A Gentleman's Game (12 page)

“You needn’t worry, Tara,” Wallace said after they had traveled several blocks in silence. “She’ll never replace you in my affections.”

Enough sincerity had crept into his voice that Chace wasn’t certain if they’d left the realm of jokes and crossed the border to someplace more serious.

•

They found a newsagent’s on the High Street and bought more cigarettes, then made their way to the Magna Tandoori Restaurant, on Bemisters Lane. The curry was devastatingly hot, the way they both liked it, and each washed the meal down with more beer, spending most of the meal bitching about everything from expense reimbursement to the bastards in the Motor Pool who wanted seventeen forms for every time you needed a car on the job. It was late and they were both drunk when they finally staggered back onto the street, and when Wallace offered to give Chace the couch at his place, she agreed without hesitating.

It was only when they were back in the Triumph, the night chill of sea air forcing some sobriety back into her brain, that Chace recognized the danger of what they were doing.

•

Wallace had found himself a two-bedroom flat on the third floor on a block of surprisingly posh-looking homes on Marine Parade Drive. He parked the Triumph in his garage, cluttered with auto parts and tools, then guided Chace through the front door and into the building. There was a videophone in the alcove, and another set of doors, triple-locked, and inside doors to two ground-floor flats, a flight of stairs, and a lift. They took the stairs as a matter of habit.

His flat was cramped and plain, with two large curtained windows facing toward the seafront. Chace dropped her leather jacket over the back of the couch, then pulled the curtains to take in the view of the water and, in the distance, the lights shining from the Isle of Wight. In the kitchen behind her, she could hear Wallace rattling around, opening cabinets, clinking glasses.

He offered her a glass of whiskey when he joined her, holding the bottle and a glass of his own, which he then attempted to juggle while opening one of the windows. It swung outward, and he stepped over the sill and onto the small balcony. Chace followed him out, and they stood together, drinking their drinks and listening to the sounds of the sea and the distant horns and clatter from below.

“What do you think?” Wallace asked.

“It’s spectacular. I’m wondering who you robbed to pay for this place.”

“That’s not really what I was asking.”

Chace took more of her drink.

Wallace sighed, refilled his glass from the bottle, then hers. “We could, you know.”

“Oh, trust me, Tom, I know. I’m drunk, but I know.”

“I didn’t mean to . . . I mean, when I offered, it wasn’t because I was planning on anything. It’s the truth, I don’t know if you believe me.”

“I believe you.”

“Then I have to ask it again, Tara. What do you think?”

Chace almost laughed. “I wish I knew.”

After a moment, Wallace broke open one of the new packs, offering a cigarette to her before taking one for himself. They smoked them down in silence.

“The whole thing with Kittering,” Chace said. “The thing with Ed, you know. You never told Crocker.”

“I never told him, but he knew.”

“No, he didn’t. I mean, he knew what Ed and I were up to, but he didn’t
know.
”

Wallace looked away from the water to her, curious.

“It was about you,” Chace explained. “Took me until you announced that you were leaving to realize it, but it was about you, Tom. The whole time, it was about you.”

Wallace stared at her, and she laughed without a sound, amused by how pathetic it all seemed to her.

“Tara?”

“Come on, don’t do this. You’re a bright lad, you can figure it out.”

“Not with this I can’t.” Wallace looked away, back to the sea. “I’ve never been good at figuring things like this.”

“Neither have I. That’s why it took until you were gone.”

Wallace shook his head ever so slightly.

Chace looked into her whiskey, then drained the glass, feeling the raw heat in her chest. The lights from the Isle of Wight danced on the water, teasingly, as if you could walk all the way to their source.

“I didn’t want Ed,” she said. “I wanted you, Tom, and there was no way in hell I was going to make a try at my Head of Section.”

She turned to him, waited, and when Wallace finally faced her, she kissed him, feeling his mouth unyielding at first, then softening, answering. The taste of cigarette smoke and whiskey and curry and the ocean, all the flavors of the forbidden.

“I wanted you,” Chace said.

