Doha 12

by Lance Charnes

  Jake didn’t have to look for the little blue plus sign to know what it said. The huge smile that spread from Rinnah’s lips to her eyes told him all he needed to know. “You’re…”

  “Yes! We’re going to have another baby!” She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him again, hard.

  He held her tight against him, rocked them both. Another baby! They’d talked about it since Eve was a toddler, and now it had finally happened. A brother (he hoped) or sister for Eve, the second child they’d always wanted.

  Another baby. They hadn’t been trying to get pregnant, but they hadn’t been not trying. As each year passed, it seemed ever less a possibility, that they’d had their chance. But now…

  Another baby? They were just getting by now. Clothes and diapers and baby food. The pediatrician on speed dial. Shots, colic, earaches. Even with Rinnah’s job at the hospital, it would cost a fortune.

  She pulled back, brushed hair off his forehead. “You are happy?”

  “Can’t you tell? Yeah, I’m, jeez, this is great.” He felt the way he had when that mortar round had gone off a few yards behind him—dazed, deaf, happy to be alive, unsure what just happened. “How long have you known?”

  “For certain? Ten minutes maybe. I’m a few days late, I thought I should check.” She laughed, scrunched her nose. “I’m numb a little, I think I don’t believe it yet.”

  Jake squeezed her to him again. “God, I love you,” he murmured.

  “Ani ohevet otkha.”

  They’d make it work. He didn’t have a choice, now; he’d have to take his uncle’s offer. It couldn’t be too bad, could it? Maybe this time he really could help people.

  Rinnah’s body flowed against his. Her heat, the beat of her heart, her breath on his cheek, the smell of her hair enveloped him. He wanted to press this moment into his mental scrapbook so he could hold onto it forever, as he had with all those other moments with her.

  But when he closed his eyes, he felt as if he’d just stepped off the roof of a skyscraper.

  ELEVEN: Modena, Italy, 6 November

  Kassim and Alayan turned a corner off the Via Castellaro into the Piazza Grande and jerked to a stop simultaneously. Alayan let out a low whistle. “Spectacular.”

  A vast thunderhead of a building thoroughly dominated the piazza. Modena’s Duomo was not so much taller than the ocher stone buildings surrounding it, but the cathedral dared everyone to look at anything else. Marble blocks in hundreds of shades of gray made up its arches and gables and turrets, arctic white to dove gray to the near-blush of a china-doll face. From a nearby corner loomed the massive hundred-meter-tall campanile, the Ghirlandina, punctured at steady intervals by arched and columned windows.

  The Christians seemed to have a knack for the grand gesture, Kassim mused. He’d seen the Ayasofya in Istanbul—a former Christian basilica—the Imām Ridhā in Mashhad, the Jama Masjid in Delhi. They were close to the same idea. But so many mosques were low and sprawling—practical, perhaps, but hardly the embodiment of Allah’s work on Earth. Not like Cologne’s cathedral, or St. Paul’s or Winchester in England, or the Duomo in Milan.

  “Kassim? Are you still here?”

  He broke out of his thoughts and smiled at his friend. “Sorry. I was just thinking. How does a little market town like this end up with something like that?”

  “They’re everywhere in Italy,” Alayan said. “Let’s look closer.”

  They drifted clockwise around the cathedral, pausing to peer at the bas reliefs of saints and biblical scenes, the stone lions and elaborate Corinthian capitals. “Thank you for letting the men take the day off,” Kassim said. “We miss so many of the holidays. At least we can celebrate Eid this year.”

  Alayan arched his eyebrows. “I didn’t think I had a choice. You were pretty insistent. I’ve never known you to be so worked up over a religious festival.”

  “It’s not about the festival.”

  “I know. Maybe you’ll tell me what it’s really about.”

  Kassim paused to light a cigarette and measure Alayan’s mood. Though his face was lighthearted, his eyes were weary, and the fatigue showed in his voice from time to time. Little wonder. Five days in Rotterdam, eight in Hamburg for the German woman Grusst, then those eleven endless days in Paris before they’d finally caught Dujardin in the open. After that, they’d made Jules Krosner disappear from Marseilles after seven eighteen-hour days of surveillance. The gas explosion that killed Elia Sabatello in Milan had taken another seven days to engineer. The only rest any of them had had was on the train between cities.

