Storm Front

by John Sandford

  “All right. But if I get in trouble, I’ll blame you.”

  “That’d be a change,” Virgil said.

  —

  VIRGIL DROVE two blocks to the Downtown Inn, where Yael-1 was staying, and parked fifty yards away. He got out of the truck, dug a Nikon D800 out of his equipment box, mounted a huge Nikon 400mm f2.8 lens with a fast-release plate, attached a monopod, sat in the cargo space, and ran the rear window halfway down.

  Five minutes later, a cab pulled up out front of the motel, and Virgil focused on it. One minute later, Yael walked out, and he fired off nine automatically bracketed shots, in three sequences of three. The cab pulled away, headed for the Coop, a bar that backed up to the Minnesota River, where the Reverend Jones would not be, unless by a terrific coincidence. Which should, he thought, teach Yael-1 a lesson: just because a woman calls you and says she’s Reverend Jones’s daughter, you shouldn’t necessarily believe her. Would a member of the Mossad make that mistake?

  When the cab was out of sight, Virgil plugged the Compact Flash card into a reader, plugged the reader into his Mac laptop, imported the photos into Lightroom, and cleaned them up. Two of them were okay; one was really good. He turned on the Verizon Jetpack, switched the laptop to the Verizon WiFi, and exported the three best photos to Davenport as hi-res JPEGs.

  Davenport called a minute later and said, “I got the pictures. I don’t have the GPS units yet, but I’ll get them before I leave, and I don’t have a picture of the real Yael Aronov, but Rose Marie is talking to somebody at the American embassy in Tel Aviv. We ought to know something soon.”

  Virgil: “Okay. I’ll see you in a couple of hours. If you’re gone, leave the units on Shirley’s desk.”

  “I’ll do that. If more Yales show up, I’ll be in a meeting.”

  “Ya-els,” Virgil said, but Davenport was gone.

  —

  SOMETHING ELSE was about to happen, Virgil thought, but he didn’t plan to call Davenport about it. He sat in the truck for a couple of minutes, in case the taxi came back, and while he waited, changed the lens on the Nikon to a 60mm macro. When that was done, he watched another fifteen seconds, then got out, walked down the block, into the Downtown Inn, and up a flight of stairs to Yael-1’s room. He took out the stolen room key as he walked, and at the room, knocked a couple of times to see if he’d get an answer—there was still an open question of an accomplice or associate who’d supplied Yael with the pistol—and then used the key and stepped inside.

  The lights were on. One of the huge suitcases was open, showing a mesh bag full of clothes. He picked up the bag, squeezed it, and put it back. He picked up the other suitcase, but it was so light it was obviously empty. A laptop sat on a side table, but was turned off. He felt that he dare not turn it on, because it was too likely that it would be alarmed, and she would know that somebody had opened it.

  He spent five minutes searching quickly through the room, found nothing of interest except another mesh bag, the size of an envelope, with a few papers inside. He checked them out, and found a passport and some letters in Hebrew, one with an English translation on the letterhead that said: “Israel Antiquities Authority.”

  The passport was in both Hebrew and English. Her picture was current, and her name was given as Aronov, Yael; the birth date looked more or less right.

  He flipped through the back of it and found a few entry stamps for European countries, and one for Jordan. Virgil didn’t know that Israelis could go to Jordan, but he wasn’t sure they couldn’t, either.

  He was leaving, giving the room one last look-around, when he hesitated, then went back to the empty suitcase and thought, The old empty-suitcase trick. He unzipped it, and found it empty.

  Of course it would be empty. He pushed his fingers against the interior fabric, and dragged them down the length of the suitcase . . . and found a thin lump where there shouldn’t have been one.

  It took him a minute to figure out how to get to the lump: it was easy enough, a professionally neat slit in the fabric, right where the seam was, closed with Velcro. He pulled the seam apart, and found another passport.

  A diplomatic passport for a Tal Zahavi, with a current photo of Yael-1. The same birth date as in the other passport. The interior must have had fifty entry stamps for European and South American countries, plus the U.S., Japan, and South Korea. The woman traveled a lot.

