Eye for an Eye: A Dewey Andreas Novel

by Ben Coes

  “They’re not,” said Cooperman. “I assure you of this.”

  “Forgive me, but your assurances mean nothing.”

  “What’s your point?” asked Lavine.

  “Bhang is rising,” said Chalmers. “His malevolence grows. This is simply another chapter in a very dark book.”

  There was silence in the room and over the intercom as Chalmers paused.

  “My question is, when are we going to do something about it?” he asked.

  “So what’s your idea?” asked Calibrisi.

  “We have to find Dillman,” said Chalmers. “Obviously. Then, my suggestion is, we use him. But not in the way you’re thinking, Hector. No, instead of using him for disinformation then killing him, we’re going to switch the order around. Kill him, then use him. We’re going to lure Fao Bhang out of his hole, and Dillman is going to be our bait.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” said Rolber.

  “Bhang won’t care about the loss of one human being, even his most treasured asset in the West, but he will care if the loss of Dillman exposes him as weak, as not in control,” said Chalmers. “If we can undermine him in the terribly cutthroat drama that is Chinese leadership, it will endanger him. It will, potentially, signal those who fear Bhang or who covet his power. It’s time to destabilize Fao Bhang and let his enemies move against him. Otherwise, there will be no end to his reach and the damage he inflicts upon the West.”

  Cooperman suddenly reached for his chest pocket and pulled out a vibrating cell phone.

  “What?” he whispered into the cell.

  Cooperman listened, then signaled at the phone, indicating to Lavine to mute the conference call.

  “We found him,” whispered Cooperman, looking at Lavine, then Dayan and Rolber. “He’s in Haifa.”

  Lavine pressed the mute button on the speakerphone.

  “Haifa?” asked Lavine. “What do we have there?”

  “I have a kill team in the city,” said Rolber. “Boroshevsky, Malayim. They’re good to go.”

  “No,” said Dayan. “This is not Mossad’s kill.”

  “You don’t trust us now, General?” demanded Rolber.

  “It has nothing to do with whether or not I trust you,” said Dayan, his gravelly voice rising. “I gave my word to Andreas; it’s Kohl Meir’s kill. Get Meir up to Haifa, brief him en route, get him whatever weapons he wants. That’s an order.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In the meantime, Fritz and I will coordinate with MI6 and Langley. I’m not sure I understand what the hell Derek Chalmers is talking about, but I like it. These British always have brilliant ideas, even if their food does suck.”

  2

  DAN CARMEL HOTEL

  HAIFA, ISRAEL

  Dillman walked through the lobby of the hotel, stopping outside the sliding glass doors. He stared at the rising sun, then glanced around. Like all Mossad agents, he’d been looking over his shoulder for so long it was second nature.

  He was dressed in blue tennis shorts, a white shirt, and black-and-white Adidas tennis sneakers. In his hand, he held a yellow Babolat racket.

  Dillman began his morning jog in the hotel driveway. He ran down the steep, winding road toward the neighborhood called Carmeliya. He ran past large stucco homes until he came to a school, then ran across the parking lot to the public tennis court. There he would hit the ball against the backboard for an hour or so, then jog back to the hotel.

  As he came around the corner of the school, he was surprised to find somebody already at the backboard, hitting tennis balls. Dillman thought about turning around and heading back. He didn’t feel like waiting God knows how long for the court.

  Instead, Dillman approached the man. He was young, bearded, and scraggly-looking. He was dressed in red sweatpants, a long-sleeve gray T-shirt, topped with a yellow baseball cap and mirrored sunglasses.

  The man tossed the ball up and swatted it toward the backboard. Dillman could tell by the rhythm and pace that the player was decent.

  “How long will you be, my friend?” asked Dillman in Hebrew.

  The player turned, raising his hands.

  “I only just arrived,” the man said, slightly annoyed.

  “No worries,” said Dillman. “I’ll go for a run instead.”

  As Dillman started to walk away, he heard a whistle. He turned around. The tennis player waved him over.

