by Allan Topol
* * *
Moshe had a red phone in his office that was a secure line to the director of the CIA in Langley. With little fanfare, the line had been installed several years ago to assist the two governments in dealing with international terrorism.
Sagit used that phone to call Margaret Joyner, while Moshe sat across the room and listened. “We managed to get the hostage out of France,” Sagit said, “and we’re making good progress in getting the answers to both of your questions.”
“Good progress isn’t enough. I need something specific.”
Sagit gulped hard. “We know that there are Saudi air force officers involved,” she said. “Right now I can’t be more specific, and please, Margaret, keep even that information to yourself.”
“For God’s sake, Sagit, look at a calendar. It’s already September 22. People at State and Defense are getting antsy over here. To put it mildly. Frantic is more accurate. They’re all over me. You can’t believe the pressure I’m under. They want me to have our people get involved directly. Ralph Laurence, God bless him, wants to fly to Riyadh and talk to the Saudi foreign minister.”
What a stupid idea, Sagit thought. She was beginning to understand why David didn’t want to involve the Americans, apart from his own personal situation. “If he does that, he would destroy everything we’ve set in place.”
“I figured as much. That’s why I’ve been putting them off. But I can’t do it forever.”
“We need just a little more time.”
“How much is a little more?”
“One week. I’ll come to Washington in one week with the results of our investigation. If you’re not satisfied, that still gives you another week to do whatever you want.”
“You’ve got to tighten that schedule. I can’t live with another week’s delay.”
While Sagit was thinking about the schedule David had given her for General Chambers’ visit to Saudi Arabia, Joyner said, “Sagit, you can have three more days and that’s all.”
Sagit remembered her grandfather, the rug merchant in Baghdad. “The whole world’s one big souk,” he used to tell her. “So always bargain hard.”
“I can be in Washington, on the 27th, five days from now, but that’s the absolute best we can do.”
“How about the 26th?”
“It’s just not possible, honest. We both want accurate information. I can’t cut it any closer.”
She heard Joyner sigh deeply at the other end of the phone.
“All right,” Joyner finally replied. “Fortunately, the President’s heavily occupied with his tax cut bill, and he’ll be out west for the next couple of days for campaign appearances. Surprisingly, General Chambers hasn’t been on my case about Saudi Arabia. As far as the other wolves are concerned, I’ll keep them at bay for another five days. Anything I can do to assist you?”
Sagit was delighted to hear Joyner’s question. She had been wondering how she could steer the conversation around to the help they needed. “There is one thing. I could use a couple of American passports. No matter what cover we create, arriving in an Arab country with an Israeli passport guarantees lots of official attention.”
“How many do you need?”
“Two. One for me, and one for our Russian immigrant.”
“That’s easy enough to do. Take a couple of photographs to the American embassy in Tel Aviv. Ask for Mary Pegnataro. She’ll have passports for you within an hour, along with credit cards, and bios if anybody should ask.”
Sagit hung up the phone and reported the conversation to Moshe. “And you think you’re going to get everything in the next five days?” he asked.
Uncertain how to respond, she left the question hanging in the air.
Chapter 14
Alexandra and Carl Holt from Bloomington, Indiana, buckled their seat belts when the captain of Lufthansa flight 820 from Frankfurt to Dubai announced that they were crossing the border from Saudi Arabia into United Arab Emirates, and the plane would be landing in a few minutes. Directly ahead, the sparkling blue waters of the Persian Gulf suggested a quiet calm totally at odds with the violent regimes in Iran and Iraq that abutted its waters. The plane was crowded with a combination of Germans in search of sun and good beaches, wealthy residents of UAE returning from western Europe, their bags stuffed with luxury items, and businessmen in search of the riches for themselves and their companies that flowed in a never-ending stream of black gold.
