False Flag

by John Altman

  Working the dripping cheesecloth bag of guts loose from the chest cavity triggered a memory of chemical orange sky. Distant small-arms fire. A screaming haji civilian. Female. Clutching her belly. Gut shot—the worst. Slow, painful death. The woman’s own intestines slipped through her fingers. He had felt an urge to put her out of her misery, as one might a rabid dog. But he had turned away, pretending not to see. Not his problem.

  He came back to himself some time later. Still holding the dripping bag of turkey giblets. Pot frothing, hissing against the stove. Tears rolling down his cheeks. Please, God, don’t let my son come into the kitchen now and see me like this.

  He switched off the burner and stood there, quaking. A fucking mess—that’s what he was. Silas would be better off without him.

  He sniffled, wiped his nose on his sleeve. That set off another memory: lying awake sobbing in his childhood bed shaped like a race car. His brother peeking into his bedroom. Backlit, haloed. Michael turning away, covering his shame. Seth coming into the room anyway, settling gently on the edge of the mattress. Bedsprings creaking. “What’s wrong? Let me help.” They had stayed awake half the night, studying together. And at the seder the next night, Michael had recited the Four Questions with flying colors. Seth watching with an approving smile. Father beaming from the head of the table. Then Father had moved on to the next part of the ceremony, explaining how the Lord, Blessed be He, King of the Universe, with a strong hand and outstretched arm, and with great terribleness, and with signs and wonders, had avenged the Jews upon their enemies, delivering unto the Egyptians ten plagues, culminating with the slaying of the firstborn sons.

  Future generations will sing songs about you.

  Michael dumped out the chicken stock, which had mostly boiled away. Measured more, put it back on the stove, and started dicing vegetables. Knife rapping fast against the cutting board. Tears drying up now. Back to reality. Work to be done.

  Tomorrow was Thanksgiving.

  Columbia Heights,

  Washington, DC

  Looking at the message, Jana puckered her brow.

  Yoni had played her like a violin, but he at least had bothered to play her. The director was all cold formality and entitled assumptions. Await further orders. Not even a cursory, Well done.

  The message deleted automatically when she closed it. Brimming with nervous energy, she paced the length of the apartment for a few minutes. Eventually, she shucked on her navy pea coat. Before descending to the street, she checked herself briefly in the mirror. At the ramsad’s suggestion, she had worn no makeup while rendezvousing with Fletcher: Let the scars show. You look on the outside the way he feels on the inside. Now she brushed over the scars with light blush, then applied lipstick.

  She walked down four flights, through stronger-than-usual pockets of cooking smells—preparations for tomorrow’s holiday. Reaching the front stoop, she picked a direction to walk, clear her head. Where hardly mattered. As she struck off, someone gave a piercing wolf whistle. She paid no attention.

  Fingers working against the phone in her pocket. Just to hear the sound of a friendly voice would do wonders, but there was no one to call.

  For a moment, she dared think of Yoni. Maybe she had misunderstood, during her brief conversation with the director a week ago. Hearing that voice on the other end of the line had caught her off guard. (And she had been impressed, despite herself, as any girl from a shabby old Jewish Agency house would surely have been.) “Our mutual friend is indisposed. From now on I must contact you directly, using the alternate number. You should take care. Watch your back. We may have suffered a … lack of sanitation.”

  Angrily now, she shook her head. She knew what “indisposed” meant. Yoni, who had been so alive, so passionate, so vital, was dead. Gone. Worm food. And that was okay. He had known the risks. She was the unfortunate one. Still alive, still fighting. But alone now. And more homesick than ever. She wanted to be back in Jerusalem, in the bazaar, surrounded by Israelis in jeans, Arabs in colorful kaftans, soldiers in crisp fatigues, clerics in flowing black robes. Hanging Persian carpets and clouds of burning incense, awnings and umbrella-covered food carts, honking taxis and pecking pigeons. Dusty olive groves beyond red-tiled roofs. Hazy blue mountains sleeping in the far distance. Home.

  Maybe Mom.

