Janson raised his voice. “As if times weren’t tough enough already, Israel Weapon Industries faces fresh competition from China’s Norinco. Norinco wants my business, not to mention Serbian, Turkish, and Brazilian start-ups, who could teach even yourfactories a thing or two about bribery. IWI can make your life unpleasant, too. Not to mention your entire career.”
She stood abruptly, cold gaze fixed at a point in the middle of his forehead. “Welcome to Israel, Mr. Kurzweil.” She stamped an entry permit, instead of the passport—a routine dodge that allowed a businessman to enter the Arab nations that denied entry to those who had visited Israel.
He pocketed the Kurzweil passport. Then he surprised her with a warm Janson smile and a white lie of the sort that extinguished burning bridges: “Thank you. And may I say that if my schedule weren’t entirely booked I would invite you to dinner.”
A return smile made a hard mouth pretty. “If I weren’t married, I might accept.”
They shook hands. Janson rented a car and drove a short way from the airport to a high-end assisted-living complex in the Tel Aviv suburb of Nordiya. In the Mediterranean sunlight on a perfect June day it was a beautiful setting. Lush gardens and stands of palm trees surrounded cream-colored stucco apartment buildings that were crowned with red tile roofs and softened by waterfalls. A lavish clubhouse with flower boxes in its windows sprawled around a gigantic outdoor swimming pool.
Israel’s former Mossad operators could not ordinarily afford to end their days in the company of wealthily retired expatriate doctors, lawyers, and businessmen. But Miles Donner had more than his civil service pension to draw on, having worked his whole life under the cover of being a highly paid London-based travel photographer.
To Paul Janson, Miles Donner was “The Titan.”
“Better for a spy to be known for his failures than his successes,” Donner had taught Janson when Janson was in his twenties and Donner was sixty-five. “Best not to be known at all.”
No one had ever taught Janson more. No one knew as many secrets. Secrets came to Miles Donner and stuck to him like burrs on an aimlessly wandering sheep. But he was the original wolf under the sheepskin and had never spent an aimless moment in his long career serving Israel.
He had not looked like a titan, not with his soft face. Janson recalled sensitive features, full lips, warm eyes, and the easy, aloof manners of a middle-aged English gentleman who had prospered in the law or medicine. “Better to be underestimated than feared. Be soft. Surprise them with hard.”
The sight of a now-frail Donner struggling to his feet to greet him in the nursing home foyer stunned Janson. It had never occurred to him that time would diminish such a man. Oddly, though, Donner appeared less soft in frail old age, as if he no longer had the strength to conceal his nature. He was eighty-five, with wisps of white hair edging his bald dome, big ears, and an old man’s prominent nose. He wore glasses, now, black frame glasses. But he watched the way he always had, as if through two sets of eyes, one warm and smiling, the other, barely visible, focused like searchlights on his subject’s deepest thoughts.
“I have a surprise for you,” he said, in his upper-crust English accent. “Come along.” He disdained the elevator and walked unsteadily to the stairs. Janson instinctively went ahead to catch him if he fell. Donner noticed but did not remark on it. They walked slowly to the far end of the enormous swimming pool. At a table set off to one side in the shade of a cluster of palm trees sat two more men from Janson’s past. Grandig was younger than Miles, a vigorous seventy. Zwi Weintraub had to be at least ninety-five and looked it from his pinched cheeks to the oxygen tubes in his nostrils.
“Young Saul,” he greeted Janson. “You don’t look a day over eighty.”
“And you look like you could give Methuselah a run for his money.” Janson took Weintraub’s tiny hand in his. “How are you, sir?”
“I’ve stopped buying oxygen bottles in bulk.”
Grandig shook hands with a fist still hard. “And how am I, thank you for asking? Fine if I could trade in my skeleton. Or at least the aches.”
“Don’t start with the organ recitals,” Miles said with a benign smile. “Paul, when you telephoned that you had questions, I thought, who better to answer them than the Stern Gang?”
“I didn’t know they were still in business.”
“You thought we were dead,” cackled Weintraub. “We’re not; we just look that way.” And Grandig said, gesturing at the opulent surroundings, “Who could resist an invitation to spend even one hour in Miles’s splendid quarters?”
Janson had met them when he was a freshly recruited, probationary Consular Operations officer posted to the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. He was supposed to liaise with the Mossad. But the CIA, habitually at war with the State Department’s Cons Ops, had skillfully undermined him, whispering to key Israelis that Janson’s mission was to spy on the Mossad. The Mossad shoved him out of the way by assigning him to a marginalized unit of older men who had lost a power struggle within the Israeli spy agency.
They had nicknamed him “The Kid,” the only time in his life Janson had been called that, having grown into a man’s body by age fourteen. But in the presence of Zionist veterans who had fought the British and the Arabs on the battlefield, outfoxed them in Israel’s spy wars, and hunted Al Fatah and Black September terrorists to the death, Janson had felt very much “The Kid.” Interestingly, he had discovered there was no Israeli word, Hebrew or Yiddish, to express that American phrase for a young man invited into a circle of older practitioners; but the native-born Israeli sabras and even English Miles had grown up on American movies and peppered their speech with screenplay slang.
Janson had realized the second he reported that he had been knocked out of the loop. Weintraub, their commander, had been seventy-five years old. Of their so-called field agents, Donner was nearly sixty-five, and Grandig, the youngest, was pushing fifty. They knew they were out of the loop.
“Welcome to the Stern Gang,” they had greeted him, explaining that the original Stern Gang had been a radical branch of the Irgun during World War Two, frequently jailed by the British and shunned by their fellow Zionists as too radical. Avraham Stern himself had ended up shot.
“You’ve pissed someone off for sure, young Janson,” Weintraub had said.
“Or scared the hell out of them,” Miles ventured. “Either way, you had better get used to Siberia.”
Janson had pulled every one of the few strings he had in those days to try to get out of it, but to no avail. He was liaison to the Stern Gang and would be for his entire time in Israel if the CIA had any say in the matter, and they did.
Donner, old Weintraub, and Grandig had treated him kindly. It was easy to see that the young American was going stir-crazy, and they invited him on excursions to “come shooting” at a military firing range. Janson was Army Ranger trained already and had received early doses of Cons Ops instruction. But there were assassin gun tricks he hadn’t known yet. Similarly, when the old men arranged for him to work out with close-combat instructors the Jewish Krav Maga techniques had opened him to huge new possibilities in hand-to-hand fighting. To see his grandfatherly comrades in action was a revelation that still served him.
Would he like to see the Mossad’s explosives school? They had accompanied him there repeatedly, admitted with a wink and a grin by young officers deeply loyal to their former bosses. They took him to “the kitchen,” where Mossad scientists concocted antidotes for exotic poisons. And to “the paperworks,” where passports, visas, and credit cards were fabricated.
Janson had been grateful. He would have gone nuts without the excursions. Only gradually had it dawned on him that he was not being taught so much as tested.
He said so.
Donner didn’t blink an eye. “You’ve passed with flying colors,” he replied. “How would you like to join a rogue operation?”
“What kind of rogue operation?”
“Less Shakespeare’s ‘sweet little rogue’ than savage-elephant rogue.”
“Without my bosses at State knowing?”