  “Would you like to hit some?” the man called from the court.

  Dillman shrugged.

  “Sure,” he said.

  They played for the better part of an hour. The stranger was good. His strokes were a little unnatural, but he was fast and was able to get to everything, despite a slight limp. He beat Dillman 6–3 in the first set. Dillman took the second 7–5. Then, in the third, the bearded stranger jumped to a 4–0 lead.

  In the middle of the fifth game, they both heard the string break, after the young man ripped a particularly nice backhand up the line, out of Dillman’s reach. Dillman welcomed the interruption. Not only was the younger man beating the crap out of him, but Dillman was sweating like a pig and hungry for breakfast.

  “That’s too bad,” said Dillman, breathing heavily. “I guess that means I win, yes?”

  Dillman had been kidding, an attempt at a joke, but the stranger either didn’t hear the joke or, if he had, didn’t think it was funny.

  “I have another racket,” the man said, walking to the bench at the side of the court. Other than the score, it was the first thing the young man had said the entire match.

  He unzipped his racket bag.

  Dillman walked toward him as he reached into his bag.

  “Are you from the area?” asked Dillman as he came up behind the stranger.

  The man kept his back to Dillman as he searched inside his bag.

  “No,” he answered. “Tel Aviv.”

  “Are you a student? Do you play at the university? You’re very good.”

  The stranger turned around and removed his sunglasses.

  “No, I’m not a student,” he said. “I’m in the military.”

  Dillman stared into the stranger’s eyes. Something in his dark, brown eyes triggered Dillman’s memory. Then, slowly, Dillman looked to the man’s right hand. Instead of a graphite shaft there was a thick piece of wood; instead of a racket head and strings, there was the dull steel of a large ax, the kind of ax you could chop down a tree with.

  “Your second serve needs some work,” said the man, who Dillman now recognized: Kohl Meir. “Other than that, you’re actually not bad.”

  Dillman lurched to run away, but Meir swung the ax, catching him in the torso. Dillman fell to the ground, gasping for air, the ax stuck in his side. The pain was so intense he couldn’t even scream. His mouth went agape, his eyes bulged, and blood gushed down his chest and side.

  Dillman reached desperately at the ax handle.

  Calmly, Meir knelt next to him.

  “You like my ax?” asked Meir, smiling. “It’s for chopping the heads off traitors.”

  Meir stood and placed a foot on Dillman’s chest then jerked up on the handle, pulling the steel ax head from the traitor’s body. Dillman whimpered in agony. He was bleeding out, drifting into shock, moments away from death.

  Meir lifted the ax over his head. He swung down, burying the blade into Dillman’s skull.

  A white van moved slowly around the corner of the school, crawling toward Meir. The van stopped a few feet from the corpse. Meir watched as the back of the van opened and two men in blue unibody suits climbed out.

  The Mossad cleanup crew jogged forward, placing a stretcher next to Dillman’s blood-soaked corpse.

  “One thing,” Meir said.

  “Yes, commander.”

  “Don’t touch the ax,” he ordered.

  3

  RESIDENCE OF THE PREMIER

  ZHONGNANHAI

  BEIJING, PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA (PRC)

  A small brown pony with a fluffy tan mane stood p
atiently in the large backyard of a simple red building with an ornately decorated roof. At least twenty school girls gathered in front of the pony, waiting their turn.

  It was a balmy Saturday afternoon at the official residence of the premier of China, Qishan Li, who was elevated three years ago. Li’s face sported a large smile as he watched his granddaughter, Meixiu, climb atop the animal. Her friends all clapped loudly and screamed as Meixiu moved the pony away from the house.

  The crowd in the backyard included Meixiu’s classmates from the private all-girls school she attended, their parents, and an assortment of other well-wishers, staff members, and sycophants. Li adored his granddaughter, and his annual birthday party for her was a well-known event. It was a chance not only for Meixiu and her friends and family to celebrate, but an opportunity for Chinese politicians and ministers to curry favor with the premier by giving the young girl elaborate gifts.

