Storm Front

let you guys talk to the embassy and authorize its return. Probably with the second Yael. Anyway, that’s all diplomatic, it’s not for a humble flatfoot like myself.”
    “That sounds about right,” Davenport said. “Good job, Virgil. I’ve been watching all that bullshit on TV, and it was giving me an ice-cream headache. See you tomorrow.”
    Virgil was in the process of rereading all the George MacDonald Fraser “Flashman” novels, and the spy novels of Alan Furst. He was halfway through Furst’s
Red Gold
, and picked up the book from the living room couch and carried it back to the bedroom.
    Long day. Fistfights, a naked woman, an ancient relic . . . a relic that could reshape the way people thought about a couple of world religions.
    He read Furst for a couple hours, realized he wouldn’t be able to finish it, and reluctantly put it aside. He spent a short time thinking about God and one of His creations, Ma Nobles. He was beginning to see her as a bit more than a redneck woman, although she played that role.
    And maybe even was one. She certainly wasn’t uninteresting, though he recognized that he certainly wasn’t exactly a disinterested observer in making that judgment . . . given the evidence at hand that day.
    Virgil had been married and divorced three times, and wasn’t eager to get back on the marriage market. But what he’d told Ma that day, about having a redneck kid running around the house, wasn’t exactly true. He’d like to have kids. Maybe one of each. And if he was going to do that, he had to get busy. Ma might be a little much, but . . .
    Jesus, what are you thinking?
he asked himself.
Get a goddamn dog
.
    Then he went to sleep. But not for long.
    —
    T HE BIG PROBLEM with Bart Kohl, in Tal Zahavi’s estimation, wasn’t that he was a coward, it was that he was a whiner. She could handle the cowardice with blackmail; but the guy was a nudnik, pestering her with complaints and warnings, visualizing disaster at every turn, and worse, with all his visions of tragedy, his voice was like a band saw, high-pitched and nasal. Even worse than all of that . . . he was boring.
    Like when Tal had called him and asked him to provide her with a pistol. “A
pistol
? Where am I supposed to get a
pistol
? I don’t even know how to
do
that. When people asked me to help out, they said they’d just want me to
drive people around.
They never said anything about weapons. I’m against weapons. I signed the anti-handgun pledge.”
    So Tal, operating from Tel Aviv, had had to go online and find a gun show where he could buy a firearm. Even after he had the pistol, he bitched about having to drive it across state lines. “Now I’m committing a
federal
crime, delivering it across state lines without a permit.”
    Blahblahblah . . .
    When she told him that they were going to grab Ellen Case, and use her to extort the stone out of her father, he’d nearly laid an egg.
    “Kidnapping? Are you kidding me? No way. I’m out of this.”
    She had to remind him that he’d already committed a number of crimes, both state and federal, to get him to go along. “It’s this way, Bart. Your name could be called to the police, and then what would you do? I will be back in Tel Aviv, but you will still be in Des Moines.”
    She’d had to plan the whole thing by herself, spotting and tagging Case, while Kohl sat next to her in the passenger seat of his van, twisting his hands and drilling into her head like a woodpecker.
    —
    Z AHAVI HAD C ASE ’ S ADDRESS , which turned out to be a small house on the south side of Minneapolis, near a creek or small river. When they spotted it, the house was dark. Zahavi told Kohl to pull into the driveway, and she walked up to the front door and knocked . . . and saw the lights of a security system.
    Not too large a problem, she thought—especially if Case never got to it.
    “Now, we have to be very careful,” she told Kohl. “There may be cameras, there may be security patrols. We must keep moving.”
    Kohl said, “This is the end. The end of everything I’ve worked for. The end of all my dreams. My father said, ‘You’re an American, you’re not an Israeli. Stop pretending.’ Did I listen to him? Oh, no. I had to go to Israel. I had to sign up with the Interest Group. Interest Group? I thought I’d be giving lectures in Omaha, on Masada and Yad Vashem. Maybe I’d meet some nice young girls with small noses and low morals. But no—I have to go