IN THE ROOM ABOVE THE SEAFOOD RESTAURANT, THE RETIRED general named Uri poured Lagavulin whiskey neat into the six tumblers lined up on the oval table, adding a splash or two until he was satisfied all the glasses held the same amount. He passed out five of the tumblers to the members of the inter-agency Working Group, gripped the sixth in his paw and sank dejectedly onto the overstuffed couch against one wall. From his seat at the oval table, Baruch started reading out loud the police report on the Palestinian woman Maali. Prison guards had discovered her unconscious on the floor of the cell. The prison doctor had been summoned. He had noted massive injury to the forehead and dilation of the pupils of the eyes, which indicated the brain itself had been bruised by impacting against the inside of the skull; he had observed convulsions of the extremities of the limbs, which suggested the brain may have swelled, putting pressure on the cerebrum. The chief interrogator had given the doctor permission to move Maali to a nearby hospital, but had instructed him to make sure the records showed that she had been brought in to the hospital’s emergency room unconscious after a motor scooter accident and had been in a coma ever since. A surgical procedure to drain the skull cavity and relieve pressure on the brain had been performed, but the pressure had built up again rapidly. A brain scan had indicated irreversible cerebral trauma. The woman Maali had died in the intensive care unit shortly after midnight.
Nursing his Scotch, Elihu stared out the window at the sea lapping against the Jaffa shore. For several minutes nobody said a word. Then the squall broke.
“Somebody screwed up,” Baruch said angrily, tossing the police report onto the table. “The woman shouldn’t have been left alone in the cell after our agent succeeded in duping her.”
“How could we know she’d figure out she was duped?” Altmann snapped.
“It’s our business to know,” Baruch retorted.
“Why are we getting worked up over the suicide of a Palestinian girl?” Uri called from the couch. “She was wearing a ring her husband cut off the finger of a murdered Jewish kid.”
“Uri’s right,” said Dror. “Let’s put this into perspective. I don’t see any Palestinians beating their breasts over the four Jews killed in the attack on the Rabbi’s convoy.”
“I don’t see them beating their breasts over the kidnapping of the Rabbi and his secretary,” Altmann agreed.
“The problem,” announced Wozzeck, “isn’t the girl Maali. She’s spilt milk. The problem is the lame shoemaker across from the El Khanqa Mosque. The problem is Yussuf Abu Saleh.”
Elihu turned away from the window. “Let’s begin with the shoemaker,” he said. “He’s obviously a mishlasim—a mail drop and not an operational agent. He won’t have the vaguest idea who sent a letter, or who received it, so there’s no purpose in interrogating him. Mossad cells operating in Europe have been using this technique for years—you have mail delivered to a post box, the proprietor of the box runs a flag of some sort up a pole, the addressee watches for the flag and picks up his letter.”
Altmann helped himself to another two fingers of Lagavulin. “If we have a letter addressed to Tayzir delivered to the shoemaker, he’ll run a flag up the pole and Yussuf will come out of the woodwork. We could try to follow Yussuf, but that would be tricky in the narrow streets of the Old City. Even if we succeeded, chances are he’ll only lead us back to the bedroom where he hangs his hat.”
“Yussuf should be picked up and made to talk,” Dror said. “The question is, do we do it or do we leave him to the tender mercies of Sa’adat Arif?”
“Yussuf’s our problem,” Baruch said flatly. “We deal with it. We don’t farm the problem out to the Palestinian Authority’s people in Jericho.”
“Whoever deals with it will have to move fast,” Altmann warned. “The clock is ticking. The deadline for the Rabbi’s secretary expires the day after tomorrow. If the katsa can’t come up with something between now and then, Yussuf—assuming he knows where the Rabbi is being held, assuming someone can make him talk—will be our last best hope.”
Dror said, “There won’t be time to worm information out of Yussuf, the way we did with Maali. Whoever pinches him will have to beat it out of him.”
Altmann shook his head. “We’ll have Amnesty International breathing down our necks. We’ll have the bleeding heart lawyers filing habeas corpus affidavits.”
“The bleeding hearts won’t get the time of day out of Sa’adat Arif,” the general grunted from the couch. “The bleeding hearts never heard of Jericho.”
“There’s another advantage to using Sa’adat’s people,” Dror said. “It’ll be easier to make it look as if Yussuf was the victim of Arab factional rivalry, which is important if we don’t want to frighten off Abu Bakr’s boys.”
“That’s a point,” Altmann said. “There’s less chance of Abu Bakr ducking for cover, and taking the Rabbi and Efrayim with him—or killing them outright—if he can be made to think that Hamas’s jilted jihadists cornered Yussuf.”
“I don’t like it,” Baruch said. “I don’t like owing favors to Sa’adat Arif. I don’t like letting someone else do our dirty work. It looks like Yussuf killed Jews. I think Jews should deal with him.”
“Let’s put it to a vote,” the katsa suggested from the window. “Who’s in favor of sub-contracting this out to Sa’adat Arif?”
Dror and Altmann each raised a finger.
“Who’s in favor of handling this ourselves?”
Baruch raised a hand. Wozzeck hesitated, then raised his glass of Scotch.
Everyone looked at the general on the couch. “Part of me is with Baruch—we got into a lot of hot water in Beirut letting Arabs do our dirty work for us. On the other hand—” Uri shrugged. “I just don’t know.”
Baruch looked across the room at the katsa. “That more or less leaves it up to you, Elihu.”
“It does, doesn’t it.”