by Ward Larsen
Hamedi’s next hour was spent initiating the sequence that had been branded into his mind by a hundred sleepless nights. Warnings overridden. Security codes activated. And the crowning touch, a malware he’d personally written to create a diversion—spurious air-raid warnings to indicate an imminent Israeli airstrike. From his desk on the fourth level, Hamedi had initiated all of it, and then a final keystroke to set the backward-running clock on its silent countdown.
With the unstoppable sequence activated, Hamedi had easily slipped his personal security detail and headed for the elevator. On reaching ground level he saw that his air-raid scheme had been a stroke of genius—every guard and soldier above the subterranean complex was looking nervously skyward from their guard shacks and gun emplacements. No one gave a second glance to the beaten old Fiat that puttered out the gate.
Hamedi was ten miles east now. He referenced the GPS receiver in his hand, and turned off the gravel road onto what he hoped was the correct dirt path. Five miles up the rutted track he saw what he was looking for—a dust-clad Toyota Land Cruiser nestled amid an outcropping of eroded boulders. The truck blended well, tan-colored and eroded in its own way with bent fenders and a baked-on casing of dust and grime. Twin petrol cans were lashed to the rear, and strapped on the roof rack was a sturdy spare tire. Hamedi hit the brakes hard, and the Fiat skidded and disappeared in a light brown cloud. He threw open the door and began to run, but then slid to a stop in the loose dirt. He had almost forgotten his jacket, which held the critical flash drives—Iran’s entire nuclear program condensed to fit in the breast pocket of a tweed blazer.
Returning for his coat, Hamedi heard a honk and looked over his shoulder at the Toyota’s driver. The man was pointing to a place in the field of stone, and Hamedi looked closer and saw a beige camouflage tarp strung between two large boulders. It blended in so well he’d not even seen it on his approach. Underneath the tarp was a space. A space big enough for …
Hamedi waved, and soon had the Fiat maneuvered into the camouflaged cavern. He bustled out, this time with his jacket in hand, and for the second time paused. Unsure what to do with the Fiat’s keys, he began to put them in his pocket, but then reconsidered and tossed them into the dirt next to the Fiat with the loose idea that Hassan might somehow be able to reclaim his car. Busy as he was, Hamedi did not notice the Toyota’s driver shaking his head.
Seconds later he was at the truck’s passenger door, and for the first time he saw who was inside. His heart leapt. On one side in the back was his mother, silent but with tears of happiness welling in her eyes. Next to her, on the reclined second seat, was a man—at least Hamedi thought it was a man, so dirt-encrusted and emaciated was the figure. The poor soul was nearly lying flat, and connected to an IV bag that was hanging from the upper riding handle. His face was craggy and withered, but he seemed extremely alert. Hamedi had not expected a third person in the truck, but given the man’s condition he easily arrived at a solution—this was one of the men who had trekked through the desert three weeks earlier to kill him. By some amazing turn, he’d escaped the forewarned platoons Behrouz had put in position. Hamedi was pleased, although on seeing the handgun in his lap he hoped the man had been given an updated mission briefing.
“Let’s go!” snapped the driver.
Hamedi stared at the Toyota’s last occupant. He hadn’t been sure at first—clean-cut with fair hair, a lean body he’d last seen covered in neoprene, the face no longer masked in camouflage shading. But the direct gaze and commanding voice left no doubt. It was the kidon from Geneva.
“Now!” he insisted.
Hamedi reached for the door handle, but paused. He checked his watch.
“Wait,” he said. “Only twenty more seconds.”
At first the driver didn’t seem to understand his meaning, but then Hamedi turned toward the west. No one said a word as they all looked across the desert. Heat was already rising in the early morning, a wavering mirage that deconstructed the horizon. The facility was just visible ten miles off, a handful of large white buildings surrounded by squat storage hangars, a few antennas and utilities sprinkled in for good measure. These structures, Hamedi knew, were no more than a place marker for what lay below—a massive complex that had been decades in the making. The Toyota’s engine had not yet been turned, and so the only thing Hamedi heard was the quick rhythm of his breathing. With five seconds to go even this took pause.
