Spies Lie Series Box Set

by D S Kane

  She leaned closer. “Amos Gidaehl, one of our kidon, was compromised and disappeared a few months ago while out on an assassination mission. We just got the evidence to prove he hadn’t just gone black. He was one of our best alephs. The entire assassination team disappeared. Hashim Klovosky, an ayin, or tracker. A qoph named Harry Schmidt, his communications officer. Elli Raucher, a heth, one of our best logisticians is also missing. They’re all dead, probably tortured first. For safety, Ben-Levy is distributing new identity documents to all Mossad field personnel.”

  Jon had heard of Gidaehl. He was a skilled, ruthless killer. Jon wondered what he and his team were doing and where they were when they were taken. He looked at Shula’s face for a clue.

  She looked away. “They’ll be looking for a replacement for Gidaehl. I looked at the grading board. Jon, you placed first in your class.”

  He realized he’d moved to the top of the list of unassigned kidon.

  Chapter Eleven

  Starbucks, corner of Lexington Avenue near 42nd Street, Manhattan

  August 19, 2:41 p.m.

  His first assignment, as a sayan, surveilling a Muslim Brotherhood moneyman, had lasted three weeks.

  The second assignment was also routine, acting as a katsa, guarding a diplomat flying from Jerusalem to New York for a speech at the United Nations. He’d found the work mundane, but used the experience to sharpen his counter-surveillance skills.

  The thought that he’d ever wanted to be a banker now left him grinning. He realized he was now impatient. But, he knew he’d have to practice self-restraint. It would be a problem for him. He thought, I’m ready for this. Sooner or later, I’ll find him.

  Jon’s official reporting line went up to Ben-Levy. Mother had been promoted and was now Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs. Jon’s non-official cover as a British citizen—an NOC, a “consultant” to the State of Israel—provided them all with deniability for his actions.

  He settled into using the skills he’d learned and found himself ready for something more complex. His third assignment fit the bill. Jon hadn’t carried a gun until now. Just one week ago, he’d met with Ben-Levy in the basement office at Mossad.

  The spymaster had handed him cash in an attaché case before he left on the mission, saying, “For living expenses and any tools you need. Here’s a requisition for the high-end, high-tech gun from our armory. It’s a special manufacture plastic composite 9mm Beretta using armor-piercing plastic bullets. This gun can be checked in at an airport without detection.” Ben-Levy reached out and placed a pink slip of paper in Jon’s hand.

  “Jon, This mission is vital to Israel’s interests and her survival. You’ll be a “jumper” working overseas. Your target, Tariq Houmaz, is responsible for six assassinations of Israeli diplomats and operatives. He uses shaheeds as cutouts, suicide bombers to do his killing. He’s the man we had you follow in your first mission.”

  Jon’s mouth grew dry. “What do I do?”

  Ben-Levy was silent for a while, his eyes downcast. When he raised his eyes, he stared into Jon’s. In a voice just above a whisper, he said, “Jon, we caught the bomber who murdered Aviva Bushovsky, but nearly killed him during capture. He became conscious for just long enough to tell us. We suspected before, but weren’t sure. Houmaz made the bomb.”

  Jon’s brows furrowed. “I’m following her murderer? Just following him? Nothing more?”

  Ben-Levy shook his head. “Yes. Do not kill him. Follow him. We must know his contacts and his next mission, before we execute him. Otherwise, many innocents may die. Once we’ve determined what he’s planning, I’ll decide the next step. Not you. Clear?”

  Jon nodded, hearing Lisa’s voice utter the single word, justice. He felt his head grow warm, thinking she would have wanted it for her people, not herself.

  It took a week for Jon to pick up the trail of Houmaz.

  Nerves twitching in his gut, Jon sat in the midtown Manhattan café, his hooded eyelids hidden under a baseball cap. The gray NYU tee-shirt he wore was drenched from the heat and oppressive humidity of the summer day. The garment was treated to make it look lightweight and feel cool. It wasn’t working to spec today. His 9mm Beretta was tucked into the back of his belt and the tee-shirt draped over it. His breath came in shallow spurts, his fists stuffed into his trouser pockets. He hadn’t touched the latte in front of him.

