by Ward Larsen
“Sami will see it through, God willing.”
Rafiq nodded. “There is also this,” he said, pulling a nylon backpack from behind a toolbox. Rafiq unzipped it and pulled out a compact machine pistol—Boutros recognized it as a PP-2000, a Russian 9mm weapon, buttstock removed. “There is also ammunition,” Rafiq added as he restowed the weapon.
“It might come in useful,” Boutros said. He took in the room as a whole. “Our Korean friends seem to have thought of everything.”
“Perhaps more than we realize.” Boutros looked at him inquisitively, and Rafiq gestured around the room. “The tools are from Hungary, the wire from Italy. A Russian gun barrel. There is even an American drill press. As far as I can tell, nothing on this boat can be sourced to North Korea.”
“Including, I think, the four of us.”
Rafiq blew out a humorless laugh. “I suppose you are right. But in the end, everyone gets what they want.”
“Everyone,” Boutros corrected, “except the Americans.”
* * *
Five minutes later Boutros was back on deck, completing his survey of Albatross on more familiar ground. As the lone sailor on board, it was critical that he understand the operation of every winch and pump, know the placement of every line and cleat. He paused at the stubby bowsprit, which anchored a cable running to the wheelhouse. He didn’t know what the cable was for, but noted it all the same.
With the growl of the boat’s diesel steady behind him, Boutros looked out and saw not a single ship on the horizon. He filled his lungs with the brine-laced air. The sea settled his nerves, as it always had, and he had a distinct sense of life coming full circle. It had been nearly twenty years since he’d commanded a boat. In his days with the Iraqi navy he’d plowed the azure waters of the Persian Gulf, engaging in endless games of cat and mouse with American warships. He recalled at the time feeling like a rebel pilot in a Star Wars movie—guiding a tiny fighter against the evil Death Star.
He turned and studied in the foredeck. In the middle, secured to its cradle, was a sixteen-foot utility boat with a Honda outboard. The craft would be integral to their plan in the coming days, yet as he looked at it now, it seemed almost symbolic. Like some icon of final hope. Could he allow even a private thought that he might survive this mission? No, Boutros decided. Given the nature of their strike, his fate and that of his crew was sealed. He was at peace with his fate—even eager, in a way.
This was the opportunity he’d long been searching for.
He wondered if his ISIS commanders had known all along—the reason behind his fearlessness on the battlefield. Why he had always volunteered for assignments in the Kurdish and Iraqi sectors. Boutros was a religious man on the best of days, but his commitment to the cause had far less to do with God than vengeance.
His father, an officer in the Republican Guard, had perished in battle during the Gulf War. Less heroic, but profoundly more tragic, was the fate of his sister in the next campaign. The bomb had struck a hundred meters from their home that night, taking out a gun emplacement. Yet the force of the shock wave, milliseconds later, had taken down the entire north wall of their house. They dug Irina out to find her paralyzed below the waist. She lived another year, mostly in pain. Their mother tended to her day and night, dreaming of medications and therapy that might have been available outside war zones. When Irina succumbed to a simple infection, festering out of control, it had been nothing short of mercy. Boutros’ mother died soon after, not from any kind of direct fire, but a victim of sheer despondency, the source of which was no less clear than the bomb that had collapsed the wall.
The Americans.
Always the Americans.
They’d marched halfway around the world, killing from arm’s length with their deadly technology and Special Operations heroes. When the powder keg that was Syria ignited, the Americans sided with the Kurds and a new Iraqi army. For that reason alone, Boutros had thrown himself in with ISIS. Opportunities for retribution had so far proved scarce—the Americans put few boots on the ground, preferring to own the skies and employ others to do the dirty work. When the caliphate crumbled, like everyone knew it would, Boutros had followed the lead of the other survivors: he’d melted away. Lying in wait for the next battle.
And now, he was sure, he’d found it.
