Holon Industrial District, Tel Aviv
July 20, 4:13 a.m.
Halfway down the alley, the driver cut the lights of the electrician’s van. There was enough light pollution from the surrounding area that the alley, though bordered by buildings on each side, enjoyed a sliver of dusk down the center of its length, heavy blackness on each side.
Seated in the back with the other members of the strike force, Mullaney couldn’t tell if the small truck that entered the alley fifteen minutes earlier was in the right position or if the other two squads had made it over the wall and were waiting for the go order. But there was no communication on the radio and, thankfully, no gunfire, as they rolled down the alley. That was a good sign.
Outfitted with black Kevlar body armor, a black helmet with night-vision amplified goggles, and a Shin Bet windbreaker emblazoned on each side with Hebrew letters, Mullaney refocused his mind on his job. Out the door with Levinson, double-time along the side of the building to the loading dock, and then silently force open the gate that closed over the dock.
The last drone pass didn’t show any sentries on this side of the building. On the pictures, there were two up front—complicating the assignment of the other squad, which was to climb the staircase and gain access to the offices through the second-floor door.
The driver nursed the electrician’s van, its engine idling quietly as it rolled along in neutral gear, into the open parking area between the two buildings on the right near the end of the alley.
Showtime. Mullaney’s palms itched. A trickle of perspiration rolled down his neck under his collar. It felt like someone had taken his stomach out for a walk. Always like this before a mission, even when there wasn’t a potential leak in his team. Mullaney pulled in a deep breath.
The back door swung open.
“Go,” Levinson whispered into his radio, the entire team getting the same message. And Mullaney jumped into the dark.
Following close behind Levinson, Mullaney sprinted along the side of the building toward the loading dock, his Heckler & Koch MP5 held closely to his chest—safety off, finger off the trigger. All DSS agents were trained like that. He wondered about the …
Levinson dropped to a knee, Mullaney almost running up his back. He skidded to a halt, his left shoulder scraping against the masonry wall. He could hear the heavy breathing of Tommy Hernandez behind him.
The sliding door that covered the width of the loading dock was secured by two huge padlocks halfway down each side and a third massive padlock connecting the bottom of the door, at its center, to a metal cleat cemented into the ground. Levinson reached his right arm out to the side and motioned forward. A Shin Bet officer came alongside and handed something to Levinson then hustled along the length of the door. Levinson wrapped something around the shackle of the padlock in front of him, the soldier doing the same thing to the lock in the middle of the door and then the one on the far end. The soldier took a knee, pulled something out of his pocket about the size of a cigarette lighter and squeezed it in the middle.
A light sizzle floated on the night air, a faint odor of burning metal. Levinson caught the body of the lock as it fell away from the shackle, the soldier doing the same thing on the other side. Carefully, both of them removed the remnants of the shackle from the door and its frame. The soldier came to the middle of the door, removed the pieces of the middle lock and looked in Levinson’s direction. With a hand signal, both pushed upward on the door at the same time, which swung up several feet on well-oiled hinges. No sound. It took only seconds.
Levinson pressed against the corner of the loading dock and the soldier flattened against the pavement, each scanning the interior. The night remained quiet, but the radio crackled … and Mullaney’s hopes plummeted.
“Beta team … no guards in the warehouse compound.”
Levinson shook his head and glanced back at Mullaney. He held up his right hand, a steadying gesture, and led his party inside the larger building, the temperature dropping significantly as soon as they scuttled low through the loading dock. A corridor as wide as the loading dock itself, ran straight ahead and split the space in two—walls barely discernible to the left and right.
Mullaney flipped on his night-vision gear.
The metal walls on either side of the corridor looked like they were insulated, massive, walk-in refrigerators or freezers. Each of them had double-wide doors in the middle, ten feet across, and a single, smaller entry door at the near corner. There was no light. There was no sound. Only cold. And dark.
