cocktail lounge where he introduced himself and sat down”
“Yes, and who is this man” Potok demanded. He glanced at the wall clock.
It was well past eight-thirty. “And why didn’t you report this sooner”
“He is registered under the name of Kirk McGarvey on an American passport; he has a long-term French visa along with a lot of others”
Saulberg reported. “The reason for the delay is I wanted to make sure who he was before I came up here to you. The package he received at the desk was sealed with a diplomatic stamp”
“Why didn’t you just stick with him” Potok asked. There was something else. There was always something else. “Because he had me made from the moment he entered the hotel” Saulberg said. “He even came over to me and told me it wasn’t polite to stare ” Potok suppressed a grin.
Saulberg was deadly serious, as was this entire business. McGarvey was most likely just another NPF courier. “Go on”
“I ran him through our files” the legman said. “Yes”
Liebowitz, who had stepped in behind Saulberg and had closed the door, handed over the file folder he’d brought with him. “He came up with this, Lev”
“Well, who is he” Potok asked, opening the file. “A former CIA case officer” Saulberg said softly. “Who is almost for certain an assassin”
Potok’s eyes shot up from McGarvey’s photograph, something clutching at his gut. “What”
“Not only that, Lev” Liebowitz interjected. “We have it on good authority that he has been in Germany”
“Recently”
“Yes.
Isser Shamir, known as Isser the Little, was a tiny barrelchested man who stood barely five feet, and whose head seemed almost ludicrously too large for his body. His longish white hair was always in disarray, his wide dreamy eyes seemed always to be half-closed as if he were drifting, but his mind was absolutely sharp. First class. Like a computer, his friends said; like a steel trap, his enemies countered. He looked up from reading Potok’s hastily finished report. “There is confirmation that McGarvey was in Kaiserslautern during the incident with the missile”
” Not one hundred percent” Potok admitted. “Liebowitz telephoned a friend on the police force, who said that a man matching McGarvey’s description was there. In fact, it was he who may have disarmed the missile”
“And now he has come here” Shamir said gently. “Yes, sir. Meeting with Dr. Abbott”
“It makes one wonder who he has come here to assassinate”
“That part has not been confirmed” Potok said. He sat forward. “But it has made me ask if there is any connection between the hijacked missile and En Gedi.
Shamir nodded. “That too makes for interesting speculation, Lev. What is your assessment in light of what you learned from the telephone intercept and your interrogation of this Russian” He tapped a finger on Potok’s report. “You don’t say here” With Isser the Little you never speculated. You either had the facts, and all of them, or you admitted up front that you didn’t know. Now he was asking for a guess. Potok, for all his years in the service, felt just a little uncomfortable. But then the stakes were so high that they couldn’t afford not to consider any and every possibility, no matter how farfetched. “I have a feeling that Rothstein and perhaps Simon Asher were working for the Russians. Their contact was Viktor Voronsky. I think that the Russians know about En Gedi, I think that the hijacked missile was somehow reprogrammed to strike there, and I think that they are planning to try again on June thirtieth” Shamir was nodding sadly. “What about Dr. Abbott and the NPT”
“I think she suspects but doesn’t know”
“And Mr. McGarvey” Potok nodded. “He knows. He would have gotten it from the reprogrammed rocket’s guidance system”
“That makes him a very dangerous man as concerns Israel’s safety”
“Yes, sir”
“What’s he doing here” Potok shook his head. “I don’t know”
“Nor do you wish to hazard a guess”
“Not this time”
“I see” Shamir said. “Well, then, find out”
“How far may I take it” Potok asked, keeping even the slightest inflection out of his voice. Shamir didn’t seem surprised by the direct question, but then Potok had never known the man to show surprise. “If he knows, as you say, from the reprogrammed missile, then the Americans know”
“Yes, sir”
“But they have said nothing. Perhaps he has been sent as an emissary”
“Would they have sent such a man as him on such a mission”
Shamir shrugged. “Perhaps”
“Then he has come as a friend. Again Shamir shrugged. “Which places you in a delicate situation. Fully as delicate as Israel finds itself in. Friend or foe, I suspect that soon enough the entire world will be privy to our little secret. It is up to us to keep it a secret for as long as possible, and then to safeguard what we have from attack. Whatever it takes.
After Potok left, Shamir sat for a long time staring out of his fifth-floor window toward the lights of the Shalom Meir Tower a few blocks away. It was the tallest building in Israel. A beacon, he thought, not only for hope as it had been designed, but now for guided missiles as well. Years ago, or was it centuries, he sometimes wondered, he had come to this city when it was mostly a collection of whitewashed homes, churches, mosques, and a few synagogues, all lorded over by the British. The future then had been very uncertain, as it had again seemed so in 1948 when their fight for independence had come. So many lives lost, so much blood spilled on both sides, so much senseless destruction, and now it threatened to happen again. Shamir was an ardent student of history. It seemed at times like these that we were indeed doomed to repeat our mistakes. If the Russians took over the Middle East, this part of the world would surely sink into the dark ages.
Sanity and reason would be lost for a very long time to come. Harry Truman, or had it been one of his successors, had been correct when he’d prophesied that the advent of nuclear weapons meant the abolition of all- out war. No one in their right mind would begin a war that could go nuclear. But if those weapons, as terrible as they were, no longer existed, what would hold back the horde?
He turned after a long time, picked up the telephone, and started to dial a Washington number, but before the connection was made he hung up.
He and the general went back a long way together. But he decided that he didn’t want to hear it from a friend. He would rather find out the truth himself.
EAST GERMANY The skies were overcast across much of central Europe. When Arkady Kurshin stepped from his plane and crossed the tarmac into East Berlin’s Schbnefeld’s Airport it was very dark and raining, a chill wind blowing from the northwest. The weather matched his mood. He’d come so close in Kaiserslautem that he’d almost been able to taste his success.
With a growing disbelief he had watched McGarvey simply pulling the plugs on the missile. Even now it was difficult to believe. Again in Paris he had come close. It would have been so easy to wait until dark, then sneak into McGarvey’s apartment and kill him. This far away the hate still burned strong within him. On the basis of his Soviet Russian diplomatic passport, one of several he carried, he was passed through customs with no delay. Outside a car and driver were waiting for him. He tossed his single bag in the back and climbed in the front. The driver, dressed in civilian clothes, said nothing as he pulled out into traffic, nor did he seem inclined to speak, so Kurshin sat back in his seat with his own morose thoughts for the twenty-minute drive out to Friedrichshagen on the Grosser Mijggelsee. Their intelligence about En Gedi was ironclad, Baranov had assured him, as was their information from the Pentagon. Had McGarvey not interfered, the rocket would have launched, and by now he would be on his way back to Moscow a hero, instead of here with his tail between his legs. “You understand”
Baranov had said before Kurshin had crossed the border into Western Europe, “that the price of our failure will be steep. They will know that I have a penetration agent working in their midst”
“I will not fail, Comrade General” Kurshin had promised. But he had failed. And perhaps this very night he would get his nine ounces-a Russian euphemism for a ninemillimeter bullet in the back of the head.
They skirted the small residential town and on the northwest side of the lake took a narrow dirt track down toward the water’s edge, the hills steep here, the pine trees very thick. They were stopped three kilometers off the
