Ops Files II--Terror Alert (3 page)

An endless parade of rickshaws streamed toward them on the street, their operators pedaling in the dank heat of morning with the resigned acceptance of prisoners serving life sentences. The sheer press of humanity most days, at any hour, was onerous even in the relative comfort of the car, which was made worse by Uri’s endless smoking of the local cheap cigarettes to which he was addicted.

The older man coughed, an ominous, wet sound that transitioned into a wheeze, and stubbed out his seventh cigarette of the morning. Gil eyed him without comment, knowing it was pointless to complain about his superior’s repellent habit.

“This isn’t working,” Gil griped. “We need to get into the mosque, not sit out here wondering what they’re doing inside.”

“Huh, why didn’t I think of that? Maybe you can slip in, looking as much like a native as you do and speaking perfect Bengali, and linger around where the great man’s holding court?” Uri spat in a tone corrosive as battery acid. “You know, see if he’s handing out ‘terrorist wanted’ cards or anything.”

“Then what’s the point of monitoring his movements? He could be digging a tunnel to Jerusalem and we’d never know it.”

“Because I said so.” Uri eyed the younger man and his tone softened. “I understand this is frustrating. I’ve asked for more support, but budgets are lean. You know the story. We’re to do the best we can and notify headquarters if we learn anything.”

“How can we learn anything sitting out here?”

“Well, we saw the great man go to Western Union and get money, so that tells us he’s still receiving foreign support. Which may not seem like much, but it’s something.” Uri looked back at the mosque. “And I’ve learned to hate Dhaka even more than yesterday, so at least you’re not alone in that.” He laughed drily. “Look at the bright side – at least I’ve still got cigarettes left, so you don’t have to find a store.”

The younger man looked at his watch. “They’ve been in there for an hour. Prayer service was over, what, twenty minutes ago?”

“Maybe he’s using the can.”

“Seriously. What are we doing here?”

Uri gave Gil another long-suffering stare, his eyes like a basset hound’s, yellowed where they weren’t bloodshot, and the bags beneath them dark and drooping. “We’re recording who he’s in there with. It’s the best we can do.” Uri tapped his PDA screen. “See? Camera’s still in position, and we should be able to grab faces from the footage and compare them using the recognition software our enterprising American colleagues have generously shared with us.”

“Without knowing what they’re talking about, this is a huge waste of time,” Gil countered. “We should be bribing the Western Union clerk so we can trace the money he received.”

“I know you’d like to go in with guns blazing, but that’s not what we do, my young friend. Patience is a virtue. Good things come to those who wait.”

“You should write fortune cookies.”

“I may have to if they cut our expense account any further.”

“Did you tell them that we picked up local chatter about something being planned?”

Uri sighed. “Of course. They asked what it was – which, of course, we don’t know. They wanted to know who was involved. Which again, we don’t know. They asked about a target. Which we know zip about. Let’s just say that their response to our earth-shattering news was less than enthusiastic.”

“We can’t learn any of that without the resources we need.”

“Agreed. In the meantime, we sit here, I regale you with colorful stories of the Mossad’s glory years, and you learn a thing or two about tradecraft.”

“My tradecraft’s fine.”

“Pride goeth.”

Gil stiffened and looked back at the mosque. “Wait. The doors are opening again.” They’d watched as the building had emptied out after the morning prayer, but their target, a local imam named Ajmal Kahn, hadn’t been among those who’d left – unusual, and the first time in the month that Uri and Gil had been following him.

A VW van slowed to a stop in front of the mosque. Kahn’s two bodyguards, slim young men with scraggly black beards and the expressions of hawks, stepped out of the entryway into the hazy sunlight, followed by Kahn, who as usual looked as though he was ready to single-handedly command the heavens to open so the wrath of eternity could rain down upon those around him. His humorless face could have been carved from granite, etched with deep frown lines and eyes black and beady as a weasel’s.

The three men looked around expectantly, and one of the bodyguards held a cell phone to his ear as the van’s sliding door opened. The imam and his men climbed inside and the panel slammed shut.

Gil eyed Uri. “Well? Let’s go.”

