by Larry Bond
Thera scrambled back through the front of the truck, kicking out of the open passenger-side door. As she reached the ground, one of the men began firing an AK-47 in her direction. She huddled low, grabbing for her own gun. Whirling around, she saw one of the men crawling through the truck. He had a pistol; she fired her own gun point-blank into his forehead.
Ferguson ran to the far side of the Land Rover, grabbing Thera as she staggered backward, coughing from the gas. He pulled her away and gave her a water bottle to irrigate her eyes, then trotted back to the truck. Two of the men were writhing on the ground, one still holding his gun. Ferguson blasted each one in the skull and got the other man for good measure. Then he hit them with the syringes.
“You weren’t kidding about the gas,” said Thera when he got back to her. Tears were streaming from her beet-red face.
“I meant for you to put the mask on before you pulled the grenade,” said Ferguson.
“How?”
He pulled his off, then held it to his face. “You could have run back to the side. It’s all right. Men find it hard to resist a woman’s tears.”
“You’re on a roll tonight,” she told him sarcastically.
“Tell me about it.” Ferguson walked over to the car. Besides a half-dozen guns on the floor of the rear seat, he found a duffle bag filled with hundred-dollar bills.
None of the men were Khazaal. The night had been a total wipeout.
~ * ~
~ * ~
1
TEL AVIV
THE NEXT MORNING . . .
Menacham Stein, the Mossad officer who had worked with the First Team on Seven Angels, met Corrine at the airport in Tel Aviv. He looked more like a businessman on vacation than a spy: six feet tall, with slicked-back hair and a light scent of aftershave, he walked up to her as she came out of the tunnel off the plane and led her away from the others. He slid a magnetic card into a reader on a door, showing her into a stairwell that led to an empty corridor. After several more twists and turns they emerged in an area of offices before exiting in the main terminal section. Here he slowed his pace to an easy nonchalance, guiding her with a gentle tap on the shoulder to the doors. As they walked to the car she realized that there were at least two other men watching them.
“Your people, I assume,” she said.
He smiled but said nothing, leading the way to a blue Ford in the middle of the lot. Corrine noticed another pair of men sitting in a car nearby.
“More?” she said.
“We don’t like to take chances with important visitors,” said the officer, popping the trunk for her bag.
While it looked ordinary from the outside, the vehicle had been heavily modified: the sides, roof, and floor had been armored and the glass reinforced. A phone sat on the console between driver and passenger. The Mossad officer reached under the dash and put his finger on a small device that read his fingerprint. This gave him five seconds to insert his key in the ignition and start the car.
“First time in Tel Aviv?” asked Stein.
“It’s my third or fourth, but it’s been ten years. You sound like you’ve spent a great deal of time in the U.S.,” she added. “Do you come from New York?”
“I lived in Brooklyn for a few years,” said Stein, but he didn’t elaborate.
Inside the Mossad building, Corrine was searched politely but not perfunctorily. Stein took her to an elevator that led to an isolated part of the building, where a special room was set up for top-secret conversations. To secure the room against possible eavesdropping, it had been sheathed in a layer of copper and its supports isolated from vibrations, so that it literally floated within the space. More conventionally, radio and microwave detection devices hunted for transmissions emanating not only from the room but from any of the nearby areas, and white noise generators provided a sonic barrier around the facility.
To get into the secure area, they had to walk down a tunnellike hall made of polished cement. As they started down it, another man came up from the other side. Corrine thought it was David Tischler, the Mossad supervisor she was meeting with, coming out to greet her. But after holding her glance for a brief moment, the man abruptly turned his head toward the wall and then put his hand up, shielding the other side of his face.
Stein touched her elbow, leading her through a small anteroom to the chamber where Tischler sat waiting.
“I hope your flight was a good one,” said the Israeli, rising. Unlike Stein, he was short and a little overweight; it might not have been fair to say he had a potbelly, but he certainly didn’t look like an athlete.
“We appreciate your help with the Seven Angels case,” she told him as she sat down.
“Of course.”
“I want to be assured that his death was random,” said Corrine.
“God does not call us randomly. But in the sense you mean it, yes. It was an accident. Whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, I suppose we can’t tell.”
“It was unfortunate for our investigation,” said Corrine. “He would have been apprehended, and you would have had more information about the people he wanted to contact.”
Tischler’s narrow brown eyes held no expression; his mouth was the mouth of a man staring into space, revealing nothing.
“Ferg was there,” said Stein, who unlike his boss seemed agitated at the question. “What did he think?”
“Mr. Ferguson was a little too close to be objective,” said Corrine.
“He thought it was random, too,” suggested Stein. “As did I.”
