“What’s the forty-eight all about?” she asked.
The elderly woman responded, and her deep voice was exactly the kind of voice that Ya’ara was expecting to hear. Her pronunciation was that of an educated woman. She may have been a university lecturer, Ya’ara thought to herself.
“The White Mountains have forty-eight peaks that rise above four thousand feet. For the last ten years, since my retirement, I’ve been climbing them, one after the other. I scaled the final peak today. A cause for celebration, I thought.”
Ya’ara was genuinely impressed. “That’s amazing,” she said. “What a quest! I’m Ya’ara, by the way,” she added, conversing with her fellow diner across two tables.
“I’m Ruth.”
“Pleased to meet you. Did you climb alone today?”
“Yes. I usually hike alone. Although I do have a son, who lives in Connecticut, and he joins me sometimes. He’s in good shape and likes to climb. But he couldn’t make it this time.”
Ya’ara felt her blood boil. What a “wonderful” son she must have if he can’t even find the time to come and share her festive moment, her crowning glory after a decade of climbing. She was really angry at him, but she said to herself: What do you really know? You don’t know her, and you certainly don’t know him. It’s got nothing to do with you anyway. Take it easy.
But she couldn’t let it go. She ached for the noble and lonely woman sitting opposite her.
“I feel fortunate to have stumbled upon such a special occasion,” Ya’ara said. “Will you allow me to order us something to drink?”
Ruth paused, and then nodded. “Yes. Why not?” she said. “Thank you.”
“Whiskey perhaps? Or cognac?”
“Cognac sounds good. Gladly.”
Ya’ara ordered a round of Courvoisier. A plump, fair-haired waitress served them the cognac, which glowed in the two large glasses in deep shades of brown and gold. She and Ruth, each at their respective tables, raised their glasses. “To the most impressive mountain climber I know,” Ya’ara toasted.
“To a beautiful passerby from a foreign land,” Ruth responded.
At the back of the restaurant, deep in the kitchen, the owner smiled contentedly to herself.
They spoke throughout dinner, Ya’ara trying three more small dishes with curiosity and gusto. I’m eating like a famished tigress, she thought, explaining herself apologetically to Ruth: “I walked for several hours today. The fresh air must have given me an appetite.”
“Oh, my dear,” Ruth respond with obvious fondness, a large, deep bowl of pasta on the table in front of her. “It’s healthy, to burn energy, to listen to what your senses are telling you. To eat heartily.”
Ruth asked, and Ya’ara told her that she was from Israel, that she was a novice filmmaker, and that she’d been traveling alone for the past six months.
Ruth said she was a retired clinical psychologist, who had studied in Boston and had then worked for many years in west Massachusetts. She didn’t mention her husband. “You can guess how old I am. Older than sixteen and beyond seventy-six.”
Ya’ara estimated she was approaching eighty. I really hope, she thought, to be so content with myself when I’m her age.
The glasses of cognac emptied slowly. After stepping outside, Ya’ara waved good-bye one last time to Ruth, who was sitting at the window, her figure illuminated and appearing at ease. A golden glow spilled onto the sidewalk, and fragmented, melodic sounds were still coming from inside the restaurant. The blue façade had turned black by then, but tiny lights shone on its surface. Ya’ara wrapped herself in her coat, shivering for a fraction of a second from the night chill and saying to herself, I’ll be back here. She wasn’t one to forget places in which she had found peace.
23
EAST OF BREMEN, DECEMBER 2014
Batsheva and Aslan walked side by side down the narrow pathway that ran along the top of the earth embankment bordering the swamp. The sky was an opaque metallic gray. Reeds and grasses rose from the murky water. The farmhouses on the other side of the swamp appeared deserted.
“Do you see the trees there?” Aslan asked, gesturing in the direction of a grove of bare trees at the far end of the embankment.
Batsheva nodded.
“We’ll head for them and get into position. We should have a good view of the farm from there.”
“When I imagined how all of this would be, I pictured a parallel world of cocktail parties, with elegant Prada shoes and purses, not mud trails and staking out secluded farms in the freezing cold,” she moaned, hoping she was doing so gracefully. But Aslan was all about business.
“Things can change from one day to the next,” he said. “Sometimes you’re a CEO and sometimes you’re a bus driver. One day you’re playing craps in a casino and the next you’re an ornithologist trying to observe waterfowl in a swamp. You do what works best for the operational circumstances.”
It was their third day in that dank and gloomy area and this was the seventh farm they were checking. They hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary at the first six. At five of them they spotted children, playing. Three showed signs of agricultural activity, with trucks offloading goods and filling up with farm produce. On their way to the seventh farm they saw families returning with Christmas trees tied to the roofs of their cars. Smoke billowed from the chimneys of the homes, and Batsheva could picture blazing, stone fireplaces casting an orange glow over the large rooms.
