The Heat of Ramadan, page 34
“Shall I cite precedents?” Horse had taken a seat and was eating a piece of Simona’s coffee cake. He slurped from a glass of tea.
“What did you say, Soos?” asked Benni.
“Do you want me to cite historical precedents for agent-doubles posing as other individuals? Plastic surgery is no longer just a science, you know. In Switzerland, it’s an art. There’s the Oswald case—still speculation, of course. There’s Beckman in Germany, and that remarkable Degaulle double in the sixties. Then—”
“Cut to the chase, Horse,” said Eytan.
“Well,” said Horse as he picked some crumbs from his shirt. “If I were inserting a man into your military environment, I’d double him as one of your officers. Of course, I’d have to eliminate the original. . . .”
“Yudit!” Baum yelled. The girl came scrambling out of the dining room. “Drop what you’re doing. I need a photograph. Take my car and go to the office.”
“Wait,” said Eytan. “Change that, Yudit. Stay away from H.Q. Go to Beit Agron, the Government Press Office. Tell them you need a photo of Major Rami Carrera. Tell them he’s being promoted or something. Don’t use your ID card unless you have to, and get it back here in half an hour.”
“Major Rami Carrera,” said Yudit.
“Yes. Go.”
She stepped quickly out the door.
“I’ll get a team to Carrera,” said Uri and he made for his radio.
“Yes,” said Baum.
“No, wait.” Eytan gripped Baum’s arm and shot him a look. “Uri, we can’t risk that yet. We might blow it. Let’s wait till we fax the Brits our own picture for confirmation.”
“I can’t wait on this, Eytan,” said Uri.
“Please. Just for a while. But in the meantime you can have your office check Carrera’s recent movements. If he’s been anywhere outside the country. Just in case.”
“Okay,” Badash relented.
Benni gave Eytan a quizzical look. Eckstein just turned the fingers of his left hand upward and touched them together in the Israeli gesture that demands patience.
During the next half hour, twenty cigarettes died and a liter of coffee was consumed, but nothing of significance transpired.
Before Yudit returned, Sylvia made her first appearance since secluding herself with her intercept transcripts. She limped slowly down the stairs, for her arthritis was flaring and her lungs were as black as a coal miner’s. She was holding a single sheet of yellow computer paper.
“Well,” she croaked. “There’s only one piece of any interest.” Then she looked at the round table, the ravaged cups and saucers. “What’s the matter? You can’t bring an old woman something to eat?”
“What do you have, mother?” Baum asked impatiently.
Sylvia hacked for a moment. “We have one item of some interest, a pickup from the PFLP station in Tunis. It was an intercept of a telephone request to the station, in French. Courtesy of Mossad, I might add.”
“Nu?” Eytan tried not to scream at her.
“A Mr. Theodore Klatch requested that the station broadcast a Christmas carol, on three mornings running. The song was ‘We Three Kings.’”
“So what’s so strange about that?” Uri Badash asked.
“It’s not even September yet,” Sylvia scoffed. “Policemen,” she added as if spotting a cockroach.
On hearing the song title in English, Arthur rose from his post by the cellular and came over to the table. “May I ask?” he said.
“It’s a wild card, as you might call it,” Baum told him. “Possibly a coded message. A song called ‘We Three Kings.’”
“I could send someone to the American Cultural Center to get a copy,” Eytan suggested.
Sorelli saved him the trouble. He began to sing slowly in a deep, pleasant baritone.
“We three kings of Orient are, bearing gifts we’ve traversed afar. . . .”
“Yablo,” Benni called. “Arthur will dictate a lyric to you in English. See what you can do with it.”
Sorelli joined Yablo at his GRID.
There was a soft knock at the door. Benni rose and doused the lights while everyone else froze. Eytan checked the peephole and admitted Yudit, then flipped the lights back on. She proudly handed over a black-and-white glossy of Rami Carrera, and Horse ran with it to fax London before it was too late.
“Just the face!” Benni called. “Cover the uniform!”
Yablo printed out five copies of “We Three Kings” on a small dot matrix and handed them out. Then he hunched to his machine and began trying to break the possible cipher.
