Spin Control

INFORMATION COSTS

Its official name was the Institute for the Coordination of Intelligence and Special Tasks, but most Israelis called it the Institute, or, in Hebrew, the Mossad. And the inconspicuous, close-mouthed, suspiciously fit men and women who worked at the Institute called it simply the Office.

The first time Cohen had walked into the shabby lobby off King Saul Boulevard and ridden the clanking elevator to the eighth floor he’d been in the real Hyacinthe’s body. It had been a week after the fateful doctor’s visit—and a week before Hyacinthe had worked up the courage to tell his wife about the diagnosis. Hyacinthe Cohen (Hy, predictably, to his Israeli friends) had been a pigheadedly rational man. And yet he had felt in his gut, at some level below words, that the disease wouldn’t really be real until he told his wife about it. How strange, Cohen thought now…and how human. Almost as human as the feeling the memory aroused in Cohen: that only now, when it was far too late, was he finally beginning to understand the man.

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 sayan and a katsa, a full-fledged Mossad agent. He’d gone through the katsa induction 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 katsa who 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!”

All of which drove home to Cohen just how unhuman he himself was. Because to Cohen, Didi had always seemed more real than most people, not less. And though he and Didi saw each other at rare intervals, and usually only during moments of crisis, there were few things he enjoyed more than an hour spent talking to this extraordinary man who looked so inexplicably ordinary to his fellow humans. Or at least that had been how things stood before Tel Aviv.

“Can we take you to dinner when we’re done here?” Cohen asked Didi.

“No. But you can come to my house for dinner. My daughters are here on their Yom Kippur visas, and Zillah’s always delighted to see you. And of course”—with a polite nod to Li—“the invitation is also for…?”

“Actually, we’ve met,” Li said. “At the War College on Alba. You probably don’t remember, but I took a class the semester you visited.”

“Oh dear. I should remember, of course, but I meet so many people. And my memory for faces is very poor.”

Cohen rolled his eyes and coughed.

“I’m sorry,” Didi said humbly, “it’s dusty in here. All the paper, you know. You wouldn’t believe the problems we have with allergies. Would you like to borrow my eyedrops?”

Didi’s office was material proof of the old Mossad dictum: the smaller the office, the bigger the reputation. The place must have been a mop closet in some prior incarnation. Only the timeless tools of the trade—the glass-topped desk, the paper shredder, the scrambled landline, the dusty green ranks of locked file cabinets—suggested the secrets its walls had seen.

Nor did the room give anything away about Didi himself. There were no family pictures, no knickknacks, no mementos. The only hint of personality was a fading computer printout taped to the wall behind Didi’s head, where generations of young field agents had read it while listening to briefings, waiting for Didi to get off the phone with his wife or daughters, or yawning through administrative updates. The list, which Cohen happened to know had been a present from the last class of katsas Didi took through field training, contained five items:

1. The odds of an agent ending up in a hole in the ground are directly proportional to the number of people who know him from a hole in the ground.

2. The best thing to say is always nothing.

3. When you want to know what a piece of information means, look at where it’s been.

4. Small guns are more trouble than they’re worth.

5. Everyone has his dumb blonde and his rented Ferrari.

As they passed into the office, a slender young man appeared, seemingly from nowhere, to frisk them a second time. Cohen stood patiently to be searched, as did Li; but while Li’s inspection of the boy was limited to a quick glance at all the potential hiding places for concealed weapons, Cohen’s once-over was a bit more thorough.

The boy had the parchment skin and glossy curls of a yeshiva student. His glasses were cheap, like Didi’s, and the lenses were almost thick enough to obscure the long-lashed bedroom eyes behind them. Which didn’t change by one jot the fact that the body under the rumpled suit was a soldier’s body, and the sleepy-lidded eyes looked out at the world with the calculating poise of a professional killer.

Once he’d pronounced them clean, the young man escorted them into Didi’s inner sanctum and hesitated ostentatiously.

“Thank you, Arik,” Didi said. And waited.

The boy heaved a sigh of protest over the security breach and slipped out of the room, leaving the three of them alone together.

“Good youngsters coming in these days,” Didi told Cohen. “It’s a nice thing to see kids who take their work seriously.”

“Well, you do get the pick of them.”

“You want a boy like Arik should be rotting in a foxhole? Five languages he speaks. Arabic like a native.”

No doubt he did speak five languages. He also looked like a smaller, paler, less handsome, and decidedly less good-natured copy of Gavi Shehadeh. But Cohen knew better than to suggest that this might have anything to do with Didi’s obvious affection for the boy.

Didi chatted on, mentioning mutual friends. Cohen let the small talk flow over him without too much thought—something he’d long ago learned to do when humans started talking this way—and focused on the body language. He’d wondered for a long time what Catherine Li and Didi Halevy would make of each other. Now he watched each of them summing the other up and asked himself whether these two particular opposites were about to attract or repel.

Li, three years out of the Peacekeepers, still looked so ill at ease in mufti that even the most casual observers pegged her for an off-duty soldier. Didi, by contrast, had looked like a disheveled impostor the one time Cohen had seen him in uniform. In fact, one of the often-discussed mysteries of the Mossad chief’s legendary career was the question of how a man who seemed too fragile to lift a piece of paper had survived his compulsory military service long enough for his unique talents to be recognized.

At the moment Didi was definitely in undertaker mode. If Cohen hadn’t known better, he would have thought they were talking to the janitor. Did the man have some reason for wanting Li to underestimate him, Cohen wondered, or was it just the habitual camouflage of an old spy who’d long ago learned not to trust new faces?

Li, meanwhile, had gone into her full-blown dumb-soldier act. There was no glint of humor in her dark eyes, no ironic drawl in her voice. Not one thing about her face, manner, voice, or words suggested that she’d ever had an intelligent thought in her life.

He should have expected it, Cohen told himself sourly. He’d looked forward to this meeting for years. And now here they were, both playing dumb with such consummate skill that Cohen was beginning to feel like he was the only sentient life-form in the room.

“You two,” he burst out finally, “are absolutely impossible!”

“What?” Didi and Li said at almost the same moment in voices of wounded innocence.

And then Li, having caught Cohen’s invective-riddled comment on the bad social graces of all spies and retired soldiers, laughed.

“So,” Didi said. “Now that we’re all having fun, what do you say we take a look at Catherine’s spins from Abulafia Street?”

They ran Li’s spins on Didi’s long-past-obsolete desk monitor, the three of them hunching over the small display shoulder to shoulder. It was unnerving to see the whole meeting replayed from Li’s perspective: to see the thoroughness with which she checked people over; the way her eyes flickered constantly from door to window to floor to ceiling; her almost subconscious awareness of the minute changes in the flow of traffic beyond the walls that could mean danger; the restless, constant, animal awareness of a body that had survived enough combat drops to know that bad luck can kill you at any time and from any direction.

And it was pretty obvious what pieces of bad luck she’d been alerting on back in that hotel room. First and foremost, Turner. No explanation needed there; only a fool, and a suicidal fool at that, would mess with the Americans. But her source of worry was less obvious. In fact, Cohen was embarrassed to realize that he himself had missed it entirely in real time. While he’d been glaring at Korchow and inspecting the antiques collection, Li had in fact been doing her job. And as far as she was concerned that job had mainly consisted of keeping an eye on Shaikh Yassin. Or, more precisely, on one of the hard young men hovering at Yassin’s elbow.

Li had ignored the two gorillas, obviously mere hired muscle, and reserved her vigilance for the slim young man with those pale green eyes that still popped up every now and then in the Palestinian gene pool and, a full millennium after the last crusade, were still called crusader’s eyes.

The boy had an athlete’s slouch. His body was still and relaxed, every betraying tic leached out of it by the same iron discipline that every Mossad katsa learned. His face was schooled into a calmly attentive, completely unreadable expression. And the green eyes were cold and alert and moved constantly around the room, taking in everything but never appearing to stare too hard at any one thing. The boy was Arik’s opposite number; and only a novice could fail to recognize him for the superlatively trained professional that he was.

“So who’s the bright young thing?” Cohen asked. He had a niggling feeling that he’d seen that face before, yet he could match it to none of his stored spinfeed databases. Unsettling. “Could he be Safik’s? Safik always liked the pretty ones.” Cohen cut a sideways glance at Didi. “So did you for that matter.”

“You’re right about his being Safik’s,” Didi said, “though not in the way you think you mean. Look again. Ring any bells?”

Cohen looked again, and suddenly bells were ringing all over the place. The slim, neat build; the intelligent, humorous face; the extraordinary eyes.

“Yusuf Safik,” Didi said. “The only son of Walid Safik, head of the Palestinian Security Service’s counterintelligence department.”

“So Safik did have a set of eyes at the auction,” Li said with grim satisfaction.

But Cohen wasn’t thinking about the auction. He was thinking about Gavi. If the boy was Safik’s son, then that made him…what? Leila’s first cousin once removed? That explained the eyes. And the family resemblance to Leila was unmistakable once you looked for it. He wondered if Gavi and Leila’s Joseph—obviously both boys had been named after some common ancestor—would have looked like Yusuf if he’d survived the war. And then he thought about that other lifetime before the war in which they’d all danced at Gavi and Leila’s wedding.

Cohen’s better-than-human memory called up a detail-perfect image of the day, as accurate and unfaded as remastered spinfeed. Gavi slim and handsome in his uniform, and so achingly young that he looked like a boy just playing at being a soldier. Leila all business—and to everyone’s ill-concealed delight already visibly pregnant. Didi had been Gavi’s commanding officer. Cohen had been…well, what he’d always been. And Gavi Shehadeh and Walid Safik had been just two more bright young men who might or might not amount to anything. It had been Leila—the intense young doctor with the startling eyes and the even more startling opinions—who everyone thought would change the world.

Well, the world had changed all right. And Leila had been among the first casualties. It was still hard to believe that such an extraordinary person had been killed by something as wastefully impersonal as a stray bomb.

Cohen looked up to find Didi’s eyes searching his face. The memory of Gavi hung between them. Unasked questions rose and drifted and shredded themselves in the backwash of the ceiling fan.

Didi turned off the monitor and sat down heavily. He took off his glasses, cleaned them on the tail of his shirt, put them back on and peered fretfully around the room. He seemed disappointed with the result, as if he’d expected the world to look better through clean lenses. Then, with a mournful little shrug, he got down to business.

He described Arkady’s appearance at Maris Station; his approach to Maris consulate junior intelligence staff; his disappearance and subsequent resurfacing in Moshe’s hands; GolaniTech’s agreement with Korchow, insofar as they understood it; the cautious back-channel contacts with the bidding parties.

Cohen didn’t even try to calibrate Didi’s version of events against his own information and look for discrepancies. You might as well try to catch a bird in flight as catch Didi Halevy in a lie. You just trusted him to tell you what he thought you needed to know. Or you didn’t trust him at all. There was no middle ground.

“The big questions are two,” Didi said when he’d come to the end of his tale. “One, what is Arkady selling? And two, why should we care?”

“You read my report?” Cohen asked doubtfully.

“Yes, yes. And I’m sure you thought it was perfectly comprehensible. But I’m not Gavi. And even if I were, I’d still need to get it into terms the prime minister can understand.”

“Does the interest in this case go that high?”

“This is a country of population one million and dropping. Everything goes that high.”

“Well,” Cohen began. “First of all, let’s talk about so-called weapons’ infection vector. It’s a retrovirus, and as far as I can see a relatively straightforward one. So the real question isn’t what the virus is. The real question is: What’s the transgenic payload it’s inserting into the target organism’s cells?”

Cohen stopped to collect his thoughts—a task that was both difficult and necessary because he and the half dozen or so of his aggregated Emergents who had worked on this problem had not reached anything even remotely approaching a consensus on what the payload of Arkady’s mystery virus actually was.

“Let me guess,” Didi said wryly. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”

“On the contrary. It’s exactly like something I’ve seen before. Or rather something Hy Cohen saw, and actually messed around with a bit before he invented me. Ever heard of Turing Soup?”

“I don’t cook.”

“Oh my, aren’t we funny? Turing Soup was a turn-of-the-twenty-first-century idea, child of the era of networks…just like me. People had networks on the brain back then. The way Enlightenment thinkers had clockwork on the brain. Or the way people in Darwin’s day had steam engines on the brain. Or the way we’ve got spin on the brain. Actually some associates and I are working on a paper about…right, okay, never mind. Turing Soup was the brainchild of a guy named Walter Fontana. The same Walter Fontana who invented AlChemy, more prosaically known as Algorithmic Chemistry. One thing you have to say about the guy, he had a gift for names. He also happened to be at MIT toward the end of his career, and to take under his wing a bright young French postdoc in theoretical computer science called Hyacinthe Cohen. Which is why I might just be the only person still alive who remembers Turing Soup.

