Part One — The Other Line · Adam's Robe Book 3
Chapter Five
Tel Aviv, Israel — Day 6
Katz took his tea at the kitchen table, as he had for thirty years, and the phone rang before the tea had cooled.
It was a little after eight. He had been up since five, which was the hour his body had settled on in the last decade without consulting him. On the table lay the legal pad he kept for lists, and on the pad lay nothing. He was seventy-one. He had been Glilot's custodian of a single case for nearly fifty years, and in the last two he had learned what he had not expected to be capable of learning so late. A man could stop being necessary and go on being useful, and the two were different jobs.
"Ronen," said Leah. "It's ten at night here. I'm sorry."
"You do not apologize to me for the hour. I am old, and I have no sleep to lose." He moved the cup. "You have a voice. It is the voice you use when a document has done you an injury."
"It has."
She told him. She told it well, as she told most things now, in order and without adjectives. A paper on her desk. A sixth-century inventory. A single line, and the line said whole, without division. She read it to him in English and then in the English of the author's footnote, and then she was silent, and he heard the vent in her office breathing.
He kept silent. He had taught her three questions once, over a long table in a basement room, and he asked them now in his head and waited to see whether she would answer them without being asked.
"Nobody gains if it's false," she said. "That's the first one. The second is who could have known, and I keep getting nobody. I've never published the phrasing. Karam says the same of his."
"And the third."
"If it's real, there's other paper. A family in the eastern hills had it, and somebody handed it on. That's a line of people, and a line of people leaves a trail." Her voice caught slightly. "That's why I called you. I should have called you on the first day."
"You called Karam. It was correct. He reads the page as the family reads it." Katz put one finger on the pad. "Who else has seen the paper?"
"The author. The editor. Two readers on the board, maybe. And me."
"You have asked the editor for the name."
"She's forwarding my question to the author. So the author knows that someone is asking." A breath. "I'm sorry. I couldn't think of another way to do it without lying."
"There is no other way. You did it as I would have." He found that it was true, and that it pleased him. "I will not put this on a form. I will keep it in my head, as the thing it is, until you tell me the time has come. You will not make me wait long."
"Ronen, I don't want it in a folder."
"I know. I am the man who keeps the folders. I understand your concern." He heard her laugh, small and relieved. "I will say one thing before you sleep. Whoever wrote this has been cautious. It is not a careless person who writes whole, without division and then declines to name where the document is kept. That is someone afraid."
"Of what?"
"Of being right. It is the commonest fear in our trade." He closed the pad. "Go to bed, Leah."
Glilot did not look like a war footing, which was how Katz knew it was on one. The corridors were quiet and well lit. The coffee machine in the break room had acquired a laminated notice about rationing. There were cots in an unused conference room on the third floor. A young man in shirtsleeves slept on one with a laptop on his chest, and the door had been left ajar so that someone would hear if the laptop made a sound.
He took the stairs, as he did every morning, and arrived at the archive annex at ten.
The annex was a long, low room at the back of the building, lined with gray steel cabinets and smelling of toner and old paper. Zohar Adin had run it for nine years. She was fifty, small and quick, with reading glasses pushed up into gray-streaked hair. She had never been surprised by a filing error and had never forgiven one. She was standing at the counter when he came in, and she did not say good morning.
"You still have a flag on Colonel Farhad Nassiri."
"I do."
"You've overridden the closure code five times. Once a quarter since the file went dormant." She laid a printout on the counter and squared it with the edge. "It's unusual. It's not against protocol. I nearly closed it myself last week when I was cleaning house on the dormant list, and I'm telling you now that I'm glad I didn't."
"Why?"
"Because somebody woke it up." She slid the printout toward him. "Two days ago, a visa application. Sri Lanka, electronic, filed through an agent in Colombo. The name on it is Kamran Ardalan. A conservation consultant, an Isfahan address, a purpose of visit that says heritage survey." She tapped the second line. "It's a clean application. It would never have pinged anything in the ordinary course. But the name Ardalan is sitting in your old notes on the New Julfa file, as an alias you wrote down once and never explained. That's the only reason the system lit it. It matched a word you'd typed, a year and a half ago, in a field nobody reads."
