Good and Dead (An Avner Ehrlich Thriller Book 2) Read online

  I also asked Yossi to make arrangements for our flight back to Israel.

  “On it,” he said.

  We went to the Italian place across the street for an early lunch. This time we permitted ourselves an aperitif of Campari and orange juice, a bottle of Chianti Riserva, and some Levi grappa for digestion.

  A black Range Rover with dark windows passed in front of the restaurant. Uzi noted, and Buba seconded, that this was at least its third pass.

  On the fourth pass I was convinced. We asked the waiter to delay our desserts, and I sent Uzi out back to bring around the Land Cruiser and park it behind the suspicious car, with the engine running.

  Buba went outside and stood in front of the truck while I came up and tapped on the window. The window didn’t open and the driver began to nervously tap the gas pedal, making plenty of noise but apparently still unsure what to do about Buba, who suddenly brought his fist down into the hood of the car, making a small crater in the tin. The driver started steering left, back into the road, and Buba smashed his window with another mighty swing. The doors of the Range Rover flew open.

  “Now!” I yelled at Uzi, who brought the Land Cruiser up and slammed into the back of the car. The two men in the vehicle banged their heads against the windshield and were knocked back into their seats by the inevitable ballooning of the airbags, leaving them precisely as we wanted them – incapacitated, but still able to call help.

  We watched the rest of the drama from the window of the restaurant, where we returned to finish our meal with the excellent tiramisu that was responsible for the place’s reputation.

  The local police came, followed by an ambulance. The paramedics immediately swarmed the injured men, who emphatically refused their care. And then, the moment we were waiting for – a glistening black limo pulled up by the Range Rover. A Slavic-looking man came out of it, followed by four huge thugs in suits looking about ready to split open from the sheer amount of muscle mass they were expected to somehow contain. The man waved a diplomatic passport and the thugs brought the two injured men into the limousine, ignoring the paramedics’ protests. Buba followed them in a cab, and reported that they got out at the new African-Russian trade center and disappeared inside. I called Yossi, who informed me that the trade center was owned by RET – that is, the Russian government – and dealt mostly with selling and distributing the weapons and defense systems of the Russian defense industry around Africa. Surprised by the Russians having a stake in this game, I made some calls. I wanted to make sure that not only Yossi in Eritrea, but also Boris in Leningrad and the rest of the research and intelligence divisions were trying to get to the bottom of this.

  Uzi meanwhile remained in Asmara, mainly to assist with handling Buba. I asked him to spare no effort in tracking down the ill-fitting Transformer – while he was no longer a threat, he would have to be taken care of for the sake of deterrence. Those were the rules of this world. This world that swarms above and below the space of our lives, in which the only punishable thing is failure. We listen and record and watch and steal and extort, and sometimes shoot and kill, and everything is authorized, and at the same time, loose ends are inconceivable: if someone hurts one of your people, you have to eliminate them, as anything else is a sign of weakness, and you will find that all manner of small predators will come to nibble, biting into your living flesh.

  23.

  There were no direct flights from Asmara to Tel Aviv, but Yossi got me an aisle seat on a flight to Frankfurt. I tried to fall asleep, but couldn’t. I closed my eyes and waited for Eran to show up, but instead was treated to a quick procession of horrifying scenes: The little white Iranian slicing off Gigi’s head; the head rolling on the floor; the red dot of the laser sight on Gigi’s forehead; Hamdani trying to rub off the dot, checking the back of his hand. Then I saw little Ali, his eyes filled with horror, the red bindi in the center of his forehead. I tried to push them away, to conjure Eran, and again could not. A distant, hazy landscape came instead, a huge and unending field of ice, Ya’ara in her floral dress. Barefoot, she pushes our boy’s stroller across the ice. I call out to her but cannot hear my own voice. She stops and picks him up in her arms. He is chubby and golden but entirely naked. “Ya’ara!” I try to scream through the freezing wind, but no sound comes, “Cover him!” The image zooms in – it is my Eran, no longer hazy and distant. The red dot appears in the center of his forehead and he laughs happily.