“The idea behind Turing Soup was to look at the evolution of algorithms as a model for the evolution of organic life. A Turing machine is a universal computer—in fact, the paradigmatic universal computer. It has a reading head that can ‘read’ any tape run through it. It has an execution apparatus that carries out whatever instructions the reading head reads. Turing couldn’t know it back in 1950, but he was essentially describing RNA: a ‘reading’ mechanism that zips itself to the unraveled DNA strand in order to reproduce its folded protein sequences. Fontana’s idea was to throw a bunch of molecular Turing machines together and let them ‘read’ each other’s programs and see if they could construct new programs from the components of the existing ones. It didn’t work, mainly because Turing machines have a problem that RNA and DNA either don’t have or figured out how to solve a long time ago: they hang, like just about every other computer ever invented. So the machines in Turing Soup would just lock up with each other, start reading each other’s tape, slip onto a positive feedback loop, and hang.

“So that was Turing Soup: wrong tool for the right job. Fontana moved on to lambda-calculus and AlChem. And everyone filed Turing Soup away as an idea whose time had come and gone. But if I had to describe this sample Moshe’s flogging around, that’s what I’d say it was: Turing Soup made out of DNA. Or more accurately, a virus that takes its host’s DNA and turns it into Turing Soup.” Cohen grinned. “Which—if you’ll forgive a joke that about eighteen of my associates have already made at some point in the last few weeks—gives a whole new meaning to parasitic computation.”

“So you’re saying this is…what? AI in a virus?”

“God, no! Start letting your metaphors gallop around like that and you’ll never be able to sort out what it actually is. What Moshe showed us was…conceptually provocative. But it wasn’t artificial intelligence. At least not in any form that’s recognizable to this particular artificial intelligence. If you need a layman’s label to hang on it, let’s call it…a search engine in a virus?”

“And what’s the engine searching for?”

“That, my friend, I can’t begin to tell you.”

Didi pursed his lips, considering. “And you believe Arkady’s story that they found it out on—what was the place called?”

“Novalis. I’ve never heard of it either. It’s off the maps. No record of any survey. No BE buoy within light-years, probably because the spectrometry wasn’t promising enough. It’s one of those ‘you can’t get there from here’ planets. Anyway, the host genotype is descended from an old Monsanto patent. That tells us nothing; half the known universe is littered with that crap. But it certainly would make sense if they really did find it out there. And it fits in again with what I said about it not being Syndicate splice work. They won’t touch corporate genesets as a general rule; bad associations.”

“I take it the planet’s terraformed, then?”

“That’s what they went out there to find out. And given what they seem to have brought back with them, I’d say the answer is yes.”

“Is this something UNSec ought to know about?”

“Well, I’m sure UNSec would think it was.”

“But you don’t.”

“I’m a live-and-let-live kind of boy. And UNSec has a nasty habit of breaking planets so other people can’t use them. A good planet’s a terrible thing to waste.”

Didi smiled slightly. “Okay, we’ll let it ride for now.”

Which they both knew only meant that they would let it ride until either Didi or the PM decided it was time not to let it ride.

“All right then.” Didi leaned back in his chair, caught sight of a food stain on his tie, peered at it, scrubbed at it. And then abandoned the effort, having only succeeded in making the tie wrinkled as well as stained. “You’ve answered my first two questions—what the virus is and who put it there—with more questions. Now what about the one question we ought to be able to answer: Why the hell should we be interested in it?”

“Well,” Cohen said slowly, “I know why ALEF is interested. Immortality, if you want to stick a name on it.”

“But you’ve already got that.”

“Not strictly speaking. No more than an ant swarm or a beehive does. And AIs have life spans just like any other superorganism. Even the ones that don’t collapse prematurely under the weight of their own competing identities.”

“But how does an organic virus make a machine live longer?”

“Because the underlying dynamics are the same whether you’re dealing with organic or synthetic superorganisms. We’re interested in any mechanism that propagates beneficial mutations across a population while somehow repressing harmful ones.”

“Controlling evolution, essentially.”

“Well…tweaking it. I think this would fall into what Syndicate genetic designers call the ‘soft chaos control’ theory of directed evolution. It’s what makes the quality of their genetic engineering so superior to the UN version. And it’s exactly the kind of biocomputing concept that holds the most promise for resolving the problem of decoherence in Emergents. Along with all the other dysfunctions that, tellingly, have the same names in AI design as they do in ecophysics: brittleness, perturbation intolerance, maladaptive red queen regimes, and so forth…” Cohen cleared his throat and shifted in the hard-backed chair. “But none of that answers the question of why Israel would be interested.”

“We’re not,” Didi said blandly, “or we wouldn’t be letting GolaniTech sell Arkady to the highest bidder.”

“That’s pure spin, and you know it,” Cohen objected. “You’re taking some heavy risks to do this. I don’t care how greedy GolaniTech is or how uninterested you are. They wouldn’t be running this thing if they didn’t have at least tacit approval at the highest level—”

“—which doesn’t necessarily mean from me—”

“Granted. Still. This is treaty-banned tech any way you slice it, and if you weren’t after something, you would have damn well made sure that Arkady never made it to Earth.”

At that instant a decorous knock at the door was followed by Arik’s sleek head—and by one hand, held wrist out to put the boy’s IDF-issue wristwatch on full display. The watch’s crystal was cracked, Cohen noticed. Personally he thought that was taking the look a little far.

“Time,” Arik murmured in tones that would have done an English butler proud.

“Oh, yes,” Didi said. “Thank you, Arik. Give us…shall we say five minutes?”

The boy retreated, closing the door as carefully and silently as he’d opened it.

“Well?” Didi looked around inquisitively. “I think we’ve about covered the things we need to cover. I’m just asking you two to go forward and keep your ears open and let me know what you hear. That’s all. And now let’s get home before I get in trouble for making Zillah overcook the lamb shanks.”

