Not a scheme.
A conspiracy.
But for what? she asked, only to laugh derisively at her naïveté. Weren’t conspiracies always about the same thing?
Mary turned back to the desk and tallied her findings. Beginning in November of the past year, Joe had made sixteen trips to San Jose without her knowledge. Twelve while the family was in Sacramento and four since the move to Texas. For these most recent trips, the notations in the agenda read “Bastrop,” “San Antonio,” “fieldwork,” and so on. Never once was there a mention of San Jose.
Sixteen trips were enough.
Mary put down her pen. The conclusion was there to see plain as day. Joe had not come to Austin to work on municipal corruption cases. He’d come to follow a case that had begun in Sacramento, a case that required him to fly to San Jose, California, on a frequent basis and that had ended with him being shot by an informant while sitting in his car on an abandoned ranch in the middle of nowhere.
Mary powered down the iPad. For an hour she sat drinking her tea, contemplating her new reality. There were lies and there was deception, and then there was this: a secret life.
An idea came to her. Joe hadn’t called just to say he was in trouble. He knew she wouldn’t be able to help. He’d called to tell her the truth.
Joe knew about the conspiracy, too.
28
Darkness.
A penlight illuminates a patch of wall. Trophies on a shelf. A basketball. The pale light stops on a poster of a football player, #52 of the San Francisco ’49ers. Then closer. An autograph: “To Billy Merriweather, Your friend, Patrick Willis.”
The light moves again. Now it is on the boy’s face. He lies asleep on his bed, sheets pulled to his chin. He is nine or ten. Blond. We are closer now, close enough to see the fuzz on his cheek. A hand approaches the boy’s face. The hand holds a knife. It is a stiletto, the blade long, slim, razor-sharp. The blade traces the chin, the nose, and stops a breath from the boy’s closed eye. As frightening is the tattoo visible on the man’s hand. It is a skull with vipers squirming to escape the empty sockets.
A man whispers, “Die.”
End.
All this in six seconds.
Repeat.
–
Darkness.
A penlight illuminates a patch of wall. Trophies…
“How many times are you going to watch that?” asked Shanks.
“You don’t like it?” asked the Mole.
“I liked it fine the first twenty times.”
The two men had exchanged the white work van for a custom-built Mercedes Airstream and were parked in a commercial lot a mile from Mary Grant’s house.
The Mole put away his phone. He’d made several more Vines, six-second clips that he uploaded to the Net. All were similar in content. Only the actors differed.
He’d filmed the first inside John Merriweather’s brother’s home. It showed a sleeping couple and his straight-edge razor. A second came from inside the home of Merriweather Systems’ cofounder and second largest stockholder. The last was his favorite. It came from the home of John Merriweather’s daughter. Like the Vine he’d just watched, it featured a child-in this case, a six-year-old girl with black hair and a delicious birthmark on her cheek. It had been a warm night and the girl had been sleeping on top of her covers. At the very last moment he’d touched the birthmark with the tip of the blade.
“They worked,” he said. “The Merriweather deal went through, didn’t it?”
“Is that what they were for?”
“Don’t fuck with me,” said the Mole. “You know good and well. Briggs loved ’em. Said they even scared the hell out of him.”
Shanks moved to the rear of the van and lay down.
The Mole watched the Vine again. He was thinking of the girls inside the house. He wanted to film a Vine with them.
Wednesday
29
At seven a.m. the sun bore down on the tarmac of Ben Gurion Airport on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. It had been a hot summer in the eastern Mediterranean. The last rain had fallen one hundred days earlier. In the north, the olive groves of Judea were withering. The River Jordan had dwindled to a trickle. The forecast for the days ahead offered no relief. Once again in its tortured history, the state of Israel was under siege.
Inside the private air terminal, a group of ten men milled freely in the air-conditioned lounge. Most were in their forties and fifties. All were slim, tanned, and fit. They dressed similarly in dark blazers, open-collared shirts, and pressed slacks. The habit of wearing a uniform was too deeply ingrained to discard altogether. They spoke in hushed tones, never raising their voices. This, too, was a habit. In the secret world, even a whisper could be too loud. The men knew a thing or two about listening.
The transit bus arrived. The men filed out of the building and climbed aboard. None availed himself of a seat as the bus drove across the airfield, darting in between Lufthansa jumbo jets and El Al 787s taxiing for takeoff. All stared intently out the windows, as if memorizing the surroundings.
The bus continued to the southern edge of the field. Its destination was a gleaming white Boeing 737 parked at the far corner. The plane bore no insignia apart from a stylized Roman numeral I painted on its tail. A blond flight attendant welcomed the men aboard with a broad smile and a personal greeting. “Good morning, General Gold…Colonel Wolkowicz…Major Aaron…”
The men were impressed, even if no one commented. It had been years since they’d been addressed by their rank, and never by a buxom blonde with a pleasing Texan drawl.
Once aboard, all were free to sit where they chose. The plane offered thirty seats, two to a row. Each seat was its own private sleep station, with a recumbent lounger, desk, and entertainment center. Aft was a lounge with couches, desks, a kitchen with gourmet food, and a fully stocked bar.
The flight attendant passed through the cabin taking orders for preflight libations. Nine of the men ordered orange juice-again the habit of lifelong soldiers. Only David Gold ordered a beer, but he was the group’s leader and not subject to group norms. The beer was a Lone Star. Of course it was.
Gold looked around him. At Aaron and Wolkowicz. At Stern and Silverman. The past seemed to well up around him. He saw them as they’d been in their newly issued khaki uniforms, hair shorn, standing at attention inside the barracks at Glilot. How long ago was it? Twenty years? Thirty?
Even then they had been brilliant. Top graduates of his country’s university’s electrical engineering and computer science programs. He had not been able to spare them the rigors and indignities of basic training. Nor had he wished to. Though they would never lift a weapon in their country’s defense, they required toughness nonetheless. The task of listening demanded unimagined stamina.
“You are now members of Unit 8200,” he had announced all those years ago, “the most important unit inside the Israel Defense Forces. It is your job to keep our country safe.”
Started in 1952 with a roomful of surplus American radio equipment, Unit 8200-also known as the Central Collection Unit of the Intelligence Corps-was responsible for every aspect of the nation’s signals intelligence operations. It was the unit’s job to monitor all security-related intelligence from television, radio, newspapers, and, more recently, the Internet. In the United States, the National Security Agency performed a similar function. In Great Britain, the surveillance corps went by the name GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters.