Twelve Days (4 page)

It was. 88 Gamma Macao did not have an empty seat or slot machine for nine months after it opened. By then, Duberman had broken ground on an expansion that tripled its size. Two days before his fiftieth birthday, his fortune reached $10 billion, putting him in one of the world’s most elite clubs. It now topped almost $30 billion.

For a while, Duberman’s public profile grew with his fortune. He became the largest individual donor to Israel, a supporter of close ties between the United States and China. He gave cheeky interviews like the one with
Fortune.
But in the last couple of years, he had fallen almost silent, and cut back on his charitable spending.

Meanwhile, he had become the largest political donor in American history, putting up $196 million to help reelect the President. Investigative reporters had tried to tear down the veil of secrecy and expose why Duberman had spent so much.
What Does Aaron Want?
The most popular theory was that Duberman needed White House access to lobby for better relations between Washington and Beijing.

“He’s worried if we make China mad, they retaliate, close the border with Macao,” one analyst told
The New Yorker.
“His stock falls eighty percent overnight.” Salome had laughed out loud when she’d read the article.
Them that know don’t tell, and them that tell don’t know . . .

—

She’d met Duberman while she was working for Daniel Raban. He was a right-wing member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, who had won a silver medal in the pole vault. The achievement made Raban an instant hero in a country short on successful Olympians. He was a perfect
television politician, tall and handsome, with an adoring wife and three young sons. Off camera, reality was less appealing. Raban was infamous for sexually harassing his female staffers. Inevitably, Israeli political journalists called him the Pole.

He had hit on Salome more times than she could count, always unsuccessfully. She put up with his antics because he served on the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Every member of the committee could pick one aide to sit in on classified briefings from the Mossad and the IDF. Raban had chosen Salome, giving her access she would otherwise have needed decades to achieve.

Plus, though she disliked him personally, she agreed with his politics. He had won his Knesset seat with the slogan
Peace Last!
The Palestinians and the Arab states had to accept Israel’s right to exist before negotiations on a permanent peace deal could begin, he said.
Give up trying to kill us, we’ll talk. Peace Last!

At the beginning of Raban’s second term in parliament, Duberman invited Raban to a private lunch at his villa in Jerusalem. The offer was not a surprise. Duberman visited Israel regularly and cultivated young right-wing politicians. Naturally, Salome came along. She served as Raban’s personal Wikipedia, memorizing the facts he couldn’t be bothered to learn.

Duberman recognized Raban as an empty suit by the time his waiters had cleared away their salads. He focused questions about Israeli’s strategy in the West Bank to Salome. He seemed genuinely interested in her answers. She liked him immediately. More than liked. He wore his brown hair slightly longer than was respectable for the chief executive of a major company. Though he was well past fifty, his eyes radiated enthusiasm and energy. His body was solid under his suit, his hands thick and powerful. Salome had never been attracted to older men, but she found it easy to imagine those hands around her. He was the most self-assured man she had ever met.

His mind was equally appealing. He understood a truth that many
Israelis still disliked discussing aloud. In the last sixty years, the Jews had carved a modern state from the desert. Israel could boast a strong economy, with first-rate hospitals, universities, and highways. It had a powerful army, free elections and media. Meanwhile, its Arab neighbors plunged deeper into tyranny and filth every year. In Iraq, the Shia and Sunni blew each other up as fast as they could. In Egypt, the elite lived like pharaohs while tens of millions of their subjects barely survived. The Saudis married their cousins and stoned women to death for adultery. And in Gaza and Lebanon and Jordan, the Palestinians bred like rats in their pathetic refugee camps. Like if they made themselves miserable enough, Israel would have to accommodate them.

Anyone who looked at the situation rationally could reach only one conclusion. Israel couldn’t trust its Muslim neighbors. Not now, not ever. It would simply have to manage them, so that Jews could hold on to their birthright, the land they had settled three millennia before. The Bible was filled with myths. But the Zionist claim to Judea and Samaria was real. Jews had prayed on the Temple Mount a thousand years before Muhammad drew breath. When the Arabs drew maps that erased Israel, they weren’t just spitting at Jews today but at
every
Jew who had ever
lived.

Salome didn’t say any of this at that first lunch. Neither did Duberman. He didn’t have to. She knew he understood. He discussed the Palestinians with a certain briskness, like a warden dealing with an unruly cell block. When they were finished, he took her hands and promised to call the next time he came through Jerusalem.

—

“Don’t know why you were trying so hard,” Raban said after they left. “He likes them way prettier than you.”

“You’re only jealous because he saw you for what you are. A baboon in a suit.”

“I should fire you.”

“Who would keep you from embarrassing yourself?” They’d had this conversation before.

Over the next couple years, Salome saw Duberman whenever he came to Israel. They had breakfast at his villa, or he picked her up on his hour-long drives between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. She wondered if they would become lovers. But when she suggested they meet for dinner instead of breakfast, he told her he was too busy. Even before he began dating Orli, Salome saw the truth of Raban’s barb. Duberman preferred his women as conventionally gorgeous as his cars. She wanted to think less of him for his shallow taste, but in reality his unreachability only made him more attractive.

To make sure she didn’t betray her feelings, she kept their meetings as academic as think-tank seminars. She briefed him on the secret operations and strategic analyses that the IDF and Mossad disclosed to Raban’s committee. The information was classified, of course, but Salome never worried about telling him. Duberman believed in Israel as much as any
sabra.

On the surface, Israel’s position seemed stronger than ever. With jihadis focused on fighting the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel was enjoying a peaceful period. It had walled off its Palestinian enemies in Gaza and the West Bank. Its strike on a Syrian reactor in 2007 had left Bashar al-Assad with no hope of building a nuclear weapon.

Yet, quietly, it faced increasing danger from Iran. After the United States invaded Iraq, Iran’s leaders had made the bomb their top priority.
The mullahs aren’t fools. They can read a map. Armies of American soldiers to the west and east. I think mainly they want nukes to keep the Americans out. But once they get them, who knows what they’ll do?

Salome worried that her focus on Iran might bore Duberman. She was wrong. Their moment of truth came over breakfast on a winter morning in Jerusalem, on the glassed-in patio of Duberman’s villa. A faint dusting of snowflakes coated the Old City, frosting on a golden cake. Snow here was rare but not unprecedented. Jerusalem’s hills rose a
half mile above sea level, and winter winds from the north swept down cool air from the mountains around the Sea of Galilee.

In keeping with the weather, Duberman’s chef had prepared bowls of oatmeal heaped with brown sugar and raisins. “Don’t know where he found it,” Duberman said.

Salome fluffed the oatmeal with her spoon. “I’ve never had it before.”

“Never?”

“I’ve only been to the United States and Europe in the summer.”

“Mount Hermon, skiing?”

“Not for me.”

“I think you have to grow up with it.”

Salome tasted the oatmeal, put down her spoon.

“You don’t like it,” he said.

“It tastes like paste.” She had never much cared for polite fibs. “Anyway, I have a briefing in an hour. A new program they want to tell us about. Rumor is it’s good.”

“So why don’t you look happy?”

“They’re trying. But there are things they won’t do.”

“Such as.”

“Attacking those European parasites who sell the Iranians their equipment.”

Duberman’s steward appeared to refill their coffee. “Leave us, please.” The steward vanished. “Tell me.”

“We’ve traced several. A machine tool factory outside Hamburg, a software company in Singapore that specializes in modeling fluid dynamics—”

“Fluid dynamics.”

“To understand what’s happening inside the warhead as the chain reaction takes over—”

“Wait, please. Understand who you’re talking to. I run hotels. I don’t even know what it means to enrich uranium.”

So Salome explained. Uranium existed naturally in several different forms, called isotopes. When it came out of the earth, newly mined uranium ore consisted of 99.3 percent of the U-238 isotope, 0.7 percent U-235. U-235 could be used in a bomb. U-238 could not. The two kinds of uranium had to be separated. Nuclear scientists called the process enrichment.

“Like oil,” Duberman said. “You can’t run your car on crude oil, you have to refine it.”

