by Ward Larsen
The pews were mostly empty, and he edged toward the nearest and took a seat. Slaton closed his eyes and made his peace as best he could. Then, perhaps predictably, he asked for the thing he needed most. He didn’t bother consigning to the usual, and rarely kept, bargain: Make this happen, and I’ll commit to a life of goodness and devotion. No, he decided. God had heard that one before. He simply asked for help. It was the best he could do in that moment.
He lifted himself from the wooden pew and began walking toward the arched entryway. He saw a donation box and reached into his pocket. He’d no sooner placed a twenty-euro note in the box when a figure appeared at the grand threshold.
Above a simple dress he saw a warm smile.
“I’m sorry,” Slaton said in English, stepping back to let the woman pass.
“Thank you,” she responded with a thick Bavarian accent, then added engagingly, “I am Sister Magda. I hope you have found what you need today.”
“My name is David,” he found himself saying. “And I hope so too. Your church is beautiful.”
Again the smile. “We try to do it justice, but time takes its toll.”
Slaton looked over his shoulder. “The window casings along the east wall … were they repaired after the war?”
She looked at him curiously, then said, “I only know because I am the unofficial historian, but yes, that wing was damaged in the air raids.”
Slaton led her to one of the windows. He pointed to a joint of cracking plaster beneath a mosaic of stained glass. “Whoever mounted the replacement frames used a mortar mix that was too wet. It wouldn’t be hard to fix.” He went on for two minutes about the specifics of the repair.
“You are a mason,” she remarked at the end.
“In the best of times.”
“And in the others?”
Slaton smiled for the first time in days. “I try to get by.”
“That is all any of us can do, my son.”
“I don’t want to overstep,” he said hesitantly, “but I’m having some trouble at the moment. I’ve been unable to reach my wife and son. For the last few days I’ve been traveling and … would you have a computer I could use for a few minutes?”
She answered with an expression that was benevolence itself.
* * *
Slaton was minutes later installed in a tiny church office. The computer was smaller than the one he’d seen in the gun shop, yet every bit as aged, and its low-resolution screen made every image appear like an old photograph. But it worked perfectly well, credit due perhaps to the oversight of Christ on the cross, nailed to the wall above, hovering over every keystroke. As the bells in the nearby tower struck noon, Slaton drew a deep breath and plugged in the flash drive he’d found beneath a half-eaten tuna sandwich.
The first surprise was that the drive’s contents were completely unprotected.
Could it possibly be so easy? he wondered.
Slaton clicked to view the files. The old machine made him wait for what seemed an eternity.
He couldn’t recall ever feeling so helpless. His wife and son were out there somewhere. If Christine truly was on the run, as Mordechai had suggested, she would be looking for him as ardently as he was looking for her. It seemed a paradox of the modern world. Communications tracking, facial recognition, cameras on every corner. By striving so valiantly to stay off the grid, the era of connectivity had isolated them from one another. In essence, his single-link plan for staying in touch had been beaten by the most devastating shortcoming—Mordechai had inserted himself between them. And when he did, Slaton had lost control.
But now? he wondered. Have others become involved? Given what he’d seen in Vienna, it couldn’t be ruled out.
As the tiny wheel spun, Slaton whispered the question he’d been asking for days. On Sirius. In a park in Vienna. In a church pew only minutes earlier. A question, he feared, that might never be answered.
“Where are you, Christine?”
FIFTY-ONE
His wife was, at that moment, knee-deep in the kiddie pool at a resort in the Balearic Islands. Davy was belly-down in front of her, studying the bottom of the pool through a cheap mask. His head popped up for a breath, then immersed again.
The resort was high-end, forty-two acres of understated comfort and tranquil recreation. There were waiters as thick as shorebirds, a concierge in every wing. The room had cost a pretty penny, but she’d made the selection thoughtfully. Not because she yearned to be pampered, but because when an assassin’s wife went to ground she would be expected to choose something more off-track and rustic. That was what Christine told herself, and it might have been true. Hiding in luxurious plain sight.
“No fish in here!” Davy complained after popping up again. The mask was fixed crookedly on his face and half full of water, his white-blond hair matted to the top. She reached down and helped him straighten things out. She’d earlier taken him to the beach where a rocky outcropping had been teeming with fish.
“We’ll go to the beach again later,” she said, fearing it was a promise she might not keep.
“I’m hungry,” he said. His toddler’s metabolism had quickly adjusted to the resort’s all-inclusive dining schedule.
“We’ll eat again soon.”
Davy’s face went back in the water. She kept only half an eye on him. He could swim as well as he could walk, a consequence of having spent most of his nearly three years on a boat cruising the world’s oceans. The balance of her attention went to the lounges and bar areas around them. She saw no one paying them too much attention, no faces that looked familiar. She was struck by the humor of that—there probably wasn’t a familiar face within a hundred miles.
She sighed, reached into her pool bag, and pulled out her recently purchased burner phone. It was turned off now, as it had been for three days. She spun the blank screen in her hand, suspicious as ever. Her conundrum hadn’t changed—and how would it ever? If she turned the phone on, she suspected there would be a message. But who would it be from?
