Chaim Said was living a lie. To anyone who knew him, he was a trusted agent of the Institute, a mechanical genius with an aptitude for technology. He’d been an asset to the Mossad on multiple occasions when it came to dismantling and deconstructing terrorist equipment. But if you could get Chaim to reveal his secrets, he would tell you that he was actually an American agent abroad, on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency, embedded with the Mossad to keep an eye on terrorist activity from an active and relatively friendly environment, even though Chaim knew the cardinal rule of being a spy: your friends are never your friends.
He awoke that morning to a strange chiming sound. After rifling through his drawer, he found the old beeper—an antique these days—displaying a number. He’d never heard it go off before, and was actually somewhat amazed that the batteries still worked.
He dialed the number it displayed. It rang twice and was answered with a terse, perfunctory order.
“A bomb has been recovered in Syria,” the lemony sour voice on the other end said. “Examine it in detail and report back.” Then the line went dead.
A short while later, Chaim’s cell phone rang. This time he was expecting the call.
“Agent Said,” the voice said. “We have an unexploded device taken from ya Homaar.”
“We do?” Chaim replied, trying to sound surprised.
“Yes, but it’s disarmed,” the man on the other end replied. “One of our agents in the field defused it quite efficiently. Anyway, I’ve got orders to bring you in on the deconstruction team. The bosses want it gone over in detail to see if we can find anything about their suppliers.”
“Right,” Chaim replied. “Okay. Where do you need me to be?”
Within the hour, Chaim Said was on a transport to Safed, where a team of Mossad agents had smuggled the bomb across the Syrian border. In an underground room with white walls and glaring fluorescent lights, using needle-nose pliers, tweezers, and moveable magnification lenses, Said and three other men began the slow process of disassembling the bomb.
Said noted the internal timer. That had been of special note when the field agent had defused the bomb. Apparently whoever was supplying ya Homaar had their own agenda, and didn’t trust the fledgling terror organization to know how to detonate the bombs properly. That, in and of itself, was curious, but not as curious as the otherwise relatively low-tech involved. The shielded copper wiring, the tightly-packed squares of C4…certainly it was a powerful explosion, but this was nowhere near the threat level of the suitcase nukes and dirty bombs that everyone always feared was coming.
Said was examining the shielding for any markings that might give away who engineered the bombs, when he caught sight of something just underneath the housing of the C4 components. Looking around quickly to make sure his teammates were occupied, he reached in with a pair of tweezers and pulled out a very tiny electronic object. “Hello there,” Said murmured to himself. “What’s a nice little device like you doing in a bomb like this?”
· · ·
“A transmitter?” The bitter, pinched voice that answered Said’s call sounded unimpressed. “A hidden timer inside the casing, and a secondary backup in case that fails.”
“No sir,” Chaim said. “You’re thinking of a receiver. This device is made to send out a signal, not receive one. It’s very delicate,” he added.
“I know exactly what a transmitter does,” came the terse response. “Can you determine what it was transmitting?”
“No sir, but I can tell you on which frequency.” Chaim rattled off a series of numbers. “There was something else odd about it,” he added.
“More odd than what you’ve already discovered?”
“Yes sir,” he said. “From what I can tell—and I must be wrong—the thing was wired to send out a signal just moments after the detonation of the bomb. That seems like bad timing, if you ask me. I mean, the explosion would have vaporized this thing, so it wouldn’t send out any signal at all.”
“Assuming the bomb detonated,” the voice said plainly.
Said opened his mouth to respond, but got cut off.
“Thank you, Agent Said,” the voice said before closing the connection.
· · ·
The noise of the constant vehicle and foot traffic never subsided outside the unassuming gassho style house in Kawagoe City. The doors were customized to be a foot wider than standard. The bathtub was extra-large, the kitchen sported two restaurant style double-door refrigerators, and the toilets were industrial strength stainless steel.
