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  ‘Second, we go fifty-fifty. Not sixty-forty.’

  Avner smiled tensely. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yeah, one more thing. Stop calling me fucking Adam. It’s Uzi, get it? From now on, you call me Uzi. You agree to all of that, and we’ve got a deal.’

  10

  London was copper in the evening light as Uzi left his apartment and stepped into the street. Avner was waiting for him in a white van, his elbow on the open window like a side of meat. Already Uzi was sweating. He was wearing a new jacket, into which that afternoon he had sewn new weights. He was carrying a small rucksack.

  ‘You’re early,’ said Uzi.

  ‘Can’t wait to get going,’ Avner replied. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  ‘You’ve changed your tune. Yesterday you were complaining like an old woman.’

  Avner started the engine and started to reverse around a corner and down a narrow alleyway.

  ‘It’s true. We should have prepared better,’ he said, adjusting the steering wheel by increments and craning over his shoulder. ‘We haven’t done enough surveillance, we haven’t got good enough intelligence. We haven’t even got a backup plan.’

  ‘Relax,’ said Uzi. ‘We won’t need a backup plan. This is child’s play. It couldn’t get any easier.’

  ‘The knife only needs to get through once. Twice in your case.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  Uzi lit two cigarettes and passed one to his companion. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘We can’t afford to wait until everything is perfect. I’ve got to do this now. Also, they won’t be expecting it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I got Waxman to make enquiries about a murder there. Posing as CID.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Straight up. They think I’m dead.’

  ‘And Waxman did that for you?’

  ‘He didn’t do it for me. He did it for his country.’

  Avner laughed. ‘You’re a cunning bastard, Adam, you know that?’

  ‘Uzi.’

  ‘Ah, sorry. Uzi.’

  ‘I got Waxman to tell them the bar is under surveillance and anything out of the ordinary would be noted. So they won’t run. We’ll get them tonight.’

  Avner was still chuckling as he parked the van in the shadows of the alleyway.

  Uzi jumped down and fitted false number plates on to the van. Then Avner gunned the engine, routed his iPod through the van’s sound system and turned it up. Immediately Uzi recognised Hadag Nahash, the most famous – and left-wing – hip-hop band in Israel. People from the Office were into Subliminal, the rightist rapper famous for ‘The Light From Zion’. To listen to Hadag Nahash was tantamount to treachery. Uzi got into the van and turned the aggressive beat up louder. Avner drove to the end of the alleyway and turned on to the road. Uzi’s ear began to itch and he thought the Kol was going to make an appearance. But then the itch faded. He hadn’t heard from the voice in a while. Long may it continue, he thought. Nodding their heads to the rhythm, they set off in the direction of Camden.

  When they arrived, Avner killed the music and parked the van in the shadows behind the Blue Peacock. The air was thick with exhaust and heat, and a cloud of birds was circling overhead. The sun was almost dead.

  ‘Right,’ said Avner, ‘let’s do it.’ He took from his pocket a small moisturiser tub and opened the lid to reveal a transparent, glue-like substance.

  ‘No,’ said Uzi, ‘no way. I’m not using that stuff.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Avner, dipping his fingertips in the tub.

  ‘It irritates my skin, you know that. Itches like fuck.’

  ‘So you’re going to put fingerprints everywhere?’

  ‘I’ll wear gloves or something.’

  ‘Gloves in a bar? In the middle of summer?’

  ‘I’ll worry about that.’

  ‘You brought some gloves?’

  ‘You were going to bring some.’

  ‘I brought this stuff instead. I forgot about your delicate skin.’

  ‘Give me that,’ growled Uzi, and began to apply the substance. For a few minutes they sat there in silence, hands in the air, waiting for their fingertips to dry.

  Uzi got out of the van and listened for a moment. The dull throb of a bassline coming from the bar. Traffic. The whine of a distant motorbike. Nothing out of place.

  Several square windows were set into the back wall of the building, and a fire escape zigzagged up to the roof. Uzi, limping slightly, climbed the fire escape until he was level with a first-floor window. The music obscured everything, no other sounds could be heard from the building. The window was blacked out, as he remembered it. His fingers were already beginning to itch. He rummaged in his rucksack for a tiny camera on adhesive pads, which he stuck to the glass. Then he returned to the van.

