“Good to hear from you, my friend. I thought maybe you were dead.”
I breathed out a sigh of relief. “Almost,” I said. “But not quite.”
“Al tid’ag, there’s plenty of time yet.”
Ezra Black’s voice was unmistakable. He peppered his English with Hebrew, and his English accent sounded at times more French than Israeli. But when any Israeli told me not to worry, I wondered immediately what was wrong. There was another awkward pause.
“So, what’s up, buddy?” he continued. “Did you find my plane yet or what?”
“Oh, come on, man, you were paid for that.” Baaz looked at me, uncomprehending. He could hear only one half of our conversation. “Paid more than it was worth, too. A lot more.”
At the other end of the line, the faintest suggestion of laughter—or the closest Ezra got to it.
“OK, but I liked that plane.”
“Seriously, Ezra. I’m in the shit. I need a favor.”
“OK.” The lightness in his voice evaporated immediately. “Tell me what you need, then. Seriously.” He rolled the r and protracted the ou in such a way that, if I didn’t know better, I’d have guessed he was from the Jura, not Jerusalem. “One day you can do something for me, eh?”
I didn’t doubt he was serious about that, too. Ezra ran a private security company in Sierra Leone, headquartered in the capital, Freetown. And although he’d been out of the Israel Defense Forces for nearly two decades, his paramilitary police training operation in West Africa was still very much bankrolled by the Israelis. The last favor he’d done me had nearly killed me. Baaz set down more tea and switched on the table lamp. It was overcast outside and half-dark indoors. The blinds were still drawn.
“I’m in France. There’s an Interpol Red Notice on me and—”
“Interpol?” Ezra cut me off. “What do those tembelim want with you?”
“It’s a long story.”
“It always is, eh?”
“The Russians are after me. Possibly the Brits, too. And the Yanks. Not even Grumpy Jock can help. So, I came to see Lukov, but . . .”
“Lukov?” he spat down the phone. “That aluka? I swear to you, one day I will kill him. No, I won’t kill him. I’ll just fuck him up. Death is too good for that ben zona!”
“You’re too late,” I said. “The leech bled to death yesterday while we were having a drink. In Paris. In public. Sniper. Pro job. Tricky head shot. Russians, most likely. Or the Brits. Or, you know, literally anyone.”
“Ken, or one of his kalat da’at women.” Ezra cleared his throat. “But that is serious, my friend. That piece of shit was untouchable.” He thought for a moment. “You are sure,” he added, “the bullet was meant for him and not you?”
“No,” I said truthfully, “I’m not.”
“So. This favor. I sense it’s going to be a good one.”
He was right about that.
“I need to get out of France and into Israel on a hot Greek passport.”
“You should work for the Mossad, my friend. It would be so much nicer. They give you proper passports. And they don’t shoot their own operators, eh?”
“Eh.”
“From the Israeli side it’s OK. Send me a picture of the passport. Say nothing to no one. Just show them your passport. That’s it. Barur?”
I told him it was crystal clear.
The four-and-a-half-hour flight, he said—a private charter from Paris to Tel Aviv—would take twenty-four hours and cost sixty thousand US dollars to arrange, including ground transportation. He would send a car to me in Paris tomorrow that would take me straight to the aircraft at Le Bourget—a business airfield seventeen klicks northeast of where I was holed up. As with most other private flights, the paperwork would be handled prior to boarding. At Ben Gurion I would be met airside by Ezra’s man—who would navigate Israeli immigration for me, and take me to a hotel.
“But, Max,” he cautioned me, “about the French, I can do nothing.”
In the background I could hear the sounds of Ezra’s world breaking into the call—hard, high cricket song and the chatter of monkeys. It brought back memories of the heat, the unceasing sweat, the smell of exhaust fumes and rotting vegetation. I imagined Ezra’s eyes, unreadable beneath heavy, drooping lids.
“It’s very, very unlikely the French will interfere,” he went on. “It’s a private place, Le Bourget. Only businessmen and air shows. They never check flights like this. Never, never. But if this Interpol shtut blows up and they do, then you’d better pray that Bulgarian fuck did his job with that passport, my friend. It’s a risk you take. About this I have to be absolutely clear.”
“Got it.”
“Over and out, buddy.”
I signaled to Baaz and he cut the connection.
“Who was that?” he asked.
“Let’s just say it was a friend of mine. He helped me out on a job last year. He’s going to send a plane. Tomorrow. I need to message him with a pickup point.”
“A plane? What, you mean like a private jet?” he said excitedly. “He’s going to send a private jet for us?” As soon as he’d said it, he regretted it, and he looked down, blushing.
“No, Baaz. He’s sending a private jet for me.”
“But . . .” He looked up, crestfallen, through the black wells of his eyes. “But we’re in this together, right? You helped me and I helped you.” He looked at the screens and around the room. “Am helping you. Max and Baaz. Sounds good, doesn’t it?”
“No, Baaz. It doesn’t. I know everything feels OK now, safe and warm up here—no one fucking with us, no one trying to kick the door in. No one trying to kill us. Last night already seems like a crazy dream, right? A great story to tell your mates one day.”
His shoulders sagged. There was something about him I couldn’t put my finger on. It was the same feeling I’d had in the catacombs, something not quite right about him. His responses weren’t . . . normal. No one rational survives a firefight only to turn around once it’s over and beg to get stuck in again—no one except the Paras and the legally sane psychos who swelled the ranks of Special Forces. And he was neither a red beret nor a psychopath; of that much I was sure.
“But it’s not some story,” I continued. “It’s really fucking serious. We got out of those tunnels by the skin of our teeth. Believe me, I’ve been in the shit before. Deep in it. But no matter how bad it gets, it can always get worse.”
My voice had gotten louder, imploring him to listen. But I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know. Young men infected with romantic notions about adventure can do wildly dangerous things. I knew. I’d been one myself. We were both standing up now. He looked away, struggling to find the words he wanted.
“I don’t want to tell my mates,” he said quietly, staring first at the ceiling and then at the floor. “I don’t have any mates to tell, anyway. I am twenty-two years old. My father is in prison in Chandigarh, and my mother never leaves the house—which is worse than being in bloody prison. My cousins think I’m a freak because I can do math, and my brothers think I’m”—he summoned the word with difficulty—“a traitor because I’m not interested in any of their nationalist Khalistan nonsense. I’m supposed to be doing this bloody master’s degree, but my professor is actually retarded, I can hardly speak enough French to order a meal, never mind get laid, and the only person I’ve had to stay is a bloody Irish spook, or whatever the hell you are.”
“OK,” I said. It was hard not to smile. “You’ve been very brave, and I’m very grateful, but—”
“But I thought we were friends,” he cut in. The fingers on both his hands were drumming the air now, as if typing reams of unseen digits on an invisible keyboard. “We are friends, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” I said. “We are. And friends look out for each other, right?”
“Right.”
&nbs
p; “We looked out for each other in the tunnels. And you’ve looked after me up here. But I can’t look out for you where I’m going. . . . Man, I don’t even know where I’m going, never mind what I’m going to do when I get there. But you have to get away. Lie low, have a holiday. Right now, no one knows you’re involved in any of this. And believe me, that’s a really, really good thing.”
“How much is it?” he said, still refusing to look me in the eye. Even though we were standing a foot apart, I wasn’t sure he’d heard a word I’d said.
“How much is what?”
“The jet. How much does it cost? Expensive, I bet.”
“Yes. It’s expensive. Where are you going with this?”
“How much? Ten thousand dollars? Twenty?”
“Sixty,” I admitted. “It will cost sixty grand.”
Under the circumstances that was both exorbitant—I had no way of getting the fare that didn’t involve robbery—and supremely reasonable: how much is anyone prepared to pay for their freedom? In my case, right then, right there, the answer was Everything.
