‘Also in ancient Egyptian culture,’ said Mansoor.
‘But not in this specific form,’ Daniel cut in. ‘The snake coiled around a pole, I mean.’
‘That’s true, Professor Klein. But then again there’s a lot of ancient Egypt that remains undiscovered, even today. And much of what we had was lost to theft – both foreign and domestic.’
Daniel was thinking about something Gabrielle had said about the Greek god of medicine. At the back of his mind he was also remembering what Harrison Carmichael had said about fiery snakes, Moses putting a snake on a pole and the possibility of the sixth plague returning. Now the dig had been closed down because of ‘food poisoning’ according to Mansoor. He was turning these thoughts over in his mind, uncertain of what to make of it. For a moment he considered asking Mansoor why the dig was really closed down, but he sensed that if Mansoor was holding out on him, he was unlikely to be more candid and open if pressed. He was more likely to clam up completely.
Daniel decided to test the waters.
‘I wonder if we could get some outside advice on this point. Would it be all right if I called Harrison Carmichael?’
‘Okay,’ said Mansoor. ‘But be discreet.’
Daniel called Carmichael’s number on his mobile, but the voice that answered was not that of Professor Carmichael. ‘Hallo, could I speak to Harrison Carmichael please… Daniel Klein. Yes, he knows me… What?’
Gabrielle was looking at him, concerned.
‘When?… How?… The police?’
‘What is it?’ asked Gabrielle.
When Daniel looked at Gabrielle next, his face had turned to stone.
‘It’s Harrison. He’s dead.’
Chapter 13
‘They’re anti-Semitic, anti-American, anti-British and anti-Western. They’d like to wipe us off the face of the earth.’
Sarit Shalev stared at Dov Shamir, trying to gauge how much of his manner was showmanship for her benefit. It was hard to tell with Dov, or ‘Dovi’ as she called him. Everything about him was uniformly dark – appearance and mood alike – except for the odd flash of excitement. Although he was dressed like a typical casual Israeli in a blue shirt and jeans, he somehow reminded her of Heathcliff – or at least the way she imagined Heathcliff to be when she first read Wuthering Heights as a gangly teenager.
Now a compact but kick-ass fit twenty-four-year-old, she was no longer quite so enamoured by characters in fiction, and thinking about Dov’s appearance, she realized that perhaps ‘dark’ was too strong a word. It was true of his eyes and hair, but applying it to his skin tone was stretching it somewhat. His ancestry was central European, and his skin wasn’t naturally dark, merely tanned by the Mediterranean sun.
‘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 to come home, she was accepted by the Israeli army and spent the next two years serving in communications. She also changed her name in that time to the more Israeli-sounding Sarit Shalev.
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