Hyacinthe had leaned against this very same rail, looking at his reflection, still strong and wiry as a greyhound, and feeling the first subtle tremors of the disease that would finally kill him. Cohen hadn’t remembered that heartsick moment for two lifetimes as humans measured them. Now he asked himself how he could ever have forgotten it.
He glanced at Li, who had crossed her arms and thrown her head back to squint impatiently at the flickering lights of the number panel. She doesn’t understand,he thought on a confused rush of emotion that mingled frustration, fear, and anger. She hasn’t begun to know what death is.
“What’s wrong?” She was staring at him, faint wrinkles of worry framing the bridge of her nose.
“Just appalled by the disaster in the mirror. I look like an upper-class English twit on safari. No nice French boy should ever have to wear these shoes!”
“Better alive and frumpy than fashionably dead,” Li drawled.
Cohen sniffed theatrically. “The fact that you could say—no, even think such a thing makes me seriously doubt your moral fiber!”
When the doors finally opened onto the eighth floor, Cohen realized that he’d forgotten just how underwhelming the place was. Even on the eighth floor—perhaps especially on the eighth floor—Mossad headquarters had the peculiar official shabbiness of all Israeli government buildings. All the furniture was painted IDF olive drab, but somehow it still looked like it had been bought at five different yard sales. There was no reception area, just a narrow corridor that had been transformed into a makeshift security checkpoint by pushing two heavy desks together and depositing a muscular young katsa-in-training behind them on a sagging office chair that was probably older than he was.
The guard’s sidearm was holstered, but even with the elaborate security check they’d undergone before getting in the elevator he was on his feet and ready to draw before the elevator doors opened. This wasn’t a country, or a building, in which people took chances. Li and Cohen surrendered their left hands to the guard’s implant scanner, then sat down in the chairs he waved them to and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
They’d arrived for a meeting at four, and now they were watching the clock creep toward five. The usual tomblike quiet still reigned on the eighth floor, but behind their backs they could hear the cables of the ancient elevators groaning as the departing crowds of junior spooks and clerical employees made their daily getaway.
And all the while a niggling, annoying, self-indulgent little complaint rattled pointlessly around Cohen’s mind:
Gavi never made me wait this long.
Cohen’s relationship with the Mossad had begun humbly. A few lunchtime meetings during vacations in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Keeping an ear open for useful information. Passing on the innuendoes and misinformation that the King Saul Boulevard spin doctors crafted to mislead Israel’s enemies. Making his well-secured homes available, no questions asked, to the suspiciously athletic young men and women who occasionally found reason to use them. Dropping a request for coveted information into the ear of a sympathetic UN official, and pointing out that a Jew could be loyal to his own government and still feel a moral obligation to pass along any news that would help more of the nice boys and girls serving on the Green Line go home to their parents on their own feet instead of in body bags. In short, he’d been the perfect sayan: a volunteer loyal to the country of his birth, but willing, within the bounds of that first loyalty, to do whatever little things he could to help Israel.
And of course little was a matter of perspective. Eighteen percent of the UN’s nonmilitary spinstream communications passed through Cohen’s networks or the networks of various former associated AIs. He’d written the software that handled pension administration for the civil services of half the Periphery.
All of UNSec’s feared semisentients had evolved more or less directly from Cohen’s own expert systems, and over the years he had quietly acquired controlling interests in the defense contractors who manufactured them. Very little happened in UN space that Cohen didn’t eventually find out about. And when he could—with discretion and never risking too much social and political capital on any one roll of the dice—he made sure that Israel’s interests were served.
Most of the time that was all he did. But once or twice a century he was asked to do more. And each time the Office called, he was brought up against the memory—a memory that made him the only living link to a past that was dead history to the rest of humanity—that Hyacinthe’s grandfather had gone into Dachau in 1943 and never come out.
And so, over time, Cohen had become something between a sayanand a katsa,a full-fledged Mossad agent. He’d gone through the katsainduction course five times, in five different bodies—ostensibly to refresh his tradecraft, but really to cement his relationships with successive generations of the Mossad’s human leadership. He’d worked for all the great ones: Gershon, Barzilai, Hamdani, and now the legendary Didi Halevy. He’d been burned, sometimes badly enough that even his supporters in the Security Council had shrugged and admitted his probable (though never quite provable) guilt. But Cohen was rich, very very rich. So they’d turned a blind eye and tolerated him.
Until Tel Aviv. In one bloody night Tel Aviv had killed half a dozen UNSec and Mossad agents, ended Gavi’s career, and stripped Cohen of his French passport and the last tatters of plausible deniability.
So why was he running to Didi’s aid again? And why on Earth was he dragging Li with him?
At the prospect of dragging Li into the wake of Tel Aviv, all the guilt and anxiety and self-loathing Cohen had been shoving under the rug for so long rose up to accuse him. And with them came a little shudder of apprehension that he would have called a ghost walking over his grave…if he weren’t himself the ghost of a man whose very grave no longer existed.
Did all spies feel this way? Did they all suffer from the gnawing suspicion that the safe everyday world was just the surface of a deep ocean, and that they would break through the fragile surface tension and drown if the bulkheads they constructed around their separate and conflicting lives were ever breached? At least human spies had the unity of their bodies to fall back on: one brain, one set of memories, and the ironclad physiological conviction that the chaos raging inside their skulls was unique and singular and meaningful. Cohen had nothing to hang his identity on but the spooky phenomenon of emergence. And how long could you survive out there in the lying cold when you were only a ghost to begin with?
At a quarter past five the door at the end of the hall opened and the man they were waiting for emerged.
“Cohen!” he cried. “Welcome home, my friend!” He looked back and forth between the two of them, his eyes bright behind Coke bottle glasses, his normally drawn face wrinkled with a scrappy little boy’s grin. “So which one of you is you?” he asked. “Who do I have the right to kiss, and who do I have to fob off with a handshake?”
Cohen stepped into the little man’s outstretched arms. “You’re perfectly welcome to kiss us both. But me first, please.”
Didi Halevy’s friends said he looked like an out-of-work undertaker. Didi Halevy’s enemies, if they were wise, didn’t say anything. Cohen had once spoken to a katsawho had worked the NorAmArc with Didi when they were both mere field agents. “He ought to be in the dictionary under the word nebbish,” the man had said admiringly. “When Didi walks into a room his own mother would swear someone just left!”