Spin Control

FRUSTRATION

And why would i want to help you?” Osnat asked when Arkady finally got the chance to plead his case with her.

She had a habit of turning her head when she spoke to fix her good eye on you. It reminded Arkady of old spinfeed of hawks.

“Because…,” he began. But he didn’t have a reason. Not unless the vague feeling that she was the only human who didn’t hate or despise him was a reason.

“Arkady—” she began, then stopped abruptly. “It’d be a lot easier to talk to you if I knew your real name.”

“I don’t have any other name.”

“Then what was all that nonsense Korchow was spewing back there about designations and categories? How many Arkadys are there, anyway?”

Moshe’s question again. But it sounded different on Osnat’s lips.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “There were six hundred in my cohort.”

“And when you meet another one of them, he’s just—”

“Arkady.”

“Except for this Arkasha person.”

“Korchow was exaggerating a bit there.” Arkady shifted uncomfortably. “It’s a nickname. He’s not the only person who ever had a nickname.”

Osnat hesitated visibly, took a breath, and let it out on a repressed sigh. “What’s the deal with Korchow, anyway?” she asked in a tone that made him think it wasn’t the question she’d meant at first to ask. “I didn’t think any of the Syndicates even made a K Series.”

“They don’t. Korchow’s just a name for humans to use. His real name’s Andrej.”

He could see her puzzling through that one.

“It’s phonetic. KnowlesSyndicate is authorized for more A Series than any other Syndicate. And there aren’t a lot of names with AK. It’s a joke, of sorts.”

“Not a very funny one.”

“Most KnowlesSyndicate jokes aren’t very funny, except to them. They’re spies. What do you expect?”

It was weeks before he understood the full import of the raised eyebrow that comment earned him.

“So I take it Arkady isn’t a KnowlesSyndicate name?”

He blinked in surprise and mild offense, then told himself that all constructs probably looked alike to humans. “Rostov. I’m a researcher. A scientist.”

A forager after knowledge, one of his teachers had liked to say. Arkady always thought of that phrase when he saw ants at work.

He glanced across his cell, reassuring himself that the little honey-pot ants he’d lured into his prison were still with him. They ought to be; he’d been sharing a sizable portion of his scanty meals with them. And what sensible swarm wouldn’t opt for a plentiful and reliable food source in this easy-to-navigate, predator-free landscape of linoleum tiles? Arkady’s arrival had single-handedly turned the marginal territory of a small young swarm into prime habitat, and he took some satisfaction from imagining their nests’ frenetic expansion, with foragers passing the fruit of their foraging on to the nestbound minor workers, and the queen lying vast and fertile at the heart of her brood.

“So, fine. You’re not a spy,” Osnat snapped. “Then why are you working for Korchow?”

“Why do you take Moshe’s orders?”

“Taking orders is what soldiers are for.”

“But you’re not a soldier anymore.”

A momentary hesitation. “No.”

“You’re—is the word employee?—an employee of GolaniTech. Along with Moshe. And you both work for Ashwarya Sofaer. Why?”

Her lips tightened in annoyance. “Because she pays us.”

“But Moshe treats you differently than the others. Why?”

A slow, mocking smile spread across her face. “If you’re asking have I slept with him, the answer’s no.”

“Even though you’re a workpair?”

“You seem to have a pretty odd idea of office etiquette, if you don’t mind my saying so. And does everyone in the Syndicates expect complete strangers to answer personal questions on demand?”

“There are no strangers in the Syndicates. We’re all brothers.”

“Sure you are. You and the Interfaithers and every other wacko religious cult in the history of the universe.”

Her eyes wandered restlessly across the room.

“Ugh!” she said. “Fucking ants.” And before Arkady understood what she was about to do, she strode across the room and began stamping out his little foragers.

He leapt up, so horrified that all speech, all thought, fled his mind. He crossed the room in two steps and knocked her sideways and grabbed her arm to keep her away from them.

At which point the world turned upside down and exploded.

He must have caught her completely by surprise, he realized later, or she wouldn’t have hurt him so badly. When the pain receded, he was sitting on the bed with no idea how he’d returned there, panting, and feeling like his stomach and kidneys were about to burst. And Osnat was holding a wet towel to his jaw.

