Where are you?
She tapped back a response with her thumb.
Watching TV on the sofa. Why?
She put the phone back on the table and resumed her languid gaze across the street, but seconds later she heard the screech of metal chair legs dragging across the sidewalk next to her. An attractive middle-aged man in a gray suit sat down, putting his phone on the table alongside hers. She saw the text she had just sent displayed on the screen of his phone.
He spoke softly as he settled in. “It hurts my feelings when you lie to me.” His accent was thick, but his English flawless.
The woman smiled a little now, but she did not turn to look at the man. “You know me too well, Yanis.”
Yanis had already bought a cup of tea from the counter inside, and he stirred sugar into it while he talked. He, unlike the woman, did not smile.
“You aren’t supposed to be here,” he said.
“I know.”
“You did the same thing in Buenos Aires, and you did the same thing in Tangiers.”
“And in Manila. But you didn’t catch me in Manila.” She turned to him; her smile was no longer sheepish. It had turned sexy. Coquettish. “What can I say? I like to watch.”
Yanis was not as playful. “It’s not the protocol. You know that. This could be dangerous.”
She turned back to the building across the street. “Were you so concerned for my safety at any time during the past six weeks? I don’t recall you once asking me if I was keeping a safe distance from those two bastards in that apartment over there. As a matter of fact, weren’t you pressing me to get even closer?”
Yanis Alvey softened his tone. “The investigation is over, Ruth. Your role is complete. Let’s get out of here and let the bad boys do their part.”
“I’m not in the way. And I am not going anywhere.”
Yanis sighed. He’d fought these battles with Ruth Ettinger before, and he’d always lost. He was senior to her in their organization, but she was both so damned obstinate and so damned good at her job that he let her get away with little things like this.
Yanis knew he would lose now unless he claimed victory. “All right. You can stay. I guess you deserve it.” Yanis gazed up and down the street, then spoke into his phone. “Clear.” He put the phone down and turned his attention back to the pretty brunette. “It feels odd executing in daylight.”
“That was my suggestion. The targets stayed up all night, worked till past noon. Right now is the best time to hit them.”
“I hope you are right.” He cleared his throat. “You aren’t armed, are you?”
“I’ve got Mace in my purse.”
“That must be of great comfort to you.” His sarcasm was clear. “I am armed, of course. If there is any trouble, stay with me.”
“Thank you, Yanis.” She said it like she meant it. And then, “How are they going to play it?”
Yanis sipped his tea and, over the top of the cup, he cast his eyes to the apartment building next to the parking garage. “In a moment two sedans will arrive, each carrying three men and a driver. A third van will provide a blocking force at the top of the exit to the garage. The six will go upstairs and effect the action.”
Ruth nodded. “You wish you were on the team going in, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.” He said it without equivocation. “I enjoyed that part of my life very much. But now I am the man who sits across the street to watch instead of one of the men who swoops in to carry out justice.”
“You could still do it, I’m sure,” she said.
He waved the comment away. “Someone has to evaluate the surroundings to give the all clear. Plus, none of those boys get to enjoy the afternoon at a café with a beautiful woman. They are probably all jealous of me.”
Ruth just smiled softly.
He looked at her a long moment. “You feel okay about this one, yes?”
“Yes. Of course I do.”
“Good. I know it has been difficult for you since—”
“Shhh.” She hushed him, then gestured with a subtle tip of her head toward the building across the street. Two gray cars turned into the alley and disappeared. A van pulled in behind them, turned into the mouth of the alley, and then stopped, blocking anyone trying to leave from the alley or the parking garage exit on the right.
Yanis said softly, “Fifty euros says it goes wet.”
Ruth shook her head. “Sucker’s bet. It will go wet. Somebody is about to die on the third floor of that building over there.”
They sat silently for a moment; Yanis drummed his fingers on the tabletop. He was thinking about how damn much he missed it, the action going on across the street. Ruth reached out and put her hand over his hand and the drumming stopped, and then she rewrapped her thin fingers around the espresso.
Across the street a Toyota hatchback pulled out of the parking garage adjacent to the building but was blocked from leaving by the van. The Toyota honked, but the van did not move.
Ruth knew this, very likely, was the only excitement she would see of the operation across the street. It wasn’t much, but she did not care.
As she’d told Yanis Alvey, she liked to watch.
Ruth Ettinger was thirty-seven years old, and though she had a clean and bureaucratic-sounding official title, her job description was really quite simple: She was a targeting officer for Mossad, Israeli intelligence.
Ruth ran a team of operatives on one of several task forces under Mossad’s Collections Department, all given the mandate of protecting Israeli government officials from assassination and kidnapping. In actuality, virtually all of her cases involved threats against the prime minister of Israel, Ehud Kalb, the sixty-seven-year-old ex-IDF Special Forces officer who led her nation.
Ettinger had never met Kalb, had never even been in the same room as her prime minister, but she had taken it as her life’s work, her one overbearing responsibility, to find those suspected of harming him, assess the credibility of the threat, and then, if that threat was determined to be real, to call in Mossad’s action arm, Metsada, to finish the job.
Yanis was Metsada, in control of the operators and her link to the Operations Department, and she was his link to the Collections Department.
Together they had chased terrorists, hit men, and nut jobs all over the globe. For more than five years Ruth had been serving on this task force, first as a support officer, and then as a targeting team leader. Ruth had become the best targeter in the Collections Department at locating, tracking, and assessing threats, and Ruth damn well knew it.
And then, the previous spring, Rome happened.
An incident in Rome had turned into a debacle for her agency, but she had not been blamed; a Mossad psychologist had cleared her to return to the field just days later, and soon Ruth was back short-circuiting the nefarious schemes of her nation’s enemies.
The job that had encompassed her every waking moment for the past six weeks had been the hunt for a pair of Palestinian brothers who had learned the art and science of bomb making in the territories, then detonated explosives in Afghanistan to hone their craft. As awful as this was, it was not, in and of itself, enough to garner the dogged focus of Mossad’s top headhunter. But when the two brothers masked their faces and appeared on Lebanese television proclaiming themselves to be the men who would bring Israel to its knees, Ruth was given the job of looking into their bold claim to see if there was anything behind their braggadocio. She tracked them from Beirut to Ankara to Madrid and then, finally, to Faro, and here she found them amassing chemicals and timers and researching the travel plans of the Israeli prime minister. Kalb was due at an economic conference in London the following week, and the two bomb brothers had booked ferry tickets to the United Kingdom.