Levinson was in a crouch against the wall at the end of the loading dock. He reached behind him, pointed at the lieutenant, raised two fingers, then pointed down the corridor—two-man teams at the entry doors and on either side of the double-wide doors on both sides of the corridor. He pointed at Mullaney and himself and pointed to the entry door on the right. A slight wave of his fingers and the six pairs, crouching close to the floor, moved in silent harmony, surrounding the doors.
There was no visible lock on the small entry door. Levinson edged back to cover as Mullaney reached for the door’s handle.
“Alpha team … offices are clear. No sentries.”
Mullaney’s hand stopped in midair, despair hanging heavy on every muscle. We’re too late.
Levinson gave him a nudge on the shoulder.
The handle turned freely. The door was unlocked. Mullaney drew in a breath and eased it open.
The room inside, colder than Moscow in January, was a black void. Mullaney scanned the room with his night vision, turning the thick darkness into a watery shimmer of green. The meat locker was huge, hundreds of large, metal hooks hanging from a winding course of rollers that twisted above the room. The room was empty. Except for one chair in the middle of the floor. Mullaney made one more scan with his night vision then looked alongside the door for a light switch.
“This side is clear.” It was Hernandez’s voice.
“Clear,” Mullaney replied, but blackness enveloped his voice as the cold squeezed out all hope. He stood and looked back at Levinson. Both raised their night vision gear and Mullaney flipped on the light switch.
A lone metal chair sat in the middle of the room. As he walked toward it, Mullaney saw the one thing he feared more than finding Palmyra Parker’s body.
Clumps of black hair, covered in blood, on the floor surrounding the chair.
Useless!
Seated on the edge of the loading dock, his head hanging between his shoulders, Mullaney was being assaulted by every lie from his past that—for so many years—he had accepted as true. Some lies others had hurled at him. Some lies he had hurled at himself.
It’s all your fault.
You’re just not good enough.
What’s wrong with you?
Can’t you do anything right?
Ahhh, you’re useless!
He was rescued from most of those lies by his diligence, meticulousness, and determination. And by his faith. But lately, his failures had been piling up. Doubt was becoming his daily companion. Maybe he wasn’t …
He felt the arm wrap itself around his shoulders—figured it was Hernandez trying to cheer him up—as the voice spoke in his ear.
“You will find her. She is the guardian. She will be safe.”
He looked to his left. No one was there.
Tommy Hernandez sat down on Mullaney’s right side at the end of the loading dock.
Mullaney looked at Hernandez then turned his head back to the left. There still wasn’t anyone there.
“Didn’t you just … weren’t you …”
“What?” asked Hernandez, looking at Mullaney as if he had two heads. He reached out and put a hand on his friend’s arm. “We’ll find her. She’ll be okay.”
If only that was true, Mullaney thought. They might find her, but Palmyra Parker would likely be far from okay. The question he didn’t want to ask himself: Was she alive? He looked out through the loading dock to the alley outside. Colonel Levinson was on his mobile phone. The word would be getting out.
“Brian,” said Hernandez, “if she was dead, they would have left her body.”
“Somebody needs to call Atticus.”
Mullaney realized he was speaking out loud.
Tommy was reaching for his phone.
“No … I’ll do it.” Mullaney was searching through his pockets for his phone when he heard Levinson call out.
“Brian!” Then he clicked his mic. “Right, boys … load up, on the double … we think we’ve spotted them.”
Hours on the treadmill paid off. Mullaney, running at a full gallop, was only one stride behind Levinson as the team piled into the back of the electrician’s van. Levinson grabbed hold of Mullaney’s Kevlar vest and pulled him down next to him on the bench that ran the length of the van. “Reconnaissance picked up a four-vehicle convoy of black SUVs speeding south on Route Four, between Ashdod and Ashkelon, about ten minutes ago,” Levinson yelled as the driver started up the engine and catapulted out of the alley and into Halahav Street.
Mullaney grabbed a strut to keep from being tossed across the inside of the van. “How can you be sure?”