That was when Cohen finally figured out three things that hould have been obvious from the start:

1. Their hour-long wait by the elevators had been no accident, because;

2. Didi’s office was bugged, and;

3. Didi was cheerfully spoon-feeding his own specially mixed barium meal to whoever was on the other end of the bug.

The underground parking lot in the basement of Mossad headquarters was probably one of the most heavily secured pieces of real estate on the planet. So it was amusing to see Li and the four hard-jawed Mossad bodyguards fingering their weapons and peering into the shadows as if they were stepping into the OK Corral instead of a well-lit, thoroughly guarded, and obviously empty garage. Or it would have been humorous if he hadn’t known how deadly earnest they all were.

The Mossad’s motor pool wasn’t taking any chances either; Didi’s government-issue Peugeot sedan had blastproof windows and armor-plated coachwork. They got in—one of Didi’s young men in front with the driver, the other two flanking Didi on the forward-facing seat, and Li and Cohen facing them across the foot well—and the car pulled up the ramp into the late-afternoon traffic on King Saul Boulevard with the muffled clank of ceramic compound antimine flooring.

It was nothing all that new to Cohen; Hyacinthe had driven the autobahns back when private cars were still legal and seen Porsches and BMWs romping through their native habitat at upward of two hundred kilometers an hour. Li, however, was enthralled. She inspected the floor and the doors, predictably pleased to meet a new piece of semi-military hardware. “I’ve never been in an actual car,” she said. “Is this a Mercedes?”

One of Didi’s bodyguards gave a strangled-sounding cough.

“Oh,” Li said after a moment. She cleared her throat, started to mutter something about being sorry, and fell abruptly silent.

“Never mind.” Didi leaned forward to pat her knee. “History just has a longer half-life here. Now tell me about your home planet.”

“It looks a lot like Israel, actually. Rocks and sky. Desert and mountains.”

“But without people, yes?”

“Mostly. Most of it people can’t live on yet. And even where they can, I wouldn’t exactly call it healthy.”

“And its history?”

“There is none. It’s not much older than I am.”

“A planet with no history,” Didi said. He turned to the agent next to him. “The perfect place for a week on the beach, don’t you think? They could sell vacations there. Jerusalemites would snap them up like falafel.”

“Any Interfaithers there?” the other guard asked.

“Not as bad as here.”

The Israelis exchanged significant glances with each other.

Cohen gazed at Didi, wondering if this turn of the conversation was entirely coincidental. “Is it true they’re expected to win another eight seats in the Knesset this election?” he asked, nudging the conversation along and wondering what surprises would emerge from the after-dinner chitchat.

But Didi just spread his hands in the characteristic shrug that was the Israeli reply to all life’s unanswerable questions from politics to tomorrow’s weather.

“I love my country enough to believe that she will outgrow her infatuation with the men of God and violence,” he said simply.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say that about their countries,” Cohen said.

“And were any of them ever right?”

“Not that I can remember.”

Didi opened his mouth to answer, but at that moment the car turned onto a residential street and they passed a large extended family out for a walk in the last warmth of the dying afternoon. A clucking, fussing, cosseting parade of aunts and uncles and grandparents. A pair of anxious-looking parents—and they had good reason to look anxious, given the recent wave of vigilante assaults on “bad” parents. And finally that fragile bird, rare enough in the blighted land of milk and honey to turn heads and kill conversations: a child.

As they passed, the child stumbled slightly and vanished into a dense thicket of protective adult arms. Cohen remembered Hyacinthe’s free-ranging childhood, littered with broken bones and private triumphs, and wondered what it would do to this generation of children to grow up never allowed to play or fall or risk themselves.

He glanced at his fellow passengers. Li was indifferent. Didi had glanced at the child when it first appeared, but was now staring impassively through the windshield at the road ahead. But it was the look on the faces of Arik and the other young men that would stamp itself on Cohen’s memory of this moment. Intent. Utterly still. Mortally hungry.

So this is what extinction looks like.

Didi’s house was perfectly ordinary, no less modest and no more obviously well fortified than any other house in its affluent Tel Aviv suburb. The only thing that set it apart from its neighbors were the towering trunks of the five cedars of Lebanon that had been planted there, or so the young recruits whispered, when the legendary Rafi Eitan still owned the house.

The car pulled into a garage full of the usual clutter of bicycles and sports equipment. From there they filed solemnly into the entry, where they were introduced with all due ceremony to Didi’s wife and twin daughters. Li examined the daughters with interest—as well she might, Cohen thought. Their willowy height and their cool, even-featured beauty belonged to the Ring, not to Earth. They might look like their parents in the more predictable ways, but there were other things about them, equally predictable, that put them a lot closer to the posthuman end of the genetic spectrum. The girls were the legacy of a long-ago Ring-side tour of duty under diplomatic cover, and they were at once Didi’s greatest pride and his deepest sorrow. His pride because of their obvious intelligence and beauty, and because they’d chosen—unlike so many of the Ring-bred children of affluent Israelis—to take advantage of the family unification exemption and complete their education and military service in Israel. His sorrow because the genetic engineering that had made their birth possible had also stripped them of the Right of Return that would have been theirs if their very DNA hadn’t been banned technology under the Kyoto Addendum.

Zillah greeted Cohen with special warmth. “Don’t eat too much over drinks,” she murmured as they kissed each other in greeting, “I’ve made lamb shanks. And you know what it takes to make me stay home from work and cook all day.”

“Dinner at eight?” Didi asked her.

She checked her watch. “Let’s say eight-fifteen. See you all then.” She turned to the guards, who were eyeing the twins with an enthusiasm that made Cohen think lust was about to give ambition a run for its money. “Can I make you boys a sandwich in the meantime?”

A minute later Cohen was looking around Didi’s study, wondering how recently the place had been swept for bugs…and who had swept it, given that Didi didn’t seem to trust the sweepers at the Office.

Didi subsided into his chair, looking small and fragile, and focused his gaze on Li. “What do you know about Absalom?” he asked.

Li’s eyes widened. “The mole?”

The word surprised Cohen. He’d assumed the old earthbound terminology became extinct with the insectivore that inspired it. He’d also assumed that UNSec didn’t know quite that much about the Mossad’s internal housekeeping problems.

“If that’s what you want to call him,” Didi agreed, not looking much happier than Cohen felt.

“I thought you caught him in Tel Aviv,” Li said.

“So did we. Until Arkady showed up. What I didn’t tell you in the office is that Arkady showed up asking for Absalom.”

