The Shiro Project

by David Khara

  Desperation did lead to madness. It had happened to Sean. The Kidon agent saw the value in each life he took. Trying war criminals made sense because it brought awareness to the general public, Eichmann’s trial was the most glaring illustration of this. But Woodridge was right about one thing. The fundamental values of community, solidarity, and equality were becoming lost in the world. People were focused on their jobs, the latest films, and their sports teams. Yes, they made a hue and cry over one particular outrage or another, but they quickly moved on. In reality, they believed in nothing. It made Eytan look like an idealist in comparison.

  “Now what?” Elena asked.

  “We need to make a choice.”

  The woman stared into the giant’s eyes.

  “Mine’s already been made.”

  CHAPTER 36

  North of San Francisco, three days later

  Large black clouds hanging low in the sky meant a storm was imminent. A wet-smelling electricity filled the air. Eytan was leaning against the hood of his pickup truck, parked along the bank of a turbulent waterfall that plunged deep into a valley. The hillside was covered with trees that stretched as far as the eye could see and kept the spot safely out sight.

  The agent’s phone was glued to his ear as he fed the directions to Cypher’s men. An hour earlier, he had sent them meandering over San Francisco’s hilly streets to keep them off balance. Every so often, he glanced at incoming texts. Eytan had set up checkpoints along the way and was now getting updates from the band of informants he had recruited with a few greenbacks bearing the image of Benjamin Franklin. Formed that very morning, his team was composed of bums, store cashiers, a garbage man, and even a random driver whose car had broken down near the Golden Gate Bridge.

  The last checkpoint message finally appeared. The text read: “Black Jeep Wrangler arrived.”

  “I told you Cypher would come through,” said Elena, who had been waiting silently by his side.

  Eytan covered the speaker on his phone.

  “Better safe…”

  “…than sorry. Thanks, I’ve heard that one before.”

  Eytan gave her a snide smile and continued his guided tour. At last, they heard the sound of a fast-approaching vehicle. The four-wheel-drive SUV came into sight and parked on the other side of the river. A bridge spanning the river, which was about a hundred feet away, separated Eytan from Eli. Cypher, a mere messenger until this point, spoke up.

  “Well, Mr. Morg. As promised, my men will be returning your friend safe and sound. I’m thrilled that our collaboration was such a success.”

  “I, for one, am happy it’s over,” Eytan said. “Is this the part where you ask me to come work for you?”

  Cypher burst out laughing. “Exactly, Mr. Morg. Your intellect never ceases to amaze me.”

  “You already know my answer.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Don’t be so greedy. Taking me on would be a double win for you. Not only would you be getting back your star agent, Elena, but more important…”

  “More important?” Cypher asked. Eytan could hear the curiosity and excitement in his voice.

  “Am I correct to assume that you used to run the Consortium’s operations, making you responsible for security?”

  “No secret there,” Cypher replied. Now he sounded suspicious.

  “That means keeping the lab strains secure was your responsibility. Your little playmates wouldn’t have been very happy about such a serious breach. From what I know about the Consortium’s methods, mistakes can cost a pretty penny. So you had to resort to extreme measures to fix the problem as discreetly as possible. Otherwise, it would have been bye-bye. True or false?”

  “Incredible, simply incredible. Well, you certainly helped me out of a jam. And that’s the only reason I’m letting you have Eli Karman back.”

  With that, the SUV’s doors opened, and two men in ties, black suits, and white button-down shirts emerged. Their getup made Eytan smirk. In this setting, the suits were entirely too conspicuous. And it would certainly be hard to fight in those things. This would work to his advantage if the situation came to that.

  Surrounded by the watchdogs, Eli appeared from behind the car. He looked tired, and tense, but Eytan didn’t see any bruises or other signs of trauma. He seemed to be okay.

  Eytan grabbed a sniper rifle from the pickup’s passenger seat.

  “Go ahead,” he whispered to Elena. “But no funny business. I’m watching you.”

  She stared at him with her head slightly tilted. A single bead of sweat rolled down her cheek and landed on her pale lips.

  “I’m happy your friend is free,” she said.

  “He’s not free yet. Now go!” He nodded toward the SUV.

  Elena gave him a smile he couldn’t quite comprehend. He didn’t have time for that anyway. Eli was walking toward him from the other side of the bridge.

  Eytan was locked in shooting position, staring at the black suits through his sniper scope. The same went for the shooter stationed next to the SUV. Eytan celebrated each slow step that Eli made toward him. No gunfire. No explosions. His friend’s shoulders were hunched, and Eytan saw the fear in his eyes. Elena’s nimble catlike walk, on the other hand, was surprisingly relaxed. The two captives crossed paths without exchanging even a glance.

  When Eli reached the pickup without a single hiccup, he grinned and went to hug Eytan, but the giant didn’t budge.

  “Get in the truck! Driver’s side. Start the engine. Whatever happens, don’t get out.”

  The giant’s tone allowed for no questions. Eli slid behind the wheel of the pickup.

  Elena stared into the face of each man. She had no idea who any of them were.

  “Miss, get in. We’re leaving.”

  “Did you bring me a weapon?” she asked.

