by Ward Larsen
Most obvious was the inverse of the hide’s main advantage—he was very close to the house. That could backfire in any number of ways. There was a greater chance he might be seen or heard—and if that happened, there was no excuse for his presence that wasn’t nefarious. He was operating on the assumption that the El-Masris didn’t have a dog. He’d seen no evidence of it in the backyard—no chew toys strewn about, no freshly dug holes, no telltale brown piles. That put the odds in his favor, but Slaton never took it as a sure thing—not since he’d seen a deftly planned Mossad mission ruined by one thoroughly unnerved Pomeranian.
Another shortcoming was that he didn’t have a view of the entire home. The north-facing wall and driveway were not visible from where he stood. A few steps toward the garbage can solved the problem, but it also highlighted him in the spray of a neighbor’s floodlight.
Voices again from inside. A woman, motherly and directive. A muffled male response, grudging teen acquiescence. Tenors that were universal across languages.
This gave Slaton pause.
The true reason he’d arrived early had nothing to do with getting a better look at the house or a feel for the neighborhood. That was all established, having been set this afternoon by his earlier survey. What Slaton had wanted to mitigate was the one great complication. He was desperate to find his family, which meant pressing El-Masri for information—if the Egyptian didn’t know where Christine and Davy were, he certainly knew who was responsible for their disappearance.
The problem: El-Masri had a family of his own. Slaton was determined not to involve them. Determined to defeat his enemies without becoming like them. The driveway, he’d decided, was his best hope.
He had checked the garage when he’d arrived, peering inside through a side window that was crusted with grime and the residue of a hard winter. In the scant light he saw the silhouette of the BMW that had been in the driveway earlier. There wasn’t room for a second vehicle, which meant El-Masri would park outside—based on existing tire scrub marks, almost certainly on the driveway offshoot between the niche where he now stood and the back door. That small concrete pad, at the top of the L-shaped drive, became Slaton’s area of tactical operation. The tiny battlefield where he would do what had to be done.
He envisioned intercepting El-Masri in the awkward moment when he climbed out of his car. The preferred option was to shove him back inside, occupy the back seat, and force him to drive to one of three quiet spots he’d already identified: the selection of which would be based on traffic and El-Masri’s level of compliance. Slaton allowed five minutes for travel, ten more to get what he needed from the Egyptian by any means necessary. At that point Slaton’s plan reached its end. He’d thought through a few contingencies, but without knowing what information El-Masri could provide, there was no point in taking it further.
An exterior light on the house suddenly snapped on, illuminating the rear driveway with the brilliance of a miniature sun. The back door opened and Slaton saw a young man appear. He was seventeen, plus or minus a year. Rail thin, he had a mop of black hair and was carrying a white plastic bag.
A trash bag.
Slaton took a knee behind the trash can. It was a bulky plastic item, four feet tall and two feet square, wheels and a handle on the backside. He heard light footsteps approach. Felt the can jostle once. Thankfully, the lid pivoted from the front on the hinges above Slaton’s head—a detail he’d already noted that had just gone critical.
The big container rattled against his left shoulder. Something wet and granular slopped over the back, peppering his face and hair. By the smell, spent coffee grounds. The lid fell back into place. Slaton heard the boy mutter something in Arabic, an expletive he was sure—Mossad assassins had heard them all.
The footsteps receded. The door to the house opened again, then banged shut. The driveway light went out. Slaton listened closely, waiting for the distinctive clunk of a deadbolt tumbling into place. He never heard it, which wasn’t surprising. Austria, after all, was a very safe country. Far more so than Egypt.
Slaton ventured a look. Everything was as it had been a minute earlier. The only difference—one more bag of kitchen waste in the garbage can. He drew in a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and checked the time.
12:21 a.m.
He watched.
He waited.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Slaton found himself thinking about the teenager. What if he came outside again?