When the flight attendant, a pretty dark-skinned woman with an Arab name tag, had asked if they had ever been to the UAE before, Alexandra explained that it was their first visit, and they were quite excited. “My husband,” she said, pointing at the man next to her staring intently out of the window, “is a professor of world history at Indiana University. He’s on sabbatical and anxious to study the history of the region.” She herself, Alexandra said, was an amateur photographer and thought “the clear blue skies will be superb for taking good pictures. Besides that, we thought we’d have a perfect vacation. We heard the beaches are great.”
The flight attendant nodded in approval. She had been born in neighboring Sharja, and the beaches in the area were wonderful.
Sagit smiled. She presumed that the authorities in Dubai wouldn’t raise any questions when the flight attendant reported on her American passengers in seats 2A and B.
The spanking new and modern terminal was fitting for oil-rich Dubai—with one of the highest per capita incomes anywhere in the world. With their American passports, the Holts moved quickly through passport control. When the agent asked if they had ever visited Israel, Professor Holt quickly answered in an indignant voice, “That place has no interest for us.”
In response, the agent nodded and stamped their passports. The customs agent made no effort to look inside Sagit’s camera bag.
On David’s recommendation, they had reserved a room at the Jebel Ali, a 270-room beachfront resort, with riding stables and a golf course, on 128 lushly landscaped acres about twenty-five miles south of Dubai along the Arabian Gulf. David thought that it would be sparsely occupied because it was out of season. That, coupled with its out-of-the-way location, made it perfect.
He drove carefully along the highway that paralleled the beach, keeping his distance from some of the speeding maniacs on the road. It was a harsh, forbidding terrain with dusty light shrubs and sandy desert. They passed a camel racetrack.
“I never saw one of those before,” Sagit said.
“Let’s go tonight,” David replied.
“You can. Not me.”
Their king-size room, facing the Gulf, was huge, and when the bellman had gone, David turned the radio on and checked the room thoroughly for bugs. Satisfied, he took a coin out of his pocket. “Before I order the cot, let’s flip to see who gets it tonight.”
“Listen, wiseguy. With the kind of hotels you pick, you blew my budget long ago.”
“Hey, you forgot, Uncle Sam’s paying for this one. We use the credit cards Margaret Joyner supplied.”
“From what CIA records must show about your expense reports in the past, I’m surprised that she agreed to do that.”
“Ah, but she wants to keep track of where we are. What better way to do that than credit card receipts?”
Sagit was dismayed that she hadn’t thought of that. “How’d you figure that out?”
“It’s SOP with the Company,” David said in a condescending voice, displaying a touch of superiority that CIA officials used toward the intelligence agents of other countries. “In the U.S., we have a large budget. We can toss money around.”
“We?”
“Sorry. They. Old habits die hard.” He looked chagrined. How could he sound like that? He’d never be a part of the Company again, not in a million years. “But we’ll fool her. We won’t use her credit cards until we check out. By then, the information on our location that they disclose won’t do her any good.”
The sun was setting behind the hotel. Through the glass doors that led to a patio
, David could see that dusk had settled over the water. A hotel employee was gathering up the few remaining chairs and umbrellas from the deserted beach.
To avoid having the call traced to the hotel, David picked up Sagit’s cell phone. From memory, he dialed his old office number. He got a recording: “You have reached the office of the United States Agricultural Mission. No one is here right now to take your call. Please leave a message, and we will call you back.”
He hung up and called Bill Fox at home. Not expecting to reach Fox this early in the evening, he planned to leave a sufficiently enigmatic message so Fox would return the call to the cell phone.
To his surprise, Fox answered. “Bill Fox here, who’s calling?”
“It’s your old friend, Gunther from ‘Portland, Oregon,’ Bill.” He knew that Fox would recognize his voice; and Portland, Oregon was the code they had agreed to use at their London meeting in Green Park. He just hoped that his former aide would have enough wits not to announce his real name. The Saudis might have bugged Fox’s house, or someone might be listening in on the unsecured line.
