The Pandora Deception--A Novel

by David Bruns

  Traffic jams were when she made the most money. Lorry drivers, engines idling, would order tea and cakes from their seats. Passengers in luxury cars would roll down their windows, order, and roll the tinted glass up again. People would file off the buses, place an order, and walk a few paces to catch up with the crawling bus.

  She heard the crunch of tires and the purr of a well-tuned engine pull into the turnoff where her tea cart was set up. She peered under the cart to see a car door open and a pair of polished boots hit the sidewalk. The old woman struggled to her feet.

  “Can I help you?” she said.

  The polished boots belonged to a strapping young man dressed in blue jeans and an untucked shirt. He held up four fingers.

  “Tea. Four.” His accent told her he was from the south.

  She busied herself with the brazier, bringing the water to a boil. The car was a late-model black SUV with tinted windows. She heard a mobile phone ring in the vehicle, and the driver answered it.

  “We’re here. The job will take us an hour or so, then we’ll start back.” The driver noticed the old woman watching him and rolled up the open car window.

  She lined up four teas on the front of her cart and beckoned to the young man. He carried them to the vehicle and she got a look inside as the windows came down. Four men, all well-fed and muscled.

  The polished boots, the way these men carried themselves, the peek of a handgun when the young man stretched to hand the tea to the men in the backseat. She knew these were military men.

  “What do you have to eat?” the driver asked.

  The old woman uncovered a tray of honey-and-almond desserts, a local delicacy.

  “Try one,” the driver said to the young man. He picked one up and bit off half.

  “Good,” he said, his mouth full.

  The driver beckoned for her to come closer. The old woman carried the tray over to him and collected his empty tea glass. He took two, wolfing them down in just a few bites. The tray was empty when she returned to her cart.

  “Pay her, Rocky,” the driver said to the young man. “And get the stuff out of the back.”

  The young man pulled a wad of cash from his pocket and peeled off a handful of Sudanese pounds, far more than the cost of the tea and pastries.

  “Thank you, auntie,” he said, pressing the money into her hands.

  When he smiled, his eyes were cold. The old woman clutched the bills.

  He went to the rear of the SUV and raised the lift gate. When he got into the passenger side of the vehicle, he passed out hard hats and safety vests to the rest of the men in the SUV.

  The car roared away into the night.

  * * *

  The old woman slept fitfully for the rest of the night.

  Traffic started to thicken before dawn. By the time the sun touched the tops of the buildings across the street, the flow of traffic had slowed to a crawl and her tea business was running at full capacity.

  One of the competing tea carts set up shop on a corner fifty paces down the hill. At this rate, the old woman would be out of supplies by noon and would be forced to surrender her spot. She smiled and waved to her competition. With the generous tip from the men in the SUV last night, this had been a very profitable week for her.

  BOOM!

  The sound rolled down into the city of Ad-Damazin, echoing through the buildings.

  All around her, everyone held their breath, frozen in space as the detonation rolled over them.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Three more blasts in quick succession.

  The old woman craned her neck to see up above the city, where the road ran across the top of the dam. There were four columns of black smoke rising into the pale blue morning sky.

  Then the rain started. Bits of concrete, shards of plastic and metal from blasted cars; a hubcap sailed down and bounced off the roof of a car in front of her.

  And mixed in with the material were tiny bits of bloody red flesh.

  A woman screamed. Pandemonium reigned as drivers tried to reverse their cars and get as far away from the carnage as possible.

  The old woman packed up her tea cart and pushed it down the hill.

  CHAPTER 26

  Mossad training facility, Negev Desert, Israel

  The sticky note affixed to the door of Rachel’s dorm room was characteristically brusque.

  See me. The scribble beneath it represented Noam’s signature.

  Her heart leaped. A new assignment?

  Rachel entered her room and toweled the pool water from her hair. She donned a fresh uniform and a shined pair of shoes, then drew her thick hair back into a bun at the nape of her neck.

