Twelve Days Read online

  “Too easy to trace. And I don’t think Tel Aviv”—where the Mossad was headquartered—“would approve.”

  “Where, then?”

  “Men who kill for money aren’t hard to find.”

  “Do you have specifics? Of how this might be done?”

  “I have ideas.”

  “A budget? Employees?”

  She saw he was putting the operation in the terms he understood best, a business plan.

  She shook her head. The wrong answer.

  “Then you’re wasting my time. If you truly believe you can do this, the next time we meet, you’ll have details. What it costs. How we do it without our friends in Tel Aviv catching on. I can move money wherever you need. Ten, twenty, even fifty million a year. But everything else, that’s up to you. The logistics. How big a team. How we find them. What we tell them.”

  “I understand.”

  “No. You don’t.” His voice a lash. He’d never spoken to her this way before. Like she was an employee who’d disappointed him. “There’s no timetable. You call me when you’re sure you can answer my questions, all my questions, and we’ll meet. When you’re ready. Not before.”

  “All right.”

  “Zev will see you out.” Nothing more. He walked off, leaving her to watch her oatmeal turn to concrete.

  —

  Like the CIA, the Mossad ran espionage operations all over the world. The Israeli Defense Forces had the simpler but equally crucial task of stopping suicide bombers before they reached Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

  Spy services made elaborate, months-long efforts to recruit agents. The IDF used a simpler strategy. Like a big-city police department, it paid for tips. The Palestinian security services viciously punished anyone they caught collaborating with Israel. Even so, with the average Palestinian making less than two thousand dollars a year, rewards of a few hundred dollars attracted plenty of informants.

  Salome had seen the strategy succeed firsthand. Israel had a military draft. After basic training, she joined the IDF’s intelligence division. She learned surveillance and countersurveillance, how to find and recruit potential agents, interrogation techniques. Then she went to work as a junior intelligence officer, handling low-level Palestinian informants in the West Bank. She had come away after her two years of service feeling that for enough money, anyone could be bought.

  Still, she had no illusions about her ability to handle an operation like the one she’d proposed to Duberman. She could hire the hackers and forgers she needed for communications and passports. Eastern Europe was full of those guys. Finding the trigger pullers would be much harder. She had told Duberman the truth. Plenty of men would kill for money. Unfortunately, they were mostly the wrong men: untrustworthy, uncontrollable, and potentially police informants. She couldn’t risk scraping together a new team for every job. No, she needed eight or ten men with clean passports who could travel all over Europe and Asia. Mercenaries and paramilitaries. She couldn’t find them herself, so she needed to find someone who could. He would make the hires and run the op on a day-to-day basis, serve as a screen between her and the team. Ideally, he would be American, ex-military or -CIA.

  She knew there had to be CIA or Army officers who would bite on the deal she would offer. They were the men who’d come home from yearlong tours in Kabul to find that their wives had moved out. Who waited for noon so they could settle on the couch with a bottle of Smirnoff and a glass of ice. Who slept with their pistols under their pillows. Who would be desperate to try anything that might let them stop thinking about themselves.

  Her man was one of those.

  But how to find him? She couldn’t exactly put out an ad: Troubled former CIA officer needed to run assassination cell. Competitive salary, full benefits. Must be burned out, but not completely.

  It wasn’t as if anyone kept a list of these men.

  Then she realized she was wrong. Of course someone kept a list.

  —

  She told Raban he should investigate whether the Mossad was doing enough to manage its troubled case officers. At first, the idea bored him. Then she explained that the hearing wouldn’t have to be classified. The chance for television exposure warmed him up immediately. You think it’s important, that’s enough for me, sweetie.

  She knew that the committee would never hold such a hearing. No matter. She had Raban make an official request. Then she asked a friend at the IDF to put her in contact with the CIA. Not the National Clandestine Service or even the Directorate for Analysis. The human resources department. She told the good folks in HR that she and her boss wanted to reform the way the Mossad dealt with difficult officers.

  These people, they’ve served us. They deserve our help, we can’t just toss them aside like used tissues. I know some of them we can’t reach, but at least we have to try. She figured, correctly, that human resources managers didn’t get much respect from their frontline cousins and would appreciate being taken seriously.

  I hate to bother you with this, but our people are stonewalling me. I ask them for numbers, they just say these problems are rare. I ask how rare, they say internal matter. I ask how they respond, they say internal matter. Internal matter this, internal matter that, I’m so sick of hearing those two words. I’m hoping I might run some questions by you. Pick your brain, isn’t that the English expression?

  She had top-level Israeli security clearances. Anyway, she wasn’t asking for the details of ongoing operations, just how the agency handled burned-out case officers. Three weeks later, she found herself in a conference room at Langley. I’m interested in warning signs, how you intervened, when you realized cases might be hopeless. How much damage they did, how you contained it. I don’t mean in just the obvious ways, blown operations or agents. I’m talking about more subtle problems, hits to station morale, lost management time. The stuff the frontline guys pretend doesn’t matter, but in reality matters a lot. She watched that last line score. A half-dozen heads nodded. And the horror stories began.

