Spin Control ss-2

by Chris Moriarty

  —J. TRAUB (1988)

  Its official name was the Institute for the Coordination of Intelligence and Special Tasks, but most Israelis called it the Institute, or, in Hebrew, the Mossad. And the inconspicuous, close-mouthed, suspiciously fit men and women who worked at the Institute called it simply the Office.

  The first time Cohen had walked into the shabby lobby off King Saul Boulevard and ridden the clanking elevator to the eighth floor he’d been in the real Hyacinthe’s body. It had been a week after the fateful doctor’s visit—and a week before Hyacinthe had worked up the courage to tell his wife about the diagnosis. Hyacinthe Cohen (Hy, predictably, to his Israeli friends) had been a pigheadedly rational man. And yet he had felt in his gut, at some level below words, that the disease wouldn’t really be real until he told his wife about it. How strange, Cohen thought now…and how human. Almost as human as the feeling the memory aroused in Cohen: that only now, when it was far too late, was he finally beginning to understand the man.

  Hyacinthe had leaned against this very same rail, looking at his reflection, still strong and wiry as a greyhound, and feeling the first subtle tremors of the disease that would finally kill him. Cohen hadn’t remembered that heartsick moment for two lifetimes as humans measured them. Now he asked himself how he could ever have forgotten it.

  He glanced at Li, who had crossed her arms and thrown her head back to squint impatiently at the flickering lights of the number panel. She doesn’t understand, he thought on a confused rush of emotion that mingled frustration, fear, and anger. She hasn’t begun to know what death is.

  “What’s wrong?” She was staring at him, faint wrinkles of worry framing the bridge of her nose.

  “Just appalled by the disaster in the mirror. I look like an upper-class English twit on safari. No nice French boy should ever have to wear these shoes!”

  “Better alive and frumpy than fashionably dead,” Li drawled.

  Cohen sniffed theatrically. “The fact that you could say—no, even think such a thing makes me seriously doubt your moral fiber!”

  When the doors finally opened onto the eighth floor, Cohen realized that he’d forgotten just how underwhelming the place was. Even on the eighth floor—perhaps especially on the eighth floor—Mossad headquarters had the peculiar official shabbiness of all Israeli government buildings. All the furniture was painted IDF olive drab, but somehow it still looked like it had been bought at five different yard sales. There was no reception area, just a narrow corridor that had been transformed into a makeshift security checkpoint by pushing two heavy desks together and depositing a muscular young katsa-in-training behind them on a sagging office chair that was probably older than he was.

  The guard’s sidearm was holstered, but even with the elaborate security check they’d undergone before getting in the elevator he was on his feet and ready to draw before the elevator doors opened. This wasn’t a country, or a building, in which people took chances. Li and Cohen surrendered their left hands to the guard’s implant scanner, then sat down in the chairs he waved them to and waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  They’d arrived for a meeting at four, and now they were watching the clock creep toward five. The usual tomblike quiet still reigned on the eighth floor, but behind their backs they could hear the cables of the ancient elevators groaning as the departing crowds of junior spooks and clerical employees made their daily getaway.

  And all the while a niggling, annoying, self-indulgent little complaint rattled pointlessly around Cohen’s mind:

  Gavi never made me wait this long.

  Cohen’s relationship with the Mossad had begun humbly. A few lunchtime meetings during vacations in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Keeping an ear open for useful information. Passing on the innuendoes and misinformation that the King Saul Boulevard spin doctors crafted to mislead Israel’s enemies. Making his well-secured homes available, no questions asked, to the suspiciously athletic young men and women who occasionally found reason to use them. Dropping a request for coveted information into the ear of a sympathetic UN official, and pointing out that a Jew could be loyal to his own government and still feel a moral obligation to pass along any news that would help more of the nice boys and girls serving on the Green Line go home to their parents on their own feet instead of in body bags. In short, he’d been the perfect sayan: a volunteer loyal to the country of his birth, but willing, within the bounds of that first loyalty, to do whatever little things he could to help Israel.

