“You’re off the mark there. Li wouldn’t do that.”
“You know her well enough to be sure of that?”
“I know her well enough to know she wouldn’t sell me out.”
“Everyone has their dumb blonde and their red Ferrari, Cohen.”
“Don’t spoon-feed me Didi’s proverbs!”
“Okay, maybe I spoke out of turn there. Maybe it’s not like that. But…people are who they are. You can’t imagine how angry I was at Leila after she died. I kept telling myself that if she’d really loved me, she would have come across the Line when we still had the chance. But it isn’t that simple, is it? I mean, you can love someone completely and still be bound by who you are, by what you believe in, by the other things and people you care about…by life, I suppose.”
“I know what you’re trying to tell me,” Cohen said. “You want to see UNSec behind this. You think Li’s gone back to working for Nguyen, and that Nguyen either ordered the bombing or pressured Didi into ordering it. Well, you’re talking out of turn. You don’t know Catherine. You don’t know what they did to her. You don’t know anything about her.”
But his eyes fell away from Gavi’s as he said the words.
The package arrived just as Gavi was about to leave.
“What do you mean you don’t know who it’s from?” Cohen asked the desperately nervous kid who showed up at the door of his suite to tell him about it. “Has security checked it?”
“Yes. Er. I really…perhaps you’d better come see for yourself.”
Gavi noticed with a first shiver of foreboding that the scared youngster was no mere bellhop. Someone had seen fit to draft management to deliver this particular package.
“Should I come with you?” he asked.
“Yes,” Cohen said.
They both knew he would have argued in normal circumstances.
The package—a gift box, actually, wrapped in rather tasteful gold foil and bound up with a red satin ribbon—was sitting on the head security officer’s desk in the middle of a sea of nervous uniforms.
Cohen went over to the desk, peered at it for a moment, standing completely still, and slumped limply into the nearest chair.
Gavi realized no one was taking the slightest notice of him, and stepped close enough to see over the top of the wrapping paper and into the box’s interior.
The box was lined with more gold foil, as if whoever packed it had considered its contents fragile and in need of extra padding. It took Gavi some time to see what the object carefully nested in the golden foil actually was. Part of the trouble was the normal difficulty of recognizing even the most familiar objects seen out of context. But mostly it was the glistening, razor-sharp halo of ceramsteel filament that veiled the object. It was only the smell that finally roused his old battlefield memories and made him retch reflexively.
“Is it Li’s?” he asked.
“Yes,” Cohen said dully. He was jackknifed over in the chair, his face buried in his hands, but he spoke with the same crisp, elegant precision Gavi had heard from the lips of a dozen different faces.
“You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. It’s the left hand, the one with the Schengen implant. Now do you trust her?”
When he left Cohen, Gavi walked halfway across town, then doubled back toward the Old City. He passed through the Damascus Gate into the International Zone at eight minutes to two, carefully avoiding the telltale times of the hour, and the half hour and the quarter hour.
Then he began to wander aimlessly, trying to mimic an idling, strolling interest in his surroundings that he was very far from feeling.
He kept clear of passersby and kept a sharp eye on his pockets. More than one courier had ducked into the crowded alleys of the Old City to shake a tail, only to find that he’d lost his package to a stray pickpocket. And though Gavi wasn’t nearly foolish enough to be carrying anything incriminating, he didn’t need the aggravation of a lost wallet and a futile attempt to explain to the Foreign Legion gatekeepers that he was an Israeli citizen and not simply one more in the endless flood of paperless anonymous Arab males caught up in the International Zone’s endlessly repeating bureaucratic feedback loops.
It took a lot of practice to make a convincing show of just stumbling on a place. In this case, the rendezvous was located in a run-down café in the Arab Quarter. Gavi walked in, looked around, took a seat at a back table, and downed three cups of strong black coffee, ordering a new one every time the waiter started to look impatient with him.
