False Flag Read online

  She shook out three matches, arranging them in parallel near the edge of the table, and thought of Hannibal at Cannae: the textbook example of the futility of superior technology and manpower. Two centuries before Christ, the Romans, ninety thousand strong, had cornered Hannibal, whose force numbered less than half that, against the Aufidus River. Most of the Carthaginian troops were inexperienced—an untested hodgepodge of Iberians and Gauls with shoddy arms and poor armor. And the Roman consuls knew it. Lazily they had arranged their superior numbers in three ranks—the three parallel matches—believing that the untried and outnumbered Carthaginian army, with no room to maneuver against the riverbank—the table’s edge—would be cut down in panicked disorder as the massed legionnaires drove relentlessly forward.

  In response, Hannibal had deployed his weakest men in front. Dalia broke a fourth match into four pieces, which she arranged in a shallow convex crescent facing the three parallel lines. Offering his soft white throat to the enemy. Goading the superior Roman infantry to continue its advance, he placed his few battle-hardened troops—African infantry—far at the flanks. Hannibal himself had stood in the center among his inferior foot soldiers, steeling their courage while personally leading a controlled retreat, step by step, foot by foot, slowly and methodically, in the process turning the Roman position inside out. With a fingertip, Dalia inverted the arrangement of the broken match fragments, turning the convex formation concave. Then she pushed the three unbroken matches closer, filling the open space inside the semicircle. Now the outermost bits of broken match flanked the ends of the three unbroken matches.

  And then, with whipcrack timing, the veteran African infantry had wheeled on the flanks of the now-disordered legionnaires, who now faced east, into glaring sun and windblown sand. A devastating double envelopment—history’s most effective pincer movement. And the Romans, suddenly enclosed in a pocket, packed tightly together, entangled and half-blind, were cut down like wheat. Every minute, six hundred legionnaires perished. Seventy-five thousand had died before nightfall put an end to the slaughter. Barely three thousand escaped. Hannibal at Cannae had turned the tables on a force that outnumbered him more than two to one—and exacted casualties at a rate of ten to one. And yet, military leaders still insisted on seeing as counterintuitive, despite ever-mounting proof, the lesson that maneuverability trumped force. Alexander crossing the Danube on improvised rafts where his enemy thought the river uncrossable; MacArthur, during his South Pacific campaign, seizing only the islands he needed as stepping-stones northward; the Russians implementing their Deep Battle Doctrine during Operations Bagration and August Storm. And still, for the West, might and firepower reigned supreme, always and forever. And so they would deploy their priceless equipment, their bottomless resources of manpower, and still a lone girl would prove faster and more maneuverable, ultimately leaving them with nothing.

  She rubbed her eyes. Horowitz was looking at her. “You okay?”

  She shrugged. “Hafookh.” Beat.

  “Get some sleep.” He reached out and patted her hand. “Anything develops, I’ll let you know.”

  Wisconsin Ave.,Washington, DC

  Browsing through Bath and Body Works, looking for gifts for Mommy and preschool teachers and grandmas and grandpas, canned Muzak piping through speakers, and suddenly a voice inside his head voice spoke up from nowhere: Funny how life works out, innit it, Mikey?

  The voice had been triggered by the Muzak, which evoked Kirkuk mosques broadcasting propaganda through their crackly PA systems. The United States was in Iraq only to seize the oil and wealth of holy warriors, and so on. But now you’re the holy warrior. And when the time comes, you’ll strap on your suicide vest and Allahu Akbar your way to paradise right alongside the rest. Funny, innit? Wink, nudge.

  The voice sounded a lot like his dead brother’s. But Seth had been a soft-spoken young man—polite, conscientious, kind. This voice was obnoxious, lewd, sardonic. Michael decided to pay no attention.

  After shopping, they grabbed a pizza to go. Stacy was coming to pick up Silas after dinner. They sat at the dining room table on Ellicott Street, working their way through half a plain pie. And as Michael watched his son chew, the voice turned somber. Gonna leave this kid without a father, Mikey. And once you’re gone, you know what he’ll hear about you? That Daddy was a crazy vet fuck. An enemy of the people. And don’t believe for a second, Mikey, that the bitch is going to come tell him the truth like she promised. Why would she? I think we’ve been around the block a few too many times to believe—

  Shut up, voice. Leave me alone.

