The Perfect Assassin (44 page)

Ehud Zak looked out the window of the BBJ, Boeing’s 737 business jet derivative. The night sky was clear and the blinking lights that had been their escort of Israeli F-16s were no longer in sight. The aircraft had peeled off, he was told, back when they’d entered Italian airspace. Over the open Mediterranean you could never tell, but the Italians didn’t shoot down transiting heads of state.

The pilot announced that they were over central France, and Zak looked down to see a network of lights across an otherwise black void. It reminded him of a starry sky, except the lights were clumped together in bigger groups, impossibly dense constellations connected by spindly offshoots that must have been roads. He had never been to France, but he would go soon.

Zak settled into a huge leather chair and played with the buttons that made it move. The back tilted down, a leg rest moved up, and something bulged under his lower back. He chuckled. He’d been on the new state aircraft once before, having taken it to a funeral in India. It hadn’t been quite important enough for Jacobs himself to attend, and the Foreign Minister had been in South America, so the duty had fallen on Zak to convey official condolences. On that trip he’d traveled up front. Nice enough, but nothing better than a typical airline’s first-class section. The rest of his entourage was milling about there now, while he enjoyed the solitude of the Prime Minister’s suite that had previously been off-limits. Zak looked around appreciatively. He was surrounded by the finest in furniture, fittings, and accessories. Dark wood, royal colors, crystal fixtures. And in back, in an adjoining room, was a sleeping compartment with a huge bed, an entertainment system and mirrors everywhere. Zak delighted in the prospects.

A knock at the mahogany door interrupted his thoughts. “Enter,” he said loudly. He had meant the reply to be weighty and important, but it came off sounding imperious. No matter.

A steward marched in and directly replaced the warm coffee pot with a fresh, hot one. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

“No,” he said, “not now.” Zak suppressed a smile. That had been better. Dismissive, but keep the fellow on the hook.

The steward disappeared, and Zak again looked out the window. A huge area of lights was coming into view. It could only be Paris. Zak sat mesmerized and reflected on how far the merchant’s son had come. He wished his father could see him now, the bastard. He had gone and died four years ago, but even then the old goat had seen him rise to become a Knesset member, far above what anyone could have expected from the son of a second-rate peddler. The old man might have had money, but his son had acquired power, now more than ever.

Strangely enough, Zak and his father had been born with the same gifts. They had used them, however, in very different ways. His father had been the definitive trader. Imports or exports, textiles or condoms, whatever sold. Talk fast and think faster, that was the key. As a boy, Zak had watched and learned. Learned it was all right to buy out a struggling partner for pennies on the dollar, or foreclose on a competitor’s widow whose insurance had lapsed. It wasn’t being heartless. It was simply business. Send a check to the local homeless shelter and the conscience always came around. The trader’s son had shown great promise, and expectations were universal that he would carry on the family business, perhaps even exceeding the mercantile standards set by his elder.

Unfortunately, those dreams were dashed — as so often is the case for young men — by a woman. At nineteen Zak became infatuated with Iricha, a waitress at the Café DuBres. It was a romance both fast-paced and passionate, and after four weeks young Zak had gone to his family to declare enduring love for the woman. And to announce their intent to marry. His father gave no doubt that, in his eyes, the union was beneath consideration. Not only was Iricha a divorcée and ten years older than young Ehud, she was also Palestinian. Zak brought Iricha to meet his father, to prove what a wonderful wife and mother she might be, but the elder refused even to see her.

He had fumed at his father’s bigotry, but the rift solidified. Soon his father decreed that if the marriage should come to pass, Zak Trading Ltd. would not. In fine adolescent form, the defiant son answered with the most rebellious act he could imagine. He joined the Israeli army.

