The Screaming Eagles (29 page)

“Me, I’ve got the most to lose. If I help him, I’m damned. If I don’t, I’m also damned. He made me aware that my country is in danger, knowing that I can’t ignore the warning. He knows that I’ll have to do something. He knows that if I tell the wrong people, for the rest of my life I’ll be looking over my shoulder. He has me also trapped, drawn in whether I want to be or not.

Anyone he came into contact with since he arrived in the States will have to be considered contaminated and suspect by all of the important people he’s accusing. To make absolutely sure that his accusations do not get out and are made public, we will all have to be eliminated. This will be done sooner rather than later. It will be swift and it will be sure, and it will be fatal. We will never know what hit us and that includes you Hanan. You being an Israeli won’t stop our government. With all the suicide attacks that have recently occurred, all our deaths will be easy to cover up.

Does that answer your question?”

“Do you mean what you are saying, or are you trying to alarm us?” “You better believe it, buddy boy, you better believe it. Our plans have to be foolproof or better, or we’re dead by this time tomorrow. I don’t care what you and Hanan did in the Mossad or the Israeli army. No, don’t deny it, we haven’t got time for unnecessary side issues, but you guys better come up with some creative thinking. If you can call in markers, now is the time to do so. Go as high as you can, stretch those markers, but you’ve got to get help I can’t do this alone.”

*

Michael conducted a great deal of his business from his home and had a completely equipped office with computers, laser printer, scanner, fax machine and copier.

Perry instructed Hanan and Michael to do their work from the living room and use line two. For the past hour Hanan had been compiling his list of people to contact. He began making phone calls. Within fifteen minutes, the first faxes started arriving for him.

Perry only made one call. He called his sister, Dinah.

After Reverend Blatt died, Linda his widow came to live in Chicago. She brought Perry and his sister, Dinah, with her. Both Perry and Dinah joined the police force. With his street smarts, Perry was promoted rapidly. Dinah excelled, receiving straight A’s in the police academy exams. She attended night school and obtained a law degree. Because of her uncanny abilities to size up accurately complex problems and find imaginative solutions, Dinah was transferred to Langley and a few years later became the department head of a division of B.O.S.S., the Bureau of State Security. Ten years ago she met her alter ego and married him. They had a four-year-old son Dwight, named after Dinah’s first love, a nineteen-year-old who’d been hanged by the Klan. Perry was with Dwight that night, running through the forest. He escaped. Hiding by climbing a tree, he’d watched Dwight’s murder. Perry was then twelve years old.

Dwight was Perry’s godson.

The public was unable to contact the department heads directly and Perry had to go through various secretaries before he could get to Dinah’s voice mail. He could’ve called her at home as he usually did, but she’d only call him back later in the evening. He couldn’t wait that long, so he left a message for her to call him as soon as possible. Perry waited fifty-eight minutes before Dinah called him back. “Little brother, this better be one of those exceptional calls that merits having sixteen people twiddle their thumbs and wait in an adjoining office because I have an urgent call to make. Make it good, little brother, or your ass is grass.” “Listen mama bear, I didn’t realize that you’ve grown into a bad-tempered grizzly. I hope my poor godson can survive your bad disposition and lousy attitude. Talking about my favorite person in the whole world, how is Tiger?”

“Growing much too fast, talks back at me much too often, but I adore him more and more every day. His latest is he wants to ride around the world on a Harley-Davidson. Enough chit chat, what’s up?”

“We’ve got a possible Code Red Alert and I’m going to need some answers as quick as you can locate them. Don’t wait to sort them into any chronological sequence. The suspect worked for the CIA late sixties and seventies, maybe longer. He was a Savak general who planned his getaway by making his superiors believe that he’d been killed when his offices were blown up. In those days his name was S-A-D-E-G-H M-U-Z-A-H-E-D-I. I do not know who his CIA control was, but in order for him to escape, you’ll need to check whom the chiefs of CIA operations were in the Middle East in 1978-79. Muzahedi owned a lot of properties in the States. A year after he disappeared, his properties were all transferred to a man in Chicago named M-I-L-T-O-N L-E-F-F-E-L-D. I’m mainly interested in his activities for, say, the last seven to ten years. Dig up anything you can no matter how trivial. Fax it to me at 312-477-0768 A.S.A.P. also give me a telephone number where I can reach you directly. Lastly, don’t log in the faxes that you send, and I would prefer it if you forget that this telephone conversation ever took place.”