  The plane was suddenly preparing to land. The movie was over. I opened my eyes.

  In the airport lounge in Frankfurt I went into the restroom and stuck my head under the running water until the boarding call came for the flight to Tel Aviv. When I tried lifting my hand to turn off the water, it didn’t move. I tried again, and there was nothing. I didn’t understand what was happening. There was no pain, no muscle spasm – my hand just wouldn’t move, as if its connection to my will had somehow been cut.

  It was terrifying.

  I closed the tap with my left hand and looked at the mirror – I seemed a bit tired, but everything seemed normal otherwise. I tried to move my right hand again, and again there was no response. I grabbed my right elbow with my left hand and moved it around, but there was no sensation, nothing.

  I came out of the restroom and boarded the flight, slinging my bag over my right shoulder so I could easily access my papers. The moment I sat down I asked the stewardess for a whisky, and when she came, I reached out to take the cup with my right hand, and it worked. I felt relief surge through my muscles, relaxing them a bit. I slowly sipped my whisky, and occasionally raised my arm and flexed it. It seemed fine. I decided that if my hand was able to forget about this little drama, I’d be willing to let it slide as well.

  When I finished my whisky the stewardess asked if I’d like another.

  “Always,” I said, and she smiled at me.

  I remembered a story my mother told me once, about something that happened to my father at the beginning of the Yom Kippur war, about a week before the Battle of the Chinese Farm20, where he was killed before I ever got to know him. He told her that his half-track was incapacitated by a Sagger anti-tank missile, and as they sat there, trying to figure out what to do next, an Egyptian attack helicopter dove towards them. My father laid down a “fire box” – small-arms fire aimed at the pilot – firing nonstop until the MAG’s red-hot barrel literally melted into a 45-degree angle. He went down to the floor of the half-track to take out a spare barrel and when he came up, the melted barrel came loose and swung toward his face. He reached up his arm to stop its descent and his hand, burned horribly by the twisted metal, became stuck and would not move, as if it were suddenly dead. A second later the Egyptian chopper came in for another attack and his hand came free from its strange paralysis, and functioned perfectly until the helicopter was down, as if nothing had happened. There was not even a burn mark left on his hand.

  My father was a physicist. His field was quantum mechanics. My mom showed me an article that described him as a rising star with a bright future, cut short by his death in the Chinese Farm. Another article, apparently based on the testimony of his colleagues, described him as unruly scientist, an anarchist who lacked the patience for rigorous methodology. From his library, the scientific section of which was donated by mom to the Technion, I received a few choice items including a rare first edition of Michael Kohlhaas, printed in Leipzig in 1810. She used to say that if he’d waited for me a bit instead of charging ahead, dad and I would look like twins. He was buried in the military section on Mt. Herzl, far away from my mom, who was buried twenty years later in a plot at the kibbutz, to the sounds of the Brahms Requiem. It had been years since I’d visited either of their graves.

  The nice stewardess came back, without whisky this time.

  “I was asked to relay a message. Froyke’s coming to pick you up.”

  “How did you know it’s for me?”

  “The amount
of whisky tipped me off,” she smiled charmingly and winked.

  Indeed, ten minutes after the plane hit the runway, I happily noticed the old man waving at me in the Arrivals hall.

  “Welcome back,” he said. “You stink of whisky.”

  “They finally gave you Siboni’s job?” I asked as we got into the car. The second my ass was in the passenger seat he asked me what exactly it was that had led me to attack a couple of distinguished Russian diplomats who were just minding their own business, in broad daylight, in a bustling street in the middle of Asmara, and added, looking at the note in his hand, “With ‘indefensible brutality’.”

  I considered my reply. He cleared his throat and added, “The Russians want us to extradite you so they can charge you with aggravated assault and attempted murder. Quite the kerfuffle. What happened?”

