What in hell is going on? What is she doing in Moscow? How much does Drexler know about her? How could Drexler pick an Israeli Mossad agent to be part of the operation? Why didn’t he have her vetted? Or had he? Maybe this op isn’t as secret as I thought it was. She’s on a mission for GSS and, inevitably, a mission for the Mossad. You never quit the Mossad. But punching that guy? Agents don’t make fusses and call attention to themselves. Then: Maybe very good ones do.
Falcone’s thoughts of the present were overtaken by a flashback to the night he first met her. It was an official State Department dinner for the Israeli foreign minister. Most of the guests knew each other and so did not need to follow the Washington protocol of introducing themselves by announcing their titles (those without titles were rarely on guest lists) and awaiting a similar announcement from their dinner mates.
As a general rule, Falcone refused to ride Washington’s social merry-go-round. He was at the State Department that evening because he was trying to find out more about his friend and colleague, Senator Joshua Stock, who had been murdered. Stock had been invited to the dinner, and Falcone had come in his place to see whom Joshua might have been associating with before he died.
Now, at this moment, sitting in Moscow and staring at the Kremlin, all that intrigue and tragedy fell away. At this moment, he could not remember the names of anyone at his table at that dinner. Except for a woman named Rachel, a luminously beautiful blond woman who sat on his left.
She introduced herself as Rachel Yeager of the Israeli Embassy’s “cultural affairs” department without a hint of irony about her work. What she did not announce was that she had just read the embassy’s intelligence file on him, a copy of which she later gleefully gave him. The file showed him to be a widower, Army veteran, and former prisoner of war. “While personally congenial and affable,” the profile said, “subject does not socialize often. Avoids formal banquets and dinners. Dates infrequently. Drinks moderately.” She had been ordered to find out more about him and more about the murder of a United States senator.
Falcone wanted to talk to her, but he was unnerved by her large sea-green eyes that seemed at once innocent and worldly. At the same time, he realized, with a fascination tinged by guilt, that she had an uncanny resemblance to his late wife Karen. Finally, feeling like a high-school sophomore, he asked, “May I … may I call you? Dinner?” He smiled now, remembering his tentativeness word-for-word.
They had dinner at Positano’s, a family-run Italian restaurant in Bethesda. It did not go well. Initially, they exchanged small talk. But when Falcone declared that he was fair-handed when it came to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she erupted: “You are neutral? That means you’re for the Palestinians and against Israel.”
Falcone, stung by the charge, launched an emphatic counter-attack across the table that he was not against the Israelis and resented the implication that he was anti-Semitic. The owner of Positano’s came rushing to the table to see what was wrong because other diners were growing anxious about the rising volume level of Falcone’s and Rachel’s voices. There were other, wonderful memories rushing to the surface like a deep sea diver who was nearly out of air, but he forced his mind to abandon those recollections and focus on the present.
He finished his drink and returned to his room. He had less than an hour to shower and return to the lounge to meet … Andrea, not Rachel.
* * *
He assumed that there was a U.S. intelligence file that had a reference to his first meeting with Rachel, whom he then did not know was a Mossad operative, a “Killer Angel.” That was what some in the Mossad called its assassins ever since Prime Minister Golda Meir and the Israeli Defense Committee ordered Operation Wrath of God, following the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian Black September killers during the summer Olympics in 1972 in Munich. The original Killer Angels were agents of vengeance, ordered to track down and kill the killers.
Mossad talent scouts—ever alert to promising young talent—spotted her during her compulsory service in the Israeli Defense Forces, when, on border duty questioning Palestinians, she easily shifted from one Arabic dialect to another. She was a brilliant linguist, an aggressive soccer player, and had Killer Angel potential, according to a psychiatric evaluation. Easily recruited, she quickly developed into an outstanding operative. On a mission into Iran, she made her first kill—execution was the approved word. She was sent into Iran to track down a field agent, a kiton, turned rogue. She allowed him to think he had lured her into his hotel room, where she strangled him with her scarf. She said that she enjoyed looking into his eyes as he was dying.
A Mossad psychiatrist, in a routine post-mission interview, found her to be free of post-traumatic stress disorder. “PTSD develops after a terrifying ordeal that involved physical harm or the threat of physical harm,” his report said. “This subject, who recounted the incident calmly, showed absolutely no negative reaction. She seems to be immune to fear, and has no hesitation to kill.”
* * *
Initially, Falcone believed that Rachel had murdered Joshua, who had served with Falcone on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Joshua had had his throat slit during a night of drugs and sexual odyssey. In fact, Rachel had been on the trail of Joshua’s killer and had saved Falcone’s life when he was attacked one night in the garage of his apartment building. She agreed to work with Falcone, and, together, they found the murderer. Still, her career as an assassin deeply troubled Falcone. When he asked her how she could defend murder, she had said, “It is Israel’s fate always to be under attack by her enemies. And my gift to Israel is that I can eliminate some of those enemies wherever they can be found. This is not murder, but justice for my country.”
In their quest for Stock’s killer, trust—and then peril—had pulled them together. Falcone soon realized that he was falling in love with an assassin. And though Falcone had resigned himself to a solitary life, convinced that it would be a final betrayal to his deceased wife, he was defenseless against Rachel’s allure. The attraction was irresistible. They made love on an island in Maine and again in Jerusalem, where they had thwarted a plot by the Russians to blow up the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Their romance ended abruptly with both of them knowing that there was no room for love in Rachel’s world. Or in Falcone’s.
Falcone had moved on, from Senate to law firm to Oxley’s national security adviser—and now to an “off the books” covert operative. Taking advantage of his top-security clearance, he continued to go through the CIA files on Rachel. They were full of gaps because the Mossad plays a very tight game. He found little more than some of her other names—Sarah, Miya, Elena, and countless more. There were reports of professional killings—wet jobs, as they were called. There were sometimes sightings of her around the time or place of killings. Then, suddenly, she disappeared from the files.
Early in Oxley’s first term she had reemerged. The occasion was a formal State Dinner, honoring Israeli Prime Minister Avi Weisman. For his meeting with Oxley, Weisman had demanded that he receive all the protocol honors rendered to a head of state, and the glittering White House dinner was one of the honors. Rachel had just been named Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. She was also Weisman’s mistress, according to the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
Falcone was out of the country on a mission as national security adviser and did not see Rachel during her brief visit. But they soon met again. Once more they worked together to aid their homelands, tracking down the extremist group in the United States that had conspired to set off a nuclear bomb in Iran, but had instead destroyed the city of Savannah, Georgia. After that, her brief tenure as an ambassador—and mistress—had ended. She was too much of an unbridled force of nature for either occupation. She returned to Israel, ostensibly to resign from the Foreign Ministry and become CEO of one of Israel’s many software firms. But, as Rachel had just vividly demonstrated, she was still a force to be reckoned with. Provocateur beware.