The woman opened her car door but didn’t get in. She slung her big, black handbag inside, then stood fiddling with her phone. Faint male voices drifted in from outside, behind and to Alayan’s left. Rafiq and Demetrio?
Gabir slipped his pistol from his waistband, nudged Alayan, nodded toward the woman. Alayan clamped his hand hard on Gabir’s forearm.
Now the woman was talking. Loudly. “Hi! You home yet? Yeah, just got off. You up for it tonight?”
She looked at the Jaguar, bounced her eyebrows. Then she looked straight at Alayan.
She smiled, a lot of blazing white teeth. An invitation?
Khara! His heart jumped sideways at the speed of sound. He automatically waved back, hoped he didn’t look too stunned. She saw me! Will she remember?
His phone chirped. “Sidi!” Ziyad, waiting in the white panel van parked next to Demetrio’s BMW. “What’s happening?”
The woman slid into her car, phone still clamped to her ear. Her skirt rode high up her thigh. She looked back at Alayan, smiled again. The door thumped shut. Brake lights, engine starting, back-up lights. A few moments later, the Lexus and the woman were gone.
Alayan sagged back into his seat, let out a huge breath. Of all the times to flirt… He selected Sohrab. “Go! We’re clear!”
Gabir bolted from the car to set up the camera again. A few seconds later, Sohrab sauntered into view from the next aisle over, heading for the van. The male voices took on a goodbye-nice-to-meet-you tone. Alayan’s heart crept back to its rightful place. The plan could still work. The woman wouldn’t remember anything. No problem.
Demetrio ambled into the aisle. Dark blond hair, shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows, black suit coat slung over one shoulder. He aimed a black key fob; the BMW flashed and yelped.
Ziyad’s shoulder peeked out from behind the driver’s side of the van. Get back! Alayan wanted to yell. Not yet!
The target strolled to the driver’s door. Ziyad ghosted along the van’s back doors in full view now, pistol out and ready. Baggy white t-shirt, oversized blue jeans, baseball cap worn backwards; he could almost pass as a Hispanic gang member.
Demetrio paused, bent to look closer at the BMW’s black flank just behind the driver’s door. He licked the tip of his middle finger, rubbed at the offending spot.
Just get in! “Ziyad, hold—”
Too late.
Ziyad was supposed to shoot the man in his car to lessen the noise and mess, steal it, dump it in East Los Angeles, let the gangs take the blame for now. But when Ziyad pivoted around the van’s back end, Demetrio was still fussing with the car’s paint. The two stared at each other for a moment.
Demetrio dropped his focus from Ziyad’s face to the gun.
Ziyad rushed the target, jammed the pistol’s muzzle against the man’s chest. A muted fump echoed around the concrete, a car door slammed too hard rather than a gunshot. Blood splattered the wall and pillar. Demetrio toppled from sight.
While the others cleaned up, Alayan carefully folded the newspaper and let his breathing settle down. The plan had worked. Things went wrong, but they’d recovered. Praise Allah. He started his car, left the parking garage slowly and carefully, kept just below the speed limit, signaled when he turned.
By 11PM, he was on an American Airlines flight to Dulles International Airport.
SEVENTEEN: Secaucus, New Jersey, 18 November
Gur heard the door open and close behind him for the fifth time. He turned to find everyone standing in a loose group near the little round table by the mini-kitchen, watching him. Amzi and Sasha looked bleary; they must have been out drinking last night.
“All right,” he started, not moving from the window. “Demetrio was killed on Wednesday. He’s the one in Los Angeles.” The others shook their heads, mumbled curses. Too late in the wrong place. “So clearly, the Hezbollah team isn’t starting here and working west the way we would, they’re doing the opposite.”
“Fucking Arabs do everything backwards,” Amzi muttered.
Smart Arabs, Gur thought. They went for the most remote and unlikely target first. Their team leader had to be eliminated, and soon—or the Institute needed to recruit him. “Hezbollah has two options. They can come straight here, or they can go to Washington and finish the man Nussberger. We can’t afford to commit to either option, so we have to cover both.”
