Chapter 1
Sydney
Convention Center
Sydney, New
South Wales, Australia
Wednesday, March
18, 2015
3:28 p.m.
AEST/12:28 a.m. ET
If
this is what I have to look forward to when I retire, Lavi Witz
thought as he looked across the sparkling water of Darling Harbour, then retirement doesn’t sound so bad after
all.
Ever since that incident in North London
nearly three years ago, the Mossad agent gave serious contemplation to hanging
up his gun and stepping further back from field work: Jafar Abdul Mohammed had
dropped him with a well-placed bullet in his leg, only mere minutes before
Jaclyn Johnson had killed the terrorist with a well-placed bullet between his
eyes. Since then, Witz had worked behind a desk in Jerusalem—or as he put it,
wasting away at the government’s pleasure. While he kept the well-weathered
features of his Israeli heritage in his face, his hair had grown gray near the
temples, giving him the appearance of a man determined to stay away from an
early grave.
The more he thought about it, the more
he wanted to stay behind a desk. Wasting away wasn’t exactly a bad thing.
Yet there was still a part of him—the
macho, masculine side deep within him—that wanted back into the game. He
couldn’t recall when his heart last had made his sternum ache as the adrenaline
poured through him as he neared a target—or when certain secret agents held him
at gunpoint until they truly learned of his allegiance. He always felt a
tremendous rush in the field, and for nearly three years since returning to his
homeland from England, his life felt meaningless, almost to the point of
emptiness. He hadn’t returned to Mossad until well after Hanukkah that year,
and when he came back, he walked with a slight limp, favoring his left leg. The
doctors in London had removed the terrorist’s bullet, and with nimble fingers
had sewn the limb up nice and tight, the surgery quick. And while he wanted to
dive back into his work, hesitation still gripped him even today, the aches
lingering.
When his boss had offered him the chance
to get out from behind the desk and back into action, if only for one last
hurrah, Witz had jumped at the chance with widened eyes and a toothy grin. If
he had the power to toss his desk into the shallowest part of the Red Sea, it
would have been wet within a minute.
Then he learned of the assignment: it
was a protection detail, keeping Israeli prime minister Adam Mendelsberg out of
harm’s way while he attended the OECD—the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development—conference that would be held in Sydney, Australia. Even now,
Witz remembered grimacing immediately, his eyebrows ramming together as he
worked things out in his mind.
“Who,” he had asked, “would even dream
of trying to assault the P.M. in Australia? He would be anonymous, wouldn’t
he?”
“We have to be certain,” his boss had
countered. “All attendees are receiving some sort of protection. We can’t be
too lackadaisical in this day and age. Terrorism, of course.”
Witz had pursed his lips and nodded.
And as he recalled that conversation now
while standing outside the convention center, he couldn’t help but grin. He
pulled his cigarette away from his mouth with heavily-calloused,
nicotine-stained fingers, the smoke spilling from between his lips and
corkscrewing to the blue sky above.
If
protection duty is good enough for her, he thought as he looked out toward
Darling Harbour, shading his eyes against the glare of the sun against the
unused concrete tramway across the water, then
it can be good enough for me. He had heard of the American’s exploits from
two years ago, protecting the president in Atlanta. I just hope I don’t have to run after a suspect like she did. But then
again, she had two working legs on her side.
He hefted the cane, a simple stick of
polished white ash, that he held in his left hand, thwapping the handle against
his hip as he ran the sharp edges of his teeth against his bottom lip. He sent
a blast of air from his nostrils.
I
can’t be self-depreciating, his thoughts continued. I have a job to do, and if I have to struggle when I run—well, I hope
the person can’t run faster than me. That would be a tad awkward, I think.
He heard the harbor water lapping
against the sea wall some fifty feet away from where he stood, a swath of red
brick surrounding him. Lightly-dressed pedestrians flowed across the causeway,
headed to the IMAX theater for a late matinee or to the nearby restaurants for
an early dinner. Some people off in the distance made their way to the Sydney
Aquarium, on the other side of the harbor. Closer to him, he heard steps
cracking against the hot bricks. Summer wasn’t letting go any time soon here in
Australia, but he simply shrugged off the searing heat. This was nothing, him
being from a rather warm, arid country, but he still looked the dapper
professional bodyguard in a short sleeve Oxford with a black necktie, with a
white crew neck t-shirt underneath it all to soak up any perspiration. Several
of the passersby took off their hats seconds before they pulled their forearms
across their brows, and even in the mid-afternoon glare, he saw sweat dripping
off them. Seagulls swept in with spread, black-and-white tipped wings and
landed on the bricks, toddling away as he watched them hunt for any stray bits
of food. He heard the sounds of cars speeding along the Western Distributor
Freeway, which hung near the Convention Center and Tumbalong Park, heading for
the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge half a mile away.
