Pinnacle Event

13

“There is a privacy screen in First Class, madame, if you want to raise it after takeoff,” the flight attendant explained. “It separates you from the passenger in the next seat.”

Mbali looked at Raymond, who already had his headphones on, and smiled. “Maybe I will later, but he seems like a nice guy.”

The flight attendant looked askance at the big American.

“Well, the switch is right here when you decide you need it.”

Mbali had looked around at the crowd boarding the plane and remarked to herself how few blacks were among the passengers. Relations between the South African and Israeli governments were still chilled and those who traveled back and forth between the two countries tended to be Jews, who tended to be whites, with the strange exception of the Lemba people, who called themselves the Mwenye, and had been shown through DNA to be directly related to the original Israeli tribes of Moses. She laughed wondering what would happen if 747s filled with the Lemba started showing up in Tel Aviv claiming their Right of Return after three thousand years.

“What’s so funny?” Bowman asked.

“It’s a long story?”

“Does it have to do with termites eating bars?” he asked.

“Ah, so you finally figured it out, Mr. Bartender?”

“Yes, but it took a while, and then I tried it out on my, ah, friend and she got it right away. Well, she’s more than a friend. I live with her and her partner.”

“You Americans are so strange to us, really, you know,” Mbali chuckled.

“Well, it, too, is a long story, which I am sure we will have time for at some point,” he stammered, his ears reddening in embarrassment. “I’m still getting used to it myself, but it works. Anyway, I called Emma and Linda today and I told them about meeting you and, well, anyway, Emma knew the joke.”

“Well, at least she’s smart.” Mbali said, reaching across and touching Ray’s arm. “I am so glad to hear you’re not single. When I didn’t see a wedding ring, I wasn’t sure. I’ve always had problems working closely with single men. Truth to tell, with a lot of married men, too.”

“Well, I’m taken, so don’t worry about any ulterior motives.”

“Good.”

“But what about you, since we’re having this talk? Is there someone in your life?” Ray asked.

“There is a man,” she said, smiling at the thought. “Some people assume I must be butch to be in this job, but no, there is a man. His name is Nelson. He’s almost seven years old. I thought when I was thirty it was now or never.”

“That’s wonderful, but do you ever get to see him?”

“Oh, yes. Every morning and every night, except when I travel, which is rarely.” She paused a moment and her expression clouded. “So, I know you want to ask who or where is his father. He died when Nelson was two, shot leading a drug raid in Joburg. Now, Nelson is the only man I have room for in my life and he, let me tell you, is plenty. Let me show you.” She withdrew her Galaxy smartphone and pulled up a photo album with hundreds of pictures of her boy, many with both her and her son.

“Maybe I can meet him when this is all over?” Ray asked, handing back the phone.

“I keep him well away from my business,” she said. “No offense.”

“Understood,” he said. He leaned back in the chair and put his headphones back on, hoping for another airborne moment of clarity. Instead, he fell asleep.

He woke several hours later. Mbali had put up the privacy screen between their two seats. The long overnight flight from Johannesburg in the old El Al 747 had been wearing. Even in First Class the seats were uncomfortable. The only thoughts that came to him before he had dozed off were of the men in the cars, the men in Vienna, and the noise, the blood, the shooting in Camps Bay.

CIA men had been surveilling him at the café in Vienna. That meant the Agency knew what he was doing, or thought they did. Had Winston told them, had he told them to protect him? Or had they learned about it through one of their people inside the NSC staff? Were they trying to get a lead from him and then swoop in and claim credit, in the process blowing the opportunity, if there were an opportunity?

And there had been the others in the cars in Grinzing.

Two sets of others, Rosch had said. Others who were watching him or watching Johann Potgeiter, or now watching us both? Maybe Mossad was watching him, too. They always had a way of showing up in interesting places when there was a whiff of nuclear something in the air. Maybe Potgeiter had protection, now that he was a Trustee, replacing his father? Protection from those who had killed the first batch of Trustees, whomever their killers were.

That was still the central question, why kill the Trustees, especially after they had delivered the bombs. If they had, in fact, delivered bombs. Perhaps because what they had delivered was defective? The buyers felt scammed and retaliated? Killing the sellers would not get you your money back. Killing the sellers might, however, wipe clean your trail, your identity. That would work, that would be a motivation, but only if the Trustees alone knew the identity of the buyer and there were no records for the successor Trustees to figure out what had happened.

