The Bistro was dark and had been for at least an hour when Lee and I arrived at the rear door. Since I’d received no call or message from Cassandra, I assumed that the evening had progressed much less eventfully at the restaurant than it had out in the real world.
Inside, I tapped in the alarm-canceling code, but the warning beeper continued. Then I remembered—new code. My second try did the trick.
The cooking aroma was chased away from the main rooms and the kitchen by the cleanup crew, but it tended to linger in the alcove where Lee and I stood. My stomach growled. “You get anything to eat at the hospital?” I asked.
“Some kind of pudding,” she said. “White. Very sweet.”
“Tapioca,” I said. “A hospital favorite. I could whip up something a little more substantial.”
“It’s late,” she said, and headed up the stairs.
I cast a lingering look in the direction of the kitchen, then followed. That’s when I noticed she was carrying a slim briefcase. “What’s with the luggage?” I asked. “Planning on a work night?”
“It’s something you asked for,” she said. “Trina Lomax’s background check. I put an agent to work on it right after we talked.”
At the top of the stairs, to my dismay, she didn’t even hesitate in selecting the office over the living quarters. She clicked on the light and placed the briefcase on my desk. From it she removed several sheets of paper.
“This is just a quick first hit, but it includes some significant information.”
The biographical high points began with Trina’s birth on October 12, thirty-six years ago, in Tokyo, where her father, a designer in the automotive industry, had relocated. She’d attended the American School in Japan briefly before being sent back to the United States to board at Miss Porter’s in Farmington. There she did well academically, edited the school newspaper, played varsity tennis, yada, yada, yada.
I glanced at my watch. A little past midnight. The day had been a wearying one. I’d hoped that if I arrived on the set in a few hours yawning, it would be for reasons more romantic than reading up on Trina’s bio.
“What’s this note, ‘Farid Qedir at Avon’?”
“Qedir was a student at Avon Old Farms, a boys’ school near Miss Porter’s. He and Trina seem to have … bonded at joint socials,” Lee said. “They both spent their junior year abroad in Paris, cohabitating. They also attended Brown University.”
“And this is important because?”
Her face registered a mixture of sadness and regret. “It’s on the sheet, if you read further. Trina went on to join the news staff at CBS in Paris, and Farid Qedir returned to his homeland, Saudi Arabia. Am I boring you, chef? Would you prefer to discuss this in bed?”
“I would prefer to be in bed not discussing it.”
“This is important,” she insisted. “But I can summarize. While Trina’s star rose in the television news firmament, Farid was placed in a key position in Islamic World Health, a charity funded by a number of oil-wealthy Saudi sheikhs, chief among them his father.
“In 2002, customs agents in this country raided a web of so-called charities based in Herndon, Virginia, that were suspected of helping to finance Islamic extremists here and in the Middle East. Many of these ‘charities’ had strong ties to similar Saudi organizations, including Islamic World Health. The following year, documents surfaced, including correspondence between Yasser Arafat and IWH, that linked the Saudi charity with several in the West Bank identified with Hamas. IWH was summarily closed down.”
I felt the yawn coming but was helpless to block it.
“Am I keeping you up?” Lee asked.
I was so tired I almost used the old punchline, “That’s what she said at the picnic.” But instead I managed, “No, please go on.”
“Well, here is the crux. The reason the documents surfaced is because a Mossad team captured an official of IWH and ‘convinced’ him to surrender them. That official was Farid Qedir. He died two days after he was released. A year later, to the date, the leader of that Mossad operation, Reuhen Fromm, a six-foot-two-inch muscular brute, was found in his home near Tel Aviv. His eyes, testes, tongue, and hands had been roughly removed. While he was still alive.”
Suddenly I was wide awake. “He just sat there?” I asked.
“He’d been injected with a drug. Vecuronium, of the curare family. Administered as it was there, without the proper sedation, it left its subject paralyzed but wide awake and in constant pain even before the ‘operation.’
“According to our sources, which are impressive, this marked the first appearance of the childish cat scribble, left in Fromm’s blood on his bed linen. The debut of our friend Felix.”
“I thought assassins were supposed to be dispassionate,” I said.
“I will spare you the description of what had been done to Farid Qedir,” Lee said. “Not that it justifies what Felix did.”
“I’m guessing that Trina was on assignment near Tel Aviv when Fromm was murdered?”
“She was preparing the special report on the West Bank for CBS that established her reputation,” Lee said. “It ultimately resulted in her being hired by INN as a sort of international roving reporter, given carte blanche to create her own documentaries. And to travel wherever she chose.”
Lee suggested I look at the final two pages she’d given me.
“On the left are the cities Trina Lomax visited for her INN special reports. On the right are cities where key political figures, most of them InterTec clients, by the way, were murdered during that same period.”
I scanned the lists. “It’s not a one hundred percent matchup,” I said.
“No. But remember, she was not working alone. I bet we will find that Ted Parkhurst’s schedule put him near the other assassinations, like the Touchstone guard in Kabul. I’m convinced she is our Felix. And there’s one more thing you should know.”
“A month ago, when Goyal started his European tour, he was asked which of his Mossad assignments had made him the most proud. Among those he mentioned was the capture of a little ‘mouse of a man’ who was easily ‘convinced’ to provide his team with proof that a Saudi charity was funding Hamas.”
“Like the song goes, it’s a small world after all,” I said.
“And unless we act, Felix will most certainly find a way to avenge the torture and death of her little mouse.”
“We should take all this to the police,” I said, placing the papers on the desk next to her briefcase.
“As you know, the police will do nothing without evidence. All we have is conjecture.”
She stopped talking, a reaction to the sight of me nearly falling asleep on my feet. “Forgive me,” she said. “You are exhausted and you must be alert for your broadcast. We should go to bed. In the morning, we can both think more clearly.”
I discovered something that night: Sleep was not at the top of my physical necessity list. Later, mentally, physically, and sexually exhausted, with her warm, naked body pressed against mine, I was just drifting off when Lee whispered in my ear, “I have thought of a plan to trap her.”
Pillow talk.