Read Online Intercept by Patrick Robinson - Free Book Online

billed at a premium thousand dollars per hour, not the normal five hundred, because of the risks to the firm’s reputation and all, plus expenses. Not to mention that there would be a massive bonus for success. Josh could barely contain his elation.
    Never a man to give much thought to problems that did not directly concern either him or his family, Josh cast aside any flickering concerns about the moral issue of liberating known mass murderers. Outside in the parking lot of the building, a dark blue turbo-charged Bentley bore testimony to the skill and ruthlessness of the senior partner of Epstein, Myerson, and Marsh.
    Josh opened up his computer and clicked into Google Instant Messaging: Thank you, Keith, he wrote. I’m sending two appeals court specialists to Cuba tomorrow. Access no problem. We’ll file on Monday. Five seconds later came a one-word reply: Perfect.
    Josh Epstein summoned his two closest terrorist lawyers into his office. Then he reached across his desk and started the time-clock that counts off the billing hours, per lawyer, per case. In this case, a thousand dollars a tick. Times three.
     
     
    THE ONLY MINOR blot on the horizon of Epstein’s new case was a big Chevy transit van, parked right on 12th Street, maybe forty yards up the sidewalk from the firm’s main entrance. On the driver’s side was a small decal, two inches across, which bore the unmistakable insignia of the Central Intelligence Agency, with its white battleshield inscribed with a red compass rose. A thin, white line beneath it confirmed this was an operational vehicle, which may not be disturbed. Every cop in Washington recognized that insignia, and the unspoken message: If we need you, you’ll hear, real quick.
    Inside the van, four operatives sat before a bank of computer screens. Each man wore a slim-line headset and a wire-thin microphone. It was stifling hot in their ops-room, and they wore only T-shirts, shorts, and sneakers. And they all spoke in a completely foreign tongue.

    They were hooked into the law firm of Epstein, Myerson, and Marsh, through a clandestine network of telephonic wires and carefully planted listening devices, situated throughout the law offices. It had taken months to set it all up, wire by wire, bug by bug, office cleaner by office cleaner, mole by mole.
    But now the system was on stream. And the CIA, which had been subversively, and probably illegally, involved in making it possible, had stepped back. The four men in the van worked for the Mossad, Israel’s ruthless Secret Service. They were controlled by the vast Intelligence operation that works from the deep basement of the Israeli embassy, three miles north of the city of Washington.
    Cooperation between the CIA and the Mossad began to intensify during the first Gulf War and it had, if anything, grown stronger with each passing year. The Israelis have never dropped their guard against the growling threats of Iran, never forgiven Iraq for unleashing Scud missiles at Tel Aviv in 1991, and never forgiven any Western power that offered even the remotest support to the Palestinians.
    Since President Bush declared vicious and open war on terrorists, the Israelis, and especially the Mossad, had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States. No country, no organization has ever been braver or more loyal to Uncle Sam.
    The CIA trusts, admires, and uses the Mossad on a daily basis, both in terms of information and direct action. Only rarely is a favor judged too great to be asked or granted. The secretive pact between two of the world’s greatest Intelligence Services is binding, one to the other, essentially because their interests are usually identical.
    The big blue van represented the explicit wishes of the Mossad, wishes honed over decades of study. That van represented conclusions reached after hundreds of hours pouring over court cases and identifying lawyers who had fought for the freedom of jihadists and terrorists, killers who had