Storm Front

named Georgina, the same one with whom he went dancing, when her husband wasn’t in town, and asked her for a favor. He described the favor, and she asked, “This won’t get me in trouble, will it?”
    “Don’t see how,” Virgil said. “Just read the script and hang up.”
    “All right. But if I get in trouble, I’ll blame you.”
    “That’d be a change,” Virgil said.
    —
    V IRGIL DROVE two blocks to the Downtown Inn, where Yael-1 was staying, and parked fifty yards away. He got out of the truck, dug a Nikon D800 out of his equipment box, mounted a huge Nikon 400mm f2.8 lens with a fast-release plate, attached a monopod, sat in the cargo space, and ran the rear window halfway down.
    Five minutes later, a cab pulled up out front of the motel, and Virgil focused on it. One minute later, Yael walked out, and he fired off nine automatically bracketed shots, in three sequences of three. The cab pulled away, headed for the Coop, a bar that backed up to the Minnesota River, where the Reverend Jones would not be, unless by a terrific coincidence. Which should, he thought, teach Yael-1 a lesson: just because a woman calls you and says she’s Reverend Jones’s daughter, you shouldn’t necessarily believe her. Would a member of the Mossad make that mistake?
    When the cab was out of sight, Virgil plugged the Compact Flash card into a reader, plugged the reader into his Mac laptop, imported the photos into Lightroom, and cleaned them up. Two of them were okay; one was really good. He turned on the Verizon Jetpack, switched the laptop to the Verizon WiFi, and exported the three best photos to Davenport as hi-res JPEGs.
    Davenport called a minute later and said, “I got the pictures. I don’t have the GPS units yet, but I’ll get them before I leave, and I don’t have a picture of the real Yael Aronov, but Rose Marie is talking to somebody at the American embassy in Tel Aviv. We ought to know something soon.”
    Virgil: “Okay. I’ll see you in a couple of hours. If you’re gone, leave the units on Shirley’s desk.”
    “I’ll do that. If more Yales show up, I’ll be in a meeting.”
    “Ya-els,” Virgil said, but Davenport was gone.
    —
    S OMETHING ELSE was about to happen, Virgil thought, but he didn’t plan to call Davenport about it. He sat in the truck for a couple of minutes, in case the taxi came back, and while he waited, changed the lens on the Nikon to a 60mm macro. When that was done, he watched another fifteen seconds, then got out, walked down the block, into the Downtown Inn, and up a flight of stairs to Yael-1’s room. He took out the stolen room key as he walked, and at the room, knocked a couple of times to see if he’d get an answer—there was still an open question of an accomplice or associate who’d supplied Yael with the pistol—and then used the key and stepped inside.
    The lights were on. One of the huge suitcases was open, showing a mesh bag full of clothes. He picked up the bag, squeezed it, and put it back. He picked up the other suitcase, but it was so light it was obviously empty. A laptop sat on a side table, but was turned off. He felt that he dare not turn it on, because it was too likely that it would be alarmed, and she would know that somebody had opened it.
    He spent five minutes searching quickly through the room, found nothing of interest except another mesh bag, the size of an envelope, with a few papers inside. He checked them out, and found a passport and some letters in Hebrew, one with an English translation on the letterhead that said: “Israel Antiquities Authority.”
    The passport was in both Hebrew and English. Her picture was current, and her name was given as Aronov, Yael; the birth date looked more or less right.
    He flipped through the back of it and found a few entry stamps for European countries, and one for Jordan. Virgil didn’t know that Israelis could go to Jordan, but he wasn’t sure they couldn’t, either.
    He was leaving, giving the room one last look-around, when he hesitated, then went back to the empty suitcase and thought,
The old empty-suitcase trick
. He unzipped it, and found it empty.
    Of course it would be empty. He pushed his fingers against the interior fabric, and dragged them down the length of the suitcase . . . and found a thin lump where there shouldn’t have been one.
    It took him a minute to figure out how to get to the lump: it was easy enough, a professionally neat slit in the fabric, right where the seam