Christine set the phone on her lounge chair. I never would have guessed it’s harder to come out of hiding than go into it.
She’d never hesitated when she received David’s first message. Sitting in Sirius’ cabin in Gibraltar, a box of cereal between her and Davy, his instructions had arrived like a lightning strike on the emergency phone they carried whenever they were apart: Get clear now!
It wasn’t their prearranged warning code, but the message couldn’t have been more clear. She’d quickly set sail, taking Sirius into the bay. There she waited for David, only to have their standing plan altered by a second message: Barcelona ASAP. Ditch phone and buy new burner. Also included was a new contact number.
Her thoughts whipsawing, Christine had collected their prepacked emergency bag, retrieved the backup passports for her and Davy, and pocketed a wad of cash. Within minutes, the two of them had abandoned Sirius and were in the dinghy headed for shore. The phone went to the bottom of Gibraltar Bay. Soon after that, she had her arm around her son in the back seat of an Uber heading toward the train station. Destination: Barcelona. In her pocket was a fresh phone, its number already sent to the new contact she’d been given.
Then, for a time, there had been nothing. Not until later that day when, wandering the heart of Catalonia with a two-year-old in tow, the third message had changed everything. Something about the wording seemed wrong, a verbal construction David wouldn’t use. That caused her to reconsider the other messages. Like a wave crashing down, she realized in a terrible moment that the instructions hadn’t come from David at all. Some unknown intermediary had inserted themselves into the chain. At first she didn’t know what to make of it. Had something happened to David? Why would anyone try to manipulate her in such a way? In the end, she decided there was no good in any of it. Whatever strings were being pulled, she had to sever them. She turned the phone off.
From the shadows of the train station, she’d taken a cab to Puerto de Barcelona. After a qu
ick study of the ferry schedule, she and Davy hustled onto the next available departure—Mallorca, Spain. A mid-Mediterranean playground. Precisely the kind of place people went to leave behind their problems.
So here they were, three days later. Searching for a way back. She guessed any call she made to David’s phone might be tracked. Yesterday, in a blaze of inspiration, she’d borrowed a phone from a concierge to call the marina where Sirius was docked—or at least had been before Christine had left her on the Bay of Gibraltar. Without saying who she was, she’d convinced a young woman at the desk to deliver a message. Christine soon got a callback from their next-door neighbor—the Scotsman in slip 96.
He explained that David had been searching for her.
He came back to the slip that morning and seemed surprised Sirius was gone. He borrowed my launch, then came back with your boat an hour later. Said it was all a big misunderstanding.
Christine asked if her husband had said where he was going, and the Scotsman seemed perplexed. He told me the three of you were heading to Spain for some sightseeing …
After thanking the man for watching over their boat, she’d ended the call quickly, wanting to avoid any more lies. Only then did she take the time to deconstruct what he’d told her: sightseeing, Spain, a big misunderstanding. Could there be some message hidden in those words? No, she decided. They were but the standard fabrications of a practiced spy. And another dead end.
She wondered how long it would go on.
Davy kept up his splashing. Christine kept scanning.
She saw a face she recognized, a middle-aged man seated at the tiki bar—sunglasses, watchful gaze, drinking what looked like water. She’d already pegged him as hotel security. It was the kind of thing she would never have noticed a few years back. She knew they should have stayed in their room. David would have insisted on it. She’d paid for two nights, at which point her plan was to move to a different resort on the island.
Christine was glad for David’s foresight—he’d included a credit card with her ID. Unfortunately, she had no idea what its limit was or if the bill would magically be paid. It was a system of household finances few couples could imagine. She supposed the next hotel, if it came to that, ought to be something more economical. It struck her that at some point in recent years money had lost its meaning. She and David kept a handful of accounts across the world, but accessed them rarely. They weren’t rich by any means, but along with a bit of income here and there from David’s masonry jobs, and her dabbling as a physician, they could cruise more or less indefinitely.
“Playground?” Davy said. He’d popped up again and was pointing to a plastic pirate ship where a half-dozen kids were swarming. For a boy who spent most of his life at sea with his parents, it was a rare chance for socialization.
“Yeah, let’s go,” she said.
She got her son out of the pool, dried him off with a plush resort towel. “But first we’ll need some more sunscreen.” Christine pulled out a tube of high-SPF lotion, squeezed a blob into her hand, and began working it over her son’s shoulders. When she was done, she finger-combed his hair back. “You need a haircut, mister.”
“You told Daddy he needed one.”
“Yeah, I did,” she replied, remembering saying as much last week as they’d all sat eating pizza at a shoreside restaurant.
As she was putting away the sunscreen, Davy snatched up the phone on the cushioned lounger. “Let’s call Daddy!” he said.
“Sorry, kiddo—can’t right now. But we’ll see him soon.”
She wrapped him in the towel, and a rib tickle got a grunt of laughter. So distracted, it was in the next moment that Christine made her only real mistake of the week.
