Eventually I returned to the apartment and took a long, hot shower. I thought about shaving my head and getting rid of my beard as well, but didn’t feel up to it. I’d let Matt get a good laugh and then shave it off next week. Instead, I toweled off, dressed in some clean khakis and a black polo shirt, and slumped in a chair.
I pulled up a Bible app on my phone but found I had no idea what to read. I had raced my way through the New Testament in the last few weeks and found all of it fascinating. I especially loved the verses that made it clear I’d go to heaven when I died.
Like when Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.”
Or when the apostle Paul wrote, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Or when the apostle John wrote, “He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life.”
Such verses had spoken powerfully to me in recent days. But now that I had read the New Testament, what was I supposed to do next? Plow my way through the Old Testament? That had little appeal. The Garden? The Flood? The Law? Who begat whom? I had no idea how any of that was relevant to me. But was I just going to skip it? Wasn’t it important? Weren’t there things in there God wanted me to know? I had so many questions, and I looked forward to sitting down with Matt. I knew he had answers, and I was fairly certain I wasn’t likely to find them on my own.
In the end, I did finally dip into the Old Testament. After stumbling around for a while, I settled on the book of Psalms. I picked a random number and decided to read the ninth chapter. One passage particularly captured my attention.
My enemies retreated;
they staggered and died when you appeared.
For you have judged in my favor;
from your throne you have judged with fairness.
You have rebuked the nations and destroyed the wicked;
you have erased their names forever.
The enemy is finished, in endless ruins;
the cities you uprooted are now forgotten.
How I wished this were true for me. It just wasn’t. My enemies were not retreating. By all measures, they were advancing. They weren’t staggering or dying. They weren’t finished or in endless ruins. Abu Khalif and his men were still on a genocidal killing spree. And I was being kicked off the battlefield and sent into hiding. Where was the justice in that?
I glanced at my grandfather’s pocket watch and realized it was time. So I grabbed my suitcase and briefcase, walked out of the room, and locked the apartment door behind me for the last time.
I suddenly found myself overwhelmed by a profound and pervasive sense of sadness. I was about to leave a team I had truly begun to respect and admire. I was leaving a job unfinished, and there were few things I hated more. And then there was Yael, who had tried to let me down gently but nonetheless had rejected me. I wasn’t angry at her. To the contrary, I genuinely wanted her to be happy. But it stung, in part because of the suddenness of it all. I’d come to Israel imagining everything going so differently between us. It had never even occurred to me that she might be seeing someone else, much less falling for him, much less agreeing to marry him. Last night I’d been in shock. This morning I felt like I was grieving the loss of another friend.
We would not write. We would not call. We would not keep in touch. There would be no point. She had a new love and a new life ahead of her.
What exactly did I have in front of me?
87
It was nine o’clock exactly when I knocked on the conference room door.
A moment later, I heard Yael’s voice through the intercom telling me to come in, and the electronic locks opened. I entered and found the entire team assembled with Ari Shalit at the head of the table. It was immediately apparent by their disheveled appearances and the empty coffee mugs that they had not just arrived. They’d been there much, if not all, of the night.
“Please, J. B., take a seat,” Yael said.
There was a spot available next to her, but I chose not to take it. Instead, I walked over to Shalit and took the empty chair next to him and prepared myself for what was coming. Yael would undoubtedly thank me for being on the team, however briefly. She’d say I’d been helpful, and Ari would agree, and the team would nod, and I would say thank you, and they would clap, and that would be that. I’d already decided I wanted to leave on a positive note. I was grateful for these specialists, a unique breed with a high calling, and I desperately wanted—no, needed—them to succeed, so there was no point saying anything sour or critical. The entire little ceremony would be mercifully quick, and soon I’d be on a chopper bound for Ben Gurion International Airport and then on a long flight back to the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Except the morning took an unexpected turn.
“The team and I have been here since just after midnight,” Yael explained after I’d sat down.
“Why’s that?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
“We’ve been testing your theory,” she replied.
“What theory?”
“About Dr. Al-Siddiq.”
“Okay,” I said cautiously.
“The short version is that over the past few hours we’ve determined that Al-Siddiq hasn’t left Saudi Arabia in four years,” she continued. “He lectures. He writes. He’s somewhat of a big shot. Runs seminars. Runs conferences. Islamic scholars from all over the world come to see him. But he doesn’t travel.”
“Go on.” Did the team find my theory compelling or ridiculous? And if the latter, why bother telling me minutes before I departed?
“Two days ago, Al-Siddiq booked his first international flight in four years,” Ari Shalit noted. “Want to take a guess where to?”
“I have no idea.”
“Istanbul,” Shalit said.
“Interesting.”
“We thought so,” Shalit added. “Is he going on vacation? Doing a little sightseeing for the first time in his life? Or is he going to meet with his daughter and with Khalif?”
“The fact is we don’t know for certain,” Yael said. “But everything you told me last night about Al-Siddiq checks out. We’ve been going over his life, his writings, his phone calls and e-mails, our databases—everything—double-checking your work. And you’re right—he’s a close friend and advisor to Khalif. He clearly loves his daughter, as does Khalif. Once we realized he’d just bought a ticket to Turkey, we found ourselves hoping this was the break we’ve needed.”
