Jericho Mosaic (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 4)

by Edward Whittemore

  Halim set up his business in Damascus and began exporting leather goods and jewelry to Europe. Soon he added shesh-besh sets and tables, which became his most profitable product. His new friends in Damascus were helpful and he had good contacts in Europe, especially in Belgium. His business flourished and once or twice a year he traveled to Europe.

  At home in Damascus, meanwhile, Halim continued to live quietly, an unassuming and charming and modest man, a patriot with a growing circle of acquaintances. In Syria it was a time of rampant instability as the country broke out of its union with Egypt. There was one coup d’etat after another and the Baath party gradually strengthened its hold on the army. Then in 1963 the Baath seized power outright and the new ruler of Syria was the general who had once been a military attaché in Buenos Aires, Halim’s former shesh-besh partner.

  FIVE

  DURING THAT TIME THE most important struggles over the Runner’s fate didn’t take place in Syria but in the headquarters of the Mossad, between Tajar and his superior, the only two men who knew the identity of the Runner and the details of the Runner operation. Their disagreements were fundamental and unresolvable and concerned the very nature of the operation. Tajar saw the Runner as a long-term asset who would acquire his worth only after years of being in place, while the chief of the Mossad felt there was more use to be made of the Runner now. Long-term and now were terms that constantly changed and their arguments took many forms.

  The argument might have seemed to be simply the traditional one between an operations officer and the man above him who paid the bureaucratic bills: the operations officer wanted to protect his agent and keep him from danger, and his superior wanted more immediate results from investments made in time and money. But Tajar’s great experience, and the fact that he himself had once briefly been chief of the Mossad, made the issue far more complex than that, as both men recognized. Not only careers and roles and self-respect were involved, but history and philosophies.

  The son of the rabbi from the Ukraine who was the chief of the Mossad had acquired his intelligence experience inside Israel, unlike Tajar. Little Aharon, as he was called, was a short stocky man of immense energy who did nothing in life but work at his job. He had made his start as a policeman and become a counterintelligence expert for Shai during the British Mandate, later expanding this position to counterespionage against the Jewish Revisionists and their right-wing cells. After independence, on orders from the prime minister, he disarmed the right-wing Jewish underground and became even more powerful in the government. He was a brilliant, ruthless man who knew how to run an organization and get things done.

  His first serious clash with Tajar over the Runner operation came when it was time for the Runner to take up residency in Damascus. Tajar insisted that the Runner shouldn’t report by secret radio, which was standard procedure for agents then and also their greatest risk. Instead, Tajar wanted the Runner to use false bottoms in the shesh-besh tables he sent to Europe for his reports. An agent who didn’t use a radio was in a different category, by definition, with different goals. Tajar won that round of long-term over now, as he won several others. But in 1963 when the Runner’s former shesh-besh partner from Buenos Aires became the president of Syria, Little Aharon exploded.

  This is preposterous, he shouted at Tajar. The Runner’s in a position to tell us almost anything. Why won’t you put him on the general and let him tell us what is going on?

  But what happens when there’s another coup? replied Tajar. Even if the Baath stays in power, it’s almost certain the general won’t. He’s just the first man out of their pack. Who comes next?

  And what if there’s going to be a war tomorrow? shouted Little Aharon. The Runner can’t even tell us. It’s madness.

  No, it’s wisdom, replied Tajar. If there’s going to be a war tomorrow someone else can tell us. We have other people for that. The Runner’s time will come but it’s not yet. I want him to last.

  Little Aharon frowned. To last, he thought. Yes, of course you want him to last. He’s your hope and your dream, all you’ve got.

  Tajar sat facing him, adamant, using his hands to rearrange his crippled legs. In a way Little Aharon pitied Tajar, and Tajar knew that. Little Aharon, after all, had captured Eichmann in Argentina and obtained, for the West, Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing the crimes of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union. He had an international reputation in intelligence and was famous among the powerful. When professionals in other capitals thought of the Mossad, they thought of Little Aharon, who was the Mossad to them. Yet at the end of the war it was Tajar who had been the one with fame and power and promise. Why shouldn’t Little Aharon give in to him now over one agent? One operation?

  Look, said Little Aharon, if you won’t have the Runner jumping into bed with the general, at least give me something new. Some way I can tell myself the operation is going forward.

  Two things, replied Tajar at once. I’ll have him move closer to Syrian armaments and also to the Palestinian refugees.

  Little Aharon looked down at his desk and at the crippled legs stretched out on the far side of it. Syria’s armaments came from the Soviet Union, so that offer was something. But the activities of the Palestinian refugees were close to nonexistent, so that amounted to nothing at all. One offer of hard facts, another of the Runner skulking around in the desert disguised as an Arab. Sadly, he thought, Tajar was a prisoner of his own past. What had worked for him once he went on dreaming would work for him again. He was an idealist and a romantic who didn’t understand change. He kept trying to do the same things over and over again, living in ideas and hope and cut off from change by his own imagination—and by an automobile accident. No one was better at the mechanics of infiltrating agents into Arab countries and supporting them once they were there. But when it came to goals, he kept slipping back into the past.