“I’m really, really sorry, Arkady. Of course. Ants. Shit. I didn’t even stop to think. Are you all right?”

She looked sick. He felt as if he were seeing, for the first time, the woman inside the soldier. No, he corrected himself. Not the woman inside the soldier, but the woman who was the soldier. Because there was no inside or outside with Osnat, no layers under layers. That was what had drawn him to her from the beginning, though he could only now put words to it.

“I’ll get you new ants, Arkady. Okay? I’ll go outside and trap the little fuckers. I’ll buy you a damned ant farm. Whatever you want. Just don’t look like that, for God’s sake.”

He smiled, making an effort. “The ants will be back. It’s their gift.”

He thought she would leave after that, but she didn’t. Instead, they both stared at the river of ants, significantly thinned by the carnage Osnat’s boot had wreaked, but still moving according to the unfaltering guiding logic of the superorganism.

“By the way,” he said, “you still haven’t answered my question.”

“What questio—? Oh. No, there’s nothing between Moshe and me anymore. Nothing like that, anyway.”

“Why not?”

One coppery eyebrow lifted in amusement. Obviously she was recovering her composure. “I didn’t explain it to him. What makes you so special?”

“Nothing.” Arkady closed his eyes and put a hand up to feel the rising lump above his cheekbone. “Nothing at all.”

Osnat put the towel back up to his cheek. “I’m sorry I hit you. I really am.” She laughed her laugh-not-to-cry laugh. “You’re having a pretty rough time of it, aren’t you, boychik?”

“Is it going to get better from here on in, do you think?”

“It’s going to get worse.”

“I don’t know if I can take it.”

“Most people can take a lot more than they think they can.”

He looked up at her. What could he tell her that would help Arkasha, if, please God, Arkasha still needed help? How could he hope to sway her, move her?

“Help my friend, Osnat. Please. He’s a good person. He deserves your help.”

She stood up, frowning, and pressed the towel into his hand. “Keep it on the bruise and keep running cold water on it every few minutes. It’ll make a big difference.”

“Osnat—”

“And don’t fool yourself into thinking you have some kind of relationship with me, Arkady. I’m not your friend. I’m not looking out for you. And pretending different is just going to make things harder on both of us.”

She was leaving, he realized. The conversation, which had never really gone anywhere in the first place, was over.

“No, Osnat! Wait!”

She turned in the open doorway to face him. “I feel bad for you. And I feel like a monster for hitting you just now. But I can’t afford to let things get personal. I’m here because they pay me to be. I take Moshe’s orders because I’m paid to take them. It’s not personal. None of it’s personal. I made that choice a long time ago.”

“And what if Moshe orders you to kill me?” He hadn’t meant it to be a question, but there it was, naked enough to make him cringe.

“Do you want me to lie to you?” Osnat asked. “You don’t seem like the kind of person who wants to be lied to.”

They crossed into Palestine twenty minutes before the border closed in a dusty, stinking, gasoline-powered minivan that Arkady suspected was older than KnowlesSyndicate.

The man who handled their travel papers sat at a large empty desk in a large empty office, under a large bronze relief of a lion disemboweling an antelope. He worked in the dark, with only the fading daylight that filtered through the dust-caked windows. There was no power, he explained in tones of austere self-righteousness, because the Zionists had turned off the water that fed the hydroelectric turbines. He apologized with distant courtliness for the fact that the lack of electricity had inconvenienced them by making it so hard for him to read their travel papers. He suggested that they try to make future border crossings between 10:00 and 12:00 A.M. Weekday mornings were, as a general rule, the best time for electricity.

He seemed to be under the mistaken impression that they were off-planet journalists—an error that Osnat made no attempt to rectify.

“You understand,” he told them, “that it isn’t always possible to guarantee your safety once you enter Palestine. It isn’t us threatening you, naturally, but the Zionists…” He let his words trail off into suggestive silence.

“Are you going to stamp our goddamn visas,” Osnat asked, “or do we have to stand here all day talking to you?”

The man eyed her narrowly for a moment. Then he stamped their passes, tossed the customs declaration forms on top of them, and scraped the whole little pile of paper off his desk and handed it to Arkady.

“I’ll be taking those, thank you very much.” Osnat snatched the papers out of Arkady’s hands and secreted them in the same pocket they’d originally emerged from.

