Chapter Eleven

  Sanguine Springs.

  Late Evening.

  The thin knife met no resistance. The blade, a carbon steel filleting knife, was sharp—beyond sharp. Its owner made sure of that. Sharp knives save lives, in the kitchen and beyond. The blade sliced, cutting an almost surgical cleavage on the draw stroke. It passed easily through the skin, once, twice, three times. There was no pleading, no crying, no words—only tears.

  Always with the tears.

  Jael Barak raised her forearm, using the relatively clean sleeve of her fitted green sweater to dry her eyes. She set down the knife and grabbed the semi-peeled onion from her cutting board. Her practiced fingers peeled the onion's skin, dropping the paper-like hollow shells into her compost bowl with the bulb's two ends. Across the kitchen, at the far end of an L-shaped counter, her propane range flared blue beneath a large stainless steel pan. Inside, the oil rippled as the tiniest of bubbles began to coalesce at the bottom of its surface.

  Jael sliced the onions into tiny translucent pieces, her hands working automatically while her mind wandered. Through the kitchen window, she scanned the pond's dark surface for the bird she'd spotted earlier that day. Gavia immer—the common loon.

  Two loons, she corrected. The bird, and Tony Dalotto.

  A paranoid loon. Always going off half-cocked. Like earlier, with Jake's daughter. She was about to step in when Brad showed up and de-escalated the confrontation.

  Poor girl. At least she's not a suspect.

  Sanguine Springs seemed like the safest town in America. Smaller than even the kibbutz of her childhood, the hamlet was set in an isolated zone that pros referred to as the "Middle of Nowhere." It's why she'd moved here, after taking a very early—and very painful—retirement from the Mossad. If anyone had a reason to be paranoid, it was her. Especially since she'd found the cameras. She'd found another one today, right before rattling Tony's cage.

  Jael had watched the whole surreptitious vehicle inspection. She wondered what Tony had been looking for after the young woman went inside. Luckily, he'd been jumpy and distracted. Suspicious, and sloppy too. Otherwise he'd have asked his own questions. Questions like what was Jael doing under the tree the whole time anyway?

  The tree. She'd forgotten to mark it.

  Jael put down her knife and turned from the cutting board, crossing through the shiplap-walled kitchen, through a living room right out of a therapist's vision board, and into her tiny study. The study was sparse, minimalist in nature, almost a closet, with no chairs or filing cabinets. Instead, a simple metal post-framed standing computer desk held a laptop on a stand at eye level and an additional USB keyboard trailing down to her desk's top at the perfect height for typing. The only other items within the room were a single bookshelf and a map.

  The bookshelf, three-tier and black, stood crammed with books about the Adirondacks, Lake Champlain, a few books of classic American poetry, and one shelf entirely devoted to religion. A Hebrew-language Torah sat alongside a thick leather-bound MacArthur study Bible, a Strong’s biblical concordance, and another foot’s worth of theological works. Other than the Torah, there were no books that connected her to her past. Jael ignored the bookshelf and computer, turning instead to face the map—a map stapled to a salvaged bulletin board on the room's longest wall. It was a map of Sanguine Springs, the town laid out in crisp aerial overview. Jael pulled a blue tack from the bottom edge of the bulletin board, rolled the dumbbell-shaped cylinder in her fingers, then pressed it into the image of the hamlet's towering lodgepole pine. The map was already studded with various tacks, each color denoting a different asset.

  Blue meant camera. This one made six. Six out of… who knows how many others.

  How did the old cliché go? You're not paranoid if they're really out to get you. Sanguine Springs was minuscule, a population small enough to fit in a minivan. Who else would be worth watching? The cameras had to be for her.

  But who was watching?

  Not Matthias. As much as the German rubbed her the wrong way, Jael's arrival predated him by more than a year. Not Jake either, even though he'd been a resident before her arrival. And not just because he was dead. The technophobic woodworker hadn't even bothered to install a landline in his house. He'd just use his brother's if he needed to make a call.

  He wasn't even hiding, and he acted more incognito than I do, she mused. But dichotomies aside, he was out of the running. That left Brad or Tony.

  Jael stared at the map for a second longer, then with a crooked frown, returned to the kitchen. Oil hissed and popped within the skillet as aerosolized droplets danced in the light of her exhaust fan. She swore and hastened to the pile of onions.

