Everyone around the table froze. Didi, caught with his glass in midair, looked significantly at Zillah, who just threw up her hands as if to say it wasn’t her argument.
Cohen put his fork and knife down, folded his napkin into a precise square, and set it beside his plate. “Zillah. Forgive me. I’ve been unpardonably rude. I’m not myself. In fact, I’m not feeling at all well at the moment. I think if no one minds, I’ll just step out for a breath of fresh air.”
Outside the sun was well and truly set, and the air had that damp glacial chill that Cohen never had gotten used to in all the long centuries of the artificial ice age. He walked down the path, his feet thudding dully in pine needles, and stood under the lace-and-shadows canopy of the cedars of Lebanon, feeling Roland’s poor head throbbing.
You’d think,Cohen told himself, that after four centuries I could learn to control my temper a little better.
But it wasn’t so easy. If anything, it got harder. His irrational likes and dislikes only got stronger. His emotions only ran hotter with the additional mileage. The Israelis weren’t fools, he told himself, pulling the plug on EMET when it got too self-aware for comfort. Humans claimed to understand themselves better as they got older, and perhaps they did. But Cohen was beginning to suspect that for him the process was running in the opposite direction.
“Doing a little arithmetic of the soul?” Didi asked, coming up behind him with the cautious tread of the old field agent he was.
“If I am,” Cohen said savagely, “then one of us has a mistake in his math somewhere. Because we’re sure as hell not coming up with the same answers.”
“Mmm.” Didi craned his head to look at the towering foliage.
“What’s Gavi doingout at Yad Vashem anyway? And when’s he coming back?”
“He’s not. He’s the permanent caretaker.”
This piece of news was so bizarre that Cohen thought he must have misheard it. Why would a man who’d been in close competition for the top post at the Mossad be baby-sitting an abandoned museum? And if he was going to baby-sit a museum, why on earth would they send him to the Holocaust Museum, now centrally located in the contaminated thickness of the Line? Not knowing what question to ask first, he settled for the most trivial one. “But…that’s a Line job.”
“So? They froze sperm before they sent him.”
“I’m glad to hear his sperm’s safe,” Cohen said sarcastically. “There is the little question of the man himself, however.”
“No one made him do it.”
“And no one gave him anything else to do either, am I right? It was either that or rot in some stinking veterans’ hospital?”
“He’s not a cripple, Cohen. Israel has extremely good prosthesis technology.”
Cohen started to speak, then bit the words back. He was breathing hard—or rather Roland was. He forced himself to compartmentalize, to cut the emotive loop that tied his psychological reactions to the ’face’s physiological ones. He knew it looked eerie, even frightening, to humans. But there was no sense in making Roland pay for his fight with Didi.
“So I take it you’re not going to talk to Gavi for me?” Didi asked.
“I’m not sure I can.He hasn’t answered my letters for almost two years. And he hasn’t cashed his royalty checks either. I don’t think he wants to see me.”
“I wouldn’t put too much stock by that. I think he’s gone a little off the rails out there. Some crazy idea about building the museum a golem.”
Cohen had heard about the idea too, in the streamspace haunts where Gavi appeared, rara avis,asked the odd, intriguing question about AI architecture, and vanished. People had started calling it Gavi’s golem. And it was exactly what Didi had called it: crazy.
“I suspect that whether he wants to see you and whether he needs to see you are two very different things,” Didi said. “And you have reason to see him as well.” He paused to let that thought sink in. “If I were you and I believed that Gavi was innocent and Absalom was still roaming the eighth floor, then I would be very wary of talking to anyone still on the Mossad payroll. Including me. And if, for instance, I had a Syndicate defector to debrief, it might occur to me that the one man I was pretty sure wasn’t responsible for Tel Aviv was also one of the best interrogators in the country and quite up to the task of dissecting Arkady’s pretty little head for you.”
“You’re telling me to smuggle Arkady into the Line to talk to Gavi? And then what? Announce to Gavi that you’re looking over his shoulder and he’d better hand you the dirt and not try any funny business? I wouldn’t blame him if he shot us himself!”
“Oh, not Gavi. He always smiles when he tells you to go to hell.”
“You’re still putting a hell of a load on his shoulders. And you’re asking me and mine to risk a hell of a lot on what looks like a pretty crazy gamble.”
“You have to set your own priorities, of course,” Didi said placidly.
“Is that an implied Do Variable?”
“No, boychik. It’s a good old-fashioned Jewish guilt trip.”
Cohen rubbed at Roland’s forehead again, trying to break up the ache.
“The thing I just can’t get past, Didi, is Tel Aviv. I was there. I know it wasn’t nearly as neat on the ground as you make it sound in the retelling. I think Gavi was innocent. And not just because it’s what I want to think.”
“Surely it’s crossed your minds that you don’t know everything.”
“Of course. But I know Gavi.”
Silence.
“I mean what’s the motivation? Money? Give me a break! When the ARTIFICIAL LIE royalties started coming in you know what he did with the money? Bought fifteen new pairs of socks and underwear so he could switch from doing laundry twice a month to doing it once a month.”
Didi smiled fondly. “That sounds like Gavi, all right.” The fond smile lingered for a moment, then faded into an expression that Cohen didn’t want to put a name to. “It also sounds like the basic personality type of every unmaterialistic ideologically motivated high-level double agent in the classic case studies.”
“Bullshit. Those guys were all frustrated ambitious types. And Gavi and ambition just don’t fit in the same sentence. Gavi would have been content to sit in your shadow for the rest of his life. Or in Ash’s shadow if it came to that. He never wanted to run the Mossad, just rewrite the flowcharts and tinker with the data abstraction models.”
“Yes. Funny, isn’t it? Gavi had the charisma and the physical bravery to lead agents in the field…but he always preferred to be the one who stood in the shadows and held all the keys and knew where all the back doors were. Forget the friend you think you knew. Forget the big eyes and the little-boy grin and the wrinkled T-shirts. What do the choices he made in his career say to you?”
“Oh, come on, Didi! Every eccentricity looks bad when you start from the assumption that a man’s a traitor. I’m not saying you’re one of the ones who was ready to suspect him because of his last name. But I still have to ask why?”
“Everyone has his dumb blonde and his rented Ferrari.”
The dumb blonde and the rented Ferrari rule, known as Rule 5 around the Office, was part of the age-old Mossad lexicon. It referred to a famous Mossad operation in which a field team had recruited an Iraqi nuclear physicist by dressing a blonde katsaup like a floozy and having her drive by his bus stop every morning in a rented red Ferrari. When she finally offered him a ride he took it—hook, line, and sinker.
The logical conclusion, one borne out by centuries of covert work, was that if you scratched a potential recruit’s guiltiest itch, he’d fall into your lap. It was just a question of wading through enough poison ivy to figure out what that itch was. For some people it was sex or money. For others it was the lure of intrigue, or the need to feel they were on the side of the angels, or the urge to prove an overbearing parent wrong by amounting to something…even in secret.