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The Spoils of War
Gordon Kent


An exhilarating tale of modern espionage and adventure featuring US Navy intelligence officer Alan Craik.In Tel Aviv, Commander Alan Craik, a US Navy veteran agrees to check out the death of a former Navy enlisted employee. He plans to be out the door and on to his real work in half an hour. But the task quickly turns dangerous, and what should have been a routine investigation becomes something very ugly.Nominal American allies in Israel withhold or alter information; nominal colleagues at home set up their own operation to satisfy the political needs of Washington; a wife betrays her husband and deceit and distrust prove to be the only common denominator.When Mike Dukas, a dogged, cynical special agent of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service joins the investigation, it leads them all from Tel Aviv to Gaza and the Greek island of Lesvos to Jerry Piat, a renegade CIA officer.With agents of Mossad and the Palestinian Authority always close behind them, Alan Craik demands the answers to some far-reaching questions. What are the rules in modern conflict? Where is honour? And what is the cost of telling the truth?









The Spoils of War

Gordon Kent












T. Cuyler young

Donald G. Cameron



They went further than seemed possible




Table of Contents


Cover Page (#u639fa146-9ee9-5580-92dd-003b86ecbd4a)

Title Page (#u55e9b6ea-fd6f-5716-8217-0add2b9ae579)

Excerpt (#u61b4d156-86d7-5237-8595-49f7c69b23ab)

Prologue (#u2c64a9ba-8bad-5989-b292-2fa9b6f9c903)

Part One (#ue907facd-03d8-5432-a198-a1ed1728fc13)

1 (#u01d2aa9b-1d56-5a2a-bd69-559fe670cf2d)

2 (#u75353a8d-a49c-50c8-a0e5-32249d0fc787)

3 (#u279abf43-685e-5e0d-aaf2-d27d540e18d9)

4 (#ue9e15a1b-98f1-55ef-a51c-e949d7b7dd43)

5 (#u71105eb0-76a0-56f1-84eb-7ca2cd558d93)

6 (#u681e66f0-6f99-5131-84b2-e1743c015b9d)

7 (#u48129a15-f2aa-53bc-b04e-b0f35ed4b0c5)

8 (#ubb86575f-e8ef-5eed-a0d4-0965e4797223)

9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)

10 (#litres_trial_promo)

11 (#litres_trial_promo)

12 (#litres_trial_promo)

13 (#litres_trial_promo)

14 (#litres_trial_promo)

15 (#litres_trial_promo)

16 (#litres_trial_promo)

17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)

18 (#litres_trial_promo)

19 (#litres_trial_promo)

20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Coda (#litres_trial_promo)

About The Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Other Books By (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Prologue (#ulink_79391915-5a66-574f-a22e-0acf5c652d45)


The Kosovo-Albania Border, 1997

The late afternoon rain sent the Albanian soldiers into the cover of the trees. Dukas thought the move was probably for the best. What he had seen of the Albanians scared him, and he was glad when they walked off up the road to the stand of oak trees, shouting at each other and carrying their rifles across their necks like ox yokes.

The rain beat on the windshield of Dukas’s borrowed Land Rover and the wipers droned back and forth, harmonizing with the heater and the raindrops on the roof, washing away some of the mud accumulated in a nine-hour drive across “the former Yugoslavia.” There was mud from Bosnia and mud from Croatia and a little mud from Kosovo, all washing off into the ruined tarmac of a road in Albania.

“Have a little faith, okay,” muttered the Mossad guy in the back seat. Actually, there were two Mossad guys in the back seat, but one of them was so obviously a bureaucratic functionary that Dukas ignored him. Dukas tried to adjust his body language so that he was not telegraphing his views on the afternoon quite so blatantly. He looked back.

“When do you want to call this off?” he asked.

“Give the man another hour.”

His name was Shlomo, he had said. Dukas thought the name was funny, but the man himself was serious. Now, he moved his hand slightly to indicate that, no, he didn’t expect their quarry to appear either, and that, yes, they were going to wait an hour because he, Shlomo, was under the scrutiny of someone who had sent a bureaucrat to watch him.

Dukas liked Shlomo. And he didn’t mind helping the Israelis, as long as his own investigations into Bosnian Muslim war crimes benefited from helping them. He pulled a headset up over his ears and keyed his radio.

“Roger, Squid, I copy you,” the voice on the other end said. The Canadians he had picked up as an ops team thought it was hilarious that Dukas was attached to the US Navy, and they called him Squid at every opportunity.

“Give it another six zero minutes.”

“Roger, copy.” The Canadians were in cover along the Albanian side of the border. Dukas had looked for them a few times and failed, but they answered radio calls and they had stayed in their positions all day; now they would all be drenched in addition to tired. By contrast, the Albanians had a roaring fire going in the tree line; at dusk, both the smoke and the fire must have shown for miles. But Dukas would not have been allowed here without the “support” of the Albanians.

A column of headlights showed across the ridge to the south in Kosovo. Dukas and Shlomo had their binoculars up in an instant and then back in their laps. They both sighed on much the same note.

“He’ll come in this lot,” the bureaucrat said.

Dukas shook his head. Shlomo said, “No, David. It’s just local militia crossing the border to buy weapons.”

“Why can’t he be in among them? He could be with them.” The Mossad bureaucrat, who had introduced himself as David, sounded as if he believed that he could make his assertions true by repeating them. He had the makings of a politician, Dukas thought.

“He doesn’t have that kind of contact.”

“You don’t know that.” David sounded petulant.

Dukas listened to them and wondered what made their target, a Lebanese, so important that David would get his penny loafers dirty coming to collect him, especially as it was Dukas who would have to do the work and who would do the interrogation. As was almost always the case when he was working with foreign intelligence people, Dukas suspected that he was being used. He was a cynic. But he was usually right.

He cleared his throat. The two men in the back fell silent. “How is it that a Muslim Lebanese doesn’t have contacts in Kosovo?” he asked.

“He’s a city boy,” Shlomo said.

“You guys said he was an arms dealer.” Dukas turned to look into the back seat. It was dusk, and Shlomo’s face was almost invisible. David was leaning forward into the last sunlight. He seemed excited.

“I said his efforts helped to put guns in the hands of the Muslims in Bosnia,” Shlomo said.

The convoy of headlights over in Kosovo had descended the ridge and made it to the checkpoint at the Albanian border.

Dukas kept going. “Why does he sell arms to Bosnians and not Kosovans?”

David said, “Why don’t you do your job and let us do ours?” His words hung there for a few seconds. Shlomo’s hand twitched, as if he was going to try and withdraw the words his partner had said.

Dukas looked at his watch and turned to face the back seat again, bunching the skirts of his raincoat in his fist. “My job is to aid the UN and the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague in the apprehension of war criminals.”

He turned and met David’s eyes, but the younger man returned his look with indifference. Dukas continued, “If the guy we’re after isn’t of interest to me, my job will include dropping you guys at an airport and driving back the nine hours it took me to get here. With nothing. And unless it suits me, my job has nothing to do with helping you do yours.”

David held his gaze, and then his eyes flicked away as he seemed to lose interest. He shrugged.

Shlomo shook his head.

Dukas was considering a further lecture on the subject when he heard a radio tone in his headset.

“Yeah?”

“Palm Two has movement on the hillside.”

Dukas looked over his shoulder through the rain-streaked glass reflexively; in fact, he couldn’t see anything except a yellow smudge where the Albanians had their fire. “Just Albanians,” he said.

“Palm Two says it’s a sniper with high-res optics and a ghillie suit,” reported the voice in his ear.

Dukas’s head snapped up.

“What’s happened?” Shlomo asked from the back seat.

The windshield wipers cycled. Fifty meters below them, at the checkpoint, an ancient white Zil was being searched thoroughly while its former occupants stood and smoked. One man had a briefcase. This drew Dukas’s eye.

Surprise, surprise.

“That’s our guy.” Dukas waved. He was out of the car and moving. He stopped to clutch his headset to his ear. “The guy at three o’clock in the car being searched now. No, not in the car. Next to the car. Yeah! Briefcase. Take him!” He started down the rocky hillside, paused to draw a heavy revolver from his shoulder holster.

Shlomo caught up with him and they ran down the hill together, raincoats flapping like ungainly wings.

Boom.

The shot sounded like a cannon. Two Canadian soldiers, halfway out of their concealment, froze and looked around for the source.

In his headset, the Canadian voice said, “Sniper!” and then, “Palm Two, do you have a shot?”

Pop, pop.

Dukas was now a bystander, lying full length in the wet bracken between two stones with Shlomo wedged in next to him.

Pop, pop.

“Hawk One, this is Palm Two. He’s gone. No hits.”

“Is it safe to move?” Dukas asked. He was soaked; runoff from the hillside was going right down his pants.

“Wait one.”

It took the Canadians ten minutes to clear the hillside. They found a small patch of dark khaki polyester and a one-inch square of flannel.

“That’s off his ghillie suit,” a black Nova Scotian sergeant said. He presented them to Dukas and Shlomo. “That flannel he used to wipe the optics on his rifle.” He sounded as if he was from Boston.

Dukas knelt by the body. It was impossible to establish whether this was, in fact, the man they’d come for; a fiftycaliber sniper round had removed most of his head. Dukas began to search the corpse. The man had a wallet with American dollars and several forms of ID. His clothes were all international—a Gap sweatshirt with a hood, blue jeans. The briefcase was locked to his wrist; the keys were in his jeans.

Shlomo leaned in to see what was in the case and Dukas rotated it so that he could see everything.

“This guy was an arms dealer?” Dukas said.

Shlomo shrugged. “We make mistakes, too.” Shlomo didn’t seem surprised by the contents.

Dukas pointed with a booted toe at the remnants of the jawline and lack of a head. “Was that a mistake?” he asked.

Shlomo raised his hands. “I don’t like what you’re suggesting.”

“You going to tell me that the Albanians shot him?” Dukas exhaled sharply. “With a fifty-cal?”

Shlomo glanced up the hill at the Land Rover. “It wasn’t right, what David said, but he is political and thinks he rules the world, okay?”

Dukas knelt again by the briefcase and began to inventory the contents. He pulled plastic freezer bags from the zippered liner of his raincoat, assigned a chain-of-custody code to each item, placed it in the freezer bag, and stuck the number on the outside. Most of the items in the briefcase were Roman coins. He did the inventory carefully, because he was angry and he didn’t want to do something stupid. Shlomo watched him for a while and then walked over to the car the dead man had arrived in and began to question the three other occupants in English and then in Turkish. Then Arabic.

In the inner pocket, Dukas found a red leather calendar book. Once, its edges had been gold-leafed, but it had been used for too many years. The calendar date was 1987. He flipped it open to the back—penciled addresses and phone numbers in Arabic and in roman script, in cities throughout the Mediterranean.

David thrust out a hand. “I’ll take that.”

Dukas hadn’t seen him come down the hill, but it looked as if he had taken the longer and drier route on the tarmac.

Dukas didn’t reply. He placed the calendar in a plastic bag, put a sticker on it, and wrote a number. He tossed the bag on the pile.

David stepped around him and bent over the pile. Dukas stood up suddenly, his hip grazing the younger man and sending him sprawling.

“Sorry,” Dukas said, offering his hand. “I’m clumsy.”

David crab-walked away and rose to his feet. His jaw worked as if he was chewing, and his face was red, but he kept his distance.

Shlomo came back from the car.

“He attacked me,” David said.

Dukas shook his head. “A misunderstanding.”

“He attacked me,” David said, his anger causing his voice to rise. “He is interfering.”

Dukas talked over David. “Get this guy out of here.”

David began to use his hands. He wasn’t speaking English now, but Hebrew, and he was speaking only to Shlomo.

Shlomo didn’t move. David went on talking. Shlomo ignored him and looked at the briefcase and then at Dukas, his head bent slightly to one side as if he were asking a question. Dukas locked the locks on the briefcase and put the keys in the pocket of his raincoat. The Canadian sergeant was standing by the Zil, watching the three terrified Kosovans and smoking. From time to time he glanced at the two Israelis.

David wiped his hands on his coat, turned away from Shlomo in obvious disgust and faced Dukas. “Give me that briefcase.”

“Don’t tempt me to start this as a homicide investigation.” David raised his hand and pointed at Dukas. “You don’t even understand what you are interfering with. Give me the briefcase.”

Dukas walked past the younger man and started up the hill, then turned. Instead of anger, he found only fatigue and boredom, as if he had played this scene too many times. “This is evidence in a war-crimes-tribunal investigation. You never mentioned a briefcase in our memorandum of understanding. You told me that this guy was some kind of terrorist heavy hitter. I don’t know why you wanted him dead, but he’s dead. Now—”

“We wanted him dead? The Albanians shot him!” David shouted, turning to Shlomo for support. Shlomo said nothing. His attention had switched from Dukas to David. He eyed him with distaste, the way tourists look at panhandlers.

Dukas shook his head, looked away, glanced back at a flicker of movement. The younger man had taken a long sliding step forward and his hand hit Dukas’s elbow hard, numbing it. Dukas dropped the briefcase but managed to pivot, block the follow-on blow, and stand over the case. Dukas had plenty of time to see that the Canadians were too far away to do anything. He risked a glance at Shlomo, who hadn’t moved.

David crouched, a relaxed martial arts position. He looked confident. “Give us the fucking briefcase.”

Dukas shook his head. He didn’t think the briefcase was worth a crap to him or any of the cases he was making, but this was too stupid a point to concede. He picked it up and held it to him like a schoolgirl holding her books and hoped that the heavy case would deflect a blow.

Shlomo stepped up behind his partner and elbowed him in the head so that he sat abruptly on the wet road. Again.

The Canadian ordered all three Kosovans to the ground and started bellowing into his radio for backup.

“It would be better if you gave us the briefcase,” Shlomo said. He sounded as tired as Dukas felt.

“Put in a request through channels.”

David moaned.

“That guy’s dangerous,” Dukas said.

“More dangerous than you know, my friend.” Shlomo wiped the rain from his eyes. “I think you’d better get out of here.”



Part One (#ulink_b0baf43a-69b6-51e9-aa42-92988dc7d92c)




1 (#ulink_a592d09f-4734-5b58-b8df-dee03a1db818)


Tel Aviv, Israel, January, 2002

Abe Peretz told the old joke about the Polish immigrant woman and the boy on the bus. It was practically archaic, he said, from the early days of Israel, but still funny: A mother and her little boy are riding on a bus in Jerusalem. The boy speaks Hebrew but the mother keeps speaking Yiddish. A man sitting across the aisle leans over and says, “Lady, the little boy speaks wonderful Hebrew; why do you keep talking to him in this wretched Yiddish?” “Because,” she says, “I don’t want him to forget he’s a Jew.”

Outside, the night was coming down like a lavender curtain, darker to the east behind them but brightening into orange on the undersides of the clouds out over the Mediterranean. The apartment was high above Ben Yehuda but the sounds of the street came up; and the smell of evening, a swirl of salt sea and car exhaust and cooking food, rose with them.

“They say that if you breathe really deep, you can smell the desert,” Abe Peretz said.

“Only if you’re a Jew,” his wife said with a smile. “You, you’d have trouble.”

The Peretzes lived in Tel Aviv but had been there only a few months; the Craiks were old friends passing through. The two men had served on a ship together fifteen years before, when one had been new to the Navy and the other had been in too long; now Peretz was the FBI’s deputy legal attaché at the US embassy, and Alan Craik, long ago that young newbie, was the Fifth Fleet intel officer in Bahrain.

Peretz grinned at the two guests. “Bea thinks I’m not Jewish enough. Funny, because I don’t look Jewish.” He winked at his wife; she overdid rolling her eyes and laughed and said to Rose Craik, who was visibly pregnant, “This one had better be a girl. Two boys are enough.”

“Well, I’m concentrating really hard.”

“Two girls are enough, too,” Peretz said. His own two had just come in, still out of sight but noisy at the apartment’s front door. “The quietest voice they know is the scream. If you think Italians are noisy, wait until you’ve lived in a—”

The two girls erupted through the glass doors to the terrace, both in T-shirts with slogans across their breasts that were meaningless to the adults, one in Hebrew, one in English. There was a lot of kissing and flouncing and shouting; the greetings to Rose were enthusiastic but forced, because Rose Craik had been a great favorite when they had been children but now they were grown up—in their own eyes, at least; and after a lot of shouting, in which Bea took a major part, they whirled out again and the terrace seemed astonishingly quiet.

“As I was saying before I was interrupted,” Abe Peretz said. He grinned again. He grinned a lot, his way of saying that nothing he said was quite serious, or at least not quite as it sounded.

“As you were saying,” Bea Peretz erupted, “it’s time I started cooking if we’re ever going to eat.” She got up and gestured toward Rose. “Come help me.” She was a big woman, getting a little heavy, but she had beautiful eyes and still-black hair that lay tight against her skull and then cascaded down her back. “You guys tell each other war stories so we don’t have to listen over dinner.”

Alan Craik smiled at his wife, who had as many war stories as either of the men—chopper pilot, ex-squadron CO, currently deputy naval attaché, Bahrain—and who now gave a little shrug and let herself be led away.

That was the day that the latest fragile truce between the Israelis and the Palestinians had self-destructed when a Palestinian militant was killed by a car bomb in the West Bank. The al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade declared that the cease-fire was finished. Before the day was over, two soldiers had been killed at a settlement, and the Martyrs Brigade took credit.

That was also the last day of a man named Salem Qatib, who, like the cease-fire, was a victim of both sides: first the Palestinians tortured him, and then the Israelis tortured him, and then he died.

“Bea’s kind of bossy,” Abe said. He looked at the fingertips of one hand, sniffed them—an old habit. “We talk too much about being Jewish, don’t we.”

Embarrassed, Craik mumbled something vague.

“No, we do. Since we moved here, Bea and the girls have got like the Republican Party—a steady move to the right.” He gave a snort, certainly meant to show disgust. “Bea has a new bosom buddy named Esther Himmelfarb. I mean, it’s good that she’s found a friend; Bea doesn’t usually get close to people. And the woman helps her a lot—she knows where everything is, knows who to see, what to say, but—” He waved a hand. “We keep kosher—that’s new. The girls want to go live on a kibbutz, even though the kibbutzes are all turning into corporations and the days of boys-and-girls-togethertaming-the-desert are long gone. It’s a romance. All three of them have fallen in love.” He sniffed his fingers.

“You don’t like it here?”

“I’m not enchanted by living on land that the former owners gave up because they had a gun at their head. And now they’re sitting out there in refugee camps, watching me eat their dinner.”

“The Palestinians don’t exactly have the cleanest hands in the world.”

“They’re absolute shits. Just like a lot of Israelis. But overall, Israel gives me a royal pain in the butt because they’re the occupying power and that puts a special responsibility on you to behave better than the other guy—and they won’t face up to reality.” He shot Craik a look to see if he knew which reality he meant. “You can’t say �No right of return, no reparations’ and be a moral entity.” He rested his arms on the terrace railing and put his chin on them. “That’s why Bea says I’m a bad Jew. Because I won’t join in the national romance.”