And then it happened.
The speed of light having its advantage, the first sensation was that the complex visibly shuddered, as if a full square mile of earth had bounced on a trampoline. Then a billowing wall of dust skirted the perimeter. There would be no classic mushroom cloud, Hamedi knew, the mechanics being all wrong for that. No spherical fireball, no rising column of heat to generate a Rayleigh–Taylor instability. Underground blasts dissipated energy in an entirely different manner.
The ground wave was next to arrive, the earth rattling under Hamedi’s feet in a seismic event that would travel across continents in the next minutes. The audible blast was nearly simultaneous, a low-frequency, muffled thump that echoed off the rock outcroppings. The vibrations dissipated quickly, and in the ensuing calm Hamedi imagined what was happening underground. After extensive calculations, he had positioned the weapon at the principal point of vulnerability in the underground support structure. Thousands of tons of dirt and concrete, originally intended to protect the facility, would now entomb it. Ceilings would collapse, voids would fill, and when the dust cleared—something that would take hours—the world would find a crater half a mile wide and nearly forty yards deep.
This was Hamedi’s moment of truth, and his well-considered plan had worked flawlessly. Yet there was one thing that surprised him. Something that had not been in his calculations. Hamedi did not feel the predicted elation.
“Get in!” the kidon barked, snapping Hamedi out of his trance. The Toyota’s engine rumbled to life.
“Yes,” Hamedi said, dropping into the passenger seat. “Yes … it is time.”
Moments later gravel was rattling in the wheel wells as the truck sped northward. Hamedi took an embrace from his mother, and was then introduced to the soldier, a man named Stein. After the greetings ran their course, he found himself again staring over his shoulder, mesmerized by the rising cloud of dust. When he turned away, Hamedi felt strangely nauseous. Were he not a physicist, he might have wondered if it was the radiation whirling in his stomach. After a thoughtful silence he looked directly at the kidon.
The blond man seemed to read his thoughts, and asked, “How many?”
“Ninety,” Hamedi answered, knowing exactly what he meant. “Possibly a hundred.”
The blond man nodded noncommittally.
“Does it…” Hamedi searched for the words, “does it ever get better? Any easier to accept?”
This time the kidon seemed to think about it. “No, not really. But always remember one thing—you did what had to be done.”
FIFTY-EIGHT
Arne Sanderson sat in the passenger seat of his ex-wife’s new Volvo, tinkering with the seat controls to find a more comfortable position.
“Can I help?” Ingrid asked from the driver’s seat.
“No, I’m fine. Just a bit of soreness from the surgery.”
“It’s only been two days. Have you taken your pain pills?”
He gave her a severe look. “I won’t let you be my nursemaid as well. By the way, I haven’t asked lately—how is Alfred?”
“The same,” she said.
Sanderson stared out at Stockholm in the late-morning gloom, a steady rain peppering the windshield. “Sjoberg came to see me yesterday.”
“Did he?”
“I’m being put up as a hero, you know. Relentless detective, fighting illness and the odds. All that rubbish. Of course there’s no mention of the fact that I had been taken off the case, let alone that the assistant commissioner thought I’d slipped my gimbals.”
She asked, “Did
you really throw your credentials at him?”
“I suppose that was a bit juvenile of me.”
Ingrid giggled.
“It felt good at the time.” Sanderson allowed a smile, and the ensuing silence was broken by no more than the thrum of passing cars and the hiss of wet asphalt under the Volvo’s wide tires.
He said, “They want me to come back.”
“Arne, that’s wonderful!”
“Is it?”
“Please—don’t tell me you’ve turned them down.” Her tone was that of a mother chiding a recalcitrant child. “Arne?”
“I told Sjoberg I’d think about it. But I just don’t know.”
