False Flag Read online

  “You’re asking me,” Dalia said slowly, “to enlist the US Department of Defense … to assist a Mossad plot … to stop another Mossad plot?”

  Feigenbaum shrugged, nodded.

  Meir watched her without blinking.

  Dalia hesitated. McConnell was a realist. He understood that the futures of their countries were entwined. He appreciated the danger of lashom harah—evil tongues. He might agree to help. But Dalia would be surrendering her only leverage: exposing herself to the Americans as an Israeli spy, leaving herself nothing to offer the Mossad except feeble reminders of an earlier promise. While Zvi, if he even lived, rotted in some Arab prison.

  If he even lived.

  “We’re meeting tonight,” she said. “If it feels right, I’ll ask.”

  * * *

  An airplane whined overhead, bumped down against cold tarmac a quarter mile away.

  McConnell sat with eyes closed, apparently lost in thought. Dalia watched, waiting. In the next room, the coterie from the Joint Chiefs—joined tonight by a cadre of analysts from CENTCOM—would be finishing their bathroom break and finding their seats again around the conference table. In another minute, they would start looking at their watches, wondering why they weren’t yet back to the subject of foreshortening OODA loops and the limits of air power.

  She was about to poke McConnell’s shoulder when his eyes suddenly opened. He looked at her directly. Her cheeks burned at the implications of that stare, but she managed to return it without flinching.

  He paused to let the slow thunder roll of an approaching jetliner build, crest, and fade. “I have a friend,” he then said, “with the State Department. Discreet. And sympathetic to Israel. He happens to be currently attached to the Trenton HSAP field office.”

  Her mind raced to unpack the words. HSAP: Homeland Security and Preparedness. “State Department” might be code for NSA, or perhaps CIA.

  “I suggest we go back in there, you and I.” Gesturing with his jowls toward the next room. “We proceed as if this conversation never took place. And then we go see my friend.”

  She nodded.

  “But for future reference, Dalia, I don’t like being lied to. And I don’t like being used. Unless, of course, you’re going to try to tell me that the Mossad contacted you just today, out of the blue.”

  Her lips formed a tight line.

  “I’ll give you credit there, at least. You know better than to double down.”

  “Jim …”

  “Let’s … just don’t.” McConnell seemed about to add something else, but the moment passed. Somewhere down the hall, a toilet flushed, pipes hissed. He took out his phone and sent a text. The reply came almost instantly. He read it, then nodded. “This is the last time we’ll be meeting with the Joint Chiefs, by the way. Do me a favor: don’t embarrass me by being invaluable or anything.”

  They went back to the meeting.

  Afterward, they rode in the black Land Rover back to campus, said their good-nights for the benefit of the cadaverous chauffeur, then regrouped five minutes later before the Fountain of Freedom. They took her Prius down Route 1 South, effectively reversing the path George Washington had followed on January 2, 1777, after the Battle of the Assunpink Creek. Washington’s ragtag army would have crossed black woodland and icy brooks. Now they passed strip malls, Whole Foods and Babies“R”Us, Staples and Home Depot and Walmart. Applebee’s advertised half-price appetizers. ShopRite offered a free Thanksgiving turkey or ham with your Price Plus Club Card, limit one per family.

  Leaving the highway after twenty minutes, they hit Trenton: churches and small houses, boarded-up windows, sneakers dangling from power lines. They wound into a residential neighborhood: factories converted to lofts and apartments, garbage cans and recycling containers overturned at the curbs.

  They parked in a shallow driveway behind a navy blue Lincoln Navigator. Dalia followed McConnell up a concrete walk to a front porch. The white-framed Victorian was noticeably better tended than the other houses on the block. Manicured box hedges lined the facade. An unseen dog yipped from a neighbor’s fenced-in backyard.

  McConnell banged a wrought-iron knocker down three times. The door opened to a crying baby, a TV blasting SpongeBob SquarePants, and a harried-looking man of about forty, with black curling hair and graying five o’clock shadow. Dry orange crust—strained carrots, Dalia guessed, or maybe squash—stained the V-neck of his green sweater vest.

