The End-Time Foretellers Page 3

  “Well?”

  “So think about it. Cars have to drive all day to photograph the streets. Do you think they’d have drivers in them?”

  “Is there any alternative?”

  “Turns out that there is”, he replied. “Google has developed driverless cars, they recently made a deal with the state of California over twelve such vehicles.”

  “That is amazing,” I said. “How’s it possible?”

  Amos went into YouTube and typed without looking at the keys. On the screen a video came on, showing these cars in action and explaining the laser beams that scanned the roads and alerted obstacles, cameras and other details that really didn’t interest me at that very moment.

  “I think I got the idea, it’s really exciting. Call Toyota Tel Aviv, ask if they got these cars in and text me. I’m on my way to the bank, I’ll take out two million. It’ll probably cost something like that with all the equipment. “

  Amos smiled. “So should I throw out the summons for the driving course?”

  “No”, I said. “Leave it on the desk, maybe I’ll go. It’s worth keeping the license valid, who knows when I’ll need it.” I glanced at the screen. “I don’t think I’ll come across a car like this any time soon, you got to leave your options open.”

  “I thought you don’t intend to leave Tel Aviv”, he answered defiantly.

  “To the extent that I have anything to do with it, I hope not to leave Tel Aviv in the near future, or to leave the neighborhood, for that matter.” I paused and looked at him. “How about you, Amos?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, what about your license?”

  He looked away from me. “They won’t let me have one. I didn’t go to the army. I’m...”

  “Still? Those jerks” I said. “Give me your ID card.”

  Amos looked at me in puzzlement and took the ID card out of his wallet. I took a photo of it with my phone and gave it back to him. “Thanks”.

  “What?” he asked, smiling.

  ***

  The bank was close, about three hundred yards down the street. I hate this city but at least everything is close. Every cloud has a silver lining.

  I assumed the black car would follow me.

  I began to walk briskly towards the bank. I had two checks to deposit, with a total of less than a thousand shekels. I hate checks, usually the kids are fine actually, they bring cash without making problems, but the mothers, oh, the mothers: “Can I split it into fifty payments?”

  “Lady, it’s a gaming mouse costing seventy shekels.” The black car started. I increased my pace. The car caught up with me. I thought of breaking into a sprint but I knew there’d be no use.

  The car was driving beside me. I started walking purposefully slowly. The blacked-out window opened and I saw Rami’s face in a graying marine haircut, wearing his ubiquitous sunglasses. I haven’t missed him. I suspected it could be Rami. Him and his secret operations. It’s always something, it’s always secret, confidential and of the utmost importance to the State of Israel. Every time is the last time. Until next time. What does he get out of it? Money, perhaps prestige as well. I didn’t stop walking.

  “Tell me,” asked Rami, “don’t I get a hello?”

  “No.” I kept walking.

  The last assignment was the last assignment as far as I was concerned. Breaking into a bank in Lebanon, going into Hezbollah’s secret accounts in order to attain more targets. Rami was with me on the ground. The remote intrusion produced the entry codes for the bank’s computers, we needed the computers inside the bank itself. We landed at the bank accompanied by a unit that broke into it and secured the perimeter. It was two-thirty in the morning, the bank was vacant. At the entrance, one guard was anaesthetized. Flares deployed two kilometers north of us and a little noise in the area allowed us to operate quietly with attention directed away from us. A helicopter circling above was planned to evacuate us at the right moment. Rami breathed down my neck as I extracted the data from the bank’s main terminal. I hated it. He stood over me and distracted me and kept pressuring me. “It’ll take as long as it takes, Rami, get out of my face and make sure that there isn’t some missile heading over with our names on it.” It didn’t help, he didn’t ease up. He never eases up.

  ***

  “Stop for a moment, Yoav.”

  “Not likely. Leave me alone.” I said not, looking at him as I continued walking.