Bowman could not suppress the thought that if he failed and the parallel work by the intelligence agencies did too, something so dire might happen that the world would go off in a different direction, as it had after 9/11. It was a direction to a far worse place, where large sections of cities lay in radioactive ruin, where the dead were counted not in the hundreds, but in the tens of thousands, where paranoia and state surveillance would run amok, where the economies would tank and progress of all kinds would slow or retreat.

Or not. Maybe all the fears were wrong, all the theories flawed. Maybe the double flash was not a nuclear bomb going off. Or even if it had been, maybe it was a North Korean or Pakistani experiment. Maybe the Saudis had been developing a weapon as a hedge against the Iranian nuclear program. The Trustees were real and they had all been killed after being paid huge sums of money, but maybe there was another explanation that was eluding him.

What was real was the fact that the American President, and apparently his South African counterpart, both believed that there were loose nukes and that those nukes were going to go off in their cities sometime soon. Both men were doing, or about to do, searches that would be so obvious that the media would get the story of loose nukes in a matter of days, if not hours. Then no amount of presidential rhetoric or assurances would stop people pouring out of the great cities and engaging in all sorts of disruptive and self-destructive behavior. If there were actually bombs hidden in cities, the terrorists might well decide to ignite them then, rather than risk being uncovered in the searches. As he began to drift off again, there were two pings.

“Please make sure your seat belts are buckled and your seat is in the fully upright position as we begin our final approach to Ben Gurion.”

When the 747 hit the runway with a thud, Bowman turned on his iPhone and clicked on Data Roaming. As the plane taxied to the gate, the stream of e-mails that had been waiting for him poured on to the iPhone. He was definitely going to bill the government for the charges. He pulled up his Wickr app for encrypted messages and checked to see if any had come in.

There was one from Gunter Rosch in Vienna. “Ray, tracked down the two teams that were surveilling you in Grinzing. One was the South African service, your new friend Mbali. The other were hired former Wien Polizei. They swear they don’t know who hired them. We are working on that with them.” Wickr shredded the message on his iPhone when he closed it, making it disappear forever from any corner of cyberspace.

He looked across at Mbali, who was actually putting on lipstick and staring into a compact mirror, getting ready for their arrival. Of course she had had the younger Potgeiter under surveillance. That’s how she knew he had interviewed him. She probably had all the new Trustees being followed. It was about time he saw those surveillance reports and learned everything she knew, or else he might not take her with him up into the Galilee Hills. He remembered that sharing, she had said, had to be a two-way street.

When the First Class door opened, they were the third and fourth passengers off the plane and into the jetway. An athletic-looking man stood just inside in a short-sleeved khaki shirt and jeans. “Mr. Radford, welcome to the Holy Land. Please come with me, and your lady friend.” The man opened a side door in the jetway and led them out onto a stairway to the tarmac, where a tan Mercedes waited.

“Danny Avidar is sorry he could not be here himself to welcome you, but he wanted to make sure you arrived okay and got settled into the hotel. So we will just skip over the Immigration business. If I can have your passports, I will get them stamped and return them to you. You are already checked in at the Clock. They call it a boutique hotel. It’s in Jaffa. Not so many tourists as the Hilton or the Dan.” He paused and then looked squarely at Ray, as if to double-check. “Two rooms, as you requested.”

Danny Avidar had asked no questions when Ray had called him to arrange the visit. Either Mossad already knew what he was doing, which was likely, or Danny just assumed he would find out when Ray showed up. One thing Ray knew, Danny Avidar, the head of Ops for Mossad, would not be letting him wander around Israel unsupervised. Once he knew what Ray was up to, Avidar would probably have to tell the internal security service, the Shin Beth, to keep an eye on him.

“It’s quite modern, Tel Aviv,” Mbali observed as the car sped through the city.

“Your first time in Israel? You expected maybe the Holy Land was still like it was in the Bible?” their driver retorted. “We fixed it up since then. Jerusalem we left old. You will see it while you are here, of course. Meanwhile, Danny is waiting for you.”

