profits if Germany reunifies? Or could they have been blackmailed all
these years by Germans who knew their dark secret?
Germans who had secret ends of their own?'
Natterman was shaking his head. 'I keep coming back to the past, Stern.
Consider our highly placed clique of Nazi sympathizers in the wartime
Parliament. I would imagine they had quite a bit of 'old boy' control
over British policy vis-A-vis Palestine, wouldn't you? Think about it.
In 1917
Britain promised the Jews a national home in Palestine. Yet while
England drifted into war with Hitler-the man who had vowed to
exter?ninate world Jewry-the British government used military force to
prevent every European Jew it could from reaching safety in
Palestine-the country Britain had already promised them. Was that
rational policy? Who really made those decisions? Could those
anti-Semitic feelings still be thriving in some families in Britain?'
Stern's face burned red with anger. 'Professor, I can't even think
about those days without feeling rage toward the British.'
Natterman was staring at Stern with strange intensity.
'Tell me,' he said softly. 'Were you part of the Stern Gang?
Is that how you know all this? Or were you Irgun?'
Stern's eyes bored in on Natterman. 'Neither, Professor.
A very long time ago-before LAKAM-I helped found the Haganah.'
Stern glanced past Natterman, to the small window-square of cerulean
sky. 'In the winter of 1935, I emigrated with my mother to Palestine.
My father refused to leave our homeland, which happened to be Germany.
Despite my youth, I did a bit of everything for the Haganah: foug4t
Arabs, procured illegal arms, set up radio links across the Arabian
peninsula, smuggled in Jews from Europe-but mostly I fought the
British.' The Israeli's face hardened.
'But I was no terrorist. Haganah was a moral army, Pr sor. The moment
Israel declared nationhood, we emerged as her legitimate defense forces.
I've never believed in senseless violence to achieve political ends. I
saw too many men start out as patriots and end up as criminals.' Stern's
eyes misted with some half-forgotten emotion.
'Terror is a tempting tool in war, Professor. The easiest short-term
solution is always to lash out-to murder. I know. I tried it once.'
He sighed deeply. 'But 'an eye for an eye' is no road map to a better
world.'
In her seat near the staircase, Swallow clenched her trembling hands.
Jonas Stern's voice-his hypocritical, Zionist voice-had hurled her back
into the past, back to Palestine.
Swallow knew all about Jonas Stern's flirtation with revenge, and she
had a very different opinion about the merits of the concept. She could
no longer even think coherently about her pain. Her clearest memory was
of her time as a mathematics prodigy studying at Cambridge, her time as
Ann Gordon. She still remerhbered the stunned expressions of the dons
as she soared through the nether reaches of theoretical calculus at age
@ixteen. When the war broke out, British Intelligence had snatched her
up with the rest of the savants and whisked her into cryptography. Her
parents lived in London, but her two brothers were stationed abroad: the
elder an RAF bombardier on Malta, the younger-Ann's fraternal twin-a
military policeman in Palestine. Ann and her twin brother, Andrew, had
been inseparable as children, and they had danced with joy when fate
landed them both in the same theater of the war.
. The family had a splendid war-right up until the end. In 1944
both of Ann's parents were killed by one of the last V-rockets to fall
on London. Then her elder brother was shot down over Germany and
lynched by civilians while the Warren-SS looked on. That left only Ann,
decoding German signals in a stifling shed inTel Aviv, and Andrew,
caught in the escalating violence between Jews, Arabs, and the British
in Palestine. With the rest of the family dead, the twins had grown
closer than ever. They even shared a small apartment in the poor
quarter of Tel Aviv-until the night Andrew was blown into small pieces
as he sat on a toilet in the British police barracks. His brutal death
finally shattered Ann's Enghsh stoicism. During the long, desolate
months of anguish, her grief slowly metamorphosed into a dark,
implacable fury. The war with Germany ended, but she had found a new
war to fight.
With methodical fanaticism she set to work finding out who had killed
her twin brother. It didn't take long. The bomb that killed Andrew had
been a Zionist reprisal attack, revenge for some filthy Jews who had
died in a British deportation camp. And the name of the young firebrand
who had planned and carried out that reprisal? Jonas Stern.
It had taken Ann just two hours to learn everything the local
authorities knew about Stern. He had apparently helped the British
quite a bit during the war, but before and since, the young Zionist had
killed enough Englishmen to earn an unofFicial bounty of a thousand
pounds on his head. Ann Gordon didn't give a damn about the bounty.
All she cared about was avenging her dead brother.
The next day she volunteered for the operations side of British
Intelligence, and they accepted her. She was brilliant, tough, and best
of all an orphan. After rigorous training in England, they christened
her Swallow and put her to work.
As an assassin. The trouble was, she had no say in her choice of
assignments. She spent year after year luring IRA gunmen, Arab
terrorists, African communists, anti-British mercenaries and other hard
cases to their doom, instead of hunting down the Zionist demon from her
past. In all the years Swallow worked for British Intelligence, not
once did she manage to get within striking range of Jonas Stern. To her
everlasting fury, the young Zionist fanatic had evolved into a
singularly gifted field agent. And long before Swallow was pensioned
off, Stern himself had retired to a fortified haven in the Negev desert,
apparently never to emerge.
TWice since then Swallow had attempted to breach the defenses of Stern's
desert refuge. She had drawn Jewish blood on both occasions,.
but she had failed to reach her hated target. After that, the Mossad
had learned her identity and warned her off. For Swallow, crossing'into
the Holy Land meant certain death. And so she had returned to England.
And waited. Until yesterday. Yesterday, like a call from Olympus, Sir
