The man kissed her back and then smiled at her. “Ruth, my darling. Have I told you that you are getting fat?”
She smiled at this, kissed his mouth again, and spoke with his lips so close to hers he felt the warm breath of each syllable. “The new parabolic mics only have a three-band equalizer. I’m going to call technology to see if we can switch out the EQs on the new mics for the old five-channel ones. We’ll get better midrange vocals at distance that way.”
They kissed again. Embraced lovingly through the thickness of their down ski jackets. The man said, “Would it kill you to take a shower once in a while? You smell like a goat.”
And to this she replied, “If Technology won’t let us use the five-channel EQ, I’ll see if there is something we can do in the software to boost midrange. That might help us during replay, but it won’t do anything in real time to isolate vocals from background noise.”
“I love it when you talk dirty.”
Smiling the smiles of lovers who’d suddenly realized the extent of their public display of affection, they both sat back straight on the park bench, and Ruth grabbed the bag of warm honey cashews she’d bought at the Nuts4Nuts cart next to the ice-skating rink. She popped a cashew into her mouth and offered the bag to Aron, her younger lover, or at least the twenty-eight-year-old man posing as her lover for today’s surveillance in Central Park.
Aron was one of three on Ruth’s team; the other two, also posing as a couple, sat on the far side of the path just outside the entrance of the Central Park Zoo. Mike Dillman and Laureen Tattersal were both in their early thirties, both nice looking but not distractingly so, and they were also spending their time kissing on a bench, thirty yards up the path. Like their senior officer, Mike, Aron, and Laureen were all Israeli citizens who had emigrated from the United States, and they all looked perfectly at home here in New York City.
Directly between the two sets of fake lovers, an Arab man sat with his wife on a park bench, their baby in a stroller in front of them. The father rolled the stroller back and forth while he and his wife talked.
Laureen had a long, narrow, directional microphone that just jutted out of a small hole in the side of her oversized purse, and with it she and Mike were able to pick up the vast majority of the conversation between the man and his wife. The audio was piped into their tiny Bluetooth earpieces; both of them spoke Arabic fluently and, in the past twenty minutes of surveillance here in the park, they had covertly listened in on a long conversation about diapers and baby shit. It was an argument hinging on how he was not pulling his share of the diaper duties and, as far as Laureen was concerned, the wife seemed to be making a lot of good points.
While they sat on the park bench Mike and Laureen enjoyed spicing up their sweet nothings, just like Aron up the path. Sometimes Laureen giggled, leaned into Mike’s ear, and whispered obscenities. Mike never blushed, never reacted with surprise or distaste; instead he gave as good as he got, replying softly with his own crude comments.
In contrast to her team, Ruth was all business in times like this. She stayed in character with her body language, but her whispered voice remained on task, discussing the technical or logistical minutiae of surveillance work. She allowed her junior officers latitude to be silly, if they had nothing important to say, but she had done this long enough that she no longer felt any awkwardness in locking lips with her subordinate when in close foot follow or static watch.
Ruth and Aron scooted close together on the bench again, combating the December chill that filtered through the quilting of their heavy coats. They kissed again. “I’d rather make out with Mike,” Aron said.
Ruth stopped talking about parabolic audio equipment and said, “I can arrange that next time.”
Aron laughed at this.
Despite these brief moments of levity, they were hard at work now, just hours after arriving in the United States. They had been in Faro, cleaning up a few loose ends after the operation that led to the death of the two bomb-making brothers targeting Prime Minister Ehud Kalb, when Ruth received the order to fly with her team to New York City. Here in Manhattan, a thirty-five-year-old schoolteacher and father of a newborn had been under surveillance by the FBI for his recent purchase of a large quantity of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that also served as a key component in a potent explosive.
The FBI found the purchase curious but not strictly illegal, so they began what Ruth Ettinger considered a painfully slow and underwhelming investigation. That the professor was Palestinian and related by marriage to a midranking Hamas functionary in Gaza piqued the interest of the Mossad, and, because Prime Minister Ehud Kalb was scheduled to speak here in Manhattan at the United Nations in a few weeks, Ruth and her team rushed from Faro to Manhattan without delay to begin their own accelerated investigation.
She did not mind coming back to the States, although she knew she’d feel guilty if she didn’t drop by her mom’s house in Brooklyn before it was all said and done, and she really would much rather chase blood-soaked terrorists than sit at her mom’s kitchen table over beef brisket or matzo ball soup.
Aron put his hand on her knee while he leaned into her face. He smiled as he spoke, but the jokes were over for now. “Initial impressions?”
Ruth smiled back and shook her head, then whispered, “This guy is not a threat.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Look at him.”
Aron did so, discreetly, then looked back to his “girlfriend.” “Terrorists don’t take their kids to the park?”
“This is no terrorist. I can smell a terrorist.”
Aron conceded this point. “I won’t argue with you on that. You do seem to have a nose for the worst of them.”
Ruth took his hand and held it through her mittens. “This one feels like a complete waste of time, and I fucking hate wasting time.”
She turned her attention back to the Palestinian couple, watching them take turns rocking the stroller as their low-intensity argument continued.
Ruth was bored, but she was accustomed to the boredom. She could not help feeling that she and her team were overqualified for this assignment, but she did have to admit that her close knowledge of the area and her ability to weed out the real terrorists from the wannabes and nobodies made hers the perfect team to send. Despite the light banter of the junior officers, all four members of this team were exceedingly professional, and they took their work seriously. The psychiatrists who worked for the Mossad told Ruth she took things too seriously, but she found their supposedly learned opinions to be nothing more than government-funded guesswork bordering on quackery.
Ruth was fine, she’d told everyone, and she was most fine when she was out in the field and hard at work.
Her phone rang in her purse and she snatched it up, knowing it would be Yanis Alvey, her superior. He’d promised to call her with more information on the subject.
“Hello?”
“Ma nishma?” What’s up? Yanis always broke protocol and spoke in Hebrew when he called from Tel Aviv.
She answered back in English with her native Brooklyn accent. “Hi, Jeff. How are things?”
By calling him Jeff, she was reminding him to speak English. Of course it was unlikely that any subject she might be tracking could hear the man talking to her through her telephone, but it would be easier for her to slip up and start speaking Hebrew if the other party’s end of the conversation was in the foreign tongue.
Yanis answered back. “Your subject is clean. The purchase he made was benign.”
“In what way?”
“He is a high school teacher, true, but he also recently became a member of an agricultural co-op in Sullivan County, Pennsylvania. His crop is beans and figs, but the co-op grows all sorts of things. They are small scale; one of the farmers purchases equipment, another seeds, another fertilizers, and it all is pooled into the resources of the co-op.”