In addition to being the resident tech expert, Sarah Halevy was a bat leveyha, an escort agent whose task on this particular assignment consisted of posing as his spouse.
They had worked together before, and although official Mossad regulations prohibited romantic entanglements between personnel, in reality it prevented very little. Gideon cast a glance around the room where they had spent the night and smiled with the realization. They had moved beyond acting a long time ago.
“Do we have confirmation from Chaim and Yossi?” he asked.
“Yes,” Sarah replied without looking up. “They are in position as of 0300 hours. Currently — Eiland has the gun.”
“The cave is just ahead.” Thomas’s head came up at the sound of her voice — the first words she had spoken since they had left the band of peshmerga. They had walked the twelve kilometers in dark, brooding silence, silence broken only by the rattle of small-arms fire from the east, punctuated by the occasional scream of a rocket.
Turning a corner in the mountain path, he saw the cave, there in the side of a cliff and nearly invisible to the casual eye, obscured by a carefully planted screen of pistachio trees.
“A mountain shepherd tends to the needs of the animals,” Estere explained, pushing her way through the brush covering the entrance. “The border peoples are forbidden to own horses, but the order is disregarded more often than not, particularly by those friendly to our cause.”
He ducked his head to enter the cave behind her, his eyes slowly adjusting to the dim light. There, in rough-hewn stalls cut into the side of the mountain, were stabled two large horses, a black and a dappled grey. Slinging her rifle over her shoulder, Estere walked into the stalls and brought out the mounts, one by one.
“This is Kejal, the gazelle,” she announced, handing the reins of the grey to Thomas. He looked up at the massive flank of the horse and grimaced, suddenly feeling rather foolish.
He had just begun to place a foot in the stirrups when her voice arrested him. “No, no. Kejal is my horse. You will ride Bahoz, the black.”
“Oh,” he responded, flushing in spite of himself. She reappeared in a moment leading a black stallion that seemed even larger than the grey, if that were possible.
She took the reins of Kejal from his hand and swung herself into the saddle with the grace of a bird.
Oh well, here goes, Thomas thought, placing one foot in the stirrup in an attempt to swing himself up.
Something went wrong — he would never quite figure out what — but he ended up on the dirt floor of the cave, rolling over in a crude approximation of the parachute landing fall as Bahoz shied away in fear, a loud whinny of protest issuing from the stallion’s mouth.
“What is going on?” cried Estere, grasping the reins of Bahoz in one hand while trying to calm her own mount.
Thomas picked himself up and stared at her, a hot flush of embarrassment once again spreading across his face. “I–I’ve never ridden a horse before,” he responded.
“You haven’t?” Her tones were filled with disbelief.
He shook his head with a wry grin. “Never actually been this close to a horse before, let alone ridden one.”
She muttered something in Kurdish under her breath — what, he didn’t know, but he was sure it wasn’t complimentary.
“Let me dismount,” she said after a long moment, “and I’ll show you. And here — give me your gun, we don’t need that going off.”
“It’s been thirty minutes,” Yossi Eiland announced, checking his watch. “Time to shift over.”
Moving cautiously in the small confines of the hide, the two men traded places, Chaim Berkowitz taking his place behind the bipod-mounted Remington. “I have the gun,” he announced into his lip mike. It was standard protocol to rotate shooter and spotter every thirty minutes. Any longer and field studies showed a degradation in situational awareness.
He nestled down, pressing the buttstock against his shoulder as his eyes focused in on the scope.
Suddenly Eiland reached over and tapped him on the shoulder. “We’ve got a subject at your two o’clock. Is that him?”
Chaim swung the barrel of the M24 around, the cross-hairs resting on the subject’s face. It matched the file photo they had been shown, older, to be certain — but a positive match.
“We’ve got Harold Nichols at the south entrance of the hotel. He appears to be making a phone call. Do you copy?”
Gideon’s voice came crystal clear over the comm channel. “Yes. I’ve got Nathan following him. Sarah tried to tap into his cell phone frequency, but she’s not getting anywhere. Our best guess is that it’s the new-gen CIA TACSAT.”
“What are we looking at, Tex?” Harry asked, looking out over the palm-shadowed courtyard of the hotel. A swimming pool nestled in the middle of the courtyard and it was already crowded with tourists taking advantage of a mid-morning swim. Or splash, which seemed to be what most of them were doing.
“Hard to say, really,” came the Texan’s laconic reply. “I’ve been on the scope for an hour — no sign of the Israeli agents yet.”
Harry cast a cautious look back inside the lobby restaurant. “I’ve got one of them on my tail if I don’t miss my mark. Youngish guy, mid-twenties I’d say, medium-build. He’s wearing a photographer’s vest, my guess is he’s packin’. Carries himself like an operator.”
“I’ll keep an eye out.”
“You do that, I’m going to call Langley and give them an update. Hour and fifteen minutes till showtime.”
“Blast it!” Sarah Halevy exploded, pulling off her headphones and throwing them to the floor in frustration. “I almost had him.”
“Easy, love,” Gideon replied. “What were you able to get?”
“I ran a trace on some of the diplomatic communications channels that American intelligence typically uses. Sure enough, he’s using one of them. Here’s the thing — it’s a satellite phone, so I can track the satellites he’s using to bounce the signal.”
“So?”
“So, I was able to ascertain that he’s placing a call to someone here in Israel. Another couple minutes and I could have run a locator trace on their phone as well.”
“You’re saying he may have back-up here in Eilat?”
“Maybe. Just two or three more minutes and I could have known for sure.” She glared at the laptop as though it was responsible for the failure.
Gideon placed his hands on her shoulders and began to knead the tight muscles there. “Don’t be so tense,” he admonished, leaning over her. “Just relax.”
“Right…”
“What’s the latest?” Barney Kranemeyer demanded, arriving in the NCS op-center like a gust of wind.
Carter looked up from his terminal. “Not much. According to a call we got from Nichols about thirty minutes ago, everything’s still on course. He’s got a Mossad agent tailing him, but that’s to be expected.”
“As much for his protection as anything else,” Kranemeyer added.
Carter acknowledged that comment with an affirmative nod. The senior analyst yawned and took another sip from the coffee mug at his desk. The clothes he wore looked like they had been slept in, his tie pulled loose from his throat, the shirt wrinkled like an accordion, his pants devoid of crease, giving him the over-all appearance of a bedraggled starling.