Last Instructions Read online

  I drive back to the town. It’ll be dark soon. I’ll head out to the cemetery tomorrow morning at 4, just as the sun is rising, and before any tourists get there—although the chances of that are pretty slim. The mochileros like to sleep in.

  It’s good that my body has produced sufficient red blood cells to compensate for the lack of oxygen. I’ll be able to work tomorrow without my lungs exploding. During my 1st few days in La Paz, even the slightest effort would leave me breathless. La Paz sits at an altitude of 3,650 meters and Uyuni is only about 50 meters higher. When climbing to an altitude of more than 2,500 meters, it’s advisable to ascend just 100 meters per day to allow your cardiovascular system to acclimatize. I flew directly to La Paz, so I suffered headaches for the 1st few days. If you ascend too quickly to altitudes of more than 5,000–6,000 meters without acclimatization, the resulting side effects include headaches, vomiting, fatigue, loss of appetite, insomnia, dizziness, and death.

  I set the alarm clock on my phone for 3:30 in the morning and plug the phone in to charge. I connect the power screwdriver to its charger for the night, too, and then go to sleep.

  December 6, 2016

  The control room was dark, with the keyboards and mice on the control desks illuminated only by strategically placed spotlights. The desks were arranged in a semicircle on a raised platform a few steps off the ground. They faced a semicircle of huge monitors, all black but one, which displayed several graphs in white and rows of numbers in green. The two Shin Bet operators that were on duty were busy exchanging war stories from their military service in the IDF.

  “Then they said, ‘Keep an eye on him,’ and left me alone in the Cipher Room with the body of a terrorist wearing an IDF sweater and fatigues … and one of the Golani Brigade soldiers still had the nerve to turn around and say, ‘And don’t touch him,’ before they closed the door and the room’s automatic external locking system kicked in … I was left there all alone with the body. They didn’t say when they’d be back to collect him and I had to stay there until eight in the morning. I was just a nineteen-year-old soldier. And don’t touch him? Like all that was missing in my life was the chance to touch a dead body.”

  “What time did they bring him in?”

  “Two thirty-six a.m. I made a note in the shift log. His eyes were open but blank. They looked slightly grayish, like someone had cooked them in hot water—a little like hard-boiled eggs. The green uniform he had on was stained brown with blood. I just had to call Yarden from the command center. I saved a recording of the conversation on my computer. Want to hear it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay, listen. It’s quite hilarious.”

  “You won’t believe what they’ve just done to me. I’m alone here in the Cipher Room with a dead body they just brought in.”

  “A dead body?”

  “Yes. Some Golani soldiers tossed him into the room here with me next to the printers, and he’s stone-cold dead.”

  “Soldiers from the same battalion as Avi the hottie?”

  “Yes. But Avi’s sick, poor thing, bed rest for a week. He was stung by a wasp and he’s allergic. You should have seen the size of his ear. Like an elephant’s.”

  “Aww, poor thing!”

  “But did you hear what I said? There’s a dead body in the room with me.”

  “Okay, so I won’t bother the two of you then.”

  “Not that kind of body, you idiot—the body of a dead terrorist.”

  “What?!”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m trying to tell you; they dumped him here in the Cipher Room with me and told me not to touch him. As if I would touch him. Eww, gross!!”

  “Why in the Cipher Room of all places?”

  “God knows. Maybe he has a USB connection in the back of his neck and they want to get something out of him.”

  “Well, what do you expect? Your room is the only one that locks from the inside. They probably left him locked in there with you to prevent the entire battalion from showing up to take pictures and post them on Facebook. That wouldn’t look good at all. Do you have a weapon?”

  “There’s an Uzi for whoever’s on duty in the Cipher Room. But why would I need it?”

  “Maybe he’s not quite dead yet?”

  “Oh my God! Wait a sec, I’m going to check; don’t hang up. I’m putting you on speaker.”

