False Flag Page 19

She closed her eyes. The case beneath the bench contained enough sarin to kill hundreds, maybe thousands. She opened her eyes.

  No cops. No soldiers. No sign of the old Israeli woman in the woods. A bucolic small town, cut and pasted directly from the Universal Studios back lot.

  The blister on her thumb felt puffy and tender. She rubbed it absently.

  The old woman had sensed the trap. A civilian, crashing like a boar through the forest, yet she had sensed the trap where the military team had failed. Who was she? An Israeli. Yet working against Israel. Working for the Americans. We may have suffered a lack of sanitation.

  A group of kids, not much younger than she, were coming down the sidewalk. Backpackers, redolent of patchouli and body odor, each lugging half their own weight in gear … and heading for the train station. She would not find a better chance. She stood, case and coffee in hand, and mingled good-naturedly among the backpackers, slipping into the station under their cover.

  Inside, they formed an unruly line at the ticket window. She waited her turn, sticking close, and bought a ticket aboard the 57 Vermonter on the Northeastern Corridor. Using a fresh driver’s license, she splurged on a business-class seat—a hundred and sixteen dollars.

  Then she found a seat on a hard wooden bench near the kids and blended in. Twenty-two minutes until the train departed. Surely they would board a few minutes earlier.

  Holding the empty cup in her lap, she waited, counting down from five again and again.

  North of Andover, VT

  Fifty miles away, Jacob Horowitz scowled at the monitor above the fireplace.

  “Boss.” A small woman with a pale, strained face, whose body seemed to float inside a large fleece parka that she kept zipped nearly to the top. She had called Horowitz “boss” since their first day in the lodge. Dalia suspected that he appreciated the implied authority, even though—perhaps because—it was not strictly true. The real boss of this outfit was Operations Coordination in DC. Led by a woman named Alana Matthews, who held twice-daily phone conferences with Horowitz, after which he always looked as if he had received the telephonic equivalent of a particularly distressing suppository.

  Frowning, he moved to the tech’s console. Dalia drifted behind so she could see, too. She had taken four Tylenol with codeine, supplied by a medic from the EMS vehicle. Now the pain of the bruised leg and hip were gone, and the throbbing in her forearm had faded to the smart of a bad sunburn. But the codeine had set her head mizzling like a spring rain. Her ears still rang with a loud electronic tone, which came and went in waves.

  Now the tone came again, and she missed the woman’s next words. But she saw Horowitz lean closer to the screen. The live feed portrayed thirty-six square miles, centered on Klein’s house, where one member of the tac team had been killed and three severely wounded by the young woman’s booby trap. A highlighted off-center square had been enlarged twentyfold: cowshed, silo, orchard, barn, rustic farmhouse, pasture dotted with cattle.

  The view of the orchard inflated again. A rutted dirt track; a metallic blue dot hidden in a row of bare trees.

  On the monitor above the fireplace, the image appeared and then enlarged yet again, to a resolution of ten centimeters. They were looking at a blue Mazda 3 hatchback—Klein’s missing car—expediently abandoned in an apple orchard. New windows popped up as techs struggled to find workable views of the license plates, which had apparently been slathered with wet mud and then left to dry.

  Someone to Dalia’s left asked a question. She missed it—the tinnitus still—but caught the answer. “Waterbury, Montpelier, Randolph, Coolidge, White River Junction, Windsor. Trying to get access to their systems. Charlie’s ready to roll. But not till we’ve got something solid.”

  The satellite pulled away to a relatively medium shot. Other windows closed. The feed flickered, switching from real time to cached video, then began to run backward. A time code counted down from 09:18. A crow flew backward. Cows remained mostly motionless. On the country road intersecting the rutted track, a pickup truck rolled the wrong way. Daylight darkened slowly toward dawn.

  At 07:53, a lime-green compact car with Vermont plates rolled backward down from the top of the screen. It stopped, discharging a passenger who moved backward on foot. The image froze, expanded. The discharged passenger was a slender bleach blonde, wearing a navy pea coat and carrying a small black valise.

