ProxyWar Read online

  PROXYWAR

  BOOK 6 IN THE SPIES LIE SERIES

  D. S. KANE

  Copyright © 2015 D. S. Kane

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-0-9862321-6-9 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-0-9862321-7-6 (Kindle)

  ISBN 978-0-9862321-8-3 (ePub)

  Cover design by Jeroen Ten Berge [www.jeroentenberge.com]

  eBook editions by eBooks By Barb for booknook.biz

  Praise for DS Kane’s Spies Lie Series

  Bloodridge

  “A globe-trotting spy thriller dense with intriguing insider’s knowledge.”—Kirkus Reviews

  “I thoroughly enjoyed this book … It is definitely a page-turner.”—Judge, 22nd Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards

  “This is a sizzler torn straight from tomorrow’s headlines. Bloodridge by D.S. Kane is one you won’t want to miss.”

  —John Reinhard Dizon, author of Nightcrawler and Wolf Man

  “What a wild ride! Filled with adventure and suspense and kept me on the edge of my seat. There wasn’t a slow moment in it. Reminiscent of Ludlum and Follett.”

  —Sharon Law Tucker, Author, How To Be A BadAss, A Survival Guide For Women

  DeathByte

  “Readers who adore action-packed thrillers in the vein of Robert Ludlum’s Bourne series will enjoy its many double-crossings.”—Kirkus Reviews

  “This was a great thriller … and the speed of the plot was breathtaking.”—Judge, 22nd Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards

  “This is a must read for anyone who enjoys espionage, thrillers and suspense. Thank you DS Kane for a wonderful creation.”—Rhoda D’Ettore, Fiction Author

  “DeathBytes will leave you paranoid, unable to trust anyone—or even your next cup of coffee!”—E.M. Cooper, Fiction Author

  Swiftshadow

  “…In Cassie, Kane has created a female protagonist who bears a striking resemblance to the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, from her extraordinary hacking talents and resourcefulness to her fluid sexuality and tendency to be targeted by evil men who underestimate her ability to survive… the high stakes and dizzily paced action will hook genre fans from the first page… solidly entertaining spy series…”—Kirkus Reviews

  “Author DS Kane has thrown in wholesale the tools of this trade – hacking, lock picking, passport faking, money forging, travel without crossing a Customs line. And occasional killing, when required… this is no life of glamour. Swiftshadow will appeal to fans of spy thrillers and to those who want to know more about this background.”

  —Clare O’Beara, Fiction Author

  “…written by a master story writer who knows his craft …Cassandra Sashakovich is no run of the mill spy… she is taught how to hack the terrorist’s bank accounts in addition to her cover as an economics and business consultant … DS Kane has shown that he is the master of this genre and can spin a yarn that leaves the readers enthralled and asking for more.”—Pankaj Varma, Fiction Author

  GrayNet

  “Author Kane continues to deliver solid thrills chock full of international intrigue and shocking ideas that get the conspiracy wheels turning… Cassie’s… ingenuity and will to survive against such insane odds will make readers root for her … Nonstop action and suspense starring the definition of a strong female lead.”—Kirkus Reviews

  Baksheesh (Bribes)

  “Author Kane shows no sign of running out of wild plot twists and corrupt figures out to destroy Cassie, not to mention the world … readers will be swept away on the tidal wave of sexy, espionage-laced prose … More wild, violent adventures in the world of international espionage.” —Kirkus Reviews

  The Spies Lie Series by DS Kane:

  Bloodridge, Book 1 – AMAZON BESTSELLER

  (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K0029J0)

  DeathByte, Book 2 – AMAZON BESTSELLER

  (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L2LLKSC)

  Swiftshadow, Book 3 – AMAZON BESTSELLER

  (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MJ5KXKG)

  GrayNet, Book 4 – AMAZON BESTSELLER

  (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P8HRT9U)

  Baksheesh (Bribes), Book 5– AMAZON BESTSELLER

  (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B010NR3RD6)

  and, ProxyWar, Book 6

  …with more to come.

  For Dennis Phinney, Barry Eisler, and

  Eric Witchey, who each, in turn, helped me

  hone my skills as a storyteller.

  Contents

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  FIVE YEARS LATER

  CHAPTER 2 • CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4 • CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6 • CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8 • CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10 • CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12 • CHAPTER 13

  PART II

  CHAPTER 14 • CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16 • CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18 • CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20 • CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22 • CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24 • CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  PART III

  CHAPTER 27 • CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29 • CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31 • CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33 • CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35 • CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37 • CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39 • CHAPTER 40

  PART IV

  CHAPTER 41 • CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43 • CHAPTER 44

  Glossary

  Appendix A – Character List

  for the Spies Lie series (alphabetical)

  Appendix B – On CyberWar

  Appendix C – Notes on Creating the Spies Lie series

  BONUS: The first chapter of CypherGhost,

  Book 7 of the Spies Lie series!

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events depicted here are the work of the author’s mind. Most but not all of the places are real.

  “We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape—to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.”

