“And the key?” Cohen asked.
“Gone. Vanished. As if it had never existed.”
It had taken months to put the puzzle together. The final piece had fallen into place when they learned that a young man had walked into the Beir Zeit post office the next morning, chatted up the postmistress in flawless Hebrew, presented an unmarked key, and collected the contents of Box 530.
“Operationally, he was perfect,” Didi observed as if he were critiquing one of his own boys. “The failure, if there was one, lies at the door of the man who sent him. It turns out”—a brief grin—“that he was too charming for his own good. When I interviewed the postmistress she was still hoping he’d come back. All she could talk about was his beautiful green eyes.”
“Shit,” Li whispered.
“It does make one wonder.”
Cohen dropped his head into his hands and massaged Roland’s temples. He had a headache, something that shouldn’t be possible technically speaking. And there was an odd fluttery feeling behind the eyes that he would have put down to overclocking in a nonorganic system. He hoped it wasn’t something he was doing to the boy.
“So what about the walk-in?” he asked when it was obvious that Didi wasn’t going to volunteer anything more.
“In what sense?”
Oh, so it was going to be a teeth-pulling exercise, was it? “In the sense of what happened to him. To the best of your knowledge.”
“To the best of my knowledge, the authorities found him dead in a back alley two days later.”
“The authorities meaning you? Or the authorities meaning the French?”
“Oh. Right. I see the question. Yes, he was found in the International Zone. Legion jurisdiction. No question about that.”
“Who ran the investigation? Fortuné?”
“Who else?”
The pause that followed was long enough for Li to take out her cigarettes, catch Didi’s eye in a silent request for permission, receive the ashtray he handed her, and light her cigarette.
“And, to the best of your knowledge,” Cohen said when he couldn’t stand it anymore, “did Fortuné ever figure out who killed him?”
Didi shook his head mournfully.
“Would it be jejune to ask if weknow who killed him?”
“We know we didn’t order the hit.”
Li froze in midpuff, her eyes flicking back and forth between Didi and Cohen.
‹Squirrelly, ain’t he?› she observed onstream.
‹You have no idea.›
Cohen turned his attention back to Didi. “That leaves two options, right? Either the Palestinians killed him to stop him from passing along the documents that would have put the finger on Absalom, or Absalom killed him…for pretty much the same reason.”
“That sounds reasonable,” Didi said placidly.
“Oh, for crying out lou—”
“Can we backtrack for a minute?” Li interrupted. “You just got asked if you knew who killed the guy, and you answered that you knew you didn’t orderthe killing. Sounds to me like you’ve got way too much slippage in your chain of command. Agents losing walk-ins. Agents turning up in canals with body piercings courtesy of parties unknown. Agents maybe or maybe not offing people on their own initiative. Unless your lion tamers have bigger chairs than they did three years ago, I’m not feeling warm and fuzzy about working with you people.”
“It was a bad time in the Office,” Didi admitted. “A confusing time. But we have eliminated the, ah, more troublesome lions.”
It was an unfortunate metaphor, Cohen thought, given that the Hebrew word for lion was Gur.A fact that Didi remembered about a second after Cohen, judging from the rapid blink of his eyes and the subtle tightening of his mouth.
“So basically,” Cohen cut in, “the whole bloodbath in Tel Aviv was just a loyalty test. You set up the whole operation so that if things went sour, you’d know it was Gavi who was to blame. Or at least that’s how it was supposed to work.”
“That’s how it did work,” Didi said mildly.
“Except that Gavi’s gone and Absalom’s still here.”
“Or that’s what someone wants us to think,” Ash pointed out. “I mean isn’t that always the question with a mole hunt? It’s a no-win situation. If you go after the mole, you rip your agency apart and end up cashing out half your best agents, since the best ones are the most highly indoctrinated and therefore the first to fall under suspicion. If you don’t go after the mole, you risk letting him operate unchecked…and you leave half your senior officers looking over their shoulders wondering if it’s safe to talk to the guy in the next office. Or worse, whether you stopped investigating because you’re the guilty one yourself. Either way you lose.”
“You know,” Cohen said slyly, “this is the kind of problem you really need Gavi for. He’d be talking about shells and kernels and trap commands and output redirection and flow of information…and pretty soon you’d have all the players and all the contingencies mapped out neat as you please, complete with a sweet little plan for making the bad guys deliver themselves to your doorstep all wrapped up like a birthday present.” He paused, then twisted the knife. “In fact, if you’d trusted him enough to give him the information he needed before Tel Aviv instead of barium meals, he might have done it back then.”
“Gavi had his chances,” Didi said, sounding as remote as the stratosphere.
“So you’re still holding to the post-Tel Aviv story,” Cohen said. “Gavi’s guilty, even though Absalom is still operating—”
“ —maystill be operating—”
“—when Gavi’s buried alive out at Yad Vashem.”
Ash stirred restlessly. “You don’t always have all the answers, Cohen.”
“And you do, I suppose?”
Li cleared her throat. “Not to interrupt an argument between friends, but how are you going to handle this without Gavi?”
“We’re not,” Didi said.
Ash was leaning forward slightly in her chair, biting her lower lip in anticipation. She knew what Didi was going to do, Cohen realized. She’d known it before she ever walked through the door. And whatever it was, she liked it. Which in Cohen’s experience meant it was good news for her and bad as hell for anyone unlucky enough to get caught standing between her and her next promotion.
“We’re going to have you bring Gavi back in from the cold to work this case,” Didi said. “One shot. Up or down. Guilty or innocent. With you as the cutout so the Office has plausible deniability if the whole operation heads south.”
“And if he screws up again,” Ash said with relish, “we’re going to arrange a rerun of the nice little traffic accident the PM wouldn’t authorize after Tel Aviv.”
Dinner was surreal.
Lamb shanks and small talk while Cohen kept angling to talk to Didi in private, and Didi kept resolutely refusing to take the hint, and Ash and Li chatted with Zillah and the twins as if they were just there for a social occasion.
“Are you going to see the new Ahmed Aziz spin while you’re here?” Zillah asked. “I’ve heard it’s great. And our Ring-side friends always seem to enjoy those.”
Cohen realized abruptly that she was talking to him. “I won’t go to Ahmed Aziz spins with Catherine anymore,” he answered. “The last time we went to one she started bitching and moaning before the credits had even rolled, and a week later she still hadn’t paused for breath.”
“Well, I was right, wasn’t I?” Li protested. “The so-called hero committed eighteen fatal errors before the opening credits even rolled. And anyway, I don’t like violent movies. If the violence is realistic it’s depressing. And if it’s not realistic, it’s just stupid. How any intelligent adult can sit through such crap totally escapes me.”
“They don’t sit through it anymore in Israel,” Cohen snapped irritably. “Israelis like their violence automated and sanitary these days. After all, shooting fourteen-year-olds isn’t much fun when you have to look them in the eye.”