  ***

  I finally managed to extract the list of targets and upload it onto a mobile storage device. That wasn’t enough for Rami. He passed me a note. “What is this?” I asked. He said I had to make a transfer from one of Hezbollah’s accounts to an account in the Cayman Islands. “What’s going on here, Rami?” I asked again, and he pulled out a gun. I looked at him in astonishment. He said that I was endangering all the soldiers fighting the mission and delaying them all. “Stop being smart, Yoav, and start obeying orders.” I made the transfer. He never mentioned it since.

  ***

  “I had to, Yoav, you know that.”

  “What are you referring to?”

  “The gun in the bank. I am unable to reveal every detail to you. There are things that are classified and you refused an order at a critical moment. I did what I had to do.”

  “And now I’m doing what I have to do, Rami, I’m going to the bank to deposit these checks. And you -- do you know what you have to do? You have to get out of here. Take yourself and your tired slogans and beat it.”

  The car continued inching its way forward, Rami observing me in silence.

  “Listen, Yoav, you’ve gotten into some serious trouble, we all have. We need to talk.”

  I stopped for a moment and looked at him. “I’m sick of this, Rami. You appear in my life, each time wrecking it a little further. As far as I’m concerned, the prime minister’s cat can remain stranded on the moon! I have no interest in your operations.”

  Rami was silent for a moment and then said, “This is the last time, believe me. For better or worse, the last time, but you have to talk to us.” I don’t have to do anything. Certainly not for Rami. “My word,” Rami said. “This is the last time you’ll ever see me. I don’t want to involve other forces. A fifteen-minute meeting, that’s all. I’m bringing you back to this very spot at 9:00 AM precisely.”

  I looked at the clock, it was 8:15. “That’s three quarters of an hour, Rami... How does a fifteen-minute meeting take forty-five minutes?”

  I got into the car and we drove to the small apartment in Basel Street. I thought I’d never have to see that place again.

  7

  Basel Street, Tel Aviv

  “You can’t do that,” I said finally. The anger was welling inside of me. The fat man looked at Rami and then looked back at me. “Really?!” There was the smell of mildew in the air. Don’t they ever ventilate this place? I thought. A bare floor with small old-fashioned tiles, white-painted stark walls. Once upon a time there was a plant purchased in Ikea, it must have wilted and gotten thrown out with the trash. A lonely desk stood in the middle of the room, I was seated on one side of it, and they on the other. The only thing missing was a fan circling over my head... In the corner of the room was an air conditioner set to 32 degrees, operating at a minimal setting.

  Everything is terribly accurate in their world, even the chairs. New black chairs, insufficiently padded lest you feel too comfortable. On the left was a small kitchenette. I saw the electric kettle, Nestle instant coffee, Elite black coffee and a box of Wissotzky Green tea, the only tea Rami drinks.

  “Rami,” I protested, “you were there! You saw exactly what happened. Tell them it was Yossi, he fired at the girl, I wasn’t involved in the shooting. It was Yossi, he did it in self-defense, you know that.”

  “No one cares,” Rami said. “B’Tselem have proven that an innocent civilian was shot. We broke into h
er home and killed her. It’s murder in any language you want.”

  I blinked for a moment. “Rami, listen, murder or not, I really don’t understand how I’m connected to it.” Yossi shot her in self-defense, how many times do I need to say it? You were two feet away from me, explain it to... whatever your name is.” I pointed at the fat man.

  Rami lowered his head and said, “Sorry, Yoav, I have no choice, you’ve been caught. You’d better cooperate.”

  “I’ve been caught?” I asked. “I have been caught?” I felt like a fish in a net, pulled out of my comfortable life and left to squirm. I hated these encounters, the helplessness. They had rehearsed this, I pictured Rami pacing from the window to the table and lecturing the fat man about the different stages of my recruitment. I’ve seen it so many times before that it made me want to puke.