  “Eeesh. Better start driving,” I sighed, and as he navigated out of the parking lot I explained. “They drove around the restaurant four times and I preferred not to wait for their attack. And, trust me, they looked more like trained assault dogs than like any diplomat I’ve ever seen.”

  “Maybe they couldn’t find parking?”

  “In Asmara? People there get mostly around by walking, there are barely any vehicles. You’d be hard pressed to find anything but parking spots.”

  “Are you sure you’re not getting a bit paranoid in your old age?” he inquired.

  “The fact that I’m old and paranoid has nothing to do with the fact that a two-man terrorist group with a combined weight of 550 pounds attacked Uzi, then me. And what’s worse, they knew not only who Gigi was and where he worked, but also exactly where and when to find Uzi and me. That’s what you should be worried about. We’ve got a leak!”

  We left the airport and got on Highway 1, and I didn’t even need to ask where we were going. I was exhausted and my entire body ached. I raised my right hand for a moment and lightly flexed it. It seemed to work fine.

  “You really are paranoid,” said Froyke. “The Russians also provided the waiter’s testimony – including a ridiculously inflated bill with four Campari and orange juice, two bottles of Chianti Riserva superiore –” he paused to laugh, “Because it’s nothing but the best for our Ehrlich, apparently; and no less than six – six! – glasses of Levi grappa. Well, at least our reputation is safe. How did you manage to imbibe all that?”

  “I mean, there were three of us, Froyke.”

  “Huh. The muzhiks forgot to mention that part. Well, in case you were wondering, that paranoia proved far more useful than that tiny brain of yours. That attack gave us our first serious lead into Gigi, Alina and Ofra Ostashinski’s murder, and apparently an entire hornet nest we knew nothing about.”

  “Thank God my brain’s too tiny to get in the way. Where’s he now, then?”

  “Hold your horses. It’s more complicated than that, but we’ll find him. The local guy, the one you described as a busted Transformer, came straight from the Iranian Ansar Allah. The local branch found him. Your Buba interrogated him, and after realizing the man had no more info to sell… well, don’t ask.”

  “I’m… asking?”

  “The barbarian fed him to a crocodile in a nearby lake.”

  I swallowed my smile.

  “I didn’t want to hear the details, frankly,” Froyke continued, “But apparently the little shmuck with the hat commanded the group and carried out the kills, both Gigi and his family, and the local prostitute. Anne-Marie Claire says this is the work of a clearly pathological psychopath, adding that he has a rich combat background, is highly intelligent, and most likely holds a high-ranking position. The profile she compiled is about five inches thick, mind you, but here’s the best part – he’s Russian. Not Iranian, Russian! The Iranians were the ones who ordered Ansar Allah to team up with him, but the man himself is Russian, and an exceedingly white one, at that.”

  The car tore through Highway 1 at an unreasonable speed, with Froyke speaking nearly as quickly. “Meanwhile, Albert and his team managed to hack into the IRCG’s Unit 400 human resources database. They found no one with a registered interest in sadomasochism – you’d be surprised the level of detail these organizations go to in profiling their personnel – and no match for the DNA found at the scene. So, while having access to this database is obviously a good thing, it wasn’t much help. However, after your encounter with the Russians in Asmara, Nora contacted Boris, who bought his way into some more databases – mostly Spetsnaz and the GRU21 – where he found not only an abundance of S&M enthusiasts, but also a perfect match to our DNA sample. There is, however, a small discrepancy – the owner of said DNA has been dead and buried for forty years.”

  The airplane whisky, the fatigue and the overabundance of information were becoming too much.

  “Froyke, I honestly can’t see the forest for the trees, here. Help me out.”

  He smiled and sighed. “Alright, kiddo. Here’s the gist of it. The Transformer was an Ansar Allah man, and before the crocs ate him, he was sent by the Iranians to cooperate with a little white Russian professional who murdered Gigi Ostashinski and his family, as well as a local hooker.”

