A voice speaking Russian could be heard over the speaker, followed by two others, one male, the other female. All claimed to be lawyers. Mayberry introduced herself in Russian.
While they were talking, Garrett began to pace back and forth, looking vigilant. While he was acting like an amped-up hired goon, he was actually looking around the office for anything that could link Zharkov to a planned submarine attack. His eyes settled on two maps displayed on the office’s conference-room table. One contained a highly detailed topography of the outer continental shelf off Virginia and North Carolina; the other, the entire North Atlantic Ocean.
As Mayberry handed legal papers from her briefcase to Nikita to fax to Moscow, Garrett walked back toward Esther and caught her attention. He subtly motioned to the table across the room.
“Why is this taking so long?” Esther complained in a loud voice.
“They need to read the contracts,” Mayberry replied.
Esther groaned and retrieved a gold-plated makeup compact case from her purse. She raised it to her face and applied rouge as she began to walk toward the maps. The Russian guard noticed and started toward her. “The sunlight is better by the window,” she explained, nodding at windows near the table. The bodyguard returned to the door.
Garrett checked the time on the Rolex that he was still wearing. They’d been inside long enough for Moscow to conduct a background check on Mayberry’s nonexistent solicitor credentials.
“We need to get the hell out of here,” he declared, interrupting Mayberry and the Russian lawyers. “As long as we get our money, we’ll keep our mouths shut.”
Mayberry picked up her briefcase. “Your lawyers have the required papers, and my clients are clearly uncomfortable remaining here. Quite frankly, so am I. We’ll return to my office. My card has a fax number on it for signatures.”
One of the Russian attorneys objected over the speaker, but Mayberry had already started toward the door.
“Wait!” Nikita declared, standing from behind Zharkov’s desk.
The Russian guard stood ready to stop them from leaving.
“You forgot this,” Nikita said. He lifted up the gold lapel pin with the black rose. “I believe it was a family heirloom.”
Esther walked to the desk. Took the pin from him.
Five minutes later, they were riding in the limo toward Claridge’s. Garrett beamed. “We did it!”
“I misjudged you,” Esther said to Mayberry. “You were brilliant!” She removed the gold compact case from her purse and opened it. “I managed to get video of the entire office.”
“The maps?” Garrett asked.
“Yes. I’ll send it to Tel Aviv. This not only takes video, it senses heat and moisture.”
“Meaning?” Garrett said.
“If anyone had their fingers on those maps recently, we’ll be able to detect their prints—and, more importantly, the spots they were touching.”
Garrett had opened his mouth to speak when a bullet punched through the car’s windshield, killing their Mossad driver.
Part IV
I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights; and I will blot out from the face of the land every living thing that I have made.
—Genesis 7:4
Thirty-One
Fathi Aziz rose shortly after 3:00 a.m., dressed in pungent, unwashed work clothes, and pulled the hood of a grimy gray sweatshirt over his head.
A dented, tired GMC Savana van was idling outside, with five construction workers as passengers. Aziz entered and the van began the trip to Checkpoint 300, one of thirteen major crossings where Palestinians with Israeli work permits are allowed to pass through a concrete border wall. Although Israel abandoned the Gaza Strip in 2005, a land, sea, and air blockade continued to contain the 2.6 million Arabs living on the West Bank.
Aziz usually crossed into Israel through a maze of secret tunnels and drainage pipes. But those routes were too risky this morning because of clashes between young Palestinians, throwing rocks and burning tires, and young Israeli soldiers, firing tear gas, rubber-coated bullets, and live ammunition. Patrols had been stepped up.
More than three thousand workers passed through Checkpoint 300 each day, some of the seventy thousand Palestinians allowed to work legally in Israel. Despite those numbers, it would have been difficult for Aziz to slip through unnoticed. Each worker had to press their thumbs on a fingerprint scanner mated to their photo and work permit. Yesterday, Aziz had received word that the scanners at Checkpoint 300 had stopped working. A breach, but only if they hadn’t been repaired overnight.
