Pinnacle Event (23 page)

After brunch, he dropped her off next door at the Cineplex, where she would meet her friends for an afternoon movie. Then, he would drive through the double gates into the compound. It was a nice neighborhood, he thought, country club, cineplex, intelligence headquarters.

He dreaded this Saturday. While his wife was watching some comedy about young Americans in love, he would be interrogating the prisoner. He hated interrogations. In fact, he actually didn't really do them, never had. His approach was straightforward, reasoning. If that failed, what happened after that was the prisoner's fault, not his. He didn't do what happened after that. Someone else did. Sometimes it worked and he got what he wanted. If he didn't, what followed was never very productive, or useful.

“Leonid Klishas, you are an Israeli citizen, emigrated from Leningrad, excuse me, Petersburg, when you were fifteen,” Danny Avidar began the questioning. “Klishas, is that a Jewish name?”

“No, my mother was Jewish,” the handcuffed man at the table said, looking at his wrists. “Why am I here? What is this place?”

“You know the answer to both those questions, Lenny, don't you?”

“Is this Mossad?” Klishas asked. “Why am I talking to you? You are not the police, or even Shin Beth.”

“No, but we can introduce you to them. Shin Beth's facilities are not so nice. Nor is their technique, not so nice.”

“What do you want with me?”

“Actually, it's more like what do you want with me, Lenny. Why did you try to kill me and my luncheon companions in Jaffa? What did I ever do to you? Nothing yet,” Danny said, walking behind the prisoner. “He was no fool, the boy. He followed you, after you gave him the down payment. Got the number off your car, maybe just in case you didn't pay the rest. Nice picture on his mobile. The mobile survived the bombing. He, of course, did not.”

“I don't even know who you are or what you are talking about.”

“Of course you do, Lenny. You hired that poor Palestinian boy to drive the car bomb. You told him it would go off after he cleared the area. You lied, Lenny. You lied to him, just like you are lying to me now.” Avidar came around and sat opposite the prisoner at the small wooden table. “I have no time for liars. When you decide to tell me the truth, why you hired him, why the car bomb, why you tried to kill me and my friends, you can just say my name and they will hear you. My name, by the way, is Daniel.”

Avidar's tone was matter of fact, unemotional. He could have been a doctor talking to a patient, flat, to the point. “You have thirty minutes to do that. Then they will come for you. The Shin Beth, not the police. See, if the police had taken you, there would be an arrest record. There is no record at all that you have been taken. And when your dead body is found, in poor condition, maybe, then the police will be called. They will conclude that you were the victim of a brutal killing by other Russian mobsters like yourself and dumped in the sand dunes where the whores ply their trade. Thirty minutes from when I walk out the door. You can see the clock?”

Klishas stared at him. Avidar moved to the door. “That's it? That's all you are going to say?” Leonid asked as Danny opened the door.

“You won't have to raise your voice to yell for them to get me,” Avidar said softly. “They will hear you. If you call out. Not, if you don't.” Avidar walked out and shut the door quietly behind him.

OUTSIDE WHISTLER, BRITISH COLUMBIA

“They've got two guys out front in a van and two who walk around the sides and the back of the lodge. The guys out back are carrying long arms. They also have several cameras on the building, maybe some in the woods. Four cars and two vans in the parking lot. There are eight bedrooms, it was built for the Olympics. A TV network rented it out. So there could be a dozen or more guys inside,” the ERT commander explained to Lyle Deveaux. Ray Bowman and Mbali Hlanganani stood next to the Deputy Commissioner on the road half a mile from the lodge. It was 0315 in the morning.

“How will you achieve surprise?” Deveaux asked.

“We have been authorized to designate the target hostile, so we will sneak up as close as we can and then launch stun and smoke grenades. At the same time, we will cut the electricity. While we are charging in from the woods, the helos will come over the hill. One will drop a team by rope onto the parking lot. Number two will hover over the roof while four men rope down and enter through the balcony on the third floor. That will give us two dozen men on site in the first minute.”

“Everyone in full body armor?” Deveaux checked.

