Part Three — The Trial Proposed · Adam's Robe Book 3
Chapter Twenty
Tel Aviv, Israel — Day 23
Leah's call came at half past six, and Katz took it standing at the kitchen window with the kettle not yet boiled.
She told him in order, without adjectives, as she told most things now. The old man had spoken to them that morning in the room behind his study, with his granddaughter beside him and a lamp lit though it was day. A man had come to the gate at dusk the evening before. He had given his name before he was asked, or the old man had given it for him. He had said that he carried what the household kept, the other of the pair, and that he had carried it out of a mountain for nearly three years. The old man had offered him a trial, before witnesses, in ten days. Nassiri had not refused.
"He said carried," Leah said. "Framroze noticed the word. He thinks it matters. I don't know why."
Katz did not answer at once. Through the window the gray of the morning lay along the roofs, and a woman in the opposite building was hanging a blue towel on a line. It was an ordinary hour. He found that he was holding the edge of the sink.
"The mountain fell," he said. "We were told it fell."
"It did."
"Then he went back."
"Or he was never in it." She breathed out. "Ronen, I have to tell you one more thing, and you're not going to like it. They want us there as witnesses. Karam and me, and Ani and Vartan when they come. And Framroze says that, if the trial's to be honest, it can't be secret from the people who've been asked to watch. He asked me to tell you. He knew I would."
"He is correct."
"I know he is."
"And you know that I must tell the Director."
There was a long silence on the line, and he let it run. It was a courtesy of his generation.
"I know," she said at last. "I think that's why he said it. I don't think he wants it hidden. He wants it out in the light and then to see what the light does."
"The light does not always behave." He took his hand from the sink. "I will tell her what I must. I will not tell her where."
"She'll know where."
"She will know a town. She will not know a house." He reached for the kettle. "Leah. Whatever you do, do not be seen to flinch. If she reads fear in this, she will act on it."
"I'm not afraid of her."
"No," Katz said. "That is what frightens me."
Glilot at eight had the look of a ship under way. The corridors were full. Young men with laptops moved in twos and threes, and a woman in a gray suit stood at the lift with a telephone at each ear. Somebody had pinned a map to the wall outside the third-floor briefing room. Somebody else had put a red pin in it, and a third had taken the pin out again with a muttered word. The war went on in the building as it went on everywhere, in small movements.
Cho was waiting outside his office.
She sat on the bench by the window with a paper cup and a leather bag between her feet, in a navy coat that had been bought to be forgotten. She was thirty-nine, short and straight-backed, with a plain square face and eyes that took in the corridor and its occupants in one slow sweep. She had flown in the night before from Washington by way of Frankfurt and had not, he saw, slept. She stood when he came.
"Ronen."
"Erin. You did not tell me you were landing."
"I told Zohar." She shrugged. "It's a liaison visit. It's on the schedule. Nobody reads the schedule." She looked at his face. "You got a call."
"I did."
"It's bad?"
"It is not bad. It is not good." He opened the office door. "Come in. You will hear it in any case."
She followed him, and sat, and listened to the whole of it without a word, with her hands round the cup and her eyes on the wall behind his head. She had spent a career being told things in rooms, and it had taught her stillness. When he had finished she looked at him for a moment. Then, slowly, in the flat voice she used for the dangerous parts, she said, "He's got it."
"He says so."
"You believe him."
"I believe that he believes." Katz sat down. "I have believed for a year and a half that he was not dead. I did not know that I believed the rest."
"Livnat's going to love this."
"Livnat will not love it. Livnat will use it." He took a pen and set it straight. "I am going to tell her nothing that is not true. And she is going to hear in it exactly what she wishes to hear."
"That's a bad way to tell the truth."
"It is the only one I have left."
The Director read the page in under a minute.