Craik slumped lower until his spine was almost ready to fall off the seat, his long legs thrust out toward the edge of the terrace. He had his own doubts about Israel, but he had to shut up and do his job: in two days, he was supposed to meet with Shin Bet, Israel’s military intelligence, to get their input on an operation in Afghanistan.

Fifty miles south in Gaza, three men were beating the Palestinian named Salem Qatib. Two would hold the victim while the third hit him, and then they would slam him against a stone wall and shout, “What else? What else?” They were Palestinian, too.

“Your husband looks like hell, if I’m allowed to say that, Rose,” Bea Peretz was saying.

“He’s stressed out, is all.”

“What’s he doing in Israel?”

“Oh—Navy stuff. You know.” She hesitated, added, “He got a couple of extra days on his orders to try to sort of run down.”

“Israel’s a great place! Really. Even Abe thinks so.” She was pounding dough down on a board, making it thin. “I wish you could meet my friend Esther. She makes you understand how you can love this country. We all want to stay for good.”

“The Bureau’ll go along with that?”

“There’s other jobs, Rose. Some things are more important than what you do for a living.” The way she said it, Rose felt as if Bea had said it before, maybe many times—the detritus of an old argument, washed up on this woman-to-woman beach. Rose sampled a bit of something made with chopped olives and murmured, “We are what we do for a living, to some extent.”

“And we can change!” Bea hit the dough a tremendous whack! “You were going to be an astronaut once. You didn’t make it. You didn’t die.”

Only where nobody but me can see, Rose thought. She said, “Anyway, maybe Abe’s not so invested in it as I was.”

“Oh—Abe!” Bea cut the dough into squares with great slashes of a knife. “Abe could sell bread from a pushcart and be happy! He lives in such a fog—”

“How’s Rose coping with not being an astronaut?” Peretz said to Alan Craik. They were still on the terrace, new drinks in their hands, the sky almost blue-black.

“I think it almost killed her, but—you know Rose. Get on with life.” He sipped at his weak gin and tonic. “She’s going to be deep-select for captain.”

Peretz looked out at the sky for a long time, and when he spoke it was clear that he’d hardly listened to the answer to his own question. “If I get a transfer, I don’t think Bea’ll go with me. Or the girls.”

“Well, if they’re in school—”

Peretz bounced a knuckle against his upper lip. “It’s a hell of a thing, to watch a family go in the tank because of—” He sighed. “It’s never just one thing, is it. Bea and I have always had a—You know, the relationship has always been noisy. But suddenly—It’s this damned place. Jesus.” He stared at his fingers. “Religion’s soaked into the goddam soil here. Like Love Canal.”

Salem Qatib, who had been beaten, lay in one rut of a Gaza road. By and by somebody would have driven along the road and run over him, but a Palestinian who knew about the torture and who was a Mossad informer got on a cell phone and alerted his control.

Over dinner—candles, no kids, Israeli wine, lamb and grains in a recipe that was millennia old—the Craiks tried to talk about old friends and old days and things that didn’t have to do with Israel or being Jewish. But as more wine was poured, Bea didn’t want to talk about anything else, as if they had a scab that she wanted to scratch and watch bleed. She cited her friend Esther often—“Esther says.” Even Nine-Eleven, the topic of conversation everywhere in those days, brought her back to Israel. “Now you know what it’s like!” she cried. “Now you know what the Arabs are!” She gestured at Abe with a fork. “You’ll say next that we should be more understanding, because al-Qaida blew up the World Trade Center because they’re misunderstood!”

Abe started to say that he never said, and so on, and she interrupted, and so on.

“Bea enjoys being a caricature,” Peretz said, smiling to show it was a joke and failing. “Bea, beautiful Bea, light of my life, could we talk about baseball?”

“Esther says the Palestinians are terrorists and invaders and we ought to throw them out and keep them the fuck out!”

“�We,’” Abe said, smiling at them.

“Arafat is a monster. He’s paying the terrorists, killing women and children, and pretending to want peace. Esther says they live out there like animals; they live in kennels; they’re barely able to read and write and they say they have �universities,’ my God!”

“When our great-grandparents lived in the shtetls, the Russians called them animals; they couldn’t read or write; they—”

“And they came here and they made the desert bloom! They built real universities! They made a nation!”

“On land that they took with the gun,” Abe said wearily.

“Because it was ours!”

Abe looked at Alan and gave an apologetic shrug. The silence grew longer, and Abe said, falsely cheerful, “What d’you hear from Mike Dukas?”

Maybe because she had had too much wine, Bea broke in with, “I’ll never forgive Mike Dukas for saying that Jonathan Pollard was a traitor! Never. Never, never, never!”

“But Pollard was a traitor,” Abe made the mistake of saying.

He was probably going to explain that somebody who sells American secrets to another state, even if it’s Israel, is in fact a traitor, but Bea said in a suddenly quiet voice, “I know what you think,” and she turned away and began to talk to Rose about having daughters.

Then things were easier for a while, and they got through dessert, and Alan looked at his watch and at Rose, and when Bea brought in coffee everything would have been all right if Rose hadn’t asked for cream, and there was embarrassment and confusion, and Abe explained the kosher rule of thumb and ended, smiling as at a great joke, “It’s a dietary law, which I’d be happy to explain the logic of if I understood it myself.”

Bea said, “If you were half the Jew you ought to be, you’d understand it.”

“But I must be a Jew—my mother was Jewish. Okay, Bea?”

She dropped her voice to a purr. “Abe means he’s a modern Jew. Just like everybody else—no funny foods, no embarrassing hat, no accent—oy veh! that he should have an accent!—he should be taken for a Presbyterian, maybe. Assimilate, right, Abe? That’s the magic word, right? Assimilate European high culture and never look back—Dostoevsky, Mozart, and Wittgenstein, right?”

In the embarrassed silence, Alan said, “Who’s Wittgenstein?”

She stared at him, broke into loud laughter, then patted him on the cheek. “I love you, Al—you’re perfect.”

Alan looked at his wife and got the slightly wide-eyed look: Say nothing; we’ll leave soon.

Salem Qatib lay on a table now. A big Israeli was leaning over him shouting Shit! again and again, and then he screamed at another man, “You stupid asshole, you’ve fucking killed him!”

Acco, Israel

Rashid Halaby sat in the dark with his back against a wall that had been built when Augustus was Caesar. The fancy American flashlight that his mother had given him for his birthday had a new battery, but it was running down now. He had his cell phone, but the signal couldn’t penetrate the layers of rock and mud brick above him. He was hungry. He was filthy. He was thirsty and had no water. His ribs hurt every time he took a deep breath or moved in a certain way, from a fall.

Salem, his best friend—taken. Beaten.

Rashid had run from the dig in Gaza, fought the men who had tried to stop him. He had run and left Salem to their attackers. Then he had hidden, then hitched a ride with workers from a kiln going back to their homes in Israel. He thought he might have killed a man—a Hamas man. With a rock hammer.

He couldn’t go home.

His hand dug almost of its own volition, scrabbling in the ancient dirt. He built a little pile of worthless artifacts; the bones of a small animal, some shells, a coil of brass or bronze wire, something that might have been a bead or a carbonized grain of wheat. And a bronze arrowhead with a distinctive cast barb, the type that the Scythians had used. Salem Qatib had taught him all that.

Sitting in the dark, he cried. Once he started, he couldn’t stop, and it went on and on, because too many bad things had happened. He wanted out. He needed to find Salem.




2 (#ulink_7e3badd4-c67b-5a5f-9183-a8ac590ff0fd)


Acco

It was after midnight when Rashid emerged from the tunnels under Acco. He left by way of new digs into the crusader city; they were unguarded and had opened new routes to the surface for him. One came up just outside the north walls, close enough to the sea that he had to wade the last few yards through water filthy with refuse in his wavering flashlight. He washed as soon as the water looked clean. Then he picked his way along the stone shoring intended to keep ancient Acco from washing into the Mediterranean until he passed the walls and entered the industrial zone to the north. There he climbed up into the over-lit modern night and squelched his way to a bus stop. By the time a bus came, he was nearly dry. Neither of the two passengers gave him a glance.

He was going to the apartment of Salem’s girlfriend. He didn’t like her, but he had nowhere else to go. She would tell him what had happened. She would know where to find Salem.

Even his feet were almost dry by the time the bus dropped him a few meters from her apartment, a heavy building with too much concrete and too little glass. From the street, he could see a paid security guard in the lobby. He had been here before, many times. Salem had virtually lived in her apartment after he met her.

He walked around the building, hungry, thirsty, and every time he slipped his side gave a pulse of pain like a knife-jab. Yesterday, or perhaps two days ago, he had had everything a man his age could want—a job, a place to live, a wonderful friend—

Before he could start crying again, Rashid pushed himself up the steps and into the lobby. The guard did not raise his head from his Koran, and Rashid went by. The building had elevators that actually worked. Rashid hit the up button and waited. When the doors opened, he entered, panicked briefly when he saw a man coming up from the garage with him, and then made himself press the button for sixteen. The man smiled at him and then frowned at his shoes, good American basketball shoes now caked with filth and still damp.

“I got lost,” Rashid said.

The words hung in the air between them. Rashid knew immediately that talking had been a mistake. The other man looked away. The elevator came to a stop on twelve and the man got out, looking at Rashid as he left and then at the digital floor display as if to check where Rashid was going.

Rashid felt his hands begin to shake. He clenched them.

The doors shut.

Rashid was sure that the man intended to call the desk when he reached his apartment. If Saida refused to see him, he would be taken, perhaps handed over to the police.

The doors opened on an empty corridor. Rashid stumbled forward, rattled and apprehensive. Saida was a hard woman, but she wasn’t bad.

A slut, his mother said.

He got to her door, still confused about what to say when she answered, and knocked. He should have called before he came, but he had little money, and in movies, people could be traced by their cell phones. He knocked again, put his ear to the door and knocked as loud as he dared.

The elevator departed behind him with a loud hum and whir of hydraulics and pulleys. He listened to it as it ran all the way down to the lobby without stopping.

He knocked again.

She wasn’t home.

The stairwell was locked on the ground floor, he knew. He didn’t want to face the security in the lobby by going down the stairs.

The elevator was coming back up.

He tried to turn the handle of her door. Locked, of course.

He tried again, as if strength could break a lock. Suddenly, his apprehension turned to panic at the approach of the elevator and he put both hands on the knob and wrenched at it, throwing his weight against the door.

The knob suddenly turned freely, and he stumbled through and the door slammed shut behind him. He tripped and fell sprawling with a crash as loud as the slam of the door. His flailing hands found paper, clothes, pans—

The balcony light shone through the sliding doors at the end of a short hall. The floor of the entire apartment, bigger than the place he shared with his mother, was covered in papers and trash. Every item in every drawer, every sheet of paper, had been rifled and tossed on the linoleum.

The lock had been forced. That’s why he had got in so easily.

Two thoughts seemed to occur to him simultaneously: that whoever had done this might still be there, and that the lobby security might be coming up in the elevator, might enter and assume he had robbed her. The association of the two thoughts froze him on the floor.

The elevator ran and ran, a pulse-like vibration allowing him to count the floors.

It stopped. The doors opened. It was this floor; someone got out and walked swiftly up the hall, and then back down it. Rashid held his breath, sure, sure that it was the guard. Unable to move. With nothing between him and arrest but an unlocked door. The man moved and stopped.

And moved.

And stopped.

Rashid saw the guard’s feet under the door against the light of the outside hall. In his mind, he prayed. Inshallah, Inshallah, Inshallah.

Allah’s will was that the guard should walk on. He moved down the corridor a few more doors, stopped, and came back.

The elevator doors opened and closed again and the car began to move.

Rashid breathed.

What if she was here, dead? That was a foolish thought, born of fatigue and the alien landscape in which he suddenly found himself. It was like finding himself on the set of an American horror movie.

He couldn’t push it out of his mind. In movies, the dead person was always in the bathroom. The bathroom was the next room on the hall.

He wished he had a weapon. He forced himself to crawl to the light-switch and threw it. All the lights came on, revealing the destruction of Saida’s effects more cruelly than the hallway lighting had done. He peered into the bathroom and saw no body. Emboldened, he moved into the kitchen, found a clean glass on a paper on the floor, and drank her expensive bottled water from the refrigerator. He drank three bottles before he was done; then he ate a sandwich that was days old but tasted wonderful.

Saida’s absence left him with no options. No money, no place to go, no one to beg for help. But his brain began to run again, and the panic drew back to the edge of his consciousness.

He had to get out of this building.

He had to get money.

He had to find Salem, although it was increasingly clear to him that Salem was in deep trouble. Rashid knew he had found something—something wonderful. Salem could not hide his feelings from Rashid. And he had taken things from the dig—Rashid had seen them in a gym bag in Salem’s car.

The men beating Salem at the dig, pounding him with their fists and the flat of a shovel. Yelling abuse. Telling Salem he was a thief. And Rashid, Salem’s loyal friend, had run away and hidden in the old tunnels under the city.

He went into the bedroom. The epicenter of the apartment’s wreckage. He started to go through the piles of clothing the searchers had thrown on the floor.

Salem’s clothes were in a separate pile. Rashid dug into it for Salem’s Navy coat; he didn’t wear it in Gaza, where American sailors would hardly be popular, but he often wore it in Israel where the opposite was true. Up in the padding of the shoulders was Salem’s emergency stash. Salem had shown it to him, once, with a joke.

“It’s my fly-away money,” he had said.

A thousand dollars in American bills, crisp and neat. And a tiny hard rectangle that felt unfamiliar. Rashid pulled it out and tried to remember what it did. He took another swig of water and remembered. He was holding a flash card, the memory of a digital camera. And Salem had hidden it.

He pocketed it with the money. He took the peacoat, because it was warm and dry and it was Salem’s. It made him feel taller.

He still had to leave the building. He poked through the rubble of Salem’s life with Saida and found a pair of his boots, rubberized duck shoes that Salem had seldom worn because, he said, they hurt his feet and were too hot. They fit poorly, but with the peacoat they made him look like a young man of means. They gave him the confidence to take the elevator and face the man at the desk.

As the elevator descended, he found he was calm. Perhaps too tired to feel more fear.

“She’s not home,” the guard said when Rashid emerged. The tone was on the edge of accusation.

“I know,” Rashid replied, walking steadily to the doors. Whatever the guard might have wanted to ask, Rashid kept going, volunteering nothing, a tactic that seldom failed him, until he was out on the street in the cold winter rain. When the guard finally opened her apartment, he, Rashid, would be the obvious suspect. Then the police would join Hamas in searching for him.

His life here was done. He was going to find Salem, and the place to look was back in the occupied territory. So be it. Rashid felt the crisp bills in his pocket and headed for a bus stop.

Naval Criminal Investigative Service HQ, Naples, Italy

“Aw, shit!”

Mike Dukas was looking at a message directing him to do something—urgently—and his people were already stretched thin and he didn’t have time for Mickey Mouse. His hand hit the phone.

“Dick,” he growled, “get in here.”

“Your wish is my, mm, suggestion.”

Dick Triffler was the ASAC—the Assistant Special Agent in Charge, NCIS Naples. He was a tall, slender African American with an oddly high voice and a manner so precise that he seemed to be doing an imitation of somebody—Clifton Webb, maybe, or William F. Buckley. He had worked with and for Dukas off and on for years and had always been eager to transfer someplace else; Dukas had been astonished, therefore, when Triffler had requested to be ASAC when Dukas had taken over Naples as Special Agent in Charge. Asked why, Triffler, who had been running his own long-term investigation on the West Coast, had said, “I thought I needed a challenge.”

Now Triffler came in, buttoning a black blazer over a blueon-blue striped shirt and a thick silk tie that, in an office where Dukas was wearing an ancient polo, made it look as if the Prince of Wales was visiting a homeless person. “You rang?” Triffler said as he sat down, pulling one knife-creased pant leg over a knee.

“I got a Rummygram telling us we urgently got to get the closeout details on some poor ex-Navy bastard who died in Tel Aviv. What the hell, is this any way to run a war on terrorism?”

“What war on terrorism?”

“The one we’re waging twenty-four-seven throughout the universe. Isn’t that what all this paperwork is about? Jesus Christ, I’ve got five drunken sailors in foreign jails, three sex abusers, a phantom shitter on the Fort Klock, and we’re supposed to be looking under the beds for al-fucking-Qaida! Now I’ve got to scrape up somebody to do scut work in fucking Tel Aviv! Let the naval attaché do it!”

“You’re venting again. That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it—to listen to you vent. As you know, naval attachés have better things to do, like looking for a good place to have lunch, and dealing with dead sailors in foreign places is our charge.”

Dukas sighed. “Well—yeah, it’s our business—so who’s near Tel Aviv? The Jefferson’s already in the Canal. Athens office is too busy. We got anybody who can take a day and go?”

Triffler’s laugh was deliberately false. “How about Al Craik? He’s in Tel Aviv even as we speak.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Your wife told my wife.”

Dukas stared at him, stuck his lips out, raised an eyebrow. “That’s some network you got—two wives. You ever think of going into intelligence?”

Triffler stood—an impressive unfolding of long-boned limbs. “Am I done being vented at? You get in touch with Al.”

“You giving the orders now?”

“Somebody has to do it.”

Dukas scowled at his retreating back and then put out his hand for the phone and called Fifth Fleet, Bahrain, to ask where Commander Craik was staying in Tel Aviv.

Washington

In the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) mint-new Office of Information Analysis, the workday went on longer even than in the White House. The atmosphere of the place was that of a great business enterprise at the top of its game—buoyant, aggressive, determined, and overworked.

For a thirty-five-year-old named Ray Spinner, the place was salvation. He’d got bounced from the Navy for passing privileged information to his power-lawyer father; Dad had placed him in OIA to make it up. Now, Spinner reeled through his workdays in a frenzy half joy and half terror (Could he measure up? Could he be hardline enough? Did he dare to ape the bosses and wear power suspenders?). It was better than the Navy had ever been, but scary.

Sitting in a cubicle among twenty other cubicles, he was watching a message come up on his computer. New data came first to people like him; he knocked out the obvious bullshit and passed the rest up the line. The criteria had little to do with either authenticity or reliability and everything to do with usefulness to the office’s main goal—just then, getting something going in Iraq. He had already made the mistake of knocking out a report from a defector who said he had overheard a third party say that sarin gas was being manufactured nights and weekends in a Baghdad elementary school; it had been made very clear to him that this was precisely the kind of intelligence that was wanted, and if he made the same kind of dumb-nuts mistake again, he’d find himself handing out towels in the men’s room.

Spinner therefore really bore down now. The bit he was looking at struck him as a no-brainer—forwarding of a Tel Aviv police department memo about some dead A-rab.

Yarkov District police tonight reported death of Salem Qatib, Palestinian, resident West Bank. Held US student visa 1994-95, ex-US Navy reserve.

Meaning that the informant thought the dead guy might be of interest because he had US connections. Wrong. The real question was, Was he a terrorist? Well, let’s see. Spinner brought up OIA’s own list, which was different from the CIA’s and the FBI’s and much longer, and he didn’t find Salem Qatib as a terrorist but did find him on the Purgatory list (“not in Hell, but nearby”) of people “tracked for conflate background”—that is, for combining at least two suspicious factors. Like being Palestinian and having served three years in the US Naval Reserve.