Witz took another puff on his cigarette,
soon whittling it down to the nub. He dropped it and pressed the heel of his
cane down on it, instead of walking to the water and flinging it to a sizzling
end. He didn’t want to go too far away from the front doors. He was on duty,
and had a duty to perform.
He checked his watch and shrugged.
There’s
still an hour to go in today’s session, he thought. Once all the other dignitaries and their security details leave, then
I’ll resume my duties. Until then, I’ll pollute the air some more.
Without preamble, he lit another
cigarette, passing the time trying to blow wide smoke rings as the shadows
crept over the causeway from left to right.
During that time, he thought back to
North London and the mosque where Mohammed—I
know I was undercover, but did I really have to call him by that honorific?—met
his grisly end.
I
went by the name of Achmed then, he recalled instantly. Yusef, one of Mohammed’s agents, had just
blown up the Briton’s casket and sent the mourners scurrying for safety when
she sped around the corner. With a deft flick of her thumb, she sent a
surface-to-air missile speeding toward our location. Yusef, the wretch, died in
a vicious explosion of wood and stone shrapnel as I hurried underneath to evade
the inevitable destruction.
And
in the World War II tunnels that lay underneath Highbury, she somehow caught up
with me, threatening to kill me even though she didn’t truly know for whom I
worked. When I told her that I was an ally, she staggered a bit in stunned
silence before I explained everything. And I’m glad she trusted me or else I
wouldn’t be here right now, breathing in the warm, salty air blowing in from
Sydney Harbour.
But
still, the way Mohammed—musahib—had blasted those true Muslims while they
worshiped, peaceful Muslims who wanted nothing to do with the hatred that
Mohammed preached, I still hear their cries in my nightmares. I could have
stopped him, putting the gun I held at the back of his head and pulling the
trigger, but the time truly wasn’t right. I had no back-up, and there were two
more of Mohammed agents in play. Witz sighed. I should have done it then, regardless if it meant I would die then and
there.
Once
she arrived though—and by helicopter, too; that was rather ingenious—the odds
were stacked fully in my favor. Mohammed had wanted her to come after
everything she had done to his agents, everything she had done to prevent more
destruction in London. He had killed one of his agents after she got the drop
on him as she entered the mosque, unknowingly making it a two-on-two. Witz brought
the cigarette back to his mouth, taking a long drag. He caught two
twenty-something women in spaghetti-strap tank tops—one with breasts that
strained against the thin, white material—checking him out as they brought
straws to their mouths as they passed him. He smiled. The smoke billowed away
as he looked at their rear ends as soon as he had the opportunity.
He smirked, and his thoughts of that
night returned.
She
had awoken from her little nap, and after I announced my presence to her, it
was only a matter of time before Jafar Abdul Mohammed met his end. Especially
when I slapped her sunglasses on her face. Once they were there, and I had slid
a gun into her holster, there was no chance of Mohammed walking out of there
alive—of course, had he walked out of there, Tom Messingham and the rest of MI5
would have pounced and put a bullet in him. Honestly, he should have run for the
Scottish border when he left Oxford Circus. He was in a lose-lose situation
right from the get-go, as the Americans say.
Then
she dropped the other jihadist, making it two-on-one. I had pulled my gun away
from Jaclyn’s waist and shoved it right at Mohammed. I even remember what I had
said to him.
Witz smiled as the words came rushing
back.
“Stop
the launch if you want to walk out of here alive,” I had said, knowing there
was no chance of that happening. Then I was on the floor just as the countdown
reached its end, the terrorist that she had dropped taking me down before he
finally died. Then she killed Mohammed with a twist of her wrist, stealing his
gun and killing him with both weapons.