  “Russians. Gotcha. How about the watch? Any new leads?”

  “I’m afraid not. Your Transformer knew nothing about it, and the muzhik was very careful in front of the security cameras.”

  “I see. Is that all?”

  “Not exactly. The Russians working for RET made an effort to stop you and Uzi from getting to their man, obviously. Meanwhile we’re concentrating our efforts on Ansar Allah, whom we honestly did not treat with the proper gravity before now. As it turns out, RET are moving weapons into Africa, by sea, to Ansar Allah – they pass them on to Yemen, and escort the convoys that the Iranians are buying into Sudan and Hadhramaut, where they get shipped off to Hezbollah and Hamas. They have considerably more business in the region than we’d previously estimated.”

  Things were starting to fall into place. Only one thing still bugged me. “Did you find anything that might look like that leak I mentioned?”

  Froyke hesitated for a moment, obviously pained. “Allegedly, it’s in the Russians’ interest to assist whoever is fighting the Saudis and the rest of the pro-American Gulf countries, but it’s really about weapon sales. That’s all they’ve got to sell, these days – ISIS’ and Iran’s oil, and weapons systems which are frankly quite dated, according to our experts.”

  “Froyke, please, enough tiptoeing. Is there a leak?”

  Froyke sighed. “It cannot be positively stated that there isn’t.”

  “Say again.”

  He glanced at me sidelong. “Yeah, kiddo. You were right to suspect it. It looks like we do have a leak, or at least a gap in our security. We’re working on it.”

  We fell silent for a while. I saw that he was worried, at least as much as I was, though we both knew that it wouldn’t be long until we found the leak. A moment later he said,

  “Nora found Ali Hamdani.”

  I looked at him, surprised. “No shit? And I take it I shan’t be going home to my wife any time soon.”

  “Indeed you shan’t. We’re going straight to Nora, and after that –”

  “Has she found the professor?”

  He made a small tsk. “No. Not yet.”

  * * *

  20The Battle of the Chinese Farm took place during the Yom Kippur war in 1973, between the IDF and the Egyptian Army, just east of the Suez Canal. It is remembered as one of the most brutal battles in the history of Israel, with both sides suffering heavy casualties.

  21The GRU or G.U. is the Russian foreign military-intelligence agency.

  24.

  Before heading into the conference room, we went through Bella, who let us know that “The little schvantz put on a whole detective show,” and indeed the lights had already been cinematically dimmed when we went in. Mosh
e shook my hand, squeezing warmly, and Nora blew me a kiss from across the table, putting as much sex as humanly possible into the small gesture. Mordechai dimmed the lights further, and the savant Ali Hamdani, dressed in his little tuxedo, started playing the Well-Tempered Clavier with perfect, beautiful precision. He finished and bowed to the audience, encouraged by the roaring applause to bow again and again. Nora brought up the lights as the concert audience began to thin out, faded and one-dimensional. For a moment I thought I saw a familiar face, but it was only a fraction of a second, before the cameraman turned the camera back to Ali’s final bow. The lights in the concert hall also came on, turning Ali’s image into something like a soft, faint hologram.

  “You’re the one who deserves the applause, Nora,” said Moshe, bringing me back to the conference table.

  “Thank you, but really it should go to the whole division – especially Mordechai, who insisted that we find the kid, though he claims to have done so in the face of some resistance.”

  Both Moshe and Froyke looked like they were trying very hard not to smile.

  “He should really have known better than to piss her off,” Froyke whispered in my ear.

  “This was taken a week ago in Ansbach, in western Germany,” Mordechai proudly declared, and brought up a couple of Russian passports onto the main screen. The photos were of Faiza and Ali Hamdani.

  “As you can see, they changed their names to Hamdanov, and received authentic Russian citizenships and passports.” He brought up the next photo, showing Ali being led by a thug in a cheap suit. “Would you like to take it from here?”