Abigail – The Avenging Agent: The agent appears again (52 page)

When she caught sight of the dead body
of Timmy, her heart shrank.  She took fright when the phone rang but was
relieved when one of the men spoke.

“Yes, we're coming with him.  He’s dead
since this morning.”

Screaming was heard coming from the
telephone and the driver explained that he suffocated from the rag that had
been stuffed into his mouth, adding that this was the way Allah punished his
enemies.  The fellow put the phone on speaker, because he wanted the driver to
participate in the conversation and Abigail heard how the speaker was yelling:

“He’s not dead, he’s pretending.  How do
you explain that we called his phone, someone answered and then hung up?”

“Oh, Almighty and Holy Allah, help me!”
the driver yelled, and Abigail immediately thought of ways to use the religious
devotion and fanaticism of the two as weapons against them.

She leaned against the back seat,
looking for the number of the last incoming call and pressed on it.  She
listened to the ring and heard someone answer her.  She sniffed, whispered and
hung up.  A second later she heard the fellow sitting in front of her pick up
the telephone and his voice trembled with fear.

“What? Do you want to say that the dead
are phoning you again?!

The driver stopped, opened the door and
yelled:

“Get out, Y’Allah; let’s get the hell
out of here!”

The second fellow hesitated momentarily,
but ran after him. Abigail didn’t wait for even a second.  She jumped over to
the driver’s seat, put her foot down hard on the accelerator and the car flew
forward on the unfamiliar road.  When she reached the road sign to the
Hungarian border, she stopped and called Michael.

When he answered her, she just said:

“Hello.”

“Oh, thank God.  I can’t bear this any
longer.  I’m as stretched out as a violin string.  Did you get to him?  Did you
catch them?  Can I hear him say a word to his worried father?  What happened? 
What happened to him?”

Abigail pursed her lips, wondered how to
tell a father that his son was lying dead on the back seat of the car.

“Hey, Naima, why are you silent?”  He
begged, forgetting the code word and using her real name.  When she didn’t
answer, he began babbling and chattering.  He understood that the news wasn’t
good and shut up for a moment and then spoke again.

“How did it happen?”

“They tied his arms and stuffed a rag
into his mouth.”

Michael wept.  She could not see his
tears but his breaths told her what he was going through and her heart went out
to him.  She spoke quietly:

“I am looking at him now and he is at
peace.”  She drew in her breath. “I’m looking for a way to send him to you, to
take care of him and lay him to rest.”

Another voice burst out on the phone and
she recognized it as Barak.  He sounded tense, almost like that day in her
apartment in Tel-Aviv, when he discovered her paintings and took them away from
her. The tone of his voice was acerbic:

“Get to the Hungarian border post and
transfer Timmy to a man, who will meet you there,  in an hour from now, at five
o’clock.”

“Barak,” she murmured, “I didn’t get
there in time.  He died hours ago.”

“It’s not that,” he pointed out.  “It’s
the painting you took with you and left in the tunnel.”

“Ah, it was left behind when I escaped,
but they would found some other way of taking revenge on me, even without that
painting.”  Since she heard no response, she carried on speaking.

“Do you know what?  I will make it up to
you with another mission.  It will be so enormous, that it will destroy the
whole system of reactors in this country!”  And Barak laughed joylessly.

“They destroyed a whole neighboring
tribe of yours by mistake.”

He knew that she would understand that
this was an act of revenge and retaliation against her and her family.  She was
sure that Barak meant to lay the blame for the death of the Alheb tribe on her
conscience.

She responded quietly:

“I understand. So, Barak, if I succeed
and the next assignment is carried out perfectly then, according to you, you
will blame me if they respond by attacking the entire population of the Negev,
right?”

As he remained silent, she added:

“I was sent to do a job.  If I succeed –
they will respond and that’s the name of the game.  Ask San, who sacrificed an
eye for this sport!” And, she hung up.

Barak pursed his lips.  He knew he was
blaming her for the vengeance of the Iranians, just because her actions had
been successful and caused them damage.  He glanced at Michael, saw his look of
misery and heard him say something.

“What did you say, Michael?”

“I said she’s pregnant.”

“What, what?” He heard and understood
what Michael said, but it hadn’t completely sunk in.

“How do you know?”

“When I called her this morning, she was
throwing up and told me after that.”

San countered immediately:

"Then we have to hurry with the primary
mission before she’s too large to move with ease.”

He glanced at Barak and noticed his
expression, recognizing both surprise and disappointment on his face.

*
* *

            At
exactly ten o’clock the watch on Karma’s wrist clicked and reminded him to get
up.  When he opened his eyes to the darkness around him, he was convinced that
it was the middle of the night.  He closed them again, promising himself that
he would wake up in another minute.

Someone knocked at the door and he sat
on the bed and listened.  No one was supposed to know that he was in this room
and Karma did not expect anyone to look for a man named “Barzani” at exactly
ten o’clock at night.

He had fallen asleep in his clothes and
socks so, now, he hurriedly put on one shoe and felt around for the other one
and found it when he heard knocking at the door again.  He picked up his
knapsack and took pains to do everything silently.  He looked at the entrance.

“Sir, can you open the door?” he heard a
youthful voice and his heart rate quickened.

Karma looked around, seeking somewhere
to hide and when he couldn’t find a place he turned to the window, climbed out
on the railing and walked to the right, pressed up against the exterior wall.
He looked below at people illuminated by the street lights, and their heads
appeared small.  He remembered that he was on the sixth floor.  When he thought
through the possible complications, he checked if he could hang on to the tree below
or, at least, use it to break his fall and avoid injury.    

