He’d learned to blend in as a Palestinian Arab. Learned to harness his fear while walking in the belly of the beast, to succeed against all odds, locating and eliminating terrorists in their own backyard. He’d lived through many missions that he would have considered suicidal before, and had had the art of the impossible hammered into him.
In 1994, right about the time he’d begun to grow comfortable with the mission, the Gaza Strip had been given back to the Palestinians, and because of it, his unit had been disbanded. For about a day.
Before Aaron could even wonder what he would do next, the Mossad had called, wanting Samson’s skills and promising future missions.
Now the commander of the unit, he’d made a deal with the devil and found his team doing more Mossad tasks than manhunting. A necessary evil to keep the support. He, as the Samson commander, was not immune, which was why he was in Bulgaria attempting to glean intelligence on Syrian intentions.
Aaron turned a narrow corner and saw the cobblestone run up to the ruins at the top of the hill. To the right was a smattering of picnic tables perched on an overlook two hundred meters above the town.
Must be the place.
He went down the steps, purchased a bottle of Kamenitza beer, then casually surveyed the deck. Full of students and backpackers, he focused on singletons and found his contact fairly quickly. A large, overweight man of about sixty-five or seventy, he was sitting at the very edge of the overlook, next to a small trail leading precipitously down. He had a porkpie hat on the table to his front, and a tourist map laid out. The map was the identifying bona fide, and the hat was the safe signal. Had he been wearing it, Aaron would have taken his beer elsewhere and simply reported back, letting his higher command in Mossad reinitiate contact and determine what had gone wrong.
Aaron took one more look around the deck, checking for anything out of the ordinary, once again searching for singletons who didn’t fit in. He found none, but that didn’t mean there was no threat. Just that if there was a threat, it was well trained.
He approached the man known as Boris and said, “Sure is pretty up here.”
The man said, “It is, but I prefer Moscow. Have you been there?”
Aaron sat down opposite of him and said, “No, but I’ve always wanted to go.”
The correct words exchanged, with both men satisfied they were talking to the correct person, Boris wasted no more time.
“Did you bring the money?”
“Yes. Well, I brought a card and a PIN. You can draw the money from any ATM or bank, but the card won’t be activated until I get what I came for.”
“How do I know you aren’t tricking me?”
Aaron smiled and said, “How do I know you have any information that’s worth a shit?”
Boris said, “The Americans thought it was good. They have paid me handsomely.”
“You’ve already sold this to the CIA?”
“Yes. Perhaps you’d like to wait on them to pass it to you.” Boris smiled again.
“What am I buying?”
“Have you heard about Edward Snowden?”
“The American traitor? The one who gave all the secrets to you people? Is that what this is about?”
“No, no, I just mean are you aware of the large cache of documents he stole from the American National Security Agency? I am like him. I have a treasure trove of documents, from the KGB’s help of terrorists against your state in the 1970s to what they’re planning to do today. Russia is worse now than it was under the USSR, and the KGB is alive and well in the FSB.”
Aaron knew that Boris was prior KGB himself, and understood that he — like many, many KGB agents — had made a fortune plying his skills for less-than-savory individuals before returning to the new federal security apparatus — the FSB. He was no saint. No white knight out to expose Russian corruption. No, he’d been turned out into the cold for some transgression, and now he was looking for a final golden parachute. An augmentation of his retirement fund to be earned by selling the souls of the people he’d worked with for decades. It made the Israeli sick to his stomach.
Aaron said, “Let’s just get this done. How do I get the information? You’ll earn no money until that happens.”
Boris said. “I figured as much, but a man can hope. I didn’t bring the information here with me. Bulgaria is easy to get to, but very, very dangerous for me to operate within.”
He smiled, his teeth cracked and yellow from a lifetime of tobacco. “If you’d walked up with an umbrella, I would have jumped off the cliff. The KGB may be gone, but they can still kill pretty ingeniously.”
Aaron knew he was talking about the death of a Bulgarian dissident named Georgi Markov, assassinated by the Bulgarian secret police in London in 1978. While waiting on a bus, a man had approached and injected a ricin tablet into Markov’s leg using a spring-loaded umbrella. Markov had died three days later.
Aaron said, “I have no weapons. I have a card I’m willing to activate if you have information.”
Boris nodded and said, “Taped underneath my chair is a key. It opens a lockbox held by a man at an Internet café in the main bus station in Istanbul. He’s waiting for you. You give him the key, and he’ll call me. You’ll give me the PIN to the card, and I’ll have him pass you the thumb drive. I get the PIN and I’ll give you the password to the encryption. Fair enough?”
Aaron started to reply when Boris slapped his chest with both hands, his eyes squeezed shut in pain before popping open wide in shock. He swayed a minute, then fell out of his chair. Aaron raced around the table and grabbed his shoulders. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
Boris said, “Heart. Heart. Pacemaker. Stop…”
Aaron propped him up with one hand while sweeping his other under the chair, retrieving the key. He cloaked the movement by shouting, “Is there a doctor here? Anyone have medical training?”
A crowd had gathered, but nobody moved forward. Aaron looked into Boris’s face and saw his eyes go flat. Something he’d seen many, many times.
Boris was dead.
4
Yuri Gorshenko watched from the rear of the crowd, gawking like the rest of the people at the dead Russian. Finally, two men pushed through the throng, ostensibly some sort of medical team. He saw the Israeli stand up and fade to the back. Yuri waited until he had disappeared from view before leaving himself.
Figuring the Israeli would take the shortest route out of the old town, Yuri kept to the high ground, circling the ancient cobblestoned streets until he was standing next to a Roman theater from eons ago, now equipped with modern sound and advertising contemporary shows. He found a small table in the sun and sat down, giving the Israeli time to clear the area. Killing time, he fiddled with an electronic device, checking the readout for a sniff of a vulnerability, but it came up empty.
No pacemakers around here.
Looking like a scientific calculator with an antennae, he marveled at how quickly it had worked. He’d practiced with it endlessly, but had never used it live.
Worth the risk going to San Francisco.
The device was nothing but a bunch of plastic and silicon, harnessed together like any other modern gadget, from a Nintendo portable game player to a digital cell phone. The difference was its purpose. There would be no joy working this device, unless one liked watching people die. Using a wireless connection, it injected malware into implanted medical devices. In plain language, it caused pacemakers to flame out with eight hundred volts.