Knowing Avidar would be in his suite, Ray asked Mbali to come with him to meet their host. As they entered, he was pouring. “It’s the Yarden Chardonnay you liked so much last time,” he offered the first glass to Bowman. “Robert Parker and Oz Clarke have both rated it now, so you may have been right about it.”

Ray introduced Mbali and the three of them toasted, “L’chaim.”

“Did you know, Raymond that the Crusaders brought the Chardonnay grape to France from Israel. It’s actually native here. In Hebrew it means ‘gate of God.’”

“Don’t tell the French,” Ray laughed.

“I ask them where in France is a place called Chardonnay? There is no such place. There is Burgundy and Bordeaux, but no Chardonnay because it is not native to France. Anyway, we are all glad you came back to do this one, Ray. The Prime Minister and the Security Cabinet are going crazy. How do we keep these bombs out of Israel? It is existential for us. However many there are, doesn’t matter how many. One and we are in deep trouble. Two and we are done as a nation. Everyone will leave. No one will live in a radioactive waste pile, waiting for the next bomb to go off. You need to tell us everything you know because Washington. Washington is acting like they know nothing. Nothing to share? They think the bombs are going to end up in the States? Crazy. We are the target. What do you know? Now, tell me.”

Ray had almost forgotten how fast Danny could talk, how quickly he got down to business and put his cards on the table. “You overchilled the Chard,” he said pulling the bottle of Yarden out of the ice bucket. “Washington does not know much and I am sure you have ways of knowing everything they have.” He sipped the wine and sat on the couch. “I suspect you may actually know more than we do.”

“Then, we are all in trouble. What could we know? Somebody bought something expensive from men who used to make nuclear bombs. Then he killed them all. Our guess is that it was bombs, but we don’t know where they are or who is the buyer. That’s it. That’s what we know,” Danny said, sitting down opposite Bowman.

“One of the men who died was killed here in Tel Aviv. Shin Beth must have taken that case apart by now,” Ray replied. “And the sellers were all men who had worked with Israel on developing missiles and bombs. You know them.”

Danny Avidar threw up his hands. “We knew them. That was when I was in diapers, twenty-five years ago or more. We had nothing to do with them since then. Don’t try to shmear this on us, Raymond. You want to talk to the boys in Shin Beth, that I can arrange. But you know those guys are not refined and cultured like my outfit. No Chardonnay at Shin Beth. Beer maybe, if they like you.”

Ray moved to the edge of the couch and placed the half-empty glass on the coffee table. “Danny, cut the shit. You just told me that this is the top priority investigation from the Prime Minister, that it is about the continued existence of Israel. So don’t tell me you don’t know all the details of the Shin Beth and police investigation of the death of Dawid Steyn, right here in Tel Aviv.”

“Blunt as ever. Are you sure you’re not a Jew? Maybe on your mother’s side somewhere? That way we could give you citizenship and recruit you into the Mossad.” As Bowman scowled at him, Danny Avidar sat back. “You I am authorized personally by the Prime Minister himself to tell everything to, but under four eyes. Not yet for Washington, the CIA, the FBI, the National Zoo Police.” He looked at Mbali, who had perched on a barstool and was watching the back and forth between these alleged friends with fascination. “With all due respect to my new South African friend, you I am not authorized to brief.”

Mbali did not move or say a word. She continued to look at Avidar.

Bowman cut the silence. “This is a joint investigation, Danny, between the U.S. and South Africa. She knows more about the Trustees than you ever will. So she’s in. If you need to call the PM to ask permission go right ahead. We’ll wait, but we are doing this together or not at all.”

Avidar sighed. “Then it must go no further than you, miss. No reporting back to Joburg or wherever. And you, my friend, Raymond, will have to explain this personally to the PM when we see him.”

“With pleasure. I haven’t seen him since the Syrian reactor briefing,” Ray said. “Now, you first. What have you got?”

“Less than we would like, more than we had a week ago,” Danny started. “Dawid Steyn was murdered, of that there is no doubt. Pushed off the platform at the Haganah Station. We have it on the videotape. Who did it? Mr. Nobody.

