Billionaire

10

General Isser Ephraim, head of the Mossad, whilst heavily guarded at his office and home, relied on nothing but his wits when he was not in these places. He travelled frequently, and used a combination of disguises, spontaneous changes of plan, and illogical routes.

On this particular mid-June Tuesday morning, having flown the night before from Tel Aviv to Athens, he had hopped onto a Singapore Airlines jumbo making its last stop between the Far East and London, using a passport which identified him as being an air conditioning systems consultant.

As he emerged into the throng of people at London’s Heathrow Airport, his eyes, behind slightly tinted lenses, worked their way in a matter of seconds over every face that was in the terminal. They relayed to the memory banks of his brain essential details of features, height and stance, information that could at any split second trigger the alarm bells. But on this hot summer morning, General Ephraim did not notice anybody whose business it might be to kill him hanging around this section of the airport. He walked smartly out, climbed into a taxi, and ordered it to take him to the West Middlesex Hospital.

Twenty minutes later, he was sitting beside Baenhaker’s bed in the large ward. The Mossad agent was conscious and sitting up in bed, looking sullen, and attached by a battery of wires to a large assortment of monitoring equipment.

Occupying the bed to one side of him was a 90-year-old white-haired man who was sorting out a cardboard box full of used bus tickets and muttering to himself; on the other side was an equally ancient man who appeared, to Ephraim’s trained eye, to have been dead for some hours. The beds on the other side of the ward did not, in Ephraim’s quick summing up, contain anyone who appeared remotely capable of carrying out even the most basic surveillance.

‘How are you, Danny?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know, you’ll have to ask someone else. I’ve no idea how I am.’ Baenhaker stared at the General for a brief moment, then turned his eyes away.

Ephraim looked him up and down carefully. Considering the distance he had come, he felt he was entitled to a slightly heartier greeting than this. It further confirmed the feelings he had about Baenhaker. He wanted him out of this hospital and out of this country. ‘The Sister tells me you are making a good recovery.’

‘What have you come for, General? To say goodbye?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Come on, General, they don’t reckon I’m going to last another week.’

Ephraim looked shocked. ‘Sister said they’re going to start you walking again tomorrow.’

Baenhaker gave him a pathetic look — a look that was full of defeat — and told him not to bother to lie. ‘They reckon I’m crippled for life — if I don’t die from my internal injuries.’

Ephraim stared at him for a long time, then shook his head. ‘Is that what you’re doing, Danny? Lying in bed, thinking about everything that’s bad, and how it can all get worse? Is that all you’re doing?’

‘What else should I be doing?’

The General leaned forward. ‘You should be working, Danny, that is what you should be doing. You are an agent of the finest Intelligence organization in the world; you committed yourself to working for that organization twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. How long have you been in this hospital, Danny? Eight days is it? Do you know who else is in here? In the other wards?’

Baenhaker shook his head.

‘The Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Defence; two Syrian government ministers; and an Irishman who is a key link-pin with the PLO. All scraped off the same motorway as you during the past few weeks. I’ve been here thirty minutes and I’ve found all that out. You have been here eight days, and what have you found out? Nothing.’

‘You do have a slight advantage,’ said Baenhaker, sullenly.

‘Who knows best what’s going on in a place like this? It’s the nurses, they’re the ones that know best. They’re going to give information to anyone they feel sympathetic towards. They all feel sympathetic towards you. All you have to do is ask, and they’ll tell you anything you would like to know. You’ve been here eight days, and you haven’t asked them one solitary question, have you?’ Ephraim did not wait for him to reply. He stood up. ‘You want to hang onto your job, then you’d better pull your ass up off that bed, and do it fast.’

Ephraim marched out of the ward, through the swing doors and downstairs to where the cab was waiting for him. He smiled to himself as he climbed in. It had worked. Five minutes earlier, Baenhaker had been a disintegrating vegetable with nothing to drive him forward. Now Baenhaker was furious, and would be wanting to hit back at him, wanting to hit back badly; and in order to do that, he had to get himself out of that hospital. Ephraim smiled more broadly; just as soon as Baenhaker got himself out of that hospital, he would remove him from England.

Ephraim checked into the Intercontinental Hotel in Old Park Lane, put his bag in his room, then went down to the foyer and telephoned the Israeli Embassy from a pay phone and made a rendezvous with his head of United Kingdom operatives for that afternoon. Then he asked the doorman for a taxi to take him to Putney, climbed in and, as they pulled off, told the taxi he did not want to go to Putney but, instead, wanted to go to the City of London, to 88 Mincing Lane, where he had a 12.30 luncheon date with Sir Monty Elleck.