“Mr. Ferguson wasn’t prepared to say it wasn’t random. But he lacked proof, one way or the other.”
“Spoken like an American lawyer,” said Stein.
The faintest of grins appeared on Tischler’s face.
“We’ve made arrests in the case,” said Corrine, loosening her tone slightly. “The FBI will share what’s appropriate as it becomes available. If you require specific items to assist you, I can certainly facilitate sharing that. As I said, we appreciate your assistance. I’m wondering if you’ve developed any additional information that might be useful to us.”
“We’ve shared everything we know,” said Stein.
“There was a jeweler?”
“A blind, as far as we can tell.”
Corrine looked at Tischler, whose face was once more a blank wall. “Do you see a connection between Seven Angels and Nisieen Khazaal?”
Tischler’s eyes widened ever so slightly. “Is there one?”
“Thatch was on his way to Egypt. We believe the people he was to see in Cairo may have been on their way to the meeting that Khazaal is going to.”
Tischler’s eyes went dull again. “I guess.”
“It would be difficult to believe,” said Stein. “The Seven Angels would be more aptly named Seven Wanna-bes. They’re really amateurs. Thatch would have been killed by them, just as Ferguson almost was.”
The connection between Seven Angels and Khazaal was every bit as far-fetched as Stein said. Egyptian intelligence indicated that the tailor, Ahmed Abu Saahlid, commanded a network of terrorists and had plans to travel to Lebanon or Syria—typically for the Egyptians, they couldn’t be specific. The tailor opposed the Egyptian government and was “of interest,” something that might be said of at least a third of the Egyptian population. Nothing in his dossier, however, showed that he had any connection with Khazaal or any Iraqi for that matter. The Egyptian report made it seem unlikely that he would have been willing to act as a go-between with Seven Angels even if he did have access to Khazaal. Several of his recorded statements showed he despised Americans in general, and Ferguson’s experience with him demonstrated a willingness to act on those beliefs.
But something in Stein’s answer interested Corrine a great deal: the line about wanna-bes. It had been in an FBI report she’d read on the way over, one that was not among the documents shared with the Israelis.
Coincidence? It was a common phrase.
“I suppose it’s unlikel
y there’s a connection,” said Corrine, moving on to the real reason she’d come to see Tischler in person. “What else can you tell us about Khazaal?”
“Very little,” said Tischler.
“You know his travel plans?”
“Only that he is due to see others in Syria. Two men we have interest in over in Damascus transferred some money into an account used by one of the exile groups friendly to the so-called resistance. And a room there was rented for the weekend.”
One of the men was being followed by Iraqi intelligence, and the bank account was being monitored by the CIA. But it was possible that the exiles had already been tipped off; the second man had disappeared.
“Do you expect the meeting in Damascus?” asked Corrine.
“Not necessarily,” said Tischler. “Damascus would not be ideal, because of the Syrian government’s presence. Somewhere in the east, perhaps.”
While that would sound logical to someone uninitiated in the intrigues of Iraq, the sparsely populated desert areas of Syria were much worse than the capital of Syria. Strangers there tended to stick out, and there were many competing interests—Kurds, informants, smugglers, drug dealers—who would have much to gain by supplying information to the Syrians or to the Iraqi spies and operatives in the area. A meeting outside of a city would be visible to spy planes or satellites. Though in reality the coverage over the area was spotty at best, the resistance people tended to think American coverage was twenty-four/seven.
So why had Tischler even suggested it, Corrine wondered. “Could you make an educated guess?”
“Syria is a place where educated guesses can often get one in trouble,” said Tischler. “I wouldn’t try.”
Corrine let the matter drop temporarily, asking if the Mossad required assistance on any other projects and receiving the bland answers she expected. Finally she glanced at her watch.
“I’m afraid I’m running a little late,” she said, rising. “I’m due at the embassy.”
“Of course.” Tischler rose. “If we can be of further assistance while you’re in Tel Aviv, please tell us.”
“Thank you. The Khazaal meeting—”
The Mossad officer looked at her expectantly as she paused. He was well practiced at keeping his face expressionless, and Corrine simply couldn’t tell now whether he knew more about it than he had shared.
“You would suppose that would be more likely in the west than in the east,” she suggested.
“I’ve learned not to suppose.”
An answer there could be no arguing with, Corrine thought. “If we get any additional information,” she said, extending her hand. “We’ll share it.”
“As we will with you,” said Tischler, walking out with them.