  “You’re driving the men hard. We’ve been at it nonstop. They’re tired, and so are you.”

  “That’s nothing new.” Alayan shrugged. “We always work hard in the field.”

  “But not like this. We need to be careful, Fadi. Careful takes time. Mossad took twenty years to finish with Black September, remember? It’s not like we’re on a deadline or schedule.”

  Alayan paced to the front of the church, pointed up. “Look at that rose window.”

  Kassim’s scalp prickled, not from the chill. “We’re not, are we?” No answer. “Fadi?”

  “They call this Romanesque. It came before Gothic, very straight, plain forms, but look how they go together.”

  Alarms pulsed in the back of Kassim’s brain. “Answer me!”

  “Speed makes us think harder. The gas explosion in Milan, that just came up, but it worked, didn’t it?”

  “That’s not the point. We’re going too fast, we’ll make mistakes, like when Ziyad ran into the police in Milan. You keep saying we can’t afford mistakes. Fadi, what—”

  Alayan finally spun to frown at him. “We need to do it quickly, that’s all. We can do it. We…we can do it.” His voice had turned anxious, as if trying to convince himself.

  The bottom fell out of Kassim’s stomach. “What have you done? What did you promise them?” Alayan spent far too much visible effort to keep his eyes trained on the carved marble procession over the cathedral doors. “You’ve been pushing the men every day since we left. Why, Fadi? Why are we in such a hurry?”

  The few tourists were far enough away to be only a rustle of sound. Kassim and Alayan were alone, and a good thing it was. Kassim stared at his friend, his mind stacking up a nasty pile of bad possibilities, his chest constricting as the pile grew higher. “Please tell me I’m wrong,” he pleaded. “Please tell me we don’t have to work a miracle.”

  Alayan took a deep breath, heaved it out in something resembling a sob. “Hanukkah.”

  “What about Hanukkah?”

  “The Council expects us to be done in time to announce our victory on the first day of Hanukkah.” He kept rubbing his hands together slowly, as if washing them in a ritual. “Our present to the Jews for their festival of light.”

  The pile of bad outcomes collapsed in Kassim’s gut. “And when is that?”

  “The 23rd of December.”

  No. No. Not so soon. We can’t do it, no…

  “You know, the prayers they say during Hanukkah thank God for delivering the strong into the hands of the weak and the wicked into the hands of the righteous. It’s perfect if you think about it, really. We ought to have a prayer like that. So we—”

  “A month and a half?” Kassim didn’t even try to keep his voice from cracking. “Seven more in a month and a half? Are you insane? Why did you agree to that? We can’t possibly work that fast! We’ll make mistakes, we’ll get caught or killed!”

  “It’s settled. We don’t have a choice.”

  The words’ meaning took a few moments to reach Kassim, like hearing an echo. “We don’t have…”

  “If we don’t finish, they’ll do it the old-fashioned way, with car bombs. They’re moving people into place right now. If all twelve targets aren’t dead by the 22nd, on the 23rd the bombs will hit Jews in all five countries. Dozens, maybe hundreds will die, and it’ll set the cause back a decade. I tried to tell the Council, but they wouldn’t liste
n.”

  “Wait. You told us they wanted us to do the job the way we’d planned.”

  “I convinced them they wanted that. I told them we don’t have to act like animals. But we’re an experiment, and you know how much patience they have for experiments.”

  Kassim closed his eyes and offered up a silent prayer. Allah, the great, the merciful, please protect and deliver us from the stupidity of our leaders. “What happens…to us?”

  No answer for an eon. Then, “You know how they feel about failure.”

  TWELVE: Modena, 8 November

  Carlo Massarani thanked the Virgin for her kindness as he slipped his emerald-green Maserati Quattroporte into a rare open parking spot across from the Teatro Communale. He didn’t know how much farther he could drive. He quieted the engine’s throaty purr and flopped back against the glovelike Poltrona Frau leather seat. Another riff of pain spiked from his upper chest and sprinted up the side of his thick neck, the third in twenty minutes. Merda, it hurt. No matter how he shifted his bulk in the seat, he couldn’t drop the boulder from his chest.

