IDF Base
Nine days after Assassinations
Two days to Announcement
Magal and Shiri broke away from the rest of the kidon, who were lingering around the central area.
The previous day, Carmel and Abhyan, accompanied by the two watchful security guards, had taken them inside the conference room.
That occurred because Magal had whispered in Yakov’s ear. ‘Who knows whether there really are negotiators behind that door? That’s what they told us in the Galaxy.’
Back at the hotel, he had noticed that Yakov was excitable. His verbal nudge did the trick. The kidon had approached Carmel and had demanded to see the negotiators.
She had eyed him calmly and had then called Abhyan. The security commander was in uniform and cut an imposing figure, but that didn’t cow Yakov. Mossad’s kidon were just as well-trained and experienced as Sayeret Matkal soldiers.
‘Carter and you duped us in the Galaxy. We need to see that’s not happening again,’ he said firmly.
The security chief had taken them without a word to the conference room and had stood back as they entered.
Twelve heads had risen up in surprise at their entrance. Magal recognized the Palestinians from the handler’s files. He swiftly noted where they sat in relation to the door. They were close to it.
People tend to choose the same chairs every day, at a conference. Something about familiarity in new surroundings.
‘Satisfied?’ Abhyan had asked.
Yakov had nodded.
‘Take out your cell,’ Magal spoke softly, bringing out his device as they approached the kitchen next to the conference room.
‘It doesn’t work here,’ Shiri hissed, but obeyed.
‘Just checking,’ Magal said to the two guards outside the room. The conference room’s doors were twenty feet away, the security detail watching them impassively.
He and his partner entered the kitchen. The chef was busy in front of a stove. His assistant was chopping something on a sideboard.
The two servers lounged, chatting with each other. They were in uniform and, as Magal passed, he snapped their pictures swiftly.
He entered the supply room and saw that it was dark, lit by a single bulb. Rows of tall, stacked shelves extended to the rear of the room. Big freezers hummed at the back. A window at the back. No rear door.
He and Shiri returned to the kitchen and went to its back door. Magal opened it and stepped outside. There was a parking lot next to the door. A military truck parked in it.
He went to the vehicle and checked inside. The key was in its slot.
‘You got an idea?’ his friend asked.
‘Several. That,’ he pointed to the truck, ‘will be our escape route.’
Shiri looked at it and then at him. ‘How will we get inside the conference room?’
‘You’ve seen all the soldiers? All of them were armed. Even the servers.’
‘Yes. M16s, Glocks; I saw grenades, too.’
‘Their build?’
‘Similar to ours.’ Which wasn’t surprising since many IDF personnel and Mossad operatives were similarly sized.
‘Hair?’
‘That, too.’
‘Helmets?’
‘On the kitchen counter.’
‘You know how we will enter the conference room?’
‘I know, now. But getting out of the base—’
‘Working on it.’
Carmel approached him at three pm, her face worried. ‘Eliel, there’s a call for you.’
He took her cell, turned away and cupped it to his ear.
He adopted a grave expression and nodded silently several times.
‘I will be there,’ he said and hung up.
‘I need to go.’
‘I assumed. I arranged a military vehicle for you.’
‘I need it only till Beersheba. My foster family has arranged a ride for me from there. I will return on my own.’
‘I thought—’
‘She’s hanging on,’ he smiled grimly. ‘She wants to see me.’
‘Go.’
Magal went.
Beersheba
He waited at Beersheba until the military vehicle departed and then climbed into the Toyota that his associate had driven.
Jud Lipman was in his fifties, and with his straggly, white hair, he looked like a university professor.
He was a master forger, a counterfeiter, a con man, a maker of disguises, and had successfully stayed clear of the law for decades.
‘That thing with your mother. It’s not easy, you know,’ he grumbled. ‘I had to record her voice and perfect it so that it could pass most audio tests. I jump whenever I get a call from your organization, checking if she is really ill.’
‘You’ve been pulling that stunt off for a while now, pretending to be my foster mother or someone close to her, attending to her.’
‘It’s difficult, rerouting the calls so that it looks like I am replying from Haifa.’
‘You don’t complain when I pay you.’
That shut the old man up. He drove them inside the city, past office buildings and warehouses. He entered a gated, dilapidated building and called out a name at the squawk box. The iron gates opened silently.
‘No one’s inside,’ he grunted. ‘Voice recognition and iris scan at the box.’
Lipman took him up a rickety elevator and opened a door at his floor. The office was in stark contrast to the outside of the building. It was sleek, hi-tech, and had several pieces of equipment Magal couldn’t identify.
He recognized the 3-D printer in the corner and a kiln the forger still used for his fakes.
‘You need something?’ Lipman drew his attention. ‘I figure you haven’t come here to greet me.’
‘I need face masks.’ Magal brought out his phone and showed the pictures he’d taken of the servers. ‘Exact replicas.’
‘That will take time. Days.’
‘You have five hours.’
Zeb split from the sisters and investigated the main admin building for himself. The twins walked with Carmel and Dalia, who showed them around.
The three of them hadn’t checked out the base the previous day. They had spent most of it, after their arrival, with the base’s commander, and Moshe Abhyan.
He joined them an hour later and gestured to a vehicle that was waiting outside.
‘Want a tour of the base? To the areas that no one sees?’
A resounding ‘yeah’ was his answer.
