JET, no. 3

by Russell Blake

  “This is not the result I pay you for.”

  “No, sir, I agree it isn’t.” There wasn’t much to disagree with.

  “Did you send untrained men? Green personnel? How do you explain this?” Grigenko demanded.

  “No, we didn’t, sir. These were experienced veterans. All ex-Spetsnaz, as always. No corners were cut. I, frankly, am at a loss…I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  This was a disaster. Grigenko sat back down in his executive chair and slammed his fist on the table in frustration.

  “I have,” he seethed. The silence on the line was deafening. “Are we in any way exposed?”

  “Of course not…I mean, no, sir. We have taken all the usual precautions. Nobody had any ID. There are no criminal files available on any of them through Interpol. Their identities will remain a mystery. Nothing leads back to any of us,” Yuri assured.

  “And what are you doing to re-acquire the girl?” Grigenko asked, through clenched teeth.

  “Everything possible. But as you know, once a target is alerted, it can become extremely difficult. Especially if they have decent knowledge of tradecraft, which I think it’s obvious this woman does.”

  “I want no expense spared. None. I don’t care what it costs or how many men it takes. I want her head brought to me so I can piss on it. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Abundantly, sir.”

  “And Yuri? I can’t express to you how disappointed I am with how this was handled.”

  “I understand. There will, of course, be no charge for the failed operation. And you can trust that I have taken this personally. I will be handling every aspect of the sanction from this point on. You have my guarantee that I will make things right.”

  “I thought your contracts came with an implicit guarantee.”

  “They do, sir. Nothing like this has ever happened before. It cannot be allowed to stand. My reputation depends on my ability to perform. So I will perform.”

  “You’d better.” Grigenko slammed down the phone, fuming.

  A straightforward execution, routine, like countless others he’d commissioned, suddenly went south on them and became a massacre? He was flabbergasted. This woman had been given no warning. She couldn’t have known anything. He had been getting daily reports of her movements, and she suspected nothing. Then a team of the most lethal killers in the world moves in to terminate her, and suddenly, she not only gives them the slip, but also paints the streets with their blood?

  What the hell was going on?

  ~ ~ ~

  Jet was up early the next morning, the clamor of traffic below her window acting as an alarm clock. She took a shower, noting that her hand was free of infection. The mirror confirmed the shoulder and knife wounds were also clear. She turned and studied her face. The discoloration on her jaw was noticeable, and probably would be for at least another couple of days. She’d need to get some makeup to cover it so as not to arouse attention.

  She checked the time and decided on some exercise before breakfast – a daily regimen she’d adhered to since her teen years. After pulling on the shorts and T-shirt, she strapped on the backpack and grabbed a hand towel and her water bottle, and then hit the stairs.

  Once at the beach, she took off down the sand at a run, moving rapidly past the vendors, who were just setting up for the day. This was their reality, selling trinkets or snacks along a desolate stretch of the Caribbean in a city most had never heard of. They would live, love, fight and die there, and none of it would ultimately change much of anything.

  She pushed the fatalistic thoughts aside as she stretched out along the strand, sweat beginning to trickle down her back as the morning heat increased with the ascent of the sun. A gathering of gulls hopped in and out of the creeping tide while pelicans wheeled overhead, occasionally dive-bombing for their breakfast beyond the surf line.

  On her return to the hotel, she stopped at an internet café that featured ten-year-old PCs, and slipped the proprietress some coins in exchange for a half hour of time. She logged on and began a search for any news from Trinidad. It didn’t take her long to find it.

  Every online site on the island had extensive coverage of the bloodbath. All described it as an unprecedented outburst of regrettable drug-related violence, with speculations about cartels battling for supremacy over territory. Photos of the bullet-riddled SUV and car abounded, as did several grisly crime scene photos of blanket-draped forms surrounded by police.

  And there was her passport photo. She was listed as wanted for questioning – ‘to assist the authorities with their inquiries’, as the hacks had tactfully phrased it.

  Reading on, she saw that the coverage didn’t really have any substance, and the articles were all essentially the same. Sensationalistic descriptions of running gun battles and carnage, all of them gravitating to the organized crime angle. By some miracle, no tourists or other innocents had been harmed, and Carnival festivities were still in full swing, albeit with a heightened police presence.

  Two of the papers had posted short accounts of the stolen boat and the explosion in Venezuelan waters off of a remote, uninhabited stretch of coast. None made any connection between the shootings and the theft – it was viewed as a separate incident. A government official made a terse statement about a probable gas fire onboard and left it at that.

  One of the articles described the dead men as from former Soviet bloc countries. Nothing more specific. That tied in with what she’d seen of them – obviously not Latin. It went on to hint that perhaps the Russian mob had made a play against local drug lords and discovered the hard way that they weren’t welcome.

  None of the articles mentioned that all of the gunmen had been equipped with identical silenced weapons. The police had probably left that out of their press briefings.

