I eased out, checking behind and across the street. I didn’t see any problems.
“Boaz,” I called out.
He turned, keeping his hands at his sides.
“Ah, I didn’t think you’d be where you told me,” he said.
“Just come this way. And keep your hands where I can see them.”
He complied. We cut down Claymore Road. I glanced behind as we moved. No one was following.
Harry’s bug detector was buzzing in my pocket. “You have a mobile phone?” I asked him.
“Of course.”
“Reach for it slowly and turn it off.”
He shrugged and slipped his hand into one of the front pockets of his shorts. Harry’s detector fell silent.
“Are you armed?” I asked.
“Only with something sharp. Nothing that goes bang.”
I steered us into another alley. “Face the wall,” I said. “I’m going to pat you down.”
“I don’t see how we can accomplish our objectives with this level of mistrust,” he said, his expression grave.
“Boaz, a year ago, your organization was trying to kill me. Turn around.”
He shrugged. While I patted him down, he said, “That was situational, you know, and personally I regretted it.”
He was wearing an FS HideAway knife in a sheath around his neck, the same kind Delilah had introduced Dox to a year earlier. For the moment, I didn’t bother with the backpack. He couldn’t access it quickly enough for anything in it to present a threat.
“I’ll let you keep the knife,” I said, straightening. “Just don’t reach for your neck suddenly. What’s in the backpack?”
He smiled. “Camera gear. Take a look.”
“I will as soon as we’re settled. Come on, let’s keep moving.”
“You’re wasting time,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m alone. And if I weren’t, I wouldn’t have a team follow me now. I’d have them waiting wherever Hilger is, as soon as you told me. They would know to expect you there eventually.”
I looked at him, disturbed by the truth of his words. Goddamnit, I was in a box. And Delilah had caused it.
“We want Hilger,” he said. “Why would we want you? That situation is over. Our interests are aligned now.”
All right, the hell with it. I didn’t have a choice.
“What do you have for me?” I asked.
He broke out in a big, boyish grin. “Wait’ll you see it.”
We took a cab to a hawker’s market, one of the outdoor food courts that dot the city and serve cheap, delicious Singaporean food. The centers are popular and can be crowded and noisy well past midnight, but we were ahead of the lunchtime crowd and had no trouble getting a table. We sat on plastic chairs under the shade of a big beach umbrella and enjoyed skewers of chicken and beef satay washed down with mango juice. While we ate, Boaz invited me to take a look in the backpack, which he had placed on the concrete floor between us.
I did. As he’d mentioned, the pack seemed to be full of camera equipment: a Nikon camera body, a variety of lenses, portable lighting equipment, a tripod, and battery packs.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”
He gave me the boyish grin again. “Have you heard of an ‘active denial system’?”
“No. Should I have?”
“ADS is the Pentagon’s name for a nonlethal millimeter wave energy weapon. America’s troops have used it in Iraq.”
“Okay…” I said, getting interested.
“It shoots electromagnetic radiation at ninety-five gigahertz. Boils moisture in the skin, but only to a depth of one sixty-fourth of an inch. So it hurts like hell, but doesn’t cause damage.”
I glanced down at the backpack. “Your guys have developed a portable version.”
“Correct. The Pentagon’s unit, which they had developed by Raytheon, is truck-mounted. Very powerful-the range is over a kilometer-but big. What I’ve got here has to be employed close up, but you can carry it on your back.”
“It goes through walls?” I asked, doubtful.
“That’s…the tricky part. You can adjust the frequency. Shorter-range frequencies go through walls, yes. But they also cause more damage.”
“So if you don’t calibrate it right…”
“Right, you can cook the hostages along with the terrorists. It looks bad on TV after. Do it right, though, and no one gets worse than a sunburn.”
I nodded. “What does it feel like?”
He smiled. “You want to try?”
“Just tell me.”
He laughed. “A wise decision. I had it done to me-once. It feels like your skin is on fire, simple as that. The Sayeret Matkal had a little competition. Five thousand shekels to anyone who could group three rounds in a five-inch cluster from ten yards away while being hit with the beam. This is a joke for these men, they’re expert shooters. Ordinarily they group in one inch from much farther.”
“What happened?”
He laughed again. “They couldn’t shoot at all. They were too busy writhing and running away. No one asked to try twice. When word got around about what it felt like, people stopped volunteering.”
“I like it,” I said.
He nodded. “You should. Without intelligence…”
“Yes, I know. Delilah’s already been persuasive on that point.”
He looked at me. “You’re treating her right?”
I returned the look. “That’s really none of your business, is it?”
He shrugged. “She’s my colleague, and as close as a sister. We watch each other’s backs.”
I nodded. “It’s good of you to ask, then.”
“So? You’re treating her right?”
I couldn’t help laughing. He laughed, too. “I know, I know,” he said. “We Israelis are pushy. You know, there’s no word for ‘Excuse me’ in Hebrew?”
“What?”
He shrugged. “An old joke. But with some truth. If I put my nose where it doesn’t belong, forgive me.”
“We’re…managing,” I told him, thinking of what she had said to me on the phone just a few hours earlier. “It’s not easy, though.”
He laughed again. “It never is, my friend. It never is.”
We were quiet for a moment. I said, “You…have a family?”
He nodded. “Three sons and a baby daughter. Thank God we finally had a girl. My wife was ready to give up. And you?”
“It’s a long story,” I said, after a moment.
We were quiet again, and this time he didn’t push.
“Why did Hilger take your friend?” he asked.
“Does it matter?”
He shrugged. “It won’t affect what happens to Hilger.”
“It did affect it. It guaranteed it.”
“Good.”
We finished the food. He said, “So? How do you want to do it?”
I shrugged. “Show me how to use the device. I’ll take care of the rest.”
He nodded. “I owe Delilah a hundred shekels.”
“What?”
“She told me you would say that.”
I looked at him, nonplussed.
“I can’t show you. It takes training and experience. I have to see the terrain. Set the controls wrong one way, and it has no effect. Wrong the other way, and you boil your friend’s internal organs. And while you’re trying to get it right, probably people on the boat will be shooting at you. Don’t be stupid.”
I didn’t answer.
“Besides,” he went on, “I’ve already got a van, a driver…”
“Jesus, you’re not alone?”
“No one works alone anymore, Rain. You’re the only one I know.”
Again I didn’t answer. I was trying to account for how quickly and thoroughly I’d lost control of this op. And at the same time thinking, admitting, really, that my odds of success were better because of it.
“You’ll like Naftali,” he said. “He’s, what do you call it, a wheelman?”
“You could call it that, I guess, yeah,” I said.
“Very serious. I don’t think he knows how to talk.”
“That’ll be refreshing.”