It was going to be, Ashmead thought, one fuck of an interesting way to spend his last days on earth.
Chapter 5
By the time Beck got back to Jerusalem he felt like a shuttle diplomat in the middle of some Gulf spasm war: his little four-passenger prop developed engine trouble over Qatar and when he checked in with Dickson on the Qatar section’s secure phone, Dickson told him to report to Tel Aviv immediately: “A week out of contact, at a time like this? All that money? A contingency fund is one thing; every piece of hard currency we’ve got is quite another. I couldn’t cover for you when it turned up missing and the loss was reported to Tel Aviv. I didn’t know where you were I told them; everything I had on you was F-6, I swore up and down. Remember our arrangement, Beck.”
And then he’d been listening to the seashore-whisper of a dead secure line. “F-6” was information about which the truth could not be judged, from a source whose reliability could not be judged: Dickson was telling him that Beck was free to cover his ass any way he might when he was called on the carpet, but that Dickson expected Beck to leave his chief’s name out of it: as per their understanding, if heads were to roll, Dickson’s was not to be one of them.
Tel Aviv station told him to go to the Circle and wait to be met on the west side of the glass fountain, and by this he assumed that he was in only minor trouble: he hadn’t been summoned to the Ambassador’s residence; it was an intelligence snit, not a diplomatic one. So he waited there, in the shadow of the ugly modern hotels which occluded the beach, watching masked people in silver space-blanket suits scuttle indoors from their cars, for someone to take him to the little house on the northern end of Hayarkon, near the defunct old port, where tea houses and bars were open till the wee hours and agents in the de rigueur swaddling clothes of the paranoid could come and go without attracting attention.
Always when he was in Tel Aviv, Beck craved the real Israel, the gold stones of Jerusalem, the polished Roman paving stones of the north—anything but this facile, miniature cosmopolis scarred first by the Mandate, then by industrious Jews homesick for Miami or New York.
This time he was more than usually restless: he could feel the clock ticking away inside him; he had too much to do to waste time in a bureaucratic wrangle. So far as he knew, the jet stream was still blocked, but the spring sky was full of storming clouds and at the Tel Aviv airport he’d seen what looked like a riot in progress, then used his black diplomatic passport to avoid finding out if he was right.
On Kikar Dizengoff, Tel Aviv’s Times Square, he’d smelled vomit and seen too many hollow eyes: people were making themselves sick or convincing themselves they were sick, because it was just too damn soon for any serious symptoms. To make sure, Beck checked his Geiger counter, which read a measly one and one half Rem, and began to get angry. Hysteria would kill more people in Tel Aviv than radiation; in Qatar it had been the same.
He kept conjuring Chris Patrick: she was his plus in a world of minuses—his agent; he wanted to get home and debrief her.
Instead, he was scooped up by two blank-faced men with civilians’ paper masks and wires in their ears who said only, “Beck? Let’s go,” and hustled him into a waiting Dodge Aries with American military plates and a powerful air-purification system, who drove like deaf and dumb maniacs through a cloudburst, half the time in four-wheel drift, slowing only at the gates of an old villa Beck had never seen, and then only long enough to wave familiarly to the checkpoint guards and accelerate again.
In the villa’s forecourt, while rain bounced a foot high off ancient stones and, on the roof, soaked soldiers in full anti-radiation kit and holding M16s looked on attentively, he was hustled inside, through cypress-paneled halls lined with relics, into a vacant room the size of a tennis court where he was told to wait.
Alone in that room with the whirring of the air purifiers in each caulked window, empty but for an ash partners’ desk with a reading lamp on a Paki stani rug, three gilt Louis Quinze chairs and matching settee, and a battery of olive filing cabinets, he had plenty of time to wonder who had interpreted his behavior as subversive—whether the missing gold was just an excuse, whether Dickson was involved, and whether he had legal recourse—before the Ambassador himself, flanked by a Marine colonel with a camouflage film badge nestled among too many grimy ribbons and a pair of well-groomed civilians in Brooks Brothers suits joined him.
He stood up and they didn’t tell him to sit.
“Beck, Beck,” the Ambassador said with a shake of his leonine head and a pat to the silver mane that was his trademark: “What are we going to do with you?”
“Mister Ambassador?” he replied, while the Marine took the chair beside the desk, the Ambassador the one behind it, and the two civilians whispered to themselves over the low rumble a filing cabinet made as they opened it. “Can you tell me what’s going on here?”
His attempt at innocent outrage didn’t impress anyone: the Ambassador gave him a neutral cocktail-party smile; the Marine yawned and watched him the way combat commanders will, his gaze fixed on a spot on the wall some distance behind Beck’s head; the two civilians continued thumbing through the files and chatting to one another.
“We’d like to know where you’ve been, Marc,” the Ambassador said as if to a troublesome nephew who had finally created an incident that couldn’t be ignored; “we’d like to know with whom, and why, and what, exactly, you did with the Jerusalem Consulate’s contingency fund—assuming, that is, you don’t have it?” Bleary-eyed, the Ambassador leaned forward.
Beck said: “Why? Do you think I hopped up to Monoco or Liechtenstein, started a numbered account? No offense intended, Mister Ambassador, but you’re not cleared to be asking me these questions.” Like Ashmead’s protégé, Slick, the night before, Beck dodged and feinted; he wasn’t going to cave. He knew what they wanted now—Ashmead. For openers. Maybe Beck’s game plan, too, if Dickson or somebody else had leaked it.
Before the Ambassador could respond with more than a reproving blink, the Marine said: “He will be once we bust you to civilian, mister. Don’t give me this INR—”
The two civilians, each with his load of manila red-bordered folders, intervened: “We told you this wasn’t necessary, sirs,” the first said.
“That’s right,” the second agreed smoothly, “we think you ought to let us keep this in the family. There’s no need to be hostile. Marc was just doing his job, the best way he knew how.”
The first continued when the second left off in a way that let Beck know this was an orchestrated team play: “Everyone’s judgment is a little skewed right now. If Marc, here,” he touched Beck’s elbow familiarly, squeezed briefly, took his hand away—“had a judgment call to make and he made it, it’s up to us, not the diplomatic corps or the military, to determine its validity.”
The Marine snapped to, clicked his heels together, and with an outstanding show of umbrage, growled: “When you speak to me, spook, an occasional ‘sir’ is appropriate. And when you’re done coddling your traitor,” the fingers of his right hand went to his hip and tapped there, “I’ll expect to see the entire verbatim transcript. We’re under martial law—not just at home, but all Americans, everywhere. And no matter which way your Mister Beck has flip-flopped, he’s still under my jurisdiction.” Turning smartly on his heel, the Marine stamped out.
As the door slammed, the Ambassador winced and rubbed his face with both hands; when they came away, he was the picture of sympathy: “He’s right, you know, Marc. You’ve had such an outstanding record until now… I hardly know what to say. Consorting with the Israelis whom you must know are calling up their reserves and getting ready to kick a little Arab butt while the kicking’s good, handing out national secrets like the recipe for Coca-Cola, sneaking off with embezzled funds to Mister Ashmead, whom you must have known is no longer—”