squeezing tighter. Parker gagged, struggled, every little move sending shards of pain through her skull. “Your life hangs by a thread. A thread that will be sliced when we have no more need of you. A pleasure I hope will be mine.” A final, punctuated squeeze and the fingers loosened.

  “Prepare,” slithery voice said in Turkish. “And guard what you say around this …”

  Heavy steps walked away from her. She could hear slithery voice speaking in descending volume, but his words were indistinct.

  US Ambassador’s Residence, Tel Aviv

  July 20, 2:30 a.m.

  The iPhone in the ambassador’s hand went blank as the FaceTime call ended. He was holding it up so Mullaney and Hernandez could see the screen over his shoulder. Cleveland’s head dropped to his chest and Mullaney placed a steadying hand against his back.

  “It’s okay, sir. She’s alive,” he said. “And we’ll find her.”

  Mullaney looked to his right to Hernandez. “Tommy,” he said softly and nodded his head toward the armchair.

  “C’mon, sir,” said Hernandez. “Let’s sit down so we can talk this out.”

  Pulling his mobile phone from a jacket pocket, Mullaney tapped on Levinson’s number.

  Shin Bet Headquarters, Tel Aviv

  July 20, 2:32 a.m.

  Levinson had the notebook secured during the raid in Jaffa in his left hand and was scribbling some of the notations from it on the back of an envelope when his lieutenant came into the office.

  “Yes?”

  “Strange hit on the communications intercept scan, Colonel. Mossad was running word recognition software on their mobile frequency scanners and came up with this.”

  The lieutenant handed Levinson one sheet of paper. He was scanning the report, trying to sort through c
onflicting thoughts, when his phone rang.

  “Good timing, Brian. We found the owner of the market stall where we think Mrs. Parker got abducted. A bit of a mess, I’m afraid, but we did find a notebook that I believe could—”

  “Look, Meyer,” Mullaney interrupted, “we—the ambassador—had a call from Mrs. Parker’s abductors. By the time I got to his study, they called back on FaceTime. We could see her. She appeared to be hurt in some way, but she’s still alive.”

  Levinson put the notebook and the envelope on the table. This needed his full attention. “What do they want?”

  “That’s a long story for another time, Meyer. What’s more important is that Mrs. Parker quickly rattled off three facts before the call was cut off. She said she was extremely cold … that she could hear low-flying airplanes … and that there were two men with her who were speaking in Turkish.”

  “Extremely cold … in this heat?” Levinson pulled over a map that was lying on the table and glanced at his scribbles on the envelope. Hmm—that’s an interesting coincidence. And I don’t believe in coincidence. “Right. Brian, pull together a team and beat a path over here fast. I think we’re on to something. Hurry.”

  Levinson tossed the notebook on the table and held the single piece of paper out toward his lieutenant. “They’ve checked this? Confirmed these transmissions?”

  “Yes, sir. Three times.”

  “Right.” Levinson threw the piece of paper onto the table next to the notebook. “What a bloody mess. Here, let’s look over this map.”

  US Ambassador’s Residence, Tel Aviv

  July 20, 2:36 a.m.

  “Tommy, call Barnes … no,” said Mullaney, “call Pat McKeon. Tell her I want four agents armed and ready for field work, on the double. Have them bring two SUVs out front and keep the motors running.”

  “She didn’t look good,” said Cleveland. “She looked like she was hurt.”

  Mullaney heard a new edge of toughness in Cleveland’s voice. The ambassador was still sitting in the armchair, but now he was perched on its edge. His head was no longer in his hands.

  “Shaken up, maybe,” said Mullaney, who walked over to stand next to the chair, “but she was still alert enough to give us those three clues. Palm—Mrs. Parker is tough. She’ll be okay.”

  With a shake of his head, Cleveland pushed his shoulders back and stood up. “What did Levinson say? We need to get moving.” There was an undercurrent of pleading to Cleveland’s call for urgency. “We don’t know how much time it takes”—he paused—“if she …”

  Mullaney was wrestling with the same concerns, but fear wasn’t going to help them get Parker back safely. He faced Cleveland eye to eye.

  “Mr. Ambassador, there are too many things we don’t know to begin running what-if games now,” said Mullaney. “We don’t know if Palmyra touched the box, we don’t know for sure if the maid touched the box, and if she did, we don’t know how long it took before—”

  “So we don’t know how much time she has,” said Cleveland. “We don’t know that either.”

  “No, sir, we don’t. But we don’t really know if what that assistant rabbi told us was true. We don’t really know anything about that box except what other people have told us. Atticus,” Mullaney reached out and laid a hand on Cleveland’s chest, “we can’t allow our emotions and our fears to run out ahead of us. We take this one step at a time. We find Mrs. Parker and make sure she’s safe. Right?”

  Cleveland nodded. “I hear you, Brian. And I know, intellectually, you are right. But I am afraid that there is not much time.”

  They jogged across the wide, enclosed terrace to a side door that led to the office wing, Mullaney in the lead.

  “You don’t believe that story you spun for Atticus, do you?” asked Hernandez. After looking at Palmyra Parker’s face on the iPhone, Hernandez couldn’t shake the fear that they were already too late.

  “We don’t know how much time she has,” said Mullaney, pushing through the door to the office wing.

  They covered the distance to the DSS security office in three strides. Mullaney punched in the code on the lock’s keyboard, and they headed straight for the weapons locker.