That Boutros considered this mission personal would have no bearing on its prosecution. If any tenet of warfare was too-oft forgotten, it was that no army, no matter how dominant in the field, was immune to the power of imagination. Bin-Laden had proved it on 9/11. So too, the lone wolves who regularly drove cars and trucks onto crowded European sidewalks. Albatross, in microcosm, was perhaps the ultimate response: one devastating weapon deep inside her hold, delivered by a handful of committed individuals.
Imagination indeed.
A stray gust of wind swept over the deck. Boutros looked aft, saw the Korean peninsula fading fast into a gauzy marine haze. He went to the helm and took over, sending Sami and Saleem below. He checked the engine gauges and the latest weather data. In his navy days he might have recorded the time, position, and heading in the ship’s log. This voyage, he decided, was best left unchronicled.
Boutros would never come to realize how prophetic that choice was. As it turned out, not a single soul on earth noticed when, at 9:06 that morning, a Thailand-registered trawler named Albatross departed North Korean territorial waters. She set to sea skippered by a former officer of Saddam Hussein’s navy, and with a crew consisting of a mechanical engineer, a bomb maker, and one chipper suicidal jihadist.
Her course was steady at 070 degrees. Speed twenty-two knots.
Also left unrecorded was any hint of her destination: a remote chain of islands over two thousand miles east.
TWENTY-NINE
The change imparted upon Austria by the gig economy was like it was anywhere—a case of technology outpacing the grasp of rules and regulations. Seemingly overnight, web-based companies mushroomed into existence. They skirted labor laws to employ workers without customary benefits, and formed virtual corporate structures to evade taxes. Workers went along with the game. School-teachers moonlighted as online tutors for a few extra dollars. Doctors wearing pajamas gave diagnoses over the phone. Carpenters rented out nail guns not being used that day. From warehouses to bicycles to boudoirs, the world was running in entirely new ways.
None of which was lost on the world’s intelligence agencies.
For spies, the online marketplace was the greatest advance in defensive tradecraft since the invention of sunglasses. With little more than a valid credit card, one could summon a car, hire a nurse, or rent a forty-foot motorsailer. Hot food, toothpaste, and burner phones could be delivered to one’s doorstep, eliminating risky forays to busy shopping areas.
It was shortly after midnight, on the third day since his family’s disappearance, that Slaton leveraged one of the most practical applications of the new order: the ability to anonymously book a short-term safe house.
The software infrastructure was already in place. On his phone were applications for no fewer than ten online services, each with an active account and method of payment established: Uber, Lyft, Priceline, Amazon were all there, clicks away from delivering critical mission support. So it was, while sitting on the fast-emptying patio of Café Leandro, and with fewer keystrokes than it took to dial a mobile number, Slaton arranged lodgings on short notice through an online booking site.
Thirty minutes later he was thumbing a four-digit code into a lockbox on the door of a two-bedroom flat. Located in Leopoldstadt, Vienna’s second district, the building was an unpretentious walk-up, three brick-and-mortar stories on a quiet residential row. It was also, not coincidentally, a twenty-minute walk to IAEA headquarters. He and Mordechai had agreed that such proximity, at least in the near term, was a practical necessity.
The first thing Slaton did on entering the apartment was use the prepaid phone he’d purchased to check the local news on three separate websites—
two run by newspapers, the third by Vienna’s main television channel. None made any mention of three bodies being discovered in Danube Park. Slaton gave the story an 80 percent probability of breaking by noon. More critically, he knew the leader of the team he’d eliminated had not yet reported back to his taskmaster. One way or another, whoever had commissioned the hit squad would soon realize their fate.
He considered turning on his primary mobile to check for messages, but decided the risk of giving away their location was too high. He’d last done so as they left Mistelbach, calling up the compromised messaging account for the fourth time since arriving in Vienna. Slaton had found himself holding his breath as the connection ran. In the end, he saw only the same altered message thread, now forty hours old.
