At 3:30, he visited a series of working-class bars, smoking Gauloises and sipping rouge de table until he spotted the targets he was looking for. Over the next four hours, the Israeli picked a total of four pockets at half a dozen bars. Less than an hour after he’d scored his final wallet, he was riding the TGV to Paris. The dozen or so items he’d removed from the stolen wallets were secure inside his hidden blazer pocket.
He arrived just after ten Friday night. By eleven, he’d opened the triple locks on the safe-house door, checked the clandestine intrusion devices to make sure no one had made surreptitious entry, poured himself two fingers of Napoleon cognac, then stood under the shower for fifteen minutes until the hot water ran out. He dried off, then wrapped the oversize bath sheet around himself like a toga.
Thus clad, he opened the package he’d retrieved in Koblenz. It contained a sterile Glock model 26 semiautomatic minipistol with a pair of extended, threaded barrels and a second firing pin in a small plastic baggie. Wrapped separately were a short cylindrical suppressor, two ten-round magazines, and a box holding fifty 147-grain subsonic frangible hollow-point bullets in 9mm Luger, similarly untraceable.
Mossad and other Israeli black-ops units were known to employ Beretta single-action.22-caliber pistols. CIA historically favored Browning High Power 9mms. In 1992, Reuven had used a Browning to assassinate the PLO’s intelligence chief Atif B’sisou. And indeed Reuven’s choice of weapon created some initial confusion over the identities of the perpetrators because the Mossad combatant had had the foresight to use an agent of influence who made sure DST knew B’sisou was suspected by CIA, which had recruited him in 1983, of being a double agent.
Reuven understood that the 4627 organization followed CIA’s ground rules: it did not approve of its personnel carrying weapons except in the most extreme of circumstances. It was, the Israeli thought, a naive policy, especially in the largely hostile post-9/11 world. In Israel, Reuven went armed all the time. And for years, he’d made sure that he always had access to weapons when he was overseas, even if he didn’t carry them on a daily basis. The pistol and its accoutrements ensured that Paris would not be an exception.
Besides, the Glock itself gave him an added layer of deniability-both with the authorities and with his current employer-should the need to use it arise. Glocks were favored these days by many black-operations units, including Brits, Americans, Egyptians, and Jordanians. The pistol and its accoutrements went into a safe concealed in the parquet flooring beneath an Oriental carpet.
Saturday morning, Reuven awoke at six. By seven, he had pulled the stolen ID cards out of his blazer pocket, switched on the computer and the color laser printer, found the lamination kit and plugged it in, then spent the next thirty hours crafting a series of new identities for himself and Tom.
18
8:03A.M. Tom rapped on the wood door.
It opened and a stranger peered out“Bonjour, monsieur. Entrez, s’il vous plaît.”
“Jeezus.” Reuven was a bloody chameleon. The man had totally changed his appearance. The beard was gone and the mustache trimmed down to a narrow line that ran a quarter-inch above his upper lip. There was none of the heavy jewelry-only a thin gold chain from which dangled a small golden cross. The bouffant black hairpiece had been exchanged for a short-cropped brown toupee that gave Reuven a decidedly Gallic yet surprisingly Levantine appearance. He might be French, he might be Lebanese.
Tom stepped into the bright foyer, where he noticed that even Reuven’s eyes were different. They were no longer dark brown but a greenish hazel-much brighter. Even his heavy eyebrows had been trimmed back. In fact, the whole shape of Reuven’s face seemed to have changed. He watched as the Israeli smiled broadly.Of course it had: Reuven was using a set of dental prosthetics.
“So-are you ready?” The Israeli was all business.
“Let’s do it.” Tom shed his clothes and climbed into a black T-shirt, then shrugged into a set of dark blue coveralls with white reflective strips identical to what Reuven was wearing. They were the same as the ones worn by EUREC/GECIR technicians-the crews who serviced Paris’s traffic signals and street lighting.
“Hoist your sleeve.” Tom rolled up his left cuff over the elbow and displayed the inside of his arm so Reuven could apply an appliqué tattoo like those commonly worn by former French soldiers.
Once the ink was dry, Tom pulled on a pair of rough-soled work boots. He looked over at Reuven. “Paperwork?”
Without comment, Reuven handed Tom a wallet. Tom opened the cheap leather trifold and checked inside. There was a driver’s license identifying him as Serge Thénard, as well as a full set of pocket litter for the alias. He flipped through the bundle. There were forty euros, acarte orange for the metro, a dog-eared ticket for a 2002 Paris Ste. Germaine football game, half a dozen business cards from various electrical wholesalers, a pair of receipts from an ATM, a union membership card and dues receipt, a Visa card, an honorable discharge card from the French Army, even an old fifty-franc note folded around apréservatif.
Tom displayed the condom between thumb and forefinger and gave the Israeli a dirty look. “Funny, Reuven, real funny.” He tucked the wallet in the back pocket of his coveralls and paused just long enough to savor the moment.
Savor, because Tom felt a euphoric rush of anticipation and excitement. He was fully charged, totally alive. These were the same larger-than-life emotions he experienced whenever he stood in the door of a plane at twelve thousand feet and then took that first step into the slipstream; the same heady mixture of emotional and physical highs he’d feel the instant he kicked through the starting gate and started the long, inexorable downhill run. He was feelingthe Rush. And he loved it.
He’d first experienced what he called the Rush as a twelve-year-old when he water-skied up and over a six-foot ramp. The sensation of flying…flying…through the air that way had been the most incredible experience of his young life. Then, when he’d taken sky-diving lessons on his sixteenth birthday, it happened again. Adrenaline, euphoria. An ineffable, exhilarating, physical and emotional high. At St. Paul’s, then again at Dartmouth, it was rock-climbing and skiing-downhill and giant slalom. As a member of the Dartmouth ski team, he’d set a course record that had stood for six years.
After college, it was operations that gave him the Rush. Brush passes in hotel corridors, meeting his agents in plain sight in crowded restaurants, or sensing surveillance and slipping into a rabbit hole to go black gave Tom the same physical and emotional highs as jumping out of planes or taking a curve at seventy-plus miles per hour on a downhill course.
He’d gotten the Rush during his training evolution at the Farm, and known in his gut he’d made the right decision in joining CIA. And then, when life in the real world of espionage turned out to be less than he’d imagined-when too many of his bosses were cautious and risk averse, when recruiting agents actually became hazardous to his career, when reports officers and analysts were put in charge of the DO-he’d had to look elsewhere for satisfaction.
That was when he’d discovered motorcycles. During his Paris tour, he’d splurged on a Ducati, which he discovered, much to his delight, was the perfect vehicle on which to run cleaning routes. When he’d been yanked back to headquarters, he’d brought the bike home. He used it to commute to Langley. Hitting a hundred on the George Washington Parkway was the closest thing to the Rush he felt during two and a half years of CTC paper-pushing. He still kept a bike in Paris-a big black BMW 750. He’d pre-positioned it in the tiny courtyard of the safe house four days ago.