DEAD BEEF (Our Cyber World Book 1) (35 page)

Chapter 45

They stood in silence for a few tense seconds. To Martin, Chana seemed tired and haggard. She reminded him of his mother lying in her death bed.

“Hello, Martin,” Chana said with a sad smile. “You look well.”

“You don't,” Martin replied.

“Thank you for caring. Keeping up with you over the past few hours has taken its toll on this old woman. I will live. Long enough, I suppose.”

“Far too long,” Sasha said, stepping up to Martin’s side. “Much longer than those you’ve murdered. What is your nickname again? Oh, yes, Solomon’s butcher-bitch!” Sasha paused, as if to let that last word get the due it deserved. Then in a lower almost growling voice, she added, “Behold the trail of bodies that lies in her wake.”

“It’s good to see you too, Sasha, my dear Sasha. Or should we finally start calling you Rachel.”

“I don’t work for you,” Sasha said. “You should have retired that call-sign long ago, or passed it on to another stupid girl.”

“The call-sign may be obsolete now,” Chana said. “But your real name remains. Your blood isn’t Iranian, Rachel. It is the blood of Abraham. It is my blo—.” Chana doubled over holding her abdomen and screamed in pain.

Up above they heard a helicopter dropping in altitude.

Sasha shoved Martin toward the Jeep, and with one foot cut out his feet from under him, bringing him face down on the ground. Then she was shoving him under the Toyota FJ screaming, “Take cover!” followed by a scream of her own pain.

Under the FJ, Martin looked back and saw Chana waving up at the sky with both arms, shouting “I am not shot! I am not shot! I am alright! I am alright! I am not shot!”

Sasha’s feet were running to Chana, and a moment later, Sasha had her by her hair in one hand, with knife under her neck.

On the trail, Martin could hear the Land Rover speeding toward them. It came to a hard stop, Martin heard doors clank open and in another few seconds two other set of feet were next to him.

Martin started to come out, and Sasha screamed “Martin, stay there! Stay there!”

“Do as she says,” he heard Leticia say. “Don’t move until we’re cleared.”

“What’s going on, Ms. Bauman?” Ochoa asked. “We saw the helo and thought they’d shot you.”

“It’s just abdominal pain,” Chana said. She was still grimacing and holding her abdomen with both hands. “I need my pills. From my purse. Back in the Suburban.”

The sharper, higher pitch sound of a motorbike’s engine was now approaching them, and a minute later the bike came to a sliding stop, dropped on the ground, and Martin heard Cynthia saying, “What the hell is going on here!”

“A misunderstanding,” Ochoa said calmly.

“Jesus!” Cynthia said. “We’re totally exposed here, Ochoa. This was a bad—”

“Stay calm, please,” Ochoa said. “Do me a favor. Take your bike back to her car and grab her purse and her phone.” Cynthia seemed to vacillate “No time to waste. Please.”

A moment later Cynthia and her dirt bike were speeding back toward the entrance of the trail.

“Sasha, let her go,” Ochoa said. “It’s a misunderstanding, and the longer you hold—”

“Misunderstanding,” Sasha spat back. “I’d like to misunderstand her throat right now, ear to ear.”

“Go ahead!” Chana screamed. “Go ahead and put me out of my pain! Go ahead and slash my throat and spill my blood. But I warn you that it will be your blood that you spill, the same blood that is seeping out of that wound of yours!”

“Is there no end to your lies?” Sasha screamed back. “Is there no shame in your soul that you have to resort to such outlandish claims to save your neck?”

Chana paused to compose herself. With eyes closed, still grimacing she lowered her voice to say, “Why would I recruit a girl to infiltrate Iranian intelligence? Why would I try to use a female, with the low standing your sex carries in that culture?”

“Because a girl was all you could get.”

“Oh, Sasha, you are a special girl, very special, but not in that way. You learned well, and your knife technique is excellent. But there were and are plenty of boys,” Chana said. “We didn’t need a girl. But I needed a way to rescue a long-lost niece I had been searching for ever since I can manage to remember. And I found you, Rachel. My beautiful, youthful, vibrant Rachel. Rachel Bauman, daughter of my dead brother Alon, and of your beautiful mother Ayala.”

“You lie,” Sasha said. “You lie so well.”

“You say that as if you don’t want to believe it,” Chana said, now smiling.

“Sasha, let her go,” Ochoa said. “What she’s saying matches up with what she told us back at the agency, in D.C.”

Martin could hear the motorcycle racing back.

“She told you this in D.C.?” Sasha asked. “What the—”

“I never mentioned it because I didn’t think it mattered,” Ochoa said.

The motorcycle came to a stop, and Leticia said, “You met with her, knew that she was chasing Sasha down, and you didn’t think it mattered to mention she had talked to you? What were you thinking?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve been a little busy,” Ochoa replied.

