"It was a pretty dreadful funeral," the Prime Minister said, and shrugged off an overcoat. "Lady Armitage was first class, could have been welcoming us to a cocktail party, but there was a granddaughter there who cried her eyes out, noisily, rather spoiled things. What a thing to get back to, fourteen hours in the air and straight to church…"
The Director General knew the form. He allowed the talking to go on. Neither of the previous Prime Ministers he had served had exactly rushed to allow him to throw into the fray whatever hand grenade he was waiting to communicate.
"… Do you know the Soviet ambassador read the second lesson, and read it pretty well. I thought that was a very spirited gesture. .. "
"He was badly overdue a spirited gesture, Prime Minister," the Director General murmured.
"I don't follow you."
"The deaths of Sylvester Armitage and Miss Canning are a considerable embarrassment to the Soviets. The killings were an act of political terrorism," the Director General said flatly.
"My brief from FCO said quite clearly that our diplomats were shot down by a common criminal."
"Which is regrettably untrue."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning that the Soviet Union lied. Prime Minister, we are still looking for the last piece of evidence, but our belief is that the assassinations were the work of a Palestinian terrorist who was on a course in a military academy in the Crimea. We believe he flew out of the Soviet Union on the same day as the killings."
"Where does he lead us?"
The Director General said heavily, "The road goes directly to Damascus."
"Where he is beyond our reach."
The Director General produced a small leather notebook from his inside pocket. "'They must never be beyond our reach', Prime Minister. May I quote you your words? I keep this with me always. You said two years ago, when speaking of the threat of terrorism, 'We need action, so that the terrorist knows he has no safe haven, no escape'. Your very words, Prime Minister.
As I remember, you were heavily applauded."
"What do you have?"
"A face; we hope soon to have a name."
The Prime Minister's head was shaking, the eyes ranged anywhere in the room but back to the Director General's face. "We cannot just storm into Damascus, of all places."
"Miss Canning was a member of my team. I have never taken anything you have said, Prime Minister, to be empty rhetoric."
"He'll be beyond reach," the Prime Minister said.
"He'll have to hide well."
"There is something I have to know."
"Yes, Prime Minister?"
"Were the deaths of the ambassador and your Miss Canning condoned by the government of the Soviet Union?"
"We think that they knew nothing of it – may not know it now. Hence the embarrassment, hence the deception."
"I find it beyond belief that Syria, a client state, for God-'s sake, would instigate a terrorist outrage inside the Soviet Union."
"They may be a client state, Prime Minister, but not subservient. Their missile systems, for instance, won't allow Soviet personnel near Soviet hardware. Most certainly they do not take orders. They had a target – a motive too if you accept their twisted logic – and they would have believed with some justification that they could get away with it."
"I repeat myself… We cannot just storm into Damascus."
"And I repeat myself… We need action, so that the terrorist knows he has no safe haven… I will keep you fully informed."
The flies surged in the room, careless of the swatting irritation of the commander.
He gestured that Abu Hamid should sit. He brought him a can of Pepsi from the fridge. The sounds of the camp drifted through the windows.
"What do you want of me?"
"Major Said Hazan," Abu Hamid said.
"You have pleased him."
"His face."
"What of his face?"
"What happened to his face, his hands?"
"You are not a child to be frightened, Hamid. You are a fighter."
"Tell me what happened."
"He was a pilot, MiG-21. In combat over the Golan Heights in 1973 he was shot down, hit by a Sidewinder air-to-air missile fired from a F-4 Phantom. There was fire in the cockpit. He had to level out before he could eject. He is not a man to panic, he waited. He would not know the meaning of panic. When it was safe to eject, then he did so. His parachute brought him down behind his own lines. His face was rebuilt in Leningrad.
Perhaps in the hospitals there they are not experienced in such injuries."
Abu Hamid drained the Pepsi. "I just wanted to know."
The commander leaned forward, his face close to Abu Hamid's. "You should understand, Hamid, that a man, with his face and his hands on fire, who does not panic, does not eject until the right time, that man is to be treated with caution."
"What are you telling me?" Abu Hamid's finger flicked at the scar hole on his cheek.
"That Major Said Hazan works now for Air Force Intelligence, that he has great influence…"
"I have performed a service for him. I am his friend."
"Be careful, Hamid."
"He told me today that I would be rewarded for what I did. He himself signed the chit for my girl to come to the camp. On his orders cars have been sent for me, bills have been paid."
"Then you are indeed his friend," the commander said softly.
He was a clever young man, with a bachelor's degree in physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the reserve of the Israeli Defence Forces he held the rank of sergeant, in civilian life he was a research scien-tist for a company specialising in the manufacture of military electro-optics. He was said to have the most complete knowledge among all the reservists of the labyrinthine computer files held by Military Intelligence on Palestinian personnel.
The computer failed to throw up any reference to the crow's foot scar. The failure told the sergeant that the man of the photokit likeness had not been in IDF custody since the scar was acquired. A disappointing start… He was left with the computer and with thousands of IDF and Mil Int photographs. There were few concrete items in the information he had that would help him to reject material unlooked at. A flight to Syria told him that his subject would not be a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's Force 17. A man of Force 17 would never fly via Damascus. But the men had flaking allegiance. A fighter who was now in the Popular Front, or the Domestic Front or the Struggle Front, could have been in Force 17 a few years before
… It would be a long slog with the green screen, and the photograph bank.
The sergeant reckoned from the age of the subject, and from the fact that he had been taken to Simferopol for a platoon leader's course, that it was possible he had been in Beirut when the Palestinians evacuated in the summer of 1982. There were 1787 photographs available from the days when the Palestinians had trooped down to the docks and boarded the boats that would sail them to exile. The photos were blown up from American newsreel coverage that had been purchased unedited by the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation. The sergeant put up every print onto a screen for magnification. Each photograph was studied meticulously.
For five days the photographs flashed in front of him in his room, the blinds drawn over the windows, a cone of light from the projector to the screen.
He had a dogged persistence.
After 1411 failures his squeal of triumph was heard in the adjacent rooms and corridors. He had found a thin young man riding on the top of the cab of an open lorry, a short-haired young man with a thinly grown moustache. A young man who had a rifle aloft in one hand, and whose second hand was raised in the V-Victory salute. He saw the wound on the upper left cheek. Standing close to the screen, a magnifying glass in his hand, he found the lines of what the report called the crow's foot… Back to the computer. The number of the photograph fed in. The search for cross reference information. Long moments of stillness and then the rush began.