In the blood a thriller, p.24
In the Blood: A Thriller, page 24
part #5 of Terminal List Series
Reece didn’t know if it was appropriate to laugh at the icebreaker. He smiled and said, “That makes sense.”
“I don’t get many Americans in here, Mr. Donovan, either for book restoration or for my more select services.”
“Probably a good thing, on the ‘select services’ side of things anyway.”
“The director doesn’t call often. It is much more common for me to call him.”
“But you didn’t in the case of Nizar Kattan.”
Abelard paused.
“No, I did not.”
“And why is that?” Reece asked.
“Mr. Donovan, I am not in the habit of explaining my business, but I do acknowledge the level of importance placed on this matter by the director.”
“What did you think Kattan was going to do once you connected him with an Africa hand?”
“That ‘Africa hand,’ as you say, was a sergeant in the French Foreign Legion. I’ve been his handler for going on five years now, Kattan for just under a year. I tell you that because though I am freelance and don’t work for Tel Aviv, I do have an allegiance to my former home country.”
“As I understand it, you pass the Mossad information if you become aware of any plans targeting Israeli citizens or infrastructure.”
“That is part of the arrangement.”
“But it didn’t work this time,” Reece said.
“No, it did not. As with most of my clients, I believed their intent was a liquidation.”
“An assassination,” Reece said.
“That’s correct.”
“And when you saw that a plane went down in Burkina Faso?”
“I was not sure it was Kattan and Le Drian.”
“Until?”
“Until Le Drian called me and requested assistance with extract.”
“Which you provided.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“I did not yet know that Tel Aviv had an asset on board but still, Mr. Donovan, it did give me pause.”
“Why was that?”
“I am not in the business of mass murder.”
“Just individual murders.”
“A subject I believe you know something about, Mr. Donovan.”
Reece took a breath. His reputation had obviously preceded him.
“So why help get them out? Why not let the local or national-level law enforcement or intelligence services detain them in Africa?”
“Because I am the, how would you say it in English, ‘dot’ that connects them. Better to deal with them quietly.”
“But then Katz calls you.”
“He did. And I found out we had an asset on the plane.”
“So now the mission becomes finding them and taking them out with a Mossad hit team.”
“Yes, but then you show up, Mr. Donovan, and I am asked by Tel Aviv to assist you in any way I can. It’s quite curious, really.”
“What is?” Reece asked.
“That you are here and not a team from Caesarea. And there was not an active contract out on Aliya Galin. Trust me, in my channels I would have heard about it by now.”
“What does that tell you?” Reece asked.
“It tells me that this is not a simple act of terrorism, nor an assassination disguised as terrorism.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mr. Donovan, I have been in this chair for over thirty years. I can get around just fine. I’ve adapted. But my clock is ticking.”
“Your clock?”
“Oh yes, life expectancy for people with my spinal injury is far less than the average Italian. I have been patient, but I also need to speed things up a bit.”
“Speed what up?”
“When I was shot, I was doing my job. I had purpose. Then I woke up in a hospital bed without the use of my legs. I had to find that purpose again.”
“I can understand that, the purpose part at least,” Reece said, his mind drifting to a storm in the mid-Atlantic as he sailed for Africa years ago, leaving the death and destruction he had wrought in his wake. “What did you do?”
“I sought solace where I felt most comfortable.”
“In books,” Reece said.
“That’s right. My mother and father ran a used bookstore in my youth. I escaped into the pages of books that would filter though their small shop. After my father died, I helped my mother in the store. Those books transported me from Israel to places all around the world. My fondest memories are of reading books in the shop as a child.”
“So, you learned to restore books and started this business?”
“Correct. I learned from the masters. What you see here in this store is more than a cover for action, Mr. Donovan. It’s a life’s work. These books still transport me, from here, from this chair, back to my youth.”
“I see.”
“Some books arrive with water damage. You would be surprised what heat, dust, and insects can do to the pages, bindings, and spines. People transport books when they move and do not package them correctly; the changes in temperature and humidity, even altitude can wreak havoc, Mr. Donovan. Books are adaptable but if you ask too much of them, they will fall apart.”
“And you think that’s what happened to you? Tel Aviv asked too much?”
“Oh, I am sure the Mossad psychiatrists would love to talk with me. Too bad they will never get the chance.”
“Why is that?”
“I am never going home, Mr. Donovan. I found my purpose.”
“In book restoration?”
“In part.”
“You are looking for someone.”
“I am.”
“The man who put you in that chair.”
“Someday, I will get a lead. Then I will work him into my sights,” Abelard said. “And when I do, I will have more mercy than he had. No chair for him. He will go straight to the grave.”
Is this what I am like? Reece wondered. Is this how Katie sees me?
“So, what of Kattan and Le Drian?” Reece asked.
“I can’t be certain. I met Kattan once in person in Dubrovnik. He doesn’t use cell phones.”
“And Le Drian?”
“I have never met him. Much of our communications have been electronic. Not my preference but sometimes a necessity.”