“No worries, Agent Ochoa,” Chana said. “Martin has his own secrets which I bet he’s never shared with you. Have you, Martin?” She paused. “Remember me, standing atop Masada herself just before sunrise as a shot-up, smoking helicopter came streaming from the east? Remember how wide-eyed young Jewish boys climbing the dry mountain looked up at its approach in disbelief? Remember how you stood next to me as they said their oath: ‘Masada shall not fall again!’? Remember how you told me these brave boys knew nothing, and how you who knew so much had just run away from your biggest failure? Remember how that morning, shortly after we arrived in Tel Aviv, washed off of your blood and that of she who saved you, you fell in my arms, and how I nurtured you in my bosom as if you were my long-lost son?”

Martin crawled out just a bit to look at Sasha. She had released Chana and stepping to the side now took a few steps toward him. “Martin!” she shouted. “Martin, how could you!”

“Oh, Sasha, how could he indeed?” Chana was saying. “He was distraught to no end, in no condition to be deceived or enticed. He never even knew me by name, much less in the biblical sense. Now after all these years he finally remembers the voice that whispered soothing comfort into his ear, while he cried softly into my chest and whispered your name.

“‘Sasha, Sasha,’ he said again and again. ‘If you’d only been here, if you’d only been with me, none of this would have happened.’

“And he was right, you know. You are the biggest mistake the Americans made with this tangled mess, tossing you aside as they did. We wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t. You and Martin would be running InfoStream, and God would have blessed you for your blood’s sake, Sasha. He would have blessed you with children, happiness from a man who adores you, and with success that makes what InfoStream has achieved a pale, sad shade of Californian fog.”

Chana winced and held her breath before adding, “And then there’s Cynthia. She too has her own secrets, except hers are pure and full of so much love for a man that keeps making her go after him. Three times he has needed rescue, and three times she has gone after him.”

Still holding her abdomen, Chana managed to rise to her feet. “As much as I would love the luxury of reminiscing about a boy and a girl that never could, and who now might find happiness, in another few seconds my boys up top will, against my prior orders descend upon you like dark angels. I’d rather we all do our level best to keep our word to your president. Not to mention that time is short, and jointly we have far greater matters to consider,” She coughed. “Shall we go on with business?”

“Ochoa, your call,” Martin said.

Ochoa had been digging through Chana’s purse, the one Cynthia had brought back from the Suburban. He held Chana’s cell phone up to the helicopter, and in another second it rang.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” Ochoa said. “Per Mrs. Bauman’s instructions, please set down your helo by her SUV, guard perimeter and await further instructions.”

“May we receive confirmation from her, please?” a voice said on the other end.

Ochoa glared at Chana, and she raised both arms, each hand flashing a thumbs-up. The helicopter hovered for another moment, as if making sure, then headed to the directed location. A few seconds later it was setting down on the field just to the east of the entrance into the dirt trail.

“Inside, now,” Ochoa said pointing at a building two hundred yards down-trail.

Outside, Leticia Ortiz and Rodrigo Ochoa stood guard. Stan Beloski, wielding a small sub-machine gun sat sentry just inside the building’s door and only entrance. Chana Bauman, Cynthia Spencer, Martin Spencer and Sasha Javan sat around a dusty, rusted metal conference room table. Martin sat directly across Chana, with Sasha at his left, and Cynthia also to his left and across the table.

The long-ago abandoned InfoStream subsidiary building reeked of moths, fungus and failure of a promising project that had started and died before it had a chance. Martin remembered how he’d never been able to sell this lousy building, which in some twist of luck he could not have planned, now worked in his favor. He mused this was the sort of random happenstance Julian would love to point out.

“A couple of days ago, my team and I had a discussion about trust,” Martin said. “As quickly as we can, you need to earn ours, and we yours.”

“That may never happen,” Chana said. “In the interest of time, I suggest we focus on practicality and shared interests. We may not be able to set our fears and distrust aside, but perhaps we can put trust, faith even that we need one another desperately. We need your brains, and you need our brawn.”

“I’m sure the president is sending other teams,” Cynthia put in. “This area will be swarming with ops teams in a couple of hours.”

“In a couple of hours?” Chana scoffed. “Why not already? Why not yesterday? How is it that a foreign intelligence agency can set down a team, with more arriving as we speak, before the leader of the free world can bring in his horses?”

Chana smiled at Martin. “Martin knows the answer. It comes down to a single word. The president, solid, capable and big-hearted man that he is, is surrounded by this word, crushed by it even. You know the word, Martin, don’t you? It starts with ‘I’ and it isn’t ‘Imagination.’ It’s not ‘Iranian’ or ‘Israeli’ either.”

“Incompetence,” Martin muttered.

“Exactly. Incompetence. It’s why you ran and want to work alone. Because you don’t want a repeat of the same incompetence that left your life’s work behind enemy lines during the Iranian operation,  leaving you now with an untidy mess to clean up.”