Some cover! thought Levi. The Americans could afford to be so sloppy. They were rich and powerful. And they were not Jews.
Walking to his office on the Rue de Phenice, Levi could see the grand facade of the American Embassy on the Corniche. He would look to the fifth floor, where the CIA officers worked, and try to imagine what they were doing and thinking. It was easy with some of them. The case officers who handled Lebanese politicians were so clumsy they left footprints all over town. Others, like the new man Rogers, were more careful. They looked, from a distance, as if they were almost clever enough to be Mossad officers. That worried Levi, and it made his stomach hurt.
Watching the Palestinians was the other part of Levi’s job. In some ways that was easier than watching the Americans. It was almost too easy, with too many tidbits of information in the air and too many tracks to follow. The Palestinians were braggarts. Rather than trying to conceal their military and intelligence operations, they boasted about them. And they fought over who would control them. Levi made it a practice to check out gunfights in Fakhani, because they often involved rival Fatah officers dueling for control of units, or operations, or money.
Levi despised the Palestinians. That hatred was part of what kept him going. The Palestinians were so thoroughly corrupt. And they were spoiled by the other Arabs, who were terrified of them. To become rich, all a PLO official needed to do was gather up a band of scruffy refugees in a place like Qatar or Abu Dhabi, let the local Emir know that trouble was brewing, and wait for the payoff to arrive. It was so easy to buy PLO officials that Levi wondered whether the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict might lie, not in another war, but in a takeover bid.
He watched the Palestinians with a horrid fascination, hating what he saw, his hatred in turn feeding his curiosity about the nature of his enemies. He was fascinated by their sexual habits. The Old Man, for example, had never been known to sleep with a woman. Who, then, did he sleep with? Levi wanted to believe that he slept with little boys. That would be exactly, perfectly right. Levi wanted evidence to support his theory, but where could he look? He couldn’t very well ask young boys in Fakhani whether they had ever been molested by a man in guerrilla fatigues.
And then there were the playboys, the young men in Fatah’s so-called intelligence service. There was Abu Namli, who bought his whisky by the case and frequented the whorehouses of Zeituny with a fat roll of dollar bills, buying two or three girls at a time. There was Abu Nasir, cool and austere, who liked to use women for other tasks, such as planting bombs.
And there was Abu Nasir’s assistant, a flamboyant young man named Jamal Ramlawi. Levi was convinced that Ramlawi was the mystery Palestinian in the recent scandal involving the French diplomat’s wife. There was no proof, but there were many rumors. Agents had even seen a dark-haired European woman near Ramlawi’s office in Fakhani. It had to be Ramlawi. He was notorious in Beirut as a ladies’ man. He had been seen in every nightclub and bistro in town. He was almost reckless in his behavior. So reckless that Levi wondered, as he thought about it, whether the young Palestinian’s disregard for what most people liked to keep secret might conceal a deeper secret. That was a possibility. Levi made a note to open a new index card in the Palestinian file. And to start checking Ramlawi’s travels more carefully.
Levi could remember dimly the time when he hadn’t been scared. That was before he joined Mossad, when he was just a simple soldier. When all he was required to do for the state of Israel was to risk the chance of dying once, in war. As an intelligence officer, he had already died a thousand times.
Levi liked to remember how he had joined the Israeli intelligence service. It was a way of pinching himself, reminding himself that he had once had another life.
He had been serving in the army. That wasn’t unusual. All Israelis join the army. But he was very fit and very clever, so he was allowed to join the paratroops, which made his parents proud. And he was so good in the paratroops that they asked him to join the special operations unit, where he was a team leader.
Perhaps the fear began then. Levi had made a jump into southern Sudan, with a team of Israelis who were helping to foment a civil war there between the Moslems of the north and the Christians of the south. The Israelis provided guns and training for the southerners, on the theory that if the Moslem-dominated regime in Khartoum was pinned down by internal strife, it couldn’t do much to help Nasser in Egypt make war on Israel. That assignment was only frightening for the few minutes before the jump. After that it was easy. Either you died or you didn’t.
After a year in special operations, he left the military and attended university. It was enough, he had done his service. A few months later the phone rang. Go to an address in downtown Tel Aviv tomorrow. No explanation, except that it was for the army. They spent four days asking questions, assembling every detail of his life history. The family’s background in France. Old addresses and telephone numbers in Marseilles. Old passport numbers and the names and addresses of dead relatives. A former girlfriend called to ask whether he had done anything wrong, because an investigator had just spent the entire day asking questions about him.
And then the ruse. He was called back to the army for more training. A three-month advanced intelligence course. Okay. Fine. No problem. Everyone in Israel is in the army. Then another course. A more advanced intelligence course, at a much higher salary, the salary of an Israeli Army captain, which was a small fortune in those days. By this time it was becoming obvious what was happening. The subjects covered in the course included covert communications, demolition, small-arms training, how to operate inside urban areas.
And finally the graduation ceremony. He was roused from bed in the middle of the night and taken to the airport, where he was given a false French passport and $10, put on a plane, and flown to Frankfurt, West Germany. Leaving the plane they gave him an address and told him to be there in ten days. Until then he was on his own, speaking no German, with $10 in his pocket. He had to survive in a strange country for more than a week without giving away his identity.
So what did he do? He survived. He stole a car and drove around Germany. He was a French student on holiday, he told people. He lived by stealing money. Purses, wallets. It helped that he hated Germans. He arrived ten days later at the address they had given him driving a brown Mercedes, with a new set of clothes and the lipstick of his German girlfriend still on his cheek. He was one of the few recruits who made it. Some of the other boys had slept in the bushes near the airport, eaten food from trash cans, and called the Israeli Embassy in desperation after two days. They were not survivors, like Levi. Perhaps they were not scared enough.
They said, Okay. You have survived. You are one of us. Go to France, to Marseilles. Settle down. Disappear. Take classes at the university. Build an identity. Apply for a passport. It’s legal; you were born in France. Here are the supporting documents. Money arrived every month at a numbered bank account in Nice. It was like a long vacation, until the French passport arrived in the mail. A few days later came a message from a Mossad case officer, and the beginning of the awful fear.
Levi went to work as a courier, making runs behind the Iron Curtain. He travelled as a French businessman, servicing dead drops and agents in Warsaw, Prague, Lithuania, Kiev, Moscow. He carried money, messages, assignments for Mossad agents in the East. They were Jews, nearly all of them. People as frightened and determined to survive as Levi was. He would collect their information in a quick meeting at a railway station in Warsaw, or in a brush pass in a Moscow subway station, or by retrieving a set of documents from a metal can hidden in the spout of a rain gutter in Bratislava. He travelled on a precise itinerary, pre-programmed down to the minute. Each contact set for a precise time, with a fall-back twenty-four hours later in a different place if the agent didn’t show or the dead drop was empty.