ZERO TWO HUNDRED. It had been five hours since I’d said good night to Baaz. Before going upstairs to sleep, I’d made sure he was checked into the room next to mine, at the very end of the corridor. There was only the roof above us; below his room were the kitchen and the corridor to the bar. There was no sign of anyone occupying the rooms opposite. January was not the most popular month to visit Israel.
I sat on the edge of the bed with the lights off and listened. Outside, from the beach below, the gentle rasp of surf on sand and, when the wind picked up, a faint pinging of halyards against masts in the marina. The TV set in the other room next to mine had died down after midnight. And from Baaz’s room there was only silence. I concentrated on my breathing and cleared my mind.
There was only one thing to do.
I stood up and dressed fully and gathered up what few possessions I had. I tucked the SIG into the back of my jeans. Light-footed, I stepped out into the hallway. Everything was still. No cameras. No staff except for the night porter downstairs. I slipped the spare key card into the port on Baaz’s door. The lock whirred and the LED shone green above the handle. I swung myself around the frame as quickly and quietly as I could, leaking as little light into his room as possible.
My eyes adjusted to the gloom. The windows were shut tight, the air rank with fried food and sweaty feet. Baaz had fallen asleep clutching his laptop. White light from the screen saver illuminated his face. Stretched out on his back, mouth open, snoring softly, he lay surrounded by sheets of hand-scrawled notes and strings of numbers. His hair was unfurled, masses of it, spilling over the pillow and keyboard. Next to him, on the bedside table, the remains of a half-eaten veggie burger. I stepped closer. He looked like a child.
Max, I thought, he is a child.
I drew the SIG carefully and cocked the hammer. I’d rather have had a .380. I’d rather not have had to do it at all. I don’t like the act of killing. And no professional likes collateral damage. But Baaz had made himself a player. And, I told myself, in comparison with what the Russians would do to him when—not if—they caught up with him, a bullet now would be a mercy. What I’d said about his auntie was harsh, but it was true. I was a single, isolated target. He was the node in a network of innocents. Anyone prepared to kill Lukov for that hundred-dollar bill wouldn’t hesitate to wipe out Baaz’s entire family if they thought it would get them closer to what they wanted.
I stood at Baaz’s feet and lined the front sight up on the space between the tip of his chin and his Adam’s apple. The shot would vaporize his cerebellum and sever his spinal cord. Instant. Painless. The mattress and the thickly furnished room would absorb most of the noise. If anyone heard anything, it would be as unremarkable as a distant slammed door. By turning up in Tel Aviv, Baaz had ensured that I’d be unable to operate freely—and, consequently, Rachel would remain beyond help.
But it was more than that. For days I’d wondered if Baaz was really all he seemed. From the expert way he navigated the catacombs to the casual way he’d rocked up in Israel: naive, maybe; intelligence agent, possibly; inconvenience, definitely. Because I’d needed him, I hadn’t interrogated him. A bullet to the brain would end the speculation. Permanently.
The Israelis would do nothing. A clean hit, no witnesses, their weapon. They knew I had the note and needed me alive. The crook of my finger rested on the trigger. People who got in the way, people who didn’t get out of the way: any operator too squeamish to tidy up was not long for this world.
But this wasn’t a job. It was an obsession.
I heard my mother’s voice then, a distorted hum at the back of my head, asking me exactly what I thought I had become.
Baaz stirred and muttered something in Punjabi. I kept very still, and he started snoring again. It was justifiable; I could justify it. In the morning I knew I could look in the mirror and still see Max and not a monster.
Baaz slumbered on, four and a half pounds of pressure from the grave. I raised my left hand, palm out, behind the pistol to shield my eyes from any blood or bone blown back toward my face.
I felt the pressure of the trigger and looked aside.
Goddamn it, Max. Just do it.
On the bed beside him I saw the numbers he’d been writing out, over and over again. It was the same number—reversed, multiplied, factored, divided against itself. Rows and rows of tiny scrawled digits. Perhaps a hundred or more times he had returned to the same eight-digit number. My finger crept on the steel. I focused on the number.
The number. I knew that number. I’d been staring at it for days. Staring through it.
Fuck.
I dropped my palm and picked up one of the sheets of paper. I turned it over. On the reverse he’d written, simply, Arkhangel!
I switched the SIG to my left hand and worried the hundred-dollar bill out of my ticket pocket. I unfolded it one-handed, peering into the folds in the weak light afforded by the computer screen. I studied the serial number and Baaz’s spidery digits. They matched exactly. Baaz had written it out with compulsive accuracy, working it into a series of equations and computations that I didn’t even begin to understand. What I did know immediately, though, was that if I pulled the trigger, I probably never would. I put the bill back in my pocket, thumbed the decocking lever on the 9mm and tucked it into my jeans.
And then I put my hand on Baaz’s shoulder and rocked him gently back into the land of the living.
23
I told you,” Baaz said, drumming the middle fingers of his right hand against his temple, “it’s bloody crowded in there.”