  “That’s when I went over to the emergency cabinet and retrieved the Uzi. I inserted a magazine and cocked the Uzi. Listen to some crazy bits coming now.”

  “What’s that noise?”

  “I cocked the Uzi. Just a sec, I’m going to poke him with a squeegee stick and if he moves, I’m gonna kill him again.”

  “Woo hoo, G.I. Jane!”

  “And did you actually touch him?”

  “I touched him with the end of the stick, which I was holding in my left hand, while I had the Uzi in my right; and because I’m left-handed and my palms were sweating so much, my finger slipped on the trigger of the Uzi and I emptied half the magazine into his body. Wait a moment and you’ll hear the gunfire on the recording.”

  Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat

  “What the hell is that? What happened?”

  “Oops, sorry. Didn’t mean that. My finger slipped.”

  “Okay, I’ve heard enough. That’s gonna give me nightmares.”

  “Okay, I’ll just tell you the rest then. So this is what happened. I’m busy talking to Yarden, and suddenly this hissing sound starts coming from the body, like the sound of a balloon deflating, and his hand opens and a grenade rolls out and I hear, Click, and the pin of the grenade flies out and I hear, Pssssssst, and nothing happens except for a bit of smoke coming from the grenade. And I jump behind two IBM disk cabinets and count, ‘Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three,’ and nothing happens. Except for the fact that the door opens because I’d forgotten to lock it from the inside, and the Golani soldiers burst in all freaked out and start yelling at me for killing him again, and Yarden is yelling back at them over the speakers in the room, telling them that they should be ashamed of themselves, leaving a corporal all by herself with the body of a terrorist, and I tell them how lucky it was that the grenade he had in his hand didn’t explode, pointing at it on the floor under their feet by the stairs. I swear I’ve never seen soldiers run so fast in my life. And up a flight of stairs no less.”

  The two operators had changed the subject of their conversation and were now engrossed in descriptions of sumptuous meals they ate while on vacation as civilians. Meital was in the middle of a detailed description of a dish of deep-fried sticks of breaded Halloumi cheese when the encrypted communication system came to life.

  “AngelFire, commander here,” they heard.

  Meital leaned forward and pressed the Push-to-Talk button. “AngelFire here, over,” she said.

  “Commander here. I have three objectives for you. Timeline reference point—yesterday morning at nine forty. For each of them I want to see all movements a week prior to the reference point and then unbroken from then until now, and onward. Keep an eye on the monitors all the time. First objective—private home, 21 Mevo Nahagei HaPredot Street, Ganei Yehuda. Second objective—private home, 17 HaShikma Street. Mazor, at the end of the path. Third objective—apartment building, 203 Ibn Gvirol Street, Tel Aviv. Is that a Roger? Over.”

  “Roger, repeating, please confirm. Reference point—December fifth, 2016, nine forty in the morning. First objective—private home, 21 Mevo Nahagei HaPredot Street, Ganei Yehuda. Second objective—private home, 17 HaShikma Street. Mazor, at the end of the path. Third objective—apartment building, 203 Ibn Gvirol Street, Tel Aviv. Over.”

  “Roger, confirmed. I’m on my way to you with three civilians. Prepare the system. Over.”

  “Any need for a blackout? Over.”

  “No, they have the necessary security clearance. Over and out.”

  Meital leaned back in her chair again, “Shit,” she said, “I thought it was going to be a quiet day.”r />
  Dafna started typing and the screens in front of them flickered to life. “Tell me something, isn’t 203 Ibn Gvirol the building that blew up yesterday from a gas leak?”

  “If they want us to look at it, there must be another reason for the explosion. Do you think it’s a terror attack they want to keep quiet?”

  “Strange. And the three civilians must be Mossad. They’re the only ones outside the Shin Bet who know about this facility. But if it was a terror attack, they wouldn’t have given us two additional objectives. And certainly not two objectives that aren’t border crossings or in the territories or East Jerusalem.”

