“Yes? Who is it?” he asked, uneasy at the unexpected intrusion.
“Ben Eshel?”
“Who’s asking, and how did you get in?”
“Mossad, Mr. Eshel. Open up. We need to speak with you.” The speaker sounded annoyed, as if unused to being questioned.
“Mossad? What… let’s see some identification,” Ben demanded, mind whirling. What did the Mossad want with him? Perhaps it had something to do with the devices? Or perhaps they were going to chastise him for spending so freely…
One of the men held up an identity card, and Ben studied the photograph and official crest. He truthfully didn’t have the faintest idea what ID the Mossad issued, but the man’s demeanor wasn’t friendly, and a part of Ben intuited that it would be a bad idea to stall any longer than necessary.
“Okay. Just a second,” Ben said as he took a final pull on his coffee before twisting the lock open.
The door swung wide as the men pushed their way in, and Ben was taken aback, knocked off balance.
“Wha–”
One of the men punched him in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him, and the room swayed as he fought for breath; and then everything dimmed and he blacked out.
When Ben came to, he was bound to a chair in a small room. His head felt like someone had played soccer with it, and his mouth was dry to the point he had a hard time swallowing. Some part of his awareness warned him that he wasn’t in his condo any longer, and as his eyes flickered open his heart sank.
“He’s awake,” a voice said from behind him, and footsteps circled as a figure stepped into the light beaming down on him from an overhead bank of lamps.
“So he is,” the figure said.
Ben cringed inwardly at the humorless smile the man offered.
“If this is about how I’ve been spending the money, listen, I’m sorry, and I’ll–”
The man seemed to hardly move, and yet the blow, when it came, was like lightning. Pain blossomed from his jaw to his hip, radiating with an intensity that he would have thought impossible. He gasped, struggling to breathe as tears welled in his eyes, the agony worse than if he’d been shot.
“We know all about your spending, Ben. That’s not the problem. It’s what you did to make the money. That’s what we want to talk about. Now here are the ground rules. I’ll ask questions, and you’ll respond, quickly and honestly. If not, well, this will get unpleasant quickly. Am I clear?” the man said.
“What, and this isn’t unpleasant?”
The slap knocked his head to the side, and his cheek burned like fire.
“You don’t get it, do you? We know all about what you’ve been up to. Now no more smart mouth or it’ll get worse. Way worse,” his captor warned.
Ben blinked back the tears and gave the man a puzzled look.
“What I’ve been up to? Of course you do. So what’s the big deal?” Ben managed, then cringed as if he expected another blow.
Which didn’t come.
The man looked uncertain for a split second, and then regained his glacial composure. “You know that we know?” he asked, his voice giving nothing away.
“Of course. I figured you had to. I mean, given what you had me do…” Ben stammered.
“What we had you do?” the man repeated, the adversarial approach replaced with a calm, soothing tone.
“Yeah. I mean, I know it’s a state secret and all, but you’re with the Mossad, so I assume the information has been disseminated to someone other than those at the top.”
“The information,” the man echoed.
“You know all this. And you also know I can’t talk about it,” Ben said, figuring that would be the right response.
The second slap surprised him as much as the first had.
“You’ll talk about it. That’s what you’re here for, and you’ll stay here till you do. I’m already losing my patience. You wouldn’t like me once I’ve lost my patience – trust me on that.”
Ben looked confused as he bit back a whimper. “Is this some kind of a test? To make sure I won’t talk about it? I won’t. I swear. I’ve never told anyone…,” he blurted.
The man stepped back and dug in his pocket for a mini-cell phone. He stabbed it on and listened intently, then returned his attention to Ben.
“What do you mean, a test? Do you have any idea what sort of trouble you’re in? Let’s start with treason, then terrorism.”
“But I haven’t told a soul. I’ve never talked to anyone about it, so how can it be treason? What the hell are you talking about?” Ben asked, butterflies of panic fluttering in his stomach.
The man fixed Ben with a steely glare. “How about this – in your own words, tell us what happened. Because you don’t seem to get this, at all.”
“And you won’t hit me any more?”
“Just talk,” the man said.
“I…are you officially waiving me of the requirement to stay silent about this?” Ben asked.
“Yes. Officially,” the interrogator said, playing along.
“Don’t I have to sign something? Get it in writing?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because they made me sign a mountain of paperwork swearing me to secrecy,” Ben stammered, now in full-blown panic mode.
“Tell me about that. You say you signed something?”
“Correct. Official Secrets Act, an acknowledgement that I would never speak about what I did for you upon penalty of death, the whole deal.”
The man considered Ben’s sweating face. “What you did for us…,” he said, almost inaudibly.
Ben’s eyes widened as comprehension slowly dawned. He began shaking his head slowly. “No. No…”
“I think it would be best if you started at the beginning, Ben. This is as bad a situation as you can imagine, but you might be able to save yourself if you’re completely honest and don’t hold anything back. Tell us everything, starting with what you did.”
