“Did you get him?”
“I did, yes.”
“Yay for the man from Texas!” she shouted.
He said, “Say, weren’t you G.I. Jane?”
“I just pulled the trigger and hid.”
“That’s how wars are won. Sorry, didn’t kill the dog. Maybe next time. Got all your stuff? We ain’t coming back.”
“Got it all.” She had remembered her bag, all her phones, even the carefully wrapped plate.
“Good. Let’s see what we bagged.”
Interlude in Tel Aviv VI
“There are better killers in the world today,” said the director. “The best that science, government, and unlimited budgets can devise. Why would anyone go to so much trouble to manufacture this old garbage?”
“Indeed, there are more efficient chemical and biological weapons,” responded Gershon. “Nerve agents, anthrax, sarin, Ebola, all sorts of vapors, dusts, unguents, and gizmos for murder. Moreover, the methods of deploying the Zyklon are awkward and prone to difficulty. It works best in a locked chamber disguised as a shower room. That is, in controlled circumstances. It is heavy for its effect, difficult to transport, and lacking, outside the extermination camp, sophisticated dispersal technologies. It’s old-fashioned.
“But that’s not a mistake, that’s the very point. I see this as what might be called a ‘tribute atrocity.’ That is to say, a sentimental act of murder, a gesture in which the murderer’s true motive is not merely to kill but, by killing, to pay homage to an earlier generation of murderers. In other words, someone wants to replicate and sacralize the Shoah and to inform the world with his method that the ancient Nazi genocidalists are still out there, waiting, watching. It has nothing to do with Allah, not really, and is uninterested in Islam, other than as a means to an end. No, this fellow kills in the name of Hitler, and to him, it doesn’t matter if he kills five, fifty, five hundred, or five thousand, though the more, the better.”
The faces at the table stared at him. He had their attention. It was well past midnight, the lights of the black cube burned brightly, and in the conference room not only the director and several department heads stared at Gershon, but so did IDF representatives and an emissary from the prime minister. In the background of the room, a silent TV carried a newsfeed from CNN, and the screen bled blue light into the dim space.
“How could they deliver it?” Cohen said. “I don’t think the shower-room trick will work twice on us.”
“No, indeed. The ‘crystals’ are actually placed under pressure and become embedded in porous stone or wooden disks and locked in airtight containers for transport and deployment. Air releases the vapor; water releases it more quickly. The Nazis packed them in pellet form in sealed cans, opened them, and dropped them into water to release the gas. So, bulk would be a problem. To kill a lot of people, you need a lot of stuff. On the other hand, he has a lot of stuff. Given what we know about his manufacturing process, he could have churned out ten thousand pounds of the stuff. Consider a low-flying plane that crashes into Tel Aviv in the night without warning, loaded with the pellets, releasing their gas into the air when their fragile containers break open. The gas — without the odorant to tip us off to its presence, and being heavier than air — would drift at low level through the city air, smothering people in their beds. Thousands could die. That would be the mega-disaster. In smaller applications, a shopping mall might contain people and gas long enough for hundreds of deaths, a school, any building would do. It could be added to water supplies, its deadly vapors drifting this way and that off the breeze. It could be packed in rockets and fired from Gaza. Fifteen rockets and people come out after the all-clear, unaware they’re walking into a poison-gas cloud. Dozens, hundreds could die.
“Then, too, when the dying is over and the investigation begins, think of the furor after it is discovered that the death gas was our old Nazi enemy Zyklon, the cyclone. The world press would go nuts, as they love to run pictures of Nazis, which are sure magazine and newspaper sellers. All the old footage is rerun. Someone digs out Triumph of the Will, and the parades are run over and over on the news channels. Everyone loves to hate the Nazis, bad boys of a hundred thousand silly plots. Why, it would be like National Nazi Month. It would be the best month the Third Reich has had in seventy years. That in itself would be a major victory for the author of this event.”
“Which brings us to the point of this meeting, Gershon. Who is he? Who is Nordyne? How do we find him? How do we kill him? How much time have we got?”
“Well,” said Gershon, “I’d be trying to answer those questions myself if I weren’t at this damned meeting.”
Where are you, mister? You must have left a trace, a clue. You have to be somebody. You’re not just a spirit of malevolence that seeped out of a grave, you’re corporeal, of flesh, and mind, and hair, and stench, and somewhere, somehow, you’ve left a trail. I will find it.
All around was activity, but Gershon was calm. He was where he wanted to be. He was hunting.
I cannot hunt you in your Swiss bank, you putz, because those institutions are notoriously secretive, and I cannot get to your accounts without the validating algorithms. It could be done but would take far too much valuable time. Running your little ploy out of Switzerland was a master stroke.
So what have you left? Only the logo.
Yes, the logo. Two stylized faces staring off, “facing the future.”
He stared, he stared, he stared. Was there a significance in the image? What could something so simple, so banal, conceal? Just another corporate bromide; who would look twice at it? A trademark, amusing to eye but devoid of content, as designed. It had no signature, no house style or indication of what graphic artist had confabulated it. It seemed offhand, yet the artist had captured in those two light lines a true glint of human intelligence, individuality, and flesh. Maybe it was steganography, a method of encoding information in graphic presentations. In some cases, not here, microdots. But Gershon thought that somewhere in the images, or in the imagination that conceived and selected and refined the images, there was a code of sorts, perhaps unconscious.
Besides: he had nothing else.
So: Two faces, facing left. Two profiles. Shapes. Though they’re technically lines, they’re really shapes. Your imagination attaches them to a head and completes the image in the eye of you, beholding.
He knew of a Darknet site called Imagechase.com, which hunted for selected images, just as other search engines found words, names, anything in the universe of print. He called it up, activated it, and fiddled and faddled, defining the original image from the Nordyne website, cutting it and then pasting it to the software screen “target” area of Imagechase. Maybe in the posture, in the alignment, there was something, and Imagechase could hunt it down. It might lead to something that had inspired the actual artist in his studio, wherever he was.
He pressed SEARCH.
A magic animated disk appeared, the universal symbol that the elves inside were at work. The seconds dragged by. But then the screen changed and produced a chain of mini-images, each of which could be full-screened by a click.
Mostly the click wasn’t necessary. It was a selection of left-facing profiles, many banal, many of no use whatsoever. Easter Island seemed to predominate, those odd busts from time unimaginable, two stories tall, as viewed in profile, endless fodder for speculation and photography. It seemed unlikely, however, that Easter Islanders were behind Nordyne GmbH.