  She checked her appearance in the mirror, smoothing the green uniform shirt against the flat of her belly. She was fitter than she’d been in a long time, and she looked relaxed and healthy.

  Still, she needed to make a good impression. As leader of the kidon, the decision to send Rachel into the field was Noam’s alone. He would be watching her for weaknesses, for any reason to keep her at Scorpion’s Ascent.

  Rachel moved swiftly through the halls. The dinner hour was nearing and most of the work for the day was done. She nodded to the few people she socialized with in the center. One of the assessments by the psych team was social interactions, so she made an effort.

  The door of Noam’s office was closed when she arrived. She rapped her knuckles three times below his nameplate.

  “Enter,” the rumbly voice from within said.

  She threw open the door and took three steps forward and saluted. “Officer Rachel Jaeger reporting as ordered, sir!”

  Noam looked up in surprise, then collapsed back into the cushions of his chair, guffaws of laughter filling the office. He waved his hands at her.

  “Have a seat, Rachel,” he said, still laughing. “When was the last time you saluted me?”

  Rachel grinned at him. “I wanted to make a good impression.”

  Noam’s mirth lessened and he wiped his eyes. “A good impression. A good laugh, you mean. I think maybe Psych needs to take another look at you.”

  Outside, the setting sun outlined the bulk of Scorpion’s Ascent, but Rachel’s eyes were drawn to the pictures decorating the wall of Noam’s office. A much younger, and much thinner, Noam in an IDF uniform. A photograph of a young boy next to an army officer. A picture of that same boy a few years older at a funeral next to a woman dressed in black.

  Noam followed her eyes. “My father,” he said. “He died in the Yom Kippur War in ’73. I had just turned thirteen.” He sat back in the chair with a sigh. “Big shoes to fill. Still.”

  Rachel swallowed. They all had reasons to be here. Patriotism, guilt, duty, or just running away. But motivation was less important than results—and she was good at her job.

  “I have your evaluation here,” Noam said, paging through a file on his desk. “But what I really want to know is: Have you learned your lesson?”

  Rachel nodded smartly. “Absolutely.”

  Noam raised his bushy eyebrows, planted both elbows on the desk, and posted his chin on his fists. “Tell me.”

  He was baiting her. Rachel knew it, but she couldn’t resist. “Not to wear high heels on a mission,” she said. Noam’s eyes clenched together in suppressed laughter. She waited for the outburst to subside.

  “You’re lucky I don’t send you to a board for your fitness for duty evaluation,” he said. “They’d never let you out of here. No wonder the psych people don’t know what to do with you.”

  Rachel’s spirits fell. So that’s what this meeting was about. That idiot doctor wanted her to open up about her dead husband and how she was dealing with the pain of loss. Rachel dealt with Levi’s death by working as long and as hard as she could. She dealt with his murder by taking as many of the bad guys off the board as was humanly possible and with extreme prejudice when she could get away with it.

  Levi had been killed years ago, but she was still angry about losing him. She knew she
used his death as a motivator for this work, but so what? She was good at what she did.

  Rachel set her jaw, her shoulders tightened. Let them ramble on about feelings and motivations as much as they wanted, but count her out. She wasn’t playing that game.

  “What did they say this time?” she asked. Rachel did her best to keep the sarcasm out of her voice and failed.

  Noam’s eyebrows showed he’d heard the tone. “Same as before, mostly. They want you to talk about your motivations as an agent and you don’t.”

  “So, what’s different now?”

  “What’s different now is that I need you in the field.”

  Rachel tried to suppress the smile that threatened to spread across her face. “You have a new assignment for me.”

  Noam sighed and tossed a folder over the desk to her. She caught it and eagerly opened it.

  Rachel found herself looking at the face of a man in his forties with penetrating dark gray eyes. The shade of his skin and the wave of his hair suggested North African blood in his heritage, but the name on the bottom of the page was French: Jean-Pierre Manzul, CEO of Recodna Genetics.

