Headhunters (32 page)

Blum and his parents had survived the war, and in 1950, the family made
aliyah
, a “return” to Israel. Blum had been conscripted into the Israeli Defense Force and had completed his compulsory service in 1966, but was called up as a reservist in 1967, fighting in the Six-Day War as an officer. He stayed in after the end of the war and had commanded an ad hoc undercover commando unit known as
Sayeret Rimon
, whose task was to combat the increasing violence in the Palestinian territories. Later, he had fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1982 Lebanon War. He had then held a series of high-level positions in the IDF command, eventually reaching the rank of major general.

The prime minister had appointed Blum to the role of director-general of the Mossad in August 2002. As such, he was responsible for intelligence, counter-intelligence, and counterterrorism activities outside of Israel and the Palestinian Territories and was infamously aggressive in ordering killings of terrorists on foreign soil. Milton had heard of the paradox that, while Israel did not have a domestic death penalty, the Mossad under Blum had carte blanche to target Arab terrorists outside of its borders with complete impunity.

Victor Blum was a killer at the head of an organisation of killers.

And Avi Bachman had been the tip of the spear.

Milton opened another file.

Blum lived in a penthouse in the recently completed Meier-on-Rothschild Tower, a six-hundred-foot-tall apartment block in the heart of Tel Aviv. Prices started at a million dollars per apartment and went far higher than that; it was more, Milton thought, than might have been expected on the budget of a government employee. He suspected that a penthouse apartment, several hundred feet above the ground, had been provided so as to ensure Blum’s security. It would be much easier to defend than a ground-level property.

All Milton wanted to do was talk to him.

His residence wouldn’t be the place to do it.

He would try something else.

IT TOOK them four hours to complete the drive to Tel Aviv. The driver took them to the city’s main railway station, where they changed to another car. They took that car to the Best Western and checked into two rooms. Ziggy waited ten minutes and then came to the room that Milton and Matilda had taken. He knocked three times, as they had agreed, and Milton let him in.

“Ready?”

Milton nodded.

“What are we going to do?” Matilda asked.

“Not we,” Milton corrected. “Just me. You’re staying here.” He could see that she was going to argue. “Please, Matty. It’s safe here. We weren’t followed. And what I’m going to do could go either way.”

“
What
are you going to do?”

He had been deliberately vague about that until now. “I’m going to talk to them.”

“What? Just walk in and ask to speak to someone?”

“Exactly.”

“And say what?”

“I’m going to persuade them that they need to stop taking sides.”

“And you think they’ll take kindly to that?”

“I have no idea. Probably not.”

“And then? What happens when they arrest you and tell Bachman?”

“That’s where Ziggy comes in.”

“Right,” she said, not bothering to hide her doubt. “And what’s he going to do?”

Ziggy held up a USB stick.

“What’s that?”

“We’re going to blackmail them,” he said.

THE MOSSAD’S headquarters were notoriously difficult to locate, but Ziggy had managed easily enough. He led the way to a highway intersection called Glilot Junction, which contained a partially hidden campus of low-slung office buildings sandwiched between the junction, a Cineplex, and a shopping centre.

Milton looked at the bland buildings, all smooth stone walls and tinted glass. The men and women going in and out of the anonymous doorways all wore business dress. It looked as the agency must have wanted it to look: completely unremarkable.

“What do you think?” Ziggy asked him.

“Looks like all the intelligence agencies I’ve ever seen,” Milton answered.

They continued up the street until they were a block away from the building. They reached a kiosk that was selling cheap cell phones and SIM cards. Milton bought a phone, gave it to Ziggy and memorised the number.

“I’ll call you when it’s done.”

Ziggy nodded.

“Do you have it?”

Ziggy reached into his pocket and gave him the USB stick.

“Are you sure it’s going to work?”

“Reasonably sure.”

“Reasonably?”

“This is cutting edge, Milton.”

“You’ve tested it?”

“Yes.” He paused, frowning. “Of course I tested it. But not like this.”

