Eckstein had no idea who this bewildered American fellow might be, but he was in Benni’s charge and it was not the first time Baum had shown up to a rendezvous towing a tomech—SpecOps slang for a foreign but loyal assistant. Eckstein removed his sunglasses, approached O’Donovan, and smiled behind a finger forbidding dialogue, then he gestured at one of the double beds. O’Donovan shrugged and sat down, feeling, for all his NYPD rank and experience, like a child on the first day of grade school.
A strange ballet followed, with Baum and Eckstein moving quickly, as if repeating a mime routine they had often taken on a road tour. It reminded O’Donovan of the initial search of a crime scene, without the banter.
Neither of the Israelis really suspected that the Moroccan Mukhabarat would take enough interest in them to monitor their activities. But hostile agencies also had a foothold in Casablanca, and Martina Klump was certainly not funding her efforts with the profits from a McDonald’s franchise. Someone was supporting her, and whether that banker might be the Syrian, Iraqi, or Libyan government, technical aid might also be lent. So the two men proceeded out of professional habit, like pilots running a preflight check.
Benni began by closing the wide window draperies, then he unplugged every lamp in the room, which submerged the space in a brown gloom lit only by the spill from recessed bulbs in the foyer.
Despite the popular notion that high-tech wizardry allows for miniature, battery-powered room bugs of unlimited endurance, most such devices are still secreted in harmless appliances and run off standard electrical current. Removing the plugs reduces that risk by a certain percentage. Another popular option is to conceal line-powered microphones inside electrical boxes behind the plug plates. Benni was not about to unscrew all the plates in the room, so he went to his valise and fished out a thick cellophane packet. It was certainly reasonable for a middle-aged salesman to carry a supply of Dr. Scholl’s sole inserts, and he peeled the backings off a handful of foam pads and gently covered each receptacle.
Eckstein came out of the bathroom, where he had run the shower while he finger-searched the light fixtures, plumbing lines, and cavities beneath the sink, bidet, and toilet tank. Careless operatives often thought a closed bathroom to be a safe haven for discussions, so these areas were frequently targeted by acoustical interceptors. His search could only be cursory, so he eliminated the risk by leaving the water on, exiting, and shutting the door.
O’Donovan watched as Baum and Eckstein now regarded each other across the large room. Both men were wishing they could have smuggled in a portable sweeper, which would have greatly simplified their efforts. AMAN’s wizards now produced a very fine model, essentially a multiband receiver with an incremental scanner and a directional antenna. The operator donned headphones, flooded the room with prerecorded music from a portable tape player, and proceeded to “sweep” every wall, carpet, and stick of furniture. If a transmitter was functioning, eventually the scanner would intercept the frequency, and the operator would hear his own taped music being played back into his ears. But these devices were very expensive, and though usually disguised as Walkmans or CDs, they were not issued to field operatives without a commanders’ assent. The department comptroller refused to risk having some third world customs inspector confiscate a sweeper for his teenage daughter.
Like tired boxers, Baum and Eckstein retreated to opposite ends of the suite, turned, and began again.
Eckstein used his Maglite to inspect the standing closets in the foyer, then was pleased to find that a full-length mirror was merely hung from a hook and could be lifted away from the wall. Baum opened the radiator below the windows, pulled the cushions from a love seat, ran a pencil point through the upholstery cracks, then lay down beneath a coffee table like a car mechanic. Eckstein got up on a chair and swept his beam over the air conditioner grate, while Baum removed the drawers from the writing table, inspected it, replaced them, then set the telephone down on the bed and gently smothered it with two pillows. Both men now went to their knees, and like blind men searching for a lost cuff link, they touched every centimeter of carpet, poked under the beds, and caressed the furniture, windowsills, and picture frames with more delicacy then either of them had shown a woman in a very long time.
The whole security dance took less than twenty minutes, but by the time it was over, both men had worked up a sweat. They were not foolish enough to feel carelessly comfortable, yet with their wits and experience as the only available tools, they had done what they could. Benni opened the minibar, handed Eytan an orange juice, and popped the tab on a can of soda water. He gestured at O’Donovan, inviting the American to help himself. A British veejay was now babbling nonsense and nearly poking his nose out from the TV screen. Benni turned up the volume, and Eckstein joined him in a corner near the draped windows.