~ * ~
2
CIA BUILDING 24-442, VIRGINIA
Thomas Ciello could not believe his good fortune. The CIA analyst had stopped at the post office on his way to work and found, completely unexpectedly, a new manuscript on UFOs by Carmine P. Ragguzi. Professor Ragguzi, a true genius who had devoted nearly forty years of his life to the problem of extraterrestrial communication, had sent a select group of devotees an advanced copy of a mammoth work on UFO sightings he hoped to publish next year. A letter that accompanied the book urged Ciello to “make whatever suggestions you feel are warranted.” Of course, given that Ragguzi was a genius, Ciello doubted that he could do much more than cheer. Nonetheless, the opportunity to read a Ragguzi work before it was released to the rest of the world was truly an honor. He took it inside with him, hoping to steal a glance at lunch or on his morning break.
The security person at the entrance to the CIA building didn’t bother hiding her skepticism when Thomas told her what it was. He was used to that sort of reaction and waited patiently while she applied a blacklight stamp to several of the pages and made random photocopies of a few more so the work could be checked on the way out. Security at the CIA in general was tight, but Building 24-442 had even more elaborate precautions. Even though it had been logged and inspected, it was possible that the manuscript would be confiscated when he tried to take it home and held until it had been thoroughly checked for classified information. The process could take days—there were no preset limits—but Thomas was so eager to start reading the book inside that he didn’t mind the hassle. Besides, he’d spent just about every waking hour here since joining the First Team as what Corrigan called its resident “geek freak.” If he was going to find any spare time at all, it would be here.
Thomas thought “geek freak” was a compliment, though sometimes the people on the action side of the agency were too eccentric to decipher.
Cleared down to his office, Thomas immediately went to work, signing into his network and “checking the traps” as he called it: reviewing overnight alerts, briefs, and regular news developments. Thomas’s position at the Agency was unique: he was assigned to facilitate intelligence gathering for a specific group and had access to nearly every area of the Agency to do so. Still, it mostly came down to reading. Making sense of what you read was important, surely, but you had to read it first.
Three days before, he had asked the National Security Agency to “harvest” possible communications in Syria related to Nisieen Khazaal. The request had yielded two phone conversations which included an alias Khazaal was believed to use: Snake. Translated by computer from Arabic, the conversations were both brief and frustrating:
1.
man’s voice 1: The Snake is not here.
man’s voice 2: Yes.
man’s voice 1: Yes.
[Disconnect]
2.
man’s voice 1: When?
man’s voice 2: The day after tomorrow.
man’s voice 1: Difficult.
man’s voice 2: The snake will be in the East. It must be then.
[Disconnect]
Did they pertain to Khazaal? The NSA didn’t pretend to know. That wasn’t their job; they just gathered conversations and passed them on.
Thomas set the intercepts aside in one of his note files on the secure computer and continued trolling through the information and notes that bad accumulated while he slept. He had a memo from the desk—from Corrigan, actually, who usually personally supported the First Team during a critical mission—about the desert snatch operation, and a brief on the preliminary interrogation of the men they’d stopped in Syria. Two of the men who’d been in the last car stopped, a Ford, had been positively identified, and Thomas recognized one of the names right away, Sadeghi Saed, a Palestinian who had helped fund a Shiite resistance group in Iraq. Thomas set that aside as well.
Were there a lot of Fords in Syria? He hadn’t thought so. He punched into a database, trying to see if it was significant.
There were in fact many thousands. But perhaps some additional information about it would allow him to trace it. He accessed another database compiling foreign registrations and found that VIN or vehicle identification numbers were sometimes used to show where sales were; different series indicated different regions. It was a tenuous link, but he could at least differentiate between vehicles brought into Syria and Iraq; and, after he looked through some customs records poached by an NSA computer program from Lebanon, that country as well.
Thomas wrote a quick “action note” for Corrigan, asking for the VIN attached to the various components; the brief on the vehicle had already indicated there was no visible registration.
Two hours and many notes later, the UFO manuscript beckoned at the corner of his desk. Deciding he was ready for a break, Thomas dragged it over and opened to a page at random.
The 1950s Turkey sightings and landings were the most phenomenal event in the history of mankind, and a key extraterrestrial moment.
Thomas gasped. That was a serious error. The sighting he was referring to had actually been U.S. Air Force spy flights, with the UFO story floated out as a cover when the Soviets became suspicious.
“Ah, there you are,” said Debra Wu, peeking in the d
oorway. Wu was Corrigan’s assistant.
Thomas practically jumped out of his chair, grabbing the manuscript and holding it to his chest. Unfortunately, the papers weren’t bound, and they flew all over the office.
Wu rolled her eyes. Ciello was eccentric, even for an analyst.
“Corrigan wants to see you. He’s downstairs.”
“I’m going.” Thomas grabbed the papers and took them to one of the lockable file cabinets at the side of his room. Technically, the cabinet was only supposed to be used to temporarily store classified information. But he had no other place to put the manuscript, and besides, his cabinets were all empty.
