‘Don’t waste your breath,’ Abed said to Stratton. ‘You don’t know his kind. He wants to take me away and interrogate me, for weeks if necessary, until they have every piece of information they can get out of me, and then, if I survive, they’ll toss me into a stone room and leave me there until I can find a way to kill myself. He will kill me. He just needs a little help.’
Abed took another step towards Raz.
‘Stand still,’ Raz commanded. But Abed did not obey him.
Raz stepped back. ‘Stand still, I said,’ he shouted, but Abed ignored him, his expression calm, his hands moving out from his side ready for the shot that he hoped would kill him.
‘I’ve saved your life too many times to want to kill you now,’ Raz said, standing firm, the gun levelled at Abed’s heart.
Abed did not understand, and although the comment slowed him, he took another step closer to Raz, who was now within reach of him.
‘I am your father,’ Raz said.
Abed froze.
Stratton was equally stunned.
Raz stared at Abed, shaking with the effort to control his finger on the trigger, desperate not to have to pull it. ‘Do you remember the time you were hit by a car leaving your university?’ Raz said. ‘You thought you had damaged your hip so badly you would have a limp. Did you ever wonder why you received better care than all the other patients in your ward?’
Abed remembered it well, but he never thought he had a mysterious benefactor.
‘And during the many incursions into Rafah, the times you were released while others were taken away. You were on a list of people not to be harmed. Did your mother ever tell you where the money came from each month while you were growing up? And do you remember that day in your metal shop, when you were shot at by the soldier who had threatened one day to kill you? The last shot you heard came from the building beside you. That shot killed the soldier, fired by me.’
Abed was rocked to his very foundations, even more so than the night his mother revealed his father was an Israeli. The shock was tenfold now that he was facing the man he had thought about all his life and never believed he would ever see.
Raz was no longer looking at Abed but at the ground in front of him, his eyes seeing only his own youth and remembering Abed as a baby in his arms in a derelict building in Rafah camp. He lowered the gun and his arm hung limply by his side.
Raz finally looked up and the two men stared at each other, unable to do or say anything.
Abed had heard the anguish and sincerity in Raz’s voice and it had touched something inside of him. The man he had hated with all his heart only seconds ago had disappeared but he could not understand who had been left in his place. Abed could not reach out and touch him, nor could he back away. He could not hate him, nor could he embrace him. He did not feel love of any kind, but neither did he feel fear any more. Time and space had momentarily stopped for both men.
The sound of running snapped them out of their trances and Raz glanced over his shoulder to see several troops approaching. He took his identification badge from his pocket, raised it for them to see and shouted something in Hebrew.
The soldiers stopped and did not come any further.
Raz looked at his son, then over at Stratton.
‘What happened here today?’ Raz asked Stratton.
Stratton could not tell Raz the whole truth, not about the atom bomb, but if Raz was going to let Abed go he needed to be able to tell his bosses why. Abed was on videotape, and there were witnesses to Raz conversing with a young Arab at the scene that would need explaining if the Arab was suddenly gone.
‘This man,’ Stratton said, indicating the dead Russian. ‘His name is Zhilev. He’s former Russian Spetsnaz. Stockton’s in there . . . what’s left of him. If Zhilev had succeeded with his plan, you, me and a lot of other people, we would all be dead. Abed played a major role in preventing that.’
Raz could only guess at what Stratton was trying to tell him and it did not sound encouraging, but that was not the point of the Englishman’s revelation. He was offering Raz information that would help him let Abed go.
Raz put his gun into his pocket. ‘Since you work for MI6, you are a guest in this country. It sounds like I must thank you,’ he said to Abed. ‘One word of advice before you go . . . Never come back.’
They held each other’s gaze for a moment longer, then Abed slowly stepped towards Raz to move past him.
‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ Raz said softly.
Abed paused alongside his father.
‘I was by her side yesterday,’ Raz said. ‘She went peacefully. I told her I was sorry and that I always loved her.’
Abed could feel a lifetime of emotion churn inside of him, all too much for him to digest. This man had represented everything that was vile, but he could see none of that now. He was his father. He had given him his life, and had now done so again. He must have felt something for his mother to have been by her side when she died. He was saying sorry to Abed and to his mother in the only way he could, and Abed could not hate him any more.
The tension eased from Abed’s eyes and as he walked away, Raz turned to watch him go, past the soldiers and down the walkway until he rounded the corner out of sight.
Raz looked back at Stratton, who was watching him, and wondered what the man was thinking.
‘Will you report this?’ Raz asked, without making it sound like a plea or request.
‘Report what?’
Raz believed him. He turned and shouted something to the soldiers and they started to move in.
‘We’d better get you to a hospital,’ Raz said. ‘You don’t look so good.’
‘To tell you the truth, I feel like shit,’ Stratton said.
‘And then we’ll talk and maybe you can tell me what happened on my patch.’
‘Absolutely,’ Stratton said.
Raz knew Stratton would fabricate enough of a story to explain Abed’s release, but perhaps they could also do some dealing. That was the true fun of the intelligence world. It was like a marketplace where things were bought and sold and exchanged like anything else.
Raz looked back to see if Abed was perhaps still there, but he was not, and he knew he would never see or hear from his son again.
Sumners sat behind a desk in his tiny office on the tenth floor of MI6 headquarters on the south side of the Thames, a stone’s throw from Vauxhall Bridge.The one window overlooked the river and was some consolation for the size of the room, which was, in fact, not exceptionally small for the building. His boss’s office, on the floor above, was only marginally larger and did not have a view.The room was clean, tidy and as lacklustre as one might expect for a civil servant’s office.
Chalmers walked in without knocking, placed a file on Sumners’ desk and left without either men saying anything, which was quite normal. On the surface, life in the firm hadn’t changed for Sumners. From a psychological point of view, he had dealt with his situation back in Israel and succeeded in putting it behind him. Two months had passed since that horrible day on board the C130 on the tarmac of Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport but, as time went by, he thought about it less and less. Even the presence of Chalmers and his boss evoked few memories of that day, other than perhaps the slightest of fleeting images. It was simple enough for a man like Sumners to put it out of his mind. He had taken the logical approach and reasoned that he was never going to get another crack at running a field operation, and it was wise to believe so for the healing process to take effect. To that end he re-accepted his long-time role as a desk officer - and a damned good one at that - and continued to exert the confidence and authority he had enjoyed before the incident, which was considerable. A handful of people in the building might have had an inkling of what had taken place, but the majority would not. If it had been a major scene and Sumners had lost control and thrown a wobbly then perhaps that much of the story might have got out. But since it was a top-secret operation, explaining Sumners’ little moment would require far more detail than would be deemed acceptable. Sumners was as aware of that as anyone and it aided his rehabilitation.