45
The Mossad officer looked out the window through the early evening’s haze to the twinkling lights of Tel Aviv and then beyond, into the vast blue of the Mediterranean Sea.
The man retained the clarity of mind to know this view was probably very beautiful, but he was not able to enjoy it as he should. He was a captive here in this room, and the big city, so close it looked as if he could touch it, just drew a deeper contrast to his predicament.
He understood his situation intellectually. The men and the guns and the orders to sit and wait made it clear he was a prisoner. But despite this difficult predicament, the Mossad officer did not understand what the hell he had done to find himself here in the first place.
Yanis Alvey had served in Israeli intelligence for twenty-six years, most of these as a member of Metsada, a paramilitary and direct action arm of the Mossad. He had been a shooter, then when he reached the age where he could not keep up with the younger men in his unit any longer, he graduated from black Nomex and balaclavas to an Armani suit and a BlackBerry. He became a coordinator for Metsada operations, overseeing logistics and planning of the unit’s kill/capture missions all over the globe.
Life in the Mossad had been good to Alvey, until very recently that was, when he was shot during an in extremis operation in Hamburg, Germany. He spent most of the following month recovering at Tel HaShomer Hospital in Ramat Gan, a suburb east of Tel Aviv, before finally being released to go home for a lengthy convalescence.
After several weeks his wound had all but healed, and he was nearly ready to return to work. Then, just five days ago, he was called in to a meeting at Mossad’s headquarters on the Coastal Highway north of Tel Aviv. Here he met with a superior officer who asked him a question that tipped Alvey off he was in serious trouble.
“Yanis, yes or no. Did you, in any way, facilitate the escape of the Gray Man from Europe last month?”
Yanis Alvey had done exactly that, and he’d done it without authorization. That his superiors suspected likely meant that his career in the Mossad was in jeopardy.
But Alvey told the truth because he was a man of good character. “Yes. I alone helped the Gray Man leave Europe.”
There were no more questions. He was told to stand and then he was handcuffed. It was done politely — no one thought the legendary Yanis Alvey was any sort of a threat — but he was restrained nevertheless. He was driven a kilometer east to Ramat HaSharon, a northern suburb of Tel Aviv, to a Mossad safe house on a gentle hillside. He’d visited here many times in his career, but this time, for the first time, it was clear he was a captive. He was uncuffed and led into a small apartment in the expansive home and told to remain inside. Security forces patrolled the garden and the driveway outside, and in the home outside Yanis’s door, bored Mossad officers half his age sat around and smoked and watched TV, keeping one eye on the older man locked in the apartment.
They brought Alvey his food and a collection of daily newspapers, but he had no more contact with the outside world, and no information about what was going to happen to him.
After the first day Alvey demanded to speak with Menachem Aurbach, director of the Mossad, but Alvey’s minders here had no way to make that happen, and to Yanis his handlers looked as if they had less of a clue about what was going on than he did.
So he just sat there, waiting for answers. He knew this strategy, of course. Aurbach was keeping him prisoner, softening him up, taking his time to allow Alvey to spend some time realizing the severity of his predicament and coming to terms with the fact his career, and his freedom, could be so easily threatened.
Late in the evening of his fifth full day here in the Ramat HaSharon safe house he sat looking out the window at the twinkling lights of Tel Aviv to the south and the water to the west. His near catatonic state was broken by some commotion outside of his room, and then the door opened.
Menachem Aurbach, the swarthy old man who ran the Mossad, stood in the doorway, along with two younger officers. In his right hand Aurbach held a thin blue file folder. He entered with a tired little smile and a nod to Alvey, and then with a wave of the folder he bade Alvey to follow him over to a small sitting area with a table in the corner.
Yanis did as his director asked, and soon the two men sat close to each other without a word, Aurbach calm and relaxed; Alvey tense and on edge.
The director of the Mossad waved his hand in the air and the two other men left the room. Only when they were gone and the door was shut did Aurbach speak.
“Shalom. Ma nishma, Yanis?” Hello. How are you, Yanis?
“Tov, Menachem. Toda.” Fine, Menachem. Thank you.
“The wound to your stomach has healed?”
“The wound is better. But I do not understand why I am here. I do not deserve this treatment from the service I served loyally for so long.”
Aurbach looked around the little apartment. “Five days of house arrest. You are still young, relative to me, anyway. I can see how a few days locked in a home, even a nice home like this, could be a nuisance for you. Me? I’d consider house arrest a wonderful holiday.” He laughed aloud and patted Yanis on the knee. “Why won’t someone sentence me to a little vacation?”
Alvey did not smile. He leaned forward, feeling the pinch of tethered scar tissue in his midsection as he did so. The gunshot wound had healed, but the scar, like the memory of the pain, would remain with him forever. “I know why you put me here, but I don’t know what I did wrong. I helped the man who saved our prime minister from assassination. How can that be bad?”
Aurbach put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it with a wooden match from a box he pulled from his pocket, then extinguished the match with a swirl of his wrist. As he blew out smoke he said, “You did it unilaterally, without telling your control. Without telling me. Why was that?”
Alvey spoke plainly and honestly. “Because the Americans wanted this man dead, and I worried you would give him to them. Your good relationship with the USA is a great benefit to this service and to our nation, don’t misunderstand me. But your good relationship with them would have meant the death of Mr. Gentry, and I thought we owed him better after what he did for us.”
Aurbach nodded. Clearly he couldn’t have been happy with the explanation his subordinate had just given. The man was, after all, confessing to going behind Aurbach’s back on an operation. But the old man did seem to appreciate the candor.
The seventy-two-year-old gently placed the thin blue file folder on the table between the men, and then he laid his rough hand on it. Patting it gently, he said, “I am going to tell you a little story, but before I begin the story, I will tell you how the story will end. It will end with you covering your head with your hands and begging forgiveness.”
“Forgiveness for what?”
“Forgiveness for your complicity in allowing the Gray Man to live after what he has done.”
Alvey just said, “Tell me.”
“What do you know about a Mossad asset with the code name of Hawthorn?”
Alvey shook his head. “Nothing. I’ve never heard the name.”
“Well, believe me, you know the man’s work.” The statement hung in the air a long time. It was all the more curious to Alvey because he never knew the plainspoken Aurbach to speak with such melodrama.
The younger man just replied, “Who is he?”
Slowly Menachem leaned back in his chair and puffed on his cigarette. “He was Iraqi. Hawthorn’s father worked for us first. He was a pilot in Saddam’s air force. This was the eighties, mind you, shortly after Osirak. We recruited the father while he was on leave in Cyprus. It wasn’t an ideological recruitment; he was chasing money and girls, and we gave him a little taste, then offered him much more of both for helping us. He agreed. He wasn’t terribly useful at first, he didn’t provide us much in the way of intelligence about Saddam’s air power capabilities, so we cut him loose, not wanting to throw good money after bad.