Driven by a tight-lipped captain, the four of them went to the exercise grounds and watched a drill in progress: IDF teams attacking what looked like a Syrian terrorist training camp. A chopper flew overhead and a drone made passes, as the soldiers went from stealth mode to aggressive attack, from house to house, as enemy fire tracked them
‘How did you wrangle this?’ Beth asked in awe, as they halted at a distance. A hundred yards away there was a team of uniformed observers, watching through binos. They didn’t make any attempt to stop their vehicle. Nor did they approach it.
They are tolerating us.
That didn’t surprise Zeb. No military commander liked the presence of externals in his camp.
‘You have met the prime minister,’ he reminded the younger sister.
Carmel and Dalia looked at them sharply. ‘You have, what?’
‘It was accidental,’ Zeb assured them. ‘We met in passing.’
Carmel gave him a long, disbelieving look. ‘Really?’
‘Even we, and I know Dalia and I have security clearances at par with them,’ she jerked a shoulder at the soldiers, ‘aren’t allowed entry. Just who are the three of you?’
‘Friends of Avichai,’ Zeb shrugged, and the kidon had to settle for that.
Alice Monash and the ramsad were at the base when they returned.
‘We arrived yesterday, but didn’t see you anywhere. Checked out the place? It doesn’t look like even a fly can enter this base unauthorized, at least not to my untrained eyes.’
‘Seems like that, ma’am, but we can’t take anything for granted.’
‘You are satisfied?’ Levin queried.
‘Yes, but it is Abhyan you should ask. We are careful watchers, nothing more.’
At seven pm, Zeb joined Carmel, who was briefing her team in front of a drinks’ stand in the open space. There was still foot traffic in the building, despite the hour. It looked like the base didn’t sleep. Time merely slowed in the night.
Meghan looked back at him. ‘Nothing yet on Raskov’s file. He’d encrypted it. Werner’s trying out various algorithms that the Russians normally use.’
Zeb nodded absently. He was counting heads and came up one short. He started again.
Eliel!
‘Where is Eliel?’ he asked Carmel, once the operatives broke up.
‘Gone to Haifa. His mother’s condition is deteriorating. Someone from his home called, said she wanted to speak to him.’
‘Someone?’
‘Cross-checked, Zeb. The caller is genuine. He does have a mother. She is ill. Critically.’
Navon was with Yakov, the two men talking softly, cradling drinks in their hands. Nachman was with a soldier. Other operatives sprawled in lounge chairs. Some were heading to their rooms.
Carmel had arranged shifts. Six kidon in twelve-hour rotations. She and a few others would be on watch till the early hours, till other operatives replaced them.
Zeb found no fault with her system. He had nothing to complain about in terms of security arrangements.
Still, something niggled at the back of his mind.
He reviewed the investigation he had carried out on the twelve kidon in the compound. Nope. He was sure they weren’t involved. It wasn’t just his gut feeling; the twins had gone through their data and given them a clean chit.
I trust their judgment better than mine.
He listed the various events that had occurred since he had arrived in the country. Found nothing that worried him. That time outside Beit Aghion, when I thought we were being watched. Should I have dug deeper? How?
He shook his head impatiently. It was behind him now, and in any case Masih had been killed. He continued thinking, staring unseeingly at no one in particular, unaware that Levin had joined the sisters and the three were watching him.
No. Something else was worrying him, just at the edge of his consciousness.
He gave up. It would come to him. He hoped it would be well in time and would turn out to be a harmless thought.
‘Let’s walk and talk,’ Levin said, tapping his shoulder. ‘You need some fresh air.’
The four of them went out into the night and moved away from the admin building until they came to a check post. A guard stopped them, while another trained his weapon on them.
They handed him their credentials. He made calls and waved them past the barrier.
‘It’s dark out there, sir,’ Zeb told Levin.
‘We aren’t going far. Just to stretch our legs.’
Levin stopped and glanced at the sky. A pale moon was partly hidden by clouds. A few stars looked down at them.
‘I hope what we are doing is right,’ he exhaled loudly.
‘What’s that?’ Meghan sat on the ground and rested her back against Beth’s legs.
‘You will know in less than forty-eight hours. If Zeb hasn’t told you …’ he gestured apologetically.
‘He never tells us anything,’ she said snidely. Then smiled, and all was good.
‘No one told me anything, either,’ Zeb protested. ‘I worked it out for myself. What’s worrying you?’ he asked the Mossad director.
‘It will divide my country in half. Maybe forever.’
‘Nothing’s forever. Twenty, fifty years from now, people will have forgotten.’
‘This is the Middle East, Zeb,’ Levin snorted. ‘Centuries of history are remembered as if events happened yesterday.’
‘What do you believe in?’
‘I would have resigned if I thought the prime minister was wrong. On something as significant as this.’
‘Many people call me a killer, Avichai.’
Meghan got to her feet abruptly. This statement, that voice, was unlike Zeb. Beth grabbed her forearm and urged her to silence.
‘There are probably kids out there who will not know their father; women and men whose lives broke down because I killed their partners. I shed blood because I believed it would further peace. I would do so again, without a second thought, if I believed in its rightness. If what Cantor and Baruti announce will help millions of people get certainty in their lives … that they will definitely see another sunrise and sunset, it is a worthy cause.’
He stopped suddenly when he became aware of three pairs of eyes on him.
‘Let’s head back,’ he said, laughing in embarrassment. ‘This fresh air is making me light- headed.’
Unknown to any of them, Shiri wasn’t far from them.
He had a flashlight in his mouth and was reading a letter.