Three sentries guarded the crossing. They were all female, all young, and all pretty underneath their jilabs as far as Arkady could tell. Two of them stood before the crossing arm. The third stood on the little hillock above the road, her eyes glued to the high-resolution sight of a tripod-mounted machine gun.

One of the girls at the crossing arm had a first lieutenant’s bar sewn crookedly to her sleeve. She asked for the papers in Arabic, then in UN-standard Spanish, pored over their small print with exquisite deliberation, stuck her head into the car’s open window to stare at them, and then retreated into the makeshift guardhouse.

Two minutes passed, then five, then ten. Once Arkady made the mistake of looking up to meet the second girl’s unwavering stare. After that he kept his own eyes resolutely glued to the dashboard in front of him.

They heard the Enderbots long before they saw them. And when they finally saw them there was something monotonously anticlimactic about the massed block of soldiers. Until you saw the eyes. The eyes were terrifying.

“Those…things are fighting civilians?” Arkady said.

“Not fighting. Occupying. That’s why they did it in the first place. Armies aren’t good at police work. And training only helps so much. Frankly, anytime you hand a bunch of teenagers assault rifles and put them in charge of unarmed civilians you’re gonna find out that some of those teenagers aren’t very nice people. Also, even the nice ones are terrified. And fear can make you one heap big trigger-happy. EMET stopped all that. It’s not afraid. It’s not mean. It doesn’t play the bully. It doesn’t panic. It just does its job. The year EMET came on-line, IDF casualties on the Line dropped twenty percent, and reported civilian casualties in the Line were cut almost in half. EMET is a better, cleaner, more human way to fight an occupation. That’s the official line, anyway.”

“But not what you think.”

She shrugged. “I see the good points of it. But I also see that there’re plenty of officers—in the IDF at least, and I assume it’s the same this side of the Line—who like the idea of soldiers who don’t think for themselves and can’t argue with stupid orders or tell reporters when the generals fuck up.”

“So is EMET good or bad?”

Osnat twisted around in the cramped passenger compartment and fished on the floor behind her seat until she came up with a beach towel decorated with fluorescent pink cartoon fish schooling across blue-and-purple seas between strands of electric-green seaweed. She shook the towel out and leaned out the window to wipe the yellow khamsin dust off the driver’s side mirror.

“Both, Arkady. Everything’s both. That’s the way the world works. Anyone who tells you different is selling you something.”

Finally, the phone rang in the guardhouse, and the lieutenant exchanged a few curt words with her unknown interlocutor, came outside, returned their papers, and waved them on. As they accelerated away from the crossing, Arkady saw the girl on the hill straighten away from her gunsights, kneading at a sore back and throwing her hip out to one side like a woman carrying a child.

It took ninety minutes to reach the airstrip Shaikh Yassin had directed them to, but they picked up his security escort—two late-model, American-built sedans with impenetrable mirrored windows—within a kilometer of the border crossing. When they turned off the pavement and through the barb-wire-topped gate of the airstrip, they were stopped, searched, and bundled onto an unmarked helicopter. Osnat submitted to the whole process with an indifference that verged on boredom.

They were in the air for almost forty minutes. And with every moment that they flew through Palestinian airspace unchallenged, Arkady became incrementally more frightened of the man to whom Moshe had just entrusted him for a span of time and under conditions of treatment that had no limitations Arkady knew about.

The helicopter finally touched down on a makeshift landing pad in the middle of a weed-choked parking lot that looked big enough to accommodate every automobile still left on the planet.

“What is this place?” Arkady asked.

Osnat just pointed. Arkady followed her pointing finger and saw a rusted, dust-caked sign looming over the horizon like an artillery emplacement:

Arkady’s first thought when he saw the hotel itself was that it was a building that had been built in a more peaceful time. The near-transparent pavilion of glass and stucco had been replaced piecemeal by armored shutters and mirrored plexi-flex that reflected the world outside with that smeared, underwater quality that was a sure sign of bulletproofing.

Two vast beasts flanked the hotel’s main entrance. Winged hippocanths whose broad chests swept upward into enigmatic smiling faces framed by heavy stone ringlets that made them look, to Arkady, like the avenging angels of the Hasidim. One of the two statues was pitted with bullet and shrapnel scars. The other was in such pristine condition that Arkady wondered momentarily if it was a fake.

