He reached into his pocket and pulled out a single sheet of paper. On it was a facsimile of what had been found on the bodies.
Aaron took it, seeing,
You attack us with impunity in Syria and Iraq from the air, like cowards. And now we attack you man to man. Our reach is long, and our patience is infinite. This man is not the first to die, and it will not be the last, Little Satan. Tell the Great Satan they are next.
Aaron looked up and said, “Who is it? The Iranians?”
“We honestly don’t know. The pilot is an Iraqi expat who earned refugee status in Switzerland. After digging into his past we’ve found some contacts with Keta’ib Hezbollah, but the money train isn’t there. We have tracers on all of their accounts. Keta’ib Hezbollah paying for a man to learn to paraglide and then killing a Ramsad is something we would have found. At least we think we would have. Something else is going on here. And we want you to find out what that is. Which is why there is no lethal authority.”
He turned to Shoshana and said, “You want to find the man who killed your mentor, and I get that, but he is dead. He blasted into the earth just like Gideon. We want to know what’s happening. Some in the Knesset and the military are already demanding action against Iran, but we want to make sure it really is Iran before we end up in a war we didn’t want. And we can’t use anyone in Europe to do it, because they penetrated us somehow. Whoever it is sure as shit isn’t a militia in Iraq. It’s something else. That’s what we want to know.”
Shoshana nodded, but he could see her mind spinning. He said, “Can you do that?”
She said, “Yes. But we’ll need some support.”
“Can’t happen. You guys are on your own. We’ll give you a complete data dump on what we have, front any costs, and you’ll report back to us, but there will be no contact with any other Caesarea personnel. Sorry. We don’t know where the leak happened or how they planned this attack. We’re not sure who has been penetrated. If we use Caesarea personnel there now, it might automatically be a compromise, just because they’ve identified them as such.”
Shoshana smiled at that and said, “I’d expect nothing less. So we’re on our own?”
“Yes.”
“Can we get our own support, or is that something that’s too big of a shit storm, too?”
“What do you mean? What support?”
“Well, we have to go to America in two days for a wedding. Is that okay?”
Jeremy looked at Aaron, then back at her, saying, “The wedding can wait. Your country is calling.”
Aaron knew where Shoshana was going. He said, “You’ve given us a mission with no support. We’re going to the wedding.”
Perplexed, Jeremy said, “What’s a damn wedding got to do with this?”
Shoshana leaned into him, getting face-to-face. She tried to be calm, but the anger leaking out was a visceral thing. She said, “I’ll find the killer of Gideon. Not for you or Israel, but for me. And the wedding is how I will do it. I need passports for four individuals.”
Chapter 4
I stared at Jennifer in her white dress, slowly walking up the path to my position next to the minister. She reached it, smiled at me, and then took my hand. The minister smiled as well, happy to be here on a warm June day for the wedding. I glanced at the gate to the Ashley Hall grounds and saw it shaking, like someone was trying to barge in. The gate broke, and three terrorists entered, screaming and firing weapons.
Jennifer ripped off the lace of her dress, exposing three hand grenades held in place by their pins.
Wait, what? Who would attach a grenade to themselves by the damn pin?
She pulled two, threw them at the gate, and then . . .
And then . . .
A voice entered my head. “Pike!”
I felt a slap to my belly and was brought out of my Walter Mitty daydream.
Jennifer glared at me and said, “What in the world are you doing?”
Sheepishly, I said, “Nothing. Sorry. Where were we?”
She glared at me and said, “We’re rehearsing our wedding!”
I saw Amena with the rings, going from foot to foot, embarrassed for me, and my best man Knuckles looking at me like I’d had a stroke.
I said, “Uh huh . . . Got it. Let’s keep going.”
Jennifer looked like she wanted to gut me, but turned with all sweetness and light to the minister. Amena snuck up behind me, pulled my pant leg, and said, “You’re really terrible at this.”
I said, “You wouldn’t be any better.”
She laughed and said, “Oh yeah I would.”
Jennifer glared at her as well, and she scampered away, going back to her position for the rehearsal.
Twenty minutes later it was over, and I was in the alcove of the McBee House on the campus of Ashley Hall, getting an earful from Jennifer for not taking this seriously. She really, really, wanted a legitimate wedding to match our justice of the peace certificate, and I suppose I wasn’t helping, but it was getting a little ridiculous.
I said, “Jenn, come on. We’re not even allowed to have a crowd here because of the damn pandemic. We’ve got like ten people. How much rehearsal does this take? I’ve seen less rehearsals on an assault in the Al Anbar Province against a terrorist force hell-bent on killing me.”
Even with the vaccine rollout, things had been slow to return to normal. Now, with all the new, exotic mutations running amok, the projection from the powers-that-be was next fall, which aggravated me to no end.
She glared at me, made sure we were out of earshot, then said, “I only asked for one thing: a wedding ceremony. You can at least do that.”
“But we can’t even have a real ceremony because of the damn pandemic. Why don’t we wait six months? The vaccine is out, and this will all be a bad dream then.”
“I don’t want to wait. The only people I care about are here. Except for Shoshana and Aaron.”
She said that last part without any rancor, but while she didn’t show it, I knew she was upset. Shoshana was her maid of honor, and had promised to be here for the rehearsal. She was also an Israeli assassin who was about two beers shy of a six-pack, but for some reason she and Jennifer had bonded.
I said, “They’ll be here. They promised. They’ve probably just had a plane delay or something.”
She looked a little wistful and said, “I can’t believe they didn’t come. After what we did for their wedding.”
I thought of my daydream and said, “Well, it might be for the best. If they’d shown up, you might have been throwing grenades attached to your skirt.”
She said, “What?”
“Nothing. Here comes Wolffe.”
George Wolffe was the commander of our little extralegal unit and while he was officially my boss, he was also a friend. In official top-secret traffic the command was called Project Prometheus, but since that was classified, we couldn’t run around saying the code name like we were the 82nd Airborne, so we just called it the Taskforce. He was invited to the wedding, but wasn’t actually in it like my team, so he didn’t really need to be at the rehearsal, but since things were quiet in DC, he’d decided to come down for a little rest and relaxation.