JUDEAN HILLS, ISRAEL
Lia Ganz was still on the grounds of Kif Tzuba amusement park when Moshe Baruch arrived, two hours after the roller coaster had crushed Dar Ibrahim al-Bis to death. The head of Mossad was accompanied by a full security and forensics team to take over for the national police, who had secured the scene in the meantime.
“I see the police were wrong,” he started, “when they told me a Mossad agent was involved.”
“I made clear it was former.”
“Someone told me recently there was no such thing.”
“Close enough,” Lia acknowledged.
Baruch frowned. “I seem to have erred in giving you permission to return to the field.”
“I don’t recall asking for it.”
“Close enough,” Baruch said, using her own phrase against her. “Once a lion, always a lion. And like a lion you can’t stop hunting.”
“Lions hunt to live, Commander. I acted so more Israelis don’t die.”
“What did you have to promise that prisoner to make her give up the name, Colonel?”
“A visit from her two young children.”
“Which you knew to be impossible.”
“In spite of which, I gave her my word.”
“Which you lacked the authority to give.”
“I’ve never broken a promise, Commander.”
“There’s a first time for everything, including using a roller coaster as a weapon.”
“You taught me to use whatever was available.”
Baruch shook his head, looking like he’d swallowed something sour. “Too bad you didn’t pay as good attention to all of my lessons, like promising something you can’t deliver and undertaking a mission without proper authorization or backup. Even the Lioness of Judah can overstep her bounds.”
“Why don’t we give the man’s workshop a closer look and then decide how far I overstepped?”
After an hour had passed, with Lia pacing nervously outside the old shed al-Bis had appropriated for his repairs and workshop, she had begun to fear that her suspicions had led her astray. More likely it was how close her granddaughter had come to falling victim to the drone attack. Perhaps she hadn’t been thinking clearly in her rush to judgment. And now a man was dead—a man who, even if he hadn’t designed the deadly flying machines, might have proven an excellent source of information to Mossad.
Then Moshe Baruch emerged alone, his expression dim and blank.
“There’s something inside you need to see, Colonel.”
She followed him through the fading afternoon light and back inside the dimly lit workshop. It was quiet, no sound of voices or movement. Then again, it had also been quiet in the park itself since the initial national police first responders to the scene had evacuated and closed the park. Lia had noted the noise first ebbing and then vanishing entirely, producing an eerie sense of stillness in her, while she’d waited for Mossad’s arrival. It should have made her feel more secure, but instead it had made her feel less so. Lia was left imagining herself taking her granddaughter here, happy and cackling as she rode the roller coaster on which her grandmother had just killed a man to save another child’s life.
Inside the late Dar Ibrahim al-Bis’s workshop, the dim lighting revealed a rectangular hole in the floor where some shelving had been shoved out of the way. Lia imagined all the seams being covered or camouflaged to keep anyone from noticing the hatch’s existence. A ladder that smelled of fresh lumber extended downward into a darkness now broken by several floodlights that had been placed to provide illumination in the dark space. That was enough to tell her that the hidden room must have been some sort of subbasement and that the shed itself likely had been already standing when the rest of the park was constructed, making use of any number of preexisting structures on the sprawling grounds.
Moshe Baruch preceded her down the ladder and then gestured for her to join him. Lia took the rungs agilely, despite the numbness in her now bandaged shoulder, where al-Bis had grazed her with a knife strike. She reached the bottom, which was formed by a flattened gravel floor, and found herself in a space little bigger than a decent-size closet. Except, in place of clothing was an assortment of the tools of Dar Ibrahim al-Bis’s true trade: weapons, and the materials required to customize them to the needs of this fighter or that.
Lia’s gaze went to a neat array of bullets that she recognized as the very modified 5.56-millimeter ordnance that had been used in the drone attack in Caesarea.
“Colonel,” the head of Mossad called out, directing Lia’s attention to a wall papered with drawings and schematics.
She took a flashlight from his grasp and studied the drawings closer, fixing on one featuring the very drones he’d designed, and perhaps even constructed, in this very room, following the precise parameters of these blueprints. She realized the stacks of aluminum she’d spotted not far from the modified ammunition must have been used to manufacture the custom housings of the weapons to make them light enough for the drones to carry. All of the walls were papered with such plans, making Lia shudder at the thought of how many lives had been lost as a result of the work performed in this cramped and cluttered house of death.
The flashlight beam held on another drawing, which looked fresher than the others. The paper was still radiant white, without any of the yellowing bubbling from collected moisture, or streaks of grime that marred the plans that had been here longer. Of course, a man of al-Bis’s experience and prowess never should have left them here, a kind of shrine to his murderous achievements, but she supposed that was the point, and she imagined him reveling in the sight of them as an art lover might while standing before a Picasso or a van Gogh. Al-Bis likely fancied himself an artist of a different ilk, and since he never got to enjoy for himself the final tapestries drawn in blood, feasting on the sight of his creations was the next best thing. Destroying them would be tantamount to destroying the objects they presaged; it would be sacrilegious in his mind, showing disregard for the glory the acts had brought him. They were the next best thing, in other words, to photographs of the aftermaths of the attacks to which he was party.
“What are these?” Lia asked, beam held on a portion of the drawing’s contents: a pair of objects drawn to scale but lacking enough detail to identify.
“We’re not sure yet,” Baruch replied. “So far, we’ve found nothing here that matches anything like this.”
“We need to find out,” Lia told him, “and fast…”
With that, she shined her flashlight on the next drawing over, detailed schematics etched upon similarly fresh paper, no more than a month old.
“Because that’s a suicide vest,” Lia continued, “and someone must be planning to strap it on.”