Slaton suppressed the urge to check six. No one would be following him. Not yet. The world thought he was dead. Everyone except a young American doctor, who was probably in a police station in Penzance. And she had no idea who he was. All the same, he stayed alert.
The first train to Reading left at four in the morning. He boarded a nearly empty car at the far end of the platform and took a seat. Slaton closed his eyes as the train lurched ahead. He knew where he had to start. Ingrid Meier had told him, the anguished voice echoing in his head. What happened, David? He was coming to see you, to go hunting. There was such pain in her voice. The kind of pain that would never go away. Not without answers.
Slaton vowed to find out what happened to Yosy. When he did, he would go to Ingrid and tell her everything. Then, perhaps she could heal. Perhaps she could recover as he never had.
Chapter Six
At that same early morning hour, in the basement of the Israeli Embassy, the watch officer on duty opened his second can of Coke. He needed the caffeine to stay awake during another graveyard shift, which he, being the most junior person assigned to the station, was awarded three nights each week.
The windowless room was dimly lit, regardless of the time of day, and the duty officer sat surrounded by a forest of radios, cipher machines, computers, and telephones. There were also two televisions, tuned respectively to BBC News 24 and CNN, Mossad’s reluctant admission that even the world’s best intelligence networks were often scooped by some unrelenting newshound.
The duty man scraped for crumbs at the bottom of a bag of potato chips — he needed the salt to make him thirsty — then went to a computer station and began searching the newswires. There was a Reuters dispatch about a French arms sale to Iran. Nothing new there. As he continued searching, he remembered the dead-drop letter. It had come in just before the shift change, and the woman he’d relieved suggested he decipher it sometime during the night.
He found it, simply enough, in the in basket. The letter originated from a source inside Scotland Yard, a mid-level man who worked in the Operations Center. He was an agent whose information was supposed to be delivered each Thursday, taped to the underside lid of a toilet reservoir in the men’s room at the Shady Larch Pub in Knightsbridge. It actually came with great irregularity — once a month at best. Nobody at the station could decide whether the agent’s skittish nature was due to fear of being found out, or a randomly active conscience. The man was a British citizen and apparently had no ill will against the Crown. He was, however, also a Jew whose maternal grandparents had both perished in Bergen-Belsen, and he confessed to his control officer a nagging urge to aid the ancestral homeland. There were millions of people who could trace their lineage to victims of the Holocaust, and the Mossad made a living out of recruiting them.
Unfortunately, this particular agent was a ragged, sweaty bundle of nerves. He actually vomited on his control during their first meeting. The good news was that the information he did provide had always proven authentic and accurate. The Israelis decided it best to give him a dead-drop location and let him produce whatever he could, quietly hoping he might eventually move up to a higher position at the Yard.
The duty officer yawned as he labored to decipher the coded letter. It used a cumbersome one-time pad. Time consuming, but very secure. It was the ship’s name that raised his eyebrows. Polaris Venture. He tried to remember the Watch Order headquarters had put out a few days back. Was that the name? He was shuffling through papers when he heard someone in an adjacent office. He walked over and found a familiar face.
“Hey, Itzaak. What are you doing here at this hour?”
The more senior man frowned sufferingly, “Dumb-ass reports, due yesterday.”
The duty officer nodded sympathetically.
“Do you remember that Watch Order headquarters just put out? They were looking for a ship in the eastern Atlantic.”
“I guess. Why?”
“Well, our boy at Scotland Yard came through today. I just deciphered it and he’s got something in here about a woman who says she rescued some guy from the middle of the ocean. Then this guy commandeers her sailboat and they end up in England. She thinks the name of the ship that went down was …” the duty officer looked at the deciphered message in his hand, “Polaris Venture. Wasn’t that the name?”
Itzaak answered right away, “Nah. I saw the message. I don’t think that was it.”
The duty officer shrugged and walked back to his station. After all, it was a crazy story, which was probably why the agent at Scotland Yard had tacked it onto a few other more relevant bits of information — that odd English sense of humor. He’d ask his relief about it at six. In the meantime, he considered getting a sandwich from the snack machine, but one glance down at his newly expanded waistline quashed that idea. He didn’t need it.
Three hours later, Emma Shroeder came into the embassy basement to visit the coffee maker.
“Morning, Emma,” the duty man offered.
“Morning,” she replied in her raspy, deep voice.
“Listen,” he said, “I know it’s not your area, but do you know where they keep the current Watch Orders?”
Emma eyed the new guy, clearly not having decided about this one yet. She sighed, went to the file cabinet by his knee and pulled out a file, nicely labeled watch orders.
“No,” she said, retreating to the stairwell, “I’m not cleared for stuff like that.”
The duty officer’s smile lasted until he found the order in question. Itzaak had been out to lunch. The name Polaris Venture was highlighted in yellow and seemed to jump off the page. Worried that he’d screwed up, the duty man immediately condensed the agent’s report and transmitted it to headquarters in Tel Aviv. He had no idea what a hornet’s nest it would stir.
The message arrived at Mossad headquarters just after 5:00 GMT. It was quickly routed up, and Bloch got the news over breakfast. He called to check the Prime Minister’s schedule, then arranged for a secure message to be sent to London.
TO: LND: COS
FROM: HDQ #002 30NOV0552Z
RE PREVIOUS MESSAGE 0510Z. SEND TEAM TO
INVESTIGATE DISCRETELY. NO, REPEAT, NO
CONTACT. FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS BY
NOON ZULU. ACKNOWLEDGE.
Ninety seconds later the reply came.
TO: HDQ
FROM: LND: COM
RECEIVED HDQ #002 30NOV0552Z. WILL COMPLY.
Chief Bickerstaff had gone back to the Penzance station at five-thirty in the morning. He didn’t normally start so early, but his phone calls to the States the previous evening had been troubling. By six this morning, he was uncomfortable, and now at six-thirty Bickerstaff was quite sure he’d blown it.
He had fully expected to find that this Christine Palmer woman was going through a messy divorce, a bankruptcy, or maybe she was just a loon. Unfortunately, his phone calls had proven quite the opposite. She had indeed graduated, with honors, three years ago from the University of Connecticut Medical School. Having completed the first part of her residency at the Maine Medical Center in Portland, she was on a temporary leave of absence to retrieve her late father’s sailboat from Europe. The faculty and staff at the medical center held Dr. Palmer in the highest regard, both as a physician and a person. The more Bickerstaff found out about her, the more she seemed a perfectly normal, intelligent twenty-eight year-old woman.