  The footage zoomed out, resumed in reverse. The lime-green compact vanished off the bottom of the screen. The woman on foot hid behind a stand of pines as a full-size pickup passed. Then continued backtracking, off the road, past the cowshed and silo, to the waiting blue Mazda. Climbed inside. The Mazda retreated from the orchard, reversing down the track, to the road, and away.

  Forward now. Day brightening; blue Mazda hatchback coming up the road, turning onto the rutted farm track, driving into the orchard. Woman abandoning car, walking to road. Woman hiding as pickup passes. Then—zooming closer again—woman walking, extending a thumb. Lime-green compact stopping to pick her up. “Toyota Camry,” said a young man. “Got the plate.”

  “BOLO,” said Horowitz.

  On-screen, the Toyota kept driving, and the field of view followed it: up the road paralleling Route 5, along the Connecticut River, dividing Vermont from New Hampshire.

  Fourteen pairs of eyes watched.

  The time code sped forward: 08:02, 08:04, 08:06. At 08:09 the Camry skirted a looping tangle of interstates—89 and 91—and eased into a small business district. Past a clump of car dealerships and fast food, motels, and a medical center; closing on the junction of the Connecticut and White rivers. Then turning more directly north, traveling through another short stretch of countryside. At 08:14:17, the Camry hit the main street of a small town and pulled over. The woman left the car, exchanged brief words with the driver. The car pulled away. ARGUS divided, one view following the Toyota, the other focusing on its former passenger.

  “Coolidge,” reported the young man who had identified the car’s make and model.

  At 08:15 exactly, the woman on-screen started walking. “God damn it,” Horowitz said, “I want local feeds.”

  As if on cue, the image on-screen split seven ways: the bird’s-eye ARGUS perspectives of Camry and woman, plus street-level views of a traffic intersection, two interstate toll plazas, and security feeds from bus and rail stations.

  A moment of confusion as techs rolled forward and back, synchronizing the time codes. Then all seven ran in sync, moving forward from 08:15:30.

  The young woman came into view on the traffic cam. Still holding the small black case. As she turned toward a bakery—We Deliver Fresh Daily—another tech brought up Jana’s dossier photo. The computer squared her face, scanned for common nodal points, identified sixty-three.

  Jana entered the bakery, disappeared. Dalia’s eyes ticked from one window to another. Traffic cam, toll plazas, darkened railroad station, shabby bus station. 8:16. The clocks crawled forward in real time. After an eternity, 8:17. Dalia made herself release a breath. Horowitz said, “Run it forwa—”

  At that moment, Jana reappeared, holding coffee and, in the same hand as the black case, something else.

  The radio clicked. Horowitz picked it up as the woman on-screen moved down Main Street. “Go ahead.”

  “Tango’s warm again,” a voice squawked. “No sign of primary.”

  “Take him,” Horowitz said. He announced to the room at large, “We’re taking Klein.”

  They focused again on the screens. The traffic cam lost Jana as she left its field of view. But ARGUS stayed with her, following as she moved down the street. A dog barked, and she recoiled visibly. McConnell made a sound in the back of his mouth, almost a snarl.

  Jana vanished from the ARGUS feed and, at the same instant, appeared on the bus station’s CCTV. She walked to the counter, giving no sign of awareness of the camera.

  Dali
a’s mind, sharpened by the thrill of the hunt, cut right through the codeine fog.

  Jana exchanged words with the cashier and dug cash from a hip pocket.

  “Anybody catch it?” Horowitz asked.

  Only silence in return.

  Jana accepted a ticket. She left the CCTV’s view, but not the building. “Where the hell did she go?” Horowitz demanded.

  “Bathroom,” McConnell suggested.

  “Get me the goddamn bus schedule. Get me that cashier. Get Charlie on standby. Get me a goddamn lip-reader. And get that goddamn Camry.”

  As people broke off into their various activities, Dalia hooked Horowitz’s elbow and brought him aside. The P25 was clicking again. He looked at it longingly. She put a hand on his cheek, drawing his attention to her face. “It’s a trick.”

  Gazing distractedly over her shoulder, he didn’t answer.

  “She knows we’re watching. Don’t believe everything you see.”

  “We’ve got her,” Horowitz insisted.

