by John Altman
Up top was the ramsad, looking resolute behind a podium. The photograph had come from the man’s previous life with the IDF General Staff. The prime minister and the defense minister stood behind him, before a blue Star of David on a white field.
A strand of black yarn ran down one tier, connecting the director to a young man standing on a street corner, perhaps waiting for a traffic light to change. Enlarged and pixelated and bearing a CIA watermark in one corner, the photo showed a handsome man with mirrored sunglasses and black curly hair. Block letters declared him to be one Yoni Yariv.
“The initials in the dossier,” said Horowitz, “match only one known Mossad operative: Yoni Yariv, the other voice in the recording.”
Below Yariv, the yarn forked into three branches. One led to the most recent photograph from the file: Jana Dahan, with wicked merriment and suppressed fury gleaming in her eyes. The other two led to placards bearing typewritten bullet points but no names or pictures.
“Our mystery man.” Horwitz tapped the leftmost unlabeled card. “Who, we are told, ‘will see it through’—at least, according to the psychologists. A veteran who ‘suffers from PTSD, misdiagnosed as mere combat stress.’ Who has recently suffered a failed marriage. And who can get ‘close enough to whisper a secret. Within an arm’s length of countless secondary targets.’”
He thumped the last card. “This is ‘the woman in charge of the event … a trusted pillar of her Washington community.’ Married mother of four; a churchgoer. Yet she is ‘completely farmisht’—dysfunctional. She keeps a secret. Our conspirators see an opportunity here. Which brings us full circle, back to …”
Another thump of the index finger. “Jana Dahan, who has already been moved ‘into position’ and ‘awaits only the final order to proceed.’”
“You’ve been busy,” Dalia said. She had sent along the file, via McConnell, only eight hours ago.
“I asked for a name and a face, and you came through. Just holding up my end.”
McConnell’s green eyes focused intently on the board, the way a cat might look at an unsuspecting bird. In that grim determination, Dalia could see the younger man, lean and ambitious, hidden beneath the slack, pink jowls.
Horowitz rapped Jana’s photograph again, with a knuckle this time. “As of this afternoon, she’s been scanned into facial-recognition software. Cross-referenced with tollbooth cameras, INS, DMV, every database we have. She’s on TIDE, the Terrorist Identifier Datamart Environment. That means watch lists, and cooperation, if needed, from Homeland fusion centers, which means Customs and Border, TSA, Coast Guard, ECHELON, and EEC. Local and state police. FBI, CIA, NSA, DOJ. The whole damned alphabet. All on the US taxpayer’s dime. And no pesky red tape to tangle us up. I haven’t given any one entity enough information to put the pieces together—which means I haven’t given nearly enough to justify the expenditure. Congressional committee comes sniffing around, heads will roll, starting with mine.”
He read the question in Dalia’s furrowed brow. And she read the answer in his. He had put himself so far out on a limb for the same reason she had: because Jews needed Israel, flaws and all.
“Yariv’s last note on her file came about three years ago. So I looked at a four-month window of US Customs surveillance at major airports … and found this.” He reached for the computer’s mouse. Grainy black-and-white footage appeared on the monitor: a three-quarters top-down view of a customs station, crowd-control lanes, haggard international travelers. A green time code in one corner scissored off fractions of seconds, starting at 04:06:18:41 on 11/11. “JFK. Three years ago, almost to the day.”
A young woman stepped forward and slid a passport across a desk. Horowitz paused the footage to open another window alongside: the most recent photo from the dossier. A sudden outbreak of red dots on the two faces. “Eighty-two nodal matches. We consider twenty an actionable hit. The flight was a red-eye from Paris. Now, stay with me …”
Minimizing the images, he opened another camera feed. Watermark HERTZ, time stamp about an hour after the first. Another grainy top-down view. No need now for the computer to identify common nodal points. The pretty young woman was filling out paperwork, then offering a credit card and driver’s license. “Her passport belonged to one Carine Fournier—who vanished off the face of the earth, far as I can tell, the instant she passed through immigration. She rented the car as Tiffany Watson, giving a fictional address in Rhode Island. Nine days later, she dropped the car off just north of San Francisco. Electronic toll information lets us track her progress …” He opened a satellite map of the United States, with date/time balloons in northeastern states connected by a zigzagging red line. “… as far west as Illinois.”