  She snorted aloud. The last time Jana spoke with her mother had been to announce that she would be staying with military intelligence beyond her mandatory service. (In fact, she had been preparing to make the switch to Mossad, but that detail one did not tell even one’s own mother.) And suddenly, Mom had lit into her: “You’re a follower, Jana. You’ve always been a follower. You don’t think for yourself. You don’t stand on your own two feet. Nit ahin, nit ahir. Neither here nor there. You’re drawn to strong people because they give you a sense of purpose. But it’s only skin deep. My own daughter, a professional hanger-on. A lifetime nokhshlepper.”

  No, she would not be calling her mother.

  She walked past laughing families, bickering couples, feeling a certain festivity in the air. The night before Thanksgiving. More evidence, she thought darkly, of American hypocrisy. They wagged their fingers at Israelis, told them to give back the land they had stolen. Even as they celebrated their own epic land grab, adding insult to injury with cutesy little paper turkeys, buckled Puritan hats, war feathers, and Indian headbands. Government-sanctioned alcoholism had finished the job started with smallpox-infected blankets. And so the question of giving back the land had become moot. Wasn’t that convenient. But if Jews were to try the same approach, watch the world scream.

  Dark thoughts. She needed human contact. But Yoni was gone. There was nobody else. She was reaping what she had sown.

  Cousin Miriam, maybe. Aunt Becca …

  She took out the phone, deliberated, then returned it to her pocket.

  “We may have suffered a … lack of sanitation.”

  Turning a corner, passing boarded-up windows, she quartered the street, checking her six. No one followed her. But it paid to be cautious.

  Half a block farther on, she stumbled across what may have been a drug deal: two teenagers jamming hands in pockets, melting away into shadows. All within a stone’s throw of the White House, with its private chef and underground bowling alley. Yet the White House dared criticize Israel. For what? For defending itself. Truly, Americans had made an art form of hypocrisy.

  Her mind turned back to Cousin Miriam, to Aunt Becca. She could picture them just sitting down to dinner. A rich dinner, no doubt. In that apartment, every dinner had been rich. Compared to the house where Jana had grown up, with its concrete walls and weeds and cockroaches and paychecks stretched thin, the Upper East Side doorman building had been a fantasy straight out of a children’s book. Speaking of which, Miriam’s bookshelf had featured every Eloise title: the original, and Eloise in Paris, and Eloise in Moscow, and even Eloise at Christmastime. Because in America, even Jews celebrated Christmas. Over dinner in that apartment, they didn’t talk about gas masks or bomb shelters or what to do if you inhaled anthrax. They talked about reality TV shows, and how Miriam’s private school, whose annual tuition exceeded those of many universities, was nonetheless always trying to squeeze still more money out of the parents. Miriam’s father had announced that he would not even go into that school without keeping one hand on his wallet. Chuckle, chuckle. But what if New Jersey had been lobbing rockets at that fancy school? What would they do then?

  Americans. They saw no reality except their own. They could not see that the Mideast was not Ellis Island, that there was no melting pot in the Mideast. Sunni, Shia, and Kurd would not fight alongside each other in some jury-rigged army, arms linked, tra-la-la, just because it suited Americans to believe they would. Their “Middle East” was the result of lines drawn almost at random by French and British diplomats who had not troubled themselves to understand the first thing about local history. H
ere, let’s call this “Syria.” And let’s call this “Lebanon.” This we call “Iraq.” So what if it contains the very different people of Kurdistan, Baghdad, and Basra? So what if our Anglo-French manufactured national consciousness is but a century old—despite Saddam’s speeches about eternal Iraqi empires—and so there will always be fighting until the bitter end? Ever since the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Middle East had been unstable. And it would continue to be so until one side or the other delivered the killing blow. But no, that makes us uncomfortable as we eat our fine rich dinners and celebrate our whitewashed version of our own history, so we will reject it. Even as we kill more babies with more bombs and more flying robots and, with each dead child, drive a new generation into the arms of radical fundamentalists, we will happily throw Israel to the wolves and claim to be above it all.

  They deserved everything they were going to get. Everything and more. Fucking hypocrites.