  “It’s in the glove compartment.”

  She leaned into the passenger side of the SUV and opened the glove box. As she was taking out the gun, a man with dark shades and a buzz cut handed her a cell phone. Cypher wanted to talk to her. Signaling the sniper to lower his weapon, she walked away from the vehicle to take the call. He obeyed but stayed on guard.

  “Elena, my dear. So happy to hear you’ve been released.”

  “Thank you, sir, for doing what had to be done.”

  “Of course, you know how much I value your talents. Those men will be driving you back to me. I’m anxious to hear the information you’ve gathered on our Patient 302.”

  Elena held the phone between her ear and shoulder, freeing her hands to check her weapon’s bullet count.

  “I’d like permission to do away with Eytan Morg, sir.”

  “Negative. I have other plans for you.”

  “In that case, I have some news.”

  “Is it important?” Cypher asked, intrigued.

  “Yes, it’s very important. I fucking quit, sir.”

  She threw the phone to the ground and fired a bullet into the thigh of the man standing closest to her. Then she snagged the sniper in both shoulders. Before the driver had the chance to draw his weapon, a bullet had been lodged in his arm.

  Elena walked over to each victim and collected the weapons and ammo, which she tossed into the river.

  Eytan had been watching the whole scene through his sniper scope. He opened the passenger-side door of the pickup and put his rifle and phone on the seat.

  “Can we go now?” Eli asked restlessly.

  “I have one more thing to settle,” the agent replied as he shut the door.

  He started toward the bridge. Halfway across, he stopped.

  Elena had been checking the SUV for any remaining weapons. Assured that there were none, she walked to her side of the bridge, leaving the three wounded men behind.

  “Coming back so soon?” Eytan shouted.

  “I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time,” Elena yelled back. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  She tightened her grip on her weapon.
<
br />   Eytan opened his vest and took out a small handgun.

  “Are you sure about this? We have options,” he said.

  Elena looked around. The treetops on the surrounding hills almost reached the clouds racing across the sky. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Most likely, the heavens were unleashing their wrath over San Francisco. Surging water was splashing against the bridge supports and misting the air.

  “No, people like us don’t have options,” she said and sighed. “We both knew how this story would end.”

  He stared at her with unyielding eyes.

  “If you say so.”

  She lifted her weapon and pointed it at Eytan. But before she could steady her aim, she heard the crack of a gunshot. She brought a hand to her chest, stunned by her opponent’s speed. A splotch of blood on her shirt swelled between her breasts.

  A second shot caused her to lose hold of her gun and threw her against the steel guardrail. The giant watched Elena topple over the barrier into the vast unknown. He caught the sound of her body hitting the water.

  Eytan put his gun back in its holster and returned to the pickup. He got in and told Eli to step on the gas. Just then, his phone began to vibrate. Eytan answered and heard Cypher breathing on the other end.

  “She made her choice,” the Kidon operative said. “I tried to stop her. No dice.”

  “I’ve lost a great deal in this affair.” Eytan could hear the rage in the Consortium master’s voice. The man’s civil façade was quickly falling apart. “However, I won’t be the only one to suffer. I didn’t want it to come to this, Mr. Morg, but I’m going to make sure your life becomes a living, inescapable hell.”

  “I’ve escaped from hell before. I’ll do it again. So you want to try and make me suffer? Be my guest. But you should know that I’m going to spend every day of my life hunting you down. And once I find you, I’m going to lodge a bullet between your eyes.”

  A long silence fell before Cypher replied.

  “You went behind the back of your own intelligence service and assaulted agents from a NATO-member country. I hope you’ve enjoyed living in the shadows, because you’re about to step into the spotlight. Tracking me will be the least of your worries.”

  And with that, he ended the call. Frowning, Eytan put the phone down. The next time he’d speak to that man, he’d be the one putting an end to their conversation. Once and for all.

  Eytan’s jaw was locked tight, but his eyes were moist.

  “I’m happy to have you back in one piece,” Eytan said, looking straight ahead. He swallowed, trying to get rid of the lump in his throat.

  “Yes, thanks for everything,” his friend replied. The muscles in his face were beginning to relax. “We have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “You’d have done the same for me,” the giant said.

  “Well, with my arthritis and weak lungs, I doubt I’d have gotten the same results.”

  Eytan relaxed his shoulders, picked up his phone, and punched in a number.

  “Is it just me, or do you spend more time making calls than a telemarketer?” Eli asked.

  “Just two more. Both for good causes. But for the rest of the summer, I don’t want to be anywhere near this thing.” Eytan touched his friend’s arm to put their conversation on hold as the person on the other end picked up.

  “Branislav?”

  “Hey, Eytan! How’d it go?”

  “Perfectly. Please thank your wife and her friend from the special effects studio in LA. He did an excellent job. Even I believed it.”

  “I take it Elena really hammed it up,” the journalist said.

  “She didn’t go too overboard. Her performance was actually pretty convincing.”

  “I know you’re speaking from experience. Do you think you’ll ever see her again?”

  “No, she wants to live on her own for the little time she has left. I understand.”

  “All right, Eytan. So see you soon?”

