LITMIR.BIZ

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Hezbollah claimed full credit. The Israelis are launching retaliatory air strikes as we speak.”

      “Yes, but one of the attackers survived. The suicide vest failed.” Wethers looked over from his screen pointedly. “A teenage girl, off everyone’s radar until last week.”

      “She claims she didn’t do it?”

      “Full signed confession, save that the Haifa police had a file going and everything prior to her confession has been completely redacted.”

      Kurtzman knew where this was going. “The Mossad took over the case.”

      “Military intelligence took over the case,” Wethers confirmed. “And while it doesn’t say it in so many words, it sure smells like Mossad yanked the case from them.”

      Kurtzman mulled that over. “Haifa and military intelligence.”

      “You know something?”

      “I might know somebody, and they might still owe me a favor.”

      “You calling this actionable?”

      “Best lead we have. I need every scrap of information on the bombing in Haifa, news feeds, internet rumors and anything else we can cajole out of the Israelis through normal channels. Contact Jack, tell him to pull Cal out of Texas, and tell Able to sit tight.”

      Tokaido nodded. “I’ll do it! Anything else?”

      “Tell Barb I want Phoenix Force assembled in the next six hours, and I want them in Israel in twelve.”

      Jerusalem, Israel

      “IT WAS VERY STRANGE.”

      Dr. Galina Rabovskya looked every inch the Jewish grandmother she was. She had been a military doctor with medical degrees in both neurology and psychology. The doctor maintained a small private practice and on the side was an Israeli military intelligence medical “asset.”

      She poured coffee from an ancient copper ibrik for David McCarter and Calvin James. “Extremely jet-lagged” barely described the two Phoenix Force men.

      “You would think there would be a matrix for predicting terrorist inclinations,” McCarter, the leader of Phoenix Force, noted.

      She arched a thick eyebrow. “I assure you it takes all kinds.”

      McCarter sipped his Turkish coffee and his eyes nearly rolled back in his head. James matched the doctor and perked her eyebrow for eyebrow. “But?”

      “But this was very strange. Oh, on the surface it made perfect sense. A pair of young Palestinian lovers decide to cement their love into eternity with a suicide pact against their hated Jewish oppressors. All very romantic. They strap on explosive vests they made together, go to a nightclub full of innocent people, and...”

      “But?” James repeated.

      “But the girl’s vest malfunctioned. The boy, Hamdi, rode the elevator to martyrdom and took ten club patrons with him. The girl? Lena? She managed to launch most of her right arm into the VIP room. The emergency medics stabilized her and she was turned over to military intelligence.”

      James conjured up Lyons’s new favorite-hated word. “And things started getting anomalous?”

      “That is a good word,” the doctor admitted. “And highly accurate.”

      “She denied all knowledge of the attack?”

      “Not at first. After being captured, she was completely unresponsive. This was naturally attributed to the trauma of her boyfriend’s death and her own survival and self-mutilation. Despite her injuries, some of the Mossad boys got rough with her. They got nothing. Then she went into what I would describe as a fugue state, which lasted for approximately an hour. When she came out of that she was responsive.”

      “How did she respond?”

      “Miss Labaki responded exactly like a seventeen-year-old girl who woke up in terrible pain to learn her boyfriend is dead, she is missing an arm and accused of capital crimes.”

      “She denied being involved in the crime?”

      “She denied all knowledge of the crime. She begged us to tell her who we were, what was going on and where Hamdi was.”

      Cal saw where this was going. “And the men from Mossad were not amused.”

      “They got rough with her again.”

      “How did she react?”

      “React? She was like a hothouse flower suddenly thrown into the desert. They could have broken her just by yelling at her. They overrode my objections and turned off her morphine. She confessed. She confessed to everything.”

      James mimicked Lyons. “But if you hadn’t seen the security camera footage from the nightclub?”

      “I would have believed her story before her confession.”

      “You don’t believe her confession?”

      “I believe she would have confessed to anything, including the Kennedy assassination, to stop the pain. But they got their confession and their case tied up neatly in ribbons and bows. They were satisfied.”

      “And Miss Labaki went into a coma and died,” James concluded.

      “Miss Labaki is currently in a persistent vegetative state.”

      McCarter sat straighter. “She’s alive?”

      “She’s alive,” Rabovskya confirmed. “But I would not call it living. I use the term vegetative state loosely. I was so alarmed by what I saw that before my medical team was taken off the case I ordered both functional magnetic resonance imaging and arterial spin labeling scans.”

      McCarter blinked.

      The doctor smiled sympathetically. “These scans rely on the paramagnetic properties of oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin.”

      McCarter looked to James for a lifeline.

      The Phoenix Force medic smiled smugly. “It means you can see images of changing blood flow in the brain associated with neural activity.”

      Rabovskya nodded. “I see you have had some training. I also ordered a magnetoencephalogram.”

      “How many letters are in that word?” McCarter asked.

      “Twenty. In layman’s terms it is an imaging technique used to measure the magnetic fields produced by the electrical activity in the brain.”

      James leaned forward. “What were the results?”

      “Before Miss Labaki went brain-dead? Her brain was like Fallujah on a Friday night. Or in American terms—the Fourth of July. I was ordering a positron emission tomography when I was suddenly thanked for my work and informed my services were no longer required.

      “I do not know what the interrogators did to her after that, but I can tell you I do not believe it could have made any difference. I can only describe it as a cascading series of brain malfunctions. Machines currently breathe for her, keep her heart beating, clean her blood and feed and hydrate her. The only reason she is being kept alive is that she is such a medical anomaly.”

      McCarter shook his head. “Hate that word.”

      The kitchen went silent as they all brooded.

      The landline phone on the wall rang and the doctor rose. “Excuse me.”

      James considered what he had heard. “I am definitely putting it in the wheelhouse.”

      “Definitely,” McCarter agreed.

      Dr. Rabovskya answered the phone and her face went blank. Her expression grim, she covered the receiver with her hand. “It is for you.”

      The two soldiers looked at each other. “Who is it?” McCarter asked.

      “A

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