Authors: Gary Haynes
State of Attack (30 page)
“It’s not much to go on,” she said. “You could be describing yourself, except you look strong and you say he looks thin.”
Sanaa stood up from the table and walked over to one of the wooden shelves. She lifted off a tin box about three inches in diameter, and he saw the outline of her breasts against her light brown, long-sleeved dress. She brought it over to the table and placed it down. She eased off the lid and, after removing a sewing kit, removed what he knew to be a false bottom. She took out a small object, which Tom thought looked like a gelatine protein pill.
She looked down at the pill. “It won’t dissolve inside you,” she said. “It’s a GPS sensor. Just don’t eat any prunes until we are finished.”
“Finished? Do you have some information?” he asked.
Ignoring him, she said, “The GPS is wrapped in an insoluble membrane. Take it. Swallow it.”
He hesitated at first, without really knowing why, except that from that moment on he could be tracked, which had never been something he’d been keen on. He’d made sure his charges back in the States wore GPS trackers, and the Secretary of State, of course, but never an ingested one. But he took it from her, took a mouthful of coffee, and swallowed it.
She got up again and went to a drawer beside the sink. She took out a thin and folded light blue towel. Unwrapping it as she came back to her chair, she placed the towel down on the table. There were four sachets there.
“Antidiarrhoeal drugs,” she said. “They taste like hell so take them with your coffee. They will prevent what nature intended for at least four days.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said.
She looked hard at him. “Remember that I am a woman here and you are a man. Your American manners may be regarded as unseemly if you think like you do back home.”
Tom nodded.
He thought the membrane GPS was a simple but good idea. Unless the armed wing of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, or any other terrorist group in Gaza did full body X-rays, which he doubted they would, nothing could detect it. He knew that the bomb makers in Yemen were developing surgically implanted devices and non-metallic, low vapour ones known as AEDs, or artful explosive devices, but they wouldn’t expect a Westerner to go to such lengths, or rather he hoped they wouldn’t.
“When we go out later, don’t carry your weapon. It’s too hard to conceal, and someone will think you are what you are, especially since you are a stranger. Tom Dupree. Do you have French ancestry?”
“Yes,” he said, knowing that the Mossad back in Israel had known his name and had passed it on.
She ducked down under the table and brought up a pair of leather sandals. “But these could save your life,” she said, handing them to him. “There’s a detachable heel for another GPS. If they find it, they’ll think you’re off the radar.”
Tom thought that was sound reasoning.
Unabashed, she held up the hem of her dress. “Mine,” she said. “Now we must go.”
“Go where?”
“To meet an asset. Be nice to him. He doesn’t trust anyone. You will see his bodyguards drinking coffee at nearby tables. He may even have a couple of snipers on the flat roofs. Ignore them. He says he has information on where Ibrahim is staying.”
Sanaa drove Tom along Gaza’s main street, Omar Mukhtar Street, and onto the main coastal road, Ahmad Orabi/Rasheed Street, to the Rimal district, which meant sands, roughly two miles from the city centre. She stopped in Southern Rimal beside a small square made of grey paving stones, surrounded by narrow cafés, restaurants and
qahwa,
or coffeehouses, with concrete apartments above.
As Tom got out, the smell of roasting beans and fried garlic assaulted his nostrils. Besides the fixed structures there were a few makeshift stalls, selling kebabs and Arabic candy. They walked to a plastic table and chairs on the cracked sidewalk, where Tom saw a man sitting alone.
He was wearing a cheap, threadbare dark grey suit and smoking a cigarette. Before him on the table were a glass of Arabic tea and bowls of humus, chillies and chickpeas. He was unshaven and balding. He had spindly arms and his shoes were scuffed. When they got to the table, he got up to greet Sanaa. His front teeth, Tom noticed, were black and yellow and worn down.
He gestured for them both to sit down at the two empty chairs but he didn’t acknowledge Tom, who looked around, noticing that there were about twenty men sitting outside the establishments, some of whom were looking in their direction. He didn’t know whether they were wary of him, or drawn to Sanaa. Some were, no doubt, the asset’s bodyguards.