“Kind of. Anyway, during World War II, the United States figured out how.” American scientists had come up with several ways to enrich uranium. One still in use today combined uranium with fluoride to make it a gas. Then the gas was injected into spinning tubes called centrifuges. The lighter molecules spun out against the centrifuge walls. The heavier molecules stuck to the center. Because U-235 was lighter than U-238, the gas against the wall held more U-235 than natural uranium did. The gas was vacuumed into another centrifuge, where the process was repeated. Slowly but surely, the amount of U-235 increased. Until, finally—

“You have enough of the good stuff. And boom.”

“There are other steps, too, but yes. But the centrifuges need special parts. High-strength steel. Perfectly round bearings because they spin so fast. The fluorine gas is corrosive. All this takes advanced equipment that the Iranians can’t make themselves. They have to buy it. Mainly from Europe.”

“If we stopped the suppliers, would we stop the program?”

“Not necessarily stop it. But slow it down, sure.”

“But isn’t it illegal, what the suppliers are doing? Violating sanctions?”

“Yes. We’ve told the Germans, the French. And so have the Americans. But what we know isn’t always the same as what we can prove. The Iranians are smart. They use front companies from China and Russia to buy the stuff. The Europeans say they can’t be responsible for what happens if they sell equipment to a legitimate buyer in China and then that
company sends it to Singapore and then to Dubai and then Iran. And the Chinese won’t listen, they don’t care.”

“But these European companies
know
?”

“Oh yes. It’s a very specialized business.”

“The Mossad won’t stop them?”

“They’ve said no to attacking the suppliers directly. They’re worried what the Europeans will say. But they’re making a mistake. Someone needs to hit these people.”

“Someone.”

“It wouldn’t be that hard. They aren’t government officials. No bodyguards or police looking after them.”

Duberman pushed back from the table, scratching his chair against the tile floor. His villa sat atop one of Jerusalem’s highest hills, with a view over the gold-encrusted Dome of the Rock and the Mount of Olives. The snow had stopped. The winter air was crystalline, the city’s buildings etched against the gray sky. He stood, looked at the Old City, the narrow alleys where Jews and Muslims and Christians had fought and mingled for fifteen hundred years.

“Whatever I want, it’s mine. Too much money to spend in ten lifetimes. No wife, no family.” At this point, he hadn’t met Orli. “Even if I did. One percent of what I have would be enough for my children and their children and their children, too. What do I do with a fortune like this?” He turned to her. “What is it you’re saying? Clearly, now.”

Until this moment Salome hadn’t been sure herself. She’d been thinking out loud. Writing letters to the stars, as her high school boyfriend said. But the words came to her. She knew they were true. Her legs trembled under the table, but her voice was steady.

“For a few million dollars, we can do this.”

“Men from the Mossad? The IDF?”

“Too easy to trace. And I don’t think Tel Aviv”—where the Mossad was headquartered—“would approve.”

“Where, then?”

“Men who kill for money aren’t hard to find.”

“Do you have specifics? Of how this might be done?”

“I have ideas.”

“A budget? Employees?”

She saw he was putting the operation in the terms he understood best, a business plan.

She shook her head. The wrong answer.

“Then you’re wasting my time. If you truly believe you can do this, the next time we meet, you’ll have details. What it costs. How we do it without our friends in Tel Aviv catching on. I can move money wherever you need. Ten, twenty, even fifty million a year. But everything else, that’s up to you. The logistics. How big a team. How we find them. What we tell them.”

“I understand.”

“No. You don’t.” His voice a lash. He’d never spoken to her this way before. Like she was an employee who’d disappointed him. “There’s no timetable. You call me when you’re sure you can answer my questions,
all
my questions, and we’ll meet. When you’re ready. Not before.”

“All right.”

“Zev will see you out.” Nothing more. He walked off, leaving her to watch her oatmeal turn to concrete.

—

Like the CIA, the Mossad ran espionage operations all over the world. The Israeli Defense Forces had the simpler but equally crucial task of stopping suicide bombers before they reached Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

Spy services made elaborate, months-long efforts to recruit agents. The IDF used a simpler strategy. Like a big-city police department, it paid for tips. The Palestinian security services viciously punished anyone they caught collaborating with Israel. Even so, with the average
Palestinian making less than two thousand dollars a year, rewards of a few hundred dollars attracted plenty of informants.