The English Teacher (24 page)

“‘I
WANT YOU TO ASK
ME
how I'm feeling,' she said to me when she sat down with me two months later, after peering at the press clippings I had saved for her, looking at the ruins of the wrecked garage and reading the report in
Haaretz
:
‘A leading terrorist has been killed in a mysterious blast, and a secret office of the PLO has been completely destroyed. The office, masquerading as a garage on the outskirts of a harbor town, served as a center for the planning of terrorist attacks, and a senior source in Jerusalem, who spoke on condition of anonymity and denied any connection with the incident, would only say that the death of this man had thwarted a major attack which had been in the planning stages for some time. Local police investigators suspect that explosives stored in the garage detonated accidentally, while according to one British newspaper this was apparently the result of a turf-war between rival organizations.'

“And there was also the report we prepared for the Minister of Defense, who wanted to know how we had done it. Of course we omitted Rachel's name and certain other details that even the minister didn't need to know, and only described in brief how she arrived at the garage, having ‘found' a fault that had been prearranged, got a new battery installed, and went on her way. No need to explain to the minister that she was acquainted with the garage and the way it worked, having reconnoitered it in advance, and she knew what they did with batteries that had been replaced and where they stored them. Also no need to tell him where she set out from and what she did afterward.

“‘I want to know what you think about the operation,' she added, ‘the significance of it, the difference it might make.' Her voice trembled and her face was flushed. I could see she was keeping something inside, she was holding herself back from telling me more, and I decided to wait. This was my method—let her choose her moment to speak. And if she doesn't? It's her choice.

“‘Have you any idea what happened at the border checkpoint?' she said. ‘I know what you wrote in your report. Some clerk mixed up the car number and you had to smile at the fat man and persuade him to turn ignore it. That's what you wrote, isn't it?' And at that moment I didn't suspect anything. I certainly wanted to know more details, but she reported the procedure she had followed in typically laconic style, and I took notes. And anyway, everything was dwarfed by the scale of the operation itself, by the reports in the press and the congratulations we received from the Prime Minister, who wanted to meet her and thank her personally. She told me she felt exploited, and she asked if I was prepared to hear her out, or if I would have a problem with that. Her face hardened and I heard a critical and resentful tone in her voice. What could I do after she gave me the full story, tell her she see should see a doctor? I couldn't do that. The next morning she was due to fly back to her adopted country. God knows why she postponed the conversation to this moment. Perhaps to test me, to see what I would do. I glanced at my watch. I had no choice. In an hour and a half from now I was supposed to be meeting my wife and leaving for a vacation that had been planned long ago. How could I tell Rachel that life goes on, people go to work and come home, they have children, they have their little ways, they have their pleasures?

“‘When he put his hand under my dress,' she said, ‘I thought of you. I thought of what you would tell me to do, of what you would have done. You would tell me to do nothing. I hated you and I went
on smiling at the fat man as if nothing were happening. When his hand was in my panties I wanted to scream, but I didn't. The cigarette smoke was choking me. I didn't move even when his finger went inside me. I remembered you saying something about the terrorist I was going to blow up. I remembered you saying such a thing has never been done before. It took all of two minutes maybe, until I heard his little gasp. I did what you asked of me and I hated you.'

“She began to weep, and I sat there paralyzed and waited. I wasn't the right person to be sitting with her when she is talking about me. The awful story of what I made her do should be told to somebody else, without holding back and without the complications of the relationship between us. I know she felt my devotion to her, she knew I loved her, and that made it harder for me. I tried to be professional, to do my job, but inside it felt like I had been there, in that room, and I had done nothing to help her. Since then we haven't talked about it, and I keep thinking about her visit to the garage with the explosive battery, the mission that she went ahead with despite what she had to endure, despite the trauma to her body and her soul, and all of this was supposed to stay secret.

“And I didn't know, then, if she had told him. If after scrubbing her body and putting on her nightgown, and after hiding her passport and wallet and car keys, and after going over the whole episode minute by minute as she lay on the hotel bed, wondering if anything could have been otherwise, if she was somehow to blame—she contacted him.

“I assume she thought of him and was ashamed. She told me about the guard who raised the barrier and said goodbye to her as if he knew what had happened, as if anyone seeing her would know what had happened. She thought she made it possible. This wouldn't have happened to anyone else.

“She arrived at her apartment in the evening and listened to the news in English. There was no mention of the explosion and the fire, and she had to wait for our clandestine broadcast to hear the plaudits showered on her.

“And today I know that afterwards she called him.

