Game Changer (31 page)

48

Yosef Mizrahi was tall, athletic, and handsome, with thick raven-black
hair and masculine features that drove women wild. Yet he could honestly say
that the time he spent in Cockaponset State Forest was more pleasurable than
any weekend he had ever spent in the arms of a beautiful woman.

Not in a sexual way, of course. But in a way that enriched his
very soul.

And this was due entirely to Dmitri Kovonov. Mizrahi basked in the
presence of the great man, barely able to keep his star-struck awe to himself during
their interactions, only managing to do so after Kovonov had chastised him
repeatedly for gushing and had insisted he keep this adulation more hidden.

What a priceless opportunity Mizrahi had been given.
One he would be telling his grandchildren about someday.

He had always had a deep admiration for Kovonov and
shared his views that neurotech should be deployed against Israel’s enemies,
who wouldn’t hesitate to treat Israel a hundred times more harshly if given the
chance. But ever since joining this inspirational leader on his exodus from the
Mossad, Mizrahi’s admiration for the man had deepened, had grown to
stratospheric levels. He now saw Kovonov as not only a genius whose discoveries
would catapult the human species to new heights, but as a father figure, a
sage.

Mizrahi sat quietly on a bunk inside the cabin Kovonov
had turned into an interview and lie-detector center. He watched the great man
as he finished interviewing the last of the twenty prisoners, a pretty young
blonde, reveling in how smoothly he did so, how at ease he put each churchgoer.
Kovonov had been so elated by the results he could barely contain himself.

History would show that the ultimate game changer had
been tested in these woods and that Yosef Mizrahi had been right there to
witness the dawn of a new era. He didn’t have a ringside seat on history, he
was actually
in the ring
, in the
corner of the boxer destined to beat the limitations of the human species into
submission.

“Yosef,” said Kovonov, breaking him from his reverie,
“take Linda here back to the mess hall and tie her back in.”

“Right away,” said Mizrahi, fighting for all he was
worth to keep his response subdued.

“Once you’ve finished,” continued Kovonov, “return
here for further instructions.”

Mizrahi nodded. Given they had now achieved their
goal, he suspected what these further instructions would entail: the release of
the prisoners. They would need a plan for doing so that would give them an
ample head start. Mizrahi had no doubt that Kovonov had come up with one that
was as brilliant as usual. He was eager to find out.

“Tell Daniel to give us ten minutes alone and then
join us in this cabin,” continued Kovonov.

“You’re okay with leaving the door to the mess hall unattended?”
said Mizrahi, glancing at the prisoner named Linda who had heard this last
instruction.

“I am,” said Kovonov. “It will be locked and I’ll keep
my eye on the monitors.” He waved a hand toward the prisoner. “And I’m sure no
one will attempt to escape now that they’re so close to being released,” he added
pointedly. “Will they?”

The woman shook her head rapidly, as if this was the
last thing in the world she would ever consider.

“I’ll give Daniel the message,” said Mizrahi.

Kovonov nodded curtly and went back to studying a
computer readout and making entries into his laptop.

Mizrahi led the prisoner away and reinserted her back
into the human chain. He then carefully relayed Kovonov’s message to Eisen before
eagerly returning to the cabin to learn what else he could do for the great
man.

He entered and approached Kovonov, whose back was to
him and the door. “So what is your plan to release the prisoners?” he asked.

Kovonov turned, revealing a gun in his right hand that
was extended toward Mizrahi. Such was the trust Mizrahi had in this man that it
never once occurred to him he was in possible danger, or that he should attempt
to protect himself.

He opened his mouth to ask why the great man was
pointing a weapon his way, but speech never came. Instead, Kovonov pulled the
trigger and Mizrahi’s world was instantly plunged into darkness.

***

Kovonov was in great spirits as he
awaited the imminent arrival of Daniel Eisen. His plan was proceeding
flawlessly.

He had even learned that morning
that Rachel Howard was dead after all, which had given him great satisfaction,
icing on his cake. Perhaps he had judged his second set of mercenaries too
harshly. Before they were killed, they had managed to take the professor with them.

Interestingly, Wortzman had gone to
great lengths to get the Americans to believe she was still alive and working
with the Mossad in Israel. Then he had made sure her location in Israel was a closely
guarded secret. A secret that Kovonov’s moles managed to learn.

Kovonov had been considering
sending in a team to dispose of her once and for all when it occurred to him
that this had all played into his hands a bit too easily.

Wortzman was a clever bastard, but Kovonov
knew how he thought. One didn’t get to the top of the Mossad unless one had a
talent for deep deception. He began to suspect that Wortzman had wanted his
moles to learn where she was located, hoping that they or their boss would go
after her. It was a trap.

