Usually, he’d send the unencrypted JPEG first, then send the encrypted file later to break up the signature, but he didn’t have the time for that now. He needed an answer without waiting a day between transmissions. It was a risk, but without the program, nobody would be able to decrypt the file. The only strange thing would be an email with two copies of the same pictures—one slightly larger than the other.
He palmed the thumb drive and then began his walk to the hotel across the river. In no way did he want his own computer to transmit the pictures over the shaky Wi-Fi of the apartment he rented. No telling who was watching that. Better to do it in an environment where anyone at all could access the computer.
He put on his jacket, skipped down the stairs, and exited out onto the cloistered streets of old-town Zurich. Full of college students who refused to wear a mask and tourists who wouldn’t go to the bathroom without one, it was the perfect place to blend in. An eclectic mix that allowed him to swim among the population without being seen.
Except for the fact that he had a name. And that name was tied into the death of a member of the Mossad.
Chapter 15
Sitting at an outdoor café on the Rathausebrucke promenade in the old-town section of Zurich, I was enjoying the June breeze coming off the Limmat River, patiently waiting on some activity from the target building while I licked my ice cream cone. Truthfully, I was just enjoying the ability to travel again, and didn’t really think anything was going to happen here. At least for Jennifer and me. We’d left the hard work to Aaron and Shoshana—if they even had the correct intelligence.
After landing at the Payerne airport, we cleared customs relatively easily—while I sweated the whole Israeli passport thing. We’d had no issues, including our American pilots, the negative PCR COVID test the one big thing authorities wanted to see. The pilots had been happy to learn that the quarantine was now only a five-day wait instead of fourteen, and we’d remained at the airport until they officially had rooms at the on-site hotel. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the whole mission might be over before they were allowed to leave their room.
We’d rented a couple of Range Rovers and set out for Zurich, two hours away, planning as we went. Through a Mossad dossier, Shoshana and Aaron had the location of a man called Qassim Khaled, and they were convinced he was a conduit for the money flow for the killing of the retired Ramsad. They knew the suicide pilot had stayed in his apartment, and also knew that Qassim had fled Syria as a refugee years before meeting the pilot. Meaning they thought the two were connected on the battlefield. They had a photo of the guy and an address.
Other than that, they had nothing. Just a guy with a past who might have been connected to a killing in Interlaken.
I’ll admit the suicide pilot’s stay was a little strange, but it was easily explained by other events. The pilot was fleeing persecution just like Qassim had done, and he had to have a place to stay once he arrived. Qassim might be Doctor Evil, but then again, he could just be collateral damage because of a shared hardship. I had a Syrian refugee who could be blamed for just such a connection. I’d seen the mighty United States make linkages the same way—seeing a forest fire when there was only a whiff of smoke—but I was willing to help, if only to sit by a river in Zurich and eat ice cream.
Jennifer licked her cone and a bit ran down her hand. She raised it to her mouth, cleaned it off, and said, “You think this is all BS, don’t you?”
I took a bite of my ice cream and said, “Yep. I think it’s bullshit.”
She said, “I’ve never seen Shoshana be wrong. When she has an intuition, it’s right. There’s something here.”
I said, “Really? She tried to kill me in Istanbul when her intuition told her I was the bad guy.”
Jennifer smiled and said, “You were the bad guy. You ripped her off of a moving motorcycle. And if memory serves, she quickly learned otherwise.”
I said, “Okay, I agree. There is something here, but it’s not the big conspiracy they think it is. This guy is probably running some coyote scam to get refugees into Switzerland, and now he’s going to get burned because one of them ended up being a terrorist.”
She nodded, going back to her cone. I said, “Hey, at the end of the day, we’re in Zurich, paid for by Israel, eating ice cream in the old town. Can’t beat that.”
She said, “Aaron and Shoshana are outside his door right now. They believe, and we should, too. At least until this is over one way or the other.”
I turned to her and said, “Seriously? You’re giving me advice on staying alert here? You think I’m slacking because I don’t think this will go anywhere?”
Chagrined, she said, “Well, you seem to be enjoying the ice cream more than the mission.”
I laughed and said, “Don’t take my skepticism of the strategic mission as slacking on the tactical side. Getting into his apartment is not bullshit. It’s volatile, and we need to protect them, so I’ll do that without regard to what I think.”
Qassim lived in a rat warren of a seventeenth-century building above a consignment clothing shop called Blenda Vintage, the surroundings a maze of stairs and apartments right in the middle of the old town on the east bank of the Limmat River. The mission was fairly simple: Aaron and Shoshana would trigger when the target left, wait for the roadblock teams to pick him up, then they’d break into the apartment to search for evidence that he’s a bad guy.
The way the apartment was situated, he’d have only two ways to go to get to the city—south, toward us, or north, toward where Knuckles and Brett were sitting on the only other bridge within walking distance over the Limmat River, where the city center was located. We knew he didn’t have a car, and we surmised that when he left his place, he would travel west, toward the city center.
In a perfect world, we’d have the forces to cover all avenues of approach, but we were a little light, so we did some analytical work and decided where to position. If we were wrong, and he went east, away from the city center, we’d just re-cock and try again, this time positioning ourselves to box him going that way.
Surveillance in and of itself is a shadow game. You don’t want to force the issue with aggressive actions to find the target, because he or she will invariably find you from those same actions. Patience is the name of the game, and missed opportunities help to build the pattern of life we needed to know.
Our job, outside of eating ice cream, was to keep Qassim in sight while Aaron and Shoshana penetrated his apartment. Basically, we were to be the early warning to let them know if they had to abort. An easy assignment—especially since I got to sit in Zurich’s old town with my wife, licking a frozen treat.
Jennifer wrapped another napkin around her cone in a losing battle to keep it from melting before she could finish. She said, “What if she’s right? What if there’s something going on here? Do you think we can get the Taskforce to engage?”
I chuckled and said, “You mean beyond letting us take the Rock Star bird? No. They’d better find the diabolical plan to start World War Three before Wolffe will engage. He’s got enough political bullshit to deal with besides telling them he let us freelance using Israeli passports. It would have to be pretty big.”