Good and Dead (An Avner Ehrlich Thriller Book 2) Page 2

  “This assessment comes from the PM himself, as well as the division and the National Security Council,” said Mordechai.

  “And if it hadn’t been the Prime Minister’s personal assessment, would you and the NSC still recommend it?” Nahum shot back.

  Mordechai fiddled with his yarmulke in place of a response, nudging it from side to side in search of the apex of his little skull, as he did whenever he was challenged.

  “Ehrlich, please continue,” said Moshe.

  “The American sanctions prevent the Iranians from selling their oil, other than to the Russians, who buy it from the Iranians a dime a barrel and sell it for a great deal more. Iran is headed for bankruptcy, and meanwhile they are getting their ass kicked up and down Syria, Iraq, and in their own back yard – mainly by us – and are too terrified to retaliate. The sixth and seventh American fleet are already circling them like hungry sharks, but they keep funding that nuclear program of theirs and pissing off the entire planet, while they could just straight up buy some plug-and-play nuclear warheads for their missiles, et voila – they are officially a nuclear power, for none of the time and a tenth of the price, without stepping on the whole world’s toes and getting destroyed by sanctions.”

  “Anything more concrete?” Moshe asked.

  “Nora has a much better grasp of this,” I said, and briefly smiled at her. Since Nora became head of the intelligence division, she’d been putting her hair up in a bun and wearing tailored clothes. She looked like a Hollywood bombshell vacuum-pressed into a power suit. Those thick glasses should do the trick, though, I thought.

  Nora stood up, straightened an invisible wrinkle in her skirt, and fired off with machinelike efficiency: “The aerial distance from the Khorramshahr missile sites to Tel Aviv is 680 miles. 700 miles to Jerusalem. The effective operational range of the BM-25 is at least 1,200 miles –”

  Nahum sputtered, coughed, and drank some water. Mordechai drummed his fingers on the table. “BM-25,” Nahum squinted, “help me out?”

  “Long-range missiles purchased from the North Koreans. They are supposed to be fitted for warheads by one Professor Habib Hamdani. To be exact – six warheads per missile.”

  Nahum let out a low, awestruck whistle, which created the pause I needed to signal Nora that I’d like to add something. She nodded and sat down, smiling lightly.

  “At this point,” I said, “All their chief hero needs to do is take his little basket to the market and buy as many nuclear warheads as he likes, from China, from North Korea, from the Red Army surpluses. No need for reactors and nuclear scientists – they can realize their vision and become the potentially nuclear threat they’ve always wanted to be, without pissing off the rest of the world, and for a fraction of the cost.”

  “And these days,” added Nora, “They can do it from the comfort of their own home. With darknets all you need to do is click ‘add to cart’.” “It’s a good thing they can’t hear you right now,” I grinned. “Don’t go giving them ideas, yeah?”

  A tense silence settled over the room. Mordechai waved his hand dismissively, and started hastily jotting things down in a small notebook. I wondered whether he was planning a takeover of our division, or taking down talking points for his next meeting with the Prime Minister.

  Moshe stood up. “Bella, get the PM on the line, please,” he said, and with that the meeting was adjourned.

  * * *

  2The Director of the Mossad.

  3Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps

  4.

  The Prime Minister approved raising Professor Hamdani to the top of the EEI4. Mordechai, unsurprisingly, was not a fan of the change, which transformed the amorphous Iranian threat into a concrete target susceptible to immediate action. He was nonetheless forced to cooperate, having been ordered to do so directly by Moshe –based on our specialists’ assessment that neutralizing the professor would delay the Iranian annihilation project by at least two years.

  The intel collection and surveillance teams handled by the Iran division in Tehran changed targets, and were now tracking Hamdani. They also placed his family and bodyguards under 24-hour surveillance, and sent in the intel at a nearly hourly rate, burning through a truly impressive pile of burner phones.

  The observation post they had set up facing the professor’s upscale penthouse on 13 Zaferaniyeh Street provided excellent coverage of the comings and goings of Hamdani and his family.

