ProxyWar Page 9

  Had William and Betsy arrived back in Woodbine, Iowa? If he could find William, he’d need a plan. Both William and his current squeeze had proven they could cope in dangerous situations, but he’d need to present this news in a way that wouldn’t arouse their sense of possible pending death.

  It might take him hours to craft a workable plan. He could begin sketching one out in his office at the bank. Best for him to proceed to the office as if nothing urgent was happening. He could use the bank’s own transaction processing systems to backtrack William’s current location using his friend’s bank accounts and his spending habits.

  If he simply closed the door, no one would interrupt his search for William. He expected it would take him only a few hours to locate his friend.

  The express lift from his apartment dropped forty-five floors to the lobby in under a minute. From there it was only a half-mile walk through the cold to the bank. The streets were dangerous, but by now Jon knew which routes offered a low probability of robbery or worse. He headed up Second Avenue and turned west at Forty-Sixth Street.

  About fifteen minutes after leaving his apartment building, Jon entered the lobby of the headquarters building of the American National Bank at Park Avenue and 46th Street. The surveillance detection route he’d walked had taken him extra time to reach the thirty-nine-story granite tower on the east side of the street. Black ice on the sidewalks had made him more cautious as he walked to his workplace.

  Jon bought coffee in the lobby. He nodded at the security guard as he flashed his ID, then walked through the metal detector. He took the elevator to his office on the thirty-fourth floor and walked to his office, next to the opulent corner office of Susan Rubin.

  Susan’s real name had been Shula Ries. But that was before she almost died when her hotel room was bombed. Now nearly crippled, she had transformed from being a Mossad kidon team leader, or aleph, to running Israel’s financial Laundromat in the money center. Her identity was a guarded secret, but Jon had known her when they both were kidons with the Mossad.

  Jon ambled in small steps, so Susan, his boss, could keep up the pace. She used crutches. Jon peered at her face as they walked. “I need to take a few days of personal leave. Urgent.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “I smell a covert mission. I thought you’d given that up.”

  He shrugged. “This is different. William Wing is in danger and I have to warn him.” He thought it safer if he changed the subject. “I understand you’ve heard from Avram. Where is he now?”

  The woman was only five years older than Jon but she looked ancient. Plastic surgery to repair her made her look several decades older than her thirty-five years. She stopped and turned so she could face Jon. “Avram is taking me to dinner tonight. At Club Bleu on the Upper West Side.”

  Jon nodded. So, Avram was back in town. Avram was always out saving the world with his small band of mercenaries, based in DC. “How is he?”

  She pressed the elevator button and turned away. “Call him.”

  Jon wondered if he would. When he thought about how Avram and William had worked with him on the Bloodridge black operation, his wounds itched. The explosive device at Susan’s hotel had been partial payback from the terrorists for the Bloodridge op, and his lover Ruth’s brutal death was another part. His heart throbbed with the memory of Ruth. She was pregnant when they’d literally ripped her apart. He’d arrived too late and found her just before she breathed her last. Devastated, Jon had left the Mossad to work once again as a banker. He’d sworn to never work for the Mossad again.

  The emotional pain from the memory of her death pulsed through him. Now, he’d have to confront the twisted demons his memories of William and Avram triggered within him.

  The elevator doors opened. His only work interruption today would be a meeting after lunch to discuss the new banking regulations and how they might affect funds transfer and foreign exchange, his two departments at the bank.

  He watched Susan amble from the elevator and turn back to him. “Remember our budget meeting tomorrow at 10 a.m.” She smiled and the doors closed.

  Jon walked from the elevator to his own office, haunted by the ghost of the other woman he’d loved, Aviva Bushovsky, who also worked for the Mossad. She had died in a car bombing.

  He closed the door and asked himself the questions he needed to answer before crafting a plan. How to convince William of the danger? Where would his friend be safe? How could Jon get him from where he was to wherever that safe place might be? Would William want to see his father before he disappeared forever?

  * * *

  At the ancient cemetery outside Beijing, Xian Wing stood closest among the mourners at the grave pit. A man almost as old as Xian shoveled dirt onto the coffin.

  His wife of forty-seven years was now among her ancestors.

  He wiped his eyes, and his tears mixed with the mist and snow. The medical report he’d received this morning was proof he would soon follow her into the earth. Only William, their son, would remain alive. But only if the hit squad sent by his government couldn’t find his son.

  The snow crunched as he walked, his footsteps leaving deep furrows in its most recent layer. He touched the tombstone marking her final resting place as the diggers finished covering her.

  Taking a deep breath, he turned away. Behind him walked several bodyguards, their slow, watchful pace matching that which his frail body could deliver. At the limousine, he turned again before entering. For several seconds he scanned the cold, gray sky. It matched the mood of his soul.

  As he lowered his frail body onto the seat in back of the limousine, he wondered if Lily would be successful.

  He yearned to see his son one last time. He’d thought he knew where it would it be safe to do so, but how could he manage a trip without the bodyguards? Who could he trust to help him? General Benjamin Chan had worked with him for decades, and William had long ago run into the man when Chan was a lieutenant. There had been friction between them then. And recently, Chan acted as if he held secrets.

