Margolis struggled to maintain his composure. This was the type of oversight that he knew could destroy years of effort. Internally he was cursing himself. At the same time, in that instant, he was certain for the first time that Mikhail Gordienko was fully on his team. “Thank you, Mikhail Andreievich. I am very glad we are on the same side.”
Gordienko put the two integrated circuits into a separated area of his aluminum case and closed it.
Amit removed his anti-static wrist bracelet, stood and walked into the bedroom of the suite. He returned with two glasses and a bottle of Moët & Chandon Brut Imperial champagne. “I had room service bring this up earlier today,” he said. The bottle was dripping water from the ice bucket it had been in until a moment earlier. Amit was careful to keep the bottle over the rug.
Gordienko smiled as he peeled the bracelet from his wrist. “You remembered.” The tension in his body eased for the first time since he entered the room.
“I don’t forget important things, my friend.” Amit put the glasses down on the desk, popped the cork and poured some champagne.
Mikhail lifted his glass, no stranger to alcohol consumption. “To your health.”
Amit lifted his glass up. “To health.”
Amit sipped his champagne in western fashion. Mikhail chugged his beverage in one gulp, returning the glass to the desk top with a relish that announced his Russian heritage.
“Ah, that is good,” said the Russian. He looked into Amit’s eyes. “Who are you, really?”
“I am Michael Jenkins.”
“No. Really.”
Amit took another sip and put the glass down. “You know all you need to know about me, my friend. Anything else is counterproductive.”
Gordienko lifted the bottle of Moët and filled his glass back up. He took a sip this time. “When can you pay?” The request by the Russian was blunt, much in keeping with his temperament. The offer from Margolis that enticed the Russian to show up at this hotel room was a deal that guaranteed a tidy profit margin for Gordienko’s company. Times had been tough, with Russian arms exporters losing a lot of business to American companies in the wake of yet another Russian-supplied military having been easily destroyed by the U.S. Army. The latest victim, Iraq, was the second time in a dozen years that the country had been knocked off. The spectacle of a large paper army trained and supplied by Moscow being so handily defeated by the U.S. with minimal losses, made it a hard sell for Russian arms makers in the competitive global marketplace. Gordienko’s company, despite its ties into the Kremlin, could not thrive when Russian weapon systems were not selling. The result was that the cash flow of Phase Technologies Corporation, or PTC, was extremely tight and the offer from Margolis had to be considered.
The deal offered by Margolis allowed PTC to aggressively bid as a subcontractor to design dedicated chips for a Tor M-1E surface-to-air missile system being built for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Margolis would guarantee a nice profit for PTC if the company bid for the contract at cost, ensuring a win. Behind the scenes, a Canadian company controlled by “Michael Jenkins” entered into a technology consulting project with PTC that guaranteed a nice profit for no real work. For Gordienko the money was welcome. But the real motivation was the chance to inflict harm on an Islamic nation. He only hoped that whatever the real purpose was for the chips now in his briefcase, it would wreak massive destruction on Iran.
“I will pay you half of what I owe next week. The balance will be paid when the chips are inside the Tor computers.”
Gordienko nodded. He was satisfied with the business response, but still far from satisfied with his knowledge of the man across from him. “At least tell me what country. I know you are either American or Israeli or British, but I think American.”
“I am Canadian. You have seen my passport many times.” Amit smiled at the man he had successfully recruited into the service of Mossad eight months earlier.
“Come on Mike. I deserve to know at least this much. I deserve to know who I am working for right now.”
Amit looked out the window. If this same series of questions had occurred in Moscow, he would be very nervous about a setup. In the distance, a rain shower was moving in their direction. “I have friends in Washington. That’s as much as I will say.”
“American. I knew it.”
Amit Margolis smiled. He had not lied to his Russian friend, at least not directly. Disinformation was the ancient art of intelligence agencies and he was an artist. Seeds, he thought to himself. I am planting seeds.
The chips fabricated by Citadel would soon be on their way to Moscow to be tested, certified and then delivered by Phase Technologies Corporation to Diamond-Alnay Concern, the leading manufacturer of high-technology military equipment in Russia. The chips were destined for the command, control and network integration computers for 29 batteries of the mobile Tor M-1E systems purchased by Iran and scheduled for delivery in early 2007.
The Application Specific Integrated Circuits, or ASIC chips, were subcontracted to a Chinese chip foundry instead of being sourced inside Russia because the Russian government would not let the latest generation of Field Programmable Gate Array chips be sold for export. As designed by PTC, these specific ASIC chips would prohibit the Iranians from using symmetric enciphering keys longer than 110 bits and limit the number of targets that the system could track simultaneously — a safety valve for the remote possibility that the Russian Air Force might someday need to attack Iran, or the more likely risk that Iran might deliver one of these systems to an enemy of Russia. This type of degradation of cutting edge technology was a routine practice of both the U.S. and Russia when selling military hardware. Every country wanted to retain a qualitative military advantage if at all possible.
2 — The Kitchen Cabinet
“Gentlemen, please be seated.” These had become the trademark words of Eli Cohen to signal the start of any meeting. He would use this phrase even when, as now, everyone present was already seated. As the long-serving prime minister of Israel, Cohen commanded the full attention and respect of the small gathering. The date was Wednesday, May 20, 2009, and Prime Minister Cohen had just returned from Washington, where he held his first face-to-face meeting in the White House with the new President of the United States. He had no need to tell the men in this room just how poorly that meeting had gone; it had been the only news story occupying Israel’s attention for the last three days.
Cohen and the six other men in the room formed Israel’s unofficial ”Kitchen” Cabinet — the small group that made the most critical decisions facing the tiny nation of almost 6 million Jews and 1.7 million Arabs. The discussions of this group were always important. Sometimes the words being exchanged probed the very issue of Israel’s continued existence as a nation-state. Today was one of those days. The sense of isolation for these men was only accentuated by the meter of reinforced concrete that formed the walls and roof of this room in the basement of the prime minister’s office building located at 3 Kaplan Street in Jerusalem.
Cohen sat at the head of the conference table and opened a new bottle of water. He averaged about a bottle every hour — three liters over the course of his typically long work days, the end point of a habit started as a young Army sergeant in command of a Sherman tank during the Six Day War. At age 62 he still looked like he would be right at home inside a tank, his strong physique obvious despite his full head of gray hair and the lines that etched deeper on his face during times like this.
The prime minister took a long swig of water. “I will start by saying that my trip was as bad as you are all thinking,” he began. “If anything, the headlines understate the problem. The man who came here as a candidate last summer and gave that speech on Iran was just bullshitting for votes. Unfortunately I learned the man’s real thoughts on Monday. Frankly, I am not even sure we have an ally in the White House anymore.”