A
aron had grown bored from the stagnant sitting, hating the slow pace and tedious reality of intelligence work. Used to planning missions, then executing with a definitive result, he had little patience for the endless pools of potential outcomes that was the life of a case officer. He dealt in concrete operations, with a clear-cut end state, but the world of Mossad was not like that. It was a universe of possibilities, with the case officer trying to decide if this or that dedication of effort would pay off, but never knowing for sure if he wasn’t missing an opportunity elsewhere.
Eventually, as the night grew long, the clerk left his shop. Sitting in a chipped plastic chair next to a barbershop, his head nodding, Aaron caught the movement and perked up. He concentrated on the security in play at the café. To his relief, there was none. The clerk turned on no alarms nor set any other electronic trip wires. He simply locked the glass door to the little cubicle he’d rented in the bus station. Which, given the location, made sense. It would be very hard to break into his shop inside a bus station that operated twenty-four/seven, especially since the café to the left—the one with the kid—never closed.
Aaron focused on where the clerk put his keys, then faded back, letting the man take the stairs. He followed discreetly behind.
The clerk went directly to the metro station, descending into the darkness. Due to the time of night, there wasn’t a lot of traffic accessing the train, and Aaron realized he was in trouble. If he entered, the clerk would recognize him from his previous encounter, precluding any further operations. He hung outside for a moment, debating, then heard a crowd approaching. He looked behind him and saw a large crew of men and women, all wearing waiter and waitress uniforms. Something had just closed for the night, and the employees were giving him some cover.
The group walked down the stairs and he tagged along in the back, reaching the station platform five steps behind them. Dodging in the flow of people, he located his target, now standing at the edge and waiting for the train.
The platform was fairly new and clean. He would have appreciated something a little more archaic, with faded lighting, strange odors, and shadowed crannies like other countries he’d operated within, but this one was modern, well lit, and had digital cameras on the fore and aft of the platform.
A tougher nut to crack, but not impossible. He’d be on camera, but if he did it right, he wouldn’t spike. The man wouldn’t even know he had been there.
He needed five seconds. An accomplished pickpocket would only take a second or two, but he would have to get the key, press it into clay, then return it to the rightful owner without him knowing it had gone missing. Of course, it all depended on the situation and the target, but having done this multiple times, he knew the average was five seconds.
He worked his way through the crowd, getting right behind the target, wishing he had a Samson teammate here. Using three people for the operation would guarantee success. But wishing didn’t make it so.
He positioned behind the man and considered his options. Like a street magician, he needed the target to focus on something else while he picked the pocket.
The crowd was thick just to the left of the target, and the workers from the restaurant were rowdy. Two girls were bouncing up and down and singing, while the men cheered them on. One girl was dancing closer and closer to the edge of the platform, imitating the twerking she’d seen in US music videos. Everyone was looking at her, including the target, ogling the antics with lecherous grins.
Aaron shifted his position and waited. He saw the headlights for the metro train in the distance and paused until the light bathed the platform itself. When he was sure of the timing, he backed into one of the waiters cheering on the dancers and gave him a hip check. Caught off guard on the edge of the platform, the man windmilled his arms to regain his balance, which he managed to do. But not before bumping into the girl.
She fell onto the tracks.
The crowd went wild, screaming and yelling, dashing in to help her back onto the platform. The target joined the fray, and Aaron glided in behind. The old clerk leaned over, offering his arm, and Aaron slipped his hand into the man’s coat, retrieving the key ring.
He turned away, pulled out a container the size of a small soap dish, and imprinted the three keys on the ring in a block of clay. Jamming the lid closed, he whirled back around and helped pull the woman to safety, slipping the keys into the pocket of the target to his left.
Getting her off of the tracks, the target recognized Aaron, his eyes puzzled, but he said nothing, focusing on the hysterical girl’s near-death experience. Back on the platform, everyone began a relieved discussion, talking and shouting at how close disaster had been as the train pulled into the station.
In the confusion, Aaron slipped away.
Two days later he returned to the bus terminal, armed with three keys. He repeated his static OP at the barber shop, watching the clerk leave the station. Waiting an additional hour, he approached the Internet café as if he belonged. He worked through the keys until he found the one that matched the lock. Glancing to his left, he saw the kid at the adjacent café looking at him curiously. He ignored him and entered, moving straight to the location of the lockbox.
He pulled it out and opened the lid, seeing the thumb drive inside. He’d just put his hand on the drive when he heard, “What are you doing in here?”
Aaron snapped his head up, his body now fired with adrenaline, only one thought in his mind:
Eliminate the threat.
He said, “I was supposed to get this. The clerk gave me the key.”
He held them up while cursing himself for not learning the clerk’s name. For not preparing a suitable cover.
The kid said, “Mustafa never lets anyone in here after he closes. Why didn’t you get it when he was here?”
Aaron said, “Close the door. We need to talk.”
