“But how did you know about her?”
“I didn’t. I called in to Dovi. He checked the address online at the UK Land registry and got the owner’s name. He also checked it against the voting register to see who was actually registered as living there. Then he cross-checked the name against the various watchlists and needless to say it came up, with a whole long case file.”
“How many names of you got on the watchlist?”
“There are several lists, ranging from terrorists, to enemy-recruitables, to friendly recruitables to non-violent critics, etc. She’s on the non-violent critics and enemy-recruitables list. She’s seen as some one who would actively work against us if she could. Until now she’s been basically a talker. But the fact that Bar Tikva arranged to see her after Sam Morgan tried to kill you while he was working for them, meant that the meeting might have something to do with the attempts on your life. And of course because she’s on the enemy-recruitables list, she might be ready to do more than just talk. We knew that Bar Tikva didn’t go there just to have a chat.”
“What do you mean ‘arranged to see her’?”
Sarit looked confused.
“Pardon?”
“You said ‘Bar Tikva arranged to see her.’ That means it was pre-planned. How did you know?”
Sarit blushed. She wasn’t supposed to reveal more than she had to.
“Well we didn’t get it on an intercept, as we should have done. He used a new phone and we didn’t get its details until after that. His old phone actually went dead and we didn’t initially have the number of the new one. He probably ditched the old one for security reasons.”
“So he knows he’s being watched?”
“Not necessarily. He was probably just being cautious. But he may know now of course.”
“And when you said ‘we didn’t get its details until after that…’.”
Daniel smiled. Sarit smiled back.
“You’ve got it. That’s how we tracked him.”
“Tracked him?”
“After I followed him to the Lefou woman, I waited down the road, keeping the place under surveillance. When he emerged, I followed him to a hotel in Golders Green. Then Dovi called me and told me that they’d got a lock on his new phone number and they were tracking him. So I stood down and checked into another hotel there. I got a call bright and early telling me that he was on the move and got dressed quickly and followed him again. He was picked up at the hotel by three men in a car and I followed them.”
“They didn’t spot you?”
“Obviously not.”
“And where did they…”
“They drove through north London into Hertfordshire to the court where you were appearing. I saw them going into the court building but obviously I couldn’t follow them in, because Bar Tikva would have recognized me from the plane. But I figured they wouldn’t try anything inside the court building.”
“So you knew they were going to try and kill me?”
“I suspected. I mean, after the last attempt, it seemed reasonable that they’d try again. And the fact that Shalom Tikva sent his son here after Sam Morgan botched it, plus the fact that they went to the court building, suggested that they were up to something along those lines.”
“And you couldn’t have got some back up?”
“Not at such short notice. Time was of the essence and we didn’t have enough specific information to go to the police.”
“So my life was in your hands.”
“Don’t worry Daniel. You’re safe in my hands.”
Daniel smiled.
“I suppose they’re registered as lethal weapons.”
“Not quite. But I am trained to do my job.”
She decided not to tell him that she was an assassin and not merely a field officer.
“But I thought you guys always work in small teams — or even large ones.”
She knew what he was talking about: the assassination in Dubai. Maybe she didn’t need to tell him that she as an assassin.
“We work in small teams. We work in large teams and we work alone. We do whatever we have to do. The question is why do they want you?”
He told her about the blurred picture sent to his phone, the text exchanges with Martin Costa and dropping the phone in the house when it went up in flames.
“So you have no idea what was in the picture, other than that it was a Hebrew manuscript that he claimed to have found at the dig site?”
“Yes. I mean either Hebrew or Aramaic. Martin Costa may have thought himself to be a great Theology scholar, but he wouldn’t have known the difference.”
“So it looks like they’re trying to kill for nothing?”
“Well assuming that what they’re doing has something to do with Costa, I guess so. But then again they don’t know that.”
“Well regardless, Dovi regards you as an asset to be protected and if you want to come to Israel, we can keep you safe there.”
“I can’t stay there forever. I have my career. I have my life to lead.”
“Well we’ve got enough evidence to intercede on your behalf on the murder charge and to get them to arrest Bar Tikva. It’s just a pity that we don’t know what it is they’re after.”
Daniel realized that he could trust Sarit, so he decided to come clean.
“I did upload a copy to my cloud account.”
“You did?”
“Uh huh.”
Daniel was enjoying Sarit’s display of enthusiasm.
“Can I see it? There’s a computer here.”
“With internet?”
“High speed broadband.”
“Then you may.”
She led him upstairs to a room packed with computer equipment: a PC with four screens in one corner and a Mac with another four in the other. This wasn’t a computer room: it was a control centre for World War Three. Sarit threw the switch and the computer sprang to life. Daniel had expected the boot-up to be the bottleneck in this entire process. But the computer was on and ready for action in almost the blink of an eye.
“Solid state hard drives,” said Sarit when Daniel looked at her quizzically.
She eased the keyboard over in Daniel’s direction. He keyed in the URL of his cloud account, typed in one of his eMail addresses and then looked at her again, as if he expected her to look away while he logged on.
“You’re worried about your password?” she asked incredulously. “You think we couldn’t get it if we were interested?”
“Dovi probably already has,” he said with a shrug, and typed it in.
In another blink of an eye, the screen refreshed with his account summary. A couple of clicks opened up the image that he had uploaded. Sarit looked at it. She was somewhat less equipped to read it than Daniel, although she was able to make out the shapes of some of the Hebrew letters.
“You do know,” she said “that blurring of an image is usually caused by jerking the camera in one or another specific direction while the picture is being taken?”
He looked at her blankly.
“So?”
“Well that means that the blurring has a certain specificity about it. If the picture is, say of black text on a yellowish background. Then the blurring involves a specific amount of black and yellow depending on the speed of the movement and the exposure time or digital equivalent.”
“You’re talking in jargon,” he said.
“What I’m trying to tell you is that we have people who can use image-enhancement technology to clean up this image and get the text.”
Daniel’s puzzlement turned into excitement.
“Let’s go for it.”
Chapter 29