Hanan continued to receive a stream of faxes, and Perry read each one. Michael used his color copier to enlarge the photos that had been faxed. Leffeld wore steel rimmed spectacles, had a slightly curved nose, and was bald on the top of his head with close-cropped grey hair around his ears. A pattern had begun to emerge. Apparently Mossad had mysteriously lost an unusual number of their best agents in 1992. Eight men and three women in less than six months had been discovered tortured and executed. Mossad were certain that they had all been betrayed and launched an intensive investigation. Within a few weeks they narrowed the potential traitors down to three people. One of them was a CIA agent, Aldrich Ames. They began to follow him. After he passed the information to his Russian courier, they not only followed him but a team of their agents also followed the Russian. Twice, in two different cities, they photographed Leffeld meeting with the Russian. Mossad contacted the CIA and informed them to put Ames under surveillance.

The CIA ignored the tip-off.

Mossad then decided not to feed the CIA any information that would be processed or handled by Ames’s department. Leffeld flew regularly to Europe and on numerous occasions met with representatives of the PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah. He also met Saudi and Iraqi diplomats. Mossad’s surveillance of Leffeld was only overseas and not in the States. His status had been determined by them to be “No action, but be aware of.” Mossad had compiled a file on him, as they had on hundreds of people who were sympathizers, fund-raisers and supporters of Arab fundamentalists in the States. However, until he posed any danger, such as meeting terrorists that were on Mossad’s wanted list, the file would continue to grow, but no action would be instituted.

Hanan was pleased. He’d come up with far more than he’d anticipated. Perry fiddled with his empty coffee mug, not bothering to fill it. He stared at the fax machine unable to understand why none of the faxes were from Dinah. He waited, but line one didn’t ring.

Michael had placed all of Leffeld’s photographs on a worktable. Carefully, using an enlarger, he examined each section of Leffeld’s face. Nowhere could he see any similarities to the Sadegh he had known. He filled his mug with coffee, adding artificial creamer and two spoons of sugar. Slowly he stirred it, absorbed in the photographs in front of him. He jumped slightly as the telephone next to him rang. It was line one.

Perry moved forward, picking it up on the second ring. “Di?”

“Little brother, who the hell is this guy? As far as the CIA here is concerned, he never existed. Using our new IBM Global Services computers that we’ve just installed, we searched every place we could think of using variations of the spelling of both names. Nothing. I then tried the CIA control who was stationed in Turkey for a number of years. Turkey’s CIA control was the closest to Iran and the man’s name was Esposito. In January of 1979, a few days before the Shah abdicated, Esposito flew to Germany and met with a plastic surgeon in a small village in the Bavarian Alps, Oberstaufen. The CIA used this surgeon extensively for our witness protection program. Two weeks after Esposito arrived there, and we presume he arrived with someone that needed a new face, both Esposito and the surgeon were killed when the car he was driving skidded off the road. The police report stated that the brake system failed. Oberstaufen is high up in the Alps and it was presumed they had been drinking too much and had crashed. We found no record of who the patient was.” “Thanks Di. Can you fax that to me?”