“The department has been your life.”
“Yes, I know. But in those days—when I thought my career had ended—it wasn’t so bad. Sooner or later I’ll be gone, and the department will get along fine without Arne Sanderson. My thirty-five years won’t even be stuffed into a file cabinet—just compressed onto a hard drive somewhere that won’t have the decency to gather dust. An electronic urn for the remains of my career.”
“And what did you expect? A statue in Stortorget Square? I won’t tolerate self-pity, Arne. No one will make a record of my life, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been useful. I’ve made a difference in people’s lives, and put a few smiles on faces along the way.”
He looked at her and met her eyes for a moment. “Yes. Yes, you have.”
Her attention went back to the road as she added, “I see no reason for either of us to go idle—not while we can still contribute something.”
She turned onto Sanderson’s street, and soon the Volvo was splashing into his rutted driveway. She kept the car going, the wipers flapping rhythmically.
“Can I help you inside?” she asked.
“No, I’ll manage.”
“I’ll check on you tomorrow, maybe bring a batch of my potato soup.”
“That would be nice, thank you.”
“Did you remember your key?”
He gave her a suffering look, but after a long moment turned serious.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Can you keep a secret?”
“Well, I—”
“No, of course you can’t, you’re a policeman’s wife … or were. But I want you to promise me this once.”
Ingrid nodded.
“All this business in the papers about me getting the better of the assassin, shooting him on that bridge in Geneva. It’s all a lie. My official report, the details of how I came across the two of them—it’s fabricated, nearly every word.”
“But Arne—why?”
“The whole thing was staged.”
“Staged?”
Sanderson confessed, telling her about the three-way encounter on the jetty, Hamedi’s confession and the assassin’s plan.
“You can’t be serious,” she said when he was done.
“All I had to do was pretend to shoot the man.”
“So this Israeli killer—he’s still alive?”
Sanderson looked away, clearly perplexed. He mused aloud, “When I was standing on that bridge, facing the two of them—I wasn’t well. I had a terrible pain in my head, fine motor issues. I wasn’t thinking clearly. It couldn’t have been a more simple task. All I had to do was point the gun at the man and miss, then he was to go over the rail. But my vision—”
“Your vision?”
“At the last moment I remember seeing double. There were two of him, and I was terribly confused and dizzy. You see, I’m not sure, but … I fear I may have shot him after all.”
She held his hand for a long moment, then reached over and kissed his cheek. “Is there anything I can do?”
“No, you’ve been wonderful as always. Thank you.”
“Take care of yourself, Arne.”
“I will. And you take care of Alfred.”
Minutes later Sanderson was inside and had the teakettle on the stove. He turned on the furnace, then went around the house and cracked windows open to clear the stagnant air that had built in his absence. On the kitchen counter he lined up enough pill bottles to start his own pharmacy, and finally settled into his best chair. He turned on the television and quickly found a news broadcast. The banner at the bottom told him all he needed to know. BREAKING NEWS: NUCLEAR BLAST DETECTED IN CENTRAL IRAN. GOVERNMENT SILENT AS TO CAUSE. The commentator speculated, because that was all he could do. Sanderson registered none of it. Instead, he weighed the evidence himself, having a good bit more to work with. He sat very still, sifting and making deductions, applying the events of today to what he remembered from Geneva.
The teakettle began whistling three minutes later, and by that time, as he stood gingerly and went into the warming kitchen, Arne Sanderson had a broad smile on his face.
FIFTY-NINE
Ten months later
Dingli, Malta
Anton Bloch walked gingerly across a wide cobbled street, the uneven brickwork a test to his faltering gait. His long rehabilitation had gone well enough, but he still lacked the strength he’d once had, and the half-mile walk up a steep hill, in the heat of a Mediterranean August, was more than he’d bargained for.
