Headhunters

Chapter Forty-Three

Milton slept badly.

His mind was anxious, full of questions and possibilities, and he woke at four in the morning as dawn broke. He tried to return to sleep, but it was impossible. Eventually, he gave up. He got up and collected his cigarettes from the table. He paused at the door to the bedroom and glanced inside. Matilda was asleep on the bed, lying face down with the sheets pulled down so that her back was bare. The curves of her figure were obvious and eloquent and Milton had to remind himself, once again, why he needed to keep his distance. There were dozens of reasons, but it was still a struggle.

He went out onto the balcony. The spreading glow of dawn revealed the bay in all its glory, the fringe of yellow sand hemming in a sea that was so blue it was almost violet.

Matilda woke soon after and, after she had showered, they went down to breakfast together. They were both a little subdued. Milton was anxious about what the day might bring, and it was obvious that some of his anxiety had transferred to her.

They were in the hotel lobby at five minutes to nine. Ziggy arrived promptly on the hour. Milton led the way outside; the sun was already burning away the chill of the night and promising another scorching-hot day. Ziggy had hired a large Mercedes people carrier with two rows of seats in the back. He opened the door and slid it back for them. Matilda got in and Milton followed behind her.

“Morning,” he said.

“Morning.”

He waited until the driver had started off before he spoke again. “All okay?”

“It was fine. You?”

“No problems.” Ziggy spoke animatedly, as if he was buzzing. Milton remembered how excited he could get during an operation. It would be something to bear in mind. Excitement could get you into trouble.

“Did you get anything?”

Ziggy reached into his bag and withdrew an iPad. “Quite a lot,” he said as he handed it over.

“From where?”

“Best you didn’t ask.”

Milton took the iPad and started to read.

Of course, he already knew about the Mossad. He knew of its reputation, its methods and the operations that had done so much to protect a country that was surrounded on all sides by states that wished not just its defeat, but that it be erased from existence.

The files were concerned with the director of the agency. Victor Blum had been born on a train between the Soviet Union and Poland during World War Two. His parents were Polish Jews fleeing Warsaw for the Soviet Union as the Germans hurried to implement the Final Solution. It was his impending arrival into the world that had persuaded his parents that they could no longer risk remaining in their home, so they fled. Not all of the family were so fortunate. Many members had been killed by the Nazis, including his grandparents and his two older brothers..

Blum and his parents had survived the war, and in 1950, the family made aliyah, a “return” to Israel. Blum had been conscripted into the Israeli Defense Force and had completed his compulsory service in 1966, but was called up as a reservist in 1967, fighting in the Six-Day War as an officer. He stayed in after the end of the war and had commanded an ad hoc undercover commando unit known as Sayeret Rimon, whose task was to combat the increasing violence in the Palestinian territories. Later, he had fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1982 Lebanon War. He had then held a series of high-level positions in the IDF command, eventually reaching the rank of major general.

The prime minister had appointed Blum to the role of director-general of the Mossad in August 2002. As such, he was responsible for intelligence, counter-intelligence, and counterterrorism activities outside of Israel and the Palestinian Territories and was infamously aggressive in ordering killings of terrorists on foreign soil. Milton had heard of the paradox that, while Israel did not have a domestic death penalty, the Mossad under Blum had carte blanche to target Arab terrorists outside of its borders with complete impunity.

Victor Blum was a killer at the head of an organisation of killers.

And Avi Bachman had been the tip of the spear.

Milton opened another file.

Blum lived in a penthouse in the recently completed Meier-on-Rothschild Tower, a six-hundred-foot-tall apartment block in the heart of Tel Aviv. Prices started at a million dollars per apartment and went far higher than that; it was more, Milton thought, than might have been expected on the budget of a government employee. He suspected that a penthouse apartment, several hundred feet above the ground, had been provided so as to ensure Blum’s security. It would be much easier to defend than a ground-level property.

All Milton wanted to do was talk to him.

His residence wouldn’t be the place to do it.

He would try something else.

It took them four hours to complete the drive to Tel Aviv. The driver took them to the city’s main railway station, where they changed to another car. They took that car to the Best Western and checked into two rooms. Ziggy waited ten minutes and then came to the room that Milton and Matilda had taken. He knocked three times, as they had agreed, and Milton let him in.

“Ready?”

Milton nodded.

“What are we going to do?” Matilda asked.

“Not we,” Milton corrected. “Just me. You’re staying here.” He could see that she was going to argue. “Please, Matty. It’s safe here. We weren’t followed. And what I’m going to do could go either way.”

“What are you going to do?”

He had been deliberately vague about that until now. “I’m going to talk to them.”

“What? Just walk in and ask to speak to someone?”

“Exactly.”

“And say what?”

“I’m going to persuade them that they need to stop taking sides.”

“And you think they’ll take kindly to that?”

“I have no idea. Probably not.”

“And then? What happens when they arrest you and tell Bachman?”

“That’s where Ziggy comes in.”

“Right,” she said, not bothering to hide her doubt. “And what’s he going to do?”

Ziggy held up a USB stick.

“What’s that?”

“We’re going to blackmail them,” he said.