by Allan Topol
He looked impatient. “Doesn’t sound much different than the half million, or so others who came from the former Soviet Union in the last decade.”
“Stick with me, Moshe. It gets more interesting, I promise you. When he arrived in Israel, he went to Ulpan Ha’emek in the Negev to learn Hebrew, unlike most other Russians.”
“So he’s smarter than they are.”
“While at the Ulpan, he’s working part-time for the Dead Sea Chemical Company as a computer programmer. He comes to Tel Aviv one Saturday night. He’s sitting in a café in Diezengoff sipping a coffee, and he meets a woman from kibbutz Bet Mordechai. Two months later he marries her and goes to live with her on the kibbutz. He begins working in their high-tech business, trying to get foreign contracts. He’s now director of the high-tech operation. They did two million in foreign contracts last year. They just landed a big contract with Ford Motor Company.” She paused to look at him. “Nothing I said so far rang a bell for you?”
He rubbed his eyes. “What am I missing?”
“You must be tired, Moshe. You ever know anybody from kibbutz Bet Mordechai?”
He thought about it for a second. “Yeah, Yael Golan, but...” Involuntarily his head snapped back. “You’re kidding.”
A smile formed on her lips. She loved being one step ahead of Moshe. “Nope, you got it.”
“Our Russian boychik married Yael?” A long, low whistle broke from his mouth.
“Yep.”
While Moshe’s mind was busy processing this information, Sagit picked up her analysis.
“Let’s talk about Yael now. She volunteered for the Mossad about the same time you recruited me and Leora. From the time I met her in the training program, I hated her. I was green with envy. She was everything I wanted to be. Twenty years old. Tall, blond, beautiful and smart. She also came from a home in Herzilya and a family that was wealthy by Israeli standards at the time. Quite a contrast from me, who was trying to scrounge food for my brothers and sisters when you recruited me in a Tel Aviv gutter.”
“None of that’s relevant,” he replied.
“Yael was also fearless. We used to call her the ‘hellcat.’ For our first assignment after training, you sent us both to Baghdad. She saved my life when I was lured into a trap by Iraqi intelligence. After that, I didn’t hate her anymore. But then you transferred her to Morocco or Yemen or somewhere else in the Middle East, and I lost track of her. Last year I was in Washington for that CIA co-operative project you set up for me with Martha Joyner when the bomb went off on Bus eighteen. Otherwise I would have gone to the funeral.”
“I went,” Moshe said softly, sunk in his own private thoughts about Yael’s funeral. Looking at him, Sagit remembered what she had heard when she returned from the United States last year. People said that they hadn’t ever seen Moshe so upset. He had taken Yael’s death hard. She might have been his own daughter.
Sagit waited a few moments and then continued. “There was gossip in the field that she left the agency in some type of scandal a few years after you transferred her out of Baghdad. Nobody would talk. I think you better tell me what happened.”
He squirmed in his chair. “I can’t tell you.”
“You’re joking.”
“I swore to her that I would never tell anyone.”
Sagit held out her hands in front of her, egging Moshe on to respond. “She’s dead now.”
“There are survivors who are affected.”
“Oh, c’mon, Moshe. We’re trying to save lives. One Israeli is dead already, or perhaps you forgot.”
He looked at her angrily. “That was out of line.”
She was sorry she had made that comment, but she still pressed ahead. “You have to tell me about Yael. It could be critical.”
“Why is it so important?”
“Think about what I’ve told you so far. It doesn’t compute. A new Russian immigrant suddenly marries one of our best people, who left the Mossad in a scandal. Supposedly, he meets her by chance in a café. She’s never been married before. She marries him two months later. Something’s wrong with this picture, but unless you tell me what happened with Yael and the Mossad, I won’t be able to figure it out.”
“It’s irrelevant, and I won’t tell you,” he snapped. “The subject is off limits. End of discussion.”
As Sagit started toward the door, relieved that this humiliating meeting was over, Moshe picked up her ID badge and tossed it back to her.
* * *
Professor Barach was waiting for Sagit in an horrendously cluttered tiny office with a glass wall that overlooked a large clinical laboratory. Dressed in a long white lab coat, with piercing blue eyes and a thick head of gray hair, Barach looked every bit the cutting-edge researcher that he was. Decades ago he had been a practicing dentist and professor of dentistry at Hebrew University. Then he became interested in pain. First pain concerning teeth and then facial pain generally. Now at the age of seventy, he was a world-recognized expert on the subject.
Sagit had worked with him several times over the years after Arab terrorists had bombed helpless civilians, who often died fiery deaths. Dr. Barach became the expert asked to perform the grim work of confirming the identity of the victims in suicide attacks or, the perpetrators, from their dental records.
“I would like to see you sometime socially,” the professor had said to her the last time they performed this grisly task. “You’re a charming person, but you only show up at my office for work.”
Today when she walked in, he was smiling. He brushed a few strands of hair back on his forehead. “Since there was no disaster on the news today, could this be the social visit you’ve been promising?”
She was all business in her expression and her voice. “Not today, I’m afraid, Dr. Barach.”