From an operator’s point of view, the boy was at an awkward age. If faced with an intruder, there was no telling how he would react. Would he bolt back inside the house? Or might he have a yellow belt in some martial art and try to be brave? There was a reason wars were fought by young men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three. That was when they were fearless. Indestructible. The specific age at which that myth took hold varied, but this kid was definitely in the window.
I’ll have to be careful, Slaton thought. I should—
His musings were interrupted by headlights sweeping across the side fence. He heard the purr of a big engine, tires squealing around a turn.
Right on schedule, a silver Audi coasted smoothly to a stop. Behind the wheel Slaton saw the profile of a dark-haired man wearing glasses. A face he had seen before on the IAEA leadership web page—researched that afternoon.
Tarek El-Masri. His best hope to find his family.
He edged closer to the entrance of the tiny passageway. Slaton was still in shadows, less than ten feet from the driver’s-side door.
He planned his path carefully—around the right side of the garbage can, then left to reach the driver’s door from the rear quarter. He would surprise El-Masri early, as his left leg swung out over the rocker panel. His cue would be the door opening. Slaton was in place, ready to move, yet the Egyptian seemed to hesitate.
Slaton was confident he hadn’t been seen. Then he noticed a faint glow of light on El-Masri’s face. He was checking his phone. A perfectly normal behavior. He made a mental note. The phone would have to be secured.
He kept waiting.
A few more seconds.
Then everything went to hell.
* * *
A second set of lights strobed across the side fence. Slaton saw a dark van rush up the driveway, the engine thundering as it careened wildly. It skidded to a stop in a perfect blocking position.
El-Masri’s Audi was trapped.
Slaton watched two men scramble from the van’s front doors. Three more burst from a sliding side door.
El-Masri saw it too. With surprising agility, he leapt from his car and bolted for the back door, shouting in Arabic as he went. He disappeared inside.
Slaton had his Glock in hand, but was frozen by the fast-moving situation.
The first two men rushed the back door in pursuit of El-Masri. Each was carrying what looked like a Russian Vityaz-SN 9mm, distinctive with its pistol grip and thirty-round box magazine. None had suppressors. The three who’d bailed out the side door disappeared toward the front of the house. As far as Slaton could see, no one remained in the van—the kind of assumption one never relied upon.
He tried to make sense of it. Who were these men? The way they moved and handled their weapons told Slaton they were trained. The thickness in their torsos suggested body armor. He wondered if it could be some kind of police raid, a SWAT team here to apprehend El-Masri. Perhaps he and Mordechai weren’t the only ones to have learned that a senior IAEA inspector was skimming uranium.
But that theory felt wrong. The van was beaten and worn—either freshly stolen or bought on the fly. A throwaway vehicle. That wasn’t how special tactics teams operated. Then he considered the lack of any verbal warnings—nobody was shouting “Police!” or ordering El-Masri to surrender. Of the men near the back door, one wore night optics and a black knit beanie, so his face was largely obscured. Yet the other Slaton saw clearly in a spill of light. He was definitely Asian.
One of them spoke in a hushed voice. Chines
e, Slaton thought. Possibly Korean. Neither case made sense. It all coursed through his head in a flash, and two truths crystallized. Tarek El-Masri, the key to finding his family, was inside the house.
And these men had come to kill him.
* * *
The two Asians paused at the back door. El-Masri had burst through moments ago, confirming that his son hadn’t locked it. Yet El-Masri almost certainly had. Slaton watched an exchange of hand signals between the men, and one of them leveled his weapon while the other positioned to kick in the door.
To Slaton’s eye, the door looked solid.
He moved quickly, silently, using the Audi for cover. He heard a distant crash—the front door giving way—and shouting from inside the house. The first kick on the back door failed, the man stumbling back. The second succeeded and the door slammed back on its hinges. In that moment, Slaton recognized his chance: both men had their undivided attention on the room they were clearing.