  “Brian, you saw how she looked,” said Hernandez, but Mullaney was focused on pulling open the locker and grabbing a vest of front and back body armor. Hernandez stepped between Mullaney and the weapons locker.

  “Brian … she looked like she was barely conscious.” Hernandez felt like a member of the death squad—agents who were dispatched to the home of family members when a DSS agent was killed in the line of duty.

  “We’ll get there. She’ll be okay,” said Mullaney, strapping on the armor.

  “Did you see the hair?” It was the first thing Hernandez noticed when Parker’s face came up on the screen. Clumps of Parker’s dark, black hair sitting on her shoulders—covered in blood. Her hair was falling out.

  Mullaney pulled a Heckler & Koch MP5 9-millimeter submachine gun out of the cabinet, grabbed an ammunition bag, and dropped them on a table in the middle of the room. He finally looked at Hernandez. “Yes. I saw it. Now saddle up!”

  27

  Shin Bet Headquarters, Tel Aviv

  July 20, 3:15 a.m.

  The Shin Bet office in Tel Aviv was in the White City district of the city, over one hundred square blocks—though hardly any of the blocks in Tel Aviv were square—containing over four thousand stark, 1930s era bright white Bauhaus buildings. Designed primarily by German architects who emigrated to Israel in the formative years of Tel Aviv’s existence, these austere, modern design buildings—similar in appearance to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City—had bold, sweeping, rounded corners, long narrow balconies stacked one atop another, and deep narrow windows, called thermometer windows.

  Erected one after another, side by side, on the meandering streets around Dizengoff Square, the ubiquitous nature of the Bauhaus architecture and the twenty-four-hour bustle of the Old City made Ten Gillickson Street a perfect place to hide the headquarters of the nation’s internal security apparatus. There was a large parking lot across the street from the four-story building with flowing balconies and a large, abandoned round kiosk on the corner of Bellinson Street, last occupied by a fruit monger, that made for a perfectly hidden observation post accessed by a tunnel under the street.

  Mullaney’s two SUVs squeezed into a tight little alley behind the building, off Aharonovich Street, and—with Levinson waiting at the door—his team passed quickly through the three layers of escalating security that kept unwanted visitors away from Shin Bet business. There was no conversation as Levinson led the DSS agents down a flight of stairs to an elevator.

  There were two maps on top of the round table just outside the armory secured deep in the bowels of Shin Bet headquarters. Hernandez and Levinson’s lieutenants were coordinating the arming of agents from both Shin Bet and the Diplomatic Security Service and working through the coming rules of engagement in the hope of eliminating friendly fire casualties. Levinson and Mullaney were stretched over the maps—one of them hastily hand drawn.

  “This is the Holon industrial district, between Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion airport,” said Levinson, pointing to the printed map. “It’s a sprawling area of warehouses, shippers, car dealers, wholesale shops—a mishmash of everything, some of it modern, some of it decrepit and falling down. There are not that many streets running through the district but an endless number of unnamed alleys.”

  Hernandez came over and handed Mullaney a pocket-sized radio transmitter. A thin, stiff filament connected the earpiece with a small microphone. “We’re all going to use Israeli communications gear and be hooked into their network,” said Hernandez. “And they’ve got a nasty assortment of weapons over there, if you’re interested.”

  Levinson looked up from the map. “You should get this briefing too, Agent Hernandez. This is not going to be an easy operation.

  “All these streets,” said Levinson, pointing to the map “are densely
packed with small retailers and offices, along with warehouses and factories. During the day, it’s a cauldron of activity. But at night, it clears out like a ghost town. That will help avoid civilian casualties, but it’s not going to give us much cover.”

  He threw some photos on top of the table. “We pulled these off Google Maps. As you can see, some of these facilities are protected by high walls, topped with razor wire. Some look like fortresses. And this,” his finger stabbed a squat, two-story, ochre-colored building, “is our target.”

  Mullaney cringed. “Looks like a small prison,” he said, looking at the high walls and barbed wire. “What is it?”

  “An abandoned meatpacking company,” said Levinson. “There are huge rooms that were once used as refrigerators, others that were freezers. And that section of the Holon district is directly under the final stages of the flight path for Ben Gurion.”

  “Fits Palmyra’s description,” said Mullaney, “but how can we be sure it’s the right place?”

  Levinson picked up the brown leather notebook from the table. “We recovered this at the home of the man who owns the market stall where we believe Mrs. Parker was abducted. There were two armed young men, now deceased, in that house, one of whom went back into a bedroom to retrieve this notebook. There are several addresses in this book, but only one has refrigerated rooms and is on the flight path of an airport … this ugly building.”

  He pulled another photo from inside the notebook. “And then there’s this. We ran a drone over the area about an hour ago.” He handed the photo to Mullaney. “It’s infrared, but you can see there are armed men in strategic locations in the complexes on both sides of the alley.”

  “Sounds like a winner,” agreed Mullaney. “It’s your show, Meyer. How do you want to tackle it?”

  Leaning over the table, Levinson pointed to the rough drawing. “This is Ha-Banai Street, one of the main arteries through the district. Running parallel is Halahav Street over here. That street is more lightly traveled, has fewer business fronts on the street. There are few through streets running between Ha-Banai Street and Halahav Street. But our building is here, adjacent to this alley … more like a driveway … and facing onto Halahav.” He picked up one of the photos.