The Protector Read Online Free PDF Page A

takeoff, I mustered up the courage to ask the question, “Am I?” 
    “Yes and no,” he answered me while looking straight ahead.  My eyes shot open and a sob welled up in my chest. How I managed not to let out an exasperated cry of protest I will never know.  Tears formed at the corner of my eyes. Nothing was going to stop them from falling. My mind raced in confusion.
    “Alison, relax.” He reached over and touched my arm.
    “Relax?” I managed to get out through clenched teeth.  “You’ve just told me I could possibly be under arrest and you want me to relax?”
    “No one but the nation state of Israel wants to arrest you right now. That is why you needed to be on this flight. They guy you were talking too? Joed, he’s an Israeli intelligence officer sent to keep an eye on you. They sent him to the airport to delay you until his superiors could come. And they only reason they didn’t arrest you right there is they didn’t want a huge scene. You would have been interrogated and it would not have been pleasant Alison. I had to do something.”
    Again confusion wracked every synapse in my brain. “Why do they think I’m a criminal? I was invited here because of where I work?”  My head began to spin and my body began to ache. The heavy feeling, like someone was sitting on my chest was getting worse. As the plane ascended into the sky, my head began to pound. “Who are you?” I managed to spit out in a barely audible whisper.
    He evaded my question and it annoyed me. “We are getting everything straightened out.  The processor you handed off, before the phone call. You gave it to the wrong guy.”
    I looked at him in disbelief as my head continued to pound. “I gave it to Professor Hassan
    “No.  I know Professor Hassan and that was not him.”
    “Wait.” I suddenly sat up in my seat. “How do you know Professor Hassan and how do you know I gave it to the wrong guy? And did Tom know about this?”  I could hear my heart racing in my chest.   The beating was causing the thumping in my head to get worse. They were simultaneous bursts of pain.
    “I don’t know what Tom knew.”  He was almost sarcastic in his tone which angered me all the more. I suddenly felt stupid.
    My head was now spinning and thumping and I had the urge to vomit all over the man who sat next to me. I opened my mouth and prayed desperately that words came out of it and not the contents of my stomach.  “How?  Who? Involved?”  I couldn’t finish the question I so desperately wanted to ask him. 
    “You look like you could use a drink?”  He reached his hand up to the call button but my hand flew up and grabbed his arm. 
    “No,” I whispered. “I need answers.”
    “I don’t have all of them Alison. Not yet anyway.”  I met his golden eyes and knew I wasn’t going to get any of the answers I so desperately wanted.  Something had gone terribly wrong in Tel Aviv and I still wasn’t sure how and why.
    I replayed the many conversations with Tom before I had left for Tel Aviv.  It was simple. He couldn’t go so I had to go to the conference in his place. He asked me to deliver a processor to an old friend of his he knew from Intel and that was that. It was perfectly legal technology they were swapping.  Then why did everything seem so much like a sick comedy of errors.  One thing goes wrong and everything seems to snowball.
    I hadn’t exactly taken the processor Tom wanted me to.  He, as always, didn’t package it correctly and I was afraid I wasn’t going to get through customs with his so I had grabbed another one. The one Tom had given me was still in a box in my purse at the bottom of my closet buried underneath all the clothes I had decided not to take. 
    Suddenly I felt so stupid. What had I done?  What had I given to this guy who wasn’t Professor Hassan. I could feel the blood drain from my face. I refused to let the tears fall and I choked back the sobs that were in my chest.
    Aston Martin