It is Hollywood fantasy that elite operators invariably shoot off-handed, or on a dead run from fifty yards. In reality, they never choose to engage while hanging upside down or in mid-leap between buildings. Not when more effective methods are available. Not when lives are on the line. What sets the best apart is far more mundane: they do the simple things well.
Very, very well.
Magazines are exchanged with incomprehensible speed. Recoil is little more than an ordinary rhythm. Clearing jammed weapons falls to second nature. From a hundred yards, with most weapons, a first-tier operator will rarely miss. Yet they prefer to be at ten, because that’s where they’ve fired a million practice rounds. It is the ground they own.
Slaton engaged with precisely that mindset. He used the Audi as both cover and a stable platform. Situated seven yards behind his intended targets, and with the Glock in a comfortable two-handed grip, he addressed the figure in front who was advancing through the back door with his Vityaz sweeping left and right. Adjusting his aim-point to account for the body armor, he sent two rounds. The first struck his target in the neck, the second at the base of his skull. He dropped like a shotgunned pheasant.
His partner reacted quickly to Slaton’s unsuppressed shots, spinning to locate some previously unknown threat.
Much to his detriment, he found it.
Slaton put him down instantly, two rounds grouped marginally beneath his night optic.
It was as simple as it was ruthless.
But then, there was no silver medal in a gunfight.
Slaton ran toward a door hanging on broken hinges, the Glock leading the way. He glanced at the two men as he passed, verifying there was no life in either. The sound of his shots would have registered with the front-door element. They might or might not realize they hadn’t come from a Vityaz. Either way, they would know something wasn’t going to plan.
As if to confirm the point, Slaton heard a muted burst of radio chatter. He looked more closely. Both men were wearing earpieces and tactical mics. Their lack of response would confirm something had gone wrong.
How many am I facing? That became the critical question. He had seen three men bail out of the van and move to the front door. Could there still be anyone in the van? Might there be a second vehicle, perhaps parked along the street? Slaton had seen and heard only the van, so the odds were good he was facing manageable numbers. But that was all he had—decent odds. If this were a Mossad mission, gambling for the good of Israel, Slaton might have pulled back to assess the tactical situation.
As it was—he had no choice. He had to interrogate El-Masri.
He retrieved a Vityaz from one of the dead men. It wasn’t a high-end weapon, but reliable enough. The high rate of fire and big magazine gave it a brute-force edge over the Glock. Slaton checked the box mag, found it full. The fire selector above the trigger was set to “ОД”, the semiautomatic setting—some ancient vestige of his training kicking in when he needed it.
He secured the Glock in his rear waistband and edged toward the main room. Stepping past the breached door, he entered the kitchen, clearing every space as he went. His senses were on high alert, processing every sound and sight and smell. He logged a heavy table that could be upended for cover. A large kitchen knife in the drying rack near the sink.
A sudden torrent of shouting broke the silence. It came from upstairs, cascading, Slaton knew, down the narrow stairwell in the main room—five steps ahead, then a ninety-degree turn to his left. Next came a crash, like a piece of furniture being overturned. Something big and weighty, probably in the northern front bedroom. As he neared the main living area, Slaton was thankful to have the precise layout of the house in his head.
With that diagram in mind, he placed himself in his adversary’s position for his next assessment: he allowed a fifty-fifty chance that one man had been stationed at the nearby front door. That put either two or three on the second floor. Everyone would have heard the shots downstairs. And they would know by now their rear element wasn’t responding on the radio.
Slaton neared the threshold that connected to the main room. He peered carefully around the corner, the Vityaz ready, and saw the big street-facing window. The front door had caved and was flat on the living room carpet. The room itself was clear. No El-Masri. No wife or son. No hostiles. There was also no guard outside—at least, not in his field of view.
Another crash and a scream from upstairs. Then, sickeningly, the report of tightly spaced shots. Three groups of three echoing through the house. Slaton looked up the staircase, fearing the worst. He saw a shadow shift on the second-floor ceiling. Otherwise, nothing out of the ordinary.