“Good grief, Gunther, I haven’t spoken to you since Helen’s funeral in Portland. How long has that been?”
“About five years.”
“God, how awful. Helen and all those people dying in that gas explosion. I still get the willies thinking about it.”
C’mon, Bill, David thought. People may be listening. Don’t overdo it.
David continued, “Well anyhow, I’m over in Dubai for a few days on business, trying to sell computer software to the Conoco people. I’ve got a good connection in Houston. I figure I might be able to parlay it into some business here.”
“So how the hell are you?”
“Pretty good overall, I’d say, though I’m not getting any younger.” Sagit looked at David apprehensively. Shouldn’t he cut this short and get to the point already? He raised his forefinger, asking her for a little patience. He knew how to play Fox.
“How the hell is old Jack?”
“About the same... Say, any chance of getting you to come over here for lunch or dinner? We could catch up on old times.”
“You tell me when.”
“Tomorrow for lunch. One o’clock at the Jebel Ali. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”
“I’ll be there, pardner.”
* * *
As they sat down at an isolated table in the luxurious hotel dining room that evening, Sagit said to David, “I don’t like the idea of our depending so much on Fox. We can’t count on him.”
“C’mon, Sagit. We’ve been though this a dozen times. It’s the only chance we have.”
She took a deep breath. “I know that, but I still don’t like it.”
“I’ve got an idea. Let’s forget about Fox and this whole business until noon tomorrow. We’ve been through so much in the last few days. Tonight and tomorrow morning should be a break for us. We owe it to ourselves. Let’s compartmentalize. Please, Sagit.”
She hesitated for a moment. “It’s hard to turn off.”
“Will you try?”
“I’ll try. I promise.”
“Great.”
He signaled the waiter for a bottle of Dom Perignon.
After two glasses of champagne, the rest of the world began to fade into the distance. For the first time, no one and nothing else existed. Just the two of them.
He told her about himself as a young man growing up in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. He talked about his father’s death and how he had felt. He told her about his anguish during the Vietnam War because his leg prevented him from serving his country, and he was relegated to being with draft dodgers and druggies who had no respect for the wonderful country in which they lived.
“I’m no right-wing fascist,” he said, “and I can even understand the case against the war, but nobody should burn or piss on the flag, for God’s sake.”
Wonderful fish courses came. He ordered a bottle of 1985 DRC Le Tache, proving that with enough money anything can be brought to anywhere on the globe. He told her about his first sexual experience, when he was sixteen, with his cheerleader girlfriend in the backseat of an old Plymouth Valiant after a football game in which he had scored two touchdowns against Ambridge.
The lamb and rice arrived, and he asked her to talk about when she was young. She was startled. For an instant, she hesitated, looking chagrined. She had never spoken about her childhood before with anybody, not Moshe, and none of the men she had dated. With David, though, her inhibitions gave way, and the words came rolling out. She told of her grandfather, the rug merchant, the patriarch who had led the family’s exodus from Iraq to Israel when the Iraqis drove out virtually all of the Jews, sending them to the despised Zionist state.
“The Israeli government wanted to help us, but there were too many of us, all coming at the same time from all of the Arab countries, and the Israeli economy wasn’t strong then, like it is now, when the Russian immigrants came. It was so hard. My family settled in the Hatikvah section of Tel Aviv. What a joke. Hatikvah. Hope. We had no hope. It was a slum. Like the Lower East Side of New York a hundred years ago. We were too poor to hope. All we could do was worry about food for the family.
“As long as Grandfather lived, we had some dignity. When he died, that went too. I was twelve at the time, and I had been his favorite. My mother died a year later. I was the oldest of five children. I had two brothers and two sisters. We all slept in the same room.”
He listened to her mesmerized. It was a part of the Israeli saga he had never heard.