Benni leaned back against the sill and looked up at his younger comrade, realizing that if only their operational union had never been broken, he would probably not be in this predicament. Fate would likely have taken a different course. Ruth might still be in her New York apartment, trotting off blithely to classes, ignorant of O’Donovan’s existence, comfortable in her antipaternal hostility. Safe. Yet if this was a crueler reality, it was best faced with Eckstein, and it was hard for Benni to keep the emotion out of his voice. They conversed in low Hebrew tones full of subtext.
“Asoor l’cha l’hiot kahn. You shouldn’t be here,” said Benni with a pained smile.
“Neither should you, my friend.” Eytan meant: in such a terrible position. “Who’s the bruised bodyguard?”
“A New York detective,” said Benni. Eytan glanced at O’Donovan, who was now smoking a cigarette and staring blankly at the television. “He was working on the consulate bombing. Itzik sent me over there to liaise.”
Baum relayed the rest of the details in a clipped shorthand. He was reluctant to expound on the relationship between Ruth and Mike, but it was key to the sequence of her kidnapping. Eckstein tried not to react overtly, but sexual images lie close to the surface of a man’s mind, and he could not help reappraising the American. It was not lost on Eckstein that, despite the haircuts, he and O’Donovan were physically similar. The detective still wore a strip of white plaster over his nose bridge, and there were purple patches under his eyes. The bandage was as blatant as a Sikh’s turban. He would have to lose it, and a woman’s compact would camouflage the rest.
O’Donovan looked over at Eckstein, who touched the fingers of his left hand together and made a motion of plucking a grape from a low vine, the Israeli gesture that means: We’ll get to you in a minute.
“I don’t suppose you’ve had any ideas,” Benni said hopefully.
“Even without the facts, I’ve got some infrastructure going.”
“Always the renegade,” Benni complimented. “I do have the facts, though I’ve made no contacts yet, except for you. The ‘Mafia’ will do what he can.”
Baum was referring to Art Roselli, but Eytan also realized that Benni assumed his partner’s preliminary efforts were purely out of channels. He looked at Baum, unsure that the colonel would be able to function with calm clarity, given the circumstances. He was about to confess his doubts, and reveal the actions he had already taken, when there was a rapid knock at the door.
Baum was moving to shoo away a probable chambermaid, when Eckstein touched the burly man’s chest and held him in place. His eyes apologized. “I’m not always the loose cannon you think I am,” said Eytan. He walked to the door.
When he opened it, General Itzik Ben-Zion strode into the room.
The commander of Special Operations dipped his head as he passed through the foyer. There was no obstruction there, but previous encounters with door-frames had ingrained the defensive habit. He was wearing a pearl-gray double-breasted worsted suit, a white shirt with European collar, and a blue silk tie. The temple frames of stylish sunglasses disappeared through his stiff salt-and-pepper curls, yet he was also carrying a lightweight London Fog, as even
Casablanca could readily change its tune in the winter months.
Benni had not seen Itzik out in the field or, for that matter, out of uniform in many years. He looked like a Sicilian don en route to a conference of the Families. But it was not the general’s attire that drew Baum’s focus. Rather, it was the fact that Eckstein had clearly blown the whole scenario to their boss, including Ruth’s abduction, placing her life in further jeopardy by casting her fate to the winds of Itzik’s ambitions. Stunned and feeling betrayed, Baum folded his arms and sliced into Eckstein’s soul with a withering glare.
“I had to, Benni,” said Eytan. “It was too complex, too many factors, Moon-light not the least of them.” Baum said nothing. “There are other risks, other lives at stake,” Eytan continued. “You knew you’d have to share, but there wasn’t time to talk you into it.”
Baum’s expression gave no quarter, though beneath his squint of anger he realized that Eckstein was right. He could not have brought himself to consider anyone or anything but Ruth. He would have sacrificed Dan Sarel. Someone had to act on behalf of the logical part of his mind, which was temporarily crippled.