Jana’s slender, foxy face watched dispassionately from the bulletin board.
“She pops up again fifty-two days later—in Portland, Oregon, applying for a job at a local drugstore.” He shrank the map for a moment and opened a .jpg screen capture from another security camera. And again their quarry. Even hunched over an application inside a tiny office, there was something insolent in her carriage.
“She gave a legal residence near West Hills.” He clicked back to the map. “So I called a buddy in the Oregon DHS field office. He has a friend in the local PD. You think I’ve had a busy day. First they spoke with the super of the apartment, who says he last saw Tiffany Watson on October eleventh. He didn’t go inside until last week, after the grace period for overdue rent expired. But all activity in the apartment, according to water, PSE&G, Verizon, and the post office, stopped around the eleventh. Plenty of fingerprints and genetic material inside. Prints match Jana Dahan’s military personnel file. Remains of an iPhone recovered from the garbage disposal. And I do mean ‘remains.’”
McConnell and Dalia exchanged a glance.
“As it happens, the young lady was well known to local PD. She spent most of her after-work evenings in bars—rough ones. Militia types, survivalists, white power. Scrapes with the law here and there, but never any charges. Maintained as low a profile as possible, considering the company she kept. All of which jibes, of course, with this undercover operation, Di Yerushe. One of these bars, called Shaky Ground, was already on PD radar because of a man named Luke Harris. A local, last seen there—his regular watering hole—on the night of October tenth.”
He clicked. Coarse black-and-white CCTV footage played: a rough-looking bar, neon beer signs, crowded tables. An unoccupied drum kit tucked off in one corner. Coolers lining a wall. Horowitz paused the video and used the cursor to point out two blurs, barely recognizable as a man and a woman. “Here’s Harris. Hard to see his dance partner’s face, but ten to one it’s our Janala. On the seventeenth, one week after this video was taken, a girl from the bar finally wondered where Harris had been. Visited his cabin on Mount Hood. Noticed his truck missing. Front door locked. She found a broken padlock out back and opened the cellar door. Smelled decomp and called the law. Next thing you know, Hood River County Sheriff’s on the scene. They found a body and a murder weapon—pair of bolt cutters from the toolshed. Official cause of death is penetrating head trauma to the occipital bone. October out there is cold nights, warm days; inside a cellar, somewhat open to the elements, but closed for the most part to varmints. Decay consistent, according to the pathologist, with death around the tenth or eleventh. So our story comes together. On the night of the tenth, Tiffany Watson goes with Harris from Shaky Ground to his cabin on the mountain—where none of her fingerprints or DNA were recovered, I should mention, because the scene had been washed with bleach. The next day, she goes back to her apartment, where she’s seen by the super in midafternoon. One neighbor also reports seeing a red Ford pickup briefly parked by the curb. Harris owned a red 2014 Ford F150. As of ninety minutes ago, we’ve got a Be-On-The-Lookout in the entire lower forty-eight.”
Dalia pursed her lips thoughtfully and said, “She’s already been ‘moved into position.’ That mean
s within striking distance, I’d guess, of this ‘pillar of her Washington community.’”
“The BOLO includes MPDC. Washington State Police, too, although I find that a less likely target. Unfortunately, we can’t scan every face picked up by every security camera in the DC metropolitan area—at least, not without using so much computer time that we’re guaranteed to get the wrong kind of attention. On the other hand, we’ve got one hard address: the apartment in Manhattan where she spent summers growing up. The cousin, Miriam, died six years ago—leukemia. The uncle died of bladder cancer fifteen months later. But Aunt Becca still lives in the same apartment on Eighty-Eighth and Madison. We’re watching landline and mobiles, looking into phone records for the past three years; also intercepting network packets, monitoring Internet activity and email. No FISA warrant or District Court approval, by the way, for any of this. But until someone catches on, I say push ahead. Desperate times.” McConnell scratched absently at a pale scar that curved around his forearm. “Facial recognition’s linked up to street cams within a five-block radius. If she contacts the aunt in New York, we’ll see her or hear her.”