Arthur’s telephone rang. He answered it, listened for a while, then he covered the mouthpiece and spoke to Benni.
“It’s my boy in Virginia. We duped the Frogs, but they really don’t have anything. However, Vienna station does have one item of possible interest, but they can’t give it to us over an open line.”
Baum thought for a moment. “Can he telex?”
“Hold on.” Arthur turned back to the phone. “Can you telex it? Come on, Chuck, just give it to me in a simple One-Time. I don’t know, use your imagination for Christ’s sake.”
Benni snapped his fingers and Yablo wrote his GRID modem number on a pad and handed it to Arthur.
“Yeah, now you’re cookin’!” Roselli said into his phone; then he recited the number for his co-worker in Virginia. “Encode it and send.”
Yablo switched back to his telex software, and after twenty long minutes a paragraph of gibberish appeared on his screen. Arthur was pacing next to Yablo’s computer.
“All right,” said the American. “It’s like this. My boy says, ‘Back up the value of the last digit when Boston won the Pennant.’ That was 1975, so take each letter and back through the alphabet by a value of five.”
Yablo saved the gibberish to disk and loaded a word-processing program. Then he pulled the enciphered message onto the screen, typed out the English alphabet, and wrote a simple macro that would take each letter of the message and replace it with the proper value.
After a few minutes, he handed Arthur a printout. Roselli smiled as he read the decoded transmission aloud.
HI ARTY. FUCK YOU. MARK THIS. RECENT INTERCEPT VIENNA STATION OF PHONE CALL TO MOTHER.
“That’s the Russians,” Arthur interjected.
CALL INITIATOR, MAJOR V. KOZOV, FOREIGN AGENT RUNNER DEPARTMENT VIII. CALL RECIPIENT, COLONEL I. STEPNIN. RELEVANT QUOTE: “HE CAN’T LAST LONG WITH THAT FACE. THEY WILL EITHER PROMOTE HIM OR KILL HIM.” END OF SHAREABLE INFO. HAVE A NICE DAY.
Arthur lowered his paper. Benni and Eytan stared at each other.
Uri Badash responded to the crackle of his radio and picked up the handset. He signed off and spoke to the room.
“Rami Carrera has not been out of the country in eight months.”
Horse appeared above them, leaning over the railing. He was also holding a piece of paper, but he did not need to read from it.
“MI6 responds to our fax of the photograph. That’s him. That’s the killer.”
It was no easy task convincing Uri Badash to leave Rami Carrera alone. The Shabak agent did not believe that Carrera was a double or a mole, but he wanted to pick him up for questioning just the same.
Benni and Eytan stalled him, calling a break in operations while they went upstairs and out onto the veranda off Eytan’s study, where they conferred quietly in the eerie silence of postmidnight Jerusalem. Then they asked Badash to join them.
They begged him to do nothing about Carrera until after 7:00 A.M., at which time he would be free to act as he saw fit. In the meantime, they asked him to accomplish another difficult mission.
Benni explained that a prisoner in Atlit might still hold the key to the Kamil case. He wanted George Mahsoud transferred to the Russian Compound in Jerusalem, and only a GSS man of Badash’s rank could effect such a transfer. And he would have to do so in person.
Badash reluctantly agreed, not bothering to disguise his skepticism.
“This had better not be a wild-goose chase, Baum,” he said as he packed up his communications gear.
“I promise to invite you for dinner when the goose is cooked,” said Eytan.
As no more pertinent intelligence was forthcoming from any contacts, Benni ordered one and all to work on the “We Three Kings” code. They did so until it was after 3:00 A.M. and everyone was thoroughly drained. They produced a lot of gibberish and some interesting poetry, but nothing of operational value.
Finally, Baum gathered them all together in the salon.
“Okay,” he said. “Fine work. Wrap it up and sweep it. Don’t leave a scrap. Go home, get some sleep and keep your mouths shut.”
One by one, the agents and analysts left the apartment. Arthur shook hands all around, sorry that he could not join them for the remainder of developments. He was promised a discreet postoperation briefing by Baum.
