The Vatican Knights

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

It was night.

Yosef Rokach sat before his PC in the darkness of his apartment, the light of the monitor casting ghoulish shadows upon his face. During the six hours he sat before the computer, trying to decode the encryptions on the data stick, Yosef’s studious eyes hardly looked away from the screen.

On average, it took approximately two hours to decode a single page of data, leaving three pages remaining, which would take him into the dawn hours. So far he had been able to bring up photos of the Soldiers of Islam and their personal histories — low-level material. In fact, this same material had already been forwarded to multiple intelligence agencies that day. So why would such data be protected by the LAP?

With rapid fingering on the keyboard, Yosef undid the visible stitching and continued to open the cyber gates, producing readable material.

And then the first of the security lights came on, blinking.

A security screen to the right of the PC monitor was divided into quarters, showing a different part of the residence on each segment. The top left portion showed three men scaling the small gate to his building, which was always kept locked. The second security lamp lit up. The intruders were now at the front door of the building, one hunkering by the lock to disengage it.

Yosef typed even faster, realizing that he wouldn’t have time to decipher the rest of the encryption. He saved the partially decoded document onto his desktop.

The third security lamp began to blink, the intruders now in the hallway making their way up the stairs to his apartment.

Yosef quickly brought up the email addresses of Washington’s FBI office and the CIA and attached the desktop document. As the file uploaded, the computer suddenly appeared to work with glacial slowness. The message, when received by the American constituencies, would be from a Mossad ISP address in order to protect the identity of the operative. Mossad would appear as the direct sender.

The fourth and final lamp lit, the amber bulb blinking in rapid succession. The intruders were now milling at his doorstep, their voices hushed, talking, deciding.

Just as the document loaded, Yosef hit the SEND button.

At that moment, the door to his apartment crashed inward.

After hitting the reset button to quickly clear the computer screen, Yosef stood to face his aggressors. “What is this? What do you want?”

Three men stood silhouetted against the light of the hallway.

“I demand to know—”

“What you demand means nothing to me,” said the first man. Even silhouetted, the man appeared slight — hardly a physical threat, but his voice possessed something strong and unyielding.

The small man stepped closer, his features clearer. His hair was dark and his face was lined with age and wisdom, the creases also denoting years of pain, anger and persecution. Here stood Yitzhak Paled, head of the Lohamah Psichlogit.

“How much did you decipher?” he asked calmly. “And who did you send it to?”

Yosef shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talk—”

Paled reached out with a quick hand and cuffed Yosef in the face. “How much did you decipher?” he repeated. “And who did you send it to?”

Yosef stood there with his hand to his face, the thrill of espionage no longer a romantic ideal, as reality set in like an anchor. His gut was churning.

“If I have to ask you again, Yosef, which I doubt is your real name, then I’ll break every bone in your body until I get what I want, starting with your fingers. Is that clear?”

Yosef didn’t respond, his tongue bound by paralytic terror.

“Case in point,” said Paled, removing three Polaroids from his shirt pocket and splaying them across the table in the glow of the computer monitor. Even in the feeble light, Yosef could see the brutally battered face of his LAP contact, David Gonick. His features were bloodied, his mouth slightly agape, teeth missing. His eyes had rolled up into their sockets before he died. “He was caught on tape dropping the data off on your level,” Paled added. “And you were caught on tape picking it up.”

Yosef’s eyes traveled back to the photos.

“If I don’t get what I want, Yosef, then I’ll be adding three more Polaroids to this set.”

Yosef broke down. Some spy, he thought, crying like a ten-year-old child. But he held true, revealing nothing, even until the moment Paled took Yosef’s pictures to add to his collection.

Spurred on by a single hand gesture from Paled, the two toadies grabbed Yosef and forcefully ushered him out of his apartment.

“If you play, Yosef, then you have to pay.” It was Paled’s final statement to a man who held no hope of seeing dawn’s early light as he had anticipated.

With a gloved hand Paled shut off the security monitors and wondered who Yosef’s liaisons were. To find out, he would take the PC, examine it at Mossad Headquarters, and get the answer that way.

Once he did find out, he’d instruct Mossad’s department heads to deny everything on the document to all United States constituencies, especially the FBI and CIA.

Removing the data stick from the PC, Paled examined it, turning it over between his fingers as adeptly as a magician passes a coin from one digit to the next. It was incredible how something so small could hold enough information to start a war, he considered. Then, with little effort, he snapped the data stick between his fingers and placed the broken pieces in his pocket.

One of Shari’s team members heard the annoying ping indicating that an email had been received. Taking immediate notice that it had been sent to the FBI and the CIA, she burned the document onto two CDs. Per protocol, she then deleted the email to minimize the risk of misappropriation by hackers, despite the FBI’s state-of-the-art firewalls and anti-theft software. She marked one CD to be placed into the vault as a backup file.

The other CD was placed into a jewel case marked VITAL and hand delivered to Shari’s team leader, who, after signing the chain of custody log, hand delivered it to Shari per departmental procedure.

Within moments, Shari was in possession of the disc that initiated from Tel Aviv.