The Pure

by Simons, Jake Wallis

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Let me ask that a second time. Will you decode this intel accurately, and to the best of your ability?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And a third time. Will you be completely honest when you decode the intel?’

  ‘Yes. As I’ve said I want to obstruct the Israeli air strikes as much as you do.’

  ‘I doubt that, my friend, but I thank you. That will be all.’

  Ghasem gestured to the man in the white coat to remove the machine from Uzi. Then both men left the room, taking the PCASS device with them. The bodyguard followed, locking the door.

  Uzi’s right hand strayed casually across his ribcage and inside his jacket. The plastic gun bulged reassuringly against his knuckles; it was as if he was protecting it, like a baby bird. He got up and went to the window. A few slowly swaying trees obscured the lower third of the rectangle, but beyond that he could see the distant sea, the sky. Boats no bigger than fruit flies were drifting lazily offshore. He turned away and sat down again, just in time for the door to open. In silence, Ghasem, the man in the white coat, and the bodyguard took up their previous positions. Then the door was locked again. Ghasem was holding the PCASS device.

  ‘You’re lying to us,’ he said softly.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘The machine indicates that you have been lying,’ said Ghasem.

  ‘It must be malfunctioning,’ Uzi replied.

  Ghasem’s face clouded over. ‘Do you realise that you are only a hair’s width away from death here? You are in Syria. You are in Little Tehran. Every man in this country, every man in this building – in this room – hates the Zionist regime more than you could ever imagine. Every man would gladly take you down to the basement and spend a long time bringing about your death. A long time. And now you are lying to us.’

  The Kol was saying something, but Uzi wasn’t listening. He leaned forward suddenly, slamming his palms on the table. ‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ he hissed. ‘How dare you trust that machine more than me? You know what I have given up to be here. You know what I have gone through. My death would be of no consequence to me any more, quick or slow. My only motivation is to bring peace to our countries. I have no other agenda. So do not accuse me of lying. Throw away that machine. You decide: trust me and let me help you, or do not trust me and kill me now. But do not allow my fate to rest in the hands of a machine.’

  He sat back, fuming. To his surprise, Ghasem broke into a grin. ‘Well done, my friend,’ he said, ‘you have passed the lie detector test. The device indicated that you have been telling the truth all along. And now I have challenged you, and you have remained true. You are an impressive man, my friend. A man of honour. Welcome to our family.’ He got to his feet and offered Uzi his hand; Uzi hesitated then shook it vigorously, rising to his feet.

  There was a knock at the door and the bodyguard opened it. Uzi’s heart skipped a beat. There was Leila. She had changed her clothes; now she was wearing a flowing skirt and a light embroidered blouse, together with a peach-coloured headscarf loosely framing her face. She looked more Persian than he could have imagined, and also more beautiful.

  ‘My sister,’ said Ghasem warmly, ‘the time has arrived at long last. After all of your toils. Come and sit down. Come and witness the fruit of your labours.’

  For a moment Uzi and Leila caught eyes, and something wordless and powerful was exchanged between them. Then they all sat down, and the bearded man set about attaching the PCASS machine to Uzi once more. The bodyguard left the room and came in with another silver tray of tea; Leila began to brew it.

  ‘Now,’ said Ghasem magnanimously, ‘I apologise for subjecting you to the machine again when you have already passed all the tests. But you know how it is.’ He shrugged. ‘The bosses are paranoid.’ He opened a laptop on the table and began to boot it up.

  ‘First a lie, as before, please,’ said the man in the white coat. ‘Are you now in Syria?’

  ‘No,’ said Uzi, watching Leila make the tea, inwardly begging her to look up at him. The machine beeped.

  ‘Very good. And now please tell the truth. Are you an Israeli national?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Uzi, aware of the brief expression of triumph that flitted across the face of everyone in the room – even, he thought, Leila.

  ‘Very good,’ said the man again. Then he nodded to Ghasem, who turned the laptop slowly around to face Uzi. On the screen was a cable – an intercepted Mossad cable. Uzi could tell it was written in top-level code. Alongside it was the translation that the MOIS code breakers had produced. Uzi had to admit: they had done a very good job.

