“He’s quite a character, that Max, isn’t he?”
“You should only know,” Ya’ara responded. “Lucky I’m good with numbers. As for him, his head’s in the clouds. And he chooses to be a dealer. A dealer! He’s a professor who’s lost his way, that’s what he is.”
Ya’ara glanced at Frances, but she couldn’t discern any unusual reaction to her words. Something’s put her mind at ease, she thought to herself. She isn’t jumping at every little thing. She knows her husband is okay.
They made a big salad together and ate in the handsome dining area overlooking the home’s backyard, both sipping on Californian wine from large glasses. And a ray of sunshine shining directly onto Ya’ara’s glass through the large window appeared to shatter its crimson contents into slivers of sparkly red. When Frances went to the kitchen to pour the coffee, Ya’ara called out to her: “I’ll be back in a moment, okay? The wine’s gone to my head. I’m just going to splash some water on my face.”
55
TEL AVIV, MARCH 2013
“Well, Aharon, what do you say?”
Aharon Levin leaned back, his eyes closed. Adi had shown him the database and the criteria based on which the list had been narrowed down to five names. They knew Brian had traveled abroad from the United States, and they were assuming that Cobra was outside Israel somewhere. Of the five people from the table, two had left Israel in the past week. One of them could, possibly, be Cobra. Adi remained dumbfounded. The prime minister’s political strategy advisor and the head of the Shin Bet’s counterintelligence division. To Adi’s surprise, a brief online search had revealed that they were both connected to the Knesset in their youth. That was significant, too. The former BND chief, Dr. Walter Vogel, had told Aharon Levin that Cobra was once a parliamentary or perhaps even a ministerial aide. Alon Regev served as a parliamentary aide as a young man. Oded Leshem used to work at the Knesset Research and Information Center. All records pertaining to him disappeared shortly thereafter. Oh, well, obviously, he had joined the Shin Bet.
“You know,” Aharon said, “it could be bad and it could be a whole lot more horrendous.”
“What do you mean?” Adi asked.
“Look. If Cobra is Oded Leshem, it’s bad. He’s the head of the Shin Bet’s counterintelligence wing. His job is to catch spies, including Russian ones. And lo and behold he’s a Russian spy himself. He’s at the top of the pyramid, he could provide cover for each and every SVR or GRU intelligence operation in Israel. He knows everything the Shin Bet knows about the operations of the Russian intelligence services in the country. And that would mean that the Russians know everything that we know. Worse even, everything we don’t know. For someone in the spy game, you couldn’t find a more important asset than the very person who heads the entity that’s tasked with apprehending you.”
Michael’s head was about to explode. The notion that the head of a Shin Bet division, and the one responsible for thwarting espionage activities in Israel to boot, was working in the service of a foreign and hostile superpower was too much to take in. Adi appeared stunned.
“But,” Aharon continued, “if Leshem is Cobra, we could still consider ourselves lucky. That’s the simple scenario. If Alon Regev is Cobra, we’re in serious trouble.”
“What does the prime minister’s political strategy advisor actually do?”
When Aharon responded, Michael and Adi couldn’t help but notice the air of tension his voice had adopted. “That’s just the thing. The title itself is insignificant. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Alon Regev’s career. He started out as a parliamentary assistant, and very quickly—in tandem with his studies, in which, as in everything else, he excelled—secured the position of aide to Daniel Shalev. A general in the reserves, and a hero from the battles on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War, Shalev was serving at the time as the minister of energy and infrastructure. Regev then left the Civil Service a few years later and was appointed to a very senior managerial post at the Israel Electric Corporation. Just imagine that, he gets parachuted into the post of deputy director-general of business development at Israel’s largest company at the age of thirty. Following his stint at the IEC, he served in various roles in the private business sector for the most part, and then returned to a position at one of the government ministries, always with Daniel Shalev, time and again. Once as a bureau chief, once as a director-general, once as a personal advisor with this or the other title. And all the while, he made hay while the sun shone. I hate that expression,” Aharon remarked offhandedly. “But he’s undoubtedly talented, intelligent, level-headed, and calculating. People who’ve met him say he oozes personal charm. A seasoned manipulator, aggressive and forceful when necessary, but always perceived in the end as a good guy.” Aharon took a deep breath.
“And like I said,” he continued, “he worked with Minister Shalev at all the stations Shalev went through—the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, the Foreign Affairs Ministry, the Defense Ministry, and finally the Prime Minister’s Office. There wasn’t a single forum in which he wasn’t present, sometimes to the left of his boss, sometimes to his right, sometimes behind the scenes. He’s had access to every single classified document in this country. Certainly during the periods in which he served in a governmental post, but probably during the times he worked as a private businessman, too. Then, too, he served as an unofficial, sometimes semiofficial, advisor to the minister. And then fate dealt its blow to Daniel Shalev. And at the time he slipped into a coma, Alon Regev wasn’t at his side. Back then he was spending long periods in Beijing as a partner in a Chinese investment group, and the new prime minister summoned him to serve as his right-hand man, and gave him some meaningless title, political strategy advisor, or strategic political advisor, or something like that, the title is really insignificant. If Alon Regev is Cobra, we’re well and truly fucked. It would be an absolute catastrophe. Let’s just pray that Cobra’s simply some Shin Bet division chief.”
No one said a word, and Aharon planted his fist silently on the table. His face looked tired, his wrinkles had deepened, and his true age was plain to see all of a sudden. The muscles in his right cheek trembled with rage. He’s truly angry, Michael thought to himself. That’s the look he gets when he wants to kill someone. And not in the metaphorical sense of the word. But for real.
His phone rang.
Ya’ara. She sounded worked up. “Michael, hi, it’s Ya’ara.”
“The three of us are here together—Aharon, Adi, and me.”
“Put me on speaker, please. I want all of you to hear this.”
“Ya’ara, honey,” Aharon said, his voice no longer shaking with rage, “is everything okay?”
“Everything’s just fine. Listen. I’ve just come from another visit with Frances Hart. Yes, I’m still in Providence. You remember, Aharon, how on edge she was when we went to see her a few days ago. Well, she was completely at ease today. I got the feeling that she knows her husband is fine. That he hasn’t disappeared without a trace. And indeed, on my way to the bathroom I saw something that wasn’t there on our previous visit. An antique wooden statue, from the Middle Ages I think, but I can’t say exactly when.”