“And she told him, and he listened. And perhaps he had questions, and perhaps he thought of scolding her for traveling alone, but he didn't say anything. I hope he rushed over to see her and took her in his arms and brought her to bed, to prove that he loved her and to earn her everlasting love.”

“A
ND WH
AT DID YOU DO THEN?”
Joe yawned, and Ehud tried to hide his disappointment. The stack of files on the small cart beside them hadn't shrunk at all, and the security personnel assigned by the department to guard the classified documents were working around the clock. Joe reflected sadly that he was too old for all this, and in his day things were done differently. True, he knew how to use a computer and a cell phone, and like all of them he too admired the work of the surveillance teams, and the satellites that the Intelligence Corps had launched into orbit, but he still believed there was no substitute for dialogue and for the human factor when dealing with people and their innermost thoughts. He didn't think Ehud was lying, or deliberately withholding vital information. Ehud was searching for something deep inside him, and he had no way of getting to it without talking and talking and unraveling whatever was in his heart in the simple and familiar way—word by word, date by date, event by event.

When Ehud took a short break for a nap, Joe had a talk with the
Unit commander. The red phone allowed him to speak freely and he asked the commander to be patient: “Ehud is the key to this lock. He was her case officer, and he was the one she contacted. She told him her father was dead as if this is a password that he'd forgotten.”

The commander had learned a thing or two about Joe, and he let him continue.

“Ehud too wants to know where she is. It's been fifteen years since they parted company. In the meantime his wife has died and his children have grown up, and I think he's still in love with her.”

“Are you sure he's telling you the truth?” The commander reminded Joe that all they had was what Ehud was telling them, including the call he received.

“Even if he is lying and even if he's hiding things, he's not the type who would be helped to confess by the interrogation room and the cold water treatment. He's too experienced to be intimidated by that.”

The commander mumbled something, and Joe had no doubt that the idea of a third-degree interrogation had occurred to him.

“The problem is that Ehud doesn't know what to do either. He doesn't know her anymore, and now he's afraid that even then he didn't know what she was thinking and where her loyalties lay. She had a lover out there, did you know that?”

The commander didn't know, and he sent Yaniv, their liaison man, to go and scour the files. Joe waited on the line and listened to the commander giving Yaniv his instructions, and he knew this was pointless. All that Yaniv would find, if he found anything, would be a handful of dry, laconic reports, nothing that would be helpful.

There was one more important point to be raised, and he wanted the commander to grasp precisely what he meant. “Ehud is not one of us,” he said, and he heard the sharp intake of breath at the other end of the line. “Ehud is on her side. He wants to protect and rescue her.
If we back him into a corner, he'll choose to defend her interests rather than ours.”

“I'm not sure I understand,” said the commander.

“
We
are looking for her to make sure that she doesn't divulge the secrets she knows.
He
is looking for her because he loves her. These are two completely different things, and we have a classic conflict of interests.” He paused to let this sink in and continued: “We need to treat him like a target, the same as Rachel. We need his help and his knowledge and we have to exploit the fact that she turned to him and not to her regular contact. This shows there is something between them. She could have been missing for weeks and months without anyone noticing her absence, and that's why I need him here in my house, and not in the war room or the archive.”

“Okay, so what are you doing?” The commander wasn't the impatient type and he was a good listener. This was part of the reason that put him in the big leather chair.

“I'm talking to him, that's what I'm doing, I'm listening and letting him tell the whole story in his own way, until he himself leads us somewhere. It's obviously connected with her past, and obviously connected with what they shared. Otherwise she would have contacted someone else, or no one at all.”

The commander murmured his agreement.

“But where is she now? In Canada, where her cover story is based? In Europe, in one of the places she stayed for months before she went out to the operational zone? Or none of these places? I don't know, but I think we're making progress. Don't bother us, that's all I'm asking for.”

The commander agreed. He added that they were working on all the leads they had—the phone card that she bought, the brochures they found in her father's house, her British and Israeli passports. “We
sent teams to all the possible places, spoke to all the intelligence agencies that we cooperate with, and right now we're waiting.”

Joe asked the Unit commander to check a few things for him, and after speaking again to young Yaniv and telling him which of the old files to go through, he woke Ehud and asked him to continue.

“A
FTER SHE TOLD ME ALL THE
details of what happened at the border crossing, I told HQ I was postponing her return to active service and sending her to Israel for a break. Deep silence prevailed over the preparations for what should have been a vacation and most of the time she spent in her room. Before the journey I gave her a makeup set and a wig that we had prepared for her at home, and she took them from me as if she really did want to change her identity. I could barely recognize her when we set out, and her whole demeanor had changed too. The restrained young woman I knew had turned into a noisy flapper, in keeping with the blond wig and the heavy makeup. At first I thought she was being the consummate professional, going deep into the image assigned to her and making it unlikely that anyone flying with us would recognize her as Rachel Brooks. But when I watched her then from a distance of three rows away on the plane it seemed to me she was allowing herself the relief that only a change of identity could give her.