  Silas chewed pensively. “Daddy, what’s pizza made out of?”

  “Bread and cheese and tomato sauce.”

  “I love cheese. I love it five thousand times.”

  Michael smiled. “I love it five thousand plus one.”

  “I love it five thousand plus infinity plus one.”

  “Everyone loves cheese, I guess.”

  “Lou doesn’t.”

  Michael kept his face pleasant. “Who’s Lou?”

  “Mommy’s sleepover friend.”

  There it is, Mikey.

  “Huh,” he said.

  Too old, he guessed, to get consumed by jealousy—been around the block a few too many times, as the voice had pointed out. Still, he might have expected to feel something. His soon-to-be ex-wife, mother of his only child, shacking up with Lou, who didn’t care for cheese.

  But he felt nothing. Nothing at all.

  “Huh,” he said again. And that seemed to cover it.

  “Can I go play?”

  “Sure. Go play.”

  Silas bounded away, and Michael sat alone at the table, looking dully at his half-eaten slice of pizza.

  He knew a dozen grunts who had gotten hitched at courthouses the week before deploying, just so someone would get their benefits if they came home in a box. And while his own effort at matrimony had risen slightly above that dismal standard, half of him, he guessed, had never really been invested in the union with Stacy. He had gone along with the program, sure. But he had been a passenger, a bystander. Just look at the honeymoon picture hanging by the staircase. His body had been at Niagara Falls. But his eyes, his mind, his heart, had been somewhere else. He remembered the wedding day: tinted sunlight coming through stained-glass windows. A church wedding: psalms and pious murmurs and lacy white. And what had he thought at the time? One word. Bullshit.

  At last, he carried plates into the kitchen. He dumped half-eaten pizza into the garbage and stood, looking at nothing, as the cat wound around his ankles. The house was quiet. Silas was quiet. The block was quiet. Even the voice was quiet—for now.

  * * *

  After Stacy picked up their son, Michael went into his bedroom, turned on the lights, drew the shades, and took off the prosthetic leg.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, blinking slowly like a man in a dream, he gave it the closest inspection yet. Beneath the carbon fiber shell, molded plastic casing contained six vacuum-sealed cavities. Each cylindrical cavity sloped up, with its own customized fuse and detonator built in at the base.

  During their latest meeting, the woman had explained that Mossad engineers had considered two possible approaches. Speaking slowly and carefully, making sure Michael understood every word—not because she wanted him, having been made aware of the consequences of his choices, to reconsider. He knew that she did it only so that if he did reconsider, she could witness it happening and take action to prevent it.

  The first option had been a spray device with multiple nozzles. A single drop of sarin mist, twenty-six times deadlier than cyanide, was fatal to a full-grown man. A liquid form of the substance had been used in Japan in 1995, when five members of the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo had boarded subway cars during Tokyo’s morning rush hour, holding plastic packets wrapped in newspaper. They had dropped the packets to the floor, punctu
red the newspaper and plastic packets with the sharpened tips of their umbrellas, then retreated, leaving trainloads of commuters to die. The toxin had both leaked onto the floor and evaporated into the air. Sloppy planning and cowardly execution, using no mechanism more complicated than an umbrella, and the casualties still had been high. Twelve dead, fifty crippled, and many thousands injured.

  “But our target area is much larger than a subway car. And every corner will be filled with objectives worth reaching. Our payload will be surrounded by obstacles …”

  “Obstacles”: a polite euphemism for human flesh—including, of course, Michael’s own. He thought of Abdullah al-Asiri. In 2009, the al-Qaeda operative had tried to murder Saudi Arabia’s deputy minister of the interior, gaining access to the man’s Jiddah home during Ramadan by claiming to be a well-wisher. Passing successfully through a metal detector and a search by bodyguards, al-Asiri had waited more than twenty-four hours with half a kilo of plastique hidden inside his rectum. When at last he had achieved direct proximity to his target, his own body absorbed the brunt of the explosion. He succeeded only in lightly wounding Muhammad bin Nayef, while killing himself. Human flesh was an effective absorber of explosive force.