  And of course little was a matter of perspective. Eighteen percent of the UN’s nonmilitary spinstream communications passed through Cohen’s networks or the networks of various former associated AIs. He’d written the software that handled pension administration for the civil services of half the Periphery.

  All of UNSec’s feared semisentients had evolved more or less directly from Cohen’s own expert systems, and over the years he had quietly acquired controlling interests in the defense contractors who manufactured them. Very little happened in UN space that Cohen didn’t eventually find out about. And when he could—with discretion and never risking too much social and political capital on any one roll of the dice—he made sure that Israel’s interests were served.

  Most of the time that was all he did. But once or twice a century he was asked to do more. And each time the Office called, he was brought up against the memory—a memory that made him the only living link to a past that was dead history to the rest of humanity—that Hyacinthe’s grandfather had gone into Dachau in 1943 and never come out.

  And so, over time, Cohen had become something between a sayan and a katsa, a full-fledged Mossad agent. He’d gone through the katsa induction course five times, in five different bodies—ostensibly to refresh his tradecraft, but really to cement his relationships with successive generations of the Mossad’s human leadership. He’d worked for all the great ones: Gershon, Barzilai, Hamdani, and now the legendary Didi Halevy. He’d been burned, sometimes badly enough that even his supporters in the Security Council had shrugged and admitted his probable (though never quite provable) guilt. But Cohen was rich, very very rich. So they’d turned a blind eye and tolerated him.

  Until Tel Aviv. In one bloody night Tel Aviv had killed half a dozen UNSec and Mossad agents, ended Gavi’s career, and stripped Cohen of his French passport and the last tatters of plausible deniability.

  So why was he running to Didi’s aid again? And why on Earth was he dragging Li with him?

  At the prospect of dragging Li into the wake of Tel Aviv, all the guilt and anxiety and self-loathing Cohen had been shoving under the rug for so long rose up to accuse him. And with them came a little shudder of apprehension that he would have called a ghost walking over his grave…if he weren’t himself the ghost of a man whose very grave no longer existed.

  Did all spies feel this way? Did they all suffer from the gnawing suspicion that the safe everyday world was just the surface of a deep ocean, and that they would break through the fragile surface tension and drown if the bulkheads they constructed around their separate and conflicting lives were ever breached? At least human spies had the unity of their bodies to fall back on: one brain, one set of memories, and the ironclad physiological conviction that the chaos raging inside their skulls was unique and singular and meaningful. Cohen had nothing to hang his identity on but the spooky phenomenon of emergence. And how long could you survive out there in the lying cold when you were only a ghost to begin with?

  At a quarter past five the door at the end of the hall opened and the man they were waiting for emerged.

  “Cohen!” he cried. “Welcome home, my friend!” He looked back and forth between the two of them, his eyes bright behind Coke bottle glasses, his normally drawn face wrinkled with a scrappy little boy’s grin. “So which one of you is you?” he asked. “Who do I have the right to kiss, and who do I have to fob off with a handshake?”

  Cohen stepped into the little man’s outstretched arms. “You’r
e perfectly welcome to kiss us both. But me first, please.”

  Didi Halevy’s friends said he looked like an out-of-work undertaker. Didi Halevy’s enemies, if they were wise, didn’t say anything. Cohen had once spoken to a katsa who had worked the NorAmArc with Didi when they were both mere field agents. “He ought to be in the dictionary under the word nebbish,” the man had said admiringly. “When Didi walks into a room his own mother would swear someone just left!”

  All of which drove home to Cohen just how unhuman he himself was. Because to Cohen, Didi had always seemed more real than most people, not less. And though he and Didi saw each other at rare intervals, and usually only during moments of crisis, there were few things he enjoyed more than an hour spent talking to this extraordinary man who looked so inexplicably ordinary to his fellow humans. Or at least that had been how things stood before Tel Aviv.

  “Can we take you to dinner when we’re done here?” Cohen asked Didi.

