End Game (34 page)

*   *   *

When they reached the Hilton, a bellman took the suitcase from the trunk. Alex paid the cabby, and once inside, she showed Pete's passport and checked in. The morning desk clerk didn't bother looking at the photo. He just had her sign, and then gave her the key card.

Her suite was on the twelfth floor, overlooking the Mediterranean. She gave the bellman a good tip, then ordered a pot of coffee and a plate of sweet rolls.

She figured that whatever was going down would happen within the next hour or two. She didn't think that George, or the Israeli authorities, would let it drag out any longer than that.

Her coffee and rolls came, and she'd sat down to eat when someone else knocked lightly at her door.

No one was visible in the peephole, but when she opened the door, a man was rounding the corner to the elevators halfway down the corridor. He'd left a small leather valise.

Otto had arranged for her to have a standard U.S.-issue 9-mm Beretta with a decent suppressor but with only one fifteen-round magazine. She field-stripped the weapon to make sure it was in working order, and then reloaded it.

She sat by the half-open slider, smelling the Med and drinking her coffee, nothing else to do but wait until Otto called.

 

FIFTY-NINE

The Aman officer identified only as Mr. Smith rode shotgun in an eight-passenger Mercedes van, a taciturn young man in jeans and a T-shirt driving. McGarvey and Pete sat in the second row while Sharon sat in back. Sheila had remained behind to help airport security with the search for Alex.

“Leave her alone, and she'll show up on her own,” McGarvey had told Sharon. “No one will get hurt.”

“That's not acceptable,” Sharon had said, and Smith had agreed.

They headed into downtown Tel Aviv directly from the airport, the early morning traffic beginning to pick up, mostly with trucks making deliveries to hotels and restaurants or collecting garbage. It was the same in every city.

An explosion had come from somewhere in the southeast, lighting up the morning sky for just a few moments, but Sharon or Smith didn't seem to be affected by it. What was common in a place became the norm, and most people ignored it.

The driver was very good, turning down narrow streets and then doubling back, pulling into hotel driveways, including the Hilton's to see if anyone could be outed behind them, then speeding off in a completely different direction.

“Is someone following us?” Pete asked.

No one answered her. She looked at McGarvey, who shrugged.

“We've passed Mossad headquarters twice, but I don't suspect he'd want to meet with us there,” McGarvey said. “Not unless Mossad and Aman are on better terms than they were when I was DCI.”

“Where is Alex?” Sharon asked. “Do you know?”

“She could be anywhere.”

“That doesn't help,” the Mossad officer said, vexed. “We're on the same page here, Mr. Director. We want to help you solve your mystery and we want to stop the killings.”

“Did you know General Yarviv and Alex were lovers during the war?”

Smith laughed. “That's the woman's story. I know better.”

“Do you?” McGarvey asked. “Did the general tell you what he and Alex did?”

“You've already made your accusations.”

“Yes, but did you ever discuss Iraq with him—if he turns out to be Alex's George after all?”

McGarvey kept his tone neutral, though he could see he was getting to them, especially to Smith, who was probably Yarviv's chief of staff or personal friend.

“Was Mossad briefed on the Iraq operation above Kirkuk?” McGarvey asked Sharon. “Or has all this come as a surprise?”

“Mr. Director, you have come here looking for answers I don't know we can give you,” Sharon said. “But I would caution you to take great care with the questions you do ask, because you might not like the answers.”

“Good advice,” Smith said, his voice soft.

*   *   *

They left the city on Highway 1 toward Beit Dagan, the terrain rising from the narrow coastal plains within less than ten miles to the beginning of hill country, where they turned south on Highway 6, which more or less paralleled the border with the West Bank.

Just before the town of Modi'in, they turned east on Highway 443, and within a couple of miles of the border, the driver turned off the main road and took a stony dirt track up a steep hill through an olive grove to a sprawling stuccoed house nestled in a slight dip just below the crest.