“Not so fast. We know our friend is in the van. What we don’t know is what he was doing in the mosque, or who he was with.”

“One of us has to follow him.”

“Agreed. I’ll take the car. Think you can find someplace discreet to watch the entrance from? Take photos of anyone that comes out.”

Gil nodded. “You’re lucky my phone’s state-of-the-art and not that piece of shit they authorized.”

“We’re all grateful for your profligate habits, young man.”

“Where do you want to rendezvous?”

“Back at my place,” Uri said, referring to the shabby office in the basement of his building that served as cover for the Mossad’s Dhaka operations. “Better snap to it, or I’m going to lose him.”

Gil stepped out into the heat, and the toxic dust that swirled around him instantly coated him with a film of filth. He was dressed like the locals, in cheap dress pants and a lightweight button-up shirt, but with a fanny pack that contained his essential spy tools, which in this case were a cell phone and a butterfly knife.

The Nissan pulled away in a cloud of poorly combusted exhaust as the van negotiated through the rickshaws, and Gil focused his attention on the mosque, whose doors were now closed again. Three small boys approached him, begging for coins, and he shooed them off, ignoring their colorful curses – language that would have made a pirate blush, and not one of them over six, he guessed. Gil had long before hardened himself against the pervasive poverty in the city, the desperation, the disease, the alarming evidence that God had long ago abandoned the place. It was routine to see beggars without legs stewing in their own feces outside towering office buildings, or children with limbs rotting off and no medical care in evidence, every kind of defect or abomination on display as the more fortunate avoided their brethren, taking care to skirt their begging positions so as not to sully their shoes.

His attention was drawn from the parade of misery to the doors of the mosque, where two young men appeared from within. Gil pretended to text on his phone as he zoomed in and photographed them. After a brief hug, the pair separated and walked in opposite directions down the street.

“Well, well, well. What have we got here?” Gil muttered to himself as he watched them part.

He waited another half hour, but nobody else left the building. After debating staying in position, he decided that he wasn’t going to learn anything more standing in the street and hailed a rickshaw – one of a half million of the primitive conveyances that plied their trade in the swelter. The driver, barely more than skin and bones and tanned the color of beef jerky, set off at a plodding pace while Gil studied the photos he’d snapped.

On the small phone screen, it was hard to see much detail, but the camera had the latest in high-resolution technology, and hopefully the images would enlarge sufficiently to run through the magic software the Americans had given them.

Of course, it was entirely possible that the two men were nobodies – that they were workers of some sort, or any other of a hundred kinds of innocent visitors.

Gil didn’t think so, though. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but something about their body language, even from across the open sewer of a street that fronted the mosque, had struck him as strange. As if they were up to no good.

Furtive, for lack of a better word.

Perhaps it would amount to nothing, as so many of his efforts had. There was no way of knowing until he tried. That was the job.

Gil punched his speed dial and waited as Uri’s phone rang and rang.

“What?” the older man finally answered.

“We have two possibles. When will you be back?”

“I’m enjoying the sights and smells of one of Dhaka’s leading cesspools. Figure…an hour, tops?”

“Okay. I’ll be waiting. I may have something to go on. Anything promising on your end?”

“If you consider watching ice melt promising, you’d be in heaven.”

“Ah. Well, at least you have cigarettes.”

When Uri met Gil at the office, they worked together to put the photos through the image-recognition software, and waited for hours until they got a result. They eyed the printout with the two possible IDs, and Uri shrugged.

“This isn’t a high enough degree of certainty to cause a fluster,” Uri said.

“It’s above eighty percent.”

“I could put a picture of my foot in it and it would show eighty percent. We’ve got nothing.”

Gil paced in front of the computer monitor. “We’ve got two possible terrorists meeting with Khan. That’s worth making some noise over.”

“Thanks for the career advice. I’ll let you know when I’m recalled.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

The rest of the day went by in tense silence. One of Uri’s local watchers lingered outside the imam’s residence, cell phone in hand. Nobody entered or left, and at the end of the afternoon, as Uri greedily inhaled his sixtieth cigarette of the day, Gil stood and stretched. “It’s been a pleasure being asphyxiated by you, but I’m going to grab a decent meal and get some sleep. Let me know if you need anything. Should be back by seven tomorrow.”