  The limo pulled away from his wife’s gravesite, crunching gravel on snow as it traversed the cemetery road.

  Whose side was Chan really on? If the man was trustworthy, Xian would be able to make arrangements without alerting suspicions, but if Chan had joined forces with Xian’s enemies in the Central Committee, it would turn the meeting into a potential slaughterhouse for Xian and William.

  Could he trust Chan? There was no one else, and time was short.

  CHAPTER 7

  Cassandra Sashakovich’s home,

  1805 Wilson Lane, McLean, Virginia

  February 21, 3:15 p.m.

  At seventeen years of age, Ann Silbey Sashakovich had applied for early admission to both Harvard and Stanford. Her boyfriend, Charles Breckenridge, was now a freshman at Harvard. While admission to Harvard was what she wanted most, her mother—Cassandra Sashakovich, the woman who’d adopted her four years ago when she was a homeless orphan—demanded she choose a better backup school than those of her classmates. Ann let Cassie make the choice, and since Cassie had graduated from Stanford, that was her backup. Ann worried that Stanford was as difficult to get into as Harvard, but that choice had been made months in the past. Too late to change.

  Ann sat at the breakfast table with a cup of cocoa untouched in front of her and waited for the mailman, watching on the closed-circuit cam at the front of the family compound.

  Today, she hoped she might receive her most important snail-mail ever. There hadn’t been any envelope yesterday or the days before that. She’d been glued to the kitchen for over an hour. Damn! He’s overdue.

  She heard the mail cart rolling up to the row of boxes before she saw him on the cam. Ann ran out through the outdoor hallway and found him at the box in front of their home’s compound wall, sorting mail. “How long until you’re through?”

  He didn’t stop sorting. He nodded his craggy face. “Minutes. Just a few.”

  She stood, bouncing on her toes,
shivering in the falling snow. She ran a hand through her tangled mousy brown hair.

  “Must be important.” He handed her a stack of envelopes.

  Ann ran back to the house, shouting over her shoulder, her breath steaming into the cold with the words, “College admissions.”

  She took a deep breath as she slammed the front door and sat once more at the kitchen table. Bills. Junk mail. Harvard! Stanford! She almost dropped the envelopes, a tingle of electric current shooting through her fingertips from the cold static. She noticed the envelops were light, possibly containing just one page. Did this mean they were rejection letters? Her heart pounded.

  Which should she open first? Stanford was her backup, so she ripped it open first:

  Dear Ms. Sashakovich,

  We regret to inform you we have declined your application to early enrollment at Stanford University. Your application can be appended and resubmitted for standard enrollment if you so desire.

  She stopped reading. Was there something wrong with her? Why hadn’t she been accepted? She’d had straight A’s in every course for the last two years. She was haunted by memories of her early life, her drug-addicted birth mother, the murder of her younger brother when she was only twelve in the abandoned train tunnels beneath Grand Central Station, and Cassie appearing, like an angel to save her from being raped yet again, and possibly murdered.

  She’d always feared rejection. And here it was. If Stanford had rejected her, Harvard must surely have also done it.

  She picked up the second unopened envelope. Clenched her eyes shut as she tore through its edge.

  The letter from Harvard had the same basic message, but without an invitation to reapply. She found herself wailing. Her fists pounded the table.

  When her sadness turned to anger, Ann decided to do something wild. She thought about how unfair this set of rejections was on the day that should have been her best triumph. How could she punish Stanford and Harvard?

  Her eyes darted from the letters to the computer she could see in Cassie’s home office.

  She’d learned how to hack computers when her mom asked William Wing to teach her some basic skills. Even then, William had a reputation as one of the world’s best gray hat hackers. She’d been fifteen then. She’d learned more from him than he’d ever known.

  Her mom was visiting the pediatrician with Evan. It would be at least another hour until they returned. She walked in and sat at the desk, flexing her fingers. It was time to demonstrate her skills.

  The Harvard University website had a firewall and ancient 128-bit security. She ran a SQL injection script she’d stolen last year from William Wing. She modified it for penetration into the Harvard website pages. In less than three minutes, she was inside the server. She searched the directory tree for one named “Admissions” or something like that. Nothing. She found a directory called “Students,” and underneath it there was a child directory called “Incoming Class” and another called “Rejected.”

  Both of these required passwords, and she used another program written by Wing to crack the passwords needed to get into the directories. In minutes, she’d changed her status by deleting her name from the Reject directory and adding it to the Accept directory.

  Ann smiled. So easy. She accessed the site for Stanford and found it more challenging. It took her almost an hour to penetrate their more sophisticated 256-bit security, but when she was done, both schools were mailing her acceptance letters.

  She felt elation at having what she wanted. It occurred to her she’d had to cheat to get it, but so what?

  She wondered how Charles would feel when he found out she’d be at Harvard with him. She remembered how his touch felt, how he smelled, how she felt when he touched her during sex. Ann opened the email application on her cellphone to tell Charles the good news.

  There was an email from him waiting in her inbox and she grinned as she opened it:

  Ann—

  So sorry to be writing you about this. I got involved with a freshman named Nancy. Long-distance is too tough. Bye.

