Traitor

by Jonathan de Shalit

  “Did you buy it?” he asked.

  “Yes, and at an affordable price, too. So much beauty in that one statue! Did you see? A pure expression of suffering and humility and sacrifice. A masterpiece. No less. Made by a great artist. Who may be anonymous today, but who has achieved immortality thanks to his work of art. And within twenty-four hours it’ll be in my home. Thanks to DHL.”

  “Your home in Moscow?” Alon cynically asked.

  “Don’t get all heavy on me, Alon. I realize it’s on your mind, but bitterness won’t do us any good.”

  “Look at the irony here. You’re offering me refuge in Russia, and you’re going back to your comfortable life in the U.S. Don’t you find that a little strange?”

  “Yes,” Brian responded philosophically, “God works in mysterious ways.”

  “Are you allowed to believe in God, or do utterances of that nature still get people sent to the torture dungeons at the Lubyanka?”

  “You’re angry, I know. And rightly so.”

  “You have no idea just how angry I am,” Alon said, his tone soft but sharp. And despite the bitter cold, he loosened the buttons on his coat.

  “Come with me to the art museum. We’ll warm up a little, have something to drink, look Paul Klee in the eyes.”

  “Like I said, I’m all yours until this evening. Don’t you have a small Klee at home?”

  “Believe it or not, I do. Not an oil painting, of course. I’m a civil servant. But a signed reproduction. It also cost me a fortune.”

  “Oh, Brian, Brian. In a different world we could have been friends. Not spy and handler.”

  Brian gave Alon a friendly elbow in his side. And then he embraced him, brought his head closer, and kissed him on the cheek. “We’re already friends,” he said. And the cloud of concern on Cobra’s face lifted for a moment and he looked happy.

  53

  TEL AVIV, MARCH 2013

  “Write this down,” Amir said to Michael, a distinct tone of excitement in his voice even over the phone. “Two of the five names you gave me are abroad right now. Alon Regev and Oded Leshem. Does that tell you anything?”

  “It tells me a whole lot! That was quick, man.”

  “That’s the way it is, when the books are calling. I need to go into a seminar class now, otherwise they’re gonna kick me out and Amir will have to spend another year at university.”

  Michael smiled. Amir tended at critical times to refer to himself in the third person.

  “God help us. Get moving. We’ll talk tomorrow, at the apartment.”

  Adi looked at him, on edge. He showed her the two names he had written down on the piece of paper he tore from the notebook. Alon Regev, the prime minister’s political strategy advisor, and Oded Leshem, the head of the Shin Bet’s counterintelligence division. They both remained silent. Michael was pale and grave-faced. Adi appeared to be trying still to comprehend what she was seeing, or perhaps she had chosen not to at all. Michael could see the questions and dismay on her face.

  “Call Aharon Levin right away and ask him to come here, please,” he said.

  54

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND, MARCH 2013

  Their meeting this time was arranged ahead of time. Ya’ara called Frances Hart and asked if she’d like to get together. Frances agreed readily, happily even, and suggested they meet that same day, in the afternoon perhaps, if Ya’ara was free. They could have a light snack together. “I’ll come get you in a taxi,” Ya’ara said. “No, no, we’ll stay here at my place,” Frances insisted. Ya’ara chose not to use the call to find out if Professor Hart had by chance already returned from his unexpected trip. She wanted to be sitting face-to-face with Frances, to look her in the eyes, to stand next to her and cut the salad vegetables together or wash the lettuce or whatever. Being with someone, doing things together, it brought people closer, it opened the heart sometimes.

  • • •

  Frances opened the door with a smile on her face. The yellow taxi pulled away and disappeared around the corner. The front yard of the house was still covered with a layer of snow, which was dotted here and there with dark islands of brown grass. Never mind, Ya’ara thought, spring is just around the corner. And it always arrives with a bang, like an unstoppable force. And then everything will blossom again, and the grass will turn green again, a light hue at first, shiny, and then dark and deep when the summer comes. Her head was filled momentarily with all those thoughts, though it wasn’t as if she had ever taken much interest in gardening or the state of lawns. She approached Frances, kissed her on both cheeks, and suddenly embraced her warmly. “Come in, come in,” Frances said, and Ya’ara walked in as if she was one of the family, removed her coat, and shook out her hair, which had been hiding under her hat.

  They sat this time in the spacious kitchen, the coffee bubbling in the macchinetta, and talked. No, Frances explained, Julian wasn’t back yet, she hadn’t spoken to him either. But she appeared at ease now; the anxiety that had gripped her during their previous meeting had disappeared without a trace. Ya’ara was on edge. She had to figure out what had transpired since her last visit. What had caused that frightened woman, who couldn’t even hold on to a plate without dropping it, to now appear calm and relaxed? She waited, knowing her opportunity would arise. And Frances, meanwhile, showed an interest in the antiquities trade in which her guest was involved, with that older man, Max.

  “He’s quite a character, that Max, isn’t he?”