  Obviously, I wouldn’t want you to tell me names. But I would hope you would stick to the facts of their lives and careers. In other words, if someone was drummed out for being an alcoholic in Cairo, don’t make him a heroin addict in Tokyo. The more accurate the information you give me, the better sense I can make of it.

  And the easier it will be for me to find the man I need.

  They provided even more information than she’d hoped. Whatever else it might be, the CIA was a bureaucracy. Everybody had a file. After two days, Salome had learned about dozens of troubled officers. One in particular stood out. A man who served with distinction in Baghdad, then transferred to Hong Kong and flushed his career away. Who lost millions of dollars gambling. Who rejected the agency’s every effort to help and was ultimately forced out. Millions of dollars? Weren’t you concerned where the money was coming from? If he was selling secrets? Of course, the CIA managers said. But the money turned out to be his own, an inheritance. His parents had died in a car accident. He’d received a large settlement. After a review of his career, the agency determined that he was not a security risk despite the gambling losses. There was no evidence that he had tried to contact the FSB, the Chinese, or any other foreign intelligence agency. Nor had he tried to hide his problems. They had been obvious from the start of his Hong Kong posting. And even if he’d wanted to betray his own agents, he hadn’t had any to give up. In Hong Kong, he had hardly worked. In Baghdad, he had teamed with the military on operations against al-Qaeda in Iraq. But those missions had little ongoing intelligence value.

  So the officer had been forced out, his security clearance pulled. He could never work for the agency again. But he hadn’t been prosecuted. The CIA had even let him keep his pension.

  So Iraq made him break down? The stress? The managers confessed they couldn’t be sure. All along, the officer had refused to discuss his problems. And where is he n
ow? Still in Hong Kong, they said. They had asked the station to monitor him. But its chief had insisted that anything other than an occasional look-in would be a waste of manpower. The consensus was that the officer would drink himself to death in a year. If he didn’t put a bullet in his head even sooner.

  Sounds like a tragic case. Exactly the sort of situation I’m hoping to prevent.

  —

  She met Duberman four days later at his villa in Jerusalem. No oatmeal this time, and no patio. He sat at an ornate gilded desk that looked like it belonged in Versailles. Spread across it were pictures of sharks, ugly beasts with squared-off heads. He held one up.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think that’s why I never learned to surf.”

  “My casino manager wants to put in a new tank in Macao, drop in a couple of those. I’m not sure looking at them would make you want to throw down a thousand dollars on red.” Duberman put down the photo. “So. You asked for the meeting, here I am.”

  She told him what she’d done. Normally, he was difficult to read. Not now. He started grinning right away. Five minutes in, he interrupted.

  “You conned the CIA into giving you a list of its worst burnouts.”

  “You haven’t heard the best part.” She told him about the Hong Kong officer who had lost everything gambling in Macao. “I know there’s no guarantee he played at 88 Gamma—”

  “You said he lost millions?”

  “That’s what they told me.”

  “And he’s American, not Chinese?”

  “That was the impression they left. He had served in Baghdad.”

  Duberman reached for his phone. “Start the timer on your phone. It’ll take me two minutes to get his name if he played with us. Five minutes if he did it somewhere else. Round-eye losers that size are rare.”

  He was wrong, barely. Three minutes passed before he hung up. “Glenn Mason.”

  “You sure?”

  As an answer, he reached across the desk, put a finger to her lips. His touch was heavy, firm. A jolt of sexual energy coursed to her hips. She forced herself to lean back so that he was no longer touching her.

  “Mason lost three million dollars with us. Blackjack. Two and a half million of his own, a half million on a chit. Far as we can tell, he never played anywhere else. Ironic. We cut him off a few months ago. We have his address, but we haven’t put any pressure on him because he’s broke. They’ll email me everything we have.”

  “Great.” Her voice sounded breathy in her ears. She hoped he didn’t notice.

  “So now?”

  She cleared her throat. Time to stop acting like a teenage girl who’d just been touched for the first time. “Now I quit Raban’s office and start spending your money. A reliable source for passports. Anonymous email accounts. Phones. Pistols. Eastern European stuff. Won’t take long.”

  “Why not talk to him first?”

  “Because he’ll have questions. He’ll want proof that we’re serious, and the more I do the more details I can give him.”

  “Will you tell him it’s about Iran?”

  “Yes. He’ll figure that out anyway.”

  “But nothing about where the money’s coming from.”

  “Of course no.”

  “If he says no?”

  “We move on. I’ve got twenty possibilities. They won’t all be as easy to find as he is, but they’re all real.”

  “So nothing subtle.”

  “No. I’m just going to show up.” The IDF philosophy. No mincing around. Make a direct approach, get a yes or no. The first betrayal was the toughest. Later on, people found reasons to keep getting paid. “From what they said, they’re hardly even watching him. If he agrees, then everything else falls into place.”

  “Make sure he’s not too broken.”

  “He spent years in Iraq. He’s tougher than you think.”

  —

  The next day she told Raban she was quitting to become an independent consultant to companies interested in making Middle Eastern investments. She hinted that Duberman was a client, but told him she couldn’t be more specific because of a nondisclosure agreement. Raban said he understood.