Several ancient outbuildings dotted the west side of the property, and as they drove up, two young men were leading a small flock of sheep away. The scene in that direction was almost biblical.

But the roof of the main house bristled with several antennas, including one used for microwave burst traffic. An American-made Hummer with Israeli-army markings was parked around back, and a fairly new Mercedes S-Class sedan was parked directly in front.

It didn't look like an ordinary safe house to McGarvey; it was too ostentatious, and nothing was anonymous about the place.

McGarvey and Pete and the two Israeli intelligence officers went up a white river-rock path to the front door that opened as they approached. Their driver had gotten out of the van, but he lit a cigarette and stayed there.

A middle-aged woman in khaki slacks and a short-sleeved white blouse, a smile on her round face, stood there. “Good evening,” she said in English. “My husband has been expecting you.”

She showed them back to a large study, its sliders open to a patio and pool beyond which was a garden with a riot of fruit trees and bright flowers in full bloom.

“Lovely,” Pete said.

The woman's smile broadened. “This is our favorite place of anywhere we've lived,” she said. “If you'll have a seat, the general will join you momentarily. Would anyone like coffee or tea?”

“No, ma'am,” Smith said. “We'll only be staying for a short time.”

The general's wife nodded and then left the room.

The study was large, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases on two walls, an ancient oak desk with ornate carvings on the front and sides, and an arrangement of a leather couch, a pair of wingback chairs, and a coffee table. One space to the left, which could have used a chair, was empty. Old oriental rugs covered the multicolored terrazzo floor. A couple of very good paintings, one of them McGarvey thought might be an original Renoir, hung on the textured red stone walls. Altogether it was a totally masculine room of a refined man.

“Good evening,” a baritone voice said, coming in from the corridor. He was a broad-shouldered man with a thick head of mostly gray hair, and a large square face with prominent eyebrows that stuck out in all directions. He was dressed in jeans and a white shirt, and he looked like a general. He was in a wheelchair, and he came around to the empty spot.

“Good morning, sir,” Smith said. “Sorry to be a bother so late.”

“It's okay, Uri. We were expecting some company sooner or later,” the general said. He turned to the others. “Mr. McGarvey, I presume, and Ms. Boylan, I was told. I'm Chaim Yarviv. Until I retired a few years ago, I was a deputy director of Aman, but then a stupid incident put me in this chair.”

“Good morning, General,” McGarvey said. “Do you know why we're here?”

“Yes, and I knew someone like you might be showing up on my doorstep to get some answers, which neither of our governments would like me to give. But Ms. Unroth isn't with you?”

“We lost her at the airport,” Smith said.

“I'm told she is an inventive woman, ruthless when need be, but very bright. I expect she'll be showing up soon.”

“I'm sorry, General, but we think she may still be at the airport,” Sharon said.

“I doubt that,” Yarviv said. “So, to the business at hand. We received the properly formatted message to George, from Alex though our travel agency in Paris. It was brought to me, and I authorized the reply for her to come.”

“You're George?”

Yarviv smiled. “No. That would have been Jacob Ya'alon. An utterly charming man, one of our best field operators, but a man totally lacking in any sense of morals. He was well educated, but for whatever reason, he could never distinguish right from wrong. Because of that character trait, he was one of our best tools. Shame on us.”

“We have been fighting for our lives here since 1945,” Smith said.

“Yes, but shame on us for using such tools. Only those who believe the ends justify the means can do such things. Hitler's philosophy. Stalin's.”

“What became of Ya'alon?” McGarvey asked.

“Major Ya'alon at the end. We took him out of the field and put him behind a desk, hoping to muzzle him. But he became a hopeless drunk, and maybe used some cocaine at the end. He murdered his live-in girlfriend, and we locked him up. That was eight years ago. He went crazy in prison, tried to kill himself a couple of times. But less than a year after he was convicted, he developed cancer—leukemia, I think it might have been—and was dead within eight months.”