“How do we do that?” David asked.
With six people? Good question. “David, Natan, take the train to Washington, rent cars, keep watch on Nussberger. Don’t make contact, report in regularly. The rest of us? We know where the four targets here live and work. One person to a target, keep on them, watch for shadows. Sasha, see if you can track down Kaminsky. If anyone sees anything, report it immediately. Any questions?”
Sasha asked, “Do we have a picture of Kaminsky yet?”
“Not yet,” Kelila said. “I keep asking, but it never comes.”
David raised his hand. “What if we see Hezbollah? Do we engage?”
Gur considered this possibility—probability?—and the men he’d assigned the task. David had the face of a Raphaelite saint and could put a bullet through a one-shekel coin at three hundred meters. Natan looked soft as a suburban office drone and excelled at close-in work; by the time the target realized the clear blue eyes were empty, he’d be dead. “Do what you can without attracting too much attention. Don’t get into situations you can’t get out of. We can’t afford to lose you. Understand?”
David said, “Yes, sir.” Natan nodded.
“Excellent.” Gur checked his watch. They were later than the time suggested. “Get going. Hezbollah’s driving this bus. Let’s take the wheels off before it runs over us.”
EIGHTEEN: Brooklyn, 18 November
Jake balanced the plate holding his formerly frozen individual supreme pizza on a stack of books to one side of his laptop. He conjured up Google and started a search for “Qatar +Hezbollah +Mossad.”
He’d gone underground with his homework since Rinnah had caught him a month ago, waiting until she was in bed or out of the apartment. She’d said she didn’t mind, but he didn’t want to push it. Media interest in the Doha story had slackened in the past few weeks, so the Mississippi-sized flood of news in September had withered into a drainage-ditch trickle.
He sorted his hits by date, newest on top. Jake pulled a slice of pizza from the plate, but before he could finish his first bite, his eyes locked on the fourth result: “Burbank Man Killed in Carjacking,” from that day’s Los Angeles Times.
A Burbank man was killed yesterday in the aftermath of what Los Angeles Police Department detectives are calling a carjacking turned deadly.
Frank Demetrio, 33, was discovered by drivers at 6 AM yesterday in the open trunk of his 2009 BMW M3. The car, which had been stripped of its wheels, seats, and electronics, had been left in an industrial area on South Mission Road near the 6th Street bridge…
Jake considered this for a moment. What were the odds that out of six billion people, one on a list of twelve would suddenly show up dead? Pretty long, he figured.
He started at the top of his notes, Googled each name in turn, looked for new activity, especially activity ending in death. Three names down, a Dutch website showed him what he’d hoped he wouldn’t see.
Albert Schoonhaven, 41, killed in a street robbery in Rotterdam on September 23rd.
Two out of twelve? Jake’s pizza started attacking his stomach.
More appeared. Erika Grusst, a professor in Germany. Andre Dujardin in France. Elia Sabatello and Carlo Massarani in Italy. All dead.
Six dead. Out of twelve. Suddenly, he was freezing cold.
He hauled out his cellphone, stabbed his uncle’s number. While he listened to ringing, he tried to figure out what to say so he wouldn’t sound nuts. “Gene? It’s Jake.”
“Hey, kid, how you doing? Rinnah spent your first paycheck yet?”
“Yeah, she’s crazy excited. We’re going out to buy me some suits this weekend. Say, can
you do me a favor? Look up some names?”
Gene laughed. “You on the job already? Christ, kid, we’re not paying you yet.”
“Just…humor me. Frank Aaron Demetrio from Burbank, California.” He listed the other five. “They’re all dead, in the past couple months.”
Gene repeated the names under his breath. “What’s this about?”
“They were all on the list. The INTERPOL list.” He hesitated. “The one I’m on.”