There was a sensor attached to the door. As Arkady stepped up to it the mirrored panel whispered sideways on hidden tracks and Arkady found himself face-to-face with Shaikh Yassin.

“You admire my sentries?” Yassin asked. “They come from Baghdad. Before people invented you, that’s what we used to think monsters looked like.”

The lobby was dominated by an immense fountain whose centerpiece was a massive limestone ziggurat rising from the middle of an eye-stingingly chlorinated reflecting pool. Water coursed from hidden spouts at the ziggurat’s summit. When the fountain was new the water must have run smoothly down the ziggurat’s steps, creating the illusion of a structure made entirely of water. But time had sloughed off the ziggurat’s limestone facing, exposing the rebar-reinforced concrete behind the luxurious veneer, and now the water rilled down the ruined, rust-streaked surface in a complex series of broken fractals.

Arkady looked at Osnat. She was transfixed by the water, staring at it with a slight curl to her lip that might have been disgust or incredulity or both.

Water is power, he remembered Korchow saying. On this planet water is the only power that matters.

Korchow had told Arkady that Yassin’s great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-grandfather had both attended Oxford University on Saudi oil revenues, at least according to Yassin’s version of the family history. But the myth of oil and Oxford was only kept alive to emphasize the family’s royal pedigree. The real Middle Eastern oil aristocracy had gone down in the general wreck of Earth’s industrial economy. The shaikh’s grandfather had made—or if the shaikh was to be believed, remade—the family fortune in a form of liquid gold more priceless and more fraught with political controversy than oil had ever been.

Arkady looked at the shaikh’s face, at the lines of cruelty carved into it beneath his smiling manner, at the subtle tics he was already learning to recognize as the signs of human privilege. He’d admired the man’s soft-spoken courtesy at the first bidding session, and had wondered several times since then if he ought to throw himself and Arkasha on Yassin’s mercy. But now he realized, with a certainty that went beyond reason or logic, that he could never entrust Arkasha’s safety to such a man.

“What are the limitations of this exercise?” Yassin asked Osnat, entirely innocent of the fact that he’d auditioned for, and failed to win, the role of Arkasha’s savior. “May I speak to Arkady alone, or are you required to provide some form of supervision?”

“Show him your wrist,” Osnat said.

Arkady lifted his left hand to display the biomonitor Osnat had strapped on before they left.

“You leave that on,” Osnat told him. “Other than that, you set the rules. And you have your privacy. I just go away and come back when you’re done with him.”

“That’s trusting of you.”

“Only if you mean that we trust you not to do something suicidally stupid.”

Yassin raised his carefully groomed eyebrows. “Yusuf,” he said, “would you mind showing the good captain to the kitchen? I’m sure we can find some sandwiches for her.”

He was speaking to a slim green-eyed boy dressed in civilian clothes. Arkady vaguely remembered the boy from the meeting at Abulafia Street, but he looked as unimpressive now as he had then. The young man hesitated as if he were about to argue with the order, but then slipped out of the room with Osnat behind him.

As soon as the pair was gone, Yassin gestured to one of the remaining guards, who stepped forward, seized Arkady’s sleeve, rolled it up above his elbow, jabbed a needle into him, and extracted a nauseatingly large quantity of blood into the same color-coded vials that littered half the Syndicate biotech labs Arkady had visited.

“Excuse our bad manners,” Yassin said, “but we wanted to get that over with. You understand, I’m sure. It won’t be necessary to mention it to anyone.”

“I feel dizzy. Can I sit down?”

“Oh, certainly.”

A chair was provided.

Arkady sat in it.

“Well,” Yassin said, “shall we begin?”

What followed was the strangest series of unconnected and apparently pointless questions Arkady had ever been asked in his life. No question was linked to any other in any logical way that Arkady could understand. And even when he grasped a question well enough to answer it sensibly, Yassin was as likely as not to cut him off in midanswer. If he hadn’t known better, he would have suspected that Yassin was deliberately trying to prevent him from relaying any useful or coherent information.