He was making a hash of it, of course. He should have done his business and left after the first cup. He knew he was attracting attention. He knew that attracting attention, any kind of attention at all, was a major failing in tradecraft. But still he sat there, sipping the execrable coffee, gripped by an indecision more savage than any he could remember in a long career fraught with life-and-death decisions.
Cohen’s certainty about Li shook him. The whole conversation had shaken him. Every minute of every day since Osnat and Arkady had fetched up on his doorstep four days ago had shaken him.
The waiter was staring at him, he realized, examining him surreptitiously. His field instincts began to sound the old alerts, but then he saw the sickened and fascinated look on the man’s face and realized that it wasn’t his presence that the man was concerned with but his leg’s absence.
Pretty is as pretty does, my friend.
How many millions of times had his mother told him that when he was growing up? She’d been terrified, old kibbutznik that she was, that her too-pretty boy would grow up to be one of the frivolous and useless people she so despised. And he’d internalized the message, just as he’d internalized her ardently idealistic Zionism. He’d fallen in love with and married a woman who was intelligent and cultured but by no stretch of the imagination beautiful. And he’d always faintly despised the people who would glance back and forth between them on the first meeting, toting up the all-too-obvious aesthetic calculus and wondering: Why him? Why her?
Arithmetic of the body, he’d called it. Implying (God, how egotistical he’d been!) that he cared only for the arithmetic of the soul.
But now he was doing that same arithmetic in reverse. Hanging on Osnat’s faintest nod or smile. Watching the eyes that were so wary when she spoke to him, and the strong hands that were so carefully impersonal when she so much as passed a plate to him. Inventorying his broken body and his broken reputation, and wondering what he could possibly offer to a woman whose body and honor were so vibrantly whole.
He had to get her out of his home and out of this operation. If there’d been any question about that, his demeaning little tantrum of the other night had answered it. He was acting like an idiot. And he was too old and shopworn for the young-pup-in-love routine to be anything but ridiculous.
He got up, paid, and asked for the bathroom in Arabic.
“The toilet’s plugged,” he said when he came back. “Can I make a local call before you call the plumber, though?”
The waiter was gray, middle-aged, nondescript. But when their eyes met for a moment across the counter Gavi had a sudden uncomfortable intuition that this was a man who was far too smart to be waiting tables.
“I’m not supposed to…” But the man was already setting the terminal on the scratched bartop.
Gavi rang up the number, waited for two rings, then hung up. “No one home,” he said before leaving. “But thanks anyway.”
Two hours later he was climbing the steps of a grimy, narrow-fronted apartment building on Ibn Batuta Street.
He rang the bell, waited while unseen eyes inspected him and unseen fingers buzzed him in.
A young man waited for him in the shadows behind the door. He looked like a Yeshiva student, except for the aura of cold-blooded confidence that even the thick glasses couldn’t completely camouflage. Gavi raised his arms and leaned against the wall and submitted to the search that was never quite perfunctory enough to be a mere formality. Then he
climbed the steep stairs to the third floor and stepped into the familiar room and closed the door behind him and leaned back against it.
“Hello, Gavi,” said the man in the armchair.
Gavi looked into the sad eyes of the man he loved and hated more than he’d ever loved or hated his own gently distant father.
“Hello, Didi.”
Short and sweet and rare. That was how Didi liked to keep their meetings.
“It’s difficult to live a double life,” he’d said the first time they’d sat together in this room. “It’s terribly tempting to begin to rely on your control for emotional support, even for simple relief from the loneliness. But every meeting is a fresh chance to buy yourself a bullet in the head. So when you walk out of here, this room must no longer exist for you. I must no longer exist for you. The less we disturb the unity of the life we wish you to lead, the less we risk revealing ourselves.”
Now Didi just looked at him, smiling.
“How are you, Gavi?”
