The Traveler (6 page)

The moon just started to rise over the holy city of God. She was dressed in a navy blue suit with wide-legged pants, necessary for the two ankle holsters she wore beneath them. Her eyes watched the front doors of the building as men and women of the archival staff prepared to leave after their evening shift. She watched as the two very-well-armed guards waved at the departing employees and then securely locked the front doors. The two guards looked through the glass and then turned back to their duties. The woman knew that security here wasn't as tight as at other government facilities, as this operation was more a written and oral history of the State of Israel. So, if you wanted someone's eyewitness testimony in regard to the Holocaust this was the place to go. Any other secrets were stored in many more highly secured facilities across the country. The dark-haired woman could only hope the files had not been transferred over the years.

She saw the young man with the thick horned-rimmed glasses as he also separated from the rest of the archive staff as they made their way to the parking area beside the building. Through years of training she was able to keep her heart from racing faster as she anticipated what the employee had to say. He was obviously up to no good as she took in the frightened way the boy moved. His head flitted left and then right as he approached her and then sat.

“Look, Sami, relax, this is not a facility that houses nuclear secrets. It's just a records storage unit, you said so yourself.”

The boy who had just graduated from Tel Aviv Technical Institute frowned as he looked around the park area nervously.

“I said relax.” The woman patted the boy's leg. “Do you have the file?”

The young man looked around and shuffled his feet as he clutched his backpack closer to his body.

“Sami, you're not steeling state secrets, it's only concentration camp testimony.”

“Yeah, then why was this file cross-referenced with another, and that one is flagged as secret? Secret and no longer in this building.”

“Cross-referenced with what?” she asked, becoming concerned.

“A file code-named ‘The Traveler.'”

The boy could see something register in the woman's eyes, which were the strangest he had ever seen. In the defused moonlight he could swear she had one green and one brown eye. He decided that this dark-haired woman scared him and he wanted to leave. The beautiful woman was holding out her hand as she was deep in thought.

“Uh, are you forgetting something?” he said as he shied away from her elegant hand.

The woman came back to the present, frowned, and then handed the boy a white envelope. He accepted it and placed it in his backpack and in the same motion brought out a file folder and handed it to her.

“That's only a copy, the original is where it's supposed to be.”

The woman acted as though she didn't hear the boy as she opened the file and leaned into the cover of the streetlight to read it. The archivist watched a moment and then moved off into the night. She sat on the vacated park bench as the night became still around her. Her eyes scanned the thin sheets of paper.

She knew she had lost some of her edge when she missed the four men moving in around her. Her eyes continued to read from the weak streetlight above when a hand came from over her shoulder and snatched the file from her fingers. She immediately raised her right leg to retrieve the gun in the ankle holster but a Glock nine-millimeter handgun appeared in her face. As she raised her head, the gun was removed from her grasp, and she saw the young man from the archives being led back to the area. The woman knew just who it was she was facing. She turned and looked at the man who had taken the file from her.

“Uncle,” she said as her double-colored eyes took in the heavily mustachioed man in front of her. The large frame of the heavyset former army general stood over the diminutive woman. “How are you?”

“Niece,” he said as he closed the file and then looked at the heading on the front. His brown eyes went from it to the woman who was being handcuffed in front of him. He whistled and then handed the folder over to a man next to him. The large man in the blue blazer and simple white shirt shook his head sadly and then turned and left. Her eyes followed him until she couldn't see him anymore.

“You are under arrest for crimes against the State of Israel, in particular, for espionage.”

Former Mossad agent Major Anya Korvesky watched a large Mercedes as it sped off. She was pushed and shoved to another waiting car that would follow the Mercedes to her final destination—the headquarters of the Mossad, Israel's hardened intelligence apparatus.

There she would face the charge of treason that her uncle, General Shamni, director of the Mossad, would file against his niece in the next hour.