Katz read the page. The Isfahan address was a house in New Julfa that did not exist. The applicant's date of birth was off by three years. The passport number was one digit away from a number he remembered from a different folder.
"And the agent?"
"A small outfit near the port. Clean as far as we know. They file two hundred a week." She watched his face. "The applicant gave a contact address as well. It's a post office box in Bandar Abbas."
"A port city."
"A port city in the south of Iran, under blockade, where everyone with a boat is selling passage." She took off her glasses and put them on again. "I don't think he'd use a name twice by accident, Ronen. I think he used it because it's the only one he has paper for. And I think he doesn't expect anyone to be looking."
"He is correct that nobody is." Katz folded the printout in half and then in quarters, which was a habit of his that Leah had once found endearing. "Nobody but me."
"That's the other reason I wanted to tell you in person." She looked, for a moment, almost uncomfortable. "I'm required to log the hit. I logged it this morning. It will be read."
"By whom?"
"By whoever reads the log." She left the name unsaid. It did not need saying.
The summons came at four.
Director Livnat's office was on the sixth floor, at the end of a corridor where the carpet changed. It was a bare room with a desk, two chairs, a map on the wall that had been turned to face the plaster, and a window that looked south toward a gray sea. Livnat stayed seated. She was forty-six, lean, dark-haired, in a gray jacket that had not been bought for comfort. She had run Special Recovery for four years before the building made her a director, and she carried that time with her the way some people carry a limp.
"Sit," she said. "I have forty minutes."
He sat.
"You've had a flag on an Iranian colonel for seventeen months." She had no file open. "You renewed it by hand, five times, which is a procedural irregularity I'm choosing not to write up. Today it fired. A passport alias, a visa, a port in the south." She folded her hands. "You'll tell me what it is. In the order I need to hear it."
He told her. He told her the shape of it in clean sentences, as he had been taught to tell things to superiors. A colonel of the Guards, once the case officer for a smuggling network, once the leader of an operation at Yekta that had ended in a landslide. A man now unaccounted for. A man whose name he had kept alive because nobody else would. He gave her no more of Isfahan than the report on her desk already said, and he saw her notice that he gave her no more.
"And the object," Livnat said.
"It is a family's heirloom. Armenian. Ancient."
"Dayan told me." She said it without inflection. "She told me you were running a matter between the Armenians and the Iranians, and that a document had persuaded her to renew your desk for a year. She didn't tell me what the document said. She said it wasn't hers to tell." Her mouth moved. It was not a smile. "I've read the Isfahan file twice. I understand it as a stolen antiquity and a useful man. I'm told he tried to kill a scholar for it. I don't need to understand more than that to act."
"I would counsel you to understand more."
"You'd counsel it. Noted." She leaned back. "Here is where we are, Katz. Half this building has not slept since the war began. Every desk in it has a file about a more urgent matter than a colonel with a fake visa. Dayan's committee renewed you for a second year, with a budget, on a promise that you would bring me leads. This is the first." She let it sit. "I'll be generous. It's a good one. Disgraced IRGC, mobile, possibly carrying an item with a market. Someone on the other side will want him, and someone on ours will want to know what he knows about the Guards' internal arrangements. I'd like to be the person who gets to him first."
"He will not be got to by being chased."
"Then how?"
"Slowly. By someone he knows."
"You."
"Perhaps. Perhaps another." He took a breath. "I intend to make one inquiry before I trouble anyone. There is one person who sees more of the money in the southeast than any of us. If a colonel is moving south with papers made in Iran, money will have moved first. I would ask him."
"Who?"
He had not meant to say the name. He found, when she waited, that he had no good reason not to, and a good reason, the size of a brass plaque, to keep it. But the sixth floor was not the place to be sentimental, and he had been cautious for fifty years.
"Bhatti," he said. "Tariq Bhatti. A senior officer in the Pakistani service. He was a colonel when I knew him."
Livnat held still. Her eyes, which had been resting on his face, sharpened.
"Your friend from the culvert."
"I would not say friend."