As a cryptologist.

Hey, whoa!

Cryptologists had high security clearances and were tracked for years after they left the service because they had had access to sensitive stuff—codes, for example, that might not be changed for a long time. So Qatib must have been tracked, and he appeared to be clean, but OIA still had him on the conflate list because Palestinian plus cryptology equaled possible spy, right?

So. It wouldn’t do to make another mistake. Which he could do either by bumping this one up the line (but the word was that the White House was tired of the Palestinian problem), or by killing it (but maybe there was a secret interest in Palestinians that he didn’t know about).

Naval Reserve. That meant that the Navy would have to do a red-tape write-off—certify that the guy was dead, close his files, tie up all the loose ends of debts and pensions and all the other petty crap that the bean-counter mind could think of. So who did that?

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service, that’s who.

Nearest office to Tel Aviv? Athens. He looked at the Athens roster, didn’t recognize any names—Spinner liked to deal with friends—and noted that Athens was actually under NCIS Naples, so looked there. And my God, Mary, look at that—the Special Agent in Charge, Naples, was an asshole named Mike Dukas!

Spinner grinned.

Mike Dukas had been the prick who’d got him read out of the Navy.

So Spinner forwarded the Qatib report to Michael Dukas, SAC NCIS Naples, blind-copied to his own boss at OIA, with the terse order, “Check implications anti-terrorism and terrorist connections and report back ASAP.” He put the name of OIA’s head at the bottom—a stretch, but permissible. He sent it Urgent.

Up yours, Dukas. He could just see the overweight, glowering, blue-collar Dukas hunched over the message, trying to figure out why he’d been told to jump, and to jump urgently.

Spinner grinned. He stood, stretched, looked over his cubicle wall at a guy going by wearing red suspenders. Yeah, he’d look drop-dead good in those.

Tel Aviv

Alan Craik was sitting on a hotel-room bed, a telephone in his hand. His wife, mostly naked, came out of the bathroom and turned, her back to him, to rummage in a suitcase. He grinned at her back. “Sexy buns.”

On the telephone, a voice barked, “Dukas.”

“My God, you mean I was holding for you? If I’d known it was you, I wouldn’t have waited.”

Rose ran back toward the bathroom, an irrelevant nightgown fluttering from her shoulders.

“I got a favor I want you to do me.”

“The answer is no.”

“No, the answer is yes. There’s nothing to it; it’ll give you something to do in Tel Aviv while Rose shops.”

“How the hell’d you know where I am?”

“Rose talked to Les a couple days ago. Les talked to Triffler’s wife. You can’t have secrets, man.” Les—Leslie—was Dukas’s new and pregnant wife; she and Rose were pals. “Anyways—”

“Yeah?”

“This is strictly routine—I gotta have somebody from the Navy get a death certificate. A guy died, ex-Nav. Find out what the story is, blah-blah-blah. Anybody could do it.”

“Get anybody.”

“There isn’t anybody! Look, the guy died; we gotta make it possible to close out his file, notify next of kin, all that. Just do it, will you?”

“Meaning what?”

“Piece o’ cake.” Dukas told him where to go in Tel Aviv—the main police building on Dizengoff Street—and the victim’s name—Salem Qatib.

“That’s an Arab name.”

“Palestinian.”

“Mike, a Palestinian who’s ex-US Navy?—in Tel Aviv—?”

“Just do it, will you? Fax me the death certificate and anything else you get. And don’t overdo it—forget you’re an intel officer and just be my errand boy. I’ll fax the dead guy’s paperwork to the embassy.”

He would have objected, but Dukas had hung up and his wife came out of the bathroom, and when she saw his face, she said, “Now what?”

Bayt Da Border Crossing, Gaza

Rashid spent the bus drive across Israel handling his papers and his Israeli passport, and imagining how he might handle the border crossing. He was dirty—even his eyes felt dirty—but the other passengers going to Gaza weren’t much cleaner.

When he had worked on the site, it had been easy, because he had been in Salem’s car and Salem had a work permit—bogus, in that it mis-stated Salem’s reasons for being in Gaza, but real enough and issued under the seal of the Palestinian Authority. Salem knew how to get such things.

In two hours of tired worry, Rashid concocted a simple story to cover his visit; a girl he had met in Acco, the need to see her again. True enough, if he substituted Salem for the girl. He rehearsed his story to himself, staring at his passport and his travel documents, until the bus slowed to a stop in the morning line at the border crossing. The bus was half empty. Rashid felt alone, and his anxieties were pushed into his stomach and his limbs. He had to put the passport down because it showed the trembling of his hands.

The bus inched forward in the line, surrounded by barbed wire and graffiti-covered concrete, steel reinforcement rods rusting away in long brown streaks. The stink of leaded gasoline fumes filled the air around him, came in through his open window and bit at his throat.

Before they reached the checkpoint, armed Palestinian Authority security men came on to the bus. One of them took the passenger list from the driver and read through it. Another, younger, officer checked through the documents that passengers had; passports, work permits, sometimes only letters from a possible employer and an identity card.

The man with the passenger list made a call on his cell phone. The bored young man with an AK on his back flipped through Rashid’s Israeli passport.

“Where do you live?” he asked.

“Acco.”

“Purpose of your visit?” he asked, looking carefully at Rashid’s travel documents.

Rashid hadn’t seen him ask anyone else these questions, and he started to tremble again. “I’m—I’m going to see a—girl.”

The man laughed. He was only a little older than Rashid.

Rashid relaxed a little, and then the man with the passenger list pointed at him. “Rashid Halaby?” he said.

The younger guard nodded, held up Rashid’s passport.

“Take him.”

Tel Aviv

Dressed and waiting for his wife, Alan Craik was thinking not of her but of how thoroughly their world had changed since September eleventh. He was not thinking in sequence, not being rational or logical, rather letting his mind leapfrog from idea to idea; in fact, there was no logic, only the sequence of time itself, certainly no meaning. September eleventh obsessed his world, but he was oddly not quite of it: he had been on an island in the Gulf of Oman on September eleventh, miles from a television set, and he had not seen those images as they had burned their way into the world’s consciousness. He saw them later, to be sure; he had been shocked, saddened, angered, but he had missed the raw outrage—and the fear—that had gripped so many people. The difference was that he had not seen the horror live on television:

The island was rocky scrub and sand. There were goats, lots of them, many apparently wild. People walked into and out of this landscape as if passing from another reality into his and then out again. The sky came down like gray, hot metal and the sea, a smell wherever he went, was rarely visible. He was doing the red tape on the setting-up of a Navy sonar station, a job that could have been done and done better by a lieutenant with some sonar experience, but he was out of favor at Fifth Fleet, out of favor with the new flag and the new flag captain. The flag captain had said that there was no place for him there anymore and they’d expedite a new duty station for him but they didn’t want him as their intel, didn’t want his kind, whatever that meant. But he knew what it meant: a risktaker, a man who thought that out on a limb was where intel was done best.

He was out at the site, watching the goats, the odd Bedouin. Nothing was happening. He was thinking that they didn’t need him there at all. Right at that moment, they didn’t need him anywhere. Then his cell phone rang and the world changed. It was Sully, a CIA security thug who was a bully but the right man to have if people started shooting at you. Sully pushed people around verbally by saying the things that you didn’t say when the dynamics among people were fragile or explosive—sex, politics, religion—and now he said, the very first thing he said, “Al-Qaida just re-elected George Bush to a second term.” Then he had explained that a jetliner had crashed into the World Trade Center and other passenger aircraft were missing and bad shit was going down.

The event had jerked him from the job at Fifth Fleet to one as a Temporary Additional Duty case officer at Central Command, Qatar. He had been twice to Afghanistan since then, three times to Kuwait, once to Pakistan, once to Iran, all in the four months since that remarkably, perhaps fantastically, lucky, successful, outrageous al-Qaida hit. He had gone from vengefulness to resignation, then to a kind of skeptical sadness.

“Penny?” Rose said.

He took her hand. “I was thinking that al-Qaida did things right, and we’re going to do things wrong.”

“Still chewing on it.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I don’t want to go rushing back to a squadron to throw myself at bin Laden, if that’s what you mean.”

She’d been really hurt, he knew, by bailing out of the astronaut program. The Navy had lost some of its zest for her; he thought that it was that loss that had let her get pregnant again, driven her, maybe, back on her kids and on him. “There’ll be plenty of time to go to a squadron,” he said. “Years.”

“Another war, you think?”

“Oh, yeah. Lots of them.” He stood up, kissed her. “Bin Laden has arranged our futures for us.”

“We make our own futures.” She believed in self-determination.

“I thought so until this happened, but now—” He shook his head. “I keep wanting to look up to see who’s jerking my strings.” He straightened his clothes, pulling on himself as if he were rearranging his body, and they went to the elevator. He told her, in a different, heavier voice, that he was going to run Dukas’s errand while she shopped for presents for their kids. “I’m going there now and I should be done by two, and we’ll have a late lunch and then I’ll mosey over to the embassy and arrange to have them send the stuff to Mike.”

“I want to see a movie. Let’s go to a movie.”

“In Hebrew? Anyway, I’ve seen Harry Potter as much as I can stand.”

“It might be more interesting in Hebrew.”

On the street, he warned her for the third or maybe the fifth time of what to look for to avoid car bombs; he told her to duck if anybody started shooting, because half the crowd in any given spot would be armed; he told her to be careful of the baby. She told him he was a fuss-budget and she loved him and she’d see him at two o’clock.

He was back to thinking about September eleventh. “Everybody’s scared here,” he said. “Scared people scare me.”

Naples

Mike Dukas flicked a paper across his desk to Dick Triffler. “What the hell is an Office of Information Analysis?”

Triffler studied the paper. “It’s a secret office in DoD to do an end run around the intel agencies.”

“What the hell?”

“Folks who don’t like it call it the Office of Intellectual Paralysis. Folks who do like it think it’s the latest thing in what they call �intelligence reform,’ which means doing the Alley Oop around worn-out old shitkickers like the CIA, the FBI, and the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. We are, and I think I quote, �tired, old, liberal, and nitpicking.’ It’s do-it-yourself intel.”

“How come you know all that and I don’t?”

“I read The New Yorker.”

“Some secret.”

Triffler looked up over the rims of his reading glasses. “The New Yorker has an excellent track record. You should read it.”

“I don’t have time to read. So why the hell is this secret bunch of bureaucrats sending me a message to do what I already did anyway, namely get things moving on this guy who died in Tel Aviv?”

Triffler took off the glasses. “You’re a bureaucrat, too, after all.”

“That’s the worst thing you’ve ever called me.”

“No, it isn’t. You just didn’t hear the others. Done with me?”

“I smell fish. Rummy’s errand boys don’t send me messages by name. Somebody’s after me. Well?”

“Sounds right.”

“Check it out, will you?”

Triffler sighed. “If I say �Why me?’ will you do it yourself?”

“No time.”

Triffler sighed again. “The black man’s burden,” he said. He went back to his own office and got on the phone to a friend who taught public policy at Howard University. The woman was deep into Washington’s Democratic political scene, a good bet for elective office if she ever wanted it. “I need some information,” he said.

“Are you the Dick Triffler who’s tall, thin, and a dynamite dresser?”

“My word for it would be �elegant.’”

“Your wife is so lucky.”

“Tell her that.”

“Information is my middle name, honey; what d’you need?”

“There’s a new office in DoD called Information Analysis. I want to know who works there.”

“This administration’s pretty tight in the ass, hon.”

“You’d win my undying gratitude.”

“That your best offer?”

“At this distance, I’m afraid so.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

What she did was call a grossly overweight but unpredictably vain man in the office of a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. He had been an aide for a decade, knew where bodies were buried and who had held the shovel. He loved information, which he hoarded and then dealt like cards in a game of cutthroat stud.

“What’re you offering, chickie?”

“Well, I was just offered undying gratitude, how’s that?”

He laughed. “For gratitude, I don’t even give out the correct time.”

She cajoled, joked, reminded him of her usefulness in promoting legislation for his member.

“You promoting my member, sweetie? You haven’t set eyes on my member yet!”

“Spare me the Clarence Thomas jokes. You going to get me what I want or not?” She let an edge show in her voice; he got it. Business was business, after all. He’d need her, she was saying—each in his turn. He sighed. “You one tough lady. I’ll get back.”

The fat man slicked his wavy hair back—shiny, very like Cab Calloway’s, he thought—and checked his reflection in a window and called a guy he knew at the Pentagon. “Whose dick I gotta lick to pry loose a list of folks in some shithouse called the Office of Information Analysis?” he said.

Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv is a city of beautiful women and ugly architecture; the first make up for the second. Craik found it a pleasure to walk.

The police station on Dizengoff Street was on a par with the city’s other buildings, but at least it looked as if being a cop was a good thing—clean, solid, windowless. The entrance didn’t invite you in but announced that going in, with the right credentials, would be easier than getting out with the wrong ones.

He showed his passport and his part-timer’s NCIS badge. “Commander Craik, US Navy. About the death of Qatib, Salem.”

The policewoman at the inquiries desk spoke better Hebrew than she did English, but she wrote some things down and got on a telephone. Meanwhile, a plain-clothes detective was looking Alan over and probably realizing that he wasn’t armed—Alan, like most of the men in Tel Aviv, was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and slacks—while Alan was looking him over and deciding that the extra tuck on the right side of his shirt covered an in-the-waistband holster, and his slightly cocked left foot might suggest an ankle gun.

People went by as if they were heading for a somber event, heads down, moving fast. The space was big, harshly echoing, lighted with banks of fluorescents overhead; the noise of footsteps was like some sort of clattering engine. Move, move, the noise, the atmosphere seemed to say; get in and get out, don’t linger, we’re serious here.

“Commander Alan Craik?”

The man was blond, chunky, purposely likable. He had a Browning nine-millimeter in a very visible shoulder holster and he smiled as if he really was glad to see Alan. Maybe he was simply glad to see anybody who would allow him to strike an item off his to-do list. “Detective Sergeant Berudh.”

They shook hands. Berudh led him toward a bank of elevators, one hand behind Alan’s left arm; he was chattering about the building—how big it was, how many different offices it housed, how many crimes they covered a day. “You’re US Navy,” he said abruptly. “Not from a ship, I think.”

“No, not from a ship.” Habit kept him from saying where he was stationed just then. Which was absurd, of course, because the Israelis would already know. And they were allies. More or less.

Berudh was silent in the elevator, surrounded as they were by worried-looking people who were certainly not police. The elevator smelled of nervousness, Alan thought. Then two young women got on, smiling, bouncy, and chattered as the elevator rose. They worked there and seemed to say, “What is there to be nervous about?”

“Only the police are at home in a police station,” he said when they got off.

“And why not? Everybody’s guilty about something.” Berudh led the way down a corridor. “Most of them are here for permits, licenses, getting papers stamped, but they feel guilty. Actually, it makes the job easier.” He held a door open. “You’re NCIS?”

Alan explained that he had a badge but it was left over from earlier duty. “The special agent in charge of NCIS, Naples, asked me to do this for him.”

“Scut work,” Berudh said and gave him the smile. Berudh spoke American English with a slight accent, clearly knew American slang. “We work with NCIS when there are ships in Haifa, stuff like that. Sailors come down here, get in the usual trouble sailors do, we have to arrest them, blah-blah-blah. But we’re all friends.”

He was leading Alan through a room that had half a dozen desks in it, fluorescent lights overhead, a computer on each desk and a man or woman working at each one. More guns were in evidence here, some hung in their holsters on chairbacks.

“Okay.” Berudh sat behind the only empty desk, pulled a metal chair over for Alan. He offered coffee or tea or soda, told a quick joke, surprised Alan by asking to see his ID. “I know you ID’d yourself at the door and at reception, but it’s a rule. Death is serious business, isn’t it?” He looked over the passport and the badge, made some notes, and sat back. “Okay.”

He had a thin pile of photocopies and computer printouts. He began to hand them across the desk, naming each one as he did so—“Initial contact sheet—log sheet—physician’s report—death certificate—telephone log, that’s only to show when we notified your embassy—” The pages were clean, all typed, neat, efficient, but in a language Alan couldn’t read. Berudh explained that Qatib, Salem, had begun his police connection as an unidentified corpse in Jaffa, another of Tel Aviv’s sub-districts, then been logged in as a homicide, then identified from missing-person calls placed by his family.

Alan could have taken the papers then and left, but a perverse sense of duty made him ask questions he wasn’t at all interested in. “How come if he was found in Jaffa, you’re handling it here?”

“Question of internal politics.” Berudh made a face. “Yarkov District claims control over all cases of wrongful death. Not that we handle them all. Our homicide people are very territorial.”

“How long had he been missing?”

“Unh—” Berudh half-stood and leaned over to look at Alan’s pages. “You’ve got a page from our missing-persons log—it’s small type, very dense—” Alan held up a page; Berudh squinted at it and said, “I think the first call came in about eleven p.m.” Berudh rattled through a translation of the missing-persons page: a woman’s voice had made the first call, identified herself as a girlfriend; the victim hadn’t turned up for dinner at his cousin’s. They looked at the physician’s report. The man had been dead an estimated seven to twelve hours when the doctor had examined him.

“But no autopsy,” Alan said.

“No, no, no. Arabs are against that.”

“Can I see the body?” He hoped the answer was no.

“We released him to the family pretty much as soon as the doc was through with him. Off to the West Bank.” Berudh raised his hands. “Coffin was closed.”

Something pinged in Alan’s brain but didn’t quite connect, and he said lamely, stalling until the connection was made, “You don’t have a suspect.”

“At this point, no. Mugging? Girlfriend? Palestinian infighting?” He shrugged. “This guy was in your Navy, but a Palestinian can be into anything. Hamas, Fatah—he could have had a suicide belt stashed someplace, chickened out, got punished. They’re all fanatics.”

Alan signed a paper that said that he had in fact received all the stuff in his hand, and Berudh, smiling again, gave him a dark blue plastic folder with something in Hebrew on it and TLVPD in English in white letters. “It’ll keep them neat; they blow in the wind, you know; we always have a breeze, it’s the sea—that’s Tel Aviv, my friend, the Fort Lauderdale of the eastern Med—” He was seeing Alan to the elevator, explaining twice how to get out of the building, assuring him that if there was anything, anything he could do—and was gone.

In the vast lobby, assaulted again by the clatter of echoes, Alan crossed among the worried people heading for the elevators and looked with relish at the thin slice of the outdoors that showed through the guarded entrance. Guilt. Even when you weren’t guilty of anything, you felt it. He thought of September eleventh: Yes, it’s guilt, as if I could have stopped it. Which was nonsense.

It was at that point that his brain made the connection he’d missed earlier. According to the two-page file Dukas had faxed him—Qatib’s short personnel record and an ID sheet—he had had family in the States. But the body, Berudh had said, had been sent to the West Bank. Maybe the family had moved back? Or the parents had divorced and one had come back? Or—?