When Kovonov had insisted that his
operatives peel back further on the onion, they had found the truth: the
professor had been killed in Waltham, after all. Wortzman may have deceived the
Americans and his own people, but his attempt to flush out Kovonov had failed.
 

Kovonov’s thoughts were interrupted as Eisen entered
the cabin, right on schedule. His lieutenant was quick to react to the figure
of his colleague sprawled out on the floor. “What happened?” he asked Kovonov who
was standing near the body.

Kovonov shrugged. “I shot him,” he said calmly,
raising a gun at the same instant and providing Eisen with a reenactment of
this event.

Eisen collapsed to the ground beside Mizrahi.

Satisfied, Kovonov walked to a bunk on which an assault
weapon was resting, an H&K UMP 45, long used by US Customs and Border
Protection, a lighter successor to the MP5. He picked it up and pocketed an
extra magazine that was sitting beside it.

He made his way to the door of the mess hall and
unlocked it, entering as he had any number of times over the past few days. The
prisoners were spread across the back corner of the room on the platform of thin
blue cushions. Some were reading quietly, others were engaged in conversations,
and still others were playing cards.

All eyes turned to him as he held the H&K loosely
in his right hand, the muzzle pointed straight down at the floor.

An unearthly quiet and stillness overcame the room.

“Have you come to set us free?” asked the pastor after
several seconds, piercing the silence. He eyed the UMP 45 in Kovonov’s hand warily.
“We’ve cooperated. We’ve answered your questions and done everything you’ve
asked.”

“You have all been wonderful,” agreed Kovonov. “May
you spend eternity in heaven with your loved ones.”

With that he lifted the submachine gun and began to
spray the prisoners with .45 caliber rounds.

It was absolute
carnage
.

Blood and flesh splattered into the air as helpless,
unsuspecting men and women were turned into Swiss cheese, to the accompaniment
of screams of death and terror that would haunt a medieval torturer.

When the magazine had emptied, Kovonov replaced it
with the spare and set the weapon to single shot, this time taking careful aim
and making sure to put a round through the forehead of each and every member of
the Danbury Evangelical Fellowship. He did so with a ruthless, clinical
efficiency and thoroughness, ensuring that none had any hope of revival.

While this resulted in the spilling of additional quarts
of slick, bright blood, turning the mats a mixture of light blue and bright
red, at least the screams had now died out along with the screamers.

Kovonov had considered letting them know that they
would be dying for a greater purpose. That sometimes sacrifices had to be made.
Reminding them that even God had allowed his only son to be tortured and killed
for the right reasons.

But he knew that this would do nothing to ease their
journey into oblivion.

Kovonov calmly checked the monitors
and was pleased to see that while the thick wooden structure of the mess hall
hadn’t fully suppressed the racquet he had made, the noise hadn’t traveled far
enough to attract attention. The many cameras his underlings had installed
earlier indicated that the nearest park visitors were many miles away and going
about their lives in blissful ignorance.

Perfect.

Kovonov removed a paintbrush he had shoved into his
back pocket. He carefully picked his way between the corpses, minimizing the
gore that ended up on his shoes but not avoiding it entirely.

He stopped a few feet in from the back corner of the
room, next to where a particularly large pool of blood had gathered, and dipped
his brush into the vivid crimson liquid. Carefully, painstakingly, he proceeded
to write an Arabic phrase across the entire back wall of the mess hall, coming
back for more red ink on numerous occasions.

When he was finally done, he stepped back to admire
his handiwork.

Ash hadu an laa ilaaha
illallaah
he had written: There is no God but Allah

wa ash hadu anna Muhammadan
rasool-ullaah:
And Muhammad is his Messenger.

It was the Muslim
shahādah
,
their most profound statement of faith. In some sects the recitation of this
phrase was the first of the Five Pillars of Islam and was the only formal step required
for non-Muslims to convert into the religion.
  

Kovonov surveyed the grisly scene one last time and
was struck by the fact that it didn’t trouble him. He had previously abhorred
violence. Just a month or two ago, not only would he have been appalled by the
idea of hurting a single one of these men and women, he would have been vomiting
at the sight of the carnage before him.

And yet now that he had changed, he found that he was
actually enjoying himself. He found pleasure in his lack of weakness, pride in
his thoroughness. He found a certain fascination in the grisly ballet of death,
a poetry in the patterns the flesh-and-blood splatter had made on the floor and
walls.

A slow, satisfied smile crept across his face.

Perhaps he was not yet done evolving.