Yassin seemed to find the interrogation just as frustrating as Arkady did. The shaikh’s annoyance was reflected not in his own body, however, but in the increasingly threatening demeanor of his bodyguards. It was the first time Arkady had encountered this kind of complicated power by proxy. It was less impressive than Moshe’s personal ability to intimidate…but it was just as terrifying.

“My dear fellow,” Yassin said at last, interrupting Arkady’s fifth or sixth attempt to explain basic terraforming techniques, “do they have such things as schools where you come from?”

Arkady nodded.

“And do you happen to know where I went to school?”

Arkady shook his head. Yusuf, who had slipped back into the room, coughed.

“Al Ansar,” Yassin said. The name didn’t seem to have the anticipated effect on Arkady. “You’ve heard of it?” Yassin prompted. “Yes?”

“Uh…sorry.”

“It’s a prison camp. Run by the Zionists. I spent eight years there.” Yassin pinned Arkady under a stare intense enough to make him wonder what ants felt like when they were plucked up by entomologist’s pincers. “They tortured me. Can you tell?”

“No.”

“Of course you can’t. They’re a clever people, the Jews. They know how to extract the maximum information with the minimum damage. You would think that it wouldn’t work on a planet as violent as this one. You would think that people would become inured to anything less than the immediate threat of death or mutilation. But pain has its own power.”

The larger of Yassin’s two bodyguards shifted, intruding on Arkady’s space and making him move his feet away before he could repress the gesture.

“I’m not trying to hide anything from you.” Arkady screwed up his courage. “Why don’t you just ask me a question I can answer instead of threatening me for no reason?”

Yassin muttered something in Arabic and one of the bodyguards kicked Arkady’s chair out from under him, plucked him off the floor, and tossed him against the wall as offhandedly as if he were handling a piece of luggage.

At the other end of the room, Yusuf coughed again. Yassin turned toward him and snapped out a sentence in quick, angry Arabic. The young man shrugged.

“I was just clearing my throat,” he answered in UN-standard Spanish. “I didn’t mean anything by it.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “I really couldn’t care less what you do to him as long as I get out of here in time to avoid the rush-hour traffic.”

“Someday,” Yassin said sourly, “your frivolity is going to get you into trouble that even your fancy friends can’t get you out of.”

“So you keep telling me.”

Yassin made an exasperated spitting noise and left, followed by the two bodyguards.

Yusuf stayed behind.

He and Arkady stared at each other.

Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, the young man crossed the room, righted Arkady’s chair, and sat down on it, resting his chin on the chair back. He treated Arkady to a smile so brilliantly friendly that it was impossible to believe it wasn’t at least a little sincere. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“For what it’s worth, Yassin actually went to Princeton. He’s never seen the inside of a public restroom, let alone a prison cell. He was just fucking with you.”

“Oh.” Arkady paused in confusion. “Um…thanks for telling me, I guess.”

“My pleasure, pussycat.”

“And what about you?” Arkady asked. He was probably doing something incredibly stupid, but after all the boy seemed so harmless.

“Where did you go to school?”

“I went to a severely fancy private boys’ school that you’ve never heard of. Then I went to LSE. Ringside, of course. Then I went through the PalSec officers’ training course.”

“And what subjects did you study?”

Yusuf laughed. “Let’s just say I have an advanced degree in kicking up trouble. I’m a spook, Arkady, in case you hadn’t guessed yet. And not an amateur like Yassin and his clowns. I’m just the poor unlucky bastard who was too junior to get out of the scut work of baby-sitting them.”

“Baby-sitting them for whom?”

“Oh, now that would be kissing and telling, wouldn’t it?” He flashed his let’s-be-friends grin again. “I will tell you something else, though. I might actually be the only human you’ll ever meet who’s been to the Syndicates. I spent four months on Knowles Station studying…well, you can probably guess what by now.”

“Did you like it there?”

“Hated it. Just hated it. Pretty girls everywhere and none of them interested in adorable little me. Seriously, though. Other than the total absence of sex it was great. I made some good friends. It’s refreshing to be around people who honestly don’t care about class or money or any of the usual bullshit. And Gilead’s beautiful. Ever gone hiking in the Lodi Range?”

“I did most of my dissertation research there.”

“Paradise, right? No other word for it.”

“No,” Arkady breathed.