Gavi stood, knowing he should sit down but too nervous to do it. “How are the girls?” he asked, forcing himself to take a genuine interest, repressing the surge of resentment that flooded through him whenever he was faced with the offensive and depressing fact of other people’s children.
“They’re fine, Gavi. You look tired.”
“I am tired.”
Didi’s eyes rested gently on him, but was it the concern of an old friend or just the cool professionalism of a katsa assessing the condition of a valuable resource? And why, after two years of this, was Gavi still asking himself that question?
“You know about Li?”
“I just heard.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“Not yet.”
“Your mole hunt’s getting ugly, Didi. Has it occurred to you that Li’s…wherever she is because someone took one of your barium meals too much to heart?”
“It crossed my mind.”
“That’s all? It just crossed your mind? Like the weather report?”
“I have a job to do.”
“That’s pretty cold, Didi. Even for you.”
“If it makes you feel better to make me the heavy, go ahead.”
Gavi dropped his head into his hands and rubbed at his temples. “Sorry. What about this Maracaibo bar bombing, then? Any news on that?”
“The boys are working on it.”
“Osnat said there were people from the Office there. She brought Arkady to me because she decided she couldn’t trust anyone else. You included. She brought him through the Line on nothing but guts and shoe leather. Crazy. Only a lunatic would try it.”
“She’s a little hotheaded,” Didi agreed, “but she’s a good girl.”
“Can I trust her?”
“It’s not like you to ask that. The Gavi I used to know wouldn’t have trusted her no matter what I told him.”
“I’m not the Gavi you used to know.”
“You are looking a little frayed around the edges.” Didi acknowledged this as simple fact, in the same disinterested voice with which he would have acknowledged that the weather was warmer than usual.
“I’ve had it, Didi. If I were in your position, I’d cash me out before I brought the whole case down on top of our heads.”
“Your slang is out-of-date,” Didi said on a smile as gentle as snow falling on the desert. “These days the youngsters call it ‘better worlding.’ Or, in the case of death by apparently accidental causes, ‘giving someone the measles.’ And in any case I know you far too well to believe that you would do any such thing. You always took care of your people to a fault.”
“Not Gur.”
“No. Poor kid. I guess I don’t have to ask what’s got you thinking of him.”
There was a sofa along the wall facing Didi’s chair. Gavi subsided into it and turned sideways so he could put his bad leg up. The skin under the normally comfortable cuff was raw and bruised from the long day of pounding over concrete and cobblestones, and it stung atrociously as the feeling came back into it. Why was it that trudging on concrete was so much worse than running on any natural surface?
“What I still don’t get,” he said, “is how Osnat got mixed up with GolaniTech. Moshe, I can buy. But what idiot decided to push Osnat off the Office payroll?”
He looked over to find Didi watching him with an intensity that would have been infuriating in anyone else. He took in the shapeless figure slouched in the armchair, looked past the stained and wrinkled suit to meet Didi’s eyes for the first time since he’d entered the room.
“Oh,” he breathed. “She never left. She’s still yours. You sent her.”
“Let’s just say I may have pointed her in your direction and given her a gentle push.”
“I’ve been on the receiving end of your gentle pushes. And how could you even think about sending her through the Line without someone to cover her back?”
“Osnat can cover her own back, I imagine.”
And then, for the first time, Gavi stopped thinking of the risks Osnat was running—and started thinking of the risks he was running. “My God. She’s kidon. And I’m still on the prime minister’s list. You sent a Mossad assassin into my house, with only his initials to stand between me and the knife!”
“Actually, the PM initialed your name last month.” Didi spread his hands in a gesture that was half excuse half apology. “Old friends aren’t what they used to be.”
“I saved that son of a bitch’s life!” Gavi said—and even as the words left his mouth he realized that he sounded ridiculously like Dibbuk when someone stepped on her tail.
“He told me. Twice. If it makes you feel any better, I had to spend half the night at his house letting him cry on my shoulder before he’d sign the order.”
