The Broker

21

At an unnamed, unnumbered, nondescript building on Pinsker Street in downtown Tel Aviv, an agent named Efraim entered from the sidewalk and walked past the elevator to a dead-end corridor with one locked door. There was no knob, no handle. He pulled a device that resembled a small television remote from his pocket and aimed it at the door. Thick tumblers fell somewhere inside, a sharp click, and the door opened into one of the many safe houses maintained by the Mossad, the Israeli secret police. It had four rooms — two with bunk beds where Efraim and his three colleagues slept, a small kitchen where they cooked their simple meals, and a large cluttered workroom where they spent hours every day planning an operation that had been practically dormant for six years but was suddenly one of the Mossad’s highest priorities.

The four were members of kidon, a small, tight unit of highly skilled field agents whose primary function was assassination. Quick, efficient, silent killing. Their targets were enemies of Israel who could not be brought to trial because its courts could not get jurisdiction. Most targets were in Arab and Islamic countries, but kidon were often used in the former Soviet bloc, Europe, Asia, even North Korea and the United States. They had no boundaries, no restraints, nothing to stop them from taking out those who wanted to destroy Israel. The men and women of kidon were fully licensed to kill for their country. Once a target was approved, in writing, by the current prime minister, an operation plan was put into place, a unit was organized, and the enemy of Israel was as good as dead. Obtaining such approval at the top had rarely been difficult.

Efraim tossed a bag of pastries onto one of the folding tables where Rafi and Shaul were plowing through research. Amos was in a corner at the computer, studying maps of Bologna, Italy.

Most of their research was stale; it included pages of mainly useless background on Joel Backman, information that had been collected years ago. They knew everything about his chaotic personal life — the three ex-wives, the three children, the former partners, the girlfriends, the clients, the old lost friends from the power circles in D.C. When his killing had been approved six years earlier, another kidon had worked urgently putting together the background on Backman. A preliminary plan to kill him in a car accident in D.C. had been jettisoned when he suddenly pled guilty and fled to prison. Not even a kidon could reach him in protective custody at Rudley.

The background was important now only because of his son. Since his surprise pardon and disappearance seven weeks earlier, the Mossad had kept two agents close to Neal Backman. They rotated every three or four days so no one in Culpeper, Virginia, would get suspicious; small towns with their nosy neighbors and bored cops presented enormous challenges. One agent, a pretty lady with a German accent, had actually chatted with Neal on Main Street. She claimed to be a tourist and needed directions to Montpelier, the nearby home of President James Madison. She flirted, or tried her best to, and was perfectly willing to go further. He didn’t take the bait. They’d bugged his home and office, and they listened to cell phone conversations. From a lab in Tel Aviv, they read every one of his office e-mails and those from home as well. They monitored his bank account and his credit card spending. They knew he’d made a quick trip to Alexandria six days earlier, but they did not know why.

They were watching Backman’s mother too, in Oakland, but the poor lady was fading fast. For years they had debated the idea of slipping her one of the poison pills from their amazing arsenal. They would then ambush her son at her funeral. However, the kidon manual on assassination prohibited the killing of family members unless said members were also involved in threats to Israeli security.

But the idea was still debated, with Amos being its most vocal proponent.

They wanted Backman dead, but they also wanted him to live a few hours before passing on. They needed to chat with him, to ask some questions, and if the answers weren’t forthcoming they knew how to make him talk. Everyone talked when the Mossad really wanted answers.

“We have found six agents who speak Italian,” Efraim said. “Two will be here this afternoon at three, for a meeting.” None of the four spoke Italian, but all spoke perfect English, as well as Arabic. Among them there were eight other languages.

Each of the four had combat experience, extensive computer training, and were skilled at crossing borders (with and without paperwork), interrogation, disguises, and forgery. And they had the ability to kill in cold blood with no regrets. The average age was thirty-four, and each had been involved with at least five successful kidon assassinations.

When fully operational, their kidon would have twelve members. Four would carry out the actual killing, and the other eight would provide cover, surveillance, and tactical support, and would clean up after the hit.

“Do we have an address?” Amos asked from the computer.

“No, not yet,” said Efraim. “And I’m not sure we’ll get one. This is coming through counterintelligence.”

“There are half a million people in Bologna,” Amos said almost to himself.

“Four hundred thousand,” said Shaul. “And a hundred thousand of those are students.”

“We’re supposed to get a picture of him,” Efraim said, and the other three stopped what they were doing and looked up. “There’s a photo of Backman somewhere, one taken recently, after prison. Getting a copy is a possibility.”

“That would certainly be helpful,” Rafi said.