The glass of the café was mirrored with privacy film, leaving the open door the only access to witnesses. Of which there were many wandering about outside. Stupidly, believing his story, the kid did as he asked, sliding the glass door until it clicked.
He said, “So what are you doing?”
Aaron said, “Nothing. Like I said, I’m just getting something Mustafa owed me. Come here. I’ll show you. I’m not stealing anything.”
He held up the thumb drive and said, “This is what I came for.”
The kid approached for a closer look, and Aaron struck.
Having spent over twenty years studying Krav Maga, Aaron’s biggest threat was killing the kid outright. The art itself had no subtlety, and was designed simply to destroy an opponent. There were no subduing or compliance holds in Aaron’s repertoire.
Aaron whipped his elbow around and caught the teenager directly across the nose. He heard it shatter with a gristly pop, followed by an explosion of blood as the kid began to collapse, arms flailing about, eyes squeezed shut in pain.
Aaron caught him, then lowered him to the ground. He dragged the body just outside of the door to the café, then hollered into the adjacent shop, where the kid worked, looking for a manager. When people gathered, leaving their computers to help, he professed innocence, acting confused and scared by the blood. As the crowd grew, he had faded back, leaving the scene. He knew the entire scenario would make the highlight reel on local television, but Turkey wasn’t Israel. It would be investigated and dropped within hours due to a lack of leads.
The kid would do what he could, but with the thousands of people passing through the bus station, the investigation would reach a dead end that the police would have no heart pursuing. Logically, the old man in the café wouldn’t lift a finger to help the investigation, even when he saw the thumb drive missing. He knew he was doing wrong, and wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of Turkish authorities. He’d proclaim no knowledge, and the kid with the broken nose would end up living with the mystery for the rest of his life.
He’d worried that the sloppiness of the action would cause his Mossad masters to question his judgment and perhaps even his leadership of Samson. Now, staring at his computer screen and seeing the threat Boris had exposed, he knew his activities had been worth it. It wasn’t clean by any stretch, but Mossad actions were rarely clean. Risk was an inevitable part of the game, and the Israeli Special Forces lived to push the envelope. He’d made a choice, and his decision had been right. Because of it, one of the most efficient killing machines on earth was coming his way.
His men.
K
eeping my distance, I sat down on a little park bench while surreptitiously watching Chiclet. Jennifer followed suit, pretending to enjoy the sight of the children playing in a fountain to our front, but I knew her real focus: trying to determine if there was someone else conducting surveillance on our target.
After our little climb yesterday, we’d made it inside the hotel without getting compromised—the closest being when Jennifer went to retrieve her shoes and had to explain to the bellboy why she was walking around the premises digging in the bushes—and had begun to monitor Chiclet’s hotel room.
The first thing we had done—before installing the microphone yesterday—was to initiate a cell phone IMSI grabber while we knew the room was still empty. A device about the size of a laptop with a small cellular antenna poking out of the side, it duplicated the actions of a cell tower and tricked any cell phone within a hundred meters into registering with it. It would suck them in, record the mobile subscriber number—the IMSI—then reject it back into the cell network. What we wanted was a footprint when Chiclet wasn’t around so that when he returned, we could repeat the process and identify his phone.
After getting recovered into Retro’s room from our monkey climb, we’d fired up the IMSI grabber, knowing Chiclet had a cell phone that was sniffing for a tower. Siphoning out all the previous phones from the earlier grab, we ended up with four new ones. Four was a little too much to hand to the NSA for content. They’d call it a fishing expedition, and with all the troubles they’d had recently, they would be in no mood to play ball, sending enquiries we at the Taskforce didn’t want to answer.
It was hard enough getting our requests into the greater system without questions, and an enormous Taskforce infrastructure had been built to do just that. The employees of the CIA, NSA, NGA, and every other three-letter agency screamed at anyone who would listen that they were following the law, and that was true, but they didn’t know about the Taskforce. We were an element working outside their scope, doing exactly what they claimed they weren’t.
It was a dangerous place to be in today’s world, but it was necessary. We’d prevented some potentially catastrophic attacks in the last few years, but we couldn’t do it on our own. We weren’t omnipotent. We still had to leverage the leviathan known as the US Intelligence Community. We just had to do it in a manner that remained beneath the radar—a radar that had become particularly sensitive in the last eighteen months. Because of it, feeding four numbers to the NSA was too many. It was something we’d have to refine ourselves.
We’d waited, listening on our installed microphone until we heard him begin to dial his phone, then waited a beat more until we heard him talking, ensuring that his cell was connected and passing data. We fired up the IMSI grabber, sucking in his phone, disconnecting it from the tower, and identifying his specific number. It was interference I didn’t like, as it was a direct manipulation. Although benign—after all, cell phones dropped signal all the damn time—it was something a paranoid person could run with, seeing spies in the woodwork.
And everyone we tracked was paranoid.