Instead of leaving the police building, ignoring Dukas’s plea not to be an intel officer, he went to the information desk and said to the same young woman, “I’d like to talk to somebody in Homicide.” Why hadn’t he asked to see Berudh again? he wondered. Because you check one source against another. He pointed at the signature on the first page in the blue folder Berudh had given him. “This person,” he said, figuring that one way in was as good as another.





3 (#ulink_1b8faea0-5cc4-5e97-826a-1429d0d62253)


Gaza City, Palestinian Authority

He wasn’t sure where he was—somewhere in the territories. The interrogation room smelled of mold. It was underground, the white paint on the walls peeled away from the concrete in long strips, exposing the rough surface beneath. It was too bright, lit by a pair of hot halogen lights, so that cockroaches threw sharp shadows on the floor where they scuttled.

Rashid had been waiting there for three hours. He had surprised himself by falling asleep. He had woken up to find that the persistent itching on his leg was an insect that had crawled up his jeans. He panicked, flailed around the room getting the unclean thing out of his clothes.

Then he sat, his arms crossed on his chest, and waited.

He heard steps in the hall, conversations, snatches of laughter, once, a startled scream.

More steps in the hall, sharper, and the click of a woman’s heels. His door opened.

There was a man and a woman. The man was middleaged, thin, smoking. The woman was younger, but not by much, wore heels and a short skirt.

Men with guns brought two chairs.

“I am Colonel Mahmoud Hamal and this is Zahirah,” the man said. “You are Rashid George Halaby?”

Rashid nodded.

“You know who I am?”

Rashid shook his head.

“Perhaps you have heard me called the Tax Collector. Hmm? I am responsible for the security of our Palestinian Authority in regard to antiquities. You work for Hamas?”

The question pierced through Rashid’s other fears; something to be dreaded, something for which he had not prepared an answer. So he said nothing, tried to keep his eyes down. He had heard of the Tax Collector. Salem had mentioned him—feared him, even.

“How long have you been with Hamas?” Colonel Hamal was looking at a manila folder.

Rashid looked at him with lowered eyes. The colonel was wearing a suit, had a silk tie, and a heavy gold ring on his finger. Rashid blinked to keep tears off his face.

The colonel waved the folder at him. “You are Rashid George Halaby. You live in Haifa. You run errands for Hamas. You had two brothers killed in the Intifada by Jewish soldiers. Your father died in Jordan in a riot. Your mother teaches at a Muslim school. Why not just say these things?”

Unbidden, Rashid’s eyes rose and met the colonel’s. The man smiled.

“You have an Israeli passport. As far as I can tell, you have never been arrested in Israel. Are you a Muslim?”

Rashid nodded.

“How do you come to have an Israeli passport?” the woman asked. Her voice was warm, her Arabic slightly accented.

“We live in Acco. Not Haifa.” Rashid spoke softly, as if he was afraid he might be overheard. They must know these things. Haifa was an Israeli town. Acco had a big Palestinian population, one of the biggest in Israel. “I’m a Palestinian.”

The man waved his hand, his attention still on the documents. “Acco, then. Either way, you are not from Gaza or the West Bank. You have an Israeli passport.” Hamal threw it on the table in front of the boy. “Why didn’t you proclaim it? I have no jurisdiction over you.”

Rashid couldn’t think of a reply. He couldn’t think at all. All answers were going to lead to the same place—Hamas, Salem, Hamas, Salem. Had he killed the man with the hammer? Did they know? He shrugged, the motion stiff. Rashid rubbed the back of his hand over his face, rubbed his lips. The arresting officers had not been gentle.

“What were you doing here?” Hamal paused for effect. “In Gaza?”

“Working. With a friend.” Rashid thought that sounded harmless, but both the man and the woman smiled.

“What were you working on?”

Rashid’s lips trembled.

“How long have you been with Hamas?” Hamal asked again.

“Since my brothers died.” Rashid answered savagely.

Hamal nodded. He smoked for over a minute. “You were working with a friend. Digging, perhaps?”

Rashid didn’t know what to say, because these people seemed to know so much. And he had no idea what they wanted. But after too long a hesitation, he said, “Yes,” softly.

The woman leaned forward across the table. “Is your friend Salem Qatib, Rashid?”

Rashid gave himself away with his reaction, and read it on them. But the mention of the name caused much of the fear to drop away. They were in it now. He raised his eyes, met hers. She was attractive; her eyes were big and friendly. She wore scent.

“Yes,” he said.

“How well do you know Salem Qatib?” Colonel Hamal asked.

Rashid squirmed. “We are friends.”

Hamal rustled his papers and glanced at his watch.

“He—he played with my oldest brother—when they were boys,” Rashid said.

Hamal didn’t look up from the dossier in front of him.

“Then—then he went away to—America,” Rashid said. “When he—Salem—came back, he came to visit my mother.”

The woman nodded her understanding.

Rashid went on, “He wanted to offer my brother a job, but Ali—was dead. So he took me instead.”

“Tell me about that job.” The woman leaned forward, and her scent covered the smell of mold and made the room a better place. It was not a smell of sex, but of flowers.

“We dug. For old things, antiquities.” Rashid knew he was committed now, had said too much, but their expressions didn’t change and he had nothing to lose. They were interested in Salem. So was he. “Salem would identify a site, and we would dig by hand. If there were things, then other men would come, but we would do the fine work.” Rashid tried to express the fine work by brushing the table with his fingers. “With a toothbrush? You know? And sifting. The other men would never sift, they wanted to use a backhoe for everything.”

“And Hamas told you to take the job.” Hamal was leaning forward too, his cigarette smoke cutting through the woman’s perfume. She waved at the smoke, but her eyes stayed with Rashid.

Rashid wrapped himself in his arms again and sat quietly. Because it was true, and because it was a betrayal of Salem before he even knew Salem.

“You had to, yes? Your mother would have asked you to do this work for them.” Zahirah sounded concerned. Perhaps she, too, despite her modern clothes, was a mother.

“They took care of us when my father died.”

“Of course. And you—what? You reported to them on what Salem found?”

Rashid put his face in his hands. He sobbed, “Not after we were friends! I—” he gulped air, swallowed the word loved. “We were friends.”

She nodded. Hamal leaned across her. “You were at the dig at Tel-Sharm-Heir’at?”

Rashid nodded. He could see the dig, the pit facing the sea, and everything covered with blue tarps against the winter rain. The row of burial urns that started them on the site. The stone structure nearest the sea that had electrified Salem.

“You were there when Qatib was beaten?” Hamal asked.

“I—ran.” The beach full of men. Salem kneeling, hit with a shovel. The bearded man he hit with a hammer.

Zahirah nodded. Hamal made a mark in the manila folder.

“Salem Qatib is an archaeologist, yes?” Hamal asked.

Rashid was still on the beach in his mind. His hands were shaking again, but his voice was steady. “He went to school in America.”

“He entered the Masters program in Archaeology and Ancient Studies at the University of Michigan,” Hamal said. “Which means that he is, in fact, an archaeologist. I would like to hear you confirm that, Rashid.”

“Yes, he is an archaeologist.”

“He is conducting an illegal dig.”

“Are there legal digs here?” Rashid surprised himself. But he wasn’t as afraid as he had been.

The woman, Zahirah, raised her carefully plucked brows. The man smiled, grunted a laugh. “Digs are legal if we license them. Hmm? And if not—then we seize them.”

Rashid looked at the table in front of him, because he now knew who had taken and beaten Salem. His sweat turned to ice, his relaxation vanished.

“You—” he began. He started again. “Where is Salem? Have you arrested him?” And he thought Do they know I hit the man with a hammer?

Hamal took a drag on his cigarette, exhaled to the side, away from Zahirah. “We seized the dig at Tel-Sharm-Heir’at. We do not have your friend Salem. Do you know that Salem Qatib was abducted that night? After my men took the site?”

Rashid put his hands out, grabbed the table as if he might slide off his chair. “No.”

“He was taken by Israelis, Rashid. Do you know anything about that?”

“No! No!” Rashid’s head went back and forth between them.

“And they killed him.” Hamal’s voice was brutal.

Rashid sat in shock.




Tel Aviv


Alan Craik and a woman detective named Miriam Gurion were sitting in a cubicle in the homicide detectives’ “room,” really a space big enough to play basketball in. She was in her late forties, he thought, her face lined by sun and wind, her hair gray. She spoke English well but with an almost-swallowed “r” that sometimes disappeared into her throat.

“How do you know I was lied to?” he said. He watched her eyes, which met his honestly enough but flicked away to each side; she had the head movements, too, of the watcher who is always checking the periphery. The watchfulness of a cop in a place where bombs go off. Or of a detective of homicide who thought the walls had ears.

“The 27-14,” she said. “The 27-14 is a routine piece of paper, but it has to be signed when we say it’s a homicide—and that’s my name on it, and in fact I signed it.” She leaned toward him over her messy desk and lowered her voice. “Two years ago.”

Behind her, three cat photos and five people photos were stuck to the cubicle wall; the people, he had already figured out, were the same two, young and older, one also in a wedding dress—her daughters?

“Let’s go for coffee,” she said.

“Yeah, but I don’t—”

“I don’t say another word in here.” She was almost whispering. She led him out a side door of the building to a sidewalk café a block away, not mentioning Salem Qatib or the paper or what she had meant by “two years ago.”

He ordered coffee, she a soda. While they waited, she lit a cigarette and puffed and simply shook her head when he tried to talk. She blew out smoke and he unconsciously waved it away. “Oh, you’re one of those,” she said and turned sideways to him, holding the cigarette low on her street side. The waiter put the coffee and the soda down between them and hovered, and she made a shooing gesture. When he was gone, she said, “Tell me about this detective who gave you the papers.”

“What’s your interest?” he said.

She grunted. “My interest is my job.” She puffed, exhaled out of the street side of her lips. “My interest is in living in a good country, where the cops don’t tell lies. This detective you talked to told you lies.”

He told her about Berudh, described him, his office. She said, “Mossad.” When he looked skeptical, she said, “He has to be a Mossad liaison. We have to work with them, but they’re bastards. So they lied to you.” She got out another cigarette, played with a cheap lighter, said, “I didn’t want to say these things at Dizengoff Street. You understand. But faking a homicide file, that’s serious business.”

“You don’t know it’s faked.”

She sighed. She held out her hand. He didn’t get it. She moved the hand impatiently, then lit her new cigarette, put the hand out again. He gave her the blue folder with the papers Berudh had given him.

Miriam Gurion opened the papers on the café table and put her head low over them as if she were near-sighted. She smoked and turned pages, separating them into two stacks. “This is bullshit,” she said. “You believe in feelings? I get bad feelings.” She stubbed out the end of the cigarette and burrowed for another in her huge handbag. With her head, she indicated one of the piles she had made. “These papers, you see them? They’re authentic—I know, because they’re from a case I had two years ago. That’s what I meant, I signed the 27-14 two years ago—these are all from another case.” She touched the other pile. “These are new, mostly dreck. See, your Berudh or somebody dug out my old case, probably scanned the file into a computer, printed it out, blocked out the name and the date, typed in new ones, rescanned—and here we are! A nice case file on somebody named Qatib, Salem, to give to the nice American officer who only wants to get it over with so he can go home. Eh?”

She lit a new cigarette and leaned back, smoking, her eyes on the street, and then she said without looking at him, “I don’t believe this crap about your guy, what’s his name—Qatib—being taken to the West Bank for burial. The family is in the US, you said? So the burial story is bullshit. I think maybe so is the story about people calling him in missing; we’ll check this. Right now.” She got a cell phone from the overstuffed handbag. Alan figured there was a gun in there somewhere, too; could she ever find it if she needed it? She punched in numbers, said to him, “I think we need to work together.” Then she was barking Hebrew into the cell, touching new numbers, making another call.

When she was done, she threw the phone into the handbag’s open maw and stubbed out the cigarette and lit another. “The file on my two-year-old case is checked out from storage. Okay? Also, there’s nothing in the missing persons log for any calls last night about Qatib, Salem.” She put a hand on one pile of paper. “All bullshit.”

“Okay. Why?”

“You tell me, darling.” She blew out smoke. “What a bloody mess! I’m going to have to open a file, new case, plus file a complaint against your Berudh, plus I got no body—” She sat back and puffed, then looked at the papers she had said were from her old case and said, “Maybe we go find a body.” Smiled.

“Qatib?”

Her open hand, turned upward, floated over the table. “Why do they pick my case to do their faking? Chance? No. Something against me? No. Then why? Very fast work, darling, doing all this between about midnight and this morning. So they pick my case because a lot of the work is done for them already, nu?” The hand closed into a fist. She laughed. “Two things: somebody knew my old case, remembered it, and maybe there was a connection. Like the same people found the body? Or turned it into a body? Mmm?” She ground the cigarette into her saucer. “Let’s take a ride to Jaffa.”

The coffee was terrible, and Alan didn’t mind leaving the café, but he didn’t get it. “What’s in Jaffa?”

She waved the waiter toward her and scrambled in her bag for money; Alan was late in reaching for his own. “Two years ago, a body was found in an old military barracks there. He was young, Palestinian. I got the case. Mossad waved me off when I seemed to be getting somewhere. Now that case file is being used for the body of another young Palestinian. And here is Mossad again.” She stood. “Maybe Qatib, Salem, ended up in Jaffa.”

He looked at his watch. He had only an hour until he was supposed to meet Rose. Dukas had told him not to behave like an intelligence officer. He’d done enough. “I think I’d have to have more to go on than that.”

She gave him a look that might have been disgust and then sat again and got the cell phone out. She did the numbers, held up a finger, eyebrows arched, as if saying Watch what I’ll pull out of my ass now! She waited, sighed, jerked upright and began to bellow Hebrew into the phone. Then she listened, said something that sounded awfully like the Hebrew for bullshit and closed the phone with a distinct, though small, bang. “He’s pissing his drawers, he’s so scared!”

“Who?”

“The guy, darling, the guy who runs the place in Jaffa where they found the body two years ago! He knows something, and I scared the piss out of him! Are you coming or not?”

He felt as if hands were dragging at him to pull him down into his chair, but he stood and said, “Let’s go,” which was not what he wanted to do at all.




Gaza


Both the colonel and the woman had left the room. Alone, Rashid cried a little, silently, straight-backed. He had feared this very thing, that Salem was dead, when he saw Saida’s apartment. And now it was proven true.

The woman brought him tea, and he drank it. The colonel came back with Rashid’s backpack and placed it on the table with a plastic zip-lock bag that held the contents of Rashid’s pockets when he was taken.

When they started again, their tone was different, as if he had passed a test and now they were all on the same side. They asked him questions, hundreds of them, and he answered as best he could; about Salem, about Hamas and their interest in the dig, about the dig itself at Tel-Sharm-Heir’at.

They gave him food. They didn’t ask anything about the man he had hit with the hammer.

After several hours, Hamal appeared satisfied. It was Zahirah who was still interested in the dig and everything about it, so it was Zahirah who asked the question that changed everything.

She asked, “Where were you for the last twenty hours? Why were you coming back to Gaza?”

And Rashid told her. He was past concealment, except where he tried to cover his act of violence at the dig. He told them about hiding in the old ruins under his home town of Acco. And he told them about going to Saida’s apartment. And eventually, he told them about the flash card he had found in Salem’s coat.

They brought in his belongings. He showed them the card.

Hamal lit another cigarette. “Who else had been in her apartment, Rashid?”

Rashid shrugged. “It was all pulled apart,” he said slowly. “Everything ruined.”

And Hamal raised his eyebrows at Zahirah and said, “Hamas.”

Zahirah nodded, and then turned back to Rashid. Her voice was especially gentle, almost tender. “Who is this Saida?” she asked.

After a moment Rashid said her surname. “Frayj. Saida Frayj. She—Salem.” He stopped in a conflict of desire to incriminate and desire to protect. While he struggled to find words, his interrogators exchanged glances.

Hamal left. Zahirah stayed, asking questions about the dig, about the stone structure, about how long Salem had been interested in it. Rashid tried to be careful. They could be lying; Salem could be in a cell just under Rashid’s feet. He tried to cover Salem; he told Zahirah that Salem had only just found the stone structure.

“Do you know what it is, Rashid? That stone structure?” she asked.

“A tomb?” He knew what Salem had said about it. He didn’t want to betray too much.

“A very particular type of tomb, Rashid. A tholos tomb. A stone chamber made by Greeks and no one else.”

“Oh,” he said, trying to sound surprised.

Then Hamal returned with a laptop computer. He turned it on, inserted the card, and in a minute he had the card opened. He and Zahirah crouched over the screen, which was hidden from Rashid by the angle.

“There we go,” Hamal said.

Then he laughed. Zahirah turned her face away.

Hamal began to stare intently. He swore. “Zahirah, look at what she’s holding. Look at it!”

The woman did as she was told. She breathed in sharply, leaned forward, reached forward to touch the screen. The vivid colors on the screen lit her face, so that she looked younger and more mysterious to Rashid. She played with the keyboard, spun the screen so that Rashid could see the image.

On the screen was a naked woman, her breasts prominent and glossy in the harsh light of the camera’s flash. She was handsome, her features strong, her nose long and fine, her eyebrows heavy and black, and her eyes were filled with reflected light. They glowed red at the centers. She was smiling.

Saida, the slut.

In her hands was a two-handled cup. It was gold.

“Do you know this woman?” Hamal asked him.

Rashid spat, “Saida.”

“This came from her apartment?” Zahirah asked.

“Taken inside the tomb,” Hamal said. “Look, here and here. Those big stones—you can see where the flash just shows them.”

They both looked at the image, and then the next, and then more, often turning the screen for Rashid to answer questions; Saida in jewelry, Saida holding a dagger, Saida with the cup again, Saida with a bottle of champagne.

Rashid became angrier and angrier. He did not tell Hamal that he had seen a canvas bag full of these things in the car—that would have been betrayal. But he didn’t hide that Saida was a greedy girl who his own mother called a slut and a whore, who was not Muslim but a Christian from Bethlehem, and who always wanted money and good times.

They both listened intently to his anger and his enmity. In the end, he ran down like an old battery, his sentences more disconnected, his gestures subdued, until Colonel Hamal rose to his feet and Zahirah patted his hand.

They took the computer and left.




Tel Aviv


After the glitter and bustle of Dizengoff Street, Jaffa might have been in another country, another time. It had to some extent cultivated its look—old streets, winding passages, the Camel Market—but it was genuinely old, partly Arab, its back turned on the aggressive newness of central Tel Aviv.

“Over there, the Pal’yam blew up the two British patrol boats,” Miriam Gurion said. She gestured vaguely toward the water. “In 1946,” she said, in case his knowledge of Israeli history wasn’t as good as hers. In fact, he didn’t get it and said so.

She stopped, her head back, eyebrows arched, a pair of unflinching eyes looking into his. “We had to fight the British to get what is ours. We’ve had to fight everybody. Come on.”

They had come in her car, which she had left almost carelessly at an angle near a curb as if she was saying I dare you to ticket me. Now, she led him toward a battered chain-link fence with old razor wire looped along the top. A gate big enough for a small car stood partway along, a concrete guardhouse behind it. The guardhouse wouldn’t have withstood a car bomb, he thought, but what terrorist was going to get media attention by bombing an almost derelict site? It was in fact a moribund Israeli navy barracks, a former British facility that had faded into obsolescence as Israel had matured.