They had a hundred old photos of Joel Backman. They had studied every square centimeter of his face, every wrinkle, every vein in his eyes, every strand of hair on his head. They had counted his teeth, and they had copies of his dental records. Their specialists across town at the headquarters of Israel’s Central Institute for Intelligence and Special Duties, better known as Mossad, had prepared excellent computer images of what Backman would look like now, six years after the world last saw him. There was a series of digital projections of Backman’s face at a hefty 240 pounds, his weight when he pled guilty. And another series of Backman at 180, his rumored weight now. They had worked with his hair, leaving it natural, and predicting its color for a fifty-two-year-old man. They colored it black and red and brown. They cut it and left it longer. They put a dozen different pairs of glasses on his face, then added a beard, first a dark one, then a gray one.

It all came back to the eyes. Study the eyes.

Though Efraim was the leader of the unit, Amos had seniority. He had been assigned to Backman in 1998 when the Mossad first heard rumors of the JAM software that was being shopped around by a powerful Washington lobbyist. Working through their ambassador in Washington, the Israelis pursued the purchase of JAM, thought they had a deal, but were stiff-armed when Backman and Jacy Hubbard took their goods elsewhere.

The selling price was never made known. The deal was never consummated. Some money changed hands, but Backman, for some reason, did not deliver the product.

Where was it now? Had it ever existed in the first place?

Only Backman knew.

The six-year hiatus in the hunt for Joel Backman had given Amos ample time to fill in some gaps. He believed, as did his superiors, that the so-called Neptune satellite system was a Red Chinese creation; that the Chinese had spent a hefty chunk of their national treasury in building it; that they had stolen valuable technology from the Americans to do so; that they had brilliantly disguised the launching of the system and fooled U.S., Russian, and Israeli satellites; and that they had been unable to reprogram the system to override the software JAM had uploaded. Neptune was useless without JAM, and the Chinese would give up their Great Wall to get their hands on it and Backman.

Amos, and Mossad, also believed that Farooq Khan, the last surviving member of the trio and the principal author of the software, had been tracked down by the Chinese and murdered eight months ago. Mossad was on his trail when he disappeared.

They also believed the Americans were still not sure who built Neptune, and this intelligence failure was an ongoing, almost permanent embarrassment. American satellites had dominated the skies for forty years and were so effective they could see through clouds, spot a machine gun under a tent, intercept a wire transfer from a drug dealer, eavesdrop on a conversation in a building, and find oil under the desert with infrared imagery. They were vastly superior to anything the Russians had put up. For another system of equal or better technology to be designed, built, launched, and to become operational without the knowledge of the CIA and the Pentagon had been unthinkable.

Israeli satellites were very good, but not as good as the Americans’. Now it appeared to the intelligence world that Neptune was more advanced than anything the United States had ever launched.

These were only assumptions; little had been confirmed. The only copy of JAM had been hidden. Its creators were dead.

Amos had lived the case for almost seven years, and he was thrilled to have a new kidon in place and was urgently making plans. Time was very short. The Chinese would blow up half of Italy if they thought Backman would end up in the rubble. The Americans might try and get him too. On their soil he was protected by their Constitution, with its layers of safeguards. The laws required that he be treated fairly then tucked away in prison and protected around the clock. But on the other side of the world he was fair game.

Kidon had been used to neutralize a few wayward Israelis, but never at home. The Americans would do the same.

Neal Backman kept his new, very thin laptop in the same old battered briefcase he hauled home every night. Lisa had not noticed it because he never took it out. He kept it close, always within a step or two.

He changed his morning routine slightly. He’d bought a card from Jerry’s Java, a fledgling coffee and doughnut chain that was trying to lure customers with fancy coffee and free newspapers, magazines, and wireless Internet access. The franchise had converted an abandoned drive-through taco hut at the edge of town, jazzed it up with funky decor, and in its first two months was doing a booming business.

There were three cars in front of him at the drive-through window. His laptop was on his knees, just under the steering wheel. At the curb, he ordered a double mocha, no whipped cream, and waited for the cars in front to inch forward. He pecked away with both hands as he waited. Once online, he quickly went to KwyteMail. He typed in his user name — Grinch123 — then his pass phrase — post hoc ergo propter hoc. Seconds later there it was — the first message from his father.

Neal held his breath as he read, then exhaled mightily and eased forward in line. It worked! The old man had figured it out!

Quickly, he typed:

He placed the laptop in the passenger seat, lowered his window, and paid almost four bucks for a cup of coffee. As he pulled away, he kept glancing at the computer to see how long the access signal would last. He turned onto the street, drove no more than two hundred feet, and the signal was gone.

Last November, after Arthur Morgan’s astounding defeat, Teddy Maynard began devising his Backman pardon strategy. With his customary meticulous planning, he prepared for the day when moles would leak the word of Backman’s whereabouts. To tip the Chinese, and do so in a manner that would not arouse suspicion, Teddy began looking for the perfect snitch.

Her name was Helen Wang, a fifth-generation Chinese American who’d worked for eight years at Langley as an analyst on Asian issues. She was very smart, very attractive, and spoke passable Mandarin Chinese. Teddy got her a temporary assignment at the State Department, and there she began cultivating contacts with diplomats from Red China, some of whom were spies themselves and most of whom were constantly on the prowl for new agents.