  Her time expired, she pushed back from the computer and stood. At the counter, she asked about stores that might carry items like makeup and underwear, and was directed to a shop a few streets over. She located it easily and soon was back at the hotel, contemplating her reflection again.

  It was time to deal with her hair. She rummaged around in the backpack and extracted one of the dye boxes. Her natural black had to go. There was no question that any surviving pursuers would have forwarded on a more up-to-date description of her than her passport photo, and her thick black locks were now a liability.

  An hour later, she rinsed the last of the color away. She was now a medium brunette. No more obviously dyed than many of the other chemically lightened women she’d seen on the waterfront. If anything, the somewhat brassy look made her less obvious, less striking, and made her features appear to be more likely Latina, especially with her tan.

  A few dabs of makeup, which she normally eschewed, and the facial bruising was toned down to an acceptable level. She packed up her belongings, carefully stowed the dye materials in an empty plastic clothes bag, and was ready to go.

  Jet spent a few minutes wandering around the block where the bus station was located, on the alert for anyone suspicious watching the departures. Other than the usual miscreants that were for some reason drawn to bus depots, she didn’t spot anyone. She approached the ticket counter and bought a ticket – the next coach left in forty-five minutes and would take the rest of the afternoon and much of the evening to get to Caracas, a city of almost seven million and the capital of Venezuela. The international airport there would have flights to almost everywhere in the world, so she would be unlimited in her options.

  Which brought her up short. So far, she’d been driven by an imperative to get as far from her pursuers as possible. But then what? She hadn’t formulated a plan yet, preferring to react rather than try to steer events.

  That couldn’t last. As she browsed the newspaper rack, part of her mind was mulling over possible next moves.

  She glanced at her watch and asked the magazine vendor whether there was an electronics store anywhere nearby. She needed a cell phone. With
ten hours to kill on the bus, it would be helpful to be able to get on the internet and research things such as flight schedules. The young woman nodded and pointed to a shop across the street.

  Jet was quickly able to find a Nokia with web-browsing capability, which she bought, along with several airtime cards. A late-model bus pulled into the station, and she scooped up her purchases and ran for it. The last thing she wanted to do was miss her ride and spend another day in Carupano. It was too close to Trinidad for comfort.

  The door opened, and she stood in line with the other passengers. Thankfully, her seat was only a few back from the driver, so she wouldn’t be sitting by the bathroom for the whole trip. Her luck didn’t completely hold, though, when a mother and three small boys took the seats behind her. One immediately began crying when the other smacked him, and Jet turned around and gave the oblivious mother a dark look. The woman got the message and shifted the little squawker across the aisle then took the seat behind Jet herself.

  As the bus bumped along the streets leading to the highway, Jet stuffed tissue in her ears and settled in for the long trip. She had nobody sitting next to her, at least for now, so she closed her eyes and reconciled herself to thinking through her situation and devising a plan.

  In order to do so, she needed to understand how whoever was targeting her had located her.

  And to do that, she needed to go back down a rabbit hole she thought she’d sealed off forever.

  Chapter 11

  The bus swayed around a gradual curve then straightened out, the steady rumble of its wheels on the weathered asphalt blending with the muted roar of its diesel engine. The odor of spicy food pervaded the cabin as several of the passengers who had made the long trip before opened containers and ate lunch. The driver announced over the speaker that they would be making a ten-minute stop within two hours and that vendors would be selling food there, but the regular travelers preferred to bring their own – for reasons that would shortly become obvious.

  Jet opened her eyes and stared at the passing landscape, her mind churning over the ramifications of the attack.

  When she had disappeared in a ball of flame in Algiers, her existence had ended. Nobody knew that she was still alive except for David.

  Who was also the only person who knew what her final destination had been.

  She’d chosen Trinidad because it was far from her stomping grounds in the Middle East. There was basically zero chance on the island of being recognized by someone from her past life. She’d also considered Indonesia or Brazil, but didn’t speak the native tongues so communicating would have been a barrier. Trinidad’s official language was English, although she discovered after arriving that most spoke a Creole mixture in daily life. Jet spoke perfect English without an accent, thanks to her parents – her mom, born in Israel but of half Japanese and half Dominican heritage, had spoken Spanish as well, but always communicated with her father and her in English.

  Nobody but David knew she was going to Trinidad, which left three possibilities: he had knowingly betrayed her, or had unknowingly done so…or they had slipped up somehow and someone had found out. The third scenario was impossible – Jet’s knowledge of craft was such that there was no way she could have been followed or traced.

  Besides which, as far as the world was concerned she was dead.

  That David would breach her confidence was hard to believe. He had no reason to give her up. And she believed that, in his own way, he loved her. Even if much of their attraction had been physical, over time, she had developed powerful feelings for him, and she knew it was mutual.

  Then again, he lived in a no-man’s-land of fluid ethics and constant duplicity, where allegiances could shift in a heartbeat and nothing was sure. It was the spymaster’s life, which defined moral ambiguity. Could he have run into a situation where he’d had to divulge that she was alive? Sold her out? Was she nothing more than a pawn in some unknown game he was playing?

