Intercept (32 page)

Nonetheless, he strode fast down Wooster, heading south, seeking the address Ben Shalit had given him. When he found it, he was surprised. The sign above the door and steel-meshed picture window read BANDA FINE ARTS. For a moment Mack thought he was in the wrong place, but he re-checked the number and this was it.

As far as he could tell, the art gallery was not even open. There was a single light somewhere in a back recess, but no one could call it inviting. Mack turned the handle and pushed open the door. He stepped into a gloomy, half-lit showroom, where, at the far end, behind a low desk lamp, he could see someone sitting.

The lamp lit up the man’s chest and jacket, but his face was invisible. One hand was gently holding a drawing of some kind, the other was gripping a Browning automatic pistol, which was aimed straight at Mack’s head.

Mack glanced left and right, and debated the best way to kill this faceless gunmen. But then a soft, refined voice said, “Are you Mack Bedford?”

“Yup. You planning to shoot me or something?”

The gunman laughed and put the offending weapon into his desk drawer. “I’m afraid you can’t be too careful these days,” he said.

“You’re telling me, pal,” said Mack.

From behind the desk, the man turned on another light and then walked out to shake Mack’s hand.

“Good evening,” he said, “I’m John Strauss.”

His grip was hard, and so were his brown eyes. Strauss was tall and athletic-looking, with well-cut, curly black hair. There was something about his bearing that Mack instinctively sensed was military. He also had a slight accent, and Mack guessed Israeli. Ben Shalit had the same intonations.

Strauss walked over to the door and locked it, pulling down an inside blind. He led the way into a big room behind the art gallery, which was probably the finest room Mack had ever seen.

There was something classic about it, although it had no windows. It had a wideboard polished oak floor with teak paneling on the walls. The beautiful Persian rug was patterned in deep red and blue. Mack was no expert on carpets, but he knew “sure as hell” that it had cost more than his car.

A small log fire crackled in the wide brick fireplace, and a fine French sideboard, which Mack was sure cost more than his house, rested against the wall. He was not absolutely clear what this Strauss character really did for a living, but he sure got well paid for it.

On the wall above the sideboard there hung three exquisitely framed sketches, and Mack had no doubt they were valuable. He stared at them for a few moments while Strauss walked to a decanter on the sideboard and poured two glasses of chilled white wine. Mack hesitated but accepted. “Come on, Mack,” said the art dealer. “Even a Navy SEAL can have a glass of Israeli dessert wine with a new friend.”

Mack chuckled. “Those are really great drawings, John. I was just admiring them.”

“Preliminary sketches for Titian’s
Bacchus and Ariadne,”
he said. Mack didn’t have any background in art, but he’d heard of Titian, although he would not have recognized his work. All he knew of the artist was that all the girls he painted had dark red hair.

“He’s one of the easiest artists to recognize,” said Strauss, “because of the amount of bucolic landscapes he almost always used, no matter what his subject. Do you know why that is?”

“I’m sorry, John. It’s not really a subject I know anything about.”

“Well, I know you did not come here to buy a print or a drawing, but I’ll tell you anyway. Titian was born in the Dolomite Mountains—that’s
the last jagged peaks of the Alps, where they sweep down to the plains north of Venice. They influenced his work till the day he died.”

“Funny, isn’t it,” said Mack, “the way we never forget where we come from.”

Strauss nodded and sipped his wine. “And now, Mr. Bedford,” he said, suddenly slipping into a wryly formal mode, “you better tell me what you want.”

“First thing I want is to know who
you
are. I’m guessing Benjamin told you all about me.”

“He told me what you are working on. And I have to say you are right to be concerned about the four hoodlums who got out of Guantanamo Bay. You think they are in New York?”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Can I know why?”

“Well, who the hell else would be in Penn Station with a hand grenade? And where else would you be if you were planning a major hit on the USA? Also, one of my most reliable men thinks he saw one of them, that Ben al-Turabi, coming out of a bookstore on Fifth Avenue, midtown. That’s the sonofabitch who bombed the Park Hotel in Netanya. We had him once, and then you guys found a way to release him.”

