LITMIR.BIZ

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the humiliation retreated with this little victory.

      He’d never spotted a real surveillant before. And these were Israelis, probably Mossad. On their home ground.

       Take that, you bastards.

      Alan showed them how boring he was, how unconcerned he was that he’d been their prisoner sixteen hours earlier. He had to fight the temptation to show them that he had spotted them. He wished he had a camera—maybe Mike would care? The embassy? He’d have to file a report, anyway. Embassies took this kind of thing seriously.

      Leaving the huge concrete octagon of the university library, he scored another victory. He’d spotted the possibilities of the library on his first trip to Israel. Doors everywhere, and one small, but legitimate, exit to a garden whose real purpose was to illuminate the chancellor’s plate glass window. The garden had a narrow walkway that led out past the graduate residence and directly downhill to a protected bus stop.

      When he arrived at the bus stop, he had the intense satisfaction of watching Miss Andrews run down a ramp behind him, talking into the collar of her shirt, stopping to talk to a youngish man he hadn’t spotted, and then, to be treasured and retold forever like a find in a yard sale, he got to watch a third person, a stocky middle-aged male in a T-shirt, climb into a waiting van with a heavy aerial and speed away through the bus lane, the paunchy occupant staring at Alan openmouthed through the passenger window from four feet away.

      Alan got the license number. It didn’t matter a damn, it shouldn’t have done anything to balance the indignity of yesterday, but his mood was lighter. His shoulders were squarer, and he found that he was whistling when he approached the meeting. His watch said he’d enter the lobby on time to the minute.

      The man in the hotel lobby wasn’t anyone’s idea of a military intelligence officer. He was short, heavy to the point of fat, dressed in a khaki bush jacket, faded jeans and sandals that had been worn to paint something orange. His head was bald and almost perfectly round. His hands were huge, which, combined with his round head and his dark glasses, gave him the look of a garden mole.

      Alan had expected an officer in uniform. Or perhaps a slender, sunburned man in shorts. He expected the Shin Bet to be different from the Mossad—but not this different.

      The man’s smile was warm and penetrating, too warm to be feigned. “Commander Craik?” he said. “Benjamin Aaronson. Call me Ben.” Alan’s hand vanished in one of his, and then they were in an elevator headed up, their recognitions exchanged.

      “Your wife like Tel Aviv? Ugly city, but great shopping.” Ben held the door to a room—no, a suite of rooms. There was a laptop on a table big enough to seat a board of directors. He closed the door behind them, set the bolt. “You got fucked over by Mossad yesterday.” It wasn’t a question.

      “Yeah.” Alan tossed his backpack on the table. He was surprised by the wave of anger that accompanied the admission, as if having to confess that he’d been snatched put him at a disadvantage. A rare insight—Alan could suddenly see that it was a macho thing, like getting mugged. His masculinity—to hell with that.

      “Well, we’re sorry. We’re really sorry, and you beat the odds by showing today—half the guys in my unit said you’d walk. Wouldn’t blame you.”

      Alan swallowed a couple of comments, all unprofessional. “Not something I’d really like to talk about,” he said.

      “Sure.” Ben opened the laptop. “You have some files for me.”

      Alan opened his backpack, removed a data storage device and put it on the table, tore off a yellow sticky from a pad on the table and wrote a string of numbers from memory. “Files are on the stick. There’s the crypto key.” He shrugged. “I don’t really know what’s on it.”

      Ben plugged it into his laptop, replaced his black sunglasses with bifocals, and peered at the screen, hunting keys with exaggerated care as he typed the digits. “You want some food? There’s enough in there to feed my whole unit.”

      “You the commander?” Alan asked. He was looking out the window, wondering if he should have ditched the meeting.

      “Um-hmm.” Ben was scrolling now, looking very fast at the documents Alan had provided. “I’m the colonel—you think they’re going to send some stooge to meet you?” He smiled over the screen. “Relax, Commander. This is going to take some time.”

      “You have stuff for me, too, I hope.”

      “That’s what ‘exchange’ means.” His attention went back to the screen.

      Maybe it was the residue of yesterday, but Alan had expected something more adversarial, something like bargaining in the souk. He already thought he’d been put at a disadvantage by coughing up his stuff first, but it didn’t feel like that. Ben felt more like an aviator than a spy.

      “You always been an intel guy?” Alan asked.

      “No. No, I started in a tank. I was a crew commander in Lebanon in ‘83.” He continued to scroll while he talked.

      Alan nodded to show that he knew what had happened in Lebanon in 1983.

      “Everyone goes into the military here—that means everyone is supposed to, you know? Except that there’s religious exemptions and too many rich fucks who send their kids to Europe or the US or Canada to evade military time—you know that?” He looked up, his eyes bright above his bifocals.

      This isn’t just small talk. Alan took a chair and sat opposite Ben. “I guess I thought everyone served.”

      “That’s the myth. Here’s the reality—the kids getting hit by rocks in the West Bank aren’t the kids whose parents are in Parliament.”

      “That sounds familiar.” Alan was surprised he let that slip. He didn’t criticize his own country to foreigners. It was a rule, a navy rule.

      Ben’s eyes were back on the screen. “A lot of this is pure shit, you know?”

      Alan got to his feet. “Look—”

      “Don’t get on your tall horse, Commander.” He looked over the screen again. “Your President is a good friend of Israel, but he’s a terrible intelligence manager. Yes?”

      “He’s the commander-in-chief,” Alan said without too much emphasis.

      “Politics and intelligence, they go so naturally together and they are terrible bed mates, yes? You know what I am saying, Commander?”

      Not a clue, unless this is another recruitment attempt. What the hell is he talking about? “Not sure I do, Ben. Call me Alan. Okay?”

      “Sure. I’m saying that good intelligence is the truth, yes? The truth we see on the ground? And good intelligence officers tell the truth.”

      Alan gave a cautious nod, already worried about where this was going. Was it yesterday making him shy? He was growing anxious because a friendly foreign officer was trying to make professional talk in a hotel room.

      He caught himself watching out the window. Ben read on. He began to read snatches aloud.

      It didn’t take Alan long to understand what the man meant when he said “shit.” He read a report summary on an interrogation conducted in an unknown location. The target of the location was referred to as “the terrorist.” The summary sounded as if it had been written for a Hollywood movie. Ben read several of these without comment, although his English was good enough to convey his amusement—and his disgust.

      Alan fought with anxiety. Followed a train of thought out of the room. Back to Afghanistan. Brought himself back to the room.

      After twenty minutes of this, Ben went on as if he had never stopped. “Politicians want the truth to serve their own ends—their own ends. Not the truth. Not the truth you saw. And they never see the people—the dead ones, the results of prolonged interrogations.”

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