  He was called the fisherman. He could recruit anyone, a kind of dark talent. He could obtain secrets about every guy in the country and engineer it so that that person couldn’t refuse. He did it well, and he was well-compensated for it and for his other questionable talents. I despised him but he didn’t care. For Rami, life was utilitarian, there were no metrics of love or hate, there was willing or unwilling to cooperate. It also had its advantages. If you upset him very much but ultimately did things that suited his agenda, he would forget that you ever fought with him.

  I thought back to the first time I had met Rami. It was a long time before the mission to the bank in Lebanon, and before we were ever deployed in Hebron. We were seventeen and a half, Yossi and I, in my parents’ home in West Rishon LeZion. In those days we weren’t very accomplished hackers. We were young and excitable; the very fact that we were able to penetrate any database was exciting to us. Covering up the trail that lead back to us – which is rudimentary in any decent hacker’s book – seemed utterly distant and irrelevant to us. At that age, you think you’re going to live forever and that nothing bad will ever happen to you.

  We were riding a wave of supposed success, made up of insignificant small hacks – and then one day we looked at the monitor in astonishment. “I think we accidentally breached the Bank of Israel’s computer,” Yossi said, and both of us burst out laughing. I had a neighbor who worked for the Bank of Israel, we went into his house once and asked him for milk. While I waited, Yossi snuck inside and did something on his computer. When the neighbor came back with the milk, I told him I thought his sprinklers had been on for several hours. Of course I had taken it upon myself to turn them on in advance. The neighbor ran to turn them off. Meanwhile, Yossi returned with a big smile. We hadn’t imagined that it would be so easy to break in through his computer.

  A persistent knocking at the door half an hour later dispelled our jubilation. The interrogation in separate rooms also didn’t help our mood. A man wearing civilian clothes came into my interrogation room and said that his name was Rami. He explained that he was responsible for a special unit that answered directly to the prime minister and that he was looking for talented hackers. I appeared to him to be suitable, apparently. In fact, he decided to recruit myself and Yossi together. In the blink of an eye we went from being dangerous hackers to cyber information fighters in a highly classified unit. Following my military service and after Yossi died, I continued to work with Rami and hated every minute of it until I managed to get rid of him with the damned mission in Lebanon, or so I thought.

  I looked at his Australian boots and the black jeans that covered them. Brown Blundstones that the jeans made look more like shoes than boots. If they really are water resistant, perhaps he can go fishing in the sea instead of this hole. Maybe I’ll manage to free myself of the hook after all.

  “Are you out of your mind? How does this have anything to do with me?!” I tried to push off as hard as I could.

  The fat man gave me a menacing look. “Listen, kiddo, it seems that you’re not getting what’s going on here. The State of Israel is under threat of extinction, there is a tangible threat of an Iranian nuclear missile aimed at Tel Aviv. I’m starting to lose patience with you.”

  Rami gave him a sharp glance.

  “There’s nothing to hide, he’s going to carry out the mission anyway,” the fat man said. He looked at me and pointed at a piece of paper. “Do you see this?” he asked, waving the piece of paper around and then throwing it at me.

  I looked at the page and saw a Ministry of Justice logo on it. “That’s your indictment,” he said.

  “Indictment?”

  “For murder.”

  The fat man rose from his seat, snatched the piece of paper, and sat back down.

  “Rami?”

  Rami lowered his gaze. “Sorry. You have to do this mission, you have no choice here. Either you sign an emergency conscription to our unit or...” He got up, walked over to the window, leaned on it with both hands, and looked out.

  Rami spoke monotonously, looking outside. “I am going to testify that five years ago we mistakenly entered the wrong house in Hebron where you panicked and shot an innocent girl. We tried to stop you, but you were terrified. Yossi was killed by terrorists. I don’t remember what happened apart from that. It took the B’Tselem human rights NGO several years to compile the material.”

  I couldn’t utter a word, I wanted to flip the desk onto the fat man and Rami and run away from there, but I was rendered immobile. I lowered my gaze. “But Rami, you know what happened, you know exactly what happened...”