I was sitting on the edge of his bed now. He hadn’t startled when I woke him, but he was clearly embarrassed by the situation, wrapping his hair up, struggling to make eye contact.
“Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have forgotten it. It’s like . . .” He struggled for a simile. “A worm! Just like a worm. You know when you hear a bit of a song and it goes round in your head, sometimes for days? Just like that.”
“The banknote, that number on that bill, is like a song?”
“Correct. But not just that number. All numbers. It’s like they have a rhythm, a tune. Lots of people can remember songs. My auntie knows hundreds of them. Always singing. My mother, too. But my father is a numbers man. Just like me. He says numbers are like the hymns of the gurus. They have patterns. And patterns have meanings. And meanings have solutions.”
“And solutions . . . ?” Realization began to dawn on me. Baaz had figured something out. I felt a surge of adrenaline in my guts.
“Solutions have applications.” He pulled the covers up higher over his chest. “But only,” he continued, “if you know what the problem is.”
“OK.” I spoke calmly, as much to coax him as to relax myself. It felt as if I was teetering on a cliff edge, about to find out whether I could fly. “So . . . what’s the answer?”
He looked at me blankly. “What answer?”
I tried again, slowly, thinking how best to frame a question I had no idea how to formulate.
“What does it mean, Baaz? The number on the banknote. What does it . . . signify?”
“Oh!” he said. “Oh, I don’t know. Not yet, anyway.”
My shoulders sagged. He was exasperating. And I was a fool for imagining his nighttime scrawling amounted to anything more than a distraction. There was no silver bullet. All he’d done was to buy himself more time. I breathed out hard and clenched my jaw, trying my best to smile through my disappointment.
“So you came here why, exactly?” I asked.
“Because your friend told me to.”
“My friend? What friend?”
“The friend you spoke to from my flat in Paris.”
“What, Ezra? He called back?”
“No, I called him.”
“You called Ezra?” He was nothing if not unpredictable. “Why did you do that, Baaz?”
>
I tried and failed to imagine how that conversation had played out. Ezra’s promised “surprise” had suddenly been realized.
“Because I needed to talk to you and you don’t have a phone.”
“Right. And you needed to tell me what? That you really like that number, but you don’t know what it means?”
He nodded.
“And you told that to Ezra and he spoke to, uh, Talia, and that’s how you got here?”
“No, I got here on easyJet.” I stood up and slid open his wardrobe door. He looked at me warily. “What are you doing?”
“Raiding your minibar.”
“What for?”
“A drink.”
I inspected the cabinet. Chivas Regal. Shit. I emptied one of the miniatures into his empty water glass, added some Evian from the fridge and swilled it across my teeth. It would do. I poured in a second miniature and pulled from my jeans the packet of Marlboros and book of matches that the Shabak agent had given me and shook out a smoke.
“Get up,” I said. “We’re going outside.”
I needed some air. And besides, I thought, most likely the Talias can hear every word we say in here.
* * *
—
“OK, THEN, CLEVER clogs. If you don’t know what the number means, why bust a gut to find me? I need clear, simple answers. No ‘rhythms.’ No ‘hymns of the gurus.’ Just facts, all right?”
Three o’clock on a Wednesday morning and Tel Aviv was finally asleep. We were back on the terrace, sitting this time at a low table by the pool. The underwater lights had been switched off and the surface was inky black. It felt like we were at the edge of an abyss. Baaz had wound his hair up in a simple turban and looked more relaxed. I shifted on the cushions and felt the SIG dig into my spine. He’d come back unscathed from a journey he didn’t even know he’d undertaken. Perhaps we’d both been saved. I tore a match out of the booklet and struck it and lit a cigarette. Baaz moved away from me slightly and cleared his throat. I exhaled and waited.
“The serial number,” he said, “is 73939133. That’s obviously a prime number.”
“Obviously.” I nodded. I didn’t know where he was going, but I was on safe ground. Prime numbers can be divided only by one and themselves. I’d at least learned that much in school.
“But it’s a special prime number,” he continued. “Because it’s the largest right truncatable prime in base ten.”
“Right.” I dragged hard on the Marlboro. It had taken him less than thirty seconds to lose me. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” he said, “that if you remove the right-hand integer”—I cocked my head—“uh, number, it’s still prime. So 7393913, 739391, 73939, and so on, they’re all prime numbers, all the way down to 7. It’s really interesting because there are only eighty-three right truncatable primes—in base ten, anyway.”
“Fascinating.” I blew a cloud of smoke up into the night sky. “Tell me,” I asked, swallowing my pride, “are we at the ‘patterns’ stage here, or the ‘solutions’ stage? Because I can tell you how many mils to correct a scoped target at a thousand meters uphill in a stiff breeze. But I’m not exactly sure I could tell you what base ten is.”
“Base ten is the—”
“What,” I interrupted, losing my patience, “does it mean, Baaz? Why is the fact the number is a ‘right’ whatever important?” I sucked on the cigarette. “Man, you have risked a lot to be here. More than you know. Much more. So please, please tell me—for my sake as well as yours—that there is more to this than a quirk of the Federal Reserve’s printing process.”