Still, the only thing she could focus on was the file that had been taken from her and was now speeding back to headquarters with her angry uncle. Now she had lost her only lead to uncovering the truth that she and Doctor Compton sought.

The young Queen of the Gypsies raised in Jerusalem and secretly placed into the Israeli Mossad at the age of eighteen was now going to hang before she could help getting back the man she had fallen in love with—Carl Everett.

*   *   *

Three hours had passed and Anya found herself still waiting in the most uncomfortable position she could have ever imagined, although sitting in a dark room with handcuffs was not a memory she could draw from. The two agents who watched her looked noncommittal as if they dealt with treason on a daily basis, and with her uncle that was probably closer to the truth than she knew. She eyed the men but knew that any escape attempt was futile as these agents watching her were not your average Mossad personnel—they were the personal protection of her uncle, General Shamni. They answered only to him.

A man looking more the academia-type, thin and proper, entered from the large office fronting the empty reception area.

“The general will see you now,” the young man said in his perfectly pressed suit, which was a great accomplishment at two in the morning. The man nodded, indicating that the two guards should assist the prisoner to her feet. They did so, far gentler than she could have hoped for. They fell in line behind the first man and soon she found herself in a large and very dark office with no windows. There was a single lamp burning on the large desk of the head of the Mossad—her uncle's desk. The two men stood on either side as the first man brought the general another folder and then with one last disturbing look at Anya, he left the office.

Her eyes went to the general, who was busy reading a file folder report. He absentmindedly held out the small silver key that would free her hands. The agent on the right loosened and then removed the cuffs. Both men turned and left the office. Anya looked for a chair and when she saw one started to move toward it.

“Remain standing in front of me, please, Agent Korvesky.”

Anya froze and didn't move as the general kept reading. She watched his large hands as he flipped a page and read some more.

“You have placed me in what the Americans say is ‘between a rock and a hard place,' young lady, you know that?”

“I hate that I had to do that, Uncle.”

The large rotund man closed the file and finally looked up at her. “Yet here we are. The head of the Mossad and his lovely niece, who was just arrested for espionage.”

“This is the last thing I wanted, was to embarrass you, Uncle.”

“But again, here we are.” He slid the yellow file across his expansive desk and then looked up at his niece as she rubbed her wrists after the uncomfortable cuffs. She watched her uncle's eyes move to a far, darkened corner of his office. “With the world getting even crazier than before this war in space, this is not the time to be a treasonous agent in a paranoid country. The men in charge have certain knee-jerk reactions to things like that. The order of the day would be that you are taken into the desert and shot.” His dark eyes settled on Anya. “Believe me, many a person has left this office from the very spot you are now standing and were immediately executed—shot on my direct orders.” He slammed his hand down on the desk and the file folder.

“Uncle—”

He held up his beefy hand, stilling her voice.

“Do you think you could keep secrets from me, niece?”

“I—”

“I am the gatekeeper, young lady. I know what is going on in my own home, and the Mossad is
my
home. Israel is my home.” His eyes again flitted to the far corner. She saw nothing but the blackness of the room. “I keep the secrets.” He shoved the file forward until it was perched on the edge of the desk. “Do you think for one minute your returning to our little family satisfied me enough to lower my guard, even where my niece was concerned?” He shook his head. “Sit, Anya.”

With her heart aching for the pain she was causing her only living relative, Anya sat with lowered head.

“I have read a few of the briefing reports to the American security council. I know why it is you want these files so dearly. I'll tell you now, not that it matters much, that the information you are seeking is not viable. It's a dead end as we ourselves found out three years ago in our cooperative search with the rest of the world as we scanned every archive file for technological information. That's why I can say to you in no uncertain terms that what you seek is just not there.”

Anya felt her hope to find the file fall through her stomach as she realized that this was just another dead end.

General Shamni reached down and brought out another file and placed it on the first.

“This is the file you are looking for.”