He sat back in the taxi and pulled down the window to let in some air. He felt under pressure at the moment, great pressure, and he knew he must try to relax. He thought about the nuclear mines that had been discovered in a fishing dhow in the Persian Gulf; a good job had been done by the Omanis in keeping that quiet. Rumour was circulating in United States Intelligence and in the intelligence networks of the other countries which had learned of the incident that the Israelis were, in some way, involved in it. He knew that this was rubbish, but it had not been easy to convince his superiors. The Israeli Prime Minister had given him a thoroughly unpleasant grilling, and he wasn’t sure at the end of it that the Prime Minister was really convinced of his innocence or, indeed, of Israel’s innocence in the whole affair. Then there had been all the extra work resulting from the second attack on Osirak, monitoring and reporting on world reaction.

Ephraim was at an age when many men had retired; but what, he wondered, did they retire to? To tend their gardens? Peaceful gardens? Not in Israel, he knew. A peaceful garden was one you could look out at and know it would be there tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, and in ten years’ time, and in one hundred years’ time. Not in Israel. You could not, he knew, look at anything in Israel and believe it was going to be there even until tomorrow.

Ephraim emerged from the elevator on the sixth floor of 88 Mincing Lane and was ushered straight into the office of the Chairman, Chief Executive and one hundred per cent owner of Globalex. The diminutive Lithuanian and the bulky Israeli hugged each other warmly. ‘Issy, you look terrific, terrific!’ said Elleck.

‘And you look as successful as ever, Monty.’

‘Come, sit.’ Elleck ushered him into an ornate armchair, and then went to his drinks cabinet. ‘Chivas and ice? Still your favourite?’

‘Just a small one — don’t go mad with the bottle.’

‘It’s so good to see you — how can I keep my hand steady?’

There was a bond between the two men, a bond that went back a long way, to the summer in Germany of 1944, to the concentration camp Auschwitz — to a day when a Nazi soldier had been taunting Elleck, calling him a ‘fat Jewish bubble’, and pricking at his stomach with a bayonet. They were in the open, digging a mass grave for several hundred of their companions and probably, within a short while, for themselves, too; there was no one else around. Elleck was yelling abuse back at the soldier, who was fast becoming increasingly violent. At any moment, Ephraim knew, the soldier was liable to pull his trigger. The Nazi never heard Ephraim, who had been a thousand times better trained than he; before the Nazi’s eyes had even picked up Ephraim’s advancing shadow, his windpipe had been shattered like an old china vase.

Ephraim and Elleck had fled, and made the cover of the woods. They knew they had no chance of getting any distance, and instead searched for an ideal hiding place. Under the roots of an oak tree they found a natural hollow and, by excavating it a bit more, they were both able to fit into it. They spent every day for the next five months jammed in their tiny hollow, frequently hearing soldiers walk close by or even directly overhead. At night, they foraged for anything they could eat, from berries to dead animals, although they had to eat everything raw; even if they had had matches, they would never have dared to use them. They were able to get all the water they required from a stream a short distance away. It was not until two months after Germany surrendered that they came out of hiding, and then it was only because Elleck had contracted double pneumonia, and Ephraim had gone, in the night, to a farmhouse to try to get help. It was there that he was told that the war had been over for eight weeks.

It wasn’t until halfway through their grilled soles at their corner table at Le Poulbot, that their talk turned to business. Elleck swirled his glass of ’71 Montrachet around in his hand, took a large sip, put a forkful of sole in his mouth, took another large sip, and allowed the king of white burgundies and the prince of fish to mingle together in the company of a motley assortment of enzymes in the dank and stagnant void between his fat and greasy cheeks. After a while, he swallowed.

‘How did — er — everything work out?’ asked Ephraim.

Elleck looked nervously around, and then leaned forward: ‘Issy, you did wonderful. Wonderful.’ He shook his head. ‘The timing — the timing was so good.’ He lifted his glass up to him. ‘You’re a good boy, Issy, one hell of a good boy.’

Ephraim grinned. ‘And you’re a terrible rogue, Monty. It doesn’t matter which hole in the ground you are in, you’ll always end up on top of the pile, won’t you?’

‘With a little help from my friends.’ He grinned back. ‘Did you do what I said, Issy? Did you make plenty?’

Ephraim shook his head. ‘You know I’m not interested in that. I advised the go-ahead for Osirak because you needed a favour, and because of what you promised my country if we were successful. I did not do it to make money for myself, and I wouldn’t want any of it. My country needs money badly, my people around the world need money, money for their struggle. How much money are we going to make from the raid on Osirak?’

‘Who else knows about it?’

‘Who else? Do you think I am crazy? If the Knesset found out my true reasons, that I advised my country to bomb Iraq’s nuclear power station not because there was a danger that they were using it to manufacture plutonium for nuclear bombs, but so that our act of aggression would for a few hours send a nervous twitch around the money markets of the world, banging up the price of gold, so that you could make a killing, and bail your company out of the financial crisis you told me you had coming; if the Knesset found that out, what the hell do you think they would say? Eh? You think I’m going to go around shouting my mouth off about it? No way, Monty. I did what I did for two reasons: Firstly, when you and I were down that hole, right in those first days we were there, we made a pact; you remember? We said that if we ever got out, and survived, if either of us, at any time, ever, during the rest of our lives, was in trouble, needed help, the other would go to the ends of the earth to help him. Well, Monty, I’ve just done that now, and I tell you, Monty, the strain is killing me.’