Danny Romano was the last to leave. In the doorway, he turned to Benni and Eytan.
“And what are you two up to now?”
“A few hours’ rest, we hope,” Eytan answered.
“Sure.” Romano smiled over his pipe stem and left.
Alone now in the apartment—except for Simona, who had slept peacefully through all of the ruckus—Benni and Eytan put up a fresh pot of coffee.
Sleep was a luxury they would have to forswear.
* * *
It was just another beautiful summer morning in Jerusalem. The violet sky was paling to a robin’s-egg blue, the air was still cool and dry with the desert night, the branches of the trees were heavy with dew-dampened leaves and dancing starlings.
In the northern hilltop suburb of Ramat Eshkol, Major Rami Carrera stepped out from his quaint stone cottage. As usual, he was wearing a crisply ironed dress uniform, his black combat boots highly polished, his black beret tucked under his left epaulet and his Ray Bans perched in his curly red-blond hair. The Jerusalem summer had brought out the freckles on both sides of his slim nose, and the stretched tissue of the curved scar below his right eye—souvenir of a near-fatal jeep accident—was burned to an even deeper red than usual.
Major Carrera carried the usual pile of rolled-up maps under his left arm, and with his right hand he jauntily swung the leather briefcase that never left his side. He stopped as he often did, to take in the fresh scent of Jerusalem pine. Then, once more thanking his lucky stars for his career-making posting to the Knesset, he marched down his slate walkway, opened his wrought-iron gate and headed toward his parked Ford Escort.
Carrera stopped short as two men emerged from another parked car and blocked his way. They were both in uniform, wearing officers’ field ranks. He could not see their eyes for their sunglasses, but they were polite as they showed him ID cards designating them as IDF Field Security agents.
The men asked him to confirm that he was indeed Major Rami Carrera, Planning and Logistics. Carrera produced his own ID, and the two men informed him that they had been instructed to escort him immediately to General Headquarters in Tel Aviv. When Carrera asked the reason for the summons, the men replied in typically cryptic fashion, “This is a matter of national security,” and they produced a typewritten order on army letterhead.
Carrera wanted to take his own car. The agents politely declined his request, and he reluctantly joined them in their vehicle, which promptly sped off out of Ramat Eshkol. Yet the car made a left turn on Sderot Eshkol, instead of a right, which should have been evidence enough. . . .
The men were not simple Field Security officers.
And Rami Carrera was certainly not headed for Tel Aviv.
13: Bethlehem
The Next Morning
AMAR KAMIL WAS ALMOST HOME.
Through the swirling dust of an Israeli army convoy he could see the church steeples, domed mosques and minarets of his city of birth. The shining stone structures shimmered in the distance, poking through a long swatch of filigree cloud that was part morning fog and part residue from a dying Negev storm.
The army convoy stretched for a full kilometer along the Hebron road, dipping into a shallow bowl of scattered shops and houses before rising toward the city. Amar had no other choice but to wait his turn, for the customary Israeli roadblocks were out in force and there would be no skirting the issue. Still, the image of the city seemed to float in the morning air like a mirage from an Arabian fable, and Amar feared against all logic that it might suddenly disappear.
For years he had trained himself to ignore emotion, scorn longing and repress love. Yet as he sat behind the wheel of the car and stared out into the bright morning, he could feel his heart begin to swell within his breast.
It had been twenty years.
The line of vehicles began to move more quickly now, for most of them were jeeps and trucks of the Occupying Powers, and they would be quickly waved through at the checkpoints. The traffic halted only whenever an Arab vehicle, identified by its blue or green license plate, was stopped and searched by the soldiers. All of the Arab vehicles were inspected, their drivers and passengers humiliated, no matter how polite or tactful the process.
Amar was driving a white Siat he had rented in Tel Aviv. The plates were Israeli, and that fact, along with the army’s desire to decongest the morning traffic, would probably work in his favor.