  Meixiu had opened all of them, and the back terrace was cluttered with gifts: bright sweaters, jewelry, toys, shoes, flowers, and a hundred other items large and small, stacked on tables for the guests to admire.

  A half mile away, a dark blue delivery van pulled up to Xinhua Gate. The driver lowered the window and handed his ID to one of the armed soldiers guarding the entrance.

  The soldier inspected the identification. The driver was from the Ministry of State Security.

  “Who is it for?”

  “The girl,” said the driver. “A present from Minister Bhang.”

  The soldier passed his ministry ID back to him and nodded to another soldier to let the van through the gates.

  The van moved at a placid speed through the massive multibuilding compound that served as central headquarters for the Chinese government, including the Communist Party and the State Council. Pretty trees and manicured lawns separated the ancient, beautifully maintained buildings. Every few hundred yards stood an armed soldier or two. The van stopped outside Li’s residence. The driver climbed out of the van as a pair of armed soldiers in paramilitary gear crossed the front lawn of the house.

  The driver opened the back of the van. All three men stood and stared inside. Sitting in the back was a lone object, a large brown shiny-new Louis Vuitton trunk with a pink ribbon wrapped garishly around it, then tied in a bow.

  “It’s heavy,” said the driver. “Give me a hand, will you?”

  The three men lifted the trunk and carried it across the lawn. Another guard, this one in plain clothes, opened the front door.

  They carried the trunk through the house. At the door to the outside terrace, Li’s wife caught the sight of the three men, then let out a delighted laugh.

  “What have we here?” she yelled in a high-pitched giggle.

  “From Minister Bhang, madam,” said the driver.

  “Oh, delightful,” she said, waving them toward the door. “Just delightful.”

  They carried the trunk to the back lawn amid excited oohs and aahs. Meixiu, still atop the pony, let out a squeal as she suddenly saw the present being set down on the lawn. She practically jumped from the pony and ran across the grass to the trunk.

  A bright yellow envelope was taped to the top of the trunk.

  “To Meixiu,” said Meixiu, reading the note aloud as Li and his wife stood at the young girl’s side, surrounded by the rest of the children and adults. “On this, the happiest of days, happy birthday to you, from Minister Fao Bhang.”

  Li glanced at his wife, a slightly confounded smile on his face.

  “Who is that, Grandfather?” asked Meixiu.

  “Just someone I work with,” said Li.

  “What a kind gesture,” said Li’s wife.

  “May I open it?” asked Meixiu, a huge smile of excitement on her face.

  “Of course,” bellowed Li, gleefully.

  The girl pulled one end of the ribbon and let it fall to the ground. She unclasped the two buckles on the front of the trunk, then lifted it up.

  At first there were smiles and shouts of delight, as many people didn’t understand what it was they were seeing. Then came the silence, as smiles disappeared. Finally, there was the scream, the first one, from Meixiu herself, a piercing yelp of a scream that ripped the air. Her scream was soon joined by others from her grandmother, schoolmates, and everyone else within sight of the trunk.

  Inside the trunk was the body of a dead man, stuffed unnaturally into the trunk, dressed in tennis shorts, a tennis shirt, covered in a flood of dried blood and mucus. In the middle of the man’s head was an ax, which had been hacked deep into the skull.

  As Meixiu suddenly vomited and everyone else scrambled to leave amid a chorus of quiet hysteria, Li turned calmly to one of the plainclothed security men.

  “Return this to the ministry,” said Li as he reached for his chest and tried to control his anger. “Then tell Fao Bhang I want to see him immediately.”

  4

  MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY

  BEIJING

  “Do you recognize him, sir?”

  Fao Bhang, China’s minister of State Security, the top intelligence official in China, stared at the mangled corpse. It was stuffed like a side of beef into the Louis Vuitton trunk. The smell was overwhelming, but the pungent aroma didn’t stop Bhang from looking. The dead man had on tennis sneakers, shorts, and what had been a white tennis shirt. A long gash had been cleaved into the torso, at least a foot long and four inches wide. His ribs were visible. The skin around the gash was swelled up, septic and rotting. From the man’s skull, a large ax jutted out, the ax head embedded deep into the dead man’s forehead. At the nape of the neck, a silver Star of David lay still, attached to a thin necklace.

