The League of Night and Fog by David Morrell Read Free Book Online Page B

was in Washington,” he told Erika, “I knew that you’d come here. When I went back to Tel Aviv, I kept up with what you were doing.”
    “So you’re the source of the rumors the captain heard,” Saul said. He pointed toward the officer who stood at a sentry post on the outskirts of the village, talking to a soldier.
    “I thought it was prudent to tell him he could depend on both of you. I said he should leave you alone, but if you got in touch with him, to pay attention to what you said. I wasn’t trying to interfere.”
    Saul watched him steadily.
    “After what happened here today,” Misha said, “it was natural for him to get back to me, especially since the raid had its troubling aspects. Not just the pointlessness of attacking a village so far from the border, one with no military or geographic value.”
    Saul anticipated. “You mean their fingernails.”
    Misha raised his eyebrows. “Then you noticed? Why didn’t you mention it to the captain?”
    “Before I decided how much to depend on him, I wanted to see how good he was.”
    “Well, he’s
very
good,” Misha said. “Dependable enough toshare his suspicions only with me until I decided how to deal with this.”
    “We might as well stop talking around it,” Saul said. “The men who attacked this village weren’t typical guerrillas. Never mind that their rifles still had traces of grease from the packing crate, or that their clothes were tattered but their boots were brand-new. I could explain all that by pretending to believe they’d recently been reequipped. But their fingernails. They’d smeared dirt over their hands. The trouble is, it hadn’t gotten under their nails. Stupid pride. Did they figure none of them would be killed? Did they think we wouldn’t notice their twenty-dollar manicures? They weren’t terrorists. They were assassins. Imported. Chosen because they were Arabs. But their usual territory isn’t the desert. It’s Athens, Rome, Paris or London.”
    Misha nodded. “Three years out here, and you haven’t lost your skills.”
    Saul pointed toward the ruined building behind him. “And it’s pretty obvious, the attack wasn’t directed against the whole village. Our home took most of the damage. The objective was
us.”
    Erika stood, walked behind Misha, and put her hands on his shoulders. “Old friend, why are you here?”
    Misha peered up sadly.
    “What is it? What’s wrong?” she asked.
    “Erika, your father’s disappeared.”
4
    T he stability of the past three years had now been destroyed. The sense of peace seemed irretrievable. The constants of his former life had replaced it—tension, suspicion, guardedness. Escape was apparently impossible. Even here, the world intruded, and attitudes he’d been desperate to smother returned as strong as ever.
    In the night, with Christopher asleep at a neighbor’s house and Misha asleep in his car, Saul sat with Erika by the fire outside the ruin of their home.
    “If we were the target,” he said, “and I don’t think there’s any doubt that we were, we have to assume other teams will come for us.”
    Erika repeatedly jabbed a stick at the fire.
    “It wouldn’t be fair to allow our presence to threaten the village,” he added.
    “So what do we do? Put up a sign—the people you want don’t live here anymore?” The blaze of the fire reflected off her eyes.
    “They’ll find out we’ve gone the same way they found out we were here.”
    “But why did they come at all?”
    Saul shook his head. “Three years is a long time for the past to catch up to us. And my understanding with the Agency was if I stayed out of sight they’d pretend I didn’t exist.”
    “That’s one thing we did, all right,” she said bitterly. “We stayed out of sight.”
    “So I don’t think this has anything to do with the past.”
    “Then whatever the reason for the attack, it’s new.”
    “That still doesn’t tell us why.”
    “You think it’s coincidence?”
    The