from the police had noticed the breach of their network and somehow traced the IP address.
She drove towards the water and found a restaurant she hadn’t been to in years. Looking at her watch, she saw that she had an hour and forty minutes to kill, so she ordered dinner and settled in, forcing herself to be patient.
The sun set, and the city’s lights twinkled off the sea as she digested the day’s events.
Whatever this was, she’d never heard of anything like it in her life.
Chapter 13
“I have good news and bad news, sir.”
Grigenko sighed. “Give me the bad news first.”
“The Mossad case officer got away. But he is wounded. It is just a matter of time until we find him. I’ve got all our contacts working on it, and you know we have pull in the Mossad,” Yuri said.
Grigenko considered that.
“You say that you wounded him?”
“Yes, sir. And we are monitoring the police communications, the military hospitals and the civilian hospitals. It shouldn’t be long until he turns up, then we’ll finish him.”
“Why is it that every time you go up against one of these operatives you have excuses instead of results?” Grigenko demanded.
Yuri said nothing for a few seconds. “I’ll call as soon as I have something to report.” Grigenko hung up. What was it about this group that they were having so much trouble killing them? He’d never had so much difficulty. Usually he told Yuri who to target, paid him whatever he asked, and the target disappeared. Simple. Effective. No surprises.
Then suddenly the woman destroys one of the most lethal wet teams on the planet, and now a desk jockey escapes a straightforward hit?
None of this was complicated.
Find them. Kill them.
Easy.
Only apparently not.
A part of him wanted to crush his enemies like bugs, but another part told him not to worry about the details. The plan was far bigger than these two minor nuisances. And Yuri was right. Nobody could hide forever. They would turn up, and when they did, they would be eliminated.
Grigenko rubbed his face, feeling the stubble on his chin, and realized he had been in his penthouse office for ten straight hours.
Enough. It was time to relax, unwind, get something to eat. He buzzed his assistant and told her to have the car ready.
Yuri could handle the loose ends. And if he didn’t, there were more Yuris out there.
~ ~ ~
Jet found another wireless hot spot after dinner and checked back in. Moriarty had delivered, but the result hadn’t helped. There had been no hospital admissions that matched David.
She was now fifteen thousand dollars poorer and dead in the water.
The hacker agreed to keep monitoring and alert her if anything surfaced, but her longshot had just gotten way longer, and she wasn’t hopeful.
Yawning, she realized that she needed to get a room somewhere. There wasn’t anything more she could think of doing that night, so all that remained was to wait and see what surfaced the following day.
One of the motels near the highway looked clean enough, and the manager didn’t seem to be interested in niggling details like identification — he was just happy to take her cash. She tromped up the stairs to her room overlooking the parking lot and quickly unpacked, then took a long shower and tried to decompress. There was no point staying up all night, worrying at the situation. After a decent night’s sleep, maybe something would occur to her.
It only took five hours.
She sat bolt upright in the bed and stared at the clock, heart trip-hammering as her mind raced, sure that she’d had a breakthrough. She reached across the end table and grabbed a bottle of water, mulling over the best way to proceed. Whether or not she was right, it was too late to do anything about it until daylight.
The rest of the night went by slowly, and she found herself tossing and turning, trying to get comfortable, frowning at her watch’s minute hand as it inched towards morning.
Rani Stein scratched his head as he exited his modest home in Haifa, moving like a man far older than his thirty-eight years. The son of an accountant and a seamstress, he had spent his life in sedentary pursuits, and the lack of exercise was evident in his weight as well as his energy level. Rani was over three hundred pounds, none of it muscle. His main problem was that he liked to eat. A lot. More than almost anything in the world. This had interfered with his social life, resulting in his remaining a bachelor long after most of his peers had tied the knot.
“Mrs. Veldt! Good morning!” he called agreeably to his neighbor, a feisty seventy-year-old, who was already out in her front garden trying to coax life into her sickly collection of plants.
“Good morning to you, too, Rani. And how are you this beautiful day?”
“Never better, Mrs. Veldt, never better.”
Rani trundled to his sensible sedan and opened the door, tossing his briefcase into the passenger seat before wedging himself behind the wheel.
“You go cure someone today, do you hear?” the old woman called to him.
“I will. You can count on that!” he replied with false cheer, then shut the door and started the car.
He backed out of his driveway with customary care, slowly, methodically, as he did everything in life.
Rani didn’t notice the car a hundred yards down the street as it joined him on his eight-minute journey to his office building. Even if someone had pointed it out to him, he wouldn’t have been concerned. Rani was a man who bore nobody a grudge, and who had gone through life without making any enemies. The last thing he would have believed possible was that he could be in any sort of danger.
He made it to his office parking lot in good time. As he closed his door, he sensed a presence immediately behind him, and turned as quickly as his girth would allow. Facing him was an extraordinarily beautiful woman with a neutral expression on her face.
“Rani?”
“Hmm. Yes? And who do I have the pleasure of speaking with?”
“Do you have a moment?” she asked, ignoring the question.
“Well, hmm, actually not. I have patients waiting…”
“Then I’ll be brief. I need to know when you last saw David, and where.” Jet spoke softly, eyes roving over the other vehicles in the lot to confirm they were alone.
Rani had a terrible poker face.
“David? I…I don’t understand. What are you talking about?” he stammered.
“Rani. I know David. We’re…close. I know he’s hurt, and I know you’re his friend,” she explained. “And I know you’re a doctor.”
He blanched. “There’s no law against being a doctor…”
“True. But David’s in trouble, and I need to find him.”
“I told you I have no ide-”
“Cut the shit, Rani. You went to university together, and he was your roommate. He told me about you. That’s how I know,” she explained.
He seemed surprised, but relaxed a little.
