Someone opened it, and Rafi stepped into a room with an eight-foot-long table and straight-backed wooden chairs. There were two metal desks, battered but large, each with a computer. There was also a pair of old, mismatched file cabinets. A man sat leaning back in a swivel chair, his jacket open, exposing a white shirt, and a shoulder holster with pistol. Facing him, five men and two women sat at the table. No one greeted or questioned Rafi. He too took a place at the table. Rafi was the newest member, but like the others, sat looking semicomatose, saying nothing—a function of institutional paranoia, giving the impression of profound boredom.
The New Mossad lacked not only the mission, focus, and sense of limits of the old, it lacked its camaraderie, sometime enthusiasm, and any trace of humor. What it had in abundance was ruthlessness, dedication to violence, and broad-spectrum hatred, the ugly products of defeat, frustration, bitterness, and psychosis.
They sat like that for several gray motionless minutes, waiting. Then a buzzer buzzed, and reaching, the man in the swivel chair pressed a button on an ancient intercom. “What is it?” he asked in Hebrew. The answer was cryptic, two initials. “B and B,” the voice said.
The man reached again, and pressed a switch that unlocked the office door. A minute later another man entered, tall, powerfully built, wearing a sweatshirt and jeans. He might have been thirty-five years old; perhaps forty. He looked to be, and was, the joint product of a martial arts academy and a military academy. Radiating charismatic ruthlessness, he performed as well as lived his role. Being conspicuous was his primary weakness; he stood out in any crowd as dangerous. Rafi feared and hated him for things the man had done in the last weeks of their homeland: Moishe Baran had been in charge of interrogations.
By contrast, the man who’d come in with him was more inconspicuous than any of them—and more dangerous than even Moishe Baran. In the New Mossad, he was the leader, “the first among equals” in the ruling threesome calling itself “the Wrath of God.” Another borrowing from the true Mossad that offended Rafi deeply in this new context.
He despised all three leaders, but hid it well. On the day it showed, he would die.
The meeting was businesslike. Local projects were summarized, their problems enumerated. Assignments were made or changed, new projects proposed and discussed. No action decisions were made. Decisions were a function of the Wrath, and made in private.
Nothing was said of teams elsewhere in the country. Rafi knew nothing specific about them. But appropriately, Riverside held the central command—the Wrath.
Near the end, it was proposed that all reputed “messiahs” be assassinated, as an affront to God. There could be only one messiah, and he could only be Jewish.
My God, thought Rafi. These people have graduated to murdering the deluded.
It was decided that the Mahdis and Maitreya did not pretend to be the actual, true Messiah. Only “messiahs” in the Jewish and Christian traditions qualified for execution, and the only one with a meaningful following was Ngunda Aran. To Rafi it seemed likely that a project would be set up to kill the man.
Finally, miscellaneous observations were called for and shared.
Rafi would remember all of it, nearly verbatim and in detail: that was his unique talent. He’d write it down in the privacy of his small apartment, then leave his report in the “letter box” of the week.
* * *
When all the rest had finished, Moishe Baran made a final announcement. “I have succeeded in obtaining a Ninja Junior, a highly accurate, ground-to-ground cruise missile with a five hundred-pound warhead, a speed of zero point eight mach, and a range of nine hundred and fifty kilometers. At our next meeting, we will discuss possible uses for it.”
The meeting was then adjourned.
11
People were still filing into Sacramento’s Arco Arena and seating themselves. There’d been a bomb threat, not the first for an Ngunda appearance, and the search had delayed the opening for more than an hour. The arena was not more than half full, and the inflow had already thinned notably.