  Across the street, his target exited an office building at the southwest corner of 42nd Street and headed north up Lexington Avenue toward Grand Central terminal. Houmaz crossed the street and turned west on 42nd Street. Jon rose and walked with the expanse of 42nd Street separating him from Houmaz.

  He hurried past a record store. The rich tones of “A Fool No More,” a blues song from an old Fleetwood Mac album, blared from the store and echoed out into the street. He kept a wall of people as a curtain, rushing along, the sidewalk between him and the target. To him, the others were lost inside the pockets of their routine lives.

  His pulse quickened as he anticipated his target’s counter-surveillance tradecraft. So far, Houmaz used traditional methods similar to his. Jon used the store windows on his side of the street to track the other man’s progress. His constant worry was being detected if the man had a team of counter-surveillance trackers. He fought the urge to see if Houmaz had any accomplices following him. If there were, looking for one would be a definite giveaway.

  He’d been tracking the bomb maker for three days, since landing at JFK from London on the same plane as his quarry. Each of his days of tailing Houmaz had ended when the bomb maker returned to his hotel, a small tourist place on Third Avenue.

  His target appeared well-rested and relaxed as he walked along the exterior of Grand Central Terminal. Houmaz even smiled at another who bumped into him. The bomb maker moved sideways through a group of Asians exiting into the street from a luggage store. Jon scowled at Houmaz’s casual attitude.

  At the next intersection, Houmaz took a right and walked north up Vanderbilt, wading against the crowd.

  Now Jon nodded, suspecting the destination where the bomb maker was headed. He slowed to increase the distance between himself and Houmaz. As he passed a hot dog vendor, he stopped and sniffed. Still watching his quarry’s reflection in a store window, he tried misleading his target by ordering a dog slathered with sauerkraut and mustard. Except for candy bars from his room’s honor bar, it was the first thing he’d eaten since leaving the airport. The boiled meat on a bun tasted horrid as he bit into it.

  The target was now a block away, crossing 46th along with so many others that Jon strained to keep sight of him. He tossed the sour dog into the trash and followed Houmaz through the Helmsley Building’s short Park Avenue tunnel.

  Pulling his cell phone from his pocket, Jon punched in a number and waited for someone to answer. He continued walking as he spoke. “It’s Sommers. Put Mother on.” The call terminated. He waited a second for the cell phone to vibrate in his hand, and a gruff male voice with an Israeli accent asked him to report status. “I’m tracking him now. He’s headed towards the Bank of Trade’s headquarters building. On Park at 46th. Now what?”

  “Go to your hotel and get some rest. We have a team landing now at JFK. Your work is finished. But don’t leave. There might be other favors you can provide, and we’ll need you refreshed. Mother out.”

  Jon took one last look at the glass, steel, and concrete tower fortress as Houmaz walked through its revolving doors.

  He wanted to end the man’s life right there, right now. But his orders forbade that.

  He headed east toward the Lexington Hotel. Walking into its ragged entrance, he stopped short inside. Who were the two Arabs wearing formal white desert robes at the registration desk? He panicked, and ducked back out through the revolving door. He took a deep breath. It must just be my paranoia. Not all Arabs are fundamentalists. And not all fundamentalists are terrorists.

  Reentering, he walked past the Arabs as they leaving the registration desk and nodded at
the clerk. He was backstopped as “William Preston,” one of the many new identities Mother had handed to the kidon, katsas, and sayanim. He also carried another passport bearing the name “Adam Wallace,” for use if everything fell apart. The legend for each identity was clean and simple, a British banker on a business trip. And, as usual, his identities had been washed; owned by real people who’d died.

  He took the ancient wood-paneled lift up to his room on the third floor. The hotel was known as an inexpensive place for tourists to stay, not ostentatious in any way. Perfect for a cover during a covert operation.

  The small piece of gray thread he’d inserted between the door and its jamb was still in place. An ancient method, but still taught because of its effectiveness, and, easy to use. Sliding in his keycard, he cracked the door open and plucked the thread from the floor at the door for reuse. Pulling the plastic-composite Beretta from under his NYU tee-shirt, he took a deep breath before entering. Using a walking shooter’s stance he checked the room. No one else was there. He re-holstered the gun and took a small electronic device from one of the kangaroo pockets in his khaki pants to “fumigate” the room, searching for bugs. Nothing.

