“Crystal. Now get off the phone so I can make some calls.”
“Stay away from the window,” the man advised, reaching for the boy’s shoulder.
“Why?” Matthew demanded as he twisted from the man’s grasp.
The man pulled away as if his hand had been burned. After removing Matthew from Fett’s charge, he and the two others assigned to the boy had expected a response on his part of fear, obedience, submissiveness. What they had gotten was obstinance and rebelliousness.
“It’s safer,” the man said. “That’s all.”
“From who?”
“People who want to hurt you.”
“I don’t have to look out the window to see them,” the boy shot back. He continued to gaze stubbornly outward.
“We’re not your enemy.”
“That’s what the man you took me from said.”
“He was lying.”
“And you’re not?”
The man reached across him and yanked down the shade.
“Why don’t you just let me go?” the boy asked matter-of-factly.
“It’s for your own good.”
“The other man said that too.”
“This time it’s the truth.”
Matthew tilted his head back toward the covered window. “He’ll find me, you know.”
The man smiled, glad at last his reassurance might mean something. “I promise you he won’t. You don’t have to be scared.”
“Not the Arab,” the boy snapped disparagingly. “Blaine McCracken. When he finds out what you’ve done, he’ll find me. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when he gets here.”
The man looked at him dumbfounded. He had not had much experience with children, and if this was any indication of what they were like, he had no desire to have any experience with them again. He watched the boy swing arrogantly back to the window, and with a quick flick of his hand the shade spun from the glass again.
“He’ll be coming,” Matthew assured. “And it won’t be long now either.”
“You cheated! I take my eye off the board for one second and you make an extra move!”
“Putz,” Abraham snapped back at Joshua, waving an arm before his face.
“You took three of my men with one jump from a spot you shouldn’t have been in.”
“You forgot I moved there move before last. You forgot and you want to blame me because you’re going soft in the brains.”
“Putz,” Joshua snarled this time.
Sitting in the shade outside the house in Hertzelia, not far from where the two old men were playing checkers, Isaac and Isser caught pieces of the argument.
“Are they always like this?” the head of Mossad wanted to know.
“You want them — we — should change after all these years? We’re soldiers, Isser, and nothing frustrates soldiers more than age.” He cocked an eye back toward the deck. “They fight with each other mostly to remember. Believe me, I’m no better, and someday neither will you be.”
“Will there be a ‘someday’ for me, Isaac, for my children?”
“There has been one these past forty-five years and there always will be. We were there at the start, don’t forget. We’ve seen it all.”
“You mean you had seen it all. You haven’t seen Hassani.”
“I’ve seen others like him. Plenty.”
“So you’re not worried.”
“Worried? Of course I’m worried. I was worried in ’48 and ’67 and in ’73 too. And I’m worried today after what you’ve told me. But you learn after awhile that if God wasn’t resigned to taking care of us, we wouldn’t have survived this long.”
“God might need some help this time. I’ve laid out the scenario of what we may be facing. I want you to consider moving up the timetable for Operation Firestorm.”
Isaac just looked at him, wisps of his stray white hair blowing in the breeze.
“You don’t seem surprised by my request.”
“I didn’t think you came here to discuss history.”
“Can you do it?”
“You knew the answer to that even before you came, Isser. You know the logistics. Our people are too spread out, they’re not in contact with each other. We all agreed it was the safest setup on the chance that one of the cells was penetrated. No trail, remember?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“For a year now we have planned everything toward a single day. Thousands of people are involved, hundreds of thousands. Firestorm can’t be moved up. Not by a week, not by a day, not even by an hour. All was finalized when we received those Comanches from the Americans.”
“Apaches, Isaac. They’re called Apaches.”
“Whatever they are called, I can do nothing to move up the timetable.”
“Even if it means Hassani’s forces beat us to the punch?”
Before Isaac could respond, red and black game pieces flew wildly off the deck, followed by the checkerboard itself as Saul fought to position himself between Abraham and Joshua.
“You can’t plan for everything,” the old man told the chief of Mossad, “but you do the best you can.” A grimace stretched across his face as his eyes found the ruined checkerboard halfway between their chairs and the deck. “The problem is sometimes no matter what you do, nobody wins.”
It was past midnight when Blaine called Hank Belgrade at a second number, as arranged at the end of their last conversation.
“I found your Nazi for you, MacNuts,” Belgrade said.
“He’s alive?”
“Yes and no.”
“I don’t like the sound of that, Hank.”
“Wait until you hear the details. Dr. Hans Bechman was the charter member of something called the Paperclip Club. Ring any bells?”
“Nazis who we wanted to salvage from the war were identified by a paperclip attached to their files. Right?”
“On the money. Except Bechman came over so early he didn’t even have a file. I haven’t got a clue as to what he was working on for us in 1945, but as near as I can make it out, his specialty for the Reich was genetic engineering.”
“Gene splicing, recombinant DNA, and the like?”
“Yup. Man was way ahead of his time. Fortunately, Hitler didn’t think much of his work when compared to the nerve gases those Nazis were creating, so his project never really found an audience. It if had …”
“You still haven’t told me if he’s alive or not.”
“Yes, he’s alive, or at least what I’ve been able to dig up indicates he is. Over eighty now and who knows in what condition, but alive. Trouble is you can’t get to him.”
“Try me,” Blaine said.
“Look, MacNuts, this is out of even your league.”
“Just tell me where to go, Hank.”
“It’s not that simple. Men like Bechman aren’t allowed to retire to beachfront property in Florida for obvious reasons. Government takes care of them a different way and my balls are on the line for merely mentioning this to you.”
“You haven’t mentioned anything yet.”
Hank Belgrade took a deep breath. “Senior citizens who fall into the know-too-much category require special care. Think about it, MacNuts, all those deep dark secrets stored in a mind going soft. Our enemies could have a field day picking those minds apart.”
“So no gin rummy in South Beach. What, then?”
“Permanent residence at a very secret retirement community known only as the O.K. Corral.”
“And don’t tell me when I get there I’m supposed to ask for Wyatt Earp.”