“Thereby all but guaranteeing you would hustle him through the blockade to Earth.”

“The fact that information may be false doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore it. Besides, GolaniTech seems quite confident he’s genuine.”

“And how reliable is your source at GolaniTech?” Li asked pointedly.

“Funny you should ask. I think I hear her in the hall.”

The door opened and one of Didi’s bodyguards ushered in Ash Sofaer.

Wheels within wheels, Cohen thought. If Didi packed them in any tighter, one of his human cogs was going to lock up and start stripping the gears.

“Sorry I’m late,” Ash said breezily. “I came from home and the traffic was just awful. Sometimes I wonder why any sane person still lives in Jerusalem.”

“Sit down,” Didi said. “I was just telling them about you. And we were working our way around to Absalom and Tel Aviv.”

“Oh.” She pulled off her raincoat, dropped it on the floor, and coiled her long body into the chair Cohen had gotten up to offer her. “I was hoping I’d missed that part.”

She was wearing another of her white suits, this one with a skirt instead of pants. It was a smartsuit—made of that obnoxious programmable cloth that had taken over the wardrobes of tasteless rich people all over what passed as civilization. In accordance with the latest Ringside fad, Ash had programmed her suit to go transparent every fifteen cycles or so. Not for long enough that any human would consciously notice it, but definitely for long enough that they wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything much except trying not to think about sex. Knowing Ash, Cohen guessed that the ploy had nothing to do with seduction and everything to do with ambition.

He caught Li’s eye and made a face.

She glanced at Ash, did a double take, grinned. ‹I think it’s funny. And she’s plenty good-looking enough to pull it off.›

‹Forget it,› he said on a fuzzy affect set that reeked of sour grapes. ‹She’s too tall for you.›

“Nice suit,” Li told Ash.

Ash gazed into Li’s eyes a little too long and a little too deeply for mere politeness. “I’m glad you like it.”

Didi cleared his throat.

Cohen looked around for another chair, didn’t see one, and decided to go sit in the window where he could listen to Didi without having to stand up to Li’s sharp eyes. Or Didi’s even sharper eyes.

“Let’s start with Absalom,” Didi said. “Without Absalom none of it makes sense.”

As Didi told it, the downhill slide had gained momentum so gradually that no one could pinpoint the exact starting point. There had been no dramatic revelation, no blown cover or high-level defection. Just a gradual realization that the Palestinians always seemed to be one step ahead, and that some of their lucky breaks couldn’t reasonably be put down to coincidence.

“We were running a number of midlevel double agents at the time. All of them classic two-way-flow-of-information doubles.” He glanced at Li, clearly unsure how much she knew. “It’s not like in the spins you know. The surveillance is so tight on both sides that you can’t pull any of those Rafi Eitan/James Bond stunts anymore. Now it’s all about controlling the flow of information. The basic model is two case officers, one on each side of the Line, each talking to the other. Each agent tells his own side that he’s running the other guy as a double agent and until we get computers in our skulls like you’ve got, only the two agents can know whose side they’re really on. And of course, each of them is technically committing treason; you always have to give the other side some real intelligence product.”

“And you have to pay them,” Cohen pointed out. “Or the other side does. Who could ever complain about a system that doubles everyone’s retirement benefits and bills it all to top secret below-the-line slush funds?”

Didi barely acknowledged the joke, which meant things must be a lot worse than he was letting on. “It’s an exercise in shades of gray,” he said. “The name of the game is to make sure that your guy is passing the other guy pure spin wrapped in just enough real information to make it plausible…while the other guy is handing your guy the straight stuff. Multiply that a hundredfold and you’ve got some idea of what’s moving across the Green Line every day between us and the Palestinians. Then imagine that little by little, over the course of months and years, you awaken to the realization that time after time and despite all your best efforts, the Palestinians are getting more and better intelligence from you than you’re getting from them.”

“So you were winning,” Cohen said, “but the Palestinians were always winning a little bit bigger than you were. And of course all those little bits would eventually start adding up. That kind of ‘you win, but I win more’ strategy has Safik’s name written all over it.”

“Yes,” Didi agreed blandly. “It’s very subtle. I would say it betrays an almost mathematical turn of mind. In fact it reminds me a bit of that streamspace game you and Gavi wrote together. What was it called? Lie?”

LIE’s full legal name was ARTIFICIAL LIE™. Born during a late-night drinking bout, the original rather silly idea had blossomed into one of the most widely played semisentient AI-based games of the last decade. It was now entering its eighth incarnation, popularly known as LIE⁸, and Ring-side consumers between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five were already being bombarded with larger-than-life advertisements proclaiming that THE LIES START FEBRUARY 28.

ARTIFICIAL LIE had made Cohen a bundle, even by his rarefied standards. It had made Gavi a bundle too, though you wouldn’t know it by the way he dressed. And it had spawned an entire generation of Ring-side children who grew up pretending they were Freedom-Loving Emergents imprisoned by Evil Scheming Humans, which put a lot of noses satisfyingly out of joint among the anti-AI lobby. Plus the silly thing was fun to play. Even Li liked it. And her standards in such matters were exacting.

Cohen cleared his throat, aware of Didi’s gaze on him. “I didn’t know you played streamspace games.”

“Only yours.” Didi’s eyes narrowed behind his thick lenses. “And I only made it to the level where my AI started lying to me.”

“That’s Level Four,” Li said brightly. “You definitely need to play more. The really good violence doesn’t start till Level Seven.”

“It’s just a game,” Cohen muttered.

No one dignified his protest with an answer.

“So,” Didi continued after a moment, “we developed a list of suspects. We looked at access, travel patterns, the usual telltales. When we were done we had seven names. Seven people who would have had the level of access needed to stick their fingers into that many operations across that many desks and departments.”

“Which seven?” Cohen asked.

“Gavi and I were on the list.” Didi’s expression was as mild as ever, but the look he gave Cohen was as cold as space. “So were you. And I’m not going to tell you who the others were. I refuse to condone a witch hunt.”

“Anyway,” Ash continued, perhaps sensing that Didi lacked the stomach to finish the story. “We had our suspects. Then it was only a question of putting out the barium meals and waiting for one of them to bite. We didn’t have to wait long. It all came to a head in Tel Aviv.”

“It came to a head,” Li asked in a dangerously quiet voice. “Or you made it come to a head?”