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “Let me do my job, Dalia.” He pulled away. Meanwhile, on the bus station’s CCTV, a man with a beard had approached the ticket counter. A kerchiefed woman in a pale coat passed beneath the camera. ARGUS zoomed in on the rear of the building, to catch Jana if she left through a bathroom window. Three long Greyhound buses sat parked like beached whales. On another monitor, pedestrians crossed at the town’s sole traffic light. At the interstate toll booths, Saturday morning traffic remained thin.

  A man said, “Only one bus so far today. Left five minutes ago. 10:17 to Portland.”

  “We’ve got her now, god damn it. Charlie will get her.”

  Powerless, Dalia looked on.

  Coolidge, VT

  The train left the station.

  Past the leaning utility poles, rocking, gaining speed. Jana’s business-class car empty except for a pretty woman of around her own age, plugged by headset into a phone, and a chubby straw-haired man a decade older, wearing muttonchop sideburns and a denim jacket, reading a dog-eared science fiction paperback.

  She closed her eyes, relishing the warm sunshine on her face. The faded black case nestled beneath her seat like an obedient dog. Every once in a while, it nudged against her calves as if to reassure her of its presence. All things considered, she felt remarkably calm.

  Yet fewer than ten minutes passed before the train was slowing, whistling, and then rolling into the next station. A heavily pierced teenage girl came into the car and sat across the aisle, two rows ahead of Jana. A few moments passed. The whistle blew again. As they jerked forward, the girl tossed Jana a look over one shoulder.

  And suddenly Jana’s eyelid twitched. Something about the way the girl had looked at her …

  A teenage girl was the least of her concerns. Military task forces with Kevlar and CS grenades, gas masks, and automatic weapons—those would be cause for alarm. Not surly adolescents with cheap piercings and too much attitude for their own good.

  Now the conductor was coming down the aisle. Jana watched the teenage girl hand up a ticket. Then she handed up her own. Legitimate passage, she reminded herself as the conductor inspected it closely. No reason to be nervous. Five, four, three …

  The punched ticket came back, and she smiled thanks.

  Making good speed now, countryside rocketing past the window. Almost exactly the same countryside she had driven through two months ago, during her initial foray south. Leering scarecrows, rolling brown cornfields. Back then Yoni had still been alive. Back then she had never met Michael Fletcher. Back then she had never had direct contact with the ramsad. What a difference two months made.

  Her mind skipped to the heavyset Israeli woman who had come barging through the woods, sensing the trap. Di yuchna, she thought derisively. Fishwife. Something about the woman reminded Jana of her own mother. Loud, boorish, nasty old bitch. “My own daughter, a professional hanger-on. A lifetime nokhshlepper.”

  A signal box flew past her window. Then a railroad crossing, with cars waiting behind the gate arm, sunlight flashing off hoods. Then countryside again. Forest, blue sky, distant low mountains. Moving faster than ever, the case nudging against her heels.

  The kid had not looked her way again. Instead, she had taken out a knitting bag—knitting, of all things. She dug past a pair of scissors with pink plastic handles, found needles and yarn, and cast on.

  Before she could overthink it, Jana stood. Leaving the case beneath the seat, she nonchalantly plucked the scissors from the bag as she passed, slipping them fluidly beneath her coat. She went to the bathroom at the end of the carriage: OCCUPIED.

  She waited. The band of red beneath the lock turned green, and the bathroom door opened. The man with muttonchop sideburns emerged, gave her a shy smile, and moved back to his seat.

  Jana stepped inside and latched the door. The rhythmic sound of wheels against track reverberated, strangely amplified in the small space: WICKwickaWICKwickaWICK.

  Everything was metal: sink, toilet, mirror, refuse container lid. Please flush toilet after each use except when train is standing in station. No windows, and only a tiny ventilation grate. A fluorescent lightbulb safe inside its metal cage. Facing the mirror, Jana untied the kerchief from her chin. She wet her fingertips, then her hair. Quickly, using small snips, she trimmed. The dye job had been almost five weeks ago; get right down near the skull, and the roots were dark.

  She shook her head, dislodging remnants. What little hair remained, unevenly cropped, would not win any beauty pageants. But it would serve her purpose. A bleach blonde in a ragged kerchief had gone aboard the train. A brunette with a crew cut would get off. Under the right light, the coif might even pass for stylish—no one could say it wasn’t daring.

