Russell Blake - Jet

A call had come in at four forty-two a.m. from a frantic neighbor. Gunfire, explosions, screaming. All units scrambled, the first arriving in seven minutes to find the house empty and four unidentified males dead outside. A car was burning, its gas tank ruptured, and tire tracks suggested that a vehicle had driven off at high speed. One of the other neighbors reported that his dog had lunged at the back door and gone crazy when a figure ran past. He’d caught a quick glimpse; it was the man who owned the house that had been attacked. Forensics later found blood droplets consistent with a wound of some sort. Then the military had taken over the case, and the Mossad arrived shortly thereafter. End of report.

So David had been there, had been hurt, but had escaped.

And the Mossad was in the mix and had clamped a lid on it.

Which they could effectively maintain for as long as necessary by claiming national security interests were involved.

Now Jet had even more questions than answers.

Who had attacked the house? What did they want? If it was to kill David, as Rain had been killed, then why? Was it the same group? Terrorists? Or someone else? And was David okay? Wounded, yes, but how badly?

Whether she liked it or not, she needed more information than the report offered. It would mean hacking the military network to scan for any admissions to military hospitals in the last sixteen hours. That was too big a project for her to bite off — she could do it, but she didn’t have the tools or the time to devote to covering her tracks and doing nothing but trying to hack her way in.

But she knew someone who did.

She typed in a series of keystrokes and sent an e-mail to an account she had committed to memory. Moriarty — a hacker she had never met, but who had come in handy in the past on delicate assignments where discretion was required. David had given her the contact years ago when she had needed specialized computer work done on one of her missions, but wasn’t in a position to do it herself. Since then, she’d used the hacker three times, and each had been impressive.

But not cheap.

Moriarty replied to her ping within two minutes. A dialog box popped up on her screen.

[What’s shaking? Long time no talk.]

[Yup. Got a gig. You busy?] Jet typed.

[For you? Never.]

[I need you to track and report to me admissions at every military hospital in Israel for gunshot, trauma, stabbing or other wounds. I don’t need routine admissions for illness. Just trauma.]

[Are you serious?]

[Yup.]

[Gonna cost.]

[Figures. How much?]

[When do you need it?]

[Now.]

Twenty seconds dragged out.

[Fifteen grand. I’ll have it within an hour, two, tops.]

[OK. Banks are closed. Wire tomorrow?]

[Sure. You’re cool.]

[Good luck.]

[Luck has nothing to do with it.]

The dialog box disappeared, the discussion over.

Jet closed the computer and powered it down. She didn’t want to linger there on the off chance someone 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.

David attacked at a top secret safe house.

Injured.

Whatever this was, she’d never heard of anything like it in her life.

“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.