Occupying the bed to one side of him was a 90-year-old white-haired man who was sorting out a cardboard box full of used bus tickets and muttering to himself; on the other side was an equally ancient man who appeared, to Ephraim’s trained eye, to have been dead for some hours. The beds on the other side of the ward did not, in Ephraim’s quick summing up, contain anyone who appeared remotely capable of carrying out even the most basic surveillance.
‘How are you, Danny?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know, you’ll have to ask someone else. I’ve no idea how I am.’ Baenhaker stared at the General for a brief moment, then turned his eyes away.
Ephraim looked him up and down carefully. Considering the distance he had come, he felt he was entitled to a slightly heartier greeting than this. It further confirmed the feelings he had about Baenhaker. He wanted him out of this hospital and out of this country. ‘The Sister tells me you are making a good recovery.’
‘What have you come for, General? To say goodbye?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Come on, General, they don’t reckon I’m going to last another week.’
Ephraim looked shocked. ‘Sister said they’re going to start you walking again tomorrow.’
Baenhaker gave him a pathetic look — a look that was full of defeat — and told him not to bother to lie. ‘They reckon I’m crippled for life — if I don’t die from my internal injuries.’
Ephraim stared at him for a long time, then shook his head. ‘Is that what you’re doing, Danny? Lying in bed, thinking about everything that’s bad, and how it can all get worse? Is that all you’re doing?’
‘What else should I be doing?’
The General leaned forward. ‘You should be working, Danny, that is what you should be doing. You are an agent of the finest Intelligence organization in the world; you committed yourself to working for that organization twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. How long have you been in this hospital, Danny? Eight days is it? Do you know who else is in here? In the other wards?’
Baenhaker shook his head.
‘The Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Defence; two Syrian government ministers; and an Irishman who is a key link-pin with the PLO. All scraped off the same motorway as you during the past few weeks. I’ve been here thirty minutes and I’ve found all that out. You have been here eight days, and what have you found out? Nothing.’
‘You do have a slight advantage,’ said Baenhaker, sullenly.
‘Who knows best what’s going on in a place like this? It’s the nurses, they’re the ones that know best. They’re going to give information to anyone they feel sympathetic towards. They all feel sympathetic towards you. All you have to do is ask, and they’ll tell you anything you would like to know. You’ve been here eight days, and you haven’t asked them one solitary question, have you?’ Ephraim did not wait for him to reply. He stood up. ‘You want to hang onto your job, then you’d better pull your ass up off that bed, and do it fast.’
Ephraim marched out of the ward, through the swing doors and downstairs to where the cab was waiting for him. He smiled to himself as he climbed in. It had worked. Five minutes earlier, Baenhaker had been a disintegrating vegetable with nothing to drive him forward. Now Baenhaker was furious, and would be wanting to hit back at him, wanting to hit back badly; and in order to do that, he had to get himself out of that hospital. Ephraim smiled more broadly; just as soon as Baenhaker got himself out of that hospital, he would remove him from England.
Ephraim checked into the Intercontinental Hotel in Old Park Lane, put his bag in his room, then went down to the foyer and telephoned the Israeli Embassy from a pay phone and made a rendezvous with his head of United Kingdom operatives for that afternoon. Then he asked the doorman for a taxi to take him to Putney, climbed in and, as they pulled off, told the taxi he did not want to go to Putney but, instead, wanted to go to the City of London, to 88 Mincing Lane, where he had a 12.30 luncheon date with Sir Monty Elleck.
He sat back in the taxi and pulled down the window to let in some air. He felt under pressure at the moment, great pressure, and he knew he must try to relax. He thought about the nuclear mines that had been discovered in a fishing dhow in the Persian Gulf; a good job had been done by the Omanis in keeping that quiet. Rumour was circulating in United States Intelligence and in the intelligence networks of the other countries which had learned of the incident that the Israelis were, in some way, involved in it. He knew that this was rubbish, but it had not been easy to convince his superiors. The Israeli Prime Minister had given him a thoroughly unpleasant grilling, and he wasn’t sure at the end of it that the Prime Minister was really convinced of his innocence or, indeed, of Israel’s innocence in the whole affair. Then there had been all the extra work resulting from the second attack on Osirak, monitoring and reporting on world reaction.
Ephraim was at an age when many men had retired; but what, he wondered, did they retire to? To tend their gardens? Peaceful gardens? Not in Israel, he knew. A peaceful garden was one you could look out at and know it would be there tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, and in ten years’ time, and in one hundred years’ time. Not in Israel. You could not, he knew, look at anything in Israel and believe it was going to be there even until tomorrow.
Ephraim emerged from the elevator on the sixth floor of 88 Mincing Lane and was ushered straight into the office of the Chairman, Chief Executive and one hundred per cent owner of Globalex. The diminutive Lithuanian and the bulky Israeli hugged each other warmly. ‘Issy, you look terrific, terrific!’ said Elleck.
‘And you look as successful as ever, Monty.’
‘Come, sit.’ Elleck ushered him into an ornate armchair, and then went to his drinks cabinet. ‘Chivas and ice? Still your favourite?’
‘Just a small one — don’t go mad with the bottle.’
‘It’s so good to see you — how can I keep my hand steady?’
There was a bond between the two men, a bond that went back a long way, to the summer in Germany of 1944, to the concentration camp Auschwitz — to a day when a Nazi soldier had been taunting Elleck, calling him a ‘fat Jewish bubble’, and pricking at his stomach with a bayonet. They were in the open, digging a mass grave for several hundred of their companions and probably, within a short while, for themselves, too; there was no one else around. Elleck was yelling abuse back at the soldier, who was fast becoming increasingly violent. At any moment, Ephraim knew, the soldier was liable to pull his trigger. The Nazi never heard Ephraim, who had been a thousand times better trained than he; before the Nazi’s eyes had even picked up Ephraim’s advancing shadow, his windpipe had been shattered like an old china vase.
Ephraim and Elleck had fled, and made the cover of the woods. They knew they had no chance of getting any distance, and instead searched for an ideal hiding place. Under the roots of an oak tree they found a natural hollow and, by excavating it a bit more, they were both able to fit into it. They spent every day for the next five months jammed in their tiny hollow, frequently hearing soldiers walk close by or even directly overhead. At night, they foraged for anything they could eat, from berries to dead animals, although they had to eat everything raw; even if they had had matches, they would never have dared to use them. They were able to get all the water they required from a stream a short distance away. It was not until two months after Germany surrendered that they came out of hiding, and then it was only because Elleck had contracted double pneumonia, and Ephraim had gone, in the night, to a farmhouse to try to get help. It was there that he was told that the war had been over for eight weeks.