you do not suspect private contractors?”
“I do not know. I cannot put my finger on it, but I do not like anything about what I am hearing.”
The Wolf sighed wearily. If the Americans knew what was really going on, all hell would be breaking loose. However, Hell’s fire and chaos appeared to remain confined in Gehenna, for the moment. This led him to believe that the Americans had stumbled upon the side effects. Nevertheless, he could not afford to have them bumbling around. A United States intervention could be catastrophic. The question was, like the watch in front of him, was it repairable?
“Where are these cowboys now?”
“Ferraris reports they have gone dark.”
“We know their line of inquiry?”
“Yes, in fact they were very useful in that regard.”
“They will reemerge. Pick your team. Have them standing by.”
“At once, I will—”
“Have Ferraris lead it.”
Winter controlled her facial expression but the room went as cold as her name.
“You will act as controller, in the field,” the Wolf concluded.
The room warmed a degree or two. Winter loved fieldwork, and field commander on an assignment of this magnitude was huge. However, putting Winter in charge of Ferraris hinted at a possible hierarchy to come. “As you say.” Winter lingered a moment by the door. “Pirmin?”
“Yes, my dear?”
“Do I have permission to exercise the fight-fire-with-fire protocol?”
The Wolf bent over his work. The die was cast. “Yes.”
The War Room, Stony Man Farm
Kurtzman and Huntington Wethers pored over databases based on Lyons’s search criteria. The initial search had brought up thousands of files. The obvious conclusion was that the world was a violent place. Kurtzman trawled North, Central and South America while Wethers worked North Africa and the Middle East. They’d been at it through the night. Akira Tokaido looked up from his workstation and laughed. “Data dump from Japan! Godzilla size! Who wants it?”
Wethers let out a long breath. “Sometimes, I hate him.”
Kurtzman stared at his vast folder of not much. Besides the recent attacks in Mexico, the Americas were yielding nothing save cartel killings and the usual South American sicko horror. The United States was loaded with anomalous killings, crimes and misbehaviors, but nothing quite rang true to Lyons’s criteria. Kurtzman smiled at his map. “I’ll take it.”
“Transferring now!”
Kurtzman watched file upon file descend upon him courtesy of the Farm’s resident young hacker. In Kurtzman’s experience a great deal of Japanese crime could be considered anomalous. They had a very different culture. Part of that culture was a code of silence when it came to violent crime. It was also an open secret that Japanese authorities cooked their books to make their nation appear to be a nonviolent industrious island paradise. Kurtzman sent the files to his main west screen of the drive-in-size monitor and hit his translation software.
Hunt Wethers tapped his display. “Here.”
“Where?”
“Israel. Haifa to be exact.”
A map of Israel popped up on one of Kurtzman’s auxiliary screens. He tapped a key and data scrolled wearing a frown. “The string of suicide bombings last week? Hezbollah claimed full credit. The Israelis are launching retaliatory air strikes as we speak.”
“Yes, but one of the attackers survived. The suicide vest failed.” Wethers looked over from his screen pointedly. “A teenage girl, off everyone’s radar until last week.”
“She claims she didn’t do it?”
“Full signed confession, save that the Haifa police had a file going and everything prior to her confession has been completely redacted.”
Kurtzman knew where this was going. “The Mossad took over the case.”
“Military intelligence took over the case,” Wethers confirmed. “And while it doesn’t say it in so many words, it sure smells like Mossad yanked the case from them.”
Kurtzman mulled that over. “Haifa and military intelligence.”
“You know something?”
“I might know somebody, and they might still owe me a favor.”
“You calling this actionable?”
“Best lead we have. I need every scrap of information on the bombing in Haifa, news feeds, internet rumors and anything else we can cajole out of the Israelis through normal channels. Contact Jack, tell him to pull Cal out of Texas, and tell Able to sit tight.”
Tokaido nodded. “I’ll do it! Anything else?”
“Tell Barb I want Phoenix Force assembled in the next six hours, and I want them in Israel in twelve.”
Jerusalem, Israel
“IT WAS VERY STRANGE.”
Dr. Galina Rabovskya looked every inch the Jewish grandmother she was. She had been a military doctor with medical degrees in both neurology and psychology. The doctor maintained a small private practice and on the side was an Israeli military intelligence medical “asset.”
She poured coffee from an ancient copper ibrik for David McCarter and Calvin James. “Extremely jet-lagged” barely described the two Phoenix Force men.
“You would think there would be a matrix for predicting terrorist inclinations,” McCarter, the leader of Phoenix Force, noted.
She arched a thick eyebrow. “I assure you it takes all kinds.”
McCarter sipped his Turkish coffee and his eyes nearly rolled back in his head. James matched the doctor and perked her eyebrow for eyebrow. “But?”
“But this was very strange. Oh, on the surface it made perfect sense. A pair of young Palestinian lovers decide to cement their love into eternity with a suicide pact against their hated Jewish oppressors. All very romantic. They strap on explosive vests they made together, go to a nightclub full of innocent people, and...”
“But?” James repeated.
“But the girl’s vest malfunctioned. The boy, Hamdi, rode the elevator to martyrdom and took ten club patrons with him. The girl? Lena? She managed to launch most of her right arm into the VIP room. The emergency medics stabilized her and she was turned over to military intelligence.”
James conjured up Lyons’s new favorite-hated word. “And things started getting anomalous?”