Ash shrugged. When Cohen glanced at Didi he saw the older man ruefully inspecting the thick patina of scuff marks on his shoes as if he’d just noticed their sorry state.

“I knew the UNSec agents who died there.” Li’s voice had shifted into a flat murmur that meant nothing but trouble in Cohen’s experience. “They didn’t sign on for your dirty little war. And they certainly didn’t sign on to be burned for the greater good of the State of Israel.”

“We didn’t burn anyone,” Didi said.

“Of course not. You just sent them out into the cold knowing that one of the people covering their backs was a traitor.”

No one seemed to have an answer for that. What was there to say, really?

Cohen looked out the window. On the other side of the glass the sun was setting over a rolling landscape of wild olive groves that had passed back and forth into Palestinian and Israeli hands so many times over the centuries that nationality had become a matter of semantics. The trees must be older than he was, Cohen realized, which was something fewer and fewer organics could boast of anymore.

“We lost three of our own people in Tel Aviv,” Didi said finally. “The traitor covering their backs was our chief of counterintelligence, a man I brought into the Office and trained and supported and promoted—”

“Zillah practically fed him for a year and a half after his wife died,” Ash muttered, her voice drenched with the bitterness that had come to follow any mention of Gavi Shehadeh as surely as dust followed the khamsin.

Didi went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “If the Absalom problem hadn’t come to light, I would have retired next year and Gavi would have moved into the delightful office you saw this afternoon. When an organization is penetrated at that level, there is no bloodless way to salvage it.”

Cohen watched Li chew on that for a moment. Watched her connect the dots—Gavi, Cohen, Didi—and begin filling in the tangled web of competing loyalties that had looked, from the UN side of the line, like simple betrayal.

As if betrayal were ever simple.

Tel Aviv began with a defection.

A low-level Palestinian data-entry clerk had walked into the Israeli consulate in the International Zone claiming to have seen the contact files of an extremely highly placed agent in Israeli counterintelligence whose code name was Absalom and who was being run directly out of Walid Safik’s office. Didi explained, “We tried to turn the clerk and run him back across the lines as a double, but he was ahead of us. He’d scheduled delivery of a note to his office announcing his defection, and he offered us a take-it-or-leave-it deal with a five-day fuse.”

Li nodded. “A pro.”

“Yes. And a pro who wasn’t planning to give us a chance to send him back out into the cold. Anyway, he proposed a trade: his copied documents in exchange for one million UN deposited into a numbered Swiss bank account. We would meet him at a diplomatic event in the International Zone, where he would give us an unmarked key and we would give him the account information. Then he’d catch the next Swissair shuttle to Geneva, verify the account balance, and call us in the morning to tell us what lock to stick the key in.”

Gavi had been put in charge of the operation. He was the logical choice, Didi explained somewhat defensively. Give it to anyone else and they might as well have taken out a full-page ad in Ha’aretz telling Safik they’d blown his mole. They’d done the swap over champagne and canapés at the United Nations headquarters, with the full assistance of UNSec’s local branch. The clerk had gotten his account information, walked out the front door past the guards as if for a cigarette, and vanished. The katsa in charge had taken possession of the unmarked key, bundled himself and his two agents into a taxi, and set off for King Saul Boulevard.

They never got there.

They were found three days later, each of them the proud new owner of two .22 caliber slugs deposited in their skulls at point-blank range.

“And the key?” Cohen asked.

“Gone. Vanished. As if it had never existed.”

It had taken months to put the puzzle together. The final piece had fallen into place when they learned that a young man had walked into the Beir Zeit post office the next morning, chatted up the postmistress in flawless Hebrew, presented an unmarked key, and collected the contents of Box 530.

“Operationally, he was perfect,” Didi observed as if he were critiquing one of his own boys. “The failure, if there was one, lies at the door of the man who sent him. It turns out”—a brief grin—“that he was too charming for his own good. When I interviewed the postmistress she was still hoping he’d come back. All she could talk about was his beautiful green eyes.”

“Shit,” Li whispered.

“It does make one wonder.”

Cohen dropped his head into his hands and massaged Roland’s temples. He had a headache, something that shouldn’t be possible technically speaking. And there was an odd fluttery feeling behind the eyes that he would have put down to overclocking in a nonorganic system. He hoped it wasn’t something he was doing to the boy.

“So what about the walk-in?” he asked when it was obvious that Didi wasn’t going to volunteer anything more.

“In what sense?”

Oh, so it was going to be a teeth-pulling exercise, was it? “In the sense of what happened to him. To the best of your knowledge.”

“To the best of my knowledge, the authorities found him dead in a back alley two days later.”

“The authorities meaning you? Or the authorities meaning the French?”

“Oh. Right. I see the question. Yes, he was found in the International Zone. Legion jurisdiction. No question about that.”

“Who ran the investigation? Fortuné?”

“Who else?”

The pause that followed was long enough for Li to take out her cigarettes, catch Didi’s eye in a silent request for permission, receive the ashtray he handed her, and light her cigarette.

“And, to the best of your knowledge,” Cohen said when he couldn’t stand it anymore, “did Fortuné ever figure out who killed him?”

Didi shook his head mournfully.

“Would it be jejune to ask if we know who killed him?”

“We know we didn’t order the hit.”

Li froze in midpuff, her eyes flicking back and forth between Didi and Cohen.

‹Squirrelly, ain’t he?› she observed onstream.

‹You have no idea.›

Cohen turned his attention back to Didi. “That leaves two options, right? Either the Palestinians killed him to stop him from passing along the documents that would have put the finger on Absalom, or Absalom killed him…for pretty much the same reason.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Didi said placidly.

“Oh, for crying out lou—”

“Can we backtrack for a minute?” Li interrupted. “You just got asked if you knew who killed the guy, and you answered that you knew you didn’t order the killing. Sounds to me like you’ve got way too much slippage in your chain of command. Agents losing walk-ins. Agents turning up in canals with body piercings courtesy of parties unknown. Agents maybe or maybe not offing people on their own initiative. Unless your lion tamers have bigger chairs than they did three years ago, I’m not feeling warm and fuzzy about working with you people.”

“It was a bad time in the Office,” Didi admitted. “A confusing time. But we have eliminated the, ah, more troublesome lions.”

