In the blood a thriller, p.22
In the Blood: A Thriller, page 22
part #5 of Terminal List Series
The attack would take place in the northern Italian city of Turin. The Islamic State would claim responsibility for a bombing that would kill two people: a Jewish bookseller bound to a wheelchair and with whom Oleg was familiar, and an American who was in fact the primary target. The Islamic State had ample motive to want them both dead. If the bomb failed to kill them, the jihadis would finish them off with Kalashnikovs. Oleg was there to ensure the assassination went as planned. The old GRU assassin had one more mission for Mother Russia before they would let him hang up his gloves. It was best to not run afoul of the Russian president.
CHAPTER 51
Over the Mediterranean Sea
THE EL AL FLIGHT from Tel Aviv to Milan was a relatively short four and a half hours on the Boeing 737. From his business-class window seat Reece looked down at the crisp blue Mediterranean waters. He knew the route would take him just southwest of Turkey and then across Greece and Albania before landing in the fashion capital of the world.
Almost there, Reece.
One more stop before you put Nizar Kattan in the ground.
Reece looked down at his father’s Rolex. The watch had seen so much combat in the jungles of Vietnam and who knew how much more in the decades following the war. Perhaps it had seen enough.
Time.
After it was done Reece would move on. His family had seen enough of war. If he survived, it would be time to turn the page on this chapter.
And he had a question to ask Katie.
He felt the weight of his dead wife, daughter, and unborn son. The guilt. Would it always be there? Probably. Could he make peace with it? Maybe.
Time.
Get your head straight, Reece.
Reece was not interested in Milan’s fashion industry, nor was he interested in the city’s art galleries or museums. Milan was a waypoint on his journey to meet the man in the wheelchair, the man who had put Nizar Kattan in contact with those who had the means to take an airliner out of the sky, a specific airliner with an Israeli agent on board, a Mossad operative named Aliya Galin.
This time Reece had the help of two of the world’s most effective spy agencies, the CIA and the Mossad. He also had assistance from an unquantifiable and almost unknown entity operating on a mythical level of the Internet: Alice.
AI. Artificial intelligence. What the hell even was it? Was she?
Reece struggled to wrap his head around what he had learned from General David and from Jimmy in the depths of Lackland Air Force Base, and what he had gleaned from his conversation with Alice herself.
Did the CIA or NSA know that Alice had sent the KryptAll phone? Was she acting independently? Did Rodriguez know? General David? Jimmy? Who controlled her? Did anyone? What were her intentions? What were the ramifications of working with a machine—no, not a machine, an artificially intelligent entity that could not be turned off?
Even though the cabin of the El Al jet was not particularly cold, Reece shivered in his chair.
When he landed, he would meet with a Sayan who would ensure he had a car to get from Milan to Turin. In this case the Sayan was Jewish, an Italian citizen who was loyal to the state of Israel. The network was first established under the direction of legendary general and spymaster Meir Amit, who ran Israel’s military intelligence agency, Aman, and the Mossad in the 1960s. Among his many distinctions was that he was the only person in the history of the country to run both organizations at the same time. If Israel were to survive, she needed to leverage all the assets at her disposal. Jews who were citizens of foreign countries but loyal to the new nation on the Mediterranean were assets Meir Amit was not about to leave uncultivated.
Reece leaned back in his seat and recalled his conversation with Ronen Katz concerning the anomaly that was Saul Abelard.
Abelard had fought for his nation at the highest levels of special operations and had then been recruited and trained by Israeli intelligence to execute negative treatments abroad. When he had disappeared after a lengthy hospital stay in Berlin, his masters in Tel Aviv feared the worst. It was easier to vanish back in the days before everything had cameras embedded with geolocational data to make life more “convenient.”
