LITMIR.BIZ

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big picture. Israel will take care of itself if we fix the big picture. The key to the Middle East is Iraq. You don’t understand that; it took me six years to figure it out. Don’t sentimentalize about Israel.” He looked down at something on his desk, looked up again, said with a quick smile, “Don’t sentimentalize about anything.” McKinnon sighed. He chewed a thumbnail. “Imagine you have to brief the philosopher-king on this Tel Aviv thing. That’s the standard. But don’t bean-count and don’t nitpick. Think policy.” He said nothing for so long that Spinner stood, assuming he was dismissed. McKinnon, however, didn’t look at him but said in a gloomy voice, “The policy is that we will democratize the Middle East by democratizing Iraq, and anybody who gets in our way is an enemy. That includes the military and the State Department and the fucking intelligence establishment.”

      Spinner wanted to say that McKinnon had just told him that Israel wasn’t either here or there. Now he seemed to be saying that Israel was either here or there. But was it here? Or there? On that note, with McKinnon staring into a corner, he crept out of the office.

      Tel Aviv

      An hour after his release, Alan Craik was spent. He had been screaming at Mike Dukas. His voice was hoarse by the time he slammed down the phone, his rage a blast against the friend who had given him the supposedly trivial job that had led to humiliation. He had been snatched off the street like a beginner, held prisoner, shamed. Made helpless.

      Then an aide to the Chief of Naval Operations had called, then an assistant secretary of state, then Abe Peretz, and a general from CentCom, and the ambassador to Israel. Their message was that they were behind him and that the wrong that had been done him would be paid for.

      His fury at Dukas ran down and became contemptible.

      “I lost it,” he said. His face was in his hands. He was sitting, disheveled and sweaty from the day, on the hotel-room bed. “One of my best friends, and I trashed him.”

      She sat next to him and hugged his shoulders. “Mike understands. It’s okay.”

      “Christ.” He looked at his hands. They were trembling. “What’s the matter with me?”

      “You need a rest.”

      He was thirty-eight. The face he lifted to her looked older. “What do I do?” he said.

      “Call Mike back.”

      “I can’t.”

      “Apologize. Then work with him to get back at these bastards.” She got up and passed in front of him, and he followed her with agonized eyes as she picked up the telephone and dialed and waited. He heard her speak to somebody in the Naples office and then she held out the phone to him. “Mike,” she said.

      He put the instrument to his ear but said nothing. He was listening to his own breathing and perhaps to Dukas’s, as well. Finally, he croaked, “I’m sorry, man.” He was suddenly choked with tears.

      “Well, it was an experience.”

      “It wasn’t meant for you. It was—”

      “Jeez, it sure seemed to have my name on it! You kept calling me Mike and using the word bastard. Sounded like it was for me.”

      “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—it’s them, but I can’t get at them—”

      “I know, kid, yeah, shit. All is forgiven. Forget it.”

      “If I could take it back—”

      “You can’t, so forget it. I’m still the guy you’ve slogged through the shit with. The truth is, now you’ve calmed down, I put the phone down for a while and let you rant while I did something else. Anyway, look, you’re right: I sent you into something without checking it out, and you got slammed. It is my fault. So forget it. The real question is, what do we do now?”

      “Declare war on Israel?”

      “Ho-ho, naughty boy. I suspect the gubmint has about shot its wad, expressing its displeasure in a demarche. What happens from now is what we make happen. So what d’you want to make happen?”

      “I want to nail several Israeli skins to the barn door.”

      “Okay, but you gotta ID them. You got names?”

      “The two ass-kissers who delivered me to the hotel were named Shlomo something and Ziv something. No last names. I don’t know the shmucks who had me in the hotel room, but my guess is they were grunts—dumb, clumsy, a couple of them didn’t even speak English.”

      “I need first and last names.”

      “They didn’t give last names. Don’t hassle me!”

      “Okay, okay! You done good.”

      “I want to hit somebody.”

      “Don’t. I’ll take over from here.”

      “You’re going to follow up?”

      “After the chewing-out you gave me? Christ, I’ll have the tooth marks on my ass for life! Actually, I’ve already had the order to pursue ‘with utmost diligence,’ plus State sent a demarche to the Israelis that was the diplomatic equivalent of your blast at me, and it ended with a promise to follow up. That’s my warrant. I’m off to see the wizard as soon as I can clear my desk.”

      “You’re coming to Tel Aviv?”

      “No way are the Israelis going to fuck me out of a country clearance on this one; they’re too scared. So you leave, I arrive, life goes on.”

      Alan gave the telephone a feeble grin. “You’re a good guy, Mike.”

      “I’ve ordered up a forensics team. We’ll do a number on the dead guy, Qatib. Who, by the way, was a cryptologist—you know that?”

      “You didn’t bother to tell me. Serious business?”

      “Maybe. I mean, the Israelis, a former cryptologist, a body—like, they’d be dee-lighted to have our codes.”

      “Oh, shit.”

      “My favorite expression.”

      They talked some more, but mostly they repeated what they’d said. Dukas’s parting words were, “Hang in there, kid.”

      And Alan said, “Dov—one of them was named Dov.” That was all he could remember.

      When Alan hung up, his hands were still shaking. Rose put her arms around him. He was enraged because he had to go to the embassy next morning to be de-briefed and to get a medical check. She told him it was all routine; everything would be okay. “It’s over. We’re okay. We’re okay.” She held him tighter. “You still going to do your meeting tomorrow?”

      “You’re goddam right I am!” He stood. “It’s the reason I came! Not all this fucking Mickey Mouse—” He didn’t say that the clandestine meeting to exchange information with Shin Bet might erase some of the humiliation of the day.

      Dukas put the phone down as if he were placing it on a box of eggs. He pushed his lips out, shook his head, then looked up at Dick Triffler.

      “That bad?” Triffler said.

      “Bad. Wouldn’t you be? I sure would.” He sat back in the desk chair, his weight making the springs groan. “The Tel Aviv cop woman says it was murder. She doesn’t say how, so we need the forensics before we jump to a conclusion; she and Al both say there was torture, too.” He shrugged. “Peretz says the FBI is already on it. I told him to spread the word there that this is our case and everything will come to us, and if it doesn’t, I’m going to scream all the way up to the White House. I talked to Kasser.” Kasser was the head of NCIS, Dukas’s immediate boss. “We’re to make the Qatib case a top priority. It’s what this office is here for until we close it.

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