by D S Kane
Crane’s eyes were filled with fury. “How dare you even suggest that? I demand you contact my government. I have the right to be expelled from this godforsaken patch of desert.” He stretched his arms against the shackles.
Ben-Levy took a single step toward Crane and slapped him across his ears several times until his captive stopped struggling. He sighed. “Why?”
His captive glared back. “You sent the Sommersteins to London, to work for me. To spy on me. Their work almost got me fired. I’ve hated you for decades, Mother.”
Mother tapped the glass wall. “Come here now.”
Dushov entered the room. When Mother nodded, he opened the leather case.
Mother nodded to Lester. “Use your tools. Turn on the recorders. Get his final statement. Ask my questions. When you’re done, have a disposal unit process him. Then come see me.”
Dushov reached into the case and took out what appeared to be a water pistol. He squirted something onto Crane’s face and watched the man go slack. Then he filled the syringe.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Mossad headquarters, Herzliyya, Israel
July 31, 4:45 p.m.
Mother paced the tiny office in the basement. He held a chalk marker in one hand and a sheaf of notes in the other. He’d been here most of the morning. A cold cup of coffee sat on a corner of the desk in the room’s center. His stomach sent a strong pang through his gut, throttling him, and he frowned, muttering to himself. I’m getting too old for this.
The chalkboard hanging in the front of the room was filled with his scribbles from the last hour. He stopped, his brows arched as he scratched his nose. He sorted through the paper notes and nodded. Makes sense. Finally!
He drew another set of Venn diagrams on the board, one with “MI-6 Sir Charles Crane Ness Ziona Lev→→→ Robinson.”
What is the connection? Is MI-6 selling or gifting intel to Greenfield’s intelligence agency in Washington? If that’s so, would the United States be so stupid or so arrogant as to give Houmaz Bug-Lok samples to test?
Most of the intelligence agencies and services in the United States had made gigantic mistakes before. It seemed remotely possible that no one in the US intelligence community had any idea what was going on. With about 1,400,000 people having security clearances in America, and more than 1,200 covert services, it was inevitable that something like this would happen. Greenfield’s agency was just one, and there were almost 7,000 classified US contractor companies in the mix.
Walking to the board, he traced the movement of funds Drapoff had tracked after Jon told him about Gunda Schlein’s work. He wrote another note close to a blue box he’d labeled “Houmaz Bank of Trade Dreitsbank Grund→→→ Bank Antron, SA.” Mother tapped the marker against his→ palm.
He took a step back. I know what Pesi Houmaz wants manufactured, and where. But where is his older brother? Does Tariq have a bigger role in this? Or is it even more complex than that?
He was out of options and out of time.
He picked up the secure landline and dialed Shula Ries’s phone. “Please get in my office now. I have an urgent mission for you.”
After terminating the connection, Ben-Levy pulled a yellow folder from the top drawer of his desk. He keyed several pages of notes into his desktop, printed them and placed them in the folder.
He’d been wrong. Sending only Jon’s team wouldn’t solve the problem. It would take two black operations to eliminate the Bug-Lok threat. Bearing a grim smile, he waited.
When Ries knocked on the door, Mother yelled “Come” and nodded as the kidon entered. “Sit.” He pushed the yellow folder across the desk and waited for her to read it. “This is a daylight priority, I have another urgent mission that cannot start until you are ready. Both must start at the identical point in time. The timing is thus because there may be someone out there smart enough to see how they are connected. Someone who might then keep the second from completing successfully.”
Ries nodded. She scanned the contents of the folder. “It’s straightforward. I’ll need the respondent codes for a satphone connection to you. I’ll assemble a team. We can leave for Bern in two hours.” She rose and departed the office, closing the door.
Ben-Levy prayed for her team’s success. The fate of the world might depend on it. He would arrange the flight now.
In the seat Ries had occupied seconds before, the ghost of Aviva Bushovsky shook her head. “Uncle, you cannot believe that two missions half a world apart can succeed when they are dependent on pinpoint timing. You taught me that. You are a fool!”
He clenched his jaw and turned back to the board. He wished for something that would tell him she was wrong.
Jon held the cell phone to his ear, with his jaw wide open. “You want us to hold off for another twelve hours? Why?”
He heard Mother’s voice on the other side of the call go silent for a few seconds. “You do what I tell you. No questions. Clear?”
Jon pounded his fist on the desk but kept his silence. Then he terminated the call. He shifted his eyes to Ruth, then Avram and William, and sighed. “The old man wants us to be ready to run the op but do nothing until his call. When the call comes, we go then, no matter what. His plan…all his plans, they’re riddled with faults. It won’t work. So we’ll have to fix it before we start. At the minimum we have about four hours.”
He called them into a huddle around the table. Jon watched their faces: three desperate kidon and a hacker, with no real guidance except for his hunches about the security for a manufacturing facility.
They argued for three hours, but in the end, Jon had a modified plan with a small increase in probability of success. All four collapsed in various places within his room, dressed for the mission, attempting to nap while they waited for Mother’s call.