  “Dalia Artzi,” said McConnell, “Jacob Horowitz.”

  The man shook Dalia’s hand while openly taking her measure. He turned and led them down a dim hallway strewn with Legos, pieces from board games, and headless plastic action figures. Waving them into a study, he closed the door gently but firmly and gestured to the two chairs before an old Steelcase desk. Dalia stood for a moment, her gaze ticking around the study, gathering information. Framed diplomas behind glass: Williams, Notre Dame. Awards from the Director of National Intelligence and the previous New Jersey Governor’s Office for, respectively, leadership and professional achievement. Horowitz followed Dalia’s gaze and gave a crooked smile. “Those are what they gave me instead of a bonus.” He was so soft-spoken that she had to concentrate to catch the words.

  On the olive-drab desk sat a mug crusted with old coffee, and another filled with pencils and pens, bearing an inscription from the Talmud: “If you are planting a tree and you hear that the Messiah has come, you finish planting the tree before going to greet the Messiah.” On a high shelf, a small golden Buddha smiled alongside candles, incense, and a brass singing bowl. On the next shelf down, a plaque reading THIMK! On the shelf below that, a faded Kodak print of a gangly grinning boy—perhaps young Jacob Horowitz himself—standing splay-legged over a seventies-era purple banana seat.

  A toddler in the next room screamed, then dissolved into tears. Horowitz shrugged with weary embarrassment. “Jim said to keep this off the record. That means staying away from Homeland offices.”

  Dalia nodded.

  “So.” He leaned against the desk, arms folded. “He made it sound as if you had something to share with me.”

  Dalia hesitated for a few seconds more. Then she reached into her purse, fished past the sugar-free gum and Kleenex travel packs, and came up with the USB drive.

  Horowitz took the drive, frowning. He turned around a laptop on the desk. The computer woke up, displaying on-screen a happy baby, all cheeks, buckled into a playground swing. When the operating system found the plug-in, a media player opened automatically. He switched on the attached speakers. Then the amateurish recording was emanating into the study: muffled clattering, wind stirring through digital hiss. “Shookran, Naomi.” The voice echoing as if down a long hall of stone.

  Dalia translated in murmurs as each sentence was spoken:

  “Where were we?”

  “He will see it through, I was saying—at least, according to the psychologists. Textbook PTSD, misdiagnosed by his own government as mere combat stress. Now the added trauma of a failed marriage—they estimate ninety-six percent certainty. There is also a young son to be used as leverage if necessary.”

  “And he can get how close?”

  “Close enough to whisper a secret. And within an arm’s length of countless secondary targets. We’ll reach dozens. Maybe more.”

  Horowitz clicked pause. “What are we listening to?”

  “Do you recognize the voice?”

  He rubbed the bridge of his nose, then traded a glance with McConnell.

  “It’s the rosh hamossad. The director of the Mossad.”

  A moment of silence, broken by another squall from the next room.

  Horowitz, stone-faced, resumed the playback; Dalia resumed her murmuring translation.

  The younger voice: “The woman in charge of the event itself …”

  An anticipatory pause. The flick of a match, followed
by a short exhalation. Then the voice continued: “She’s completely farmisht.” The nearest English translation was “dysfunctional.” “A married mother of four, a churchgoer, a trusted pillar of her Washington community. Yet in private …” A clunk as something, perhaps the pack of cigarettes, was set down on the microphone, obscuring the next few words. Then: “She has worked hard to keep her secret. But people who make it their business to know such things have long since become aware.”

  Horowitz clicked pause again and stared into space, parsing, meditating. A fly landed on the coffee-rimed cup, prayed briskly, and took flight again. The Buddha watched from his high shelf.

  Horowitz started the recording again.

  “Promising.”

  “I’ve taken the liberty of moving Jana into position. She awaits only the final order to proceed.”

  Another pause. And then, probably, a nod or gesture, to which the younger voice replied: “Very good.”

  Digitized wind echoed off stone. The older man murmured something unintelligible. Chairs scraped, and muffled thumping was followed by more wind.