Vienna, Wednesday evening, 8:15. Do what you do best.
Disappointing as it had been, Slaton refused to dwell on it. If what Mordechai told him was true, El-Masri was complicit in a scheme to steal highly enriched uranium. That kind of operation needed the help of larger players. The kind of people who could effortlessly hack into phones and computers. Who could abduct women and children. And who dispatched teams of assassins. He couldn’t simply wait for a message that might never come.
Slaton performed a walk-through of the apartment. There were two bedrooms, but only one had a window. He decided that would be his—the window provided a way out, and allowed him to watch for anyone with the opposite idea. His overnight bag bounced once on the bed, and he returned to the main room.
“How long will we stay here?” Mordechai asked as he looked over the small kitchen.
“That depends on a lot of things. Right now whoever wanted you dead has to be wondering what happened. As long as you stay out of sight, your fate is an open question. It buys us a little time.”
“I have meetings scheduled at work tomorrow.”
“We’ll worry about that tomorrow. For now, you can’t go anywhere near IAEA headquarters or your apartment. Don’t call anyone, don’t answer calls, don’t send any texts.”
“How could I? You still have my phone.”
“In time.”
Mordechai seemed unsure. “What if I leave? What if I get up while you’re sleeping and go home?”
“Then I would be forced to fulfill my contract after all.”
The little Israeli looked at him severely. Slaton couldn’t read his expression, but it wasn’t fear.
“Look,” Slaton said, “staying out of sight is your safest move. Like it or not, you and I have parallel interests. You believe you’ve found a conspiracy that needs to be exposed. I want my family back safely. We need to figure out a way to make both things happen.”
Mordechai thought about it, then nodded acquiescently.
“But know one thing,” Slaton cautioned. “If those two objectives ever get crossed—have no doubt which is my primary.”
* * *
Slaton kept Mordechai up until two o’clock that morning. What had begun as an interrogation evolved into a strategy session for the following day.
“El-Masri is working with someone,” Slaton said. “We have to find out who it is.”
“There might be hints in the files at the agency. I could research which inspectors were with him on the site visits where material went missing. If certain names recur, it could mean he has internal collaborators.”
“A possibility. If I gave you access to a computer, could you do it from here?”
“Definitely not. The security protocols give me access from our internal network. But from the outside—I could never do it, not without raising alarms.”
Slaton didn’t argue the point. “Let’s concentrate on how the message you sent me got altered. You think someone hacked your phone, supplanted the text you sent with the one I received.”
“It is the only thing that makes sense. They knew the location in the park, and when I would be there. The only place I ever mentioned that was in the message. They altered it in a way that would eliminate me, then sent killers to deal with you in the aftermath.”
Slaton weighed it. “Something about that still doesn’t seem right. To begin, I would never have come based on your original message. You had no way of knowing it, but I wouldn’t have left my family alone for the sake of a stranger, no matter how desperate you sounded. And whoever lured me to Vienna had an even bigger bridge to cross. They not only had to make sure I came—they had to give me a good enough reason to kill a stranger.”
“Which is why they abducted your family.”
“Apparently. But even if that’s plausible, it’s harder to understand how quickly and efficiently everything materialized. You sent your message on Monday. Within twenty-four hours my family was missing and I was on my way here.”
Mordechai sank into the biggest chair in the living area, an over-upholstered recliner that seemed to swallow his slight frame. “Yes, I see what you mean. That wouldn’t be easy.”
“Not at all.”
Slaton noticed Mordechai looking at him with more than a trace of suspicion. “What?” he asked.
“I can’t help but wonder … what were your intentions when you left for Vienna?”
“You mean was I really going to kill you?”
Mordechai nodded.
“No. But as I told you earlier, it was nothing altruistic. The kind of people who concoct blackmail schemes like this … they’re not the sort who keep bargains. I came to Vienna looking for answers. I got the first one when I realized I was being followed. From there, it was a matter of making things break my way.”