  She would call Miriam. Give whoever answered a long-overdue piece of her mind. She took out the phone again. She still remembered the number of the apartment. Funny how long-term memory worked. She keyed it in, and her thumb hovered over the call button.

  * * *

  On Eighty-Eighth and Madison, two hundred miles north, the StingRay technology used by Homeland Security to extract stored data from mobile networks waited, humming, poised to reverse-trace the call.

  * * *

  But of course, Jana thought, a decade had passed since her last visit to New York. Miriam would be a young woman now, as she herself was. Not living at home and eating with her parents.

  She lowered the phone and kept walking, hands jammed in pockets, head lowered against the cold wind, alone.

  North of Andover, VT

  At seven on Thanksgiving morning, George Rockaway closed the side door gently behind him and fell into a loose, loping jog, through frozen forest striped with shadows. Finding a good, steady rhythm, taking care to pace himself, to avoid twisting his ankle on leaf-hidden roots or treacherous ice.

  Feet pounding, heart thumping. Clear blue sky, dark mountains. Reaching the end of the long gravel driveway, he turned right without slowing. The same route he had followed back in high school when he joined the Kearsarge Regional High track team. Back then, trapped every night beneath his father’s roof, he would run six or eight or ten miles at a stretch, pushing himself to exhaustion and beyond. Then he would come home, wolf down dinner standing at the kitchen counter, and crawl into bed.

  Having everyone back together under the same roof for the holiday brought all the old dysfunctional dynamics bubbling up with a vengeance. His sister, Judy, who had always been a whiner, complained incessantly. His brother, Jack, a lifelong mama’s boy, turned childlike and helpless. For her part, Mama fretted, for she was a born fretter. And, of course, Daddy drank. Hiding bottles in cupboards, on high shelves, under couches. And when Daddy got sufficiently drunk, his simmering irritation boiled over. As the baby of the family, George usually took the brunt.

  But he would survive. And on Sunday afternoon he would escape back to the city, to his dorm room and the new life he was carving out for himself, very far from here. The next four days would be a pisser, yes they would. But he would make it through.

  And the woods were beautiful. No denying that. And after a few months in the concrete jungle of Manhattan, he did miss this towering forest, the yawning sky, the watchful mountains. Reaching the old fire road, he turned right. Once around the lake. If he had enough energy, maybe twice.

  Cranking up his lungs, he hawked up a plug of phlegm. He pushed harder, extending his stride. Back in the old days, he would run until his mind turned white, washing away all the family dysfunction. Running, running, running, and nothing else. Now he was out of shape, and his chest already burned.

  He reached the lake, following a rough natural trail, drawing toward and away from the banks as terrain dictated. Thin ice near the shore, but open water farther out. Winter birds calling querulously, morning songs echoing. Land climbing and dipping. Dark hollows, slashing ravines, open fields, wild country.

  A glint in the water. Ice, George thought. Then it flashed again, and he knew it was metal. He drew to a stop, panting, hands on knees, squinting across the lake, into the sun.

  Metal indeed—and a lot of it, from the looks—there beneath a scrim of ice near the banks.

  He straightened, spat again, and cautiously picked his way closer.

  Shadows were lifting now as the sun climbed higher. The only sounds were the birds, the soft wind, the slow drip of a warming day. George shielded his eyes with one hand. The metal was mostly underwater, reminding him of an iceberg, just peeking above the surface. The color of rust, giving way to shining chrome. A fender.

  A car, he thought.

  He took out his phone. But there was no reception out here.

  After another moment, he turned, spat again, and began running back toward the house as fast as his lungs would let him.

  Trenton, NJ

  “October twenty-first.” On the left side of the screen, Horowitz opened the image of the Grand Marquis, captured by a tollbooth camera near Youngstown, Ohio. “And, this morning …” On the right, he scaled to size a top-down image of a claw dredge and an industrial tow truck, parked near the edge of a wooded lake outside Andover, Vermont. A loose throw of men and patrol cars. At the end of a winch cable, the Grand Marquis emerged, streaming water.

