The Spoils of War

Ten minutes later, he was learning to use a cell phone for clandestine communications. And he had chosen a side.

Washington

Spinner’s new status was symbolized by a message that was waiting on his computer in the morning. It had been routed to him by name—major development, to be a name and not the generic “Screener”—and included the information’s source, also a first for Spinner. The information had come from “Habakkuk,” who was passing information from “Deborah.”

Deborah/Habakkuk/Routing

Subj: American officer detained by Mossad

US Naval intelligence officer Alan Craik was detained yesterday by, supposedly, Mossad officers. Cause may be his involvement in illicit investigation of death of Palestinian terrorist named Salem Qatib. Craik released last evening unharmed but feathers very ruffled. Release the result of efforts by his wife, Rose Siciliano Craik, also naval officer and also possible intelligence agent (Ass’t Attaché, Bahrain). Real reason for their presence in Israel not known. Evidence here of US condemnation of Israel for Craik detention. Question: why so much attention to death of one terrorist?

Spinner frowned at this. He read it again, and then again. He knew who Alan and Rose Craik were because Craik had served on the Fifth Fleet staff in Bahrain. What made him frown was the apparently private knowledge that the source had of the Craiks—“feathers very ruffled… Release the result of efforts by his wife…” How did somebody know that? And yet know at the same time about the demarche? (“Evidence here of condemnation of Israel…”)

Spinner wrote a note on a memo pad and clipped it to the message. The note said, “Who is Deborah?”

And it occurred to him—the stirring of, perhaps, an instinct for intelligence, and the reason that the CIA insists on vetting all agent reports before they are disseminated—that Deborah wrote reports that revealed too much of himself. Or was it herself?

Tel Aviv

The Craiks were taking Miriam Gurion to lunch. They had wanted to take the Peretzes, too, but Bea had said that she couldn’t make it, and Abe had called back to apologize and say that Bea “was busy advising Likud on how to be Jewish,” and he had explained a bit lamely that in fact she was busy all the time with things he didn’t understand. “Maybe she’s found a younger guy, who knows?” The upshot of his call was that Rose was embarrassed and asked him to come to lunch, anyway.

Now they were sitting at a table in a crowded room in what Miriam said was the best Yemeni-Ethiopian restaurant in Tel Aviv. “Noisy, but the food’s worth it,” she had said. And she was right. It was definitely noisy, and the food was definitely great.

Alan felt awkward, bellowing the details of his detention over the bellows that surrounded them, trying to keep his rage from bursting out, but the other three kept shooting questions at him as they all forked down spicy lentils, ground lamb with fennel, cold mashed tomatoes with cumin and hot peppers. He told them of the capture, the hours in a room, the sudden release.

“So what about the dead guy?” Abe shouted.

“Not here,” Miriam said.

Alan shrugged. “Later,” he said to Abe.

When they were stuffed and groaning and happy, Miriam led them down the street to a shabby café and took them to a table at the back. “Cop place,” she said. “You know, when cops take a break?”

“I think we call it ‘cooping,’” Abe said. He had to explain to her what a coop was.

She said, “Well, this is a coop. A cop coop.” She laughed, a big laugh that surprised Alan, who had seen only her serious side. “Okay,” she said to him when black coffee and a plate of tiny cakes had appeared, “talk about the dead man Qatib. But talk quietly.”

After Alan, with interpolations by Miriam, had explained who Qatib had been and why Mike Dukas had asked him to do the supposedly routine closeout, Abe said, “I don’t get it.”

“Neither do we, darling. None of it hangs together.”

“Mossad doesn’t do such things.” Abe seemed embarrassed. “As a rule. I mean—no offense, Mrs Gurion, but you know how these things work.” Miriam was making noises like a revving engine. “Well, you know what I mean—they’d need a big reason to do something like this.”

“Not to mention snatching my husband off the street,” Rose said.

“That is because he is so handsome, darling,” Miriam said, patting Rose’s hand.

“They never said I was handsome,” Alan muttered.

“What did they say?”

“Everything they said was so stupid, I couldn’t believe it was happening. I really had a hard time believing they were Mossad.” He rubbed his chin, felt the beginning of stubble. “But they were.”

