by Brad Thor
Considering all she had done for them and all that she knew, she hoped that they wouldn’t come looking. They owed her that much. They owed it to her to leave her alone. There were other girls out there—younger, worse off. Replacing her wouldn’t be a problem.
Adjusting her sweater, Helena opened the door and exited the ladies’ room. She only had to keep Damien happy for a little while longer. As soon as she had everything she needed, her new life could begin. And once that new life began, the only thing that would matter would be what she needed.
CHAPTER 40
* * *
Ben Mordechai paid the check while Sloane Ashby was in the ladies’ room. When she returned, they left the restaurant together.
It had pained him to see Helena with Damien like that. She really was in love with him, and he was head over heels in love with her. No one was that good of an actress.
Even from across the room, the necklace was amazing, and Mordechai questioned not only where he had lost control of this operation, but of her.
Making matters worse, there was a front moving in. Though it was bright and sunny outside, he could feel it in his hands. As they stepped outside, a cold burst of wind blew a rumble of fallen leaves down the sidewalk. Mordechai turned up the collar of his coat and kept pace with Ashby back to their car.
She didn’t talk much, except during the meal where it had been important for them to appear as two colleagues out having lunch. When Damien’s security men had clocked the room, their eyes had fallen on Mordechai and stayed there a beat longer than they had on anyone else. Then they had moved on.
He had assessed them too—the cut and fabric of their suits, the shoes, the haircuts—even their eyes, jawlines, and facial structures. They were good-sized men, all over six feet tall, and they appeared European. Western European, probably, definitely not Eastern European or Israeli. The world was changing so fast, though, that it was getting harder for Mordechai to tell anymore.
The takeaway was that the men were disciplined and carried themselves with military bearing. With the kind of money Damien had to spend, they were likely former soldiers who had seen combat in multiple war zones. Not men to be trifled with, or underestimated.
“She’s quite lovely,” Ashby said as they neared their vehicle.
“Who?” Mordechai replied, lost in his own thoughts.
“Helena.”
He nodded, not sure how to reply. It was an uncomfortable situation he found himself in. He wasn’t exactly their prisoner—Deputy CIA Director Ryan had made that clear—but he also wasn’t free to go. He either cooperated fully, or they would eject him from the country, along with a handful of Israeli intelligence agents known to the CIA to be operating out of Israel’s embassy. Mordechai had no choice but to comply.
Hopefully, he now had what he needed and would be able to part ways with the Americans. Per their agreement, though, the Americans would get to copy the memory card before turning it over to him.
When they got into the car, Ashby unlocked her phone and swiped to the picture she had taken of the lipstick kiss on the bathroom mirror. “I think she left this for you.”
Handing him the phone, Ashby put the car in gear and pulled out into the street.
As they drove, Mordechai didn’t speak. Their destination was an area several minutes north called Rutherford Crossing. It was a commercial shopping area with several big box retailers and plenty of parking.
Two surveillance teams had stayed behind to keep an eye on Damien. By the time Ashby pulled into the lot near the home improvement store, Nicholas and Harvath were already there. Chase Palmer arrived a couple of minutes later.
“Do you want us to join you?” Ashby asked.
“Just Mr. Mordechai,” Harvath replied. “You and Chase stay out here.”
She nodded and handed him the memory card she had recovered from beneath the sink of the ladies’ room at La Niçoise.
Mordechai stepped out of the car and followed Harvath over to the van.
“Do you like dogs?” Harvath asked as he reached for the handle.
“I don’t really have a problem with . . . Jesus!” he exclaimed upon seeing Argos and Draco sitting inside.
When he looked up and saw Nicholas, he added, “Son of a—”
But Nicholas cut him off. “Not two sentences you want to be putting together.”
“You!”
The little man smiled. “Me.”
“So this is why we haven’t been able to find you,” said Mordechai. “The Americans have been hiding you.”
“First of all, I didn’t know the Mossad was looking for me. Second of—”
“Like hell you didn’t. It was you who tipped the Emiratis about the Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh operation.”
Harvath looked at Nicholas. “You two know each other?”
“Only by reputation.”
“Al-Mabhouh. Wasn’t he the founder of Hamas’s military wing? The one you guys got caught whacking in Dubai?”
“Cofounder,” Mordechai asserted.
“Whatever,” Harvath replied. “Get in the van.”
Once the Israeli was inside, he climbed in behind him and shut the door.
Mordechai took one of the seats in front of the racks of electronic equipment.
Argos and Draco didn’t care for him. Each of the enormous white dogs began to growl the moment he stepped inside.
Nicholas ordered them to be quiet, but they refused to obey, and the growling continued. Harvath had never seen that before.
Nicholas repeated the command, and the dogs finally fell silent.
“With or without assistance,” the little man clarified, “Emirati intelligence would have figured out what happened.”
“So you admit it came from you,” Mordechai seethed.
“I had nothing to do with it. But considering what an embarrassment it was for the Mossad, I can understand your professional desire for a scapegoat.”