She took the phone back from her son, not realizing that he’d done what children often did—he’d pressed the button. She dropped the handset into the side pocket of her beach bag having no idea it had been turned on. Nor did she see the days-old message that flashed to the screen and remained for two minutes before the sleep settings removed it.
STAY WHERE YOU ARE. I’M COMING FOR YOU.
FIFTY-TWO
As the contents of the memory stick flashed to the screen beneath Jesus, Slaton recalled the words of a renowned Mossad hacker who’d once given him a primer on cyber tactics. The first rule when combing through electronic data: the more innocuous the subject line of a file, the more important the information tended to be. Show me a message about a cancelled paper clip order, Mossad’s chief of cyber operations had said, and I’ll show you the secrets of Iran’s nuclear program.
It was time to put that theory to the test. Slaton saw a dozen options and opened the first, a three-page text document. Two lines in, he knew what he was looking at:
To whom it may concern,
What follows is my confession …
Having spent years as a Mossad operative, Slaton had seen such letters before. They were the kind of thing deeply compromised individuals placed quietly in the hands of trusted lawyers or safe-deposit boxes. This was the timeless “If anything should happen to me” letter.
Slaton knew that as a method of forestalling retribution from coconspirators, such letters were of limited effectiveness. In El-Masri’s case, clearly, the strategy hadn’t worked. All the same, they often proved a gold mine for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, exposing all manner of nefarious activities to be, depending on the mission statement, either prosecuted or exploited.
Slaton wasn’t sure how he would use the material.
But what he saw was astonishing.
In three pages El-Masri laid out the details of the scheme, an eighteen-month-long conspiracy in which highly enriched uranium had been skimmed during five IAEA site visits. He gave detailed records of the amount of material diverted, including how it had been isolated and concealed for shipping.
Slaton was no expert in the transport of radioactive material, yet he saw right away the hallmarks of an effective covert operation. An overly complex regulatory system, a ponderous bureaucracy, countless government agencies involved. There were inspectors from a dozen countries, language barriers, outdated oversight methods. He’d seen many such schemes before. He’d designed his share. The most successful mirrored this one, conceived and executed by high-level insiders. With a bit of planning and the right support, virtually any organization could be corrupted by the person who oversaw its day-to-day operations.
The greatest remaining mystery—that of El-Masri’s motive for his crimes—was answered on the final page. The Egyptian had been diagnosed with leukemia two years earlier. He’d undergone chemo and experimental treatments that kept the disease at bay for a time. Then a battery of tests brought the worst possible news: the cancer was winning. In the face of insistent queries by El-Masri, his oncologist admitted that yes, the variant of cancer involved could well be the result of long-term, low-dose radiation exposure. I know you’ve taken precautions over the years, the doctor had written in an email that was copied into the letter, yet this type of cancer does have a higher level of occurrence among those working in your field. Those words had clearly had an effect on the physicist—the dreadful irony that his life’s work was destined to destroy him in the end.
Slaton considered the timing of the diagnosis, relating it to Mordechai’s estimate of when the thieving of HEU had begun—it was roughly the same eighteen-month period. If nothing more, the letter explained the scheme’s genesis.
As it turned out, El-Masri was not a man to rely on broad strokes. After the overview, Slaton found himself combing through IAEA spreadsheets and internal communications that documented every aspect of the thefts, as well as copies of El-Masri’s personal bank and investment statements. Completing the picture were threatening emails from at least three attorneys implying that in recent years the deputy director had fallen deeply into debt from speculative investments and, perhaps reading between the lines, a bit of gambling. For the last sixteen months, however, his accounts had been shored by large cash in
fluxes from banks in China and Singapore. He’d paid off substantial debts, and even set aside a nest egg in a nameless offshore account—a limited liability corporation admittedly structured for the benefit of his family. This, El-Masri pleaded at the end, would hopefully remain unchallenged in exchange for his post-mortem candor.
Slaton was about to open the final file when muted steps sounded in the hallway outside. The room was constraining: there was one door, no windows, and little room in which to maneuver. Sister Magda had told him the space doubled as a bomb shelter during the war, and he saw no reason to doubt it. The rough-hewn walls were probably half a meter thick, and the ceiling was reinforced by arches on all four sides.
The footsteps receded, followed by a conversation in the distance. Befitting a house of worship, voices steeped in warmth and compassion.
Slaton went back to the screen.
The most useful find in El-Masri’s files came at the end. Slaton read the final document breathlessly, for this was the one that gave him direction. The one that could put him on the offensive. El-Masri named his primary conspirator, a man named Park. He was North Korean, and apparently a high-ranking officer in the SSD. For Slaton this was a home run. It meshed perfectly with what he’d seen last night: men who could easily have been Korean. The involvement of a rogue nation seemed almost predestined.
Energized, he went back to the beginning and read the entire package a second time. For nearly an hour he pored over documents, committing details to memory. Park Hai-joon he gave particular attention. El-Masri admitted to having no direct evidence of his meetings with Park. Every contact had been in person, arranged clandestinely, and El-Masri was always searched for wires or recording devices. It meant there were no emails or recorded conversations to tie North Korea to the pilfering of highly enriched uranium. Only the despondent confession of a dying man.