A telephone rang, and somehow through the cacophony of passing music, honking horns, people shouting, cars backfiring, and the occasional gunshot, the jangling was heard. An elephantine arm the girth of a tree limb reached for the receiver.
“Moshi moshi.” The greeting rumbled through prodigious lips that smacked when they formed words. Jowls jiggled from the simplest of mandibular activity.
“Mushy yourself, Big Asshole,” the flirty female voice responded from the other end.
Asashoryu Hakuho, aka The Big As Ho, smiled. “This is a funny call,” he said. “Only two women could call me that, and they are both dead.”
“Aw, he remembers us,” came a second female voice, fainter, indicating she was further away from the phone.
Big As Ho smiled wider, revealing an expansive set of teeth which still had bits of lunch, breakfast, and last night’s dinner wedged into the crevices. “Ladies,” he exclaimed. “How may I be of service to you?”
“We just have a teensy little favor to ask of you, big guy,” the voice purred.
“For you, I would kill a man,” he joked.
Musical laughter tittered across the line. “It’s so funny you should put it that way,” she said.
· · ·
Remo sat with his elbows on his knees, his chin resting in both hands. His unpacked bag sat tossed in the corner where he had absently and expertly tossed it upon arrival back at his set of suites at La Haule Manor. He had left Avital downstairs without saying a word, which seemed to be fine with her as she hadn’t spoken to him the entire trip back. Apparently she had only come because he had rushed them both out so quickly that she had left most of her personal belongings behind.
Chiun lay prone on the wheeled hospital bed, looking more and more like a model of a man made out of vellum parchment draped around a skeleton of Popsicle sticks. Remo thought about how much death the two of them had seen together, how inured they had both become to it. Remo even know that, if given the orders from Upstairs, he would kill Chiun or Chiun would kill him. But this was different. If he had to kill Chiun, Chiun would understand—that was the business. He would even respect Remo for it. This was someone else killing him—hell, the accidental byproduct, really, even though the killer’s intent was one of global genocide. That ought to have made it the most impersonal of killings, but Remo was taking it very personally.
Remo felt the displacement of air in the room indicating that someone had joined the doctor and the two nurses who were perpetually on duty to see to the comatose Korean. The attending scent of jasmine wasn’t necessary for Remo to know Avital had come in. She pulled up a chair next to him beside Chiun’s bed and sat in silence with him for several minutes.
“So are you never going to speak to me again?” she asked. “Not even to say goodbye?”
Remo looked at her as if she had asked him why purple giraffes were singing the multiplication tables. “Not talking to you? I thought you weren’t talking to me?”
“Well, I was upset for a while with you,” she admitted with a shrug. “What with the way you rushed in headlong without a plan…”
“I had a plan.”
“Oh, you had a plan?”
“Yep,” he said. “Go in and start killing until someone gave us answers about the bomb, then kill the rest of them.”
“That was your plan?”
“Did I kill them?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have the bomb?”
“Yes.”
“Then I had a plan.”
Avital sighed. “We still don’t know who’s supplying their ordnance,” she said.
Remo couldn’t tell her that the man she was looking for was the esteemed Reverend Billy Walker, for the same reasons he couldn’t tell her why the reverend was supplying the bombs. If anyone else found out it was Walker, they might also learn about the processes he was employing. “We’ll find who they are,” he said. “I’m sure your team will find some clue.”
“You understand I had to turn the bomb over to my colleagues,” she said. “I couldn’t just give it over to the CIA.”
Remo tilted his head at her. “You thought I was worried about that?” he asked. “I’m not. I want to get to the son of a bitch behind this as much as you do. Probably more. It doesn’t matter to me which outfit points me in his direction.”
“And then what?” she asked. “You’ll rush in and kill whomever it is?”
He gave her a lopsided, humorless grin. “That’s the biz, sweetheart.”
She sighed. “You’re a much colder man than I could have imagined,” she said. And then she was silent again.
Five minutes later, she held his hand in hers, and they listened to the steady beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor deep into the night.