Billionaire

6

Somewhere in the murky half-light in the whirling sandstorm that had been the past forty years of his life, something deep inside his brain had snapped. Sometimes, on the shrink’s couch, he looked back into the vortex, but terror always made him turn away.

General Isser Aaron Ephraim, head of the Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence service responsible for overseas intelligence, had thought that maybe, as the years advanced, it would go away. But now he was sixty-four years old, and it had shown no signs of going away. The hatred that burned inside him, as he lay there, burned as fierce as the day it had begun, on a hot, dry day in 1938, when he’d returned with his father to the farmhouse, after a day at the market in Shedema, to discover the butchered bodies of his mother, two brothers, three sisters, grandfather and grandmother, victims of a Syrian vengeance raid.

That hatred was compounded more times than he could ever comprehend two months later, when he saw his father standing with a rope around his neck on a scaffold in Tel Aviv. His offence had been to steal a machine-gun from a British post and open fire on a Syrian army truck. It was a hanging offence under the British rule, and they hanged him.

Ephraim had spent most of the Second World War killing Englishmen, first for the Stern Gang and later for the Irgun, under the leadership of Israel’s future Prime Minister, Menachem Begin. In 1944, whilst on a mission to Germany in an attempt to free Jewish prisoners of war, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in Auschwitz. After the surrender of Germany, Ephraim was sent by Begin to Rome, as part of a team to infiltrate the Vatican and expose the lucrative racket the Vatican was running, under the full sanction of the Pope, of organizing the escape routes and safe destinations for fleeing Nazi officers.

After the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, Ephraim was recruited into the Mossad and placed in Syria as a mole, in the guise of a highly successful businessman with a lavish lifestyle. He married the daughter of the Syrian Minister of Technology, and rose to become an influential economics adviser to the Syrian Parliament.

In his seventh year in Syria, whilst his wife was out shopping, the Syrian intelligence service kicked down the attic door of his house, and found him crouched over his radio, tapping out his weekly transmission to Tel Aviv.

He wanted to die, but that was a release they had no intention of granting. Beginning with the rape of his pregnant wife outside the locked door of his cell, by a dozen prison officers who did not stop until long after she and the child were dead, he spent four years in which his mind was progressively disembowelled. From the young prison warder who used to grin and urinate on his food before passing it through the bars, to the other Israeli agents, the names of whom his torturers extracted from him one by one, who were brought up and tortured to death in front of him, a hatred welled up inside him, a hatred of the Arab race that was so strong, it became the only thing that kept him alive.

In 1958 he was suddenly returned to Israel in exchange for eighty captured Syrians and, after a long recuperation period, he was given a desk job in the Tel Aviv headquarters of the Mossad.

The fervour that he threw into his work brought him rapid promotion and he rose up through the ranks until finally, one year ago, he had been appointed its Director.

Ephraim had married an Israeli girl, Moya, who had produced four children, two sons and two girls. The eldest son was already a captain in the army, the second son had begun a promising political career, and his eldest daughter was engaged to be married to one of the most prominent young rabbis in the country. The solidity of his family, his respectability, the warmth and the achievements put a barrier between him and his past, but however much he immersed himself in a family life, and he had time for very little, the barrier, he always found, was ever only paper-thin.

The Head of the Mossad raised himself gently off the Arab’s back and ran a caressing finger down the young man’s spine. ‘You know,’ he said, in a strange, flat voice, ‘it’s too bad we never had longer together, time to get to know each other, perhaps, a little; we might have become really good friends.’

General Ephraim put his trousers back on, and pulled the sheet up over the bare back. It was very quiet in the room, except for the steady hissing of the air conditioning. Ephraim could hear no other sound, not even the faintest hint of a whirr from the tape that slowly revolved in the Sony video-camera, whose 28mm wide-angle lens peered down through the tiniest crack in the ceiling.

Ephraim walked through the eerie stillness with a strange smile on his face; all the weird nightmare feelings that welled within him, threatened at times to overpower him and smash his brain to pieces, were calm now, completely calm. He walked towards the door, stopped just before it, and sat down on the step. All of a sudden he felt weak — weak and very sick. He bent his head forward and cradled it in his arms. He began to sob, slowly at first, then faster and louder, until he was near hysteria. He wept for ten minutes and then, still in the same position, he slept.

When he awoke, he did not know how long he had slept; it was always the same when he came here, drawn by a magnet he did not understand and could not resist. He awoke full of a deep sense of dread, full of fear in the pit of his stomach and fear in his eyes. He looked around the room. Nothing had changed since he had slept. The slow whispering hush continued. He rose to his feet and went through the door, into the corridor.