  He fumbled for the switch to roll down his window. The cool air didn’t stop the sweat rolling down his forehead. His lunch had begun to eat him.

  The next shock of pain ripped through his upper chest and down his left arm, a searing flame of agony lodged deep in his heart. He battled for a breath, but couldn’t get air past the growing balloon of fire inside him. He tried to call for help, but only a gurgle escaped his throat. His hand flapped on its own against the center armrest to his right.

  Massarani’s vision shrank to the size of a saucer, then a button, then was gone forever.

  Sohrab forced himself to walk normally, not stiffen or rush as he drew near the beautiful green car drawn up on the curb. He wanted to appreciate the flowing, almost feminine curves, but his mind clamped onto the mission to the exclusion of all else. He fingered the syringe in his jacket pocket.

  He reached the driver’s door. The window was down. The target had made this so easy; all he’d have to do is reach in, inject the scoline into the man, and the overdose of muscle relaxant would stop the target’s heart. Fat as Massarani was, nobody would think twice about him having a heart attack.

  Sohrab glanced into the car, then stared. The target slumped in his seat, collapsed against the door, his face an unhealthy purple. This beached whale looked at best like a distant relative of the younger, thinner man in the passport photo.

  Sohrab checked both ends of the street, saw no one, then probed the man’s throat for a pulse. Nothing. He felt a spike of wariness, stepped back, scanned the area again. An old woman in black hobbled down the sidewalk two blocks away. No one in the windows or the parked cars.

  He approached the Maserati again, checked the target’s body. No blood, no wounds, skin still warm. No, this is too good. He pressed his radio’s transmit button. “Sidi? He’s dead.”

  Alayan’s voice came back a moment later. “Good work. Come back.”

  “No, you don’t understand. I didn’t touch him. He’s dead. It looks like…well, like he had a stroke or his heart gave out.”

  “Seriously? You didn’t do it?”

  “No, sidi. Allah took his soul before I could.”

  Long silence. Finally, Alayan chuckled. “Well, Allah is great, then. Come back, we’re done here. Six down, six to go.”

  THIRTEEN: Tel Aviv, 10 November

  In a Hollywood movie, the Mossad Watch Center would be full of dark glass and steel and dramatic lighting and high-tech toys. Gur had been to the watch centers of many of the world’s intelligence agencies and had never seen anything like that, even in America. The Institute would never spend money on that kind of foolishness, anyway.

  No, his Watch Center—after less than two months, it was already his—was a middling-sized room with small beige half-height cubicles lining the two long walls, a third set running down the center. Various news programs played on four flat-screen televisions hung on the walls. His cubicle squatted at the end of the room nearest the main entry.

  Gur leaned back in his chair and watched his analysts pore over their message traffic. He could get used to this place. Regular hours, his own desk, sleeping in his own bed every night. The luxury of being himself, not having to remember a cover identity, no tension every time he saw a policeman or had to hand over identification. No running routes, no checking for tails. No one trying to kill him. Was this what “normal” felt like? If so, he rather liked it.

  Where was Kelila? She usually came by the Watch Center to visit him every morning around this time. She was late. His heart drooped in a way that told him just how much he’d come to look forward to seeing her.

  They’d met two years before, when she first transferred from the Paris embassy into Komemiute. Ever since they’d been training, preparing for a mission, working a mission, or debriefing, and as she worked for Gur, he’d been careful not to notice too much how attractive she was. Perhaps not classically pretty, but strong and proud and healthy in a way that made men look twice or more.

  Now they were on restricted duty, they could be friends. More than that, perhaps? She was ten years younger than Gur, a potential problem. She had a nine-year-old daughter by a soldier who died in Lebanon. She was young enough to want more children. Was he ready to be a father again?

  He laughed at himself. You should go on a date with her first, maybe?

  “What’s so funny, Raffi?”

  Gur startled from his thoughts and smiled up at Kelila. “You’re late. I thought you’d run off with Amzi.”

  She made a face and held out a paper cup. “Please, I just ate. This is for you.”

