preparation, Levi was trembling. He bit his lip hard and put his hands in his pockets so the guard couldn’t see them shaking. I’m not going to make it, Levi told himself. This is one trip too many. I’m a dead man.
The guard was writing something down in a book. Levi looked away. Shit. Shit! Here it comes.
But Levi was wrong. The guard was handing him back his papers and waving him on. The man behind him in line was pushing toward the window. Levi apologized in French. Pardon, pardon. He returned to his Citroen and drove it to the customs-inspection line. The hard part was over, he told himself. The customs men were cheap thugs. Sometimes they wanted a bribe. But they didn’t want to kill Levi.
Levi got through easily, letting the customs man “confiscate” a carton of French cigarettes. He always carried extra cartons, more than he needed, as a distraction for wayward policemen. And then he was off. Levi relaxed in the overstuffed seat of the Citroen, feeling the sweat from his armpits drip down his sides. He had survived another hour in his eternity of fear.
Levi drove east toward Damascus, then north on the main highway to Aleppo. He was a French businessman, on a business trip. He smoked cigarettes, one after another, and turned his car radio on loud. It was a Syrian station, playing a ballad by Fayrouz about how the Arabs would someday recapture Jerusalem. “The gates of Jerusalem will not remain closed to us,” sang Fayrouz. “We will rebuild you with our own hands. Jerusalem, we salute you.” Levi knew the tune. He sang along.
Levi had a momentary fright, outside Homs, when he flipped the radio dial and caught the sound of a Hebrew voice on Israeli radio. It was a jingle for a new bank. It was a catchy tune, and Levi found himself singing it in Hebrew. That’s what made him panic. In that idle moment of singing, his true identity had ruptured through the fine membrane of his cover. He willed himself to forget the tune, forget the words, forget the Hebrew language itself, for another few days.
He stopped for lunch in Hama, in a small outdoor cafe by the River Orontes. He sat by the stream, eating a veal cutlet, looking at the old waterwheels that lined the banks. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a military officer, dressed in the camouflage uniform of the internal security forces, examining his car. It’s normal, he told himself. They check all cars with foreign tags. It’s routine. The officer took out a pad and wrote something. Probably the license number. The officer continued walking and stopped at another car with Lebanese tags, this one a Mercedes. He wrote down the license numbers of that one, too. That was the peculiar advantage of operating in a police state, Levi decided. They were watching you always, it was true. But they were watching everyone else, too.
Levi reached Aleppo that night and checked into the Hotel Hovsepian. It was a fine old pile of a hotel, built by a distinguished Armenian family that had come to Aleppo in the late nineteenth century. Levi sat in the bar and swapped stories with the owner, not telling too much about himself-that would seem odd-but revealing just enough to embellish his cover when the Surete stopped by that night to inquire about the names on the hotel guest list.
Levi was awakened the next morning by the sound of the muezzin. He had read once in a guidebook that Aleppo was called the city of a thousand mosques. This morning, it sounded as if all one thousand were just outside his hotel room. He bathed, ate a leisurely breakfast, and asked the concierge for tips on local sightseeing. Then he left the hotel to collect the first of his four drops.
Aleppo seemed to Levi that morning like the most remote spot on earth. There wasn’t another Jew in 100 miles. Levi felt he had reached the edge of the planet. In the streets he saw the dark faces of Turks, Circassians, Armenians, Kurds. The rough faces of the merchants and nomads and farmers who dwelled in this edge of the world, so very far away from anything else. The morning was quickening. The streets were filling up with people, and the air was fragrant with the smell of bread baking and coffee brewing. An entire city of people Levi had never seen before that day and, God willing, would never see again. He passed an orphanage for Armenian children. My God! he thought. That is the very farthest exile from the garden: to be an Armenian orphan in Aleppo.
Levi walked to the souk, which was about a mile from his hotel. With its maze of narrow alleys and and its many entrances and exits, it was an easy place to spot surveillance, and to get lost. He stopped often, looking for familiar faces. He bought a lacquered wooden box in one of the stalls. After thirty minutes, he was certain that he was clean. There was nobody following him.
