THREE WEEKS LATER
MOSSAD HEADQUARTERS, TEL AVIV, ISRAEL—JULY 23, 2021—08:30 / 8:30 A.M. IDT
Nir took a seat on one side of the conference table and nodded to the two men already there. They were leaders of Kidon teams like his, and that told him who would likely be filling the two empty chairs to his left.
“Got any idea what this is about?” he asked the man to his right.
“Not a clue.” Lavie Bensoussan, a late-forties operative, was missing his right ear, lost to a knife thrown by a Palestinian in a tunnel under the border wall with Gaza. Nir had served under Lavie when he was first brought into Kidon. “But I’m guessing one of those five chairs across this table is for the ramsad.”
Nir had flown home to Antwerp a couple of days after that disappointing discussion with Nicole. She’d already left Tel Aviv, off to a show in Lisbon. They hadn’t spoken again, and Nir wasn’t exactly sure where their relationship stood now. Were they still friends? Had they fallen back to how it was after the Iran vault operation?
He would find out soon enough. She’d flown in this morning, and he would see her in CARL once this meeting was over.
The other two Kidon leaders entered and took their places. Nir fist bumped the man who took the chair on the other side of him, the only one besides himself still in his mid-thirties.
Moments later, a door opened opposite them, and Nir and his fellow Kidon leaders stood. The first person out was Efraim Cohen. He was followed by Assistant Deputy Director of Mossad Karin Friedman, Deputy Director Asher Porush, and Ira Katz, the ramsad.
Then came a surprise guest, Prime Minister Oren Geller, who had been in office for only a month and a half. So far, Nir was unimpressed with him.
The leaders sat.
“Sit,” said the ramsad. “Prime Minister Geller, I’d like to introduce you to the leaders of my five Kidon teams, Ravid Efrat, Irin Ehrlich, Lavie Bensoussan, Nir Tavor, and Zakai Abelman.”
“Gentlemen,” Geller said.
“Ha’mefaked,” they answered.
Geller continued. “Only three weeks after I took office, Ira came to tell me that one of you—”
“Agent Tavor,” said Katz.
Geller waved him off. “Had come to him with evidence that Iran was training militias for suitcase nukes. As much as I had hoped that one of our allies would be able to reason with the regime in Tehran, this information proved to me otherwise. It appears there will not be a political intervention to stop the Iranian nuclear program. And there is one truth that all of our intel over the years has made quite clear—when Iran goes nuclear, they will use it.”
He leaned forward just slightly, as if to be certain they’d hear him well. “We may have been able to interfere with their missile capabilities, but the idea that they plan to disseminate these weapons to their militias to deploy is unconscionable. This tactic will also be nearly impossible to stop once they are in their hands. So it’s time that we end the Iranian nuclear program once and for all.”
Finally, Nir thought. I’ve been waiting to hear those words for years. Sure, we’ll pay a price, but no cost is too high to keep a nuke from going off in Tel Aviv or Haifa or Ashdod.
Geller continued, now leaning back in his chair. “I dispatched Ira to Riyadh to speak with King Salman about using his airspace. Not surprisingly, it was the crown prince who showed up to the meeting. I think that old king makes even the new U.S. president look spry. The crown prince said he was open to discussions, but he would hold them only with me. So I called Ira home.”
Nir saw the ramsad bristle every time Geller used his first name. It was no secret that these two did not like each other, and many believed that if this prime minister lasted more than a year, Ira Katz would be out.
“At the Saudis’ invitation, I had already planned on visiting Neom, their future technology city by the Red Sea. We moved up the date, and the crown prince met me to show me around. Then when we spoke privately, he told me the price for letting us make use of their airspace—a single life.”
That caught Nir’s attention. He thought since they’d been in Neom, which was supposed to become the greatest planned “smart” city in the world, the price would be Israel’s water extraction and purification system or their chip technology or some other Israeli scientific discovery.
He caught Efraim’s eyes. The man’s look was hard with warning. Whatever he was about to hear would be extremely difficult and dangerous.
Geller nodded to the ramsad, who took over. “The target is a member of the royal family, and the information you are about to receive is everything we have on who he is.”
Friedman stood and slid a thin folder to each man. Nir opened his and read the name, but he didn’t recognize it.
The ramsad continued as Nir closed the folder. “His stipulations are, first, that he does not want the man harmed on Saudi soil. In fact, he doesn’t want him even touched on Saudi soil. He will have to be lured away for the hit. Second, he wants to make sure the world knows we eliminated him.”
“What?” asked Bensoussan. “He wants us caught?”
“No. He just wants our fingerprints on it. The crown prince has had enough bad press to last a very long time.”
Ravid Efrat, who had to be pushing 60 and was so rough he gave sandpaper a rash, asked, “So this Saudi prince chooses the victim, then demands that we serve as both hitman and patsy? All so we can fly our planes over his giant sandbox on our way to Iran?”
“That’s the deal.”
“And do we know why he wants this man killed?”
“No. He refused to say.”
Efrat nodded. “Yeah, I can live with that.”
Nir felt chills on his spine at the gruff man’s words. The truth was he was intimidated by all these guys—except for Abelman, who was more of a peer. They were legends. They were older and wiser, and they’d seen and done things Nir had only heard about after hours over bottles of Goldstar.
Again, the ramsad spoke. “The wheels are already set in motion for our attack on Iran, and word has been dispatched to our assets in-country. This must happen. We cannot take this back without losing an unacceptable number of our Iranian agents.”
He quickly looked into five sets of eyes. “I am giving each of you and your teams twenty-four hours to come up with a plan that will lure the target outside of Saudi Arabia, where he will be dispatched in a manner that says Mossad. We will meet here at this time tomorrow. Make sure your plans are foolproof, because, again, we cannot fail. Do you have any questions?”
“When is the strike happening? What’s our time window?” asked Nir.
“The timing of the strike is eyes only. Your deadline is August 24, a month from now. If this guy is still breathing after that, we’ll have to call off the strike, and some of our people in Iran will die.”
Geller looked down his side of the table. “Are we done here? I have another meeting to get to.”
They all stood, Nir’s side followed suit, and everyone filed out of their respective doors. Once in the hallway, Efrat said, “Nothing like a good competition to get an old man’s blood flowing. How about the winner buys a round for the rest?”
Bensoussan said, “I’m in on that. But only after the dirty is in the ground.”
The five men agreed to the wager, then separated to see what their teams would come up with.