“That’s it!” He stood up, his voice rising with excitement. “You guessed! I knew you would!”
“Jesus Christ! Would you ever sit down?” I looked around. Except for the night lights in the bar the joint was dead. He sat again, perched on the edge of his seat. “Guessed what?” He was so excited now that his fingers drummed a constant tattoo in front of him.
“The Fed. That’s it. Look. Look at the bill.”
“Sure. I will. Later, though.”
“No, now,” he urged. “Let’s look at it now. I can show you.”
With misgivings, I stubbed out the cigarette and removed the note from my pocket. Possession of the bill was, it seemed, both a death sentence and stay of execution. If we were being watched, the location of the note would be beyond doubt. But with the high wall of the hotel behind us and the sea in front we weren’t directly overlooked and there was no obvious position for a snooper, or a sniper, to take up. I unfolded the bill and we sat closer. I struck another match and held it over the ragged slip of printed paper.
“OK, what am I looking at?”
“Here.” Baaz pointed. “These two letters, before the serial number: LL. The first L is the series of the banknote. See, here at the bottom, 2009A.”
“OK.”
“And the second L is the Federal Reserve Bank that printed it. There are loads of them: Dallas, New York, Virginia. L stands for San Francisco. You can see here, too, under the serial number, it says L12. So it’s definitely the San Francisco Fed that printed it.” I dropped the match before it burned my fingers and the note dissolved back into the shadows. “Except they didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“Print it.”
“I don’t understand.” It was hard to make out his expression, but the glow of the night lights in the bar caught in the corners of his eyes. “How could you know that? Actually”—I lit another cigarette—“how do you know any of this?”
“I asked a good friend of mine.”
“I see. And who is your friend?”
“Professor Google. He’s, like, totally amazing. You can ask him anything.”
“Are you fucking with me?”
“No! You can check it yourself, Max—seriously. Did you see the other letter, after the serial number? It’s a J. That series of bill was actually printed in 2013. Except that bill wasn’t, couldn’t have been, because the LL J notes end at LL 44800000.”
“So the numbers and the letters don’t match up?”
He peered at me with a look that mingled pity with incredulity. “Correct.”
“And that, combined with the fact that the serial number is a right”—I searched for the term I’d already forgotten—“prime—this special number—made you get on a flight?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. Ezra made me get on the flight. He wanted me to come and find you.”
“Ezra told you to find me?” It was a lot to take in. “And why did he do that?”
“Because he has a message for you that I don’t think he wants Talia or her friends to know about. He said I should tell only you.” He paused for a moment. “Should I tell you now?”
“Yes, Baaz.” My own voice was rising, too. I took a deep breath. “You should tell me now.”
“OK.” He cleared his throat, every inch the messenger arrived from Marathon with news of victory. “Ezra told me to tell you that you must visit Moshe Mendel Katz in Mea She’arim.” He paused again, and then added, less formally, “About the banknote, I mean. Ezra says he knows a lot about money.”
I pinched the sleep out of my eyes with my left thumb and index finger.
“And why didn’t you mention this when you arrived?”
“I wanted to! But you started up with all your big-man bakwaas about my auntie’s head in a box. And I haven’t even got a bloody sister! You think I’m a stupid kid, right? Well . . . fine. That’s bloody fine. But I’m here and I did what I was asked and . . .” Tears welled up in the catchlights of his eyes. “And I just wanted to help.”
I put my hand on his arm and squeezed it lightly. “OK, partner,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
And I was.
24
Good luck, brother.”
Almost the entire quarter was populated by strictly Orthodox Haredi Jews. Men wearing wide-brimmed black fedoras and long black silk coats hurried about their business. Women sporting wigs and prim skirts bustled about beside them. The entrance to the district was presided over by a sign printed in red and black block capitals warning “WOMEN AND GIRLS” visiting the enclave to cover up:
PLEASE DO NOT PASS THROUGH OUR NEIGHBORHOOD IN IMMODEST CLOTHES
Baaz and I looked each other over.
“It says, No trousers,” he pointed out nervously.
“Don’t worry,” I reassured him. “That’s only for women. Besides, you look gorgeous.”
“I feel like a bloody Martian. Take me to your leader, huna.”
He was right. We looked entirely out of place. Blending in simply wasn’t an option—though Baaz was making things worse by spinning three-sixty while taking in the strangeness of it all.
“This is totally crazy. Usually it’s just me wearing the funny hat. But check out these guys.” He stared unceremoniously at the passersby. But they ignored him, us, entirely.
“If only we were in East Jerusalem,” I muttered to myself. My Arabic was good, my Hebrew almost nonexistent. I grabbed Baaz’s arm and pointed him due west. “We need to keep moving. Let’s get this over with; then you can be on your way.” Although where he’d be on his way to was unclear. Even he must have suspected that going back to his flat in Paris was becoming increasingly unfeasible. “Remind me,” I asked, “what are we looking for?”
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