  After a couple weeks recruiting hackers in Eastern Europe, she flew to Hong Kong to recruit Mason. She knew he would agree as soon as he opened the door of his apartment and stared at her with his haggard, bloodshot eyes. As she’d predicted to Duberman, once she had Mason, everything else clicked. Within a few weeks, Mason traveled to Thailand to fake his own death. Then he had plastic surgery so he could travel without worrying about tripping facial-recognition software. As soon as he recovered from the operations, he began recruiting. Over time, Mason’s guys met her, but none learned her real name. And even Mason never figured out who was funding her.

  —

  While Mason recruited, Salome created the network of safe houses and vehicles and communications gear he needed. She became an expert at using anonymizing browser and email software, learned to judge a fake passport. The preparation was necessary. Still, she chafed at the wasted time. The Iranians were inching closer to a weapon. She knew because she still had access to the Mossad’s analyses, thanks to Raban.

  Every couple of months, she had lunch with him. She peeled his hands off her legs while he updated her on the Mossad and the IDF. He still thought of her more or less as one of his staffers. Staying connected to Raban helped in another way, too, by giving her an excuse to talk every so often to right-wing groups in Washington that supported Israel. Through them she could get invitations to the circuit of cocktail parties and conferences where CIA analysts and Pentagon lifers mingled with defense contractors and Middle Eastern lobbyists. She moved carefully, of course. She knew that she would set off alarms if she seemed too pushy. She kept her job description vague, a common practice at these gatherings, where business cards often had titles like Principal or Managing Director/Services. As she’d hoped, she became a familiar face. Even in an age of drones and metadata, informal networks mattered. She traded tidbits about Israel’s fight against Hamas for tips about the European and Asian companies that were making hundreds of millions of dollars by helping Iran enrich uranium. Slowly, she built a hit list.

  And a year after that snowy breakfast in Jerusalem, she gave Mason his first targets, two executives at a German metal company that was selling high-strength steel to Iran. Seventeen days later, he called her at her office in Zurich. The killings had gone off perfectly.

  She had feared guilt might overtake her afterward. Instead, she felt the childish thrill of a bullied ten-year-old who had punched her tormentor and sent him gasping. You thought we couldn’t touch you, but you were wrong. Her lack of empathy surprised her. I suppose this is what it means to be evil, she thought, but the word had no sting. She’d chosen these men to die, and their deaths had come.

  Over the next year, Mason and his team kept killing.

  Yet the Iranian program steamed ahead. Then Raban told her that the Mossad had pilfered the most recent American National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. The NIE reported that Iran remained determined to build a bomb and would complete one in two years, three at most.

  Their work had failed. Tehran was too determined. Only obliterating Iran’s nuclear facilities could stop its program.

  In her twenties, Salome had fallen into a depression so deep that it seemed as if every cell in her mind was misfiring at once. Merely breathing became unbearably painful. The word depression didn’t begin to describe how she felt. She had slid to the bottom of a crevasse five hundred meters deep, the kind that swallowed climbers on Everest. Not only could she not see the sun, she couldn’t even be sure it existed.

  She was at her lowest for only a few weeks, but the experience stamped her, changed her deep in her bones. To this day, she wasn’t sure what had brought her down. The experience forced her to face her own mind�
��s fragility. Yet, paradoxically, it had given her a sense of invulnerability. She no longer feared the world. It couldn’t hurt her as much as she could hurt herself.

  Hearing about the NIE didn’t instantly send her back down the hole. But it did make her remember what those days had been like, and to realize she was at risk. If this project failed, she’d lose everything. The Iranians would have the bomb, and she would know she had missed her chance to stop them.

  She forced herself to retreat. To think. She still had Mason and his team. She needed a new way to use them. She drove east and south from Jerusalem into the desert, to the Dead Sea. The lowest point on earth, hundreds of feet below sea level. A depression, yes. Mountains on either side flanked the grandly named sea, in reality nothing more than a narrow salt-filled lake. Third-rate hotels clustered in a resort community midway down its shore, offering Dead Sea mudbaths and all-you-can-eat buffets, salmonella included. They catered to Russian immigrants and pensioners who didn’t have the money to go anywhere else. Yet Salome felt strangely rejuvenated when she came to this ugly place. Maybe because of the sulfurous warmth. The fear that threatened her was cold.

  On her third day, she watched Russian television, the foreign minister complaining about the White House. “The Americans think they can do whatever they like,” he said. “They invade this country and that country. They pay no attention to national sovereignty. One day they will see the rest of the world does not jump to their drum.”

  They invade this country and that country . . .

  Only the American military was powerful enough to destroy Iran’s weapons program. But the White House didn’t see the danger Iran posed. Or it feared another war in the Middle East too much to respond. Salome needed to force the United States to see the risk of allowing Iran to build a bomb. If the Iranians weren’t yet ready to threaten America, she would threaten it for them. She would foretell the future, in order to prevent it.

  She spent the next day figuring out realistic ways she might bait the United States. Then she flew halfway around the world to meet Mason in Indonesia. He told her she was insane.