It was an unfortunate metaphor, Cohen thought, given that the Hebrew word for lion was Gur. A fact that Didi remembered about a second after Cohen, judging from the rapid blink of his eyes and the subtle tightening of his mouth.

“So basically,” Cohen cut in, “the whole bloodbath in Tel Aviv was just a loyalty test. You set up the whole operation so that if things went sour, you’d know it was Gavi who was to blame. Or at least that’s how it was supposed to work.”

“That’s how it did work,” Didi said mildly.

“Except that Gavi’s gone and Absalom’s still here.”

“Or that’s what someone wants us to think,” Ash pointed out. “I mean isn’t that always the question with a mole hunt? It’s a no-win situation. If you go after the mole, you rip your agency apart and end up cashing out half your best agents, since the best ones are the most highly indoctrinated and therefore the first to fall under suspicion. If you don’t go after the mole, you risk letting him operate unchecked…and you leave half your senior officers looking over their shoulders wondering if it’s safe to talk to the guy in the next office. Or worse, whether you stopped investigating because you’re the guilty one yourself. Either way you lose.”

“You know,” Cohen said slyly, “this is the kind of problem you really need Gavi for. He’d be talking about shells and kernels and trap commands and output redirection and flow of information…and pretty soon you’d have all the players and all the contingencies mapped out neat as you please, complete with a sweet little plan for making the bad guys deliver themselves to your doorstep all wrapped up like a birthday present.” He paused, then twisted the knife. “In fact, if you’d trusted him enough to give him the information he needed before Tel Aviv instead of barium meals, he might have done it back then.”

“Gavi had his chances,” Didi said, sounding as remote as the stratosphere.

“So you’re still holding to the post-Tel Aviv story,” Cohen said. “Gavi’s guilty, even though Absalom is still operating—”

“—may still be operating—”

“—when Gavi’s buried alive out at Yad Vashem.”

Ash stirred restlessly. “You don’t always have all the answers, Cohen.”

“And you do, I suppose?”

Li cleared her throat. “Not to interrupt an argument between friends, but how are you going to handle this without Gavi?”

“We’re not,” Didi said.

Ash was leaning forward slightly in her chair, biting her lower lip in anticipation. She knew what Didi was going to do, Cohen realized. She’d known it before she ever walked through the door. And whatever it was, she liked it. Which in Cohen’s experience meant it was good news for her and bad as hell for anyone unlucky enough to get caught standing between her and her next promotion.

“We’re going to have you bring Gavi back in from the cold to work this case,” Didi said. “One shot. Up or down. Guilty or innocent. With you as the cutout so the Office has plausible deniability if the whole operation heads south.”

“And if he screws up again,” Ash said with relish, “we’re going to arrange a rerun of the nice little traffic accident the PM wouldn’t authorize after Tel Aviv.”

Dinner was surreal.

Lamb shanks and small talk while Cohen kept angling to talk to Didi in private, and Didi kept resolutely refusing to take the hint, and Ash and Li chatted with Zillah and the twins as if they were just there for a social occasion.

“Are you going to see the new Ahmed Aziz spin while you’re here?” Zillah asked. “I’ve heard it’s great. And our Ring-side friends always seem to enjoy those.”

Cohen realized abruptly that she was talking to him. “I won’t go to Ahmed Aziz spins with Catherine anymore,” he answered. “The last time we went to one she started bitching and moaning before the credits had even rolled, and a week later she still hadn’t paused for breath.”

“Well, I was right, wasn’t I?” Li protested. “The so-called hero committed eighteen fatal errors before the opening credits even rolled. And anyway, I don’t like violent movies. If the violence is realistic it’s depressing. And if it’s not realistic, it’s just stupid. How any intelligent adult can sit through such crap totally escapes me.”

“They don’t sit through it anymore in Israel,” Cohen snapped irritably. “Israelis like their violence automated and sanitary these days. After all, shooting fourteen-year-olds isn’t much fun when you have to look them in the eye.”

Everyone around the table froze. Didi, caught with his glass in midair, looked significantly at Zillah, who just threw up her hands as if to say it wasn’t her argument.

Cohen put his fork and knife down, folded his napkin into a precise square, and set it beside his plate. “Zillah. Forgive me. I’ve been unpardonably rude. I’m not myself. In fact, I’m not feeling at all well at the moment. I think if no one minds, I’ll just step out for a breath of fresh air.”

Outside the sun was well and truly set, and the air had that damp glacial chill that Cohen never had gotten used to in all the long centuries of the artificial ice age. He walked down the path, his feet thudding dully in pine needles, and stood under the lace-and-shadows canopy of the cedars of Lebanon, feeling Roland’s poor head throbbing.

You’d think, Cohen told himself, that after four centuries I could learn to control my temper a little better.

But it wasn’t so easy. If anything, it got harder. His irrational likes and dislikes only got stronger. His emotions only ran hotter with the additional mileage. The Israelis weren’t fools, he told himself, pulling the plug on EMET when it got too self-aware for comfort. Humans claimed to understand themselves better as they got older, and perhaps they did. But Cohen was beginning to suspect that for him the process was running in the opposite direction.

“Doing a little arithmetic of the soul?” Didi asked, coming up behind him with the cautious tread of the old field agent he was.

“If I am,” Cohen said savagely, “then one of us has a mistake in his math somewhere. Because we’re sure as hell not coming up with the same answers.”

“Mmm.” Didi craned his head to look at the towering foliage.

“What’s Gavi doing out at Yad Vashem anyway? And when’s he coming back?”

“He’s not. He’s the permanent caretaker.”

This piece of news was so bizarre that Cohen thought he must have misheard it. Why would a man who’d been in close competition for the top post at the Mossad be baby-sitting an abandoned museum? And if he was going to baby-sit a museum, why on earth would they send him to the Holocaust Museum, now centrally located in the contaminated thickness of the Line? Not knowing what question to ask first, he settled for the most trivial one. “But…that’s a Line job.”

“So? They froze sperm before they sent him.”

“I’m glad to hear his sperm’s safe,” Cohen said sarcastically. “There is the little question of the man himself, however.”

“No one made him do it.”

“And no one gave him anything else to do either, am I right? It was either that or rot in some stinking veterans’ hospital?”

“He’s not a cripple, Cohen. Israel has extremely good prosthesis technology.”

