Chapter 5
September 4th, 2011 was a glorious late summer day in Tel Aviv, as Eyal drove to work.
He had scheduled the periodic review and alignment meeting with the Mossad in the morning and he was happy to see that after many months of procrastination, Yaakov had gotten around to the Sean Ewals case.
This, mixed with the memory of the last Shabbat spent at the beach with his girlfriend Ruth, made for a very good start of the week.
When Yaakov finished the slides about the second point, the excitement had turned into disappointment. Since it was a face to face meeting, Yaakov understood immediately.
They knew that George and Sean were the same person.
They had managed to find out that he also had a girlfriend in Singapore, as they could see from the picture of the two taken on the poolside of the Raffles hotel by the Mossad operative. She was a Spanish woman named Rosa who was working as a financial analyst in a hedge fund and Eyal could not help noticing she looked a bit like Ruth.
Another interesting fact was that George/Sean was at the center of an extensive network of global connections, logging countless airline miles. Beyond a regular monthly trip to Singapore to visit Rosa, he visited Europe at least twice a month, Middle East (including Israel) twice every three months, and occasionally the Far East - mostly in South Korea and Japan. Yaakov had not been able to send an operative to every country, but in the countries he had managed to get a team member into, like France and England, all they had reported was the typical venture capitalist lifestyle. There were no suspicious associates found and Yaakov did not have enough resources to evaluate everyone George/Sean had met during these past months of surveillance.
Eyal had not much more information to offer. During his missions in Israel, they had tracked every number that Sean had called and everything he had brought along in his suitcase - including a full scan of his hard disk which was copied during the airport security checks - but again, nothing suspicious showed up.
In any case, the Israeli people known to George and connected to the biodrone project, had been moved to other companies. The business partners of George reported that he asked about their new jobs, but he did not try to contact them again.
“So, at the end of the day,” sighed Eyal, “the only suspicious activity here is that we have a former Silicon Valley billionaire that likes to live a second life and appears to be barely thirty when he is actually sixty-something…nothing that you could not reach with the help of a good plastic surgeon up in Beirut and nothing that poses an immediate threat to Eretz Yisrael..”
“Correct,” chimed in Yaakov, “the only other strange thing we can add to the list is that the man is going to spread out into Hollywood. One sayan in Los Angeles is active in the movie production industry and told us that Sean is helping to finance a new sci-fi movie about a future where part of mankind has become immortal while the vast majority is condemned to live in the slums. The plot looks quite plain, but they are going to hire big actors like Matt Damon or Tom Cruise to make it sell. The movie name has not yet been decided. It could be ‘Olympus’ or ‘Elysium’, some fancy mythological Greek name.”
“Alright, how do we move forward then?” Eyal continued, “We know we have an extremely well-crafted identity change, we know it has to do with advanced biological research and all the big money associated to that, we know that - although we have no evidence - it was intentional, and it has got into contact with one of our most secret research programs. The big media might soon be involved. I think we need to fire a warning signal, Yaakov, even though we do not want to…”
Yaakov knew where Eyal was going with this proposal. A warning signal meant officially asking the CIA if they knew something about it, watching Sean undercover, and questioning foreign secret services. This was tricky business from here on out. Not to mention that if you were proved wrong, you would owe the CIA a favor.
“Alright,” Yaakov gave in, “we will take all the necessary steps with our friends in Foggy Bottom, but I won’t bring this about on an urgent basis, rather I will mention it verbally as an off-agenda topic in the monthly interexchange meeting we have in Cyprus, two weeks from now. Then, as I understand, you plan to question our man next time he sets foot in Israel so please let me ask you one favor: do not arrest him or take any action that could create an issue for us.”
Eyal noted that Yaakov had used the nickname Foggy Bottom to refer to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He usually did this when he wanted to be particularly cautious. So he tried to reassure his colleague as much as he could.
“Come on, Yaakov, we are not in the US where they send to Guantanamo everything that moves. Worst case, we get yet another complaint call from the US Embassy about our tight security procedures at Ben Gurion airport. And as usual our answer will be that, according to the latest survey we took, ninety-nine percent of US citizens approve of it,” he added with a laugh.
The Last Enemy - Parts 1,2 & 3 - 1934-2054 Page 16