  ‘Look through the translation, please,’ said Ghasem quietly. ‘Take your time. You will see a recurring code word, each time in capitals, which we have been unable to break. This is the target of Operation Desert Rain. When you are ready, please tell us the real name of this target.’

  ‘A computer would usually do this,’ said Uzi. ‘Luckily I’ve been trained to do it manually as well.’

  He pored over the document, drawing it close to his face, his movements made awkward by the wires connecting his hand to the PCASS device. Meditatively he lit a cigarette. The smoke rose in a lazy double helix towards the ceiling. An almost religious silence fell in the room as he concentrated. Even the Kol fell silent. Uzi noticed that a silver-lipped glass of tea had appeared by his elbow, together with two pieces of sugar. He glanced up at Leila and saw that she was gazing at him now, her eyes aflame.

  ‘Take your time, please,’ said Ghasem again.

  The PCASS device was humming almost imperceptibly. A tiny fruit fly that nobody had noticed before crawled at a diagonal across the screen of the laptop, then spiralled up into the air. The man with the beard swatted his palm at it automatically. The soft scent of orange still hung gently in the air. Uzi took a long drag on his cigarette and concentrated.

  ‘Can I have a pencil and paper?’ he said. In an instant, one appeared beside him. He began to sketch out some tables, filling each cell with a syllable – scores of them – from memory. ‘The Mossad uses a phonetic, syllable-by-syllable code,’ he said, almost to himself, ‘and they wrap that within a sleeve code which is numeric.’ He didn’t look up from his work but was aware of his companions exchanging glances. ‘In the special case of target names, the sleeve code is encased once again within a phonetic code, and this is once again rendered into figures.’ He jotted down a column of numbers. ‘Has anybody got a calculator?’ Again, one appeared instantly. He noticed Ghasem sneaking a look at his watch. The air strikes were hours away; but if the yellowcake needed to be moved, there wouldn’t be very much time.

  Uzi punched numbers into the calculator, his cigarette clamped between his teeth, eyes slitted against the stinging smoke. Then, slowly, he copied down the digits that were glowing on the screen and ran his finger down the table of syllables. A puzzled expression came over his face and he went through the calculations again, and again. Then he sat back, frowning. The atmosphere tightened. He stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette, placed a piece of sugar on his tongue, and sipped from the small glass of tea, not removing his eyes from the piece of paper in front of him.

  ‘No,’ he said softly, ‘this isn’t working. This isn’t right. I’ve made a mistake somewhere.’ For what seemed like an age he sat there without moving, like a chess player examining a complicated board. He hunched over, crossed out a few figures, scribbled some more, shook his head.

  Following a sip of tea, he pressed his palm to his forehead and exclaimed, ‘Of course, of course. They’ve put it in three sleeves. Three sleeves.’ Feverishly he hunched over the pad of paper, making notes and punching digits into the calculator with a single hooked finger. Around the room, people shifted in their chairs. Uzi continued to write, continued to scrawl, relating his figures repeatedly to the table of syllables like a mad scientist. Finally – finally – he breathed a profound sigh and smiled. He flipped the pad on to a new page and wrote out a single word in bl
ock capitals. Then he turned the pad around, and the Iranians saw what was on it. A single word: NATANZ.

  There was a pause; everybody seemed to be holding their breath. Ghasem exchanged glances with the man in the white coat, who nodded.

  ‘This is the target?’ said Ghasem.

  ‘Yes,’ Uzi replied.

  ‘You have been completely honest with us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ghasem looked at the man in the white coat again and saw that he was grinning broadly. All at once, a ripple of relief flowed through the room, and then the Iranians were all on their feet, embracing each other and smiling. Uzi knew that there could only be one reason for this display of jubilation: the yellowcake wouldn’t need to be moved. The Israelis had the wrong target.

  He sat there in a daze until Leila walked deliberately around the table and raised him to his feet. They were both gripped by an impulse to fall into each other’s arms, but in the present company they had to resist. They held hands; Leila’s was trembling. When she raised her face to him, he thought that her eyes were filling with tears. But he couldn’t be sure.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, ‘thank you.’

  Ghasem strode over and clasped him heartily by the hand as the bearded man removed the PCASS device.

