Текст книги "Spin Control"

Автор книги: Крис Мориарти

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

“Which seven?” Cohen asked.

“Gavi and I were on the list.” Didi’s expression was as mild as ever, but the look he gave Cohen was as cold as space. “So were you. And I’m not going to tell you who the others were. I refuse to condone a witch hunt.”

“Anyway,” Ash continued, perhaps sensing that Didi lacked the stomach to finish the story. “We had our suspects. Then it was only a question of putting out the barium meals and waiting for one of them to bite. We didn’t have to wait long. It all came to a head in Tel Aviv.”

“It came to a head,” Li asked in a dangerously quiet voice. “Or you madeit come to a head?”

Ash shrugged. When Cohen glanced at Didi he saw the older man ruefully inspecting the thick patina of scuff marks on his shoes as if he’d just noticed their sorry state.

“I knewthe UNSec agents who died there.” Li’s voice had shifted into a flat murmur that meant nothing but trouble in Cohen’s experience. “They didn’t sign on for your dirty little war. And they certainly didn’t sign on to be burned for the greater good of the State of Israel.”

“We didn’t burn anyone,” Didi said.

“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 fedhim 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’aretztelling 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 katsain 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 weknow 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 orderthe 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.”

“You know,” Cohen said slyly, “this is the kind of problem you really need Gavi for. He’d be talking about shells and kernels and trap commands and output redirection and flow of information…and pretty soon you’d have all the players and all the contingencies mapped out neat as you please, complete with a sweet little plan for making the bad guys deliver themselves to your doorstep all wrapped up like a birthday present.” He paused, then twisted the knife. “In fact, if you’d trusted him enough to give him the information he needed before Tel Aviv instead of barium meals, he might have done it back then.”

“Gavi had his chances,” Didi said, sounding as remote as the stratosphere.

“So you’re still holding to the post-Tel Aviv story,” Cohen said. “Gavi’s guilty, even though Absalom is still operating—”

“ —maystill be operating—”

“—when Gavi’s buried alive out at Yad Vashem.”

Ash stirred restlessly. “You don’t always have all the answers, Cohen.”

“And you do, I suppose?”

Li cleared her throat. “Not to interrupt an argument between friends, but how are you going to handle this without Gavi?”

“We’re not,” Didi said.

Ash was leaning forward slightly in her chair, biting her lower lip in anticipation. She knew what Didi was going to do, Cohen realized. She’d known it before she ever walked through the door. And whatever it was, she liked it. Which in Cohen’s experience meant it was good news for her and bad as hell for anyone unlucky enough to get caught standing between her and her next promotion.

“We’re going to have you bring Gavi back in from the cold to work this case,” Didi said. “One shot. Up or down. Guilty or innocent. With you as the cutout so the Office has plausible deniability if the whole operation heads south.”

“And if he screws up again,” Ash said with relish, “we’re going to arrange a rerun of the nice little traffic accident the PM wouldn’t authorize after Tel Aviv.”

Dinner was surreal.

Lamb shanks and small talk while Cohen kept angling to talk to Didi in private, and Didi kept resolutely refusing to take the hint, and Ash and Li chatted with Zillah and the twins as if they were just there for a social occasion.

“Are you going to see the new Ahmed Aziz spin while you’re here?” Zillah asked. “I’ve heard it’s great. And our Ring-side friends always seem to enjoy those.”

Cohen realized abruptly that she was talking to him. “I won’t go to Ahmed Aziz spins with Catherine anymore,” he answered. “The last time we went to one she started bitching and moaning before the credits had even rolled, and a week later she still hadn’t paused for breath.”

“Well, I was right, wasn’t I?” Li protested. “The so-called hero committed eighteen fatal errors before the opening credits even rolled. And anyway, I don’t like violent movies. If the violence is realistic it’s depressing. And if it’s not realistic, it’s just stupid. How any intelligent adult can sit through such crap totally escapes me.”