The man stubbed out his cigarette in a china bowl but immediately lit up another one. He hunched over towards Sanaa, and Tom could tell that she disliked the man, although she was masking it as best she could.
“Some of the fighters, the younger ones, it has to be said, are saying that he has come to rid them of the Jews. That he will bring a plague from Allah upon them. Their American weapons will not be able to help them. Not even the Iron Dome will help them,” the man said, referring to Israel’s missile defence system. “But he’s not here. He was, but he’s gone. He’s gone over the northern border to Lebanon via a tunnel.”
“Are you sure?” Sanaa said.
“Oh yes. Very sure. He was only here for a day. No more.”
“Why didn’t you tell Sanaa before?” Tom said.
He saw the man’s bloodshot eyes look at him with barely concealed disdain. He turned and addressed Sanaa.
“I found out ten minutes ago.” The man put his hand into his inside jacket pocket and took out an old-fashioned cell. “On my cellphone. Do you want to see the text?”
“Yes,” Tom said, reaching over to it.
But Sanaa gently put her fingers on the top of Tom’s hand and he withdrew it.
“That won’t be necessary,” she said.
The man got up. “I have drunk too much tea,” he said, heading for the nearest doorway, with thin blue and white strips of plastic hanging down to keep the night insects out.
“How much are you paying him for that?” Tom asked.
“Now we have to leave,” she said, ignoring him. “You can catch a taxi to a hotel along the coast here.”
Tom nodded. He had twenty thousand Israeli Shekels in his pocket, a little fewer than six thousand US dollars, and had been told that he couldn’t stay in Sanaa’s apartment. It would be noted and it would be frowned upon and her life would be at risk because of it.
Tom watched her take out her car keys. She looked at him. Her mouth started to form a word but she swallowed it. She put out her hand to touch his fingers but withdrew it halfway across the table.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“For your wasted journey.”
She got up and walked over to where her car was parked and Tom watched her all the way. As she ducked in and pulled away, he sensed the atmosphere change. He stood up and looked around. Old men nodded sagely, as the younger boys were shooed away.
Six men got up in his sphere of vision; men who had a certain look and gait and demeanour that he was more than familiar with. He knew them to be killers.
With that a truck came from a side alley to the left, another up the street from the right, and both slowed to a stop, blocking Tom’s exit points. A few other men got up silently and walked away. The six men drew handguns and tightened the circle.
They’re not bodyguards for the asset, Tom thought, they’re Hamas, or some other terrorist outfit, and I’ve been played. It’s happening again, he thought. It’s happening again.
Three blocks away, Sanaa pulled up at the kerb after a black Mercedes behind her had flashed its headlights. She was sitting ramrod straight, he hands gripping the wheel, her jaw clenched. She heard the footsteps on the tarmac road and glanced at the side mirror. It was the man who had contacted her in a market outside a fruit stall just yesterday.
He’d showed her a video on her cellphone then. It had been Miriam and her dead husband’s mother and father. They had been cowering in the corner of a room, their mouths taped, their limbs bound. When a masked man had walked into view, a knife in his hand, she’d seen the fear in her daughter’s eyes, and she’d vomited beside the stall.
The man, who’d come up to her shoulder, and was stocky, with fingers like fat cigars, opened the car door now, and she shuddered as he held up the same cellphone again with his free hand. He put the cell in front of her face.
“Look,” he said. “They are alive. They are safe. They are back in Tel Aviv.”
She started to weep, deciding that she would have to ensure that they were put into a form of witness protection programme, at least for a couple of months. The people who had taken them and had made the video were Arab Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, and they were over one and a half million in Israel.
As the man walked back to the Mercedes, she felt an almost overpowering sense of relief. But the American didn’t deserve to be where she’d sent him, she thought. They’d work on him for weeks, months even. He was an agent, and he knew things, things that they’d want to know. But in her heart she knew that she’d handed him to Ibrahim, and that was why they had wanted him so badly. They had even sounded excited when she told them who was coming to Gaza.