  Horowitz stopped the sound file. He stroked his unshaven chin, and Dalia noticed for the first time a pronounced cleft. “This is genuine?”

  “It is.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I trust my source. A friend in the Mossad. One with a different idea of what’s best for Israel, it goes without saying, than the rosh hamossad.”

  “Who else has heard this?”

  “No one.”

  “If it is what it sounds like …” Horowitz picked up a pen from the blotter and turned it over broodingly. “I agree, prudence would be advisable. And, in the long run, beneficial for Israel. But …” He looked to Dalia, then to McConnell. “What, exactly, are you asking me to do?”

  “You hear one name: Jana. ‘I’ve taken the liberty of moving Jana into position.’ Find this operative. We’ll take it from there.”

  “When was this recorded?”

  “Three days ago.”

  “It raises more questions than it answers. This ‘event.’ This ‘primary target.’ This ‘woman in charge’ …” He drummed a brief tattoo with the pen against the desk. “Hebrew school was a long time ago. I’ll need a written translation.”

  “You’ll have it.”

  “You’re one hundred percent.”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “I’m not a miracle worker.” Tap-tap-tap went the pen. “Tell your ‘friend’ I need something more to work with.” Tap-tap-tap. “A full name. A face. A license plate. Something.”

  Another moment of silence stretched out, broken at last by a child’s piping laughter, high and sweet and pure, from the next room.

  Chapter Five

  Ben Gurion International Airport, Tel Aviv, Israel

  The boy who took Yoni aside was about nineteen, nervous but trying to hide it, with hair shorn so close that every tiny bump and mole in his scalp was visible. He wore crisp Border Police fatigues and stood painfully straight, as if striving to avoid any suggestion of a child playing dress-up. He looked from ticket to passport and asked gruffly, “What is the reason for your trip?”

  “Visiting my sister,” Yoni said.

  “Where, exactly?”

  “Montparnasse.”

  “Her occupation?”

  “She works in a food truck, owned by her boyfriend.”

  “Her name?”

  “Levana Harel.”

  “Israeli?”

  “Yes.”

  “Her boyfriend is French?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Jewish?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why visit her now?”

  “I haven’t seen her for a year. The timing worked out. I’m between jobs.”

  The boy looked up sharply. Yoni pushed down his frustration. This exhaustive intrusion, he reminded himself, was why Ben Gurion had never lost a plane to hijackers. “I quit,” he elaborated. “I wanted more in life than selling tickets.”

  “Where did you sell tickets?”

  “At the Museum of Art.”

  “How long did you work there?”

  “Nearly three years.”

  The boy looked down again. “How long will you be away?”

  “Ten days.”

  The boy handed back the ticket and ID. “Bon voyage,” he said dryly.

  Fifty minutes later, the runway fell away beneath the El-Al Boeing 737-800. Yoni held his armrest as they turned, arcing out across the Mediterranean coast, wheeling slowly into blinding sun.

  He accepted a plastic cup of orange juice from a flight attendant. His seatmate, a middle-aged Parisian businesswoman—nobody in the world put themselves together more neatly than middle-aged Parisian businesswomen—tried to engage him in conversation about the difference between Israeli and French orange juice. Every kind of fruit, she opined suggestively, tasted better in Israel. Yoni gave a noncommittal smile and opened his in-flight copy of Atmosfera.

  Ten minutes later, he leaned back, closing his eyes. The funeral would be getting under way about now. Then would come the levayah procession to the graveside—joining, bonding, escorting the deceased back to the souls of her ancestors. Mourners reciting Psalm 91 seven times, with a pause following each recitation. The corpse would be interred, shovelfuls of earth thrown atop the coffin. The grief-stricken ramsad would watch it all.

  His seatmate jostled him as if by mistake. He didn’t take the bait. The hostess offered dinner. He ignored her. Someone a few aisles up blew her nose honkingly. Yoni kept his eyes shut tight.