  —Charles

  Her mouth fell open. For the second time this afternoon, she cried. She wanted to do something truly wild. She hacked into Harvard again and changed his grades. He was now about to flunk out.

  After the wall of sadness crumbled, a piece of her heart with it, she made her decision. Since Charles was at Harvard, she would attend Stanford, just as her mother had.

  But now, something inside her was broken.

  She wanted to do something even more dangerous.

  * * *

  In his Washington, DC, embassy office, Yigdal Ben-Levy punched the number into his encrypted landline. It buzzed several times. So long after nightfall, he could see nothing outside his office window, but he could hear the howl of the frigid wind. Somewhere in the building, he could hear the muffled rhythm of a Wagner overture. He stopped his foot from tapping to the tones as the prime minister’s secretary answered his call.

  “It’s Ben-Levy for the PM.”

  He waited, his fingers tapping on his desk.

  “Yigdal. How are you?”

  He avoided replying to the question. He already knew his doctor reported daily to Oscar Gilead. “Oscar, I’ve done a preliminary investigation of something related to an email that crossed my desk. I’ve forwarded it to you as Project ID 74-831.”

  “I saw your email. How did you get it? It’s Mossad level. No longer your domain.”

  Ben-Levy felt a pang of yearning for his old role as spymaster. “Why does it matter? What is important is, I believe the intelligence is good. I believe the Chinese CSIS and Russian mafiya have been in partnership to destroy America. The Russians have been using cutouts and proxywars for several generations to weaken the United States. And if our strongest ally and supporter falls, so may we.”

  “That intel is none of your business.”

  Ben-Levy struggled to contain his rage, but the result was a sharper pain in his gut. He steeled himself. “According to the document, a war is imminent. As Israel’s UN Ambassador, I want permission to address the United Nations. Maybe if their plans are exposed to the light of world opinion, the Chinese and Russians will think twice before their attack. If no one stops this, there will be a global cyberwar followed by a kinetic follow-on with a death count likely to make the Holocaust look like a picnic.

  He waited for the PM to reply.

  Seconds passed. “I forbid you. Permission denied. Let them figure it out. We’re pariahs at the United Nations. If you want, send your friends in the US a private message. But leave Israel out of it. Our political position is too precarious.”

  Ben-Levy heard the click as the call ended.

  He shook his head in disbelief. Idiocy! He thought, Only the United Nations has the collective power of the world behind it to delay or stop this war. Not addressing the General Assembly is suicide.

  CHAPTER 8

  Yigdal Ben-Levy’s Office,

  top floor, Israeli Embassy,

  Washington, DC

  February 21, 7:32 p.m.

  Yigdal Ben Levy paced his office like a prisoner in a cell. The old spymaster muttered to himself. He watched the ghost of Aviva Bushovsky dance along the side wall, ending upside down, hanging off the ceiling. She’d never done that before. He shook his head.

  The ghost stopped moving and faced him, still upside down. “Uncle, you are about to fail again. Your biggest failure, and your last ever. Israel will perish. You will die with this on your head.”

  His jaw dropped. If the United States fell, Israel would very likely be in mortal danger. There would almost certainly be another Holocaust against the Jewish people. He staggered to his desk chair and fell into it. The pain in his belly fell upon him, like a concrete wall. He felt the breath go out of him and struggled to breathe for several minutes. He was running out of time.

  He picked up the secure landline and dialed a number he’d memorized. “It’s Yigdal Ben-Levy, the foreign minister of the St
ate of Israel. Please connect me with your director of operations.”

  He waited a few seconds. The voice was a half-octave lower than when they had worked together, a decade before. There was a southern twang to it. “Mother, you old fool. How are you?”

  “I’m dying. But I have something for you. It’s the kind of intelligence that you’ll want to elevate. Your president needs to hear this. From me, if possible.”

  There was an extended silence. He could imagine Mark McDougal thinking about the request. After Gilbert Greenfield’s death and his agency’s collapse, McDougal had moved from Greenfield’s unnamed and private intelligence agency to the NSA. “Well. Uh, can you tell me first?”

  “Of course. I just read a report containing an analysis of aggressive military encounters, from decades in the past up through the middle of last year. The analysis I’m holding in my hands right now concludes that, with the exception of small parts of World War II, every battle the world has seen since World War I was a proxy war between the United States and Russia or the United States and China. And it suggests there will be another, an imminent conflict, with China and Russia working together as allies, against the United States. This one will combine cyber operations with a heavy kinetic element.”

  His contact in the United States remained silent for just a second. “Let me get back to you.” The line went dead.

  The pain left Ben-Levy’s belly. He closed his eyes and smiled. Maybe he could do a mitzvah before he died, after all.

  The ghost of Aviva Bushovsky walked through his desk and stood inches away. She put her face against his. “A good start, uncle. But not enough. They will never believe you. You’ll need all the nations of the world to make it work. And even then, it might not be enough.”

  The pain returned, stronger. He sat at his desk, unable to get up. The pain pulsated so intensely he was unable to move a muscle for almost an hour.

  He’d forgotten everything except his distress when the phone rang. “Ben-Levy.”