“I’m fine. Mostly. Listen, do me a favor. Look the Professor up and see if you can locate his number. His full name is Winston G. Twain. If my memory serves, he’s in the Palm Springs area of California. I wrote him a letter a year ago, but that’s all I can remember. Palm Springs, or Palm Desert. If you can’t find him, I can root around for the address in my desk. I probably still have it,” Steven said.
“Okay. You don’t sound so hot. You’re not coming into the office today, are you?”
“I’ll play that by ear,” Steven replied. A siren drowned out the call for a few moments.
“Good Lord, Steven. Are you at a hospital?”
As the taxi pulled up to the glass doors, the driver looked around, irritated, as though he’d been waiting for his fare for half an hour. He spied Steven and gestured impatiently.
“I have to go now. Call me as soon as you get a hit,” Steven said, and then hung up.
He wasn’t in much of a mood to chat.
CHAPTER 5
Two days after Steven nearly plummeted to his death in a field near Lucca, Colonel Gabriel Synthe glanced casually at the date on his watch as he passed through a suburb ten miles from the airport. He frowned. It was exactly six years ago that he’d resigned his position with the Mossad. He’d committed the date to memory, filed away — along with countless other unmentionable data points accumulated over a long career of savagery in the name of God and country.
He’d made a decision to never forget the circumstances surrounding his resignation, so he figured he might as well memorialize the date as well.
It was the day of his last assassination.
The Palestinian, Nassar, had been stretched out on the bed in his hotel room, near the Place de l’Opéra in Paris. He was suspected by the Mossad hierarchy of planning a car bombing that had killed four people two years earlier outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, and later, the strangling of the Prime Minister’s cousin while she was enjoying her vacation near the Black Sea. The Mossad had gotten a tip that he was meeting with a terrorist cell in Paris, and Synthe had been selected for the operation, which would require planning and delicacy, in addition to ruthless efficiency.
He had contemplated using poison, but after getting the lowdown on the hotel had instead opted for the simple and effective. When Synthe’s contact at the front desk received an order for room service from the terrorist, Synthe intercepted the errand and showed up at Nassar’s hotel door in person, dressed as service staff, carrying a tray with a platter cover and a towel on it. When Nassar opened the door, he’d curtly gestured for him to bring the food in, and Synthe had obligingly moved into the room behind him with the tray. As Nassar turned his back to close the door, Synthe drove the razor-sharp carbon fiber blade of his custom-made stiletto into the base of his neck. Nassar crumpled to the carpet, his spinal cord severed at the junction of the spine and skull. Synthe then calmly withdrew the knife and drove it through Nassar’s left eye, into his brain.
Nassar’s head had convulsed twice, then lay still, blood pooling on the carpet beneath his twisted frame.
The entire episode had taken eight seconds.
Synthe then carefully moved to the bathroom and washed his weapon in the small sink, taking care to also rinse the blood from his hands and right sleeve. He pulled off the pair of translucent latex gloves he’d donned in preparation for the messy errand and methodically removed his bellman’s jacket, folding it carefully before slipping it and the gloves into a plastic laundry bag the hotel provided for guests.
Synthe studied himself in the mirror. He winced as he tore off the mustache and sideburns that he’d affixed with theatrical adhesive and then dropped those into the bag as well. Now he looked like any one of millions of nondescript forty-something year old men wandering the busy French metropolis, wearing a Versace knock-off dress shirt and fashionable black slacks.
He had returned to the room and poked the corpse with his foot, more out of habit than anything. Satisfied that Nassar wasn’t going to spontaneously come back to life, he walked to the door and listened carefully for any movement.
Nothing.
Synthe spied the terrorist’s wallet on the dresser and quickly moved to pocket it. Brutal robberies were not unknown in large cities — a sad but unavoidable fact of life. Nassar would be just another in a long string of quickly-forgotten burglaries that had taken a turn toward the violent and, after a few days of no progress, would be largely abandoned by the police. He had no fear of getting caught — the security cameras had conveniently stopped working several days before and the maintenance company couldn’t make it for a week. Yet another unfortunate coincidence for the police in an entropic universe.
Senses tuned to detect any threat, he cautiously opened the door and scanned the hall in both directions. Nothing. The area was empty.
Within two minutes, he was on the sidewalk with his bag of goodies, making for the Metro at a leisurely pace.
That same afternoon at the embassy, he submitted his report on the operation and then tendered his resignation. His superiors had been surprised, but ultimately, accepting. Everyone burned out eventually. It was impossible to predict what would trigger it, but it happened, and when it did, all they could do was let the operative try to make it in private life; and if he failed, have a position available for him behind a desk running his own gambits in the field with younger, more resilient agents doing the dirty work.
Synthe had taken the train to the South of France to spend a week amongst the rich and beautiful before flying to Tel Aviv, where he’d been met by his new employer and briefed on his odd new assignment.
Six years was a long time, and yet it seemed like yesterday.
It wasn’t so much that killing Nassar had been memorable in any distinct way. Rather, it had been so mundane, so routine, it barely stood out from a host of other sanctions he’d carried out during his career.
That’s why he’d had to commit the date to memory.
Lest he completely forget, and Nassar became just one in a long blurred lineup of hateful faces whose last living impression had been Synthe’s icy stare.
Synthe looked out of the window of the black Lincoln Town Car at the throngs of carefree pedestrians enjoying an early summer day in Tel Aviv. It had to be nice, living in the innocent world of the civilian. He sometimes wished he could rejoin it and then banished his daydreaming — what was the point? His life was what he’d made it, and there was no turning back, which was why he was now sitting in an armor-plated sedan taking him to a meeting with one of his current employer’s other operatives.
Something serious had happened in the past week, and his superior was not happy.
Synthe thought back to the meeting that had preceded his resignation from the Mossad, and his first encounter with the man known to him only as ‘The Sentinel’. Two weeks before he’d assassinated Nassar, Synthe had attended a meeting with this shadowy figure, who had approached him through a contact with another intelligence service. Synthe had been curious, based on the veiled suggestion that a highly-paid position was available to an operative with his experience, and had allowed the courtship to proceed from the seemingly chance discussion with his counterpart at an embassy cocktail party to a lunchtime meeting at a deserted coffee bar several miles from the city center.
Synthe had arrived at the rendezvous at the small outdoor café at the agreed-upon time and had been greeted by a dignified older man in a perfectly-pressed Italian suit of expensive tailoring. They were the only ones in the small, walled courtyard of the establishment, and the disinterested waiter disappeared after bringing them their order of espresso.