“Did your man get a chance to follow him? Were there any clues?”

“No. He was across the street on the east side of Fifth Avenue. And al-Turabi came out and jumped into a black limo, which headed west at the next light. But our man was quite certain it was him.”

Mack sipped his wine. “You keep speaking as if we are somehow separate. Come on, John, who are you?”

“Because I have been told I can trust you with my life, I will tell you. I’m the head of the Sayanim in New York.”

“Ex-Mossad?”

“Affirmative.”

“Some art dealer.”

“It’s my hobby. And a useful front for my real activities.”

“Can I know what they are?”

“I’m involved with the relentless pursuit of those criminals who have committed crimes against my country. Killers who have blown up supermarkets, buses, synagogues, and hotels. Many of them end up here in New York, either temporarily or permanently. My task is to hunt them down.”

“And then?”

“To ensure they do not repeat their crimes.
EVER!”
John Strauss uttered that last word with such venom Mack was actually startled.

“You mean, you do the deed?”

“When I find them? No. I have a man to carry that out. A trained killer whom I trust more than I ever trusted any man.”

“Benny?”

“Affirmative.”

“Christ, John, I’m talking to the new Simon Wiesenthal.”

“Well, there are similarities, I admit that. But Simon was a pure Nazi hunter, a scholar, who scoured the old records, and tried to bring them to justice, publicly to expose and humiliate the Germans.”

“You mean your basic objectives are different?”

“Most certainly. You see, terrorists do not represent a State. They represent a loose operation delighted to be publicized as killers and murderers. So there’s nothing in it for us, trying to humiliate them. They cannot be humiliated. Our objectives are simply to eliminate those who have killed and murdered on Israeli soil. And there’s a lot of them.”

“So the only similarity between you and Wiesenthal is you are both hunters—but he basically displayed his prey, you kill it.”

“Nicely stated. But remember, the Vienna bookseller was not averse to an execution, if the wheels of justice moved too slowly.”

“I guess not. Did you ever meet him, John?”

“No, to my great regret. I spoke to him a few times on the phone. But never in person. If I had met him, that would have been the greatest honor of my life.”

“He is not such a major figure in the United States,” said Mack. “But I know he’s a real big deal in Israel.”

“I think about him every day,” said Strauss. “Just imagine. He’s the man who captured Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo brute who arrested Anne Frank. He also captured Franz Stangl, Commandant of the Treblinka death camp. He tracked and located Adolf Eichmann, head of Hitler’s extermination camps.”

“Simon was old when he died?” asked Mack.

“He was ninety-six, and he said his work was done.”

“Except that you’re carrying it on.”

“We think those who maim and murder Israeli citizens are the same as the Nazis. Stangl, Eichmann, al-Taburi, Abu Hassan—what’s the difference? They all deserve to die. And they all will.”

“Are we going to catch these four in New York?”

“I think so. And it will be my pleasure to guide you wherever I can.”

“Where do I start?”

“With the money. I have my ear to the ground on that. Soon as something suspicious happens, I’ll call. Meantime, we need to make sense of that Jewish target they allude to in that conversation.”

John stood up and informed his visitor that he had an appointment in the next fifteen minutes, and would have to terminate their discussion. “But I’ve enjoyed it,” he said. “And I think we’ll have a break in this case soon. If those characters are in the city, they can’t stay hidden for much longer. One of my people will spot them. I’ve circulated all their photographs. We’ll find ’em.”

Mack stood up and shook his hand.

“By the way, Commander Bedford,” said Strauss, “my friends call me Johnny. Try to remember that.”

Mack laughed. “G’night, Johnny,” he said, and he headed back into the dark canyons of New York.

 

IT WAS 2 A.M.
in the Cotswolds when the cryptologists made their first break in the phone conversation between Islamabad and New York. Deep inside the Doughnut, they decided the word “Nalseb” did not exist. There was no place in the world with that name, no trace of anything like it in the dictionary, and the two words before it, “back to,” suggested an anagram.

