Headhunters

Chapter Forty-Eight

Ziggy had set a timer on his laptop for an hour. They were going to leave when that hit zero, regardless of how much information was left to be delivered. He had masked his location as thoroughly as he could, but he knew that once the Mossad brought their systems back online again, they would very quickly be able to find out where all of their secret data was going.

Thirty minutes.

Forty-five minutes.

He adapted as he worked, constantly rearranging the data to be downloaded.

Fifty-five minutes.

He found one particularly juicy piece of information — a list of agents active in the United States, together with Social Security information and images — and decided it was worth waiting the additional time it would take for it to download.

Sixty-five minutes.

The delay was greedy on his part. Almost fatal.

Seventy minutes had passed when he and Matilda hustled out of the hotel and onto the street. Two cars pulled up outside and six men disembarked. There was nothing to mark them out as agents, not that Ziggy would have expected that, but their haste to get inside was evident and, as Ziggy and Matilda tarried a little at the end of the street, they watched as the agents sealed the building and prevented anyone else from leaving.

“Come on,” Ziggy said. “We don’t want to be here.”

Milton found a cab on the street. As soon as they had pulled out into traffic, he allowed himself to exhale and relax. The afternoon had been exquisitely stressful. He had known that his life was in the balance and that he had ceded a decision on whether he lived or died first to the scheming of a socially inept hacker and then, second, to a man who was not noted for his compassion. He realised, as the car put the anonymous office block behind him, that he had half expected not to be able to walk out of it again.

He told the driver to stop next to a payphone. While the driver waited, he thumbed in the coins, dialled the number for the prepaid phone that he had given to Ziggy and waited for the call to connect.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“How did it go?”

“He took it. He left me for a couple of hours and when he came back he was very unhappy.”

“I bet. You fucked up their network. They’ll basically have to blow it up and start again.”

“You did it. I was just the deliveryman.”

“So they’ll stop Bachman? Call him off?”

“No.”

“They’ll help you, then?”

“Not exactly. But they might not help him.”

“They might not?”

“I can’t say any better than that. That’s what I needed most of all. The deck was stacked before. It might be even now. They certainly know I’m serious after what we just did to them.”

“So what do we do?”

“We need to give our friend a reason to come and find us.”

“How do we do that?”

“I’ll explain. But you need to leave the country.”

“And go where?”

“Dubrovnik.”

They had already discussed the safest way to leave, and now Milton told him to put the plan into effect. Ziggy and Matilda would return south to Ovda and leave from there, while he would make his own arrangements. He knew that he would have a Mossad tail now that he wouldn’t be able to shake until he had exited the country. But he wanted to ensure that Ziggy and Matilda were able to leave safely. He made Ziggy promise that he would keep a careful eye on her, and he said that he would. Milton didn’t think that Matty needed a babysitter — indeed, it would probably have made more sense to tell her to look after him—but he couldn’t help himself. He said that he would call again when he had reached their destination and then ended the call.

Back in the car, he leaned forward so that he could speak to the driver. “Change of plan,” he said. “Can you take me to Haifa, please? The airport.”

It was a hundred kilometres to the north, and the driver — happy to contemplate the larger fare he would be able to charge — said yes and changed course.

Milton settled back in the seat as they headed out on Route Two, and gazed out the window to the west. The deep blue sea stretched out all the way to an immaculate horizon, a few pleasure craft skirting across the surface. He turned back as a Mercedes with blacked-out windows accelerated by them, matching their speed for a moment before passing and pulling in ahead of them. He wondered whether the car was involved in his surveillance.

Probably.

He would make no attempt to shake them.

It would make no difference. They knew where he was going.