by Matthew Dunn
DEDICATION
To my children
CONTENTS
Dedication
Part: I One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Part: II Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Part: III Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Matthew Dunn
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
Place des Vosges, Paris
Israel’s ambassador to France was due to retire in three months, but that wasn’t going to happen because in six minutes he’d be dead.
He had no inkling of his imminent demise, given that he was a healthy fifty-nine-year-old who’d recently undergone a full medical checkup and had been told by his doctor that he wasn’t going to die anytime soon. In fairness, his doctor could not have been expected to anticipate that his patient’s heart might be targeted by a sniper.
The ambassador was not alone as he walked through Paris’s oldest square. Tourists were ambling nearby, taking photos of the striking identical seventeenth-century red-brick houses that surrounded the square. Children were playing tag, running through the vaulted arcades. Lovers were strolling arm in arm, admiring the manicured lawns that partly covered the interior of the square and the rows of trees that had turned an autumnal russet.
Walking forty yards behind the ambassador were three men who had pistols secreted under their suit jackets.
The ambassador took a walk through the square every lunchtime, and on each occasion his bodyguards wished they could be closer to their charge. But the ambassador was stubborn and insisted they keep their distance so that he could have space to unclutter his mind from the hundreds of tasks and problems sent his way during the course of the morning.
Today, he was deep in thought on one issue: indications that American and European support for Israel was on the wane.
He reached the fountain in the center of the square and stopped. He’d been here so many times that his eyes barely registered his surroundings, nor his ears the sound of running water. His bodyguard detail also stopped, silently wishing the ambassador wouldn’t do things like this that made him an easy target. Their hands were close to their weapons, ready to pull them out and shoot anyone who ran toward the senior diplomat carrying a knife, bomb, or gun.
The ambassador moved on.
His protectors kept pace with him.
They were good bodyguards—ex–Special Forces who’d been given subsequent training in surveillance, close protection, evasive driving, and rapid takedown of hostile attackers. But the Place des Vosges was a nightmare environment for such men. It was too big, with too many buildings, windows, people, entrances and exits, and open spaces. They couldn’t be blamed for not spotting the sniper behind one of the top-floor windows of a house seventy yards away. That window was one of hundreds that looked onto the square. And the sniper had chosen it because at this time of day the sun reflected off it and made it impossible to see anyone behind the glass.
There was no noise when the bullet left his silenced rifle, penetrated the window, traveled across the square, and entered the ambassador’s heart. But when the diplomat collapsed to the ground, the square became chaotic and loud. Some people were running toward the dead man shouting. Others screamed, held hands to their mouths, and pointed at the body. The bodyguards raced to the ambassador with guns in hand, yelling at everyone to get out of their way, the sight of the handguns now introducing fear and panic into the square.
Many believed the armed men must have shot the ambassador. Some fled the scene; others threw themselves to the ground; mothers grabbed their children and held them close, their expressions filled with horror. The bodyguards ignored them all.
When they reached the body, they rolled it onto its back. They cursed in Hebrew as they saw the bullet entry point in the ambassador’s chest. One of them checked for a pulse, though it was obvious the diplomat was dead. The others scoured the surroundings for a man with a rifle.
They saw no one like that.
The sniper had vanished.
TWO
The Palestinian boy Safa was thirteen years old, though he had the mind of an older teenager because he’d grown up too fast in Jabalia, a city in the northern part of the Gaza Strip. His maturity had come from Israeli artillery shells, the poverty in which everyone he knew lived, the constant stench of decay in Jabalia, and the fact of having spent all of his life worrying about where the next morsel of food or drop of drink might come from. But underneath his smooth golden skin, black hair, and blue eyes, he was still a child; one who was encouraged by his parents to read nineteenth-century adventure stories, had a penchant for making model Jewish soldiers and Arab freedom fighters out of bits of broken wood from shacks and scraps of cloth taken from the dead, and drew paintings that most often contained an imaginary mighty blue river coursing through the center of Gaza, with people drinking from it and bathing and smiling at each other because it was a God-given source of life and hope. Though he was wiser than his years, he was, other Jabalia residents lamented, a dreamer. They worried about him.
Especially those who resided in the large refugee camp where he survived alongside his dying mom and dad, a place that was crammed with the hopeless, forgotten by everyone except Western do-gooders and Israeli undercover soldiers. Here were tents that were torn and laced with bacteria; decrepit huts that afforded no protection from wind and rats; once fine-looking buildings that were now bombed-out shells; and oil barrels that were torn in half and littered along dusty tracks, some containing burning rags, others brewing insipid broth that was stirred by women and watched over with eager anticipation by lines of starving people.
Approximately one hundred thousand refugees lived in the camp. Most of them rarely smiled. But some did. There was humor to be found in the camp, and Safa witnessed it as he ran along an alley toward his home.