  “Jogger called it in at half past eight. Local kid, home from college for Thanksgiving. No human remains, no sign of foul play, no contraband; so the case becomes a less-than-alpha priority, especially on Thanksgiving Day. Upshot: the car’s sitting in the Merrimack County impound lot, where nobody will give it another thought until Monday.”

  McConnell scratched one ear. Horowitz worked the keyboard, and the image zoomed out. Not standard Google Maps, Dalia noticed, but EEC satellite, doubtless accessed via a “fusion center,” providing current real-time footage. She thought again of the days when only top-level spooks had possessed this technology. There was a plus side to the democratization of surveillance. Yet the downside was terrifying. Technology had a mind of its own, but no conscience, no moral center. What it could do determined what was done.

  “The EEC cache dumps after sixteen days. No sign, during that time, of the car going into the drink. However …” The cursor moved to the far end of a clearing. “Must have driven in from this fire road. Mother Nature has long since covered the tracks—three heavy rains in the past sixteen days, and five since we saw her in Youngstown. But …” The image pulled back again, revealing a toy patchwork of lakes, ponds, trees, fields. “Where did she go after dumping the car? I see four possibilities. One: she’s still roughing it somewhere nearby. Two: she had access to another vehicle. A bike stowed in the Mercury’s backseat, a car or motorcycle hidden beforehand. Three: an accomplice gave her a lift. Four: she went somewhere on foot.”

  “Lex parsimoniae,” Dalia said.

  McConnell nodded. “Also known as Occam’s razor. Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Or, as my freshman logic prof put it, ‘The simplest answer is usually correct.’”

  “So, in order …” Horowitz tapped one fingertip against the cleft in his chin. “She’s not nearby; we know she was ‘moved into position’ around Washington. Another vehicle, then. But we’re talking about a woman who’s driven from Oregon, probably straight through, to Vermont. She’s exhausted. In a stolen car. Carrying explosives and sarin. Where does she find the time to hide another vehicle beforehand? Where does she get the vehicle? We’ll check local police reports during the dates in question, but I’d be surprised if we find anything.”

  His fingers flew across the keyboard, and the display switched to a data cube—a three-dimensional array of values used to describe a time series of information. Multispectral insights for the past sixteen days r
evealed no event outside usual parameters. Heavy November rain had covered any tire track, footprint, or heat signature. “We also won’t find any evidence of an accomplice. Which doesn’t mean there wasn’t one.”

  He pulled out again, higher this time. “But if she went on foot …” Still higher. The nearest area with any population density was the town of Andover. “Only three houses within five miles of the lake. Per the Merrimack assessor’s office …” A website filled the screen: lot numbers, square footages, valuations, property taxes, sales histories. Two of the houses had been resold within the past seven years; the third, not for twenty-five. A toggle provided names to go with the addresses: Fisher, Klein, Rockaway. “Rockaway—that’s the jogger. Still, doesn’t mean someone in the house isn’t working with our Janala.”

  “Spoof ’em,” said McConnell.

  “Feasible. But we need someone on the scene to run the equipment. I’ve got nobody I trust closer than Boston. And my wife’s been cooking for two days. Maybe tomorrow I could get away …”

  “I’ll go.” Dalia had no classes until next week. Thanksgiving was not her holiday anyway. Both of which Horowitz had no doubt already guessed.

  “Shotgun,” McConnell said. “Beats the Hungry Man Bachelor’s Special.”

  * * *

  Traffic on the holiday was as light as yesterday’s had been heavy. Even stopping for gas and a rest-stop meal that tasted like freeze-dried cardboard, they reached the first house on their list—the Rockaway address—at 7:22 p.m.

  They parked on a frozen dirt shoulder near the driveway’s mouth, behind a compact thatch of evergreen. McConnell opened a laptop in the passenger seat, fired up IMSI Catcher 4.5, and extended the directional antenna.

  The program found four hits within two hundred yards: four cell phones inside the house. He sent a command to the first baseband chip. The view on the laptop was of a blank ceiling. Audio as crisp as if the conversation were occurring beside them in the car: