“Maybe, maybe not.” Ari was enjoying himself now. “But I wouldn’t feel too confident in any case. The Jews are everywhere. Every time you get in a car you’d better check the rear-view mirror and make sure no suspicious vehicles are following you. The same goes for the streets. Also I wouldn’t accept food or anything to drink from anyone except a close friend. Restaurants and bars are out—I wouldn’t go near them. You can never tell who’s been paid off to slip something in your food.”
The shaking in Ludin’s hands spread to his entire body. Perspiration dripped down his wrinkled forehead. “What are you going to do?”
“Get out of Damascus as soon as possible.”
Ludin inhaled deeply, trying to calm himself. “I’d better go now.”
“You’re right. It’s probably dangerous for us to be together. A double target might tempt the assassin.”
Ludin shook his head and stood up—he hadn’t thought of that possibility. Ari brushed past him and opened the door. Ludin muttered something unintelligible that sounded like thank you, and literally ran out of the room, lumbering down the hall with awkward strides.
“Good luck,” Ari called after him.
He didn’t respond.
Ari closed the door to his suite and stood in the hall until he was sure Ludin had left the New Ommayad. When a full five minutes dissolved into the backwash of time, he strode toward the elevator—strengthened by a surge of energy, granted by the realization that the end was nearing.
As he stepped out of the hotel he stopped and stared down Maysaloun Street, as if by an act of will he could cause Kim to reappear. But the street was deserted, the shops shuttered, their windows dark. It was almost beyond hope that he could do anything for her, but he would tell Operative 66 what had happened; make him listen, help.
Ari jumped into a taxi and ordered the driver to proceed over the short distance to the intersection of Port Said Street and Farouk El Awal Boulevard. When he got out of the cab he casually glanced down the street to see if any vehicles had stopped to discharge their passengers. None had, but that meant little. Those following him would be careful. Ari crossed the wide boulevard, darting through the rush of oncoming cars, whose drivers chose to swerve around him rather than brake to a halt. Looking back across the muddy Barada, he saw the tall, twin minarets of the Tekkiyeh of Suleiman the Magnificent.
The sidewalk on Port Said Street was crowded. Ari blended into the flow of people and headed for the red marquee of the Al Ahram Cinema. At the cashier’s window he bought a ticket and went inside. The Arab film, already in progress, had no subtitles. As Ari’s eyes adjusted to the lack of light he settled into an end seat. The rustling of paper, the crunching of chickpeas, and the shouting of advice to people on the screen drowned out the dialog of the actors. It was not so different from Israel, where patrons noisily rolled Coke bottles down the concrete aisles. After a while he realized why there was so much noise—it was not necessary to listen in order to follow the plot. The action centered on a heroine, wearing a chenille dress, who strolled through an oasis singing songs, unaware that she was being pursued by three villains intent on murdering her. As a sheik’s dagger poised above her veiled head a woman next to Ari jumped up in excitement and spilled chickpeas into his lap. Then suddenly the hero arrived on a white stallion and charged toward the sheik. A great sigh escaped the audience.
Approximately thirty-five minutes later he rose and eased his way down the aisle toward the corner of the theater and a green neon sign that read SORTIE. He pushed a heavy wooden door open and stepped into a dimly lit alley. His back pressed against the red brick wall, his heart pounding, he waited; but nobody followed him outside. Breathing easier, he proceeded along the alley toward the residential Baramke district and away from anyone waiting for him on Port Said Street. The sounds of his footsteps echoed through the still night. Quickening his pace, he hurried through a series of mazelike alleys that eventually opened onto the square in front of the Hejez Railway Terminal.
Chestnut and fruit vendors stood behind carts on the cobbled pavement, but they had no customers. Passing them, he entered the huge four-story terminal. Inside, a glance at the information board confirmed that a train to Homs, Hama, and Aleppo was scheduled to depart in forty-five minutes. Ari bought a ticket and climbed the refuse-littered steps to Track Four. He would wait.
With the squeal of metal grating against metal the train moved out of the station. The journey to Homs would take an hour and ten minutes, but Ari had no intention of remaining on the train that long. He looked out the window as the locomotive slowly picked up speed and headed northwest toward Mount Kassioun, nearing the spot where he had picnicked with Kim. He closed his eyes; that afternoon seemed like a lifetime ago. The train maintained a steady forty-five kilometers per hour as it crawled through the city. The locomotive would not pick up speed until it penetrated the fringes of the desert.
When the train entered the small bridge that forded the Tora River, Ari made his way to the back of the car, opened the door, and stood out on the platform. Tall, leafy eucalyptus trees lined the banks of the river. The winds had shifted suddenly, the Mediterranean breezes temporarily succeeding in pushing back the summer siroccos.
The night was cool and crisp. Broken points of stars scattered in the sky winked through the treetops as the train wound along the edge of the al-Ghutah apple orchards toward the Yazid River. Two miles away, nestled under the protective cover of the slopes of Mount Kassioun, was the exclusive Mohajirine district. Composed of handsome houses and gardens, the quarter was built by Ottoman aristocrats in search of clear water and fresh winds, away from the heat and grime of Damascus. As the train slowed to climb the hill leading to the bridge over the Yazid River, Ari jumped.
He hit the dirt at the orchard’s edge and rolled, letting his whole body absorb the shock of the fall. Seconds later he was on his feet and peering back at the train. No other forms flung themselves off the moving vehicle. He was alone.
Quickly he plunged in among the trees, stopping only long enough to pick an apple. He was hungry. Events were moving with inconsiderate haste—he had not eaten since noon. Listening to the sounds of the river flowing past in the darkness, he bit into the apple and continued northeast toward the Mohajirine district, relishing each mouthful as he slowly chewed and swallowed it.
Emerging from the orchard, he looked up at the slopes of Kassioun. In the pale moonlight he could make out the red-domed Koubbet el-Sayyar mausoleum and higher up the tall steel tower that beamed the programs of Syria’s single television station down to the city. It took him a little over half an hour to reach Jarir Street, a small avenue lined with myrtle saplings, located behind the brilliantly lit, H-shaped presidential palace. Approaching number seventeen he cautiously surveyed the exterior of the villa. The answers to all his questions, the removal of all the uncertainties, were just seconds away. At least he had not been followed. He was sure of that.
He entered the outer courtyard and moved past a fountain, brimming with water and surrounded by lemon trees. The soft scent of the fruit floated in the air. He tapped on the oak door, uncertain if the sounds his knuckles made would penetrate the thick wood and be heard within. Reluctant to knock again, he waited. Just as he was about to ring the bell, the legendary Operative 66, a man so completely integrated into his background that even he wondered sometimes whether he was Jew or Arab, swung the door open.
Ari stood in the darkness, momentarily blinded by the bright light thrown out from inside the house.
“Sabri al-Alazar?” he asked, blinking rapidly, trying to accustom his eyes to the light.
“Come in, Ari,” al-Alazar said in Hebrew. “I’ve been expecting you for several days.”
20.
SEPTEMBER 20
The tapping on his office door woke the Colonel. Groggily he lifted his head; it hadn’t done him any good to fall asleep slumped forward on his desk. As he sat up pain arched through his back. It hadn’t done him any good at all. He
rubbed his eyes, then groped blindly for his glasses, knocking over an ashtray and the remains of a half-dozen or more smoked cigars. “Shit,” he mumbled out loud.
The knocking at his door intensified, then stopped, and a voice spoke to him from the hall:
“Colonel, it’s six A.M. Lieutenant Barkai is on his way up.”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” the Colonel said, listening to the sound of his bodyguard’s footsteps fade as the Sergeant moved toward his desk at the far end of the corridor.
The Colonel picked up the file folder on Suleiman Sarraj, over which the cigar ashes had spilled. Gingerly he brought it toward the wastebasket and knocked the manila folder against the side of the can, jarring the fragments of ash off the paper. A few specks of gray remained. The Colonel brushed at them with his hand—rubbing the ashes into the paper instead of propelling them to the floor. Angrily he snapped the file shut and threw it on his cluttered desk. Yawning, he reached for the mug in front of him, brought the heavy porcelain cup to his mouth, and drank. The coffee was cold. What time had he made it—three, four A.M.? He should have asked the Sergeant to bring him a fresh cup, but it was too late now. He took one last sip, rubbed his tongue against his palate, then pushed the mug to the far end of the desk and out of his way. The cold coffee left an unpleasant taste in his mouth.
For possibly the hundredth time in the last twenty-four hours the Colonel picked up a single soiled piece of paper and went over the timetable for Operation Goshen. The Hanit, one of the six fast attack craft paid for in 1968 and secretly spirited away from Cherbourg during the French arms embargo two years later, would depart the Atlit Naval Base north of Caesaria on the twenty-second. Armed with 76-mm. Oto Melara AA guns and eight Gabriel surface-to-surface missiles, the Hanit would leave Israeli coastal waters at seven-thirty P.M. Saturday night. At exactly one-fifteen A.M. the lone boat would rendezvous with Lieutenant Barkai in a little cove at Ra’s al-Basit, eighteen miles south of the Turkish border. The Israelis had never sent their navy that far north before and evidently the Syrians expected no incursions near Ra’s al-Basit. Operative 66 reported a total absence of military activity in the area. Syria’s Soviet-built “OSA” patrol boats were heavily concentrated thirty-two miles south of Ra’s al-Basit, at Latakia, where Russian cargo ships docked to unload MiG-21s, T-54 tanks, SAM missiles, and other heavy war material. The Colonel was counting on the Hanit being able to skirt around Latakia and slip in and out of the designated cove unobserved.
On the back of the heavily creased sheet of paper the Colonel had drawn a rough sketch of the main lines of Damascus’s sewer system. The city’s refuse, discharged into the lower Barada River or the Yazid and Tawrat streams that issue from the Barad, flows below the streets by way of a series of underground canals built by the Turkish governor Nezem Pacha between 1908 and 1932. By the 1960s the narrow Tawrat tributary had become so polluted that the raw sewage spilling into it had to be diverted directly into the lower Barada, via a newly constructed channel. The old channel, now dry, leads from the walled city to the Tawrat tributary, passing directly under the Alliance Israelite Universelle School. Shaul Barkai would drop down into the city’s sewer system, enter the school’s basement through a passageway dug in 1966 by escaping Jews, and guide the children through the underground cavern to a car he would leave in the desert, walking distance from where the concrete canal opened into the Tawrat.
A knock on the door suddenly severed the Colonel’s train of thought. “Come in,” the head of Israeli Intelligence said.
Shaul Barkai entered wearing a light gray suit, custom tailored for him by a Jewish firm on Bond Street in London.
“What time does your plane leave?”
“Eight-ten.”
“And the connecting flight to Damascus?”
“It departs from Heathrow at two this afternoon.”
The Colonel nodded, wondering why he’d bothered to ask Barkai about the flights, when he’d already gone over the lieutenant’s schedule three times that morning. He cleared an empty space on his desk, set the ashtray in the middle of it, and lit a Montecruz. “So far everything has proceeded as planned. There were some problems associated with Major Ben-Sion, but the matter is being taken care of.”
Barkai seemed to stiffen as he stood before the Colonel. “What problems?”
“Nothing that you need concern yourself about. Your mission will not be affected.” He flicked the ash off the top his cigar. The constant questioning by this young breed of intelligence officer, their forever wanting to know things that were unnecessary to the fulfillment of their assignments, irritated as well as worried the Colonel. But he betrayed none of this in his manner or expression.
Barkai sat in the chair across from the desk, though the Colonel had not asked him to do so. “What if I run into Ben-Sion in Damascus?”
“You won’t.”
“What if I do?” he persisted.
“Then ignore him.”
“What if he insists on speaking to me?”
“He won’t.”
An uneasy quiet filled the gap between them, punctuated by the sound of the wind rustling through the trees outside.
“Are you scared?” the Colonel asked suddenly.
