“It is absolutely necessary,” she shot back. “I repeat: What is your business on this visit?”
Janson spoke quietly. No one won a shouting match with an Israeli. That went triple for officials at Ben Gurion Airport. Nonetheless, he put an edge in his voice. “I do not want to hear of a passport identical to mine being carried by a member of a hit squad who resembles my photograph gunning for a Hamas leader.”
“If you are referring to an incident in Dubai distorted by the media, you are laboring under a common misconception.”
Israeli espionage could be very, very good or unbelievably clumsy. Most of the time the Mossad enjoyed quiet successes, but now and then it perpetrated clownish excesses, like sending twenty operators to murder one terrorist while allowing themselves to be caught for YouTube on security camera videos.
“Please return my passport.”
To Janson’s relief, the interviewer slid it out from under her keyboard and placed it on the desk in front of her. At least they weren’t cloning it while she stalled him. But she wasn’t exactly handing it back. She said, “What are you shopping for?”
“Submachine guns, light machine guns, and pistols.”
“For your government?”
“For my clients.”
“Who are?”
Tradecraft said, Trust your legend. As Paul Janson he’d be smooth. Adam Kurzweil was not smooth. Janson was unflappable. Kurzweil was a prickly son of a bitch. He reversed a heart-slowing exercise to speed it up. His face grew red.
“You’re out of line, lady, and you know it. You know who I am. You know I’ve come here before to conduct business. You’re jerking my chain for the hell of it.”
“Mr. Kurzweil, in the course of executing my responsibilities I can make your life considerably more unpleasant than a ‘jerked chain.’ ”
Janson raised his voice. “As if times weren’t tough enough already, Israel Weapon Industries faces fresh competition from China’s Norinco. Norinco wants my business, not to mention Serbian, Turkish, and Brazilian start-ups, who could teach even yourfactories a thing or two about bribery. IWI can make your life unpleasant, too. Not to mention your entire career.”
She stood abruptly, cold gaze fixed at a point in the middle of his forehead. “Welcome to Israel, Mr. Kurzweil.” She stamped an entry permit, instead of the passport—a routine dodge that allowed a businessman to enter the Arab nations that denied entry to those who had visited Israel.
He pocketed the Kurzweil passport. Then he surprised her with a warm Janson smile and a white lie of the sort that extinguished burning bridges: “Thank you. And may I say that if my schedule weren’t entirely booked I would invite you to dinner.”
A return smile made a hard mouth pretty. “If I weren’t married, I might accept.”
They shook hands. Janson rented a car and drove a short way from the airport to a high-end assisted-living complex in the Tel Aviv suburb of Nordiya. In the Mediterranean sunlight on a perfect June day it was a beautiful setting. Lush gardens and stands of palm trees surrounded cream-colored stucco apartment buildings that were crowned with red tile roofs and softened by waterfalls. A lavish clubhouse with flower boxes in its windows sprawled around a gigantic outdoor swimming pool.
Israel’s former Mossad operators could not ordinarily afford to end their days in the company of wealthily retired expatriate doctors, lawyers, and businessmen. But Miles Donner had more than his civil service pension to draw on, having worked his whole life under the cover of being a highly paid London-based travel photographer.
To Paul Janson, Miles Donner was “The Titan.”
“Better for a spy to be known for his failures than his successes,” Donner had taught Janson when Janson was in his twenties and Donner was sixty-five. “Best not to be known at all.”
No one had ever taught Janson more. No one knew as many secrets. Secrets came to Miles Donner and stuck to him like burrs on an aimlessly wandering sheep. But he was the original wolf under the sheepskin and had never spent an aimless moment in his long career serving Israel.
He had not looked like a titan, not with his soft face. Janson recalled sensitive features, full lips, warm eyes, and the easy, aloof manners of a middle-aged English gentleman who had prospered in the law or medicine. “Better to be underestimated than feared. Be soft. Surprise them with hard.”
The sight of a now-frail Donner struggling to his feet to greet him in the nursing home foyer stunned Janson. It had never occurred to him that time would diminish such a man. Oddly, though, Donner appeared less soft in frail old age, as if he no longer had the strength to conceal his nature. He was eighty-five, with wisps of white hair edging his bald dome, big ears, and an old man’s prominent nose. He wore glasses, now, black frame glasses. But he watched the way he always had, as if through two sets of eyes, one warm and smiling, the other, barely visible, focused like searchlights on his subject’s deepest thoughts.
“I have a surprise for you,” he said, in his upper-crust English accent. “Come along.” He disdained the elevator and walked unsteadily to the stairs. Janson instinctively went ahead to catch him if he fell. Donner noticed but did not remark on it. They walked slowly to the far end of the enormous swimming pool. At a table set off to one side in the shade of a cluster of palm trees sat two more men from Janson’s past. Grandig was younger than Miles, a vigorous seventy. Zwi Weintraub had to be at least ninety-five and looked it from his pinched cheeks to the oxygen tubes in his nostrils.
“Young Saul,” he greeted Janson. “You don’t look a day over eighty.”
“And you look like you could give Methuselah a run for his money.” Janson took Weintraub’s tiny hand in his. “How are you, sir?”
“I’ve stopped buying oxygen bottles in bulk.”
Grandig shook hands with a fist still hard. “And how am I, thank you for asking? Fine if I could trade in my skeleton. Or at least the aches.”
“Don’t start with the organ recitals,” Miles said with a benign smile. “Paul, when you telephoned that you had questions, I thought, who better to answer them than the Stern Gang?”
“I didn’t know they were still in business.”
“You thought we were dead,” cackled Weintraub. “We’re not; we just look that way.” And Grandig said, gesturing at the opulent surroundings, “Who could resist an invitation to spend even one hour in Miles’s splendid quarters?”
Janson had met them when he was a freshly recruited, probationary Consular Operations officer posted to the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. He was supposed to liaise with the Mossad. But the CIA, habitually at war with the State Department’s Cons Ops, had skillfully undermined him, whispering to key Israelis that Janson’s mission was to spy on the Mossad. The Mossad shoved him out of the way by assigning him to a marginalized unit of older men who had lost a power struggle within the Israeli spy agency.
They had nicknamed him “The Kid,” the only time in his life Janson had been called that, having grown into a man’s body by age fourteen. But in the presence of Zionist veterans who had fought the British and the Arabs on the battlefield, outfoxed them in Israel’s spy wars, and hunted Al Fatah and Black September terrorists to the death, Janson had felt very much “The Kid.” Interestingly, he had discovered there was no Israeli word, Hebrew or Yiddish, to express that American phrase for a young man invited into a circle of older practitioners; but the native-born Israeli sabras and even English Miles had grown up on American movies and peppered their speech with screenplay slang.
Janson had realized the second he reported that he had been knocked out of the loop. Weintraub, their commander, had been seventy-five years old. Of their so-called field agents, Donner was nearly sixty-five, and Grandig, the youngest, was pushing fifty. They knew they were out of the loop.