This had two results, first being that his father made good on his threat to sell the business, retiring early and well on the proceeds. The second, and the one that took him completely by surprise, was a sudden coolness that developed in his relationship with Iricha. She eventually made a tear-laden confession that, although her love for him was boundless, life as the spouse of an enlisted man in the IDF was not the idyllic future she had envisioned. She then went about devising any number of schemes by which they could rescind his enlistment and return to the good graces of his family. Her favorite idea was to fake a pregnancy, which she imagined might lead to a hardship discharge for Ehud, and a softening of his father’s stance. Then, a quick marriage-miscarriage strategy would put them back on the road to enduring happiness and prosperity.

It was here that Zak united the concepts of love and war. He had grown up watching his father, the master artisan of trade, deal his way to success. Getting a customer to pay more for less while believing it was
he
who had gotten the bargain — that was the elusive masterpiece. Yet it was Iricha, the buxom, raven-haired waitress from Haifa, who made him realize that slickness and manipulation were not limited to the world of commerce. He finally saw that his fervent Palestinian lover had been negotiating her own contract, one in which he, and the security of his family’s wealth, were the commodities in question.

Then there was the matter of his enlistment. Zak’s father was not without influential friends who probably could have orchestrated the loss of his enlistment papers. But the choices had been made, and his father would make him live with them. Stung by this realization, Zak did the only thing he could. He jettisoned his bride-to-be and stuck with the Army.

The string of events served to form Zak’s life in many ways. He knew in the recesses of his mind that he could just as easily have been duped by an Israeli woman, or for that matter a Greek or a Latvian. But resentment grew within, and he started to despise and distrust that entire race of people who were generally considered “the enemy.” This ember was fanned easily, as Zak lived and worked within the IDF. Like most military sub-societies, the culture was close-knit, conservative, and completely suspicious and intolerant of the enemy. That meant all things Arab, and particularly all things Palestinian.

Within the first year of his service, Zak received word that Iricha had gone on to marry a wealthy Lebanese banker, a man more than twenty years her senior, and the flame was stoked ever more brightly. First Zak had lost his family and fortune, then his soul, all to an amoral temptress. It created a vast emptiness within him. But the void filled quickly with hatred, with an urge to extract payback on the people, the way of life, whose product was Iricha and her carefree evil.

He was not a warrior in the conventional sense. He had never been one to strike out with fists, nor was he physically strong or athletic. Yet he looked for ways to use the weapons that had always served him. Wits and cunning, the ability to manipulate. Those were the instruments he’d use against the vile people who were both his national and personal enemy. Iricha had turned the tables on him, but Zak vowed to never let it happen again. And someday an opportunity for retribution would come.

Early on, he made every attempt to put these troubling thoughts aside in order to focus his considerable talents on a fledgling military career. It got off to a promising start when, as fate would have it, he was assigned to be the supply clerk of a large infantry unit, something akin to placing an arsonist in charge of a fireworks factory. He quickly learned the intricacies of the military bureaucracy and turned them, wherever possible, to his advantage. Within eighteen months, the 6th Infantry Regiment had caviar and the finest Scotch each Thursday afternoon, the commanding officer was riding around in a Mercedes staff car, and corporal Zak had found himself recommended for a commission.

Having never intended to make the military a career, he reconsidered, and decided life as an officer might not be bad, especially in view of his limited prospects outside the service. That in mind, he accepted the promotion, but only with his commander’s personal assurance that he could switch specialties. A career in supply and logistics was tempting, but Zak had already seen its limitations. In choosing a new field, he fell back on one of his estranged father’s favorite maxims —
scientia est potestas.
Knowledge is power. And so it was, Lieutenant Zak requested, and was granted, appointment to a new division. Aman. Military Intelligence.

For the merchant’s son, it was an atmosphere in which to flourish. Lies and deception were the stock in trade, a veritable playground for Zak’s shrewd mental games. It was also his chance for payback. He felt increasing satisfaction each time he embezzled money from a Hamas bank account, or bribed a shopkeeper in Gaza. Each success brought gratification, but also whet his desire for more. His stock rose quickly in this shadowy corner of the IDF, and his commanders gave him increasing freedom, opportunities for bigger and more meaningful operations. However, here Zak had gotten carried away. He lost sight of the fact that this obtuse branch of the military was still just that — a branch of the military.

