The Moses Legacy - Adam Palmer [25]
‘They sound like the usual crowd of semi-literate rednecks.’
‘Except these guys aren’t semi-literate, Sarit. These are movers and shakers, people with power and influence. These are the people who manipulate the rednecks: the educated people who use pop science to sell people on their crackpot conspiracy theories.’
She was eight years his junior, and in terms of intelligence experience, that difference was vast. But it didn’t restrain her feisty, independent spirit when it came to questioning his judgement as he briefed her on the assignment in this windowless room at Mossad’s headquarters in the coastal town of Herzliya.
‘Why did this Milne woman contact us in the first place?’
‘She first approached us a couple of years ago. Technically she’s been my asset even before she took her husband’s place.’
‘But she initiated contact, not vice versa?’
‘She didn’t like what her husband was doing.’
‘Can we trust her?’
‘Walk-in assets are always potential bait. But we have ways of verifying. Everything she’s told us checked out.’
‘But if she was your asset, why did she have to go through the embassy?’
‘I was treating her as passive. Once we ID’d the key people from her, we maintained silence.’
‘So what’s changed?’
‘They’ve changed. They’re becoming more active… and more dangerous.’
He told her about the murder of Harrison Carmichael and Roksana.
‘Does it check out?’
‘According to the British press and the police statements, yes. The fire, the ante-mortem injuries. They’re planning to do a report about it on a programme called Crimewatch.’
‘And have we passed on any of the information that she gave us?’
‘Not yet. We’re hesitant about passing it on. We don’t want to compromise her position at this stage. We may want to use her more actively, either to flush out more of their members or to disseminate misinformation to them.’
‘So we’re going to let these murders go unpunished?’
‘No, but right now the most urgent priority is tracking down this Goliath. We don’t actually know his real name. And at the moment, we don’t even know where he is.’
‘So what do we know?’
Sarit and Dov went back together some four years, when she was the eager young twenty-year-old immigrant from Ireland, fresh out of her two-year army service. In those days, she was called Siobhan Stewart. At eighteen, she had left her sheltered middle-class life in Cork and volunteered to work in Israel and ended up staying. The trigger for her decision had been a visit to the Holy Land the previous year with her family during which her brother had been killed in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem along with twenty-one other people. She herself had been one of the 135 wounded, albeit comparatively mildly.
After that she had tried to understand both sides in the conflict and not merely jump to a conclusion based on emotions alone. But what she found particularly galling were the one-sided condemnations when Israel retaliated against the organizers and planners of a whole spate of similar suicide bombings that followed.
So the following year, bypassing the more traditional picking-apples-on-a-kibbutz option, she had 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 sincerity, and in the face of plaintive appeals