As it began to descend, Uzi saw Haldemann toss the card to the ground.
DAY EIGHT
Thoughts sped through Uzi’s mind faster than he could process them. He’d slept fitfully, and finally decided to give up the charade and get out of bed. Now, sitting at the kitchen table, he drummed his fingers on the surface, trying to process what Haldemann had told him.
He glanced at the clock and realized he had to get in the shower or he’d be late for his session with Rudnick. Fuck it. Can’t deal with it now. He pulled out his phone and texted Shepard.
skipping shrink appt. too much going on
He tossed his phone aside, opened his iPad, and began dictating notes when his Nokia vibrated. Return text from Shepard.
wisconsin resident agency is short an agent. pack ur bags. naming osborn new head of jttf.
Uzi clenched his jaw. Goddamn it, Shep. Cut me some slack. He closed his eyes, took a breath, and replied:
dont like cheese. will make my appt.
He looked at his notes, realized he had lost his train of thought, and shut his iPad. Perhaps a cold shower would shake loose some useful ideas.
Uzi sat opposite Rudnick, his foot drumming a furious beat on the carpeted floor. Rudnick sipped his coffee and waited for Uzi to speak.
“Are you feeling okay this morning?” Rudnick finally asked.
“Me? Yeah, fine. Just a lot on my mind. Things are starting to come together, I think. You okay if we skip today’s session? I’ve got a ton of things to follow up on and very little time left.”
“When we last talked, you were having some issues with Leila. How’s that coming along?”
Clearly, skipping the session’s not an option. “So much has been going on with the investigation, we haven’t had much time together.”
“I see.”
“I did run into Jake Osborn. That didn’t go so well.”
“The agent you wrote up, yes. So you were expecting a more favorable reaction?”
“No.”
Rudnick took a long drink of coffee, then leaned back in his chair and seemed to appraise Uzi for a moment. “The FBI wasn’t your first choice when you moved back to the US, was it?”
“You’ve been spending time in my personnel file.”
“Just a bit. But there’s really nothing in there. Just a note that you interviewed with the CIA.”
“Their Special Activities Division,” Uzi said. “Secret paramilitary operators that work undercover. They do everything the military does, and more — and with deniability. I was looking at hooking up with their Ground Branch.”
“Sounds right up your alley.”
“Because of, well, because of what had happened, I’d had my fill of covert missions. Enough following orders. I realized I couldn’t handle it mentally anymore. I’d lost my edge, my mental toughness.” Uzi forced a grin. “You realize what it took for me to admit that just now?”
Rudnick didn’t smile. “You had ‘enough of following orders,’ yet you chose to work for the FBI, where protocols and procedures are vital to the performance of your job.”
The grin evaporated from Uzi’s face. “We’re back to Osborn.”
“We’ll get to Osborn in a minute. First let’s talk about ‘what had happened,’ as you put it.”
“How about… let’s not.”
“I really think it’ll help. Go back to your days with the Mossad. Was following orders something they stressed?”
Uzi’s foot was tapping the floor furiously as he decided whether or not to answer Rudnick. Realizing the good doctor wouldn’t allow him to sidestep the issue, he pressed on. “Mission success was the bottom line. They gave you the tools needed to get the job done and the rest was up to you. There were rules, yeah, but they were there to ensure survival. If you didn’t follow those rules, you ended up getting caught and embarrassing Israel, or getting killed. Or both.”
“What was your role?”
“I did what I did because it was necessary. But I’m not proud of it.”
“It?”
Uzi looked away. He pulled a toothpick from his pocket. He could feel Rudnick’s gaze on him as he fumbled with the plastic.
“Those toothpicks are like cigarettes for you, aren’t they?”
“I used to smoke. These are a hell of a lot healthier.”
“Are you embarrassed about what you did with Mossad?”
“Embarrassed? No. Not embarrassed. It was necessary. It was my job.”
“Yes…” Rudnick said. “But there’s something that still bothers you about it.”
Uzi had to give the shrink credit. He was very intuitive. He read his patients as if their diagnoses were imprinted on their foreheads. “Killing someone would bother any law-abiding citizen, even if the people you killed were terrorists, horrible people who enjoyed killing others because they were different and had different beliefs.
“During wars, soldiers sit in tanks with a ton of steel between them and the enemy. Or they fly in jets a few thousand feet in the air dropping bombs on a faceless enemy… lie on a mountainside hundreds of yards away and pull a trigger… launch a missile from a drone. Or fire a machine gun across a ravine. But what I did was up close and personal.”
A moment later, Rudnick caught on. “A kidon. A government-sponsored assassin.”
“If our operatives found out about a terrorist plot and infiltrated the cell, they would call us in. It was our job to… neutralize that cell before they could do any damage.”
“You killed them before they could kill innocent people.”
“Only if they’d killed before and posed a known risk to the general population.” Uzi chuckled. “Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? It’s not. You try to go about your business because you know what you’re doing is right. But you still wake up in cold sweats reliving the mission.”
Rudnick nodded slowly, then took a sip from his coffee, as if he were measuring his response. Finally, he said, “I would imagine it’s a very difficult thing for anyone to live with, regardless of who your… targets are.”
“Over the years I worked with other counterterrorism agents— Special Operational Forces, GSG-9s, MI5s, MI6s. We all felt the same way. Yeah, there were some who got off on it, the killing, but most did what we did for our country.” He shrugged a shoulder. “’Course, knowing that didn’t really make it any easier to live with.”
“Your last job was before Dena’s… death?”
Uzi felt his eyes tearing and looked away. He managed a nod, but couldn’t get his voice to work. He cleared his throat and, staring at the floor, said, “A terrorist cell that’d assassinated one of our interior ministers was also responsible for three other bombings. A café, a disco, and a school bus. Seventy-nine were killed. They were planning an attack on the Knesset, to take out a major portion of the Israeli government. It’d be like 9/11, if the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania had made it to the Capitol building.”
“It would’ve been… very demoralizing.”
“And it would’ve triggered a war with devastating consequences. So the agents kept a watch on the group’s activities, checked and double-checked everything. We found out how they were going to do it. They’d be able to defeat the building’s defenses and hit different parts of the structure simultaneously. But we didn’t know when it was going down.” Uzi relived the events in his head as if they’d happened a month ago. “There was one point each day when the six terrorists were in separate locations. We knew where and when, and I was given the assignment of eliminating one of them. Another five kidons were dispatched to take out the others.”