Through the eighteen-inch-thick flint wall, Theo sounded as if he was trying to blow up some gigantic balloon whilst having a red-hot poker thrust up his back-side. This sound was punctuated every seven seconds by what sounded to Rocq and Amanda remarkably like a knight in armour doing somersaults on the bare springs of a trampoline. Throughout the shaking cottage, books were falling off shelves, crockery was crashing to the floor. Suddenly, the Italian emitted a series of ear-piercing wails out into the sleeping Sussex countryside and then for a few minutes all went quiet. A similar thing had happened half an hour ago, and again, an hour before that.
‘Seems the fat man’s got over his hang-up about brunettes,’ said Rocq.
‘I’d noticed,’ said Amanda.
Rocq slid his arms around her and moved over towards her.
‘You’re not feeling horny, are you?’
‘Yes — aren’t you?’
‘Not with that racket — and I’m very tired, Alex.’
‘What’s the matter? You haven’t been looking happy all evening.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Must be something. Did that girl upset you?’
‘No.’
‘Theo?’
‘No. I like Theo.’
‘Something’s upset you.’
There was a long silence before she spoke: ‘It’s Danny,’ she said at last.
‘Baenhaker?’
‘Yes.’
‘Has he been calling you?’
‘No. I got a call from a hospital — the West Middlesex — this morning. He’s been in a car smash. I went to see him this afternoon. It happened on Monday — he’s been in a coma for three days — only came out of it yesterday. He’s in intensive care still.’
‘What happened?’
‘I’m not really sure — went through the central reservation of the M4.’
‘We drove down the M4 on Monday.’
‘Oh Alex — he looked so terrible.’ She started to cry, and he hugged her tight. ‘I’m sorry — I don’t want to ruin our weekend.’
‘That’s okay. I’m sorry about Baenhaker too.’ He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. An ominous clanking started up again in the next bedroom.
‘You know,’ she said, brightening a little, ‘I think I prefer that rubber-freak friend of yours from Toronto — he’s quieter!’
6
Somewhere in the murky half-light in the whirling sandstorm that had been the past forty years of his life, something deep inside his brain had snapped. Sometimes, on the shrink’s couch, he looked back into the vortex, but terror always made him turn away.
General Isser Aaron Ephraim, head of the Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence service responsible for overseas intelligence, had thought that maybe, as the years advanced, it would go away. But now he was sixty-four years old, and it had shown no signs of going away. The hatred that burned inside him, as he lay there, burned as fierce as the day it had begun, on a hot, dry day in 1938, when he’d returned with his father to the farmhouse, after a day at the market in Shedema, to discover the butchered bodies of his mother, two brothers, three sisters, grandfather and grandmother, victims of a Syrian vengeance raid.
That hatred was compounded more times than he could ever comprehend two months later, when he saw his father standing with a rope around his neck on a scaffold in Tel Aviv. His offence had been to steal a machine-gun from a British post and open fire on a Syrian army truck. It was a hanging offence under the British rule, and they hanged him.
Ephraim had spent most of the Second World War killing Englishmen, first for the Stern Gang and later for the Irgun, under the leadership of Israel’s future Prime Minister, Menachem Begin. In 1944, whilst on a mission to Germany in an attempt to free Jewish prisoners of war, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in Auschwitz. After the surrender of Germany, Ephraim was sent by Begin to Rome, as part of a team to infiltrate the Vatican and expose the lucrative racket the Vatican was running, under the full sanction of the Pope, of organizing the escape routes and safe destinations for fleeing Nazi officers.
After the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, Ephraim was recruited into the Mossad and placed in Syria as a mole, in the guise of a highly successful businessman with a lavish lifestyle. He married the daughter of the Syrian Minister of Technology, and rose to become an influential economics adviser to the Syrian Parliament.
In his seventh year in Syria, whilst his wife was out shopping, the Syrian intelligence service kicked down the attic door of his house, and found him crouched over his radio, tapping out his weekly transmission to Tel Aviv.
He wanted to die, but that was a release they had no intention of granting. Beginning with the rape of his pregnant wife outside the locked door of his cell, by a dozen prison officers who did not stop until long after she and the child were dead, he spent four years in which his mind was progressively disembowelled. From the young prison warder who used to grin and urinate on his food before passing it through the bars, to the other Israeli agents, the names of whom his torturers extracted from him one by one, who were brought up and tortured to death in front of him, a hatred welled up inside him, a hatred of the Arab race that was so strong, it became the only thing that kept him alive.
In 1958 he was suddenly returned to Israel in exchange for eighty captured Syrians and, after a long recuperation period, he was given a desk job in the Tel Aviv headquarters of the Mossad.
The fervour that he threw into his work brought him rapid promotion and he rose up through the ranks until finally, one year ago, he had been appointed its Director.
Ephraim had married an Israeli girl, Moya, who had produced four children, two sons and two girls. The eldest son was already a captain in the army, the second son had begun a promising political career, and his eldest daughter was engaged to be married to one of the most prominent young rabbis in the country. The solidity of his family, his respectability, the warmth and the achievements put a barrier between him and his past, but however much he immersed himself in a family life, and he had time for very little, the barrier, he always found, was ever only paper-thin.
The Head of the Mossad raised himself gently off the Arab’s back and ran a caressing finger down the young man’s spine. ‘You know,’ he said, in a strange, flat voice, ‘it’s too bad we never had longer together, time to get to know each other, perhaps, a little; we might have become really good friends.’
General Ephraim put his trousers back on, and pulled the sheet up over the bare back. It was very quiet in the room, except for the steady hissing of the air conditioning. Ephraim could hear no other sound, not even the faintest hint of a whirr from the tape that slowly revolved in the Sony video-camera, whose 28mm wide-angle lens peered down through the tiniest crack in the ceiling.
Ephraim walked through the eerie stillness with a strange smile on his face; all the weird nightmare feelings that welled within him, threatened at times to overpower him and smash his brain to pieces, were calm now, completely calm. He walked towards the door, stopped just before it, and sat down on the step. All of a sudden he felt weak — weak and very sick. He bent his head forward and cradled it in his arms. He began to sob, slowly at first, then faster and louder, until he was near hysteria. He wept for ten minutes and then, still in the same position, he slept.
When he awoke, he did not know how long he had slept; it was always the same when he came here, drawn by a magnet he did not understand and could not resist. He awoke full of a deep sense of dread, full of fear in the pit of his stomach and fear in his eyes. He looked around the room. Nothing had changed since he had slept. The slow whispering hush continued. He rose to his feet and went through the door, into the corridor.