  I remembered Yossi. My heart began to pound. He knows what happened, he would never forgive me, no one would. Flashbacks from Yossi’s funeral, everyone so tough, reading eulogies monotonously. And me screaming on the inside, burning with shame. How could I let him die like that? How could I chicken out at the last moment? I felt like I had killed him and everyone was accusing me. I wasn’t there for him, for Yossi, a man who would do anything for me, including jumping on a grenade. My heart was torn to shreds. Where is Yossi?

  For years I’d been trying to do anything to forget. If I could drink alcohol I would purchase a subscription to Johnnie Walker. I would do that if I didn’t see the Deleted, that’s how Amos calls them, the Deleted who drag their feet into the store to exchange a game with their blood continuously swarming with chemicals.

  I couldn’t do it, so I found other ways. A slow and certain death from boredom in a games store where nothing happens. I thought the years would dull the pain and I could start over. I imagined that one day I would get up in the morning, all the memories would be erased and I could do something with my life.

  Rami continued to stare out the window. “Yes, I remember exactly what happened at the critical moment. You left us there to die like dogs, I’ll never forget it.” The bitterness in his voice took me back to those days.

  There was a silence in the room. The fat man shifted uneasily in his chair, or perhaps it was only my imagination. The Ice Man persisted in his native unfeeling state.

  I was filled with shame and rage. Years had passed and I still could not forgive myself for abandoning Yossi in the battlefield. I couldn’t understand how it happened to me. An automatic mechanism disengaged me from space and time and I found myself hiding out while my friends were inside. It was only the shouting and the shooting that brought me running back inside, but it was already too late.

  “Anyway,” I took a breath, “you admit I wasn’t there. Coward or defector, call me whatever you want, but I wasn’t there and I certainly didn’t shoot her.” My heart was beating wildly, my gaze drifting between the fat man and Rami.

  “What I know doesn’t necessarily correspond with what I’m going to say,” Rami said, still looking outside. “The situation is more complicated, and if we have to sacrifice a single tool in the battle, we will sacrifice one tool, like a champions’ game of chess, I look at the big picture Yoav, you must understand that.”

  The metallic chill in Rami’s voice served to flood me with aversion. It was as t
hough this weren’t a man’s life but a lab mouse in his cognitive experiment.

  Rami disengaged from the window and looked at me. “Of course there is a second option. We have a mission for you, maximally classified. We are an independent unit directly subordinate to the prime minister. No one will know you have joined us unless they have to be deployed. You will not be listed anywhere, we’re not listed in any agency either, to prevent leaks. It’s too critical.”

  There was a long silence in the room.

  “Where is the mission?” I asked.

  “We don’t know”, Rami said. “In the USA, but it’s unclear where exactly. That’s where you come into the picture”.

  “Is there anything that you do know?”

  “Have you heard of Pillar of Fire?” Asked Rami.

  “Well?” I said, vaguely remembering the news of recent days and the newspaper headlines at Charlie’s bodega.

  “There’s a problem,” the fat man said dramatically.

  “A problem?”

  “The system is un-hackable, right?” he said, agitated, stumbling over the words. “So, the truth is, it has a back door.

  Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Sure“, I said. ”Wait a minute, are you trying to tell me that this magnificent system is actually wide open?”

  “Not quite. The code to the back door is very complex. In principle, it can’t be hacked by ordinary means.“

  “If it becomes known that the system has a back door, there is a very high risk of it of being hacked,” I said. ”Why do you think it won’t be hacked? That’s completely crazy. “

  “Because no one knows apart from you, the two of us and some other people in the defense system, the president of the United States, the prime minister and the US developers of the system.”

  “Why put a breach in a defense system?”

  “The US agreed to give us the system with one restriction. If it falls into the hands of a megalomaniac prime minister who decides to provoke other countries, it will complicate the standing of the US in the region, so they put us on a leash, like dogs. If we try to attack, a slight pull on the leash and the collar will begin to tighten,” the fat man said.