personnel other than you and Moises.”
“I was told it was a horizontal structure.”
“Yeah,” Moises added. “We don’t even know who the client is.”
Zoya tried to think of her next line of questioning, but before she could come up with something, Yanis muttered under his breath, “I do.”
This was too good an opportunity for her to pass up. “You do?”
“Yeah. It’s obvious. It’s the Mossad.”
“Bullshit,” Moises said. “Why do you say that?”
Zoya found herself in the enviable position of sitting quietly while someone else probed for the intelligence she sought.
“Look, man,” Yanis said. “Sure, it’s set up with a German front company. Some ex-Stasi character who is probably living in the south of France and has less to do with running this show than I do. But three of the four case officers I’ve met are Israeli. You’re Israeli. I’ve met Ennis, a Dane, a guy from the UK, and Stephanie, but the rest of you guys are straight-up Mossad.”
Moises shook his head. “I’m Israeli, but that doesn’t mean I’m Mossad. Never was. We aren’t supposed to say anything about our backgrounds, but I guess I can say what I wasn’t.”
Yanis said, “Okay, maybe you were recruited by Shrike, but what about Dan, Simon, and Miriam? All three case officers with clearly a ton of experience, and all three Israeli.”
Moises shook his head. “I don’t know Simon. Dan’s from Tiberias, which is in Israel, and you’re right, he’s probably former Mossad. But Miriam isn’t Israeli.”
Yanis cocked his head at this. “She’s not?”
“I’ve worked with her. She sounds German to me. She speaks Hebrew, but she has a little accent.”
“Israeli or not, Miriam is hot,” Yanis said, and Moises agreed, but added a caveat.
“Not as hot as you, Stephanie, if you don’t mind my saying.”
She was barely listening to him. “Maybe I’ll work with Miriam soon.”
Yanis shook his head. “You are a case officer, she is a case officer. Shrike keeps the officers compartmentalized. Us techs work with different officers, but you guys only work with us techs.”
Yanis continued with his thought stream. “Still. I think this is a Mossad front, set up in the heart of Europe to tear into Iranian intelligence efforts here. What we are doing is good, and that’s all I care about.” He grinned. “We’re gonna change the world. We’ve uncovered a Quds Force cell, and when the operation wraps up next week, our client is going to go to the German government and get those guys arrested.”
Zoya was surprised at this news. “Quds Force? Here? In Berlin?”
Moises nodded. “Yeah, like a big-time commander of them, who has recruited his own cell of operatives. They are dormant now, anyway, working in the shipping and transportation industry.”
Yanis said, “They’re dormant because they’re sleepers. But as soon as they get the go-ahead from Tehran, they’re going to light this town up.”
Zoya was astonished. “Why don’t we notify the German government now? Why wait till the end of the contract?”
Yanis answered, “Because if we do that now, they’ll just get deported. Germany has eased sanctions, moved towards normalized relations. They are basically trying to distance themselves from the U.S., Israel, and anyone else playing tough on Iran. But if we catch these assholes actually planning something, then the Germans will hold them, interrogate them, and hopefully find out who else is out there hiding.”
The plan made sense to Zoya, unless, of course, the cell was able to pull off a terror attack before getting arrested.
Moises was obviously worrying about the same thing. “I don’t think Shrike is a front for Mossad. Mossad wouldn’t play on the knife’s edge like this. Our surveillance screws up for one day, and Quds Force could blow up a restaurant or something.”
Yanis thought this over, but before he could form a retort, Moises added, “Also, I don’t see why Mossad would need to establish a front company like Shrike to do all the work Mossad is doing anyway.”
But Zoya had a feeling she did know. If Shrike was secretly hiring the missing intelligence officers from around the world, men and women with state secrets from their home nations, then Israel would not want to be affiliated with the operation officially.
* * *
• • •
An hour later Zoya Zakharova climbed out of the van as a warm rain fell, opening her umbrella as she headed south. She was in a foul mood, because right in the middle of her social engineering experiment to glean information from the two young technicians in the van, Suzanne Brewer began