Ben-Zion approached the two men, stopped, and cocked his head back toward O’Donovan, who saluted him wearily and returned to the television.
“What’s this?” Itzik demanded, as if the American were a rubber doll.
“Tomech,” said Eckstein.
“Niflah. Wonderful,” Itzik grumbled sarcastically as he threw the raincoat over the back of the small divan. “I love unvetted witnesses.”
“He’s in one hundred percent. And he doesn’t have the language,” Eckstein reassured.
Ben-Zion ignored him and turned to Baum. The general assumed that his men had swept the room, but the television blared, and they drew their heads close, like defense attorneys discussing a tactic in open court. He should have used their cover names, but he wanted to cut quickly into Benni’s defenses. He removed his sunglasses.
“Eckstein here says you might want to tell me something about the Tango file, Baum. And you had better tell it straight.”
Benni looked up at his towering boss, the dark eyes set in that unblinking, don’t-bullshit-me glare he often used to jelly the knees of headquarters staff. Then he glanced briefly at Eckstein, whose pained expression and slight nod were those of an accomplice encouraging confession. This was it. It was over. He felt the years and the lies and the burden of his secret unwinding like the sliced strands of a rubber-band ball. The man who had resisted hostile interrogations without giving up a single secret now found himself confessing like a philanderer.
“Martina Ursula Klump was ours,” Benni said to Itzik. Then he walked to a writing table, picked up an ashtray, came back around the love seat, and settled his rump on the edge of its headrest. Itzik shifted, to once more tower over his colonel, while Eckstein stared at the window draperies as if he could see through them to Casablanca’s seaport.
“Come again?” Ben-Zion said, squinting as he bent his head.
“Klump was ours.” Benni lit up a cigarette and blew the smoke from the corner of his mouth.
“What do you mean, ours?” Itzik demanded with growing alarm.
Benni looked at him squarely. “She was my agent. I turned her.”
Ben-Zion blinked. Although the magnitude of this revelation was already beginning to dawn, he resisted the onrushing implications. The general lived on secrets, coveted them, used them for professional and political leverage. He prided himself on knowing the hidden treasures of all the compartmentalized units that funneled their whole truths only to him. It was not possible that any of his men, even the Terrible Twins, could have kept such a thing from him.
He straightened up and turned to his younger subordinate.
“What’s he talking about, Eckstein?” he asked, as if Baum had been speaking Cantonese.
“Listen to him,” Eytan replied curtly.
“It was nearly twenty years ago, Itzik,” said Benni, as he held his cigarette and watched the tip burn. “Before I came over from the civilians.” Benni had begun his intelligence career as a Mossad officer, then was co-opted by AMAN chief Shlomo Gazit to help form a Special Operations branch for military intelligence, initially called Unit 509. “We were working out of Paris, trying to penetrate Action Directe. She was fresh in from Buenos Aires, a student at the Sorbonne. Her father had been a Nazi engineer. We got to her while she was still a leftist recruit.”
Ben-Zion was fully familiar with the scenario. During the student revolutionary years of the late sixties and early seventies, the children of former Axis fascists were coming of age. They were often confused, riding the radical political fence, sympathetic toward third world, anti-imperialist efforts, yet secretly appalled when Arab terrorists murdered Israeli schoolchildren, echoing their parents’ crimes. At times, that guilt could be played upon.
Itzik shook his head, lit up his own cigarette, and exhaled with a rumbling sigh. He knew that there was more, much more. “And I suppose you bought her ice cream at Yad Vashem,” he said sarcastically. The Holocaust museum in Jerusalem was a must stop for Israeli tour guides shepherding nonbelievers.
“Twice,” said Benni. It was still common practice to bring foreign assets secretly into Israel for indoctrination. They were often photographed there in the company of uniformed officers, an insurance policy to guard against the opposition’s trying to “triple” them back.
