Mati Fless drew the hired BMW Cabriolet to a halt on the hard shoulder’s crisp new tarmac. It was good to see California again. Fless turned the radio off and breathed in the creamy, fresh air wafting in from the snow-capped Sierra Nevada to the east. He cast his eye across Lake Oroville. The clear blue waters glittered like a tray of gems.
When he’d received instructions to fly to San Francisco, Fless had expected some squalid assignment in a back-lot in Haight-Ashbury or the dank corridors of a government housing project in Daly City. That was the usual environment for his kind of work. But Fless was headed for Paradise, 100 miles north of Sacramento.
Fless caught his image in the side mirror. He hated mirrors. He hated to see himself. Without an image he was invisible, just an idea, the point of somebody’s will. His olive eyes seemed darker than usual, his face longer than usual, his short black hair less plenteous. He was thirty-four and he’d started thinking. Not just asking questions and settling for attractive answers, but really thinking. Deep stuff. He wouldn’t last much longer in the job.
It had taken three years to get a transfer from Shin Bet’s anti-subversion department to the Israeli Mossad’s foreign operations branch. God, how Fless hated spying on his own people. Yes, some of the guys in the ultra-nationalist Kach were nutters – but spending days staking out student families in the hills of Samaria in the West Bank had got him right down.
Fless hadn’t joined the security service to watch organic farmers, ceramicists, sculptors, theatrical types, musicians, embroiderers, stained-glass artists and candle-makers. Of course, the idealistic self-help groups were a nursery for the Bat Ayin underground, a West Bank settler group. There’d been some bad things. Fless himself had foiled a plan to detonate a cart filled with explosives next to a school in the Arab neighbourhood of At-Tur in Jerusalem. The zealot Israeli militant mentality left him cold.
The final straw for Fless had been the uncovering of a secret Kach plan to blow up the al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount and replace it with an altar to be used for animal sacrifices. The whole thing gave him crazy dreams. It wasn’t even something he could talk about. He couldn’t drink it off his mind either. As far as Fless was concerned, the problem in the East was too much religion and not enough reality. It always had been.
But California: wow! Every kind of nutcase – but not a bomb in sight. The sun, the fir trees, the dazzle of sky on the windscreen, the roar of the engine. Fless felt intoxicated as he wound his way round the lakeside and up into the mountains towards Paradise.
The car sped up the hairpin track, higher and higher. Then Fless slammed on the brakes and reversed the car. To his left, a small sign: ‘KISMET’, the professor’s house.
Fless continued up the track until he reached a lay-by shadowed by great pines. Taking a case from the boot, he darted into the forest. He caught his black jeans on a barbed-wire fence concealed by ferns. Maybe the fence was wired to an alarm. Listening hard, Fless backed off, following the fence down the hillside.
Ten miles away in Chico, Fless’s team waited on his call.
Through a clearing, he caught his first sight of the house, an early seventies split-level job. Fless crouched on the ground for an hour. He checked the contents of his case: a hypodermic gun and a phial of something the doctor didn’t order – humanely brief and fast dispersing.
Fless heard a crack behind him.
An Alsatian leapt at his neck, biting and tearing through his jersey. A blur of teeth strained for the jugular. Pulled to the ground, hard against the barbed wire, Fless rolled over with the animal as it gnawed and salivated as the scuffle intensified. Fless kept his chin down and forced his right hand against the Alsatian’s beating chest, down towards his waist. Once he’d got leverage, the job was soon done.
The blade severed the dog’s neck. A high-pitched bark was abruptly silenced by Fless’s adept twist of the knife. The dog’s legs beat helplessly in the undergrowth as its lifeblood seeped into the scattered sunlight.
‘Fucking dogs!’
Fless heard a car in the distance and then a click. He felt sick. A gun barrel pushed hard into the nape of his neck.
‘One move, son, and you’re as dead as that dog.’