Emerald (40 page)

Then at seven, just as they were about to go to dinner, Miriam’s cell phone rang. Ringo was calling with news that changed their plans. Mrs. Ricardo Klement just died ten minutes ago. He had intercepted the call to the coroner. “If you guys want to be morticians, you can get inside right now. I will send George with hospital coats in an ambulance. I will take care of the regular mortician’s staff.”

“We’ll do it!” Miriam exclaimed and hung up. Then she quickly explained the situation, and everyone got their equipment and weapons ready. David gave the final word: he and Miriam would do most of the talking with the family and attend to the body. Marla and Forbes would venture from the immediate scene throughout the house using any excuse to move into other rooms. They had done the drill. They had the skill. Now in for the kill, David said. Lenny and Jan would also go in the ambulance, and go to plant bugs in the other two houses during the uproar. The signal to get the hell out would be when George hit the ambulance siren then immediately turned it off. Whoever failed to re-enter the ambulance within 5 minutes, would be assumed to have gone over the fence and to then returned to their apartment on their own. If any of the team ran into anyone at any time in any house, they were to tell them they are counselors who were looking for whomever to speak to about their grief. “You’ve got to make it look like you were looking for a person to run into,” David told them.

The phone rang again. It was George on his way. They should leave now.

Everyone in the Klement compound had gathered in the main house to express their condolences, so Lenny and Jan accomplished their task with no interference, bugging every room in the two side houses. They got back to the ambulance before the siren sounded. David and Miriam were drawing out their procedure as long as they could. Forbes and Marla talked with several people in the large two-story house, carefully planting the wireless bugs as they moved through the rooms.

Finally, David and Miriam came out with the body on a gurney and carefully slid it into the ambulance. They had instructed the family not to come with them now. It would be better for all to view the body after it was prepared at the Martinez Mortuary. George handed Karlene Klement a black wreath for the front door, walked to the waiting vehicle, got in, put it in gear, and slowly drove down the circular driveway and out the gate toward the mortuary. Two blocks away, he let the six operatives, stuffed inside, out to make their way back to the apartment complex..

“I can’t believe it! We could have planned for a month and still not have been able to pull it off that well,” said Marla, and the rest of the crew agreed.

“Can we take further advantage of this situation to get onto their training grounds?” asked Lenny.

“We go back on the day of the funeral,” said David calmly, “once we learn the date and time.”

“The funeral will be in the daylight hours, so it’s going to be tricky,” Jan said.

The phone rang, and everyone quieted as David picked up the receiver. “Okay. Okay. Make sure the recording is working. Tell Sofie and Barto to let us know when anything comes up. Thanks, Rolf.”

David told the group that the Mossad couple in the third apartment, Rolf and Theo would share the listening duties and will notify us of anything significant. They will be listening in shifts twenty-four hours a day.

“That means we can leave after the funeral, hopefully?” Marla asked.

“Yes, hopefully,” Miriam said.

Ringo overheard that following the afternoon funeral the there would be a wake to be held at a large convention center in downtown Buenos Aires. From what he over-heard, everyone from the Compound would be in attendance. At four o’clock in the afternoon, the day of the funeral, the six operatives watched as two buses pulled out of the entrance of the Klement Compound decorated with wide black ribbons draped across the front bumpers. A man in a black suit got out of the second bus, closed the gate. The buses pulled in line to follow the three family limousines also draped with black ribbons. After the cars and busses left the Compound looked quiet, but those watching the proceedings could not tell if anyone remained in the Compound.

Forbes, Lenny, Jan and Marla each walked a quarter of the Compound perimeter looking for signs of life and seeing none, David sent one person over the fence to scout the place.

As the copper sun sank over the Rio de la Plata and the streetlights began popping on along Garibaldi Street, the Mossad team wearing camouflage khakis, faces blackened, got their walkie-talkies, cameras, filled their pockets with electronic bugs, and drove to the back end of the compound in Theo’s van and waited for anonymous darkness. Finally, Miriam got out, laid leather shield across ten fence spikes, scaled lightening the fence and sprinted across the vegetable garden to the safety of the trees bordering the training ground. She would give the ok for the next person to enter, when she felt it was safe. David nervously repeated quietly: “Plant a bug. Take a picture. Move on, and repeat some where else.”

Miriam headed straight to the ‘gym-like building’. With her ear next to the door, Miriam slowly turned the knob and opened it about four inches only to find pitch darkness. She slipped inside quietly and hugged the wall to get her bearings and allow her eyes to adjust. No light, no noise no movement, so she flicked on her flashlight. She was in a small office, placed a small bug under the desk, and slipped through another door on the far side, which opened into a large cavernous space. No sign of anyone. She gave the signal for the next two people to enter the compound.

Now Miriam had the choice of either going across the open area to the closest two-story building or getting in from the back end by circling around behind the gym structure. Taking the long way around she reached an outside door that opened with an easy twist of the knob, and silently crept through the lower level rooms lit only by the beam of her flashlight. Finding more empty offices and she again bugged the underside of each desk. Moving swiftly up the stairs she gave the signal for the others into the compound. She sent word that the top floor was all office space, then departed to the two-story building next door.

