Free Dead Eye by Mark Greaney Page B

her agency, but she had not been blamed; a Mossad psychologist had cleared her to return to the field just days later, and soon Ruth was back short-circuiting the nefarious schemes of her nation’s enemies.
    The job that had encompassed her every waking moment for the past six weeks had been the hunt for a pair of Palestinian brothers who had learned the art and science of bomb making in the territories, then detonated explosives in Afghanistan to hone their craft. As awful as this was, it was not, in and of itself, enough to garner the dogged focus of Mossad’s top headhunter. But when the two brothers masked their faces and appeared on Lebanese television proclaiming themselves to be the men who would bring Israel to its knees, Ruth was given the job of looking into their bold claim to see if there was anything behind their braggadocio. She tracked them from Beirut to Ankara to Madrid and then, finally, to Faro, and here she found them amassing chemicals and timers and researching the travel plans of the Israeli prime minister. Kalb was due at an economic conference in London the following week, and the two bomb brothers had booked ferry tickets to the United Kingdom.
    Ettinger and her team determined that this was, in fact, a credible threat on their PM, so they called in Yanis and his kill/capture crew from Metsada, and then Ruth and her team were ordered to stay the hell away from the target location while the hard men from Tel Aviv swooped in to end the threat.
    But now Ruth sat less than a hundred yards from the action, sipping espresso in the cool shade.
    She was not worried about her colleagues in Metsada. The bomb brothers had been mixing chemicals and constructing timers for the past eighteen hours and they were sound asleep, and the cameras her team had passed through the ventilation ducts in the apartment across the street confirmed that the front door to their flat was not booby-trapped. She knew the Israeli operatives would burst through the door with orders to capture the men if it was feasible to do so. But she also knew the two men in that flat had exactly one Kalashnikov rifle, and it was staged on the floor directly between their two beds, and they would both wake, both reach for it, and both fumble it.
    And the Metsada officers would make the decision in a single heartbeat to shoot the two young men with their silenced pistols.
    And then they would back up through the door and leave not a trace of their act behind other than the bloody bodies and a few untraceable shell casings.
    Across the street the Toyota had stopped honking. One of the operatives in the blocking van climbed out and, in halting Portuguese, explained to the Toyota driver that his friend was having trouble with his van’s transmission and, if the man in the Toyota could just give them a moment, they would push the vehicle out of the way. The Toyota driver complied, perhaps recognizing that the polite foreigner was doing his best to rectify the situation, and perhaps also noticing that the polite foreigner had a hard and formidable look about him, and it might be best not to piss him off.
    There was a brief screech of tires now. Ruth and Yanis watched as the two carloads of Mossad operators backed out off the alley, stopping behind the Toyota. The blocking van rolled off to the west, the Toyota pulled into the street and turned to the east, and the two cars then executed perfect three-point turns in the narrow alley and followed the van to the west.
    No one sitting at the outdoor café around them had any idea they were witnessing the ending of the perfectly choreographed assassination across the street.
    Yanis Alvey said, “And . . . scene.”
    “Never gets old,” Ruth said, no happiness or levity in her voice now. Yanis noticed this.
    “You hate when it’s over.”
    She corrected him. “I love when it’s over. As long as we have done our jobs correctly, and there is no collateral.”
    Unlike Rome,
Yanis thought, but did not