  Digital Albert, nicknamed after Albert Einstein and formerly named Snir, a bespectacled little ex-8200 geek with a world-class reputation, had managed to compile an impressive profile on the professor. It included everything from his birth certificate and his extraordinary academic achievements to the testimonies of his superiors in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (the IRGC) and his benefactors in the Lebanese Hezbollah and Gaza Hamas. Albert had even tracked down his father’s personal file, including reports from neighbors who were informants for the VAJA, the Shiite secret police.

  Habib Hamdani, 38 years old, received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from Tehran University and his master’s in nuclear engineering from MIT, both summa cum laude. He received his doctorate in Moscow, where he was also considered a prodigy of exceptional ability.

  After his return from Moscow, Habib joined the IRGC. During this time he stayed with Hezbollah in Lebanon and with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, assisting them in increasing both the payload and the accuracy of the heavier warheads that had arrived from North Korea via Iran. His exceptional ability, according to the assessments of the military intelligence division and the Shin-Bet, had cost us dozens of physical injuries, and hundreds of cases of post-traumatic stress.

  Now Hamdani was head of the Special Weapons Team in the IRGC, and a senior lecturer in nuclear engineering at Shahid Beheshti University and the Sharif University of Technology.

  His father, Issa, was a Palestinian – a Shiite pharmacist who escaped his village of Tarbikha in the Western Galilee, lived for a while in the Shatila refugee camp in south Lebanon and, with the help of a wealthy cousin, escaped with his family to Tehran, where Habib was born.

  In a series of recent photos from the field, Hamdani had every appearance of an American college professor. Around 5’7, with a wiry, springy physique. His sharp face sported a week-old hipster beard, and round John Lennon sunglasses protected a pair of large, perpetually bewildered eyes.

  This morning he was wearing a red t-shirt with that famous Che Guevara portrait, the one with the beret. He apparently had a thing for Che Guevara because he owned the same shirt in an assortment of colors, and wore them often. I sympathized, having had my own brief affair with Che Guevara. He always reminded me of Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas. To this day I cannot help but be moved deeply by Hasta Siempre Comandante, especially when it’s performed by Silvio Rodríguez.

  Faiza, Habib’s wife, was an attractive 34-year-old pharmacist who owned a modern pharmacy named Druhna Tohid on Razashi Street. Faiza drove a red Volkswagen Beetle and, like other Iranian hipsters, never let the presence of the hijab impair her impeccably fashionable ensemble. In one of the photos you could see that her hijab carried the same Nike logo as her sneakers. The sort of luxury and creature comforts enjoyed by the Hamdanis could only be a result of the professor’s status.

  According to the file, the professor’s love for his 12-year-old autistic son, Ali, knew no bounds. Ali, who was as beautiful as his mother, was a musical savant – he played at the Tehran University of Art as a guest pianist with the orchestra. Our source sent several written reviews and a clip of Ali somehow managing to do justice to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier – a feat that according to my mother, the musicology professor, no one other than Vladimir Horowitz was capable of achieving. An ecstatic German music critic who attended the concert later wrote that “Little Ali is the only pianist in history to play The Well-Tempered Clavier as Bach
intended.”

  Every second of the professor’s free time was dedicated to Ali, and he regularly dropped Ali off by the school or the music conservatory whenever he had the chance, even in the middle of a workday. They would play basketball or listen to music together, or stroll across Pardis Elm va Fanavari Park near the university, or wrestle on the campus lawn.

  Of course, this spontaneity in the professor’s schedule posed a problem for us. The neutralization would have to take place while the kid wasn’t there – but it was clear that it had to take place. This guy was responsible for hundreds of casualties in the Gaza envelope settlements, and dozens of devastated families, and if he was allowed to arm the ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, the price would be incalculable.

  A sudden glare of reflected light pulled me from my thoughts and back into the meeting room, which was droning with the small-talk that often covers up the hesitation and disagreements that always accompany the time before any violent operation in hostile territory.