After a five-year hiatus he resurfaced in Rome at the Central Institute for the Conservation and Restoration of Damaged Books and reestablished contact with his former employers. He informed them that he was going to embark on a two-year internship at Giulio Giannini e Figlio in Florence, where he would learn the “Florentine style” of book binding. Following another two years of training under the famed Conti Borbone book restoration dynasty in Milan, he had the credentials to open his own business, a business that would give him cover for action.
With start-up funding from a discerning investor, he located a storefront for rent in Turin between the time of the First and Second Intifadas and founded Abelard’s Libri Rari e Restauro—Abelard’s Rare Books and Restoration—on a quiet street in an old part of the city. That the discerning investor was the Israeli Mossad was known only to Abelard.
He was not a Sayan or a Katsa. He was something else entirely. He was his own entity, a concierge to the underworld. From his quaint bookshop, he could find talent and handle logistics, weapons, passports, and identities for black-market transactions, catering to those who still operated the old-fashioned way and preferred to keep their business off the darker levels of the Internet. For his services, Abelard collected a healthy fee. He was also gathering information for his former agency, though now it was not for love of country or out of a sense of duty to the Jewish state. Now it was personal. He was looking for someone who operated in the world of shadows and if he wanted to find that person from the confines of his wheelchair, he needed to be an integral part of that world. He was looking for the sniper who put him in his chair.
It was an arrangement of convenience. The Mossad had an asset in the underworld who could pass on information about impending attacks on Israelis and Israeli interests, and if and when Abelard found the man he was looking for, he had one of the world’s most ruthless spy agencies at his disposal.
When Abelard connected Nizar Kattan with Jean-Pierre Le Drian in Africa, there were no indications that they were planning to shoot down a passenger jet, let alone one with a Mossad operative aboard. The bookseller still felt an allegiance to his home country even if he had not set foot there in over thirty years.
The Mossad had informed Abelard that an American was inbound, an American looking into the Air France attack in Africa. They requested that Abelard offer his full support.
When Reece landed, he had a two-hour drive to Turin, where he would meet the man who could lead him to Nizar Kattan.
CHAPTER 52
Turin, Italy
IT WAS NOT DIFFICULT for Oleg Berzin to slip back into his old ways.
The Syrians had all fought under the banner of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Six of the seven were refugees, six of the millions displaced by the Syrian Civil War. These holy warriors had made their way to Europe among the thousands that Italy was attempting to manage, deport, or resettle. What made these six different than the others was that they were well versed in fabricating homemade explosives and on the finer points of operating AKs.
The seventh was an Italian citizen who had answered the call to jihad and was one of five thousand Europeans who had traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight during the course of the war. Tammam Nasri spoke Italian, English, and Arabic. As an Italian citizen, he could exercise freedom of movement throughout the European Union. He had been radicalized at home but his two years in the Levant had given him the skills and experience to lead his newly formed terror cell on Italian soil. Oleg had confirmed through the Russian Internet Research Agency that Nasri was on an Italian watch list but was not currently under surveillance.
The weapons they would use originated in the central Albanian town of Gramsh, where copies of Chinese-cloned AK-47s had been made since the 1960s. The weapons procured for this operation were ASh-82 models, identified by their underfolder buttstocks, which would allow the hit team to more easily conceal them, or keep them completely hidden if they were not needed. More and more weapons had been making their way into Europe from the Balkans in recent years. Once inside Europe’s twenty-six-country Schengen area, travelers had unrestricted access to almost the entire continent. There were no border controls or passport checkpoints to worry about once one was inside. The former GRU man shook his head at the absurdity of it. It was a soft underbelly that terrorists had already exploited and would continue to exploit. That was not his concern. His assignment was to kill the American and the Jew and ensure that it looked like the work of ISIS, a mission that was certainly within his wheelhouse.