“Yes, Commissioner, and then the three Tactical Armored Vehicles will race up from the road below and unload another dozen men.”

The ERT commander was making a point of ignoring the American and South African standing next to the Deputy Commissioner. Bowman interrupted. “If there is anything that looks like a bomb or an electronic device, do not touch it. And we will need to interrogate the guests at the lodge as soon as possible after the raid.”

The commander kept looking at his boss. “Is there anything else, Commissioner?”

“No. Very good. Whenever you are ready,” Deveaux replied. He turned to Ray and Mbali. “Let's go inside the truck so we can watch it on the video link.”

“All units, status check, prepare to move, sound off in order,” the ERT commander said into his radio. As the Deputy Commissioner and his two foreign guests climbed up into the mobile command post, the commander hit the
PUSH TO TALK
button again and said, softly, “On my order now: Go, go, go.”

The Mounties in black tactical gear, who had crawled on their stomachs the last hundred yards through the woods toward the lodge, leaped up, some ran straight for the building, while others provided covering fire from the tree line. Smoke canisters fell on the meadow on all sides of the lodge, sending up walls of colored clouds: green, yellow, black. Two small helicopters, with their lights out, were suddenly hovering over the lodge, with men rappelling down ropes, and crashing through windows. Simultaneously, the lodge's guards down the road were jumped. Then three black, tanklike trucks roared past the guard post and up to the lodge, with blue lights strobing. More men in black tactical gear jumped from the trucks.

In seconds, half a mile away, Ray, Mbali, and Commissioner Deveaux could hear muffled explosions and a whirring from the helicopters. On a video monitor they could see flashes and smoke around the ski lodge. The radio loosed a torrent of crisp, coded chatter, as ERT men described what they were doing.

At the lodge, the guards outside had raised weapons toward the rushing commandos and been dropped by the shooters from the tree line. The first wave of ERT Mounties burst into the building, through the front and back doors, through ground floor windows. Nine of the assault team charged up the grand staircase, exchanging places with each other as they moved forward, hit the landing, and moved up, providing protective cover as the point team dashed forward.

In the darkened Great Room, only the fireplace provided light. There were brief flashes as the first of the assault team threw four stun grenades about the room. Then the first four ERTs into the room saw the shooters, two men who rose from behind furniture with long guns. Both were taken out before they could fire. As other ERT commandos entered the darkened room, one of them yelled, “Gun, three o'clock.” They all looked right and saw two more men with handguns near a large desk. Five of the ERT fired at them, riddling the bodies and the desk.

At the command post down the road, the chatter on the radio and the noise of the assault seemed to let up and then, they could hear the burst of gunfire again and the chatter resumed on the tactical radios. The ERT commander came back into the mobile command post to report to Deveaux. “The building is secure. There are casualties, but none of our boys. We've told the ambulances to drive up now, although I doubt they will do much good. I'm going up there now, Commissioner. I'll radio you after I get there, but you all should be able to come up in a few minutes.”

After the ERT commander left, Bowman sat down next to the Deputy Commissioner. “Sir, you have done everything we could have hoped for here,” he began, “but if there are nuclear weapons on site, there is a U.S. military unit from JSOC standing by just over the border in Washington State. They can be here within the hour on their Black Hawks. By agreement between your Prime Minister and our President last night, this will become a NATO military operation and the JSOC unit will take control of the area.”

Deveaux looked crestfallen. “I suppose your JSOC Black Hawks have already taken off?”

“Yes, sir, they are circling near the border now and will come in if I see nuclear weapons on site,” Bowman admitted.

Deveaux looked at Mbali. She shook her head, “Americans.”

“Let's go up to the lodge then,” Deveaux sighed. “We will have to do this carefully so that if your guys do come in they don't see my ERT and shoot them.”

*   *   *

The lodge was now lit up like it was part of a television show. Spotlights from the little tanks and police cars were augmented by mobile light stands that were being set up by the Mounties. The electricity had been restored and every light in the building was on. Ninjas in tactical gear, uniformed police officers, and men and women in civilian clothes moved around purposefully, like a swarm of ants going in all directions.

