Read Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) for Free Online

his people were in danger of becoming what they hated and feared the most. And he couldn’t be a part of that.
    Had they driven him to it? No. But they left him no other choice when they put him between themselves and the lives of children. Dio’s grandfather would have beat him bloody for saying it, but it was true. Dio had passed on the small amount that he knew to Hamas – a one-time, unidirectional communication – and with that information, Hamas had prevented the collateral killings of over a hundred innocent civilians.
    The macabre symmetry of what had followed, however, was something that he should have seen coming. Ironically ...a true traitor almost certainly would have. The man marked for death by the IDF – the man who had been spared as a by-product of Dio’s empathy – was the one to plan and finance the lethal retaliation that had, in turn, exposed Dio’s duplicity.
    When they came for him, after he’d been beaten and tortured, Dio was ready to die. He’d assumed that was what was happening. When those two hulking, dead -eyed Mossad agents had arrived at the door to his cell, he hadn’t really seen any other possibilities. The only questions left unanswered seemed to relate to exactly how long the final torture would take, and how creative they intended to be about it. Not that increments of agony mattered all that much beyond a certain point. Dio’s great grandfather had been an Irgun fighter. His grandfather had been with Mossad. His father had been a delivery driver who – through his father and grandfather – had seen and heard more than any man should. Dio’s father was an honest man. Too honest, perhaps. And no less with his son than with any other person. Dio, better than anyone, knew that when traitors died behind closed doors, they died screaming.
    “What do you know about Colorado?” One of the Mossad agents – the one on his right – had murmured to him as they led him through the corridors beyond his cell.
    “I -in America?”
    “Yes.”
    “They say there’s snow...” He responded wistfully. He’d never seen snow before. Seeing it hadn’t been a dream, or an ambition...or even a casual afterthought, really. But if asked, the answer would have been yes. ‘Yes’, Dio would have said: ‘I would very much like to see snow one day’.
    “Snow, yes. There is snow. And there are good lives for good men, also.” They had us hered him out of an unguarded door, and pushed him into the back of a nondescript delivery truck. An hour later, Dio was with Yvonne, and the two of them were boarding a plane bound for a refuelling in Frankfurt. From there, the two exiles had proceeded onward towards the United States.
    Those words, though; Dio would never forget those words. ‘Good lives for good men’. Those were words to live by. Words to die for. They were the words that were, for him, the first, last, and only things that he needed to know about The Organisation. His consternation was that he was unable to do more for his rescuers. But Mossad’s network was vast – the two double-agents who came for him had been the exception, not the rule – and the Americans held Israel’s interests as their own. At least insofar as traitors like Dio were concerned. Thus, for the time being, he had no choice but to stay where he was. And while, at first, the literality of ‘going underground’ by way of co-habiting in a bunker was amusing to him...after a year, the joke had begun to wear a little thin.
    “Dio?”
    “Sorry, what? I was elsewhere.”
    “Plus one: how many is that, now?”
    “That brings us to...” Dio looked down at the document, running a finger down the messy running total he’d been keeping just outside the table’s right margin. “Seventy-three.”
    “Really? That’ s going to be a very long night.”
    “Too many.” He frowned. “This is far too many for...what was it? Eight hours?”
    “Sounds about right ...”
    “This is just Pueblo. Pueblo alone. What if