  Jael lifted the maple cutting board and carried it to the range, onions and all. Blue flames danced, stirred by the air current of her approach. The stove, like her water heater, ran on propane, stored in a large tank on the outside of her house. The population density of Essex County did not lend itself to such amenities as municipal water, sewage, or gas pipelines.

  She scraped the onions from the board into the waiting pan, drawing an immediate hiss as the alliums began to fry in the heated oil. She stirred the pot with an olive wood spoon and felt a pang of sadness. The spoon was a housewarming gift from Jake Clarke. Despite her introversion, the big man had carved the spoon, along with an accompanying salad fork, butter spreader, and charcuterie board as a welcoming present. He'd been friendly in a way she'd never known—no romantic interest, no ulterior motive. Just kindness. He'd helped her find her rhythm, even set her up with her job as sous chef at a high-end restaurant on Main Drive in Lake Place. But Jake, wonderful as he might have been, was dead.

  And now his daughter's here to pick up the pieces. Maybe I can repay the favor. At the very least, she could run blocker for her at Tony's party tomorrow.

  She had to attend anyway. The big guy would sulk if she didn't. And her files on neighbors could always use some updating. Maybe she'd finally be able to cross Tony off the suspect list. Brad was the obvious choice for surveillance after all. A former SEAL, Jael had always been suspicious that his military connections weren't as far in the past as he claimed. Whatever the cause, the surveillance seemed passive. If her enemies wanted her dead, she wouldn't be caramelizing onions right now.

  She was used to being watched. And she'd done some truly terrible things, in the name of her country. But that was in the past, before immigrating to America. Let them watch. It’s fine. The person I was is dead, buried along with her sins. Nothing to see anymore.

  She crossed the kitchen to stare at the lodgepole. The tree stood proud of its cluster, lit along its eastern side by Brad's porch lights. She stepped closer to the window and craned her neck to see the house almost fully lit. It was homey, bright, brighter than it had been in a long time. Must be catching up with his niece. Company did sound nice. Maybe tomorrow wouldn't be all bad.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  One good thing about Tony? He was always throwing parties. They were tedious, but secretly welcome. Life in Sanguine Springs was safe, but dull. Jael had never even had a dinner guest in her dining room.

  She turned towards the adjoining dining room. A black rectangular table, set with chairs for six, sat beneath a silver chandelier in the shape of a willow crown. The table was clean, cleared off after her solitary supper, prior to the night's special recipe. Its surface was a black plain, punctuated only at its center by the carefully placed quartet of irregularly shaped silver candlestick holders.

  A bittersweet reminder of happier times. It had graced the table of her parents' home, in the Golan Heights—right up until the suicide bomber that had claimed them both. She'd been away at university in Jerusalem, hoping to earn a degree in culinary sciences, but returned the very next day. Jael had seen the flash of silver among the charred debris of her family home. She left the smoldering ruin, carrying the candleholders with her. The dented settings were all she had left.

  That, and a new career path.

  The next day, she made a call from a battered payphone, letting the university know she wasn't coming back. After hanging up, she marched across the street, through a security checkpoint, and enlisted in the Israeli Defense Force.

  Seventeen. I've carried the family silver since I was seventeen. It had been twenty-five lonely years since then.

  The silver baubles held more than candlesticks—they carried the weight of generations. The silver had once been a menorah. It was her grandfather, Jocham, between the wars, who had melted the heirloom down, recasting it to hide the implement's true nature to survive in inter-war Berlin. Then came Kristallnacht, and the dangers multiplied like a wildfire.

  Jocham packed up his family and moved to France, only to hear the tread of German boots once more when France fell to the Third Reich. Frustrated by the lifetime of flight and hiding, Jocham decided to stop running. He joined the French Resistance, and somehow survived, outliving the "thousand-year Reich."

  When the world offered up the contested lands of Palestine to the Jews after the war, Jocham was one of the first to arrive in the promised land. There, he plied his skills for his new and promised homeland until his death in '88. By then, his son Jonathan was following in his footsteps, working hand in glove with the Israeli special forces. After Munich, and the white-knuckle brinksmanship of the Cold War, he knew that peace would not arrive in his time. His, or that of his daughter, Jael.

  For her part, Jael had not known about her grandfather’s past until her final year of high school. Nor had she planned to join the "family business."

  The bomb changed everything. She joined the IDF one year ahead of conscription. It was unusual but not unheard of; young nations are less bound by protocol. Jael was approved, sped through basic training, and leveraged her family name—the real one, not her current pseudonym— to land an interview with the Mossad.

