“We’re going to have you bring Gavi back in from the cold to work this case,” Didi said. “One shot. Up or down. Guilty or innocent. With you as the cutout so the Office has plausible deniability if the whole operation heads south.”
“And if he screws up again,” Ash said with relish, “we’re going to arrange a rerun of the nice little traffic accident the PM wouldn’t authorize after Tel Aviv.”
Dinner was surreal.
Lamb shanks and small talk while Cohen kept angling to talk to Didi in private, and Didi kept resolutely refusing to take the hint, and Ash and Li chatted with Zillah and the twins as if they were just there for a social occasion.
“Are you going to see the new Ahmed Aziz spin while you’re here?” Zillah asked. “I’ve heard it’s great. And our Ring-side friends always seem to enjoy those.”
Cohen realized abruptly that she was talking to him. “I won’t go to Ahmed Aziz spins with Catherine anymore,” he answered. “The last time we went to one she started bitching and moaning before the credits had even rolled, and a week later she still hadn’t paused for breath.”
“Well, I was right, wasn’t I?” Li protested. “The so-called hero committed eighteen fatal errors before the opening credits even rolled. And anyway, I don’t like violent movies. If the violence is realistic it’s depressing. And if it’s not realistic, it’s just stupid. How any intelligent adult can sit through such crap totally escapes me.”
“They don’t sit through it anymore in Israel,” Cohen snapped irritably. “Israelis like their violence automated and sanitary these days. After all, shooting fourteen-year-olds isn’t much fun when you have to look them in the eye.”
Everyone around the table froze. Didi, caught with his glass in midair, looked significantly at Zillah, who just threw up her hands as if to say it wasn’t her argument.
Cohen put his fork and knife down, folded his napkin into a precise square, and set it beside his plate. “Zillah. Forgive me. I’ve been unpardonably rude. I’m not myself. In fact, I’m not feeling at all well at the moment. I think if no one minds, I’ll just step out for a breath of fresh air.”
Outside the sun was well and truly set, and the air had that damp glacial chill that Cohen never had gotten used to in all the long centuries of the artificial ice age. He walked down the path, his feet thudding dully in pine needles, and stood under the lace-and-shadows canopy of the cedars of Lebanon, feeling Roland’s poor head throbbing.
You’d think, Cohen told himself, that after four centuries I could learn to control my temper a little better.
But it wasn’t so easy. If anything, it got harder. His irrational likes and dislikes only got stronger. His emotions only ran hotter with the additional mileage. The Israelis weren’t fools, he told himself, pulling the plug on EMET when it got too self-aware for comfort. Humans claimed to understand themselves better as they got older, and perhaps they did. But Cohen was beginning to suspect that for him the process was running in the opposite direction.
“Doing a little arithmetic of the soul?” Didi asked, coming up behind him with the cautious tread of the old field agent he was.
“If I am,” Cohen said savagely, “then one of us has a mistake in his math somewhere. Because we’re sure as hell not coming up with the same answers.”
“Mmm.” Didi craned his head to look at the towering foliage.
“What’s Gavi doing out at Yad Vashem anyway? And when’s he coming back?”
“He’s not. He’s the permanent caretaker.”
This piece of news was so bizarre that Cohen thought he must have misheard it. Why would a man who’d been in close competition for the top post at the Mossad be baby-sitting an abandoned museum? And if he was going to baby-sit a museum, why on earth would they send him to the Holocaust Museum, now centrally located in the contaminated thickness of the Line? Not knowing what question to ask first, he settled for the most trivial one. “But…that’s a Line job.”
“So? They froze sperm before they sent him.”
“I’m glad to hear his sperm’s safe,” Cohen said sarcastically. “There is the little question of the man himself, however.”
“No one made him do it.”
“And no one gave him anything else to do either, am I right? It was either that or rot in some stinking veterans’ hospital?”
“He’s not a cripple, Cohen. Israel has extremely good prosthesis technology.”