  Little Aharon did some more shouting but his heart wasn’t in it. In the end he decided to let Tajar have his way with the Runner.

  All right, Little Aharon said finally. The Runner concentrates on Syrian armaments and Palestinian refugees and not the president … for the time being.

  Tajar was triumphant. He knew it was the most important decision ever made in the Runner operation. It would take still more time but slowly, methodically, he was giving the operation the shape he wanted. Not even Little Aharon could suspect how long-term his goals really were. And except for the Runner himself, no one else knew enough about the operation to be able to judge it.

  What Tajar had been planning for so long was no less than the ultimate penetration of an enemy nation. The Runner would go on for years acquiring power and influence in Syria until one day he would be one of the most important men in the country. But at the same time he would never be simply an agent, a Syrian who worked for a foreign country. Foreign agents worked for money or power or out of faith or ideology, but they were always still foreign agents and the Runner would never be that. The Runner would be a Syrian who was also secretly an Israeli, his motivation and devotion forever beyond question. And that ultimate achievement in espionage, to Tajar’s knowledge, had never been accomplished anywhere before, by anyone.

  We have two new directions to explore, Tajar said to Yossi when next they met in Europe. The first is the armaments business. It would be useful if you could think of a way to get into repair work. In a very small way to begin with, you understand. Nothing glamorous or dramatic but something quite ordinary, such as armored personnel carriers. They’re always being modified this way or that, not the heavy work but little things. Rods and gadgets, the seats or the exhaust system, anything. I’ve looked at the work our people do and it doesn’t require an engineer, just some competent machinists and a man overseeing them. Most of it is regular business. You call in a technician to design a fitting or a tool when you need to, give your customers good service and make sense of the books. The army supply officers get used to dealing with you, they know they can count on you and ask you to take on a
little more, perhaps. In time it can grow.

  And I know you like that sort of thing, added Tajar, because once you thought of being an engineer.

  Yossi laughed. It sounds easy enough, he said. And the other new direction?

  The Palestinian refugee camps, replied Tajar. Now that the Syrians are starting to organize and arm a few Palestinian groups, it would probably be wise for you to get started with them. It’s patriotic and it’s in the Arab cause and it would give you a chance to get out of Damascus and taste some desert air. There’s that side to you too and you can’t spend all your time over ledgers and talking to people in cafés or on strolls by the river.

  And the general? asked Yossi.

  After this general there will be another general, replied Tajar, and then another and another. But armaments and Palestinians, I suspect, will be with us much longer than any of them.

  He always beat me at shesh-besh anyway, said Yossi.

  I don’t believe that.

  Out of design, of course.

  Ah, now that I do believe, replied Tajar, smiling, and went on to other matters.

  A Syrian army officer asked Halim to say a few words to the president about a personal matter. Others approached him with propositions for smuggling or special contracts or to serve as an intermediary with more senior officers who were Halim’s friends. But with honesty and gentleness Halim always turned aside these opportunities for making men indebted to him.

  Only ideals will sway him, it was said in Damascus as his reputation grew and he became known as a man of vision—the incorruptible one.

  As a boy growing up with Arab ways, long before he became Halim, Yossi had dreamed of the fabled place known as Damascus, a source of myth and wonder from his childhood which would always exist beyond time and stone. An imaginary city to him, like Jerusalem.

  Damascus the fair, city of many pillars, the pearl of the East and the gateway to Mecca, where for centuries the caravans of the faithful had set out on the haj to cross the desert. A city of many moods but known above all as el Fayha, the fragrant, from its innumerable gardens and orchards.

  Astride its river at the foot of a mountain where it nestled against a harsh landscape, a transdesert route from antiquity at the confluence of Asia and Europe and Africa, which was unique even in the ancient Middle East. For unlike any other city on earth, Damascus had never known obscurity in all its four thousand years of history. Instead, it had been preeminent to every empire that had ever held sway in the Fertile Crescent, Egyptian and Hittite and Babylonian and Assyrian, Persian and Greek and Roman and Arab, Seljuk and Mongol and Mameluke and Turkish.

  Always important, forever destroyed and rebuilt, famous for its apricots and grapes and melons, its damask silk which was brought to Europe by the Crusaders and its figs and pistachios which the Romans transplanted around the Mediterranean as a far-flung gift from the Damascenes, worshipper once of Adad the storm-god and later a flourishing center of Christianity and Islam, holy to Christians because of the conversion of St. Paul and holy to Moslems as the burial site of Salah al-din, the great Kurdish warrior who defeated the Crusaders. With its luxuriant gardens and orchards, its old walled city to the south of the river and its new quarters to the north along shady avenues, the ancient beauty of Damascus reached back in history to the very birth of towns, recalling man’s earliest dreams of an earthly paradise on the edge of the desert.

  Halim loved the city and always felt these past worlds adding new dimensions to his life in Damascus, where the inhabitant’s subtle sense of time also allowed him to find a place in his days for the distant persona of Yossi. Thus when Halim wished to strengthen himself by giving voice to his attachment to Tajar and the present, he talked to some Syrian friend about the kindly, thoughtful widower-cousin in Argentina who had given him his start in life and had taught him so much.