It took someone about forty-five seconds to come up with Beslan, and they all turned their attention to that town in Russia’s North Caucasus region, where, on September 1, 2004, there was an incident that still ranks as one of al-Qaeda’s most brutal achievements. The attack on School Number One ended in violent explosions, fire, destruction, and the deaths of perhaps 385 people, many of them students, with a further 780 people wounded when the roof caved in.

The jihadist leader Shamil Basayev had stormed and then dominated the school and the town, and then held the Russian army at bay for three days. The night-shift operators at Cheltenham, not necessarily military historians, read with disquiet that the operation had been financed and the leaders trained by al-Qaeda, and that, in their opinion, “No military operation since 2001 ever brought such endless glory upon the jihadist revolution. Or such world attention.”

They also read the unnerving rider, placed at the conclusion of the report, that three senior U.S. Navy SEAL commanders considered Beslan
only a dress rehearsal. They placed their own conclusions about the wording on the link to the CIA and the NSA, knowing the hour was much earlier in the United States. And they added that the words “top class” and “Abe’s Place” may indicate some kind of an educational establishment with Jewish connotations.

They had run a search for a school or college in America with the word Abraham in the title, but they’d drawn a blank, even though there were more than eight hundred Jewish schools, colleges, and universities in the States.

The emergence of the word Beslan was unnerving, and Britain’s Joint Services Signals Unit had gone on high alert for any new telephone contact of a military nature between Islamabad and New York. But no one was holding their breath. Breaks of that quality were rare and valuable.

And the al-Qaeda command was getting shrewder every year, rarely repeating a mistake. Captain Simon, for a start, would have been amazed if they did not by now understand they had been intercepted—
the buggers had moles everywhere.

 

FAISAL AL-ASSAD
did not have a high profile in New York, but neither was it low. He occasionally attended diplomatic and charity events, and socialized with oil industry heavies. What Faisal al-Assad did not need were the four most wanted terrorists on earth hiding out in his luxurious East Side quarters. And that night, in the small hours of the morning, he received new and welcome orders, delivered via a landline phone call from Boston, Massachusetts: “Move your guests to temporary HQ somewhere close to Norfolk, Northwest Connecticut. Buy or rent small house ASAP. Also open two bank accounts town of Torrington, also NW Connecticut.”

“Roger that, caller,” replied Faisal, as instructed. And with that, he awakened all four of his guests to inform them that they would be pulling out at 7 a.m. sharp, and it was essential they be ready for the long journey ahead.

Meanwhile they were each to leave a passport with him, because it was essential they all be legally stamped into the country with the small, blue, oval crest of U.S. immigration, which showed red stamps for date of entry, and another for compulsory departure after six months. Faisal needed to get this properly forged if they were ever to get out of the United States without a million questions.

MACK BEDFORD
, also working in the dead of night, called back Captain Ramshawe at home in response to a message on his hotel phone—that Cheltenham had made a firm connection with the message from Islamabad and the massacre at Beslan Number One School in 2004.

A SEAL team leader, who had personally captured two al-Qaeda hardmen, had once told him the next major assault on America would be a college or university—the soft, unguarded heart of the United States. And the team leader had been definite. The Russian Op, he insisted, was just a rehearsal.

And now, Captain Ramshawe was telling him this recent intercept confirmed those words. Mack was silent for a few moments and then said, “Jimmy, our guys have suspected this for a few years. And the trouble is, these fanatics are never joking. We better get on the case.”

“We’re on it,” said Jimmy. “Checking out Jewish colleges because there’s a definite Jewish intonation in that phone call. You know, Abraham and King Saul. But it’s tough. There is no Abraham College except for some agricultural place in Georgia, and it was only the first name of the founder. But we’re searching, and everyone’s waiting for a new intercept.”

“Jimmy, I made a few inquiries myself last night. And I may have tapped into a decent lead. I’ll keep you posted. But I guess this Beslan bullshit has turned up the pressure a bit.”