The Moses Legacy - Adam Palmer [27]
However, between the moment she had captured the decoy hunter and the real one captured her, she had taken out a bottle of sparkling wine from the fridge and told the decoy hunter that she was going to drink to celebrate her victory and record it on video. The real hunter had picked the lock and pounced before she could open the bottle. But he made the mistake of assuming that an unopened champagne bottle couldn’t be drugged – or more likely he hadn’t thought about it at all.
In fact, it is possible to open the bottle, lace it with Rohypnol or GHB and then reseal it. She had not only done this, she had even carefully preserved the foil and re-covered the plastic stopper. And Mr Macho Israeli couldn’t resist the urge to drink her sparkling wine before her eyes and then pour some over her, accompanied by the crude words: ‘I like you wet.’ (He later explained that this was to ‘toughen’ her up to the real world of espionage and was not in any way a representation of his real self.)
She had wanted to smile, as he had already drunk enough of the drugged sparkling wine. But she held her facial muscles, showing great patience, to maximize her victory. It was only when he held the bottle to her lips and offered her the chance to toast his victory – which she politely declined – that he got his first inkling of what was about to happen.
‘Why don’t you want to be magnanimous in defeat?’ he asked mockingly.
‘You’ve got it wrong,’ she replied. ‘It’s magnanimous in victory; defiant in defeat. Besides, I want to stay awake.’
That was when he realized. But by then it was too late, he was already feeling the lethargy that precedes unconsciousness. So a few hours later, it was the hunter who was deposited bound and gagged on the floor of the field HQ by a triumphant Sarit. Then, after three days, when his sleeping patterns had returned to normal, she was confronted by her ‘victim’ again and told the whole story.
She was led into an office – amidst the utmost solemnity – and found herself facing a tribunal. Her first instinct was panic, assuming that it was some sort of disciplinary tribunal. But that assumption was contradicted by the even more terrifying fact that her deadly foe was on the tribunal. The chairman of the panel introduced him as ‘Dov Shamir’ and explained that he was not a trainee but a long-serving intelligence officer and one of the training team. This in itself was none too reassuring, but what did put her at ease was the fact that Dov was smiling, and it was not a gloating smile, although there was perhaps a hint of mockery about it.
The chairman went on to say that they had identified her early on as a promising recruit for training as a kidon officer. This meant that her job would be assassinations of Israel’s enemies and not merely intelligence gathering like a regular katsa.
Dov had been assigned to bring out the best in her, to put her through her paces and test her to the limit. And she had passed with flying colours. He was to give her one-to-one coaching, and after that they had got on like a house on fire. It was obvious that he respected her – especially after she had turned the tables on him. And it was also obvious that he was attracted to her.
‘What we know is that he’s extremely dangerous,’ he said to Sarit.
‘But why should that concern us?’
‘For several reasons. Apart from anything else, what Daniel Klein is doing involves discovery of old material pertaining to our ancient history and the doctrine that forms our very justification for having a homeland in this part of the world.’
‘So what?’ said Sarit with a cheeky grin. ‘We’re going to execute him for challenging biblical dogma?’
‘We’re not going to execute him at all unless he becomes a threat to us. But you have to understand that we may be facing a much bigger threat here: a threat to our very survival.’
‘What threat?’ she asked, knowing that Dov was not one for idle talk.
He told her the nature of the threat… and she listened with growing alarm.
Chapter 14
‘You’ve got to be kidding!’
‘That’s what he told me, just before