Yusuf leaned forward, fixing those disconcerting eyes on Arkady. “Tell me true, one pre-citizen to another. Do you still want to stay here now that you’ve gotten to know Earth a little? Or would you rather go home?”

Yusuf was speaking English, Arkady realized suddenly. Not Hebrew. Not UN-standard Spanish. Not the bastardized English of the Trusteeships, but the pure, slightly archaic English of the Syndicates. And he had no accent that Arkady could hear.

“Is this the real interrogation?” he asked.

“What’s real? What’s an interrogation? I’m just passing time while the rich old farts are out of the room.”

“So when do they start asking me the real questions?”

“They already did. Or did you perhaps miss the part where they stuck the needle into you?”

“You knew about that?”

“I heard a rumor. There’s a proper epidemic of rumors making the rounds in this operation. Kind of makes you wonder if there isn’t someone managing the spin from behind the scenes.”

“If there is, it’s not me.”

Yusuf laughed. “That makes two for tea and tea for two of us.”

“So…Yassin isn’t going to question me at all?”

“He might beat you up some more. But that’d be pleasure, not business. And I’m not authorized to monitor his entertainment. Sorry. Only so far a guy can go to help a total stranger. And though I might seem young, I have my pension to worry about. Retirement can really creep up on you fast in my line of work.”

Arkady swallowed.

“Sorry.” Yusuf really did sound genuinely contrite. “I shouldn’t joke about it. I have an awful sense of humor. But the fact is I actually do have to turn into a pumpkin pretty soon. Decisions above my pay grade, et cetera, ad nauseam, et al., El Al, and so forth.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“An answer that unfortunately I doubt you’re in a position to give me. Because some of us on this side of the Line actually kind of desperately need to know, Arkady, if you’re really who you say you are. Or are you being used, with or without your knowledge, for some…excuse me if this sounds pretentious…deeper purpose?”

“If it’s without my knowledge, then what’s the point of asking?”

“Well. Right. Obviously that would be the problem. By the way, have you met Didi Halevy yet?”

“No,” Arkady said—and realized that the denial was itself an admission.

“But you know the name. Who told you about him? Korchow?”

Arkady pressed his lips closed, suddenly understanding the old phrase about locking the barn door after the horse has run off.

“And what about the cripple? Have you met Gavi Shehadeh yet? We’re laying bets back in the office about when Didi will decide to trot him out. And you can tell Didi that, too, when he gets around to questioning you in person. It’s good for his ego to be reminded that we don’t automatically scarf down every piece of garbage he tosses our way.”

Yusuf sighed, settled his chin more comfortably on his arms, and fixed Arkady with a gaze that was uncomfortably intense despite its obvious good humor.

Arkady inspected the scuffed toes of the desert boots that Osnat had given him. They were too wide. His feet, accustomed to soft spacer’s shoes, were developing blisters in places he’d never known feet could get blisters. He wondered where Osnat had gotten the boots. Actually, on second thought, he didn’t want to know.

“I hope this doesn’t sound rude,” Yusuf said at last, “but you’re really making a hash of this. I mean, forgive me for pointing out the obvious…but though you keep talking about how you want to talk to Absalom, what have you really done about it?”

Arkady couldn’t answer that.

“It doesn’t make sense, Arkady. You’ve got us and the Israelis all buzzing around like bees who’ve had their nest stomped on. But at some point someone’s going to wake up and start asking whether even a man who spends his adult life playing with ants can be as incompetent as you seem to be. You have no idea who Absalom is, or even which side he’s on. You’ve made no discernible effort to talk to him. And yet you keep babbling on about Absalom, Absalom, Absalom. Frankly, Arkady, I’m disappointed. I thought Korchow was smarter than that.”

Arkady shrugged.

“Do you actually know anything at all about Absalom?”

Arkady shrugged again.

“Well listen, pussycat. I’ll tell you about him. Just in case. You never know when it might come in handy.”

“You mean when the Israelis start torturing me?”

“Don’t be naive. The Israelis don’t actually torture people anymore. They just bore them into talking, same as we do.” His voice shifted into a different register, and he began to recite the story of Absalom as if it were a myth or a martyr’s life. “Absalom was a Jew and a hero of the last war. He was also, of course, a hero of Palestine.”

“Was. Is he dead, then?”