12

Israel—Tel Aviv, Mossad Headquarters
23 August 0904 Local (GMT+3.00)

It was the second bombing
in as many weeks, this time in Jerusalem, on King David Street, Friday night, when the kids were out. Another suicide to accompany the murders, an eighteen-year-old Palestinian girl who’d walked up to a crowd of teens and ended them all in fire and light. Seven dead, another four wounded, two of them critically. The eldest had not turned twenty; the youngest was fifteen.

The Israeli response came the following Sunday morning, less than thirty-six hours later, when two IDF helicopter gunships launched two missiles each into the home of Abu Rajoub, near the Gaza Strip. Rajoub, long identified as the director of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s martyrdom division, was killed along with two lower-ranking members of the organization, his wife, and one of their six children.

The thing that bothered Noah Landau most about all of this was that it barely bothered him at all.

Wrestling his beaten Toyota through Tel Aviv traffic and listening to the news on the radio, outrage and regret and condemnation and threats, he couldn’t bring himself to feel anything about it anymore, one way or another. The intellectual response remained intact, the understanding of the horror visited and revisited, the seeming futility of the cycle. He knew all the reasons, beginning with the essential principle that a government is obligated, morally and legally, to protect its citizens from violence, within and without. He still believed that a zero-tolerance policy was the only possible solution in the face of terrorist violence.

But as he cleared the security to the underground parking lot of the innocuous and frankly dull building that housed his office with the Mossad, Noah Landau realized that his emotional disconnect was complete. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what he should feel; it had reached the point that he simply could not feel it any longer.

He’d reached this point before, twice. Once in late 1982, fifteen years old and kicking a soccer ball in the front hall of his family home in Haifa, much to the fury of his mother. The phone had rung and she had answered and he had continued to play, and then she had screamed. It had been an extraordinary noise, and as an adult, he still heard that sound, something perfectly pure in its horror, the sound of a soul being torn from a body.

His father had been killed in action in Lebanon.

His mother’s grief had so overwhelmed him, he’d been left with nothing of his own. In that vacuum, he’d felt the absence for the first time.

The second time had been when his wife, Idit, and their eight-year-old son had died in a Tel Aviv café, when a car bomb had detonated twelve feet from where they were eating.

•

“Noah.”

“Viktor.”

“El-Sayd is on the move.”

Landau stopped in the hallway but didn’t look back, wondering if this was another of what Viktor Borovsky considered “jokes.”

If it was one, it wasn’t funny.

“He doesn’t leave Egypt,” Landau said softly.

“Yeah, well, I know that, but this is out of Cairo. El-Sayd’s making plans to go to Yemen sometime in September.”

That was enough to earn second consideration. Landau turned around, peering at the other man over the top of his glasses. Viktor was leaning in the doorway of his office, his long arms folded across his chest like spider’s legs. He shot Noah a sharp, thin smile and then, with the heel of one foot, kicked his door open farther, pushed away from the frame, and disappeared into his office, inviting Landau to follow.

So Landau followed, closing the door behind him. Borovsky was already at his desk, flipping through stacks of signals and memos. He was almost six and a half feet tall, bamboo-shoot thin, and bony. Landau could see the rounded cap of each of Borovsky’s shoulders beneath his cotton shirt.

“The Old Man hasn’t seen it yet,” Borovsky was saying. “Got it this morning, haven’t finished with the stack that came in overnight. But I saw el-Sayd, I thought of you.”

“Does it check?”

Borovsky stopped riffling through the papers long enough to blast him with a glare. “Got it this morning, I said. Haven’t had a chance to do anything else with it. Still have three dozen of these shit signals to do, okay?”

“Then until it checks, you’re wasting my time.”

“Don’t be such a cocksucker all the time, Noah. You don’t have to be such a dripping-dick cocksucker.”

Landau moved to the desk, set his case down beside it, not speaking. When Borovsky swore, his Russian accent grew thicker, sometimes to such an extent that it was impossible to make out the Hebrew he was using. Adding profanity into the mix didn’t help, since most of the profanity in Hebrew was actually taken from Arabic.

