THIRTY-SIX
This particular Mossad operations facility had always reminded Jack of a mission control center for spacecraft launches. Like the seating in a mini amphitheater, rows of curved counters with workstations descended toward a small stage with a wall of monitors behind it displaying up-to-the-minute information. Those monitors were alive with everything from maps, to scrolling lists of information, to video feeds of demonstrations going on at different locations. One of the feeds showed a speech being given at the United Nations. Another was a live feed of an interrogation of a prisoner.
Dozens of controllers, managers, and coordinators tended monitors of their own, along with their own sets of switches, buttons, and knobs. Many of them were talking on headsets. These operators tracked, and were in communication with, agents in the field. When Jack had been in the United States and called in, he talked to Dvora in this very operations center.
As Jack made his way across the surprisingly quiet room, he immediately noticed that all the controllers seemed especially tense. Some of them pored over reams of paper readouts in their laps. Others were talking into headsets. The lighting in the room was muted, to make it easier to see all the information both at their own screens and on the large monitors against the wall. It gave the place a kind of foreboding atmosphere.
Jack spotted Dvora Artzi and stopped at her station. When she saw him she broke into a sudden smile as she pulled off her headset and then stood to squeeze him in a warm hug.
“How are you, Jack?” she asked, holding his shoulders as she looked up at him with a broad smile.
“I’m okay,” he said without much enthusiasm.
Ehud saw Jack stopped at Dvora’s station and rushed over to meet him.
“Jack!” he said as he extended a hand. “Where have you been? Didn’t you get my messages? I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks! It’s not like you to be out of communication.”
Jack shook hands with the man as he looked around.
“Sorry, Ehud,” he said, returning his attention to the man. “I just didn’t want to search for another subject right now.”
“It’s not your fault that Uziel was murdered.”
Jack flashed him a weak smile. “Nice try, Ehud. But if I wouldn’t have found him and convinced him to help us, he would be at home and safe right now.”
“Safe at home mourning his wife. You gave him a reason to care about living. You let him be part of something bigger than himself. You didn’t force him to help us. He wanted to do it.”
Jack sighed. “I suppose.” He didn’t want to debate it, so he didn’t. “But I’m thinking I may take a break from our work. I’m a little sick at heart of finding people who can recognize killers only to watch them be murdered.”
“Jack,” Dvora said, “these are special people. They are hunted by those who want to kill their kind. You save many of them by finding them first. You saved Kate. If not for you, she would have been slaughtered without ever knowing the reason. She never knew about her ability until you found her and helped her understand what she could do. If not for you, she would be dead. Not just her, but others as well.”
Jack smiled more sincerely. “True enough. I just wish I could find her. I taught her a little too well how to go off the grid and become a ghost to hide from those killers.”
“Anyway,” Ehud said, interrupting the conversation about Kate, “that’s not why I’ve been trying to reach you.”
Jack folded his arms and devoted his full attention to Ehud. “Okay, what’s up?”
“What’s up?” Ehud looked a little surprised. “Haven’t you been listening to the news?”
“No, I’ve had my phone off. I’m a bit sick of listening to all the problems in the world. I wanted to be left alone to do some background research on some of the super-predators I’ve been hunting. I’ve been thinking about taking some time away from all this to go do that for a while.”
Dvora frowned with concern. “You don’t know about the attacks?”
Jack looked between Dvora and Ehud. “Attacks? What attacks?”
“In America,” Ehud said, lifting his hands out in exasperation. “There were also some terrorist attacks in the UK, one stabbing at a nightclub in France, and a truck attack in Brussels. But there were a great many more in the US and they were much worse.”
“Worse?” Jack’s arms unfolded. “What happened in the US?”
Dvora sat down at her station and pulled up video of a massive hotel fire. Ehud gestured to the monitor.
“That’s a hotel in Las Vegas. They still don’t know the death toll. Right now it’s thirty or so, but it’s expected to climb over a hundred. It could even go much higher. It was started by a large incendiary device that probably contained jellied gasoline. It went off on a lower floor, taking out elevators and trapping people on higher floors. The stairs were destroyed by explosive devices so that people couldn’t escape as the fire climbed up inside the building.”
Dvora switched to another scene. “This is the airport in Tampa.” The surveillance video showed people walking along, then debris and smoke exploding out, leaving bodies littering the terminal. She pulled up another video showing rescue personnel with gas masks carrying people out of a subway station in New York City. Another video showed the aftermath of a car bomb in a big United States city, but it could have been a scene from Baghdad.
“Who claimed credit for all the attacks?” Jack asked as Dvora kept pulling up different videos, different scenes of destruction and victims.
“Each attack was claimed by a different group,” Ehud said.
Astonished, Jack glanced down at the monitor. “Has that ever happened before? A series of attacks all carried out at once with different groups claiming credit?”
Ehud clasped his hands behind his back. “No, not like this. To tell you the truth, we don’t know what’s going on, but it’s obviously very troubling.”
“Here’s one of the worst,” Dvora said as she pulled up what looked like a war zone in Syria. Shells of burned-out trucks littered the scene. “This is Oeste Mesa, the big commercial border crossing between Mexico and California.”
