6 - The Eye of the Virgin: Ike Schwartz Mystery 6 (15 page)

Chapter Thirty

Shmuel Gold listened to the messages in his voice mail. It had been years, how many…sometimes he lost track. There’s a reason why retirement eventually becomes mandatory rather than optional. Events begin to run together and only the past remains crisp in one’s memory. How long had it been since he’d heard from Isaac Schwartz—Ike? And now, two messages on his machine, one from him and one from Jerusalem about him. He pulled an old briar pipe from his cardigan pocket and filled the bowl tamping the rough cut shreds of tobacco carefully in place. Correctly packed, the pipe would stay lit for an hour or more. It would burn cool and slow. Pack it too tightly and it would go out, too loosely and it would be hot and dump ashes on his slacks which were already singed in places where he’d gotten careless with his smoking. After all, it wasn’t like he was in any hurry.

He wouldn’t light yet. He’d wait until the strong Turkish coffee he preferred over the weak English stuff his housekeeper bought finished brewing and the sun came up. Then he would smoke his pipe, read the paper, and drink coffee until they wheeled him out to the main room and he could start his day. No hurry. He didn’t sleep much these days anyway. Old people don’t. Well, not until they started to disintegrate. That’s how he envisioned the process. You grew old, your muscles atrophied, your brain shrank, lungs failed and then you disintegrated, fell apart bit by bit like an old car rumbling down the road with bits and pieces, bolts and nuts, exhaust pipe sections dropping on the ground. He thought of his old friends, lined up in armchairs, nodding in the sun, their mouths agape, a little drool at the corners. Some had Alzheimer’s, some were…disintegrating. He hoped when his decline became obvious someone would have the decency to shoot him. He doubted they would, but he hoped. Perhaps that is why his daughter took away his service revolver. Smart woman, Rachael.

So, what was this thing with Ike? And what did Jerusalem want? Somewhere in the desert the Mossad stirred restlessly, ferreting out plots, watching Israel’s enemies, its historical adversaries and its friends equally. Everyone had to be surveilled. Everyone had to be assumed to be a threat. Survival meant there could be no surprises, no interference.
Never again.

It had always been that way. Joshua sent the spies into the land. Rehab, the harlot, revealed the secrets of the Canaanites and the people of Israel crossed over and took the land. Survival. His coffee ready, he poured his first of the day into a small porcelain cup, stirred it, and breathed in its aroma. He liked a little sugar and milk in it in the morning. Coffee, his pipe, and the
Jerusalem Post
because he needed to keep his English current.

Maybe the call from Jerusalem signaled an assignment. Maybe he would have another day “in the sand.” That was how he described his early life to his grandchildren. The years fighting in the wars, in the intelligence gathering. The days in the Sinai—in the sand—the old days when things were straightforward, the enemy clearly defined, and the goals certain. These days? Who knew? But not likely. Not from a wheel chair.

He jotted down the phone number Ike had left him, looked at his watch, the battered Rolex Mariner he’d liberated from a Palestinian border jumper in ninety-one, and called his old headquarters. There was protocol to be followed, after all. Protocol and procedures. He called the local number. He would find out what Jerusalem had to say. Isaac and the United States would have to wait. He would call Isaac afterwards.

Perhaps.

***

Besides the tech who’d retrieved the data, the only people to see the print-out of the documents on the microchip was the director, his deputy for mideastern operations, and Charlie. The tech did not need to be reminded he was sworn to secrecy, and the rest were even now debating whether or not to inform the President of the United States and the Secretary of State. The operative word in the discussion was
deniability
. What the President should and should not know, how much should he be able to reasonably deny? And then, if he were to be told anything, which version of the truth should it be? Charlie wondered, not for the first time, about an institution that withheld information about a sensitive area in foreign affairs from the President in order to protect him from the possibility of political attack by his own people as well as his foreign allies, never mind the country’s enemies. Somewhere in the country’s history, he thought, we misplaced the kernel of truth that shaped us in the first place.

He stopped thinking in abstractions and concentrated on the problem that had been thrust on the Agency, on him. There was the immediate difficulty—the microchip and its contents— and the larger problem, the originals of the documents from which the documents had been generated. Fortunately for Charlie, the latter was not his to worry about. The director would either mount a black operation to retrieve and destroy them or he wouldn’t. Certainly the Israelis would, or perhaps already had. Indeed, they may have been found and destroyed by now. But that did not mean there were no more copies. He heaved a sigh. At this juncture, Charlie’s only task was to keep a lid on the local operation which, in turn, meant keeping a lid on Ike Schwartz. That would not be easy. Ike had that intuitive sense about things that would inevitably take him down the same road Charlie and the Agency were traveling. And unless he could find some device to quickly divert Ike, he was already on that journey or soon would be. Charlie let out an exasperated sigh. Why couldn’t things be easy for a change?

