CHAPTER 20
T
he United Nations Secretary-General had planned a retreat for the full SMG to the picturesque Austrian village of Alpbach. That’s where the Mossad had decided to take out Pierre Damien. Nava Itzik and her Metsada team were mobilized and tasked with the assignment. Ben Mordechai would carry out the hit.
Alpbach looked like it had been built by Hollywood set designers. Cradled in a narrow valley, surrounded by lush meadows, the flowerboxes of its wooden chalets exploded in riots of color. Soaring pines gave way to jagged mountain peaks. It was clear why it had been voted Austria’s most beautiful village.
Though not given to such thoughts, Bentzi had found himself thinking that there was probably no more perfect place for a honeymoon. But he hadn’t come to Austria for a honeymoon. He had come to kill Pierre Damien.
The Institute was very nervous about the assignment. Not only because their target was a diplomat who held dual American and Canadian citizenship but also because a previous Metsada team had botched the assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, the cofounder of the military wing of Hamas.
Al-Mabhouh had been wanted for numerous offenses, including the killing of two Israeli soldiers, as well as the purchase of arms from Iran to be used in Gaza.
The Institute had tracked Al-Mabhouh from Damascus to the Al
Bustan Rotana hotel in Dubai. So had Jordanian Intelligence, which wanted to capture him and bring him back to Jordan to stand trial. Instead of taking a breath and figuring out how to handle the Jordanians, the Metsada rushed their operation. Almost immediately, mistakes started happening. It was amateur hour.
Though they succeeded in killing Al-Mabhouh, they didn’t succeed in making it look like he had died of natural causes. It took ten days, but Dubai officials eventually ruled it a homicide and began piecing together what had happened. In the end, still images from CCTV cameras of twenty-six Mossad agents were released to the press, as well as the names and countries of origin on the passports used to enter the country.
Once the names were out there, it became evident that the Mossad had stolen the identities of Israelis who held dual citizenship in Great Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia. The Dubai authorities also arrested two Palestinian Fatah operatives who had been assisting the Mossad team.
It wasn’t as bad as the botched CIA operation several years earlier to snatch radical Egyptian cleric Abu Omar off the streets of Milan, but it was an embarrassment nonetheless. The Institute wanted the smallest footprint possible and absolutely no mistakes. The message had been sent from the top—if you screw up, don’t come home.
The Institute had done its homework. They knew Pierre Damien—his quirks and idiosyncrasies, habits and routines. They also knew diplomatic boondoggles, which was exactly what the SMG retreat to Austria was.
There was always a big night at these things and for theirs, they had rented out the best restaurant in town. That was when Nava wanted to strike. Bentzi had agreed. Damien would eat too much and drink too much, making him an easier target and his “accidental” death all the more believable.
The Under-Secretaries-General departed the chalet hotel in a convoy of vans and minibuses accompanied by their UN security teams.
The housekeeping staff had been instructed to begin their turndown as soon as the guests had left for dinner. Bentzi watched from outside.
Once Damien’s room had been serviced, he exited his vehicle, threw on a small backpack, and approached the chalet.
It was overcast, and there were no streetlights in the village.
Bentzi avoided the small stay-behind team and worked his way around back. It wasn’t a good night for his hands. He had difficulty climbing, and it took longer than it should have. When he finally reached Damien’s third-floor balcony, his hands were in a lot of pain.
He always carried two pills in a small paper envelope just in case. Pausing, he popped both and then, after pulling on a pair of special latex gloves, went to work on the lock for the large glass door.
The suite resembled the pictures he had viewed on the hotel’s web site. The walls were clad in knotty pine, the floors covered with a patterned carpet similar to the drapes. A feather duvet lay across the foot of the bed, and a row of thick pillows in perfectly pressed cases were staged along the headboard. The crisp, white sheets had been turned down and bottles of water had been left next to the bed along with a card forecasting tomorrow’s weather. After checking the bathroom, Bentzi made his way into the sitting room.
There was a couch, a coffee table, two side chairs, and a dresser. In the corner was a vintage tile stove. Not far from it was a desk. What there wasn’t, was a laptop.
The Institute wanted a copy of Damien’s hard drive. Because the death was supposed to look like an accident and not a robbery, the computer needed to remain behind. Damien had left for the dinner empty-handed, so it had to be somewhere in the room.
Bentzi checked the front closet, and there, on a luggage stand, was Damien’s suitcase.
It was a ubiquitous, soft-sided piece. It’s main compartment had been zippered and locked shut. Removing a pen, Bentzi applied pressure to the teeth of the seam and easily opened the zippered area. Inside, was a locked hard-sided briefcase. Sliding it out, he took it over to the desk.
The locks were tricky and the pain in his hands only compounded their difficulty. He took a deep breath and willed himself to slow down. Damien and his colleagues would only just be getting into their salads by
this point. Even so, Bentzi radioed his team surveilling the restaurant for a situation report.
Once word came back that the party was still on cocktails, Bentzi relaxed and focused back on the case.
The thin picks were a challenge for him to hold, much less manipulate with his crooked fingers. The job should have taken seconds, not minutes. Had Nava known the state his hands were in, she would have replaced him. But she didn’t know, and Bentzi was determined to see his assignment through.
When he finally had the case open, he lifted the lid and looked inside. There were several file folders on top. Beneath those were Damien’s laptop and an additional cell phone. He had been spotted using an Apple phone and this one appeared to be an Android. Bentzi took it out and set it next to the case on the desk. The laptop would take the longest, so he decided to work on it first.
Opening his backpack, he removed a small tool kit and extracted an electric screwdriver. Once he had found the right sized head, he flipped the computer over and removed the screws from the bottom.