“Fuck my dog, where is it?” Borovsky muttered. “Little piece of turd, where is it?”

Landau removed his glasses, used the tail of his shirt to clean the lenses. The lenses didn’t need it, but it was something to do instead of becoming impatient. The glasses were plain, black plastic frames designed to hold thick lenses, and Landau knew they were unflattering on him and didn’t care in the slightest. He hadn’t cared what he looked like since Idit died.

There was a rustle of paper and Borovsky made a satisfied grunt, tugging a thin sheet free. Without his glasses, Landau wasn’t sure if it was a single sheet or perhaps a couple of sheets clipped together.

“Little shit can’t hide from me,” Borovsky announced, then waited until Landau had his glasses back on before handing the signal over.

The message had been printed on colored paper, almost a pistachio green, the date stamp from the Signal Officer at the upper left indicating the intelligence had come in just before four that morning. Routing indicated that the message had originated with one of the Cairo cells, but nothing more specific on the sourcing. Landau skimmed it quickly, then reread it again, more slowly, then handed it back to Borovsky.

“Useless,” Landau said.

“The fuck you say.”

“It’s from an informant, it’s bought information. Muhriz el-Sayd hasn’t left Egypt since the Luxor shootings, Viktor.”

“You think like a train, Noah, you go only back or forward, not sides, you know? Just because he hasn’t left, that’s not he never leaves.”

“This is not enough to act upon, you know that.”

“So maybe we get more, huh?”

“It’ll have to be better than some unidentified informant’s intelligence. It’ll have to be something verifiable.”

Borovsky grinned. “Well, shit, I can do that, sure.”

Landau handed the sheet back, picked up his attaché, and left the office without another word.

•

Thursday afternoon, this time heading in the opposite direction down the hall, Borovsky stopped him again.

“I think I’ll make you happy,” Borovsky said.

“I doubt that.”

Borovsky laughed, and this time, instead of ushering Landau into his office, he stepped farther out, shutting and locking the door behind him before starting off down the corridor. Landau followed to the elevators and they waited for the second car, and then Borovsky used his passcard to access the second basement level.

“Where are we going?” Landau asked.

“SigInt.”

Landau sighed.

“You are a big baby, you know that?”

“I have five operations running right now, Viktor, I don’t have time for this.”

“How’s that thing in Istanbul? You get the fuckers yet?”

Landau blinked at him slowly, hoping his expression was enough. Apparently it was, because Borovsky barked laughter.

The elevator ground to a stop, then opened to the pleasant cool of the subbasement. The guard seated at the checkpoint fifteen feet down the hall got to his feet by the door, his Uzi hanging from its strap on his shoulder, and waited for Landau and Borovsky to approach. The guard knew them from sight, just as Landau knew him, but he asked for their passes nonetheless, then checked them against the computer before logging them in and allowing them to proceed. The magnetic locks on the door snapped back with solid thuds, felt more than heard.

They made their way down the hall, past the rooms full of computers and communications equipment, to the Signals Intercept lab. Borovsky led the way inside, and they moved through a room of cluttered tables to another door, where David Yaalon sat, headset firmly clamped over his ears, face a sculpture of concentration. He was a young man, not older than thirty, working with a pen in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The room stank of cigarette smoke and coffee and ozone, computers and various blocks of audio equipment built into banks on every wall.

Landau would have been happy to wait, but Borovsky had other ideas and, with two fingers, rapped Yaalon on the back of his bowed head. Yaalon squeaked in surprise, dropping both pen and cigarette and yanking the headset from his ears, alarmed.

“Boo,” Borovsky said, and then began barking with laughter again.

Landau looked an apology to Yaalon, who returned it with a wounded face, then bent to pick up his still-smoldering cigarette and the lost pen. Once everything was back in place, he reached to the console in front of him and pressed three buttons in sequence, apparently shutting down whatever he’d been listening to.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Yaalon said to Borovsky.

“What were you listening to? Someone having a bit on the side?”