Unless they were fools, they would have positioned one man there, covering the top landing. Slaton would have placed him to the right, where the wall gave solid cover. A position that commanded the top of the staircase.
He, however, owned the bottom.
It was a standoff of sorts. The men upstairs were trapped, facing a force of indeterminate size. Slaton was frozen below. He knew the numbers, but time wasn’t on his side. Shots had been fired, and he needed El-Masri.
Needed him alive.
He looked pensively at the staircase. To go up was to die. He racked his brain for another way to reach the second floor. He considered the windows outside, the shape of the roof. He weighed how the physical situation had altered from the blueprint in his head. Slaton realized there might be one chance.
He kicked over a floor lamp, sending it tumbling into the main room. An attention-getter.
He quickly reversed into the kitchen. On the way to the door he noticed a stainless steel trash can. He grabbed it and set it on the slab outside the back door. He heaved the damaged door shut. It no longer seated properly in its frame, but he was able to wedge it into place. Which actually was ideal. He leaned the metal trash can against the outside of the door at a thirty-degree angle. If anyone pushed through, instant alarm.
Slaton ran flat out to the side of the house.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Slaton cleared the van first, found no one inside. He saw discarded clothing, a few water bottles, two ammo boxes—nothing that altered his perception of the situation. With a better angle, he looked out front and saw no suspicious vehicles in the street. His assumptions were holding. A team of five professionals had come to engage a family of three.
From El-Masri’s point of view, hopeless numbers. As far as Slaton was concerned, however, the situation was improving: two down, three to go.
He saw a key with a fob dangling from the van’s ignition. He removed it and put it in his pocket. A mistake on their part. But then, they hadn’t been expecting any real opposition. They’d expected one stunned physicist, his wife, and a teenage son. He could hear the briefing now: Get in, get out. One easy night.
The Vityaz had a simple strap, and Slaton shifted the weapon behind his shoulder. He opened the passenger-side door of the van and laddered upward, stepping sequentially onto the running board, the dash, and finally the seat back. He hauled himself on
to the roof of the van.
From there his plan evolved.
The driveway was close to the house, and he looked across at the nearest section of roof: four feet above the top of the van, the same horizontal gap. The roof was sharply pitched, but near the edge he saw a circular vent—a bathroom, he knew, lay directly below. The vent looked solid. A decent handhold.
What could go wrong?
From the far side of the van’s roof, Slaton accelerated as best he could in two giant strides. He launched himself through the air at the rows of shingles, one hand reaching for the vent. He hit hard, his hips banging painfully on the edge, his legs dangling in midair. He reached the vent with his fingertips, but his first attempt to grasp it failed. With no purchase from below, he tried to stabilize himself, one elbow on the lip of the roof, the other hand clinging to the overhang. He tried to writhe higher and gained a few inches, enough to touch the vent. Taking a better grip on the roof’s edge, he steadied himself momentarily before heaving upward. This time he got a handful of the vent—a solid cast-iron pipe. He worked himself upward, clambered over the edge, and got silently to his feet.
Slaton wasted no time, heading straight to the northern window. He ran in a crouch, trying for soft footfalls on the weathered shingles. His eyes never stopped moving—the small front yard, the street beyond, the van behind him. There had been no new sounds, and he feared he was too late—the tightly grouped shots weighed ominously.
Move faster!
He shouldered to the outer wall next to a four-pane window. The lace curtains were thankfully drawn open—as they’d been all day. Slaton readied the Vityaz. He knew that the window fronted the master bedroom. There would be a doorway straight ahead, a bed to the left. He carefully leaned toward the nearest pane of glass.
What he saw caused his heart to sink.
There were three bodies on the floor. All lay still, and each was centered in a crimson pool. El-Masri and the boy he recognized immediately. The other was a middle-aged woman of Middle Eastern extraction.