Shula Ries and her team—Lester Dushov, Ari Westheim, Michael Drapoff, JD Weinstein, and Shimon Tennenbaum—all snored away in first class on the El Al flight from Tel Aviv to Zurich.
Each had a special area of focus for the mission. Ries was the team leader, a kidon, skilled at killing with a handgun. Dushov’s forte was poisons. Drapoff was their computer hacker, a yahalom. Westheim was a martial arts expert with additional experience in explosives and automatic weapons. Tennenbaum had a PhD in psychology and was capable of hypnotizing a
person while talking with them.
As the El Al aircraft began its descent, a flight attendant woke Ries. “You will exit the aircraft before we dock with the terminal. From the back exit you will find a minivan on the tarmac, ready to take you to your ultimate destination. I’m told the driver has all the equipment you’ll need.”
Ries nodded and touched Lester’s shoulder. “Wake the team. It’s time to go.
Near eight o’clock in the evening, a black delivery truck pulled to a stop in the parking lot in front of the Mayflower Chinese Restaurant. William fished around the box and pulled out an apron and a hat. He glared at Jon. “This sucks the big one.” He put them on over his treated clothing. He grimaced. “Big-time danger. Why am I doing this?”
Jon shrugged. “Come on, William. It’s for friendship. Besides, we both know you secretly enjoy it.”
William shook his head. “Fuck you very much.”
He opened the door to the truck but before he could exit, Ruth’s cell beeped and she touched his arm. “It’s Ries.” She pressed the Answer Call button on her secure phone. “We’re two blocks away from the Stillwater Technology manufacturing facility, in an Asian food mall at McCarthy Ranch in Milpitas. Where are you?”
From 12,000 miles away, Ries said, “In Bern. Two blocks from Antron, in the parking lot of a quiet office park. Are you ready?”
Ruth said, “Yes. Let’s be about it, then.” She terminated the connection and tapped Yuri’s shoulder. “Take us to the factory.” The drive took just one minute.
William’s fingers flew over his notebook computer’s keyboard. “Okay. It’s all set up. You’re hacked into Stillwater’s mainframes. L
ook here. It’s the lobby terminal. You have access to all the security cams and the guard’s telephone. When he calls anyone, he’ll be calling you on your cell. Got it?”
Ruth nodded.
Jon nodded to William. “Deliver the dim sum.”
William nodded. He gazed at his reflection in the rearview mirror and straightened his bow tie and chef’s hat. He stuffed the running laptop in a delivery box and placed that box below the top box, containing a real dim sum, albeit, drugged with a hypnotic. There were har gow, siu mai, and turnip cake. The bottom box contained enough C-6 to destroy the entire building, wired together, molded, and colored to look like real dim sum. One of them, a disguised char siu bao, carried a remote timer and a fail-safe switch.
William’s cell vibrated against his leg. He pulled it from his pocket and gazed at the screen. The Butterfly. He looked around the van at the faces of the team. No, he couldn’t take the time to answer. She’d be angry, but he wasn’t going to stress the mission parameters any more than he had to.
As he left the van, he smoothed out the apron that proclaimed “Mayflower Dim Sum Delivery.” He knew the others watched as he crossed the street to the lobby of the manufacturing facility.
William felt an icy nausea. His stomach did flips as the savory vapor of the drugged dumplings hit his face.
Shula Ries observed the manufacturing facility through binoculars. “The tall pines will give us cover as we approach. Easy target. No guards. We may not even have to kill anyone.”
Lester handed each of the team a weapon. “Okay. To review the parameters, we use Ruger Mini-14s modified for full automatic function. These carry rounds that won’t penetrate the skin very deep. The rounds supply a powerful hypnotic that works in seconds. Even a hit to the hand will render the target unconscious. Clear?”
The others all nodded. Ries examined herself in the rearview mirror and straightened her business suit jacket. She placed a camera disguised as a tie clip into the center of her necktie. “Time to go. Holster your weapons under your jackets. Remember, our cover is that we’re members of the Swiss Drug Enforcement Unit, looking for a suspected terrorist. Carrying the weapons would be normal. We must act with the authority of our roles.”
Weinstein spoke German with dialect closest to that of a local from Bern. “I’ll do most of the talking.”
Ries nodded. She, Dushov, Drapoff, Weinstein, Westheim, and Tennenbaum exited the minivan and crossed the street toward the lobby of the Antron manufacturing facility.
At Stillwater in Milpitas, William walked to the glass revolving door and was met by a guard on the other side of the windows. William pointed to the boxes and the guard pointed to the revolving door. He entered the building.
The guard’s voice was terse. “No one ordered takeout. Place the boxes on the floor and get on the floor yourself.” William nodded and did as ordered. The guard ran his hands over the places William might hide a weapon. The pat-down took seconds. “Okay. Get up.” He did. “Whose name is on the dim sum delivery order?”
At Antron in Gals, Switzerland, the six kidon wore Brooks Brothers business suits and Burberry rep neckties. When he reached the security desk, Tennenbaum spoke in a confident tone. “My name is Gunther Raucher. We’re Swiss Drug Enforcement. We’re here to inspect your facility.” He handed the security guard a stack of papers. “The SDE received a tip. We have a warrant.”
