(TRUE) Q: Anything else? A: American. (TRuE) That's all. (TRu*E) Q: Who was your instructor in training? A: Ertl. (READING INDETERMINATE) Q: That wasn't his real name, though. A: I don't know. (FALSE) Nol Not the button let me think it was just a minute I think somebody said his real name was Manner. (TituR) Q: Oh, Manner. Shame. He's the old-fashioned type. He still believes you can train agents to resist interrogation. It's his fault you're suffering so much, you know. What about your colleagues? Who trained with you? A: I never knew their real names. (FALSE) Q - Didn't you? A: (scream) Q: Real names. A: Not all of them- Q: Tell me the ones you did know. A: (no reply) (scream) The prisoner fainted. (pause) Q: What is your name? A: Uh... Towfik. (scream) Q: What did you have for breakfast? A: Don't know. Q: What is twenty minus seven? A: Twenty-seven. Q: What did you tell Krantz about Professor Schulz? A: Sightseeing ... Western Desert ... surveillance aborted.. . Q: Who did you train with? A: (no reply) Q: Who did you train with? A: (scream) Q: Who did you train with? A:Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death- ' Q: Who did you train with? A: (scream) The prisoner died.
When Kawash asked for a meeting, Pierre Borg went. There was no discussion about times and places: Kawash sent a message giving the rendezvous, and Borg made sure to be there. Kawash was the best double agent Borg had ever had, and that was that. The head of the Mossad stood at one end of the northbound Bakerloo Line platform in Oxford Circus subway station, reading an advertisement for a course of lectures in Theosophy, waiting for Kawash. He had no idea why the Arab had chosen London for this meeting; no idea what he told his masters be was doing in the citv-, no idea, even, why Kawash was a traitor. But this man had helped the Israelis win two wars and avoid a third, and Borg needed him. Borg glanced along the platform, looking for a high brown bead with a large, thin nose. He had an idea he knew what Kawash wanted to talk about. He hoped his idea was right. Borg was very worried about the Schulz affair. It had started out as a piece of routine surveillance, juit the right kind of assignment for his newest, rawest agent in Cairo: a high-powered American physicist on vacation in Europe decides to take a trip to Egypt. - The first warning sign came when Towilk lost Schulz. At that point Borg had stepped up activity on the project. A freelance journalist in Milan who occasionally made Inquiries for German Intelligence had established that Schules air ticket to Cairo had been paid for by the wife of an Egyptian diplomat in Rome. Then the CIA had routinely passed to the Mossad a set of satellite photographs of the area around Qattara which seemed to show signs of construction work-and Borg had remembered that Schulz had been heading,in the direction of Qattara when Towfik lost Win. Something was going on, and he did not know what, and that worried him. He was always worried. If it was not the Egyptians, it was the Syrians; if it was not the Syrians it was the Fedayeen; if it was not his enemies it was his friends and the question of how long they would continue to be his friends. He had a worrying job. His mother had once said, 'Job, nothing-you were born worrying, like your poor father-if you were a gardener you would worry about your job.' She might have been right but all the same, paranoia was the only rational frame of mind for a spyinaster. Now Towfik had broken contact, and that was the most worrying sign of all. Maybe Kawash would have some answers. A train thundered in. Borg was not waiting for a trafiL He began to read the credits on a movie poster. Half the names Were Jewish. Maybe I should have been a movie producer, he thought. The train Pulled out, and a shadow fell over Bor& He looked up into the calm face of Kawash. The Arab said, 'Thank you for coming.- He always said that Borg ignored it: be never knew how to respond to thanks. He said, 'Vhat's new?' 'I had to pick up one of Your youngsters in Cairo on Friday. ' 'You had tor
'Military Intelligence were bodyguarding a VIP, and they spotted the kid tailing them. Military don't have operational personnel in the city, so they asked my department to pick him up. It was an official request.' 'God damn,' Borg said feelingly. 'What happened to himro 'I had to do it by the book,' Kawash said. He looked very sad. 'rhe boy was interrogated and killed. His name was Avrarn Ambache, but he worked as Towfik el-Masiri.' Borg frowned. 'He told you his real name?' 'He's dead, Pierre.' Borg shook his head irritably: Kawash always wanted to linger over personal aspects. 'Why did he tell you his name?' 'Were using the Russian equipment-the electric shock and the lie detector together. You're not training them to cope with it.' Borg gave a short laugh. 'If we told them about it, wed never get any fucking recruits. What else did he give awayr' 'Nothing we didn't know. He would have, but I killed him first.' 'You killed him?' 'I conducted the interrogation, in order to make sure he did not say anything important. All these interviews are taped now, and the transcripts filed. We're learning from the Russians.' The sadness deepened in the brown eyes. 'Why-would you prefer that I should have someone else kill your boysr' Borg stared at him, then looked away. Once again he bad to steer the conversation away from the sentimental. 'What did the boy discover about Schulz?' 'An agent took the professor into the Western Desert.' 'Sure, but what for?' 'I don't know.' 'You must know, you're in Egyptian Intelligence!' Borg controlled his irritation. Let the man do things at his own pace, he told himself; whatever information he's got, he'll tell. 'I don't know what they're doing out there, because they've set up a special group to handle it,' Kawash said. 'My department isn't informed.' 'Any idea why?' The Arab shrugged. 'I'd say they don't want the Russians to know about it. These days Moscow gets everything that goes through us.'
