The men sat silent, without moving a muscle. The leader shook his head.
“Good. I don’t need to belabor how important this operation is. You are the best of the best. Each one of you has been handpicked for this duty. Pay is double your usual rate. Feel free to eat and drink as much as you like on the flight, but once on the ground, you will remain dry until we are through. Pavel?” Yuri looked to the leader.
“All right. You heard the man. Time to mount up.”
The fighters stood, each reaching down and hoisting a small black duffle bag with a week’s worth of clothes in it. The flight wasn’t going to transport any weapons — they didn’t want to risk a search. The leader nodded, the door to the tarmac opened, and the group filed out, trotting to the plane once out in the cold night air.
“Call me when you’re on the ground. I’ll be right behind you with the second group,” Yuri said to Pavel, then shook his hand.
Pavel nodded and rubbed the scar on his neck, a souvenir from Afghanistan, pulsing red even after all these years.
Yuri watched the men climb the fuselage stairs and enter the private jet. A few minutes later, it began rolling to the runway, the snow having been cleared recently by an unlucky snowplow. It slowly taxied to the far end of the tarmac and sat awaiting takeoff clearance.
An explosion of sleet blasted from behind the plane as the jets ignited, then it was hurtling down the strip, lifting into the ominous sky before it had traveled three quarters of the length. Streaks of white vapor trailed from its wings as it pulled confidently upward, its lights blinking as it disappeared into the overcast.
Yuri pulled an encrypted cell phone from his pocket and placed a call. Grigenko answered on the second ring.
“The first group is en route, sir.”
“Very good. Any update on the other matter?” Grigenko asked.
“Our contacts in Israeli intelligence are turning over rocks, but so far there’s nothing new to report. He hasn’t shown up in any healthcare facilities. You know…he might just be dead,” Yuri offered. “He was badly wounded according to the survivors.”
“I don’t believe we got off that light. He’s still alive, and he’s out there. I feel it in my bones,” Grigenko snapped.
“We are proceeding with the assumption that he is still alive. I have four more men on the ground now in Israel, so we will be ready within a matter of minutes from when he turns up.”
“And the woman?”
“That is a bigger problem, although it has no impact on our operation. She has dropped off the radar. If she is still on the island, she’s living in a cave or has successfully evaded not only our men, but the police. I think it is probably diminishing returns to keep that hunt active. I would suggest we keep her on our watch list and wait for her to surface, if she ever does.”
“Yuri. I thought I was clear. Put whatever resources on this you have to, but I want her. No giving up. I don’t care about the expense or how long it takes. I want specialists whose only reason for living is to find her. She is not going to get away again.”
Yuri considered possible responses. He could argue with his client about the number of people on the planet, and the tiny fraction of a chance they would ever pick up her trail at this point — a highly skilled operative, alerted that she was being pursued, who could literally go anywhere in the world to hide. He could argue, or try to convince Grigenko that the odds of getting her now were less than being struck by lightning — twice. Or he could continue to spend the oligarch’s money, a few million dollars a year, on maintaining an active search, pocketing forty percent of the take as profit.
“Of course, sir. I have my best people on it. It will just be a matter of time. Whatever is required, we will do it.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear.”
The line went dead, and Yuri smiled, his features taking on a reptilian cast from the unfamiliar expression.
Jet spent the morning trying to get into the Mossad’s network using David’s information as the gateway. His password still worked so it wasn’t as difficult as trying to get in cold. She’d found his security clearance adequate to move beyond his immediate operations, but not sufficient to access everything she was after.
One of the biggest obstacles was that the team didn’t exist in any records, so beyond David’s encrypted notes, suitably ambiguously worded so even if decoded it would be impossible to glean specifics, there wasn’t any obvious place to begin.
She decided to start at the internal description of the attack on the safe house, and quickly found that the account was nothing more than a repetition of the police report, along with a few tersely worded sentences inserted by the agent in charge of the scene. It spoke in generalities, and studiously avoided mentioning David as anything more than ‘the occupant’.
There was no new information, other than a glimpse into how the agency was thinking.
She noted that there was an addendum, which contained one of the assistant directors’ speculations on the attack, commenting that the most likely explanation was that it comprised some sort of a reprisal. No elaboration was forthcoming.
David had given her a series of areas to nose around in, but she kept getting security denials that she had to hack around, which was tedious and time consuming. She’d masked her IP address so it would be impossible to track her location, so she wasn’t worried about being traced — more that she would trigger some internal alert that would then shut down access.
She leaned back in the chair and rolled her head, trying to loosen her neck muscles, rigid from hours of immobilization. It would be a lot easier if they knew what they were looking for.
David shuffled into the room, and she leapt to her feet. He was pale — the effort had obviously cost him a lot.
“You aren’t supposed to be out of bed.”
“I know. But I had an idea, and I need to use the computer for a while. Are you in the network?”
“Yes. But I can’t say I’ve found much.”
“Give me half an hour. It won’t kill me to sit here.”
“It might.” She saw the look of determination on his face. “I’ll tell you what — I’ll compromise. Let’s get you back to bed, and I’ll bring the computer in for you. It’s on the wireless network, so you can use it there.”
She helped him back to the bedroom and then brought him the laptop. After showing him what she had accomplished so far, she left him to his research and went to take a shower.
Forty minutes later, David called to her from the bedroom. She rose from the dining room table, where she was brushing her damp hair, and went to him. He was sitting up in bed, looking a little better than he had earlier.
“How are you feeling?”
“Like a horse kicked me in the stomach.”
“You shouldn’t have gotten up. That was stupid.”
“I actually feel a little better. I stopped the morphine this morning, and I can think more clearly. I won’t be taking any more of that shit any time soon.”
“You know I hate drugs. Speaking of which, just how bad is the pain?”
“Scale of one to ten, it’s a six, down from a nine yesterday. I’m hoping it will drop quickly from here on out so I can get back on my feet. We can’t stay here forever.”
“Where are you planning to go? I mean, since you’ve got people looking to kill you and you have no idea who you can trust…”
“I haven’t worked that part out yet.”
“I see. You want a smoothie? I have strawberries and more bananas.” She knew there was no point in asking him whether he’d found anything on the computer. He would tell her when he was ready.