  “To achieve maximum dissemination,” she had said, “we must volatilize our liquid to gas.” Unwilling or perhaps unable to disguise her enthusiasm, her cool gray eyes glinting keenly. “Aum Shinrikyo initially planned a similar approach, hoping to spread the agent as an aerosol. But they lacked a team of talented engineers to make it happen. Of course, Israeli engineers are the best in the world. Child’s play, they assure me. A small explosion to break open the ampoules and raise the temperature beyond sarin’s boiling point of 158 degrees Celsius. Then dispersal occurs through natural Brownian motion.”

  Initial symptoms included running nose, tightness in the chest, constriction of pupils. Then nausea, difficulty breathing, drooling. Vomiting, incontinence. Twitching, convulsive spasms. Death from asphyxia, within minutes.

  It had to be done. A tragedy, a crime against God—but history, left unchecked, would only repeat itself.

  Again and again and again, just because they were Jewish.

  For no other reason than that.

  It was the right thing to do.

  It had to be done.

  North of Andover, VT

  “Dalia.”

  A strange overlay of past and present: sitting up abruptly in bed, as if jabbed with a needle.

  “Dalia.”

  “Mm. What time is it?”

  “Four a.m.” In the dimness, McConnell’s eyes gleamed like obsidian. “We’ve got her.”

  Still in her nightgown, Dalia followed McConnell into the makeshift operations room. Horowitz handed her a steaming mug. She took one sip, set the cup on the mantel of the fireplace, accepted headphones.

  The call had been recorded eight minutes ago. Whatever method the man called Klein had used to block the spoof apparently also worked on StingRay. They were listening to a feed from a parabolic mike—mostly high end, tinny, and hissing. Nevertheless, Dalia could clearly hear the voice, thick with interrupted sleep: “Hello.”

  The reply was dim but audible. “Lots of fog,” a woman said. “Not safe to drive. I’m taking an alternate route.”

  A pause as the man no doubt processed code phrases. “Drive safe,” he answered. “Ten and two.”

  The recording ended. The whole thing had lasted eleven seconds. Before Dalia could comment, a drone operator called breathlessly, “On the move.”

  Through a night-vision camera, they watched a lumpy glow leave the door of the house and climb into the car—not the blue Mazda registered to Klein, which was still MIA, but the black Chevrolet Sonic RS he had leased from a dealer in Concord six weeks ago. The Chevy turned around and eased down the long driveway.

  “Dust,” Horowitz said.

  The screen shaded from pink to purple, from thermal to ultraviolet. The spy dust—powdered nitrophenyl pentadien mixed with luminol, sprinkled liberally onto the Sonic’s door handles, steering wheel, and floor mats and now clinging to Klein’s hands and feet—glowed like phosphorus.

  Facing the laminated field map, Horowitz found a channel on the P25 radio. “Checking Alpha.”

  In response, a distant fire-team leader keyed his radio once.

  “Alpha, we’re warm. Tango, eight o’clock. Bravo, route two. Charlie, LCC.”

  On-screen, the purple smear that was the Sonic reached the end of the driveway and turned north.

  “Alpha, Tango, twelve o’clock. Bravo, route three to rally point two.”

  He lowered the radio to his hip. Without turning from the screen, he echoed McConnell: “We’ve got her.”

  * * *

  Lying prone on a high ridge, Jana watched the Chevy roll away down the long driveway.

  She relaxed slightly—if they had traced her call, they would be on her already. No doubt they had left behind cameras, microphones, night-vision, drones, satellites. But they would not be expecting her here. They would expect her to rendezvous with the Chevy. She had bought herself a chance.

  One last moment to steel herself. Then she clamped her teeth together, picked up the shovel, and went, hugging three layers of blankets around her shoulders. The layer nearest her coat was wool. Then a heat-reflecting blanket of polyethylene terephthalate. Then wool again. It wouldn’t render her thermal signature completely invisible—high-end imagers detected not only changes in temperature, but also the actual photons emitted by an object—but the three layers would afford her some breathing room.