Mordechai looked at Harvath while pointing his finger at Nicholas. “He is a global criminal wanted by more countries than I can count. America should not be giving this man safe haven.”
“They gave me more than safe haven. I even received a Presidential pardon.”
The Israeli couldn’t even look at him. He continued to address his remarks to Harvath. “How could your country even consider bestowing the protections of its sovereignty on someone who blatantly traffics in stolen intelligence?”
“I don’t know,” Nicholas continued. “Why don’t we ask the American intelligence analyst serving life in prison a hundred and fifty miles south of here for selling classified information to Israel? Remember him? He’s the guy your government has made an official Israeli citizen. If I could only remember his name.”
“Jonathan Pollard,” Harvath replied.
“That’s right, Pollard.”
“Completely different,” Mordechai snapped, turning to face Nicholas.
The dogs started growling again.
Harvath had had enough. “Listen, you two can meet at the bike rack after study hall. Right now, I want what’s on this memory card.”
Nicholas began to say something, but Harvath silenced him. The dogs seemed to sense his mood and fell quiet.
Harvath handed the card to him. “How long is this going to take?”
The little man responded, but did so while looking at Mordechai. “Piece of cake. This won’t take long at all.”
The pissing match notwithstanding, the reason Harvath had brought Nicholas and his rolling TOC to the exchange, was so that he could immediately go to work on the memory card.
Out of professional courtesy, Harvath had invited Mordechai into the van. He didn’t have an axe to grind with him. He wanted him there when Nicholas examined the card. It was both a sign of respect and the right thing to do.
As Nicholas
inserted the card into his Toughbook, Harvath reached into the cooler, withdrew a bottle of water, and offered it to Mordechai.
“You doing okay?” he asked.
The Israeli slowly curled and uncurled his hands. It was obvious he was in a tremendous amount of pain.
Harvath pulled the bottle back, twisted the cap off, and then offered it to him again.
“Thank you,” Mordechai said.
“Ein be’ad ma,” he replied. Don’t mention it.
The Israeli smiled. “You speak Hebrew.”
“A little.”
“Have you been to Israel?”
“Once or twice,” Harvath lied. He had been there many times.
“Business or pleasure?”
“Are you interrogating me, Mr. Mordechai?”
“Please, call me Bentzi.”
“So this is a recruitment then.”
Mordechai winked at him. “That depends. Are you recruitable?”
“No, he’s not,” said Nicholas from behind his laptop.
Bentzi leaned in closer and whispered to Harvath, “It would drive me crazy working with him.”
“He’s changed.”
The Israeli laughed. “Even the smallest of leopards do not change their spots.”
“Trust me, this one has. And a word of advice? Don’t make short jokes.”
“He’s that sensitive?”
Harvath gestured toward Argos and Draco. “And these two haven’t eaten all day.”
“I’ve heard stories about his dogs.”
“All true.”
Mordechai shook his head and kept his voice low. “Primordial dwarfism. He should be dead by now.”
“So should we, yet here we are.”
The Israeli nodded, conceding the point. After taking a long sip of water, he changed the subject. “What’s going to happen to Damien?”
“That depends on what your colleagues back in Tel Aviv pull off the mirror of his hard drive.”
Mordechai curled and uncurled his free hand.
“Arthritis?” Harvath asked.
He nodded. “Courtesy of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh.”
“What did you do? Break both of your hands against his head trying to help him get into a police car?”
Harvath expected a smile from the Israeli, but he didn’t get one. Instead, Mordechai replied, “Many years ago, there was a member of the Knesset. He was popular in Israel, particularly when it came to his opinions on Gaza and the West Bank. He was a good man, a fair man. Even a majority of Palestinians liked him. He seemed poised not only to become Prime Minister, but to achieve something even more important—peace.”
As peace had yet to come to Israel, Harvath knew the Knesset member’s attempts had somehow been dashed and waited for Mordechai to explain.
“The man had two daughters,” he said, taking another drink of water. “Beautiful girls. Young, stupid, beautiful girls. They liked going out to clubs and they liked doing drugs. They were Israeli royalty who could do no wrong. Their father was warned, repeatedly, about their behavior, but their celebrity fed his as much as his fed theirs. It was the dysfunctional epitome of a vicious cycle. Instead of throttling back, even a little, so that he could focus on his family, he admonished his daughters and turned his attention right back to his own career.”
Harvath had seen the same thing in many American political families. In a culture obsessed with likes, shares, and number of followers, politics had become the ultimate social media contest where a man like Abraham Lincoln could never get off the ground without a Guy Fawkes mask.
“As is typical for children who have no boundaries, the girls were constantly in search of where the line was. How far could they actually go before their parents stepped in and lowered the proverbial boom?
“The mother, a popular Israeli television star with a fledgling pop music career, was worthless. She was the one who set the bad example for the girls—liquor, drugs, and rumors of an affair with not one, but two of her co-stars. The family was a disaster. And then things got really bad.
