“I love my country enough to believe that she will outgrow her infatuation with the men of God and violence,” he said simply.
“I’ve heard a lot of people say that about their countries,” Cohen said.
“And were any of them ever right?”
“Not that I can remember.”
Didi opened his mouth to answer, but at that moment the car turned onto a residential street and they passed a large extended family out for a walk in the last warmth of the dying afternoon. A clucking, fussing, cosseting parade of aunts and uncles and grandparents. A pair of anxious-looking parents—and they had good reason to look anxious, given the recent wave of vigilante assaults on “bad” parents. And finally that fragile bird, rare enough in the blighted land of milk and honey to turn heads and kill conversations: a child.
As they passed, the child stumbled slightly and vanished into a dense thicket of protective adult arms. Cohen remembered Hyacinthe’s free-ranging childhood, littered with broken bones and private triumphs, and wondered what it would do to this generation of children to grow up never allowed to play or fall or risk themselves.
He glanced at his fellow passengers. Li was indifferent. Didi had glanced at the child when it first appeared, but was now staring impassively through the windshield at the road ahead. But it was the look on the faces of Arik and the other young men that would stamp itself on Cohen’s memory of this moment. Intent. Utterly still. Mortally hungry.
So this is what extinction looks like.
Didi’s house was perfectly ordinary, no less modest and no more obviously well fortified than any other house in its affluent Tel Aviv suburb. The only thing that set it apart from its neighbors were the towering trunks of the five cedars of Lebanon that had been planted there, or so the young recruits whispered, when the legendary Rafi Eitan still owned the house.
The car pulled into a garage full of the usual clutter of bicycles and sports equipment. From there they filed solemnly into the entry, where they were introduced with all due ceremony to Didi’s wife and twin daughters. Li examined the daughters with interest—as well she might, Cohen thought. Their willowy height and their cool, even-featured beauty belonged to the Ring, not to Earth. They might look like their parents in the more predictable ways, but there were other things about them, equally predictable, that put them a lot closer to the posthuman end of the genetic spectrum. The girls were the legacy of a long-ago Ring-side tour of duty under diplomatic cover, and they were at once Didi’s greatest pride and his deepest sorrow. His pride because of their obvious intelligence and beauty, and because they’d chosen—unlike so many of the Ring-bred children of affluent Israelis—to take advantage of the family unification exemption and complete their education and military service in Israel. His sorrow because the genetic engineering that had made their birth possible had also stripped them of the Right of Return that would have been theirs if their very DNA hadn’t been banned technology under the Kyoto Addendum.
Zillah greeted Cohen with special warmth. “Don’t eat too much over drinks,” she murmured as they kissed each other in greeting, “I’ve made lamb shanks. And you know what it takes to make me stay home from work and cook all day.”
“Dinner at eight?” Didi asked her.
She checked her watch. “Let’s say eight-fifteen. See you all then.” She turned to the guards, who were eyeing the twins with an enthusiasm that made Cohen think lust was about to give ambition a run for its money. “Can I make you boys a sandwich in the meantime?”
A minute later Cohen was looking around Didi’s study, wondering how recently the place had been swept for bugs…and who had swept it, given that Didi didn’t seem to trust the sweepers at the Office.
Didi subsided into his chair, looking small and fragile, and focused his gaze on Li. “What do you know about Absalom?” he asked.
Li’s eyes widened. “The mole?”
The word surprised Cohen. He’d assumed the old earthbound terminology became extinct with the insectivore that inspired it. He’d also assumed that UNSec didn’t know quite that much about the Mossad’s internal housekeeping problems.
“If that’s what you want to call him,” Didi agreed, not looking much happier than Cohen felt.
“I thought you caught him in Tel Aviv,” Li said.
“So did we. Until Arkady showed up. What I didn’t tell you in the office is that Arkady showed up asking for Absalom.”
“Thereby all but guaranteeing you would hustle him through the blockade to Earth.”
“The fact that information may be false doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore it. Besides, GolaniTech seems quite confident he’s genuine.”
“And how reliable is your source at GolaniTech?” Li asked pointedly.
“Funny you should ask. I think I hear her in the hall.”
The door opened and one of Didi’s bodyguards ushered in Ash Sofaer.
Wheels within wheels,Cohen thought. If Didi packed them in any tighter, one of his human cogs was going to lock up and start stripping the gears.
“Sorry I’m late,” Ash said breezily. “I came from home and the traffic was just awful. Sometimes I wonder why any sane person still lives in Jerusalem.”
“Sit down,” Didi said. “I was just telling them about you. And we were working our way around to Absalom and Tel Aviv.”
“Oh.” She pulled off her raincoat, dropped it on the floor, and coiled her long body into the chair Cohen had gotten up to offer her. “I was hoping I’d missed that part.”
She was wearing another of her white suits, this one with a skirt instead of pants. It was a smartsuit—made of that obnoxious programmable cloth that had taken over the wardrobes of tasteless rich people all over what passed as civilization. In accordance with the latest Ringside fad, Ash had programmed her suit to go transparent every fifteen cycles or so. Not for long enough that any human would consciously notice it, but definitely for long enough that they wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything much except trying not to think about sex. Knowing Ash, Cohen guessed that the ploy had nothing to do with seduction and everything to do with ambition.
He caught Li’s eye and made a face.
She glanced at Ash, did a double take, grinned. ‹I think it’s funny. And she’s plenty good-looking enough to pull it off.›
‹Forget it,› he said on a fuzzy affect set that reeked of sour grapes. ‹She’s too tall for you.›
“Nice suit,” Li told Ash.
Ash gazed into Li’s eyes a little too long and a little too deeply for mere politeness. “I’m glad you like it.”
Didi cleared his throat.
Cohen looked around for another chair, didn’t see one, and decided to go sit in the window where he could listen to Didi without having to stand up to Li’s sharp eyes. Or Didi’s even sharper eyes.
“Let’s start with Absalom,” Didi said. “Without Absalom none of it makes sense.”
As Didi told it, the downhill slide had gained momentum so gradually that no one could pinpoint the exact starting point. There had been no dramatic revelation, no blown cover or high-level defection. Just a gradual realization that the Palestinians always seemed to be one step ahead, and that some of their lucky breaks couldn’t reasonably be put down to coincidence.
“We were running a number of midlevel double agents at the time. All of them classic two-way-flow-of-information doubles.” He glanced at Li, clearly unsure how much she knew. “It’s not like in the spins you know. The surveillance is so tight on both sides that you can’t pull any of those Rafi Eitan/James Bond stunts anymore. Now it’s all about controlling the flow of information. The basic model is two case officers, one on each side of the Line, each talking to the other. Each agent tells his own side that he’s running the other guy as a double agent and until we get computers in our skulls like you’ve got, only the two agents can know whose side they’re really on. And of course, each of them istechnically committing treason; you always have to give the other side somereal intelligence product.”