  “No. But you can come to my house for dinner. My daughters are here on their Yom Kippur visas, and Zillah’s always delighted to see you. And of course”—with a polite nod to Li—“the invitation is also for…?”

  “Actually, we’ve met,” Li said. “At the War College on Alba. You probably don’t remember, but I took a class the semester you visited.”

  “Oh dear. I should remember, of course, but I meet so many people. And my memory for faces is very poor.”

  Cohen rolled his eyes and coughed.

  “I’m sorry,” Didi said humbly, “it’s dusty in here. All the paper, you know. You wouldn’t believe the problems we have with allergies. Would you like to borrow my eyedrops?”

  Didi’s office was material proof of the old Mossad dictum: the smaller the office, the bigger the reputation. The place must have been a mop closet in some prior incarnation. Only the timeless tools of the trade—the glass-topped desk, the paper shredder, the scrambled landline, the dusty green ranks of locked file cabinets—suggested the secrets its walls had seen.

  Nor did the room give anything away about Didi himself. There were no family pictures, no knickknacks, no mementos. The only hint of personality was a fading computer printout taped to the wall behind Didi’s head, where generations of young field agents had read it while listening to briefings, waiting for Didi to get off the phone with his wife or daughters, or yawning through administrative updates. The list, which Cohen happened to know had been a present from the last class of katsas Didi took through field training, contained five items:

  1. The odds of an agent ending up in a hole in the ground are directly proportional to the number of people who know him from a hole in the ground.

  2. The best thing to say is always nothing.

  3. When you want to know what a piece of information means, look at where it’s been.

  4. Small guns are more trouble than they’re worth.

  5. Everyone has his dumb blonde and his rented Ferrari.

  As they passed into the office, a slender young man appeared, seemingly from nowhere, to frisk them a second time. Cohen stood patiently to be searched, as did Li; but while Li’s inspection of the boy was limited to a quick glance at all the potential hiding places for concealed weapons, Cohen’s once-over was a bit more thorough.

  The boy had the parchment skin and glossy curls of a yeshiva student. His glasses were cheap, like Didi’s, and the lenses were almost thick enough to obscure the long-lashed bedroom eyes behind them. Which didn’t change by one jot the fact that the body under the rumpled suit was a soldier’s body, and the sleepy-lidded eyes looked out at the world with the calculating poise of a professional killer.

  Once he’d pronounced them clean, the young man escorted them into Didi’s inner sanctum and hesitated ostentatiously.

  “Thank you, Arik,” Didi said. And waited.

  The boy heaved a sigh of protest over the security breach and slipped out of the room, leaving the three of them alone together.

  “Good youngsters coming in these days,” Didi told Cohen. “It’s a nice thing to see kids who take their work seriously.”

  “Well, you do get the pick of them.”

  “You want a boy like Arik should be rotting in a foxhole? Five languages he speaks. Arabic like a native.”

  No doubt he did speak five languages. He also looked like a smaller, paler, less handsome, and decidedly less good-natured copy of Gavi Shehadeh. But Cohen knew better than to suggest that this might have anything to do with Didi’s obvious affection for the boy.

  Didi chatted on, mentioning mutual friends. Cohen let the small talk flow over him without too much thought—something he’d long ago learned to do when humans started talking this way—and focused on the body language. He’d wondered for a long time what Catherine Li and Didi Halevy would make of each other. Now he watched each of them summing the other up and asked himself whether these two particular opposites were about to attract or repel.

  Li, three years out of the Peacekeepers, still looked so ill at ease in mufti that even the most casual observers pegged her for an off-duty soldier. Didi, by contrast, had looked like a disheveled impostor the one time Cohen had seen him in uniform. In fact, one of the often-discussed mysteries of the Mossad chief’s legendary career was the question of how a man who seemed too fragile to lift a piece of paper had survived his compulsory military service long enough for his unique talents to be recognized.