“This attack was accompanied by a cyber attack that took down the entire US network for their border stations,” Ehud said. “Besides this attack, here, there was also a mass shooting—several people with machine guns—at a crossing into America from Canada. The terrorists killed five agents and almost two dozen civilians before they were shot dead. This attack at Oeste Mesa was much worse.”
“There are several terrorist groups that have been working on that kind of cyber warfare,” Jack said. “Sounds like they chose this time to strike.”
“There were also cyber attacks on air traffic control, as well as power plants and other infrastructure.” Ehud glanced at Dvora before looking back at Jack. “US intelligence services leaked to the press that the cyber attacks were Russian.”
“The Russians!” Jack put one hand on a hip as he swept his hair back with the other. He held the hand against the back of his head as he paced a few feet away and then returned. “That doesn’t make any sense at all. The Russians doing something like that—especially in coordination with terrorists groups—would cause the Americans to jump to a war footing.”
Ehud arched an eyebrow. “They did.”
Jack cast about for some answer that made sense. “You have to know that it’s possible to make a cyber attack look like it was done by anyone—Russia, China, even Israel. All it takes is a team inside Russia to set up servers using Russian credit cards to pay for hosting services and then use a VPN to remote into those servers from access machines inside the country. That would make it look to all the world like the hack had been done by Russia. The evidence would seem irrefutable—unless you really understand how it can be done.”
Ehud waited until Jack had paced back. “The problem is, US intel leaked information to the press saying that the Russians carried out the cyber attack. People are used to things like this on a smaller scale from Russia or China. Ransomware attacks have crippled large companies, hospitals, and government agencies for some time now, so this being done by the Russians makes perfect sense to many in the American intel community. Of course, the news media and thus the public are absolutely convinced it was the Russians, so they’re up in arms. They’re demanding action. Some are even demanding a strike at Russia.”
“But it doesn’t make sense. It’s most likely not true.”
“Perception is reality,” Dvora said.
Jack paced off again, thinking, looking at the wall of monitors. Many of the scenes of destruction and panic were the attacks in America. Something was bothering him.
“The Mexican bomber you captured in Jerusalem,” he said when he realized what was nagging at him. “That has to be connected to these attacks.” He pointed at Dvora’s monitor showing the carnage at the Oeste Mesa border crossing from Mexico into the United States. “That’s too much of a coincidence. Your Mexican bomber isn’t really Mexican, is he?”
“He says he’s from Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico. He doesn’t speak any language except Spanish—we’re sure of that much. We questioned him about Santiago de Querétaro and growing up in Mexico. Once we got into the details, he knew a lot of the basic information, but he wasn’t convincing. When pressed, he came up with the name of a street where he says he grew up. He described a pretty standard Mexican slum, but we don’t believe the street exists. There were other things as well that lead us to believe he’s lying.”
“What do you think he’s covering up?”
Ehud pinched his lower lip as he glanced around the room and lowered his voice. “We found something on one of his boots.”
“Okay …” Jack said. “What did you find?”
“A speck of plutonium-239 stuck in the lugs of the sole.”
Jack stared at the man for a long moment. “He certainly didn’t pick that up walking around in Santiago de Querétaro.”
“Nor did he get his suicide vest there, either. The materials that were used in it are common throughout the Middle East, but not Mexico.”
“Any suspicions where he picked up plutonium?” Jack asked.
Ehud shrugged unhappily. “Pakistan? Iran? A terrorist group bringing material out of Russia? Hard to tell.”
“Were you able to get anything useful out of him?”
“We told him that we found nuclear material in the sole of his boot. We pressed him about where he could have picked it up. We pressed him hard. He seemed confused about everything, including how to answer our questions.
“He seemed lost and disoriented. He started to cry. He cried for hours and hours as we continued to ask him questions in Spanish. It seemed like being captured was something that had never crossed his mind before and now that he was away from the people he knew, he didn’t know what to do or how to answer. He knew, though, that he wasn’t supposed to cooperate.
“We put him back in a cell to let him think about it and get a little sleep before we questioned him again. Captives expect torture. Letting them get some sleep instead often helps soften them up so they will begin answering a few questions. A few answers eventually lead to a few more, and so it goes.
“Sometime while the guards were changing, he managed to kill himself.”
“He killed himself?” Jack was stunned. “How could that happen? You know quite well that these terrorists are suicide risks. You take precautions to prevent it. Wasn’t he in a straitjacket or something like that to prevent him from killing himself?”
“Yes, of course.” Ehud sighed. “You won’t believe it. He apparently stood up off the floor—likely on the toilet—and did a backflip to come down on his head and break his neck. He was fine one minute, the next minute his neck was broken and he was dead.
“But he did unwittingly leave us one clue before he died.”
“What’s that?” Jack asked.
“His arms and hands were restrained, so he rubbed his nose until it was bleeding and wrote ‘Allahu Akbar’ on the wall.”
“That doesn’t sound very Mexican,” Jack said.
“We’re running DNA analysis to see if we can come up with his country of origin,” Dvora told him.