The fence was lined along the bottom with wind-blown plastic bags and papers; weeds grew inside; broken concrete paths connected buildings that looked mostly abandoned, with signs that identified in fading paint military offices that no longer existed. He saw one that said Fourth Royal Marines Enquiries. Others, in less faded paint, were in Hebrew.

The teenaged guard came to attention and looked at their ID and made a call. The site was modern enough for that, at any rate. The result was surprising: a middle-aged officer with a rather menacing, gnome-like face dominated by a hawk’s-beak nose came hurrying around a corner, still adjusting his hat on his head. Alan’s reaction was that the guy was only a lieutenant and much too old for a lieutenant, and his menace was all bluff.

“Mosher,” Miriam Gurion said quietly to Alan. “A shlemiel.” She went toward Mosher as if she was going to beat the life out of him, and he actually stopped, and the look on his face went from menace to guilt to fear in one pass. He said something, and she rapped out a burst of Hebrew that caused him to flinch. He tried to recover, said something that sounded like pleading, and she erupted into more scolding Hebrew.

She grabbed Alan’s arm. “Come on.” She began to march him away from the gate. Lieutenant Mosher watched them and fell in behind, uttering more pleading noises.

Alan glanced at his watch, saw that he was going to be late meeting Rose. “Where are we going?” he said.

“To look at a body.” She snorted. “I said to him, �Mosher, where’s the body?’ I thought he was going to piss himself. I said, �It’s right where the other one was, isn’t it, Mosher.’ I thought he was going to cry.” She shook her head. “A nice man, actually, but a shlemiel.”

They were striding along the building that had once belonged to the Fourth Marines. The windows were mostly dark, but he saw fluorescent lights burning in one secondfloor room—Mosher’s office, or some negligible naval function that had been banished here? A door was open at ground level; as he looked, a man stepped into it, heavy-set, ridiculous in long, baggy shorts. He might have been some idler in a small town, curious about outsiders. Alan nodded but the man didn’t respond. Maybe the sun was in his eyes.

What had once been a parade or exercise ground opened to their right, its gravel partly consumed by grass, and beyond it three identical buildings that would have been barracks. Their windows were boarded over now.

Alan wondered what Lieutenant Mosher had done to get such duty. He was well over age for a lieutenant, he thought. They walked up a slope and then down the other side. “Here,” she said. She was pointing at a low mound perhaps ten feet high and forty feet long, at the end nearer them a trench that seemed to cut it into two unequal parts.

Ammunition storage, Alan thought. And that was what Mosher, suddenly speaking in English, was explaining. The British and then the Israelis had used it as an ammunition bunker; then it was judged to be obsolete and it had been used for other things—at one point, the base canteen—and it had served until the Gulf War as a repository for hazardous waste.

“Then Saddam started throwing Scuds and they were ordered to have a bunker, so that’s when they put in the air conditioner.” He was talking to Alan. “But it’s empty now. Unused. Empty!”

Alan wondered why he could hear an air conditioner running.

The beginning of the trench was a flight of concrete steps down to the ex-ammo dump’s steel door. Above it, a windowsized air conditioner wheezed away. She said something in Hebrew, and Mosher worked at the door with a big ring of keys.

Alan smelled death as soon as the door rasped open. Apparently Mosher did, too; he said, “Air-conditioning is not adequate.” He was sweating and swallowing a lot.

The interior was cracked, unpainted concrete. It curved overhead to a height of ten feet, darkening where it sloped down to meet the floor at the sides. A line of five electric bulbs in wire cages ran along the center of the ceiling, connected by old-fashioned BX cable. Desks stood in the shadows, their chairs stacked on them along with big typewriters and wire baskets and solid shapes that might have been books. The air conditioner whined. The air smelled of damp and mold and death.

Miriam Gurion led them to the far end. An old tarpaulin, stiff as a tarred sail, was mounded up there. “I never saw this in my life,” Mosher said. He pulled the tarpaulin, which was heavy and unwilling; Alan grabbed it and helped him lift and fold it back and then pull it completely clear to reveal the dead man.




Naples


“I got your list.”

Dukas looked up from his paperwork. Triffler was standing in front of the desk, his coming into the office unnoticed, his words meaningless. Dukas frowned. “List?” he said.

“The bunch in DoD. Information Analysis?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah—” Dukas came back from the Land of Paperwork. “That was quick.”

“The black DC network. We use drums.” “You know, it doesn’t help for you to keep saying how black you are. In fact, you’re about as black as my Aunt Olympia.”

“We keep saying it so you guys won’t.” Triffler was hitting keys on Dukas’s computer. “I networked this, but I figure you don’t know how to access it, which is why I came here in my very own person.”

“I like stuff on paper.”

“We know you do, Mike. We all laugh about it all the time.” He punched a last key, his long, thin body curved into a bow because he was standing, and a list of names came up on the screen. “Ecco, as they say over here—the roster of OIA.”

Muttering that Triffler did good work and he thought he’d keep him around, Dukas swung his chair to face the screen and started scrolling down. There were only forty names, and he didn’t have to read all of them.

“Well, well, well.”

“A hit?”

“You done good.” Dukas tapped the screen. “Spinner, Raymond L. Ha!” He was smiling. “How stuff you do does come back to bite you in the ass!”

“Shakespeare said something like that.”

“What d’you know about Shakespeare?”

“Andrew’s a freshman at Brown. A parent’s got to keep up.”

Dukas looked fleetingly troubled; perhaps he was thinking that when his yet-to-be-born child was a freshman somewhere, he’d be ready for Social Security. He jerked himself away from the thought. “This guy—” Dukas tapped the screen again. “Raymond Spinner. I busted this guy for passing internal fleet information to his daddy, who swings in Washington. I persuaded him to cash out. And now he’s washed up on a beach in DoD—I think Daddy’s been at work again—and he thinks he’s going to fuck me over.” Dukas grunted. “Well, well, well.”

“You’re going to do something ugly.”

“Surely not.” He smiled at Triffler. “I’m going to be a good little bureaucrat.” He began to draft an email as a reply that piggy-backed on the one he had received:

From: Michael Dukas, Special Agent in Charge, Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Naples, Italy

To: Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Department of Defense, Office of Information Analysis

Subject: Your request.

Message: Per 1347.5 Sec. 11, please locate your place in chain of command and justify referenced request. Recommend GS-10 Raymond Spinner expedite.

“What’s 1347.5?”

“How the hell should I know?”




Tel Aviv


“Light,” Alan said. He could see that a nude body was lying there and that there was shiny metal along one side of him, but he couldn’t see enough. Miriam was burrowing in her handbag and she came up with one that Alan recognized as of a type advertised in the pricier gun magazines—high-intensity, small size, big price.

The body was lying on a rolling litter, like a low gurney; it supplied the metallic reflection he’d seen. The damage to the man was sickening.

“Beaten,” Miriam said.

“Cause of death?”

“I’m not a doctor.” She was shining her very bright light on the eyes and prying one of them open; then she focused on the mashed lips, which she parted with a ballpoint pen so she could study the teeth. “Really bad,” she said. She pressed on the chest, but nothing happened. “I thought maybe water.”

“Torture.”

“Mmmm.”

They worked their way down to the feet, which, like the legs, were less damaged than the head and upper body. He pointed out two round marks on the left leg. “Cigarette.”

“Your guy?” she said.

He took the ID sheet that Dukas had faxed to the embassy. Two head shots, front and profile, were in the upper right corner, the size of passport photos. Faxed, smudged, they didn’t look like the battered mess on the table. Alan read down the sheet to Distinguishing Marks and said, “Two-inch tattoo of fouled anchor, left forearm.” He thought he had to explain it to her. “A fouled anchor is an anchor with a rope twisted around it, sort of. Two inches is about—five centimeters.”

She was holding the dead left arm. “Yes.”

“Surgical scar, right abdomen, appendectomy. About—four centimeters.”

“Yes, okay.”

“Three moles, prominent, smooth, dark brown, left side of chest, triangle pattern about—seven centimeters.”

She hung her head over the dead man’s chest, her light bright on his waxy skin, turned her head toward Alan and said, “Now aren’t you glad you came?” She dug into the big handbag, which she dropped on the gurney, shining the light into it, and pulled out a plastic phial and then a sterile packet and then a box big enough to have held half a dozen cigars. She took a swab from the packet and swabbed the inside of the dead man’s mouth and put it into the phial, then clipped hair from his head, put it into another phial, and unpacked a small ink pad. Alan figured she had an entire evidence kit in there.

“Won’t your forensics people do that?” he said.

“Mossad, darling, Mossad.”

Alan switched his light off and straightened, his back sore from bending. “How did somebody get a body in here?” Alan asked Mosher.

“Many people work here over the many years. Keys—” He made walking motions with his fingers.

“But you didn’t know the body was here?”

“Me?”

Oddly, Alan believed him. Mosher was a schlemiel, and probably a nebbish, too, and he knew he was being used, and he was scared.

“Do you—does anybody live on the facility?”

Mosher shook his head as if the idea disgusted him. “Where would they live? Some buildings don’t even have water. I live in Tel Aviv. Most of my people are IDF reservists. It’s nice duty—you go home to mama’s cooking.”

“You have a duty officer at night.”

“A petty officer.”

“Who checks everything.”

“Yes, yes—”

“And guards on the perimeter?”

He shrugged. “Kids. Good kids. But—”

“Who else has space on the facility? I saw a man back there—”

Mosher backed away, his hands up to ward off threat. He shook his head and bolted out the door.

Alan found Miriam outside, standing on the top step, a cell phone at her ear and a roll of crime scene tape in her left hand. She gestured at him to help; he took the tape and together they taped off the entrances to the stairs and the steel door. Miriam went right on talking to somebody in Hebrew.

“I called it in to Homicide,” she said. “They’re sending a team. Let them fight with Mossad.” She was lighting a cigarette. “How come you don’t smoke?”

“My wife persuaded me my kids deserve better.”

“Nice wife?”

“Wonderful.”

She held the cigarette at her side, away from him. “I had a nice husband for a while. Then I scared him off. Two kids. One’s a wifey in London; one’s a doctor in bet-Elan.” She blew out smoke. “Actually I threw my husband out. He started playing around.” She looked aside at him. “I’m embarrassing you.”

“I don’t embarrass that easy.”

She patted his arm. “We’ll get along.” She got on the phone again.

Alan stood on a little hill, looking down at the entrance to the bunker, thinking of the dead man inside. Tortured, beaten to death. It turned his stomach. It always did.

He and a master chief named Fidelio, whom everybody called Fidel, had been in northern Afghanistan before the bombing began. He had had half a million dollars in US cash, but he was there because Fidel spoke Farsi and Pashto and they needed an officer to go with him. They were in the western part of the Alliance territory buying help for the US attack that was yet to come. As it happened, the warlord they had been sent to spoke Turkmen, so they needed somebody local to translate the Turkmen into Farsi so that Fidel could translate it into English for Alan. They were sitting in a stone house in a room hung with carpets and carpeted under them, sitting cross-legged, tea and food in front of them. Outside, it sounded as if somebody was beating a rug, except that there were screams. Alan had put a quarter of a million US in a pile next to the food, and the general said, “How many men will the US send?” The screaming went on, and the thumping, and Alan frowned at Fidel and then at the sound, and the general muttered something and an aide left the room and the thumping and the screaming stopped. Then they made the deal. The general and his army would fight for the US, and he expected weapons and trucks and petrol and some heavy weapons. Alan said through the chain of interpreters that the quarter-million dollars was for those things, and the general sighed and said back through the chain that his expenses were very high. Most of his money, Alan thought, came from Iran; his men had Iranian weapons and Iranian uniforms, and there were men wandering around speaking Farsi, according to Fidel, who were probably Iranian intel. Still, none of that mattered; his job right then was to get the general to say yes, and they’d worry about Iran later. The general had said yes; Alan said yes. The general and Alan and Fidel all shook hands and smiled a lot and the pile of money disappeared, and when they went outside, there was a bloody body on the ground, and a frightened man was being made to look at it and some soldiers started to shout at him and push him around. He was next.

Thinking of it, Alan wanted a cigarette, and he might have asked her for one, but Miriam said, “You and I are going, darling,” and he didn’t want to push the intimacy of her “darling” by sharing one of her cigarettes.

“So soon?”

She laughed and told him to be nice. “I’ll drive you back, start the paperwork, come back here. It’s my case now.”

“And you’ll inform me.”

“I will, of course I will—” She was leading the way toward the gate. Alan asked if Mosher would get into trouble and she said she supposed he would. “But nothing serious. I think he really didn’t know.”

“It isn’t much of a job.”

“He made a mess once; he’s only waiting here to get out.”

An SUV was slanted into one of the parking spaces by the gate, but he barely noted it. She pointed at her car and they started for it. They crossed the street, and he heard the SUV start up behind them but paid no attention, and then the big vehicle was beside them and the doors opened and three men poured out. He was grabbed by the arms before he could react; he shouted, but they were pulling him into the car. He saw her trying to get a hand into her bag, and a man punched her hard and sent her sprawling, and then Alan was on his back on the floor of the SUV and it was starting to move, the doors still open and his feet sticking out. Somebody kicked his legs and there was a lot of shouting and the doors slammed.





4 (#ulink_9c310793-b979-5c78-a9f7-c1f418fd99c4)

Tel Aviv


Rose Craik didn’t worry when her husband wasn’t at the hotel at two because she assumed the job had taken longer than he had expected. The possibility annoyed her, nonetheless; she wanted him to climb down from his work for a day, to try to forget the war that now seemed to consume him. She didn’t really want to see a movie; she wanted him to see a movie.

Or not forget the war, not merely the war in Afghanistan; rather, the altered military world into which he had been launched by September eleventh. He felt guilt, she knew, because US intelligence hadn’t anticipated the attack; he felt a deep, not very well defined anxiety about America itself. When he had said, “Scared people scare me,” she knew that he was trying to express that anxiety for her, perhaps for himself. Sometimes he seemed stunned by the attack’s intricacy and its success; other times he was puzzled by the reaction to it. “We’ve had terrorism against the US for twenty years. Everybody knew al-Qaida was out there. Why is everybody over-reacting?” And the job was grinding him down—literally; she had watched him get thinner over the months.

Bored now, frustrated, she telephoned home—Bahrain—where a Navy friend was keeping their kids; she said they were fine. She called her office; she was missed but they were getting along. She watched some Israeli television. At three o’clock, she allowed herself to worry.

At three-twenty, the telephone rang. Intense disappointment when it wasn’t Alan, then a catch of breath when she heard a woman with an accent who said she was with the police. Rose’s gut dropped. The woman said that they had to talk. She was in the lobby—could she come up? Rose was an attaché with all that meant about classified knowledge, being an American in a foreign place. Hotels, even in Israel, weren’t necessarily safe; a public place was better than a room. “I’ll come down.”

The woman was heavy-set, hard-eyed, maybe a little flamboyant in her loose hair and her bright scarf. She had a bruise on the left side of her face from eye to chin, the eye puffing and darkening. “Miriam Gurion, sergeant, Tel Aviv police.” She held up ID.

“Is it about—?”

The woman put a finger to her lips.

If anybody in the hotel lobby thought it was odd that a woman was holding up a badge and a card, nobody gave any sign. Rose took the card and studied it, handed it back with her own diplomatic passport. She glanced around the lobby, looking for the signs of a watcher, threat, anomaly. What was the woman afraid of?

Mrs Gurion—she said she was Mrs, not Ms—led her to a deep sofa in an alcove that allowed them to see the doors. When they sat, the sofa gave a kind of sigh, and mounds of pinky gray fabric swelled around them.

“I think your husband is okay, but the situation is not good.” Tears came to the woman’s eyes. “I am so ashamed. It is my fault—all my fault—” She gulped. “They took me prisoner!”

Rose’s heart raced but she leaned forward. “Is he all right?”

“I was with your husband. We were doing a job, maybe you know about it, a man who was dead—”

“Where is my husband?”

The woman shook her head. “They took him from the street. They give me this.” She waved fingers at her bruised face. “Four men in a big car.” She started to cry. “I don’t know where they took him. They put me in another car and we drove around and around. Then they put me out in Ayalon. The bastards!”

Rose shook her head. “I don’t understand—who would—Was it the Palestinians?”

“They wouldn’t dare. An American?” Her laughter was edged with contempt. “Who dares to snatch an American off the street in Israel? Gangsters? Not possible.” She took out a cigarette. “They might dare to take a policewoman, but not an American.” She eyed Rose. “He says you made him quit.”

“I don’t—oh, smoking. Go ahead.” She tried to be patient as the woman fiddled with a lighter, but she burst out, “How bad is it?” Her brain was turning over possibilities, actions: should she telephone the embassy? The Navy in Bahrain? Mike Dukas? It was confusing because the woman was the police, the first ones she would have called.

“It is Mossad; it has to be Mossad; nobody else dares. You know what I mean, Mossad?” She told Rose how she and Alan had spent the hours he had been away—how he had found her at the police station on Dizengoff Street; she had told him what she knew; she had taken him to a place where the body had been hidden. “Then, when we come out, they grab him. And knock me down and drive me around. I am not pleased.”

“How bad is it?”

The woman blew smoke. “These are some very stupid people, but how stupid they can be, I don’t know. My idea is that they can’t be stupid enough to do something large. But, when they find he is an American officer, they may be frightened.”

“Scared people do stupid things.”

“Just so.” The woman met her eyes. The look was open, curious, challenging. “You are brave?”

“I’m a naval officer, too.”

The eyes appraised her, made some judgment. “So.” She screwed the cigarette into an ashtray. “The formalities you can forget—reporting to the police, I mean. I did that. They told me to shut up. Now you must do whatever things will bring weight on them. Understand?”

“Pressure.”

“Yes, okay—pressure. I say it is Mossad.” She took out another cigarette. “It is Mossad. Press.”

“I can call my embassy—”

“If you call as a citizen, they will be days doing anything. I know. You have friends? You can—” she made a motion—“do you say �pull strings’?”

“Yes, that’s what we say. And yes, I can. Why won’t the police help?”

“When your husband and I had seen this body, this dead man, I called Homicide. They didn’t come. Why? Because some voice came from up high and said don’t.”

“But they attacked you. You’re police.”

“Exactly, and so my superiors are, mmm, confused. Not very daring people. They are angry because of this—” She flicked her fingers at her bruised face again. “But beyond a certain place, they have to ask themselves, �How far dare we go?’ The right thing is not always the right thing, understand?” She touched Rose’s hand. “I was afraid you would be one of those screamers, you know?”

“No, I’m not a screamer.” She stood. “Except when I get mad. What are you going to do?”

“Try to find your husband. I keep you informed, I assure you.”

Rose nodded, hugged herself. “I’ll go pull strings.”

The naval attaché in Bahrain was a senior captain who was as politically astute as a presidential campaign manager. He would make admiral but not as a battle-group commander; he’d probably wind up at NATO or the National Security Council, and he’d probably serve as attaché again at some even more vital post than Bahrain. Rose had worked for him for almost two years, respected him, liked him in a cautious way, trusted him within certain bounds. Now, she got herself on a secure phone at Abe Peretz’s office in the American embassy. The Bahrain attaché wasn’t available until she told his aide that the matter was important enough to affect USIsraeli relations—something she’d worked out for herself on the cab ride.

