“A little more than that,” he replied. “About a year after the unsuccessful Mossad attempt to assassinate Khaled Mashal, head of Hamas, in Amman, King Hussein kicked all the Hamas leaders out of Jordan. He died a little while after that. His son, Abdullah, the present king, has been ruling ever since and there’s constant talk of the return of the Hamas leaders to Amman. Fatah has filled the vacuum left by Hamas, and the suicide bombing on a No. 19 bus in Jerusalem last week was the work of their Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. Shin Bet intelligence tells us Fatah is drunk with victory and is planning to do more. We know nothing at all about their infrastructure in Amman.”
I had indeed been wondering if we were going to sit with our arms folded after that bus bombing, in which eleven Jews were killed, but I knew there was no point asking because I wouldn’t get a reply. We were only one of many squads, and perhaps another one had been assigned to take retaliatory action.
Udi continued: “We do not want to find ourselves in the same situation we were in before the Mashal incident, when our operatives didn’t know the arena or the actors and where they hung out. So we’ve been carrying out occasional surveillance ops on the Hamas people who remained in Jordan or returned to Amman, as you did in Cyprus. Updating addresses, filling in gaps in pre-op intelligence files. This time, we want to get to know the Fatah functionaries as well. They are providing quite a lot of funding and weaponry, although their high command is here, in the West Bank.”
I had no doubts as to the importance of this mission. Udi saw fit to stress that, “Amman is what we call a ‘soft target’ but it must not be taken lightly. We’ve already had one phenomenal cock-up there. The main difference with Limassol is that you’ll be walking around in areas that are totally Palestinian, suspicious and sensitive, and you’ll stand out far more than you did in Cyprus, with everything that this implies. You’ll start working on the intelligence with Moshik, and then Avi will go over the plan and your cover. I’ll define the goals for you. Oh, and it’s important for you to know that you’ll be there on your own.”
I had the same feeling as I had before going to Cyprus and on the way to Warsaw: this was for real. How long would I have these butterflies in my stomach before missions? After Amman there would be the really tough targets, Beirut perhaps, or Damascus or even Tehran. It was clear that Udi was preparing me for that stage by stage and, as in every selection process, the constant examination and screening boosted my hunger for success, my desire to make it. Somewhere deep inside my mind a thought was taking shape that didn’t dare come to the fore: when I finally did perform the critical act, the one for which I had been trained and for the likes of which I was posing as Ron Friedlich, and following which I would feel I had justified the investment in me and had repaid my moral debt to the organization and to the state, only then would I feel free to go back to my Niki. If she still wanted me.
“You’ll go when you are ready,” Udi told me. “But we always set a tentative date, and that’s one week from now.”
I felt like someone who’d been told to come back in a week for his biopsy results: not necessarily a death sentence, but the possibility of one. Of course, it wasn’t really the same thing, because I’d chosen a job that included high-risk missions in target countries and that meant something to me.
I knew what the two great crossroads in my life had been, when I had made a certain decision that had closed off other possibilities: when I had abandoned art and when I abandoned Niki. Since childhood I had set being an artist as my goal in life. Because drawing and painting were the most natural and primal thing to emerge from me, and on the very day that my career as an artist took off, at the opening of my first exhibition, I had been diverted onto another path. When I rediscovered the lost love of my life, that path led me away from her. I knew I would continue on the path I had chosen. This sprang from an existential need that charged my life with greater significance than had either art or Niki.
I wondered why. After all, I wasn’t a believer in grandiose ideas like the eternity of Israel. In a few thousand years’ time, our people wouldn’t exist. In a few decades’ time, I myself wouldn’t exist. Only what I did in those few decades had any significance for me. In the light of all this, was it right for me to devote my life to defending the Jewish people and its state, and to sacrifice on this altar the things that sprang from my own inner forces – my artistic talent and my love for Niki? Were the genetic links that flowed from my grandfather to my father and to me, and my membership in the Jewish “flock”, stronger and more deserving of realization than my talents and emotions? All of these elements had genetic-biological aspects, not merely the sense of belonging to the collective. My love, like anyone’s love, was also a kind of biological-genetic attribute without which we wouldn’t exist today. And to a certain extent, so was my artistic ability. So what was it that determined which of these took precedence over the others?