“What’s going on, Didi? You taking out insurance on me?”
“Gavi, please believe me when I say that I want you to come out of this alive and well more than I want anything except the safety of Israel. But my grip on things is slipping. The IDF is rattling their cage. There are two more Interfaithers on the Knesset Intelligence Committee. We could run out of turf before we catch Absalom. And if there’s going to be a hit order out on you, I’d rather it was my hand on the trigger than my enemy’s hands.”
Gavi looked out the window. His leg was spasming from the long walk. He rubbed at the cramp, but it didn’t seem to improve things much. “Does Osnat know about this?”
“About the PM’s order? No. She really is there to help, not hurt. She’s the best I could send you without everyone on the eighth floor knowing I’d sent someone.”
“You still shouldn’t have picked Osnat. I can’t work with her. I don’t want her there.”
“Don’t you like her? That’s funny. I always thought you had a bit of a crush on her.”
“I was her commanding officer,” Gavi said, doubly outraged by the accusation because of the little grain of truth in it. “I would never have thought about that. And just because I have a thing for the heroic kibbutznik types doesn’t mean I’m easy picking for any—”
And then he finally put that puzzle together too. One step too late, as always.
“No dumb blondes and rented Ferraris for you,” Didi murmured.
“For you I only send the real thing.”
Gavi held his hands away from his body and looked at them as if they belonged to someone else. They were trembling.
“You’re going to push too hard,” he told Didi. “And then I’m going to break, and you’ll have nothing. I’m not complaining or threatening. I’m just reporting as objectively as I can on the status of an agent in place.”
“I can’t back off now, Gavi. I’m sorry it’s been so hard, and I’m sorry it took so long. But we’ve reached the crossroads. If we do it right, then we can all go home. If not…”
Gavi sighed deeply and stretched out on the sofa with one arm over his eyes. He thought of the horror he’d seen in the King David Hotel security chief’s office, then
forced his mind away from the thought.
“Can’t you take Osnat back and send in Yoni?” he asked. “Or anyone, for that matter. Please?”
“I’m going to write that off as kvetching. Unless you actually want to make it official. In which case the answer is no.”
Hard to argue with that; it was the answer Gavi himself would have given in Didi’s place.
“I can’t tell you how desperately I regret these years.” Didi spoke softly. “But they have not been wasted. Only a little longer, Gavi. Only one last night out in the cold. Then we bring you home.”
Down in the street a bus pulled up to the intersection with a whine of brakes, and a moment later Gavi heard the chuttering roar of its acceleration. He was sticky with sweat, and the light that seeped through his eyelids was as red as lung blood.
“Meanwhile,” Didi continued, “a curious piece of news has been leaked across the Line to us. It seems the Palestinians have managed to get Korchow to send Arkasha to Earth.”
Gavi’s eyes flew open. “My God. And the Palestinians have him? What are they going to do with him?”
“Give him to Turner, apparently.”
“Why the hell would they want to do that?”
“Not all of them do. Safik’s office seems to have been responsible for getting Arkasha here. Then Sheik Yassin horned in and brokered the deal with Turner over Safik’s protests.”
“So you think the leak comes from Safik? You think he’s trying to sabotage the exchange?”
Didi shrugged.
“I still don’t get it. What could Turner have that Yassin wants enough to get and trade Arkasha for?”
“I was wondering when you were going to stumble around to that question. Turner’s promised to give Yassin Arkady.”
Gavi rolled over on his side to look at Didi, the sofa’s springs protesting at the movement. “But Turner doesn’t have Arkady.”
“Not yet.”
“What the hell is he up to?”
“I don’t know. But I’d watch my back if I were you. And Arkady’s back.”
“Didi.”
“What?”
“Please tell me you’re not getting ready to burn Li and Arkady in order to catch Absalom. I don’t want to be part of another operation like that. I’ve lost the stomach for it.”
Spin Control ss-2 Page 43