  Virgil put the passport on the worktable, flattened it along the edge with a magazine, and took a photo, checked to make sure the photo was good, and took a backup just in case.

  When he was done, he returned the passport to the suitcase, zipped it back up, put it back where it had been, and took another look around, and left. One minute later, he was in his truck.

  Tal Zahavi.

  With a diplomatic passport . . .

  —

  DAVENPORT CALLED again when Virgil was halfway to St. Paul. “The incoming Yael is the real one, unless there are three of them. I sent you a picture of her, you’ll have it in your e-mail. Anyway, Yael-1 doesn’t look anything like the photo we got from the embassy.”

  “I wonder who the hell she is?”

  “Maybe Yael-2 will know,” Davenport said.

  “She’s gotta be working with somebody,” Virgil said. “Listen, the gun’s gonna have her prints on it, and I’ve got it locked up in my truck. I’ll drop it off with the guys upstairs and see if they can pull anything off it.”

  “I’ll make sure somebody waits for you. I’m going home,” Davenport said.

  Virgil rang off. It would be convenient if the feds were able to identify Tal Zahavi by name. If they could, there’d never be awkward questions about how Virgil had identified her, if it became necessary for him to reveal her identity.

  —

  WHEN VIRGIL got to the BCA building on St. Paul’s north side, he found a latent print specialist waiting; she was reading a Kick-Ass comic, which she set aside as he brought in the gun.

  “It has your prints all over it, of course,” she said.

  “Mostly on the slide. I didn’t touch the stock, but I’d think the magazine would be the best possibility,” Virgil said.

  “Give me a half hour and I’ll tell you if there’s anything there,” she said.

  “Call me,” Virgil said. “I’m on my way to the airport.”

  He stopped at Davenport’s office, where he found a single GPS and a tracker tablet, along with a note from Davenport. “Apparently, right after the class, everybody wanted one of these things, so there was only one left in the house. I could get a couple more tomorrow or the next day if you still need them. Let me know.”

  Probably guys tracking their girlfriends, Virgil thought. He went back to his truck and headed to the airport.

  He got a call from the latent prints tech as he was walking through the skyway into the main terminal: “We’ve got prints. Partials on the brass, a couple of good ones, thumb and forefinger on the magazine. I’ll get them off to the feds.”

  “She’s a foreigner, so there might not be anything,” Virgil said.

  But: if she were really with the Israeli government, a Mossad agent, would she have left fingerprints on the magazine?

  Virgil had taken his laptop and the phone/WiFi link with him. At baggage claim, he found a seat, turned all the electronics on, and first checked his e-mail, where he found the photos of Yael-2. Then he went to the Israel Antiquities Authority website at www.antiquities.org.il, clicked on “About Us,” and then on the “Organizational Structure” and “Curriculum Vitae” tabs, and harvested as many names, with positions, as he could find. He transferred the data to a Microsoft Word document.

  He was still doing that when Yael-2 called from the plane, which had just touched down.

  —

  YAEL-2 WAS a middle-sized dishwater blonde, who looked more German than Virgil’s idea of an Israeli—pretty and
a little plump, and exactly like the photos Davenport had forwarded to him. She had a more pronounced accent than Yael-1. She shook hands as she introduced herself, apologized for arriving later than expected. “I went through Amsterdam, there was some stupid problem with my passport. I had to stay there two extra days before they would allow me on the plane.”

  “You were arrested?” Virgil asked.

  “No, no, they even arranged for a hotel, though I had to pay for it. Then it turned out, there was no problem, and they arranged for me to get on the same flight I would have been on two days before. Annoying. I thought the computer systems were better than that. And sometimes, when things like this happen, I think, the Europeans don’t like Israelis so much.”

  “Annoying.” And delaying, Virgil thought. Mossad.

  “At least I’m not so jet-lagged as if I came straight through. Going west is easier than going east.” She looked past him to the luggage carousel. “My suitcase is going around.”

