As soon as she stepped outside the lab, she heard a baby crying. Quickly moving around the building out of sight of the barracks she notified David then decided to get the others out of the Compound. He passed the word on to the others. Miriam saw the leather shield still in place as she approached and swiftly scaled the fence. David would remove it as he came across last.
Miriam entered Theo’s van, slipped out of her camouflage garb and cleaned her face. A couple of minutes later, Forbes entered, followed shortly by Lenny and five minutes later Jan appeared. Theo yelled from the driver’s seat that the bus just turned down the side street. He was rolling. David and Marla were still out, but he had to drive away before the bus noticed them. Miriam told David and Marla to rush for the trees immediately that the van would pick them up when they came over the fence.
Marla came down the stairwell as fast as she could and raced to David who was by the door. When he peeked out and saw the bus pulling up in front of the barracks about fifty feet away he knew they could not leave by that door, so he told Marla to look for another exit on the left side while he looked on the right. David saw the metal cellar-like door in the floor and yelled at Marla to come quickly. They climbed down, closed the door behind them and continued down steep steps into the tunnel. Dimly lighted bare bulbs every forty feet or so hung from the ceiling on an open wire. The tunnel looked clear. They ran most of the way to the opposite end where a similar door lay at the top of some steps. David climbed up, lifted the door a couple of inches and peered around. He saw they were in a laundry room. No one was inside the room. David climbed out, held it for Marla and then gently closed it. Marla looked out the small window of the door leading outside and discovered that they were near the main house. The driveway lay off to the far left out of sight, and straight ahead, a short hedge grew. They slipped quietly outside and hid behind the hedge, hoping to be able to make a dash into the backyard and over the fence. As they lay there, they heard car doors slam and people talking. They were within 20 feet of the house so they had to make a break for it as soon as possible or else they’d have to stay there till it was safe. If anyone suspected them of being in the tunnel, the Klements would surely check the outside of the laundry room. David gave Marla the signal to make a run across the clearing to the cover of three tall sycamores. The trees were closer to the west fence and the activity was taking place near the front of the house.
Marla had never run so fast in her life. She froze behind one of the trees with David behind another tree in the clearing. They felt very exposed. The fence was still a good forty feet away. David whispered into the walkie-talkie telling Miriam of their predicament. She told him to stay where he was, they would make a disturbance out front so he and Marla could get over the fence. David signaled Marla to stay put and not move.
A couple of minutes later, Miriam and Jan walked down the sidewalk in front of the Klement house and stopped. They stood facing the street chatting with each other, with their backs to the guard shack. The gates were still open into the compound. Rolf pulled up to the curb in a taxi. Just as the girls were getting in, the horn suddenly got stuck. The guards and several people standing around out front stared toward the disturbance wondering what was going on. David and Marla raced toward the fence climbing over it quickly. When their feet hit the sidewalk, they walked undetected across the street to the apartments.
As they left for dinner, the team drove past the back of the compound by the training field and Jan screamed for them to stop the van. She had spotted the leather shields still on the fence spikes. Theo pulled up and David ran out and grabbed them off the fence.
Everyone was talking at once about the shield; it was a dead giveaway. No one on the Klement buses must have noticed it. They were excited that they had successfully pulled off the whole assignment that it was difficult to settle down to eat until they had all consumed at least three rounds of drinks. Tomorrow, they would pack up to leave, but before that they planned to go to the Mossad office in Buenos Aries and meet Ringo for the first time. David called him and asked him to set up return flights for tomorrow.
The non descript Mossad officein Buenos Aries shared a building with the Bank of Buenos Aries. The agency had the top two floors, the bank the bottom two. It was late afternoon when the six Tel Aviv agents walked into Mossad headquarters with Rolf and Theo and found a semi-circle of nine men and two women standing there to greet them. One of the men asked them to guess which one was Ringo, and each agent made a guess by pointing to one of the assembled group. Nobody guessed correctly. After Ringo stepped forward, everyone had a big laugh, shook hands and introduced themselves. Then they shared a catered, sumptuous feast. Champagne, talk and laughter flowed freely.
Their flights would start leaving the next day — 7:00 pm for London, 9:00 for Madrid and midnight for Geneva. Hotel reservations had been made in the respective cities and they would fly to Tel Aviv the following day, arriving around noon. Rolf and Theo had packed all their equipment for shipment back to Israel, and Ringo would report all pertinent information gained from Sofie and Barto from the bugs to Tel Aviv. The chatter tonight from the compound was good. No one mentioned anything even remotely relating to the bugs — no one was suspicious. The Klement clan and employees seemed totally distracted by their matriarch’s death and were unconscious of any intrusion into their Compound.
CHAPTER 30
David and Miriam arrived in Geneva in the early afternoon of an overcast day, checked into the Hotel Lousahne, where they stayed their first time in the city of Protestant Reformation. Their room seemed huge compared to the tiny apartment they had just left in Buenos Aries. Nonchalantly they undressed down to their underwear and fell exhausted on the beds and napped for an hour.
By the time David awoke, Miriam had drawn a tub of water. He saw her step through the bathroom door and get into the tub. Groggily, he walked into the bathroom and sat down on the toilet paying no attention to the fact that she was bathing. He asked how the couple in Buenos Aires could listen to all those bugs at the same time. He had a nightmare about it. All those bugs they had so tediously planted, they would all be talking at once. It would be gibberish. Miriam saw that David was occupied in thought and he was not leering at her. She ventured that each listening device had its own recorder, so each bug could be listened to separately. Also each listening device had a small red light that went on, telling that it was being used.