A Spy in Exile

Ya’ara had chosen to remain alone. She wasn’t happy with the plan they had come up with. Had she been working with experienced fighters by her side, she would have taken advantage of the isolation of the prisoners’ vehicle to create a significant numerical advantage at the scene. According to the most recent information they had gleaned from the computer system of the Belgian Prison Service, the vehicle carrying the prisoners would be manned by just two guards—the driver and a second prison guard sitting next to him. She assumed they would both be armed. The prisoners in the back of the van would be alone, with no guards. A guard in the back with them could very easily become a hostage. And if he were armed, the prisoners could seize his weapon. Security for the convoy, therefore, rested primarily on the escort vehicles. The guards manning them could respond quickly and efficiently to any incident. Diverting the escort vehicles and isolating the van carrying Hamdan would give them the advantage of surprise and the potential advantage of creating a superior fighting force in terms of size. They would be temporary advantages only, of course. The guards in the escort vehicles would realize that they had been cut off from the prisoner van, and were likely to backtrack to the separation point as quickly as possible. Ya’ara decided therefore to divert the prisoner van at a point along the route that would delay the return of the escort vehicles for as long as possible. A busy one-way street. They wouldn’t be able to backtrack against the flow of the traffic. They’d have to circle around to the separation point, and doing so would take time. Not long, though. Ya’ara and Assaf had checked the route, and did it, without sirens and flashing blue lights, in two minutes and twenty seconds. Ya’ara assumed that the escort vehicles would do it in a minute and a half. During that time, she and her team would have to divert the van, stop it, disable it, neutralize the two guards, gain access to the prisoner compartment, identify Hamdan, kill him, and withdraw. And all of it without causing irreversible harm to the guards and without causing any injury to the other prisoners, if there were any in the van with their object.

But Ya’ara didn’t have experienced fighters at her disposal. These were her cadets. Barely three months into their training. With the exception of the mission in Bremen, they lacked operational experience and had never found themselves in a face-to-face confrontation with professional armed guards. She couldn’t put them at such risk. Assaf had indeed served as an officer and fighter in the Combat Engineering Corps, but that didn’t make him an experienced assassin qualified to operate on the streets of Europe. Batsheva had already proven herself to be a competent actress and creative thinker, but Ya’ara struggled to picture her detonating an explosive device or firing a pistol in broad daylight, with or without Manolo Blahnik pumps on her feet. And the intelligent Nufar, she did great work as a hacker, but she, too, wasn’t ready yet for an operation of this kind.

Ya’ara was at a pub in one of the narrow alleys that led off from the Grand Place. She was sitting alone, on the table in front of her a large glass of beer, one of the hundreds of varieties the pub boasted. All made in Belgium of course. The pub wasn’t crowded, and the ice-cold look in her eyes was enough to repel the men who thought, for a fraction of a second only, of approaching her. Very beautiful, but dangerous and radiating about as much warmth as an iceberg. That’s the impression she was giving off, and at that point in time, it was the exact impression she wanted them to get. Her thoughts drifted momentarily to Matthias, and she wondered what he was going through, what was happening with him. She felt a sudden longing for him, wanted to be with him, to feel the pull of his large, powerful body next to her. She shook her head and returned to the mental image of the scene of the targeted killing that appeared so clearly in her mind. Not for a second did she consider cancelling the operation. But she had to get through it without placing her cadets in the line of fire. She pictured herself emerging from the shadows of the street and moving toward the prisoner van that had been cut off from its escorts and had suddenly run into a dead end. Municipal excavation work had closed the street. This they knew from their patrols around the area, which had focused on the final kilometer leading up to the courthouse. Being so close to their destination, the escorts would have let their guard down a little by then, forgetting that the final kilometer was always the most dangerous. Only thinking, what now?