Cohen started to speak, then bit the words back. He was breathing hard—or rather Roland was. He forced himself to compartmentalize, to cut the emotive loop that tied his psychological reactions to the ’face’s physiological ones. He knew it looked eerie, even frightening, to humans. But there was no sense in making Roland pay for his fight with Didi.
“So I take it you’re not going to talk to Gavi for me?” Didi asked.
“I’m not sure I can. He hasn’t answered my letters for almost two years. And he hasn’t cashed his royalty checks either. I don’t think he wants to see me.”
“I wouldn’t put too much stock by that. I think he’s gone a little off the rails out there. Some crazy idea about building the museum a golem.”
Cohen had heard about the idea too, in the streamspace haunts where Gavi appeared, rara avis, asked the odd, intriguing question about AI architecture, and vanished. People had started calling it Gavi’s golem. And it was exactly what Didi had called it: crazy.
“I suspect that whether he wants to see you and whether he needs to see you are two very different things,” Didi said. “And you have reason to see him as well.” He paused to let that thought sink in. “If I were you and I believed that Gavi was innocent and Absalom was still roaming the eighth floor, then I would be very wary of talking to anyone still on the Mossad payroll. Including me. And if, for instance, I had a Syndicate defector to debrief, it might occur to me that the one man I was pretty sure wasn’t responsible for Tel Aviv was also one of the best interrogators in the country and quite up to the task of dissecting Arkady’s pretty little head for you.”
“You’re telling me to smuggle Arkady into the Line to talk to Gavi? And then what? Announce to Gavi that you’re looking over his shoulder and he’d better hand you the dirt and not try any funny business? I wouldn’t blame him if he shot us himself!”
“Oh, not Gavi. He always smiles when he tells you to go to hell.”
“You’re still putting a hell of a load on his shoulders. And you’re asking me and mine to risk a hell of a lot on what looks like a pretty crazy gamble.”
“You have to set your own priorities, of course,” Didi said placidly.
“Is that an implied Do Variable?”
“No, boychik. It’s a good old-fashioned Jewish guilt trip.”
Cohen rubbed at Roland’s forehead again, trying to break up the ache.
“The thing I just can’t get past, Didi, is Tel Aviv. I was there. I know it wasn’t nearly as neat on the ground as you make it sound in the retelling. I think Gavi was innocent. And not just because it’s what I want to think.”
“Surely it’s crossed your minds that you don’t know everything.”
“Of course. But I know Gavi.”
Silence.
“I mean what’s the motivation? Money? Give me a break! When the ARTIFICIAL LIE royalties started coming in you know what he did with the money? Bought fifteen new pairs of socks and underwear so he could switch from doing laundry twice a month to doing it once a month.”
Didi smiled fondly. “That sounds like Gavi, all right.” The fond smile lingered for a moment, then faded into an expression that Cohen didn’t want to put a name to. “It also sounds like the basic personality type of every unmaterialistic ideologically motivated high-level double agent in the classic case studies.”
“Bullshit. Those guys were all frustrated ambitious types. And Gavi and ambition just don’t fit in the same sentence. Gavi would have been content to sit in your shadow for the rest of his life. Or in Ash’s shadow if it came to that. He
never wanted to run the Mossad, just rewrite the flowcharts and tinker with the data abstraction models.”
“Yes. Funny, isn’t it? Gavi had the charisma and the physical bravery to lead agents in the field…but he always preferred to be the one who stood in the shadows and held all the keys and knew where all the back doors were. Forget the friend you think you knew. Forget the big eyes and the little-boy grin and the wrinkled T-shirts. What do the choices he made in his career say to you?”
“Oh, come on, Didi! Every eccentricity looks bad when you start from the assumption that a man’s a traitor. I’m not saying you’re one of the ones who was ready to suspect him because of his last name. But I still have to ask why ?”
“Everyone has his dumb blonde and his rented Ferrari.”