  On Avner’s iPhone nothing could be seen but blackness, the opaque glass of the window. He pressed some buttons and the camera focused on the room. Gradually a scene emerged from the haze, in green monotone, but distinguishable nevertheless. Andrzej could be seen in his usual place at the table, and his two comrades lounged on sofas. Girls were moving around with drinks, smoking joints.

  ‘That’s the target?’ said Avner.

  Uzi nodded. Suddenly he almost felt sorry for them, these small-time gangsters from Poland. But business was business. He put on a baseball cap and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. Then, looking at his reflection in the rear-view mirror, he peeled a moustache and goatee beard from a piece of waxed paper and fixed them both to his face. Without a word, both men got out of the van.

  The Blue Peacock was noisy and filling up with people. Uzi’s disguise was thin but effective; he wasn’t recognised. They made their way to the bar and ordered two pints of Staropramen. Then, at a table in the corner, they sat, drinking, waiting. Uzi scratched his fingers against his jeans. ‘I’m desperate for a cigarette,’ he said. ‘This fucking country.’

  ‘You should thank them,’ Avner replied, ‘they’re saving you from yourself.’

  They drank.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ said Uzi, his casual body language contrasting with the urgency in his voice. ‘What are they waiting for?’

  ‘Relax,’ said Avner. ‘You really have lost your touch, haven’t you?’ He took out his iPhone. ‘It’s OK, our friends aren’t going anywhere.’

  Uzi gazed out onto the dance floor and, without warning, an image of a kill – his third, for the Office at least – flashed into his mind. It had been a simple one. A Hamas lynchpin on an arms-buying mission had made an unforeseen detour and ended up staying in the same hotel as Adam, in Paris. The opportunity was too good to miss. Adam’s original mission was put on hold. The kill order was given. Again, looking out at the dance floor, he felt the weight of the rifle in his hands. Again he saw, through his coin of glass, the man who was going to die, walking on the Pont de la Concorde, smiling, talking in a way that would be familiar to his mother, his friends. The cross-hairs touched his face. Now. And the living man became a corpse. This was Adam’s sorcery, the sorcery of the Office. How easy it was to make a ghost.

  ‘Drink up,’ said Avner, ‘it’s almost time.’

  A barmaid turned up the music. That was what they had been waiting for: cover. Avner was watching Uzi keenly, his face illuminated from below by the light of the iPhone. He passed it over. There was Andrzej on the screen, there were his two sidekicks, sitting around the table. Andrzej was waving the girls away; the men were getting down to business.

  From his inside pocket Avner took out what looked like a phial of eye drops, and with a quick movement squeezed two squirts into each of their half-full pint glasses. There was a slight fizz; the beer settled. They got to their feet and made their way across the bar. The girls who had been in the room, who had appeared on Avner’s iPhone, emerged and crossed to the dance floor. In the next moment, while everyone was looking the other way, Uzi and Avner slipped up the stairs.

  The corridor was narrow, forcing
them to go up single file. There was a stifling smell of beer and marijuana. Uzi followed Avner, holding his pint glass tight and grinding his teeth. His footsteps felt loud in his ears, echoing in the confined space, though the music was loud. They arrived at the door. Avner knocked loudly, and the door opened a fraction. Immediately he snaked his hand into the gap and flung his beer into the man’s face. There was a howl. Avner pushed his way into the room, aiming his Beretta. Uzi followed, drawing his Glock and throwing beer across the faces of the two other men who were getting up from the table. They crumpled, also howling now, clawing at their faces as if they were wrapped in flames. Andrzej himself, blinded by the beer, careened across the room like a bull, arms flailing, bellowing; Uzi sidestepped and struck him a heavy blow with the butt of his Glock. He went down awkwardly, making a strange coughing noise. Uzi placed a foot on the back of his head, pushed his burning face into the floor.

