by E. L. Pini
The smell of the carbonara attracted the other Garibaldi, who stalked quietly into the room, placed his head in my lap and made a soft, rumbling sound. Bruno watched the behemoth, beaming fatherly pride, and then stretched and turned to me. “And now I give you the crème de la crème,” he said, pinching his fingers together.
“I have a guy, small-time mafioso—medium-time, maybe—who sells expired meds to the Arabs and imports opium at half price. I give him a little breathing room, he gives me information.”
Just like Kahanov and his abu Seif.
“Now you listen to me, cazzo, you listen well. This Mafioso cazzo, he swore to me on his mother’s life. A Sicilian mafioso does not swear on his mother’s life for nothing. Someone in south Lebanon is offering an entire tanker of PETN for sale, capisce?”
He slid his finger again. A large red tanker appeared on his phone screen, covered with Arabic text reading “caution, flammable; hazardous materials.”
I stood up with the full intention of kissing him, but then he had to go and slide another photo, and another—there were apparently three, nearly identical red tankers.
“Three?” A chill crawled up my spine.
Bruno nodded. “One real, two decoys. They’re primitive assholes, but they’re not dumb.”
“You could blow up a city with that much stuff,” I said.
Bruno raised his eyes at me, frowning. “You’re pale. Everything okay?”
“Almost,” I said. “And what isn’t will be.”
Bruno nodded.
Afterwards, the conversation returned to the usual topics. Bruno tried to take a photo of Garibaldi, but every time he clicked, the slobbering monstrosity turned its head to the side.
“Hijo de puta…” muttered Bruno.
Around 2 a.m., I drove him to the airport. We hugged and I promised to keep him updated. I summoned Froyke and Ami to an urgent meeting before I’d even left the airport.
40.
At 5 a.m., Ami showed up at my office, and together we went to see Froyke. He seemed a bit ashen but kept insisting that he was fine. The director was out of the country—Froyke, who’d been filling in, made sure that every available resource was devoted to the task. Exposing and neutralizing the tanker was now the top priority of the intelligence community. Nora’s situation report painted a bleak picture; 9900’s satellites had located only two out of the three tankers reported by the Italian source. Thermal analysis of the two tankers had shown them to be full of water—meaning that the third, which most likely contained fifteen thousand gallons of liquid explosive, was still ticking away in some hidden location. Unless we found it in time, it would literally blow up in our faces. Observation and reconnaissance teams, some disguised as Arabs, had been sent out to perform searches, along with 9900 airborne reconnaissance. Our main assumption was that the tanker would be hidden in a heavily populated civilian area—maybe near a school, or a hospital—to prevent us from carrying out an air strike.
Ami, who’d been frantically texting during Nora’s briefing, seemed extremely unhappy. He reported that abu Seif had stopped responding to his calls. This Abu, as we’d begun calling him, was our only connection to the truck; then again, Abu was also a collaborator, and collaborators are notoriously fickle. Living under the threat of the Shin Bet on one hand and Hezbollah counterintelligence on the other can make anyone a bit unstable. Therefore, Ami decided to raid Ghajar, Abu’s village, and find the little pissant, alive or dead.
An undercover team of disguised border guard soldiers entered the village and secured the perimeter. Three drug enforcement bureau squad cars came in immediately after them and raided the clan’s central complex as noisily as possible. Ami’s team—men from the Service in blue police uniforms—located abu Seif in a hidden cellar at his parents’ house and arrested him. We all breathed a sigh of relief. At Froyke’s request, he was flown back to Tel Aviv in a police helicopter.
Later, Ami and I drove to a snug and secure apartment in Tel Aviv’s old north and found Abu terrified to the point of hysteria, and starving. When Ami asked if he was okay with hummus and falafel, Abu grimaced and responded, “Thai House—the best Asian food.” And a small, mischievous smile flashed past his face.
