The Puppetmasters (14 page)

“Israel? What the hell?”

There was stunned silence in the room. No one could even imagine where Israel fit into the unraveling mystery.

Zanders mulled the revelation. “So, the payment originated in Israel, then went to Switzerland, London, Paris, and New York, where it was finally deposited into Kendall’s bank account.” He looked at Mickey. “Is Kendall Jewish? Does she have family there?”

“No. I don’t believe so.”

“Well, then, we need to get Israeli intelligence in the loop. I need to be in DC … now!”

He instructed one of his DC junior agents to stay behind in Seattle and basically shadow Mickey. That agent was to learn all he could and pass anything new back to DC at once.

The media had finally picked up the news of the disappearance of Fields and Carson. Nothing was said about Kendall Radcliffe’s involvement. Because no one knew anything, there wasn’t much to report. It was a simple article about the men having disappeared from DC on their way back to Seattle. It wasn’t clear
how they disappeared or their manner of travel. Since the Orion people did not know the actual details, and there were no pilots around to verify the facts, there was only speculation. It was front page news, particularly since trading on the Orion stock had been halted.

The market did not seem to be reacting in a dramatic way, so the board—having been somewhat apprised of the details—decided to resume trading of the stock the next day.

Mrs. Radcliffe lay in the hospital bed and appeared quite frail and weak. The IV pole stood solidly next to her bed as if on sentry duty. A nurse came in and checked her vitals and adjusted the dials on the IV unit. She smoothed the older woman’s hair, sighed, and walked out to the nurses’ station. The night nurse, Katie, was about to go on duty and patiently awaited any updates.

“So what’s the status of Mrs. Radcliffe? Has anyone been able to get a hold of the daughter?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

“Aren’t there any other relatives that can be notified?”

“Not that we know of.”

“I feel awful. That poor woman … in here all by herself. I can’t believe the daughter isn’t answering her phone.”

“I hear ya, Katie. The daughter’s cell message says the phone is not in service … whatever the hell that means! I’m just glad Mrs. Radcliffe’s neighbor saw her lying there and called for an ambulance.”

“What’s her status now?”

“Her vitals are stable … no change … but she’s still comatose. She’s lucky to have survived the heart attack. I just hope we can locate her daughter in the next day.”

The two women continued to discuss Kathleen Radcliffe’s medical condition. The requisite thrombolytics had been prescribed as soon as she reached the hospital, but it was clear she had lain on the floor awhile before she was discovered. Heparin would be continued for at least another twenty-four hours.

Katie shook her head in puzzlement. “I don’t understand what happened to her. She shouldn’t be comatose. It’s almost as if she received a shock. She should be awake by now.”

The other nurse nodded. “I agree. Just keep a close eye on her, and notify the doctor immediately when she wakes up. You might sit with her awhile or have one of the volunteers sit with her. I sat with her for thirty minutes this afternoon, and just held her hand. She seemed to calm down a little.”

A few hours later, Kathleen Radcliffe opened her eyes. As her eyes adjusted to the surroundings, she realized that it was night and she was in the hospital. She had a slight headache from the bump on the head when she fell. But the stabbing pain in her heart and soul eclipsed any medical issues. “Oh, Kendall,” she whispered. “What have you done?” The violent turn of events had been too much for the elder Radcliffe.

She knew she should call the nurse, but she didn’t want to bother the staff. She had heard them quietly moving around her during their gentle ministrations. She couldn’t bear the idea of talking to strangers about her daughter. She just wanted to block it out and make it go away.
My lovely Kendall,
she thought.
What could have happened to her? There must be a logical explanation.
Even if Kendall had not done anything wrong, the fact that she was missing was too frightening for Mrs. Radcliffe to comprehend. She closed her eyes and retreated back into that deep, wonderful, soft place between worlds where she didn’t have to deal with any harsh realities or perplexities. There was a light at the back of that dark, comfortable world. She thought about heading in that direction. Her body relaxed as she took a step forward on the secure and untroubled pathway that suddenly opened before her.

K
ENDALL AND
R
ASHID HAD SETTLED
into a routine of spending most of the day together. After her meager breakfast, he picked her up, and they went to a rundown, abandoned military warehouse about five miles away. Two years earlier, it had been overrun with flood waters during a flash flood. The military decided it was too close to the nearby river and abandoned it. Rashid decided that retrofitting the warehouse would be the perfect solution.

He brought in a handful of local day laborers and had the warehouse floor cleaned out in a couple of days. He had them build a crude workout facility using extra lumber from the military stock that he provided in small increments. No one at the base seemed to miss the few pieces of wood that disappeared every day. The day laborers never asked questions. It just looked to them like the military was trying to save money. Either way, they were being paid and weren’t about to ask questions.

Rashid devised a series of daily workout routines for Kendall. He constructed homemade weights by filling plastic jugs with sand. Wood planks and plastic piping were used to construct an abs bench.

His favorite creation was a soundproof indoor shooting range. He had the men wall-off one section of the warehouse. The two lanes that were constructed ran the width of the warehouse in the back. Rashid again “borrowed” bags of cement from the military stash, and had his workers pour concrete blocks. He managed to secure some defective sheet rock that had been discarded and was awaiting pickup and delivery to the local refuse area.

