surveillance photos in Mexico City. He was in the company of members of a drug-trafficking cartel that had established Middle Eastern connections.
“Berkat had been a GIA terrorist in Algiers during the eighties and early nineties, but he had ambitions and had become a freelance assassin working mostly for the capos in the drug underworld in Spain, Sicily, and France. He liked poisons and chemicals, unusual for a hit man. His appearance in Mexico set off alarms.
“Garcia was called in… for various special reasons. Turned out that Berkat was trying to obtain the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. Uh, it's an organism that produces an exotoxin, a damned lethal exotoxin, one hundred thousand times more powerful than the sarin nerve agent. But this stuff also has medical uses, as a therapeutic agent in the treatment of certain neurological disorders, for example. So it was a dual-use substance that could legitimately be found in some pharmaceutical and medical environments.
“Garcia sent out a string of alerts to his foreign assets, but a month went by before one of them called him about a woman doctor in Paris who turned up dead in her apartment. She worked for a research clinic that specialized in neurological diseases. Berkat's photo was found in her possessions. A torn-up metro ticket led them to an apartment near Charles de Gaulle Airport, where surveillance photographs picked up a Hamas agent leaving the apartment.
“Berkat wasn't really on the Mossad's radar screen, but they sure as hell knew the Hamas guy. They quickly located Berkat in Gaza City, and then grabbed photographs of him at a cafe talking to Hassan al-Abed. Al-Abed had a doctorate in biological sciences from Cairo University. Back in Paris, the French DST confirmed the missing Clostridium botulinum from the research clinic. Now Garcia was sure that Hamas/Berkat were working on a dispersal method for the exotoxin.”
Norlin shifted on his feet. Gave it some more thought before he went on.
“Berkat disappeared from Gaza, and his trail went cold. Then three months later one of Garcia's agents picked it up again in Strasbourg. Berkat had spent the night with a woman there who said that he'd used her computer nonstop for a whole day before moving on. Garcia's people sucked the marrow out of the hard drive and found that he'd booked a twoweek vacation cruise from Brest to St. Kitts under a French name, traveling with his wife and two kids. That was Berkat's shtick, using the family man thing as a cover. He seemed to find no end of gullible women to help him without realizing what they were doing.
“They tracked him to Belize, where he abandoned his ‘family.’Now, under a different French name, he caught a flight to Tampico, where he rented an SUV under the name of a Mexican national and headed north.
“By now everyone had to assume that his target was somewhere in the States. Even beyond the issue of national security, the people who hired Garcia didn't want it known that a terrorist with a biological weapon had made it within even a hundred miles of our borders. At that time, we were still whistling through the graveyard and hoping the public didn't notice just how damned vulnerable we really were.
“God knows what kind of political repercussions there might be if people ever rolled their asses off their sofas and woke up to what was really going on. And the politicians didn't want the public to get the idea that Mexico was swarming with terrorists-bad for NAFTA-even though it was, and still is, a very real issue of concern. Another one of those things they hope the public doesn't wake up to.
“Anyway, Berkat just needed to disappear, and it was best if that happened in Mexico. Without the Mexican government's knowledge, of course.
“There would be no loss of intelligence if Berkat just evaporated without anyone even talking to him. We already knew Hamas was financing his run. The delivery system that he was carrying was known by its designer/creator, the good Dr. alAbed back in Gaza. The Mossad would deal with debriefing him. Berkat was just a snake that had to be killed. His poison would die with him.
“Garcia's choice of weapon was a particularly incendiary bomb design, just to make sure the exotoxin didn't survive or was somehow inadvertently distributed by the explosion. The bomb was loaded on a helicopter and flown ahead in the general direction of Berkat's anticipated route, the choices being narrowed down as he advanced north. Finally it was clear that he was headed for one of the border's smallest crossings, the toll bridge at Los Ebanos, Texas.”
Norlin paused again. He glanced out the kitchen window and cast his thoughts to far-off places. He slowly shook his head and brought his eyes back to Rita.
“You've got to understand, ”he said, “that every operation is a moving target. You start out with an objective and a plan, but you know damn well that most of the plan is bound to change because you'll inevitably be blindsided by some damned surprise. It's one of the hardest things about the job. And it's one of the things that Garcia excels at. He's cool with blindsides.
“Incidentally, his other most desirable talent is his ingenuity in making things happen without raising any eyebrows. He achieves his objective in silence. Or if that can't happen, the event is disguised to make it appear to be something other than what it actually is.
“Anyway, at a dusty village called Cerralvo, Berkat left the main highway and headed north through the backcountry desert. That was even better for Garcia's plans. The helicopter moved ahead, landed at an isolated spot of the highway, dealt with installing the explosives, and took off again. Five miles from the bomb, Berkat pulled off the side of the road at a little food stand. And, whoa, big surprise. The surveillance team was stunned to see a woman, two little boys, and a little girl bail out of the SUV with him to get snacks. Berkat had himself another family.
“Surveillance team frantically radioed Garcia. The helicopter had dropped him off on the other side of the bomb, and he was headed toward it from the opposite direction, watching Berkat's dot on his tracking monitor as they both converged on the site.”
Norlin looked out the window over the kitchen sink again. Titus followed his eyes and saw one of the bodyguards prowling around the poolhouse. Norlin, his forearm on the cabinet, rubbed his forehead with his other hand. He seemed reluctant to continue.
“One night a little more than a year after this happened, I sat with Garcia in his study in San Miguel. We'd been drinking. Too much. But I remember how the crickets were raising hell in the darkness outside the opened windows as he told me in a flat, dead voice what happened next.
“Garcia and his driver raced toward the bomb's location. About a quarter of a mile from the bomb they turned off on a dirt track and drove out into the brush and turned around to watch.
“Garcia got out of the car and vomited in the grease brush. And then, suddenly, he lost control of his bowels. After cleaning himself up, he scrambled onto the top of the car and watched the highway through his binoculars. He could see Berkat's SUV with the woman and children heading for the border and the bomb. There would be no mistake about the bomb, a computer would make sure the timing was accurate. Everybody involved in the operation who had a radio or phone or computer was using it to message Garcia about the woman and kids. His driver was inside the car, confirming, confirming, confirming.
“Garcia stood alone on top of the car in the grease brush and watched through binoculars as the SUV sped along the highway.
“Then, instantly, it went up in a geyserlike explosion. It threw up a mushroom plume high into the desert's purple evening sky. Garcia remembered the color of the sky and the color of the plume with its internal fireball. He saw it, then heard it, then felt it.
“The bomb had been designed to destroy as much evidence as possible, and the Mexican federal police couldn't even tell how many people had been in the vehicle. They and the newspapers assumed the blast had been the work of drug traffickers’assassins, and those who suspected otherwise kept their suspicions to themselves. Whatever it was, it had been a serious thing. Mexicans learned long ago to make peace with inexplicable events.”
Norlin shook his head and stared at nothing for a moment.
“Later, as Berkat's operation was dissected, and the leads gathered in those last frantic days were played out, it was learned that he had been headed for the Texas Medical Center in Houston. The effectiveness of the dispersal method designed by al-Abed for the exotoxin was a controversial question. It was an aerosol device intended for the air-conditioning system in one of the center's largest hospitals. Some argued that only twenty or thirty people would have died, but others strongly disagreed. They used words like ‘catastrophic’ and ‘unimaginable.’
“But the speculation about body count didn't have any effect on Garcia. There were always only four in his nightmares. He said it bothered him a lot that he never saw body parts in his dreams, only bits of charred clothing