  He took the cup, blew away the steam, had a sip. For all its faults, the canteen could brew decent tea. “Thanks. Late for breakfast, isn’t it?”

  She brushed a drift of hair from her cheek. That ridiculous blond bleach from Qatar had finally disappeared, revealing a natural rich bronze that reminded Gur of his wife Varda in her younger years. Kelila’s short-sleeved cream blouse set off shapely arms as golden as the jewelry glittering from her neck, wrists and ears. She’d worn a skirt again today, thank God. “My old boss wants me back. He spent seventeen shekels on me.” Kelila leaned a bare elbow atop Gur’s half-height cubicle wall, smiled, raised an eyebrow. “So, how are you going to top that?”

  His throat tightened a notch. He’d gone on two dates in the three years since Varda died, and both had been utter disasters. He liked Kelila too much to risk that. If he didn’t risk it, though, someone else would claim her. He stalled. “What did you tell him?”

  “I didn’t say ‘no.’” Her smile drained away. “It’s hard doing what we do and being a single mom at the same time.” She looked away, set her chin. “Hoping Hasia will never find out what I really do.”

  The killing, she meant. He understood much too well. “Um, we should talk about it. Maybe…at dinner?”

  Kelila’s smile crept out of hiding. “Really?”

  “If you can stand to be seen in public with an old man.”

  She gave him a you-silly-man look. “You’re not old.”

  At that moment, he didn’t feel so old, either.

  “Sir? I have something here.” One of the analysts, Yegorov, raised his hand.

  Gur sighed, turned toward the voice. He rocked out of his worn-shiny chair and motioned to Kelila. “Come see my exciting new life.”

  The analyst enlarged a website on his right-hand flat-screen monitor. “This just hit on one of the profiles you asked for, sir.” Gur had to concentrate to cut through the young man’s heavily Russian-accented Hebrew. As one of three open-source analysts in the Center, he monitored the world’s news, public statements, press conferences and so on for useful intelligence. Open Source nearly always discovered developing situations long before the people who played in the classified sandbox.

  Yegorov pointed to the Gazzetta di Modena website as filtered through Google Translate.

  Maserati executive dies of
heart attack

  An executive for Maserati was found dead in his car yesterday in the center of Modena.

  Massarani Charles, 49, could be dead for a heart attack, according to a police spokesman. It was found by a British tourist at the Municipal Theatre at 13:30.

  Maserati Massarani worked for 26 years, most recently as sales manager for the Middle East.…

  “Fuck!” Gur spat. Carlo Massarani. On the list, but not a name they’d used. A true innocent.

  “What is it?” Kelila asked. “Who is he?”

  “He’s no one.” Gur rubbed his eyes. “That’s the problem.”

  Orgad stared at the folder on the desk blotter in front of him for what seemed like years before he looked up at Gur. “The P.M. wants to deal with this. Get in front of it. Actually, he said something like, ‘Go get those Hezbollah sons of dogs before they kill anyone else.’”

  “‘Get in front of it’?” Gur had taken punches that stunned him less. “The rest of the names are in America. He wants us to go after these guys in America? That’s insane!”

  Orgad drooped into his chair, crossed his hands over his gut. “As I told the man. ‘Can you imagine if we’re caught?’ I told him. But you know how he is. If he could call down the plagues of Egypt on our enemies, he would, he’d stand up on Mount Hebron in a robe and staff.” He waved away the vision. “You know what the man says to me? ‘Don’t get caught, then.’”

  “Right.” Gur dug the heel of his hand into the headache developing behind his right ear. “This is crazy. Why not tell the FBI what’s happening and let them handle it? It’s their job.”

  “Raffi, let me tell you how things are right now. On Tuesday our ambassador in Washington spent ninety minutes with their Secretary of State being dressed down like a recruit in training. Why? Because we used American passports for you and your team. Of course, the ambassador denied everything. Now six of our resident assets are being expelled. Six, Raffi, they cleaned out our entire station in the embassy.” Orgad leaned forward, thumped his spread fingers on the desk blotter for emphasis. “So you think we can tell their FBI a Hezbollah direct-action team is going to start killing American citizens because we used their names? That’s crazy.”