  Moshe nodded at me and led me to his office as the others prattled on.

  “Feeling ready?” he asked before I even sat down.

  “Yeah, boss.”

  “And you’re giving me the plan for approval before any…”

  “Yeah, boss.”

  “And you remember that you are to run this operation from the command center, not from the field?”

  “Yeah, boss.”

  “Okay. Go home. Give your saint of a wife my best.”

  “Sure, boss.”

  I got in the car and absently started humming The Well-Tempered Clavier, and thought of Eran, and thought that an orphaned child can heal. A bereaved parent, never.

  * * *

  4Essential Elements of Information. The top priority items of intelligence information that are vital both for timely and accurate operational decision-making and for policy decisions regarding national security.

  5.

  Verbin was in the middle of examining a patient, Kahanov was unavailable, and Highway 1 was characteristically clogged with thousands of clerks on their way home from work. I took an exit southward, toward Masmiyya junction, where I got on the 383 as it softly unfurled through the hills and vineyards of Mateh Yehuda. This, together with some Pavarotti, was all I needed to heal from the day. A sort of meditation. I pressed play at the exact moment Pavarotti decided to sing Pietà, Signore, the sad, caressing aria from Niedermeyer’s stradella. My mother used to say it was one of the most beautiful arias ever written, as well as one of the saddest, and not the least because Pavarotti can’t carry a tune.

  Verbin called me back as soon as she was done with her patient.

  “Pietà, Signore!”

  “Looking for a shoulder to cry on, honey bear? Chin up. He said to say hi.”

  “My little bastard? Good. I’m on my way. When do you get off?”

  “Six. Machneyuda and then home. Sound good? And the ‘hi’ was from the big bastard, not the little bastard. He’s recovering all over the place.” In my mind’s eye I saw her radiant smile.

  “He’s getting stronger and he wants to see you. He also needs to rest, but I think that getting some work done with you might actually assist his recovery. That’s it, outta time – get a table at Machneyuda, six o’clock. Tomorrow at zero eight hundred you’ve got an appointment down here with Froyke. Bella already knows.”

  Froyke in recovery – that was excellent news. A couple of clicks skipped the Pietà in favor of the joyful La Donna È Mobile.

  Around thirty minutes later I got to Machneyuda. The restaurant was its usual self – cheerful, lively, and overflowing with shots. A glimmer of light in the dark city. Despite the day she had at the hospital, Verbin was also cheerful. We celebrated Froyke’s speedy recovery and I toasted the normal results of the AFP blood test she’d taken that morning with two shots of Arak, drinking one for her as well.

  Then I had to go and ruin her mood by telling her that tomorrow I would be taking a flight to that old familiar “somewhere.” The peaceful atmosphere helped to mellow her response somewhat. After that she ordered an assorted platter of herbs and cheeses, and I dove into a seafood stew. When we got home we walked the dogs and went to bed, falling asleep in a tight embrace.

  The next morning Verbin went to spiritual-pregnant-lady-yoga and I drove back to Jerusalem, to Hadassah. Froyke was in his bed, showered, shaved, and looking very much recuperated.

  “You look as good as new, boss,” I said, and helped him into his wheelchair. We went outside and found a distant, hidden spot in the shade where we could eat human food and smoke in peace. The questionable espresso I’d bought at the food court, along with my most recent specialty – butter and soused Dutch herring on a brioche bun – combined to provide a rudimentary adrenalin shot.

  “So how do you feel, boss?”

  “Fine, I’m fine. Previously owned by a doctor.”

  He quickly flipped through the reports I had brought him. “I see you still haven’t found a pattern in the trips to Khorramshahr?”

  “If I had a pattern we’d be speaking in praise of the dearly departed right now.”

