Free Code of Conduct by Brad Thor

brothel. The bloodbath was over. But everything else was just beginning.

CHAPTER 10
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    W hen Ben Mordechai found her, she was holed up in a cheap Jerusalem hotel near the Chapel of the Ascension. The jeweler’s phone had acted like a beacon, leading his team right to her.
    He had been with Shin Bet at that time, Israel’s internal security service. And though he had seen the carnage at the brothel firsthand, and had been told by all the girls what had happened, he still couldn’t believe it. It was incomprehensible to him that a single, untrained woman could kill that many men and walk away unharmed.
    They were treating the murders as a terrorist attack. When they hit the hotel, they hit it at three in the morning and hit it hard. A bag was thrown over Helena’s head and she was spirited away in a waiting van to an off-the-books safe house for interrogation.
    Mordechai knew within three minutes that Helena had not been trained by some radical group and smuggled in to massacre Israeli citizens. She was not a terrorist. She was, though, a murderess and this presented its own special set of problems.
    Killing the client who had regularly abused her could very likely be defended in court. Killing the pimps who kept her as a sex slave could also likely be defended in court. Killing every other male in the brothel, even in an uncontrolled fit of rage, would be much more difficult. Compounding the issue was the fact that two of the businessmen she had gunned down were somewhat prominent.
    Helena was an incredibly sympathetic figure. With all of the evil Mordechai had seen in the world, her story moved even him. He wanted to help her, but there was only one possibility. He left her in the interrogation room to make some phone calls.
    When he returned an hour later, he laid out his offer and told her he was sorry, but that she would have to decide right then and there. They didn’t have the luxury of letting her sleep on it. If she was to be spared a trial, multiple wheels would have to be immediately set in motion.
    She agreed to the offer.
    As soon as Mordechai had left the room to relay her decision, she broke down. She was free from the horror of the abuse and the beatings and the starvation. But she had traded one form of bondage for another. Looking for some sliver of hope, she focused on the fact that her family would be taken care of. If that was the only good that came out of this, it was better than nothing.
    She was taken from the safe house to a private hospital where she was treated for her injuries and allowed to rest.
    Mordechai visited her daily. She had been checked into the hospital under what would become her code name, Yael. It meant “to ascend” in Hebrew. He had chosen it because of the chapel near where he had found her. It was also a figure from the Bible who saves the Jewish people by destroying an enemy general. From the beginning, Mordechai put much more faith in her than she did herself.
    Once she was rested, she began a series of transformations. As Michelangelo could look upon a block of marble and see the statute inside, Mordechai could see the goddess beneath her Slavic features.
    A team of plastic surgeons refined and sculpted her nose, her breasts, chin, lips, and cheekbones. In the process, they noted that she had suffered an array of facial fractures, undoubtedly at the hands of the men who had held and abused her during her perilous journey to where she was now.
    He brought her family to come see her and put them all in a home near the sea for a week. The father, who was a raging anti-Semite, blamed the Jews for the entirety of his daughter’s traumatic experience. He chose to ignore that his own fellow citizens had abducted her in his own home country.
    On Mordechai’s advice, she had not told her parents that she hadbeen forced into the sex trade. While they might have suspected she had been used sexually, he recommended that she explain that she had been abducted and forced to work