49

Yosef Mizrahi’s eyes fluttered open and the world gradually
swam back into focus. He felt as if he were having an out-of-body experience.
He vaguely noted that Daniel Eisen was sitting beside him on a bunk, awake and
alert. Both were handcuffed with zip-ties, and both also had their ankles
cuffed to the bunk bed, which itself was bolted into the cabin wall.

Kovonov was seated across from them in a folding
chair, watching them intently.

“Dmitri?” said Mizrahi weakly.

“Glad to see you’re awake,” replied Kovonov.

“Now that he is,” said Eisen, “are you ready to tell
us what this is about?”

Kovonov nodded. “I shot you both with a tranquilizer
dart,” he said. “Very short acting. You’ve only been out about an hour. And let
me say I’m really sorry about having to do this. You’ve been loyal and you’ve
performed brilliantly.”

“Good to know our work is appreciated,” said Eisen
with a scowl.

“It truly is,” said Kovonov, not responding to the
irony. “I felt the need to restrain you for a while because I haven’t been
completely honest with you about my plans. I wasn’t sure how you would take
them. I need to be sure that you’re with me.”

“We’d follow you to hell and back,” said Mizrahi,
sounding hurt that Kovonov might doubt this for even a moment.
 
 

Eisen eyed Mizrahi and shook his head in disgust. “So
what
is
the real plan?” he asked Kovonov
warily.

“First, with regard to the current op, I know I told
you we’d be sparing the prisoners
—
but we can’t. Sacrifices have to be made. We can’t take any
chances. In addition, if we play our cards right we can pin their deaths on jihadists.”

“What?” whispered Eisen in horror. “You can’t mean
that.”

“Of course I do. But I’ll make their deaths as quick
and painless as possible.”

“So you want to just butcher them like cattle in a
slaughterhouse?” demanded Eisen. “They’re
helpless
.
Haven’t we hurt them enough already? And we promised to let them go. Are we
really going to slaughter helpless innocents?”

Mizrahi found himself agreeing. He had never thought
ill of Kovonov before, but he couldn’t help but find this a troubling
development.

“When you signed on for this project,” said Kovonov, “you
knew I planned to change the world. Don’t tell me you’re getting sanctimonious
all of a sudden?”

“
Sanctimonious?
”
shouted Eisen. “
That’s
what you call
objecting to the slaughter of innocents? Yes, I signed on to change the world.
But with a
virus
. Already a horrific
solution, but one that I believe our survival might depend on. But I never
signed on for
this
! How are we any
different than the Islamists we’re fighting?”

“Shit, Daniel! Are you really going to start quoting Nietzsche
like you’re Avi Wortzman? His
battle not
with monsters
shit? In every war civilians are killed. It’s called collateral
damage.” Kovonov shook his head in disgust and disappointment. “I thought you
might balk at the next step in my plan, but not this one.”

Mizrahi’s face had turned into a tortured mask of
conflicted emotions, but he remained silent.

“You can’t do this, Dmitri, ” said Eisen.

“The Americans dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese
cities to end a war,” said Kovonov. “Do you have any idea how many innocent
civilians were killed? How many children? The tens of thousands who were
vaporized instantly were the
lucky
ones. An even greater number survived the initial blast and went on to die slowly
and horribly from radiation poisoning. The Americans didn’t
want
this to happen. But they calculated
this action would save millions of lives by ending the war. Would stop the
kamikaze-deploying Japanese who were so relentless and unyielding they refused
to surrender even
after
Hiroshima.”

Kovonov’s lip curled into a snarl. “And what was the
ultimate fallout from this?” he demanded. “I’ll tell you what: Japan and
America are now close allies.”

“You’re going to compare ending WWII to shooting
helpless evangelicals like fish in a barrel?” shouted Eisen, so incensed he
looked like a rabid dog. “You’ve observed and questioned these people. On the
whole they’re a decent, well-meaning group. Maybe we find the bible study thing
a little hokey, but it helps
them
.
They don’t deserve this. And we wouldn’t be killing them to end a war or
prevent casualties on our side. You and I both know there is no need for them
to die.”

“Not a direct need,” said Kovonov, “but killing them
reduces the risk that we’ll be caught or found out, which could ruin
everything. Could prevent us from ending a war on terror. A trans-generational
battle against foes who make the Japanese seem as relentless and unyielding as
a
teddy bear
. As a small bonus, the
massacre of twenty innocents, if unambiguously tied to jihadists, will continue
to prod America out of its reluctance to truly engage. A small prodding, yes,
but a tiny step in the right direction.”

“No!” said Eisen. “I won’t be a party to this!
Watching them through the monitors, watching their resilience, I’ve found a
renewed faith in humanity. I’m not sure I even support the
original
plan any longer. But I know I don’t support this!”