  In alabaster moonlight, she scampered down the ridge, using every available bit of cover. Clumsy, half-shambling under the weight of the blankets. Prickly brush tugged at the outer layer of wool. She detoured around a shallow dip, keeping thick branches overhead. She remembered moving through this forest the first time, burying the cache. And the second, coming back from the lake. The third time would be the last. Third time for keeps.

  Beyond a thicket of evergreens, she spied the gnarled yellow elm she had dug beneath. Cover overhead; cover between her and the house. Still, she made herself pause, sniffing, listening, searching the night. She found a glint of moonlight off metal, almost close enough to touch. A camera. She had nearly blundered right through its sight line. Holding her breath, she backed away slowly and circled carefully, approaching from a roundabout route. Slow down, god damn it. You’ll ruin everything.

  The freshly turned earth, the branches and leaves and pine needles, was still distinguishable two months later. After looking one last time for cameras, she raised the shovel—fiberglass, $19.98, from Lowe’s—and jammed the blade into hard soil. Frozen. Like digging through rock. Put your back into it. Hurry.

  No. Shvoye, Yoni had taught her. Patience. The Chevy would lead them all the way to Burlington. Two hundred miles round trip. Her contact would linger for at least an hour before giving up. Altogether, she could reasonably expect five hours in which to work. Her task would take a fraction of that. She felt exposed, vulnerable, but she must slow down, stay aware, notice every little thing.

  We may have suffered a lack of sanitation.

  That was one goddamn way of putting it.

  Crunch. A centimeter’s give this time. Hurry. Crunch. No. Slow down. Crunch. Pause, crunch, look, crunch, listen.

  She rested, breathing hard now. Looked, listened, dug again. A faraway red light atop a radio tower pulsed like a heartbeat. Watery predawn diffused the moonlight. Just as she had timed it. As she labored, her heat signature would surge, eventually becoming visible to heat sensors despite the blankets. But so-called thermal crossover, the axis of night turning to day, would smear the data and help keep her concealed.

  Somewhere very far away, the howl of a police siren. She straightened, cocking her head. Back throbbing. Sweat pouring down her temples, pooling beneath her collar, collectin
g in the small of her back. No siren. Just her imagination.

  Hurry, for fuck’s sake.

  No. Shvoye.

  With a grunt, she went back to digging.

  Wind picked up, sailing a rack of clouds in front of the moon. Chilling the sweat, making her shiver. The clouds sailed on. She became aware of her shadow lumping behind her, squat and distorted, a laboring dwarf. We dig dig dig in our mine the whole day through. To dig dig dig is what we really like to do!

  Deep enough now to penetrate below the frost. Softer soil, easier going. Blisters forming on her palm and the pad of her thumb. Dank smell of fresh dirt, rising in wafts. The smell of gardens, of life, of graves, of death. Close now. Had she missed it? Did she have the wrong spot?

  The breeze sang darkly through the trees. She tossed yet another shovelful of gravelly earth, pitter-patter, to one side. Half a minute later, she paused again to catch her breath. Took advantage of the pause to look, listen, sniff the wind. Felt her ears lie back like a cat’s. Forced herself to dig again. We dig dig dig … Let the wild rumpus start!

  Then she was lifting the faded black briefcase on the shovel blade. More faded than ever, earthworms writhing atop the fraying leather. She stared at it in dumb astonishment. Apparently, she had dislodged the case without realizing it, and then kept digging. But now here it was.

  The shivers were back, from scalp to tailbone. Delicious and terrifying, the all-over tingle one felt after almost stepping in front of a bus. In her headlong race to dig, hammering away with the shovel, she might easily have broken one of the ampoules inside the case. Yes, she very easily might have done that. And then she would be dead.

  Her knees buckled unexpectedly from the fatigue. She straightened and gave herself a minute, leaning against the shovel, to regain control of herself. Setting aside the wormy black case, she resumed digging. Plastique now. The shovel could not set it off by mistake—you could grind out a cigarette in the stuff; it was that stable—but a strange kind of superstition had fallen over her, and now she dug softly, gently.