“We went to the Prime Minister's residence as soon as we landed. She went into the bathroom and got rid of the wig, removed the makeup, took out the contact lenses, and was once again the woman we knew. The Prime Minister welcomed her to his inner sanctum, and although all of this had been laid on in her honor, I thought she felt uncomfortable being the center of attention of four men. When he asked her how she succeeded in smuggling the explosives across
the border, I was afraid she was going to tell him. It was a bit strange. On one side there were the four of us—the head of the Mossad, the Unit commander, Rachel, and me—who knew what had happened, and on the other side the Prime Minister, who was asking her how she did what she did. She answered briefly and politely, and when he stood to award her the certificate of meritorious conduct I saw she was on the verge of tears. After this I took her to a hotel in Tel Aviv, left her some cash, and I took the certificate back to the Office. To this day she hasn't been allowed to keep it at home. Security comes first, doesn't it? Actually, she probably felt more isolated in Tel Aviv than in her apartment out there. She had nowhere to go, no home, no partner, and a father she had no intention of contacting. Before we parted in the hotel she stood with her back to me and stared at the dark horizon, and if there had been a single ray of light out there, I doubt she would have seen it.

“We had to decide what to do with her. Opinions were divided. The chief security officer wanted to bring her home. The trauma she had suffered could undermine her judgment and there was the risk that she would put too much emotion into her work. I wanted her to carry on and I relied on what she had told me, that she would get over it and she had no complaints about the way we had treated her.

“‘You should understand,' I told them, ‘besides us she has nothing. Now she's a highly esteemed operative making an honorable contribution to the success of our early-warning systems. At least, that is what she feels. If we bring her back, all she will have left is a sense of failure. She'll pack her bags, tell the school she's leaving, and be off. And what will she do here? Go back to teaching? Join the department as a junior bureaucrat? I agree we need to plan for the termination of her service there, but we should do this calmly and construct a routine for her. That's the only way she'll recover and be ready for more
operations.' The Unit commander suspended the discussion and called in the operations officer. I hadn't agreed he should be told what happened to Rachel at the border crossing. I didn't want the story to go any further than it already had, especially if there was a prospect that a few weeks from now she might be applying to our department for a more conventional job.

“‘What do you say?' the Unit commander asked. The ops officer was unequivocal. He insisted she be kept in place until we could find a replacement. ‘We can't afford to give up such a valuable asset. The intelligence branch would kill us.' ‘Don't exaggerate,' said the Unit commander. ‘If anything happens that puts her in danger, I'll have her out of there at a moment's notice.' But even he couldn't foresee what was going to happen. Even he underestimated the power of chance.”

“T
HE
CALL CAME THROUGH AT
TWO
in the morning. The Unit commander was on the line. ‘Congratulations are in order. We got the big project.' I thanked him and didn't ask any questions. We didn't know if anyone was listening in on our conversation, and we always worked on that assumption. We agreed to talk again in the morning and I put the receiver down. I confess, my hand was shaking. It had come. I didn't need to consult any list of projects to know what he was talking about. Rina asked me what had happened and when she saw my face in the light of the bedside lamp she said she would take the children to school in the morning and then wait for me at home.

“It took me ten minutes to get to the Rome railway station. I made sure no one was following me. I knew how to do that, and at two in the morning it's easy. When I decided I was clean, I used one of the twenty vacant phone booths and called HQ. The Unit commander was in the Office and in the background I heard other familiar
voices. It was clear there was a state of emergency. ‘Take the first available flight. Everything will be explained when you are here. But before anything else, call Rachel and tell her to start moving at once. We've made all the arrangements we can here.' I repeated his words so we would both be sure we were referring to the same thing, and hung up.

“I moved to another booth and phoned her. The conversation was short and polite. I introduced myself as a good friend of her father's, and the news was that the old man was dying. There was no risk of misunderstanding on her part. I was her regular contact and she recognized my voice. I gave the code word we had agreed on. That was all. In the original briefing she asked me what would happen if her father really did die suddenly. I said we would find someone else to contact her. And then she asked what would happen if on the day we needed to tell her to leave everything and get out at once I was ill, or couldn't be contacted, and we agreed on code words that my stand-in would need to use, so she would get a clear and unmistakable message and know she was leaving.