The Chinese were notorious for their aggressive tactics in recruiting spies. Each year 25,000 of their students were enrolled in American universities, and the secret police tracked them all. Chinese businessmen were expected to cooperate with central intelligence when they returned home. The thousands of American companies doing business on the mainland were constantly monitored. Their executives were researched and watched. The good prospects were sometimes approached.

When Helen Wang “accidentally” let it slip that her background included a few years at the CIA, and that she hoped to return soon, she quickly had the attention of intelligence chiefs in Beijing. She accepted an invitation from a new friend to have lunch at a swanky D.C. restaurant, then dinner. She played her role beautifully, always reticent about their overtures but always reluctantly saying yes. Her detailed memos were hand delivered to Teddy after every encounter.

When Backman was suddenly freed from prison, and it became apparent he’d been stashed away and would not surface, the Chinese put tremendous pressure on Helen Wang. They offered her $100,000 for information about his location. She appeared to be frightened by the offer, and for a few days broke off contact. With perfect timing, Teddy got her assignment at State canceled and called her back to Langley. For two weeks she had nothing to do with her old friends undercover at the Chinese embassy.

Then she called them and the payoff soon climbed to $500,000. Helen turned nasty and demanded $1 million, claiming that she was risking her career and her freedom and it was certainly worth more money than that. The Chinese agreed.

The day after Teddy was fired, she called her handler and requested a secret meeting. She gave him a sheet of paper with wiring instructions to a bank account in Panama, one that was secretly owned by the CIA. When the money was received, she said, they would meet again and she would have the location of Joel Backman. She would also give them a recent photo of Joel Backman.

The drop was a “brush by,” an actual physical meeting between mole and handler, done in such a way that no one would notice anything unusual. After work, Helen Wang stopped at a Kroger store in Bethesda. She walked to the end of aisle twelve, where the magazines and paperbacks were displayed. Her handler was loitering at the rack with a copy of Lacrosse Magazine. Helen picked up another copy of the same magazine and quickly slid an envelope into it. She flipped pages with passable boredom, then put the magazine back on the rack. Her handler was shuffling through the sports weeklies. Helen wandered away, but only after she saw him take her copy of Lacrosse Magazine.

For a change, the cloak-and-dagger routine wasn’t needed. Helen’s friends at the CIA weren’t watching because they had arranged the drop. They’d known her handler for many years.

The envelope contained one sheet of paper — an eight-by-ten color Xerox photo of Joel Backman as he was apparently walking down the street. He was much thinner, had the beginnings of a grayish goatee, European-style eyeglasses, and was dressed like a local. Handwritten at the bottom of the page was: Joel Backman, Via Fondazza, Bologna, Italy. The handler gawked at it as he sat in his car, then he sped away to the embassy of the People’s Republic of China on Wisconsin Avenue NW in Washington.

At first the Russians seemed to have no interest in the whereabouts of Joel Backman. Their signals were read a variety of ways at Langley. No early conclusions were made, none were possible. For years the Russians had secretly maintained that the so-called Neptune system was one of their own, and this had contributed mightily to the confusion at the CIA.

Much to the surprise of the intelligence world, Russia was managing to keep aloft about 160 reconnaissance satellites a year, roughly the same number as the former Soviet Union. Its robust presence in space had not diminished, contrary to what the Pentagon and the CIA had predicted.

In 1999, a defector from the GRU, the Russian military’s intelligence arm and successor to the KGB, informed the CIA that Neptune was not the property of the Russians. They had been caught off guard as badly as the Americans. Suspicion was focused on the Red Chinese, who were far behind in the satellite game.

Or were they?

The Russians wanted to know about Neptune, but they were not willing to pay for information about Backman. When the overtures from Langley were largely ignored, the same color photo sold to the Chinese was anonymously e-mailed to four Russian intelligence chiefs operating under diplomatic cover in Europe.

The leak to the Saudis was handled through an executive of an American oil company stationed in Riyadh. His name was Taggett and he’d lived there for more than twenty years. He was fluent in Arabic and moved in the social circles as easily as any foreigner. He was especially close to a mid-level bureaucrat in the Saudi Foreign Ministry office, and over late-afternoon tea he told him that his company had once been represented by Joel Backman. Further, and much more important, Taggett claimed to know where Backman was hiding.

Five hours later, Taggett was awakened by a buzzing doorbell. Three young gentlemen in business suits pushed their way into his apartment and demanded a few moments of his time. They apologized, explained that they were with some branch of the Saudi police, and really needed to talk. When pressed, Taggett reluctantly passed on the information he had been coached to disclose.

Joel Backman was hiding in Bologna, Italy, under a different name. That was all he knew.

Could he find out more? they asked.

Perhaps.

They asked him if he would leave the next morning, return to his company’s headquarters in New York, and dig for more information about Backman. It was very important to the Saudi government and the royal family.

Taggett agreed to do so. Anything for the king.