Blood Line by John J. Davis

extraordinary to protect Jews and Jewish interests around the world. The men told her the new organization wouldn’t forget what she had done during the war and would be waiting to answer her call. They left her with contact information. She never saw them in person again.”
    “So the Mossad paid for your education and you worked for them?”
    “Yes, that’s correct. I was sixteen, same age as you are, when Leona told me the stories I’ve just told you. She took me to the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead, Atlanta. We had tea. She said she hadn’t thought twice about the offer when her sons were born, or when my brothers were born. No, she said it never entered her mind to act on the offer till she held me in her arms. She said she knew in an instant what my future would be.”
    “So, spill it. What happened? What did you do?”
    “I jumped at the chance. Not because I wanted to be a spy. No, I wanted to go to college, and Dad’s business was struggling. There was no way he could afford to pay tuition. So, I told Leona, ‘let’s do it.’ The next thing I know, I was an early enrollee at Yale, and there was only one request made of me while I was there.”
    “What was that?” Leecy asked.
    “I had to learn Russian.”
    “Russian? Why Russian?”
    “All in due course,” Valerie said and then continued. “So, I was at Yale and it’s the fall of 1985. I loved school and, like you, I never seemed to have enough to do. But the great thing about college is you can take on as much work as you can handle. I was racing through my classes with a double load each semester. The only wrinkle was that during holiday breaks in the schedule I didn’t get to come home; I was sent to Mossad training camps. My first camp was in upstate New York near Lake Placid.”
    “Sounds like you just studied all the time and never had any fun,” Leecy said.
    “I had fun. Plenty of fun. For me it was exhilarating. I was with other girls like me. We all shared similar backgrounds and did everything together. I was learning a fighting style called Krav Maga. I learned how to shoot everything from a pistol to a sniper rifle. Actually, I learned how to fire several different sniper rifles, like the Russian Mosin-Nagant, the US Army XM21, and the Israeli ImiGaltaz. I also learned basic pharmacology: drug interactions, drug contraindications and side effects, which in most cases resulted in death. I was doing what I loved to do, which was learning. I soaked it all up like a sponge. About midway through my first training session, I was given a dossier.”
    “You mean a file on somebody?” Leecy asked.
    “Yes, a file on a target to be precise.”
    “That didn’t take long.”
    “Well, I wasn’t there to learn to bake a cake. Anyway, the first assignment was easy. See, the dossier wasn’t just given to me. All of my fellow students also received a copy.”
    “Why?”
    “We were told to memorize the contents of the dossier and develop a strategy for eliminating the target in a way that wouldn’t attract the attention of the police, or arouse any suspicion of foul play.”
    “Why would the Mossad care about police attention? They’re known for high profile public assassinations. It’s how they send the message to their enemies.”
    “You’re right, of course, but that’s not always the case. This target, as well as the next three I was eventually given, were to be handled in a much more discrete fashion. The death was what was important, not taking credit for the death.”
    “Okay, so give me the details.”
    “Like I said, every girl was given the same task, and we had to present our solutions forty-eight hours after receiving the dossier. My solution was chosen. I’d made use of the extensive background information on the target’s daily habits and routines, as well as the target’s medical history. In January of 1986, I traveled to Buenos Aries and dispatched a Nazi war criminal that had escaped detection for almost forty