Shalit noted that Al-Siddiq was booked on Turkish Airlines flight 109, which would depart Medina at 4:40 p.m. local time and land in Istanbul at 8:15 p.m. From there he had a connecting flight to Antalya, the Turkish resort city on the coast of the Mediterranean. Then came the kicker: Shalit was sending Yael, Dutch, and me to Istanbul.
“Me?”
“The mission is this: Find Al-Siddiq, follow him, and report back,” Shalit said. “You leave in fifteen minutes. Any questions?”
Many, actually—but one thing was clear: I wasn’t going home just yet after all.
We flew first to Rome on a Gulfstream IV.
I was excited, encouraged by the break. I had raised the question of why they were sending me back into the field now that Khalif had issued a fatwa calling for my murder. They’d made such a big deal about how I wasn’t trained and it wouldn’t be safe. Now their message seemed to have changed.
Shalit had simply responded that my instincts had consistently proven accurate. That was why he’d brought me onto the team in the first place, and they were too close to success to monkey with the formula. He needed me to h
elp run Khalif to ground. With false documents and disguises and the like, they would do everything in their power to minimize the danger to me, but Shalit had certainly been honest and direct with me about the risks. “There is a very real chance you won’t come back,” he had said before I left.
I knew, and I said yes anyway. I wanted to see this thing done. Period. End of sentence.
Dutch, Yael, and I disembarked with our luggage and headed into the main terminal. There, we were to board a commercial flight to Istanbul. Turkish Airlines flight 1866 would be wheels up at 3:25 p.m. local time and wheels down in the onetime capital of the Ottoman Empire—the former seat of the caliphate—just after seven that evening. This would be cutting it close. It would give us barely an hour before Dr. Al-Siddiq landed and entered the same airport. But Dutch insisted that the somewhat-convoluted route was the right way in. He had the most field experience in this type of operation, so Yael had appointed him ops leader for this mission.
Given the deeply strained relations between the Israeli and Turkish governments at the moment, a Mossad team couldn’t simply jet into Istanbul directly from Israel these days without drawing a high degree of attention from the Turkish police and intelligence agencies. That would not do, especially now with the fatwa out there. The last thing we wanted was Turkish authorities focusing their attention on me, much less my Mossad colleagues. Far better, Dutch said, would be for us to all enter Istanbul on a commercial flight—on the country’s national airline—through a long line at passport control with thousands of other tourists and businessmen.
He and Yael weren’t particularly worried about getting into Turkey with their false papers. They were pros and did it all the time. But they were a little concerned about me. It wasn’t just the Turkish border police we had to worry about. It was any Muslim who might have seen the photo ISIS was using—the one they were now spreading across the globe using all manner of social media—and who might notice me as I walked by. The good news was that the photo ISIS was using was one they’d pulled off the New York Times website. It was, therefore, somewhat dated. In it, I was bald. I was clean-shaven. I was wearing a Western suit and even a tie. What’s more, it had been taken five or six years earlier.
Now I had a full head of hair. It was short, but it was growing, and along with my full beard, this changed my look fairly dramatically. In addition, Dutch insisted that Yael and I once again pose as a married Muslim couple, as we had in Dubai. Yael, therefore, was again wearing a black silk abaya and niqab, covering her head to foot, including her entire face. I, on the other hand, was not wearing the Zegna suit, Italian shoes, or gold Rolex watch I had worn in Dubai. Rather, I was wearing a crisp white cotton thawb, the full-length, long-sleeved, traditional tunic worn by men from the Gulf region. Dutch had also asked me to wear a taqiyah, a short, rounded skullcap commonly worn by Muslim men.
Had I been flying into Israel in such garb, I could have expected to be asked many questions by the Israeli border police about who I was, where I was coming from, why I was coming to Israel, whom I knew in the country, what other Muslim countries I had visited, and so forth. But just the opposite would be true flying into Turkey, especially given that I spoke Arabic reasonably well. Rather than standing out, I should blend right in. True, what Yael and I were wearing was distinctive to the Gulf, not Turkey, but Turkish airports had a steady stream of Gulf visitors and welcomed them without hassle and even without visas.
There was just one problem, and it had nothing to do with my appearance or my fake passport or my fake marriage to Yael. This was far more serious.
The plane was late.
88
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
Our arrival was delayed by nearly forty minutes.
By the time we touched down in rain-drenched Istanbul, cleared passport control, and linked up with the Mossad’s station chief—a Turkish Jew in his midfifties who asked us to call him Mustafa—it was already 8:06 p.m. That gave us less than ten minutes before Al-Siddiq’s flight from Medina was supposed to land.
Fom there, the news got worse. A quick glance at the arrivals board indicated that Al-Siddiq’s flight had landed early. In fact, it was already disembarking, and it was on the other end of the terminal.