  Avner rammed a chair under the door handle. Swiftly, Avner and Uzi searched the Poles, taking their knives and lining them up on the table. They gagged them and handcuffed them with plastic cords. Then, gripping Andrzej by the hair, Uzi removed his disguise, peeling off his beard and moustache and tossing his cap and glasses to the floor.

  ‘Remember me?’ he said in Russian. ‘Oh I forgot, you can’t see very well at the moment. Don’t worry, you will soon.’ Andrzej, behind his gag, gurgled. His skin and eyes were crimson from the acid-laced beer. Uzi struck him a blow across the face and left him to his muffled moaning sounds on the floor. ‘I am your Russian master. Nobody fucks with me. I want you to remember that.’ Andrzej shook his head feverishly as Uzi turned away, coldness pouring from his eyes, heat raging inside him.

  Avner left the room and Uzi jammed the door closed again behind him. Then he turned towards the three Poles, who were slumped against the red drapes like dolls. He raised his gun. Three pairs of bloodshot eyes stared out blindly. ‘I have a gun in my hand,’ he said, ‘and I need some target practice.’ One soiled himself, then the other. Not Andrzej, though. Not yet.

  From his rucksack, Uzi took several rolls of brown packing tape. This was a technique he had picked up from the Christian militias in Lebanon, but he’d never had to use it. Until now. He started with Andrzej, winding the packing tape around one of his ankles. The man kicked frantically, and Uzi struck him in the groin, wincing with pain from the wound in his shoulder. As Andrzej writhed in pain, Uzi wrapped the packing tape around both of his ankles, binding them together, then around his feet, and up his legs, leaving no gaps, layer upon layer. Andrzej struggled, but it was too late. Uzi carried on, up and up, passing the roll of tape from hand to hand under his body, until he reached his neck. The brown tape covered his chin and mouth. Then his nose, eyes, hair. Uzi peeled back the tape around his nostrils to prevent him from suffocating. All that was left was a man-shaped shining parcel, glistening like wood in the gloom. Uzi stepped back and stared at the other two men. Their faces were shiny and sore from the acid. He picked up another roll of tape.

  It took Uzi and Avner some time to get all three ‘parcels’ out of the window, down the fire escape and into the van. Uzi’s injuries made it difficult; it was as if being in the presence of the people who had stabbed him was causing his wounds to smart. The men were arranged in rows in the back of the van. They made no noise. Then Avner gunned the engine and they threaded through the night-time traffic in the direction of the M1.

  ‘A job well done,’ said Avner in Russian, still full of adrenaline. He threw back his head and laughed.

  ‘It’s not over yet,’ said Uzi in the same language. He reached into his rucksack, pulled out a CD and slid it into the machine.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Avner as the sound of strident classical music swelled.

  ‘Mily Balakirev,’ said Uzi, ‘the most Russian of Russian composers.’ He turned it up louder. ‘A little psychological flourish for our Polish cargo.’

  The van, one vehicle among hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, crept under the dystopian network of uplit flyovers at Staples Corner and pulled into an all-night car wash, music still blasting. Long fluffy cylinders fell softly on the bonnet, climbed over the windscreen and spread tendrils of foam across the van. Uzi and Avner lit cigarettes, breathed ropes of smoke through their noses. On the front and back bumpers, the water covered the false number plates. As a result of contact with the soap the top layer cracked. The fragments slipped, eroded and gradually dissolved, exposing a second set of number plates below, another false identity. The wash cycle finished. Avner steered the van out of the carwash and back on to the road. Uzi looked in the rear-view mirror, all around; nothing untoward could be seen. But he could feel it. He’d felt it all night. They were being watched.

  11

  Adam stepped out of the white Mercedes and laid eyes for the first time on the prime minister’s summer residence. Now he knew for certain what he was dealing with, and this only heightened the tension. There was only one organisation based here. Everybody knew it. Its name was legendary. The massive, whitewashed building, set on a hill and surrounded with every luxury imaginable, was the seat of the most famed and feared intelligence service in the world. And he had just been accepted into it.

  In the glaring sunlight, he looked about him. Several identical cars were parking alongside in the formation of a fan, and from each a new recruit emerged, accompanied by their recruiters. They were ushered in past the guards, through metal detectors, past the retina scanners, past more guards, and into the atrium of the Midrasha – the Academy.