Gene breathed into the phone for a few seconds. “I’ll call it in. Don’t tell Rinnah.”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
NINETEEN: Cherry Hill, New Jersey, 20 November
“In Israel today, a rocket barrage on the embattled southern town of Sderot killed two civilians and raised tensions between the Israeli military and Hamas…”
Miriam tried to switch away from CNN, but it was too late. The pictures pinned her to the sofa. A dusty little town, too much sunlight, a crater, a body covered by a shocking yellow tarp, Magen David Adom in their red vests hauling burned people on stretchers. Women crying. Men holding their heads.
She was ten years old again.
Huddled in her mother’s arms, both of them curled into a tight ball in a half-buried concrete culvert pipe piled with sandbags, sixteen other people pressed together all around them. The hiccup of suppressed crying filled the gaps between the muffled thwumps of rockets gouging holes in the earth outside. The fourth time in two weeks; no one had slept since the last attack three nights before. She’d hardly been able to eat. Her stomach clutched from both fear and hunger.
“Mama,” she whimpered, “where’s Papa?”
“He’s safe, Miri.” Shopworn confidence in her mother’s voice.
The fifth explosion crashed nearby. Eighteen people in the concrete tube shrank into each other as one.
Smoke spiced with the tang of roasted lemons snaked into the shelter. A rocket must have come down in the orchard, just steps away. People nearest the opening started to cough. Gas? Did Hezbollah use gas? Should she breathe? Would they all die there?
Where’s papa? “Mama? Mama!”
“Shh, Miri.” Her mother’s hands smoothed her hair, caressed her cheek. “Be brave, my darling. Don’t let them know you’re scared. They can’t win if you’re not scared. Remember.”
Grown-up Miriam resurfaced in her living room clutching a pillow, tears on her cheeks. Bastet the Abyssinian nosed around her ankles. She remembered. Don’t let them know you’re scared. She’d lived that since she was ten, since she’d learned anger felt better than fear. Except for the moments when she was ten years old again, it still worked today.
TWENTY: Detroit, Michigan, 21 November
Al-Shami worked the edge of a 4mm iron plate on his bench grinder. A rooster-tail of sparks arched onto the concrete floor, bounced, and died. The heavy-duty noise suppressors over his ears allowed through only a distant whine. Even if the tool’s shriek escaped outside, no one important would hear it. Only people who had no interest in reporting anything to the police ventured into this industrial ghost town.
He shut down the grinder, sprayed water on the iron’s fresh edge, and climbed into the open, gutted back of the white panel van behind him. Without bothering to remove his goggles or earmuffs, he carefully slid the plate into to back of a set of modular aluminum shelves fastened to the passenger side of the cargo space. It fit, finally. Four bolt holes and some paint, and the last piece of this part of the puzzle would be ready.
The plate was just thick enough to focus the energy of a C4 charge outward through the van’s thin sheet-metal body. That and shaping the charges into hemispheres would ensure the van would explode out rather than up when detonated, creating its own shrapnel. He appreciated the efficiency.
Al-Shami stepped from the van, dropped the plate on his workbench, then paced to the nearest door as he lit a cigarette. Outside, the breeze rustled the head-high weeds in what used to be a parking lot for the abandoned spark-plug factory that was al-Shami’s workshop. The hair on his bare forearms began to prickle as the sweat dried and chilled. He’d never been so cold for so long as he had in this place; he’d be glad to leave it behind. But it had been useful in its own bleak way. More Arabs lived in the greater Detroit area than anywhere else in America, and because of the economy and the general hopelessness of the place, many of those people were poor, desperate, and angry. Excellent raw material.
He pinched the end of his cigarette and dropped it into a coffee can next to the door, returned to the long work table in the room’s middle, and picked up a five-inch diameter aluminum tube with one open end. The domed top sat on its flat end next to the saw he’d used to separate the two. The half-kilo block of white claylike plastique was still firmly in place against the tube’s inside wall, even after all the handling.