Yael and Dutch were calm, cool, and collected. They had been doing this sort of thing for a long time. But I was new and I was freaking out. We had no margin for error. This was our only known link to Abu Khalif. There was a very high likelihood that Al-Siddiq had been summoned by Khalif and could take us right to the ISIS emir. Losing him would be catastrophic, and I feared that’s what was about to happen.
Mustafa tried to calm me down. He explained that he and his team had arrived and entered the airport three hours ago. He had four agents—two men and two women—stationed near the gate where Al-Siddiq’s plane had arrived. He had other agents positioned along the corridors throughout the airport, allowing him to track the Saudi theological professor no matter what direction he chose to go. Furthermore, Mustafa had two teams of agents outside the airport, waiting in SUVs, ready to follow Al-Siddiq if he surprised us by leaving the airport instead of making his connecting flight to Antalya. If all that weren’t enough, he had three agents on motorcycles positioned near the exit ramps to the main roads near the airport so that even if those driving Al-Siddiq somehow managed to elude Mustafa’s two SUVs, he would still have eyes on the target until the others could catch up.
Mustafa’s recommendation was that we head directly to the gate where our flight to Antalya would soon be boarding, and let his team take care of the rest. They were trained, experienced professionals. They knew this airport inside and out. They knew what they were doing, and they knew the stakes. Still, he said he was fairly confident that all these precautions weren’t going to be needed anyway. His instincts told him Al-Siddiq was heading to Antalya.
“Get on the plane,” he whispered. “And don’t get caught.”
Dutch agreed and we quickly split up and went our separate ways. Yael and I wheeled our luggage through the airport, then headed to a café across from our gate, purchased cups of Turkish coffee, found an empty table, and sat together, eyes peeled and hearts pounding. Dutch, meanwhile, disappeared for a while, then passed by without acknowledging us and headed for a newsstand not far from the gate. There he leafed through magazines and bought himself a pack of gum and a candy bar, occasionally checking his wristwatch and waiting for the announcement that it was time to board.
Mustafa was nowhere to be seen. Nor were any other Mossad agents—at least none that I could identify. No one I saw around me or near me looked Israeli. None even looked Jewish. But then again, Mustafa didn’t either. His dark features and bushy mustache weren’t tricks of the trade. He wasn’t wearing a wig and makeup. He was the real deal. Yael said the Istanbul station chief and his family had made aliyah in 1982. They were all now true-blue Israeli citizens. They’d gone to Israeli schools and fought in the IDF and paid Israeli taxes and assimilated into Israeli society. But Mustafa still looked Turkish because he was Turkish. He spoke the language as a native and could read and write as a native and thus was ideally suited to serve the Israeli intelligence system in Turkey.
One of the curious and fascinating advantages the Mossad had gained from two thousand years of Jews living in exile was that with Jews coming back to the land of Israel from every nation on the earth, the intelligence agency had the unique ability to recruit Israeli citizens who looked, sounded, and acted like Arabs, Russians, Germans, Italians, Ethiopians, Yemenis, Brazilians, Koreans, and even Chinese. These agents didn’t need to be taught how to blend into a foreign society. They didn’t need to learn new languages or customs or idiosyncrasies before becoming spies. This thought should have calmed me somewhat, yet it did not.
Where was Al-Siddiq? Had he already deplaned? Was he really going to Antalya, or was that just a ruse? Who was traveling with him? How would we identify them? What if they identified us?
I grabbed my phone and opened th
e app that Dutch had briefed me on during the flight to Rome. Everyone on the team, myself included, was wearing glasses similar to the ones I’d been given in Dubai. But this version didn’t simply have a built-in microphone. It also featured a high-resolution video camera. Every team member was thus transmitting to each other’s smartphones live images of whatever we were seeing at the moment.
When the app loaded, my heart nearly stopped, for there, in front of me, was a real-time, if somewhat grainy, image of Abu Khalif’s mentor. He was here. He was on the ground, in the airport, and on the move.
A text message now flashed across the bottom of the app. No checked luggage. Just a carry-on. No companions. Seems to be alone.
I didn’t buy it. There was no way Al-Siddiq was going to the emir unaccompanied. I could believe he thought he was traveling alone, at least for the first leg of the journey. But I had no doubt Abu Khalif had ISIS operatives on that flight from Medina. I had no doubt they were in this airport. Watching their mark. Tracking his every movement. Just as we were. So who were they? And why hadn’t the Mossad guys identified them already?
Heading to men’s room, the next text read. Six breaking off.
Three, follow him, read a text from Mustafa.
Then came another: One and two, reposition along the corridor.
And a third: Six, hold back in case he turns around. All others, hold your positions.
Then came a message from Dutch. Where are the trackers? he asked, voicing my concerns precisely. Tell me we’ve spotted them.
I’ve got one, Yael texted. At the gate to Antalya. Female, jeans, veiled.
Startled, I instinctively popped my head up to look. I immediately saw an attractive Muslim woman in her late twenties. She was wearing designer jeans, a brightly colored blouse, and a hijab. At first glance, I was sure Yael was wrong. The woman looked like a college student, not a spy. But Yael quickly tapped my leg under the table with her foot. Her message was clear and emphatic: Don’t look. Turn away. Don’t risk making eye contact.