At the end of the corridor, he ignored the lift with its massive wide doors and climbed the long flight of stone steps. At the top was another corridor which he walked down, and then came into a slightly brighter ante-room. There was a small office beyond the ante-room, and a man came out of it; he had a hideous expression in his face, deeply engrained. It was the same expression he always had: a mixture of disgust and apathy. The General pulled out a roll of bank notes from his jacket pocket. It was a thick roll, and he gave the whole roll, complete with elastic band, to the man, avoiding his gaze; he could not bear the man’s gaze. The man nodded once, almost imperceptibly, and pushed the button which opened the electric lock of the front door.
The General walked outside, shut the door behind him and stood on the steps, gulping in the midday Tel Aviv heat with the gratitude of a diver who has just returned to the surface of the ocean. He looked up at the sky, at the hot sun, at the traffic that thrashed down the road, at the pedestrians, at the buildings opposite — and stood like a man starved, greedily gulping it all in.
Behind venetian blinds on the second floor of the building directly opposite, a 200mm lens on the front of a Sony video camera was trained and focused on him. The electric motor relentlessly drove the cartridge of tape over the head of the recorder built into the back of the camera. Through the viewfinder, the cameraman concentrated on keeping two subjects in the centre of the tiny television screen in front of his eye: the Head of the Mossad and the small plaque attached to the wall, a few inches to his left. On the plaque were the words: ‘Hadar Dafma House’. Hadar Dafma House is the Tel Aviv morgue.
Ephraim took a taxi back to his apartment, which was empty. His wife and family traditionally spent the month of June at their house outside Haifa, and he joined them at weekends. He bathed and then lay down on his bed and slept until three o’clock. When he woke, he was calm; the hatred that had been building up inside him to a point where it threatened to tear him into pieces was gone. It would be back again, he knew; in a few weeks it would start up again, slowly begin to grow again; but now, at least, it was quiet.
He arrived back at his office, and there was a Priority sealed envelope waiting on his desk; he cut it open, and pulled out a decoded report. He read it quickly and then put it down; he rested his left hand on the top of his mahogany desk and started, slowly and rhythmically, to pound it with his right hand. Sometimes, it seemed to him, everything in life was against Israel — not just the hatred of her enemies farther afield. It was the very soul of life itself that seemed at times to be against her.
Before the six-day war of 1967, Israel had been a minute country, smaller than Wales. Since that war it had doubled in size, but Ephraim knew that the land could just as easily, one day, be snatched away again, and Israel could be back to where she was before, a mere seven thousand, nine hundred square miles, the only true home for the fifteen million Jews in the world — a home which one day, it was not inconceivable, they might need.
Ephraim’s job was to listen in on the rest of the world, find out just what anyone might be intending to do that could harm Israel, either by propaganda or by force, and either arrange for them to be stopped himself, or advise the Prime Minister on what action to sanction.
His moles were his ears, and just as he himself had been planted in Syria over thirty years earlier, he in turn had planted men — young, dedicated men he could trust, intelligent men with the ability to rise far — in all the countries where he felt danger could lurk or good information could be obtained. With a population in Israel of only three and a half million to draw from, and a tiny budget, he had a tough task, and could not afford to carry passengers on his team. In some countries he kept better moles than others: Britain was a key country to him, both because of its own status in the world and because of its large Arab population and connections. One of the men he had placed in England was a man in whom he had originally had particularly high hopes, someone whom he had singled out as a true chameleon, able to adapt and blend into any situation — a dedicated man, and a ruthless man.
During the past few years this man had disappointed him; somehow, the zeal for Israel had deserted him, and been replaced by a bitterness with his lot in life. He had become careless in his security, lazy in his work. He was a bad agent, and it was Ephraim’s strong view that a bad agent was a dangerous person to have.
The decoded message on his desk told him that this agent was at the present moment in the intensive care unit of a hospital outside London, following a car accident.
The report of the accident made no sense: the man had apparently driven into the back of a road-laying lorry in broad daylight on a clear day. He could have fallen asleep at the wheel — or equally as easily, he could have been drugged. Ephraim had a good young man he wanted to put into England, but his budget was already over-extended; he decided that soon he would swap this man for Baenhaker. He smiled. Some occasion would arise soon in London which would involve an agent in the risk of having his cover blown — these situations cropped up all the time. As soon as Baenhaker was out of hospital, he would be put at the top of the ‘candidates for blown cover’ list. The first assignment that came up, he would give Baenhaker, and then afterwards transfer him out of England to an unimportant country, on the grounds that his cover had been blown. He smiled, and wished all his decisions could be made so easily.
7
One naked blonde English girl held his ankles and ran her tongue slowly up and down the soles of his feet. He wriggled and giggled hysterically, thrashing around, trying to free his wrists from the pincer-grip of the second naked blonde English girl at the head of the massive bed. The third naked blonde pulled away his djellaba, climbed on top of him, and lowered herself down over him.
Ten minutes later he lay there, gasping in exhaustion. She leaned forward and untied his blindfold.
‘Judy!’ he smiled, weakly.
The other two began to sponge him down with hot towels. ‘Come on, Abby, take us out today,’ said one.
‘Yes, let’s go down to that beach at Quommah,’ said the other.
‘I planned to stay in and do some work,’ said Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh, the thirty-one-year-old son and heir of Sheik Quozzohok, divine Emir of Umm Al Amnah.
Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh was a tall man with a handsome, if rather weak, face. The pursuit of English blondes in their homeland, and the persuading of them to come, for not inconsiderable sums of money, for extended stays to the Palace of Tunquit, the capital of Umm Al Amnah, was his consuming interest in life. It was also a sport to which his passion for playing, on the world’s stock and commodity markets, some of the $9 million Umm Al Amnah earned every day from its oil sales, took a firm second place.
The Quommah Beach Club is one of the few spots in Umm Al Amnah that has anything approaching western style. It was built by Missh to impress visitors, and relieve them of some, if not all, of their dollars, by virtue of its containing the only casino in the country. It is a handsome oasis of green trees and smoked glass, built around a sheltered white sand bay that faces the shimmering Persian Gulf. Impressed by his visits to the Playboy Clubs, Missh staffed the place with blonde girls dressed in two piece bathing costumes made from camels’ skin, with camels’ ears attached to their heads and tails to their behinds.
The Beach Club is midway between Tunquit, the capital, and Al Suttoh, the chief port of Umm Al Amnah. An immaculate four-lane highway connects the two towns; it is the only four-lane highway in the country and it runs no further in either direction than the airport, the seaport and the capital, passing the Beach Club on the way. Like the road, the airport, the seaport and the capital are ultramodern and immaculate; Sheik Quozzohok wanted to impress visitors to his country and, provided they didn’t stray beyond this part, which, if they didn’t have camels they were unlikely to, he usually succeeded.