The Chosen
Page 27
“As I always say, I don’t think anything at this stage. Anyway, how do you know we’re looking at two different leads? We know next to nothing, Fredrika. We think we’re looking for two perpetrators, but it could just as easily be three. Or four. Or just one. We think one of them might be a woman, but we don’t know that either.”
“If you give me Mona Samson’s details, I can find out if she’s entered Israel over the past few days.”
“Good idea. Because I’m wondering why I can’t get hold of her either.”
It wasn’t an irrelevant question, but neither was it the most important. One of their colleagues had spoken to her, and she had confirmed Saul Goldmann’s alibi. There wasn’t necessarily anything suspicious about the fact that they couldn’t get in touch with her at the moment, but if she was in Israel, it became more difficult to regard her as a person of no interest. She might have been there all the time, in which case Saul didn’t have an alibi.
“Israel again,” Alex said. “Don’t tell me it’s just a coincidence.”
He was quite right: whichever way they turned, they ended up in Israel.
“Then again, is that so surprising?” Fredrika said. “After all, we are investigating the murders of members of the Solomon Community, and the victims come from Israel. So it’s not so strange if the case has a geographical bias.”
Alex said something she didn’t hear.
“Sorry?”
“I don’t agree. You have a point, but the murder of the two boys and Polly’s abduction have something to do with events that took place in Israel. I’m sure of it. And there are people who obviously know what’s going on but refuse to talk. Which is annoying the hell out of me.”
They were in agreement on that point.
The sounds around Alex grew quieter, and she assumed he had gone inside.
“Where are you?”
“At work. I’m going to stay for a few more hours, then go home. Call me anytime if something comes up. And I mean that literally: anytime.”
“Thanks.”
She liked people who made her feel safe, and Alex was one of those people. His voice could bring her down to earth in seconds, blowing away the threatening clouds she thought she could see gathering on the horizon. When he had ended the call, she felt unexpectedly lonely.
Until Isak rang her.
“I’m on my way to the hotel,” he said. “Wait for me in the restaurant.”
“I’m already there. What’s happened?”
“We think we’ve got a name for the Lion.”
LONDON
Wood paneling on the walls and eighties music coming through the speakers. They were in a pub five minutes away from Fred Banks’s house. They had been sitting there for three hours. At first the words had come slowly. Eden had done all the talking. She hadn’t thought through what she was going to say, how she would say it. To begin with, she had felt inhibited by the fact that she wasn’t sure how much Fred knew, then she had decided that it didn’t matter.
More important assets than her own integrity were at risk.
She had to make her peace with the past and move on. Ultimately she also had to forgive herself, but neither Fred nor anyone else could help her there. She would have to manage that on her own.
She had practically dragged Fred out onto the street and down to the pub, appealing to the warm heart she knew he had.
He had said he would give her half an hour. If she hadn’t said anything that caught his attention by then, he would walk out. She noted with relief that he was still there, and he had started talking. Tentatively, hesitantly, but he was talking.
Eden was surprised to hear that Angela was no longer in his life. She had found someone else and was expecting their first child. Fred tried to look as if he didn’t care, but she could see the sorrow as clearly as fire in his eyes.
He had been promoted at work; without turning a hair he admitted that his skilled deception in the investigation into Eden’s affair with Efraim had been a key factor in his success.
“When I was called to the first meeting, I had no idea what was coming. And when they told me, I laughed in their faces. Said you would rather die than be unfaithful to Mikael. Then I stopped laughing and got angry. Said I would tell you everything. Told them I would walk away, get another job. They let me carry on like a steamroller; then they showed me the pictures.”
He fell silent. Eden had given him her version of events, and now it was his turn. She had put all her cards on the table, told him everything.
Except the fact that Efraim was the father of her children.
“At first I thought the pictures were fake,” Fred went on. “You with a Mossad operative? It was unthinkable. You had always been so loyal. But the evidence was unequivocal. And I was there the first time you met—do you remember?”
She did. Fred had been at the conference where she met Efraim.
“I don’t recall you and Efraim speaking to one another,” she said.
“We didn’t. But I saw you talking to him, and I was pleased. He made your face light up, and you’d been so low after the miscarriage.”
Eden could have wept.
So it had been obvious that he made her happy. Brightened her life. In order to crush her.
“The boss explained who he was: a Mossad operative who was well known for his ability to recruit agents. They couldn’t believe their eyes when you were seen with him one day.”
“So they knew right from the start? And nobody thought of confronting me?”
“Not right from the start,” Fred said. “But pretty early on they put together a top-secret team to monitor your relationship. I wasn’t brought in until about six months later. They had been waiting for you to tell your superiors that you had been the target of a recruitment attempt by the Israelis, but instead you carried on seeing him. They felt it was highly unlikely that you didn’t know who he was, who he worked for.”
Eden shook her head.