Abu continuously switched stories as to why he’d suddenly lost contact. Each excuse was more ridiculous than the last. Ami kept applying pressure. The security guard we sent to the Thai House came back with enough takeaway to feed a battalion. Abu ate and calmed down a bit. After coffee, Ami hugged him like a brother and thanked him for his loyal service to the state of Israel. Abu—perhaps expecting increased compensation—hugged him back, smiling. Ami’s voice was amazingly soft as he began to explain, still tightly embracing Abu, how Hezbollah counterintelligence would most likely react once they discovered that Abu had betrayed them, reported their comings and goings in south Lebanon to the Shin Bet.
Abu’s smile remained for as long as he managed to convince himself that this was some kind of joke, but once it had cracked, his face quickly crumpled into horrified, bitter tears. Ami still held him as he calmly described what they would do to Abu’s wife, his children, perhaps his elderly parents.
It wasn’t long before Abu was begging for “a thousand pardons” from Ami, who was now apparently his “best friend, brother and father.” He then, finally, confessed: the Shiite clan, his drug suppliers, had kidnapped him and demanded to be paid a blinding amount of money after accusing him of an act of lowly deception he swore he had really had nothing to do with. He added that the matter had been solved by a “judge,” a local Qadi20, who had ruled that Abu must leave them his brand-new Mercedes-Maybach. Ami sent a team to corroborate.
Ami informed Abu that he would inject a dog tracker chip in his goddamn neck, and on the other hand promised him a new Maybach on the condition that he behaved. He questioned Abu about his relationship with Nawata, again and again, until he was certain that they’d never met face-to-face, and that Nawata couldn’t recognize abu Seif.
Froyke, who arrived soon after that, looked at me, then at Ami, and a slow, wicked grin pushed the sickness and exhaustion from his face.
“So Nawata has never actually seen abu Seif, huh?” he said, raising his finger. Funny that it was the so-called responsible adult among us who was the first to figure it out. Wordlessly, Ami and I caught on.
41.
We left abu Seif with one the babysitters and went to sit at a small neighborhood café hidden in an inner garden. We were excited, talking quickly. A military raid, at a scale of a single company, seemed to be the way to go—but there was no contingency plan for the spotting and capture of an enormous ticking bomb with the face of an innocent tanker. Therefore, this ran the risk of becoming a slow, convoluted process of information gathering and meticulous planning. Every little thing would have to be approved and confirmed all the up to the prime minister. A pain in the ass, really. All three of us agreed that there was no time for this. Time is a key player in cases like these, and right now it was playing against us. And so, bit by bit, a plan was coming together.
Ami spoke perfect Palestinian Arabic. We decided he would pose as abu Seif, and we’d head out to meet with Nawata, with me posing as Abu’s bodyguard. We shared our plan with Froyke, who was apprehensive, to say the least. Honestly, so were we—it was far from perfect, but it was the best we had under the circumstances. Ami sent the security guard to the nearby mall to buy a change of clothes and asked Abu if he had any particular preference. The jackass answered, with all seriousness, that he preferred Tommy Hilbiger.
“If Abu wants Hilbiger,” said Ami, “Abu gets Hilbiger.” Another security guard was given abu Seif’s old clothes and sent to the dry cleaners, ordered to pay double and come back with the clothes as soon as humanly possible.
When the guard left, Digital Albert came in and set up his workstation. Abu, thrilled by the fact that everyone seemed to be friends again, sat on t
he old floral sofa, under a framed old certificate of appreciation from the Jewish National Fund, blatantly expressing his enjoyment at smoking my Cohiba. Albert finished planting his computer’s IP somewhere in the Syrian battle zone, near Halab, and informed us he was all set.
Ami dialed the Lebanese number Abu had provided and left Nawata a voice message in abu Seif’s name. The number, according to Albert, was listed under the pharmacy in the Beirut teaching hospital. Twenty minutes later, Abu’s pink cell received a call from a phone number Albert recognized as the result of a number-generating app. Abu Seif nodded at me excitedly, covering the phone’s microphone with his finger. “Nawata!”