He researched the construction of a gun range and dutifully used a double thickness of sheet rock, being careful to have the first layer nailed vertically and the second horizontally. He did the best he could to plug any seams where excessive noise might escape. He fervently wished he had sound-deadening paint, but that was not possible in this part of the world. A crude ventilation system was jerry-rigged to provide the required negative air flow to trap any airborne contaminants.
Finally, bags of combined sand and semi-soft cement were laid against the back wall of the firing lanes, from floor to ceiling, to deflect spent bullets.

Rashid stood back and marveled at his resourcefulness. The workout facility was quite functional. He was anxious to have Kendall begin her training in earnest. Up to now, she had done a lot of walking and running, and improved her swimming skills in the nearby river. A few times she had used the president’s pool, but she was uncomfortable wearing the required full-length gauzy swim costume worn by Afghan women. He had her run up and down the nearby hills to strengthen her legs and increase her endurance. But it was time to step up the training.

He had learned some unsettling things involving Kendall and the Orion executives, and he felt like a traitor not being honest with her. But he knew that if he told her, he would unquestionably face her wrath and lose all hope of a combined effort at ousting President Shazeb and his sons and securing the freedom of the Orion executives. Rashid was torn, but had a job to do. He had no choice but to keep these damning things secret from Kendall … for now.

Through the technical genius of the Orion datacenter guy, Daniel Blumfeld, the Mossad was able to track the investigation by Orion and the U.S. agencies. The new technical “eyes and ears”
Prophecy
was sending a constant stream of information to the Mossad. That agency was kept scrambling to change course and head off any untoward action by the U.S. that might get in the way of the Mossad’s intention … the downfall of President Shazeb. The destruction of the poppy fields and downstream manufacture and distribution of the heroin—from the manufacturing facilities to the trucks and tankers—was the highest priority for them. Intercepting a few hundred million dollars along the way, just to teach Shazeb a further lesson, would simply be an added bonus.

It was a blessing and a curse that the Orion people had been taken. This threw a wrench in the Mossad’s carefully planned operation. But the proud and tenacious agency was a master at flexibility and adaptability and had regrouped to incorporate the extra dynamics.

The most worrisome details haunting Rashid’s dreams were the medical situations of both Glenn Carson and Kathleen Radcliffe … Kendall’s mother. Carson’s situation was deteriorating. He had now contracted malaria. Even though Kabul was considered a low-risk province for malaria as compared with the rest of Afghanistan, Carson had managed to contract it. The medical facility that housed Carson did not have the proper medicine and sterile environment to combat the disease. The on-site limited laboratory was able to isolate the malaria strain to
P. vivax,
but it didn’t have the requisite antimalarial medicine
Primaquine.
The disease was slowly ravaging Carson’s body. If nothing more was done, he would be dead in a week. President Shazeb had shown no concern, and it appeared the despot would let Carson die.

On his own, Rashid had his sources check on Mrs. Radcliffe. They discovered she had suffered a heart attack and was in the hospital. For some reason, she wasn’t improving, and her situation appeared dire. He couldn’t possibly reveal this to Kendall; she would lose all objectivity and might even reveal his plans during an emotional outburst. No, there was nothing he could do with the information. But it was clear the mission needed to be stepped up.

The one bright spot in all this was that Rashid’s conversation with Paul Fields had gone very well … almost too well. He was choosing to view his unexpected departure from society as an escape from reality in the form of a vacation to an exotic locale. The only thing that bothered Fields at the moment was that he didn’t have his passport.

When Rashid went looking for Fields, he found him alone in the president’s datacenter, from which all Afghan business was conducted. Rashid was surprised that Fields had been left alone in the facility. He soon learned that Saaqib often left him alone under some guise of national security business. Rashid suspected he was going to meet one of his mistresses. Fields said that Saaqib was usually gone about ninety minutes at a stretch. In fact, he had just left when Rashid arrived. Fields and Rashid were able to have a long talk.

Rashid quickly explained who he was, his background, and the planned mission. He needed Fields to become intimately knowledgeable with the country’s technical infrastructure, and when the time was right, to render it inoperable … preferably permanently. This included the movement of funds out of Afghanistan and the shutdown of the oil refineries. This would create a diversion and wreak enough havoc to set Rashid and the Mossad’s plan into effect. Fields was more than willing to do this. He was tiring of the amusing diversion of tinkering with the Afghanistan technical superstructure and thought it was timely to discuss their exit strategy. Rashid had the distinct impression that Fields didn’t exactly live in the real world. He was concerned that Fields viewed this whole thing as a virtual game, and that he was just a player.

For the moment, President Shazeb believed that Fields was helping isolate their technical issues, e.g. prying eyes and ears, because no other shipments had gone missing nor funds disappeared. In actuality, since Rashid knew the source of Afghanistan’s spies and double-crosses by virtue of Blumfeld and his technical weapon of at-will, real-time streaming data via the Orion datacenter, the Mossad had simply gone quiet for the past week as it restructured its mission and refocused its short-term goals.

Rashid couldn’t believe he was dealing with these unknown quantities. He knew that in the end they would either engineer a grand escape, plus take down a major drug supplier and dictator, or get themselves killed in the most gruesome of ways and possibly start World War III. Rashid was not one for drinking a lot of alcohol, but he had taken to throwing back one or two stiff belts at the end of
the day—anything to help him relax. The bottom line was that once the warning bell was sounded and the first domino fell, there was no turning back. It all had to be executed flawlessly in order for the Orion people and himself to survive … and the Afghan leadership to fall.