“Why didn’t the KGB assassinate Marlene, too?” Aharon asked. “Did the priest ask her? Was she able to explain that?”
“Marlene wasn’t aware of Cobra’s real identity. A fact, according to her, that was plain to see in the dossiers the KGB took from the Archives. That was the explanation she offered for being spared. The priest did indeed ask her that same question. But it’s possible, too, that they believed that Marlene would never talk. Or that they simply screwed up. We all make mistakes, right? Even the KGB isn’t perfect, and it doesn’t kill unnecessarily either. Whatever the case may be, Marlene went on living for many years after the Cobra file was handed over to the Russians, keeping her secrets to herself. Truth be told, even when she chose to tell someone—even when she sensed that her days were numbered, even when she needed someone, anyone, even a priest who knew her as no one but a worshipper in his church, to understand that she had known love for a man in her arid life—even then she was hardly able to say anything at all.”
“Tell me, Walter, why have you come to me with this? Why haven’t you notified someone currently in office in the BND? Why haven’t you approached someone serving today in the Mossad? After all, you’re acquainted with our people. I’m retired now, whereas your ties still remain intact, at least as far as I understood things…”
“I thought it best to approach you. Honestly, I don’t know if the information is important or of no significance at all, but my gut tells me it’s important, that we’re onto something big here. Marlene was speaking on her deathbed. People don’t make up such stories. Not at a time like that. And if Gunther really was murdered, there was a reason for it. If the Russians were intent on shielding Cobra against any risk of exposure, the comrades in Moscow must have viewed Cobra as a particularly high-value asset, an agent to be safeguarded at all costs. Who knows how many more Stasi officers they assassinated in order to safeguard their secrets when everything came crashing down? And if this story about Cobra turns out to be true, that means that no one has a clue regarding his whereabouts today, the material to which he is privy, and the information he is passing on to Moscow, perhaps even to this day. I couldn’t risk approaching just anyone; Cobra, after all, mustn’t know that someone may be on his trail. Besides, I have the privileges of the elderly now, I don’t have to speak to anyone and everyone, only to those I love. And you, my dear, I love. A love shared by old spies, right?”
And thus, in the dimming light of the large fireplace, with the night’s dark shadows filtering through the bar’s windows, they continued to sit there, fighting back the chill within themselves with another drink, appalled by the thought that they’d soon have to step out again into the street’s petrifying cold, into the loneliness that always lies in wait for people like them.
12
JERUSALEM, PRESIDENT’S RESIDENCE, JANUARY 2013
A silver Toyota Avensis pulled up outside the heavy ornate iron gate of the President’s Residence. It was five-twenty in the afternoon, yet winter’s darkness had already settled over the homes of the Talbieh neighborhood, just beyond the tops of the pine trees swaying in Jerusalem’s icy wind. Aharon Levin himself was behind the wheel. One would be hard-pressed, very hard-pressed indeed, to say he was a good driver, and as always, it seemed that only a miracle prevented him from crashing into the gate. A security guard armed with an M-16 approached the vehicle, and the electric window slid down silently. “Shalom, sir, I recognize you, and we know you are expected, but I need to see some ID anyway. Thank you, sir,” he said on returning the pensioner’s card Levin chose to produce. “Straight on and immediately to the right. Park next to the black Volvo.”
The president was waiting for him on his own in the main reception room, in the large hall adorned with the ceiling mural by Naftali Bezem. It was strange for him to see the reception room empty and dark, and the figure of the president appeared as a silhouette. Light coming through one of the doors that opened into the hall shone around his host, as if his entire person was aglow. “Mr. President,” Levin said by way of greeting. “Aharon, Aharon, good to see you. Come, come, let’s go sit down in here, we can talk in peace.”
The two men sat down together in a small meeting room, sinking into gold-colored armchairs. An elderly server came in quietly and placed two cups of tea and a small plate of cookies and dates stuffed with walnuts on the small table.
“Mr. President,” Levin began, “I’ve come to you because I don’t know who I should take this to.”
The president and the former Mossad chief had met for the first time when Aharon Levin took up his position as head of the intelligence agency. They had never crossed paths before then. The president moved back and forth between the academic world and the political sphere, feeling at home in both, and making the transitions between the two with a degree of ease and elegance that left Aharon Levin in awe. Levin had operated all the while in the covert world of the Mossad, recruiting and handling agents, conducting his meetings in luxurious hotels, dingy brothels, and cold and anonymous safe houses in rural towns of distant lands. And because the worlds of politics and academe were so remote to him, he could only marvel at the seemingly effortless and natural manner with which the president conducted himself between the two. As in the case of his predecessors, following his appointment to the position of Mossad chief, he began meeting regularly with the prime minister. Some of the meetings were conducted in private, he and the prime minister alone, the recording devices switched off, the military secretary waiting outside the room. At the request of the president and with the prime minister’s approval, he started meeting from time to time with the president, too, updating him on whatever was necessary, talking to him about the trends and upheavals in the Middle East, the activities in the region of the superpowers, and listening to the ideas and thoughts expressed by the president, who was always curious, creative, far-sighted. Over time, a quiet sense of trust developed between them, two somewhat elderly Jews, well educated, contemplative but striving to take action. In this sense, too, the president was no ordinary man. Unlike his predecessors, he wasn’t willing to make do with the symbolic and ceremonial nature of his position, and instead felt profoundly responsible for the fate and future of the nation. He had seen a great deal in his life, and the more he saw the greater his concern. He knew that the existence of the state couldn’t be taken for granted at all, and he never tired of saying, and believed with all his heart, that if Israel wasn’t always at its best, if it didn’t have the ability to reap all the talent, creativity, and daring of its people, it wouldn’t survive. And thus, on more than one occasion, and entirely discreetly, he would offer the utmost of his abilities for the sake of that campaign, which never ceased.
Levin filled in the president on what he had heard from the former German intelligence services chief. “You know,” he said, “there doesn’t appear to be anything very clear or of much substance here. It’s all inferential, vague. What do we have, exactly? An old East German woman, sick and bitter, whose entire world suddenly caved in on her, without warning. Someone by the name of Gunther. Unrequited love. We don’t even know if he really was killed, and even if he was, it’s far more likely that it actually was an accident, and not a murder made to look like one. Moreover, the KGB didn’t carry out targeted killings very often, and certainly not of its people and its allies. Not in the late 1980s. Nevertheless,” Levin continued, pensive, his eyes half closed, “my experience tells me we’re onto something big here. Huge. After all, we’re never going to get anything more than this, more than a hint, a glimmer, which we may even fail to notice if we aren’t vigilant. Mr. President,” Levin said, “from this moment forward, we have to assume that the Russians have a spy in the corridors of power in Israel, and that he’s an important enough cog in the system to warrant his removal by force from the hands of the Stasi, important enough to warrant the murder of one of the East German intelligence service’s top handlers. This has to be our working hypothesis. This has to be our starting point. Only information that refutes this new basic assumption will be able to lay it to rest.”