“You’re telling me to smuggle Arkady into the Line to talk to Gavi? And then what? Announce to Gavi that you’re looking over his shoulder and he’d better hand you the dirt and not try any funny business? I wouldn’t blame him if he shot us himself!”
“Oh, not Gavi. He always smiles when he tells you to go to hell.”
“You’re still putting a hell of a load on his shoulders. And you’re asking me and mine to risk a hell of a lot on what looks like a pretty crazy gamble.”
“You have to set your own priorities, of course,” Didi said placidly.
“Is that an implied Do Variable?”
“No, boychik. It’s a good old-fashioned Jewish guilt trip.”
Cohen rubbed at Roland’s forehead again, trying to break up the ache.
“The thing I just can’t get past, Didi, is Tel Aviv. I was there. I know it wasn’t nearly as neat on the ground as you make it sound in the retelling. I think Gavi was innocent. And not just because it’s what I want to think.”
“Surely it’s crossed your minds that you don’t know everything.”
“Of course. But I know Gavi.”
Silence.
“I mean what’s the motivation? Money? Give me a break! When the ARTIFICIAL LIE royalties started coming in you know what he did with the money? Bought fifteen new pairs of socks and underwear so he could switch from doing laundry twice a month to doing it once a month.”
Didi smiled fondly. “That sounds like Gavi, all right.” The fond smile lingered for a moment, then faded into an expression that Cohen didn’t want to put a name to. “It also sounds like the basic personality type of every unmaterialistic ideologically motivated high-level double agent in the classic case studies.”
“Bullshit. Those guys were all frustrated ambitious types. And Gavi and ambition just don’t fit in the same sentence. Gavi would have been content to sit in your shadow for the rest of his life. Or in Ash’s shadow if it came to that. He never wanted to run the Mossad, just rewrite the flowcharts and tinker with the data abstraction models.”
“Yes. Funny, isn’t it? Gavi had the charisma and the physical bravery to lead agents in the field…but he always preferred to be the one who stood in the shadows and held all the keys and knew where all the back doors were. Forget the friend you think you knew. Forget the big eyes and the little-boy grin and the wrinkled T-shirts. What do the choices he made in his career say to you?”
“Oh, come on, Didi! Every eccentricity looks bad when you start from the assumption that a man’s a traitor. I’m not saying you’re one of the ones who was ready to suspect him because of his last name. But I still have to ask why ?”
“Everyone has his dumb blonde and his rented Ferrari.”
The dumb blonde and the rented Ferrari rule, known as Rule 5 around the Office, was part of the age-old Mossad lexicon. It referred to a famous Mossad operation in which a field team had recruited an Iraqi nuclear physicist by dressing a blonde katsa up like a floozy and having her drive by his bus stop every morning in a rented red Ferrari. When she finally offered him a ride he took it—hook, line, and sinker.
The logical conclusion, one borne out by centuries of covert work, was that if you scratched a potential recruit’s guiltiest itch, he’d fall into your lap. It was just a question of wading through enough poison ivy to figure out what that itch was. For some people it was sex or money. For others it was the lure of intrigue, or the need to feel they were on the side of the angels, or the urge to prove an overbearing parent wrong by amounting to something…even in secret.
No one was immune. Everyone had something to prove or some illusion too sweet to surrender. Even the blessed ones—the ones like Gavi, who seemed to walk through the morass of human greed and pettiness without being tarnished by it—even they had their dumb blonde and their rented Ferrari.
“Not Gavi,” Cohen said.
“Even Gavi.”
“Not Gavi.”
“If you really believe that,” Didi said so smoothly that Cohen didn’t hear the trap spring until he was well and truly caught, “I’m giving you the chance to prove it.”
“And what guarantee do I have that you won’t throw him to the wolves again in the name of playing it safe?”
Instead of answering Didi bent to inspect the trunk of the nearest cedar of Lebanon. From inside the house Cohen heard the boisterous opening bars of a Chopin mazurka.
“The tree’s dying,” Didi said. He tore a piece of bark from the great trunk and rubbed it between his fingers until the red dust drifted down and settled on the garden path like a bloodstain. “There are worms in the wood. The tree surgeon wants to cut down this tree before the rot spreads to the others. It seems a terrible waste. My daughters grew up playing in this tree. I thought it would outlive me. But he says that if we wait too long the rot will spread and we’ll lose the entire grove. And one tree, however beloved, does seem a small price to pay for the safety of all the rest.”
They left through the garage, just like they’d come in.
As he stepped into Didi’s car for the drive home, Cohen turned back and saw Li and Ash standing together in the hallway. Ash was stooping, her sleek head bent over Li’s to whisper in the smaller woman’s ear. Li stood there like the rock she was, arms crossed over her chest, brow knit, lips pursed, nodding intently.
“What was that about?” Cohen asked when she was settled in the car next to him.
“Nothing. She was Mossad liaison to UNSec for three years. Just asking me about some mutual friends.”
But in the silence behind the words he felt her mind flinch away from his, and he tasted the bittersweet taint of a guilty secret.
FRUSTRATION
(Random Walks on a Rugged Fitness Landscape)
EMET, and the Palestinian response to EMET, changed the nature of war itself. Combat on the Green Line was no longer a contest between armies of individual humans or posthumans, but a quasi-biological arms race between two vast and coevolving Emergent AIs. The battlefield became a fitness landscape. Tactical planning gave way to spin glass modeling, virtual annealing, and drift-enhanced memory-based learning algorithms. War was plucked from the realm of human ethics and morality and transplanted in brave new ground where words like guilt, heroism, cowardice, and sacrifice were just the linguistic echo of an obsolete weapons platform.
And why would i want to help you?” Osnat asked when Arkady finally got the chance to plead his case with her.
She had a habit of turning her head when she spoke to fix her good eye on you. It reminded Arkady of old spinfeed of hawks.
“Because…,” he began. But he didn’t have a reason. Not unless the vague feeling that she was the only human who didn’t hate or despise him was a reason.
“Arkady—” she began, then stopped abruptly. “It’d be a lot easier to talk to you if I knew your real name.”
“I don’t have any other name.”