Little Aharon frowned. To last, he thought. Yes, of course you want him to last. He's your hope and your dream, all you've got.
Tajar sat facing him, adamant, using his hands to rearrange his crippled legs. In a way Little Aharon pitied Tajar, and Tajar knew that. Little Aharon, after all, had captured Eichmann in Argentina and obtained, for the West, Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing the crimes of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union. He had an international reputation in intelligence and was famous among the powerful. When professionals in other capitals thought of the Mossad, they thought of Little Aharon, who was the Mossad to them. Yet at the end of the war it was Tajar who had been the one with fame and power and promise. Why shouldn't Little Aharon give in to him now over one agent? One operation?
Look, said Little Aharon, if you won't have the Runner jumping into bed with the general, at least give me something new. Some way I can tell myself the operation is going forward.
Two things, replied Tajar at once. I'll have him move closer to Syrian armaments and also to the Palestinian refugees.
Little Aharon looked down at his desk and at the crippled legs stretched out on the far side of it. Syria's armaments came from the Soviet Union, so that offer was something. But the activities of the Palestinian refugees were close to nonexistent, so that amounted to nothing at all. One offer of hard facts, another of the Runner skulking around in the desert disguised as an Arab. Sadly, he thought, Tajar was a prisoner of his own past. What had worked for him once he went on dreaming would work for him again. He was an idealist and a romantic who didn't understand change. He kept trying to do the same things over and over again, living in ideas and hope and cut off from change by his own imagination — and by an automobile accident. No one was better at the mechanics of infiltrating agents into Arab countries and supporting them once they were there. But when it came to goals, he kept slipping back into the past.
Little Aharon did some more shouting but his heart wasn't in it. In the end he decided to let Tajar have his way with the Runner.
All right, Little Aharon said finally. The Runner concentrates on Syrian armaments and Palestinian refugees and not the president . . . for the time being.
***
Tajar was triumphant. He knew it was the most important decision ever made in the Runner operation. It would take still more time but slowly, methodically, he was giving the operation the shape he wanted. Not even Little Aharon could suspect how long-term his goals really were. And except for the Runner himself, no one else knew enough about the operation to be able to judge it.
What Tajar had been planning for so long was no less than the ultimate penetration of an enemy nation. The Runner would go on for years acquiring power and influence in Syria until one day he would be one of the most important men in the country. But at the same time he would never be simply an agent, a Syrian who worked for a foreign country. Foreign agents worked for money or power or out of faith or ideology, but they were always still foreign agents and the Runner would never be that. The Runner would be a Syrian who was also secretly an Israeli, his motivation and devotion forever beyond question. And that ultimate achievement in espionage, to Tajar's knowledge, had never been accomplished anywhere before, by anyone.
***
We have two new directions to explore, Tajar said to Yossi when next they met in Europe. The first is the armaments business. It would be useful if you could think of a way to get into repair work. In a very small way to begin with, you understand. Nothing glamorous or dramatic but something quite ordinary, such as armored personnel carriers. They're always being modified this way or that, not the heavy work but little things. Rods and gadgets, the seats or the exhaust system, anything. I've looked at the work our people do and it doesn't require an engineer, just some competent machinists and a man overseeing them. Most of it is regular business. You call in a technician to design a fitting or a tool when you need to, give your customers good service and make sense of the books. The army supply officers get used to dealing with you, they know they can count on you and ask you to take on a little more, perhaps. In time it can grow.
And I know you like that sort of thing, added Tajar, because once you thought of being an engineer.
Yossi laughed. It sounds easy enough, he said. And the other new direction?
The Palestinian refugee camps, replied Tajar. Now that the Syrians are starting to organize and arm a few Palestinian groups, it would probably be wise for you to get started with them. It's patriotic and it's in the Arab cause and it would give you a chance to get out of Damascus and taste some desert air. There's that side to you too and you can't spend all your time over ledgers and talking to people in cafés or on strolls by the river.
And the general? asked Yossi.
After this general there will be another general, replied Tajar, and then another and another. But armaments and Palestinians, I suspect, will be with us much longer than any of them.
He always beat me at shesh-besh anyway, said Yossi.
I don't believe that.
Out of design, of course.
Ah, now that I do believe, replied Tajar, smiling, and went on to other matters.
***
A Syrian army officer asked Halim to say a few words to the president about a personal matter. Others approached him with propositions for smuggling or special contracts or to serve as an intermediary with more senior officers who were Halim's friends. But with honesty and gentleness Halim always turned aside these opportunities for making men indebted to him.
Only ideals will sway him, it was said in Damascus as his reputation grew and he became known as a man of vision — the incorruptible one.
***
As a boy growing up with Arab ways, long before he became Halim, Yossi had dreamed of the fabled place known as Damascus, a source of myth and wonder from his childhood which would always exist beyond time and stone. An imaginary city to him, like Jerusalem.
Damascus the fair, city of many pillars, the pearl of the East and the gateway to Mecca, where for centuries the caravans of the faithful had set out on the haj to cross the desert. A city of many moods but known above all as el Fayha, the fragrant, from its innumerable gardens and orchards.
Astride its river at the foot of a mountain where it nestled against a harsh landscape, a transdesert route from antiquity at the confluence of Asia and Europe and Africa, which was unique even in the ancient Middle East.
For unlike any other city on earth, Damascus had never known obscurity in all its four thousand years of history. Instead, it had been preeminent to every empire that had ever held sway in the Fertile Crescent, Egyptian and Hittite and Babylonian and Assyrian, Persian and Greek and Roman and Arab, Seljuk and Mongol and Mameluke and Turkish.
Always important, forever destroyed and rebuilt, famous for its apricots and grapes and melons, its damask silk which was brought to Europe by the Crusaders and its figs and pistachios which the Romans transplanted around the Mediterranean as a far-flung gift from the Damascenes, worshipper once of Adad the storm-god and later a flourishing center of Christianity and Islam, holy to Christians because of the conversion of St. Paul and holy to Moslems as the burial site of Salah al-din, the great Kurdish warrior who defeated the Crusaders. With its luxuriant gardens and orchards, its old walled city to the south of the river and its new quarters to the north along shady avenues, the ancient beauty of Damascus reached back in history to the very birth of towns, recalling man's earliest dreams of an earthly paradise on the edge of the desert.
Halim loved the city and always felt these past worlds adding new dimensions to his life in Damascus, where the inhabitant's subtle sense of time also allowed him to find a place in his days for the distant persona of Yossi. Thus when Halim wished to strengthen himself by giving voice to his attachment to Tajar and the present, he talked to some Syrian friend about the kindly, thoughtful widower-cousin in Argentina who had given him his start in life and had taught him so much.