He also happened to be the only person to ever kick Mike’s ass in a fight. Akiva had challenged Mike to a sparring session soon after they were first introduced and proceeded to teach Mike a lesson in street fighting he would not soon forget.
“What the hell was that?” Mike asked Akiva, who hovered over him with an instant icepack in his left hand. Mike was sprawled on the ground unsure which had taken a worse beating, his ego or his body.
“Lebatt b’tachat.”
“To kick ass?” Mike said. “You mean an ass kicking?”
Akiva was surprised with his linguistic skills. “Atah mayvin ivrit?” (You understand Hebrew?)
“Kayn, ani mayvin.” (Yes, I understand.)
Akiva smiled at the young man who appeared to be a quick study. “How you know Hebrew?”
“I learned it from my sister who dated an Israeli guy. I was maybe ten or eleven…he taught me some, I studied the rest.”
“You know many languages?” Akiva asked, as he handed Mike the icepack he’d been holding, then reached into his bag and pulled out another for himself and placed it on his right temple.
“I know a few, I guess.”
“How many is a few?”
“Eight,” Mike said.
“You know eight languages?”
“Yeah. It’s not something I share with people because they think I’m a freak or something, but languages and dialects always came easy to me,” Mike said resting the icepack on his left eye. “Dude, what was the stuff you were beating on me with?”
Akiva sat down on a stool near Mike’s head. “What do you mean ‘stuff’?”
“Was that Ju-jitsu?”
Akiva smiled. “Ahh…no, no, Krav Maga.”
Mike had never seen anything like it before. “Where’d you learn that?”
“Israeli Defense Forces, everyone in the army knows it.”
Developed and refined by Imi Lichtenfeld, Krav Maga incorporated years of military training Lichtenfeld had acquired and combined them with the skills he learned as a boxer, wrestler and gymnast. Translated as contact combat, Krav Maga was adopted by the IDF in 1948 and Lictenfeld was its head instructor, teaching thousands of students not only quick strike self defense, but an aggressive offensive attack that rendered most opponents powerless within a few short moments. Mike Ferguson’s introduction to the discipline was as eye-opening as it was painful.
Mike tried to sit up, but reconsidered when he felt his ribs attempting to separate from each other. Instead, he relaxed on the ground and continued to nurse his wounds. “Do they know it as well as you?”
Akiva laughed at the question. “No, I know it better.” Akiva leaned over and held out his hand. Mike grabbed onto it and took advantage of his new friend’s generosity. He sat up, but kept the icepack pressed firmly against his left eye. “Can you teach it to me?”
“It is different than your karate training,” Akiva said.
“How so?”
Akiva moved his hands as he spoke “It is more hand-to-hand combat in street. Karate teach power in the punch, we teach less power. Quick strikes take opponent by surprise.”
“I like that. Would you teach me?”
“You know Spanish?”
“I do,” Mike said.
“Will you teach me?” Akiva asked. “You teach me Spanish, I teach you Krav Maga. We have deal?”
“B’seder.”
Akiva smiled hearing Mike agree in Hebrew. “Mitzooyan,” Akiva said. (Excellent.)
They spent the next two weeks in intensive training before both men had to head out to new assignments. Akiva went back home to Israel and his work with the Mossad while Mike was sent to Libya to collect intelligence on a splinter cell operating freely inside that country and from there to his post in Saudi Arabia. Mike had eventually become proficient at Krav Maga, a tool which served him well on numerous occasions. The two spies had become fast friends and their relationship eventually became more personal than professional. Whenever possible, both men would negotiate their schedules to spend some time together, even if only for a day or two.
Mike had spoken to Akiva less than a month earlier, so it came as a bit of a surprise to hear anything from him so soon afterwards. He parked his car in the CIA parking lot, called his friend, then headed to his office.
“Habbibi, mah shlomcha?” (My friend, how is everything with you?)
“Mike, my friend, everything is good by me. How is by you?”
“Great.”
“I sent you something. Check my outbox. You have to see, very important,” Akiva said.
A great number of communications in the clandestine community were usually done through “dead drops.” A dead drop is a form of contact between an intelligence agent and their case officer that does not require them to meet directly. Instead, the information would be left at a pre-assigned destination, or inside an object somewhere out in the public, such as a mailbox, tree stump or a sewer. Over the years, the two friends had devised a system where letters, both English and Hebrew, and numbers, were interchangeable in emails or word documents and the two men were the only ones who knew what the code meant. Moreover, to retain security, they often changed the system every few months, so what the number four represented one month, might be totally different the next. These messages sent from dummy accounts, were deleted every few weeks, and never sent directly to the other party. Instead, they were sent to a bogus address and because that email account was inactive, the email was left in the sent box of the person who sent the email. Mike or Akiva would then go into each other’s dummy account, enter the password and find the intended message in the Sent box.
“Will do,” Mike said as he unlocked his office door and headed straight for his desk.
“I have to go. Be careful, my good friend. Shalom,” Akiva said.
“Shalom.”
Mike sat down and logged into his secured CIA account. He proceeded to sign into Akiva’s dummy account, entered the password, then checked the Sent box. He needed less than a minute to decode the message. He printed it out and placed it on his desk then leaned back in his chair, immersed in thought. A few moments later, he straightened up and searched for something else on his desk. Within a minute, he found what he was looking for. He studied it, thought about it for a moment, then put it back where he found it. Mike turned back to his computer, Googled something else, and after reading the results, printed the information and left it on his desk with the two previous pieces. He picked up one more report, read a few lines, stared at the print on the page then placed the memo next to the other three he had set to the side. He rechecked each transcript three or four times then sat in silence when he realized what he might be dealing with. Mike picked up his cell phone and called his partner.
“Todd, I think