  ‘This should be a day of national celebration,’ he said, ‘in honour of you, my friend.’

  ‘I am flattered,’ Uzi replied. ‘Really I have not done much.’

  Ghasem waved his protestations away, Rolex rattling. ‘You have saved our nuclear weapons programme,’ he said. ‘That is not something to dismiss.’ He rubbed his hands together like a salesman. ‘Now you two go and relax,’ he said, addressing Uzi and Leila together. ‘You deserve to – what do they call it? – decompress. We will take care of everything. We will move our forces into position and await the Israeli jets. And, finally, may I add this: congratulations on your engagement.’

  Uzi looked quizzically at Leila, who smiled up at him. Instantly he understood that marriage was the only way they could be together. A smile spread across his face like the rising sun. But then he glanced over at Ghasem – and something didn’t fit. For a brief moment he saw the Iranian exchanging a glance with a bodyguard, giving him the smallest of nods. It was a businesslike nod, one that was obviously intended for the bodyguard only. But something in Ghasem’s steely expression – and in the bodyguard’s barely perceptible acknowledgement – made Uzi’s blood run cold.

  Then, before he knew it, they were being bustled out of the room arm-in-arm, and Leila was clinging to him as if she would never let go. The bodyguard was carrying their luggage behind them; someone else was leading them on at a brisk pace down corridor after airy corridor. All at once they were outside, in the evening light, amid long shadows, being steered across a flagstoned courtyard lined with lemon trees, in the direction of a whitewashed cottage in the grounds of the villa. Leila was whispering in his ear: I’ll do anything you want, my love, I’ll do anything you want. And then they were inside, and their luggage was stacked neatly in the corner. The doors were closed, and the bodyguard took up a position outside. Laughing with sudden abandon, Leila flung herself on to the scented bed. Uzi joined her. They had done it. Operation Desert Rain was doomed. The yellowcake would lie undisturbed many miles beneath the earth at Qum, while the fury of Israel fell on Natanz, many kilometres away. And in a matter of months – only months – a nuclear Iran would be a reality, bringing balance to the Middle East, to the world. Uzi removed his jacket and hung it carefully in the wardrobe, leaving the M9 in the pocket. Then he returned to the bed and received kisses that were more passionate and uninhibited than he had ever received before. The bodyguard – the one who had received the nod from Ghasem – was still outside.

  42

  When Uzi awoke, night had fallen. He snaked his arm from under Leila’s head and looked at his watch. But the luminous hands were not glowing brightly enough; he couldn’t read the time in the darkness. His ear began to itch.

  ‘Uzi,’ said the Kol firmly. It was the older voice.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Air strikes will commence in sixty minutes. Sixty minutes. You need to move.’

  Fuzzy-headed, Uzi slipped out of the bed and crossed to the window. Outside there was the silhouette of the bodyguard, who now had an AK-47 slung over his shoulder. Silently Uzi opened the shutters, allowing the moonlight to fall into the room. Then, in the half-light, he made his way to the wardrobe and put his jacket on. He slipped his hand into the inside pocket, gripped the butt of his M9.

  From the bed, Leila moaned and propped herself up on her elbows, rubbing her eyes.

  ‘My love,’ she said sleepily, ‘come back to bed.’

  He had to think fast. ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘I can’t sleep. The air strikes are coming soon. I need to be out on the beach, under the stars. Anyway, I need a cigarette. I don’t want to smoke here while you’re sleeping. And it’s a beautiful night. Look.’

  Smoothing her hair, Leila got to her feet and crossed to the window, opening the shutters wide. ‘You’re right, it is beautiful. Just look at that moon. You would never get a moon that size in the West.’ She took him by the hand and drew him to her.

  ‘Uzi,’ said the Kol quietly in his ear. ‘Fifty-eight minutes.’

  He rested his hands on Leila’s hips and traced a line of kisses down her neck. ‘Come on, then. Let’s see if we can persuade that bodyguard to let us go for a stroll in private.’

  Leila took a shawl from her luggage and draped it around her shoulders, then wrapped her headscarf loosely over her hair. They put on their shoes and went out, holding hands.