“Rose, what is this?”

“Sir, my apologies for taking you away from—” Her voice was trembling, and she tried to control it.

“No apology necessary, but you know how things go here. What’s up?”

“A policewoman has told me that my husband has been grabbed off the street by agents of Mossad.” She waited a beat; when he didn’t speak she said, “If it really happened that way, at the very least the US should make a stink at a high level. An American officer—”

“Alan was grabbed on the street?”

“He was carrying out an assignment for NCIS. I don’t know the details; he said it was routine, just a bother.”

“You’re sure he’s missing.”

“He’s two hours late.” She saw how flimsy the story might sound, but she called up an image of Miriam Gurion’s face and eyes. “The policewoman who told me is a sergeant. She gave me ID. I don’t have any reason not to believe her.”

Again, there was silence. Then he said, “You get confirmation. Get confirmation of the policewoman. This is an ugly business, Rose. We can’t—you can’t—be accused of going off half-cocked. You’ve got to nail it down.” She waited, not wanting to push him, and he said, “What can I do?”

“Tell me how to get in a pipeline to somebody important so that when I can prove all this, somebody’ll be ready to holler.”

“I can do better than that. I’ll flag a buddy at State. You nail this down, Rose—nothing can go until you do. And don’t let it get to you, okay? If the policewoman is right, Mossad will be treating him like a visiting head of state.”

She said Oh, yeah to herself but babbled something aloud about gratitude, and then he was gone.

At NCIS, Naples, Mike Dukas was on another line, but Dick Triffler was available.

“Hey, Rose, what a pleasure.”

“Somebody’s grabbed Alan.” She told it fast, again fighting a tremor in her voice. “What do I do?”

“Okay, the police know and aren’t doing anything. You’ve called your boss. You better touch base with the embassy in Tel Aviv, no matter how cautious they’ll be. You have to—” Peculiar sounds came through the phone, then his voice saying something to somebody else, and then he was back. “Mike’s getting on the line from his office. Mike? You there?”

“Rose, what the hell?” Dukas sounded anguished—not for Alan, she knew, but for her. Dukas was in love with her, an old, old story; the whole world knew it. “You okay?”

“Mike, Alan was grabbed by Mossad. He was doing your damned errand in Tel Aviv!”

“No way, it was a routine—”

Triffler broke in. “Routine jobs go wrong, Mike; shut up. She needs advice.”

“But you’re okay?” Dukas growled.

“I’m fine. Guys, I want to bring pressure to bear. What do I do?”

“Mossad won’t hurt him,” Dukas said. “They won’t dare. But—Jesus. What a stupid thing to do! Well, if they’re that stupid, they may get scared. What you gotta do, babe, is get State to launch a demarche. You understand �demarche’?”

“It’s diplomatic shit.”

“Yeah, very heavy diplomatic shit. It’s when your government tells another government that it’s shot itself in the foot. If Mossad really snatched a US officer who was on US business, demarche will be the least that will happen. The Israelis will be seeing eight billion bucks a year threatening to grow wings. So that’s what we do, babe—push the right buttons.” Dukas’s voice was hoarse. “Dick, who do we know at DNI now?”

Triffler mentioned a couple of names at the office of the Director of Naval Intelligence, and Dukas told him to get on to them. “Get all the details first. Rose, give us everything—where, who, name of policewoman, time of day—”

She poured out what she knew, and then Triffler was gone and Dukas was making rather helpless, soft noises to her, and she said, “What can I do?”

“You still got an in with Chief of Naval Ops?”

“The CNO I worked for is long gone. He’s at some think tank now—”

“Tell him to call current CNO and lay it out.”

“But—they’re busy people—”

“Babe, it’s their Navy! You don’t get it. A US officer was snatched by another government—they’ll go ballistic! Now, get on it.” His voice softened. “And stop chewing on it. He’s gonna be okay. Trust me.”

“Oh, Mike—” Her voice broke.

At the same time, the deputy to an assistant secretary of state got a call from the US naval attachГ©, Bahrain. As he listened, his normally worried frown contracted to a grimace. After he hung up, he stared at the telephone for five seconds and then dialed the private number of the assistant secretary.

“Dick, I think you better alert the Secretary that Israel may have just stuck a firecracker up our ass.”

Half an hour later, Rear Admiral Paris Giglio, retired, telephoned the current Chief of Naval Operations in Washington. They had served together in the first Gulf War; although never close friends, they got along. And they had the common bond of men who have done the same tough job.

“Jig, it’s been a while! You want the job back?”

Giglio made negative noises and got right to business. “I want to bring something to your attention, Ron.”

A pause, and then a cautious “Shoot.”

“One of your officers was snatched off a street this morning in Tel Aviv. It hasn’t made the news but I have this direct from the guy’s wife, a super officer herself who served with me. She has good reason to believe that he was snatched by Mossad.”

“What?”

The Navy had its own reasons for reacting passionately to an Israeli insult. The long institutional memory still resented the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that had left thirty-seven sailors dead.

Five hours after Alan Craik had been pulled into the SUV in Tel Aviv, the Director of Naval Intelligence was on a secure line to the head of Mossad. He went through no polite protocols, listened to no formalities. Instead, he read a statement. “We have good reason to believe that your agents kidnapped an American Naval officer, Commander Alan Craik, from a Tel Aviv street shortly after noon today. Commander Craik was on US Navy business and was in your country with clearance and full knowledge of your government. His orders included exchanging classified materials with your office. What you’ve done is inexcusable and unacceptable, and we demand that he be released immediately or the severest consequences will follow. Do you understand me?”

Coldly, unemotionally—but clearly—the Mossad officer said that he did.

An hour and forty-three minutes later, Alan Craik was delivered by an unmarked government limousine to the door of his hotel. Also in the limousine, besides the plain-clothes driver, were two special agents of the Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, or Mossad—Shlomo and Ziv, no last names. Both made a great effort to smile as Craik got out of the car, and both apologized yet again for “this unfortunate incident.” They extended their hands.

Standing on the sidewalk with his left hand on the limo door, Craik waited until they had run down and the smiles had run out and the hands had drooped, and then he leaned in and said, “Fuck you!”




Demarche


From: The Secretary of State of the United States of America

To: The Minister for Foreign Affairs, the State of Israel The government of the United States wishes to state in the strongest terms that the detention in Tel Aviv of Commander Alan Craik of the United States Navy by agents of the State of Israel is unacceptable. Not only was Commander Craik in Israel with your government’s knowledge and permission, but also he was seeking legal details concerning the death in Israel of a former member of the United States Naval Reserve, Salem Qatib. This treatment of a decorated member of our armed forces is an insult to his honor, to that of his country, and to the memory of the dead man.

The government of the United States wishes the State of Israel to understand clearly that it requires that investigation of the detention of Commander Craik be pursued to a quick and satisfactory conclusion. It also wishes to make clear that it will itself continue to pursue the investigation of the death of Salem Qatib to its conclusion, in which it expects all cooperation.





5 (#ulink_2cafdb14-fe73-5920-91d3-c77ad51db92a)

Washington


Ray Spinner was thinking about a pretty woman named Jennifer when his phone rang and a man named McKinnon asked him if he could step around to his office for a sec, please? That McKinnon had an office was enough to suggest his status; he also had a title; but, most to the point, he could end Spinner’s career with a word.

“Sir.”

McKinnon looked up from a crowded desk. He was fifteen years older than Spinner, infinitely more impressive in Washington terms: eight years in State and then Defense in the Reagan administration, four more in the National Security Council and Defense under Bush One; then exile to an Ivy League professorship during Clinton. He had published two books. His name was never in the media—a contradictory achievement in a media-mad town, but one that had put him where he was, because some specialties require reticence.

“Yeah. Shut the door. Sit down.” He made a point of closing a folder, the point being that he was allowed to see it and Spinner wasn’t. But Spinner had had time to make out “Classified Special” and “PERPETUAL JUSTICE.” Perhaps oddly, “perpetual justice” didn’t sound unusual to him; it sounded like a lot of other code names in those days.

Spinner sat. It was like being back in college, he thought, called into the professor’s office because of a bad paper. McKinnon was balding and thus big-domed, unquestionably an “intellectual.” Spinner found himself sweating. Until then, only his father had been able to make him so nervous.

McKinnon handed a single sheet of paper across the desk. “That yours?”

Spinner had only to look at the From and To. It was the blind copy of the message he’d sent Mike Dukas in Naples about the dead Navy guy in Tel Aviv. Suddenly, the message didn’t seem like a very good idea.

“Well, you see—”

“Is that yours?”

“Unnh—yes. You see—”

McKinnon shut him up merely by hunching his shoulders. His jacket was off, revealing a pair of the red suspenders that Spinner so admired. He also wore one of those baggy shirts that you learn to recognize as expensive. He said, “So what’s the story?”

“I got the initial, uh—” Spinner cleared his throat “—initial data that the person in question—the name is there on my message—”

“Qatib.”

“Right.”

“Arab name.”

“I suppose.”

“No �suppose’ about it. You don’t understand Arabic? You don’t know Arab culture?”

“Well, my background—”

“Your background is the Navy; I know all about it. I don’t expect much as a result. You were saying?”

“Unnh—the person—Qatib—died in Israel and because, because he had US connections—studied here, Navy reserve—I checked the Purgatory list. He was on it. So I thought, unnh—” He glanced at McKinnon, whose eyes were fixed on him. “I thought I should pursue it.”

“Good for you! Exactly what you should have done. And?”

Encouraged, Spinner told him about NCIS and the dominion of the Naples office.

“Who is this Michael Dukas?”

Spinner thought of lying and saying he’d picked the name out of a directory, but he suspected that McKinnon already knew who Dukas was. This was a test, he decided. The prof already knew the answers. So Spinner said, “He was a nosy bastard who framed me and forced me to resign my commission.”

McKinnon leaned way back in his chair and inhaled deeply, as if he wanted to smell Spinner’s answer. He tapped a pencil twice on his desk and, without looking at Spinner, said, “So, you saw that we needed more data on Qatib. Good. So you dumped it on somebody you don’t like, and sent it over the title of the deputy assistant. Not good.” He looked at Spinner, a comical expression on his face—mouth rubbery and pulled down at the corners: clown grimace. “C minus.”

They stared at each other until Spinner had to look away. He knew he was about to be fired.

“You’re here because your father has clout,” McKinnon said. “Okay, I can live with that. Believe me, you wouldn’t be here otherwise, because a military background is the last thing we need. Correction: second last; what we need last is somebody with a background in intelligence.” He leaned forward again. “You know what’s wrong with military people?”

Spinner tried to think of all the things he’d found wrong. “They’re dorks?” he said.

McKinnon laughed. Actually laughed. “That’s one way of putting it. They’re mediocre. And they’re tentative. And they’re self-seeking. Ranks, medals, privileges. They’re fucking bureaucrats in fancy clothes, and they’re not smart. They’re timocrats.” He looked to see if Spinner knew what a timocrat is, saw he didn’t, smiled with delight. He stood; Spinner suspected that he was reverting to his academic self, that all he lacked was a blackboard. “There are only so many smart people in the world, and they don’t gravitate to the military; if they get into the military by mistake, they soon get out. Therefore, policy can’t be left to the military. They’re like mechanics—they can fix the car, but they can’t design it.” He leaned back against the wall. “Smart people come here. They come here because we recruit them. We’ve been looking at some of the people here for as long as ten years. Why?”

Spinner knew he wasn’t supposed to answer.

“Because people—ordinary people—can’t run a democracy. You know Plato?”

Spinner clawed back through his undergraduate classes and came up with The Republic.

“Right. The current president of the United States is the modern version of the philosopher-king. He is surrounded with a group of special people. Smart people. They must inform him so he can make wise decisions, and they must keep him from getting wrong information that would harm those decisions. They must also advise him on how to manage information about his decisions so that the people will accept them.”

Despite himself, Spinner frowned. Wasn’t there a contradiction there somewhere?

“To advise wisely, to screen out the false, to manage the true. Do you know who Leo Strauss was?”

Spinner, committed now to the truth, shook his head. McKinnon shook his head in response, as if disgusted, but he grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled on it and shoved it across. “Read Leo Strauss,” it said. Spinner said he’d go right out and get some.

“You won’t understand it, but keep reading. Strauss is—” McKinnon stared off at the bewildering problem of what Strauss is. “Have you read Alan Bloom? No matter. The point I’m trying to make is that there is a deep philosophical basis for what we do here and for the way we do it. You have to keep reminding yourself that we are special people and that we have a special responsibility. This is not just another dickoff government job!” He sat again, wearily, as if his lecture had exhausted him. “I want you to take this Qatib thing and run with it. I’ve got you screening inputs now; I’d have kept you there, frankly, but you went ahead and sent this message and I’m going to see if you’re equal to that act of folly. It’s a test, okay? Let’s be frank. It’s a test. I have a suspicion you can’t cut it at this level, but because of your father, who’s given us good data, and because you lost your Navy job getting data to him, I want to be fair. Open a file on Qatib. Run with it.”

“I didn’t know how much Israel would be—”

McKinnon waved a hand. “Israel’s neither here nor there.” He raised the hand, index finger pointing up. “The big picture. Israel will take care of itself if we fix the big picture. The key to the Middle East is Iraq. You don’t understand that; it took me six years to figure it out. Don’t sentimentalize about Israel.” He looked down at something on his desk, looked up again, said with a quick smile, “Don’t sentimentalize about anything.” McKinnon sighed. He chewed a thumbnail. “Imagine you have to brief the philosopher-king on this Tel Aviv thing. That’s the standard. But don’t bean-count and don’t nitpick. Think policy.” He said nothing for so long that Spinner stood, assuming he was dismissed. McKinnon, however, didn’t look at him but said in a gloomy voice, “The policy is that we will democratize the Middle East by democratizing Iraq, and anybody who gets in our way is an enemy. That includes the military and the State Department and the fucking intelligence establishment.”

Spinner wanted to say that McKinnon had just told him that Israel wasn’t either here or there. Now he seemed to be saying that Israel was either here or there. But was it here? Or there? On that note, with McKinnon staring into a corner, he crept out of the office.




Tel Aviv


An hour after his release, Alan Craik was spent. He had been screaming at Mike Dukas. His voice was hoarse by the time he slammed down the phone, his rage a blast against the friend who had given him the supposedly trivial job that had led to humiliation. He had been snatched off the street like a beginner, held prisoner, shamed. Made helpless.

Then an aide to the Chief of Naval Operations had called, then an assistant secretary of state, then Abe Peretz, and a general from CentCom, and the ambassador to Israel. Their message was that they were behind him and that the wrong that had been done him would be paid for.

His fury at Dukas ran down and became contemptible.

“I lost it,” he said. His face was in his hands. He was sitting, disheveled and sweaty from the day, on the hotel-room bed. “One of my best friends, and I trashed him.”

She sat next to him and hugged his shoulders. “Mike understands. It’s okay.”

“Christ.” He looked at his hands. They were trembling. “What’s the matter with me?”

“You need a rest.”

He was thirty-eight. The face he lifted to her looked older. “What do I do?” he said.

“Call Mike back.”

“I can’t.”

“Apologize. Then work with him to get back at these bastards.” She got up and passed in front of him, and he followed her with agonized eyes as she picked up the telephone and dialed and waited. He heard her speak to somebody in the Naples office and then she held out the phone to him. “Mike,” she said.

He put the instrument to his ear but said nothing. He was listening to his own breathing and perhaps to Dukas’s, as well. Finally, he croaked, “I’m sorry, man.” He was suddenly choked with tears.

“Well, it was an experience.”

“It wasn’t meant for you. It was—”

“Jeez, it sure seemed to have my name on it! You kept calling me Mike and using the word bastard. Sounded like it was for me.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry—it’s them, but I can’t get at them—”

“I know, kid, yeah, shit. All is forgiven. Forget it.”

“If I could take it back—”

“You can’t, so forget it. I’m still the guy you’ve slogged through the shit with. The truth is, now you’ve calmed down, I put the phone down for a while and let you rant while I did something else. Anyway, look, you’re right: I sent you into something without checking it out, and you got slammed. It is my fault. So forget it. The real question is, what do we do now?”

“Declare war on Israel?”

“Ho-ho, naughty boy. I suspect the gubmint has about shot its wad, expressing its displeasure in a demarche. What happens from now is what we make happen. So what d’you want to make happen?”

“I want to nail several Israeli skins to the barn door.”

“Okay, but you gotta ID them. You got names?”

“The two ass-kissers who delivered me to the hotel were named Shlomo something and Ziv something. No last names. I don’t know the shmucks who had me in the hotel room, but my guess is they were grunts—dumb, clumsy, a couple of them didn’t even speak English.”

“I need first and last names.”

“They didn’t give last names. Don’t hassle me!”

“Okay, okay! You done good.”

“I want to hit somebody.”

“Don’t. I’ll take over from here.”

“You’re going to follow up?”

“After the chewing-out you gave me? Christ, I’ll have the tooth marks on my ass for life! Actually, I’ve already had the order to pursue �with utmost diligence,’ plus State sent a demarche to the Israelis that was the diplomatic equivalent of your blast at me, and it ended with a promise to follow up. That’s my warrant. I’m off to see the wizard as soon as I can clear my desk.”

“You’re coming to Tel Aviv?”

“No way are the Israelis going to fuck me out of a country clearance on this one; they’re too scared. So you leave, I arrive, life goes on.”

Alan gave the telephone a feeble grin. “You’re a good guy, Mike.”

“I’ve ordered up a forensics team. We’ll do a number on the dead guy, Qatib. Who, by the way, was a cryptologist—you know that?”

“You didn’t bother to tell me. Serious business?”

“Maybe. I mean, the Israelis, a former cryptologist, a body—like, they’d be dee-lighted to have our codes.”

“Oh, shit.”

“My favorite expression.”

They talked some more, but mostly they repeated what they’d said. Dukas’s parting words were, “Hang in there, kid.”

And Alan said, “Dov—one of them was named Dov.” That was all he could remember.

When Alan hung up, his hands were still shaking. Rose put her arms around him. He was enraged because he had to go to the embassy next morning to be de-briefed and to get a medical check. She told him it was all routine; everything would be okay. “It’s over. We’re okay. We’re okay.” She held him tighter. “You still going to do your meeting tomorrow?”

“You’re goddam right I am!” He stood. “It’s the reason I came! Not all this fucking Mickey Mouse—” He didn’t say that the clandestine meeting to exchange information with Shin Bet might erase some of the humiliation of the day.

Dukas put the phone down as if he were placing it on a box of eggs. He pushed his lips out, shook his head, then looked up at Dick Triffler.

“That bad?” Triffler said.