“But you handle them both?”
“Handler may be the wrong term. I am more of an information broker; a connector.”
“Can you help me find them?”
“I can, but there is something else at play.”
“What?”
“Terrorism or assassination? What happened in Africa is most certainly both, but at the same time it is neither.”
“Did you always speak in riddles?”
“Bear with me, Mr. Donovan. The usual signals before and after the event were not present.”
“What does that tell you?”
“Now that I’ve met you and from plugging in what I learned from Director Katz and from my own research before your arrival, I ask myself, what is different about this tragedy?”
“And what do you think?”
“You, Mr. Donovan. You are what is different. You are sitting here in my bookstore. I think someone wanted to put you here.”
“Who?”
“Kattan is the obvious choice, but in this business, I have learned that the obvious is not always correct. If he led you here. I would think the next step is for you to learn what I know of Kattan. That would lead you to the Balkans.”
“Well, then that’s where I’m going to go.”
“Kattan is baiting a trap. He led you right here. He’s playing chess.”
“He may be playing chess but I’m playing poker.”
“Ugh, that most American of card games. At least make it something civilized like baccarat.”
Reece felt an unfamiliar vibration in his pocket.
“Excuse me,” Reece said, pulling out the phone that had arrived in the diplomatic pouch in Israel and hitting the message app.
Watch your back.
Reece turned to look at the door.
CHAPTER 56
“DO YOU HAVE ANY weapons here?” Reece asked urgently as he got to his feet.
“What is it?”
“Weapons,” Reece said again, looking from the door back to Abelard. “What do you have?”
“I have this,” the former Mossad operative said, holding up the H&K P7 from the desk drawer. “And what’s in the safe.”
Abelard slid the pistol between his hip and the side of his wheelchair, spun the wheels, and rolled to in the shelves that made up the wall to his right. He pulled two books from the shelf. Reece heard a click.
“Don’t just stand there! Help me pull.”
Reece ran to the shelves and pulled where Abelard indicated.
The shelves pulled away from the hinge to reveal the front of a safe.
Abelard immediately positioned his chair to give him access to the mechanical lock, which he spun while Reece alternated between looking at the door and at the H&K pistol by Abelard’s right hip.
The bookseller rotated the lock back to zero and twisted the five-spoke handle to the right, retracting the bolts and allowing the steel door to swing outward.
“Good thing I deal in more than just information,” Abelard said.
Reece stepped forward to get a better look. The safe was not huge by any standard. It had shelves on one side with books in various stages of repair and another stacked with paperbacks with names Reece recognized: le Carré, Thor, Silva, de Villiers, Hunter, DeMille, Morrell, Flynn. Reece looked at the man in the wheelchair.
“Can’t have my customers seeing commercial fiction on my shelves. Bad for business.”
Reece reached in and pulled out an old H&K G3 with wood furniture.
“This sighted in?”
“No. The weapons arrive as they are.”
Reece tossed it on Abelard’s desk behind him.
“Same with this?” Reece asked, pulling out an H&K MP5SD.
“Yes.”
Reece’s eyes settled on a weapon he knew well, a Benelli M1 Super 90.
No sling, rifle sights, extended magazine.
Reece grabbed the shotgun and checked its condition.
Empty.
“Do you have shells for this?”
“Yes. In the back.”
Reece reached into the back top shelf and pulled out a box of double-aught and a box of slugs. Moving to the desk, Reece set the twelve-gauge autoloader and the two boxes of shells on the table. He grabbed a double-aught shell, hit the shell-release lever of the right side of the black shotgun, threw in the shell, and hit the bolt release, which sent the shell containing nine lead pellets into the chamber.
Pulling the shotgun back under his arm for stability, Reece reached back into the box and began to feed shells into the tube. Seeing movement at the door, Reece brought the shotgun to his shoulder.
One round in the chamber, only one in the tube.
Off safe.
The door swung open, the bell ringing to announce that a customer or customers had arrived.
Instead of a hit man or a group of assassins, three boys closing in on ten years old entered. Their hair, eyes, and skin indicated Middle Eastern ancestry. Their laughter signaled the innocent exuberance of youth.
The boy in the middle was wearing a smile, a Juventus Football Club jersey, and a backpack.
CHAPTER 57
“LADAYA TAWSIL,” THE BOY said, unslinging the backpack and running toward them.
I have a delivery.
Reece caught the P7 coming up from Abelard to his left in his peripheral vision. He saw Lauren and Lucy riddled with bullets. Innocents.
Reece knocked Abelard’s pistol down, dropped the shotgun, and ran toward the three children, who all had abject looks of horror on their faces as the big man barreled down on them.
“Who gave you this?” Reece shouted as he approached, pointing at the backpack.
The boy froze in his tracks and said something in Arabic that Reece did not understand. The two friends turned to run back to the door. Their smiles were gone.
Reece processed the terror in the young boy’s eyes as he grabbed the backpack.