No one inside the van spoke, and everyone but the driver and Aziz nodded off as they traveled north on Highway 60, a de facto memorial to violence. Past the sleepy Palestinian town of Saer, where thirty-five Israelis had been murdered; past Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement, whose lights could be seen across the border wall, remembered as the home of American-born physician Baruch Goldstein, who killed twenty-nine Muslim worshippers with a machine gun at the Cave of the Patriarchs.
At the age of forty-five, Aziz had never known life in a free homeland. In 1967 Israeli soldiers had captured Jerusalem and crushed Arab forces in a mere six days. Despite a flurry of on-again, off-again negotiations, Israelis still held the Palestinian homeland as a de facto prison. As a child, Aziz had been taught to hate Jews. When barely a teen, he’d thrown a Molotov cocktail against the side of an Israeli Wolf armored vehicle. In most such attacks, the war machine would have continued unfazed, but not this time. Aziz would later declare that Allah had divinely directed the flames through the Wolf’s protective barriers, causing Israeli soldiers, on fire, to flee into a barrage of stones, bottles, and death.
The commuter van finally arrived at the Israeli checkpoint, where its occupants hurried into chutes that guided them like cattle through a series of slowly narrowing concrete passageways, forcing them into a single line.
“Are they checking fingerprints?” Aziz asked the Palestinian waiting in front of him. He passed that query up the line. Moments later, a response. No, the thumbprint machines remained broken.
Aziz felt relief and fought an urge to vomit as he moved at a snail’s pace along the line, surrounded by the smell of sweat, urine, and filth. Rising temperatures. Men pushing against men. As he slogged forward, Aziz used his body to block younger Palestinians trying to shove ahead in line, taking care not to fall lest he be trampled—all under the watchful eyes of Israeli security cameras. After more than an hour, he could see the metal turnstile that opened into the “aquarium,” an oblong room where Israeli soldiers sat behind bullet-resistant glass, comparing the photo on each worker’s permit to his face, and—on most days—to his scanned thumbprints.
It was too late now for Aziz to turn back. The mob pressing behind him wouldn’t allow him to retreat.
He entered the turnstile and waited for it to be unlocked so he could continue into the aquarium sally port. Click. He tested the stile and pushed it around.
The Israelis operated three windows, much like those used by bank tellers. Aziz and two others moved forward. He recognized the Palestinian who approached the first window, a Jihad Brigade brother traveling with him. The worker at the second was a stranger. Aziz moved to the third window, where he raised a forged work permit that contained his photo and counterfeited official stamps.
Fearful that the guard had seen the YouTube video of him threatening the Great Satan, Aziz lowered his eyes and tried to become another faceless Palestinian.
“Where are you working today?” the guard asked.
Aziz recited the name of a street and his Israeli employer’s name.
The soldier glanced at Aziz and returned his papers.
“Step back.”
Now all three were waiting to exit. Instead, a side door flung open, and five soldiers burst in.
“On your knees!” a guard yelled.
Aziz felt time slowing. A normal reaction, as every extraneous thought yielded to a singular focus.
<
br /> “Hands behind your heads.”
Aziz obeyed. Eyes forward.
“One of you has fake papers,” the head guard announced.
Aziz waited. Anticipating what would come next. Handcuffs. Interrogation.
The guard stopped in front of the stranger kneeling between Aziz and his fellow jihadist. Pointed his pistol at the man’s head.
“My brother’s papers,” the stranger declared. “He’s sick. Our family needs the money.”
Two Israelis grabbed his arms, forced him to stand. Frisked him for weapons.
“My children need to eat,” the Palestinian protested.
Plastic cuffs secured his wrists. He was hustled through the same door the guards had used to enter the sally port.
“You two go.” The exit door opened.
Aziz hurried from the checkpoint to where buses and cars were waiting to transport workers to their jobs. He and his fellow jihadist rode in different vehicles away from the border wall. Ten minutes later, they reconnected on a side street. Became passengers in a sedan waiting to drive them north.