  Nothing would have surprised Jet after the things she’d witnessed, but the idea of David betraying her didn’t make any sense. Not for the least reason that once she was dead, she was off the board, of interest to no one. That was the whole point of staging the explosion.

  No, it didn’t fit.

  But she couldn’t be a hundred percent certain that David hadn’t sold her out. And ninety-nine percent wouldn’t cut it. She needed to know for sure.

  Her other problem was that she had no idea who had targeted her, or why.

  It really could be anyone. Another intelligence service that she’d crossed during one of her missions. Terrorists. Criminal syndicates. A rogue government – she’d operated all over, including missions against Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya…

  The possible list of enemies was considerable and included her own country. The Mossad couldn’t be completely trusted not to have reasons to want her silenced. The team she had belonged to had carried out operations that were in clear violation of international law and would have severely embarrassed anyone associated with it, had all facts become known. Even a hint of the team’s existence would have been political dynamite.

  The truth was that trying to figure out who wanted her head was going to be impossible without knowing how they had discovered she was alive, and then how they had found her.

  And that led back to David.

  As did all roads.

  Which didn’t help her much.

  Because like her, David was a ghost. Untraceable. His official existence was top secret, and he moved around constantly, never staying in any one place for more than a few weeks. He was ultra-paranoid and cautious – all the same enemies who would have danced in the streets to kill Jet would have also delighted in getting David…and in truth, the list was probably longer.

  So it wasn’t like she could knock on his door and confront him. He could be anywhere, although he tended to stay within Israel’s borders. Which didn’t narrow it down much. There were a lot of places to hide if you were motivated and knew how.

  And David was an expert at it.

  Other than staying alive long enough to understand who wanted her dead, her number one priority would have to be finding David so she could discover the truth.

  Whatever it was.

  As the bus slowed to negotiate a series of hairpin turns, the child in the seat across the aisle vomited on the floor. The horrified mother rushed to clean it up, but the smell lingered and permeated the cabin. Jet considered stuffing tissue into her nose as well as her ears, but ultimately reconsidered. She was just going to spend a day in hell. There was no way around it.

  It wasn’t like she hadn’t spent plenty there before.

  She returned to the question of how to find David, but the more she thought about it, the more difficult it seemed.

  The only way she could see was through another member of the team. They always had some way of getting in contact with him. They had to in case a mission blew apart. How she would convince a former teammate to divulge David’s contact information would come later – her biggest hurdle wasn’t how to get that piece of info, it was how to find any of them. They, like Jet, lived like nomads and were invisible. None of them had homes. She didn’t even know their real identities, just code names nobody would ever admit existed. Even if she could hack into the Mossad servers, which was nearly impossible, there would be no trail to follow – David made a point of ensuring that nothing could lead back to headquarters. It was part of his cautious personality and the nature of the team.

  The bus rolled into the next station a few minutes later. Taking her backpack with her, Jet descended to stretch her legs, relieved to be out of the toxic atmosphere, if only for a brief while.

  The food the vendors were selling was so questionable that she bought some potato chips and a bottle of water instead, resigning herself to saving her digestive system until they arrived in Caracas.

  When the bus lumbered back onto the highway, an idea came to her with such sudden
ness it surprised her.

  There was one place she could probably find one of the team.

  The operative known only as Rain had been in deep cover during the Algerian mission, preventing him from joining them. It was a long-term penetration that had taken him out of the active team for years. She’d connected the dots when she’d been told that Rain wouldn’t be part of the Algiers operation – she’d been part of the insertion group that had set up his cover in Yemen, and had later been sent in for a sanction of a member of the cell he’d penetrated, who Rain had been afraid was suspicious of him. The man in question had suffered an apparent heart attack a few days later, and the problem had been solved.

  She might be able to find Rain again if he was still in Yemen. The Mossad wouldn’t pull him out unless it absolutely had to after all the work it had spent on his insertion and cover. Depending on what his assignment was, he might still be there.

  It wasn’t much to go on, but it was a place to start.

  Jet powered on the cell phone and busied herself searching for flights to get her to the Middle East from Caracas. It looked like her best bet would be through Germany – Frankfurt, then on to Riyadh, then finally to Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. She’d have to spend a day or two in Frankfurt to get a Yemeni visa, but that wouldn’t pose a problem – as the poorest country in the region, any tourist dollars at all were welcomed.

  Jet’s memory of the last time she’d been in Sana’a was less than pleasant. The place was a verifiable shithole, filthy and crime-ridden, run by crooks, where misogyny was institutionalized and barbarism was the national pastime.

  But if Rain was still there, she could use him to get in contact with David. What happened from there was anyone’s guess.

  For the first time in the last forty-eight hours, she felt proactive. It wasn’t standing in the middle of the street with a Heckler and Koch MP7 laying waste to her adversaries, but it was something.

  Right now, she’d take it.

  Chapter 12