Steven Savile - Silver

“I shall inform Sir Charles immediately.”

“I thought you might.”

Orla Nyren deplaned at terminal three of Israel’s Ben Gurion airport.

She emerged from the air-conditioned hull into the mid-70s heat of the Tel Aviv afternoon and lifted her face to the sky. The sun felt good. Honest. It had been a long time since she’d set foot on Israeli soil, but for a while it had been her second home.

The ground crew swarmed over the asphalt, dragging the hose from the refueling vehicle toward the underside of the G5. They were all dressed identically in white coveralls and looked disturbingly like a hazmat team going to work. They moved with the efficiency of drones, each doing their part. The nearest gates were occupied by commercial airliners, tail fins showing their allegiance to each and every flag imaginable. Farther along the hardstand a huge Airbus 380 was taxiing toward the gate. The Airbus dwarfed every other plane on the ground.

Orla adjusted the lie of her skirt. Her heels tunked hollowly down the steel stairs onto the hardstand.

Her escort waited for her at the bottom of the stairs. He was a good-looking man, typically dark, with an olive cast to his skin, and carefully cultivated two-day stubble that was neatly trimmed. He wore a light linen suit and a white shirt that was rumpled around the collar. He held out a hand to her as she reached the bottom step. It might have been misplaced chivalry, or an offer to shake hands, she couldn’t tell. Orla took his hand and turned the gesture into a brisk handshake. His grip was uncomfortably firm. “Orla Nyren,” she said, stepping down on to the blacktop.

“Uzzi Sokol,” her host said, smiling tightly. “Walk with me.” He turned on his heel without another word and led her toward the terminal building. Sokol moved with the arrogance of a military man. Orla had to walk half a step faster than was comfortable to keep up with him as he steered her toward the special customs gate. She had met his type before a dozen times a day when she’d been operating in the Middle East. It was that arrogance that marked her as a second-class citizen. It was rooted deep in the male psyche. It was the usual kind of pseudo-sexual, dynamic bullshit that really infuriated her. Orla had known the guy less than sixty seconds and he was already trying to imprint his dominance over her.

Well, screw that, she thought to herself, and stopped trying to match his pace. She turned to look back at Sir Charles’ Gulfstream. It might have looked like the runt of the litter alongside the Airbus, but it really was a majestic piece of aeronautical design. She saw Ryan, Sir Charles’ man, on the stairs. His white shirt immaculately starched despite the long-haul flight, looking every inch the dashing pilot. He flashed Orla a smile and tipped her a two-fingered salute. She smiled back, knowing the few seconds she had taken out of chasing Uzzi Sokol should have been just enough to exasperate the Israeli. That was her intention, after all.

Sokol waited for her beside the security door. He could barely mask his impatience. Orla smiled, which just seemed to annoy him all the more. She followed him through the door into the terminal. They walked through a narrow glass corridor. She could see the hubbub of passengers through the glass walls as they milled around, waiting for their flights to be called. Before she was halfway through the corridor announcements had been made in five languages.

Sokol didn’t say another word until she was on the other side of the customs gate. The diplomatic tags on her briefcase prevented them from interfering with her luggage and meant she could bring her service piece into the country. He whisked her away into a waiting black Mercedes sedan bearing the insignia of the IDF intelligence Corps, Heil HaModi'in. He closed the door and came around to the other side of the car.

“We’ll be with Lieutenant General Caspi in a short while. I trust your flight was comfortable?” If this was his attempt at small talk, Orla thought, it was rather woeful.

“It was fine,” she said, looking out the window. Airports across the world were all a much of a muchness, she decided, as the car swept around a line of waiting taxis. A snake of cars crawled up the on-ramp into a multistory parking garage. The barrier was down and the sign read full, so for every car that went in, one had to leave. Out of the airport the streets were depressingly familiar with their low buildings and spray-painted facades. Five minutes out of the airport compound they passed a man selling stacks of eggs from a rickety roadside table. Two minutes beyond that a grandmother-every damned day of her hard life engraved deep into the creases of her face-sat selling fruit from a handbasket. A little girl on a bright red bicycle pedaled hard, the frame swinging from side to side as she raced toward the row of buildings. She had her head down and wasn’t watching the traffic. Twice other drivers sounded off their horns as she came dangerously close to cutting across them. There was no uniform design to the buildings. They seemed to have grown haphazardly from out of the desert, all different sizes and different shapes. She saw black spray-painted graffiti on most of them and recognized the word Yahweh, one of the seven names of God, repeated over and over amid other Hebrew words she couldn’t decipher.

Another two minutes down the road the houses gave way to empty desert-like fields of scrub. In one field, solar panels sprouted up like corn, their glass panels reflecting the sun back brightly. In another were the tents of a gypsy camp. This was Israel encapsulated in a few short minutes, the privation of the common people right beside the wealth of the high-tech industries.

As they neared the city proper she felt the car begin to slow.

She watched the yellow and red painted curb flash by with hypnotic regularity.

The driver indicated a right and slowed. He made two more tight turns. Telephone wires were strung up overhead. As the street narrowed, the houses towered over either side of the car, the wires loaded with washing. It wasn’t something he expected. Washing lines, yes, but on the telephone wires? It was peculiar enough for him to notice.

The next turn took them off the main road. Palms lined the road leading up to a hill. A vast area had been cleared out, and construction workers were busy working with girders, rebar and concrete, setting the foundations for what would almost certainly become another skyscraper dominating the Tel Aviv skyline. It took Orla a little while to get her bearings. A lot had changed even in the few years since she had last been in the city.

They were driving up Shaul Hill-ul’s Hill. There were no IDF buildings up the hill, or there hadn’t been when she’d lived in Tel Aviv. If she remembered right, the only military establishment anywhere on the hill was Kiryat Shaul, and that wasn’t anything to do with the Intelligence Corps. It was the military cemetery where, among others, lay the victims of the Yom Kippur War.

She looked quizzically at Uzzi Sokol. The Israeli ignored her scrutiny, staring straight ahead. He reached forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder. The man nodded and slowed the car, indicating a left turn into the cemetery gates.

“Where are we going?” Orla asked.

“To see Lieutenant General Caspi, as per my orders. You do want to see Akim Caspi, do you not?”

“He’s meeting us in the cemetery?”

“It is as good a place as any in the city,” Sokol said, without the slightest trace of humor. “Unless you are frightened restless spirits might eavesdrop on your conversation?”

Nothing felt right about this.

Orla shook her head.

A moment later the driver brought the car to a stop beside the visitor’s center. “If you would be so kind?” Sokol asked, indicating the door. Orla opened the door and climbed out. High on the hill the sun was the same, but the wind brought the temperature down markedly. It was that, or the fact they were in a cemetery, Orla thought. Sokol indicated for her to follow, and he led her through the graves.