Free The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies) by Terry Brennan Page B

out into the hallway, past the guard at the desk. “Salaam.” Without a reply from the guard, Tavana retraced his steps down the hallway. Before him, the captain of the guard and his aide rounded a corner and walked in his direction.
    “Ah, Tavana, we’ve been looking for you,” said the captain. The two guardsmen flanked Tavana, standing on either side of his cart. “Come with us.” The aide took possession of the cart. “There is someone who wants to speak with you … and with a friend of yours, I believe.”
    Tavana bowed his head as he followed the captain down the hall. But his spirit danced with his ancestors.
You are too late. I have repaid my debt. You took my family from me. Now I take something valuable from you.

    Like most clandestine Israeli actions against its enemies, this one unfolded meticulously. While the two main Iranian refineries were melting into puddles from the searing heat of the phosphorous bombs, the explosions began echoing through Fordow. Up and down the corridors on three levels, light fixtures were exploding and spewing a radioactive cloud that would condemn the facility to a toxic future for the next thousand years. A radioactive poison that sentenced more than half of Iran’s nuclear scientists and technicians—along with a large number of North Koreans—to a lingering, excruciating death.
    Meanwhile, 130 kilometers to the north, in the capital of Tehran, a squad of six heavily armed Revolutionary Guards—the vault’s doors closed and locked—escorted four white-gloved soldiers as they loaded gold bars onto two reinforced carts. The pyramids of gold were dwindling, tangible evidence of the efficacy of the Western world’s economic stranglehold against Iran. The crew took the last few bars from a now nonexistent pyramid and had to move on to another to fulfill their quota.
    “Let’s move, Achmed,” said the squad leader. “Hurry, or my dinner will be cold, my wife will be angry, and my mistress will be bored.”
    “These are the last ones,” said Achmed. “And we’re ten minutes ahead of schedule.”
    Ten minutes was enough to change everything—to ruin Mossad’s meticulous planning. The explosive devices that Tavana had secured to the underbellies of the reinforced carts were timed to go off in the middle of the regular pickup, while they were still loading the gold and the vault was sealed shut. But these men were early. And now they were leaving the vault.
    The two Revolutionary Guard soldiers in front of Achmed had just opened the outer vault door and the second cart was being pushed through the open inner vault door when the twin explosions ripped through the vault’s entrance. The explosive force, though powerful, was not designed to damage the massive, hardened steel doors. Rather, the devices were shaped, the explosives arranged to forcibly disseminate their contaminating payloads.
    Achmed, five of the soldiers, and the other cart pusher lay in mounds of shredded flesh, bleeding and stone dead. The sixth soldier, blown back behind one of the vault doors, watched as silvery clouds of glittering dust jetted across the expanse of the gold depository, colliding with the far-opposite wall and spreading in all directions. Like lethal snow, the glittering dust slowly turned yellow as it settled to the floor, coating the pyramids of gold bars and everything else inside the vault. Including the soldier.
    It was an unfortunate circumstance for the Israelis, as well as the Iranians, that both vault doors were open when the explosions occurred. Because the second shaped charge blasted another silvery cloud of glittering dust in the opposite direction—out the door of the vault, into the guard rooms and the staging area. The silver comet crashed into the far wall and was fractured in a thousand directions. The particles, yellowing in the atmosphere, wormed through any opening. Large clouds of them were sucked into the Central Bank’s ventilation system. Within seconds,