A moment’s hesitation, then Harry responded, “No. He’s hiding something, like somebody bluffing with a pair of deuces.”
“Is the Land Rover worth following?”
“We back-tracked the Gulfstream to Tehran. They’re in Israel for a reason. We won’t know why until we hunt them down. So, yes, I think we need to take them down. And take Asefi along for the ride. As long as he’s useful.”
“Do it.”
Avraham Najeri was reassembling a PSG-1 sniper rifle when his prepaid cellphone vibrated with an incoming call.
A frown crossed his face as he glanced at the screen. The Agency. “Salaam alaikum,” he answered cautiously. Blessing and peace be upon you.
He listened carefully for the space of five minutes, then closed the phone without another word, going to a safe on the other side of his workroom. Fingers moving over the biometric keypad, he pulled the door open and removed a pair of Galil assault rifles, laying them out on the workbench. Three magazines for each, followed by two sets of night-vision binoculars.
Working quickly, he expertly field-stripped the rifles, dumping the components into a sack. The resulting jumble would have confused most, but not a man of his experience. He could have put them both back together in the space of five minutes if he had been so inclined. It wouldn’t baffle the men he was delivering them to either.
Another glance around his workroom and he turned off the lights, running the beads of a rosary through his fingers as he headed toward the stairs. Time to make the delivery…
The two men were no longer in sight, but he could feel their presence. They were watching. Asefi turned back to his food, picking at it with a fork. His appetite left something to be desired.
The big man had been the sniper — or was there a third?
He looked out the window of the hotel restaurant at the street outside, the sunlight streaming in through the glass. The fork trembled in his hand as he thought of the deception he was perpetrating. Hossein and his men didn’t have the toxin — he knew that. But they linked him to the Ayatollah, and if they were dead…
His eyes closed as he imagined the firefight between Hossein’s picked guerillas and the — Americans, maybe? It was not so much that the man looked like an American, but he acted with the confidence of one. A cowboy.
A shadow fell across his plate and he glanced up. “Come on, Achmed,” the man announced in Russian. “It’s time to go.”
A worried expression crossed Asefi’s face. “I thought our business together was concluded?”
Harry smiled. “Nyet. I sincerely wish it was. But it is not our lot to be so fortunate. You’ll come with us until we’ve verified the information you provided.”
The patrol wasn’t going anywhere. Hossein came to this realization after half an hour of watching the Israeli Humvee through the lens of his binoculars.
They had hidden the Land Rover about half a mile back, leaving two men guarding it. Now he, Mustafa, and another of the militants lay in the bushes on the outskirts of the village, their weapons trained on the four Israeli soldiers.
No more time, Hossein decided, reaching for the pistol at his hip. Motioning for his men to stay put, he screwed a silencer into the muzzle and rose to a crouch.
Forty yards. He could have made the shot, but there was no room for error. One shot and the remaining soldiers would react. With two of them inside the house beyond the vehicle, he wouldn’t stand a chance.
He moved into an alley between the houses, marveling at the incongruity of modern Palestine. A donkey grazed in the courtyard of a house surmounted by a television aerial. The old and the new fused together in an inseparable bond.
A wheelbarrow full of bricks stood in front of a house farther down the street and Hossein moved toward it, shoving his pistol into the load.
One of the two soldiers on guard looked up at his approach, dismissed him as a common laborer and continued to scan the street.
It was a fatal mistake. Five yards away, Hossein dropped the handles of the barrow and grabbed the pistol, his arm a blur as he brought it to bear.
The pistol coughed, a bullet spitting from its cold muzzle to strike the soldier in the middle of the forehead. A young man, he observed dispassionately, almost young enough to be his son.
His body fell backward, thudding softly against the metal of the Humvee. His comrade reacted, the muzzle of his weapon swinging upward in a sickeningly slow motion.
Hossein squeezed the trigger again. Target down. He ducked and moved forward, unclipping a stun grenade from the belt of the second man.
Alerted, the last two soldiers emerged from the door of the dwelling just as he pulled the pin on the grenade, lofting it into the air.
Thunder and lightning. The major shielded his eyes as the stun grenade went off, a blinding flash lit up the area.
He raised himself up, the pistol in both hands. Chaos. Surprise. The Israelis had been blinded by the blast and he shot both of them, one after the other, watching as their lifeless bodies crumpled to the ground.
The way was clear. The path to Al Quds…
“I need a sitrep, Carter,” Kranemeyer announced, bustling around the end of the cubicle. “Do we still have eyes on the Land Rover?”
Carter didn’t respond for a moment, his eyes focused intently on the screen before him. A command prompt appeared and he clicked on it, the resolution of the image changing as it zoomed in.
“Bet your life we do. More than that, we’ve got a situation.”
“What’s going on?” the DCS asked, shifting his weight on his prosthetic leg to lean toward the screen.
“Watch this — three minutes ago.”
The view was uncanny, a true top-down birds-eye view. The perspective of the gods. It always reminded Carter of the original Grand Theft Auto games he had played as a teenager.
A figure moving down the street, toward a patrol of Israeli soldiers. The analyst clicked another button and slowed the scene down. “Watch here — between frames 2375 and 2394.”
“He pulls a pistol,” Kranemeyer announced slowly, narrating the video as it continued. “One man, two men down. Stops. Whoa!”
The explosion spread out over the satellite imaging, concealing the scene from view for a few seconds. The DCS grimaced. “Flash-bang. It’d have to be. There. Two more men down. He utilized his element of surprise to the fullest — we’re dealing with a professional. What’s their present heading?”
“Currently-south-southwest. Toward the West Bank. At their present rate of speed, they’ll be within the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority in two hours.”
“We’re going to break a lot of laws today,” Kranemeyer observed, shaking his head.
The comment drew an ironic look from the analyst. “When don’t we?”
“It’s a match?” General Shoham looked from the analyst in front of him down to the grainy surveillance photo on the desk.
“The computer says the match is 83 % positive.”
“The computer?” the Mossad chief asked, more than a touch of sarcasm in his voice. “And what say you?”
The analyst hesitated and Shoham waved his hand impatiently. “Make the call. Is it Nichols?”
A brief nod, then the man replied, “Yes. It’s him. I’m certain of it.”