There were two bodies on the lawn, the men who had been in the truck in front of the building. The air still stank of cordite from the gunfire and sulphur smoke. Flashes went off as police photographers started to document the raid. A choir of radios at full volume blurted out in uncoordinated dysphonia.

The ERT commander escorted Deputy Commissioner Deveaux, Mbali, and Ray up the grand stair to the Great Room on the second floor. There were four bodies on the floor. Each had a rifle or a gun nearby.

“They were about to shoot at my men,” the ERT commander explained. “We had no choice.”

“Goddamn it,” Ray spit out, looking at the ERT commander.

Ray moved closer to the bodies and recognized one of the dead men as the man he had met in Vienna, Johann Potgeiter, who had briefly become Wolfe Baidermann. Next to him was the body of an older man who bore a striking resemblance to Johann.

Bowman turned to Mbali. “Remember the man who died in the car crash with the tram in Vienna, who was identified by dental records because the body was too charred by the fire?”

“Karl Potgeiter, why?” she asked.

Ray pointed at the corpse in front of him. “The dead man in Vienna was not who we thought. This dead man is the real Karl Potgeiter, South African nuclear weapons expert.”

She knelt down to examine the dead bodies more closely.

“Ah, so it's father and son,” she replied. “Well, now at least we are getting somewhere.” Ray frowned at her. “Think about it,”she said. “We now know one of the buyers, one of the group who wanted the bombs for … something.”

Two men approached the ERT commander, one in tactical gear and one in civilian clothes. “Tell them,” the commander said, to the civilian.

“There are no signs of anything resembling a bomb or a warhead and there are no unusual readings from the radioactivity sensors,” the civilian explained.

“Swell,” Ray replied.

“I think you have some Black Hawks to turn around, Mr. Bowman,” Deveaux said. “Now.”

Ray took his secure iPad out from its case. As he did, he noticed that on the large dining room table where the two Potgeiters had apparently been sitting when they were so rudely interrupted, there were two MacBook Airs. “Okay, no JSOC, but I am going to need those laptops and, since you don't want my Black Hawks to fly in here, could I ask you to loan us one of your helos to run us and the laptops over the border?”

“They're evidence,” Deveaux replied. “There are chain-of-custody concerns. They need to stay here for the trial or coroner's inquest.”

“Commissioner, there's not going to be a trial. Your highly capable team just killed the people I needed to interrogate. Now all I have left to interrogate are those laptops. And I am taking them with me. And since you are keeping my Black Hawks out, I will need one of your birds to take me to Washington State. You can send someone to accompany the computers if you like and you'll get them back when we have imaged them,” Ray said. “Promise.”

After the Deputy Commissioner relented, Ray called Dugout, who suggested they take over the largest parallel processing computer complex in the country to crack the encryption on the laptops and to give Minerva extra speed and power.

Dugout proposed they meet above San Francisco's East Bay at a national laboratory that, coincidentally, also knew a lot about nuclear weapons. Winston Burrell had, after all, promised him “Whatever you need.”

As they walked toward a pair of Canadian Air Force twin engine Hueys a half hour later, carrying two laptops, Mbali looked at Bowman. “You're always borrowing other people's aircraft. Some people would see that as presumptuous arrogance in a man.”

“In my case, it's just expediency. I'm operating without the usual American support structure,” Ray said to her. “As a result, there has been a fuckup. We let the Canadians do the raid and they killed the only lead we had. Those two knew where the bombs are.”

“Maybe. But sometimes even laptops can tell a story,” she said, looking back at the house. “It's just harder to ask them questions, but the guy you keep calling, the one I met on the video, what's his name, Sand Trap, he is some sort of computer whiz, isn't he?”

“Dugout. His name is Dugout. He devised this great predictive algorithm for the Red Sox. They're a baseball team. All he wanted in return was to sit in the dugout, where the players sit when it's not their turn to be on the field. So we call him Dugout. Yeah, if anyone can make those Macs talk, Dugout can. But it may not be fast. And right now we need fast.”