Elleck nodded slowly. ‘I’m sure.’

‘And the second reason,’ continued Ephraim, ‘is the ten per cent you said you would pay to whichever Jewish groups in the world I told you. Well — I have that list here.’ Ephraim pulled an envelope from his pocket, and passed it across the table.

Elleck stared him in the face. ‘There’s a problem, Issy. Everything went according to plan, except for two things I had not worked out properly. Firstly, as I did not want to let anyone in on what was happening, I had to buy the gold myself. I think I must be getting rusty up in my big office — it’s a long time since I have done any dealing myself. I had forgotten how difficult it can be to buy large amounts of gold quickly without attracting a great deal of attention. So I did not buy nearly as much as I had hoped. Secondly, the world is getting used to short, sharp acts of aggression. I thought gold would have jumped fifty, possibly even seventy-five — possibly more still — maybe up to $100 an ounce...’ He shook his head, finished the last mouthful of sole and took another large sip of wine. ‘But it didn’t. It only went twenty-four. If I had managed to buy all the gold I wanted — which I could have done if you had held off another month, like I had asked you — I would have been okay, even on a $24 rise.’

‘But—’ Ephraim cut in, ‘you told me how wonderful the timing was, how perfectly it all went.’

‘What was wonderful was the timing of the information — the way you got the information through to me. Because of what you told me, I knew exactly when to sell. I was also able to advise my clients, and that has made them very happy. But in terms of my firm making money, Issy, we just didn’t make enough.’

‘But you must have made some?’

‘Sure we have bailed ourselves out of a lot of problems — but I still have a long way to go.’

‘So how much are you going to be able to give to the names on that list?’ Ephraim was starting to sound uneasy.

Elleck stared at him for a long time, then stared down at the ground. He spoke quietly: ‘Issy,’ he said, ‘you know me: If I possibly could, you know that I would, but...’

The head of the Mossad was in a fury when he arrived back at the Intercontinental Hotel. He had declined Elleck’s invitation to dinner and by doing so had terminated, as far as he was concerned, the oldest and deepest friendship he would ever know in his lifetime.

He was more than a little startled when the reception clerk handed him, along with his room key, a package from the pigeon hole above it. No name was on the fat buff envelope, about ten inches long and eight across, just the room number. His mind raced for a moment; no one knew he was staying here, not even Elleck. He never stayed in the same hotel for more than one night, and he used different hotels each time he came to London.

‘You sure this is for me?’ he asked.

‘It was delivered about half an hour ago, sir.’

‘By whom?’

‘Motorcycle messenger. Don’t ask me which firm — there’s hundreds of them.’

Ephraim nodded, took the envelope and walked to the cashier’s desk. ‘Please make my bill up, I have a change of schedule and I’m leaving right away.’ He sent a bell-hop up for his bag. As he would not now be having dinner with Elleck, there was no reason for him to stay in London anyway. He wanted to have a brief meeting with his chief of UK operatives and then, he decided, he would fly on to Paris this evening, instead of in the morning as he had originally planned.

The envelope worried him greatly. Maybe, he thought, it was for a previous occupant of the room, but he wouldn’t have put a large bet on it. It worried him because he did not know what it contained, and it worried him because someone had been able to discover his whereabouts. He climbed into a taxi, sat down, and began to examine the envelope carefully.

After some minutes he decided, with not a great deal of confidence, that the contents of the envelope were not of a nature that would liberally scatter him and the taxi around the two hundred yards or so of Knightsbridge that surrounded them, and carefully slit it open with the top of his pen. It contained an RCA videocassette. A label was stuck to it, which read: ‘MEET ME AT THE MORGUE — starring I. Ephraim.’

He looked at the label, at first in disbelief, then with a grin on his face and then in terror, and he began to shake uncontrollably. There was a note also stuck to the cassette, which he tore off and opened. The note said: ‘You are to be in the bar of L’Hermitage Hotel in La Baule, Brittany, at midday, Saturday. You are to come alone. If anyone accompanies you, or follows you, or if you do not turn up, then one of these will be delivered to every press agency in the world at nine o’clock on Monday morning.’

The note was typed, by an electric typewriter with a plastic ribbon. The paper was a sheet of thin white A4 that could have been bought in any stationery shop in the world. Ephraim studied everything for some clue. There was none. His shaking got worse, and he felt his head become unbearably hot. He jerked the side window down, stuck his head out of the moving taxi, and was violently sick.