Greg Rucka - A gentleman_s game

"No, he didn't. I mean, he knew what Ed and I were up to, but he didn't know."

Wallace looked away from the water to her, curious.

"It was about you," Chace explained. "Took me until you announced that you were leaving to realize it, but it was about you, Tom. The whole time, it was about you."

Wallace stared at her, and she laughed without a sound, amused by how pathetic it all seemed to her.

"Tara?"

"Come on, don't do this. You're a bright lad, you can figure it out."

"Not with this I can't." Wallace looked away, back to the sea. "I've never been good at figuring things like this."

"Neither have I. That's why it took until you were gone."

Wallace shook his head ever so slightly.

Chace looked into her whiskey, then drained the glass, feeling the raw heat in her chest. The lights from the Isle of Wight danced on the water, teasingly, as if you could walk all the way to their source.

"I didn't want Ed," she said. "I wanted you, Tom, and there was no way in hell I was going to make a try at my Head of Section."

She turned to him, waited, and when Wallace finally faced her, she kissed him, feeling his mouth unyielding at first, then softening, answering. The taste of cigarette smoke and whiskey and curry and the ocean, all the flavors of the forbidden.

"I wanted you," Chace said.

Israel-Tel Aviv, Mossad Headquarters 23 August 0904 Local (GMT+3.00) It was the second bombing in as many weeks, this time in Jerusalem, on King David Street, Friday night, when the kids were out. Another suicide to accompany the murders, an eighteen-year-old Palestinian girl who'd walked up to a crowd of teens and ended them all in fire and light. Seven dead, another four wounded, two of them critically. The eldest had not turned twenty; the youngest was fifteen.

The Israeli response came the following Sunday morning, less than thirty-six hours later, when two IDF helicopter gunships launched two missiles each into the home of Abu Rajoub, near the Gaza Strip. Rajoub, long identified as the director of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad's martyrdom division, was killed along with two lower-ranking members of the organization, his wife, and one of their six children.

The thing that bothered Noah Landau most about all of this was that it barely bothered him at all.

Wrestling his beaten Toyota through Tel Aviv traffic and listening to the news on the radio, outrage and regret and condemnation and threats, he couldn't bring himself to feel anything about it anymore, one way or another. The intellectual response remained intact, the understanding of the horror visited and revisited, the seeming futility of the cycle. He knew all the reasons, beginning with the essential principle that a government is obligated, morally and legally, to protect its citizens from violence, within and without. He still believed that a zero-tolerance policy was the only possible solution in the face of terrorist violence.

But as he cleared the security to the underground parking lot of the innocuous and frankly dull building that housed his office with the Mossad, Noah Landau realized that his emotional disconnect was complete. It wasn't that he didn't know what he should feel; it had reached the point that he simply could not feel it any longer.

He'd reached this point before, twice. Once in late 1982, fifteen years old and kicking a soccer ball in the front hall of his family home in Haifa, much to the fury of his mother. The phone had rung and she had answered and he had continued to play, and then she had screamed. It had been an extraordinary noise, and as an adult, he still heard that sound, something perfectly pure in its horror, the sound of a soul being torn from a body.

His father had been killed in action in Lebanon.

His mother's grief had so overwhelmed him, he'd been left with nothing of his own. In that vacuum, he'd felt the absence for the first time.

The second time had been when his wife, Idit, and their eight-year-old son had died in a Tel Aviv cafe, when a car bomb had detonated twelve feet from where they were eating. • "Noah."

"Viktor."

"El-Sayd is on the move."

Landau stopped in the hallway but didn't look back, wondering if this was another of what Viktor Borovsky considered "jokes."

If it was one, it wasn't funny.

"He doesn't leave Egypt," Landau said softly.

"Yeah, well, I know that, but this is out of Cairo. El-Sayd's making plans to go to Yemen sometime in September."

That was enough to earn second consideration. Landau turned around, peering at the other man over the top of his glasses. Viktor was leaning in the doorway of his office, his long arms folded across his chest like spider's legs. He shot Noah a sharp, thin smile and then, with the heel of one foot, kicked his door open farther, pushed away from the frame, and disappeared into his office, inviting Landau to follow.

So Landau followed, closing the door behind him. Borovsky was already at his desk, flipping through stacks of signals and memos. He was almost six and a half feet tall, bamboo-shoot thin, and bony. Landau could see the rounded cap of each of Borovsky's shoulders beneath his cotton shirt.

"The Old Man hasn't seen it yet," Borovsky was saying. "Got it this morning, haven't finished with the stack that came in overnight. But I saw el-Sayd, I thought of you."

"Does it check?"

Borovsky stopped riffling through the papers long enough to blast him with a glare. "Got it this morning, I said. Haven't had a chance to do anything else with it. Still have three dozen of these shit signals to do, okay?"

"Then until it checks, you're wasting my time."

"Don't be such a cocksucker all the time, Noah. You don't have to be such a dripping-dick cocksucker."

Landau moved to the desk, set his case down beside it, not speaking. When Borovsky swore, his Russian accent grew thicker, sometimes to such an extent that it was impossible to make out the Hebrew he was using. Adding profanity into the mix didn't help, since most of the profanity in Hebrew was actually taken from Arabic.

"Fuck my dog, where is it?" Borovsky muttered. "Little piece of turd, where is it?"

Landau removed his glasses, used the tail of his shirt to clean the lenses. The lenses didn't need it, but it was something to do instead of becoming impatient. The glasses were plain, black plastic frames designed to hold thick lenses, and Landau knew they were unflattering on him and didn't care in the slightest. He hadn't cared what he looked like since Idit died.

There was a rustle of paper and Borovsky made a satisfied grunt, tugging a thin sheet free. Without his glasses, Landau wasn't sure if it was a single sheet or perhaps a couple of sheets clipped together.

"Little shit can't hide from me," Borovsky announced, then waited until Landau had his glasses back on before handing the signal over.

The message had been printed on colored paper, almost a pistachio green, the date stamp from the Signal Officer at the upper left indicating the intelligence had come in just before four that morning. Routing indicated that the message had originated with one of the Cairo cells, but nothing more specific on the sourcing. Landau skimmed it quickly, then reread it again, more slowly, then handed it back to Borovsky.

"Useless," Landau said.

"The fuck you say."

"It's from an informant, it's bought information. Muhriz el-Sayd hasn't left Egypt since the Luxor shootings, Viktor."

"You think like a train, Noah, you go only back or forward, not sides, you know? Just because he hasn't left, that's not he never leaves."

"This is not enough to act upon, you know that."

"So maybe we get more, huh?"

"It'll have to be better than some unidentified informant's intelligence. It'll have to be something verifiable."