“Ah, a pity. It’s always work with you.”
She handed him a light brown envelope.
“Why don’t you come with me on Shabbat?” he said. “I’m taking a couple of my grandchildren on a hike up in the north.”
“I’m sorry. I’m working this weekend.” She would have liked to have gone. He was a fascinating individual and knowledgeable about the land. “Another time, perhaps.”
“You know you work too much.”
“That’s also what Moshe tells me.”
“I don’t like the stories I’m hearing about your leader around town these days.”
Alarmed, she asked, “what stories?”
“He’s getting leaned on hard by some of the politicians after the death of that Kourosh boy. And Yosef had some important patrons in the Knesset. Firing him may not have been such a good move politically. Word’s circulating that the Mossad may have a new director before the end of the year.”
Sagit smiled. She knew Moshe and Barach had fought together in the Palmach in Israel’s war of Independence in 1948. They had remained friends since that time. “We’ve heard those rumors before,” she said.
It always amazed Sagit that on the one hand the name of the director of the Mossad was so confidential that newspapers for a long time couldn’t even publish it, but on the other hand, everything that happened to the director was the subject of dinner table gossip in Jerusalem. Sometimes she thought the country was too small. But was Washington any different? She didn’t think so, not after spending time with Margaret Joyner last year.
He looked down at the brown envelope she had handed him. “What do you have for me?”
“Dental Xrays of a male subject. An Israeli citizen. Came from Moscow about four years ago.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know. They’ve become important to some people. We’d like to know why.”
Dr. Barach popped the Xrays up on a screen, turned on the light and studied the teeth.
“How long did the subject live in Russia before coming to Israel?” he asked, his back still turned.
“His entire life.”
“How do you know that?”
“That’s what immigration records show.”
He wheeled around and stared at her. “You mean the forms he filled out when he arrived in the country.”
“Yes, the ones we give all new immigrants.”
“Well, he lied on those forms,” Dr. Barach said unequivocally.
Sagit was surprised. She had been on a fishing expedition, and it appeared as if she had landed a large one. “What do you mean?”
He picked up a pointer and tapped in on the center of the upper teeth. “Look at this. You see this crown? You see this bridge?”
She nodded.
“This is beautiful work. It’s also at least ten years old. At that time, work like this could only have been done in the United States, possibly in western Europe or here.”
She was excited now about Dr. Barach’s conclusions. “What about Russia?” she said, her eyes sparkling with intensity.
He laughed loudly. “It’ll be another hundred years before they do anything like this in Russia. Well, I don’t want to exaggerate. Let’s say fifty, to be conservative.”
“So you don’t think he spent his entire life living in Russia?”
“It’s not a question of thinking it. I know.”
Barach studied the Xrays some more. “Different work was done at different times,” he said, “over a number of years. My guess is that your man lived in the United States for a long time,”
“Or at least he went there for dentistry.”
“Precisely.”
As she left Professor Barach’s office, Sagit said to herself, “Well, well. David Ben Aaron. So far I have you for one crime: lying on an immigration application. Let’s see what else I can get.”
* * *
Naomi was the Mossad’s top expert on fingerprints, and when she arrived personally in Sagit’s office, rather than Teddy, her assistant, with whom Sagit had left the plastic bag, Sagit knew they had found something interesting.
Naomi was a no-nonsense professional, and Sagit was glad to see her for another reason. Unlike Teddy, Naomi would never comment on the fact that the evidence included three condom wrappers.
As usual, Naomi had no time for small talk. In Hebrew, spoken with an Irish accent, because she had been born in Dublin, she told Sagit to look at the stack of pages she handed her—each one containing a blowup of a finger or thumb print.
“You notice anything about these?” Naomi asked.
Sagit leafed through the pile. “They’re all partial prints.” she said alarmed. Running through her mind was the thought: Did I mess up in bagging the evidence? God, I hope I didn’t make another mistake in Paris. “Did I smudge the items?” Sagit asked weakly.
“Hardly. The specimens were clear. The prints look smudged because they’re partials.”
“Partials? I don’t understand.”
“The subject, a man, had skin grafting about five years ago, probably to remove his fingerprints. The problem is that the prints grow back again and look precisely the same as they did before the skin grafting. What surprises me is why someone who goes to all this trouble to avoid detection wouldn’t realize that his fingerprints will grow back.”
As Sagit absorbed the information, she began thinking out loud. “Maybe he figured that if he eluded the police, or whoever he was running from for a couple of years, then he was safe.”
“But if he truly wanted to be safe, he should have had it redone every couple of years.”
Sagit was now persuaded that David was a fugitive. “True. But people develop a new life. They get comfortable. They don’t think about their past. I think that’s what happened here.”
After Naomi left the office, Sagit sat alone at her desk, leafing through the pile of prints. Gideon had told her that he thought David Ben Aaron was, or at least had been, a KGB agent. Well, maybe Gideon had been on the right track in part. Maybe David was a CIA agent on the run from the Agency. Or maybe she was reaching. Maybe he was a civilian American who had committed a crime like tax fraud and taken on a new identity in Israel.