By the time Aziz and the jihadist crossed the Jordan River, it was midafternoon. Three hours later they boarded a private Iranian aircraft at the Damascus airport for the flight to Tehran. A car waiting there took Aziz and his comrade to a nondescript building on the city’s outskirts.
They waited there for an hour in a room furnished with three metal folding chairs and a table. Nothing else.
Like members of Hamas, Aziz and his fellow Jihad Brigade fighters were Sunni Muslims. Their Iranian hosts were Shi’ite Muslims. But their mutual hatred of the United States trumped their religious dispute about who was the legitimate successor to the Prophet Muhammad.
“As-salamu alaikum,” General Kardar said when he finally joined them. He marched directly to the table and began removing papers from an accordion folder that his chief aide, who was accompanying him, had brought to the meeting. “The scientific schematics you will need to spark fear in the Americans,” he said. Next on the table, he displayed photographs of a nuclear bomb. “For you to upload to the internet.”
Aziz said, “The Mossad Jew in Italy wasn’t killed, even though you told me he had been assassinated.”
“I was misinformed,” Kardar said. “What does it matter? You fear it will make your threat less believable? Was there not an attempt to kill him? Did you not claim credit for it? Were you not a hero to our Arab brothers despite his survival?”
“The Jews outsmarted you and embarrassed me.”
General Kardar stiffened. “Do not look backward. Give the Americans six days.”
“Six days? That is too much time. You risk having them find the bomb, or me.”
“They will not.”
“When will you tell me the code needed to detonate it?”
“On the seventh day.”
“You do not trust me with it now?”
“On the seventh day, when it is time to explode the bomb.”
“The money for our cause?”
“Small bundles—Jordanian dinars, Israeli shekels, Egyptian pounds, and US currency. Are you ready to be filmed?”
“And the weapons we requested?”
“Yes, rockets smuggled into Gaza City.”
Aziz followed him into a separate room, where a prayer cloth had been spread on the floor. The same props: a Black Standard jihadist flag, the prerequisite AK-47, and the Holy Qur’an. Four Quds Force soldiers with their faces hidden behind masks were waiting to pose behind him. A fifth officer operated a camera.
“Here’s your script.” He offered Aziz a single sheet of paper.
Aziz didn’t bother to take it. “Allah will speak through me.”
“You must say these exact words, just like before.”
Aziz read the single sentence out loud. “‘From the ocean, the Great Satan’s destruction will come.’” He shook his head disapprovingly. “These words are too similar to what you instructed me to say after you told me the Zionist had been assassinated. Do you not remember? ‘I will soon deliver a flood over your cities from beneath your oceans, and the wrath of Allah will destroy you.’ You are telling our enemies too much. Do you want them to know your plan? They will use these words to find the bomb before I can explode it.”
“Allah, blessed be his holy name, is using me as his instrument,” Kardar said, blatantly appealing to Aziz’s religious fervor. “We must trust him. You must trust him. Say exactly what is written.”
Thirty-Two
Now driverless, the armored Maybach S600 sedan that Mayberry, Esther, and Garrett were riding in swerved into oncoming traffic and ran headfirst into a Mini Cooper. A double-decker bus smashed into its rear, shoving the small sedan underneath the Maybach. The luxury car rolled over onto its right side and came to a stop on the sidewalk at the entrance of a local pub.
The fatal gunshot that had killed their driver had come from the left side of the busy street. This meant that the Maybach’s undercarriage was now blocking the shooter’s vantage point, temporarily shielding its passengers.
Seat belts and airbags had protected all three from serious injury. Sitting on the left in the front seat of the right-hand-drive car, Esther was the first to free her belt. She immediately dropped onto the dead driver, twisted, and reached up for the handle of the passenger door above her head.
“No!” Garrett hollered from the back seat. “You’ll get shot if you climb out!”
“The moonroof,” Mayberry said.