It was not the page he had given her two and a half weeks before. It was shorter. It held five sentences, in plain Hebrew. Colonel Farhad Nassiri, unaccounted for since Isfahan, had been located in a small town in Gujarat. He had presented himself to a private household of religious standing. He claimed to hold a historical object of that household's tradition. The household had offered him a hearing, in ten days, by its own customary practice. The last line was the plainest. I assess that the hearing is a religious procedure of no operational interest, and that intervention before it would be harmful.
Livnat put the page on the desk and squared it with the edge.
"A historical object," she said.
"Yes."
"In his possession."
"By his own account."
"Two and a half weeks ago you told me the Yekta matter ended in a landslide." Her voice stayed level. "I read the Isfahan file twice and I understood the object to be gone with it. And now you place on my desk a single page that says he has it."
"He says that he has it. I have not seen it."
"But you think that it is real."
Katz looked at her, in her bare gray office with the map turned to the wall. She had asked it as if it were a question about the time.
"I think," he said with care, "that he believes it is what he says. I think that the household believes it also. I do not know whether either belief is correct, and I do not think that I could find out by sending men with guns to ask."
"That is what I have told myself for the last twenty minutes." She leaned back. "A disgraced colonel in India with an object that two families have guarded for centuries, which a private priest has just offered to adjudicate in a back room. The last thing I would call it is of no operational interest."
"It is an arbitration. It is a ceremony."
"It is a transfer." Livnat said the word without heat. "If the house rules for him, or against him, or splits the difference, then it will change hands. In front of witnesses. In a town with one road in and no police to speak of. And I am told that I should wait, and read about it afterward, in your handwriting."
"I am telling you that you should not frighten them."
"I am telling you that I don't intend to." She picked up the page and folded it once. "Stand down, Ronen. All of it. You are not to go to India. You are not to send anyone, and you are not to call the American, who I'm told is at this moment sitting in your office."
"She is on a liaison visit."
"She is on a visit." The Director's mouth twitched. "I'll hold the team. I said so, and I meant it. I will not deploy it before the hearing. I will not deploy it in the next ten days. That is as far as I can go, and farther than I'd have gone for anyone else." She set the page down. "The morning after, I move. If it's a ceremony, it will be over. If it's anything else, I will not be reading about it afterward."
"The house is a private one."
"Which house?"
"I will not say."
"I know the town." She said it softly. "Zohar has the flight manifests and a clean mind. I know that it's Udvada. I'm asking you, as a courtesy, for the door."
"No."
"Ronen."
"I have given you the town, Director, because you have it already, and because it would be an insult to pretend. I will not give you the door." He stood. His knees ached. "I have kept one case for fifty years because I did not hand it to the first person who asked. You may remove me from it if you wish."
She looked at him for a long moment. It was not an angry look. She had found, in a long career, the limits of a particular man's cooperation, and she decided, on balance, not to test them today.
"I'll think about it," Livnat said. "Close the door on your way out."
Cho was in the corridor, on the bench, as before. She had finished the coffee. She looked up at him, and he shook his head once, slightly, and she stood.
"Ten days," he said, low. "She holds the team until the hearing. The morning after, she moves."
"That's it?"
"That is all that I could buy."
"It's more than I thought you'd get." She picked up her bag. "I'm going to the liaison room. I've got a meeting with Adin at ten about the shared lists. I want to read a few things on their system before I go."
"What?"
"Whatever's there." She never smiled. "Go home, Ronen. Sleep. You look like you're being buried standing up."
The liaison room was a long glass box on the fourth floor, with a view of a car park and, beyond it, a sliver of the sea. Cho had a desk in it on every visit. She sat down at it at a quarter past nine and took out a laptop, and for forty minutes did exactly what she had said she would do.
She read the shared lists. She read them the way she had read lists for fourteen years, from the bottom up, because the interesting entry is never at the top. There were nine hundred lines. She stopped at the four hundred and ninth.
L.: secure channel, Islamabad liaison, 09:50. Re: Gujarat. Standing instruction.
