LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Mike, I just got here. We’re still unpacking boxes!”

      “It’s either you or me. That’s direct from Kasser. The one who doesn’t go runs the office. Which do you want?”

      Triffler, rarely flustered, looked at his hands and pursed his lips. Dukas thought about it, then said, “Okay, I’ll go. Soonest, Kasser says. Can’t possibly go tomorrow. Saturday?”

      “You’ve got the meeting with Italian security at Sixth Fleet Saturday—remember, Saturday’s the only day everybody can make it?” Before Dukas’s well-known contempt for meetings could erupt, he said, “Mike—you called the meeting! You said it was ‘essential to cooperation on matters of joint concern!’”

      “Okay, I’ll go Sunday.”

      “When are you going to brief me on running the office?”

      “Okay, I’ll go Sunday night! Jesus.” Dukas swung forward. He grabbed a yellow pad and a pencil—the computer at his elbow might as well not have existed—and began to write. “I want everything we can get on Salem Qatib. Maybe he was murdered because he was porking somebody’s wife, but Kasser says we gotta know how important it is that he was a cryptologist. You know what it’ll cost if somebody got Navy codes out of him? About a hundred and fifty mil. So we want everything on that—what codes he knew, where he worked, where he studied, who remembers him. I want a detailed bio on him, not the summary. Check with FBI and CIA to see what they got on him. Don’t dick around—remind them of the demarche and who’s driving the bus. Okay?”

      “We need to know what was going on in his life in Palestine.”

      “Yeah, I’m working on that. Peretz and the policewoman. But listen—” He pointed the pencil at Triffler. “If the policewoman’s right, Mossad killed the guy. That’s a heavy, heavy idea. Rumor to the contrary, they don’t just kill people. Killing’s pretty rare; you need authorization, preparation. Unless it’s a mistake.”

      “What does Craik say?”

      “He’s too mad to make much sense. FBI’ll de-brief him tomorrow morning, maybe they’ll get more. He’s supposed to get a medical check; that’s got him pissed, too. He got a couple first names of the guys he thinks are Mossad, plus he thought the guys who snatched him were pretty much thugs. Maybe rent-a-goons. They kept talking to him in Hebrew and pushing him around until they looked at his wallet and realized what they had. When somebody showed up who spoke English, he was apparently all over himself explaining that they had mistaken Al for a Tel Aviv cop. Which makes you ask, why were they so ready to snatch a Tel Aviv cop?”

      “I’m the one who opens the case file?”

      “You bet. Go to it.”

      Triffler looked at his watch. It was after seven in the evening. “This is just like working for Mike Dukas,” he said. “I suppose you don’t care that I have choir practice this evening.”

      “Choir practice! You just got here!”

      “My voice is very much in demand.”

      Dukas hunched down over his work. “You can hum ‘Amazing Grace’ while you work. Quietly.”

       6

      Gaza

      A guard, far more courteous than the last pair, took Rashid to a shower, and then to a room with a bed. He heard the guard turn the bolt from the outside, but at least the room was not in the basement, and it had a window on a dusty yard.

      The night was cold. He lay with a single thin blanket and shivered, listening to the sound of knocking and ringing in the building’s steam pipes. He was exhausted, but the bile of betrayal—his own, others’, perhaps Salem’s—rolled around his guts. He shivered. His teeth chattered. Eventually, he slept, and in his dreams he ran and ran, while Salem called for help behind him.

      Washington

      Late in the day, McKinnon astonished Ray Spinner by poking his head into his cubicle and saying, “You’d better read this.”

      Spinner saw the word demarche and From and To. He read the whole thing—naval officer, Israeli government with one foot in dogshit, naughty-naughty. It occurred to him that the Qatib business, which he had tried to kick sideways, was suddenly much bigger and much more important than he had thought.

      McKinnon was leaning on the carpeted wall. “State’s got its balls in an uproar because Mossad was doing its job, apparently. About this Qatib, so your instincts were right in asking for follow-up. Full Marks. Some Navy guy got his pants caught in the gears, or something. Find out what happened and keep me current. One way or the other, the Qatib thing will expand and make at least a nice little case study.” He handed over another piece of paper. This time, he was grinning.

      A reply, Spinner saw, from Dukas direct to the Assistant Secretary—Oh, my God!—with some sort of bureaucratic blahblah-blah. Spinner looked at McKinnon. Was he going to get fired now?

      “Questions?” McKinnon said.

      “What do I do about Dukas’s message?”

      “That’s a dumb question, but you’re allowed one. Tell him to fuck off with the jokes and get you the data. That clear?”

      “My pleasure.” So he wasn’t fired. He could feel sweat below his eyes. He tried to smile. McKinnon laughed and slipped out, and Spinner could hear him still laughing as he went up the row of cubicles.

      In Israel, that was the day that an elderly man was kidnapped and murdered. The al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade claimed credit. It was also the day that two Palestinians shot into a car, killing an Israeli woman.

       7

      Gaza

      In the morning, a guard took him to wash, and then to the courtyard to pray with other men, all of whom seemed to be guards, not prisoners. He tried very hard to concentrate his mind on the glory of God. After prayer, he ate with them.

      Then they took him to an office. Zahirah was there, freshly dressed and made up. She had glossy enlargements of the photos from the flashcard in neat rows on her desk and taped to the wall behind her.

      She also had Rashid’s passport and backpack. The presence of those two items on a corner of her desk gave Rashid hope. He sat quietly while she worked away at her computer, typing rapidly, a pencil clenched in her lipsticked mouth; she grabbed the pencil to scribble notes that she pasted to her computer screen.

      “Do you want to help us, Rashid?” she asked after ten minutes. “We intend to find out exactly what happened to your friend—to Salem. And then, if it is within our power, to avenge him.”

      You were the ones who beat him first! Rashid’s brain was already split in two; half wanted to help the Palestinian Authority, and half viewed that Authority as the enemy of every Palestinian.

      “We can help you,” she continued. “If you will help us. Hamas will not help you; they have lost the dig, and all they will care about is the lost money. They cannot go outside of Palestine to ask questions. So they will likely concentrate on you.” She paused for effect. “And on your mother—who we can protect. We can. You can, if you help us.”

      Rashid had no loyalty to Hamas; they had paid the bills after the death of his father and brothers, and his mother loved them, but they had shown their true colors when he worked for Salem. He had very little loyalty to Israel; years of Hamas propaganda and experience of Israeli police methods in Acco combined to make

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