Читать книгу The Spoils of War - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 24

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?

He snapped back to the computer. His hands were trembling. He did not raise his eyes to meet Ben’s.

The documents in front of him were recent surveillance findings of the target, clearly much altered. They’d had a certain amount of information deleted, but they were thorough, carefully annotated. Exactly what he’d need to plan his operation.

The next file was a clean summary of the target’s ties to al-Qaida and his location in the financial hierarchy. To Alan, it was like reading an academic paper with no footnotes. Everything was neat and tidy—the target’s role, his family relations, his bank accounts. To Alan, it stank. Intelligence was never that simple. Terrorists were never that simple. He looked up, straight into Ben’s smile.

“Okay, you pass. You really are an intel officer. You had me worried.”

“This is like a document you send to a briefer.”

“Give that man a cigar.” Ben paused, clearly pleased with his phrase. “There’s more of the same. It was pushed on us. We decided to tell your people through you. I’m going to talk out of school—that’s your phrase, yes? Okay, out of school, under the rose—we’re a secretive lot, we have a great many phrases for this. Okay? The surveillance reports, his location—I’ll back those. My people, or people I know, did those. The background, the bank accounts, the summary—not ours, okay? I can guess, but I won’t—you don’t want to criticize your president. Same-same. Right?”

Alan was scrolling down the summary, looking at an Excel spreadsheet on banking that looked impressive as hell. Except that it was unsourced.

“Jesus.” Alan looked up self-consciously. “Ah, sorry.”

Ben smiled. “I think I’ve heard the name before.”

Alan’s eyes went back to the document and he grimaced. “I don’t get it. All this unsourced stuff.”

“But when you deliver it to your Central Command, it will become sourced. From Israeli military intelligence. Very trustworthy, yes? Maybe in some circles, more trustworthy than your own CIA?”

Alan murmured “Jesus” again without thinking.

“We decided we wouldn’t do it without telling somebody—and somebody is you, Commander. They try and fuck us. Okay, we’re proud in the military. We don’t trade shit unless we mean to fuck somebody. We ask for you. ‘Send the guy running the operation.’ So we—so I can have this conversation. There it is. It’s political. Somebody wants this man. Is he al-Qaida? I have no idea. But I think if he is, there would not be all this amateur shit in the package.”

Alan shook his head slowly. “I haven’t seen what I brought you.”

Ben held up his hand, balanced it, teetered the palm slowly up and down. “Same-same. Some shit.”

“I didn’t see it. Not my stuff.”

“Of course not. Me, I’m a meddler. I won’t do one of these things, these ‘exchanges,’ without reading everything.”

Alan shrugged. “We’re not like that.”

Ben smiled. “No? What’s to stop a double agent from filling that data stick with stolen secrets on stealth technology and giving it to you to pass? Nothing simpler.”

That idea had never occurred to Alan, whose hands froze on the keyboard.

Ben continued, “May I give you a piece of advice, professional to professional? If they won’t let you read the material, refuse the meeting. Let them find another Patty.”

“Patsy,” Alan said automatically. “Does our stuff pick up authenticity, too? I mean, what I delivered—”

“Will be devoured by our politicians. Because it comes from US intelligence.”

Alan started pressing the keys that would dump the data files into his stick. “I don’t like being used.”

Ben nodded. A slow smile spread over his face. “Good. I was afraid you wouldn’t listen.” He paused and said, “There’s more than one Israel.”

“I’m getting that idea, yeah.”

“I wish we had more time to talk—” Ben said. He rose to his feet. “You are in a hurry.”

Alan collected his bag, rested his hands on the seat back. “Maybe I’d be more receptive if I hadn’t been grabbed by other Israelis yesterday.” He shrugged, nothing to lose. “Or followed here by a surveillance team.”

Ben winced. “Not mine.”

Alan shrugged again, because it made no difference. “Thanks for the heads-up on politics. I believe you. Okay?” He was tempted to unburden; life since Nine-Eleven had left him with more reservations about his own profession than the rest of his career combined, but Ben was not the man. “You going to be in trouble over this? You know I’ll put in a contact report.”

Ben smiled. “As will I. May I tell you something that will surprise you, Commander? This is the start of something. I dislike the politicization of intelligence. I love my country. I will not sit still. Now, I fight back. And not just here.”

When they shook hands at the door, Ben gave him a slip of paper that proved to have his real name—Colonel Benjamin Galid—and a phone number. “In case,” he said.

Alan left before it could get any worse. Because he no longer knew what to believe, except that too much of it had resonated.

That day, a Palestinian gunman killed six people in Israel and wounded a score of others. The crowd beat him and the police killed him. The Martyrs Brigade took credit for the attack.

That evening, the Craiks left Tel Aviv for Bahrain.