Quickly, she rejected the latter hypothesis. The whole pattern of entry via Russia and grafting fingerprints suggested an intelligence professional. His conduct in Paris was also consistent with that scenario.
No, he had been with the CIA, or one of the other United States intelligence agencies, such as DIA. The longer she thought about it, the more convinced she became.
She tried to decide on her next move. The obvious one was to call Margaret Joyner in Washington. It made sense to tell her everything and then to forward to Washington the dental Xrays and fingerprints, to see what light they could shed on the man professing to be David Ben Aaron.
Coordination with Washington required Moshe’s approval because the director alone was plugged into the nuances of Jerusalem’s usually close, but sometimes strained, relationship with Washington, which could change on a daily basis. Feeling vulnerable because of her misconduct in Paris, Sagit wasn’t about to circumvent agency policy, even with the relationship she had developed last year with Margaret Joyner. So she picked up the phone to get Moshe’s approval for the call to Washington.
While it was still ringing, she quickly hung up.
Informing Washington at this point would be a mistake, she told herself. So far only Israeli interests were at stake. One Israeli citizen had been killed. If David Ben Aaron was a former CIA agent on the run, Washington would focus on him and seek his extradition. But Israel’s interest was in finding out who was trying to blackmail him and why; and who had killed Kourosh in Jerusalem. David couldn’t help answer those questions from an American prison.
All of those were logical reasons, she told herself for not asking Moshe to make the phone call to Margaret Joyner. What worried her was that deep down she might have had another reason. After spending time with David on the plane, in Paris, and in the hotel room, did she now like him?
It was preposterous!
She was a career Mossad agent. She had never been married, though she had had several relationships which she had always broken off because they interfered with her work. Her commitment to the Mossad had always come first. As a woman and a Sephardic Jew, she had been forced to claw her way up the Mossad hierarchy until she became director of Field Operations—the highest position a woman had ever held in the organization. Moshe, her mentor, had described actions she had planned over the years as brilliant, but she thought of herself as competent, hardworking and dedicated. With that perception, she couldn’t possibly be developing an attachment for the target of an investigation. It was stupid, and it made no sense. So she pushed it out of her mind.
Still, she rationalized, as long as there was some basis for not throwing David to the American wolves, while not sacrificing Israeli interests, she was willing to do just that.
* * *
David’s fingers moved nimbly over the computer keyboard as his eyes remained riveted on the screen. The High-Tech Center of the kibbutz was deathly still. It was four o’clock on Friday afternoon, and work had ground to a halt for Shabbat.
But David wasn’t immersed in the work of the kibbutz. He was using the Internet and every possible source of worldwide information that he could access to expand his knowledge of what had happened in Paris He began with Gina, who had so fascinated him and whose true identity he so desperately wanted to know. The Internet yielded thirty-two different Gina Martins, but none in the Nice area. French telephone directories provided no useful information. He was resigned to the fact that it was obviously a phony name.
The computer gave him masses of information about Renault, the giant automaker, including sales information, subsidiaries, locations of facilities, contractors, executives and board members. None of it was the least bit enlightening for his situation. Nor did Victor Foch show up in any Renault reference.
Entries for the French lawyer were sparse. His practice was described simply as corporate. His clients were not identified, but designated as “confidential.” He made no court appearances. Undoubtedly
, Victor was a deal maker—one of those lawyers who functioned in the privacy of boardrooms. David tried to cross-reference Renault and Victor, but he came up with nothing. His best guess was that Renault was not involved in this blackmail scheme and that Victor had used a totally separate personal relationship with an auto executive.
The French lawyer’s name appeared in newspapers on only three occasions—all in Le Monde. Ten years ago, he was counsel for a French steel maker acquiring a Czech firm. Eight years ago, he represented a French metals company seeking to import minerals from Russia.
The third entry, though, caused David’s weary eyes to lock on the screen. Three years ago, Victor Foch had represented the large French oil company Petroleum de France, or PDF, as it was called, in attempting to acquire Iraqi oil. Ultimately, Washington had persuaded the French government to prohibit the transaction because it violated the stricture against doing business with Saddam Hussein.
David’s sagging spirits perked up. It wasn’t much, but it was something. He felt a surge of adrenaline as he began to access PDF.
Suddenly, he heard the shuffling of feet in the doorway behind him. Instinctively, he hit the “panic” button, turning off the computer, and wheeled around in his chair.
She was standing there alone, dressed in a khaki skirt and black leather jacket zipped to the neck, a leather bag clutched tightly in her hand.
The words “Oh shit” involuntarily popped out of his mouth.
She was Mossad!
He should have known. How could he possibly have been that much of an idiot?
It was a rhetorical question. He had immediately liked her, and as he had spoken to her on the plane, he had developed a wild, sensual attraction to her. From the time he had seen her standing in the bathroom, naked and adjusting her shower cap, his actions had been being directed by his dick—instead of his brain.
There was no hello, no greeting at all. Instead she whipped a Mossad ID card from her jacket pocket and held it up for him to see. It identified her as Sagit Bat Yehoshua.
“I think we have to talk,” she said in a curt, businesslike tone, as she put back the ID card.