The smile didn’t end as the memory
lingered for a few more minutes. An inch of ash perilously hung on to the end
of the cigarette.
Then
it was over. She and I went our separate ways—I hear she’s engaged now, to the
Messingham bloke.
He sniffed, but there was a touch of sadness on his face, as well. Good for them.
He flicked the ash away before finishing
the cigarette, then hobbled over to the harbor this time. Witz flicked it in
and heard it extinguish itself with a quick plop. He returned to his post and
continued waiting. The shadows grew longer around him.
It was about 4:40 p.m. when the doors to
the Convention Center finally opened, jarring Witz into action. He only had to
wait a few seconds before his charge, the Prime Minister of Israel, came out,
flanked by an aide as well as a representative from England; the accent was
unmistakable. Witz fell in behind them, and immediately caught a whiff of
peppermint pouring off Mendelsberg’s tan wool coat. The P.M., he knew, liked to
smoke a pipe while in session, and he also carried small peppermint candies in
his coat pocket. He liked to suck on those afterward, if only to mask the aroma
of tobacco.
Adam Mendelsberg paused and looked back
at him.
“Witz, you smell like a bloody chimney,”
he said, his tone gruff, digging into his pocket at the same time. He pulled
out two wrapped candies and handed them over. “Here. Suck on these.”
Witz took them and immediately caught
the prime minister’s wink.
Mendelsberg was a rather old fellow. In
Witz’s eyes—and many others, he was rather sure—the Prime Minister of Israel
bore a striking resemblance to two other famous world leaders of a long time
past. He had the craggy smile and eyes of Sir Winston Churchill, the long-dead
English prime minister, as well as the size and girth of William Howard Taft,
the long-dead American president. He had been the prime minister for several
governments so far, leading the Knesset—the single-house Israeli
parliament—through some rather perilous times. There was a bit of a hitch to
his walk, Witz noticed from a few feet behind, that he thought resembled his own
mottled stride.
And
I don’t think the Prime Minister was shot in the leg, either, Witz thought.
“As I was saying, we in Westminster
understand your position,” the Englishman said as they resumed their walk.
“I’m glad for that,” Witz heard
Mendelsberg reply. He, too, walked with a cane. “Forrister isn’t too keen on
our cause. He supports a peace initiative between us and the Palestinians that
I’m working my damnedest to end.”
“You misunderstand me, Prime Minister.”
They paused some twenty feet from the waiting limousines, facing each other. “I
said that understand your position. But I must admit that Her Majesty’s
Government is behind the president one hundred percent. We, too, want to see
peace between—”
“Bah!” Mendelsberg roared, waving him
off with an impatient hand. He waddled away from the Englishman with a rather
hurried gait, leaving him behind. Witz had to rush to keep up, his cane
thwacking the bricks. Witz hoped it wouldn’t snap from the stress. “No one is
behind us,” he muttered. “They all want the damned enemy to take as much land
from us as possible, want us all exterminated. It’s like my father’s war all
over again. I came looking for sanctions against them, and no one wants to give
it.” He spat upon the bricks. “Bastards. The Palestinian State won’t grow any
larger while I still have life left within me, I can tell you that much.”
Witz didn’t say anything. He wasn’t in
the position to agree or disagree, nor did he ever want to be in that position.
That wasn’t in his job description. His job description was to keep Mendelsberg
out of harm’s way. That was it. Be a sounding board, yes. Offer input, no.
That’s why the P.M. had political advisers.
And
I’m certainly not one of those, Witz thought as he looked at his
shoes. He unwrapped and popped one of the candies into his mouth, dragging his
teeth over it. Peppermint assaulted his taste buds.
It was the crack in the air, as if
someone had funneled the sound of snapping a stick through a public address
system, which made the Mossad man snap his head up and involuntarily chomp on
the peppermint. After a sharp gasp, he found Mendelsberg falling backward,
toward him, his arms and cane flailing about as if he had lost his balance
trying to traverse a severely steeped incline.
But that wasn’t the case. The path
through the park toward the waiting limousine was as flat as a mesa.
Witz didn’t react to catch the prime
minister in time, instead watching wide-eyed as Mendelsberg tumbled to the
ground, peppermint candies spilling out of his pockets and rolling away on the
bricks. He wheeled around and saw that the P.M.’s face had turned rather pasty,
and on his chest, a smear of crimson grew right over his heart.