Oleg carefully removed the bomb from the small daypack and set it on a dirty kitchen table. It smelled slightly fruity. That was a good sign. Had it smelled of vinegar he would have insisted the team construct a new device. He inspected it with a knowing eye. He took his time and found it to be satisfactory. It would work. The white putty had not yet begun to deteriorate or evaporate. It was not the first time the Syrians had built homemade explosives. Similar devices had brought terror to London on a July morning in 2005. News pundits and terrorism analysts would be quick to draw comparisons. It was rudimentary, which was exactly how Moscow wanted it. It had to bear a certain signature.
The main charge was triacetone triperoxide, or TATP. Since its first use in Israel in 1980 it had earned the nickname “Mother of Satan.” Its chemical precursors of peroxide, acetone, and acid could be found in commonly available products the world over. Even so, the Syrians had sent their wives to separate stores to buy them independently. Seeing people of Middle Eastern descent was not an abnormality in this district of Turin. The terrorists and their wives blended into the fabric of the neighborhood. Still, it was best to avoid arousing suspicion. Anyone, not just a newly arrived Syrian immigrant, buying all the materials necessary to construct the device at one location would have raised eyebrows.
Hair dye was purchased in cash along with diapers, toothpaste, and chocolate bars at one drugstore. Nail polish remover was bought at another, along with tampons, aspirin, shampoo, and a small plastic toy truck. Liquid drain cleaner was picked up at a different location, along with a few sponges, toilet paper, and a toilet bowl plunger. A hardware store provided nails, nuts, bolts, a hammer, and two screwdrivers. Most of what was acquired was camouflage. What Allah’s holy warriors really wanted was hidden among normal, everyday items. The shopkeepers and cashiers at the various stores had no idea they had just sold ingredients of death to a terror cell.
The hair dye, nail polish remover, and liquid drain cleaner were mixed, dried, and packed into soda cans that were then secured tightly together in a six-pack of carnage. The nails, nuts, and bolts were taped to the outside. A seemingly innocuous garage door opener provided the transmitter and receiver. Two wires ran from the receiver to steel wool embedded in the TATP in the center can.
Though Oleg could have built bombs of urea nitrate, ammonium nitrate, and aluminum powder and triggered them with more highly technical and precise mechanisms, he needed to ensure that the most sophisticated investigators would never suspect Russian involvement. The perpetrators of the attack had to be new immigrants to Italy from Syria. Borgo Dora was home to a large population of immigrants displaced from the developing world. A bookstore owned by a Jew in a neighborhood with a growing Muslim demographic was a prime target.
The cell’s orders were relatively simple: wait for their targeted individuals to meet at the specified location and then blow them up. Conduct battle damage assessment just as they had done in the war, and if the American or Jew somehow survived the explosion or if the bomb failed to detonate, they were to finish them off with the AKs.
Oleg had committed the face to memory. Commander James Reece. Navy SEAL. Quite a history.
The Russian would be running command and control on this operation. He had hidden two small pinhead cameras covering the entrance to the bookstore and the back exit. You could hide a camera anywhere these days. Essentially a lens, a chip, and a self-contained power source, the miniature camera was programmed to send a black-and-white signal to Oleg’s phone. He set up in a nearby café and tested the line-of-sight connection. The black-and-white setting would offer a clearer picture if Reece was delayed and showed up later in the evening in low light. He would have liked to have at least two more to cover the avenues of approach, but keeping the operational footprint small to reduce the risk of detection by an Italian police officer or an observant citizen was a top priority. Two micro video cameras would have to suffice.
The Internet Research Agency was providing Oleg with locational data on Reece’s progress. There was no need for the former Russian intelligence operative to spend all day in the café staring at his smartphone or sitting on a park bench with a newspaper obscuring his face for hours on end, waiting for his mark to arrive. He could reduce his signature by being in the appropriate location at the right time. He thought of how much chaos and havoc he could have wrought with this technology behind the lines had the USSR invaded Germany through the Fulda Gap.