"I read that file too. He sold you a route and a man died of it." She let the sentence stand. "And now he is a brigadier, or whatever the title is."
"Yes."
"Then he owes you."
"He owes me nothing. He is not that kind of man. But he understands that one day it may be to his advantage to have done me a favor." Katz heard his own voice, level, formal, a little too slow. "He will give me information if I give him a reason."
"Good. Use him." She picked up a pen, wrote three words on a pad, and tore the sheet off. "File the channel with me by the end of the day. The number, the cutout, whatever you use. If he speaks, I want to know what he says. If he sells you anything, I want to see the invoice."
"Director. The channel is a personal one. It exists because it is not in the system."
"It's in the system now." She said it without unkindness. "You can keep your private courtesies, Katz. You can keep your card, or whatever it is you keep in that pocket. But this is not a hobby any more. It's a desk with a budget, and the budget has a reader. I am the reader." She stood. "Forty minutes. We've used thirty-four. I'll want daily reports, written, by seven."
He stood as well, which took him a moment longer than it once had. At the door he turned.
"Director. If I may say one thing."
"Briefly."
"The object is not a commodity. If it is treated as one, it will go badly for everyone in the building."
Livnat considered him flatly. She had been told many such things by many people, and she kept a list of the ones that proved correct.
"If you're right," she said, "I'll have the pleasure of saying so afterward. Seven o'clock."
He called Leah from the street.
He had walked out of the building into the late afternoon light, as far as the corner where a fruit seller kept a stall under a blue awning. He had bought three pomegranates for no reason. It was a little after seven in the morning in Los Angeles. She answered on the first ring.
"You did not sleep," he said.
"I slept four hours. It was fine." She waited. "You have news."
"I have a name, and a fact, and a fear." He turned the pomegranates over in the bag. "The name is Nassiri. The fact is that he is alive and moving. Two days ago he filed an application for a visa to Sri Lanka, in the name Ardalan, with a post office box in Bandar Abbas. It is the first sign of him in seventeen months."
The silence on the line was longer than he had expected. He had learned to read her silences. This one was different. She had assumed it quietly for a long time and had just been told it was so.
"Sri Lanka," she said at last. "It's a way out. If you can't use Iran's ports and you can't use the airports, Colombo is one of the places the container lines still run. Then south, or east." She stopped. "Ronen. Is it connected to my fragment?"
"I do not know. I think you do not know either." He crossed the street. "I think it is a coincidence until we have a reason to say otherwise, and I think neither of us believes in that coincidence."
"No."
"There is the fear." He stopped at the curb. "I am going to ask Tariq Bhatti about the money. It is the only door that has not been closed to me. I tell you this because you would learn it, and because I would rather you were angry with me today than surprised next week."
"Bhatti." She said it as one says the name of a disease. "Ronen, he sold us a route. Doron died of it."
"I know exactly what he sold. I know the name of the man who died." He kept the rest to himself. "I will use him as one uses a tool with a bad edge. I will know where the edge is."
"And when he sells you?"
"Then I will know the price." He heard the tone he had used on her, and softened it. "There is more. The Director has asked for the channel."
"The—"
"It is hers, Leah. It is no longer mine alone. I filed it this afternoon." He looked at the pomegranates. "I did not wish to. I did it because the desk is hers to renew or end, and because she was correct that it is not a hobby. If I had refused, someone else would have been sent to him, someone who does not know what the word cautious means."
She said nothing. He waited. It was a courtesy of his generation to let a silence do its work.
"I hate this," she said finally.
"I know." He reached into his jacket, to the inside pocket, and found the gray card by touch. He had not looked at it in many months. He left it where it was. "So do I. But I have held a case for nearly fifty years, and I have learned that what one hates is not always what one can refuse."
"Okay." Her voice was small and steady. "Okay. Call me when he answers."
"I will call you when he answers."
He ended the call and stood a while at the corner with his three pomegranates, under the blue awning. Somewhere over the water there was a dull double thud, an interception, far off and flat. The fruit seller did not look up. Neither did the street. Katz stood still until the sound had gone.
Then he went back inside to write his seven o'clock report.