“All this time we've been chasing a dead man,” McGarvey said, certain the general was telling the truth.

“Ah, but Alex, from what Ya'alon told me, was an utterly convincing operator. The best he'd ever seen. I think he was captivated with her. Maybe even in love, and she with him. They did terrible things together in Iraq. It reinforced who he was, of course, but it must have changed her. Given her some warped sense of herself, some skewed view of the real world. He had that effect on people.”

 

SIXTY

Alex pushed the Range Rover through Beit Dagan on Highway 1, turning south when she reached Highway 6. They'd been at the compound now for nearly ten minutes, according to Otto. He managed to repurpose a Keyhole satellite that was permanently looking down on the region to pinpoint the compound, even to the detail that the driver of the Mercedes van was still outside and on his second cigarette, and that two men were leading a small flock of sheep off to the west.

Traffic was picking up, but Alex had gotten used to driving on the left within the first few minutes. From day one, her instructors had given her high marks:
She's nothing if not a quick study.

She was driven, had been since she was a small child battling the abuser her mother had married. Her psych eval people had reported she was not in touch with reality, but actually, she knew the difference between her fantasy world and the real one; hers was nothing more than a defense mechanism.

You did what you had to do to survive. The Army Rangers knew that score: Adapt, improvise, survive! Hoorah!

“You'll turn off on Highway four forty-three,” Otto said. Her cell phone was in speaker mode on the seat next to her.

“How far?”

“About five miles.”

“Then what?”

“There'll be a dirt road leading up through an olive grove. The general's house is on the other side, just below the crest.”

Their conversation was encrypted. Whoever was monitoring the call would not be able to decrypt it anytime soon, nor would they be able to pinpoint either phone, except that their techs would guess that both phones were probably somewhere in Japan, or perhaps coastal mainland China. Otto loved screwing with the other side's techies.

“Are you monitoring their conversation?”

“I'm getting no signal. I think they took Mac's phone and pulled the SIM card. But I don't think the general is your George.”

“Why not?” Alex demanded. She wanted to get there, look him the eye, and put a bullet into the middle of his forehead. What he had done to her in Iraq was far worse than anything the guy her mother had married had done to her.

“In the first place, he's a cripple. Took a round in the spine from a sniper about eight years ago. He's been confined to a wheelchair ever since.”

“I don't believe it!” Alex shouted, a black rage rising inside her. She didn't want to believe it, now that she was so close.

“He's retired Major General Chaim Yarviv, married thirty-seven years to Merriam, three children, two granddaughters. Before he got hurt, he was deputy director of Aman.”

“No.”

“I'm sure he knew about the operation in Iraq before the second war, and he almost certainly knew George. Means he should have the answers we're looking for.”

“Not the ones I need!” Alex screamed. She'd wanted to say
the ones they wanted
, but it didn't come out that way. “George told me to come. I sent him the message, and he got it.”

“Leaves two possibilities. Either the general directed the killings, or someone else we don't know about has done it.”

“Christ.”

“Listen, Alex. If the general is masterminding this operation—never mind the question of for what reason—he won't hesitate to kill Mac and Pete if you barge in there, gun blazing. Think it out.”

“I've had more than ten years to think it out.”

“There's no powder in the bullets. Just sand.”

“Why? Why give me a weapon? Why lead me here?”

“I needed to give them the time to make contact with George, or whoever it was who responded to your message,” Otto said. “Turn around and go back to the hotel. Once Mac and Pete are out of there, they'll pick you up and take you to the airport. With any luck, all of you will get out of Israel in one piece.”

It suddenly struck her that Otto was not sure. “You don't know if it's the general.”

“I'm betting it's someone else.”

“Why?”

“A hunch.”

“We'll see,” Alex said, and tossed the phone out of the car.

*   *   *

The dirt road was easy to spot; it was the only one at that distance leading up a hill through a grove of olive trees. Alex stopped a few meters up and, making sure no traffic was coming, pointed the pistol out the window and pulled off a shot.