The stone under his feet was an intricate mosaic, clearly a matter of some honor to a craftsman centuries ago. According to the driver who’d brought him here from Luqa, a chatty amateur historian, the Roman legions had arrived two thousand years ago, and in their wake the island was subsequently pillaged by Arab hordes, sacked by the Aragonese, and occupied violently by Byzantines. So perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised he has ended up here, Bloch mused.
Though his body was travel-weary, Bloch’s mind was sharp, and he followed the directions he’d so meticulously memorized. He passed lines of white-stone villas rife with dull corners, and pairs of querulous old women rife with sharp opinions. There were shops and grocers, and the occasional municipal building, the latter distinguished by that universal air of managed demise. Bloch was completely out of breath when he reached the end of the winding lane, where the path funneled open into a broad piazza.
He decided the address he’d been given was most likely allotted to a restaurant on one corner of the square, although the place lacked any numbers to prove the point. The building had yard-thick walls, pockmarked from one invasion or another, and the tables were no more than slabs of bleached stone. Bloch kept to the sidewalk as instructed, and where it ended he paused at a scenic overlook to take in the glistening Mediterranean, a view that had certainly not changed since the day the Romans had arrived. Rolling cobalt swells met the bases of cliffs, having built and traveled for days to reach their churning end. He turned the other way and saw a lazy Monday on the square. Waiters on patios moved languidly in the rising heat to arrange place settings for lunch. Under an olive tree a workcrew was taking a break from plastering the walls of an old church.
Bloch was watching a priest cross the road, black robe flowing and a gold cross dangling from his neck, when David Slaton appeared out of nowhere. He was standing on the sidewalk a few steps away, relaxed but observant. He said, “Thanks for coming.” There was nothing more, no offer of a handshake or pat on the shoulder. For a man like Slaton, social graces were no more than tradecraft—exhibited when necessary for appearances, but otherwise superfluous.
“It’s been a long time, David.”
“Over a year. How is retirement treating you?”
“It was good until you came along. Then somebody shot me in the spine.”
“And your recovery?”
“A little stiffness. But maybe I’m only confusing it with old age.”
Slaton began moving, and Bloch remembered—the kidon was never at ease when still. He strolled the sidewalk and Bloch kept up, wondering if the easy pace was for his benefit. They paralleled an ancient stone wall as light traffic skittered past, and while they walked Bloch studied Slaton. He looked more physically robust than ever. Deep tan and sun-lightened hair, lean muscle straining the shoulders of a loose, untuck
ed shirt. On outward appearances, a man in vibrant health.
“You look fit,” Bloch offered.
“I’ve been working.”
“I’m told there are quarries outside town. Men here, it seems, still pull blocks of granite and marble from the earth by hand.”
“Do they?”
Bloch looked pointedly at Slaton’s roughhewn hands, but said nothing.
“So?” Slaton asked. “Did you do as I asked?”
“I have to say, your method of contact took me by surprise. A check in my name for five million dollars and a plane ticket to America? You never were one for subtlety.”
An unsmiling Slaton asked, “Were you tempted to take it and run?”
“No. But be thankful my wife didn’t open it first. I’d have a villa in the south of France and two new cars by now.”
This time Bloch saw perhaps a crease of humor at the corner of Slaton’s mouth. It disappeared as soon as he asked his next question. “Did she take it?”
“I think you know the answer.”
“How did you put it to her?”
Bloch sighed. “Not as you suggested. Your idea about a widow and orphan’s fund for Mossad operatives lost in the line of duty? Please, David. Do you not know your own wife?”
Slaton didn’t respond.
“I told her it was a personal life insurance policy. I said your premiums were dutifully paid, and that she was the legal beneficiary. It didn’t matter, of course. Maybe it had something to do with the messenger. You should have hired an actor to pose as an insurance adjuster, a stranger who could arrive at her door with papers to sign and a settlement statement. Or perhaps you might have set up a company with a bland name and simply mailed her a check. But no—one look at me and she wanted nothing to do with the money. By the way, where did you get it?”