“And then?” McConnell asked.
“That gets tricky. She’s trained in field ops, hand-to-hand. My feeling is that once we make a positive ID, we let a tac team do the heavy lifting.”
“Talk about getting attention.”
“Let’s be honest,” said Horowitz. “This only ends one way. It’s just a question of when. I’m willing to go down with the ship, but only after we get Jana in custody.”
A few moments of quiet as they absorbed this.
“This pillar of the community …” McConnell stopped scraping one thumbnail with the other and looked up. “… who has ‘worked hard to keep her secret.’ What’s the implication? Crime? Infidelity? Drugs?”
“Great minds,” said Horowitz. “No lack of professional ratfuckers in DC. These guys live by sniffing out dirty secrets. I’ve got some calls in.”
Quiet again.
“You haven’t even heard the best part yet,” Horowitz continued. “Along with the body in that cellar on Mount Hood, the county sheriff’s office found a dozen crates. White-power pamphlets, gun parts for full-auto conversions, knives, hand grenades. Standard-issue asshole gear. Frankly, nobody was all that surprised—or all that sorry—to see this guy go. Live by the sword, et cetera. But unlike the Hood River sheriff, I know that Tiffany Watson, a.k.a. Jana Dahan, is involved with something big and bad. So after my buddy interviewed Tiffany Watson’s neighbors, I asked him to head out to Mount Hood. A little grumbling, but he did it. Went in right under that police tape with a putty knife and a razor blade. Scraped some samples into Ziploc baggies. Fast-tracked analysis at the DHS lab. What do you think he found?”
Dalia closed her eyes. Suddenly her scalp was crawling again.
“And he can get how close?”
“Close enough to whisper a secret. And within arm’s length of countless secondary targets. We’ll reach dozens. Maybe more.”
“The samples from that cellar,” Horowitz said, “tested positive for cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine—that’s plastic explosive. Also for isopropyl methylphosphonic acid.” He let that hang in the air for a moment. “Sarin. Specifically, the compound into which sarin degrades.”
The irony was appalling. Not just a bombing attack, but chemical weapons. Outlawed by Geneva, embraced by Saddam and al-Assad—and, of course, by the architects of the so-called Final Solution: Himmler and Eichmann and der Führer himself. Dalia’s eyes opened again. A distant bell rang inside her skull. There was no depth, she thought bitterly, to which her people would not sink in their frantic scramble to become no better than their enemies.
Jana would not go through with it. In the girl’s face, Dalia recognized an essential, undeniable humanity. Compromised, angry, complicated, hurt, scarred … but still human.
But the body in the cellar; the bolt cutters, the penetrating head trauma. Fewer than one-fifth of soldiers, she taught her students, actually fired their weapons at exposed enemies. Man was not by nature a close-range killer. Usually, he took another life only to save his own. In fact, no species killed its own willingly, as a general rule. In territorial and mating battles, combatants threatened and postured. They bit, stung, clawed, and butted horns. But only when fighting other species did they gut, gore, go for the kill.
But Jana Dahan was one of the minority: a natural-born killer. When the moment came, she had not hesitated.
A sudden shadow came fluttering across the study: a night bird arrowing outside the shaded window. When it thumped against the glass, Dalia shrieked aloud.
Chapter Six
Hopewell, NJ
Yoni Yariv pulled off the woodland road into a misty shaded glen.
He donned a black tactical field jacket, thin nylon gloves, and a dark knit cap. Getting out of the rented black Cadillac DTS, he released the trunk latch. From the gray duffel he had taken from a storage unit in Queens, he removed a Jericho 941 pistol and belt-loop holster, suppressor, extra magazines, tactical folding knife, Vortex Viper HD night-vision binoculars, and a rucksack containing eight insulated squibs. And finally, a black hardside case with shoulder strap, containing a PGM Hécate II sniper rifle.