Barkai wanted to say no, to show the Mossad chief that he was tough; but he knew he couldn’t lie to the Colonel and get away with it. The man was too damn perceptive.
“Yes,” he said softly.
“Good. You’d be a fool if you weren’t.”
Barkai managed a smile.
“Is there anything else we need to go over?” the Colonel asked, gathering the papers together on his desk. “Otherwise I think you’d better pick up your luggage and head for the airport.”
“One thing.”
The Colonel lifted his eyebrows. “Yes,” he said, caught off guard. He had not expected the lieutenant to raise any questions at this late date.
“I’m still worried about something we discussed at the policy board meeting with the Shin Beth in Tel Aviv. I lived in Damascus for eighteen years. I know the Syrian police, they’re vicious when they’re in the kindest of moods. When they’ve been humiliated by the Jews they turn on the haret like mad dogs. If we succeed in smuggling the children out of the country it is quite likely that the government will vent its anger on their families. I’m afraid they might take drastic measures to get back at us.”
An almost audible silence breathed in the room. Barkai’s warning was not lost on the Colonel; he always had shared the lieutenant’s concern, privately pondering the possibility of retaliation at great length.
“It’s a calculated risk,” the Colonel said, clearly forming each word in his mind before spoke it. “A risk that Nissim Kimche and Ibrahim Sassoon chose to take. It is their children—their families who will suffer if reprisals come. Remember, they requested Operation Goshen; we did not initiate it.”
“But don’t we have a responsibility to evaluate their personal request in terms of our larger picture?”
“That’s exactly what we’ve done. The heads of Modiin and the Shin Bet agree—we need the children for their propaganda value. Those American television programs describing the idyllic coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Damascus have crippled our attempt at organizing international opinion to support free emigration for Syria’s Jews. Pressure must be put on Assad and the Baath party. Publicly presenting seven suffering youngsters who chose to leave their parents rather than endure the hardships of life in Damascus will provide the political leverage we need to offset the harm done us by the American broadcaster. I plan to have photographers and cameraman at the dock when the Hanit comes in. And I’ll have those kids sobbing and crying, if I have to order them spanked while they’re still on the boat. I won’t see this story buried. Too much is at stake!” He snuffed out his cigar and threw the butt into the wastebasket. “Now swallow the rest of your questions and get out of here. You have a plane to catch.”
Barkai nodded and rose.
As he hu
rried out of the room the Colonel’s thoughts turned to Ben-Sion.
21.
SEPTEMBER 20
Ari followed Sabri al-Alazar through the bright corridor, cascades of confusion rippling through him. Al-Alazar’s tone implied he had been waiting, not for days as he conceded, but for weeks—expecting his plea for help even before Ari arrived in Damascus. A sinking despair pulled at him. It seemed he had been set up.
Operative 66 quickly guided him through a swinging door into the kitchen, motioning at a table nestled in a corner alcove as he drew the curtains over the draining board. Ari approved of the choice of sites. The alcove was small and intimate. The kitchen, with rococo designs running along the tops of the walls, provided a touch of warmth a larger room would not have.
He stared at al-Alazar as they sat down. His host’s face, taut and weather-beaten, seemed chiseled from a characteristic Semitic mold. He had wavy black hair slightly worn away by years, a high forehead, heavy eyebrows, and a neatly trimmed moustache. But what was distinctive about him were his eyes. They were chocolate brown and large, giving Ari the impression that al-Alazar was watching him even when his head was turned to the side. Ari put his age at fifty, fifty-fine—roughly the same as his.
“Are you sure no one followed you?” al-Alazar asked.
“Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten how to shake a tail.”
“Are you positive, the Syrians might…”
“I wasn’t followed!”
Al-Alazar nodded, then glanced over at the window. He couldn’t tell because of the curtains, but he was pretty sure he’d remembered to close it.
“Would you like something to drink or eat?” he asked, returning his attention to Ari.
“I’d prefer to know why you tried to kill me.”
Al-Alazar looked puzzled for a second, then a spark of understanding flickered in his eyes. “Oh, you mean the letter bomb. It wasn’t intended to kill you.”
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