“OK. So, Mr. Max, how are you going to pay your Israeli friend sixty thousand dollars when you have”—he glanced at the money spread out on the table—“two thousand two hundred and forty-five euros, and, ah, a hundred dollars?” He looked me straight in the eye then. “Tricky, huna?”
He bent down and leaned across me and opened a secure web browser on one of the laptops between us. Left-handed, he typed in a few strokes and turned the screen toward me, angling it back so I could read it standing up. It was an Ethereum cryptocurrency trading account. His holdings showed as 1,225.5 coins.
“And?”
“And I can pay for your flight. Our flight.”
I felt my estimation of his mental stability slipping. I needed to appease him. Carefully. As much as he could be a risk to himself, his fantasies posed a threat to me, too. But I also needed to find a way of financing the flight. Ezra wouldn’t press me for the money, but eventually the debt would have to be settled. And this time I couldn’t rely on Her Majesty’s Government to pick up the tab.
“But,” I said, pointing at the screen, “you only have twelve hundred coins.” He grinned. And then it dawned on me. “Baaz . . . how many dollars are there to one of these Ethereum coins?”
“Today, 1,389 dollars and 18 cents. Yesterday, 1,377 dollars and 72 cents.” He closed the browser. “While we were sleeping, I made 14,044 dollars and 23 cents.”
“What? But . . . twelve hundred and . . .” I struggled with the multiplication.
“OK, 1,225.5 coins are worth 1,702,440 US dollars and 9 cents.” I opened my mouth, goldfishlike, but Baaz plowed on. “On the second of January last year I invested 10,000 dollars in Ether. One Ether was worth 8 dollars and 16 cents then.”
“I . . . I don’t know where to begin. I mean, for a start, where on earth did you get ten thousand dollars from?”
“From my auntie. ‘Living expenses,’ huna?”
“Wow, that’s . . .” I started to laugh. “That’s crazy.” Baaz started to laugh, too. “You’re a millionaire. And your auntie . . . she has no idea, does she?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head, grinning from ear to ear. “I think today would be a good day to cash in, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think it would.”
* * *
—
THE CHALLENGER 300 banked hard to the southeast. The dark lines of the boulevards cut the city into what looked like slabs of stone, paving the Île-de-France white in the weak morning sun. The little streets I’d raced along two days before merged into a web of fine black lines between them, knitting the capital together. Of the underworld that stretched out south of the Seine, there was no sign: no ripple in the lanes and highways, no hint of what lay beneath. Not even from that unique perspective hundreds of feet above the ground, it seemed, could the whole of the city be seen. The big, bright imperial capital was as lost to the catacombs as the dead they concealed were lost to the world above.
But as we climbed higher and the buildings shrank, the Arc de Triomphe began to look like the sepulchres in Montparnasse, the Champs-Élysées and the wheel of the avenues spinning away from it like walkways for the curious and the bereaved to meander among the graves. The picture warped and juddered in the slipstream, and for a moment it looked as if the city was consuming itself in the haze. And then a blanket of gray spread beneath the winking green eye of the starboard wingtip and Paris was buried under the clouds.
I adjusted the Grach in the waistband of my jeans and stretched out in the beige leather seat. The flight attendant who’d brought me a double Johnnie Walker Black before takeoff returned with an ashtray. I unwrapped the packet of Gauloises I’d lifted from Lukov’s corpse and lit the tobacco. The smoke was cool and soothing and I dragged it down deep into my lungs, holding it there for a long moment before exhaling and blurring the cabin with a blue-gray fog. That was the great thing about private jets: no security, and no No Smoking signs.
The other seven seats were empty. It took a day and a night of reasoning and bargaining, but in the end Baaz saw sense. Or at least he said he saw sense. At first I reminded him that Indians couldn’t travel to Israel without a visa—a plausible argument, until he produced a British passport. Then I put the frighteners on, to which his only response was to make more tea. In the end I tried the oldest trick in the espionage handbook: flattery. I convinced him that he was more use to “the operation” in Paris than he was in Tel Aviv—a secret, secure comms base that I could call on if the going got rough. What he got from me was the promise of teamwork—in spirit, if not in person. He sulked for a while, and then grudgingly accepted the wisdom of it. I knew the sting of disappointment would fade faster than that of a 9mm round.
What he didn’t get was a guaranteed repayment plan. But like he said himself, while I waited for Ezra to send the car to the Best Western hotel at the southern end of Rue du Texel, “It’s all just Monopoly money, anyway.” He converted his “winnings,” as he called them, into fiat: actual dollars, in an actual, numbered Swiss account, which he could spend as he liked. I asked him if a withdrawal could give away his identity to anyone inclined to investigate. He drummed the fingertips of his left and right hands together, frenetically. It wasn’t where you banked that compromised your anonymity, he said, so much as where you were from.
“If you’re American and you bank in Zurich,” he summed up, “you’re fucked. If you’re Indian, you’re sound.”
I was banking on a long shot: that when I found Rachel, she would believe me, believe in me. The thread that connected us as kids had unraveled across a lifetime of secrets and lies. I hoped it had not yet snapped. When I stripped away the uncertainties of the lethal money-go-round, all my mission amounted to was convincing Rachel that I hadn’t killed Doc—and that whoever had might be after her next. And I was one day ahead of an enemy as tangible as a ghost.
I stubbed out the cigarette and closed my eyes and tried to calculate the size of the void in my knowledge that yawned in front of me. Colonel Ellard had trained us to measure the dimensions of the things we didn’t know with reconnaissance and intelligence—narrowing the parameters of any operation as far as we could, remembering always that spooks could set you up and your eyes could deceive. But however much he tried to make us soldiers, he tried harder to make us gamblers—to accept that we would not, could not, ever know everything. “In the end,” he told us, “you will always roll the dice.” And no one—but no one—knew when they would throw a seven.
I surrendered to the rhythm of the engines, and the Scotch worked its magic. I closed my eyes and felt myself slipping into sleep. But the darkness was confounded by a thousand fragments of wars gone by; of Frank leaving Doherty’s Pub in Ballina; and of my mother, sinking as the faintest trace of a smile played about her lips.
As I went under, the Challe
nger reached cruising altitude, steady on a course set first toward the Alps, then over the heads of the bankers handling Baaz’s profits, and then beyond, across the Balkans and the Aegean, above the eastern Mediterranean and onward, until its tires left a little rubber on the landing strip of the Promised Land.
20
The plane landed at half past three in the afternoon, local time. Ezra’s man was waiting for me airside, a security statue in dark glasses, suited and booted, arms folded across a barrel chest, standing stock-still on the apron. He took my passport, led me through security and drove me to the Hilton—a modern concrete block that loomed above the seafront, forty-five minutes’ walk southwest of the main university campus. I checked in, went briefly up to the room—a well-appointed business box on the fifth floor paid for by Ezra’s company—unmade the bed, dropped a towel on the bathroom floor and left immediately, hanging the Do Not Disturb sign on the door handle.
Then I walked north along the promenade—a narrow walkway sandwiched between the reddening sea and the winter-shabby dun of Independence Park. At least I knew my way around. I’d been in and out of Tel Aviv a dozen times or more over the past decade. I liked being there, the feeling that anything might happen—and that, when it did, it was never quite as advertised. It was an edgy but oddly relaxing place—foreign in almost every respect and yet, somehow, it always reminded me of Dublin: great bars and pretty girls and every shade of weapons-grade nutter on God’s green earth.
I stopped for a moment and looked out across Metsitsim Beach. The sun was sinking like a fireship, setting the pale blue sky ablaze, lengthening the shadows of a gaggle of children jostling past me. A couple of surfers in wet suits dragged themselves out of the waves and onto the darkening sand. It was an unseasonably warm afternoon, nearly seventy degrees. After the steel-gray cold of northern Europe it was good to feel the heat of the sun before it slid completely beneath the horizon.
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