Assassin's Game

FIFTY-FOUR

The sorry state of Nurin’s psyche was certified when he looked down and realized that he was holding a lit cigarette in each hand. Hunched at the control desk in Mossad’s operations center, he discreetly doused one in an ashtray and took a long pull on the other.

There were three large video screens in front of him — one the direct feed from Veron’s Direct Action team, and the other two alternating between commercial news feeds, which had a tendency to loop the most spectacular clips. All showed the Armageddon-like scene that was the western reach of Lake Geneva. There was smoke and fire, and an army of first responders trying to cope with a maritime disaster — not a well-rehearsed scenario, Nurin supposed, for a traditionally neutral Alpine state.

“Still nothing?” Nurin barked.

“No sir,” replied the female communications manager seated to his left. “The DA team is searching on foot now, but no sign of Hamedi.”

“Dammit! Where the hell is he? Send the directive again — if they find him I want absolutely no contact. He is to be turned over to the Swiss authorities.”

“Sir, I’ve already sent that order twice—”

The woman stopped in midsentence, perhaps feeling Nurin’s stare. She began typing.

Nurin turned and saw Veron still squeezed into a narrow chair at the back of the room — the wood looked like it might splinter under his bulk. Thirty minutes ago the shooter from his DA team in Geneva had been fighting off an Iranian counterattack. When Veron tried to send in the rest of his team to support their comrade, Nurin immediately countermanded the order. Now the director would have to defend his actions, and it wouldn’t be pleasant. They had all been listening to the tactical channel audio. They’d heard the shooter as he engaged the Iranians, his dialogue cool in the chaos of a gunfight. Then he went down, pleading for help. Other voices picked up, the rest of the handpicked DA unit screaming for permission to engage. Nurin had ordered them to stand down.

Now the tactical channel was quiet, and Veron sat sulking at the back of the room. He looked like a human balloon that might burst at any moment. Nurin walked over and sank heavily into the chair next to Veron.

“Tell me, Oded,” he began in a quiet voice. “Through all your years of command in the field … was there ever a time when you sent a man into a bad situation, one you knew he wouldn’t come back from, in order to get a vital mission done?”

Veron didn’t answer directly. Instead, he asked, “The others this summer? Tehran and outside Qom? They were sacrificed as well?”

Nurin braced, not sure how a type-A soldier like Veron would handle that answer. But he gave it anyway. “Yes. I sent six men into situations that were guaranteed to fail. Six men, Oded. I know that number exactly, and their names and faces are burned into my mind. You don’t know how this has weighed on me.” When Veron turned to stare at him, Nurin added, “Or maybe you do.”

“But why?”

“Hamedi is one of us, Oded.” Nurin finally broke his secrecy, explaining Hamedi’s plan to ruin Iran’s nuclear program in a single moment.

Veron considered it for some time. “Yes, then I see why Hamedi must survive. But was it necessary to throw away so many lives?”

“In our limited contact, Hamedi told us that Farzad Behrouz had become suspicious of his background. He was raiding synagogues and interrogating old friends to find proof. The entire plan was at risk. To the world’s eye, Hamedi had become the driving force behind Iran’s nuclear weapons program. If we did not make attempts against him? That would have fed the suspicions Behrouz was harboring.”

They both watched the three video screens, the most impressive being a feed from one of the local Geneva television stations. In a segment that had been running repeatedly for twenty minutes, Entrepreneur lay broken in the water, the lake boiling around her like a frothing fire. Thick smoke, black in the city’s footlights, swirled wildly into the sky.

“But now…” Nurin said in a hushed whisper, “Hamedi has disappeared. Slaton has ruined everything.”

Veron stiffened — ears that had been assaulted by the thunder of a hundred battles were still sharp enough. “Slaton? David Slaton?”

“You know him?”

“I know of him — the kidon. He was a legend. But he was rumored to have been killed in England.”

Nurin shook his head. “No, Oded. He lives.”

Veron looked up at the monitor and stared at the incredible scene of destruction. “Then God help us.”

“No,” Nurin countered. “God help Ibrahim Hamedi.”