I’d never have thought that my biology studies at school, my major subject which gave me a good understanding of the logic of nature, would place me in such a concrete dilemma. The solution was by no means clear cut and unequivocal, and the fact that I, nonetheless, was making an unequivocal choice bothered me a lot. I felt overwhelmed by events, and that I was losing control over my freedom to choose. This wasn’t right for the judicious, rational person that I thought I was, until then. I was used to evaluating situations and then making decisions, and not to being dragged into them.
Moshik slave-drove me for days on end. The quantity of material he fed me in the briefing room, and the files he left for me to study in my “free time”, were inordinate and insufferable. The field intelligence on the Hamas personnel was good, and the main difficulty I had was learning the routes to the homes of the Fatah men, where all we had were the addresses and a few partial descriptions obtained by various Shin Bet agents or compiled by our intelligence from open sources. There was nothing visual that my eyes could absorb and memorize.
To save time, I didn’t go home. I had everything I needed at the base. There were showers, a TV, and a kitchen, and I avoided both the trip in the rain and having to be in my place, which evoked memories and longings I could do without.
It was quite strange, being alone in the large barracks, with the only sound coming from the rain lashing the roof and the gusts of wind whistling outside. The solitude sent light tremors running through me which I mistakenly and willingly took to be caused by the cold, and I warmed myself up with another cup of coffee, or a quick workout in the gym. Because my room was the only one in the building that was heated, I made these sorties brief, and returned to sit by the radiator and painstakingly study the intelligence files, until weariness overcame me and I went to bed.
When Moshik tested me after a few days, I had mastered the map of Amman and the traffic arrangements there, everything I had to know about the various security forces, and the names and addresses of the Hamas and Fatah personnel. The thought that one of them may have been the recruiter, the dispatcher or the mastermind behind “my” terror attack was abruptly cut off by Moshik, my channel of communication to what was happening in the outside world, as soon as I raised it.
“It was on the news. It can’t be that you didn’ hear it,” he said. “No time ago at all, at the beginning of December. The Shin Bet located some of the top Hamasniks in the West Bank. One of them was Hamdi Hasanin Rumana, who recruited Mahmoud Sharitakh. They must have shaken it out of Sharitakh. Anyway, one night they tried to pick some of them up, and Rumana resisted. He was killed.”
Once again I felt a slight drop in my motivation. The circle had been closed, without me. But it wasn’t a circle, it was a spiral. Someone had recruited this Rumana, and perhaps that someone was living in Amman.
I began working on my cover, as the Canadian Ron Friedlich, whose main occupations were painting, photography and travel. When I sat with Avi he tripped me up with some questions and I had to hone a lot of the details of my story. I practised sketching Bedouins, camels
and horses, so I’d get them right when I carried on drawing in Jordan. I decided it would be easiest to make outline drawings and then colour each one in pencil. I equipped myself with some pencils and Pilot pens to make the outline sketches, and a set of Caran d’Ache coloured pencils. At this point, Udi arrived with my operational order and the specific tasks I was to carry out. As he had said, it was similar to my Cyprus mission but in an Arab country and, what was more, most of the addresses were in Palestinian neighbourhoods, some even in areas that were considered refugee camps. “Learn every detail of the assignment, picture the contingencies and your responses, and add another contingency of your own, something that may go wrong, at all stages of your trip, and how you’ll get out of it. That’s how I’ll know the mission is in your head and not just on paper.”