  She cleaned up as best she could and went back to her seat, returning scissors to knitting bag en route, and pushed the black case farther beneath the seat with her heels. No one paid her the slightest attention.

  She stared out her window, at harvested fields and pale winter sun.

  North of Andover, VT

  “License plate is different—looking into that—but VIN matches Klein’s missing Mazda. Inside the trunk, blankets: two wool, one space. Which, if you asked me how to throw off thermals, would be my recommendation—that plus timing a crossover. Fingerprints and DNA match the dossier and the phone—burner, by the way, only made two calls: the one we recorded to Klein and the one that triggered the charge.”

  Horowitz and McConnell were giving the tech their full attention. Dalia was looking at the monitor above the fireplace, picturing now the Greyhound bus heading northeast on Route 91. The bus had both northbound lanes to itself. On the southbound track, a single red VW Beetle whipped past.

  “Intercept in ten,” a woman interrupted. “Nine … eight …”

  Charlie team’s armored Lenco BearCat appeared in the monitor’s lower right corner. Sirens off, blast shields lowered, battering ram detached. But thermographic camera operating. And as Horowitz and McConnell turned to the monitor, a smaller window opened, displaying a view of the bus from the rear as the BearCat drew into the Greyhound’s blind spot.

  “Seven … six … five …”

  On the ARGUS feed, the roadblock came into view: eight green-and-yellow Vermont State Police cruisers blocking the highway in four staggered rows. A dozen troopers under cover, handguns out.

  “Four … three …”

  The bus slowed uncertainly. A trooper came forward and waved it to a halt. The BearCat pulled around on the left, boxing it in, and slued to a stop.

  “Charlie, breach and clear.”

  The SWAT team deployed, wearing helmets and gas masks, desert camo and tactical body armor, brandishing semiautomatic handguns and M4 submachine guns. Two men in the rear guard wielded clunkier weapons: an ARWEN-37, set to fire multiple tear-gas canisters, and an LRAD
, or long-range acoustic device—a sonic contraption that created agonizing pain, traditionally used to disperse crowds.

  Overwhelming force. Yet Dalia, watching from two angles at once as the team took up positions surrounding the bus, thought of Cannae and despaired.

  A concussion grenade exploded just below the driver’s window: soundless on the monitor, but shaking the BearCat’s camera. At the same instant, two men with knives slit the Greyhound’s rear tires down to the rims.

  Then agents were on board, subduing passengers and handing them back out through the door to be handcuffed, searched, and detained.

  By the time the all clear had come, nine people stood in handcuffs by the side of the road. A traffic jam was forming, and a news copter hovered overhead. Two troopers hurried to set up sawhorses, closing off one lane and funneling traffic into the other. No one had thought to bring a tow truck to move the Greyhound with its slit tires. A pair of agents cleared out the baggage compartment, peering into the shadows with baton flashlights, as another pair watched with machine guns ready.

  Of Jana Dahan, there was no sign.

  New Haven, CT

  At New Haven, the platform was packed.

  Two young women, chattering animatedly in Czech, squeezed into the seat beside Jana. A man traveling with a brood of children took up a block across the aisle. Someone had a dirty diaper.

  “Next stop Stamford,” the conductor droned. “New Rochelle, then New York Grand Central.”

  Jana settled back into the seat. If they knew where she was, they would have intercepted the train already. In New York, the biggest and busiest city in the country, she could melt away.

  She half-dozed. Maybe she would give Miriam a call, since she was in Manhattan. Miriam was a woman now, of course. Long gone from the old apartment. Life had moved on. But in the ensuing fragmentary dream, Miriam still lived at home, and answered the phone eagerly. They went for a walk together for old times’ sake. Into the park. Down the Fifth Avenue side, to the zoo. But zookeepers followed them, approached them outside the monkey house. Ticket, please, one asked. May I see your ticket? Jana tried to find her ticket. What she found was a postcard of the Capitol dome. She tried frantically to hide it, but the zookeeper had already seen. So had Miriam, who looked at Jana sideways, frowning, and then checked her watch and said it was time she headed home. But she was not wearing a watch. And she then gave a surreptitious signal to the zookeeper, who returned a secret nod.