The Moses Legacy - Adam Palmer [26]
In the course of her two-year stint, she was based at the Urim monitoring unit in the Negev Desert – a vast array of large satellite dishes that picked up information from telecommunications satellites over the region, covering everything from India and China to Europe. This enabled them to monitor not only cell phones but also intercontinental landlines and shipping. Ultra-fast supercomputers and highly sophisticated software analysed the voice and text messages for keywords and particular phone numbers of interest.
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 at 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.
One of the first lessons she learnt was that the hunter can all too easily become the hunted if alertness flags, even for a moment. This was a lesson that she learnt all too well on one of her training exercises, when her designated target turned the tables on her. She had assumed that she had an advantage, because the targets were not told which of the ‘hunters’ in the exercise had been assigned to them. But he had been alert and set an ingeniously baited trap, making himself look careless so that she made her move with insufficient preparation.
He had punished her for the error by capturing her and then twisted the knife by subjecting her to the embarrassment of being marched hogtied back to the field HQ for the exercise. It was a humiliation that she resolved never to be exposed to again. And she never had. But more than that: it was a humiliation that she was determined to avenge. The problem was, she couldn’t just seek revenge willy-nilly. She had to maintain her professional façade in order to avoid failing the final selection process. But she suspected that her instructors were aware of her intentions and used it to their advantage.
So she waited patiently until she got the chance to get back at the trainee who had sandbagged her, and when it was delivered on a plate, she grabbed it. It took a while, because the exercise assignments were random. But she knew that despite her self-restraint, their instructors had evidently picked up on her competitive spirit, because in the very last exercise, they had made her former nemesis her designated hunter. And she suspected that this assignment had not been as random as it was supposed to be. However, unlike her arch-enemy, she did know who her hunter was, because when he opened the envelope, he had given himself away by the glint in his eye – as powerful a ‘tell’ as any she had seen.
From there it had been easy. Just like he had done in the first exercise, she had used a subterfuge: making it seem like she thought another of the class was her hunter, a nerdy type, smart but socially awkward. When the real hunter closed in for the kill, he avoided the obvious trap that he had set for her – and fell into the subtle one instead.
The trap – the idea for which came from a story she had read – consisted of allowing herself to be captured in her flat. The hunter had persuaded the trainee whom, she appeared to think of as her assigned hunter, to help him. She ‘captured’ the trainee and then her real hunter captured her – or at least thought he had. Certainly he had her tied to a chair, which he meticulously photographed using his still camera and videotaped using hers. But this didn’t surprise her. She knew that he wouldn’t be able to resist rubbing her nose in defeat in a macho display. But the exercise called for her to be ‘delivered’ to their field HQ. Until then, it wasn’t complete.