  Virgil retrieved the bag, which was extremely light. “You travel light—doesn’t feel like there’s much in here.”

  “Not yet,” she said. “Do you know this place . . . Sam’s Club?”

  —

  YAEL-2 HAD a room reservation at the Holiday Inn Express in Mankato, which was out of the town center, and not the same one housing either the Turks or the Texan. On the way down to Mankato, Yael-2 told Virgil almost exactly the same story that Yael-1 had, of the theft, the flight, and the importance of the stone.

  She did not try to hide the fact that the stone had been translated, and gave Virgil about the same information that he’d eventually squeezed from Yael-1.

  Yael-1, he thought, had been very well briefed.

  At Mankato, he told Yael-2, “We have to stop at my house for a moment. We need a private conversation, which I will explain when we get there. I need to look at my laptop while we’re doing it.”

  She was mystified. “Have I done something?”

  “Probably not, but somebody else has,” Virgil said.

  Virgil parked in his driveway, took Yael-2 in through the kitchen, paused to water his cactus, which appeared to be dying of thirst, and then asked her if she’d like anything to eat. She inquired about the possibility of fruit. Virgil opened the refrigerator, looked inside, and said, “Apples, oranges, green grapes, a few bing cherries, and an unopened tub of cantaloupe slices.”

  She took some grapes and cherries, and they moved to the living room. Virgil opened his computer, apologized insincerely about the test, and asked her to identify the people whose names he’d taken from the IAA website. He ran through twenty names, and she nailed them all.

  He shut the computer and said, “All right. I believe you. I believed you before, but better safe than sorry. The reason I had to ask is that two nights ago, a woman arrived here in Minnesota and identified herself as Yael Aronov from the Israel Antiquities Authority. She’s been working with me for two days, trying to find the stone. There’s some reason to think that she might be Mossad.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because everybody who has seen her said so—Turks, Arabs, Texans.”

  “Texans?”

  “One, anyway,” Virgil said.

  Yael-2 sat for a moment, looking down at her hands, but her eyes flicked back and forth as though she were working down a pathway, and then she said, “This fucking Mossad. This is why I had trouble in Amsterdam. Not because the Dutch hate Israelis.”

  “But why would they do it?” Virgil asked.

  “Because only three things can happen with this stone,” Yael said. “One, we prove it is authentic, which it appears to be, and we rewrite the history of Israel. Or, anyway, we rewrite the Bible. Two, we prove it is a fake, but many people don’t believe us, especially not the Arabs. Then we engage in another propaganda war about whether Jews have land rights in Israel, and the French again call us a shitty little country. Three, we drop it in the sea and the issue does not come up. They think. This would be very tempting for the large brains at the Mossad—to simply destroy the issue.”

  “And your organization would not approve?”

  “Of course not,” Yael-2 said. “Throwing it in the sea? This would be a sin. And since there are already photographs, it would not kill the legend of the stone anyway. It might even make things worse—if the Mossad is found to have thrown the stone in the sea, then our enemies would say we did it to cover up.”

  “Which you would have.”

  “Yes, and maybe unnecessarily,” she said. “It still could prove to be a fake.”

  “Nobody seems to think that,” Virgil said. “Except, maybe, me.”

  “You think it’s a fake?”

  “I can’t make any sense out of Jones’s run out of Israel. It all seemed like a con job.”

  “I don’t understand this phrase,” she said.

  “It seemed too . . . contrived to me,” Virgil said. “Like he knew the stone was going to appear, and he was prepared for it.”

  “I see. Interesting. This has been mooted at my agency,” Yael-2 said.

  “In any case, we need to find the stone.”

  “Yes. Now, more than ever.”

  “So let me tell you about our other competitors here,” Virgil said.

  —

  HE TOLD HER about the Turks, the Hezbollah, and the Texan, and about Jones shooting the Turks, and about Jones’s daughter. “He’ll be dead soon. So why is he trying to auction the stone? He can’t use the money—and it’s a lot of money.”

  “For his children?” Yael-2 suggested.