“Patience little brother I’ve got more. What’s you’re rush, are you catching a train or something? Here in the States the domestic witness protection program is different from International. Usually a battered spouse or a guy that ratted on his partner to the IRS is relocated to an area in the States and surgery doesn’t take place, unless the Mafia has a contract out. Esposito spent two weeks at the clinic, and when the surgery took place, a file was opened with a number not a name. Until the bandages came off, Esposito’s responsibility was to keep the file under lock and key. With the bandages off, the file was given to the surgeon so that he could look at the various angles of the ‘before’ photos and see if the patient needed any additional surgery as touch-up. No photos are taken of the new face. When the surgeon and the patient were both satisfied, it was Esposito’s job to destroy all the ‘before’ photos. On the last page of Esposito’s file, I found an inter-office memo, which was the Oberstaufen police report giving details about the crash, as well as a report by the surgeon’s secretary to say that the night of the accident, their office had been broken into. She estimated that about twenty files had been stolen. My gut tells me that your guy was involved in both the car accident and office breakin. No witnesses or loose ends such as ‘before’ photos were left. Your guy is obviously a pro. We lost track of him for nearly a year, then a guy named Leffeld appears out of nowhere and takes possession of the properties you mentioned, opens bank accounts, has a social security card, driver’s license and every year, like all good citizens should, he pays taxes. Even the IRS considers him a model citizen. Looking at my screen, he’s an average wealthy guy who keeps to himself and causes no one any trouble. In a few minutes I’ll be faxing all the data that we were able to retrieve, including his hobbies and associations he belongs to.”

“Di, I owe you.”

“Never fear, little brother, I’m clocking it all up. Tell you what, when you come to visit us at Thanksgiving, if Dwight is still on this Harley-Davidson thing, and you can talk him out of it, we’ll be square. Unfortunately when he sets his mind on something, he becomes consumed by it and is as obstinate as hell, just like you’ve always been. Just my dumb luck to give birth to a son who doesn’t take after his parents, but after his uncle.”

“Di, you’re on, Thanksgiving it is. Love you, sis, and thanks for the help.” Perry put the phone down. He then explained to Michael and Hanan what he’d discovered about Milton Leffeld.

*

They were sitting on the floor. Each fax that arrived was passed around and after it had been read, the fax was placed on top of one pile or the other. Important information was one pile and they would concentrate on rereading only those so they could decide what plan of action would be taken. The fax machine had been running continuously for nearly an hour. Suddenly it stopped.

Michael got up to see if it had run out of fax paper. It hadn’t. The fax was silent. The last page they’d received was about the organizations he belonged to and his hobbies. Perry and Hanan paid no attention to it. Michael read it twice, said nothing and put it onto the important information pile. Perry shook his head. “It’s not important.” “We’ll see,” Michael said. “Leave it there for the moment.”

Perry picked up the pile of important faxes and said, “Why don’t we go sit in the kitchen, put these on the table and make some fresh coffee.”

Just then Jalal walked in.

Perry got up, didn’t acknowledge Jalal, and walked to the kitchen. Seeing that Jalal was aware that he’d been snubbed, Michael said, “Come, we’re going into the kitchen.”

Together they walked to join the others. Pointedly, Perry indicated with two fingers of his free hand that Jalal should not sit with them at the table but should sit near the doorway.

“You may listen, but don’t interrupt us,” he said. “We’re trying to come up with a plan and don’t need any of your cockamamie plans. OK?”

Jalal didn’t reply. Helping himself to some coffee, he sat down moving his chair slightly so that he could sit in a slither of sunlight that came in through the top window of the kitchen.

“Okay, guys,” Perry said, “I start off, then we’ll go around the table. Option. We can kill Leffeld. We don’t know if he’s protected by bodyguards, know nothing about his routine and that could take us months to establish. If we were able to apprehend or even kidnap him, what do we do with him? Can’t go to the authorities. Can torture him, but that won’t stop the grand design to bring down America. How will we know if he’s telling the truth or if he had planned for this eventuality and has a backup that if something were to happen to him, that some other person would take over. If he’s Eagle One, and I think he is, he must be in constant communication with Abel Amir. There might be an Eagle Two or Three, who knows. Can we tap into their communications?”

Immediately Hanan nodded, “Yes, I can organize it faster than you can, Perry, and I won’t have to get the authorities involved in the same way that you would need to. But I’m positive their communications will be in code. We change our codes regularly, I’m sure they do too. To crack their codes will take time, and that’s a commodity not available to us right now.”

Michael shook his head. “Aren’t we losing sight of the fact that according to the tapes, everything is already in place and probably is currently progressing to a predetermined time table? If that’s so, what we should be concentrating on is how to throw a spanner into the operation, delay its progress, force him into some sort of changes, and in this way we maybe get the time we need.”

“I’ll buy that, but how?” said Perry.