The two hours that had just gone by felt like an eternity to her. She looked at Aslan, patiently surveying the area with the binoculars. He had made himself comfortable on the hard earth and was covered with branches, appearing to have grown out of the ground together with the trees around him. She was simply frozen and on edge. She looked again through the notebook she was using to record Aslan’s comments. There weren’t many. She placed the guide to the birds of northern Germany next to her, on a stone-cold rock covered in lichen, with the book open to the page on the white-tailed eagle. The shutters of the farmhouse they were facing were closed. She could make out the chimney rising skyward from the far wall of the house, but there was no smoke. The leveled dirt yard between the farm buildings appeared desolate. A blue VW Golf and a mud-splattered all-terrain vehicle were parked near one of the buildings. A dog was barking somewhere in the distance. The rain was falling in large, fat drops. The earth around the farm was black and saturated with water, and Batsheva felt no less drenched herself.
“It’s odd,” Aslan whispered. “There are cars here, but no other signs of life. I can hear the dog barking, but I have no idea where its barking is coming from. I get the sense that there are people around, but where are they? And if they are here, then why are the shutters closed?”
“Give me the binoculars for a moment,” Batsheva said. She scanned the area, trying to spot some movement, but the rain was clouding her field of vision.
“There’s something about this place that I don’t like,” Aslan said.
“What was that? Did you hear that noise?”
They went silent, and for a second or two all they heard was the call of a bird.
“Be dead still for a moment.”
The sounds in the distance were clearer and more distinguishable this time. Gunfire—without doubt. A rapid series of shots. Short bursts. Three rounds. Four. And then a different kind of sound. Louder. Consecutive. Ten or eleven rounds in succession. And then silence. A strong gust of wind showered them with annoying, stinging drops of rain, and also carried more sounds of gunshots, duller now, as if they were being borne on a wave, the noise rising with the peak and then dying, and suddenly rising again, clearer and louder.
Batsheva asked Aslan if he could identify the weapon types according to the sound of the shots. “Yes,” he said, “the initial shots sounded like they were coming from an assault rifle, and then the consecutive shots, the louder ones, sounded like someone emptying the magazine of a pistol. But I can’t be sure. You’ll learn to identify things
like that, too. I’m not sure where the shots were coming from. Perhaps from the other side of the embankment that borders the farm from that direction. Do you see?”
Batsheva nodded.
“As we noticed when we got here, the ground begins to fall away beyond the earth embankment, and there’s another grove of trees where the fields end a few hundred meters away. The shots may have come from there, from a lower-lying area, and that’s a blind spot for us right now. The topography and wind may be affecting the way we are hearing the sounds, which are sometimes dull. Dull and confusing.”
“Maybe it’s hunters?”
“Maybe. But going out to hunt in weather like this makes about as much sense as going out bird watching.” Aslan paused to think. “And I don’t think hunters shoot like that. In bursts. And they certainly don’t fire handguns.”
“But you can’t be sure it was a handgun.”
“True. I can’t say for sure.”
“Tell me something, are we in any kind of danger? Being here, I mean, while they’re shooting?”
“It’s far away. We’ll remain here in hiding for a little longer. Maybe we’ll get to see something.” Aslan looked at his watch. “The sun won’t be setting for another hour or so. We’ll hang around for another forty-five minutes, and then go back to where we left the car. We don’t want to get stuck here in the dark.”
“I’m the cadet and you’re my commander. I’m sure you’ll look after both of us,” Batsheva said in a tone that sought to remain calm.
“Of course, Batsheva, don’t worry.”
24
BREMEN, DECEMBER 2014
The group had assembled at a steakhouse near the port. They were seated at a large table in the restaurant’s private room. Big, tasteless steaks, a tomato salad, and baked potatoes with butter and sour cream on the side.
“At least the wine is okay,” Nufar said, “insofar as German wine can be good.”
“There we are, the Frenchwoman has spoken,” Assaf said, alluding to the prestigious university at which Nufar had studied.
“The Germans actually make some excellent wines,” Ya’ara said. “But in the same way they’ve excluded the German painters from the history of art, the French don’t have any time for good wines produced elsewhere either.”
“Anyway,” Batsheva commented, “it’s not like we can say we’re at a Michelin-starred restaurant.”
“I don’t believe the Maredo restaurants ever professed to be so. They haven’t even come close to a Michelin star,” Assaf said, playing his part in the culinary discussion.
“I’m not eating a thing here,” Batsheva said. “If I’m going to sin, then I’m certainly not going to do so for a third-rate steak. I don’t believe my life depends on making that kind of sacrifice. Maybe some salad.” She picked up a withered leaf of lettuce with her fork.
“Okay, my gourmet friends,” Ya’ara ended the conversation. “We have work to do. I want to hear the reports from the teams. Aslan, please mark every home or cluster of homes under discussion. We have to be systematic. Ann, would you like to get started?”