Ami signaled him to keep talking, while Albert tapped his keyboard like a concert pianist, trying to trace the call.
Abu, following my instructions, told Nawata that his clients were interested in purchasing a small, initial sample of the untraceable explosive. Nawata explained, with seemingly infinite patience, that the substance could be turned into said explosive by changing its state from liquid to gel. “The process,” he explained, “is very simple, but the formula will cost you extra.”
He also made it clear that he did not deal with samples. “It’s all or nothing. There is only one of these tankers in the neighborhood, and no shortage of potential buyers. So let me know in an hour. Nine hundred thousand dollars, and not a cent less.”
Not exactly pocket change. I was certain that this demand would raise a shitload of red flags, but similarly confident in Froyke’s ability to somehow make it work.
Albert sent the recording to the lab. They also failed to identify Nawata’s location. However, voice pattern analysis revealed that Nawata believed everything he said. Froyke handled the banker. Apparently, the size of the required sum had rattled him—Froyke managed to assuage him by quoting the late JFK: “The Chinese use two brushstrokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brushstroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.”
I chimed in with one of my personal favorites, Thucydides’ classic mantra: “Fortune favors the bold.”
“Fuck protocol,” Ami said, contributing his own two cents, and we concluded the historic session.
Soon after that, I received an alert that nine hundred thousand dollars had been deposited in a Zurich bank account. A biometric scan of my iris was the only way to transfer funds to or from this account. I registered as an authorized signer and, several failed attempts later, received the bank’s confirmation. Only then did I think of adding Ami as the second authorized signer—a kind of insurance policy, to make it difficult for the Victor/Nawata party to attempt to gain control by separating me from Ami.
As per Nawata’s instructions, we transferred five thousand dollars in advance, divided between three accounts, in the Cayman Islands, Adams Island, and New Jersey. Apparently Victor was exceedingly cautious. In the meanwhile, Ami’s team up north confirmed abu Seif’s kidnapping alibi. In the midst of all this uncertainty, it was surprisingly comforting.
Okay, I said to myself. Here we go. The first step to eliminating their production and distribution chain.
42.
With the exception of Eran, there is nothing I love more than these moments, just before the shift; combat-readiness mechanisms snap into action, adrenaline swells and widens the arteries, more oxygen filled the lunges. The muscles stretch, the senses sharpen, and the mind empties from all things unrelated. I am sharp and full of purpose and see nothing other than what is required for the accomplishment of the task ahead.
“A person,” Froyke told me once, “is sixty percent water, and forty percent past.” And certainly, before my combat-readiness armor engulfs me and seals me off from the outside world, I am usually hurled into the past, almost always to Eran. But this time was different.
I recalled that mission in Beirut. Guli, my partner, was shot in the throat; the tourniquet wasn’t working. The extraction team was telling me to retreat without him. Guli, who was astoundingly lucid, asked me to put a bullet in his temple and get it over with.
I came home with my tail between my legs.
I sat before Ya’ara and couldn’t stop the tears from falling.
She was sitting by the pool, barefoot as usual, strumming a German requiem on her harp. When she was done, she asked me what it was that I wanted from life.
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
Today I know that I am most likely an adrenaline addict who suffers from a chronically enlarged sense of duty.
“I don’t know anyone,” she said, picking at the strings, “who loves Michael Kohlhaas and sympathizes with him more than you do.”
Heinrich von Kleist was my father’s favorite writer; though he shared the title with Goethe, Nietzsche and Hermann Broch. The massive library he left behind contained hundreds of nonfiction books, most of which had to do with quantum physics, and one shelf of fiction. On the day of my bar mitzvah, Mother took me to his study, which she had kept exactly as it was.
“Read the books your father loved, and get to know him,” she said, and I devoured them, desperately, book after book. I liked Nietzsche, especially his cryptic humor. Hermann Broch failed to hold my interest back then, but I learned to love him years later. One line of his stayed with me to this day—”The heaviest costs are imposed by the merciful.” But I fell in love with Heinrich von Kleist. I saw myself as Michael Kohlhaas, burning down the kingdom that killed my father, burning and murdering without mercy.
