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.
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 I drove to the airport.’
Daniel and Gabrielle were on a plane back to London. Mansoor hadn’t been happy about them flying out like that, when they were supposed to be collaborating on the most important paper of all their careers. But Gabrielle was clearly upset and Daniel had been in shock when he discovered from the police when the fire had occurred.
Daniel realized that it was on the same morning that he had visited Carmichael and he had been racking his brain trying to remember if he had seen anyone at the time.
‘So let me be clear about this. He said that the plagues could recur?’
‘He said the plague in the singular. When I pressed him, he specified the sixth plague.’
‘Which was?’
‘Boils… on the flesh.’
‘Look, I shouldn’t say this about my own uncle, but he was suffering from the early stages of dementia.’
‘I know that.’
‘Then we shouldn’t really be surprised about the fire. It was probably an accident.’
‘That wouldn’t account for the injuries that the post-mortem revealed.’
Gabrielle