Kovonov shook his head. “I thought after I revealed my
true plans I’d have to
question
you with the lie detector. Make sure you were telling the truth when you said
you supported me. I never thought you wouldn’t at least
pretend
to support me.”

“Well think again!” said Eisen. His eyes widened as a new thought struck
him. “Wait a minute. If this was supposed to be the part of your plan you
thought wouldn’t trouble us, what’s the
next
part like?”

Kovonov told them, quickly and efficiently, with no
punches pulled.

This time even Mizrahi whitened in horror.

“You’ve gone totally fucking mad!” said Eisen. “I was
told you had, but I never believed it. I thought it was propaganda from
Wortzman to rein you in. But he was absolutely right!”

“What I’m doing is the equivalent of killing one
innocent man to save a thousand.”

“Spoken like a true psychopath,” spat Eisen.

Kovonov turned to Mizrahi. “Yosef?” he said, almost plaintively. “I know
I can count on you. You’re still with me, right?”

Mizrahi’s face was contorted as an absolute war raged inside his mind. Thoughts
and emotions vied for prominence, waging a pitched battle with sharp daggers.

He loved Dmitri Kovonov. This man had become almost a god to him. But the
atrocities he was contemplating were just too great.

Mizrahi finally decided that Kovonov was still a god, but one who had
fallen ill. One he would dedicate his life to curing.

“It pains me to side with Daniel on this one,” he said. “But I have no
other choice.”

And it
did
pain him, not just
psychologically but physically as well. His entire being protested the decision
to go against Kovonov’s wishes, like the body of a transplant recipient rejecting
the heart he needed to survive.

Kovonov leaped to his feet in a fit of rage and flung the folding chair toward
the far wall of the cabin with all of his strength. “Are you kidding me?” he
screamed at Mizrahi as the wooden chair struck the wall like an oversized hammer,
shattering into pieces.
 

He clenched and unclenched his fists and a maniacal look remained on his
face. “Do you have any idea how much I’ve molded you?” he bellowed. “I’ve turned
you into a loyal puppy dog! Your admiration for me has been ramped up so high
it’s amazing it hasn’t shot through the top of your head,” he screamed, spittle
flying from his mouth. “
So what happened
to following me into hell?
” he demanded.
 

Kovonov took several deep breaths and the fire in his eyes subsided, his
tantrum over. “This tells me a lot,” he said evenly, the scientist once more. “Even
the best of humanity, even manipulated relentlessly, doesn’t have the iron stomach
to do what is necessary. This is such a disappointment.”

“Are you saying my admiration for you isn’t real?” said Mizrahi stupidly.

“You fucking idiot! I understand being clueless when you had no idea I
tampered with you. But now? A light bulb should be going off in your head,
right? I fucked with your brain! Of course I did! That’s what I
do
! You followed me from Mossad so I
could do this to our enemies, remember? You didn’t
always
slavishly worship the urinal I pee in, remember?”

Mizrahi thought his brain was exploding as the dam protecting his psyche
from this realization burst open. Gorge rose in his throat.

He had agreed to follow Kovonov initially, had genuinely respected and
admired the man, but knowing that he had since been turned into a human puppet
was a shock to his system that was nearly debilitating, a lead-fisted sucker
punch to his gut.

“As disappointed as I am,” continued Kovonov, “I can’t afford to lose you
both. So I’ll still need to salvage you, Yosef. Daniel is smarter and more
competent, but I’m forced to make this choice. Your brain has been raped repeatedly
and is set up for easy manipulation going forward.”

“What does that mean?” said Eisen. “That you’re going to kill me? Your
friend? The man who stood at your side when Wortzman tried to limit you? Your greatest
ally and top lieutenant? If that isn’t proof that you’ve lost your mind,
nothing is.”

Eisen took a deep breath and softened his voice. “I can still be an ally,
Dmitri. Still help you change the world. Just abandon these plans. The virus
will be enough. Let these people go.”

“Let these people go?” repeated Kovonov in disbelief. “You’re starting to
sound like Moses.”

He raised a gun, this time one that fired bullets rather than
tranquilizers. “I’d consider your offer, Daniel, except for two things. One,
you’ve already admitted to having second thoughts about even deploying the
virus. And two, the Danbury Evangelical Fellowship is already extinct. I
butchered them like hogs while you were out cold,” he added with a cruel smile.

Eisen issued a primal scream that Kovonov ended almost before it had
begun, calmly pulling the trigger and drilling a hole through the forehead of
the man who had been his closest friend and confidant.

“I am so sorry it’s come to this,” he whispered as Eisen’s head slumped
forward against his chest.

But rather than sorrow, his face reflected nothing but self-satisfaction.