“The Israeli economy started to take off then, fueled by money from Jews in the United States, and my father was healthy. He could have worked in construction, but he was lazy. He thought it was beneath him. In truth, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had earned money. He wouldn’t have gotten food for us, anyway. He would have just lost it playing cards. That gambling of his...”
For an instant tears welled up in her eyes. She quickly wiped them away with a napkin.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“You talked about losing your virginity with a cheerleader in the backseat of a car. Mine wasn’t quite as romantic as that. My father gambled it away.”
He was nonplussed. “What do you mean, he gambled it away?”
“Once when he ran out of money playing cards, he offered sex with me to keep playing, and he lost.”
“You’re kidding.”
She shook her head. “I wish I was.” Ach, with such a fat, dirty, smelly old man. I threw up for a full day afterward.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because I was a fool. He was my father, and he told me to go with that man. I listened to him. It was the last time I ever listened to him.
“After that night I decided to take charge of the family, but I needed to earn money. I was only fourteen then, but I was well developed. I looked a lot older,” and I…
He interrupted her. “With what you’d gone though, it’s no wonder.”
“So anyhow, I talked to a couple of other girls in the neighborhood, who always seemed to have money. They took me with them down to Ha’Yarkon Street along the beach in Tel Aviv. They told me what to do. I hated it, but I had five mouths to feed. So I did what I had to do. At least most of the customers were clean. Not like the old man. They were American soldiers or American tourists whose wives were out shopping.”
A look of disgust covered her face. She was relieved finally to be telling the story, but sickened as she thought about what she had done in those days. Her eyes looked sad, her skin pale. “Then Moshe from the Mossad found me one day. He wanted girls to train and to send into Iraq as Mossad agents. He recruited three of us about the same time. ‘Moshe’s girls,’ they called us. Yael, myself and a girl by the name of Leora, whose family had been upper class in Alexandria, Egypt until the Jews were expelled in ‘56.”
Past the prostitution part of her story, the color returned to her face. Her voice became animated. “Anyhow, he gave me
an apartment in a better area of Tel Aviv and money every month. One day I moved my two brothers and two sisters to that apartment without telling my father. I never saw him again. Moshe sent over a woman—a holocaust survivor—to live with the children when I went away to Iraq. Sara, was her name, from Poland. A wonderful woman. She had lost her whole family in Auschwitz. After I heard about the boxcars and the camps, I didn’t feel sorry for myself. As much as the Arabs hated us, even in ‘48, they never did anything like that.”
“You never married?”
She shook her head from side to side. “I’ve had relationships over the years, but I’ve always broken them off because of my job. I told myself that I was married to the Mossad.” She paused, then slowly she added, “That’s all rationalization. The truth is, you’re the first man...”
She stopped in mid-sentence.
“What?” he asked.
She blushed. “I don’t want to tell you.”
“C’mon.” He smiled at her. “No secrets tonight. I’m being honest with you.”
She swallowed hard. “You’re the first man I’ve ever really been in love with.”
Once the words were out of her mouth, she was relieved. She was in love with him, and she refused to fight that fact any longer.
They didn’t order dessert or coffee. Alone, inside the gold-encased elevator, they kissed passionately as the elevator climbed three floors. Inside their room, they kissed the entire time they removed their clothes. Naked, he picked her up and carried her out to the patio, to the plush-white pillowed chaise on the balcony. There they made love slowly and tenderly in the glow of the moonlight.
For an hour afterward, they lay in each other’s arms on the chaise. When she fell asleep, he picked her up and carried her inside.
As he placed her down on the bed, she clutched his arm and said, “And you’ll be here in the morning, won’t you?”
He kissed her gently, “I promise I will. I love you, too, Sagit.”
* * *
The next morning they made love on the balcony before breakfast and again afterward. They went downstairs, and he insisted on buying her a bathing suit, an orange string bikini that she said she was too embarrassed to wear, but he convinced her to do it anyhow. They swam and sunned on the beach until the alarm on his wristwatch went off. It was eleven-thirty.