“As the father was focused on his upcoming campaign and the mother on her new album, the girls were left with zero supervision. They fell in with an even worse crowd and got involved with harder and harder drugs in search of higher and higher highs. One night, they wrapped their father’s BMW around a tree. That should have been a wake-up call to everyone, right?”
Harvath nodded.
“Except it wasn’t,” Mordechai replied. “Their parents, Scotch-filled highballs in hand, hypocritically railed against the girls’ exorbitant lifestyles. As you might imagine, the brats returned fire. According to the put-upon neighbors, it was a battle of epic proportions.
“Desperate to find, as well as to exert, some vestige of his withering parental authority, the father opted to go nuclear. In a move that could only be appreciated by some feckless bureaucrat, he declared his daughters’ finances frozen.”
Harvath looked at him. “That was it? He didn’t ground them? He didn’t sign them up for forced labor at the world’s worst kibbutz? He just took away their credit cards?”
Mordechai shook his head. “Didn’t even take their car keys.”
“So basically, his daughters still went out on the town; they were now just dependent upon other people to help provide their fun.”
The Israeli nodded. “And guess who was right there ready to provide it?”
Harvath looked at the man flexing his hands and sensed the answer. “Hamas?”
Once again, Mordechai nodded. “The last thing they wanted was peace, and those drug-addled, self-important children provided them the perfect opportunity to knock it all off course.
“Inside the bowels of Hamas is a desk occupied by a little mouse of a man. We only have second- and third-hand accounts, but by all of them he is an effeminate Francophile who code-named his operation Colette. Are you familiar with Truffaut?”
“François Truffaut? The French filmmaker?” Harvath asked.
“That’s him. Hamas’s mouse named his operation after one of Truffaut’s films, Antoine and Colette. It’s an insipid French story about unrequited love between two attractive young teens in Paris. The mouse chose the name Colette for what is essentially a glorified Palestinian modeling agency.
“Unfortunately in Israel, there is no end to spoiled, privileged children looking to rebel against their parents. Our two Knesset princesses were no exception. When daddy cut up the credit cards, they turned to other means to fund their fun. Because they had developed such a dangerous appetite for getting high, they had also developed a dangerous tolerance for risk in the pursuit of reaching those highs. One night that pursuit led them out of Israel proper and into Gaza.”
Harvath’s expression must have said it all because Mordechai shared with him a heavy, sorrow-laden glance, and bowed his head and said, “The girls had been befriended by two extremely handsome boys, hand-picked by the little Palestinian Francophile.
“The boys provided a steady pipeline of drugs, and though they applied no pressure whatsoever, the girls fell into bed with them, eager to make sure the party train continued to roll.
“Then finally one night, with their trust and dependency secured, the boys informed them that they were zipping into Gaza to pick up more drugs and needed their help. Getting into Gaza wasn’t the problem, getting back through the Israeli checkpoint was. With the girls’ good looks, family name, and low-cut tops, it wouldn’t be a problem at all.”
It was amazing how many people in pursuit of the next high tossed all common sense aside and fell for this kind of bullshit ruse. It pissed Harvath off to no end, but the fact that the girls’ father wasn’t there to protect them from this pissed him off even more.
What kind of man doesn’t protect his children from wolves? Harvath didn’t care what the Knesset man’s greater aspira
tions for Israel were. If he couldn’t protect his own family, how the hell could he ever be expected to help protect his own nation?
For a moment, Harvath was thrust into the man’s shoes. Wasn’t this the exact thing he worried about? How could he ever protect a family of his own while he was a world away trying to protect his country from the next threat or terrorist attack?
“But when they arrived in Gaza,” Mordechai continued, “there were no drugs waiting to be picked up. It was an ambush. Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh’s men did unspeakable things to the girls, videotaping all of it and leaving their bloodied and defiled bodies on a road outside Nablus.”
“The father must have been enraged.”
“First he was in denial. Then he was in shock. Then came the rage, and it burned white-hot. Al-Mabhouh and Hamas had succeeded. The fighting would continue. The greatest instrument for peace either side had seen in a generation was now solely focused on revenge.”
“Which is where you come in,” said Harvath. “Correct?”
Mordechai nodded. “The atrocity committed by Hamas was unforgivable, and could only be repaid in blood. Even the doves of the Knesset wanted revenge.
“I was with Shin Bet at the time—the Special Operations Unit.”
“Yamas,” Harvath said.
“Correct. Our focus was to locate and eliminate terrorists inside Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. We had a reputation for being able get to them anywhere, anytime. We even carried out strikes in broad daylight. No place was safe for them.
“It took us a year to track down all of the men responsible. Once we did, we spent another three months training and planning the missions to take them out. The only operation that failed was mine.”
“You missed your target?”
“We got our target, but because of some bad intelligence my team zigged when it should have zagged. The three men with me were killed, I was captured. Al-Mabhouh personally oversaw my torture. As part of that torture, each one of my fingers was bent back until it snapped. Once the bones began to heal, they would repeat the process. The pain was unlike anything I have ever known.