Cohen started to speak, then bit the words back. He was breathing hard—or rather Roland was. He forced himself to compartmentalize, to cut the emotive loop that tied his psychological reactions to the ’face’s physiological ones. He knew it looked eerie, even frightening, to humans. But there was no sense in making Roland pay for his fight with Didi.

“So I take it you’re not going to talk to Gavi for me?” Didi asked.

“I’m not sure I can. He hasn’t answered my letters for almost two years. And he hasn’t cashed his royalty checks either. I don’t think he wants to see me.”

“I wouldn’t put too much stock by that. I think he’s gone a little off the rails out there. Some crazy idea about building the museum a golem.”

Cohen had heard about the idea too, in the streamspace haunts where Gavi appeared, rara avis, asked the odd, intriguing question about AI architecture, and vanished. People had started calling it Gavi’s golem. And it was exactly what Didi had called it: crazy.

“I suspect that whether he wants to see you and whether he needs to see you are two very different things,” Didi said. “And you have reason to see him as well.” He paused to let that thought sink in. “If I were you and I believed that Gavi was innocent and Absalom was still roaming the eighth floor, then I would be very wary of talking to anyone still on the Mossad payroll. Including me. And if, for instance, I had a Syndicate defector to debrief, it might occur to me that the one man I was pretty sure wasn’t responsible for Tel Aviv was also one of the best interrogators in the country and quite up to the task of dissecting Arkady’s pretty little head for you.”

“You’re telling me to smuggle Arkady into the Line to talk to Gavi? And then what? Announce to Gavi that you’re looking over his shoulder and he’d better hand you the dirt and not try any funny business? I wouldn’t blame him if he shot us himself!”

“Oh, not Gavi. He always smiles when he tells you to go to hell.”

“You’re still putting a hell of a load on his shoulders. And you’re asking me and mine to risk a hell of a lot on what looks like a pretty crazy gamble.”

“You have to set your own priorities, of course,” Didi said placidly.

“Is that an implied Do Variable?”

“No, boychik. It’s a good old-fashioned Jewish guilt trip.”

Cohen rubbed at Roland’s forehead again, trying to break up the ache.

“The thing I just can’t get past, Didi, is Tel Aviv. I was there. I know it wasn’t nearly as neat on the ground as you make it sound in the retelling. I think Gavi was innocent. And not just because it’s what I want to think.”

“Surely it’s crossed your minds that you don’t know everything.”

“Of course. But I know Gavi.”

Silence.

“I mean what’s the motivation? Money? Give me a break! When the ARTIFICIAL LIE royalties started coming in you know what he did with the money? Bought fifteen new pairs of socks and underwear so he could switch from doing laundry twice a month to doing it once a month.”

Didi smiled fondly. “That sounds like Gavi, all right.” The fond smile lingered for a moment, then faded into an expression that Cohen didn’t want to put a name to. “It also sounds like the basic personality type of every unmaterialistic ideologically motivated high-level double agent in the classic case studies.”

“Bullshit. Those guys were all frustrated ambitious types. And Gavi and ambition just don’t fit in the same sentence. Gavi would have been content to sit in your shadow for the rest of his life. Or in Ash’s shadow if it came to that. He never wanted to run the Mossad, just rewrite the flowcharts and tinker with the data abstraction models.”

“Yes. Funny, isn’t it? Gavi had the charisma and the physical bravery to lead agents in the field…but he always preferred to be the one who stood in the shadows and held all the keys and knew where all the back doors were. Forget the friend you think you knew. Forget the big eyes and the little-boy grin and the wrinkled T-shirts. What do the choices he made in his career say to you?”

“Oh, come on, Didi! Every eccentricity looks bad when you start from the assumption that a man’s a traitor. I’m not saying you’re one of the ones who was ready to suspect him because of his last name. But I still have to ask why ?”

“Everyone has his dumb blonde and his rented Ferrari.”

The dumb blonde and the rented Ferrari rule, known as Rule 5 around the Office, was part of the age-old Mossad lexicon. It referred to a famous Mossad operation in which a field team had recruited an Iraqi nuclear physicist by dressing a blonde katsa up like a floozy and having her drive by his bus stop every morning in a rented red Ferrari. When she finally offered him a ride he took it—hook, line, and sinker.

The logical conclusion, one borne out by centuries of covert work, was that if you scratched a potential recruit’s guiltiest itch, he’d fall into your lap. It was just a question of wading through enough poison ivy to figure out what that itch was. For some people it was sex or money. For others it was the lure of intrigue, or the need to feel they were on the side of the angels, or the urge to prove an overbearing parent wrong by amounting to something…even in secret.

No one was immune. Everyone had something to prove or some illusion too sweet to surrender. Even the blessed ones—the ones like Gavi, who seemed to walk through the morass of human greed and pettiness without being tarnished by it—even they had their dumb blonde and their rented Ferrari.

“Not Gavi,” Cohen said.

“Even Gavi.”

“Not Gavi.”

“If you really believe that,” Didi said so smoothly that Cohen didn’t hear the trap spring until he was well and truly caught, “I’m giving you the chance to prove it.”

“And what guarantee do I have that you won’t throw him to the wolves again in the name of playing it safe?”

Instead of answering Didi bent to inspect the trunk of the nearest cedar of Lebanon. From inside the house Cohen heard the boisterous opening bars of a Chopin mazurka.

“The tree’s dying,” Didi said. He tore a piece of bark from the great trunk and rubbed it between his fingers until the red dust drifted down and settled on the garden path like a bloodstain. “There are worms in the wood. The tree surgeon wants to cut down this tree before the rot spreads to the others. It seems a terrible waste. My daughters grew up playing in this tree. I thought it would outlive me. But he says that if we wait too long the rot will spread and we’ll lose the entire grove. And one tree, however beloved, does seem a small price to pay for the safety of all the rest.”

They left through the garage, just like they’d come in.

As he stepped into Didi’s car for the drive home, Cohen turned back and saw Li and Ash standing together in the hallway. Ash was stooping, her sleek head bent over Li’s to whisper in the smaller woman’s ear. Li stood there like the rock she was, arms crossed over her chest, brow knit, lips pursed, nodding intently.

“What was that about?” Cohen asked when she was settled in the car next to him.

“Nothing. She was Mossad liaison to UNSec for three years. Just asking me about some mutual friends.”

But in the silence behind the words he felt her mind flinch away from his, and he tasted the bittersweet taint of a guilty secret.