  “Okay, I’m sending you the coordinates for the three objectives. Open three logs and display the images on screens two, three, and four. Drag the three sequences of images to cache storage so we can run through them quickly when the guests arrive. I’ll clean up the mess here a little in the meantime.”

  There was a buzz from the intercom some thirty minutes later and Meital pressed the button to open the front door of the building. The commander of the AngelFire facility hurried in together with three civilians, and the four went upstairs to join Dafna and Meital in the control room.

  “Okay, listen up,” the commander of the facility kicked things off with a brief explanation. “I’ll tell you a little about what we can offer you, and then we’ll move onto the matter that concerns you. This AngelFire facility is in concept similar to facilities with the same name in the United States. Hovering above every major city are meteorological balloons. Some are really just that and are used to record temperature and wind speed and various other weather-related parameters; and then there are our balloons, which aren’t meteorological at all and are equipped with extremely high-resolution cameras that transmit data. Each camera takes a picture every two seconds, each image is about half a gigabyte in size, and the image files are transmitted from the balloons to points on the ground below at high speed, thereby giving us a sequence of images for every location. All the data from the balloons flows into a central computer system linked to this control room. The daytime images are clear, the nighttime images are grainy and contingent on starlight amplification. So if the night is dark, you can’t see a thing—but that’s rare. We’ve uploaded the sequences of images of your objectives to a cache so we can run through all of them quickly. What you have here is a time machine of sorts. We save all the images, so from the time point that concerns you, we can access all the images up to some eighteen months back, which was when the system was set up, or forward up to right now minus two seconds.”

  One of the civilians who appeared to be the team leader turned to Meital. “Let’s start with 203 Ibn Gvirol Street.”

  “Okay, look at screen number two,” Meital said. Displayed on the screen was a frozen close-up of the building at the precise moment of the blast, with fragments of concrete caught in midair. “This is an image from yesterday at nine forty and thirty-two seconds. We have set this as our timeline reference point. We call it Line Zero.”

  “Run the sequence back a little.”

  —Click—

  The building appeared intact again.

  —Click—click—click—

  The computer emitted a clicking sound each time the image on the screen in front of them changed, the cars on the street appeared as blurred objects.

  “Can you make the images a little sharper?”

  “No more than you see now, and that’s after they’ve already been processed and manipulated as much as possible. Don’t forget that the camera covers a very large area of Tel Aviv and you are seeing only a tiny part of the entire image.”

  The sequence of images continued to run in reverse at two-second intervals. The stream of vehicles and pedestrians on Ibn Gvirol Street moved quickly backward. Night, evening, afternoon, morning appeared on the screen in front of them. The three civilians watched with obvious fascination. “Line Zero minus one day,” a robotic voice announced through the speakers. Followed by: “Line Zero minus two days,” “Line Zero minus three days.”

  “Pause it here,” the civilian spoke again. “I don’t see anything special, but can you run it back as far as possible afterward to look for anything suspicious outside the building? Someone in the vicinity who’s staking out the building or sneaking inside? It’ll take a few hours that we don’t have right now.”

  “No problem. We’ll run through it and report to you if we see anything suspicious. Can I get your cell number?”

  The civilian handed her a business card for: Rafael Cohen, certified electrician—Electrical works of all kinds. “Ignore the title,” he smiled, “it’s only the telephone number you want. Let’s move on to Ganei Yehuda. Line Zero. Run it backward as well.”

  “Screen four.”

  —Click—click—click—

  The image sequence appeared on screen number four. Dots that were people and rectangles that were cars moved in reverse at intervals of two seconds. “Line Zero minus one day.” The nighttime images didn’t show any people, only the headlights of vehicles in the area around the satellite branch where some of the activities of the past few days had taken place. “Line Zero minus two days.” The sequence continued to play in reverse.

  “Stop it there.”

  The time signature of the image on screen number four showed [12.3.2016 / Saturday / 09:55].

  “Run it forward a little more slowly.”