Ben began a stammering account, and the man let him continue, interrupting him occasionally with a pointed question, but otherwise allowing him to finish his narrative. Five minutes later Ben stopped talking, drained, and the man regarded him impassively.
“And this new configuration that you designed is foolproof?” he asked, as if mentally checking off a punchlist item.
“Absolutely. I redid the entire trigger and timer circuitry. What was there was junk. Just ancient technology with mediocre design. It was Neanderthal.”
The man was pacing in front of Ben, digesting the details, when his phone vibrated again. He answered it and murmured into the mouthpiece, and then turned to face Ben.
“I’m going to go consult with some people about your story. If you left anything out, now would be the time to tell me. From here, this is going to get a lot worse for you if you did. No lie, Ben. So if there’s anything else…”
Ben shook his head. “That’s everything, I swear. Look, based on your reaction, I can guess that these people weren’t actually the government. So I have no reason to hide anything. I was duped, which means I have as much reason to want to make this right as anyone. I mean, come on…nukes floating around out there, and I armed them? No, I haven’t withheld anything. Ask as many questions as you want, and I’ll answer them all truthfully. I have nothing to hide.”
The man eyed him, then nodded. “I hope for your sake that’s true, Ben. I’ll be back. Don’t go anywhere,” he said, and then stepped out of Ben’s view.
Ben listened as two sets of footsteps moved away from him and a door opened and closed, and then he was alone, the silence in the room deafening as the implications of what he had done slammed into him with the force of a meteor.
Chapter 24
Tel Aviv, Israel
Jet touched down at Ben Gurion airport at four p.m. and was escorted through customs after being met by a Mossad operative. The trip into town took longer this time due to traffic, and she was surprised when they bypassed the tower offices and continued to an
industrial park on the edge of town. When the car pulled to a stop in the rear of one of the anonymous buildings, she spotted two men near the cargo door, their suits out of place in the warehouse district.
The director was waiting for her in a large office inside the warehouse. After she entered he closed the door behind her. Once they were both seated at a small round table, he pressed a button on a recorder so she could listen to Ben’s confession. When it was over, she leaned back, staring at the ceiling.
The director cleared his throat.
“We believe him. We administered drugs this afternoon, and the story didn’t change. Our ex-operatives used their expertise to locate him, then tricked him into believing that they were us. It’s actually brilliant. But the bottom line is that he doesn’t know much beyond what he did – nothing new. You heard him. They put a sack over his head when they took him to the location where he worked for nearly a year, which was under twenty-four-hour guard. From the description it was a remote complex where someone had gone to great pains to create the impression of a government operation. Serious money was spent. But he has no idea where it was – they drove for hours, which could have been in circles, or to another city. Not that it would do us any good to know at this point. All we really have are descriptions of our ex-operatives, confirmation that both nukes were rendered operational with new circuitry, and the knowledge that the entire gambit was conducted in as professional a manner as we might have done – it’s no wonder the poor bastard believed he was working for us.”
“Yes, because they had the background, so they were indistinguishable from the real thing. I mean, until they quit, they were the real thing, so they knew what they were doing. Are you following the money?” she asked.
“We’re all over it, but it looks like a dead end. The funds came through Austria, bounced from Luxembourg, and before that, Hong Kong. It gets fuzzy there, or I should say, fuzzier. All the accounts were set up using shell companies and nominee officers, and from what we can tell, the companies have already been shut down, so these were one-time cutouts that were established specifically for this payment.”
“And let’s not forget that someone had to come up with a million dollars,” Jet said.
“Peanuts to the players in this game. They probably spent ten times that to acquire the devices and fund our three men.”
Jet frowned. “What I don’t understand is why they didn’t just kill him once he’d armed the nukes – seems strange they left him out there as a loose end…”
“They likely wanted to keep him on the bench in case they needed any future modifications or fixes to the devices. After all, he’d be hard to replace, and he had a working knowledge of the new configuration, given that he designed it.”
Jet rewound the audio, listened to it again, and then rose, walking to the credenza behind the desk and grabbing a bottle of water before returning to her seat. She took a long pull on it, and then fixed the director with a candid stare.
“What happened in Libya?” he asked softly.
“The short version is that the militia stumbled across the operation and opened up with both barrels. We had to take them out, and in doing so, the targets were alerted. When it became obvious that they were boxed in, they torched the house.”
“Do you believe they were killed inside?”
“Anything’s possible. But my hunch is there’s no way anyone escaped that. It was an inferno.”
The director nodded. “What’s the long version?”
“The two operatives you sent were somehow spotted by a roving militia patrol, which we were assured by your analysts didn’t circulate in that area – so that was an intelligence failure. Obviously, if we had known the area was hot, I would have handled things differently. Anyway, they were forced to engage, and from that point on it was a disaster. I’d already penetrated the compound and was cutting the camera feed when all hell broke loose. The targets began shooting from the house, I returned fire, and it escalated from there. I saw one confirmed dead, and then someone inside tossed a grenade at me. I took evasive action and was preparing to go back in when the house went up. I did a full perimeter search and found nothing, and there was no rear exit, so whoever was in there was prepared to die rather than be caught.”