He left the souk through a small alleyway and headed for the Crusader castle that overlooked the city of Aleppo. It was a massive pile of stone, gray and forbidding, dominating the city. The castle testified to the peculiar Syrian disinterest in the past. Though a spectacular monument, it was usually deserted.
Levi stopped at the gate, paid his ten piastres to a guard who looked half asleep, and entered the ruins of the fortress. He turned to his left and walked two hundred paces, just as the instructions had said. Then he stopped and looked for a parapet with a chalk mark, which was a sign that the drop had been filled. The chosen mark was a swastika, which seemed to Levi like a sick joke but must have struck someone as good tradecraft.
There was writing on many of the parapets. Arabic names and slogans written right to left, the chiselled names of a few lovers. But no mark. Perhaps he had miscounted the number of paces. The castle was still deserted. Should he start again? Then he saw it. A tiny swastika, drawn with white chalk. There was nobody in sight.
Levi walked exactly twenty-five more paces-strolling, ambling, gazing out over the city the way a tourist would. Then he stopped. He saw it hidden in a crack in the stone, just where the instructions had said it would be. A small brown envelope containing four rolls of microfilm of Syrian military documents, taken by a disgruntled Sunni military officer who believed that he was working for the Turks. Levi looked around. Still nobody. It was too easy. He slipped the envelope into his pocket, turned, and continued his slow stroll around the perimeter of the castle.
Levi returned to the hotel, packed his bags, and checked out. He gave a generous tip to the bellhop, who bowed and called him “Effendi.” He apologized to the owner that he was leaving so soon, but he was due for lunch at the home of a Syrian agribusinessman who lived thirty miles southeast of Aleppo. The Syrian was interested in exporting tomatoes to Europe, and Levi had the contract in his pocket. He relaxed slightly on the road south from Aleppo. One down and three to go.
The second drop was in the village of Sednaya, in the mountains between Homs and Damascus. The village was carved out of the rocky cliffs of the mountains, and in the dry and dusty climate of central Syria, it resembled the cave dwellings of Pueblo Indians in the American Southwest.
The residents of the area were Syriac Christians, an offshot of the Eastern Church. They maintained a convent just outside of the village, which made the village a tourist attraction, at least by Syrian standards. But the true pride and joy of Sednaya was something quite different. The men of the village, fathers and sons, were truck drivers, and they regarded themselves as the finest smugglers in the Arab world. Guns, hashish, whisky, whatever the market required. They knew hidden roads that traversed the peaks of Mount Lebanon, which no customs man had ever seen. They knew tracks in the trackless deserts of Arabia. The men of Sednaya made ideal agents, since they went everywhere and saw everything, but they were also dangerous. A smuggler, after all, is always ready to consider a better offer.
Levi’s agent was supposedly reliable. Ten years on the payroll and never a mistake. Providing purloined military and government documents, unaware that he was working for the Israelis. A man in it purely for the money. A man, thought Levi, who would probably sell his mother for the right price.
The drop was in a wooded area about a mile from the village. Levi approached it very carefully. Careful to avoid surveillance, careful to scout the terrain.
What terrified him, on a run like this, was the possibility that the agent had somehow been caught and turned. That he had been tortured and confessed that on this very day, in this very place, the agent of a foreign intelligence service would be retrieving information that had been left in a hollowed-out log. That at the very moment Levi put his hand into the log to retrieve the packet, a dozen security men would emerge from hiding and arrest him, and take him to a prison where they would torture him, break his bones one by one, until he confessed that he was an Israeli Jew.
Levi felt in his pocket for the tiny metal case that contained the poison tablet. He put it in his hand as he approached the drop. He had no doubt that he would take it if he was captured. That was part of being a coward. Preferring quick and certain death to the excruciating uncertainty of torture.
Levi retrieved the packet. He closed his eyes. There was dead silence. He looked around. Nothing. Empty space. Two down.
Levi was nearing the city center of Damascus when he noticed the traffic lights. Big and bright on nearly every street corner. That was remarkable enough in the Arab world. But the miracle was that the Damascene motorists actually stopped at the lights, yielded at the intersections, gave way to incoming traffic at the circles.