“Hey, Safa!” called out Jasem, a thirty-nine-year-old seller of anything, a career he’d taken up after realizing his previous vocation of creating tunnels into Israel was unsustainable due to his claustrophobia. “What you running for? Nobody here has anything to run to.”
Safa grinned. “I’m keeping fit.”
“Me, too.” Jasem started doing squats, his expression mimicking the exertions of an Olympic weight lifter. “I’m on a high-protein diet. It feeds the muscles.”
Safa ran on, his skinny limbs hurting from malnutrition, his hand clutching a white piece of paper.
“Go, Safa. Go, Safa,” chanted two young Arab girls, clapping in time with each word. They were smiling, though some of their teeth were missing.
One of them asked, “Are you playing Pretend the Israeli Soldier’s Chasing Me?”
“I have a piece of paper,” Safa replied, racing onward.
Safa reached his home—a room in a crumbling building that had decades ago been the residence of a benign judge and his wealthy family. People like Safa’s parents. All of the building’s other rooms were three-sided, thanks to Israeli shells that had destroyed their outer walls; only this room was intact. But it was a small room and smelled bad. These days, his father spent most of his life on the rotting mattress in the corner of the room. His mother tried her best to wash their sheets as regularly as she could, but water was scant and her strength was failing. Safa’s bed was a pile of blankets in another corner of the room. They were crawling with bugs and exuded a scent of overripe cheese. And in the center of the room was a clay pot that cooked everything they ate. Meals, when they could be had, were taken sitting on the floor. To do so hurt his mother’s increasingly skin-and-bone physique, but she insisted on the ritual for the sake of Safa. He had to know good manners, she had told him many times, and learn that a meal eaten properly is a meal well deserved. His father, however, could now only be spoon-fed by his mom while he was lying on his back. It broke her heart to see him like this.
“Mama,” Safa said, breathing deeply to catch his breath, “I have a piece of paper!”
“Good.” His mother tried to smile, though she was exhausted. “The Israelis are starving Gaza to death, yet you have a piece of paper. Today is a good day.”
She was by her husband, mopping his brow with a rag. His eyes were closed, and he moaned quietly.
“It could be a good day.” Safa thrust the paper at arm’s length in front of him. “A man from the United Nations says he can help me. He said the UN can get me to France, where I can be given food, an education, and maybe even asylum.”
Safa’s mom got awkwardly to her feet, wincing as she did so. She took the paper and read it. The words were in French, but that didn’t matter because everyone in her family spoke and read French like natives of the tongue. “A consent form?”
“Yes, Mama. It needs your signature.”
“Where did you meet this man?”
“At school. He’d brought books and stationery to my teacher. He asked her which of her pupils showed most academic promise.” Safa’s face beamed. “She told him, me.”
“And how would he get you out of here, to France?”
“My teacher asked him the same question. She told me to wait on the other side of the classroom while she spoke to the man. They were speaking for a long time. Me and my friends couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then my teacher called me over. She put her arms on me, said that this was a great opportunity to have a new life.”
Had this conversation been held two years before, his mother might have had the strength to shed a tear and be utterly conflicted as to what to do. But the death of Safa’s younger sister from an undiagnosed disease, and her and her husband’s rapid decline in health, made her emotions numb and her decision inevitable. She knew Safa’s father would pass away at any time. His eyes were jaundiced, his skin ashen. Almost certainly he had lung disease, and if that didn’t kill him then his inability to absorb nutrients would. She, too, was not long for this world. The once beautiful woman had caught a glimpse of her image in a broken glass window the other day. She was horrified to see how she now looked. So thin, her face etched and drawn, no longer anything like the pretty girl who’d daily brushed her long, shiny hair in front of a vanity mirror. She tried to do everything she could for Safa. But even if she’d been fully fit, she was out of options. There was nothing left in Gaza. It was a country that was being strangled to death.
She sighed as she reread the paper. “The United Nations man must be breaking rules.”
“That’s what my teacher told me. She said I wasn’t to care, and should have no fear. She said he was a good man. Would find me a good home. Would give me a new life.”
His mother went to her son and hugged him. “My Safa. Is this what you want?”
Safa looked at his mother’s face, and tears ran down his own. “I don’t know, Mama. I am scared.”
This was her final act of strength. The last opportunity for her to save at least one member of her family. She pointed north. “Over the border are people whose grandparents faced these kinds of situations when they were your age. They came from Russia, Germany, France, other places. They didn’t know what lay ahead. But they knew what lay behind. They had no choice.” She didn’t add that as a result their sons and grandsons should have known better than to do what they were doing to this small strip of land and its population. “But it worked out well for them. They became scholars, businessmen, soldiers, had families, and now they have smiles on their faces and bellies that are full. You must go.”
Safa’s voice was wavering as he asked, “What if he’s a bad man?”