She discovered it was a laboratory of some kind. A light burned inside, causing her to crouch down quickly behind the first counter. Listening intently for a full minute but hearing nothing, Miriam slowly raised her head and peered over the countertop. No one appeared to be around. She moved to a glass-door cabinet on the side wall with shelves full of various-sized bottles and looked closely. From the labels, she could see that many contained metals, such as silver, gold and aluminum in powder form and there were also liquids like mercury and nitroglycerin. She whispered into the walkie-talkie attached to her collar, giving David instruction to enter this building, but warning him to be quiet as she had not yet scanned upstairs. He radioed back that Marla was on her way, and he would soon be there. Moving on up the metal stairwell to the opened center of the two-level room, she entered a four-sided landing with small labs opening up all around the periphery. Each small work space consisted of a metal, electrical or plastic construction shop with tools and eye shields laying about. One room on the corner was a calligraphy and engraving shop with all sorts of pens, tools, blank passports and identification papers lying on a desk under a large magnifying lamp. Returned to the stair-well Miriam saw Marla on the ground floor. Miriam waved for her to come up and start in the corner office. As Miriam was leaving, David entered and she pointed up to Marla, saying nothing as she exited out the door he had just entered.

As soon as she stepped outside the lab, she heard a baby crying. Quickly moving around the building out of sight of the barracks she notified David then decided to get the others out of the Compound. He passed the word on to the others. Miriam saw the leather shield still in place as she approached and swiftly scaled the fence. David would remove it as he came across last.

Miriam entered Theo’s van, slipped out of her camouflage garb and cleaned her face. A couple of minutes later, Forbes entered, followed shortly by Lenny and five minutes later Jan appeared. Theo yelled from the driver’s seat that the bus just turned down the side street. He was rolling. David and Marla were still out, but he had to drive away before the bus noticed them. Miriam told David and Marla to rush for the trees immediately that the van would pick them up when they came over the fence.

Marla came down the stairwell as fast as she could and raced to David who was by the door. When he peeked out and saw the bus pulling up in front of the barracks about fifty feet away he knew they could not leave by that door, so he told Marla to look for another exit on the left side while he looked on the right. David saw the metal cellar-like door in the floor and yelled at Marla to come quickly. They climbed down, closed the door behind them and continued down steep steps into the tunnel. Dimly lighted bare bulbs every forty feet or so hung from the ceiling on an open wire. The tunnel looked clear. They ran most of the way to the opposite end where a similar door lay at the top of some steps. David climbed up, lifted the door a couple of inches and peered around. He saw they were in a laundry room. No one was inside the room. David climbed out, held it for Marla and then gently closed it. Marla looked out the small window of the door leading outside and discovered that they were near the main house. The driveway lay off to the far left out of sight, and straight ahead, a short hedge grew. They slipped quietly outside and hid behind the hedge, hoping to be able to make a dash into the backyard and over the fence. As they lay there, they heard car doors slam and people talking. They were within 20 feet of the house so they had to make a break for it as soon as possible or else they’d have to stay there till it was safe. If anyone suspected them of being in the tunnel, the Klements would surely check the outside of the laundry room. David gave Marla the signal to make a run across the clearing to the cover of three tall sycamores. The trees were closer to the west fence and the activity was taking place near the front of the house.

Marla had never run so fast in her life. She froze behind one of the trees with David behind another tree in the clearing. They felt very exposed. The fence was still a good forty feet away. David whispered into the walkie-talkie telling Miriam of their predicament. She told him to stay where he was, they would make a disturbance out front so he and Marla could get over the fence. David signaled Marla to stay put and not move.

A couple of minutes later, Miriam and Jan walked down the sidewalk in front of the Klement house and stopped. They stood facing the street chatting with each other, with their backs to the guard shack. The gates were still open into the compound. Rolf pulled up to the curb in a taxi. Just as the girls were getting in, the horn suddenly got stuck. The guards and several people standing around out front stared toward the disturbance wondering what was going on. David and Marla raced toward the fence climbing over it quickly. When their feet hit the sidewalk, they walked undetected across the street to the apartments.

As they left for dinner, the team drove past the back of the compound by the training field and Jan screamed for them to stop the van. She had spotted the leather shields still on the fence spikes. Theo pulled up and David ran out and grabbed them off the fence.

Everyone was talking at once about the shield; it was a dead giveaway. No one on the Klement buses must have noticed it. They were excited that they had successfully pulled off the whole assignment that it was difficult to settle down to eat until they had all consumed at least three rounds of drinks. Tomorrow, they would pack up to leave, but before that they planned to go to the Mossad office in Buenos Aries and meet Ringo for the first time. David called him and asked him to set up return flights for tomorrow.

The non descript Mossad officein Buenos Aries shared a building with the Bank of Buenos Aries. The agency had the top two floors, the bank the bottom two. It was late afternoon when the six Tel Aviv agents walked into Mossad headquarters with Rolf and Theo and found a semi-circle of nine men and two women standing there to greet them. One of the men asked them to guess which one was Ringo, and each agent made a guess by pointing to one of the assembled group. Nobody guessed correctly. After Ringo stepped forward, everyone had a big laugh, shook hands and introduced themselves. Then they shared a catered, sumptuous feast. Champagne, talk and laughter flowed freely.