forty years. I’ve served three prime ministers and spat out sneakier little Mossad shits than you before breakfast! So if you don’t want your bollocks hanging from the top of the Western fucking Wall in time for Hanukkah, you’d better tell me what in the name of all that is holy your former kidon is doing standing shoulder to shoulder with two murdering Palestinian shitheads…’
‘I would have thought, Ehud,’ Cohen interrupted, standing up as he did so, his eyes blazing, ‘that a Palestinian attack on non-Israeli soil would be rather to your liking.’
‘Are you as stupid as you look, Cohen? Don’t you think the CIA will have every analyst in Langley examining this picture? SIS? People will believe anything of us, you know that. They’d be delighted to believe that one of our people set this whole thing up…’
Cohen blinked. It was true, he hadn’t really thought of it in those terms. He sat down again, removed his glasses for a second time and rubbed his eyes wearily. ‘I don’t know what you want me to say, Ehud.’
‘Where can we find her?’
‘I don’t know.’ That, at least, he could say with some certainty.
‘You’re going to have to do a lot better than that, Ephraim.’ Blumenthal was sitting down again. A little tear of sweat was dripping down his forehead. ‘A lot better.’
Cohen had always known that Maya Bloom would come back to haunt him. As the years had passed, he’d managed to put her from his mind from time to time. But he always knew…
‘I don’t know where she is, Ehud,’ he said, a little meeker now.
Blumenthal stared at him for a full thirty seconds before talking again. His voice was quieter, almost conversational, as if his previous outburst had never happened. ‘You’d better give me something to go on, Ephraim.’
Cohen nodded. ‘Maya Bloom was the best kidon I ever knew,’ he said. ‘Too good, almost. Her parents were killed in a suicide bomb in Tel Aviv, and both she and her brother were identified to join Mossad quite young. The brother — I forget his name — died on operations in Iraq. I think that pushed her over the edge.’
‘That means she was close to the edge in the first place,’ Blumenthal observed.
Cohen inclined his head. ‘Perhaps,’ he conceded.
‘And you didn’t spot this? You didn’t think to report it to your superiors?’
Cohen stared into the middle distance. He thought back to those days, and remembered the foolish sexual fantasies he’d entertained about his kidon. ‘We all make mistakes,’ he said, ‘from time to time.’
‘I think you might find,’ Blumenthal said, ‘that some mistakes are more costly than others.’
The comment made Cohen snap. ‘The moment I realised she was a threat, I sent someone to take care of her. She killed him. It’s all in the file. I’ve heard nothing about her ever since. But I can tell you something for sure, Ehud.’
‘Then you better had.’
‘This…’ He tapped the picture that was still lying on his desk. ‘This doesn’t make sense. Maya Bloom was many things. Skilled. Dangerous. Unhinged. But she was loyal to Israel, Ehud. She was always loyal to Israel. Maya Bloom in league with Palestinian terrorists? I would sooner believe it of you yourself than of her. I can only assume she’s part of some crackpot plot to turn the West against the Palestinians.’
‘You’d better hope we find this woman, Ephraim, otherwise you might find yourself answering to less sympathetic members of the administration than myself.’ He stood up, brushed his lapels again and turned towards the exit. ‘I’ll let myself out,’ he said.
Blumenthal was just opening the door when Cohen spoke again.
‘Ehud,’ he said very quietly.
The politician turned. ‘What?’
‘You won’t find her, you know. I can absolutely promise you that you won’t find Maya Bloom. And if you do…’
He went silent.
‘What?’
Cohen remembered the brutalised body of the agent he’d sent to kill her. The guts spilled out all over the bed. The blood and the stink. The message she’d sent him, and which he had heeded. He wanted to say, ‘She’ll kill you,’ but he thought better of it.
‘
Cohen shook his head and sighed deeply. ‘Nothing, Ehud,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all.’ And he watched with an expressionless face as the Rottweiler stormed out of the room, slamming the door noisily behind him.
TWENTY-ONE
Leaving Hereford had been far from straightforward. First there had been the meet and greet with the Royal Protection Squad at 07.00 hrs. Luke hardly heard anything the RPS boys said. He was just replaying last night’s conversation over and over again. Trying to make sense of it. Trying to work out what it meant.
I was with Chet Freeman the night he died… the night he was murdered.
Part of him thought the caller must have been a nutter, winding him up or playing some sick joke. But his phone was supplied by work. That meant it was encrypted. Impossible to trace and impossible to find the number if you didn’t know it already. Luke knew that he had to get out of camp and down to London.
They were scheduled to leave for Israel the following morning. Going AWOL wasn’t an option, so he approached O’Donoghue at midday and spun him a crock of shit about having a few personal loose ends to tie up before heading out on the op. The ops officer hadn’t been happy. ‘Fucking hell, Luke, we leave in twenty-four hours. It’s not the time for you to start sorting out your woman trouble.’ But he cut his man some slack and agreed to stand him down for a few hours. And so, by early afternoon, Luke had changed out of his camouflage gear and into a pair of jeans and an old hooded top that he normally wore for jogging in the winter. Today he selected it because the hood would disguise his face a little. Before long he was screaming down the M4 to London.
He hit the western outskirts at 14.45 hrs. As a London boy born and bred, it felt like coming home. But it was an uneasy homecoming. By 15.45 he was parking up just off Fleet Street. He was in good time for the RV and that suited him well. He didn’t know what this woman looked like; he didn’t know if this was some elaborate game; so he wanted to get eyes on the location early.
The light was just failing as he walked up Fleet Street with the illuminated dome of St Paul’s rising above him. Luke turned up the collar of his leather jacket against the cold, pulled up his hood and stood fifty metres from the steps, in the shadow of the maroon awning of an Indian restaurant. The smell of curry reminded him how hungry he was, but he put that to the back of his mind and surveyed the scene.
The entrance to the cathedral was lit up, and people were wandering in and out of the huge wooden doors, only just visible behind the temple-like column of the facade. Many of them were tourists — there was a large party of Japanese students with backpacks and cameras — but he saw too a good number of ordinary Londoners, suited and booted. Perhaps, he thought to himself, the events of a couple of days ago had made people more religious. Luke didn’t know. It was all bullshit to him. When you’re dead you’re dead. No pearly gates or swooning angels. Just a hole in the ground, if you’re lucky.
The minutes ticked away. Luke stayed in the shadows, watching the steps. Waiting. People came and went. Was the woman he was here to meet one of the crowd sitting on the steps? Impossible to tell.
He continued to watch. It grew cold. He ignored it.
‘You hungry, boss?’
He looked round sharply. An Indian man in a grey suit had appeared at the door of the curry restaurant. ‘I have very good food.’
Luke shook his head and went back to watching.
Time check: 16.57. Three minutes to RV.
Luke scanned the steps, directing his vision in concentric circles so he covered the whole area. Nobody stood out. He looked at his phone. No calls. He scanned the facade of the cathedral; he checked along its wings for anything suspicious; he searched for loiterers in the general vicinity.
Nothing. It looked like just another London evening.