After consulting his phone, he tested the breeze and struck off upwind. Not quite one in the morning, and the forest was alive with drips, murmurs, hoots, and rustles. Druchus—way out in the wild. Ground slipped and squelched underfoot. Silver moonlight picked out branches weighted with ice. A cataract of weird light hung above the horizon. He found the North Star and then, working backward, the Big Dipper.
Once, at the ramsad’s behest, he had spent two weeks with a Bedouin tribe in the Sinai, digging up weapons caches and then reburying them elsewhere for reasons that had remained obscure. During long nights around spitting campfires, a sheikh had shared with him millennia-old secrets to survival in the desert. The Great Bear pointed north, said the sheikh, but if the Great Bear was beneath the horizon, Cassiopeia could serve the same purpose. Sand dunes formed at ninety degrees to the prevailing winds, meaning they ran north-south—except for the shallower crescent-shaped dunes, which pointed west. Camels were sources not only of milk and meat and labor, but, in a pinch, of water as well. The beasts could consume a hundred liters in less than ten minutes, and the water stayed in their stomachs for two weeks. But the most important lesson of all had been shvoye—patience. “You need less than you think, and you think more than you should. The desert eats alive men who run in circles. When you start to chase your own tail, count back from five.”
Now Yoni approached the safe house slowly and carefully, pausing regularly to correct his course, to scan the forest and recheck the direction of the wind and listen to the music of the night.
When the GPS indicated that he was within a thousand meters, he turned south-southeast. Two hundred meters later, he reached a clearing. A smear of Milky Way twinkled above low mountains. In a far corner of the field, shrouded by fog and almost invisible against the backdrop of forest, he found a small stone cottage with dormer windows, a brick chimney, and an old-fashioned well. A long unpaved driveway ran back through old-growth forest, toward a distant country road.
Yoni peered through the Viper infrared goggles. The cottage’s windows were curtained, cold. The Nissan Altima parked in the driveway was sheathed in frost. But heat swirled at the base of the chimney, running through pipes, collecting in several mysterious clumps. He could see the line halfway up a toilet tank, where the water stopped. He lowered the binoculars and checked his watch. Twelve minutes past 2:00 a.m.
He might conceivably thunder into the cottage and catch them off guard as they slept. But who knew what precautions they may have taken? And one of the mysterious clumps of heat might be a dog.
Shvoye. Patience.
The suppressor threaded smoothly, quietly, onto the pistol’s barrel. He cr
ept closer to the house, stopping frequently to scan for cameras, animals, traps. He came near enough to the east side to discern individual bricks in the chimney. Taking one of the insulated squibs from the rucksack, he set it within twenty meters of the front door. Retreating, he counted ten paces and left another in frozen grass. Circling around the cottage, he set squibs at regular intervals.
East again, calculating the point on the horizon where the sun would rise. Near the edge of the field, he found a suitable ridge. Range about seven hundred meters, less than half the rifle’s effective reach. Time it right, and anyone observing the position from inside the house would be dazzled by the breaking dawn. His shoulders rejoiced when he shrugged off the black hardside case.
To prevent glare, he dropped a hood over the Scrome LTE J10 F1 scope. Then he unfolded the rifle’s front bipod, planting it firmly in the crunching frost, took up position—facedown, right leg bent at the knee—and focused on the cozy little cottage’s front door.
Centering the knob in the mil-dot reticle, he adjusted windage and elevation controls. Then, to eliminate reflection that might spoil his shot, he dropped on a honeycomb filter.
Lifting the rear monopod, he tracked left and then right, to one curtained window and then the other, and mimed pulling the trigger. He preferred not to kill both men right off the bat, but to kill one and disable the other, for purposes of interrogation. Seven rounds in the detachable box magazine, another full magazine in the case if necessary.
He double-checked the silenced pistol, then readied on his phone the presets with which he would detonate the squibs. He scooped up some sleet and moved it around in his mouth, moistening his tongue.
And waited.
Discomfort, cold, thirst, hunger—a small price considering what hung in the balance. And nothing compared to what his ancestors had gone through. You, my boy, are hard.
The desert eats alive men who run in circles.