  —Henry Kissinger on the Vietnam War

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  Mossad Headquarters, Herzliyya, Israel

  September 4, 2:15 p.m.

  Yigdal Ben-Levy paced inside the supplies closet that was his office in the basement of the brand new building. They’d just moved from the tottering six-story on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. He’d been offered something on the top floor of the new building, but declined. “Elegant” was the word Oscar Gilead, the Prime Minister, used to try and entice him. The devil is ostentation and I’ll have none of that.

  He removed the black suit jacket he wore on more serious days. The top button of the collar on his starched white shirt was closed, even though he never wore a tie. He rubbed at the tiny stain on the pocket of his otherwise clean shirt while he thought about mission planning. It will be so simple, but he suspected he was missing some vital detail.

  The odds were good enough for him to send a team out, and the intelligence at hand indicated Israel would be at increasing risk if he did nothing. But he’d need to improve the odds while he planned the mission’s set-up. He wondered if he should send out an advance team to confirm the evidence hidden deep inside the situation.

  His world was depicted on the chalkboard i
n the corner: a set of overlapping circles, a Venn diagram with intersections of death, deception, outright lies, and secrets. Decades ago, he’d been a field operative. He knew the risks, the tension people felt when they faced possible death. It left a sour taste in his mouth. He ran his fingers through his graying hair.

  As one of the Mossad’s senior spymasters, he’d failed a few times, but never in the last decade. When he had failed, his had operatives died. Such failures had turned his hair and beard gray. He was thin. Worry kept his appetite at bay. The cafeteria in the building was a last resort for him, its food soured his stomach. But there were other things that made him sick this afternoon.

  This mission would be problematic. Troubling. He was running it off the books. Only the operatives involved had knowledge of it, and they only knew what he’d felt absolutely necessary to tell them. The last time he’d done one this convoluted, it had saved the State of Israel from certain doom, but it had cost the lives of the two operatives closest to him. The Sommersteins had been his best friends.

  He remembered the failure. His failure. When he was just a Mossad katsa, or case officer, he’d been responsible for changing Abel and Natasha Sommerstein’s last name to “Sommers” and sending them to London under deep cover with backstopping as British citizens for three generations.

  He remembered the Sommersteins stopped Syria’s attempt to develop nuclear weapons. Syria was using plutonium matériel purchased from the Russian mafiya in Vladivostok. The Sommersteins had hacked MI-6 spymaster Sir Charles Crane’s computer in London and discovered the location of the Syrian nuclear research facility. The Sommersteins then hacked into Syrian air defense, and the Israeli air force had destroyed the facility. Yigdal had ignored what he’d assumed would be a low-probability response to their espionage: the overreaction of MI-6 to Crane’s computer hack, causing his demotion, which in turn triggered Crane to sell the intelligence about the Sommersteins to the Syrians. The inevitable result was the deaths of his friends at the hands of a team of Syrian assassins in London.

  He’d promised Abel and Natasha that should anything happen to them, he’d take care of their son, Jon, and give him a future in Israel with the Mossad. For twelve years he’d protected Jon without the boy’s ever knowing. Jon had grown up, graduated from Oxford, and was now completing the MBA program at the University of London. Ben-Levy was now about to fulfill that sacred oath to bring him to Israel and offer him the chance to join the Mossad. Jon would be the third generation of Sommersteins working for the Mossad.

  His eyes drifted to the photo of his niece, Aviva Bushovsky, that he kept within a red folder. She’d been the perfect bat leveyha, able to seduce any terrorist. She had an irresistible heart-shaped face, olive-colored almond eyes, deeply tanned skin, and bright red hair. He marveled at how she’d learned each of her targets’ secrets in bed before Mossad kidons, assassins, were dispatched to send the killer to “a better place,” meaning an unmarked grave. She’d been responsible for the deaths of over ten of Israel’s enemies, including several high-ranking Pakistani bankers who’d worked as money launderers at the Bank of Trade.

  His tiny office was dimly lit and foreboding, with a mild smell of ammonia. He preferred it that way. The chalkboard that stood behind him was crammed against the back wall under a humming fluorescent light. Even here, in a secure building, the notes depicted on the chalkboard were encrypted.

  He placed the red folder in the top desk drawer and pulled out a folder with a yellow cover indicating it was urgent, a “daylight priority.” The tab read “Bloodridge.” It was named after the Mossad’s code name for the mountain range that separated eastern Russian from northern China. The actual name of the mountain range was nothing like the code name. These mountains were where the Mossad had assumed a border war between Russia and China might be triggered if the right circumstances transpired. He opened its cover and read it again. Would this plan work? If it did, the Russian mafiya might stop selling its Cold War weapons to terrorists and instead use them against the Chinese. He hoped Jon Sommers would be the missing piece of this puzzle.

  He heard the knock on the door of his office. “Come,” he hissed.

  A young, red-haired woman entered and stood in front of his desk. Her visage matched that of the photo in the folder one page before Jon Sommers’s picture. He motioned to the lone chair in front of his desk. “Sit.”