The GRU trained thousands of terrorists across the Middle East during the Cold War in the event they could be used against the United States. Some of that training had come back to haunt them, but had the USSR and United States gone to war, the destabilization operations of Spetsnaz and well-trained jihadis unleashed to target American interests around the world would have been a powerful force. Oleg wondered if the RA-115 suitcase bombs (though the tactical-level nuclear devices were anything but the size of an actual “suitcase”) he had hidden were still in place. Their power sources would have died long ago without maintenance. Still, he would rather his stepchildren, or anyone’s children for that matter, not find them and start tinkering. The odds of them still being operational were slim, and for all Oleg knew, the GRU had recovered and returned them to the bunkers at Penza-19.
Those were the weighty assessments of the Cold War days: tactical nukes, stealth technology, Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed “Star Wars” by an indignant senator, ballistic missile submarines, and mutual assured destruction.
Today’s mission did not involve expensive weaponry or the possibility of fallout from a nuclear winter. This mission was more straightforward; one American and one crippled Jew needed to die. Oleg and his team had chosen the time and the place of the ambush. They had the technical advantage of tracking their prey without his knowledge and had the micro video transponder to confirm his arrival at the target site. They had a bomb set to detonate when Oleg pushed the button on a garage door opener. They had the tactical advantage of surprise and violence of action. The odds were as stacked in their favor as they could be. If things went as planned, the seven jihadis waiting in the back of the small passenger van in the parking garage around the corner would never have to unfold the stocks of their AKs.
Still, James Reece was a survivor.
No, Oleg thought. James Reece prevails. Do not underestimate him as others have done.
With that in mind, the GRU man added one additional element to the equation.
CHAPTER 53
HIDDEN IN THE AURORA District of Turin, just west of the Dora River in a part of the city first constructed using what was left of its medieval walls, lay the historical hub of Borgo Dora. Home to bars and cafés, a performing arts school, a former weapons factory dating back to the Second World War that was now a homeless shelter, and what was at one point the terminus of the railway, the area had fallen into decay in recent years. That decline kept the rent well below what was demanded in Turin’s more exclusive enclaves, which allowed Saul Abelard to conduct his business without fear of being evicted in favor of higher-paying tenants.
Abelard lived directly above his shop and rented a garage not far away. The garage housed a 1989 midnight-blue Mini Cooper that he had learned to drive using hand controls after he had lost the use of his legs. He had purchased it in Rome when he had lived there as a student at the Central Institute for the Conservation and Restoration of Damaged Books. The five-year course was one of, if not the preeminent, book restoration program in the world. Was entering the prestigious program an excuse not to return to Israel, as his handlers had asserted?
Each Saturday he would wheel himself though narrow, winding cobblestone streets, searching the Turinese flea market for treasures. Those selling their wares knew to expect the “bookman,” as they called him. He never failed to buy a book or two, regardless of how worthless they might be. He wanted those who set up shop every weekend to always be on the hunt for what might be a rare volume in need of restoration, and purchasing a book or two kept them searching. It also built trust. When Abelard saw a find that actually was valuable, the seller would often accept the first price offered, like it was one of the hundred others the bookman had acquired over the years. It was as if he was running an intelligence network, though instead of one focused on targeting and killing those responsible for Munich, this one allowed him to give life to objects that were in a state of decay.
Maneuvering himself through the flea market of the old town was much more interesting than looking for rare books online. He was able to interact and enjoy the languages, sights, and smells of Turin. It was part of his routine. It was discipline. Discipline had been what kept Saul going for the past thirty-five years. He could have opted for an electric wheelchair, but that would not have given him the constant reminder that he was still on a mission. The manual wheelchair kept his hands, arms, back, and spirit strong. None of the baristas who passed Saul a coffee or any of the Saturday flea market vendors who sold him books suspected what the kind man in the wheelchair really did for a living. Saul Abelard did not keep the doors to his rare bookstore and book restoration service open because there was such a high demand for exclusive books. He had other sources of income that paid the bills.