His mother stroked a frail finger against her son’s hair. “My experience of people in the United Nations is that they can be naive but never bad. But if this man turns out to be bad, you run. And even that won’t be so bad, because you’ll be running in a land of fat bellies.” She managed to smile. “When everything else is stripped away, it all comes down to food and water. But only you can decide what to do.”
Safa went to his father’s side. “Papa, Papa, what should I do? Must I leave you?”
His father looked at him, resignation and illness so evident. “We must leave you, my dear boy.”
“But, Papa . . .”
“You have no choice.”
Safa placed his head on his father’s chest. “How could they do this to you, to us, to everyone here?”
His father stroked his son’s hair. “Most of what they’ve done is nothing, not something. There is a difference.”
“It still makes them bad.”
His father’s voice was soothing as he replied, “No, no. If that were true then we would all be bad. Charities we ignore, famines elsewhere in the world, disasters, wars, abuse—we can’t solve them all. Does that make us murderers? I think not.”
Safa wept. “The Israelis starve us.”
“And some of us hurt them back. Evil lurks on both sides of the border, but it isn’t and cannot be pervasive.”
His voice descended to a whisper, and after a moment a slight tremor seemed to pass over his face. Safa held his hand. It was limp and felt wrong. “Mama—Papa isn’t moving.”
His mother nodded, resignation flowing over her, a feeling that death had exited one body and was drifting across the room to devour her. She had no need to move to her son’s side. This moment had been coming for so long. It was inevitable. There was no heartache; that had happened ages ago. Since then, she had just been managing the situation and anticipating the logistics, including disposing of the body in a way that wouldn’t spread more disease into the already befouled air of the Jabalia refugee camp. Burning corpses was usually the only way. Even then, one couldn’t be sure that airborne bacteria and viruses wouldn’t flee charred flesh and attack any nearby mourners.
“He has told you what you should do” was all she could say. She grabbed a pencil and put her signature on the bottom of the paper. “When do you go?”
“Tomorrow. I must meet him at the school. My teacher also needs to sign some forms. He will then take me to a boat. He told me to pack light.”
“Pack? You have nothing to pack.”
Safa went back to his mother and cuddled her. “Mama, please cook me stewed beef and garbanzo beans tonight.”
His mother didn’t have any food at all. “We can pretend, okay?”
“Sure, Mama.” He held her. “That will be delicious.” His tears were unstoppable. “Delicious, Mama.”
THREE
Soil clung to the CIA officer’s perspiring skin after he inadvertently rubbed the back of his aching hand against his forehead. Roger Koenig’s sweat made some of the grime enter his eyes, and he had to blink fast to clear them. He grabbed his pickax, swung it over his head, and slammed it into the ground. Three other men were close to
him, all natives of Iran’s southwestern city of Shiraz, whose outskirts were ten miles north of their current location. They too were using shovels and pickaxes to dig, lanterns around the hole being the sole source of light in the pitch-dark night. Their grunts and the noise of their tools striking earth were the only sounds they could hear in the featureless and deserted rural location. Suddenly one blow resulted in a louder, metallic sound.
Reza, the twenty-nine-year-old son of a watchmaker, was by Roger’s side. He said, “I’ve hit something.”
Roger lay flat on his stomach and placed his hand in the hole, which was seven feet long, four feet wide, and three feet deep. The CIA officer had to stretch to touch the bottom. There was no doubt Reza was right. They’d reached something that was metal. Thank God. Roger had previously shuddered at the idea they might find rotting mahogany that would reveal what was inside if they tried to remove the item. He didn’t want that image in his head. It would be wrong.
Roger got to his feet and looked at the watchmaker. “Masoud. Very carefully.”
Masoud nodded and placed a hand on his other son’s shoulder. “Firouz will clear the surface. We’ll excavate around the box.”
They got back to work, this time digging more delicately so as not to inadvertently damage the box. It took them nearly an hour to completely uncover it. One man at each corner, they slowly lifted the heavy box, which was as long as Roger, and placed it next to the hole.
Breathing fast, Roger grabbed a rag and wiped his face and hands. “Okay. Let’s move. Box in the truck first. Then all equipment.”
Masoud asked, “Do we refill the hole?”
“No time for that.”
They drove nearly 360 miles through the night, Reza at the wheel and where possible his foot to the floor because they were all desperate to reach the southern port of Bandar ‘Abbas before daybreak. They made it with one hour to spare. Reza avoided the main roads as he expertly navigated his way through the medium-sized city until they reached the shores of the Persian Gulf. Boats of all shapes and sizes were moored alongside jetties and harbor walls. Most of them were cargo vessels; some were powerful speedboats. All of them were the type of craft that would have got them away from Iran and its naval patrols quickly. But they were too obvious. Instead, Roger had decided they needed to escape in something that no fugitives in their right minds would use.