The dumb blonde and the rented Ferrari rule, known as Rule 5 around the Office, was part of the age-old Mossad lexicon. It referred to a famous Mossad operation in which a field team had recruited an Iraqi nuclear physicist by dressing a blonde katsa up like a floozy and having her drive by his bus stop every morning in a rented red Ferrari. When she finally offered him a ride he took it—hook, line, and sinker.
The logical conclusion, one borne out by centuries of covert work, was that if you scratched a potential recruit’s guiltiest itch, he’d fall into your lap. It was just a question of wading through enough poison ivy to figure out what that itch was. For some people it was sex or money. For others it was the lure of intrigue, or the need to feel they were on the side of the angels, or the urge to prove an overbearing parent wrong by amounting to something…even in secret.
No one was immune. Everyone had something to prove or some illusion too sweet to surrender. Even the blessed ones—the ones like Gavi, who seemed to walk through the morass of human greed and pettiness without being tarnished by it—even they had their dumb blonde and their rented Ferrari.
“Not Gavi,” Cohen said.
“Even Gavi.”
“Not Gavi.”
“If you really believe that,” Didi said so smoothly that Cohen didn’t hear the trap spring until he was well and truly caught, “I’m giving you the chance to prove it.”
“And what guarantee do I have that you won’t throw him to the wolves again in the name of playing it safe?”
Instead of answering Didi bent to inspect the trunk of the nearest cedar of Lebanon. From inside the house Cohen heard the boisterous opening bars of a Chopin mazurka.
“The tree’s dying,” Didi said. He tore a piece of bark from the great trunk and rubbed it between his fingers until the red dust drifted down and settled on the garden path like a bloodstain. “There are worms in the wood. The tree surgeon wants to cut down this tree before the rot spreads to the others. It seems a terrible waste. My daughters grew up playing in this tree. I thought it would outlive me. But he says that if we wait too long the rot will spread and we’ll lose the entire grove. And one tree, however beloved, does seem a small price to pay for the safety of all the rest.”
They left through the garage, just like they’d come in.
As he stepped into Didi’s car for the drive home, Cohen turned back and saw Li and Ash standing together in the hallway. Ash was stooping, her sleek head bent over Li’s to whisper in the smaller woman’s ear. Li stood there like the rock she was, arms crossed over her chest, brow knit, lips pursed, nodding intently.
“What was that about?” Cohen asked when she was settled in the car next to him.
“Nothing. She was Mossad liaison to UNSec for three years. Just asking me about some mutual friends.”
But in the silence behind the words he felt her mind flinch away from his, and he tasted the bittersweet taint of a guilty secret.
FRUSTRATION
(Random Walks on a Rugged Fitness Landscape)
EMET, and the Palestinian response to EMET, changed the nature of war itself. Combat on the Green Line was no longer a contest between armies of individual humans or posthumans, but a quasi-biological arms race between two vast and coevolving Emergent AIs. The battlefield became a fitness landscape. Tactical planning gave way to spin glass modeling, virtual annealing, and drift-enhanced memory-based learning algorithms. War was plucked from the realm of human ethics and morality and transplanted in brave new ground where words like guilt, heroism, cowardice, and sacrifice were just the linguistic echo of an obsolete weapons platform.
—YOSHIKI KURAMOTO TN 283854-0089. IS THE MOON THERE WHEN NOBODY LOOKS? MY IMAGINARY LIFE IN MATHEMATICS. NEW DELHI UNIVERSITY PRESS. INDIA ARC: 2542.
And why would i want to help you?” Osnat asked when Arkady finally got the chance to plead his case with her.
She had a habit of turning her head when she spoke to fix her good eye on you. It reminded Arkady of old spinfeed of hawks.
“Because…,” he began. But he didn’t have a reason. Not unless the vague feeling that she was the only human who didn’t hate or despise him was a reason.
“Arkady—” she began, then stopped abruptly. “It’d be a lot easier to talk to you if I knew your real name.”
“I don’t have any other name.”
“Then what was all that nonsense Korchow was spewing back there about designations and categories? How many Arkadys are there, anyway?”