As Gardien de la Paix, intern level, Daniel Kammerer had been with the Geneva gendarmerie for a mere eight months. As a consequence of his junior status on the force, he was without fail given the most tedious and uninteresting assignments. At soccer matches he was relegated to standing at turnstiles to usher away the most blatant hooligans. At the recent wine festival he’d been assigned latrine duty, making sure the tipsy crowds relieved themselves in an orderly Swiss manner — lines respected, and no men allowed to appropriate the women’s portable toilets. And tonight, with a calamity of unprecedented drama playing out less than a mile away, Kammerer was stuck playing traffic cop, or more succinctly, shunting traffic away from the cordoned Quai du General Guisan toward Rue du Rhone and the safety of central Geneva.

He was diverting a delivery truck toward a side street, and enduring no small amount of honking and fist-shaking, when the event that would keep him writing reports until early the next morning began. The first thing that drew his attention was a shout. The words made no sense to young Kammerer because they came in a language he did not understand. The strident tone and volume, however, were enough to warrant a look. He right away saw three men standing midway along the Pont des Bergues footbridge, the second of the numerous spans connecting the left and right banks of the Rhone, and just west of the troubled Pont du Mont Blanc crossing where, according to the captain on the radio, more senior officers were searching for a missing Iranian diplomat in the aftermath of the spectacular attack.

Kammerer watched for a moment and heard more shouting. Two of the men, one dressed in black, were standing close to the bridge’s eastern side, backed against the hip-high metal railing. The third was ten steps away, centered on the bridge’s width and pointing an accusing hand at the others. In his short tenure on the force Kammerer had already witnessed his share of altercations, most involving alcohol. Yet there was something about this scene that seemed very different. Something that troubled him.

He abandoned his intersection, leaving the delivery truck at odds with a stalled motor scooter, and began closing the gap. He was twenty yards from the foot of the bridge, fifty from the rising dispute, when he realized that the man in the center of the bridge was not pointing his hand, but rather a gun. He also saw that one of the men backed to the rail was restraining the other with an arm wrapped around his throat.

Kammerer went for his radio, but the frequency was momentarily blocked by someone’s long-winded traffic narrative. He broke into a run, and shouted, “Police! Arrêtez-vous!”

The three men ignored him.

Kammerer finally heard a break on the frequency, but in the heat of the moment, with his heart thumping in his chest, the proper radio conventions and protocols escaped him — just as his instructor in training had said it would. But he remembered what she’d said next: If you forget the correct way, just screw the procedures and say something.

He did exactly that.

“Pont des Bergues, the footbridge!” Kammerer shouted into his microphone. “Officer needs help! I see a man with a gun, possible hostage situation!”

Thirty yards from the trouble, Kammerer slowed his pace and drew his service weapon. Before he had a chance to shout anything more, things began to happen in what seemed like slow motion. The man holding the hostage, the one clad in some kind of black suit, pushed his captive away and produced what appeared to be a gun of his own. Before he could raise it, the man in the middle of the bridge fired once, and then kept firing, a hail of shots that Kammerer would report as ten, but later be proven by ballistics evidence to be six. The man clad in black rocked once, twice, and then twisted back and flipped over the metal rail, disappearing into the river.

Kammerer pointed his weapon at the shooter, and screamed, “Drop the weapon!” He said it three times in all, once in each of the languages he spoke — French, English, and Swiss-German. One of them, he wasn’t sure which, seemed to work. Or perhaps it had more to do with the volume and situation. Whatever the impulse, the shooter set his weapon on the asphalt, backed away three steps, and very slowly dropped to his stomach and went spread-eagle.

“I’m a policeman!” the man shouted in English.

This Kammerer knew better than to take for granted. He kept his gun trained on the shooter as he closed in, kicked the gun a bit farther away, and cuffed the man, all while keeping an eye on the third man who was standing by the guardrail and looking very relieved. Help soon arrived in the form of three other officers, and things began to organize. Kammerer told the senior man, a captain, what had happened.

“Where is the other?” the captain asked. “The one who was hit?”

Kammerer led him to the rail and they both looked down. Fifteen feet below they saw nothing but the black Rhone rolling slowly westward, her rippled surface cold and empty.