  ‘Good evening,’ said the bodyguard politely, turning towards them and tightening his hold on his gun. ‘Is there something I can do for you?’

  ‘We want to go for a walk on the beach,’ said Leila. ‘Would that be possible? We have just got engaged.’

  The bodyguard thought for a moment. ‘Wait here,’ he said. He walked a few paces away, not taking his eyes off them, and spoke softly into a two-way radio. Then he came back. ‘It would be possible,’ he said, ‘but I would need to accompany you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Those are my orders. Please forgive me, but you and the Zionist need to be under constant guard.’ He glanced sidelong at Uzi. ‘And Ghasem said he might need to speak to you at short notice.’

  ‘Look,’ said Leila, standing a little closer to him. ‘I am an operative, you see? A MOIS operative.’ She took her ID card from her bag and showed it to him. ‘Why don’t you just give me the rifle and I’ll guard this Zionist.’

  ‘Not Zionist,’ added Uzi in perfect Farsi, ‘Israeli.’

  The guard dismissed them both with a wave of his hand. ‘It’s my job to look after you,’ he said, and smiled. His gaze was firm and opaque. Once again, Uzi felt his blood run cold.

  ‘But I am a MOIS operative.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sister. Orders are orders.’ This time his face remained stony.

  ‘No problem,’ said Leila, smiling charmingly to disguise her annoyance. Then she and Uzi walked down the path hand-in-hand, briskly, with the bodyguard several paces behind. Uzi could hear him slipping a magazine quietly into his gun. He didn’t turn around.

  They crossed the courtyard again – the moonlight bathed everything in a ghostly light – and skirted the main villa. All the lights were on inside, and from time to time they encountered armed men on patrol. Leila flashed her ID card again and again, and the bodyguard nodded to his comrades. Through a window Uzi saw a room full of men wearing headsets, typing. And then they were at the front entrance, weaving their way through several rows of cars, heading in the direction of the perimeter fence.

  ‘It’s a breathtaking night,’ said Leila, looking up at the stars. ‘Just breathtaking.’

  ‘It’s a historic night,’ Uzi replied softly. ‘Let’s get down to the beach to appreciate it.’

  ‘Uzi,’ said the Kol. ‘Forty-seven minutes.�
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  The moon sat low and yellow above them as they approached the fence. Two different guards were on duty this time; when they saw the bodyguard, they waved them through. Leila was beguiling in the moonlight, and dignified despite the bodyguard.

  ‘Sorry about our gun-toting babysitter,’ she whispered. ‘Tehran is bound to be jumpy until it’s all over. But once the Israelis have made their move, and the yellowcake is safe, people will relax. We’ll be free to do as we please.’

  They made their way down the winding, tree-lined driveway and out on to the road on the spine of the ridge. Night sounds were all around them: nocturnal birds, animals in the undergrowth, the wind. Uzi thought he could hear the bodyguard breathing; now that they had passed through the perimeter fence, he was walking much closer behind them. Leila drew her shawl tighter around her. ‘Where shall we go?’ she asked.

  Uzi’s ear began to itch. ‘Head over the road,’ said the Kol. ‘There’s a track that leads down to the waterfront.’

  Uzi turned to the bodyguard. ‘We’re going down to the ocean,’ he said casually.

  ‘For a short time,’ said the bodyguard.

  ‘Can’t you give us a bit of space? Some privacy?’

  The bodyguard made no response, remaining behind them as close as before. Uzi noticed that he had the safety-catch off. Leading Leila by the hand, Uzi crossed across the road and there, just as the Kol had said, was a rough dirt track winding down the side of the ridge. The rough grass and sand was monochrome in the moonlight.

  ‘How did you know about this?’ said Leila. ‘Have you been here before?’

  ‘I noticed it on the way here,’ Uzi replied. ‘Come on.’

  They scrambled down the track, supporting themselves on smooth-faced boulders and desiccated trees. Twice the bodyguard ordered them to slow down. But each time Uzi, prompted by the Kol, said that he needed to get down to the ocean.

  ‘So once this is all over, where shall we go to live?’ said Leila breathlessly as they neared the foot of the ridge. Only a few rows of houses, still warm from the heat of the day, lay between them and the sea. ‘Money will be no object.’