  Aviva Bushovsky flashed her olive-colored eyes. He tried to hide his pride in his niece’s prior mission performances.

  She was rail-thin and had a habit of looking down when she smiled, a sign she was hiding something. She wasn’t smiling now. “I’m here as you ordered, uncle.”

  He could feel the blood heat his face. “You will address me by my call-sign. ‘Mother.’ Have you read the file?”

  She nodded. “Yes, Mother. It should be simple. Create a relationship and invite him back to Israel.”

  “Exactly. He isn’t some terrorist with plans to kill our people, so don’t make this more complex than it is. He’s not an enemy. Don’t get so close it compromises your work. Don’t mention recruitment. Just get him here, to my office. You have two months. It’s an easy assignment for a bat leveyha. No danger.”

  She nodded. Smiled, looking down and to the left.

  What was she was hiding? “Here’s your set of identity documents.” He passed her the envelope.

  She emptied it into her lap. A backstopped passport in the name of Lisa Gabriel, student ID at the University of London as a graduate student in mathematics, an El Al ticket from Tel Aviv to London, a biography typed on a single page, and twenty thousand British pounds sterling. “Who was Lisa Gabriel?”

  Mother spoke from his memory. “She was a young woman with a slight physical similarity to you. She died in a car accident in London two months ago. She had no living relatives. We buried all news of her death. You will become her. Study the data about her in your packet.”

  Aviva read the description. “Easy enough.” She read the mission assignment. “What if he declines?”

  “Then you have failed. Do not fail.” He waved her from his office. When she closed the door, he coughed violently for almost a minute. Alone, he smiled. Aviva would not fail him.

  His recruitment of the young Brit was one of the final steps in a long-range plan to save Israel from being decimated by an Islamic militant group that was once again planning to acquire Soviet-era nuclear weapons from the Russian mafiya in Vladivostok. If Sommers could be set to work as a kidon, just as his parents had, then the operation named Bloodridge would be off and running.

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Running operatives was a nasty business. Because of the danger in this mission, he hoped Sommers would decline his offer. After all, Ben-Levy still had a debt to pay for the death of Jon’s parents. But if Sommers decided not to become an agent, Mother’s replacement options for the mission were less than hopeful. He must accept our invitation.

  Would Jon accept the offer? If he did, how long would it take to train him? Could he ever be as good as his parents were?

  Yigdal Ben-Levy shut his eyes and worried once again about Israel’s future and his part in crafting it.

  FIVE YEARS LATER

  CHAPTER 2

  House of Blues & Jazz,

  60 Fuzhou Lu, Shanghai, China

  August 12, 9:53 p.m.

  The weather on the Bund this night felt steamy, with no wind to make sounds less prominent. As a result, the discordant pounding of Robert Turner’s jazz piano pushed into Chin Ryo’s ears like tiny hornets. He walked down Fuzhou Road past the Plaza Hotel at North Gate and entered the club.

  He hated most music, especially jazz, but Turner’s fingers played better tricks on his ears than any other of the jazz musicians he’d heard before.

  Chin was a hacker, and liked to think he was competitive enough to sometimes earn a living at it. Usually he worked on simple gray hat stuff. Industrial spying, credit card and identity theft, occasional modification of
police records for a drug lord. Sometimes he worked as a contractor for the Chinese army, but never before on anything classified.

  This, meeting a client face-to-face, was something he’d never done before. None of his clients had ever seen him before tonight. No one knew he was short, overweight and, by his own estimation, butt ugly. He kept sliding his tongue over his upper lip, a sign, revealing to himself how nervous he was about exposing himself. Always dangerous for a someone who lived in the shadows.

  He took a seat at the table nearest to the deepest door within the club, adjacent the kitchen and far away from the stage. Here he had a good view of the entrance, and if things went badly, he could duck out through the kitchen. When a surly waitress held out her hand, he passed her the 50 renminbi cover charge without saying a word. The waitress remained at his table frowning, so he ordered a Guinness for the outrageous price of RMB 98.

  He prayed his client would be arriving soon. Chin fingered the thumb-drive he held under the table. How much was this data really worth? Had he settled for less than he should have?

  Turner played something reminiscent of blues tinged with a bit of soul and jazz. Chin tried but failed to stop himself from tapping his foot to the tune and soon found himself wrapped tight within the music.

  He looked up and stopped tapping. Seated across from him was a non-Asian. A rather tall and very fit Caucasian, dark eyes, possibly Russian, but he couldn’t be sure.

  The Caucasian pushed a small envelope across the table, his large hand covering most of it. He spoke in a voice that was just above a whisper, in accented English. “Yours. Where’s mine?”

  Chin nodded. Nervously, he pushed the thumb-drive under the table and into the Caucasian’s other hand. “Are we okay?”

  But when he lifted his gaze, the thumb-drive and the Caucasian were both gone. Chin peeked into the envelope. Fifty thousand USD. He smiled and sat back in his chair. The music sounded somehow sweeter to him now.