“I didn’t have a clue.”
Fred’s expression hardened.
“As far as I was concerned, the fact that you were actually having an affair sealed the deal. If you were capable of deceiving the person you said you loved more than anything in the world, I thought you could easily be unfaithful to your employer as well, so to speak.”
Of course. That’s the way friendship worked. It could be a blessing, and it could create problems. In this case it had evidently done both.
“I’ve explained what drove me into Efraim’s arms.”
She tried to sound defiant, but she couldn’t look Fred in the eye.
“You’ve explained now, but at the time I didn’t have that information. Nor was I in a position to ask for it. Anyway, I’m still not sure I understand. I can see how you fell for him the first time round, but the second time? When you and Mikael had just had the twins? I don’t get it.”
Eden fixed her gaze on a napkin on the table.
“It was a very difficult time,” she said.
As if that were a satisfactory explanation.
Fred didn’t respond. Eden wanted him to tell her more. About Efraim Kiel and how she could get to him.
“You said that MI5 already knew who Efraim was. How come?”
Fred looked grim.
“These are sensitive matters,” he said. “Top secret.”
She realized that. That was why she had come to London: to access information that would otherwise be unavailable to her.
“You have to give me whatever you’ve got,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll never be rid of him.”
Give me the ammunition to blow the bastard into a thousand pieces.
Fred hesitated for a long time.
Eventually he spoke:
“You know, deep down . . .”
She waited. Held her breath.
“Deep down I think I’ve always known that you had walked into a trap. You showed very poor judgment, but you did nothing illegal. And you’re right: the only person you real
ly betrayed was Mikael.”
She could have wept with relief.
“I’ll tell you what you need to know,” Fred said. “But not here. Let’s go back to my place.”
• • •
Nothing much had changed in Fred’s house except that all the photographs that had adorned the walls of the hallway had been removed. Perhaps Angela had taken them with her, or perhaps they had been thrown away.
Fred went into the kitchen to fetch a bottle of wine, and they sat down in the living room.
“It was after 9/11,” Fred began. “Two thousand and one. A lot of people thought it was our turn next. Through an undercover informant, MI5 learned that Palestinian terrorists were preparing a major attack on several British embassies around the world. A major investigation team was assembled to look into the threat, but they got nowhere. So they contacted the Israelis. The key player in the plot was supposed to be in a village on the West Bank, to which we had no access. The various attacks were to be carried out by Palestinians living in their diaspora across the world.”
Eden listened carefully. She thought about the role the British had played in Palestine after the First World War and the subsequent chaos which still reigned in 2001. Eden hadn’t started working for MI5 at that stage.
“The Israelis were interested when they heard what we knew. MI5’s contact on the Israeli side was Efraim Kiel. He led a special team operating on the West Bank, and they had someone in that particular village who was both reliable and willing to cooperate.”
Fred took a sip of his wine, and Eden automatically reached for her glass. She shouldn’t drink; she knew that. But if Fred was drinking, she didn’t want to sit there stone-cold sober. It sent out the wrong signals.
“Anyway, MI5 set up a joint operation with Mossad in order to track down the man behind the plot and thus put a stop to it. Efraim Kiel’s team were supposed to locate him with the help of a source on the West Bank. I don’t know how much you remember about the situation in Israel at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but it was no picnic over there.”
Eden remembered those days very well. That was when her parents, particularly her mother, had been radicalized and eventually decided to emigrate to Israel. Eden recalled endless discussions with her mother and father, weeping with rage at the dinner table.
It had always been clear to Eden that disappointment was the strongest impetus for violence—disappointment over everything that didn’t happen or didn’t happen fast enough.
The West Bank had been in flames during those years, and that was also when the decision was made to start constructing the barrier that now separated the two peoples. Running a source in a Palestinian village at that time must have been doomed to failure.
“I assume it didn’t end well,” Eden said.
“To say the least. What I’m about to tell you stays between us, Eden. It’s more sensitive than everything else I’ve told you put together.”
She nodded. She had no words to express what she was feeling.
“In February 2002, just before the Israelis moved in and reoccupied the West Bank, they thought they had a breakthrough in the source operation in the Palestinian village. Mossad contacted MI5, and we were offered the chance to be there when they went in to seize the man suspected of being behind the plot. We already had staff in Jerusalem; one of them joined Efraim Kiel’s team and accompanied them to the West Bank. A high-risk project in those days. For example, sometimes Palestinian terrorists or insurgents rigged up booby-trapped buildings.”
Booby traps. Eden had never needed to worry about that kind of danger, but she knew all about them: bombs that went off when someone stood on them; bombs that could be hidden under the floor so that an entire building would collapse on top of the intruder.