Moshe’s question again. But it sounded different on Osnat’s lips.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “There were six hundred in my cohort.”
“And when you meet another one of them, he’s just—”
“Arkady.”
“Except for this Arkasha person.”
“Korchow was exaggerating a bit there.” Arkady shifted uncomfortably. “It’s a nickname. He’s not the only person who ever had a nickname.”
Osnat hesitated visibly, took a breath, and let it out on a repressed sigh. “What’s the deal with Korchow, anyway?” she asked in a tone that made him think it wasn’t the question she’d meant at first to ask. “I didn’t think any of the Syndicates even made a K Series.”
“They don’t. Korchow’s just a name for humans to use. His real name’s Andrej.”
He could see her puzzling through that one.
“It’s phonetic. KnowlesSyndicate is authorized for more A Series than any other Syndicate. And there aren’t a lot of names with AK. It’s a joke, of sorts.”
“Not a very funny one.”
“Most KnowlesSyndicate jokes aren’t very funny, except to them. They’re spies. What do you expect?”
It was weeks before he understood the full import of the raised eyebrow that comment earned him.
“So I take it Arkady isn’t a KnowlesSyndicate name?”
He blinked in surprise and mild offense, then told himself that all constructs probably looked alike to humans. “Rostov. I’m a researcher. A scientist.”
A forager after knowledge, one of his teachers had liked to say. Arkady always thought of that phrase when he saw ants at work.
He glanced across his cell, reassuring himself that the little honey-pot ants he’d lured into his prison were still with him. They ought to be; he’d been sharing a sizable portion of his scanty meals with them. And what sensible swarm wouldn’t opt for a plentiful and reliable food source in this easy-to-navigate, predator-free landscape of linoleum tiles? Arkady’s arrival had single-handedly turned the marginal territory of a small young swarm into prime habitat, and he took some satisfaction from imagining their nests’ frenetic expansion, with foragers passing the fruit of their foraging on to the nestbound minor workers, and the queen lying vast and fertile at the heart of her brood.
“So, fine. You’re not a spy,” Osnat snapped. “Then why are you working for Korchow?”
“Why do you take Moshe’s orders?”
“Taking orders is what soldiers are for.”
“But you’re not a soldier anymore.”
A momentary hesitation. “No.”
“You’re—is the word employee?—an employee of GolaniTech. Along with Moshe. And you both work for Ashwarya Sofaer. Why?
”
Her lips tightened in annoyance. “Because she pays us.”
“But Moshe treats you differently than the others. Why?”
A slow, mocking smile spread across her face. “If you’re asking have I slept with him, the answer’s no.”
“Even though you’re a workpair?”
“You seem to have a pretty odd idea of office etiquette, if you don’t mind my saying so. And does everyone in the Syndicates expect complete strangers to answer personal questions on demand?”
“There are no strangers in the Syndicates. We’re all brothers.”
“Sure you are. You and the Interfaithers and every other wacko religious cult in the history of the universe.”
Her eyes wandered restlessly across the room.
“Ugh!” she said. “Fucking ants.” And before Arkady understood what she was about to do, she strode across the room and began stamping out his little foragers.
He leapt up, so horrified that all speech, all thought, fled his mind. He crossed the room in two steps and knocked her sideways and grabbed her arm to keep her away from them.
At which point the world turned upside down and exploded.
He must have caught her completely by surprise, he realized later, or she wouldn’t have hurt him so badly. When the pain receded, he was sitting on the bed with no idea how he’d returned there, panting, and feeling like his stomach and kidneys were about to burst. And Osnat was holding a wet towel to his jaw.
“I’m really, really sorry, Arkady. Of course. Ants. Shit. I didn’t even stop to think. Are you all right?”
She looked sick. He felt as if he were seeing, for the first time, the woman inside the soldier. No, he corrected himself. Not the woman inside the soldier, but the woman who was the soldier. Because there was no inside or outside with Osnat, no layers under layers. That was what had drawn him to her from the beginning, though he could only now put words to it.
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