  According to the reports, every once in a while, according to no discernable pattern, the professor would be either flown or driven to work meetings at the missile bases near Khorramshahr, right on top of Iraq and the Persian Gulf. The long desert road could provide an excellent location for a multitude of targeted operations: an armed drone, a car bomb, a hidden sniper, even a roadside IED – all without risking collateral damage, other than the bodyguard or other military personnel whose injuries don’t count.

  “What about his car?” asked Froyke, chewing on his brioche.

  “Mordechai’s team got the key to the parking lot at his building. The security guard checks that car every morning. Inside the city the roads are always packed, and he drives the kid to school each morning, too. That leaves the end of the day, on the city’s most crowded streets.”

  Froyke shook his head. “Surely you realize this brings us back to the winning knight. I don’t like it, but it seems very likely there is no other choice. To take out a queen, you sacrifice pawns. It’s shitty, but it’s acceptable.”

  He lit a cigarette and smoked it, exhaling contentedly.

  “Listen, Froyke, where did that schmuck Mordechai come from?”

  Froyke sighed dramatically, “I see you’ve already butted heads. I warned you, he’s connected directly to the PM, and don’t say ‘PM my ass,’ because in the end, it’s my ass it’ll rain down on. And my ass… well, it isn’t what it used to be.”

  “But where did he come from?”

  “Come from? He was a prisoner interrogator, then a handler in Unit 504, where I hear he actually worked for a living, then he moved to the Service5 to be a district coordinator, also did well, moved up in the world. You should ask your friend Kahanov, maybe he’ll know why the guy suddenly up and left the Service and joined the party. There’s talk of missing funds, and the whole thing’s more than a bit shady.”

  “I don’t like this guy. My brain just keeps coughing him up. He makes me think of a greased rat.”

  “Oh, a greased rat, that’s fascinating, thank you. And when did you get a brain installed? I heard he was also briefly in business with a company that imports temporary labor from China and Thailand. After that, well, you know how it is. Once you’re a member of the party’s Central Committee, the distance to the PM’s ear becomes much shorter – suddenly the guy’s an Iran specialist. By the way, he was born in Iran and speaks Farsi as a native tongue. He became the PM’s special advisor on all things Iran, and then they plopped him down right on top of us, special delivery from the party.”

  Froyke sighed again, put out his cigarette and started sipping his orange juice.

  “You don’t have a lot of options, here,” he said. “Surely you realize that if you
want to avoid collateral damage, you have to get in close. Maybe a syringe during one of the kid’s concerts, maybe from a passerby who stops to help him out of his car after a car accident… a syringe is focused, personal. Your Russian buddies have been using it beautifully for years. How many cars in his security detail? What’re you smiling about? You thought about it already?”

  “Yeah. The bodyguards, they check his vehicle each morning, but not their own. The closest we’ve got to some sort of opportunity. But the professor has another close bodyguard who also serves as his driver.”

  “Sometimes, there’s no choice but to…. Hide the cigarettes,” Froyke said, but we were too slow – Verbin, having appeared out of thin air, snatched it from his mouth.

  “Like a couple of dumb kids, I swear,”

  She was carrying coffee and this morning’s Ha’aretz. The headline was big and alarming: “IRAN’S NUCLEAR CAPABILITY – AN IMMEDIATE AND PRESENT DANGER,” according to one Professor Be’er, special advisor to the Prime Minister and candidate for heading the NSC – the National Security Council. The professor was quoted in the piece saying that the Iranians are considering acquisition of missiles and nuclear payloads in the hopes of securing operational nuclear ability even before their own reactors are up to the task.

  “Was this professor in yesterday’s meeting?” asked Froyke, tapping his finger on the photo in the paper.

  “Only if he was hiding under the table,” I said.

  “Sorry to bother you old women and your gossip, but I need you back inside,” Verbin said, taking the handles of Froyke’s wheelchair.

  “When do I get to see you again, honey bear?”

  I hugged her gently so as not to smoosh our boy.

  “Look after the kid. I need to grab a flight tonight. I promise it’ll be short. Two or three days, tops.”