At the end of the corridor, he ignored the lift with its massive wide doors and climbed the long flight of stone steps. At the top was another corridor which he walked down, and then came into a slightly brighter ante-room. There was a small office beyond the ante-room, and a man came out of it; he had a hideous expression in his face, deeply engrained. It was the same expression he always had: a mixture of disgust and apathy. The General pulled out a roll of bank notes from his jacket pocket. It was a thick roll, and he gave the whole roll, complete with elastic band, to the man, avoiding his gaze; he could not bear the man’s gaze. The man nodded once, almost imperceptibly, and pushed the button which opened the electric lock of the front door.

The General walked outside, shut the door behind him and stood on the steps, gulping in the midday Tel Aviv heat with the gratitude of a diver who has just returned to the surface of the ocean. He looked up at the sky, at the hot sun, at the traffic that thrashed down the road, at the pedestrians, at the buildings opposite — and stood like a man starved, greedily gulping it all in.

Behind venetian blinds on the second floor of the building directly opposite, a 200mm lens on the front of a Sony video camera was trained and focused on him. The electric motor relentlessly drove the cartridge of tape over the head of the recorder built into the back of the camera. Through the viewfinder, the cameraman concentrated on keeping two subjects in the centre of the tiny television screen in front of his eye: the Head of the Mossad and the small plaque attached to the wall, a few inches to his left. On the plaque were the words: ‘Hadar Dafma House’. Hadar Dafma House is the Tel Aviv morgue.

Ephraim took a taxi back to his apartment, which was empty. His wife and family traditionally spent the month of June at their house outside Haifa, and he joined them at weekends. He bathed and then lay down on his bed and slept until three o’clock. When he woke, he was calm; the hatred that had been building up inside him to a point where it threatened to tear him into pieces was gone. It would be back again, he knew; in a few weeks it would start up again, slowly begin to grow again; but now, at least, it was quiet.

He arrived back at his office, and there was a Priority sealed envelope waiting on his desk; he cut it open, and pulled out a decoded report. He read it quickly and then put it down; he rested his left hand on the top of his mahogany desk and started, slowly and rhythmically, to pound it with his right hand. Sometimes, it seemed to him, everything in life was against Israel — not just the hatred of her enemies farther afield. It was the very soul of life itself that seemed at times to be against her.

Before the six-day war of 1967, Israel had been a minute country, smaller than Wales. Since that war it had doubled in size, but Ephraim knew that the land could just as easily, one day, be snatched away again, and Israel could be back to where she was before, a mere seven thousand, nine hundred square miles, the only true home for the fifteen million Jews in the world — a home which one day, it was not inconceivable, they might need.

Ephraim’s job was to listen in on the rest of the world, find out just what anyone might be intending to do that could harm Israel, either by propaganda or by force, and either arrange for them to be stopped himself, or advise the Prime Minister on what action to sanction.

His moles were his ears, and just as he himself had been planted in Syria over thirty years earlier, he in turn had planted men — young, dedicated men he could trust, intelligent men with the ability to rise far — in all the countries where he felt danger could lurk or good information could be obtained. With a population in Israel of only three and a half million to draw from, and a tiny budget, he had a tough task, and could not afford to carry passengers on his team. In some countries he kept better moles than others: Britain was a key country to him, both because of its own status in the world and because of its large Arab population and connections. One of the men he had placed in England was a man in whom he had originally had particularly high hopes, someone whom he had singled out as a true chameleon, able to adapt and blend into any situation — a dedicated man, and a ruthless man.

During the past few years this man had disappointed him; somehow, the zeal for Israel had deserted him, and been replaced by a bitterness with his lot in life. He had become careless in his security, lazy in his work. He was a bad agent, and it was Ephraim’s strong view that a bad agent was a dangerous person to have.

The decoded message on his desk told him that this agent was at the present moment in the intensive care unit of a hospital outside London, following a car accident.

The report of the accident made no sense: the man had apparently driven into the back of a road-laying lorry in broad daylight on a clear day. He could have fallen asleep at the wheel — or equally as easily, he could have been drugged. Ephraim had a good young man he wanted to put into England, but his budget was already over-extended; he decided that soon he would swap this man for Baenhaker. He smiled. Some occasion would arise soon in London which would involve an agent in the risk of having his cover blown — these situations cropped up all the time. As soon as Baenhaker was out of hospital, he would be put at the top of the ‘candidates for blown cover’ list. The first assignment that came up, he would give Baenhaker, and then afterwards transfer him out of England to an unimportant country, on the grounds that his cover had been blown. He smiled, and wished all his decisions could be made so easily.