“Of course they were!” Miriam’s eyes widened and narrowed quickly. “Because now they are on me. Yesterday morning, I was on the case, good; yesterday four p.m., I am off the case; this morning, I am on the case again. Why? First, Mossad calls TLV police, get that woman off the case. Then Mossad calls TLV, oh we’re so sorry, we were wrong, do put that nice lady on the case. Why? Because you scared them.” She gestured toward Alan with a coffee spoon, then looked at Abe. “You say you need a big reason for all this. No. I say there is no big reason. I say they were stupid people doing a stupid thing.” She gave a sudden, rather girlish grin. “That is what I tell the very pleasant man who calls me from your friends in Naples.”

“Dukas?”

“No. Mister Triffler. You know Mister Triffler?”

They smiled. Abe examined his fingers, gave her a sly look. “Okay, they were stupid. But why did they kill Qatib?”

“Because that is most stupid of all! We have to live with the Palestinians, whatever happens—interrogations must not kill.” She put her chin up, said almost defiantly, “The Supreme Court of Israel ruled in 1999 that torture is illegal.”

“Al said the dead man had been beaten.”

“Yes, badly, badly. But beating, I don’t know—if he died of beating, do you think Mossad beat him to death? Are they that stupid?”

“Either way, the question remains, why do any of it? Who was he?”

She gave an elaborate shrug. “He was a Palestinian.” She put down the spoon. “I have work to do at Dizengoff Street.” She began shaking hands all around.

When she had gone and Peretz and Alan and Rose were walking back toward their hotel, Peretz said, “Interesting woman. Think she’d be open to a contact?”

“What, recruit her? No, I don’t.”

“No, no. But—I liaise with cops; she’s a cop. What I’m thinking—this thing isn’t going to go away. State told the Israelis we’ll pursue the investigation and expect them to do the same. I just got word Dukas is sending somebody to follow through. I’m going to wind up in the middle of that, no matter what happens.” Peretz stepped around a woman who was staring into a store window. “And you’re leaving.”

“You bet your ass I’m leaving.” He said that he thought that the investigation was really Dukas’s and NCIS’s, not Peretz’s, but it would be impossible to do from Naples.

When they were parting, Peretz said, “Mossad has a long arm, Alan. And a long memory.” He looked like a wise professor repeating an important point to a slow pupil.

Alan looked at his watch and nodded. “I’ll remember.” He was on his way to the meeting that was his real reason for being in Tel Aviv; he couldn’t wait for it to be over so he could get out. He left Peretz nodding to himself, conscious that the man had more to say, and too focused to listen to it.

Naples

Dick Triffler was leaning against the wall in Dukas’s office, arms crossed, one ankle over the other and the shoe resting tip-down. He’d taken his jacket off, but his shirt was crisp and white and his tie was a thick Italian silk in a shade of blue that could have been used for a late-night sky. “Tel Aviv’s already giving us static about the forensics team,” he said.

“Jeez, I thought they’d pretend to stay scared for twenty-four hours, anyway.” Dukas made a face. He was wearing the same dark polo shirt and tired chinos, and his feet, in running shoes that looked like purple bathtubs, were crossed on his desk. “How much static?”

“They ‘question the necessity.’”

Dukas made a growling noise. “Okay, message ONI, try to get them to lean on it.”

Triffler nodded.

“How about the policewoman Craik was working with?”

“Sounds nice but very cautious. Clearly thinks I’m trying to recruit her with my magic wand. She says that she’s got the Qatib case now but she’s just doing the preliminary work. She’s been promised the body by the end of next week.”

“What the hell, what end of next week? What’re they gonna do, clone it before they turn it over? The cops should have had the body already!”

“‘Administrative complications.’ Mrs Gurion says she doesn’t dare turn them off completely.”

Dukas made the face again and toyed with a pencil. “You tell her I’ll be there Monday?”

“She was beside herself with delight.”

“When NCIS was investigating Pollard, the CIA finally broke down and gave us a Mossad organizational chart and a personnel roster. What I want to do is get on to headquarters and pry that stuff out of them. Specifically, I want to know all the operational people named Shlomo and if so what they do. I’m trying to find out what the hell Mossad’s interest could be in Qatib if it wasn’t cryptology. Can do?”