Heavy.
The boy was pointing outside. His friends had reached the door.
You can’t throw this into the street after those kids.
Reece turned and ran back into the store, past the desk.
“What are you doing!” Abelard shouted. “Get that out of here!”
Reece threw the backpack into the open safe, slammed the door, spun the locking handle to the left, and felt the bolts engage, locking them in place.
“Out!” Reece shouted, pointing at the door.
The boy stood frozen in his tracks.
Just as Reece reached down to pick him up and carry him to safety, the bomb detonated.
CHAPTER 58
OLEG BERZIN WATCHED THE three children enter the shop via the camera sending signals to his smartphone.
Their job was to deliver the backpack to the two men inside and run out of the store. He had given each of the refugee children ten euros, a fortune to the new arrivals from war-torn Syria. When Oleg saw them exit, he would detonate the IED.
One of the Syrian men entering the shop would set off alarm bells for certain. Oleg still looked twice, sometimes three times, at men and women who triggered memories of the Hindu Kush; dismembered bodies of Soviet soldiers on the roadsides, the Spetsnaz troops hanging from trees, skinned alive, their genitals cut from between their legs and stuffed in their mouths.
The American would look twice, Oleg knew. The Jew, perhaps, but the bookseller had lived in the neighborhood for long enough that he might be accustomed to the growing immigrant population.
Oleg had no intention of killing the children. In his youth he had no doubt he would have triggered the explosive with the boys still inside. He may have even done it a year ago. That was the correct tactical decision. It was also the correct strategic decision, as it would confirm that Syrian immigrants had targeted a Jewish shop where an American just so happened to be buying books at the wrong time.
Intelligence services might be able to discern that there was more to the bombing, but to the general public it would feed into the narrative of radical Islamic terror cells working in Europe targeting Jewish people and businesses. It was not the first time, and it would not be the last.
Oleg told himself that this way worked as well. As the children exited, he would be able to see that the backpack was no longer worn by the oldest. That would be Oleg’s signal to detonate. Then he could get back to Brindisi. Back to his wife and stepchildren. Back to his boxing gym, where he belonged.
What is this?
Oleg looked down at his smartphone. Two of the kids had scampered out of the store.
Where is the third?
Where is the backpack?
Oleg thought of his comrades swinging in the breeze, ropes around their necks. He saw the birds fly away from their heads, their mutilated groins, and their assholes as he approached. Their eyes had already been picked out of their heads, the birds going to the softest areas first: the eyes, genitals, and anus. He remembered the Black Tulips taking off from Bagram filled with Soviet dead, dead that the USSR had not acknowledged to the world.
The Black Tulip was an Antonov AN-12, a four-engine cargo plane that transported those killed in action back to the motherland.
Cargo 200.
Corpses.
Oleg pressed the button.
CHAPTER 59
THE TRANSMITTER SENT A signal to the receiver in the backpack, which completed the circuit and drove an electrical current through the wires into the steel wool. Triacetone triperoxide is a sensitive compound. The ignition of the steel wool created a spark that detonated the TATP and triggered a chemical reaction, which resulted in energy that propagated a shock wave, turning the nails, nuts, and bolts into shrapnel. To everyone in the vicinity, it was an explosion.
For the three closest to the detonation it felt like the end of the world.
Reece had one hand on the boy when the shock wave sent him careening into a bookshelf. The safe did not contain the explosion. The energy found the path of least resistance, which was around the seals of the door. The hinges, designed to be opened outward, did just that and the safe deformed and turned the steel door into a projectile, shooting it across the shop and destroying everything in its path. Books disintegrated, filling the air with torn covers as pages floated through the smoke. The door continued its push through the front wall, taking the front window with it before landing in the street.
The ringing in Reece’s ears let him know he was still alive. Did he have all his body parts? He quickly assessed the damage, starting with his feet and working his way up to his head. All fingers and toes intact, he rolled onto his stomach and pushed himself to a kneeling position.
The ringing.
Where’s the kid?
Where’s a weapon?
Reece crawled over the debris. Papers still fluttered to the ground and settled on the floor, some on fire, some not.
A body.
A small body.
He rolled the child over, his eyes scanning the figure for obvious injuries as he felt a pulse.
Good pulse. Thank God.
Unconscious.
Reece heard a coughing behind him.
Abelard.
“Saul!”
“I’m here,” he said between coughs. “Those bastards! I had a first-edition Confessions by St. Augustine in there. Where’s my chair?”
Get a gun, Reece. The kids were the first wave. More will be coming.
Reece rose to a crouch and picked the boy up, moving him next to Abelard and carefully laying him down next to the bookseller.
“This kid tried to kill us!” Abelard said.
“He’s just a tool,” Reece responded, in a desperate search for the weapons and ammo he had laid out on the desk prior to the explosion. “A maneuver element will be coming to finish us off.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that’s what I’d do.”
The desk had been turned over in the explosion. Small fires burned as the parchments became fuel to keep them alive.