“Bad. Wouldn’t you be? I sure would.” He sat back in the desk chair, his weight making the springs groan. “The Tel Aviv cop woman says it was murder. She doesn’t say how, so we need the forensics before we jump to a conclusion; she and Al both say there was torture, too.” He shrugged. “Peretz says the FBI is already on it. I told him to spread the word there that this is our case and everything will come to us, and if it doesn’t, I’m going to scream all the way up to the White House. I talked to Kasser.” Kasser was the head of NCIS, Dukas’s immediate boss. “We’re to make the Qatib case a top priority. It’s what this office is here for until we close it. Okay?” He looked up through thick eyebrows at Triffler. “Craik’s out of it—he’s got some secret thing of his own tomorrow and then he’s outa there. Somebody has to go to Tel Aviv and ram an investigation down the Israelis’ throats.”

“Mike, I just got here. We’re still unpacking boxes!”

“It’s either you or me. That’s direct from Kasser. The one who doesn’t go runs the office. Which do you want?”

Triffler, rarely flustered, looked at his hands and pursed his lips. Dukas thought about it, then said, “Okay, I’ll go. Soonest, Kasser says. Can’t possibly go tomorrow. Saturday?”

“You’ve got the meeting with Italian security at Sixth Fleet Saturday—remember, Saturday’s the only day everybody can make it?” Before Dukas’s well-known contempt for meetings could erupt, he said, “Mike—you called the meeting! You said it was �essential to cooperation on matters of joint concern!’”

“Okay, I’ll go Sunday.”

“When are you going to brief me on running the office?”

“Okay, I’ll go Sunday night! Jesus.” Dukas swung forward. He grabbed a yellow pad and a pencil—the computer at his elbow might as well not have existed—and began to write. “I want everything we can get on Salem Qatib. Maybe he was murdered because he was porking somebody’s wife, but Kasser says we gotta know how important it is that he was a cryptologist. You know what it’ll cost if somebody got Navy codes out of him? About a hundred and fifty mil. So we want everything on that—what codes he knew, where he worked, where he studied, who remembers him. I want a detailed bio on him, not the summary. Check with FBI and CIA to see what they got on him. Don’t dick around—remind them of the demarche and who’s driving the bus. Okay?”

“We need to know what was going on in his life in Palestine.”

“Yeah, I’m working on that. Peretz and the policewoman. But listen—” He pointed the pencil at Triffler. “If the policewoman’s right, Mossad killed the guy. That’s a heavy, heavy idea. Rumor to the contrary, they don’t just kill people. Killing’s pretty rare; you need authorization, preparation. Unless it’s a mistake.”

“What does Craik say?”

“He’s too mad to make much sense. FBI’ll de-brief him tomorrow morning, maybe they’ll get more. He’s supposed to get a medical check; that’s got him pissed, too. He got a couple first names of the guys he thinks are Mossad, plus he thought the guys who snatched him were pretty much thugs. Maybe rent-a-goons. They kept talking to him in Hebrew and pushing him around until they looked at his wallet and realized what they had. When somebody showed up who spoke English, he was apparently all over himself explaining that they had mistaken Al for a Tel Aviv cop. Which makes you ask, why were they so ready to snatch a Tel Aviv cop?”

“I’m the one who opens the case file?”

“You bet. Go to it.”

Triffler looked at his watch. It was after seven in the evening. “This is just like working for Mike Dukas,” he said. “I suppose you don’t care that I have choir practice this evening.”

“Choir practice! You just got here!”

“My voice is very much in demand.”

Dukas hunched down over his work. “You can hum �Amazing Grace’ while you work. Quietly.”





6 (#ulink_54193d4a-59e6-5107-96cf-f8db5eeab105)

Gaza


A guard, far more courteous than the last pair, took Rashid to a shower, and then to a room with a bed. He heard the guard turn the bolt from the outside, but at least the room was not in the basement, and it had a window on a dusty yard.

The night was cold. He lay with a single thin blanket and shivered, listening to the sound of knocking and ringing in the building’s steam pipes. He was exhausted, but the bile of betrayal—his own, others’, perhaps Salem’s—rolled around his guts. He shivered. His teeth chattered. Eventually, he slept, and in his dreams he ran and ran, while Salem called for help behind him.




Washington


Late in the day, McKinnon astonished Ray Spinner by poking his head into his cubicle and saying, “You’d better read this.”

Spinner saw the word demarche and From and To. He read the whole thing—naval officer, Israeli government with one foot in dogshit, naughty-naughty. It occurred to him that the Qatib business, which he had tried to kick sideways, was suddenly much bigger and much more important than he had thought.

McKinnon was leaning on the carpeted wall. “State’s got its balls in an uproar because Mossad was doing its job, apparently. About this Qatib, so your instincts were right in asking for follow-up. Full Marks. Some Navy guy got his pants caught in the gears, or something. Find out what happened and keep me current. One way or the other, the Qatib thing will expand and make at least a nice little case study.” He handed over another piece of paper. This time, he was grinning.

A reply, Spinner saw, from Dukas direct to the Assistant Secretary—Oh, my God!—with some sort of bureaucratic blahblah-blah. Spinner looked at McKinnon. Was he going to get fired now?

“Questions?” McKinnon said.

“What do I do about Dukas’s message?”

“That’s a dumb question, but you’re allowed one. Tell him to fuck off with the jokes and get you the data. That clear?”

“My pleasure.” So he wasn’t fired. He could feel sweat below his eyes. He tried to smile. McKinnon laughed and slipped out, and Spinner could hear him still laughing as he went up the row of cubicles.

In Israel, that was the day that an elderly man was kidnapped and murdered. The al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade claimed credit. It was also the day that two Palestinians shot into a car, killing an Israeli woman.





7 (#ulink_169713cf-caca-5832-84d0-0b6b43b66352)

Gaza


In the morning, a guard took him to wash, and then to the courtyard to pray with other men, all of whom seemed to be guards, not prisoners. He tried very hard to concentrate his mind on the glory of God. After prayer, he ate with them.

Then they took him to an office. Zahirah was there, freshly dressed and made up. She had glossy enlargements of the photos from the flashcard in neat rows on her desk and taped to the wall behind her.

She also had Rashid’s passport and backpack. The presence of those two items on a corner of her desk gave Rashid hope. He sat quietly while she worked away at her computer, typing rapidly, a pencil clenched in her lipsticked mouth; she grabbed the pencil to scribble notes that she pasted to her computer screen.

“Do you want to help us, Rashid?” she asked after ten minutes. “We intend to find out exactly what happened to your friend—to Salem. And then, if it is within our power, to avenge him.”

You were the ones who beat him first! Rashid’s brain was already split in two; half wanted to help the Palestinian Authority, and half viewed that Authority as the enemy of every Palestinian.

“We can help you,” she continued. “If you will help us. Hamas will not help you; they have lost the dig, and all they will care about is the lost money. They cannot go outside of Palestine to ask questions. So they will likely concentrate on you.” She paused for effect. “And on your mother—who we can protect. We can. You can, if you help us.”

Rashid had no loyalty to Hamas; they had paid the bills after the death of his father and brothers, and his mother loved them, but they had shown their true colors when he worked for Salem. He had very little loyalty to Israel; years of Hamas propaganda and experience of Israeli police methods in Acco combined to make Israel more of an enemy than a home. The thought of travel, anything outside the constant war that was all around him, was more tempting than anything he had heard. And the possibility of avenging Salem, even indirectly, might help him deal with the fact that when Salem had needed him, he had run.

Still, he hesitated. Even with nothing to go home to, no job, no future, he still hesitated to commit to the Authority.

Zahirah held up the clearest photo of the slut Saida disporting herself with the gold cup. “Rashid, listen to me, please. This Saida—she has left the country. Yes, we know that. She has gone to Cyprus—perhaps Crete; I’ll know in an hour. I think she has many of these items. I think she intends to sell them on the black market.

He raised his hands. “What would you have me do?” he asked.

Zahirah smiled broadly, showing most of her white, even teeth. “You have a clean Israeli passport. You speak English. You know Saida. We want you to help us find her and bring her back.”

That sounded so appealing that Rashid answered her smile with his own. Excitement began to rise within him. “I think I could do that.”

Zahirah began to make piles of documents atop the photos. She pressed a buzzer under her desk and in answer a young man appeared at her door. She waved to him.

“This is Ali, your keeper. You have much to learn. You will have to leave tonight. The colonel will want to see you before you go.”

Ali wasn’t much older than Rashid—Salem’s age, in fact. He smiled at Rashid, who looked down at the ground to hide his confusion. Then he smiled a little in return.

Ten minutes later, he was learning to use a cell phone for clandestine communications. And he had chosen a side.




Washington


Spinner’s new status was symbolized by a message that was waiting on his computer in the morning. It had been routed to him by name—major development, to be a name and not the generic “Screener”—and included the information’s source, also a first for Spinner. The information had come from “Habakkuk,” who was passing information from “Deborah.”

Deborah/Habakkuk/Routing

Subj: American officer detained by Mossad

US Naval intelligence officer Alan Craik was detained yesterday by, supposedly, Mossad officers. Cause may be his involvement in illicit investigation of death of Palestinian terrorist named Salem Qatib. Craik released last evening unharmed but feathers very ruffled. Release the result of efforts by his wife, Rose Siciliano Craik, also naval officer and also possible intelligence agent (Ass’t Attaché, Bahrain). Real reason for their presence in Israel not known. Evidence here of US condemnation of Israel for Craik detention. Question: why so much attention to death of one terrorist?

Spinner frowned at this. He read it again, and then again. He knew who Alan and Rose Craik were because Craik had served on the Fifth Fleet staff in Bahrain. What made him frown was the apparently private knowledge that the source had of the Craiks—“feathers very ruffled… Release the result of efforts by his wife…” How did somebody know that? And yet know at the same time about the demarche? (“Evidence here of condemnation of Israel…”)

Spinner wrote a note on a memo pad and clipped it to the message. The note said, “Who is Deborah?”

And it occurred to him—the stirring of, perhaps, an instinct for intelligence, and the reason that the CIA insists on vetting all agent reports before they are disseminated—that Deborah wrote reports that revealed too much of himself. Or was it herself?




Tel Aviv


The Craiks were taking Miriam Gurion to lunch. They had wanted to take the Peretzes, too, but Bea had said that she couldn’t make it, and Abe had called back to apologize and say that Bea “was busy advising Likud on how to be Jewish,” and he had explained a bit lamely that in fact she was busy all the time with things he didn’t understand. “Maybe she’s found a younger guy, who knows?” The upshot of his call was that Rose was embarrassed and asked him to come to lunch, anyway.

Now they were sitting at a table in a crowded room in what Miriam said was the best Yemeni-Ethiopian restaurant in Tel Aviv. “Noisy, but the food’s worth it,” she had said. And she was right. It was definitely noisy, and the food was definitely great.

Alan felt awkward, bellowing the details of his detention over the bellows that surrounded them, trying to keep his rage from bursting out, but the other three kept shooting questions at him as they all forked down spicy lentils, ground lamb with fennel, cold mashed tomatoes with cumin and hot peppers. He told them of the capture, the hours in a room, the sudden release.

“So what about the dead guy?” Abe shouted.

“Not here,” Miriam said.

Alan shrugged. “Later,” he said to Abe.

When they were stuffed and groaning and happy, Miriam led them down the street to a shabby café and took them to a table at the back. “Cop place,” she said. “You know, when cops take a break?”

“I think we call it �cooping,’” Abe said. He had to explain to her what a coop was.

She said, “Well, this is a coop. A cop coop.” She laughed, a big laugh that surprised Alan, who had seen only her serious side. “Okay,” she said to him when black coffee and a plate of tiny cakes had appeared, “talk about the dead man Qatib. But talk quietly.”

After Alan, with interpolations by Miriam, had explained who Qatib had been and why Mike Dukas had asked him to do the supposedly routine closeout, Abe said, “I don’t get it.”

“Neither do we, darling. None of it hangs together.”

“Mossad doesn’t do such things.” Abe seemed embarrassed. “As a rule. I mean—no offense, Mrs Gurion, but you know how these things work.” Miriam was making noises like a revving engine. “Well, you know what I mean—they’d need a big reason to do something like this.”

“Not to mention snatching my husband off the street,” Rose said.

“That is because he is so handsome, darling,” Miriam said, patting Rose’s hand.

“They never said I was handsome,” Alan muttered.

“What did they say?”

“Everything they said was so stupid, I couldn’t believe it was happening. I really had a hard time believing they were Mossad.” He rubbed his chin, felt the beginning of stubble. “But they were.”

“Of course they were!” Miriam’s eyes widened and narrowed quickly. “Because now they are on me. Yesterday morning, I was on the case, good; yesterday four p.m., I am off the case; this morning, I am on the case again. Why? First, Mossad calls TLV police, get that woman off the case. Then Mossad calls TLV, oh we’re so sorry, we were wrong, do put that nice lady on the case. Why? Because you scared them.” She gestured toward Alan with a coffee spoon, then looked at Abe. “You say you need a big reason for all this. No. I say there is no big reason. I say they were stupid people doing a stupid thing.” She gave a sudden, rather girlish grin. “That is what I tell the very pleasant man who calls me from your friends in Naples.”

“Dukas?”

“No. Mister Triffler. You know Mister Triffler?”

They smiled. Abe examined his fingers, gave her a sly look. “Okay, they were stupid. But why did they kill Qatib?”

“Because that is most stupid of all! We have to live with the Palestinians, whatever happens—interrogations must not kill.” She put her chin up, said almost defiantly, “The Supreme Court of Israel ruled in 1999 that torture is illegal.”

“Al said the dead man had been beaten.”

“Yes, badly, badly. But beating, I don’t know—if he died of beating, do you think Mossad beat him to death? Are they that stupid?”

“Either way, the question remains, why do any of it? Who was he?”

She gave an elaborate shrug. “He was a Palestinian.” She put down the spoon. “I have work to do at Dizengoff Street.” She began shaking hands all around.

When she had gone and Peretz and Alan and Rose were walking back toward their hotel, Peretz said, “Interesting woman. Think she’d be open to a contact?”

“What, recruit her? No, I don’t.”

“No, no. But—I liaise with cops; she’s a cop. What I’m thinking—this thing isn’t going to go away. State told the Israelis we’ll pursue the investigation and expect them to do the same. I just got word Dukas is sending somebody to follow through. I’m going to wind up in the middle of that, no matter what happens.” Peretz stepped around a woman who was staring into a store window. “And you’re leaving.”

“You bet your ass I’m leaving.” He said that he thought that the investigation was really Dukas’s and NCIS’s, not Peretz’s, but it would be impossible to do from Naples.

When they were parting, Peretz said, “Mossad has a long arm, Alan. And a long memory.” He looked like a wise professor repeating an important point to a slow pupil.

Alan looked at his watch and nodded. “I’ll remember.” He was on his way to the meeting that was his real reason for being in Tel Aviv; he couldn’t wait for it to be over so he could get out. He left Peretz nodding to himself, conscious that the man had more to say, and too focused to listen to it.




Naples


Dick Triffler was leaning against the wall in Dukas’s office, arms crossed, one ankle over the other and the shoe resting tip-down. He’d taken his jacket off, but his shirt was crisp and white and his tie was a thick Italian silk in a shade of blue that could have been used for a late-night sky. “Tel Aviv’s already giving us static about the forensics team,” he said.

“Jeez, I thought they’d pretend to stay scared for twenty-four hours, anyway.” Dukas made a face. He was wearing the same dark polo shirt and tired chinos, and his feet, in running shoes that looked like purple bathtubs, were crossed on his desk. “How much static?”

“They �question the necessity.’”

Dukas made a growling noise. “Okay, message ONI, try to get them to lean on it.”

Triffler nodded.

“How about the policewoman Craik was working with?”

“Sounds nice but very cautious. Clearly thinks I’m trying to recruit her with my magic wand. She says that she’s got the Qatib case now but she’s just doing the preliminary work. She’s been promised the body by the end of next week.”

“What the hell, what end of next week? What’re they gonna do, clone it before they turn it over? The cops should have had the body already!”

“�Administrative complications.’ Mrs Gurion says she doesn’t dare turn them off completely.”

Dukas made the face again and toyed with a pencil. “You tell her I’ll be there Monday?”

“She was beside herself with delight.”

“When NCIS was investigating Pollard, the CIA finally broke down and gave us a Mossad organizational chart and a personnel roster. What I want to do is get on to headquarters and pry that stuff out of them. Specifically, I want to know all the operational people named Shlomo and if so what they do. I’m trying to find out what the hell Mossad’s interest could be in Qatib if it wasn’t cryptology. Can do?”

“If they’ll give it to me.”

“HQ will give us anything we want right now because a Navy guy was kidnapped and Mossad is in the shit.”

“For twenty-four hours, anyway.”

“Yeah, so move quick.”

“You know how many guys in Israel are named Shlomo? It’s like Bill.”

“Yeah, well one was with me in Bosnia in ninety-seven. A Shlomo, not a Bill. We gotta start somewhere.”

Dukas made a call to The Hague. He wanted a former French cop named Pigoreau, who now worked for the World Court and who had been Dukas’s assistant in a war-crimes investigation unit in Bosnia. Pigoreau wasn’t in the office yet—banker’s hours, Dukas thought—but would be in soon, he’d call back, etcetera. And did an hour later.

“Mike! Marvelous to hear from you!” Pigoreau had a great French accent—you expected an accordion accompaniment.

“Hey, Pig.”

Laughter. “Mike, you’re the only guy I let call me Pig. You know, in French this is a big insult—cochon?”

“In English, it’s affectionate. The Three Little Pigs. Porky Pig. We got a chain of supermarkets called Piggly-Wiggly.”

“Okay, I take it as an endearment. What is going on?”

Dukas reminded him of the operation with the two Israelis in Bosnia. Pigoreau didn’t remember it at once—he hadn’t been involved, but he had had contact with everything that went on in that office—and it came back with some prompting. Finally he was able to say, “The guy died!”

“Yeah, that’s the one. We wanted him, and he got shot.”

“I remember. A long time, Mike.”

“Yeah. What I need is, Pig, I want to know what the Israeli involvement was.”

“Oh, mon dieu—Mike, that stuff is buried a thousand meters deep someplace.”

“Yeah, but it’s get-attable. You guys are bureaucrats; you don’t throw stuff away.”

Pigoreau laughed again. “I try, Mike. This is serious business? Okay.”

“Leave a message on this phone. You’re a good guy, Pig.”

“Cochon.”

Dukas hung up and thought about how much he didn’t want to go to Tel Aviv. On the other hand, it would get him out of the office. And it was his job.




Tel Aviv


Tel Aviv’s sunlit concrete was a nightmare environment for spotting surveillance. Alan Craik was looking for surveillance because he was gun-shy from the events of yesterday, and because that’s what he had been taught to do in a hostile environment. And this was now a hostile environment.

He was on his adversary’s home ground, a colossal disadvantage. And the city’s modernity eliminated narrow streets with blind corners and back alleys in favor of broad boulevards. Heavy buildings set a bomb-blast’s reach away from the street gave potential watchers plenty of room on the wide sidewalks, among the hundreds of vendors and the thousands of pedestrians, to stalk him at will.