“Ya’ Allah,” Ben-Zion whispered, realizing now that Baum was not talking about a brief period of youthful turmoil during which the girl had turned over a few names and addresses. She was not a simple shtinker, Israeli slang for a stool pigeon. She had been recruited, trained, and run by Baum. “Kfoolah amitit? A real double?” Itzik squinted at Benni, not quite believing it.
“Full-blown,” said Eckstein. He moved from the window and closed in. Itzik’s ego was about to be bruised.
The general tried to reassemble history. Martina Ursula Klump, notorious German terrorist, suspect in scores of European attacks, RAF bombings, actions in Lebanon. Could this be true, that one of his own sections had been running her under his ignorant nose? He tried to distill his wounded pride from the potential vat of kudos. Could it really be that while Mossad teams kept Klump near the top of their elimination lists, she was being handled by his own pigheaded Baum? It was fantastic. A German fanatic with a price on her head, in reality an AMAN asset! He might actually get a smile out of the Prime Minister.
“How did you do it?” he asked Benni with undisguised awe.
“Do what?”
“Turn her.”
Baum hesitated. Then he blushed and looked at Eckstein for help.
Itzik’s eyes flicked between the two officers. “What is it?” Images of blackmail and torture leaped to his mind. “What did you use?”
Benni sighed. “The natural tool of the trade,” he said, as he looked at the floor.
Itzik’s mouth dropped open. “You seduced her?”
“He had hair then,” Eytan interjected, by way of explanation.
Ben-Zion slapped a palm to his forehead and slowly turned a full rotation. “Oh, that’s precious.” Sex was certainly at the top of the list of recruitment techniques, but it was usually left to the experts, the lover boys, department femmes fatales. The image of his bulldog colonel successfully bedding anyone was too much to bear. “Oh, this is rich.”
But Benni was unable to view the events with lighthearted nostalgia. Until this moment, only Eckstein had shared the secret of Martina’s turning, and he realized that no rationalization of patriotic duty had ever allowed him to forgive himself. No, he had not always been a beefy, bald, thundering field commander. He remembered the years, into his thirties, when the flesh of his wide body was trim over muscle, his face smooth, and his eyes unwrinkled, when he could tap into a gentle charm that blinded women to his aggressive appearance. He remembered that self, and a young, inexperienced German girl, alone in a Paris flat. The doorbell said Schmidt, the rent w
as paid by the Israeli government, and she cried when she orgasmed. Ruth was already beginning school by then, Maya cared for three children in Jerusalem, and he wondered if lust was the price of duty, or the reward.
Ben-Zion jammed a hand into a trouser pocket and began to pace between the love seat’s back and the window. He tapped his cigarette, dumping ashes on the floor, and he appeared to be speaking to his shoes.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll bite. You turned Klump. But from what Eckstein tells me, she’s not so crazy about you anymore. Give me the rest, quickly.”
Eckstein picked up the cue, knowing that it would be just too painful for Baum.
“Benni ran her till 1982,” said Eytan. “She moved from Paris to Frankfurt, got into Baader-Meinhoff, and stuck with it right through the RAF. She was out in the front lines, but she maintained contact. She was damned cool, and her merchandise was always hot.”
Tip-offs about pending terror actions were categorized by temperature. If an agent’s mafil, her control, declared that her information was “hot,” it had to be treated as accurate by his commanders, without identifying the source. There followed the difficult decisions, whether to act on that tip and risk blowing the anonymous agent, or hold off and pray for low casualties.
“Yes, yes.” Ben-Zion continued to pace. “When did you come into it?”
“Later,” said Eckstein. “Near the end.”
“Uh huh,” the general grunted. They had done it again, these two manyakim, running a renegade operation in his kitchen while he snored in the bedroom. They were determined to give him heart failure. “It went sour, I assume,” Itzik said with a certain satisfaction.
“She was in very deep,” Eckstein continued. “We think it just got too scary for her. She started to miss contacts, blow off meets. They were printing pictures of her in Stern, and she just went dead.”
“I decided to bring her in,” Benni whispered. Then he cleared his throat and found a fuller voice. “I just sensed that she would go for it.”
The Nylon Hand of God Page 39