“Don’t hurt them,” she ordered.
Harvath let her go.
“Who are they?”
“The son’s deaf,” she replied. “The father used to help at the clinic.”
“Why did you wander off?”
“I spotted the boy and I wanted to see where he was going. I thought he could tell us something.”
“You should have gotten me first.”
“And what if I had lost him? What if he hadn’t come back here?”
She had a point, but Harvath didn’t feel like debating with her.
“I don’t care what the situation is,” he answered. “You don’t go off by yourself. Now, why was the father following you?”
“Because he was worried.”
“About the boy?”
“About everything,” she exclaimed. “Look at this village. There’s no one left. What do you think they filled that oven with?”
“Did he tell you that?”
Decker nodded.
“Does he know what happened?”
“He knows more than we do. A lot more.”
CHAPTER 19
Helena was angry. She was angry with everyone — with Bentzi, with Damien, with her father for never finding her, never rescuing her after she was kidnapped. The one person she wasn’t angry with was herself.
She had an excellent quality of life in Israel. She had an apartment and a car. She shopped pretty much wherever she wanted and went to the best clubs and restaurants. She made more money in two months than she would have back home in Eastern Europe in a year.
She had thought about modeling. In fact, she had been asked countless times by photographers to sit for them, but Bentzi had forbidden it. He claimed it wasn’t good for her to have photos floating around out there. It made sense, but as was usually the case with Bentzi, there was what he called the “truth” and then there was reality.
Israel was everything to him. He would say or do anything to protect it. Bending or flat out breaking the truth was all just part of the job. Whatever needs to be done. It was his one and only directive. And he applied it without remorse.
After what he had experienced at the hands of the enemy, she couldn’t blame him. But she wasn’t the enemy.
He didn’t want her modeling because he wanted to keep her dependent upon him, for everything. The schedule, the insane travel, the assignments — all of it conspired to keep her isolated. Even when she did meet men from the Mossad, it was always when they were in the field. And the ones she liked were never assigned to her team more than once.
And then there was the work. While the pay was better, she was still in the sex trade. Bentzi, for lack of a better word, was simply an overeducated, government-employed pimp. He paid her, housed her, picked out her clothes, and told her where to go and what to do. She wasn’t a Mossad agent, she was a Mossad asset and she carried no delusions to the contrary.
She was nothing more than a tool — a tool that Bentzi, and on a grander scale, Israel, could use to secure things it wanted. Tools were hard, cold objects that waited to be picked up for a job. Once that job was through, they were hung up, put in a box, or cast aside.
Maybe some affection from Bentzi would have made a difference. She caught snatches of it from time to time. It was why she liked to drink with him.
If they were someplace he felt safe, like the house by the sea, sometimes she could get him to go beyond a second drink. That’s when the real Bentzi came out. Unfortunately, those times were too few and much too far in between. They weren’t enough to nourish a person. She needed more and there was a very good chance that Bentzi didn’t have more in him. The only way she was ever going to find what she needed was to get out.
But to get out, she needed a plan. Pierre Damien was it.
The fact that Bentzi believed she had fallen for him stunned her. She was a good actress, probably better than most, but she had never been able to fool him about anything. When she said she hadn’t fallen for him, she had meant it.
Nevertheless, he had decided to recall her. It wasn’t like Bentzi. Some jobs took longer than others. He knew that. She had never failed him before. She wouldn’t start now. She just needed more time.
This wasn’t about Bentzi. It wasn’t even about Israel. This was about her. If she had given him what he wanted, the assignment would already be over. She wasn’t ready yet. There was still something she had to put in place. When it was done, she would gladly give Bentzi everything, and then she would disappear.
Sitting in her apartment, she understood the pressure he was under. And though she had not seen Bentzi’s boss, Nava — she could sense that she was in Geneva. Bentzi always acted differently when she was around. More than likely, Helena figured, it had been Nava who had pulled the plug on the assignment and had moved to have her recalled to Israel. That would explain a lot.
Most of all, it would explain the high-level of concern the Institute — as the Mossad was known — was expressing over Damien.
Before being inserted into the United Nations, Helena had been given a heavily redacted file on him. The product of a Canadian father and an American mother, Damien possessed dual citizenship and had made his initial fortune in oil and natural gas, eventually branching out into petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. He had been married only once and had lost his wife to cancer. They never had children, and he never remarried. Business and philanthropy were his passions.
Up until his forties, Damien’s philanthropy had helped fund research into illnesses, like the cancer that had taken his wife, and had provided money to hospitals and universities, which saw his name placed on the wings of several buildings. Then, something changed.
It started with a book — a small, scholarly treatise that cracked a mental door. That book led to others, which led to lectures and documentaries. Those led to a reexamination of who and what he was supporting through his generous donations. He had made his money by taking from the earth, but he had never given anything back. It was an epiphany packed with revelations, one of the greatest being that he had done the world a favor by never having children.
When interviewed by the media, Damien was always quite candid about his conversion, and his belief that the earth couldn’t sustain its current rate of human growth. Even with technological advancements like fracking, crop management, and vaccine production, there were a finite amount of resources being divided up among an exploding population.
People were not only breeding like rabbits, but thanks to advances in sanitation and medicine, they were no longer dropping like flies as one researcher had put it. Left unchecked, it was a death sentence for the planet. Damien had committed himself to doing everything he could to make sure that didn’t happen.
In one of the articles Helena had read, an interviewer had labeled Damien a Neo-Malthusian — someone who advocated for population control programs in order to preserve existing resources for current and future generations. Damien, as he always did when people tried to put labels on him, laughed it off. The Mossad didn’t, because they knew what Damien really was.
In addition to being a supporter of overpopulation theory, he was a eugenicist who believed that favorable genetic qualities should be advanced while unfavorable traits should be limited, or discontinued altogether. He dreamt of an earth with a much reduced, “healthier” population.
That, in and of itself, would never have been enough to rise to the attention of Israeli intelligence. People were free to subscribe to any crackpot ideas they wanted. But what had piqued the Mossad’s interest in Damien was his particular enmity toward the Jewish state and the considerable wealth he was applying against it.