  “Maybe, but I’m not sure they really need it,” Virgil said. “I’ve warned his daughter to stay away, but I can’t think of anything else that Jones could do with the money. He’s asking for it in cash, and he’ll have to pass it to somebody.”

  “So you track her,” Yael-2 said.

  “I’m going to do that. And I’m thinking maybe I should call a conference with all the competitors and explain to them that they’ll all be going to a pretty nasty prison if they don’t cooperate.”

  “I know the boss of the Turks,” Yael-2 said. “He lives in Istanbul, and does not leave very often. His collection from the Ottoman lands is huge—perhaps the biggest in existence. I don’t think you will convince his people to go away. The Hezbollah, if it is like you say, would literally kill to get this stone. This man you say that you like, this Raj Awad, he is playing a dangerous game. And this Mossad agent . . . perhaps we can warn her away, if we can find her.”

  “She’s at the Downtown Inn,” Virgil said.

  Yael-2 shook her head. “Not anymore. If the Mossad stopped me in Amsterdam, then they know that I am now here talking to you. She will be gone.”

  “To where?”

  Yael-2 shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe an Israeli sympathizer here, or maybe another hotel under a different name. You say she had a gun, there must be somebody. If they could get a gun, they could get a car and a room.”

  “Well, poop,” Virgil said. “But tell you what: let’s go look. Maybe you’ll know her.”

  “Good,” she said. She spit the last of the bing cherry pits into the bowl Virgil had given her, then said, “Let me tell you something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “There is something going on here that we don’t understand. Something fundamental.”

  —

  VIRGIL THOUGHT about that on the way downtown, and finally concluded that Yael-2 was wrong. There wasn’t something fundamental that they didn’t understand: there were a whole bunch of things they didn’t understand.

  —

  AT THE DOWNTOWN INN, they pulled into the parking lot and almost the first thing Virgil saw was the Texan’s Cadillac. He pointed it out to Yael-2 and said, “That’s one thing we don’t understand—why those two are talking to each other.”


  Up at Yael’s room, Virgil knocked, but got no answer. He knocked louder. Nothing. He had the room key in his wallet, but wasn’t willing to use it around witnesses, just in case this should ever move to a courtroom. They went down to the front desk and talked to an assistant manager, whose name tag said Vivek Bhola. Bhola checked his guest list and said, “She checked out two hours ago.”

  Yael-2 said, “Of course.”

  “You haven’t cleaned the room?”

  “Not until tomorrow morning,” Bhola said.

  “Get the key,” Virgil said.

  Bhola programmed a key and they went up. The room was empty, except for two huge suitcases, apparently abandoned. Virgil checked the one where he’d found the passport: the passport was gone.

  “Now what?” Yael-2 asked.

  “Do me a favor,” Virgil said. “Don’t ever ask, ‘Now what?’”

  What they did was check Sewickey’s Cadillac, though not until Virgil had loaded the two giant suitcases into the back of his truck. “They are abandoned, and I may find a use for them,” Yael-2 said.

  “Take some refrigerators home?”

  She eyed the suitcases for a moment, then said, “I don’t think refrigerators.”

  When they checked the Cadillac, Virgil found the driver’s side unlocked—and the keys sitting on the driver’s seat.

  Yael-2 said, “Well, I can’t ask you . . . to rephrase it, what now?”

  “Let’s run down to the Holiday Inn,” Virgil said. “Maybe Sewickey’s there. This Caddy with the keys, that’s very curious.”

  —

  WHEN THEY got to Sewickey’s room, Virgil knocked, and got no response . . . but did hear a distant thump. “Did you hear that?”

  Yael-2 said, “Like something fell?”

  “Yeah.” He knocked again, and this time, there were four thumps. Like, thump, pause, thump, pause, thump, pause, thump.

  “This doesn’t sound good,” Yael-2 ventured. “We should call the hotel manager, and enter this room also.”

  They did that, and the assistant manager, Arjun Sharma, programmed a key and took them up. They knocked again, heard more thumps, and Sharma unlocked the door and stepped back.