“You are a cripple. And someday, I know, you will leave me,” Ya’ara said to me.
43.
The air force helicopter that Froyke arranged was waiting at our landing pad, but the security officer wouldn’t let us bring abu Seif into the compound.
“I can tie him to a rope, have him run after the chopper,” said Ami. The security officer realized she really had no alternatives, so she blindfolded Abu and put him on the helicopter.
On the way, we received word that the Shin Bet’s undercover team had been in a car accident. Froyke alerted the GOC, who brought in a replacement undercover team of Unit 217 commandos. Fast response always comes with a toll, and this time it was the risk of an info leak. Too many different parties were involved.
Froyke began to seem hesitant, again reminding us of the DM’s suggestion—to wait, and better prepare. But Ami and I were adamant.
“We have a brief window of opportunity here,” I told him. “We can’t afford to miss it.” He seemed to be convinced.
Abu Seif was mostly petrified during the flight, only piping up occasionally to ask if we were there yet.
Around midnight, we sat down with the command team from the Egoz guerilla and special reconnaissance unit. The unit commander was there, along with the intelligence officer, the deputy G3, and the captain of our extraction team. There was something, I thought, about this captain’s posture and speech patterns that was reminiscent of Eran. I asked Froyke and Ami, and neither of them seemed to notice the resemblance. They just stared at me sympathetically instead.
Froyke briefed them on the materials relating to the operation, ever since the first bombing in Rome.
“I’m sure you all realize that whoever has control of this substance holds the key to open all kinds of doors that we would very much prefer remained closed.”
The captain, who reminded me more of Eran with each passing minute, asked why we didn’t just blow up the factory where they made the stuff.
Froyke shot me a half-smile and said, “We’re looking into that option.”
The answer made it clear that the option had been rejected with no room for discussion, either by the DM or the prime minister.
We went over the predicted scenarios with the Egoz fighters, marked the coordinates of contact points, reviewed communications procedures and codes. They were excited, eager. It was understandable. If the operation had gone through the usual channels, passed through
the Intelligence Corps Special Operations and our own operations branch, either Matkal or Flotilla 13 would most likely have gotten this rare treat.
I requested for a UAV to be at our disposal until the operation was concluded, at least one experienced bomb squad, and an antitank team. I also asked for a chopper to be on standby in case we managed to take prisoners.
We got it all.
The GOC provided us with his personal ceramic vests. A technician from the Service hooked us up with minuscule, nearly invisible communication systems, and tuned them to the relevant frequencies for the Egoz unit and command.
Before we went our separate ways, the unit commander walked up to me, looking like a man desperate to get something off his chest. “You—you’re RP, right?”
I nodded, and Ami couldn’t help but add, “The very same, he and no other.”
The young commander eagerly shook my hand. “We took first place at the special units joint exercise,” he said, as if to put our minds at ease despite it being them, not the Matkal units, who would be covering us.
“We know,” said Froyke. “And around here, no one can do the job better than you.”
The scouting party was briefed and left toward the meeting point. Froyke joined the command post. The undercover Unit 217 commandos arrived—they seemed like nice kids, and they cheerfully got to work on our disguises. Ami changed into abu Seif’s dry-cleaned clothes. They were a perfect match. When he wore his dark Stevie Wonder–style sunglasses, he looked like a perfect, textbook Arab—apart from his bulging Romanian Adam’s apple.
They had a harder time with me, mostly because of my shoe size. They took away my Blundstones, and after a brief argument we agreed on Palladium boots, but there weren’t any in my size, so I got the Blundstones back, after they’d been torn up a bit and smeared with something black and disgusting.
They’d also arranged for a battered old Subaru pickup truck with Lebanese plates. A tracker was installed in the pickup, and the three of us were off to Ghajar, to Abu’s house. Abu seemed to be quite comfortable in the midst of all the chaos. He asked me for another cigar and lit it, puffing happily and pompously.