They had managed over the past three days to cover almost all of the homes located in the area defined by the cellular network cells that came up in the investigation carried out by Matthias’s friend from the federal security service. It wasn’t enough. Ya’ara knew that the fact that a specific house didn’t look suspicious didn’t necessarily mean that it could be discounted. First of all, they might not have gotten a good enough look. Second, something out of the ordinary that could have raised questions might have occurred at one of the locations an hour before they got there or half an hour after they left. Third, Martina might have been at a certain location, but might also have been keeping a low profile and out of sight. But you have to start somewhere, after all, and in the absence of additional intelligence, the scouting and surveillance were the best things she could think of. And besides, she thought, it’s excellent training for the cadets. Fortunately, they had yet to have to deal with questioning by police. But one of the pairs, Assaf and Helena, had already encountered a most troublesome adversary, one who could soon turn into a dangerous enemy—a sharp and suspicious old woman who had latched on to them and started asking too many questions. They were forced to back off and take up a position in a less favorable surveillance spot.
Thus far, the team had managed to identify three structures that had aroused some suspicion. They had already returned to two of them, for further remote observation, but were unable to gather any additional concrete information. She was planning on checking out the third home the following day. And now there was this report from Aslan and Batsheva about a fourth house—the secluded farm, the shuttered windows, the cars in the yard, and primarily, primarily, the sounds of gunfire.
“To me it sounded like there was someone doing shooting practice in the woods,” Aslan said. “And luckily Batsheva heard something. If she hadn’t, I probably would have missed it.”
“It’s still too early to jump to conclusions. It may have been hunters nevertheless. Or someone practicing with a weapon for which he has a license. Maybe there’s something like a military academy or sport shooting club in the area, where there’s an orderly firing range that we didn’t see on the maps or in the satellite images. But you certainly came across something out of the ordinary that needs to be investigated further. You said there were two vehicles parked in the yard. Did you manage to get a look at the license plates?”
“No.”
“You said the Golf was blue. And the jeep?”
“It was mostly dirty. But appeared to be a shade of khaki under all the mud. Right, Batsheva?”
“I’d say more of a sandy color. The vehicle was lighter than the mud covering it.”
“Did you recognize the make?” Ya’ara asked.
“It may have been a Cherokee or Toyota,” Batsheva responded.
“We weren’t able to say for certain,” Aslan clarified. “I’m not sure.”
“We’ll go back to that same farm tomorrow,” Ya’ara said. “Sayid and I will join you. We’ll figure out who’ll be doing what and with whom shortly. The remaining two couples will complete their tasks as originally planned. And I’d like you, Helena and Assaf, to go and have another look at this house,” she pointed out a location on the satellite image. “That’s the home we’ve marked as number forty-seven. Okay?”
Helena and Assaf confirmed that they understood. Ya’ara wrote something in her notebook.
“Okay, Aslan, stay here with me now. We’ll go to that bar at the end of the street. And make plans for tomorrow. The rest of you—home. To your hotels, in other words. To sleep. You don’t even realize just how tired you are. Sayid, you can get a proper sleep now, rather than just a nap in the car or on stakeout.”
Sayid hung his head. Ya’ara immediately felt a pang of contrition. You’re forgetting that they’re just cadets, she scolded herself. They aren’t your comrades in arms from the unit. Not yet. Taking them out into the field so soon has caused you to forgo that necessary distinction. You have to make sure, she continued with a certain degree of severity, that in your enthusiasm for the operation you don’t leave your charges behind. It takes them time to get used to the cover stories, to the intimacy imposed on small teams working together, to remarks that cross the customary line and could easily offend someone. Especially a gentle soul like Sayid. You’ve thrown him into the deep end, so don’t be surprised to see him struggling somewhat to stay afloat and swim. It’s perfectly legitimate. He’s coping, and that’s the main thing. His gentleness has the support of his strong character from within. It’s only a matter of adapting. It takes a little time. It’s fine.
25
MOSCOW, GRU HEADQUARTERS, DECEMBER 2014
All the relevant parties were assembled in the plush bureau of General Sergei Ivanov, the head of the agency’s foreign operations unit. Ivanov, a former commander of a division of special forces, had moved to military intelligence just
four years earlier. His daring and guile served him well in his current post, too. The military intelligence agency, the GRU, had worked for decades beyond the borders of the Soviet Union, in parallel with the KGB in its various incarnations. That was the way in which the Soviet leaders, Lenin, and Stalin thereafter, were able to divide and rule, and to ensure that no single organization gained exclusive power. And the GRU continued to operate outside the empire even after Stalin’s departure, employing methods that were not typical of a military intelligence agency, and this same tradition accompanied Russia into the twenty-first century, too.
Ivanov had never really felt comfortable in his gilt-edged bureau. He had always been more at home in a rangers’ tent or camouflaged foxhole. But GRU headquarters were located in a palace from the days of czars, and he was now one of the organization’s senior commanders. The palace’s splendor had indeed faded and crumbled over the years, but the bureaus were still immense, with gold work adorning their ceilings, and colorful timeworn carpets enhancing the brown wooden floors that shone with polish. He had learned to pretend to be one of the family. Right now, he was fully focused on the words coming from his colleague’s mouth.
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