  The atmosphere was silent, almost sacrosanct. Everything was white: the walls, the ceiling, the stairs. The floor was pale marble. A staircase spiralled upwards, constructed to look as if it were suspended in thin air. A glass wall faced an inner garden full of trees heavy with figs and dates. On either side two long corridors stretched into the distance. On the walls, fully two metres tall, were aerial photographs of the land of Israel. And prominently displayed above the main entrance was the motto of the Academy, embossed in gilt upon stone: ‘By way of deception thou shalt make war’.

  The new recruits were shown into an airy classroom of butter-coloured stone. They settled into their seats. The initiation process had made them guarded, ready for anything; they dared not speak. Around the edge of the room sat the recruiters, murmuring to each other in confidential tones. Then a hush fell in the room and everyone got to their feet. Adam turned to see a bear-like man prowling to the front as if intent on something immensely practical. Behind him was a smartly dressed woman, in her forties Uzi guessed, with the bearing of someone who has the power to subjugate any level of chaos with ease. The man rested heavily on a lectern and the woman stood behind him, holding a leather folder like a breastplate. Everyone sat down, and Adam felt the aversion he normally felt to synagogue rise within him, then disappear.

  ‘Welcome, recruits,’ said the man. ‘I am Ezra Oren, the head of the Midrasha. Congratulations to all of you for passing the tests. You are now theoretically members of the organisation we call “the Office”. It has a real name, and that is well known. I will speak it once now, and you will never hear it from me, or any other member of the Office again. You are now working for HaMossad leModi’in ule Tafkidim Meyuchadim (the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations) – the Mossad. Know this, appreciate it – and forget it.’

  Adam felt as if all his blood had been drained from his body and replaced with ice, which was then pumped out and replaced with boiling water. He wanted to move, to run, to punch, but he couldn’t. The Mossad. He had known, of course; everybody had known. But now it had been declared. And nobody could ever take it away from him.

  ‘You were each chosen above thousands of other candidates,’ Oren continued, ‘because you have the raw material we need. Now we need to mould you into intelligence operatives. I can promise that not all of you will make it through training. In the past we have had groups in which not a single person qualified. We would rather that than risk having
one substandard person in the Office. We are like a family; we rely on each other to survive and to defend Jews around the world. So we don’t care about size or quotas. If you want to be part of the best intelligence service in existence – the best family in existence – you need to be the best as well.’

  Part of Adam’s mind felt detached, ironic. But the rest of his mind – most of him – was drinking it all in as the heat passed through his veins.

  ‘The game you are stepping into is dangerous,’ Oren continued. ‘From now on, the highest price is no longer your own life. There are many things more valuable than that.’ He looked coldly from one recruit to the next. ‘You must trust your instructors completely. They are field operatives on sabbatical, not career instructors; afterwards, they will return to the field. They will see you as future partners, future colleagues, not students. That is, apart from myself: I have been in the Office for thirty years, and there are now very few places in Europe that I can still go safely. So I am babysitting you children – for the moment.’ He paused, leaned on the lectern again.

  ‘In short, our methods are based on experience, not on theoretical textbooks and regulations,’ he went on. ‘That’s what we are offering you. And on a personal note, I must tell you that the story from my Shabak days – about my bursting a man’s eyeball during a mock interrogation in training – is not true.’ He straightened up and glanced at the woman behind him, rubbing his chin. His expression was stony, impassive. The woman stepped forward.

  ‘Michal Bar-Tov, head of internal security,’ she said with the briefest of nods. ‘You have heard what you can expect from us. For this, we expect you to give us your whole life. From now on you must expose everything – I mean everything – to us. New friends can only be made with prior approval. You must bring in your passports and documents, as well as those of your family, to be stored here. When people ask about your new job, tell them you’re working for the defence department and can’t talk about it. Whatever you do, don’t tell them you’re working at a bank or a kindergarten. It will only arouse curiosity.’ There was a slight ripple of laughter, which she silenced with a glance. ‘There will be a lie detector test every three months which you will all be obliged to take.’