Dante woke to the blinding whiteness of a hospital room. Sunlight streamed through two windows and he felt its warmth on his shoulders above the bandages. He turned his head away from the sunlight and discovered Crystal Quest sitting on the next bed, munching crushed ice as she worked on a crossword puzzle. Benny Sapir, the Mossad spymaster who had briefed him in Washington, watched from the foot of the bed.
“Where the hell am I, Fred?” Dante asked weakly.
“He’s come back to life,” Benny observed.
“About time,” Quest growled; she didn’t want Dante to take her presence there as a manifestation of softness. “I have other things to do in life besides holding his hand. Hey, Dante, being Irish, you ought to know this one: Joyce’s ‘Silence, exile, and …’ Seven letters, starts with a ‘c.’”
“Cunning. That was Stephen Dedalus’s strategy for survival in Portrait of an Artist.”
“Cunning. Ha! It fits perfectly.” Fred peered over the top of the newspaper, her bloodshot eyes focusing on the wounded agent. “You’re in Haifa, Dante, in an Israeli hospital. The doctors had to pry some metal out of your lower back. The bad news is you’ll wind up with a disagreeable cavity and a gimpy left leg, the result of a compressed nerve. The good news is there will be no major infirmities, and you’ll be able to tuck a pistol behind your back without it producing a bulge in your clothing.”
“Did you capture the imam?”
“We collared the guy who was masquerading as an imam. A direct descendant of the Prophet my ass! I suppose it won’t hurt if you fill him in,” she told Benny.
“Izzat Al-Karim was a pseudonym. Your imam’s real name was Aown Kikodze; he was the only son of an Afghan father and his third wife, a teenage Kazakh girl who won a local beauty contest in Alma-Ata. Kikodze studied dentistry in Alma-Ata and was working as a dentist’s assistant there in the early 1980s when he made hegira to Mecca, where he was discovered by Iranian talent scouts and recruited into Hezbollah. We first noticed him when he opened a mosque above a warehouse in southern Lebanon and began preaching some malarkey about the near enemy and the far enemy—nobody could make heads or tails out of what he was saying, but it came across like the Islamic version of what you Americans call fire and brimstone and he made a name for himself. Next thing you know he was sporting the black turban of a sayyid and running a Hezbollah training base. Even as we speak, my colleagues are trying to talk him into helping them with their inquiries into Hezbollah activities in the Bekaa.”
“I suspect they’ll succeed,” Fred said. “The Israelis are at war, Dante, so they don’t have weak-kneed civil libertarians breathing down their necks the way we do. If he’s still compos mentis when they finish with him, we get to get sloppy seconds.”
Dante turned on Benny. “Why didn’t you tell me all this when you briefed me in Washington?”
“If you’d been caught, you’d have talked. We didn’t want the putative imam to know we knew he was putative.”
“Yeah, well, we lost Djamillah,” Dante said bitterly.
Crystal Quest slid off the bed and approached Dante. “The Levant is full of girls named Djamillah. Which one are you talking about?”
“The Djamillah in Beirut, for God’s sake, the Alawite who was posing as a prostitute. They executed her six hours before the helicopters arrived. I’ll lay odds you don’t want to hear how.”
Fred snorted. “Oh, that Djamillah! Jesus, Dante, for someone in your line of work you can be awfully naive. ‘Djamillah’ was a legend. Her real name was Zineb. She wasn’t posing as a prostitute; she was working as a prostitute in Dubai when she was recruited. And she wasn’t an Alawite, she was an Iraqi Sunni. Thanks to some fancy footwork on our part, she believed she would be working for Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat. There was an elegant logic to this false flag pitch, if I do say so myself: Saddam detests the Shiites and their Iranian mentors, and by extension, he loathes Hezbollah, which is a Shiite client of the Iranian mullahs.”
Dante could hear Djamillah’s voice in his ear. You are one lousy lover, Irish. “Whoever she was, she tried to save me when she could have used what she knew to save herself.” He noticed the square of white silk hanging from a hook on the back of the door. “Do me a favor, bring me the bandanna, Fred.”
Crystal Quest retrieved the square of silk and folded it into Dante’s hand. “It’s a hell of a memento,” Benny said from the end of the bed. “You owe your life to that bandanna. When you didn’t turn up at the well, our raiding party decided to write you off. One of the teams taking a last look around the camp reported seeing a man lying next to a pickup wearing a white bandanna. It saved your life.”
“My Dante Pippen cover must be blown.”
“That’s the least of our problems,” Fred said with a titter. “One thing we have an endless supply of in Langley is legends. We’ll work up a brand new one for you when you’re back on your feet.”
Benny said, “Thanks to you, Dante, the operation was a great success.”
“It was a crying shame,” Dante said with sudden vehemence, and he meant it literally.
1997: MARTIN ODUM DISCOVERS THAT SHAMUS IS A YIDDISH WORD
LULLED BY THE DRONE OF THE JET ENGINES, MARTIN—HIS RIGHT leg jutting into the aisle, his left knee jammed into the back of the seat in front of him—had dozed off halfway through the flight and had missed the sight of the coastal shoal of Israel unrolling like a fulgent carpet under the wing of the plane. The wheels grinding out of their bays woke him with a start. He glanced at Stella, who was sound asleep in the seat next him.
He touched her shoulder. “We’re almost there.”
She nodded gloomily; the closer she got to Israel, the less sure she was about tracking down her sister’s runaway husband. What if she caught up with him? What then?
As a matter of simple tradecraft, they had come to Israel using different routes: She had taken a flight to London and gone by train to Paris and then flown on to Athens to catch the 2 A.M. flight to Tel Aviv: He had flown New York-Rome and spent several hours getting lost in crowds around the Colosseum before boarding a train to Venice and an overnight car ferry to Patras, where he caught a bus to Athens airport and then the plane to Israel. Martin, queuing behind Stella, had winked at the woman behind the counter and asked for a seat next to the good looking girl who had just checked in.
“Do you know her?” the woman had asked.
“No, but I’d like to,” he’d replied.
The woman had laughed. “You guys never give up, do you?”
Landing at Ben-Gurion Airport in a light drizzle, the plane taxied to the holding area and the captain, speaking in English over the intercom, ordered the passengers to remain seated for security reasons. Two lean young men, their shirttails hanging loose to hide the handguns tucked into their belts, strolled down the aisle, checking identity photos in passports against faces. One of the young men, wearing opaque sunglasses, reached Martin’s row.