The guard’s mouth moved as he read every word on each page. It took almost five minutes, during which time the kidon team stood in silence.
The guard’s eyes rose from the papers and he spoke to Shimon as if he was alone. “I’ll need to contact someone in management, Herr Raucher.”
Tennenbaum clenched his lips. “It’s ‘Agent’ Raucher.”
“Uh, yeah. Wait just a moment.” The guard picked up the phone and pressed a number into the keypad. He spoke in a low voice for several seconds before putting the phone down. “Herr Müller, one of the vice presidents, will accompany you into the facility.”
From the van in Milpitas, Ruth spoke into William’s embedded earbud. “Tell him the takeout was ordered by Harry Stovall, Development.” William repeated Ruth’s words to the guard. In the van, William knew Ruth would have checked the man’s location from the digital sign-in sheet on Stillwater’s mainframe, and the guard’s call to Stovall would be routed to the van.
When the guard returned from the desk in the lobby, only twenty feet away, he pulled William from the floor. “The dumplings smell good. You have to leave them here. Can’t let you bring ’em in.”
William frowned. “You gonna pay me for them?”
The guard laughed. “Yeah, right. Look, I can call Stovall and have him send someone to the desk.”
William shook his head. “They’ll be cold. I gotta deliver hot or I don’t get paid by Mayflower. Uh, look, if you let me in, I’ll let you have one of Stovall’s dumplings. Okay?”
The guard frowned. “Crap. I shouldn’t do that.” He seemed to think this over. “Okay. Give me one.”
William nodded. “Sure.” He opened the top box with drugged dim sum in it. “Enjoy.”
The guard plucked a har gow from the box and smelled the tastiness wafting off it. He took a bite. In seconds, the hypnotic in the dumpling did its work. The guard would be compliant for at least another two minutes. William smiled. “Give me a badge.” He waited while the guard handed him a guest badge. “Let me pass. You will forget I was ever here. Say ‘yes.’”
The guard said “yes” and buzzed William past the security gate.
As the door closed behind him, William took a deep breath and pulled his glasses off his face. Fear had clouded the thick lenses. He wiped them and replaced them. He noticed the video cam peering down on him from a corner in the hall. “Ruth, scrub the cams. All of them.”
The man who walked into the Antron lobby was short, with graying hair and a thick middle. His business suit was as elegant as that of Ries’s hit team. “I’m Hans Müller, Antron’s chief legal officer. You’re Agent Raucher of the SDE?”
Tennenbaum nodded. He handed Müller the papers. “Can we go somewhere not so public to handle this affair? People have cell phones with video camera function.”
Müller’s smile vanished and he nodded, leading them down a series of hallways to a well-furnished conference room. He pulled his identification card from his pocket and slid it through the lock. There was a slight buzz and the door popped open.
Ries closed the door as they entered. Müller spread the papers on the walnut table. He peered at them.
Sitting across from Müller, Dushov pulled the Ruger from his shoulder holster and shot Müller. The lawyer never saw it coming. He slumped in his chair, his eyelids fluttering closed. Dushov looked at his wristwatch. “We have until about 10:30. Less than an hour before he wakes. And my guess is, he’ll be in a rage.”
Ries popped open her attaché case and pulled a small gray ball of C-6 from it. She placed a timer in it, armed the timer, and stuck the ball under the conference room table. After she grabbed Müller’s badge keycard, they left the conference room, each headed in a different direction.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The hallway outside William Wing’s apartment, Ascot Heights, Block A, 21 Lok Lam Road, New Territories, Hong Kong
August 1, 8:11 p.m.
The elevator door scraped open and Lieutenant Benjamin Chan of the Chinese CSIS emerged wearing a charcoal gray Savile Row suit, white shirt, and red-starred necktie. He strolled down the hall reading the numbers on the apartments until he reached the one where his target lived. He knocked, but there was no answer. He dripped with perspiration, but Hong Kong was a furnace city, and this was a furnace month. Heat and humidity, not fear, caused his perspiration.
He donned a pair of surgical gloves from his inside suit pocket. Then he pulled a jammer-scanner from his pocket and keyed a code to terminate all recording from the cams in William Wing’s apartment.
The door clicked and he walked insid
e. Chan closed the door and tiptoed from room to room. As his spies led him to believe, Wing was abroad. William’s father had given him the apartment’s security layout. Xian Wing had authorized this mission.
When he heard something behind him, he moved his hand into his jacket and drew the 9mm handgun so fast that he faced what was behind him in less than a second. It was a house cat. Chan shrugged his shoulders and re-holstered his pistol. There would be a catsitter coming to change the litter and refill the food and water bowls sometime soon. He’d have to hurry.
Chan found the computer exactly where the new-tech video cam the CSIS developed for Wing to test had shown it to be. The dining room. He inserted a thumb-drive and pressed a few keys on the keyboard. He loaded a program that would allow him remote access to Wing’s computer whenever he wanted without the hacker knowing. This technology was so new that even William Wing, master hacker, was unaware of its existence. The program moved to its next step and the download of William’s hard disk started. The program wirelessly routed the data to a computer collection facility in Beijing.
