Chris Ryan - Killing for the Company

‘War is around the corner,’ Cohen murmured, staring out across the park. ‘The Arabs will pay for what they did to Amit. They will pay for what they continue to do to Israel. Saddam Hussein has his missiles pointed at our homeland, Maya. We both know he would fire them if he could. The British and Americans are not going to war to make our lives safer. But that is what they will do, and we must play a part. You must play a part, Maya. For Amit, and for Israel.’

Maya was still trying to quell the rage inside her. ‘What do you want me to do?’ she whispered, looking straight ahead.

Cohen nodded with satisfaction. Then, slowly, he removed a small photograph from his shapeless overcoat. It was a colour portrait of a man in his sixties, perhaps older, with a thin grey beard and glasses. ‘Who is he?’ Maya asked.

‘A British weapons inspector. Well respected, by all accounts. Unfortunately he has taken it upon himself to become a thorn in the British Government’s side. He’s of the opinion that the Iraqis are not in possession of weapons of mass destruction, and certain interested parties are worried that he might go public.’ Cohen removed his glasses and held them out in front of his head, as though checking the lenses for dust. ‘That can’t be allowed to happen, of course.’ He replaced his glasses and turned to look at Maya, who was still avoiding his gaze. ‘MI5 can’t touch him — it would raise too many suspicions. That’s why the job is yours. It needs to look like an accident, Maya. Or, for preference, a suicide. It can be made known that the pressure of work got to him, that he…’

‘I’m not doing it.’

Silence.

‘I don’t believe, Maya,’ Ephraim said in a dangerously low voice, ‘that I offered you a choice.’

She handed him back the photograph. ‘Someone else can go after this guy. It won’t be difficult. I want direct action against the Arabs. They have killed all my family. All of them, Ephraim. I want to hit back.’

Cohen shook his head. ‘You know we can’t put you into the Arabic-speaking world. You’re a woman. You’d be too conspicuous.’

She treated that comment with the contempt it deserved. ‘I’m the best kidon the Institute has,’ she snarled. ‘Do you really think I can’t take care of myself?’

‘No, Maya. I don’t think that. But it still isn’t going to happen and you’d better get used to it. The Institute doesn’t exist so that you can take revenge. Anyway, this is an important operation. We.. ’

Maya stood up mid-sentence. She couldn’t listen to any more. ‘Forget it, Ephraim. I’m not interested.’

They locked gazes. Maya could read Ephraim’s face like a book. He was sizing her up. Working out whether she was serious. Planning his next move. Fine. He could plan all he wanted. Their talk was over.

‘You’re making a mistake, Maya,’ Cohen said. ‘I fight your corner at the Institute. Walk away now and I won’t be able to do that any more.’

She continued to stare at him, but in her mind all she saw was her brother’s face, and the pain of Amit’s death twisted inside her once again. She slowly shook her head. ‘You won’t need to,’ she said.

‘Don’t make the wrong decision, Maya.’

‘The Institute is weak. If it won’t do what needs to be done, I will.’

And then she turned her back on her handler and walked away from the bench. She didn’t look round, because she knew that a man like Ephraim Cohen would take that as a sign of weakness.

Cohen watched her leave. He saw her slim, black-clad figure stride along the banks of the Serpentine, then turn and disappear from view. He didn’t move from the bench.

A second pair of mounted policemen trotted by, the clip-clopping of their horses uncommonly loud. Cohen barely noticed them. His mind was turning over. Replaying their conversation. Deciding what to do next.

He remembered the first time he had met Maya Bloom. It had been five years ago, and he had been aroused by the sight of this beautiful creature — by the curve of her breasts and her hips, by the way her full, glossy lips parted slightly even when she wasn’t speaking. Every member of the Institute knew what a powerful weapon sex was, but that didn’t mean any of them were immune to it, and Cohen could remember the daydreams he had entertained that he and his new agent might become lovers. The thought of her warm skin against his, and the dangerous games they would play.

These, he now realised, were the pathetic fantasies of an ageing man.

So far as he knew — and he had done everything in his considerable power to find out — Maya had no lovers. The sex she exuded was shared with nobody. The body that he lusted after would never be anybody’s. Maya Bloom had only one thought, and that was for her work. This she carried out with an efficiency that sometimes surprised even the more hardened officers back in Tel Aviv.

He had lied to her, of course, about the cause of her brother’s death, but that was a necessity. The information that had come through was sketchy, filtered unreliably through British intelligence. But if it was indeed true that Amit Bloom had perished in a suicide bomb, there was no knowing how Maya would react. It had been important to him — to the Institute — that Maya’s loyalty remained unquestioned. But that wasn’t how things had played out, and he was experienced enough to know that it changed everything.

A kidon was a weapon. The very name meant ‘bayonet’. They were a tool of the state of Israel, just as surely as the missiles housed in silos in the Negev desert. If one of those missiles was faulty, the course of action would be clear: it would be dismantled and taken out of service. And what was true for a missile in the Negev was true for a kidon — especially one as volatile and dangerous as Maya Bloom.

As Cohen pulled his mobile phone from the pocket of his shabby coat, he wondered whether she might have prevented what he was about to do had she shared herself with him at some point over the course of their professional relationship. He was honest enough with himself, as he called a number, to realise that it would probably have made no difference. In their world, loyalties were not forged between the bedclothes. It was more complicated than that.

Yes. A great deal more complicated.

A voice answered the phone. ‘Who’s this?’

‘It’s me. Cohen.’

A silence.

‘What do you want?’

‘A favour,’ he said. ‘Or rather, the repayment of a favour. I have a little problem, and I need you to take care of it for me…’

As Maya Bloom walked along the Serpentine she could feel Ephraim Cohen’s eyes burning into her. Even once she was out of his line of sight, she could sense his watchfulness, as though he was some invisible spirit gazing over her. She understood the way he looked at her. She recognised the lust. She saw it in almost every man she met. There were exceptions, of course. She thought about the guy she’d killed last night. Even through the mask of his scarred face, she had seen his determination. He had looked at her not with the eyes of a suitor, but with the eyes of a killer. It was an expression she knew well. She saw it in the mirror every day.

Maya knew, however, that Ephraim Cohen was not the kind of man you walked away from without there being some kind of consequence. What she had just done had implications.

She left the park and hailed a taxi. Ten minutes later she was letting herself into an unmarked door in Lexington Street in Soho, and climbing up the tacky carpet of the stairs that led into the operational apartment she had inhabited for these past five years. Central enough to be useful, anonymous enough to be an effective safe house, it was a spartan place. Thick net curtains covered the only windows on to the street below, blocking out much of the daylight, but also stopping anyone from looking in. There was almost no sound from the busy streets, though occasionally, through the thin walls, she could hear the hookers next door servicing their clients.