“But you don’t know for sure how many were inside?”
“Negative. At least one more besides the dead man, but no way of knowing whether there were more.”
They sat in silence as he absorbed her account. The director tapped a cigarette out of a three-quarters-empty packet and stuck it in the corner of his mouth, seemingly absorbed by the simple, repetitive task. He lit it and blew smoke at the ceiling, lost in thought. Eventually he returned his attention to Jet.
“We don’t have many options left. We have to assume that at least one of them is still out there, with the device,” he said.
“I agree. It’s time to bring Weinstein in and put the screws to him. But in the meantime, I want to have a shot at this Ben character. From the tape, I don’t get the sense that he was holding out on us, but maybe there’s something he forgot that I can extract. Right now we need every advantage we can get. It’s a long shot, but hey…”
“Very well. We have him in a room down the hall. Do your worst, and I’ll put out the word to get Weinstein. Unless I’m missing something big, we don’t have any more alternatives.”
Jet rose. “No, you don’t. Where’s the prisoner?”
“I’ll take you to him.”
~ ~ ~
Forty-five minutes later Jet emerged from the interrogation room, tired and demoralized. Ben’s account hadn’t changed, although he’d remembered a few more details, but nothing that would be helpful in stopping the bomb. He didn’t know anything more than what he’d told them, and Jet had gone easy, preferring the soft approach after the director’s men had come in hard. He’d been eager to explain how it had all transpired, and a part of her empathized with him – the dumb schmuck had believed he’d been working for his government on a top secret project.
If there was anything positive in the situation, it was that he knew the circuitry by heart, so if they located the device he might prove useful in disabling it. Most of her questions had revolved around the logistics of neutralizing the bomb, once she’d confirmed that he knew little but the technical side; and while his memory had been a little hazy – possibly a byproduct of the interrogation drugs – he’d seemed confident in his understanding and had no doubt that the weapon was now armed. Perhaps the most telling thing to her was how thorough the whole charade had been, right down to the documentation he’d been forced to sign before receiving payment. In reality, he hadn’t stood a chance. Not many would have refused a big money offer from their own government to help with devices that would ostensibly be used to defend it from hostile entities intent on its destruction.
When she returned to the office the director was on the phone. He pointed to a chair while he wrapped up the call. When he hung up, he automatically reached for his cigarettes before stopping himself and raising an eyebrow, watching Jet in silence.
“He’s a zero,” she began, “but we should keep him in custody so if we find the device we have an expert who knows it intimately. Beyond that, he doesn’t know anything that’s going to help us. The target was never discussed with him, nor was the timing. One interesting thing was that he said it was obvious that someone had been working on the old circuitry, trying to get it operational again, but had failed. That means they’ve been at this for a long time, and never gave up. Not good for the guys in the white hats.”
“No, it isn’t. We should have Weinstein in custody within the hour, at which point I’ll have him brought here and put the interrogation team on him. When was the last time you slept?” he asked, eyeing her.
“I tried on the planes, but it was rough air.”
“Go grab a few hours. I’ll send someone when we know something.”
“I can question Weinstein, you know.”
&
nbsp; “Yes, I know you can, but that won’t be necessary. I have a specialist who’s probably the most persuasive of his kind we have. He’ll do well. And depending on how much Weinstein knows, I have an idea of how he can be used to discover what it is they’re planning. I don’t need you for that, although the offer’s appreciated.”
“Are you sure? I’ve got a few tricks you might not have seen, and I’m not officially with your organization, so there’s deniability…”
“It’s an attractive offer, but I’ll pass. Get some rest, and I’ll notify you once we’ve got a lead,” the director said, putting an end to the subject.
Jet nodded and made her way to the door. “Good luck.”
“Thanks. Hopefully we won’t need any, but I’ll still take it.”
Chapter 25
Doha, Qatar
Solomon Horowitz walked cautiously down the jetway to the customs area, the flight from Tripoli via Cairo having taken seemingly forever. An annoyed businessman bumped him as he pushed past in the narrow walkway, causing Solomon to wince and nearly pass out from pain before his vision cleared and he got control of himself. The gunshot wound to his shoulder wasn’t terminal, but it was still extremely painful, made worse by the butchery performed by the doctor who had dug the slug out and stitched him up.
The attack on the house had come as a complete surprise, occurring as it had in the dead of night while he and his brother had been asleep. The thought of his sibling, Peter, now dead from an attacker’s bullet, nearly stopped him in the jetway, but then he forced himself to continue putting one foot in front of the other. He couldn’t afford to break down or attract attention to himself – not when they were at the final stage of an operation that had been a decade in the making. He picked up his pace and emerged into the passenger area, and then made his way to immigration, where his Egyptian passport was duly stamped by a less-than-interested official before he was waved through to the arrivals section.
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