It turned out that we didn’t have to worry about Chiclet’s paranoia. We had to worry about our own. The NSA ran the number through its giant metadata repository, and the phone had a link to a US number. So they wouldn’t track it. Wouldn’t listen to it. Wouldn’t do anything
at all
with it.
The very database that was supposed to help find terrorists was now being used to identify numbers that they would in no way, never, ever look at. Since this phone had talked to a US cell sometime in the past, it was now off-limits until we could prove its terrorist heritage or get a warrant through the FISA court. Never mind that the phone we wanted was clearly a foreign target—and well within the legal framework of the NSA—because of public reaction to fantastical news stories they had become reactionary, refusing to investigate anything that had a US person’s taint without first covering their asses with paperwork. Since we in the Taskforce couldn’t prove anything at all without exposing ourselves—much less go to court for a warrant—Chiclet’s phone was done. A delicious irony, to say the least.
In the end, crying about it was a waste of time. I just had to get the NSA what they wanted: a phone that wasn’t tainted.
Chiclet had made that single call during the night. Because of the NSA proscriptions, we couldn’t get the transcripts from both parties, but at least we had what he said through our microphone implant earlier. He was going out to meet someone, and that someone would give him further instructions. Which meant we were swinging into action.
We wanted to do two things: one, identify the person he met for further exploration and intelligence, and two, drive him to a different cell phone so we could track his conversations.
The first objective would require a full-court press with the entire team, but the surveillance would have to be very, very loose. Someone else was potentially tracking him, and we didn’t want to get snagged in their surveillance effort. We had no idea who it was, but clearly they weren’t working with him, as the digital recorder had been emplaced without his knowledge. We’d just have to be very careful on the follow, checking to see if he had anyone on him.
As for the second objective, that was easy. Jennifer and I staged in the lobby of the Princess hotel the following morning, drinking coffee. Chiclet had repeated the meeting time, so we knew that. We just didn’t know the location. We set up way early to catch him in case he had some other plan in mind. Which he did, coming out of the hotel a full hour and a half before the meeting.
Jennifer saw him exit the elevator and hissed, giving me barely enough time to pull up our Stiletto. An electromagnetic pulse device, it looked like a compact telephoto lens mounted on a rail with a pistol grip. When triggered, it sent out an EMP that had the ability to render any small electronic device unusable. Basically, it fried the circuit boards of modern electronics like a mini–nuclear blast.
On the surface, it sounded cool, but the gun wasn’t a panacea since it had issues with backsplash that could cause the person using it to lose everything from his digital watch to a complete communications suite, depending on how shielded the electronics were.
Jennifer scooted her chair to the left, blocking my actions, letting me bring the gun to bear. She held up a menu, and I fired from the hip, seeing the small LCD graph at the back of the gun begin to trip like a seismograph registering an earthquake. I held it in place, tracking Chiclet’s movement until he was out of the building. Frying his phone and anything else electronic he had on him.
From there the team picked up surveillance, following Chiclet all over the place. He remained on foot and our follow was very, very loose, but he didn’t meet anyone. Eventually, Jennifer and I rotated back into the mix as we switched out surveillance operatives, and we had him for the last few minutes.
The team followed him for close to two hours, and saw nothing to indicate he was under another team’s surveillance, so maybe whoever was on him was just bugging his room. Maybe it was the Bulgarians, keeping tabs on someone they thought was potentially bad. Maybe it was nothing.
I watched Chiclet go across the promenade to a small convenience store, buying a bottle of water. From there, he came back across, walking right by us as if he had a destination in mind. He stopped outside a McDonald’s, the ubiquitous symbol of democracy, and checked his watch. I’d seen earlier that it had hands, but if it had a battery, it wasn’t going to help him any.
It didn’t. I saw him shake it up and down, then grab the shirt of a man to his left, asking a question. When the man replied, Akinbo hurried away, running to a storefront next door and entering.
I raised my eyes to the signage above the door and saw he’d entered a casino. An intrusion point that would demand a response, as I was pretty sure he wasn’t looking to increase his bankroll. Watching the children play in the fountain, I urgently wanted to get someone inside. Preferably me, but that would be stupid, since Jennifer and I had been on Chiclet long enough to raise our heat state. It was time to switch the eye, but not before I determined if someone else was on him.
I waited a few more seconds, until I was sure anyone that would have been following him would have committed, running through my head the heat state of everyone on the team. I keyed my mike. “Decoy, Decoy, what’s your status?”
“At your six. I have you in sight.”
“Roger. You see the casino to my three o’clock? Efbet Casino?”
“Yeah.”
“Chiclet’s inside. Need you to conduct an intrusion.”
He said, “Roger,” then I heard Knuckles come on. “You sure, Pike? He’ll be on candid camera from a thousand different angles.”
“I know, but this is the endgame. Chiclet panicked a minute ago before he entered. He’s meeting someone in there, and we need to confirm. If it burns Decoy, it burns him.”
I keyed off in time to see Decoy enter the front door.