It seemed to me that Udi was relating rather nonchalantly to my mission, perhaps because it looked simple to him, or he was preoccupied with another operation, with Ronen, Jerry and Dudu. In our little squad, although we lived together some of the time, each of us dealt solely with his own duties, and I had only a rough idea of what they were doing. I understood their mission involved gathering pre-op intelligence in some African country which served as a stopover on the weapons route from Iran to Gaza. It was the continuation of Jerry’s previous mission, which had apparently yielded good results. My own trip was even put off for a week, until Udi had the time to give me a comprehensive briefing. Obviously, he never had the time to speak about Niki, although with a great deal of discomfort I raised the matter time after time.
“Didn’t you leave her a message? Isn’t your thing all sewn up?” Udi asked almost truculently.
“I left the message, but things are not sewn up at all,” I replied. The feeling he gave me was that I was being a nuisance with my pettiness amidst the important activities of the squad, and the in-depth discussion I wanted was put off once again.
The four of them left a few days before my scheduled departure. I took leave of Udi and my three buddies, feeling a twinge of sorrow that they were going together and I’d be alone. Udi said goodbye with some warm words and added that he was confident about me. “When we get back, we’ll talk about Niki,” he said, taking my hand in both of his. “Promise.”
I was amazed at how pliable I was in his hands. I was moved by his little gesture, but someplace in my head an old Arabic saying was floating around: This is my life that you’re pushing off. My happiness, which wasn’t as important to you as another minute of prepping for your mission, about which I knew next to nothing.
I wound up my own preparations and Jack, the deputy division head, who I thought didn’t like me too much, came to the base to give me a final briefing. He told me that Udi and the others had completed their mission successfully and were on their way back but I shouldn’t wait for them and was to leave according to plan. It wouldn’t be good to make more cancellations and re-bookings on Royal Jordanian Airlines and at the hotel.
At most I’d lose a few more points with him, I reckoned, and told him I’d wanted to speak to Udi about the Niki matter. His elongated face became even longer, and his thin lips pursed.
“You’ll forgive me for not going into that, OK? I know there’s an issue to be dealt with but I’m not familiar with the details. I have four teams in target countries right now, so you’ll have to take that up with Udi, when you get back, in a week’s time. If she dumps you in the meantime, take it as a sign that she wasn’t worth the effort.”
I don’t know what it is about the Mossad and its hierarchy, and the awe that it inspires in its own insiders that stops a guy like me from saying, “So go and get fucked, you and your mission. First solve my problem for me, then I’ll go.” But the fact is, I kept quiet and that ate my heart out for hours afterwards. I made do with leaving a note on Udi’s desk: “Reminder that we have to speak about Niki, as soon as I get back. There must be a solution to this.”
I meant it. Let HQ OK an exception to the rules, so I could tell Niki exactly who I was and what I did, and then we’d see. If she allowed me to go on, I’d go on, otherwise … otherwise, what? My cover would be burned and I would be back at the starting line, where I had already once been.
The evening before I left, I visited my parents and my sisters and they all complained that I was cutting myself off and they could never reach me. “You’re also never at home, your phone just rings and rings. And that Orange mobile phone of yours just tells us, ‘The subscriber cannot take your call.’ Well, really!” fumed Tzippi, my big sister. She was right. At the base, all mobiles were switched off and I was almost never at home.
The story about exhibitions abroad wasn’t holding water any more. Tzippi’s husband had guessed I was working for “the Shin Bet or the Mossad” and Aliza’s husband thought I may be an El Al sky marshal or with a cabinet minister’s security guard detail. He also said he saw I’d been working out, that I’d “developed shoulders” and my belly had flattened out. My parents, although still quite alert for their age, were too old to trouble their minds with this question, and I was surprised at how they aged from one trip to the next.
Tzippi put her girls to bed and her husband Amnon and I watched the evening news. The lead item was a news agency report about an attack by unidentified warplanes on a convoy of container trucks on the Sudanese coastal road north of Port Sudan. In all likelihood Israeli planes had knocked out an arms shipment on its way from Iran via Egypt to Hamas in Gaza, said an analyst. So that’s what Udi and the boys had been setting up. I felt a wave of pride rising inside me and had to restrain myself not to show or say anything.