Esther pushed the dash button that opened the Maybach’s roof. Mayberry, who was nearest the opening, crawled through it at the same moment the limousine was hit by another round. The Maybach’s armor was thick enough to protect those seated inside, but the shooter was not firing directly at them. He was firing armor-piercing slugs into the car’s reinforced gas tank. Esther was out next, rising to her feet on the sidewalk with a handgun that she’d retrieved from the car’s glove compartment. A third shot punched through the gas tank, causing fuel to spew.
Garrett crawled through the moonroof and joined the women. “The pub!” he said. Its entrance was less than four yards from the Maybach. Patrons inside had initially gone outside to investigate, but retreated after hearing gunshots, leaving its door open.
“You first,” Esther yelled at Mayberry, who bolted across the sidewalk.
“You next,” Garrett told Esther. She dashed to safety without drawing fire.
Garrett started to follow, but as soon as his head appeared, the sniper fired. The round nicked the car, which deflected it, but Garrett was forced to return to safety behind the Maybach. He was penned in. He readied himself for another dash.
The sniper quickly changed rounds. Shooting a bullet into a gasoline tank does not cause an explosion or fire. But now the sniper fired a tracer round, which ignited in the air.
Garrett burst toward the doorway at the same moment the tracer round struck the leaking fuel, creating a massive fireball. Because the Maybach’s undercarriage faced the street, most of the flames shot away from Garrett. Even so, the explosion knocked him face-first across the pub’s floor. Black smoke billowed upward from the burning wreckage.
Mayberry hurried to him while Esther slipped to the pub’s doorway, hoping to spot the shooter.
“You burned bad?” Mayberry asked.
“Is there a way to be burned good?” he replied, pushing himself up on his feet. “I’m okay.”
“The sniper was trying to kill you, Garrett, not us,” Esther said, joining them. “I think he’s gone.”
“The Russians?” Mayberry asked.
“Doesn’t make sense,” Garrett replied. “Why not just kill us in Zharkov’s mansion? No need to ambush us and get the police involved.”
Esther was already on her cell phone when a City of London constable ran into the pub.
“Anyone injured?” he called.
A pub patron darted past him out onto the street, causing the policeman to curse. “Stay put! This is a crime sc
ene.”
Paramedics arrived amid the loud blare of sirens and immediately began treating those cut by flying glass and debris. More constables entered.
Garrett whispered, “Where’s a back door?”
“No, don’t run,” Esther said. “I called my embassy.”
Six men in black uniforms and protective vests arrived, and their squad leader marched directly to the threesome.
“You’re the ones from the Maybach, aren’t you?” he asked. “Malcolm Evans, with London Counter Terrorism Command. Let’s have your names.” One of his men stepped forward ready to write on a notepad with his pen.
“Diplomatic immunity,” Esther said. “I’m Israeli, and they’re with me.”
“A diplomat, huh?” Evans replied skeptically, eyeballing her skintight black slacks, unbuttoned blouse, and thick makeup. She’d forgotten that she was still dressed like a prostitute.
“Call this number at the Israeli embassy,” she said, offering the digits.
“Show me your diplomatic passport,” Evans ordered.
“It’s at Claridge’s,” Garrett volunteered.
“The shots came from a rooftop across the street,” Mayberry said. “I’m an FBI agent from the States.”
“On business, are you? You FBI too?” he asked Garrett.
“No, all of us are on vacation.”
“Let me understand this, mate. An Israeli diplomat, a Yank FBI agent, and another Yank bloke just happen to be on a holiday when they’re attacked on one of our busiest streets?”
One of his men whispered into his ear.
“It seems there was another one of you,” Evans said. “The poor chap behind the wheel outside.”
“The gunman was firing armor-piercing rounds,” Mayberry said.
“Bloody hell,” Evans replied, “aren’t you a real Sherlock Holmes?”
“I insist you call my embassy,” Esther said.
One of Evans’s men slipped behind them and saw the handguns that Esther and Garrett had tucked behind their backs.
Shakedown Page 21