  He felt the grip of disappointment from not executing Houmaz when he was so close. He could almost imagine Lisa’s voice complaining, until he shouted, “Enough!”

  Jon replaced the bug detector and pulled the cell phone from his other pocket. Using its keyboard to open a document file, he entered some notes. When he finished, he went to the bar and poured himself a shot of Finlaggan Islay single malt scotch. He savored its smoky taste.

  Jon took off his sodden tee-shirt and unlaced his shoes.

  He would now wait to be contacted.

  He turned on the television and yawned with jet lag. His eyes felt heavy, and he saw a redheaded girl with olive-colored eyes and tasted the dinner he’d cooked for her in his apartment room ten months ago, just after they’d met. A Moroccan tagine, with aroma of spicy curry. She’d fallen asleep in his arms that night, her luscious hair spread over his chest like a blanket. Was that the night she’d fallen in love with him?

  His consciousness dimmed and he rolled over on the mattress. He heard a click and realized he’d sprung the fail-safe trigger on a bomb placed under the bed, probably set there by Tariq Houmaz. Just the movement of his breathing could set it off. He held his breath as long as he could, but when he did gasp, he felt the room convulse with a fiery blast.

  Jon jolted awake to the memory of his own fiery death, panting from fear. He took a deep breath to clear his head of the nightmare. He looked toward the window. Darker outside now. How many hours had passed?

  In the dimming light of evening, he walked into the bathroom. The shower felt good. While washing his face he heard the ringing of his cell phone in the bedroom. He ran to answer it. “Yes?”

  The voice growled. “Your team just cleared customs and should arrive within the hour. Wait for them to arrive. Circumstances have changed. I prepared a new plan. Our mole at the bank reported that Houmaz took the paperwork for the money transfers but hasn’t returned it yet. He must not arrange for the funds to be transmitted out, and he must not live to leave the country. Deliver the completed forms if he has them. Rimora carries the plan.”

  Jon remembered the bat leveyha he’d used for a honey trap as a part of his first mission. Rimora was a gorgeous woman, her coiled black hair accenting a pronounced widow’s peak. More important, she was brilliant.

  When they’d first met, Rimora told him she enjoyed fucking Islamic fundamentalists. “When I bed them, I steal their mojo.”

  Ben-Levy’s rough voice drew him back. “When the team arrives at your hotel, finish the mission. Don’t call until you return home. Not until you land at Ben Gurion, unless you have questions or the mission fails.” Jon frowned as the phone went dead.

  He felt a rush of adrenaline as he finished drying his body. His vision tunneled and the world seemed more focused. He pushed his gun into the back of his pants belt and pulled on a fresh liquid-armored “NYU, Stern Graduate School” tee-shirt, chilling his skin in the air-conditioned room.

  He flinched when the doorbell rang. He looked through the peephole and smiled, seeing Rimora’s grinning face. Opening the door, he waved the four in. She wore a Princeton University tee-shirt with a similar bulletproofing chemical treatment, and he knew there would be a weapon similar to his stuck into her waistband.

  Jon motioned them to sit on the bed. He took a chair from the desk. “Welcome to the Big Apple.”

  Rimora shook her head. “Where is Houmaz? I want to be done with this and back home.”

  Their driver, a sayan named Axel, was blond and rail-thin. He walked in with tentative, silent footsteps, examining the room as if Jon might have brought death here with him.

  Jon had heard Axel’s brother died last month from a Hamas missile attack in Haifa. The sayan flashed a grim expression. “This city has the same nasty overcrowded vibe as the Gaza.” He sat on the couch and crossed his legs, with one foot tapping.

  Jon pointed out the window. “Not really. It isn’t half bad if you give it a chance.”