“If they’ll give it to me.”

“HQ will give us anything we want right now because a Navy guy was kidnapped and Mossad is in the shit.”

“For twenty-four hours, anyway.”

“Yeah, so move quick.”

“You know how many guys in Israel are named Shlomo? It’s like Bill.”

“Yeah, well one was with me in Bosnia in ninety-seven. A Shlomo, not a Bill. We gotta start somewhere.”

Dukas made a call to The Hague. He wanted a former French cop named Pigoreau, who now worked for the World Court and who had been Dukas’s assistant in a war-crimes investigation unit in Bosnia. Pigoreau wasn’t in the office yet—banker’s hours, Dukas thought—but would be in soon, he’d call back, etcetera. And did an hour later.

“Mike! Marvelous to hear from you!” Pigoreau had a great French accent—you expected an accordion accompaniment.

“Hey, Pig.”

Laughter. “Mike, you’re the only guy I let call me Pig. You know, in French this is a big insult—cochon?”

“In English, it’s affectionate. The Three Little Pigs. Porky Pig. We got a chain of supermarkets called Piggly-Wiggly.”

“Okay, I take it as an endearment. What is going on?”

Dukas reminded him of the operation with the two Israelis in Bosnia. Pigoreau didn’t remember it at once—he hadn’t been involved, but he had had contact with everything that went on in that office—and it came back with some prompting. Finally he was able to say, “The guy died!”

“Yeah, that’s the one. We wanted him, and he got shot.”

“I remember. A long time, Mike.”

“Yeah. What I need is, Pig, I want to know what the Israeli involvement was.”

“Oh, mon dieu—Mike, that stuff is buried a thousand meters deep someplace.”

“Yeah, but it’s get-attable. You guys are bureaucrats; you don’t throw stuff away.”

Pigoreau laughed again. “I try, Mike. This is serious business? Okay.”

“Leave a message on this phone. You’re a good guy, Pig.”

“Cochon.”

Dukas hung up and thought about how much he didn’t want to go to Tel Aviv. On the other hand, it would get him out of the office. And it was his job.

Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv’s sunlit concrete was a nightmare environment for spotting surveillance. Alan Craik was looking for surveillance because he was gun-shy from the events of yesterday, and because that’s what he had been taught to do in a hostile environment. And this was now a hostile environment.

He was on his adversary’s home ground, a colossal disadvantage. And the city’s modernity eliminated narrow streets with blind corners and back alleys in favor of broad boulevards. Heavy buildings set a bomb-blast’s reach away from the street gave potential watchers plenty of room on the wide sidewalks, among the hundreds of vendors and the thousands of pedestrians, to stalk him at will.

If his opponents had all these advantages and deployed a large, diverse team to watch him, he would never see them. If they were lazy, undermanned, or too uniform—that was another story. Especially if he could lead them into an environment where they were out of place, ill-dressed, just wrong. That was his technique, perfected in the souks and western hotels of the Gulf States. He planned his routes to cross the invisible social boundaries that define class and trade, profession, education. His route today went from his hotel to the diamond district, through the towers and business suits of the insurance brokerage houses, in and out of the library and the museum of the University, and on to his meeting.

He made his first watcher ten minutes into the walk. He spotted her early, a slight young woman in a drab scarf with a face like Julie Andrews. He gave her that name in his head, an automatic catalogue of everyone who gave him a glance or appeared interested in his progress. Her rugby shirt, jean shorts, and tanned legs were unremarkable on the busy sidewalk three blocks from his hotel.

What could be more natural than the American officer cruising the diamond district for his wife? But Julie Andrews drew stares from the conservative, Orthodox men on the sidewalk. She stood out like Jane Fonda in Hanoi. Alan felt his heart swelling in his chest, the first sweet rush of adrenaline hitting him. His snatch, the terror of it, the humiliation retreated with this little victory.

He’d never spotted a real surveillant before. And these were Israelis, probably Mossad. On their home ground.

Take that, you bastards.

Alan showed them how boring he was, how unconcerned he was that he’d been their prisoner sixteen hours earlier. He had to fight the temptation to show them that he had spotted them. He wished he had a camera—maybe Mike would care? The embassy? He’d have to file a report, anyway. Embassies took this kind of thing seriously.

Leaving the huge concrete octagon of the university library, he scored another victory. He’d spotted the possibilities of the library on his first trip to Israel. Doors everywhere, and one small, but legitimate, exit to a garden whose real purpose was to illuminate the chancellor’s plate glass window. The garden had a narrow walkway that led out past the graduate residence and directly downhill to a protected bus stop.

When he arrived at the bus stop, he had the intense satisfaction of watching Miss Andrews run down a ramp behind him, talking into the collar of her shirt, stopping to talk to a youngish man he hadn’t spotted, and then, to be treasured and retold forever like a find in a yard sale, he got to watch a third person, a stocky middle-aged male in a T-shirt, climb into a waiting van with a heavy aerial and speed away through the bus lane, the paunchy occupant staring at Alan openmouthed through the passenger window from four feet away.

Alan got the license number. It didn’t matter a damn, it shouldn’t have done anything to balance the indignity of yesterday, but his mood was lighter. His shoulders were squarer, and he found that he was whistling when he approached the meeting. His watch said he’d enter the lobby on time to the minute.

The man in the hotel lobby wasn’t anyone’s idea of a military intelligence officer. He was short, heavy to the point of fat, dressed in a khaki bush jacket, faded jeans and sandals that had been worn to paint something orange. His head was bald and almost perfectly round. His hands were huge, which, combined with his round head and his dark glasses, gave him the look of a garden mole.

Alan had expected an officer in uniform. Or perhaps a slender, sunburned man in shorts. He expected the Shin Bet to be different from the Mossad—but not this different.

The man’s smile was warm and penetrating, too warm to be feigned. “Commander Craik?” he said. “Benjamin Aaronson. Call me Ben.” Alan’s hand vanished in one of his, and then they were in an elevator headed up, their recognitions exchanged.

“Your wife like Tel Aviv? Ugly city, but great shopping.” Ben held the door to a room—no, a suite of rooms. There was a laptop on a table big enough to seat a board of directors. He closed the door behind them, set the bolt. “You got fucked over by Mossad yesterday.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah.” Alan tossed his backpack on the table. He was surprised by the wave of anger that accompanied the admission, as if having to confess that he’d been snatched put him at a disadvantage. A rare insight—Alan could suddenly see that it was a macho thing, like getting mugged. His masculinity—to hell with that.

“Well, we’re sorry. We’re really sorry, and you beat the odds by showing today—half the guys in my unit said you’d walk. Wouldn’t blame you.”

Alan swallowed a couple of comments, all unprofessional. “Not something I’d really like to talk about,” he said.

“Sure.” Ben opened the laptop. “You have some files for me.”

Alan opened his backpack, removed a data storage device and put it on the table, tore off a yellow sticky from a pad on the table and wrote a string of numbers from memory. “Files are on the stick. There’s the crypto key.” He shrugged. “I don’t really know what’s on it.”

Ben plugged it into his laptop, replaced his black sunglasses with bifocals, and peered at the screen, hunting keys with exaggerated care as he typed the digits. “You want some food? There’s enough in there to feed my whole unit.”

“You the commander?” Alan asked. He was looking out the window, wondering if he should have ditched the meeting.

“Um-hmm.” Ben was scrolling now, looking very fast at the documents Alan had provided. “I’m the colonel—you think they’re going to send some stooge to meet you?” He smiled over the screen. “Relax, Commander. This is going to take some time.”

“You have stuff for me, too, I hope.”

“That’s what ‘exchange’ means.” His attention went back to the screen.

Maybe it was the residue of yesterday, but Alan had expected something more adversarial, something like bargaining in the souk. He already thought he’d been put at a disadvantage by coughing up his stuff first, but it didn’t feel like that. Ben felt more like an aviator than a spy.

“You always been an intel guy?” Alan asked.

“No. No, I started in a tank. I was a crew commander in Lebanon in ‘83.” He continued to scroll while he talked.

Alan nodded to show that he knew what had happened in Lebanon in 1983.

“Everyone goes into the military here—that means everyone is supposed to, you know? Except that there’s religious exemptions and too many rich fucks who send their kids to Europe or the US or Canada to evade military time—you know that?” He looked up, his eyes bright above his bifocals.