He had to assume Ike had stumbled onto Tommy Wainwright’s possible involvement somehow. How much he’d turned up remained an unknown, but it was only a matter of time before he’d dig out all of it or at least enough of it to make trouble. Charlie shook his head and grunted. Unlike the President of the United States, Ike could not, would not accept an expedient version of the truth. What to do? Ike was his friend.

He picked up the phone and called the techs that had been tasked to search Ike’s computer operation. Samantha Ryder was far too skillful for her own good. He’d been assured that her hard drive had been wiped clean and no data from her hacking into their database remained on it or anywhere else. They had run sophisticated decoding software on all her files to be sure she hadn’t encrypted the downloads and hidden them in an innocuous file. They insisted she was clean.

She wouldn’t be happy about that when she found out what they’d done to her machine but, what the hell, who said life had to be fair. She and Ike were safer in ignorance. He called the techs and asked them to go back and be certain no copies had been made, and then be sure that if she ever ventured into their cyber world again, they could block her. They assured him that they had her signature and there was no way she could.

Yeah, yeah, do it again anyway. He hung up.

Next, someone had to find out who had outed Wainwright and to whom. Tommy was dead and the question before the house, who or what group pulled the trigger? Charlie did not want to believe it was done by friends, but he couldn’t rule out that possibility either.

There were days when he hated his job. Today was one of them.

***

Shmuel Gold’s eyebrows came together in an exclamation mark. He hung up the phone. He didn’t like this. It wasn’t a matter of public dissembling. After all, that was the nature of all politics and especially international politics, and among intelligence professionals it was habitual. No, he understood that this particular book needed to stay closed. He’d been part of the team that wrote it in the first place you could say, and well, enough already. But to put into place the suggested sanctions? Overkill, certainly. Yes, the documents had to be found and destroyed. Yes, the person or persons who’d generated them needed to be permanently silenced. All this certainly, but to authorize such an operation in a foreign country, and not just any foreign country but the United States, our strongest and oldest ally? Shmuel remembered May 14, 1948, and the declaration by the Truman administration earlier in the UN to support the founding of a Jewish nation. No, it was as the Americans would say, over the top, a dangerous over-reaction with possibly tragic consequences, and what about Isaac Schwartz? No, it was too much. He no longer worked for SHABAK. It had been years, many years, since he sat disguised as one of them, drinking coffee and listening, waiting. No more. It was not his problem to solve.

He would have to smoke his pipe and think this through.

Chapter Thirty-one

Ike looked at the two people seated across the room from him. Man and wife, well, they were man and wife once, but no more. Is this how it ends? These two had and then lost the thing that so many people sought but never found and would die to have themselves. Marriages are like Humpty Dumpty. Once they fell, they were difficult if not impossible to put back together again, all the King’s horses and men from Marriage Encounter not withstanding. Was there enough crazy glue available to ever repair it? He did notice the man had come to his estranged wife’s defense. Perhaps there was still hope for them. Were they the victims of too much familiarity? What had Ruth asked?
So, do you think I will pale eventually, become an object of contempt?
It was a conundrum and Ike wasn’t sure he wanted to unravel it. He caught sight of Essie on the phone, probably yammering away at Billy. Would that relationship degrade into the familiar, would the two of them take one another for granted, create yet another hum-drum existence?

He pictured Ruth again. He realized she was a person who never ceased to surprise him day after day. But would it last? Would the surprises become expectations? And if they did, what then? Engagements were more than a statement about commitment, they were a move toward permanency. Was he, or was she, ready to go there?

Someone was asking him a question.

“Sheriff,” Louis Dakis said, “What about our icon?”

Ike noted the plural possessive. So there was hope.

“I will need to hold it as evidence until we clear this up. It is safe enough here, I promise. Tomorrow I’d like you to come by and bring the one you were making for me, if it’s ready.”

“I have it here.” Dakis lifted the flat package he’d leaned against the desk earlier. Ike had seen him carry in the package but its significance had somehow escaped him.

“Ah, good. Tomorrow I will want you to do something with it, but I will need to explain that later.” He turned to Lorraine Dakis. “Mrs. Dakis, I know this won’t be easy for you, but I must ask you to go over to the Coroner’s Office and formally identify Franco Sacci.”

“I thought you said his name was…whoever you said he was. I don’t see how that can be. I want to know how he was killed. I want to know who…” She gulped and tears began to run down her cheeks. “I am so confused. What do I do now?”

Frank stepped forward and took her elbow. “Suppose we drop in on the coroner before he closes.” He glanced at his watch, “which will be in twenty minutes. We will have to hurry. Then you can book into a motel, or not. I don’t think you should try to drive back to Washington now.”

“She can stay with me,” her husband said.

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” She sobbed uncontrollably. “I just don’t know.”

Frank led her from the room.

