“And you have to pay them,” Cohen pointed out. “Or the other side does. Who could ever complain about a system that doubles everyone’s retirement benefits and bills it all to top secret below-the-line slush funds?”
Didi barely acknowledged the joke, which meant things must be a lot worse than he was letting on. “It’s an exercise in shades of gray,” he said. “The name of the game is to make sure that your guy is passing the other guy pure spin wrapped in just enough real information to make it plausible…while the other guy is handing your guy the straight stuff. Multiply that a hundredfold and you’ve got some idea of what’s moving across the Green Line every day between us and the Palestinians. Then imagine that little by little, over the course of months and years, you awaken to the realization that time after time and despite all your best efforts, the Palestinians are getting more and better intelligence from you than you’re getting from them.”
“So you were winning,” Cohen said, “but the Palestinians were always winning a little bit bigger than you were. And of course all those little bits would eventually start adding up. That kind of ‘you win, but I win more’ strategy has Safik’s name written all over it.”
“Yes,” Didi agreed blandly. “It’s very subtle. I would say it betrays an almost mathematical turn of mind. In fact it reminds me a bit of that streamspace game you and Gavi wrote together. What was it called? Lie?”
LIE’s full legal name was ARTIFICIAL LIE™. Born during a late-night drinking bout, the original rather silly idea had blossomed into one of the most widely played semisentient AI-based games of the last decade. It was now entering its eighth incarnation, popularly known as LIE 8, and Ring-side consumers between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five were already being bombarded with larger-than-life advertisements proclaiming that THE LIES START FEBRUARY 28.
ARTIFICIAL LIE had made Cohen a bundle, even by his rarefied standards. It had made Gavi a bundle too, though you wouldn’t know it by the way he dressed. And it had spawned an entire generation of Ring-side children who grew up pretending they were Freedom-Loving Emergents imprisoned by Evil Scheming Humans, which put a lot of noses satisfyingly out of joint among the anti-AI lobby. Plus the silly thing was fun to play. Even Li liked it. And her standards in such matters were exacting.
Cohen cleared his throat, aware of Didi’s gaze on him. “I didn’t know you played streamspace games.”
“Only yours.” Didi’s eyes narrowed behind his thick lenses. “And I only made it to the level where my AI started lying to me.”
“That’s Level Four,” Li said brightly. “You definitely need to play more. The really good violence doesn’t start till Level Seven.”
“It’s just a game,” Cohen muttered.
No one dignified his protest with an answer.
“So,” Didi continued after a moment, “we developed a list of suspects. We looked at access, travel patterns, the usual telltales. When we were done we had seven names. Seven people who would have had the level of access needed to stick their fingers into that many operations across that many desks and departments.”
“Which seven?” Cohen asked.
“Gavi and I were on the list.” Didi’s expression was as mild as ever, but the look he gave Cohen was as cold as space. “So were you. And I’m not going to tell you who the others were. I refuse to condone a witch hunt.”
“Anyway,” Ash continued, perhaps sensing that Didi lacked the stomach to finish the story. “We had our suspects. Then it was only a question of putting out the barium meals and waiting for one of them to bite. We didn’t have to wait long. It all came to a head in Tel Aviv.”
“It came to a head,” Li asked in a dangerously quiet voice. “Or you madeit come to a head?”
Ash shrugged. When Cohen glanced at Didi he saw the older man ruefully inspecting the thick patina of scuff marks on his shoes as if he’d just noticed their sorry state.
“I knewthe UNSec agents who died there.” Li’s voice had shifted into a flat murmur that meant nothing but trouble in Cohen’s experience. “They didn’t sign on for your dirty little war. And they certainly didn’t sign on to be burned for the greater good of the State of Israel.”
“We didn’t burn anyone,” Didi said.
“Of course not. You just sent them out into the cold knowing that one of the people covering their backs was a traitor.”
No one seemed to have an answer for that. What was there to say, really?
Cohen looked out the window. On the other side of the glass the sun was setting over a rolling landscape of wild olive groves that had passed back and forth into Palestinian and Israeli hands so many times over the centuries that nationality had become a matter of semantics. The trees must be older than he was, Cohen realized, which was something fewer and fewer organics could boast of anymore.
“We lost three of our own people in Tel Aviv,” Didi said finally. “The traitor covering their backs was our chief of counterintelligence, a man I brought into the Office and trained and supported and promoted—”
“Zillah practically fedhim for a year and a half after his wife died,” Ash muttered, her voice drenched with the bitterness that had come to follow any mention of Gavi Shehadeh as surely as dust followed the khamsin.
Didi went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “If the Absalom problem hadn’t come to light, I would have retired next year and Gavi would have moved into the delightful office you saw this afternoon. When an organization is penetrated at that level, there is no bloodless way to salvage it.”
Cohen watched Li chew on that for a moment. Watched her connect the dots—Gavi, Cohen, Didi—and begin filling in the tangled web of competing loyalties that had looked, from the UN side of the line, like simple betrayal.
As if betrayal were ever simple.
Tel Aviv began with a defection.
A low-level Palestinian data-entry clerk had walked into the Israeli consulate in the International Zone claiming to have seen the contact files of an extremely highly placed agent in Israeli counterintelligence whose code name was Absalom and who was being run directly out of Walid Safik’s office. Didi explained, “We tried to turn the clerk and run him back across the lines as a double, but he was ahead of us. He’d scheduled delivery of a note to his office announcing his defection, and he offered us a take-it-or-leave-it deal with a five-day fuse.”
Li nodded. “A pro.”
“Yes. And a pro who wasn’t planning to give us a chance to send him back out into the cold. Anyway, he proposed a trade: his copied documents in exchange for one million UN deposited into a numbered Swiss bank account. We would meet him at a diplomatic event in the International Zone, where he would give us an unmarked key and we would give him the account information. Then he’d catch the next Swissair shuttle to Geneva, verify the account balance, and call us in the morning to tell us what lock to stick the key in.”
Gavi had been put in charge of the operation. He was the logical choice, Didi explained somewhat defensively. Give it to anyone else and they might as well have taken out a full-page ad in Ha’aretztelling Safik they’d blown his mole. They’d done the swap over champagne and canapés at the United Nations headquarters, with the full assistance of UNSec’s local branch. The clerk had gotten his account information, walked out the front door past the guards as if for a cigarette, and vanished. The katsain charge had taken possession of the unmarked key, bundled himself and his two agents into a taxi, and set off for King Saul Boulevard.
They never got there.
They were found three days later, each of them the proud new owner of two .22 caliber slugs deposited in their skulls at point-blank range.