Raz had lived his whole life on his intuition and he was no ordinary man. He was ruthless but not exceptionally so by Shin Bet standards. Planning and selecting targets for execution was a regular activity which had dulled his conscience over the years and Shin Bet was very much behind the force that maintained the right to torture suspects for the purpose of gathering information. Raz had spent years as an interrogator in Lebanon and had become adept at interpreting the four prescribed legal methods of torture in Israel, namely shaking, sleep deprivation, music and cramped positions. The interpretations of these guidelines were broad and many prisoners had died from exhaustive combinations of them, although Raz could say, with his hand on his heart, none of those were his direct responsibility. Many of his comrades regarded the Palestinian as a low form of life and therefore brutalising them was not a human-rights issue. Raz did not feel the same way but he could never share the reason for that sentiment with any of his colleagues.
Most traditional Hebrew names for people have meanings and Raz’s was tailor-made for him. Raz means secret and, living up to the reputation of the family name, everything about him had some mystery attached. His wife of twenty-one years and his two children, both now in their late teens, knew he worked for Shin Bet, but that was the extent of their knowledge. He told them nothing of what he did or where he did it, and they knew better than to ask. There was very little routine in his life, which was essential for his personal survival; he left his house at any time of the day or night and returned hours or days later. One of the many rules of Shin Bet is that an agent cannot work near where he lives, and since Raz’s patch had been Jerusalem for nearly a decade now, he had chosen to live with his family in the town of Kokhav Ya’ir, east of Tel Aviv, on the border with the West Bank. Selecting Kokhav was not just because of its convenience. Raz had always been keen for promotion, as were most Shin Bet agents, and the competition was tough. Kokhav was populated by many high-ranking army and security members and considered somewhat exclusive to those fraternities. His promotion to head of the Islamic division in Jerusalem was in no small part due to careful fraternisation with selected neighbours.
Raz was an Ashkenazi Jew from a third-generation middle-class family of European roots. It was practically unheard of to get into Israeli intelligence without hailing from a second-generation family at least. He was the only son of a schoolteacher and recruited into Shin Bet after serving three years’ mandatory service in the army. The examination of his past went back the standard two generations although, it was rumoured, to reach the higher echelons of intelligence, that examination went much deeper.
Raz had spent most of his three years as a conscript in the Gaza Strip and it was during his last couple of months that a senior member of intelligence approached him to join the Sherut Bitachon Klali, shortened to Sha-bak or, more commonly, Shin Bet. Raz’s father had wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, and Raz might well have become a teacher since although life in intelligence appealed to him, he did not believe he had the slightest chance of gaining entry because of what he had done as a young man which was far worse than any ordinary crime. It was while he was serving in Gaza and even though he had been careful to hide it from even his closest friends, he fully expected Shin Bet to find out once they investigated his past. He could have declined the offer to join and avoid the possible consequences, but he did not. Perhaps it was the gambler in him, or the fatalist, or perhaps it was something as simple as his conscience as the discovery of his secret would have freed him from many years of mixed feelings that included guilt.
The vetting of recruits into the intelligence community was historically intense for obvious reasons, the most important one being the fear of enemy infiltration. Many potential recruits never learned why they failed to gain entry. They were simply invited to leave without explanation. All through the selection period, while he carried out various aptitude tests and examinations including foreign languages such as English and Arabic, he expected at any time to be asked to pack his bags and never darken their doors again, and possibly even receive some form of retribution for his past crime. And if they never told him why, he would know. He became so convinced they would find out he remained extremely blasé throughout the selection programme, right-wing and even at times aggressive towards his teachers, which, ironically, began his reputation for being self-assured, arrogant and unflappable. Add highly intelligent to the mix and his reputation spread.
It was not until he was given his first posting that it dawned on him they had not discovered his secret. His first thought was that perhaps the rumours about the effectiveness of Israeli intelligence were greatly exaggerated. It took several years on the job before he appreciated how he had slipped through the cracks due to the complex rules of intelligence compiling and how the three basic means of the process of information gathering were applied. The first was to direct precise interrogatives towards precise focuses for precise answers, usually because those answers were already known. In Raz’s case, no one in Shin Bet had considered if he had ever had an affair with a Palestinian woman and so there was no specific investigation of that nature.The second was the collation of data, which needed to be sorted, cross-referenced and placed in correct acquisition pools with the correct links. There were countless stories of Israeli soldiers fraternising with locals, but, again, in Raz’s case, since he had called himself David and was just a regular conscript, the spies inside Rafah had produced nothing that pointed a finger directly at him. Finally, piecing together information from the multitude of sources to form a picture relied on many things and one of those was luck, and Raz appeared to have had an adequate amount of that. His past, or that one small part of it, had been overlooked. The information was there somewhere that could link him to a Palestinian woman and her son, but it had not been pieced together.
By the time he received his first promotion and had taken up a new posting on the Lebanese border, one of the most dangerous and interesting offices of all the divisions that assured promotion if successful, he was confident enough to once more make contact with the girl and open up a bank account for her and their child. Despite his politics and, since being in Shin Bet, developing an unhealthy hatred for the Arab in general, his sense of honour and duty to the child he had seen only a handful of times was startling and ensured he watched over the young Abed as best he could. Raz did many vile things throughout his career in the name of national survival but, strangely, the hand he reached out to Abed and his mother remained a precious redemption of his soul and served in part to forgive him some of his sins.