  The Israeli spy agency took a chance, giving Jael a probationary mission—take out the Terror cell responsible for blowing up her parents. They gave her a list of names and addresses, and a disposable camera to help confirm her kills.

  That was it. No support, no firepower, nothing to tie her back to the Israeli government.

  It was the perfect test—for the Mossad. If she failed, they’d deny her. Succeed? They’d own her, and her rage.

  She took the list, went to a home goods store, and bought a block of cooking knives. Three days later, she appeared in the office of her prospective handler. Her clothes were torn, her face scratched, with one blackened eye swollen shut. She dropped a blood-stained disposable camera on the handler's desk, then collapsed to the floor.

  Jael awoke the next day in a bed in Galilee Medical Center, with an IV in her arm, and a thick folder on her chest.

  It was the first of many, many missions.

  Yes. She had reasons to be paranoid. But no reason to kill. Not anymore. She'd washed her hands. She was here for peace. Her own, at least.

  A sweetness filled the house, drawing her attention back to the stove. The steady heat had done its work, converting the stinging sulfuric compounds and water-laden starches into a rich, mahogany-colored paste. Jael returned, and flipped the onions to keep them on the knife's edge of caramelized perfection. It was tedious, but she didn't mind. It was like fishing. An organic practice of patience, where you silence your inner demons long enough to let time do the work for you. But like fishing, it required attention, or else the quarry would be lost. Patience, and vigilance. A balancing act.

  Tomorrow's party would be a similar balancing act. Jael would befriend Allison, acting as a buffer between her and Tony. And she'd give Tony something sweet as a peace offering. Homemade vanilla caramel ice cream. Her mother's own secret recipe. She might even tell him about the onions, after a few bites.

  And she'd do it all while running surveillance of her own. If Tony was the one behind the cameras, there should be something to give it away in his house.

  Girl time, cooking, and a little light espionage. It was going to be a busy night, putting on masks and balancing skills on the edge of a knife.

  Jael smiled. Just like old times.

  She did her best work on the edge of a knife.

  Tetherly Campus, Los Angeles, California.

  Early evening.

  Hadley's office dimmed. He glanced up to see a ball of molten iron slipping beneath the Pacific's waves. Sunset already?

  This was taking forever.

  I can't believe how hard they make it to kill someone these days. Hadley Caine scowled at his computer. His eyes darted left to right, his lips moving as he read and re-read the much-revised Kill Order. Horus Overwatch was very particular when it came to target packages. He assumed they were a self-contained unit, carrying everything they needed to get the job done. They certainly earned enough.

  Apparently, that wasn't the case.

  He couldn't have known. This was his first time taking the bosses' private muscle for a spin. The terse demand for more intel, and something called materiel, caught Hadley in the middle of a victory day-dream. He'd nearly pulled the plug on the mission.

  Until the hard boys started rattling the door deep inside his brain. And Hadley listened.

  What followed was an afternoon of acquiring wheels, weapons and whatever else he could find within 200 miles of Albany, New York on short notice. He was surprised how few of the guns he'd seen on TV were even allowed in New York. Something called the SAFE Act had all but neutered the state's firepower. A quick dive into the dark web led him to a contact with ties to the Albany mafia—cash up front, Bitcoin preferred, no questions asked. It left his kill squad with a collection of semi-automatic rifles with ten-round magazines, pump shotguns and a duffel bag full of handguns scoured from the streets of the Empire State's capital city.

  It wasn't what the PMC requested, but it should do. The guns were fully semi-automatic, after all. And ten rounds should be more than enough.

  It was an education. Next time he would be better prepared. If there was a next time.

  During his afternoon of frantic research, Hadley noticed that Horus Overwatch was due for an audit; a little more digging revealed a new dark project whose budget line dwarfed HO—something called PUP. The program's tacit description revealed it to be a novel, higher-tech form of "carbon neutralization."

  If that meant what he thought it did, then the Horus Overwatch initiative was nearing its end-of-life.

  Good. He hoped Newton had a succession plan in mind, one that involved eradicating that particular department. Literally. Soldiers served a purpose, but when that purpose was through? They were no longer needed. Just a tool to be replaced.

  Hadley's lips moved into a thin, customer-service smile. He raised a slender index finger and tapped the Return key, just as the sun's last ray slipped beneath the waves.

  It was done. He sighed in rare and genuine happiness.

  Nighttime.

  Hadley stood, gathered his things, and left the office. Time to eat, then go home and get some rest. He had no doubt that his dreams would be pleasant.