He exploded and said he'd deal with it himself.' Trying very hard to get a grip on himself, Machen went on, 'You have to understand, Eshkol isn't — well, he's extreme. And this… one set of his great-grandparents were Holocaust survivors. And a lot of other people in his family didn't make it.'
The same dread I had felt at Malcolm's earlier mention of this possibility returned with Machen's confirmation of it, and the feeling must have been all over my face, for when I turned to Larissa she gave me a look of concerned confusion. But I just shook my head and tried to stay alert as Slayton kept after our prisoner.
'Has the Mossad been able to track him at all?' the colonel asked.
Machen shook his head. 'They were expecting him to go public with the images — give them to a newsgroup or post them on the Net himself. They've been tracking down the correspondents with the most contacts in the Middle East — so far, nothing.'
'No sign of where he's gone?' Slayton asked.
'No, and there won't be. If Eshkol goes deep, not even the Mossad will find him. He's that good.'
Suddenly a deep rumble resonated through Machen's house, making me think that an earthquake was under way; but then I realized that the thunderous sound and feeling weren't quite seismic and that I'd heard and felt them before. As if to confirm my intuition, Larissa suddenly put her hand to the collar of her bodysuit.
'Yes, Brother?' Her expression never changed as she nodded and said, 'Understood.' She looked at Slayton and then to me, calling over the low, growing hum, 'It's Bel Air Security — Machen's guards were due to report in three minutes ago. A personnel carrier and an infantry squad are on the way.' She opened a pair of French doors that led to a balcony.
In seconds the air outside the house began to shimmer and ripple as if it were being exposed to a great heat; then a seeming crack in the very fabric of reality opened up, revealing Julien and, beyond him, the interior of the ship's corridor, all seemingly suspended in midair. The bizarre sight — a product of partially shutting down the vessel's holographic projector — brought screams from the prostitutes in the next room and prompted Machen to squirm with heightened vigor. 'Who
But Slayton only released him in reply, as Fouche began to wave to us vigorously. 'Quickly, all of you!' he cried.
We bolted for the balcony just as the ship's humming began to rattle the house hard enough to cause Machen's weapons collection to crash to the floor. A few of the guns went off, prompting more howls from Machen; but our thoughts were now all on escape, and in seconds Larissa, Slayton, and I were back aboard and the ship had gotten under way.
Thus were we able to give a name — and soon, thanks to the continued hacking efforts of Tarbell, a rather hard and frightening face — to the man we were seeking. Further monitoring of official Israeli communications indicated that Machen had not lied when he had said that Dov Eshkol's superiors believed the bitter passions inspired in their wayward operative by the Stalin images would find their vent in some kind of public exposure of the materials. But those of us aboard the ship suspected, only too presciently, that the world would not get off so lightly.
CHAPTER 30
Unaware of whether Dov Eshkol had yet made his way out of California or even the United States, we again sought refuge in the deep Pacific as Tarbell — assisted now by the Kupermans — continued to hack into the databases and monitor the communications of various American and Israeli intelligence agencies in order to assemble a complete picture of the fugitive. The rest of us, meanwhile, gathered once more around the conference table to fuel ourselves with an impromptu meal prepared by Julien and to discuss the few bits of information we'd been able to squeeze out of An Machen. This conversation produced few new insights, and those few were deeply discouraging: Machen's claim that if Eshkol went into deep cover even the Mossad wouldn't be able to find him seemed entirely plausible, given his ability to elude detection thus far; and we all agreed that if the Israelis failed in their efforts to find him, the chances of the United States (the only other nation aware that there was some sort of problem) turning anything up were virtually nil. Nor did the confirmation of Malcolm's instinctive feeling about Eshkol's being descended from Holocaust survivors give us any sense of encouragement: clearly the man was considered highly violent and something of a loose cannon by his superiors, and if his murderous tendencies— which had apparently been turned, on occasion, against his own countrymen — stemmed from rage over the fate of his relatives and his race, he would have little trouble thinking in large numbers when it came time to conceive a punishment for any and all previously un-exposed accessories to the genocide in Nazi Germany.
But we would need more hard information before we could determine just what form that punishment might take; and after several hours Leon, Eli, and Jonah were able to provide it. They filed bleary-eyed into the nose of the ship, hungry and bearing a raft of notes, as well as several pictures of Eshkol, each of which bore little resemblance to the next. These they began to explain as Julien brought them food; and while the information they'd gleaned offered no reason to doubt that Eshkol was an extremely dangerous man, it also showed why our team might be better equipped to hunt him down than either the Israelis or the Americans.
'He is a murderer, yes — a butcher, really,' Tarbell said, cramming food into his mouth, 'but he also plays on our field, you might say.'
To the rest of our puzzled looks, Jonah, who was eating slightly less ravenously, said, 'He's got the usual undercover and covert skills — disguise, languages — but the real secret of his success is that he's an information junkie. He's a brilliant researcher, and he can manufacture any sort of personal documents and records to gain access to just about anything — and then destroy any evidence that he was ever there. He's even fooled the universal DNA database.'
'I thought that was impossible,' Larissa said.
'Not impossible,' Eli answered. 'Just very, very difficult. The trick is getting the corroborative samples. If you're going to, say, travel by air using the identity of someone who's actually dead, you're going to need some sample DNA to offer when you check in, and it had better come from someone who bore more than a passing resemblance to you — and, most important, someone whose death was not recorded in the database. Eshkol's apparently got quite a collection of alter egos — and I think you can guess how he got them.'
'The other Mossad agents he executed,' Colonel Slayton said with a nod.
'Also many of the Arab operatives he's killed,' Tarbell confirmed, checking his notes and indicating the pictures, some of which showed Eshkol in traditional Arab dress. 'The narcissism of minor differences, eh? Your colleague Dr. Freud would be deeply satisfied, Gideon. At any rate, whichever side they serve, such victims are not given obituaries — and their deaths are, of course, kept from the DNA database. They are ideal, really, as sample donors — nearly un-traceable.'
'Eshkol was reprimanded several times,' Jonah said as Tarbell went back to eating. 'The first was in 2011, when he was twenty-six. Mutilating the body of one of his victims, was what the Mossad called it.'
'It's not exactly unknown in that game,' Larissa said. 'That kind of trophy taking.'
'True,' Eli agreed, flipping through still more scribbled pages, 'and so they let it go at a warning. Quite a few times. And that's where we may have him. Neither the Israelis nor the Americans know about Eshkol's modus operandi — we only happened to stumble on it when we cross-referenced the names of his victims, which we got out of the most secure Mossad files, with every travel database we could crack into. A few hits came up, then a few more.'
'He's gone on several extracurricular outings over the years,' Jonah threw in. 'And I don't think it was tourism — not the way he was covering his tracks.'
'You're saying he's engaged in private vendettas,' Malcolm judged, quietly and grimly.
Eli nodded. 'Neo-Nazis, skinheads, Arab intellectuals at foreign universities who are ardently opposed to peace with Israel — they've all mysteriously died when Eshkol has been in their respective countries, under cover of his identity-switching scheme. In a few cases we can even put him in the specific town or city where the execution took place.'
Malcolm nodded slowly, gazing silently out at the ocean in the way he generally did when things took an ominous turn.
'And you think you can track him?' Slayton asked, recognizing Malcolm's mood and assuming the mantle of