Right now, the bellboy knocked on the
door to his room, while the pair who had captured Timmy, Muntazer, and Yusuf,
stood behind him waiting for the door to be opened.

What had happened was that Timmy’s
kidnappers had fled in fear from the car when they recognized that the incoming
call was from the phone of the captive, who now lay dead in their vehicle. As
he fled, Muntazer heard the car they had just abandoned, roar and he stopped to
see how it continued driving on.  From the window, he saw a figure with a hijab
covering its head.  Yusuf also stopped, panting with fear and gazed after the
car as it drove away at speed and disappeared round the bend in the road.

“Hey, a woman is driving the car!”
Muntazer pointed in the direction of the car that was already out of sight.

He suddenly realized that someone had
cheated and ridiculed them.  He pulled off his kefiya, cast it angrily on the
sand, shouting and stamping his feet.  He ran straight into the street with
Yusuf chasing after him, laughing out loud.  Yusuf stopped suddenly and picked
up his friend’s kefiya and the black headband that had fallen beside it and
spoke out loud, as if to himself.

“What happened today?”

But Muntazer didn’t answer him.  He was
injured at having been ridiculed and, to add insult to injury, by a woman.

“What an idiot you are!” He yelled at
Yusuf when he reached him and presented him with the kefiya and the headband.

“Am I the idiot?!  Who shouted that the
dead man was calling?!  Who grabbed the phone and screamed to tell me to
stop?!”

Muntazer got up and pushed Yusuf and
they both rolled in the sand, punched one another and screamed like madmen
until Yusuf got to his feet, put his hands on his hips and said something.

“What did you say?” Muntazer stared up
at him from below.

“I said we have to return to that
Italian hotel and catch that bastard we were following.”

Muntazer sat and spat into the distance,
wiped his lips with the kefiya and spat again.  When the roar of a vehicle was
heard, Yusuf jumped into the middle of the road and waved his arms like a
madman.  A truck swerved and screeched to a jarring stop.  Muntazer got up from
the sand and ran to it, climbed up the steps at the bottom of the van and
yelled to the driver:

“If you don’t take us with you, you’re
dead meat!”

An hour later the two of them got off
near the hotel and went to the parking lot, where they had captured Timmy.

“Oh, his car is gone.”

“Right, so come let’s ask at the hotel
whether he is still here or has also left.”

They both entered the hotel lobby.  Muntazer
pulled two bills out of his shirt pocket and placed them on the counter.  A
short man stood before him and stretched his lips into a smile, revealing tiny
child-sized teeth.

Translate

“Who has been in this hotel for a few
days and has an expensive car?”

The teeth disappeared and so did the
smile.  Suddenly, his eyes lit up.

“Yes, the beautiful “Bentley” in our
parking lot since Tuesday,” and Mutazer added another bill and put it on the
first two.

“Give me the name and the room number.”

“Eh…” the reception clerk scratched his
head, glanced at the bank notes and Muntazer lifted his hand off them.  Within
a second, the bills disappeared as the clerk’s hand slid them in the direction
of a thick book on the counter and the man turned to serve others. Muntazer
turned the book towards him, flipped through dozens of names with his finger,
looked at dates and stopped at one of the entries in the end.

“Barzani,” he said, “Room 611, come let’s
go up to him!”

“Wait. Why this name in particular?”

“It’s Kurdish, idiot.  Remember what
Effendi told us?”

“Oh, right.”

Almost before they entered the lift,
Yusuf whispered to Muntazer:

“Perhaps we should send that bellboy up
to tell him something and we’ll hide behind him?”

“Wallah! (Hurrah) who said you’re an
idiot?”

The uniformed bellboy was given a bank
note and went up together with them to the sixth floor, with a simple
instruction to cause the door to room 611 to be opened.  The two men remained
standing a short distance from the boy, who knocked at the door.  They held
their pistols close to their trousers, ready to push their way through as soon
as it opened.

Since there was no response, Muntazer
instructed the boy to go down and bring the key to the room and the latter
pulled a whole bunch of them out of his pocket.  The next minute, the door was
opened and the two entered the room, each aiming his revolver in a different
direction.  But the room was empty.

Yusuf opened the doors to the closet one
by one, with his finger on the trigger all the while.  Reflected in the mirror
of one of the wardrobe doors, he saw long fingers holding the windowsill from
outside and understood that someone was apparently pressed against the exterior
wall.  He turned round and quietly moved towards the open window and fired to
the right, but he missed and the bullet disappeared into the dark.  At that
second, a bullet from Karma’s gun hit his forehead and Yusuf sank to his death.
In that slight delay of a second.

Montazr looked at the floor, see and
does not understand how Yusuf falls to his death. The tiny second of this delay
was enough for karma to peek through the window and pull the trigger again.

Without checking to see if he had made
another hit, Karma jumped into the room and disappeared through the door,
without glancing at the two dead men, who were left behind in his room.  As he
fled and went down to the parking lot, he wondered whether he should have
paused to search them to find out who they were and who sent them.  He
continued running because he also knew that he had little time and if he
delayed and stayed in the room he was likely to miss the boat that was now
anchored in the Italian port.

What he didn’t know was that the
assignment had already been canceled.  He also did not know that the bomb in
the car he was about to enter had already been neutralized and would never
explode and that the target no longer existed.

Karma
had also not been updated about the incident that had occurred on the Czech
border near the Fiano forest, where his brother-in-law, Effendi Khaidar, had been
shot to death by the Revolutionary Guards.

*
* *