  When they touched down at last, passengers who had behaved respectfully all across the Mediterranean and Italy became suddenly rude, all elbows. He waited, still and silent, for his turn to deplane. Filing into terminal 2A of Charles de Gaulle Airport, he rode automatic walkways into the central terminal’s main chamber. His second visit in as many weeks to his new home away from home. A tangle of suspended escalators rose and fell beneath a tremendous skylight. One hour earlier than Tel Aviv. The evening light was an uncanny amber. The French had a particularly evocative term for twilight: entre chien et loup—between dog and wolf.

  He passed through customs as Amin Harel, the same identity under which he had left Tel Aviv. Harried men and women staffing the checkpoint asked no questions, barely raising their eyes.

  In long-term parking, he found a waiting Fiat. He drove into Paris aggressively, dodging Opels and Peugeots with centimeters to spare. The safe house occupied a trendy block in the center of Marais. The apartment was furnished well enough to pass a cursory inspection. A locked antique desk in the bedroom opened with Yoni’s key to yield a passport featuring a biometric chip and his own photograph.

  At Gare du Nord, he bought a ticket and filled out a border agency landing card. By 8:00 p.m. GMT, he was settling into a comfy maroon seat aboard the Eurostar. In the central waiting area of terminal 5 at Heathrow, he would find his next set of papers. From there, America.

  As monotonous dusky landscape whisked by the windows, he drifted into a dark reverie. Of course, the series of hoops, although an irritant, was a reasonable precaution. Still, he envied the simpler days enjoyed by the older generations. Running in beneath coastal radar, taking men from their beds in the steamy Amazonian night, checking by touch for the small scar beneath the left armpit—a relic of the tattoo bearing an SS officer’s blood type in case of severe wounding. Making an escape in the same small airplane, or perhaps switching to a boat and becoming a fisherman for a day or a week. For every Adolf Eichmann held publicly accountable for his crimes, countless other verdicts and sentences had been rendered secretly and, hence, far more efficiently.

  But never unjustly. If he ever doubted that, Yoni need only remember the tales told by his great-grandfather. Ghettos surrounded by barbed wire. Starvation
diets, filth and lice and rampant disease. Shuls burned to the ground, select handfuls of community leaders taken …

  “Don’t let that crazy alteh kocker fill your head,” his mother had warned.

  “Your mother doesn’t want you hearing my stories, nuh?” the old man had said. Flashing his dentures, pushing a plastic chessman across the board. “Too much for you, she thinks. But I think, my boy, that you can handle it.” And beneath his breath, he had continued. Community leaders taken out and shot …

  “Why?” Yoni had interrupted in a whisper. “Why let themselves be shot?”

  “It wasn’t a matter of let, my boy. When ten Gestapo”—pronounced with the Yiddish “sh”—“with machine guns break down a man’s door in the middle of the night, drag that man from his bed, put him against the wall …” A shrug. “Any resistance he puts up is doomed to fail, and the consequences to be borne by his family. There is nothing he can do. It was not a matter of let.”

  The inside of Elter-Zayde’s upper left forearm bore a six-digit number, tattooed in faded blue. Of ten brothers and sisters, he had been the one survivor.

  “So. It started with the Einsatzgruppen, the Special Action Groups. They came into a ghetto or a village or a town and ordered the prominent Jews to gather the rest together. They announced that we were to be transferred to a new location. They shot the leaders, burned the temples. Then came the ‘resettlement.’ These were the words they used. ‘Resettlement,’ ‘transfer,’ ‘special action.’ That is a good one, nuh? ‘Special Action.’” An off-kilter grin. “It all came down to the same thing: first slave labor, then extermination.”

  From the next room had come the sound of Yoni’s mother vacuuming, his brothers and sisters—he was the youngest of six—playing unconcerned.

  “We handed over our valuables and jewelry. We boarded the slave transports, the railway cars. Packed tightly together. No food or water. No room to sit, let alone lie down. No hygiene, no toilets, not even straw; the sick along with the well—who, of course soon became sick themselves. To the Germans we were subhuman, Untermenschen. We deserved no better. Standing at first in urine, then in feces and corpses. A woman once told me, through tears, that she had birthed a baby in one of these cars and had no choice but to throw the newborn out the window during the journey. And in this horror before God, she was far from alone.