Yaalon frowned, moved his attention to Landau. “You don’t get down here often, sir.”

“I don’t often have a reason,” Landau said.

“Ah, but now he does,” Borovsky said, excited. “You play him the intercept from this morning, okay, David? The one with el-Sayd.”

“I haven’t completed the translation.”

“Arabic?” Landau asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll be able to follow most of it.”

“You want the headphones?”

“Speakers will be fine, David.”

“Yes, sir.”

Yaalon swiveled his seat back to the control panel, began using a combination of button presses on the console and mouse clicks on the nearest computer, queuing up the intercept. Landau pulled the nearest empty stool closer, perched on it carefully, waiting. Borovsky had scooped up Yaalon’s pack of Camels and was getting a cigarette going.

“This came from one of the listening posts in the West Bank this morning,” Yaalon explained. “Normally, we never would pick this kind of thing up, but something must have taken a bad bounce, because we caught most of it, and it’s pretty clear. I already ran the voices through the database, and the matches are ninety-nine point eight and ninety-eight point four, respectively.”

Landau nodded, then looked to Borovsky for explanation. Borovsky grinned and blew out a plume of smoke.

“Faud and el-Sayd,” he said.

Landau registered his surprise by raising an eyebrow.

“Play it,” he told Yaalon.

The young man leaned over the console again, depressed a button, and the speakers in the room came alive with a squeal of static, high-pitched enough to make each man wince. Then the noise broke and the voices came through, split with occasional squeaks and scratches on the line, the sound of other conversations on other calls faint in the background, as if parroting what was being said.

Older voice, male, presumably Faud:
“. . . why do you drag your feet?”

Younger voice, male, presumably el-Sayd:
“No, you don’t accuse me. You have my respect and my honor, for you are a learned man, but you do not accuse me of failing in the fight when you yourself cannot be bothered to take up arms.”

“I do what Allah, praise Him, commands of me.”

A pause on the line, and Landau was sure he heard someone complaining of stomach problems in one of the background conversations.

“All around you, your brothers fight,”
Faud said.
“Your brothers who are destined to become
shahid.
Would you let them do the fighting for you?”

Brief static, and then el-Sayd:
“—more from us? I’ve already told you what we require, and you can make it happen. I am willing to meet you both, to meet you and your benefactor in person, but I will not risk the journey on a promise alone. I need a proof.”

A pause before Faud answered,
“Do not worship money, my friend. You condemn yourself to Hell in its pursuit.”

“I fear no Hell. I am a righteous man. You asked why, I tell you why, I do not need to be given a lesson I already learned. You want more from us, we need money. You have access to that money.”

“I have given you my word—”

“And I have said I need a proof.”

Borovsky tapped Landau’s shoulder, grinning. “Sounds like you, Noah.”

“How much?”

“Fifty thousand, American. You know the account.”

“If I arrange it, that will be the proof you require?”

“If you arrange it, I will meet you and your benefactor in San’a’, you have my word.”

“Very well. Look to your account before the end of the week. Then look to San’a’, and we shall meet—”

Burst of static, almost as intense as the first, and then nothing but the ghost conversations lingering on the line.

“David?” Landau asked calmly.

“I know,” Yaalon said. “I’ve been trying to clean that last piece up all day, but I’m getting nowhere.”

“He was about to give the date.”

“I know, sir.” Yaalon shrugged. “I’m sorry.”

Of course,
Landau thought.
Everything but the piece we need.

“Keep working on it,” he said, and slipped off the stool, then headed out of the lab.

Borovsky caught up with him in the hall, halfway to the checkpoint, clearly pleased with himself. “Huh? What about that, huh? Fucking gold, that’s what that was, Noah, yeah?”

“There are thirty days in September,” Landau said. “San’a’ is a big city. San’a’ is a big city in Yemen. I can’t mount an operation based on this.”

Borovsky clapped a hand down on Landau’s shoulder, stopping him. The mirth had vanished. “You can’t let this go, Noah.”

“And I can’t act on it. Not with this, not yet.”