  * * *

  Bhang had met Dillman more than a decade before. Bhang had been sent to Israel to kill a Chinese dissident hiding out in a Jerusalem tenement. The operation had gone flawlessly; it would be a one-day hit; in and out, bragging rights back at the ministry. But it had gone awry at the airport. They’d stopped him; his cover had been blown somehow.

  Within hours Bhang was tied up and sweating in a Mossad interrogation house, located in a quiet Tel Aviv suburb called Savyon. Dillman was his interrogator. He was Mossad’s deputy chief operating officer, and Bhang recognized him immediately.

  “Welcome to Israel, Fao,” Dillman had said. “Did you finish the job on the old man? A seventy-four-year-old with arthritis. That must have been pretty hard, yes?”

  Then, the words that changed it all, that changed everything. And they came from Bhang’s mouth, as if from a ventriloquist.

  “We’ll pay you fifty million dollars to spy for China,” Bhang had said to Dillman. “Agree, promise to set me free, and it will be wired within the hour.”

  He’d guessed, correctly as it turned out, that it needed to be an awe-inspiring number. Anything less, and the Israeli wouldn’t have done it. The ministry had paid Dillman the $50 million and at least another $50 million over the years. In return, Dillman had been a virtual treasure trove of information, not only about Israel, but America too.

  The turning of the high-ranking Israeli had propelled Bhang upward within the ministry. He bathed in the reflected glory of the mole’s revelations.

  * * *

  “Dillman,” said Bhang, looking at the corpse, at rest in the trunk.

  “Are you sure, sir?”

  Bhang did not answer or show any emotion, as he stared at the dead Israeli.

  * * *

  Fao Bhang did not like idle talk. In fact, on the day when Bhang was elevated to his leadership post of the Ministry of State Security, leapfrogging over more than a dozen more senior officers who were, on paper, more experienced than him, Premier Zicheng had remarked, “Fao, you seem more like a librarian than a spy.”

  Bhang, in typical fashion, had not responded, except to nod a humble thank-you. Premier Zicheng then presented him the Order of the Lotus—the ministry’s highest honor. Bhang was appointed, at the age of forty-three, to arguably the third most powerful position in China.

/>   Only Bhang knew that Zicheng’s remark really could not have been further from the truth. It demonstrated a critical lack of understanding about him, another underestimation of his abilities, his strengths, and his cunning. In order to claim the ministry’s top office, Bhang had engineered a bold, highly ruthless plot. Over the course of a year, he had systematically destroyed the one man standing in his way, Xiangou, his boss, mentor, and caretaker. Machiavelli himself would have cringed in fear.

  It had all begun with a phone call from Bhang’s half brother. Bo Minh was an electrical engineer by training, who’d started at the ministry at the same time as Bhang. But whereas Bhang had political ambitions, Minh was more interested in the obtuse recesses of abstract technology. Minh became a mid-level functionary within the ministry’s electronic espionage and surveillance directorate, designing devices used to listen in on enemies and allies alike, helping to arm agents with increasingly tinier, more-potent tools, which could be deployed in different environments across the globe and used to eavesdrop on any sort of conversation.

  Minh had called Bhang past midnight, awakening him in a hotel room in Cairo, where he’d been sent to kill someone.

  “I have discovered something,” Minh had whispered conspiratorially.

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “I can’t talk,” whispered Minh urgently. “Listen to me. There is to be a change at the top echelon of the ministry.”

  Bhang had rubbed his eyes, then looked at his notebook, lying next to the bed. The word CAIRO was written out in bold letters. It was a habit he’d formed early on, so that in the jumbled chaos of hotels and cities he traveled to, he could wake up and know immediately where he was.

  “What time is it?”