  “See ya never, Bran. Good luck with everything.”

  Eytan ended the call. This time he was grinning.

  “Can you tell me what’s going on? I’m completely lost.”

  “You just had a front-row ticket to a staged showdown. We arranged the whole thing so the feisty Consortium member could leave her organization.”

  Eli smiled playfully. “I don’t believe it. Eytan Morg, an accomplice to an elaborate lie?”

  “Men lie, Eli. Women lie too. But guns always tell the truth.”

  He gazed at the horizon.

  “More or less…”

  As the wind started to blow harder, and the rain began to fall, Eytan gave Eli a cheeky wink.

  The agent leaned forward, reached beneath his seat, and pulled out a leather briefcase engraved with the initials S.W. He placed it on his lap, opened it, and took out a dozen large manila envelopes.

  “Do you mind stopping at the first post office we come across?” he asked. “There are some things I need to mail. But before we do that, we need to make that second call. I think Rose should have some news for us, Grandpa.”

  EPILOGUE

  Langley, Virginia, six months later

  The office looked like a junkyard cluttered with soda cans, sandwich wrappers, and copies of Variety, Entertainment Weekly, and Game Informer. A custodian’s nightmare. They all avoided Ryan Martin’s workspace like the plague. The Goliath-sized computer engineer was almost six feet five and weighed close to three hundred pounds. He figured his skills, which surpassed those of his coworkers, gave him the right to overindulge. Denied a secret agent’s license to kill, he settled for a license to fill—meaning his space. And it had started out to be a nice one, much better than the cubicles in the communal area reserved for most of the CIA’s computer and network surveillance department.

  Ryan had been discovered by the agency five years earlier, while, as an MIT student, he was attending a seminar organized by a software and operating systems company. During a lecture on security breaching delivered by some bigwig, Ryan had fired off brilliant arguments that put the speaker to shame. His valid points were met with huge rounds of applause, and it wasn’t long before corporate vultures were swooping in with job offers. Ultimately, however, he couldn’t resist the lure of working for a covert government agency.

  In a mere six months, he had pointed out in highly detailed memos every single weakness in the internal information system, which he deemed “ancient, inefficient, and overcomplicated.” He had been authorized to give all his attention to the development of new protocols. The IT department, often dumbfounded by his genius initiatives, was just happy to follow his lead and reap the rewards.

  Ryan was living the dream. He had a fat salary, highly tolerant supervisors, and almost total job control. In addition, his job gave him lots of free time to tinker with his favorite hobby—actually his only hobby—testing new software programs.

  Today’s trial wasn’t particularly exciting. It was part of a long-term big data analysis overhaul. Working on the theory that automation could always maximize task efficiency, he was running a program on all image files stored in CIA-agent cell phones. The software identified the places, documents, and people who appeared in the photos and moved them into the designated databases in order to streamline the classification and cross-referencing systems. To test it out, he went into the agency’s recent unresolved cases and pulled up an image taken from the cell phone of former agent Bernard Dean, who had been executed by a bullet to the neck. The image—which happened to be sent by agent Jacqueline Walls from Switzerland—showed a three-quarter view of a man from behind. Without paying any more attention to the content of the image, Ryan had launched his search.

  Over the course of several hours, tens of thousands of pictures, millions maybe, flooded the screen as the search attempted to find a match with the photo.

  Just as Ryan was sinking his teeth into a panini sandwich dripping with melted cheese and Italian ham, the computer started playing the theme music from The Simpson
s. Ryan was a fan of vintage television, and this was one of his many personalized settings.

  Ryan wiped his greasy hands on a crumpled napkin and put his fingers on the keyboard.

  The software had pulled up an image from the internal database. He enlarged the photo. It had been taken from a slightly elevated position in a gymnasium and showed the African American agent from behind. He was wearing a pair of tight shorts and a T-shirt embellished with an American eagle. It appeared that he was talking with a bald man in shorts and a long-sleeved polo. The scene itself looked harmless. The file’s origins, however, less so. It was from a hodgepodge archive that contained documents from the early nineteen seventies. Ryan had installed the archive a few months earlier—a huge pain in the ass.

  The file’s caption read: “US Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs. Intergovernmental training program, US-ISRAEL. In photo: trainee Bernard Dean with instructor Eytan Morgenstern. June 1975.”

  Ryan assumed that the software had selected the image because of Dean. But the computer specialist soon realized that the program wasn’t establishing a link with the young Dean but rather with the large fellow, Morgenstern, who was with him. His curiosity piqued to the max, Ryan got to work. He launched every single image-processing program at his disposal. Then he proceeded to spend the next half hour typing away with a grace and finesse that were quite unexpected for a man of his size. At last, displayed on his ginormous screens were the two photos, side by side.

  Faced with the unbelievable results, he leaned back in his chair, his fingers knitted behind his head, and heaved a sigh so heavy, a pastry wrapper went flying off his desk. The display before him was simply astonishing. It most certainly explained why certain segments of agency intelligence had been kept off-limits to him.

  “The truth really is out there,” he thought to himself as he picked up his phone.

  In memory of Edith and Valérie.

  Thank you for reading The Shiro Project.