The Israeli embassy was a white stucco mansion at the High Street Kensington end of Kensington Palace Gardens, barely a stone’s throw from the Underground. It took Liz fifteen minutes to get inside. She was asked for identification twice, was hand-searched and scanned, passed through a metal detector arch, had her handbag examined inside and out and only after all that was she allowed into a waiting room.
When she finally reached a room containing Ari Block, Mossad station head in London, it was both a surprise and a relief to find that he was a gentle-looking little man, with a soft voice and mournful eyes.
They sat down on opposite sides of a small, square table. Liz was under no illusion that this was his office. It was clearly a meeting room set aside for visitors who did not qualify to be allowed into the Mossad station proper. Ari Block was not a man to indulge in social chitchat. His voice had a sibilant, almost whispering quality as he said, “My colleagues in Tel Aviv have been in touch, so I know why you’re here.” A pained look came over his gentle face. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I don’t know where Danny Kollek is.”
“Well, that means that no one does,” said Liz. “But we do need to find him, for everyone’s sake. I’m sure you will have heard from Israel that we have good reason to suspect that he may be planning some disruption of the Gleneagles conference. We don’t know what, but at the worst it could be something very nasty indeed.”
Ari Block nodded and said, “I have been instructed to be very frank with you, Miss Carlyle, but I have to tell you that I do not know Kollek well. He is nominally on my staff and he communicates with me when he sees fit, which I have to tell you is not very often. But unusually, his reporting line is directly back to Tel Aviv. It is not an arrangement I like or approve of. And from what I understand, it appears to have turned out to be disastrous.”
“That arrangement enabled him to play his cards very close to his chest?”
“Yes. Though he gets on well enough with the other members of my team, he does not share information with them and he is not close to anyone. He can be very charming—when he wants to—but there is also something reserved about the man. A sort of coldness, even. To be perfectly honest with you, though I do not like having a member of my team who does not report to me, in one way it is a relief that I don’t have responsibility for him.”
Liz said, “What we’re particularly concerned about is the peace conference next week. Does he have any involvement with the arrangements for your delegation?”
Block looked at her and his face flushed with anxiety. “Involvement? He most certainly does. On behalf of the embassy, he is in charge of all the planning for our delegation and its programme.”
Liz found her jaw tensing involuntarily. “Has he been up to Gleneagles, then?”
“Yes. Last week.”
“Did he go alone?”
“No. One of the embassy staff and one of my staff went with him. Wait a minute,” Block said, “and I’ll try and get hold of them.” He picked up a phone on the table and spoke urgently in Hebrew.
While they waited, Liz took the opportunity to ask more about Kollek. “Does he socialise with any other members of the station or the embassy?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Where does he live?”
“In East Dulwich.” Block had already sent two men to search his flat, but they had found nothing incriminating, and no sign of Kollek.
There was a knock on the door. A woman came in, big-boned, medium height, a little older than Liz, with a tired, haggard face. She looked nervous as she introduced herself as Naomi Goldstein. Without any explanation, Ari Block told her that they wanted to hear about her visit to Gleneagles. She looked puzzled, but asked no questions and started on a detailed minute-by-minute account of the two days she had spent there.
They’d had a lot to do, with all the domestic arrangements to confirm, everything from beds to bathrooms. They’d also had to tour the resort so they could brief the delegation on the leisure facilities for their spare time. If they had any, said Ari Block, pointing out that if the conference went well, everyone would be very busy indeed.
“And then, of course,” Naomi said, almost as an afterthought, “there was the dinner to plan.”
“What dinner is that?” asked Liz.
“Oh,” said Naomi, as if she had spoken out of turn. She looked at Ari Block.
“It’s all right, Naomi. We’re working with Miss Carlyle,” he said gently. He turned to Liz. “We’ve decided to host a dinner for the Syrian delegation the night before the conference begins. I am going myself. We’re keeping it very quiet, so the press won’t make an issue of it. The thinking is, if you’ve broken bread with someone, it makes it hard to go on wanting to break their bones.” He added, “Doubtless that’s why Judas left before supper.”
Liz smiled. “Did the three of you stay together all the time you were at Gleneagles?” she asked Naomi.
Naomi thought for a moment. “Not the whole time,” she said finally. “Danny went off on his own to do things a couple of times.”
“Do you know what things?”
“No. And I didn’t think it was my business to ask. Once he said he was going for a walk. The other time he just wasn’t there.” She was thinking hard and Liz waited. Suddenly Naomi raised a hand, as if to ward off anything that might upset her train of thought. “There was something odd about the second time. It was before we had dinner—we ate in the hotel on the second night. The first night I cooked in the house that we stayed in. Anyway, Danny was late coming back that second night, and I was worried about our table booking in the restaurant—I didn’t want to lose it. Oskar and I set off for the hotel and I guessed we’d run into Danny on our way there. And sure enough we did. He was walking towards us along the road—it was quite dark—but as he got near I saw him combing his hair, which was odd because he’s not the kind of man you see doing that in public. When we all got into the hotel, where it was bright, I could see that his hair was wet. Almost as if he’d had a shower—only he couldn’t have, because he hadn’t come back to the house.”
“No. The weather had been quite bright.”
“Is there a swimming pool there? He might have gone for a dip.”
“That’s what I thought at first, but he didn’t have swimming trunks or a towel or a bag or anything like that. He was just in his ordinary clothes.”
There was silence in the room. All three of them seemed to be thinking of the implications of what Naomi had seen.
Eventually Liz said, “Thank you very much,” though she couldn’t have said exactly what she was thanking her for. At least now she knew what she was going to do next.