Adam Palmer - The Boudicca Parchments

“How did you know they were going to be there?”

“We’ve been keeping them under surveillance.”

“We… being…”

“The Mossad. There’s a limit to what I can tell you, but suffice it to say that when your name came up on the radar, Dovi took a personal interest in it.”

Daniel remembered Dovi Shamir from his last little adventure. When he fled to Israel from Egypt, he had been interviewed by Dovi and initially given quite a hostile reception. But after that, a mutual respect had developed between them. Then, when Daniel foiled a plot to contaminate Israel’s water supply, he became something of a hero amongst the elite few who were truly in the know.

Sarit Shalev had also been part of it. But she had not always been Sarit Shalev.

She had first travelled to Israel from Cork in Ireland with her parents and brother, visiting Jerusalem’s numerous churches and wondering around the city as a curious eighteen-year-old. But a tranquil holiday was turned into something ugly when a suicide bomber injured her and claimed the life of her brother. After a short stay in an Israeli hospital, in which she saw Jews and Arabs treated by Israeli doctors — also both Jewish and Arab — she became increasingly interested in the conflict that had spawned the violence that had claimed her brother’s life.

But she noticed the vast gulf between the one-sided reporting and the more complex reality on the ground. She witnessed, at first hand, Palestinians staging incidents with their children to try and provoke a reaction from Israeli soldiers, while cameras rolled nearby. And she saw the Israeli soldiers remaining calm in the face of this provocation. This prompted her to want to learn more about the Israeli army in particular.

So the following year — bypassing the more traditional picking-apples-on-a-kibbutz option — she volunteered for eight weeks of equally menial duty on an Israeli army base under the auspices of an organization called Sar-El. It was soon discovered that she had a sharp mind and was a fast learner and so she ended up being given duties that a foreign volunteer would not normally be trusted with.

This was followed by her bold decision to apply for permanent residence and volunteer for a full two years of service in the Israeli army, much to the horror of her parents. After some gruelling interviews to test her intelligence and sincerity, and in defiance of plaintive parental appeals to come home, she was accepted by the Israeli army and spent the next two years serving in communications.

Upon leaving the army, she was planning to go to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to study psychology. But she took the fateful decision of responding to an ad for a job interview involving “interesting work abroad.” After passing that interview and several more — where they looked deeper into both her motivation as well as intelligence — she went through a rigorous initial training course, that was itself part of the selection procedure. Only then was she inducted into the Mossad and the real hard work began.

In the course of her training, she had proved herself more than usually resourceful, coming to the attention of Dovi Shamir by then a training officer after he had become compromised in Britain. He took the young Siobhan Stewart under his wing and singled her out for training as a kidon — an assassin. During that time she had changed her name, to the more Israeli sounding Sar it Shal ev — with the emphasis on the second syllable in each case. Of course that was only the name she used when in Israel. She retained the name Siobhan Stewart, on her Irish passport, as it enabled her to work more freely internationally.

“He sometime shortens his name to ‘Bar-Tikva’.”

“Is that to sound more like Bar Kochba?”

“Bar Kochba?” Sarit echoed. “Could be. But he seems more concerned with fighting against his fellow Jews over their lack of piety.”

Bar Kochba — born Simon ben Kosiba, but renamed Bar Kochba , the Aramaic for “Son of a Star” by the great rabbi Akiva — was the leader of a Jewish uprising against the Romans in Judea in the year 135. Like the earlier Jewish rebellion between 66 and 72, it was brutally put down by the might of Rome. But it remains one of the high points in Jewish history for the struggle against tyranny.

She had told Daniel about Shalom Tikva — AKA “HaTzadik”. She had explained about the telephone intercepts and the SHaBaK and Mossad watch lists. And she explained how Dovi had called her at short notice after booking her onto the London flight to keep tabs on Baruch Tikva.

“But how did you know when and where he’d make his move?”

By now they were sitting down in the living room of the safe house having a cup of tea.

“I didn’t. I had a motorbike waiting for me at the airport and I followed him to an address in Belgravia — the home of a woman called Chienmer Lefou — nee Lowe.”

“Chienmer Lefou?”

“She calls herself ‘Lady Lefou’ although she isn’t really a lady.”

“But who is she?”

“Former model, professional trophy wife to the rich and titled, and now a well-spoken, but rather badly educated anti-Semitic whore.”

“Ouch! Now tell me what you really think about her?”

The smile didn’t leave Daniel’s face, nor the scowl Sarit’s.

“She’s a holocaust denier — or rather a denier-lite. She tries to play down the numbers rather than make a fool of herself by disputing it outright. But she also uses her ever-dwindling social connections to help holocaust deniers. And she tries to spread anti-Israel propaganda and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories — although she mainly preaches to the converted.”

“Is she open-eye or shut-eye?”

Sarit was surprised by this question. The terms originally referred to spiritualists and self-styled psychics. It didn’t mean that they literally closed their eyes when they performed. Rather, it referred to whether or not they believed their own bullshit. Shut-eye meant they did. Open-eye meant they didn’t. Now the term was used also for conspiracy theorists. Shut-eye were the ones who bought the conspiracy theories — often paying large sums of money for the books and videos. Open-eye meant they sold them — literally — knowing full-well that they were lying through their teeth, but making a pretty penny in so doing.

“Open-eye,” Sarit explained. “She may have initially been motivated by an argument she had with a Jewish woman about Lefou’s extravagance when arranging charity dinners. But after that she just went overboard, first venting her spleen for the sake of it and then realizing that she could actually make money out of it.”

“But how did you know about her?”

“I didn’t. I called in to Dovi. He checked the address online at the UK Land registry and got the owner’s name. He also checked it against the voting register to see who was actually registered as living there. Then he cross-checked the name against the various watchlists and needless to say it came up, with a whole long case file.”

“How many names of you got on the watchlist?”

“There are several lists, ranging from terrorists, to enemy-recruitables, to friendly recruitables to non-violent critics, etc. She’s on the non-violent critics and enemy-recruitables list. She’s seen as some one who would actively work against us if she could. Until now she’s been basically a talker. But the fact that Bar Tikva arranged to see her after Sam Morgan tried to kill you while he was working for them, meant that the meeting might have something to do with the attempts on your life. And of course because she’s on the enemy-recruitables list, she might be ready to do more than just talk. We knew that Bar Tikva didn’t go there just to have a chat.”