“They don’t sit through it anymore in Israel,” Cohen snapped irritably. “Israelis like their violence automated and sanitary these days. After all, shooting fourteen-year-olds isn’t much fun when you have to look them in the eye.”

Everyone around the table froze. Didi, caught with his glass in midair, looked significantly at Zillah, who just threw up her hands as if to say it wasn’t her argument.

Cohen put his fork and knife down, folded his napkin into a precise square, and set it beside his plate. “Zillah. Forgive me. I’ve been unpardonably rude. I’m not myself. In fact, I’m not feeling at all well at the moment. I think if no one minds, I’ll just step out for a breath of fresh air.”

Outside the sun was well and truly set, and the air had that damp glacial chill that Cohen never had gotten used to in all the long centuries of the artificial ice age. He walked down the path, his feet thudding dully in pine needles, and stood under the lace-and-shadows canopy of the cedars of Lebanon, feeling Roland’s poor head throbbing.

You’d think,Cohen told himself, that after four centuries I could learn to control my temper a little better.

But it wasn’t so easy. If anything, it got harder. His irrational likes and dislikes only got stronger. His emotions only ran hotter with the additional mileage. The Israelis weren’t fools, he told himself, pulling the plug on EMET when it got too self-aware for comfort. Humans claimed to understand themselves better as they got older, and perhaps they did. But Cohen was beginning to suspect that for him the process was running in the opposite direction.

“Doing a little arithmetic of the soul?” Didi asked, coming up behind him with the cautious tread of the old field agent he was.

“If I am,” Cohen said savagely, “then one of us has a mistake in his math somewhere. Because we’re sure as hell not coming up with the same answers.”

“Mmm.” Didi craned his head to look at the towering foliage.

“What’s Gavi doingout at Yad Vashem anyway? And when’s he coming back?”

“He’s not. He’s the permanent caretaker.”

This piece of news was so bizarre that Cohen thought he must have misheard it. Why would a man who’d been in close competition for the top post at the Mossad be baby-sitting an abandoned museum? And if he was going to baby-sit a museum, why on earth would they send him to the Holocaust Museum, now centrally located in the contaminated thickness of the Line? Not knowing what question to ask first, he settled for the most trivial one. “But…that’s a Line job.”

“So? They froze sperm before they sent him.”

“I’m glad to hear his sperm’s safe,” Cohen said sarcastically. “There is the little question of the man himself, however.”

“No one made him do it.”

“And no one gave him anything else to do either, am I right? It was either that or rot in some stinking veterans’ hospital?”

“He’s not a cripple, Cohen. Israel has extremely good prosthesis technology.”

Cohen started to speak, then bit the words back. He was breathing hard—or rather Roland was. He forced himself to compartmentalize, to cut the emotive loop that tied his psychological reactions to the ’face’s physiological ones. He knew it looked eerie, even frightening, to humans. But there was no sense in making Roland pay for his fight with Didi.

“So I take it you’re not going to talk to Gavi for me?” Didi asked.

“I’m not sure I can.He hasn’t answered my letters for almost two years. And he hasn’t cashed his royalty checks either. I don’t think he wants to see me.”

“I wouldn’t put too much stock by that. I think he’s gone a little off the rails out there. Some crazy idea about building the museum a golem.”

Cohen had heard about the idea too, in the streamspace haunts where Gavi appeared, rara avis,asked the odd, intriguing question about AI architecture, and vanished. People had started calling it Gavi’s golem. And it was exactly what Didi had called it: crazy.

“I suspect that whether he wants to see you and whether he needs to see you are two very different things,” Didi said. “And you have reason to see him as well.” He paused to let that thought sink in. “If I were you and I believed that Gavi was innocent and Absalom was still roaming the eighth floor, then I would be very wary of talking to anyone still on the Mossad payroll. Including me. And if, for instance, I had a Syndicate defector to debrief, it might occur to me that the one man I was pretty sure wasn’t responsible for Tel Aviv was also one of the best interrogators in the country and quite up to the task of dissecting Arkady’s pretty little head for you.”

“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 katsaup 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, doesseem 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.