“Lucky you’re here,” said Amnon, “otherwise I might have thought you were involved.”
“Really lucky,” I replied. “Otherwise you’d give my parents ideas and they wouldn’t sleep at night.”
“Sometimes I think you don’t really know your parents,” he said. “In my opinion, if your father knew you were involved in such things he’d only sleep better.”
I returned to Tel Aviv, full of motivation.
The next day, Avi took me to the airport. He shook my hand warmly. “Funny to be flying four hours to Paris and then four and a half hours back in the same direction just to reach a place you could get to in half an hour on a direct flight,” he smiled. “What can we do? Our lives are complicated.”
“I’m a little envious of Dudu,” I said. “Just arrived and already been on a real operation.”
Avi, tall and slender, hesitated for a second, and then told me, “Dudu wasn’t actually there. He got a bad case of diarrhoea on the way. We almost sent you instead, but Udi decided he could make do with what he had, because your mission is also important.”
“There’s medication for diarrhoea, no?” I wondered.
“It was his belly speaking in his name. It’s not a stomach problem, and he wasn’t the first. Usually, they don’t get a second chance.”
I had the evening free in Paris, and decided to spend it in a Pigalle striptease joint. This didn’t exactly fit in with the operational orders, but I justified it by telling myself, “That’s what Ron would do, wouldn’t he?” The truth was that I needed a woman more than I would admit to myself. Here would be far easier than in Tel Aviv.
Reality, as usual, did not chime with my imagination. I had to be quite firm with a rather unpleasant Moroccan hostess who joined me and insisted that I buy her a drink. When voices were raised I cleared out without getting any thrills out of the breasts and backsides that I’d been fantasizing about.
I walked along the avenue, which seemed more like part of Casablanca than Paris. There were almost no hookers on the street and those there didn’t appeal to me. It surprised me that my need to get laid was almost divorced from my need for Niki. The gap between my raw, impulsive desire and the combined love and passion I had for Niki was real. I could feel my longing for her and I could feel my as-yet unfulfilled need for a Parisian whore, and the two things didn’t clash with one another at all. I mused over w
hether the ability to compartmentalize like this was one of the qualifications for being a spy, and I decided that it was actually an ability possessed by most men. Civilization had compelled us to stick with one female, while nature was pushing us in the other direction. Or perhaps I was just a bastard. Or perhaps all men were bastards.
At my hotel, there was a message waiting. Moshik would be coming the next day with fresh information. I had to work out the time and place for our rendezvous using our usual codes.
The next day, according to plan, I purchased a suit and wore it to my meeting with Moshik, who was similarly togged out and looked so bizarre that I almost burst out laughing.
“Hey, you also look like a monkey at his wedding,” he growled at me.
We went up to his room, where he ran through some updates about my targets that had come in the day before.
“Too bad, the Shin Bet case officers don’t co-ordinate timetables with us; only yesterday they finished debriefing a source who arrived from Amman.”
After giving me all the relevant info, the diminutive intelligence officer permitted himself to have a little personal chat with me. He, like everyone at HQ who worked closely with us, was familiar with my story and, not knowing that it had been kept a secret from me, he told me that all the Mickey Simhonis in Israeli phone directories had received a call “from that girl you left in Toronto, what’s her name?” and also that a Tel Aviv private investigator had been hired to find me, but a terse warning from a high Shin Bet official had made it clear he could choose between the fee that he’d been offered and his PI license.
“So what did he do?”
“As far as I know, he told her there isn’t a Mickey Simhoni in Israel who answers to the description she gave him.”
“Are you all nuts?” I barked, stunned and frustrated. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Whoa! I’m not your case officer, nor your commander, and I don’t have to deal with this, but I gathered that you’d decided to give her up, no? So what did you expect they’d do?”
Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Page 19