  “Stop.” [12.4.2016 / Sunday / 01:39] The team leader turned to his two companions. “The car parked there is Avner’s and the dot that just walked into the base is Avner. The guard there gave me the entrance log for the past few days. Run it forward.”

  “Stop.” [12.4.2016 / Sunday / 02:52] “Can you see that? Someone is approaching from the side of the faulty camera. Notice how he’s making sure not to step into the field of vision of the other cameras. Here he’s getting under Avner’s parked car. Do you see?”

  “Let’s run it back a little to see where he’s coming from,” the other two civilians said in unison.

  “Just a moment. Make a note of this point on the timeline. Let’s see what else is going on here. Run it forward.”

  The dot under Avner’s car reappears and then disappears again in the direction of Savyon Junction. Avner steps out for some fresh air and then goes back inside a few minutes later. Grandpa enters the satellite base at 04:05. He leaves at 04:45, gets into his car and drives away. A few minutes later, another car enters the parking lot and Rotem gets out and enters the satellite base. A while later, Rotem leaves, and Avner follows her shortly thereafter. The only other movements are those of the guards ending and beginning their shifts.

  “Stop. Go back to the fourth of the month, two fifty-two in the morning. Let’s see where 10483 goes from there.”

  “Okay.”

  The images race back quickly and stop at the moment 10483 is seen emerging from under Avner’s car.

  “Run it forward.”

  10483 appears to pause for a few moments. Due to the poor resolution of the image, it’s impossible to see exactly what he is doing while standing next to the car for those few seconds. He starts to proceed on foot in the direction of Savyon Junction, turns into one of the streets of the Savyon neighborhood, gets into a van, and starts driving. He takes the road leading to Messubim Junction and then turns onto Road No. 4 and heads north.

  —Click—Click—Click—

  “Why are the images moving slowly now?”

  “This segment isn’t part of the sequence of images we uploaded to cache storage. We’ve moved farther away, so the system is displaying the images from the regular storage drives.”

  The images continue to appear one after the other, the van 10483 was driving continues to head north on Road No. 4.

  “SHIT!” all those in the room exclaim more or less simultaneously as the van disappears under a thick layer of clouds.

  December 6, 2016

  “What do you mean he disappeared a year ago?” Rotem asked. “A patient of y
ours lies here for nine years in a vegetative state and then you discover one morning that he’s disappeared from his bed and you don’t think to investigate or report the matter to someone? Are you out of your minds?”

  “Report to who exactly?” the Lowenstein Hospital doctor sitting across the desk from Avner and Rotem asked laconically. “An unidentified attempted suicide victim who’s had five reconstructive surgeries and doesn’t look at all like the person he was before jumping in front of a bus, with no ID on his person, and no one looking for him—who exactly were we supposed to report him to? If he’s so important to you, where were you for the nine years he lay here like a mummy? But we actually did do something. We informed the police and the answer we got was that there’d be no investigation due to a lack of public interest. The police said that if he got up and left, that’s his business, and if no one is looking for him, they can’t do a thing. After we insisted, they sent over some investigator who questioned everyone and said that the Ra’anana police would handle it. She thanked us and said they would update us on any developments. It’s really nice of you to remember now—a year after he woke up and ten years after he was admitted.”

  “When exactly did he disappear?”

  “December fourth, 2015. Almost exactly a year ago. The nurse on duty was doing her morning rounds and he wasn’t in his bed when she got there. We then discovered that he’d stolen shoes and clothes from the doctors’ lockers. He must have left during the night in uniform.”

  “Do you have a picture of him before his escape? Ichilov had a photograph of a bandaged head, which hasn’t helped us very much at all. Just don’t tell me that during the nine years he lay here, you didn’t bother to take even a single photograph of his face.”

  “Just a second, I think I can help you with that. Wait for me here for a moment.”

  The doctor left the room.

  “That’s good at least,” Avner said. “He had only a year to plot his revenge.”