“How did you test it?”

“An Internet café in Tokyo.”

Milton’s stomach dropped.

“But it worked well,” Ziggy said quickly. “In theory, it’ll work. Get it into the building and make sure it’s plugged in.”

“And then what? Cross my fingers and hope?”

Ziggy smiled at him. “Have I ever let you down?”

Milton didn’t answer.

MILTON STOOD outside the entrance to the office building. It was a bland, eighties construction, four storeys tall and with mirrored glass windows that prickled in the glare of the midday sun. He had been observing the building for an hour. He had been careful about it, changing his vantage point every ten minutes.

This was one of the most heavily guarded addresses in the world.

The building looked unprepossessing, akin to all the others in this part of downtown Tel Aviv. A pair of revolving doors offered access to the lobby. Milton had walked along the street two times, approaching the building once from each direction, and had fixed the interior in his mind: leather sofas positioned at the perimeter of the room, a marble floor that was polished to a dark sheen, and an impressive marble counter behind which sat three smartly dressed attendants. A steady stream of smartly dressed men and women passed in and out, going about their business. A board fixed to the wall behind the counter announced the businesses that had taken space on the various floors. Milton couldn’t read the names from outside, but he knew that they would all be aliases to mask the identity of the building’s single tenant. It reminded him of the scruffy office block down by the Thames that housed Group Fifteen. Her Majesty’s department of murderers and blackmailers cloaked itself within the fiction of Global Logistics, a front company whose legitimate business interests allowed its agents a pretext to travel the world.

The Mossad would be just the same. A similar fiction. Similar pretexts.

Victor Blum would send his killers around the globe from this faceless building, dealing death and destruction from an anonymous desk somewhere deep inside. Milton knew that the order for his own death warrant, leveraged by Avi Bachman’s blackmail, would have been signed somewhere within.

A police car cruised slowly down the street. Milton saw the officer in the passenger seat turn to look at him.

No point in waiting. He had no other cards to play. If he was going to be apprehended, it had to be inside.

He put his hand to the revolving door and pushed.

Inside, it was cool, the air conditioning turned up high to combat the heat outside. A wave of cold air gushed onto him, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. The room was quiet save for the sound of a keyboard being used behind the marble desk, the gentle whoosh of the air conditioning, and the sound of a woman’s heels as she crossed the floor to get to the exit. Milton stepped aside to let her pass. He scoped out the parts of the interior that he had been unable to see properly from outside. There was an elevator lobby with four doors, two on one side faced by a second identical pair. There was a guard in the lobby and another near to the counter. He looked up: security cameras all around the room.

Too late to turn back.

He walked to the counter.

“Can I help you, sir?”

Milton assessed him. The man was quite obviously a soldier, with close-cropped hair and a muscular physique beneath the lines of his well-fitted suit. The suit fell smooth and evenly, suggesting that he wasn’t carrying a weapon, but Milton had no doubt that he had a handgun within easy reach.

“I want to see Victor Blum.”

Milton saw a look of concern flash across the man’s face. “I’m sorry, sir?”

“Victor Blum. The director.”

The man shook his head. “Who?”

“Do we need to do this? I’m not going to leave until I see him.”

“No, really, sir, that’s not possible. I don’t know—”

Milton spoke over him: “This is what is going to happen.” He noticed the man’s hand as it slid beneath the counter. “You’re going to press your panic alarm, and those two guys over there”—he pointed to the guards—“are going to draw their weapons and detain me. And that’s fine. I want them to. And I want you to call up to Mr. Blum and tell him that John Milton is here to see him. Tell him it’s about Avi Bachman. He’ll know who that is.”

Milton saw the two guards step away from the door and start toward him. He kept his eye on the man. “Do you want me to repeat those names? John Milton and Avi Bachman.”

The first guard reached him, laying a hand on his elbow. He hadn’t drawn his weapon, although it was visible in a shoulder holster beneath his open jacket. Milton could have disabled him easily enough, taken his gun and incapacitated his colleague, too, but that would have gained him nothing. He was hardly about to mount an assault on the Mossad’s HQ. It would get him killed. It wouldn’t get him to Blum.