It had been entered that morning. It carried Livnat's initial and no second. She looked at it for a long moment, and then up, through the glass wall of the room, across the open floor, to where a door stood slightly ajar in the far corner. A young man in shirtsleeves sat outside it with a telephone in his hand, listening, not speaking.
Cho closed the laptop. She stood, picked up her coat, and walked down the length of the floor to the water cooler beside the ajar door. She filled a paper cup. She drank it slowly, with her back to the room, facing the wall, in the posture of a pause between meetings.
The Director's voice came through the gap. It was low, and it did not carry. Cho heard only the end of a sentence, in the tone of a call being closed.
"That's correct. Protective custody. It is a perfectly good phrase. It has covered a great many things."
Cho put the empty cup in the bin. She was aware of her heartbeat, steady, as it had always been in such moments. She walked back to her desk, and sat, and opened the laptop again, and looked at it without seeing.
Islamabad liaison. Gujarat. Protective custody.
She knew who ran that channel. Every analyst in the building knew the name on the dull circular that Katz skimmed each week. A brigadier with a title of nine words. The man who had once sold a route.
She sat still.
She was an American, and she worked for a service that had given her an apartment in Georgetown, a clean badge, and a series of instructions. The instructions on this case were two. Observe. Report. They had come from a man in a corner office who had never met Leah Sarkisian. They had said, between the lines, that Washington would be keenly interested to learn what a family in Gujarat kept, and more interested still if it learned it before anyone else did. She had read them in a hotel in Frankfurt with a feeling she could not name.
She had liked Katz from the first. She disliked examining why. He was more than thirty years older than she was, and slow, and so courteous that it made her want to apologize. Once, in a car in the rain, he had told her that he did not trust his own certainties and had learned to trust other people's courage instead. She had not forgotten it. She had sat across a table from Leah in a place that did not exist, with a folder she had spent a week preparing, and had watched a linguist from Los Angeles open it. She had spent weeks on the road with her afterward.
Observe, said the instructions. Report.
She picked up her phone, looked at it, and put it down again.
She doubted that she was going to report this. She was almost entirely sure. She would sit here for another hour, and keep her meeting with Adin about the shared lists, and say nothing. But she could not stay in this building and say nothing, and she could not tell Katz without breaking the one fragile arrangement that kept him in his chair. It was what was always in these rooms. A person could be loyal to one side, or the other, or to a single decent old man. For years she had been trying to find a place to stand that was on none of them.
She took out her phone again and booked a seat on the night flight to Mumbai.
Then she wrote, in the fewest words she could, to a number that Katz had given her a year ago, just in case.
Not telling you what I saw. Telling you I'm going to Udvada tonight. Somebody ought to be there who isn't wearing her badge.
She read it over. It was true, and it was not the whole truth, and it was, she thought, the most honest thing she had said to anyone all week.
She pressed send. Then she closed the laptop, and went to her meeting.
Katz read it at his kitchen table that evening, with the lamp on and the window open on a street gone quiet.
Somebody ought to be there who isn't wearing her badge.
He read it three times. He did not ask what Cho had seen. He understood, from what she had left out, that she had seen it, and that she had chosen, for his sake, to tell him only that she was going. It was the kind of courtesy that his own service had stopped teaching a generation ago.
He took out the gray card from the inside pocket of his jacket. He had not looked at it since he put it back in the pocket. He laid it on the table under the lamp, and looked at the single name in block capitals, and then at the telephone.
It rang six times in a tire shop in Haifa.
"Yes," said a heavy, gravelly voice.
"It is Katz."
There was a silence. Then, with great care, "Is it when?"
"Not yet." Katz turned the card face down. "But it is soon. Be ready to be asked."
"I am always ready."
"You are retired, Yair, and you have bad knees."
"The knees are ready also." A short breath. "Tell me one thing. Is it the Pakistani?"
"I do not know yet who it is," Katz said. "I know that it is somebody's channel, and I know whose name is on the door of it. That will have to do."
He put the receiver down. The lamp hummed. Outside, far off, there was a flat double sound, and then the quiet came back.