“And have they?”
“I’ve made progress. But my wife and son still aren’t safe.”
Mordechai rose from the chair and began wandering the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator door, found it empty. “What comes next?” he asked.
“Are you any good with phones?”
“What do you mean?”
Slaton pulled out his phone and called up the photo he’d taken of the dead man’s call log. “Each of the men I killed in the park had a phone. I was able to unlock one—I think it was the guy who was in charge.” Slaton showed Mordechai the screen. “I’m pretty sure these were calls he made to his cohorts’ burners. Can you do anything with that?”
“You didn’t keep the phone?”
It hit Slaton hard—Mordechai was right. He should have kept the handset. At the time he’d been concerned about the phone being tracked. But he could have turned it off, removed the battery. He didn’t like mistakes, and this was a clear one. Had he been task saturated? Worried about losing sight of Mordechai across the estuary? No, he decided. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, the prospect of losing Christine and Davy was like nothing he’d ever faced. It was deep and personal. And it had put him off his game.
“This is all I’ve got,” Slaton said, trying to hold back his irritation. “Can you do anything with it?”
Mordechai looked at the numbers like they were random draws to a lottery. “With Mossad’s resources, I might have. I could have given you something geographic—what relays got used, some triangulation. I might even have been able to figure out where they were purchased, when they were activated.”
“And without Mossad?”
The scientist shrugged. “I don’t have the assets.”
Slaton heaved a sigh. He felt fatigue weighing down. Not only his limbs, but his mind. The bed in the next room called. He had no idea if he would be able to sleep. But he knew it was important to try.
THIRTY
Albatross battered her way through solid swells, plowing obediently eastward under the high midday sun. From the protection of the wheelhouse, Boutros steered a course ten degrees north of his desired track. Conditions had degraded since leaving the protection of the coastline, and with a northerly wind rising, he thought it best to square the boat into the seas.
Explosions of spray flew over the gunnels, more from the windward port side, and water slapped the wheelhouse in rhythmic sheets. He eased the thrott
le back a second time, hoping things wouldn’t get worse.
He heard footfalls and turned to see Rafiq.
“Do you need a break?” he asked.
“No,” Boutros replied. “Another hour, then someone can take the watch.”
“It will have to be me.”
Boutros looked at him inquisitively.
“Sami and Saleem are both in their bunks—seasick.”
“At least they were able to eat before it overtook them. We must all keep our strength.” Their first meal on board Albatross had been rice with spicy chicken. Sami had prepared it, and everyone agreed it was far better than yesterday’s fish soup.
“The seas have risen, and it may get worse. The good news is that the body acclimates. Make sure they take water to avoid dehydration. A day, maybe two, and they’ll be used to the seas.”
Rafiq nodded compliantly.
“And you?” Boutros asked. “Are you feeling any … effects?”
In truth, Rafiq didn’t look well. He appeared pallid, and was leaning against the console.
“I puked once and feel a little dizzy … but it is only the sea.”
“Yes, I’m sure you are right.”
Boutros was confident his men were suffering from no more than mal de mer. All the same, he knew what his deputy was thinking.
They had discussed it in the premission planning. Of the four men going to sea, three had never been on anything larger than a rowboat. Seasickness was to be expected. Yet they’d also had a discussion with the caliphate’s chief and, in fact, only remaining physician. He had gone over the primary symptoms of radiation sickness—nausea, vomiting, headache, dizziness, weakness—all of which were shared with motion sickness. The material belowdecks—half of what would eventually be utilized—was well contained inside a steel tube. This, the doctor had explained, offered a reasonable amount of shielding, and so the risk of exposure was minimal. That would change during the next stage of the operation. Their first and only stop necessitated the direct handling of material. After that, more serious symptoms were certain: hair loss, stomach maladies, ocular bleeding. For at least one of his team—in all likelihood, Sami—this fate was inevitable.