“You should show more respect for your elders, young man.”

“Right. And eat more carrots. I’m working on both.”

“Smartass.”

“Good night.”

“To you as well. Stay away from those loose women in your neighborhood. Your body is a temple.”

“Says the man who smokes a carton a day.”

“Says the man who isn’t dying of AIDS.”

Gil locked the door behind him, leaving Uri in a cloud of nicotine as he stared at the printout. After several minutes of consideration, he stood and moved to the secure, scrambled line that connected to Israel. He placed a call and waited. After several delays, Yael Sheron, the number three man in the Mossad, came on the phone.

“Yes, Uri. What can I do for you?” Yael asked in a tone that clearly communicated his lack of enthusiasm.

“We have a situation here with the imam. I need more resources, Yael.”

“Tell me what you have.”

Uri did. When he was done, Yael sounded only slightly more interested than before. “That’s not much to go on.”

“We have better than eighty percent on facial recognition. I already sent the images for enhancement. But it’s impractical to do much more than file reports and surf the Internet with only the two of us. It’s not enough.”

Yael’s sigh was tired. “It’s never enough. I won’t bore you with my problems, but let me tell you, we have shortages everywhere. The country wants to stay safe, but doesn’t want to pay for it. It’s madness.”

“Promise me you’ll take a hard look at what I sent you, and get me some help. I can’t work miracles, and you know by now I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think I was onto something.”

“Sure, Uri. Of course. I’ll do what I can, but no promises. It’s a different world now. New priorities. You know the story as well as I do.”

“Right. No use for the old ways.”

“A shame, but what can we do? We have to change or be bulldozed, am I right?”

“Just look at the images. I’ll call again tomorrow,” Uri said, as an indication that he wasn’t leaving the situation alone and would persistently badger Yael until he got what he wanted.

“I might be in a meeting.”

“I’ll try back as many times as it takes,” Uri said, steel in his tone.

Yael sighed again. “Don’t ever change, my friend.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

800 kilometers north of Volochanka, Siberia

Snow blew sideways as the icy blizzard’s fury intensified, the only sound the howl of the arctic wind scouring the frozen plain. In early spring, the stretch of forgotten coast was a frozen wasteland, and storms were the only visitors to the barren reaches of the uninhabitable permafrost terrain.

Four snowmobiles banked over a rise, negotiating the sheets of ice that led to the sea with care as they were pummeled by the gelid onslaught. The lead vehicle, packed heavily with rough-weather gear, slowed to a stop, and its rider waved a hand overhead as he checked the screen of a handheld computer. The other men’s vehicles slid to a halt behind him, waiting, motors hissing steam in the subzero air.

The lead rider pointed into the distance. “It should be over there. Half a kilometer more,” he said in Russian, his words muffled by the fabric wrapped around his face to prevent frostbite and windburn, his goggles giving him the appearance of an extraterrestrial.

Vladimir Lukin had been plowing north with his team for three days, the last outpost of civilization in Volochanka a distant memory. Camping on the tundra was only one of the harsh realities of the trek to the northernmost reaches of the continent. A veteran of the armed forces, the elite Spetsnaz commandos famous for their endurance and skill, he’d seen his share of ugly conditions, but even so he was surprised by the ferocity of the intermittent storms they’d endured on their journey.

But now the object of their quest was within reach: an abandoned lighthouse, a forgotten outpost built during the Soviet era, rumored to have fallen into ruin the last time anyone had seen it over a decade earlier, located on one of the most inhospitable reaches on the planet. Why the Soviet empire had, in its boundless wisdom, decided that a point jutting into a frozen sea required a signal beacon remained a mystery – but it had, and Vladimir hoped to benefit from it.

Forced labor had built the structure, and the few survivors of the construction he’d managed to locate had been shells of humanity with something essential missing. Victims of years of malnutrition, exposure, and experimentation in the limits of human endurance, they were today denied by a nation determined to put its past behind it.