Джанет Моррис - The 40-Minute War

And then, when the questioning began again, it wasn’t about Ashmead at all, but about Chris Patrick and Morse and Netanayhu.

And maybe there was something in the coffee, after all, for when they let him go in the early hours of the morning, everyone was very friendly: Dow clapped him on the shoulders and told him if he needed any help, just holler; Watkins was telling him it was really wise of him to level with them and helping him straighten his tie, and Beck didn’t remember telling them any damn thing at all.

To his knowledge, he’d held his own, given nothing, and found out that all they had were typical bits of discrete intelligence, like a handful of jigsaw-puzzle pieces from different areas of the board, no two of which would interlock, let alone add up into any coherent picture.

And because they were at pains to part on good terms with him, to convince him there were no hard feelings, that everyone had just been doing their jobs, and that—if he kept his mouth shut—there would be no further repercussions, not even a notation in his file or an official query as to the disposition of the funds he’d appropriated, Beck couldn’t figure out the truth of it: either they’d gotten what they wanted or were pretending they had, preparing to face their own superiors; either he’d outsmarted them, or they him.

“We’ll be seeing you,” Dow said as they walked him to a waiting car.

“You can depend on it,” Watkins added with tired bonhomie; “it’s a small country.”

And that was that: he’d been let off at the glass fountain, told that his plane wasn’t airworthy yet, and, as far as he could tell, followed no more than thirty kilometers on his drive southwest to Jerusalem in his rental car.

He’d never been happier to see the Walled City, though the rain was fierce and the roads slick and he was feeling like he’d been handed one too many nightmares. In the midst of all this chaos and horror, it seemed to him ridiculous that he’d become the center of some interagency flap: but then, his superiors were only human; in the vacuum of solutions to problems not of their making, men cleaved to their routines, did their jobs, made up jobs to do which involved soluble problems and in which they could feel effective, though in the larger scheme of things, all action was probably impotent—even Beck’s.

He could have reported the entire incident, continued the game, caused some trouble for Dow, Watkins, even the Ambassador.

But by the time he’d reached the American Quarter, he’d decided he wouldn’t bother: he needed some sleep and then he needed to get to work.

The rain stopped as he pulled up at the compound’s gate and when he parked in his slot, the sky was clearing, hellclouds blowing away on a wind that didn’t know it was probably full of death, which promised spring and rebirth and smelled of cedar, eucalyptus, and a desert grateful to be wet.

Getting out of the rental car, he shrugged into the heavy, bullet-and-radiation-proof poncho Netanayhu had given him, pulled up the hood and put on his issue rubber mask, telling himself he needed the practice. All this would have to become automatic now.

Overhead, a jet screamed and he looked up in time to see a pair of contrails: he’d missed the overflights; it was good to know that they were flying again. The EMP effect, in Israel, had been minimal compared to the damage it had done closer to the strike zones, but microcircuitry was delicate; for those titanium jets to be wheeling in formation above him, much of their relevant electronics would have had to be checked out, if not replaced.

They dove and he saw that they were desert-patterned Israeli jets. He gave them a thumbs up and went inside, somehow cheered by this evidence of resurgent technology so that the questions at the back of his mind stopped nagging him quite so fiercely.

Maybe he’d done all right in Tel Aviv. Maybe he’d won point, set and match. Neither of his interrogators had mentioned personal inoculations, so maybe Beck’s recollection of that long, hazy night was accurate. Maybe they hadn’t drugged him, just exhausted him.

He fumbled his key into his lock and fell asleep without taking off his much-worn Levi’s, wondering if the jet stream was still mercifully blocked and how Morse and the Israeli biochemists were doing.

It wasn’t until he’d showered and breakfasted ten hours later that he realized someone had been in his apartment while he’d been gone: his air conditioners had been retrofitted into purifiers, turned backwards in windows securely sealed with silver tape; on his bedside table, where he customarily kept no more than one current and nonclassified report or magazine for late-night reading, were several Agency pamphlets on secondary radiation effects and a Special Forces field manual on survival in Red Zones I, II and III; Zone III being a circular area (less Zones I and II) figured by using minimum safe distance III as the radius and designated Ground Zero as the center, in which all personnel require minimum protection—all skin covered by protection equal to that of a two-layer uniform.

Since the super swore that nobody had come asking to be admitted to Beck’s apartment on grounds of a security emergency or for any other reason, and none of his doors or windows showed any signs of forcible entry, Beck had to assume that the health precautions and reading material were Ashmead’s way of saying he’d reported for duty.

Three days later, Beck still had not seen hide nor hair of his Bureau Chief, Dickson (who’d been out sick since Beck called in from Qatar, so Pickwick said) or of Ashmead or his team, but their spoor was evident, if you knew what to look for, and Beck did.

Chris Patrick called his office and asked if the long-haired girl who had come to her apartment to “fix” her air conditioner and “weather-strip” her doors and windows was really a friend of his; Morse wanted to know why his phones had echoes on them.

And Netanayhu came to Beck’s office in a fury just before noon of the third day, saying: “Inexcusable. Following me. Your people have too much chutzpah , you know, Beck? No attempt even to be coy. If again I see these cars straddling me, everywhere I go, I will have their tires shot out.”

Beck couldn’t keep a straight face but he couldn’t say anything aloud or lie to Netanayhu: he wrote “Ashmead,” on a piece of paper, handed it to Netanayhu, and said: “It’s nobody from State; must be your own people, looking out for you, some old Haganah friends who think the Arabs might take it in their heads to come after you—why not?”

Netanayhu chuckled as he tore the note into tiny pieces, then sobered: “Not funny, my friend. While you were gone, the terrorists stepped up their murdering: now it is our fault that your President pushed his button, yes. We are the lackeys of American Imperialism, and we are the enemy. So—” Netanayhu’s huge, sloping shoulders wriggled philosophically “—they are onto us again, like the jackals the bull in the field. And we, of course, have to retaliate; we have martial law and full alert and again we will soon be very busy protecting our borders from our Arab neighbors: this is no time for making jokes.”

“So I’ve heard—just a ‘little’ war, I hope—we’re in no position to pull you out if you get in too deep or one enemy comes at you from behind while you’re engaging another.” Since Netanayhu showed no disposition to argue Beck’s assessment of Israel’s war-fighting capability and no signs of leaving, Beck decided that being bird-dogged by Ashmead’s team wasn’t really the reason for the Israeli colonel’s visit: “Lunch time, isn’t it?”

“I thought,” said the colonel, “you’d never ask.”

At lunch upstairs in a private house which was Netanayhu’s counterintelligence section headquarters and thus had a busy ground floor full of chattering telexes and typewriters—his computers weren’t operational, he said sadly, shaking his huge head—Morse appeared from somewhere, looking put upon and harried, one of the ubiquitous paper masks down around his throat like an ascot.