When they’d first found her, they’d told her that Major Rosen had given her up as he’d been tortured and they’d sent her a video of his final hours and his death. She’d heard him saying her name, so that she’d known they weren’t fakers. They’d said the same would have happened to her, except she had the chance to live if she’d give them something worthwhile. Tom had been it. She guessed they’d taken what was left of her family to ensure she wouldn’t back out at the last moment. But she knew that they would never let her go back to Israel alive, that now she was a traitor she would have to continue to be so, over and over again.
Sanaa took out a secure cellphone from a secret compartment beneath the dash above the passenger seat, where she also kept a Glock 9mm. She rang the Mossad and asked to speak with her boss, David Steinman. Through her tears she told him what she’d done and why. Then she told him about the GPS Tom had swallowed, but didn’t expect any sympathy.
She asked if he could ensure that Miriam and her husband’s parents could be looked after by the Mossad for a few months. Ibrahim had come back to Palestine, though, that much was assured, and he was still here, even though the American had been told he’d gone to Lebanon. Last, she asked for his forgiveness.
Steinman didn’t say a word on the other end of the line. She disconnected the call, put the cell back into the compartment, and took out the Glock. Without a moment’s hesitation she chambered a round, released the safety, put the cold polymer into her mouth and squeezed the trigger.
From a distance, the only thing visible was the flash of the muzzle blast, like a firecracker in the night.
At Langley, Crane took a call on his secure landline from Steinman. Tom had been taken. But they’d located where he was via an internal GPS tracker. The one in his sandal was still functioning, too, and up until about ten minutes ago that had shown the same location in the north of the Gaza Strip. Crane knew that that meant Tom was either dead, or being held captive. Then Steinman confessed about the betrayal by one of his operatives and the reason for it, but Crane wasn’t interested in her, or, he had to admit, her family.
“What about Ibrahim?” he asked.
“We’ve pinpointed forty sites, using a network of assets and core collectors. All of them have been verified at least three times independently. We have to believe that our man is in one of them. Esther, known there as Sanaa, told me before she killed herself that Ibrahim was back in the Palestinian territories and she confirmed that that wasn’t a lie. I believe that to be the case. We will bomb the hell out of every house we know to be used by Hamas in the hope we might kill the bastard. We will send in Special Forces. We will call it retaliation for Hamas rockets targeting Israeli civilians.”
You always do, Crane thought, knowing there would be significant collateral damage, and that meant old men, women and children.
But he said, “Don’t waste any time.”
He wondered if one day he would pay a high price for his sins. He knew that day might be fast approaching. He’d made a decision instantly. He would meet with the director, and if she didn’t agree to it, he’d do it anyway. That would cost him his pension, maybe get him twenty years in a Federal prison, but it was something he had to do.
Ibrahim had travelled to Egypt under his American passport and had been met by his brothers in Sinai as before. He’d kept his face clean-shaven there, but had dyed his hair a soft red. Some Palestinians, in common with others in the Arab world, especially in neighbouring Jordan, had this colouring, and those that did typically had paler skin and Caucasian features.
He’d put green contact lenses into his eyes and covered them with steel-rimmed eyeglasses. He’d risked a shorter tunnel, closer to the Egyptian side of Rafah city, convincing himself that he’d overcome his phobia.
But he’d trembled with fear with every hunched-over step. The tunnel had been lower as well as shorter, and an Israeli air raid had knocked out the lights. Calf-high, foul-smelling water had seeped through the support beams, and rats had crawled up his legs. If it hadn’t been for his prayers, he’d known he would have passed out.
He’d planned to meet up with fellow jihadists in Brussels before moving on to Hamburg. He’d planned to prime them, but that wouldn’t happen now, due, primarily, he believed, to the actions of his fellow American, Tom Dupree.
As he travelled though the familiar back streets of Gaza now, past the old cars and corrugated roofs, past the bomb damage and signs of a shattered infrastructure, he thought about his life before Islam. It was as if he’d been a different person, a shell of person, a person out of sync with all he’d surveyed.
He had never known his parents, or any of his kin. He’d been given up, he’d suspected. He’d been brought up in various children’s institutions, where he’d been physically and mentally abused. He hadn’t been subjected to sexual abuse, but what he had suffered had left emotional scars.