  Jon guessed Shimon, a bodel, or courier, was a local, working at the consulate in New York. To Jon, he looked like he could stand to lose a few pounds. Jon hadn’t met him before, but Ben-Levy had described him earlier on the phone. The courier smiled and nodded, standing close to the door. “Great restaurants, some even kosher. There’s one downtown—”

  “Enough!” Yakov, the other kidon in the team, looked like he might have come from an upscale corporate office. It struck Jon that Yakov’s freshly pressed charcoal pinstripe suit and crisp white shirt and silk tie were incongruous for a cold-blooded killer. Jon guessed Yakov had redressed in an airport restroom just after their plane landed. His face was expressionless and remote as he nodded his head to Jon. Yakov let out a long breath. Standing ramrod straight, he paced the room, peeking in the bathroom, then in the closets.

  Jon faced Rimora and nodded. “Mother said you carry a plan. Tell me.”

  Rimora’s face went blank as she spoke from memory. “Yakov is aleph for the operation. Jon rents a van using his “William Preston” identity. Buy shovels. Follow your target. Stay covert until he is alone. The team should try to take him silently after dark using a tranq with Axel’s medijector. It contains a tranquilizer combined with a truth drug. Contact with the neck is best. Get him into the rental. Interrogate him and use a cell phone to record what he knows about his network, the use of the funds he’s sending, and the receiving party. Drive him to Jones Beach. Kill him silently and bury him in the sand under the boardwalk, at least five feet under. Leave the country and report back on arrival. If something goes wrong and the plan fails, obtain new identity documents from Nomi Klein, our cobbler in the Bronx.” As she uttered the last word, her eyes flashed and she grinned.

  Shimon shook his head. “Jones Beach in July? A bad choice. Even at night this won’t be a private burial.”

  Jon closed his eyes and saw a stream of mathematical projections fly through his mind. The plan was flawed. He nodded. “Yeah. Even I can see this is bad. Why not the Jersey Meadowlands?”

  Yakov sneered. “Because these are Mother’s orders. Until something goes wrong, we follow orders. Clear?”

  Jon knew better than to complain a second time. He waited for Shimon to say something or do something.

  Shimon turned away. “The plan is stupid. Might get us all killed.”

  Yakov stuck his face inches from Shimon’s. “As I just told you. We follow orders until something goes wrong.”

  Jon watched, worrying. No one else challenged Yakov.

  Yakov gazed at each in turn. “Ready?” They nodded. He opened the door. “Let’s go.” As they marched toward the elevator, Jon replaced the thread and closed the door, catching up at the lift. He wouldn’t need the room again. But the plan seemed so weak. Better to keep this sanctuary clean.

  Tariq Houmaz hurried down 86th Street towar
d Broadway, glancing over his shoulder from time to time. The day ebbed cooler and it felt good to walk. Restaurant aromas seeped through the humid air and muted pinks and blues filled the sky at dusk. The streets were crowded with people seeking a place to eat. It was the perfect time of day for him to avoid detection.

  The safe house was three blocks south, next door to a Chinese restaurant. Incessant traffic noise blared, making it more difficult for him to detect the coverts he’d noticed before. He thought, counter-surveillance is a two-way street.

  The envelope in the right-inside pocket of his brown-tweed sport jacket contained funds-transfer forms and a list of the bank codes he’d obtained earlier that day at Bank of Trade. Tomorrow, he’d return the forms and send his money on its way to the Vladivostok branch of the Bank of Trade. In four days he’d meet up with the cash in Vladivostok. What a pisshole of a city. He’d make his stay as short as possible.

  The left-inside pocket of his jacket contained a snubnose Heckler & Koch and the outside pocket contained an extra clip, both purchased from a gun dealer known for supplying local gangbangers and pushers in East Harlem.

  His eyes sparked in anger with the memory of the day his father had changed everything, taking him from a well-to-do college student to a penniless beggar. A time so long ago when he’d studied to become a petrochemical engineer. All he’d wanted then was to work for his father at ArabOil Corporation headquartered in Riyadh. But the “accident” at the refinery where he’d apprenticed had left him without his family.

  He knew for a fact it had been no accident. He’d hidden in a lifeboat and watched, peeking from under its canvas cover as Navy SEALs destroyed the refinery’s rig, trying to eliminate someone the United States thought might be a terrorist conduit. “Collateral damage,” the American diplomats claimed. They’d murdered thirty-seven innocent men and women. No one told him if the terrorist they were hunting had been executed or had escaped. Or even if there had been any terrorist.