“Oh, Harah,”
Witz blurted, the Hebrew word for shit coming easily to his lips before he
looked back toward the convention center. He felt the panic set into his face.
“Quick, call for help!” he barked, spitting up pieces of chomped up candy, a
light breeze coming across and carrying the pieces away from him a few feet.
His heart thudded until his chest ached, but that didn’t truly matter right
now. If he was in the process of having a heart attack, no one back home would
give a shit: he was anonymous, the wind. But
if Mendelsberg died... Witz blinked away the thought. He didn’t even want
to think about an Israel without Adam Mendelsberg. Mendelsberg was Israel. He noticed that the man’s
breathing had grown shallow, as if every breath was labored and a chore. His
eyes, too, were wide, as if straining to see what was in front of him.
“Stay with me, Prime Minister,” Witz
said as soon as he got to a knee, struggling with the movement. The pains in
his leg returned, but he withstood it, biting away another Hebrew curse before
it even reached his tongue. He grabbed Mendelsberg’s hand and ordered him to
clench it as tightly as he could. There was a touch of tightness as the old man
squeezed as hard as possible.
Within heartbeats, he heard the sounds
of feet rushing toward their position. Someone pushed him aside as they began
to perform emergency medicine on the victim. Witz rolled toward the limo once,
craning his neck to see the men working over Mendelsberg. He heard each
word—“Get the bleeding stopped, apply pressure,” all in Aussie accents—as if
shouted over a megaphone. Before long, he heard the sounds of sirens blistering
through the Sydney sky.
“Come quickly,” he whispered, just
before he struggled to get to his feet, his leg screaming at him, his cane a
few feet away from him. He winced with every movement, pain shooting through
his body.
He then heard another set of footsteps,
coming at a light trot, followed by a girlish giggle. He didn’t think that a
man getting shot—and his security detail doing absolutely nothing about it, in
truth—was quite funny, to be honest.
Then he looked up at the giggler.
He nearly choked as he laid eyes on her.
No, he thought,
the disbelief flowing through him. It
can’t be. It just can’t be.
The woman he saw just couldn’t possibly
be a woman he respected. Sure, she was an
assassin in certain situations, but… no. She couldn’t possibly be the assassin
today. There was no way in the world it could be true, he thought.
But the proof, as he saw it, was in
front of him, some thirty feet away. She wore black Lycra, her curves evident
and different than he recalled, but there was no sign of the trenchcoat that he
knew she wore. There was also the high-powered rifle she held, with a sniper’s
scope attached.
There was also the wild grin spread
underneath a pair of sunglasses he knew all too well. The grin turned feral,
her upper lip curling into something unnatural.
Witz’s heart raced as he tried to make
heads or tails of it. He couldn’t help but stare. He didn’t move forward, his
cane still on the ground. He didn’t move for it, for fear of losing sight of
her. His mouth didn’t move, for fear of letting loose a torrent of vomit on the
streets of Sydney.
Yet he noticed there was something odd
about the woman that stood practically across from him, a crowd growing on the
other side of the street. Her hair wasn’t slicked back, and instead fell over her
face in a golden curtain. Her skin resembled creamy coffee, but it was too dark
for his liking. As he stared, he tried to detect an anomaly, something that
would prove to him that it wasn’t really who he thought it was, but she turned
and rushed through the crowd before he could get a closer look, disappearing
into the sea of life. No one tried to stop her, the gun raised.
Witz swallowed as the sirens grew
louder, the ambulances drawing ever closer to the Convention Center.
That
can’t be her,
he thought, shaking his head. It makes no
sense. She didn’t just try to assassinate the prime minister. No. No way.
He swallowed one more time before he
turned around and, after picking up his cane, hobbled back toward where
Mendelsberg lay.
Witz turned his head and spat as soon as
the ambulances pulled to a stop. A woman and man stepped out, the woman pulling
out a gurney and rolling it toward the P.M. Their pace was slow and methodical;
it wasn’t as if a man was bleeding or anything.
“Hurry up, damn it!” he called.
As they worked over Mendelsberg, Witz
looked back toward where the woman stood again. The bile rose in his esophagus.
Stale milk filled his taste buds.
There’s
no way in hell that was Jaclyn Johnson, he thought.
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