Four dead, opened up badly by the blasts or the Swagger stitches, one barely moving. Swagger put a burst into him before Reilly got into the picture, he didn’t want to argue the moral complexity of the coup de grâce, he just wanted the guy out of the situation.
“Clear, all down,” he yelled, then retraced his way to his entrance point into the alley, where he’d set the Enfield No. 4 (T). He snatched it up and ran to a spot he’d reconnoitered earlier, a kind of promontory where an arm of rock stood out right at the margin of the scree field and gave him best vantage on what lay below.
Arm snaked through sling, rifle to shoulder. Position built from bones outward. Both eyes open but the dominant one, at the precise point of maximum accessibility to the scope, in charge. He nestled for support, feeling his bones line up, feeling his joints lock. He was against the rock, leaning over a shelf, looking down the descending line of trees, and he caught a flash of movement, vectored to it, identified Jerry by his loping stride and because he was the only living human male in the immediate world, and tracked.
Tracked.
Tracked.
Range about six hundred, so gauging that she had zeroed at a thousand, he held low, at foot level, pivoted to stay with Jerry until he led him by a good six feet, and then his finger, on direct-command line from his deep brain, P-R-E-S-S-E-D the trigger. He came back on target to see the bullet hit Jerry somewhere low and toss him, as it had a thousand or so pounds of energy left. He went down hard and lay still.
“Did you get him?”
“I did, yes.”
“Yay for the man from Texas!” she shouted.
He said, “Say, weren’t you G.I. Jane?”
“I just pulled the trigger and hid.”
“That’s how wars are won. Sorry, didn’t kill the dog. Maybe next time. Got all your stuff? We ain’t coming back.”
“Got it all.” She had remembered her bag, all her phones, even the carefully wrapped plate.
“Good. Let’s see what we bagged.”
Interlude in Tel Aviv VI
“There are better killers in the world today,” said the director. “The best that science, government, and unlimited budgets can devise. Why would anyone go to so much trouble to manufacture this old garbage?”
“Indeed, there are more efficient chemical and biological weapons,” responded Gershon. “Nerve agents, anthrax, sarin, Ebola, all sorts of vapors, dusts, unguents, and gizmos for murder. Moreover, the methods of deploying the Zyklon are awkward and prone to difficulty. It works best in a locked chamber disguised as a shower room. That is, in controlled circumstances. It is heavy for its effect, difficult to transport, and lacking, outside the extermination camp, sophisticated dispersal technologies. It’s old-fashioned.
“But that’s not a mistake, that’s the very point. I see this as what might be called a ‘tribute atrocity.’ That is to say, a sentimental act of murder, a gesture in which the murderer’s true motive is not merely to kill but, by killing, to pay homage to an earlier generation of murderers. In other words, someone wants to replicate and sacralize the Shoah and to inform the world with his method that the ancient Nazi genocidalists are still out there, waiting, watching. It has nothing to do with Allah, not really, and is uninterested in Islam, other than as a means to an end. No, this fellow kills in the name of Hitler, and to him, it doesn’t matter if he kills five, fifty, five hundred, or five thousand, though the more, the better.”
The faces at the table stared at him. He had their attention. It was well past midnight, the lights of the black cube burned brightly, and in the conference room not only the director and several department heads stared at Gershon, but so did IDF representatives and an emissary from the prime minister. In the background of the room, a silent TV carried a newsfeed from CNN, and the screen bled blue light into the dim space.
“How could they deliver it?” Cohen said. “I don’t think the shower-room trick will work twice on us.”
“No, indeed. The ‘crystals’ are actually placed under pressure and become embedded in porous stone or wooden disks and locked in airtight containers for transport and deployment. Air releases the vapor; water releases it more quickly. The Nazis packed them in pellet form in sealed cans, opened them, and dropped them into water to release the gas. So, bulk would be a problem. To kill a lot of people, you need a lot of stuff. On the other hand, he has a lot of stuff. Given what we know about his manufacturing process, he could have churned out ten thousand pounds of the stuff. Consider a low-flying plane that crashes into Tel Aviv in the night without warning, loaded with the pellets, releasing their gas into the air when their fragile containers break open. The gas—without the odorant to tip us off to its presence, and being heavier than air—would drift at low level through the city air, smothering people in their beds. Thousands could die. That would be the mega-disaster. In smaller applications, a shopping mall might contain people and gas long enough for hundreds of deaths, a school, any building would do. It could be added to water supplies, its deadly vapors drifting this way and that off the breeze. It could be packed in rockets and fired from Gaza. Fifteen rockets and people come out after the all-clear, unaware they’re walking into a poison-gas cloud. Dozens, hundreds could die.