Nathan Mills
Chapter2
2
Tel Aviv, Israel
Two years following Arafat’s death, Israeli Prime Minister Eliyahu Beit-Hallahmi and Palestinian President Rafiq al-Kawas signed what was simply called the agreement. It was an event that the world heralded as a sign of the good things to come in the twenty-first century. Palestine was now a sovereign state. Israel had withdrawn from ninety percent of the occupied territories.
Following the agreement, left-wing peaceniks raised questions about the need of the Shin Bet and Mossad. They cried for the dismantling of the organizations, leaving military intelligence, Aman, as the only intelligence agency. They taunted the security agency and the intelligence service, saying they would suffer an identity crisis. But for Mossad Director General, Memune Bialik Magen, who had been appointed to the position less than a week after Beit-Hallahmi’s acceptance of the mantle of Prime Minister, met with section heads and veteran agents and told them that the Institute will continue. The Palestinians and the Israelis may have lessened the dangers by signing a document, but the Palestinians must still be watched as judiciously as before, he told them. Israelis must continue to be vigilant in protecting its citizens and newly found peace, which, Magen warned, is like a water vapor, dissipating before you could reach out and feel the warmth on your hands or before making the tiny hairs on your arms tingle.
A small corner of office space on the lonely third floor of a semi-modern building down the street from the tallest mall in Tel Aviv, Azrieli Center, was rented using a fake name, the next six months paid for in cash. It wasn’t a long lease, but the amount handed over was what the owner could have made in a year with another tenant.
The two men, Adiel and Herzi, normally came to the office at six in the morning every weekday and left late in the evening. The building’s old security guard, if quizzed on the matter, would never remember seeing the two men leave the building during lunchtime, nor any other time of the day. Perhaps he had noticed that Adiel and Herzi would arrive each day shortly before the occupants of the office above theirs, and that they would leave shortly after the occupants. But no one would ever ask him. An explosion ripped through the third floor, splintering office furniture and building material and shredding people in the building. Walls burst and floors convulsed. Destroyed water pipes soaked the second and first floors. Fires gutted every corner and partially damaged the rest of the building. The old guard was crushed by a fallen wall.
The windows of the Azrieli Center facing the little bland office building were blown out. Glass sliced pedestrians between the two buildings and shoppers milling around the façade of the shopping center. Because of the proximity of the nameless office building to the more famous shopping center, the bombing was referred to by the media as the Azrieli Bombing.
The charred corpses of veteran agents Adiel and Herzi were found among the dead. Tel Aviv, the city known as Spring Hill, sexy and raucous, modern and narcotic, had returned to the horror of terrorism once again. There were nine more lives that had been taken in the explosion. But three victims were found with the two Shin Bet agents, on the same floor and in the same room where the explosion occurred. Fire officials, police detectives and Shin Bet agents determined where the dead were positioned at the exact moment of the explosion, and all agreed that they were surrounding the bomb, which had been placed in the center of the room.
Only two men knew of Adiel and Herzi’s assignment, which was to observe, record, and report on the five young Americans above them, but never have contact with them.