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Itzak and Rachel sat in her Tel Aviv living room, a nearly exact copy of her San Francisco living room. Itzak, sitting on the couch, held a drink. Rachel knitted in her easy chair.
Itzak said, “Do you keep in touch with your friend Bodin LaBranche?”
“Oh, I hear from him occasionally. I hear of him more often in the news. His history project is making very entertaining waves in the military-industrial complex. Why do you ask?”
“I just came from a Mossad briefing. They’re getting some very troubling reports. It appears he has major psychological problems. He’s hiring, for all practical purposes, an army of private military contractors. They are starting to target about a thousand people around the world for assassination.”
Rachel stopped knitting and looked at Itzak. He was an old man, worn, worried, and wrinkled, long past due to retire.
“That doesn’t sound like Bodin, Uncle Itzak.” She paused. “That doesn’t make sense. He always struck me as a gentle person. He loves to entertain people with stories.” Another pause. “How reliable is your intel?”
“I agree his profile doesn’t fit this sort of thing. But PTSD is unpredictable, and his is severe. Mossad thinks he may have gone over the edge. And their intel is very reliable. They have first-hand reports from some of the contractors he’s hired. All cross-checked and corroborated. The contractors are surveilling LaBranche’s targets. Identifying their established routines. LaBranche bought an entire production run of laser designators last week. He used dummy corporations to hide his tracks, but he didn’t hide them well enough. As you know, laser designators are used for only one purpose. His people have researched floor layouts of the buildings his targets frequent. And, maybe most troubling, he hired the same programmer who wrote the facial recognition app that almost caught your friend Dalton Francis.
“It’s pretty clear he’s building all the targeting data he needs for autonomous weapons to find and kill these people. Probably some sort of antigravity weapon.
“And here’s the kicker. I’ve seen a list of some of the people we know he’s targeting. They are the absolute scum of humankind. Dictators. Radical fundamentalists. Known terrorists. Racist skinheads and neo-Nazis. These are people I would love to kill if I could.
“Unfortunately, his list includes half of the Saudi royal family, and most of the Wahhabist clergy. Plus quite a few others around this region. Now I, personally, would shed no tears over any of these people. Unfortunately, Israel will almost certainly be blamed for the assassinations. That will mean war. So we have to stop him.”
He paused.
“Rachel, we might have to kill him. I’m hoping you can save his life.”
Rachel looked at her uncle very carefully. Her brow wrinkled. Her eyes narrowed.
She said, “You can’t find him, can you?”
Itzak looked down at his lap. His fingers fidgeted with the crease in his slacks. Reluctantly he said, “No.”
“And you need me to target him for you. And probably kill him myself.”
After a long pause Itzak took a deep breath and said, “Yes.”
Rachel’s face relaxed back into serene beauty. She picked up her knitting and continued as if she hadn’t stopped. “I’ll see what I can do.”
After her uncle left, Rachel went to her computer. It took her only five minutes to find Bodin. She had long ago hacked a transponder into his wifi driver. When she pinged, it pinged back. Nothing personal. It was her standard procedure for anyone she worked with.
Bodin was in Venice with Dalton.
Good. She liked Venice.
She called the home nursing service for Benny, selected a quick and silent weapon, and called her private jet service. She packed an overnight bag but didn’t expect to use it. Only in case things got complicated.
She’d need the nurse for only one day.