“Tomorrow,” Ike said to Dakis who took the hint and followed his wife out the door.

When the room had cleared Ike moved one of the many piles of paper on his desk aside and put his feet up. TMI. No, TDMI, too damned much information, not enough connection. That the murder of Sacci and the break-in at Dakis’ house were part of a whole was no longer in doubt. That there were four men in the Dogwood Motel the night of the murder was certain. That one of those people was Thomas Wainwright posing as Avi Kolb, and the second was Farouk Zaki as Franco Sacci was also a fact. Whatever connected these two dead men to one another had to be the key. The remaining two men, Brown and Wentz, their real names unknown, could be anywhere and anybody by now. He had to hope they’d remain on task, that they would return for the icon, and that when they did he would nail them. But what came next? If he could find them, he had a circumstantial case to hang the murder on them, but he wasn’t naive enough to believe he could make it stick. He needed something more, and he guessed that something lay buried in the funny farm up in Langley. What was on that microchip? Would Charlie talk? He’d have to find out.

But first he needed some time with Sam and her wonder machine. He needed some answers, and he guessed they were buried deep in some electronic archive somewhere.

***

Shmuel Gold watched the clock and calculated the time when it would be seventeen hundred in America. He assumed, rather he hoped, that Isaac Schwartz kept the office hours he associated with Americans, nine to five. When the second hand of his battered watch swept past twelve, he lifted the phone from its cradle and engaged the number he’d written on a scrap of paper. He glanced across the room to the Colonel seated behind the table. Only a small lamp lighted the desk’s surface, the colonel’s face barely discernable, lost in the shadows. Shmuel drew on his pipe and he, too, disappeared from view behind a cloud of smoke. Three rings. Four.

“Hello, Sheriff’s office.” A woman had answered. Shmuel lifted his eyes to the colonel again. He raised an eyebrow. The colonel nodded.

“Shmuel Gold here,” He said. “I wish to speak to Isaac Schwartz, please.”

“Who? Who did you say you were and you want to speak to who?”

“Gold, Shmuel.” He spelled it slowly as the voice on the other end repeated after him.

“Okay, that’s Shoomel Gold and you want to talk to Isaac…oh, you must mean Ike.”

“Ike, yes, Ike Schwartz. Tell him Shmuel Gold returns his call.”

He listened as the woman shouted to someone else and then the click as a receiver was taken from its hook.

“Hang up, Essie and go home,” he heard Ike say. “Hold on, Shmuel, I need to clear the room and I don’t have the luxury of a secure phone. Yes, I said go home. See you tomorrow. Take care of baby. Who? Never mind…an old friend. Good night. Okay, Shmuel, I’m here.”

Shmuel waved to the colonel who pressed a button and put the phone on speaker.

“You left me a message, Isaac. You wanted to know something and you thought I could help?”

“I did. Perhaps you can, perhaps you can’t. If you can, perhaps you will and perhaps you won’t. It’s the times we live in. It all depends on whether you know the answers to the questions I ask, and whether the Mossad agent monitoring the call will let you if you do.”

Shmuel smiled at the colonel and shrugged. “What are you doing playing wild-West policeman, Isaac? Sheriff, what is that?”

“It’s a living. It’s something I do now. What about you, old man, still smoking that rotten pipe?”

“No, this is a new one. The one you gave me finally cracked and broke. I took it as a symbol.”

“What can you tell me about a man who might have been called Avi Kolb or you might have known him as Thomas Wainwright?”

Shmuel took a breath and straightened the paper in front of him. “I am in a position to say only we know nothing about either Kolb or…” He saw the colonel nod yet again. “Wainwright. I am to assure you that the position of this government has been, is, and remains that we do not have any intelligence interests in the United States. We are allies.”

He heard Ike laugh and had to smile himself. The colonel did not seem amused.

“You did that very well, Shmuel. You haven’t lost your touch. Now, if I could figure out what you all were after I would…” Shmuel heard what he took to be a hand slapping a desk surface. “Shmuel, you
are
on an open phone, I take it.”

Shmuel grimaced at the colonel and shrugged again.

“Major, Colonel, whoever you are, you should know that the microchip is now in the hands of the CIA. Sorry about that. I cannot tell you what they will do with it, as I no longer collect my paycheck from them. I would not be surprised, however, if, in a day or two, there are not urgent communications between our State Department and your Foreign Affairs Ministry. But here’s the immediate problem: one of ours was killed by someone, perhaps one of yours, perhaps not. No way for me to know. I sincerely hope it was not one of yours. As we both know, keeping a lid on something like that is difficult and will require some complex explaining to be done, by us and by you. In the meantime, I have a small murder of my own here which I intend to clear up. I hope the perpetrators are not connected to you. If they should be, I want to assure you I intend to lock them up and throw away the key, as we say over here. It was good to hear from you, Shmuel, and thanks.”