  Noam busied himself with another cigarette. “Our American friends discovered a suspicious money transfer between two shell companies in the Nile River basin. One was a coffee company, the other one was Khartoum Security Services.” He paused to suck on his cigarette. “Khartoum Security Services only has one customer: Recodna Genetics.”

  “What was suspicious about the bank transfer?”

  Noam’s lips bent into a humorless smile. “It was initiated by a Saudi Arabian holding company. A big one, billions-of-dollars big.”

  “So why not go after the Saudi connection?”

  “It turns out that the CEO of Recodna Genetics is in the market for some high-end personal security. Someone who knows how to handle themselves but looks good doing it.”

  Rachel flipped the page on the briefing packet. Jean-Pierre’s bid request had gone to some of the most exclusive security firms in Europe. This would not be a cakewalk.

  “Your new identity is Zula Bekele. Italian-Ethiopian heritage. Clearwater Security in the UK owes us a favor. They have agreed to bid you out for the job. The details of your company history are all in the packet.”

  “What am I after?” Rachel asked.

  Noam didn’t answer, which told her all she needed to know.

  He didn’t know what they were looking for.

  Noam smashed out a half-smoked cigarette. “The whole thing stinks. Saudi shell companies funneling money to a security company that only has one customer, which happens to be a bio company. We don’t like it. We want you to get close to Jean-Pierre and figure out what he’s up to.”

  Rachel studied Manzul’s picture again. Now she knew why the eyes bothered her: They reminded her of Levi. They both had the same piercing quality to their gaze that even in a photograph seemed to look right through her. She flipped the page to hide Manzul’s face.

  She hadn’t thought about her late husband in days, a rarity for her.

  “And what do I do when I get close to this guy?” Rachel asked.

  “He’s your client.” Noam shrugged. “You keep him safe.”

  Rachel smiled sweetly. “I’ll leave my high heels at home.”

  Noam’s laughter followed her out of the office.

  CHAPTER 27

  Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti, Africa

  For the second time in the same day, Dre Ramirez found herself on an airplane, the same CIA-owned Gulfstream V that had carried them from the United States. Except on this flight, they had Shira Fishbein with them.

  Janet fell asleep before the plane taxied to the runway. Next to her, Don huddled over his laptop, his face locked in a scowl of concentration. Michael and Shira sat together, deep in conversation, which left Dre to her own thoughts.

  At the end of the runway, the jet’s engines rose in pitch. The acceleration pressed Dre back into her seat, emphasized how tired she was. She closed her eyes as the cabin angled upward in a steep climb.

  But sleep would not come. Instead, she tried to piece together in her mind all the facts they had gathered.

  A mysterious, messianic figure claims a desire to unite all Islam, but uses violence to inflame tensions between Egypt and the upstream countries of the Nile River basin. His website uses top-secret cryptography stolen from the Israelis, who claim no knowledge of the terrorist attacks.

  Nothing made any sense.

  She rested her head against the window and let her mind drift as the plane reached cruising altitude and leveled off. The land beneath them was a carpet of rich browns as they left the Dead Sea behind and headed south over the Negev Desert. From this height, it was not easy to tell where Israel ended and Jordan began. A few minutes passed and Dre could see the Gulf of Aqaba in the distance. Somewhere in that vast expanse of brown, Jordan ended and Saudi Arabia began, another political border.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Shira’s voice brought Dre’s stream of consciousness to a screeching halt. The Israeli woman indicated the empty seat next to Dre. “May I?”

  Dre looked past Shira to see Michael’s head bowed in sleep. She shrugged.

  Shira pointed out the window. “The Red Sea will be coming up soon. The amount of container traffic through the Suez Canal is amazing. You should be able to see US Navy ships on patrol.”

  Shira was obviously trying to make a connection, but until Dre knew more about her and this mysterious Mossad software program, she would keep her own counsel. It seemed odd that they were taking a Mossad cyber expert into a secure US forward operating base, but that decision was well above her pay grade.