“Efraim’s team ended up standing outside a house they were afraid was booby-trapped,” Fred went on. “For that reason they hesitated before going in, and Kiel moved aside to request reinforcements so that they could smoke out anyone who might be inside. At that moment a child emerged, a boy aged about ten. Two members of the team went over and spoke to him, asked if he was home alone or if there were any adults in the house.”
“They did what?”
“I know—unbelievable. They didn’t want him in there if they were going to use teargas or blow the place up, so they confronted him. But they completely misjudged his reaction. The boy panicked and pulled away from them. He was much faster than they were, of course, and he ran straight back inside through the nearest door, which evidently wasn’t the one through which he had come out. And the team found out whether the house was booby-trapped or not.”
The wine became impossible to swallow, stuck in her throat.
“The house went up,” Eden said.
Fred nodded, his face expressionless.
“They didn’t have a chance; in two seconds the whole place was in flames. We later received confirmation that the suspect had died in the explosion. There were no attacks on British embassies. Afterward, however, MI5 was extremely critical of the way in which the operation had been carried out. A child died that day. How many British citizens do you have to save for it to be worth the life of a Palestinian boy?”
Eden had no answer to that question. She looked down into her glass, feeling wave after wave of nausea. She realized how little she had known about Efraim’s background.
“We had nothing more to do with Efraim Kiel after that,” Fred said. “Until the day when he approached one of our brightest and best.”
He gave Eden a wry smile, and she couldn’t help but smile back.
“Were you there on the West Bank?” she asked.
Fred shook his head.
“I found out about the operation when I was reading up about Kiel in order to understand who he was. Painful secrets hidden away in the archives under a bizarre code name.”
“How bizarre can it be?” Eden said. “How do you name an operation that so obviously went against important principles that we’re supposed to represent?”
“You give it the name the Israelis gave their source. And on this occasion the source on the West Bank who led Efraim Kiel’s team to the main suspect was apparently known as the Paper Boy.”
The longing had been aroused deep inside him on the very first day, when the snow outside the Solomon Community was still red with blood and the two boys were missing. He had felt his pulse rate increase, felt the surge of adrenaline. And he knew that he had done the wrong thing on the day when he walked away from the police and handed in his badge without even putting up a fight. Had he been crazy? How could he have done something so stupid?
Peder Rydh knew the answer to that question.
He had been out of his mind.
His brother had been murdered, and nothing else mattered.
But now things were different. Peder was different.
I want to go back, he thought. I really, really want my old job back.
There were so many things he missed; being around Alex was one of them. Working with such an experienced investigator so early in his career had been a blessing. Peder’s success could have taken him a very long way if he had played his cards right. It wasn’t just the fact that he had shot his brother’s killer that had landed him in hot water; there were the women, too.
So damn pointless.
Unsatisfactory sex with women for whom he had no respect. You just didn’t behave like that. Not toward them, and definitely not toward your own wife. One thing had led to another, and eventually he had been working so hard at being a bastard that he no longer knew how to be anything else. Until now.
Peder had finally been forced to grow up. The question was whether he had left it until too late.
He couldn’t stop thinking about the murders within the Solomon Community. He realized he had begun to regard them as his case, his responsibility. Ylva watched with unspoken anxiety as he became unreachable, lost in his thoughts. She wondered if he was moving away from her again.
The newspapers were following the search for Polly Eisenberg. Her parents had gone into seclusion and were making no comment. Peder had met them only a few times, but they had made a good impression, particularly Carmen, the mother. She seemed calmer than her husband, more comfortable in her own skin.
He wanted to ring Alex, find out how far he had gotten with the investigation, ask if he could help in any way. Most of all he wanted to ask whether Alex wanted him back. Whether he missed him.
I’d do anything for a second chance.
The sounds from the boys’ bedroom as Ylva tried to get them to settle down reminded him that he had already been given a second chance. Things could have been much worse. He could have lost his whole family as well.
His work cell phone rang. He answered quickly, not wanting to disturb Ylva and the children.
It was the general secretary.
“Sorry to disturb you on a Sunday, but . . . I have something to tell you. Something I forgot when we last spoke.”
“What’s this about?”
“Efraim Kiel,” the general secretary said slowly.
Peder took a deep breath.
“Yes?”
He heard a sigh.
“I don’t think this is important, I really don’t. But after you asked me where Efraim Kiel was when Simon and Abraham went missing, I thought back to that afternoon. I told you Efraim was with me, but that’s not the case.”
“No?”
“Everything happened so fast. First of all, Josephine was shot just after three o’clock. We were both there when the police arrived, but then Efraim went off, said he had personal contacts who might be able to help push the police a little harder. With his background he obviously knows people the rest of us wouldn’t have access to, so I didn’t react to what he said. And he did come back; he was there when you came in, and he was the one who made the calls to check up on your references.”
Damn it to hell.
“So what you’re saying is that when the boys disappeared on their way to tennis coaching, Efraim wasn’t in the community center,” Peder said.