“They’re running a very tight formation, very fast,” said Levinson as he turned toward the driver. “Samuel, may I have the maps?” The driver, his left hand trying to keep the accelerating van under control, reached into a bin under the dashboard and handed back a leather-bound packet.
“Samuel, are you patched into the radio?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right … you know what to do.”
The van was heaving, like a small boat in heavy seas, rolling back and forth. In spite of the movement, Levinson pulled open the packet and turned to a topographic road map.
“This is where we are,” he said, pointing at the Holon district on the western flank of Ben Gurion Airport, “and this is where the first sighting was, along this road between”—he pointed to population centers—“Ashdod and Ashkelon. The first pictures came from a stationary camera. Reconnaissance is monitoring other stationary cameras along the road, but they also redirected a drone in that direction.
“Somewhere in here,” Levinson pointed south of Ashdod, “we lost them. They must have turned off …”
All of them were thrown off balance as the van hit something in the road very hard. For a moment, the van felt airborne.
“Sorry, sir,” said the driver, still wrestling with the steering wheel.
“It’s all right, Samuel. You just get us there.”
Levinson steadied the maps in his lap. “They must have pulled off Highway Four here, south of Nitzan. But the drone picked up the formation again. Now they are driving without lights, very slow, down this narrow dirt road that is sometimes used by farmers.”
The area Levinson was pointing to looked desolate to Mullaney. “There’s nothing there,” he said. “Where are they going?”
Levinson looked up from the map. “I think they’re making a run for Gaza. If they can get her into the Gaza Strip before … well … it may not be possible for us to find her, let alone rescue her. Gaza is a killing field. It’s like your Wild West where there was no law and too many guns.”
Mullaney’s mind flashed back to a past operation to rescue a kidnapped American diplomat from the war-ravaged streets of Beirut. Incredibly dangerous and unpredictable, Beirut was a rat’s nest of heavily armed militia units that flip-flopped daily from implacable enemy to impassive observer, depending on the whims of the controlling imams. The mission was a disaster. They found the diplomat, dead, hanging by his thumbs in the window of a bombed out storefront. Then Mullaney and the other DSS agents had to fight their way out of Beirut under withering fire from the rooftops and blackened windows of Beirut’s ravaged buildings. Two agents were killed, three others wounded, including Mullaney, who still carried the scars in his body and his memory.
“We need to get her.”
“I know,” said Levinson, nodding his head. Mullaney could read the determination in Levinson’s eyes. The colonel pointed down at the map. “We’ve got a plan.” He traced his finger along a faint line that ran through the barren area north of Ashkelon. “If they get into Ashkelon, we could lose them entirely. And then it’s only a short run to Gaza and too many paths for us to cover all at once. This is the Nitzanim Reserve, a preserved area of sand dunes and scrub. This unpaved road they are following runs down the eastern flank of Nitzanim. Here,” he tapped his finger, “it runs over a small, wooden bridge to cross this wadi.” Levinson looked up into Mullaney’s eyes.
“There are two squads of Shin Bet and IDF from Ashkelon heading to that bridge right now. Their orders are to tear that bridge apart, if necessary, set up a “Bridge Out” blockade and detour the SUVs down another dirt road, farther into the reserve. And here”—he tapped the map—“is where we will be waiting for them.”
Mullaney was shaking his head. “We? How are we going to get there? There’s not enough time.”
The van swerved violently to the left, all ten men hanging on so as not to be thrown about, and then shuddered to an abrupt halt, the groaning of its distressed engine overwhelmed by a growing, throaty roar.
Levinson was first to throw open the back doors and leap out of the van. “In these,” he shouted, pointing to a pair of IDF helicopters, their rotors already spinning. The other soldiers poured out of the van, running bent under the rotors. Levinson grabbed Mullaney’s arm as they jogged toward the chopper. “We’ll swing out over the sea and come in from the south,” he shouted into Mullaney’s ear. They paused in the open door in the helicopter’s side. “They won’t hear us coming. Don’t worry. We’ll be in time.”