  “You should only know,” Ya’ara responded. “Lucky I’m good with numbers. As for him, his head’s in the clouds. And he chooses to be a dealer. A dealer! He’s a professor who’s lost his way, that’s what he is.”

  Ya’ara glanced at Frances, but she couldn’t discern any unusual reaction to her words. Something’s put her mind at ease, she thought to herself. She isn’t jumping at every little thing. She knows her husband is okay.

  They made a big salad together and ate in the handsome dining area overlooking the home’s backyard, both sipping on Californian wine from large glasses. And a ray of sunshine shining directly onto Ya’ara’s glass through the large window appeared to shatter its crimson contents into slivers of sparkly red. When Frances went to the kitchen to pour the coffee, Ya’ara called out to her: “I’ll be back in a moment, okay? The wine’s gone to my head. I’m just going to splash some water on my face.”

  55

  TEL AVIV, MARCH 2013

  “Well, Aharon, what do you say?”

  Aharon Levin leaned back, his eyes closed. Adi had shown him the database and the criteria based on which the list had been narrowed down to five names. They knew Brian had traveled abroad from the United States, and they were assuming that Cobra was outside Israel somewhere. Of the five people from the table, two had left Israel in the past week. One of them could, possibly, be Cobra. Adi remained dumbfounded. The prime minister’s political strategy advisor and the head of the Shin Bet’s counterintelligence division. To Adi’s surprise, a brief online search had revealed that they were both connected to the Knesset in their youth. That was significant, too. The former BND chief, Dr. Walter Vogel, had told Aharon Levin that Cobra was once a parliamentary or perhaps even a ministerial aide. Alon Regev served as a parliamentary aide as a young man. Oded Leshem used to work at the Knesset Research and Information Center. All records pertaining to him disappeared shortly thereafter. Oh, well, obviously, he had joined the Shin Bet.

  “You know,” Aharon said, “it could be bad and it could be a whole lot more horrendous.”

  “What do you mean?” Adi asked.

  “Look. If Cobra is Oded Leshem, it’s bad. He’s the head of the Shin Bet’s counterintelligence wing. His job is to catch spies, including Russian ones. And lo and behold he’s a Russian spy himself. He’s at the top of the pyramid, he could provide cover for each and every SVR or GRU intelligence operation in Israel. He knows everything the Shin Bet knows about the operations of the Russian intelligence services in the country. And that would me
an that the Russians know everything that we know. Worse even, everything we don’t know. For someone in the spy game, you couldn’t find a more important asset than the very person who heads the entity that’s tasked with apprehending you.”

  Michael’s head was about to explode. The notion that the head of a Shin Bet division, and the one responsible for thwarting espionage activities in Israel to boot, was working in the service of a foreign and hostile superpower was too much to take in. Adi appeared stunned.

  “But,” Aharon continued, “if Leshem is Cobra, we could still consider ourselves lucky. That’s the simple scenario. If Alon Regev is Cobra, we’re in serious trouble.”

  “What does the prime minister’s political strategy advisor actually do?”

  When Aharon responded, Michael and Adi couldn’t help but notice the air of tension his voice had adopted. “That’s just the thing. The title itself is insignificant. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Alon Regev’s career. He started out as a parliamentary assistant, and very quickly—in tandem with his studies, in which, as in everything else, he excelled—secured the position of aide to Daniel Shalev. A general in the reserves, and a hero from the battles on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War, Shalev was serving at the time as the minister of energy and infrastructure. Regev then left the Civil Service a few years later and was appointed to a very senior managerial post at the Israel Electric Corporation. Just imagine that, he gets parachuted into the post of deputy director-general of business development at Israel’s largest company at the age of thirty. Following his stint at the IEC, he served in various roles in the private business sector for the most part, and then returned to a position at one of the government ministries, always with Daniel Shalev, time and again. Once as a bureau chief, once as a director-general, once as a personal advisor with this or the other title. And all the while, he made hay while the sun shone. I hate that expression,” Aharon remarked offhandedly. “But he’s undoubtedly talented, intelligent, level-headed, and calculating. People who’ve met him say he oozes personal charm. A seasoned manipulator, aggressive and forceful when necessary, but always perceived in the end as a good guy.” Aharon took a deep breath.

  “And like I said,” he continued, “he worked with Minister Shalev at all the stations Shalev went through—the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, the Foreign Affairs Ministry, the Defense Ministry, and finally the Prime Minister’s Office. There wasn’t a single forum in which he wasn’t present, sometimes to the left of his boss, sometimes to his right, sometimes behind the scenes. He’s had access to every single classified document in this country. Certainly during the periods in which he served in a governmental post, but probably during the times he worked as a private businessman, too. Then, too, he served as an unofficial, sometimes semiofficial, advisor to the minister. And then fate dealt its blow to Daniel Shalev. And at the time he slipped into a coma, Alon Regev wasn’t at his side. Back then he was spending long periods in Beijing as a partner in a Chinese investment group, and the new prime minister summoned him to serve as his right-hand man, and gave him some meaningless title, political strategy advisor, or strategic political advisor, or something like that, the title is really insignificant. If Alon Regev is Cobra, we’re well and truly fucked. It would be an absolute catastrophe. Let’s just pray that Cobra’s simply some Shin Bet division chief.”