Borg let his disappointment show. 'Is that all Towfik could manage?' Suddenly there was anger in the soft voice of the Arab. 'Tbe kid died for you,' he said. 'IM thsink him in heaven. Did he die in vain?' 'He took this from Schules apartment.' Kawash drew a hand from inside his coat and showed Borg a small, square box of blue plastic. Borg took the box. 'How do you know where he got it?' 'It has SchuWs fingerprints on it. And we arrested Towfik right after he broke into the apartment.' Borg opened the box and fingered the light-proof,envelope. It was unsealed. He took out the photographic negative. Ile Arab said, 'We opened the envelope and developed the film. It's blank.' With a deep sense of satisfaction, Borg reassembled the box and put it into his pocket. Now it all made sense; now he understood; now he knew what he had to do. A train came in. 'You want to catch this oner' he said. Kawash frowned slightly, nodded assent, and moved to the edge of the platform as the train stopped and the doors opened. He boarded, and stood just inside. He said, 'I don't know what on earth the box is.' Borg thought, You don't like me, but I think you're just great. He smiled thinly at the Arab as the doors of the subway train began to slide shut. 'I do,' he said.
Chapter Two
The American girl was quite taken with Nat Dickstein. They worked side by side in a dusty vineyard, weeding and hoein& with a light breeze blowing over them from the Sea of Galilee. Dickstein had taken off his shirt and worked in shorts and sandals, with the contempt for the sun which only the city-born possess. He was a thin man, small-boned, with narrow shoulders, a shallow chest, and knobby elbows and knees. Karen would watch him when she stopped for a break-which she did often, although he never seemed to need a rest. Stringy muscles moved like knotted rope under his brown, scarred skin. She was a sensual woman, and she wanted to touch those scars with her fingers and ask him how he got them. Sometimes he would look up and catch her staring. mid he would grin, unembarrassed, and carry on working. His face was regular and anonymous in repose. He had dark eyes behind cheap round spictacles of the kind which Karen's generation liked because John Lennon wore them. His hair was dark, too, and short: Karen would have liked him to grow it. When he grinned that lopsided grin, he looked younger, though at any time it was hard to say just how old he might be. He had the strength and energy of a young man, but she had seen the concentration-camp tattoo under his wristwatch, so he could not be much less than forty, she thought. He had. arrived at the kibbutz shortly after Karen, in the summer of 1967. She had come, with her deodorants and her contraceptive pills, looking for a place where she could live out hippy ideals without getting stoned twenty-four hours a day. He had been brought here in an ambulance. She assumed he had been wounded in the Six-Day War, and the other kibbutzniks agreed, vaguely, that it was something like that
His welcome had been very different from hers. Karen's reception had been friendly but wary: in her philosophy they saw their own, with dangerous additions. Nat Dickstein returned like a long-lost son. They clustered around him, fed hun soup and came away from his wounds with tears in their eyes. If Dickstein was their son, Esther was their mother. She was the oldest member of the kibbutz. Karen had said, 'She looks like Golda Meir's mother,' and one of the others had said, 'I think she's Golda's father,' and they all laughed affectionately. She used a walking stick, and stomped about the village giving unsolicited advice, most of it very wise. She had stood guard outside Dickstein's sickroom chasing away noisy children, waving her stick and threatening beatings which even the children knew would never be administered. Dickstein had recovered very quickly. Within a few days he was sitting out in the sun, peeling vegetables for the kitchen and telling vulgar jokes to the older children. Two weeks later he was working in the fields, and soon he was laboring harder than all but the youngest men. His past was vague, but Esther had told Karen the story of his arrival in Israel in 1948, during the War of Independence. Nineteen forty-eight was part of the recent past for Esther. She had been a young woman in London in the first two decades of the century, and had been an activist in half a dozen radical left-wing causes from suffragism to pacifism before emigrating to Palestine; but her memory went back further, to pogroms in Russia which she recalled vaguely in monstrous nightmare images. She had sat under a fig tree in the heat of the day, varnishing a chair she had made