  To change the conversation, Dre nodded toward the sleeping Michael and leaned close to Shira. “What do you think of our Michael?”

  She watched Shira’s expression soften. “I think he’s remarkable. I still can’t believe that he was able to figure out the website was secured by metamorphic encryption without using some sort of program.”

  “That’s our Michael,” Dre said with no small measure of pride. “He’s also single, in case you’re wondering.”

  Two spots of color appeared high on Shira’s cheekbones, a sure sign that Dre’s intuition had been correct.

  “Thanks for that.” Shira recovered enough of her composure to smile back. “I might be interested.”

  “You think your software was stolen?” Dre asked, switching topics again. “Or is this some sort of double-blind operation?”

  The smile evaporated from Shira’s face. “That program represents years of work by some of the best minds in the country of Israel and now…” Her voice trailed off and Dre noted Shira’s hands clenched in her lap.

  “Why not break into the website on your own?” Dre asked. “Why wait for us?”

  “In case you’re right.” Shira’s voice was soft, tentative. “If it is an Israeli operation, then it’s being run outside of Mossad and that means—”

  “It means your boss is compromised,” Dre finished for her.

  Binya and Don had hatched the idea of hacking the Mahdi website from the confines of Camp Lemonnier, the only wholly owned US military base in the region. If the Mahdi was an Israeli rogue operation, they would attribute the hack to the Americans. Mossad’s role in the hack would remain a secret.

  This was the part about the intel business that made Dre’s head hurt: the lack of trust. Every major operation was compartmentalized against the possibility that someone in the chain of operations might make a mistake—or worse yet, be working for the other side.

  In a move that even surprised herself, Dre reached over and squeezed Shira’s forearm. “You’ll know soon. It’ll be okay.”

  They spent the rest of the flight in silence, with Dre trying in vain to re-create her former stream-of-consciousness state of mind. Somewhere in the mountains of intel they had consumed, there were threads of information, clues that belonged together. She knew it, and the idea of solving the puzzle kept her
going, but the solution was just out of reach.

  Dre knew from experience not to try to force the answer.

  She watched the shipping traffic from her window seat. Shira was right about the volume of container ships and tankers. The massive vessels steamed north to where the Red Sea narrowed into the Suez Canal. At this height, they looked like toy ships in a bathtub, trailed by feathery white wakes.

  Dre spotted a US Navy ship, an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, amid the commercial traffic and wondered what the crew of the Michael Murphy was doing at that exact moment.

  As they traveled farther south, the Red Sea began to narrow again and the coastline of Yemen appeared on the left of the aircraft. In the distance, black smoke drifted up from the ground. In the war-torn country, the smoke could be a Saudi bomb strike or a farmer burning his fields.

  When they passed over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, where the Red Sea entered the Gulf of Aden, the Gulfstream made a wide turn and began to descend.

  Janet opened her eyes and yawned, stretching her arms over her head. She smiled at Dre, smacked her lips, then rooted around in her bag for a bottle of water. Don closed his laptop down and slid it into his bag. Michael’s head snapped up and he looked around wildly for a moment before he recognized his surroundings. Shira and Dre shared a quiet laugh at the expense of Dre’s colleagues.

  The Gulfstream touched down in midafternoon. When Dre disembarked she found a hot and humid atmosphere more akin to a summer in Annapolis than a military base in the desert. The Gulf of Aden glimmered in the distance beyond the end of the runway.

  They each carried their own bags to the waiting white passenger van where a young army enlisted man welcomed them to “beautiful Camp Lemonnier.” After closing the door, he rushed around to the driver’s side and put the vehicle in gear.

  He shouted names of buildings over the roar of the air-conditioning on max fan. Cold air blasted through the cabin of the van.

  “That’s the PX.”

  “Commissary,” Michael said to Shira.