This isn’t just small talk. Alan took a chair and sat opposite Ben. “I guess I thought everyone served.”

“That’s the myth. Here’s the reality—the kids getting hit by rocks in the West Bank aren’t the kids whose parents are in Parliament.”

“That sounds familiar.” Alan was surprised he let that slip. He didn’t criticize his own country to foreigners. It was a rule, a navy rule.

Ben’s eyes were back on the screen. “A lot of this is pure shit, you know?”

Alan got to his feet. “Look—”

“Don’t get on your tall horse, Commander.” He looked over the screen again. “Your President is a good friend of Israel, but he’s a terrible intelligence manager. Yes?”

“He’s the commander-in-chief,” Alan said without too much emphasis.

“Politics and intelligence, they go so naturally together and they are terrible bed mates, yes? You know what I am saying, Commander?”

Not a clue, unless this is another recruitment attempt. What the hell is he talking about? “Not sure I do, Ben. Call me Alan. Okay?”

“Sure. I’m saying that good intelligence is the truth, yes? The truth we see on the ground? And good intelligence officers tell the truth.”

Alan gave a cautious nod, already worried about where this was going. Was it yesterday making him shy? He was growing anxious because a friendly foreign officer was trying to make professional talk in a hotel room.

He caught himself watching out the window. Ben read on. He began to read snatches aloud.

It didn’t take Alan long to understand what the man meant when he said “shit.” He read a report summary on an interrogation conducted in an unknown location. The target of the location was referred to as “the terrorist.” The summary sounded as if it had been written for a Hollywood movie. Ben read several of these without comment, although his English was good enough to convey his amusement—and his disgust.

Alan fought with anxiety. Followed a train of thought out of the room. Back to Afghanistan. Brought himself back to the room.

After twenty minutes of this, Ben went on as if he had never stopped. “Politicians want the truth to serve their own ends—their own ends. Not the truth. Not the truth you saw. And they never see the people—the dead ones, the results of prolonged interrogations.” He pressed a key. “Okay, you brought what your people said you’d bring. Not your fault that it’s shit, but it is. My contact says you’ll be the officer in charge on this operation—one of the pieces in Perpetual Justice. Who makes up these names, eh?” He took the bifocals off his nose and wiped them carefully on his bush jacket’s tail. Then he pressed a few keys and spun the laptop to Alan, so that he had the keyboard under his hands and the screen lit up before him. It was an older model IBM, he noted.

“What we’re giving you is shit, too.” Ben’s voice had an edge. “Political shit, just like yours. I wanted to talk to you—really talk. You think this is a set-up, don’t you? It’s not. We’re providing a lot of the material to support these Perpetual Justice ops—and some of it is a pile of crap.”

Alan tried to feign unconcern, but his shoulders were tight and he felt as if he’d been strapped in an ejection seat for seven hours. “I’m uncomfortable with your choice of topics, maybe.”

Ben polished his glasses again. “Will I surprise you if I say we know you quite well, Commander? Africa, Silver Star, some not-so-secret decorations. You are an operator, yes? And my guess is, you are a believer.” He smiled, changing his round head into the face of everyone’s friend. The perfect friend. “As I am. A true believer in a complex canon of—of what we are.” His turn to look out the window.

Alan started through the files to cover his mixture of pleasure and fear. How could he not be flattered that they knew his career? And why did this seem so much like a recruitment attempt?

The reality outlined in the files drew him away from Ben’s words. His part of Perpetual Justice was a snatch operation against a suspected al-Qaida moneyman, and for the first time he saw a parallel between what had happened to him yesterday and what he was about to do. That hadn’t really pushed through Alan’s conscience until that very moment, a twinge:

The big SUV had powered through the streets as two men in the front shouted at each other. A big man in the back had had a gun. Alan had registered these things at a distance because he couldn’t form a coherent thought. When his brain had finally turned over, it had started on an endless loop of threat and fear. Captured. Torture. He had been conscious of just how many secrets he knew and could betray—operations, Afghanistan, fear—panic. Who has me? Why? I’ve been captured! Torture. Prepare myself Who has me?