  No one said a word, and Aharon planted his fist silently on the table. His face looked tired, his wrinkles had deepened, and his true age was plain to see all of a sudden. The muscles in his right cheek trembled with rage. He’s truly angry, Michael thought to himself. That’s the look he gets when he wants to kill someone. And not in the metaphorical sense of the word. But for real.

  His phone rang.

  Ya’ara. She sounded worked up. “Michael, hi, it’s Ya’ara.”

  “The three of us are here together—Aharon, Adi, and me.”

  “Put me on speaker, please. I want all of you to hear this.”

  “Ya’ara, honey,” Aharon said, his voice no longer shaking with rage, “is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s just fine. Listen. I’ve just come from another visit with Frances Hart. Yes, I’m still in Providence. You remember, Aharon, how on edge she was when we went to see her a few days ago. Well, she was completely at ease today. I got the feeling that she knows her husband is fine. That he hasn’t disappeared without a trace. And indeed, on my way to the bathroom I saw something that wasn’t there on our previous visit. An antique wooden statue, from the Middle Ages I think, but I can’t say exactly when.”

  “That’s not really important, the exact date. I’m still pretty impressed. Go on, go on.”

  “Anyway, it’s a beautiful statue. So when I returned to the dining area to rejoin Frances at the window overlooking the garden—you remember?—I said to her, Your new statue is amazing. Such a heart-wrenching expression on its face. And Frances says to me, Yes, it arrived this morning, just before you called. To be honest, it scares me a little. That expression. Julian bought it in Zurich and sent it home. He didn’t write anything, there wasn’t a note or a letter for me, but it’s his way of telling me he’s okay, that I’ve got nothing to worry about. Otherwise he wouldn’t have sent it with DHL. He would have sent it by regular mail, like he’s always done when buying something he wasn’t able to carry with him. After so many years of marriage, he knows me and knows his odd departure must have worried me. So he sent me a greeting in the quickest way possible other than by phone or e-mail.

  “And Frances Hart explained to me that her husband almost never calls or corresponds via the computer when traveling. Cyber abstinence he calls it, according to her, good for his soul, he tells her. How do you know it’s from Zurich? I asked. Here, here’s the address, she says to me, and shows me the receipt sent with the piece. An antiquities store in Zurich. A relic itself. Founded in 1847. Bernhard & Sons.”

  “Ya’ara, you’re a star,” Michael said.

  “Yes, yes, good job,” Aharon muttered. Michael could clearly tell his head was already elsewhere, in Zurich. “Come home now, okay? We’re going to need you here. I’ll ask Bill to get his people to check if Hart is listed as having a reservation on a return flight to the United States. I’m not sure if he’ll return directly from Zurich. He’s probably broken up his route. My money would be on Frankfurt or Vienna. And we’ll make sure they have a look around his house, too. Good work, Ya’ara. Have a safe trip back.” He motioned for Michael to hang up, and then said: “I wonder if his handlers will allow him to return. They sense we’re onto Cobra, or that we’re at least on a hunt that could expose him. I don’t know if they’re assuming that Brian’s cover has also been blown. That Frances,” he said with genuine sadness, “such a beautiful woman. An alcoholic, poor thing. I wonder if she knows anything about what her husband really does. Who he actually is. Or if he’s deceived her as well.”

  “What do we do now? Wait for Regev and Leshem to get back?”

  “Ask Amir to get his friend at the Interior Ministry to do some more work for us. I definitely want to know when they’re getting back to Israel. But I want us to do something else, too. I want us to leave tonight for Zurich. The former chief of the Swiss Federal Police is an acquaintance of mine, and there are things that can only be done in a face-to-face meeting.” He fixed his gaze on both of them. “They don’t have a security service like ours. There’s an entity within the Federal Office of Police that’s responsible for counterterrorism and counterespionage activities. A little like the FBI. We worked together many years ago. We were on the trail at the time of a faction of the Baader-Meinhof Group that wanted to wipe out the Swiss capitalist pigs—the bank directors, in other words. We provided them, the Swiss, with names, codes, and the location of a hidden cache of Kalashnikovs and pistols and, you won’t believe it, two shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles. Apparently, as the investigation revealed, they thought it would be a good idea on this festive occasion of their war on the
capitalists to bring down an El Al plane at the same time. We spent several very intensive days together, and we’ve kept in touch ever since. I want him to take us to Bernhard & Sons, or show us the establishment’s security footage. There’s no substitute for legwork,” he sighed, feeling sorry for himself, and Michael stole a glance at Aharon’s shoes and saw that they were indeed well-worn, and that the laces on his left shoe were undone.