The Boudicca Parchments (12 page)

He didn’t make it.

Instead he was hit by a large, powerful motorbike that sent him flying. The bike came to a halt directly behind the rear exit that had been turned into a gaping hole by the second explosion. And on the motorbike was a figure covered from top to toe in black leathers, face hidden by a fibreglass visor.

The figure’s head was turned so that he must have been looking squarely at Daniel. But who was he? Whoever he was, he was Daniel’s saviour. But what was Daniel to do now?

The figure looked round, in the direction that the bearded man had gone flying and signalled Daniel – with a sweeping gesture of his arm – to get out of the van and onto the motorbike. But Daniel hesitated. The same reservations applied as before. Even if the biker had not carried out the attack, to flee under these circumstances would make him look guilty. The authorities would have no way of knowing that the van was attacked by some one and that he had been rescued by some one else.

The man on the bike looked around frantically again and then produced a handgun and squeezed off two shots in what seemed like two different directions. The next thing that Daniel heard was a car engine roaring and receding. Again the man on the bike signalled Daniel, this time with the hand wielding the gun, but did not at any time point it at Daniel.

In the driver’s section, Daniel could hear voices on the radio suggesting that the police dispatcher was aware that something was up. But it was the next thing to happen that surprised Daniel most. The man on the bike lifted his visor to reveal his face and at that point Daniel saw that the
he
was in fact a
she
. And it was a face that he recognized. She had been baptised Siobhan Stewart.

But Daniel knew her as
Sarit Shalev
.

At that point his hesitation gave way to relief. He ran to the back of the van, leapt out and onto the motorbike, holding on to Sarit without fear or concern. The bike roared to life and swept past the fallen bearded man just as he was beginning to recover. Daniel felt the rush of wind and adrenaline as the powerful motor carried him away from the scene of the carnage. And in the distance he heard the sound of an approaching police siren.

Chapter 27

“How could you let this happen!”

“I don’t know who he was! One minute I was all set to kill him and a second later I was hit by the motorbike!”

This exchange between Baruch Tikva and his father was taking place over the phone. But their voices were so loud, they could have been standing eyeball to eyeball in the same room.

“But
why
were you standing in the middle of the road?”

“I wasn’t. I was standing directly behind the police van.”

“Then why did the motorbike hit you?”

“That’s what I’m telling you! It was
deliberate
!”

“What do you mean, deliberate?”

“After the bike hit me, he shot the two men who were helping me. They were professionals… men with guns who knew how to use them… and he just pulled a gun and shot both of them.”

“I thought you had
three
men with you?”

“Yes, but one was the driver.”

“And what did
he
do?”

“He ran away – the coward! He left me there. I nearly got caught. I had to run away… and I was limping. I thought he broke my leg.”

“You could have made up a story. Said you were a bystander and said the man on the motorbike was part of it.”

“But then I’d’ve been in the public eye. They’d ask me to tell them everything I saw. It’s better this way.”

“It’s not better, Baruch, it’s very bad!”

“I know… I know.”

Baruch Tivka was genuinely apologetic. He knew that he had let his father down and he felt guilty. He revered his father and would do anything for him.

“Do you have any idea where he has gone?”

“No. It came completely out of the blue. I don’t know how anyone could have known what I was planning.”

“Is it possible that the
shiksa
betrayed you?”

“ Chienmer Lefou. I don’t think so.”

“You know she hates
all
Jews?”

“Yes, but she made it clear that she was ready to work with us because we are against the Zionist heretics.”

“Then who could it be?”

Baruch Tikva tried to think.

“Maybe there’s a spy in the camp.”

“That’s impossible. I told no one but you.”

“Do you think they’re watching us?”

“Possibly. Or maybe Lady Lefou is being watched. She’s quite a controversial figure, you know. She attended the holocaust conference in Teheran.”

At the other end of the phone, there was silence. Finally the old man spoke.

“That
would
have brought her to the attention of the British authorities. They probably
are
watching her! You should have been more careful.”

“I’m
sorry
.”

“Well at least
we
are not being watched.”

“But what are we going to do?”

Baruch had always wanted to impress his father with his initiative – as he had when he found out about Daniel not being dead. But now he too had failed to kill him. And worse still, he had effectively helped Daniel escape from the police. Apart from that, he had got two of Chienmer Lefou’s men killed. And the driver would probably go running back to her with tales of Baruch Tikva’s carelessness.
He
would get the blame.

And worse still, the people she hired were probably not her own. They were
gangsters
. That meant they had their own friends and contacts who would be looking out for them.

What if they think
I
lured them into a trap?

He knew now that he would have to lie low for a while, not only from the police but also from Chienmer Lefou and her network of contacts. Fortunately, she didn’t know where he was staying. All she had was a mobile phone number. And he knew that he could blend in with other ultra-orthodox Jews in Golders Green or Stamford Hill. The only thing that marked him out was his height.

His father spoke again.

“Do you remember I asked you about Daniel’s family?”

“Yes. But like I told you, he’s divorced. And they didn’t have children.”

“No,but I was thinking about his
extended
family… parents, brothers sisters, etc.”

“I think he has three sisters. I know that one of them has three daughters, eight-year-old twins and a five year old.”

Chapter 28

“They’re a small, ultra-orthodox Jewish sect called
Shomrei Ha’ir
.”

“I’ve heard of them. The most anti-Zionist Hassidic sect – ”

“
Everybody’s
heard of them! And they’re
not
Hassidic. Ultra-orthodox, yes. But not Hassidic. Technically they’re a Lithuanian Jewish sect.”

Daniel was looking at Sarit with that same feeling of lust that he had developed for her back in Israel, after he had seen through Gaby and her true colours. Physically they were very different women. Gaby, a former competitive swimmer, was taller than Daniel, whereas Sarit was barely five feet five. Yet despite the height, she was as fit as Gaby had been and had proved quite effective when the two women had engaged in a catfight in the shallows of the Jordan River. Gaby packed quite a bit of muscle into her small frame and now that she had taken off her biker’s leathers and stripped down to a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, she looked pretty damn sexy.

“Push your eyeballs back in,” she told Daniel, firmly.

His tension broke into a smile as he realized that he had been ogling her.

They were in a safe house in Edgware, having got back to London via a series of A and B roads, to avoid the numerous CCTV cameras that now seemed to be everywhere.

“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 – née 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.