Zak hatched a plan to place a bomb at the upcoming meeting of a pro-peace Palestinian group. The bomb wasn’t supposed to go off. It would simply be a dud, one that could be readily identifiable as being of Hamas origin (easy enough, since the Israeli military was constantly defusing and confiscating just such weapons). The resulting in-fighting amongst the Arabs, Zak reasoned, would be a joy to watch.

His commander, a recalcitrant lieutenant colonel, didn’t see it that way. He thought the whole idea absurd, if not downright dangerous, and ordered Zak to kill any further thoughts of it. Two weeks later, a bomb did indeed detonate at the meeting in southern Gaza, and an anonymous caller claimed credit for a rogue offshoot of Hamas.

Zak’s commander launched a ballistic accusation up the chain of command. Things always fall heavier than they rise, and the lieutenant colonel was immediately reassigned and told to shut up. An ominously quiet investigation got underway. Zak, of course, insisted he had nothing to do with planting the bomb, which was true in the most literal sense. He passed a lie detector test with flying colors, an easy thing to do when you understand how they work, and in the end there was scant evidence. Certainly nothing to hang a court-martial on. Still, the military has its ways. The senior leadership was highly suspicious, and Captain Zak was quietly informed that he would never be anything more than Major Zak. He was reassigned to Signals Intelligence Division, or SIGINT, graveyard of careers lost.

Zak’s remaining years in the service seemed professionally quiet. This, however, was not a consequence of his having been idle. In his eyes, the bombing in Gaza was a great success. The Palestinians quarreled and became suspicious of one another. Editorials in the Arab press pointed fingers everywhere. Everywhere except at Israel. If nothing else, Zak’s time in the intelligence world taught him the value of the media, and of public opinion. Time and again, governments made decisions based not on facts, but rather on opinion polls, the mood of the people. This caused Zak to expand his original ideas, and give them one further, devastating twist. He quietly espoused his thoughts to those who had helped in the first attack, along with a few other carefully chosen friends, men who felt as adamantly about the cause as he.

The second operation took place six months after the first. A small car bomb at a pizza shop. An Israeli pizza shop. One Jew killed, two wounded. The headlines were loud, and the Israeli response clear. Helicopter gunships took ten times as many Arab lives. Zak found the success intoxicating, and his group grew larger. More attacks were arranged, but each with the greatest of care. He realized the inherent danger. If his group were ever discovered, the media’s sway that now aided him would deal a massive counterpunch. Israelis attacking Israelis, blaming the Arabs. The world would cringe.

After a dozen attacks in the first three years, Zak began to feel the risks outweighed the benefits. He scaled back, making the strikes big newsgrabbers, but fewer in number, and only when the chance of detection was low. They were also planned to coincide with the occasional efforts at peace, torpedoes to any truce that might give land to the dirty squatters.

Zak muddled through four years in SIGINT before accepting early retirement, with the rank of major, as promised. It was a divorce, in a sense, one that caused both parties to breathe a sigh of relief. By then, his organization was well established. Still young, and with a clear goal in mind, he searched for even more effective ways to manipulate the will of his countrymen. He found it in politics.

The merchant’s son was a natural. All he had to do was tell people what they wanted to hear. Tough words at the Veterans Society fundraiser, suggest peace at the university commencement speech. It took two years to land a seat on the Knesset. There, his career might have stalled among the lawyers, generals, and other merchants’ sons, had it not been for one stroke of luck. Zak managed to tie himself to the coattails of a rising star by the name of Benjamin Jacobs. The timing was impeccable. Within ten years of leaving the service under a cloud, he had become the second most powerful man in Israel, at least on paper. From there, there had only been one place to go.

And here he was. The lights of Paris had faded, along with those of the French countryside. Now he saw nothing but blackness below, and he decided it must be the English Channel, that little strip of water that had so often saved the British from their enemies. Zak wished he had a Channel. One he could throw all the Palestinians into. A chime sounded and he saw the light flashing on his private intercom. He waited a few moments before picking it up casually.