  I owe everything to that man. His ideas, his very being, run in my veins and sustain me, Halim said truthfully, with complete conviction.

  And when he met with his new Palestinian contacts and talked about their humiliation and anger and their national destiny, their fight for a homeland, his own childhood dreams fired his words with a passion no one could mistake. I know exactly how you feel, Halim told them, and the depth of his feelings could not help but make a powerful impression upon his listeners. Indeed, it was the intensity of Halim’s vision that set him apart.

  All this Tajar had foreseen. All this Tajar had carefully planned and made part of Yossi’s training when the two of them were transforming Yossi into the patriot Halim, whose success would always depend on the sincerity of his feelings. For that was the heart of the Runner operation, although only Tajar and Halim truly understood it: the Runner would succeed because Halim was genuine.

  Having been in Damascus a half-dozen years, Halim was completely at ease with his life there. It was then that Tajar decided it might be useful to add another dimension to the Runner’s life. He discussed it with Yossi when they met in Belgium and told him something about the man he wanted Yossi to meet—an Englishman. Tajar was suggesting the connection, he said, not for any professional reasons, for the Englishman would never be of use to Yossi in an operational way. Rather, it was strictly for personal reasons.

  To give you a different dimension of time, perhaps, said Tajar with a smile.

  Yossi was intrigued. Then you know this man yourself? he asked.

  Oh yes, replied Tajar. Once upon a time, in fact, he taught me much of what I know about our business. And oddly enough, he also knew Anna briefly, long ago.

  Yossi turned serious. That is another dimension of time, he said. And what’s the name of this mysterious Englishman?

  He calls himself Bell, replied Tajar.

  The man in Jericho?

  Yes.

  Yossi nodded thoughtfully. I’ve heard of him, he said.

  SIX

  IN THE EARLY MORNING stillness of what he liked to call his north verandah, actually a warped wooden platform with a tin roof outside the front door of his dilapidated bungalow, the one-eyed English hermit of Jericho sat gazing at the luxuriant shade beneath his orange trees, studying the patterns of sunlight glaring on the hard mud. Ants worked busily moving bits of straw in and out of the small patches of brightness, so diligent in their unending tasks he sometimes imagined he could hear them. But in fact the whirring hum of early mornings came from higher up in the trees where thousands of tiny insects were beating their wings in joy at having found an oasis of paradise, an intoxicating garden of orange fragrance in the middle of the lifeless desert around Jericho.

  The orange grove spread out on all sides of his bungalow, guarding his privacy. There was an open space near the back door where he could sit at night if he wanted to look at the stars, and next to it a grape arbor, the south patio as he called it, where he could sit during the day if he wanted to see no one at all. But generally he spent his mornings on the front porch—the north verandah—with its view of the dirt road beyond the orange grove. He had some benches and his most comfortable reading chair on the porch, and a table with its customary piles of fruit and books and two identical decanters of what looked like water to prevent dehydration, one decanter filled with water and the other with arak.

  So for Bell, a man with a horribly disfigured face who had long ago retired from the devious world of espionage, mornings on his north verandah contained the essentials of life.

  The bungalow itself, like most houses in Jericho, was a rambling one-story affair of mud-brick covered by plaster, painted with some faint color which had quickly faded away to indeterminate pastel. A rainstorm would have washed the whole place away in an hour, but of course it never really rained in Jericho. Instead, once or twice a winter, the sky clouded over and a vague misty substance brushed against people’s faces, causing no end of wonder and a solemn rearrangement of greetings for several days.

  Rain, a man would gravely say upon meeting his neighbor. Rain, by the will of God, came the equally grave reply.


  Bell’s rooms were sparsely furnished. There were some tables and benches and chairs, a cot here and there and bookcases fashioned from wooden crates hanging on the walls. The ceilings were high and it was always breezy inside the house because the fierce sun ate up the air it touched, causing turbulences where it didn’t reach. From the road, beneath the thick foliage of the orange trees, only small children and donkeys could see Bell on his front porch. Callers, jingling the bell at the rusty wrought-iron gate, he came to recognize by the lower halves of their bodies and particularly by their sandaled feet.

  What arcane arts we arrive at in life, thought Bell, inwardly smiling as he grew familiar over time with the idiosyncrasies of his friends’ feet planted inside the gate.

  Bell could never smile in a normal way because his face was a mask built by surgeons. A bullet had once shattered a spyglass he was looking through, driving metal and glass fragments into his face and ripping away an eye and most of his features. So in a way he was fortunate to have anything at all resembling a face.

  The shattering spyglass had also torn apart his hand that was holding it. The best the surgeons had been able to do with that, using grafted skin and metal inserts, was to reconstruct a permanently rigid claw which was half-closed and half-open, a kind of tool for holding things. Bell made use of this ugly claw of a hand by wrapping it around a glass of arak, which was also a more or less permanent fixture with him.