Now that he was actually on the ground in Israel, wearing the face of a well-known cabinet advisor, Amar had to take some further precautions. He sported a large khaki bush hat to cover his hair, and he had purchased a pair of teardrop sunglasses of the type worn by helicopter pilots. The lenses drooped sufficiently to hide his scar. Upon arrival in Tel Aviv he had quickly destroyed his purloined American passport. Then he staked out a Bank Leumi cash machine, selected a proper citizen who carelessly dropped his wallet into an open shoulder bag, and followed the man onto a crowded bus where he lifted the precious ID cards with relative ease.
He reached the roadblock before the main entrance to the city. Folding gates of vicious tire spikes had been stretched prone across the road, forming an obstacle that required slow, careful driving and tight turns. Six young soldiers toting assault rifles herded the cars through, peering in the windows with that sharp cruelty of youthful power. On the far side of the roadblock, two battered cars with West Bank plates had been pulled over, all of their doors ajar, trunks open, their kaffiehed drivers and jallabieh-draped women standing aside under the blazing sun while the Jews rummaged through their belongings.
An officer, no older than a college freshman, pointed at Amar and motioned for him to drive around the teeth and bear to the left. Amar slowed, expecting to be questioned, but then someone yelled, “Sa! Sa!” and by the added flurry of waving arms he realized that he could drive on. He touched his hand to his hat brim as he depressed the gas pedal.
When Amar had last seen Bethlehem he had been too young still to drive a car. However, like most urban children he had spent his playtime in fantasy adventures that took him through the city’s streets and alleyways, day and night, discovering secret cul-de-sacs, shortcuts and side roads. Despite the passage of time, the city had hardly changed, the only obvious difference being the blight of television antennae where none had existed at all in 1967. The layout was certainly unaltered, and it returned to him now like a suppressed childhood memory extricated by a hypnotherapist.
For some reason, Amar decided not to penetrate immediately to the heart of the city. He felt the anticipation of a man being reunited with an old lover, and he wanted to intensify the ecstasy by prolonging the act. He turned left off Derech Hebron and cut over to Manger Way, a long mountainside road that wound around the city like the hem of a pleated skirt.
The traffic was thin here, just the occasional taxi and the scratched and dented vans and pickup trucks common to all the Arab laborers on the West Bank. Amar had to concentrate hard to keep from driving off the road and into the sharp gulley below, for his gaze was riveted to the old stone houses, shops and mosques that spilled up and over the high hills to his right. Boys in dirty dress trousers and white shirts chased soccer balls through the narrow streets; girls in skirt uniforms marched in little groups, hugging their books and giggling as they watched the boys. Old farmers and peddlers prodded their flea-bitten donkeys, overburdened with wood piles, petrol cans, burlap rice bags and anything else their masters saw fit to torture them with. Outside of each small grocery or café, groups of men sat at rickety wooden tables, taking long drafts of smoke through the rainbow tubes of their narghile pipes while they tossed tiny ivory dice onto Sheshbesh boards from their sun-blackened hands.
Amar suddenly felt a stab of something in his heart, an emotion that took him by surprise. Though he had dreamed for years in exile of returning to the womb of his birth, its face unaltered in any way brought on a feeling of frustration and rage. His people were prisoners, their homes occupied by cruel and arrogant infidels, yet here they were going about their daily lives as if all that really mattered was a good game and a smoke. He had spent his youth fighting for them, killing for them, yet they seemed to have done nothing to better themselves.
He hit the brake as he realized peripherally that something was blocking the road, and he turned his attention forward. An Israeli armored personnel carrier was lumbering up the avenue from the direction of Beit Sachur. The hulking iron monster was covered with white-yellow dust, and it sprouted black machine-gun barrels from every orifice. Atop the vehicle, a squad of soldiers sat brandishing their weapons, grinning arrogantly beneath their helmets and goggles, waving the civilian traffic aside.
One of them clutched a torn Palestinian flag in his hand, and he waved it over his head like a conquering Crusader. Amar wondered if the Jews had killed some unarmed teenager to capture their prize, and he quickly turned his anger on those who deserved it.
He was suddenly ashamed of his harsh judgments of his own people. How could they better themselves under these conditions? How could a prisoner hope to improve his lot when his life was composed of iron bars, a worn mattress and an open toilet?