“Mr. Nobody with a hat pulled low. He wore thick glasses. He had a mustache and light beard. He had a nose like an eagle. And all of that, the hat, the glasses, the facial hair, the nose, the police found in a dumpster three blocks away. So what use is the picture?”

Ray brightened. “Great, so you have his DNA, the assassin’s?”

“We do. This we now know. He was a man. He was white. His ancestors came from what was Poland or Russia. He is likely a Jew and he has a better-than-average chance of getting macular degeneration in his seventies or eighties, if he lives that long,” Danny said from memory. “Did we have that DNA on file? No. Does it help us at all that we have it now? A little, not much. Not yet.”

“And the place where he bought the kit?” Mbali asked.

“Actually, we thought of that,” Danny replied, looking at her. “Not in Israel is our conclusion, not even the hat. But it’s all stuff you could get all over Europe, even in the States some of it. No lot numbers. Now, it’s your turn, miss. Tell me something about the Trustees I don’t already know.”

Mbali poured herself another glass of the Yarden. “You know of course that Dawid Steyn became a Trustee upon the death of his father, of natural causes here in Tel Aviv two years ago. He quit his job and managed his share of the Trustee funds full time from his office downtown.”

“All this we know, of course,” Danny replied.

Mbali continued. “He attended eight meetings of the Trustees. We can give you the dates and locations. But he also met twice in Vienna with the late Karl Potgeiter and his son Johann.”

Bowman raised his eyebrows. This was all news to him.

“He is succeeded by his wife, Rachel, the first woman on the Trustees. She continues to live in Herzliya, but no longer works at Google,” she said. “I want to talk to her.”

“That last part we knew,” Danny mumbled. “Rachel we are listening to, watching, very closely. There is nothing to indicate that she knows anything. Shin Beth talked to her. She admitted to being a Trustee now. Says it’s secret but, it’s just an international charity, says she had never seen the books before her husband died, doesn’t know why there was a big deposit in the accounts in Cyprus and Dubai earlier this year. But when she sneezes, we know.”

Mbali continued her account. “What Dawid Steyn’s father, Jacob, had worked on for the Apartheid regime at the Circle lab was the nuclear triggering mechanics in the missile warhead. His Israeli counterpart was the nuclear weapon designer Avraham Reuven.” She stopped to get a reaction.

Danny Avidar looked at Ray Bowman. “You’re right. She knows her stuff, this woman.” He smiled and looked at Mbali. “But here we are getting into sensitive areas for us. We must tread lightly on that bad bit of history where we and the whites in Joburg did things together, It was a different era, the Cold War. We needed each other. Maybe we made mistakes then, but it is history.”

“‘Maybe’?” Mbali asked.

“All right, we shouldn’t have done some of what we did, but that was then and this is now,” Danny said, punching the air with his hand for emphasis. “We cannot help each other as much as we need to now if there is any risk of us getting blamed again for what happened then or if it means people talking about our alleged nuclear weapons, which we may or may not have, and drawing connections between our alleged weapons and the loose nukes that might be out there.”

Mbali walked toward Avidar. “Nor do we want to draw attention to the fact that somehow we missed the fact that South Africa produced more nuclear weapons than the whites admitted to, if that turns out to be true. Both of our governments have a shared interest in finding these bombs before anything happens, destroying them and then making sure no one ever knows any of this happened. Agreed?” She thrust out her hand to shake.

“Zeman,” Avidar said. “Agreed.”

“Lovely, you have a deal. Great. Everybody’s learning things. Can we get to work now?” Bowman said, standing up. “We want to go see Avraham Reuven.”

“Always sarcastic you are. This Reuven, he’s still alive?” Danny asked.

“Alive and living in the hills above the Galilee,” Bowman replied. “In Livnim. And I want to talk to him.”

Danny Avidar shrugged. “All right. You, miss, we will have someone take you tomorrow to see Rachel Steyn in Herzliya. I don’t need to go with you, I will hear the whole conversation anyway.” He turned to Bowman. “Raymond and I will go visit an eighty-one-year-old man on the hill of the Beatitudes and try not to interrogate him so hard he has a heart attack.”

“Beatitudes?” Bowman asked.

“Heathen,” Avidar replied. “You know, like ‘Blessed are the Cheeze Markers.’”

As Ray Bowman wondered at that, his iPad beeped.