This was the cattle prod. It would get the herd moving. The van was a slaughterhouse on wheels. It would cut the herd down by the dozens, hundreds if everything worked according to plan. He’d used this combination in Baghdad with great success. It would work just as well in New York City.
TWENTY-ONE: Arlington, Virginia, 21 November
The worn orange seats and scratched windows on the Metro car hadn’t changed a bit in the ten years since Rafiq’s previous life as a George Washington University student. But he had.
Morning commuters on autopilot packed this 7:30 train. Rafiq stood near the rear of the car; in the middle, Oren Nussberger read his folded Washington Post, screened by all the bodies between them. Fiftyish, receding hairline, a head like an inverted egg, gray raincoat draped over his anonymous blue suit. The Qatari list featured his picture; unlike the others, his real name was attached. This one had actually been there. Alayan was convinced the man was Mossad; Rafiq had yet to decide.
Rafiq scanned his fellow riders, both to look for threats and to remind himself what Americans looked like. Especially the women. So many good-looking women in this city, as if they’d won a beauty contest to get in. He’d learned growing up outside Sour that girls found him attractive, and American women were no different. Back then he’d got rid of his accent as soon as he arrived in Washington. He could be just a regular Joe if that’s what the lady wanted, or he could turn the accent back on and be the charming, exotic foreigner.
A blond huddled in the seat next to the door, gray business suit and gym shoes, reading a vampire book. Lovely legs, good chest, pretty fine-boned face. He watched her, remembered some of the blonds from school. The fair-haired ones seemed to like darker men. He didn’t complain.
As if his gaze had weight, she looked up from her novel, found him, raised her plucked eyebrows. He gave her what the girls always called his “aw, shucks” smile. She returned it, favored him with a lingering once-over, then returned to her reading.
Damn, he thought. A few minutes and he might have her phone number. He sighed. If he went on a date, Alayan would go crazy.
Then it dawned on him these people would call him a terrorist. He didn’t feel like a terrorist—whatever that felt like—but it didn’t matter.
He flashed back to his senior year at GWU, when the airliners crashed into New York and the Pentagon. Having a last name like “Herzallah” and being even vaguely Arab became a mark of evil. His friends—people he’d partied with—started giving him wary looks. Exotic didn’t work for the women anymore, either. Washington became an armed camp. The irony was, he’d been as shocked and hurt as the Americans. Killing thousands of innocent people had nothing to do with Islam or the Arab world. That’s what the Zionists had done for years in his country. That was why he fought them now.
Nussberger clamped the newspaper under his arm. The man’s shoulders slumped with premature seriousness. The passport photo hadn’t shown how deep-set Nussberger’s eyes were behind the thick-rimmed glasses; his brows were like grey cliffs looming over a pair of dark waterholes.
Was this truly a Zionist spy?
Alayan picked up on the first ring. “Yes?”
/> Rafiq lounged against the rough cast-concrete wall of GWU’s Funger Hall overlooking 22nd and G streets. “He’s at work.”
“And?”
“No stops. Not for coffee, or cleaning, or breakfast, straight from home to work.” Too straight. A trained operative would have checked for tails, doubled back or taken sudden detours. Nussberger just plodded on his way. No Mossad man would be so oblivious. “Lots of people everywhere he went. There’s no way we can take him anyplace along his route.”
Alayan didn’t answer for a moment. “Well, good planning on his part. Come back now. I need you to be the electricity man. We should look inside his home.”
Rafiq flipped closed his phone, tapped the case against his palm. If Nussberger wasn’t an agent but really was in Qatar, that would mean neither he nor his name had anything to do with Talhami. Was Alayan wrong about Nussberger?
He took a last look around at the familiar buildings. A knot of students chattered by, both boys and girls. He felt a pang as he watched them pass. That had been him not so long ago.
These few blocks held lots of good memories. Fun, friends, women, challenging studies, interesting talk. Things were so much simpler then—no false identities, no watching for surveillance, no midnight operations, no killing. If that younger version of himself had known what was in store, he might never have gone home.
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