“We have no idea. In fact, we never knew who he was. He used unorthodox lines of communication. And one of the conditions of his assistance was that we were never to put his drop points under surveillance or attempt to tail the Mossad agents that serviced them.”

“Mossad agents?”

“Yeah. The cheeky bastard actually used the normal Mossad letterboxes to communicate with us. I think it would be fair to characterize that as what a Jewish ex-girlfriend of mine liked to call chutzpah.”

“So what happened to Absalom?”

“We have no idea. He fell off our radar screen after the fiasco in Tel Aviv.”

“And you never managed to reestablish contact?”

“No. And believe me, we’ve tried. So you can see what you’re stepping into. Before you showed up everyone was willing to let Absalom be forgotten because we were all mostly sure that he was dead. Now, however, the Israelis want to find Absalom just to make goddamn sure he’s dead. And, uh, we want to find him to…well, honestly, probably in order to blackmail him into coming back to work for us.” Yusuf stretched and yawned, catlike. “So as you can see, it’s slightly more urgent than life or death for us to know whether you’re for real.”

Arkady waited, but nothing more seemed to be forthcoming.

“That’s it,” Yusuf concluded cheerfully. “That’s Absalom. The whole only moderately censored story. My gift to you.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“You tell me why.”

“Because you know I’m going to talk to the Israelis at some point and you’re feeding me the story you want to feed them?”

“Pretty good for an amateur. I’m impressed. But sadly I’m neither that organized or that intelligent. And that’s not just my opinion; it’s a direct quote from my last personnel review. Any other possibilities come to mind? It’s not a trick question, trust me. You’re seriously overthinking it.”

“You want something from me.”

Yusuf pantomimed a silent round of applause.

“But we’ve already been through that,” Arkady said tiredly. “Like you said, whatever answer I would give you about Absalom would only be what I know.”

“What I want, for now at least, is more basic. I want your trust.”

“If you’re trying to convince me to trust you, then letting Yassin scare me half to death just now wasn’t the best way to go about it.”

“It’s nice,” Yusuf observed, “that you have this fairy godmother kind of impression of me. But my powers at present don’t actually extend to protecting you from Yassin’s steroid addicts.”

“If you can’t protect me,” Arkady pointed out, “then why should I believe you have the power to deliver whatever else you’re offering?”

Yusuf’s smile widened. “Who says we’re offering you anything?”

We? The pronoun had been no accident; Yusuf was watching him process it like a cat watching a bird land on its windowsill.

“Who sent you?” Arkady asked.

“I’m sure you’re way ahead of me on this, Arkady, but just in case…has it escaped your notice that everyone else is pumping you for information and I’m giving it to you?”

“No.”

“Good. Think about it. And while you’re thinking, let me pass along two more of those rumors we were talking about earlier. Rumor number one: Turner has a man in Moshe’s camp. Rumor number two: UNSec has a highly placed agent somewhere among Didi’s people. Apparently they’re pissed as hell that Didi hasn’t told them about you, and they consider this the final chapter in a long line of Mossad fuckups starting with Tel Aviv. They seem to be playing it along to see where it goes, but they could step in and squash the deal anytime they want. And when UNSec squashes, they wield a big hammer and they don’t worry too much about whose toes happen to be in the slam zone.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“I told you. Trust.” He smiled, all sparkling green eyes and honey-colored skin and dazzlingly white teeth. “Is it working? Do you trust me?”

“What difference does it make?” Arkady asked tiredly.

“None at the moment. But it might later on. And you might need to make the decision very quickly. So think about it while you’re sitting back in that nasty little cell Moshe has you in. And be careful what you say: you’ve already contradicted yourself a few times. That sort of thing could earn you the wrong kind of attention from people we really don’t want paying attention to you.”

“Who sent you?” Arkady asked again, more urgently. “Korchow?” He searched the boy’s eyes in growing desperation. “Safik?”

He could hear Yassin’s guards in the hall. In a moment it would be too late, and he would never have the chance to ask the questions he should have been asking from the beginning of this inexplicable conversation.

“Who?” he cried, just as the door opened and Shaikh Yassin appeared.

Yusuf stood up, his back still to Yassin and the bodyguards, and mouthed a single unmistakable word:

Absalom.