Even MJ’s father, who was hugely protective of her, had been charmed and impressed with Tom. MJ had been nervous about bringing Tom home. She’d finally been browbeaten into doing it only the previous Thanksgiving.
Sitting in the Great Neck living room after the turkey, and the two kinds of dressing, and the mash (which is what they called the potatoes in the house of O’Connor)-after the overcooked vegetables, the three kinds of home-baked pie, and the Folgers brewed in an old-fashioned Farberware percolator, Michael O’Connor poured Tom a healthy tumbler of twelve-year-old Jameson and, as the grandkids squalled and played, took the younger man aside and asked what he was doing to dismember al-Qa’ida and defeat Islamist terror against the West.
“I went to seventy-eight funerals, Tom,” Michael O’Connor growled. “Seventy-eight funerals and seventy-eight wakes. And then I had to stop, because there were no more tears in me. Just rage, Tom. White-hot, searing rage.”
Tom had looked her father square in the face and said, “I’m going to bring as many of them as I can to justice to avenge the people you lost at the WTC, Chief O’Connor. And believe me, when I can’t do that where I’m working now, I’ll do it somewhere else.”
“God bless you, then,” Michael John O’Connor had said, and then he’d looked over at his daughter. “Marilyn Jean, the man’s a keeper,” he’d shouted above the din, bringing silence to the room and a blush to her cheeks. “Always welcome in my house he is.”
She hadn’t understood the significance of Tom’s remark back then. Later, she’d realized it was the first hint that he’d been talking to Tony Wyman about leaving CIA, taking over the Paris office of 4627, and turning their lives-and their relationship-upside down.
She looked up as she heard Tom’s distinctive laugh. It was good to see him laugh. Those last months at CTC had been hell for him. From the little he’d said, the director had thrown money and people into counterterrorism willy-nilly. There had been no plan. There had been no thought. Tom fought for a comprehensive strategy instead of the Band-Aid approach ordered by the seventh floor. He’d been overruled, and then when he’d protested to his superiors, he’d been increasingly shut out of the decision-making process.
Of course he had. At George Tenet’s CIA, dissent was not allowed. Hadn’t she learned that only a few days ago.
Oh boy, had she ever. MJ drained the glass, stood up, wobbled just a little, and looked down at the two men, smoking cigars and conversing in the garden below. “G’night all,” she mumbled, her voice slurring from the effects of the wine. “I’m going to bed.”
From below, Tom waved offhandedly. “I’ll be up soon.” He tapped his cigar on the edge of the ashtray that sat between him and Reuven and swiveled toward the Israeli.
Reuven waited until MJ disappeared from the balcony. The guest room faced the street. There was no way for her to eavesdrop-and besides, he and Tom habitually talked business either in Arabic or French and she spoke neither.
He topped off the Napoleon cognac in the crystal bell glass sitting at his own elbow, did the same for Tom’s, then picked up his cigar, stuck it in his mouth, puffed on it, exhaled a perfect smoke ring that hung in the cool air for almost five seconds. “Ah,” Reuven said. “The perfect combination: a Romeo and Julieta Churchill, and Paul Giraud’s twenty-year-old cognac from Caves Auge.Merci mille fois, Tom.Shukran. Todah rabbah. Cheinchein. Thank you.” He saluted the American with his glass then sipped.
He set the cognac down, stroked his beard, and spoke in French. “There is no news on Shafiq, McGee’s Palestinian. He has disappeared. My guess is he’s dead. And the body already in pieces in the Mediterranean. If he was a double, then he was a loose end. And they don’t like loose ends any more than we do. But I’ll stay on the case. I know someone who knows someone who can sniff around the family-see if they’ve been paid off.”
“Good. And the plastique?”
“I will check in the morning. I can’t believeShabak12 didn’t run anything more than a swab test-at the very least a spectrograph to check the tagants. But if what you say turns out to be correct, Tom, then sooner or later we’re going to have to hunt him down, this Ben Said. He cannot be permitted to continue.”
“I understand.” Even though he did understand, Tom still felt a little out of his depth. He was a capable case officer. Which meant he had honed all the talents necessary to spot, assess, develop, and recruit agents to spy on behalf of the United States. He’d had successful tours in Egypt, France, Sudan, and Dubai. In that last post, he’d actually recruited an agent who had access to one of the bankers who helped funnel al-Qa’ida money in and out of the Emirates. Later, as a branch chief at the Counterterrorism Center, he’d specialized in identifying the links between certain members of the Saudi royal family and the private charities that through monetary sleight of hand bankrolled Islamist terrorists around the globe. But when it came to dealing with terrorists-reallydealing with them, as in eliminating them-Tom was ill-equipped.
Reuven was different. Before going to Mossad, he’d served in Sayeret Mat’kal, the Israeli Defense Force’s most elite special-operations unit. A Moroccan-born Jew who’d emigrated to Israel as an eleven-year-old in 1956, Reuven spoke native Arabic, as well as fluent French, German, Turkish, and passable Farsi. As a soldier, he had penetrated terrorist camps in Syria and Jordan, identifying, stalking, and single-handedly killing more than half a dozen of Israel’s most wanted enemies. As Mossad chief in Ankara-his final posting-he had helped the Turks eliminate a score of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) terrorists who had allied themselves with radical Islamist groups and helped attack Jewish targets in Turkey.
In April 1988, as a senior-level Mossad officer, Reuven spent nineteen harrowing days performing advance reconnaissance on PLO operations chief Abu Jihad’s home in the Tunis suburb of Sidi Bou Said. Working solo, under Lebanese cover, he flew to Tunisia. There, he researched and mapped the infiltration and exfiltration routes to be used by the Sayeret Mat’kal shooters who on the night of April 15-16, would execute the man who’d helped form Black September and was responsible for hundreds of Israeli deaths. Six weeks later, Reuven was presented Israel’s second highest award for valor, the Ott Ha’Oz, for his bravery and initiative.
It wasn’t his only award. On June 8, 1992, as Mossad’s deputy station chief in Paris, Reuven had led a quickly mounted operation to kill Atif B’sisou, the acting head of Fatah’s intelligence organization, as B’sisou drove his brand-new Mercedes SUV through Paris on the way to the Marseille- Tunis ferry.
B’sisou’s last-minute schedule changes were betrayed to Mossad’s Paris station by Mahmoud Yassin, a Tunis-based midranking PLO intelligence official. Reuven had recruited Yassin in 1990 when the Palestinian brought his wife to Paris for medical treatment. So when Atif B’sisou called Tunis from Frankfurt to tell his office he was going to stop over a day in Paris, Yassin immediately burst-transmitted the news to his Mossad control officer. By the time Atif arrived in Paris midafternoon on June 8 and checked into the Méridien Montparnasse under an assumed name, Reuven was ready and waiting.
Atif was kept under constant surveillance. He was tracked as he and his Paris station chief, S R,13drove to dinner at the Montparnasse branch of Hippopotamus, the steak-and-frites chain, in R ’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle convertible. And just after 1A.M., when the VW pulled up under the Méridien’s low-slung marquee, Reuven had watched from two hundred yards away through night-vision binoculars as two of his young paramilitary officers slung B’sisou across the hood of a Volkswagen Beetle, pumped three 9mm bullets into his head from a Browning High Power concealed in a backpack, and vanished into the Méridien’s catacomblike garage.