With the cover off, he slid an incredibly sophisticated black box the size of a paperback from his pack and began attaching leads to different places inside the laptop. He then depressed a power button on the black box and began to copy the hard drive.
The device used to suck the data out of the cell phone was smaller, about the size of a hockey puck. After finding the right USB cable, he connected the two and powered up the phone.
As the electronics did their work, he opened the physical folders and sifted through the papers. The first two were spreadsheets with budgets—dry, boring data that appeared related to Damien’s businesses. But the contents of the next folder stopped Ben Mordechai cold.
The cover page was innocuously labeled “Outcome Conference,” yet what he found on the pages that followed was anything but innocuous.
It had been prepared for a subgroup of the SMG called the “Plenary Panel” or P2 for short. Bentzi had never heard of it. Members of the panel were neither identified by name, nor their country of origin, only by number—one through seven.
After acknowledging a string of recent setbacks, the document outlined P2’s chilling goals:
1. Decrease current human population below five hundred million and keep it in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a “living” new language.
4. Redistribute global wealth under the more acceptable term “global public goods.”
5. Rebalance personal rights with “social duties.”
6. Replace passion, faith, and tradition with reason.
7. Make clever use of new technologies to go around national governments and establish direct ties with citizens.
8. Rebrand global governance as equitable, efficient, and the logical next step in human evolution.
9. Discredit, delegitimize, and dismantle the idea of the nation state/national sovereignty.
10. Prepare a mechanism to neutralize any challenges to United Nations’ authority.
Ben Mordechai couldn’t believe what he was reading. It was a blueprint for revolution. If Che Guevara was right and revolution wasn’t an apple that fell when it was ripe, but rather was made to fall, then it looked like the Plenary Panel was shaking the entire global tree.
They identified the biggest obstacles to achieving their goals as the United States and Israel. With the two nations overwhelmed and laid low by a massive event, the panel was confident that no one would stand in the United Nations’ way.
Damien’s focus on weakening both countries began to make more sense. What wasn’t clear, though, was what this massive event was intended to be and when it would take place.
In the margins were Damien’s handwritten notes. There was a three-letter designator,
A-H-F
, followed by words like
pathogenicity
,
absolute risk
, and
dose response
.
Mordechai had more questions than answers.
Did the notes refer to
a
chemical attack? Biological? Something else entirely? When was it set to take place, what was Damien’s role, and who were the other members of the panel?
The only thing Mordechai knew for sure was that they couldn’t kill Damien. Not now. Not with so many unanswered questions.
After photographing all of the documents with his phone, he reassembled the laptop and put everything in the room back the way he had found it. Then, he radioed the team that they had to abort.
Nava was livid. The Institute was going to be furious. She demanded to know why. Mordechai told her to trust him and then broke off communication as he slipped out of the hotel the same way he had come in.
He no longer cared about the pain in his hands. All he cared about was the information that he had discovered in Damien’s room. The idea that a cabal within the United Nations hierarchy was planning a coup involving something so catastrophic that Israel and the United States would be too overwhelmed to respond was almost unimaginable.
Almost
.
He had seen enough to know that anything was possible, especially when it came to those who sought power. Around the world, the majority of countries were ruled either by dictatorships or some form of Democratic Socialism. In those nations, power resided in the state. Only a handful of countries were truly free, with power residing in the hands of individual citizens. Any attempt to seat some sort of global system of government would have to sideline Israel and the United States first, or it would never succeed.
In his notes about dealing with the United States, Damien had scribbled two letters—
MC. Were they initials? Roman numerals?
He was anxious to have minds back at the Mossad unpack everything and begin connecting the dots.
While Nava had been angry about Mordechai pulling the plug on her operation, when he showed her the documents, she eventually conceded that it had been the right thing to do.
Once they were back in Tel Aviv and had turned over all the materials to the Institute, all they could do was wait.
Their biggest expectation was for what would be pulled off Damien’s hard drive and cell phone. Both turned out to be a bust. He was using a new form of encryption that they had never encountered before. Without
his passwords, there was no telling how long it would take to crack. And even if they could crack it, there was no telling what they would find and if it would be in time. That was why Mordechai had decided to activate Helena.
With her background working for a human trafficking NGO, it didn’t take much to align her with a program at the United Nations in Geneva. She used her Eastern European passport. There was nothing in her file or the apartment that had been set up for her to connect her to Israel.
The fact that she was not a UN employee, but rather working on a co-UN/NGO trafficking program, was especially important. Damien wouldn’t have wanted to run afoul of the UN’s code of ethics regarding dating subordinates. It happened all the time, but he took his role as Under-Secretary-General seriously. He didn’t need a scandal hovering over him. Not with everything he had planned.
All Bentzi had to do was to “dangle” Helena. Damien’s dick would take over and do the rest.
He was well-known for the attractive women he dated. His relationships were like monsoon season, steamy and short. He showered his girlfriends with gifts and expensive trips and as soon as he grew bored, he was on to the next.
He liked the ambiance of the bar at La Réserve Genève hotel. The views were exceptional, they had an excellent selection of whiskeys, vodkas, and cognacs, and their sushi chef was top-notch. The fact that it was close to his apartment was icing on the cake.
Bentzi parked Helena in a provocative but stylish cocktail dress at La Réserve Genève and let nature take its course.
Damien wasn’t shy. He made a beeline right for her, and she played him like a pro. They had one drink together before she announced that she had to leave. He offered her a ride home. She declined. He asked if he might have her phone number. She said no. He offered her his personal card with his cell phone number written on the back. She placed it on the table and didn’t bother to pick it back up.
The only personal information she had revealed was that she was temporarily assigned to a human trafficking project at the UN.
The next day, there were flowers on her desk. Inside the envelope was
the card Damien had handed her and which she had left on the table the night before. She gave the flowers to one of her colleagues.