“Of course not. You just sent them out into the cold knowing that one of the people covering their backs was a traitor.”
No one seemed to have an answer for that. What was there to say, really?
Cohen looked out the window. On the other side of the glass the sun was setting over a rolling landscape of wild olive groves that had passed back and forth into Palestinian and Israeli hands so many times over the centuries that nationality had become a matter of semantics. The trees must be older than he was, Cohen realized, which was something fewer and fewer organics could boast of anymore.
“We lost three of our own people in Tel Aviv,” Didi said finally. “The traitor covering their backs was our chief of counterintelligence, a man I brought into the Office and trained and supported and promoted—”
“Zillah practically fed him for a year and a half after his wife died,” Ash muttered, her voice drenched with the bitterness that had come to follow any mention of Gavi Shehadeh as surely as dust followed the khamsin.
Didi went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “If the Absalom problem hadn’t come to light, I would have retired next year and Gavi would have moved into the delightful office you saw this afternoon. When an organization is penetrated at that level, there is no bloodless way to salvage it.”
Cohen watched Li chew on that for a moment. Watched her connect the dots—Gavi, Cohen, Didi—and begin filling in the tangled web of competing loyalties that had looked, from the UN side of the line, like simple betrayal.
As if betrayal were ever simple.
Tel Aviv began with a defection.
A low-level Palestinian data-entry clerk had walked into the Israeli consulate in the International Zone claiming to have seen the contact files of an extremely highly placed agent in Israeli counterintelligence whose code name was Absalom and who was being run directly out of Walid Safik’s office. Didi explained, “We tried to turn the clerk and run him back across the lines as a double, but he was ahead of us. He’d scheduled delivery of a note to his office announcing his defection, and he offered us a take-it-or-leave-it deal with a five-day fuse.”
Li nodded. “A pro.”
“Yes. And a pro who wasn’t planning to give us a chance to send him back out into the cold. Anyway, he proposed a trade: his copied documents in exchange for one million UN deposited into a numbered Swiss bank account. We would meet him at a diplomatic event in the International Zone, where he would give us an unmarked key and we would give him the account information. Then he’d catch the next Swissair shuttle to Geneva, verify the account balance, and call us in the morning to tell us what lock to stick the key in.”
Gavi had been put in charge of the operation. He was the logical choice, Didi explained somewhat defensively. Give it to anyone else and they might as well have taken out a full-page ad in Ha’aretz telling Safik they’d blown his mole. They’d done the swap over champagne and canapés at the United Nations headquarters, with the full assistance of UNSec’s local branch. The clerk had gotten his account information, walked out the front door past the guards as if for a cigarette, and vanished. The katsa in charge had taken possession of the unmarked key, bundled himself and his two agents into a taxi, and set off for King Saul Boulevard.
They never got there.
They were found three days later, each of them the proud new owner of two .22 caliber slugs deposited in their skulls at point-blank range.
“And the key?” Cohen asked.
“Gone. Vanished. As if it had never existed.”
It had taken months to put the puzzle together. The final piece had fallen into place when they learned that a young man had walked into the Beir Zeit post office the next morning, chatted up the postmistress in flawless Hebrew, presented an unmarked key, and collected the contents of Box 530.
“Operationally, he was perfect,” Didi observed as if he were critiquing one of his own boys. “The failure, if there was one, lies at the door of the man who sent him. It turns out”—a brief grin—“that he was too charming for his own good. When I interviewed the postmistress she was still hoping he’d come back. All she could talk about was his beautiful green eyes.”
“Shit,” Li whispered.
“It does make one wonder.”
Cohen dropped his head into his hands and massaged Roland’s temples. He had a headache, something that shouldn’t be possible technically speaking. And there was an odd fluttery feeling behind the eyes that he would have put down to overclocking in a nonorganic system. He hoped it wasn’t something he was doing to the boy.
“So what about the walk-in?” he asked when it was obvious that Didi wasn’t going to volunteer anything more.
“In what sense?”
Oh, so it was going to be a teeth-pulling exercise, was it? “In the sense of what happened to him. To the best of your knowledge.”
“To the best of my knowledge, the authorities found him dead in a back alley two days later.”
“The authorities meaning you? Or the authorities meaning the French?”
“Oh. Right. I see the question. Yes, he was found in the International Zone. Legion jurisdiction. No question about that.”
“Who ran the investigation? Fortuné?”
“Who else?”
The pause that followed was long enough for Li to take out her cigarettes, catch Didi’s eye in a silent request for permission, receive the ashtray he handed her, and light her cigarette.
“And, to the best of your knowledge,” Cohen said when he couldn’t stand it anymore, “did Fortuné ever figure out who killed him?”
Didi shook his head mournfully.
“Would it be jejune to ask if we know who killed him?”
“We know we didn’t order the hit.”
Li froze in midpuff, her eyes flicking back and forth between Didi and Cohen.
‹Squirrelly, ain’t he?› she observed onstream.
‹You have no idea.›
Cohen turned his attention back to Didi. “That leaves two options, right? Either the Palestinians killed him to stop him from passing along the documents that would have put the finger on Absalom, or Absalom killed him…for pretty much the same reason.”
“That sounds reasonable,” Didi said placidly.
“Oh, for crying out lou—”
“Can we backtrack for a minute?” Li interrupted. “You just got asked if you knew who killed the guy, and you answered that you knew you didn’t order the killing. Sounds to me like you’ve got way too much slippage in your chain of command. Agents losing walk-ins. Agents turning up in canals with body piercings courtesy of parties unknown. Agents maybe or maybe not offing people on their own initiative. Unless your lion tamers have bigger chairs than they did three years ago, I’m not feeling warm and fuzzy about working with you people.”
“It was a bad time in the Office,” Didi admitted. “A confusing time. But we have eliminated the, ah, more troublesome lions.”
It was an unfortunate metaphor, Cohen thought, given that the Hebrew word for lion was Gur. A fact that Didi remembered about a second after Cohen, judging from the rapid blink of his eyes and the subtle tightening of his mouth.
“So basically,” Cohen cut in, “the whole bloodbath in Tel Aviv was just a loyalty test. You set up the whole operation so that if things went sour, you’d know it was Gavi who was to blame. Or at least that’s how it was supposed to work.”
“That’s how it did work,” Didi said mildly.
“Except that Gavi’s gone and Absalom’s still here.”
“Or that’s what someone wants us to think,” Ash pointed out. “I mean isn’t that always the question with a mole hunt? It’s a no-win situation. If you go after the mole, you rip your agency apart and end up cashing out half your best agents, since the best ones are the most highly indoctrinated and therefore the first to fall under suspicion. If you don’t go after the mole, you risk letting him operate unchecked…and you leave half your senior officers looking over their shoulders wondering if it’s safe to talk to the guy in the next office. Or worse, whether you stopped investigating because you’re the guilty one yourself. Either way you lose.”