Gavin Lyall - Judas Country

And once she'd said it, I could see the Professor as a mediaeval merchant prince – with the silk robe, the neat beard, the air of fastidious toughness. Fingering a bale of cloth here, sniffing a handful of spice there, clinking the gold coins in his satchel…

If the gold had been there. 'Straight archaeology isn't a sort of high-paid business, then?'

She flicked her hand sharply. 'If you are writing the big picture books that nobody is reading, or making television programmes for people who sleep with open eyes – yes, there is money. But if you wish to do only the real work, to dig, you are only famous.'

'Pure knowledge spreads pretty thin on bread.'

She thought this out. 'Yes, that is right.'

One radio-compass needle was pointing firmly at what it thought was Tel Aviv's beacon, but we were at too much of an angle to the coastline for me to trust it. I tried switching the VORaround to get a bearing on Ben Gurion airport itself, but we were too far and too low for a very-high-frequency gadget.

'What is that?' Mitzi leant across to look.

'A mixed affair. Combined Visual Omni-Range and Instrument Landing System. Reads on to the same dial. The VORnavigates you – points at a radio station – then when you get there the ILS, both needles together, give you height and courseto fly so you come down a glidepath on to the runway. Bad weather and night.'

'You can land without seeing?'

'No, you've still got to see the runway at the last moment. But on ILS I'd bring an aeroplane like this down to 300 feet in cloud.'

'And if then you could not see?'

'Then I'd go away and land somewhere else.'

Time buzzed gently by, a calm sea crawled away below. I took out a pre-prepared pipe and added to the collection of matches on the floor.

Finally I said: 'Your father can't have found many million-dollar swords. I mean, when you've found one the pressure must ease up a bit.'

'You must not say "million-dollar sword",' she said impatiently. 'That is museum talk. Do you think my father first thought that when he saw it?'

No, I didn't. Allowing for inflation in the last eighteen months, he probably said: "There's an $800,000 sword.' But that was wrong, too – or incomplete. It must have meant something else as well – knowledge, truth, beauty – for him to be good at his job at all. Some well-engineered aircraft mean more than money to me. No sword'sintrinsically more beautiful than the original 049 Connie.

I nodded. 'But what are you going to do when you've got it?'

'I must sell. I would want to give it to a museum in Vienna in the memory of my father, but… I have to live also. But even in New York I can make sure my father's finding of it is known.'

Professor-Doktor-convict Bruno Spohr's last round-up? But I didn't say that. Soon after, she went back to the main cabin.

My estimated time of arrival turned out just about right, and just before the coast I remembered to open the little quarter-light window at my side and shove out the two guns. Jehangir's silenced job turned out to be an old Smith amp; Wesson 'Victory'.38, one of the few models actually made with a screw thread for a silencer. Probably quite a valuable antique in its own right by now.

At Ben Gurion International they parked us well out, away from the ranks of airliners, and told us towait. After about ten minutes the customs gave the aircraft a quick frisk and we were clear to haul our baggage over five hundred yards to the terminal, watched by strolling guards in sloppy uniforms and an easy sureness about the way they held their sub-machine guns. You can't mistake Israel for a country at peace, and I don't think they shoot off their own feet much, either.

I did the paperwork for the aircraft and then went through the meat-grinder they call customs and immigration. Eleanor and Mitzi were waiting on the other side. They hadn't had any trouble.

'Just for interest,' I said to Eleanor, 'what profession do you have on your passport?'

'You don't say on an American passport, now.'

"That could help.' So then we got Mitzi into asherut – a communal taxi that looks like an American hearse – for Jerusalem. It's only thirty miles, though with Israeli driving it can seem both shorter and longer., 'Give us a ring when you've got a hotel,' I told her. 'Remember we're at the Avia. Ken'll phone us later.'

She was away in a cloud of hot rubber, and we found an ordinary cab for ourselves.

The Avia is just around the airport perimeter, in flat dull country that's fine for building an airfield, but not historic or pretty enough to suit toifrists. So the hard core of its clientele are airline crews and occasional batches of stranded passengers, which makes it a good place for getting a drink at breakfast or breakfast at teatime.

By six o'clock I'd showered, hung up my two damp shirts to finish dripping, got back into a dirty one and was sitting down behind a Maccabee beer in the first-floor dining-room. Eleanor wandered in soon after.

'No bar?' she asked.

'No, but you can drink what you like here. Airline influence, I suppose.' Despite my personal example, aircrews aren't big boozers.

She ordered a gin and tonic. 'So now we wait?'

'I have to, but you can go down to Tel Aviv for dinner. It's only ten miles.'

'I'll see.' She'd changed into a bright red trouser suit with a ruffled white blouse and a gold whatsit on a chain around her neck. Since she'd sat down there'd been some high-intensity radiation coming off a TWA crew that was breakfasting on turkey sandwiches at the next table, but she let it bounce off.

Her gin arrived, and she said 'cheers' because I was British and drank. 'I thought you said Ken had been deported.'

'Yes, but they changed their minds.' Would she ask why the change? Would I tell her my guess – a trap?

She didn't ask that. 'What was he… charged with?'

'Espionage.'

'What? And he only got two years?*

'Three with one off for good behaviour. But they call everything espionage over here. We were in the usual business: a load of small arms for Jordan only we landed in Israel instead.'

'That's a habit you can't afford often,' she said dryly. 'Wait -you said we?'

'Uh-huh. We were coming out of the Lebanon into Syria, in thick weather. There's a couple of bloody great mountain ranges around there, Mount Hermon and all, and your safety height's about 11,000 feet. So we lost an engine in between them, and we were overloaded so she wouldn't hold more than six thousand feet on one fan. Couldn't go back, couldn't go on – not unless we could see – so the only place to go was south. And that's the Jordan valley. You know it goes on down and becomes the Red Sea and then the Kenya Rift Valley?'

'But you didn't reach Kenya,' she said gently.

'We nearly made Jordan. But when we came out of cloud over Galilee we found we'd got a fighter escort. Ken put her down on a road just south of the lake.'

'Andyou got away?"

'Israel's got a lot of frontier to guard, and they guard it against an army – not just one man."

So then the TWA crew decided it was takeoff time, but not so urgent they couldn't get a closer look at Eleanor on the way. The captain, a solid man with cropped grey hair, nodded at me and said pleasantly: 'Haven't met here before, have we? You fly?'

He was looking at my shirt, which had the little pen-holders stitched to the outside of the breast pocket.

I nodded back. 'Business and charter.'

'Ah.' His Dow-Jones rating of me slumped several points. 'You do a nice line in stewardesses.'

Eleanor gave him a quick flashgun smile. 'No, I'm his employer.'

The captain sighed. 'And we get Howard Hughes. Come on, boys; it may be the wrong business, but it's the only one we know.'

Eleanor watched them to the door, sipping her drink thoughtfully. 'But Ken got caught?'