“Step away from the counter,” the guard said, squeezing his fingers so that they dug into the soft flesh around his elbow.

A little pain flashed, but Milton ignored it.

Milton looked at the man behind the desk. “Call Blum,” he repeated.

“Back away, sir.”

Milton did as he was asked and stepped back.

“Put your hands up.”

Milton did as he was told.

The man frisked him with practiced ease, starting up at his shoulders and working quickly and methodically all the way down to his ankles. The second guard arrived, his hand inside his jacket and resting on the butt of his holstered weapon. They were good. Well trained. Not thuggish, but with the threat of violence obvious and more than sufficient to make it clear that obedience was the wisest course.

“Come with us, sir,” the first guard said, impelling him towards the lobby.

Milton didn’t resist. They led him to a door that he hadn’t noticed, opened it, and directed him down a corridor that led deeper into the building. The passageway lacked the expensive gleam of the reception area. The walls were bare, the floor was treated concrete and the lighting was from harsh overhead UV strips.

The man told him to stop at the second in a series of bland-looking doors, opened it, and nudged him so that he went inside.

Another bland space. A desk with two chairs, one on either side. A dark glass window, opaque from this side, but likely clear from the other. Two cameras fixed on the wall just beneath the ceiling. No decoration. Spare and austere. Milton had been in rooms like this before, sometimes on one side of the desk and on other occasions on the other. It was an interrogation room.

The guard nudged Milton inside and then frisked him again, much more thoroughly this time. He took out his wallet and the USB drive that Milton was carrying in his jacket pocket.

“Wait here,” the guard said, closing the door.

Milton heard the lock click.

He didn’t know whether his gambit would be successful. He would either see Blum or he would not; if he did not, his long-term prospects would not be very good. With nothing else to do, he pulled out one of the chairs and sat down. It might be a long wait.

MILTON HEARD the lock click again and watched as the door opened. The man standing in the doorway was old, but he did not look frail. He was several inches shorter than Milton, but he walked with an erect, proud posture, and there was iron in his eyes.

Milton recognised him at once.

“Mr. Milton,” he said, “I’m sorry to keep you. I’m Victor Blum.”

Milton stood. Blum extended his hand and Milton took it. Blum’s grip was strong.

“Thank you for seeing me, sir.”

“Please, sit.”

Milton sat down again. Blum pulled out the facing chair and sat down.

“I don’t think we’ve ever met, have we, Mr. Milton?”

“No, sir. I don’t believe that we have.”

“Of course, I’m aware of your work. The work you used to do, I should say. You don’t do it any more, do you?”

“No, sir. Not for some time.”

“We heard about what happened, of course. I did meet Control a few times—before his unfortunate end. Was that you?”

“No, sir. It wasn’t.”

“Still, I should imagine you weren’t displeased? I know he wasn’t pleased when you decided to stop.”

“Not particularly.”

“The work we do,” he said, waving an arm to encompass the building and what went on within it, “it’s not really the sort of profession you can just leave.”

“Avi Bachman had the same problem, as I understand it.”

The mention of Bachman did not faze him. “That’s right, he did. You know I was director of the Mossad then, too?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m not too proud to say that the whole thing took me by surprise. We thought he was dead. We did for years. He was an extraordinary agent and it was a terrible blow. We investigated what had happened, obviously, as far as we could—this was Cairo, of course—and there was no suggestion that he was still alive. Avi was very inventive about it.” He sighed. “A shame, though. A real waste. Men like Avi—men like you, Mr. Milton—are particularly difficult to replace.”

Milton held his tongue. The tone of the conversation was amicable, but underpinned by the knowledge on both sides that there was a deeper and more serious topic that was going to have to be addressed. This wasn’t a social call.

“I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Milton. You are about the last person in the world I would have expected to walk through the doors this morning.”