The file was bordered in purple and read “Top Secret” in bold red letters in the Hebrew script.

“It's all there.”

“But I'm under arrest,” Anya said as the general stood from his high-backed chair.

“We believe the person you seek is no longer alive, at least not in Israel. Moira Mendelsohn no longer exists, I'm afraid, and this is the only record recovered from what is secretly known in certain circles as ‘The Traveler' file. One of the most guarded secrets held by this government, so secret that it failed to turn up in our technology search conducted by the Americans. The file ‘The Traveler' is only useful in who the Traveler was, not what the project was about. The young woman was never fully compliant when questioned by our people when she was in Israel after World War II. The only reason my predecessor thought the Traveler file was relevant was because of who financed the original project in 1943, and also the man responsible for conducting the experiments.”

“The names?” she asked, pushing her bad luck even further. But if she was going to be shot or hanged for treason she wanted to know all there was on the rumored testimony of the Traveler.

“Heinrich Himmler and engineering professor Lars Thomsen, one of Adolf's favorite technology philosophers and a correspondent and contemporary of one Albert Einstein.”

“Uncle, if I am to be charged with treason, why are you telling me these things?”

“When I said I was the gatekeeper, evidently I wasn't as good at finding out secrets as keeping them, my dear niece.”

She felt her heart slip as she realized just how good her uncle's intelligence service really was.

“Or would you prefer the future Mrs. Carl Everett?”

“No, that adds a certain charm to these proceedings, doesn't it?” a voice from the darkness said.

Anya, after the initial shock of learning that her secret engagement to Carl was now an open secret, was now trying for damage control that was not going to be there. She had indeed become involved with a foreign national, which was another crime against the state considering her job in intelligence. What was one more charge considering her predicament? She turned and faced the darkness where the familiar voice had come from. The man turned on a table lamp and sat with crossed legs.

“You?” she said as startled as she had ever been.

“I understand you two know each other from Antarctica,” the general said as he stood and stepped up to Anya as she felt her jaw drop even further when the big man stood up.

“You know this man, Uncle?” she said without turning back to face the head of the Mossad.

“Yes, we have worked together from time to time, just as he works for everyone else if the money is right … from time to time of course.”

The blond man smiled, reached down, and took Anya's right hand and kissed it, barely brushing his lips against her skin.

“Honored to see you again.”

Anya had lost her voice when Colonel Henri Farbeaux spoke and smiled that disarming smile of his. He straightened and then his brows rose three times in rapid succession.

“But alas, I have been reduced to an errand boy by men and women I'm not real sure if I like or not, but they pay and pay well.”

“I must admit you kept your secret concerning our dear Mr. Everett close to the vest. I would say you have a future in the intelligence-gathering business, but we both know that would be pushing it, don't we?” her uncle said as he handed the two folders to his niece.

“What are you doing, Uncle?”

“Sending you home. You're an American now, Mrs. Everett, and one that has made her choices.”

Anya looked from the files in her hands to her uncle and then she dropped them and hugged the director of the most brilliant intelligence-gathering apparatus in the world. He allowed it, but only briefly. After a moment the large man forced her hands apart and brought them from his neck. She could see the tears well up in his eyes. The man who had so ruthlessly protected the borders of Israel was near to breaking down.

“I have to turn my back on you now, niece. You can no longer return to these shores. As I said, choices have been made, choices you cannot turn from now.”

Henri Farbeaux retrieved the two files that had fallen to the carpeted floor as Anya stood there stunned. He read the smaller one. “The Traveler, Moira Mendelsohn.” He replaced the first with the second, far thicker file labeled simply “Doorway,” and in red letters below it, “testimony of participants.” He raised his brows and watched the two people in the room. The woman was still captivating in her exotic looks. He thought back to when they first met in the Antarctic three months before. Yes, the Gypsy woman was beautiful, and he could see the allure for Carl Everett to resign from the world in order to stay with her.