If his opponents had all these advantages and deployed a large, diverse team to watch him, he would never see them. If they were lazy, undermanned, or too uniform—that was another story. Especially if he could lead them into an environment where they were out of place, ill-dressed, just wrong. That was his technique, perfected in the souks and western hotels of the Gulf States. He planned his routes to cross the invisible social boundaries that define class and trade, profession, education. His route today went from his hotel to the diamond district, through the towers and business suits of the insurance brokerage houses, in and out of the library and the museum of the University, and on to his meeting.

He made his first watcher ten minutes into the walk. He spotted her early, a slight young woman in a drab scarf with a face like Julie Andrews. He gave her that name in his head, an automatic catalogue of everyone who gave him a glance or appeared interested in his progress. Her rugby shirt, jean shorts, and tanned legs were unremarkable on the busy sidewalk three blocks from his hotel.

What could be more natural than the American officer cruising the diamond district for his wife? But Julie Andrews drew stares from the conservative, Orthodox men on the sidewalk. She stood out like Jane Fonda in Hanoi. Alan felt his heart swelling in his chest, the first sweet rush of adrenaline hitting him. His snatch, the terror of it, the humiliation retreated with this little victory.

He’d never spotted a real surveillant before. And these were Israelis, probably Mossad. On their home ground.

Take that, you bastards.

Alan showed them how boring he was, how unconcerned he was that he’d been their prisoner sixteen hours earlier. He had to fight the temptation to show them that he had spotted them. He wished he had a camera—maybe Mike would care? The embassy? He’d have to file a report, anyway. Embassies took this kind of thing seriously.

Leaving the huge concrete octagon of the university library, he scored another victory. He’d spotted the possibilities of the library on his first trip to Israel. Doors everywhere, and one small, but legitimate, exit to a garden whose real purpose was to illuminate the chancellor’s plate glass window. The garden had a narrow walkway that led out past the graduate residence and directly downhill to a protected bus stop.

When he arrived at the bus stop, he had the intense satisfaction of watching Miss Andrews run down a ramp behind him, talking into the collar of her shirt, stopping to talk to a youngish man he hadn’t spotted, and then, to be treasured and retold forever like a find in a yard sale, he got to watch a third person, a stocky middle-aged male in a T-shirt, climb into a waiting van with a heavy aerial and speed away through the bus lane, the paunchy occupant staring at Alan openmouthed through the passenger window from four feet away.

Alan got the license number. It didn’t matter a damn, it shouldn’t have done anything to balance the indignity of yesterday, but his mood was lighter. His shoulders were squarer, and he found that he was whistling when he approached the meeting. His watch said he’d enter the lobby on time to the minute.

The man in the hotel lobby wasn’t anyone’s idea of a military intelligence officer. He was short, heavy to the point of fat, dressed in a khaki bush jacket, faded jeans and sandals that had been worn to paint something orange. His head was bald and almost perfectly round. His hands were huge, which, combined with his round head and his dark glasses, gave him the look of a garden mole.

Alan had expected an officer in uniform. Or perhaps a slender, sunburned man in shorts. He expected the Shin Bet to be different from the Mossad—but not this different.

The man’s smile was warm and penetrating, too warm to be feigned. “Commander Craik?” he said. “Benjamin Aaronson. Call me Ben.” Alan’s hand vanished in one of his, and then they were in an elevator headed up, their recognitions exchanged.

“Your wife like Tel Aviv? Ugly city, but great shopping.” Ben held the door to a room—no, a suite of rooms. There was a laptop on a table big enough to seat a board of directors. He closed the door behind them, set the bolt. “You got fucked over by Mossad yesterday.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah.” Alan tossed his backpack on the table. He was surprised by the wave of anger that accompanied the admission, as if having to confess that he’d been snatched put him at a disadvantage. A rare insight—Alan could suddenly see that it was a macho thing, like getting mugged. His masculinity—to hell with that.

“Well, we’re sorry. We’re really sorry, and you beat the odds by showing today—half the guys in my unit said you’d walk. Wouldn’t blame you.”

Alan swallowed a couple of comments, all unprofessional. “Not something I’d really like to talk about,” he said.

“Sure.” Ben opened the laptop. “You have some files for me.”

Alan opened his backpack, removed a data storage device and put it on the table, tore off a yellow sticky from a pad on the table and wrote a string of numbers from memory. “Files are on the stick. There’s the crypto key.” He shrugged. “I don’t really know what’s on it.”

Ben plugged it into his laptop, replaced his black sunglasses with bifocals, and peered at the screen, hunting keys with exaggerated care as he typed the digits. “You want some food? There’s enough in there to feed my whole unit.”

“You the commander?” Alan asked. He was looking out the window, wondering if he should have ditched the meeting.

“Um-hmm.” Ben was scrolling now, looking very fast at the documents Alan had provided. “I’m the colonel—you think they’re going to send some stooge to meet you?” He smiled over the screen. “Relax, Commander. This is going to take some time.”

“You have stuff for me, too, I hope.”

“That’s what �exchange’ means.” His attention went back to the screen.

Maybe it was the residue of yesterday, but Alan had expected something more adversarial, something like bargaining in the souk. He already thought he’d been put at a disadvantage by coughing up his stuff first, but it didn’t feel like that. Ben felt more like an aviator than a spy.

“You always been an intel guy?” Alan asked.

“No. No, I started in a tank. I was a crew commander in Lebanon in �83.” He continued to scroll while he talked.

Alan nodded to show that he knew what had happened in Lebanon in 1983.

“Everyone goes into the military here—that means everyone is supposed to, you know? Except that there’s religious exemptions and too many rich fucks who send their kids to Europe or the US or Canada to evade military time—you know that?” He looked up, his eyes bright above his bifocals.

This isn’t just small talk. Alan took a chair and sat opposite Ben. “I guess I thought everyone served.”

“That’s the myth. Here’s the reality—the kids getting hit by rocks in the West Bank aren’t the kids whose parents are in Parliament.”

“That sounds familiar.” Alan was surprised he let that slip. He didn’t criticize his own country to foreigners. It was a rule, a navy rule.

Ben’s eyes were back on the screen. “A lot of this is pure shit, you know?”

Alan got to his feet. “Look—”

“Don’t get on your tall horse, Commander.” He looked over the screen again. “Your President is a good friend of Israel, but he’s a terrible intelligence manager. Yes?”

“He’s the commander-in-chief,” Alan said without too much emphasis.

“Politics and intelligence, they go so naturally together and they are terrible bed mates, yes? You know what I am saying, Commander?”

Not a clue, unless this is another recruitment attempt. What the hell is he talking about? “Not sure I do, Ben. Call me Alan. Okay?”

“Sure. I’m saying that good intelligence is the truth, yes? The truth we see on the ground? And good intelligence officers tell the truth.”

Alan gave a cautious nod, already worried about where this was going. Was it yesterday making him shy? He was growing anxious because a friendly foreign officer was trying to make professional talk in a hotel room.

He caught himself watching out the window. Ben read on. He began to read snatches aloud.

It didn’t take Alan long to understand what the man meant when he said “shit.” He read a report summary on an interrogation conducted in an unknown location. The target of the location was referred to as “the terrorist.” The summary sounded as if it had been written for a Hollywood movie. Ben read several of these without comment, although his English was good enough to convey his amusement—and his disgust.

Alan fought with anxiety. Followed a train of thought out of the room. Back to Afghanistan. Brought himself back to the room.

After twenty minutes of this, Ben went on as if he had never stopped. “Politicians want the truth to serve their own ends—their own ends. Not the truth. Not the truth you saw. And they never see the people—the dead ones, the results of prolonged interrogations.” He pressed a key. “Okay, you brought what your people said you’d bring. Not your fault that it’s shit, but it is. My contact says you’ll be the officer in charge on this operation—one of the pieces in Perpetual Justice. Who makes up these names, eh?” He took the bifocals off his nose and wiped them carefully on his bush jacket’s tail. Then he pressed a few keys and spun the laptop to Alan, so that he had the keyboard under his hands and the screen lit up before him. It was an older model IBM, he noted.

“What we’re giving you is shit, too.” Ben’s voice had an edge. “Political shit, just like yours. I wanted to talk to you—really talk. You think this is a set-up, don’t you? It’s not. We’re providing a lot of the material to support these Perpetual Justice ops—and some of it is a pile of crap.”

Alan tried to feign unconcern, but his shoulders were tight and he felt as if he’d been strapped in an ejection seat for seven hours. “I’m uncomfortable with your choice of topics, maybe.”

Ben polished his glasses again. “Will I surprise you if I say we know you quite well, Commander? Africa, Silver Star, some not-so-secret decorations. You are an operator, yes? And my guess is, you are a believer.” He smiled, changing his round head into the face of everyone’s friend. The perfect friend. “As I am. A true believer in a complex canon of—of what we are.” His turn to look out the window.

Alan started through the files to cover his mixture of pleasure and fear. How could he not be flattered that they knew his career? And why did this seem so much like a recruitment attempt?

The reality outlined in the files drew him away from Ben’s words. His part of Perpetual Justice was a snatch operation against a suspected al-Qaida moneyman, and for the first time he saw a parallel between what had happened to him yesterday and what he was about to do. That hadn’t really pushed through Alan’s conscience until that very moment, a twinge:

The big SUV had powered through the streets as two men in the front shouted at each other. A big man in the back had had a gun. Alan had registered these things at a distance because he couldn’t form a coherent thought. When his brain had finally turned over, it had started on an endless loop of threat and fear. Captured. Torture. He had been conscious of just how many secrets he knew and could betray—operations, Afghanistan, fear—panic. Who has me? Why? I’ve been captured! Torture. Prepare myself Who has me?

He snapped back to the computer. His hands were trembling. He did not raise his eyes to meet Ben’s.

The documents in front of him were recent surveillance findings of the target, clearly much altered. They’d had a certain amount of information deleted, but they were thorough, carefully annotated. Exactly what he’d need to plan his operation.

The next file was a clean summary of the target’s ties to al-Qaida and his location in the financial hierarchy. To Alan, it was like reading an academic paper with no footnotes. Everything was neat and tidy—the target’s role, his family relations, his bank accounts. To Alan, it stank. Intelligence was never that simple. Terrorists were never that simple. He looked up, straight into Ben’s smile.

“Okay, you pass. You really are an intel officer. You had me worried.”

“This is like a document you send to a briefer.”

“Give that man a cigar.” Ben paused, clearly pleased with his phrase. “There’s more of the same. It was pushed on us. We decided to tell your people through you. I’m going to talk out of school—that’s your phrase, yes? Okay, out of school, under the rose—we’re a secretive lot, we have a great many phrases for this. Okay? The surveillance reports, his location—I’ll back those. My people, or people I know, did those. The background, the bank accounts, the summary—not ours, okay? I can guess, but I won’t—you don’t want to criticize your president. Same-same. Right?”

Alan was scrolling down the summary, looking at an Excel spreadsheet on banking that looked impressive as hell. Except that it was unsourced.

“Jesus.” Alan looked up self-consciously. “Ah, sorry.”

Ben smiled. “I think I’ve heard the name before.”

Alan’s eyes went back to the document and he grimaced. “I don’t get it. All this unsourced stuff.”

“But when you deliver it to your Central Command, it will become sourced. From Israeli military intelligence. Very trustworthy, yes? Maybe in some circles, more trustworthy than your own CIA?”

Alan murmured “Jesus” again without thinking.

“We decided we wouldn’t do it without telling somebody—and somebody is you, Commander. They try and fuck us. Okay, we’re proud in the military. We don’t trade shit unless we mean to fuck somebody. We ask for you. �Send the guy running the operation.’ So we—so I can have this conversation. There it is. It’s political. Somebody wants this man. Is he al-Qaida? I have no idea. But I think if he is, there would not be all this amateur shit in the package.”

Alan shook his head slowly. “I haven’t seen what I brought you.”

Ben held up his hand, balanced it, teetered the palm slowly up and down. “Same-same. Some shit.”

“I didn’t see it. Not my stuff.”

“Of course not. Me, I’m a meddler. I won’t do one of these things, these �exchanges,’ without reading everything.”

Alan shrugged. “We’re not like that.”

Ben smiled. “No? What’s to stop a double agent from filling that data stick with stolen secrets on stealth technology and giving it to you to pass? Nothing simpler.”

That idea had never occurred to Alan, whose hands froze on the keyboard.

Ben continued, “May I give you a piece of advice, professional to professional? If they won’t let you read the material, refuse the meeting. Let them find another Patty.”

“Patsy,” Alan said automatically. “Does our stuff pick up authenticity, too? I mean, what I delivered—”

“Will be devoured by our politicians. Because it comes from US intelligence.”

Alan started pressing the keys that would dump the data files into his stick. “I don’t like being used.”

Ben nodded. A slow smile spread over his face. “Good. I was afraid you wouldn’t listen.” He paused and said, “There’s more than one Israel.”

“I’m getting that idea, yeah.”

“I wish we had more time to talk—” Ben said. He rose to his feet. “You are in a hurry.”

Alan collected his bag, rested his hands on the seat back. “Maybe I’d be more receptive if I hadn’t been grabbed by other Israelis yesterday.” He shrugged, nothing to lose. “Or followed here by a surveillance team.”

Ben winced. “Not mine.”

Alan shrugged again, because it made no difference. “Thanks for the heads-up on politics. I believe you. Okay?” He was tempted to unburden; life since Nine-Eleven had left him with more reservations about his own profession than the rest of his career combined, but Ben was not the man. “You going to be in trouble over this? You know I’ll put in a contact report.”

Ben smiled. “As will I. May I tell you something that will surprise you, Commander? This is the start of something. I dislike the politicization of intelligence. I love my country. I will not sit still. Now, I fight back. And not just here.”

When they shook hands at the door, Ben gave him a slip of paper that proved to have his real name—Colonel Benjamin Galid—and a phone number. “In case,” he said.

Alan left before it could get any worse. Because he no longer knew what to believe, except that too much of it had resonated.

That day, a Palestinian gunman killed six people in Israel and wounded a score of others. The crowd beat him and the police killed him. The Martyrs Brigade took credit for the attack.

That evening, the Craiks left Tel Aviv for Bahrain.





8 (#ulink_01bcbee1-e0b3-5ba3-9960-098cda177084)

Cyprus


For the first two days on Cyprus, Rashid didn’t even look for Saida. He spent the Sabbaths of three religions living from phone to phone. His new friends, Zahirah and Ali, had moved him briskly around the island, passing him from one Palestinian business to another. He learned a routine and some basic habits of caution. And each day, at times he had memorized back in the concrete building in Gaza, he used a cell phone or a pay phone to call certain numbers where his new friends waited to help him. If he used a cell phone, he discarded it after the call. If he used a pay phone, he could never use that one again.

Sometimes, it was very exciting. Other times, it was like living with his mother.

In Famagusta, he found a tourist shop with novels in English. He bought a book called A Perfect Spy from the money he had taken from Salem’s coat, which he kept carefully separated from the money given to him by Ali for “operational expenses.”

The English in the novel was difficult, but the story was excellent. It passed the time between movements.

On Sunday, Zahirah directed him to the ferry docks at Kyrenia.

“Your friend has purchased a ticket on a ferry to Athens,” Zahirah said. She sounded very pleased. “You will go to the ferry, purchase a similar ticket, and follow her. Call us once you have located her.”

He arrived early in the evening and watched the passengers go on board, and he never saw her. When the ferry was less than an hour from sailing, he called another number for instructions. This time Ali directed him to board the ferry. He seemed sure that Saida would be on it. And he taxed Rashid with an unnecessary communication.

“Locate her,” his new friend said. “Don’t approach her and don’t let her identify you. Don’t call every time you are nervous. Call when you have something to report.”

Rashid did as he was told.




Washington


Standing in front of his mirror, Ray Spinner had thought he looked terrific in his new red-white-and-blue suspenders. Saturday seemed just the day to wear them—only the real gunners there on Saturday—but when he got to work he had a spasm of insecurity and didn’t dare take his jacket off. Five minutes later, he went to the men’s room and removed the suspenders and put them in a pocket, where they made an unsightly bulge. Plus his pants wouldn’t stay up.

Back in his cubicle, there was a message from McKinnon: See me. Spinner slipped the suspenders into a desk drawer and headed out at speed. It occurred to him—momentary flash of anger—that but for McKinnon, he’d be wearing the suspenders and wouldn’t have to hold his pants up with one hand.

McKinnon was standing behind his desk reading a book. He was wearing brown suspenders and looking both professorial and powerful, as if he might have been one of those Oxbridge types who were also MI5 in the days of Burgess and MacLean. “Hmmm?” he said without looking up.

“You wanted to see me.”

McKinnon read a few more words and looked up over his glasses and apparently recognized Spinner. “What’s new in Israel?” he said.

“It’s cryptology. The dead man was a Navy cryptologist; it looks like he gave up what he knew to his Palestinian buddies and Mossad got hold of it.”

“What’s your evidence?”

“Message traffic is heavy. It all says cryptology.”

“Are you sure?”

Spinner hesitated. “Of course I’m not sure!” he said. He was shocked that he let his own annoyance show.

“That’s a start. I’m not sure, either. When the hounds start chasing their tails, I tend to be a little skeptical. I think maybe something else is in play.” He smiled one of those meaningless smiles that lift only the corners of the mouth. “Off you go.”

Spinner blurted out, “Do you know something I don’t?”

McKinnon was back in his book. “I certainly hope so.” He waved Spinner away.

Back in his cubicle, Spinner frowned at the carpet-covered wall for some minutes and thought that he really shouldn’t take it anymore. McKinnon was a supercilious shit. On the other hand, he liked and needed the job.

He had gone to a Barnes and Noble and bought Leo Strauss’s The City and Man because it was the thinnest Strauss book on the shelf. He had been dipping into it. It was heavy going for a man whose idea of a book was a thriller. He had almost self-destructed on a paragraph that went on for two pages. He was put off by sentences like “For Aristotle political inequality is ultimately justified by the natural inequality among men,” because he had been raised on “All men are created equal,” but he assumed that no matter what sentences like these meant, Strauss would pull a democratic rabbit out of his philosophical hat. He didn’t want to face the possibility that neither Strauss, Aristotle, nor Plato was in fact democratic.




Naples


By Saturday, Dukas had Salem Qatib’s bio and knew that he had studied classics and archaeology at the University of Michigan but hadn’t taken a degree. Dukas tried to get the university on the phone, but on weekends academics are resting their brains. He made notes on what else he knew about Qatib: emigrated to the US with his parents at fourteen; his father returned to Palestine when Salem was seventeen and the parents later divorced; Salem did his Navy stint then and followed it with his college work, remaining a reservist. Then he’d gone off to Palestine himself and had kept a fairly clean record, except for whatever Mossad knew about him and was now not giving up—their current stance was “Who, me? Never heard of him!” The CIA had Qatib’s name but was saying that other than his being a Palestinian and having attended an anti-settlement rally in Gaza, they weren’t interested in him.

“Well, somebody was interested in him,” Dukas said to Triffler.

“Or Al Craik’s police lady is wrong about the Mossad involvement.”

“You think Al was kidnapped by four guys who just happened to be in the neighborhood?”

“Stranger things have happened.” Triffler checked his watch. “We have a meeting downtown in half an hour.”




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