  At the moment Didi was definitely in undertaker mode. If Cohen hadn’t known better, he would have thought they were talking to the janitor. Did the man have some reason for wanting Li to underestimate him, Cohen wondered, or was it just the habitual camouflage of an old spy who’d long ago learned not to trust new faces?

  Li, meanwhile, had gone into her full-blown dumb-soldier act. There was no glint of humor in her dark eyes, no ironic drawl in her voice. Not one thing about her face, manner, voice, or words suggested that she’d ever had an intelligent thought in her life.

  He should have expected it, Cohen told himself sourly. He’d looked forward to this meeting for years. And now here they were, both playing dumb with such consummate skill that Cohen was beginning to feel like he was the only sentient life-form in the room.

  “You two,” he burst out finally, “are absolutely impossible!”

  “What?” Didi and Li said at almost the same moment in voices of wounded innocence.

  And then Li, having caught Cohen’s invective-riddled comment on the bad social graces of all spies and retired soldiers, laughed.

  “So,” Didi said. “Now that we’re all having fun, what do you say we take a look at Catherine’s spins from Abulafia Street?”

  They ran Li’s spins on Didi’s long-past-obsolete desk monitor, the three of them hunching over the small display shoulder to shoulder. It was unnerving to see the whole meeting replayed from Li’s perspective: to see the thoroughness with which she checked people over; the way her eyes flickered constantly from door to window to floor to ceiling; her almost subconscious awareness of the minute changes in the flow of traffic beyond the walls that could mean danger; the restless, constant, animal awareness of a body that had survived enough combat drops to know that bad luck can kill you at any time and from any direction.

  And it was pretty obvious what pieces of bad luck she’d been alerting on back in that hotel room. First and foremost, Turner. No explanation needed there; only a fool, and a suicidal fool at that, would mess with the Americans. But her source of worry was less obvious. In fact, Cohen was embarrassed to realize that he himself had missed it entirely in real time. While he’d been glaring at Korchow and inspecting the antiques collection, Li had in fact been doing her job. And as far as she was concerned that job had mainly consisted of keeping an eye on Shaikh Yassin. Or, more precisely, on one of the hard young men hovering at Yassin’s elbow.

  Li had ignored the two gorillas, obviously mere hired muscle, and reserved her vigilance for the slim young man with those pale green eyes that still popped up every now and t
hen in the Palestinian gene pool and, a full millennium after the last crusade, were still called crusader’s eyes.

  The boy had an athlete’s slouch. His body was still and relaxed, every betraying tic leached out of it by the same iron discipline that every Mossad katsa learned. His face was schooled into a calmly attentive, completely unreadable expression. And the green eyes were cold and alert and moved constantly around the room, taking in everything but never appearing to stare too hard at any one thing. The boy was Arik’s opposite number; and only a novice could fail to recognize him for the superlatively trained professional that he was.

  “So who’s the bright young thing?” Cohen asked. He had a niggling feeling that he’d seen that face before, yet he could match it to none of his stored spinfeed databases. Unsettling. “Could he be Safik’s? Safik always liked the pretty ones.” Cohen cut a sideways glance at Didi. “So did you for that matter.”

  “You’re right about his being Safik’s,” Didi said, “though not in the way you think you mean. Look again. Ring any bells?”

  Cohen looked again, and suddenly bells were ringing all over the place. The slim, neat build; the intelligent, humorous face; the extraordinary eyes.

  “Yusuf Safik,” Didi said. “The only son of Walid Safik, head of the Palestinian Security Service’s counterintelligence department.”

  “So Safik did have a set of eyes at the auction,” Li said with grim satisfaction.

  But Cohen wasn’t thinking about the auction. He was thinking about Gavi. If the boy was Safik’s son, then that made him…what? Leila’s first cousin once removed? That explained the eyes. And the family resemblance to Leila was unmistakable once you looked for it. He wondered if Gavi and Leila’s Joseph—obviously both boys had been named after some common ancestor—would have looked like Yusuf if he’d survived the war. And then he thought about that other lifetime before the war in which they’d all danced at Gavi and Leila’s wedding.