The Righteous Spy

3 | King Solomon Street, Tel Aviv – Ten Minutes Later

3

King Solomon Street, Tel Aviv – Ten Minutes Later

Eli stepped through a set of automatic doors into the blessed chill of the downtown mall. It was a relief. The incident on the bus was unfortunate but defensible. Eli strode past the small café where the gym bunnies hung out. As usual, he pulled in his gut. Next, he passed a branch of Bank Leumi and a small supermarket with a metal turnstile and cliffs of cut-price vodka. Finally, Eli reached the northwest corner of the mall and a scuffed metal door that bore no sign. As he did every office day, Eli curled his right hand around the vertical handle and contacted the fingertip recognition keypad. Hand in position he looked around the mall, checking to see if there was anyone nearby. It was unnecessary as there were cameras everywhere but it was procedure. It’s what you did; it’s what you were trained to do.

Periodically refurbished and updated, this particular Mossad facility was located in a building within another building. It had its own generators, electronics and water supplies, communications, cryptography and the rest of the technical tricks department. While Eli visually swept the mall, his vital signs were being monitored, fed into the computer system, compared to a set of algorithms and minutely measured to see whether he was unusually stressed or unusually unresponsive.

The door clicked open and Eli slid into the first security section where he handed in his home cell phone to the staff behind the desk and had a further retinal identification check.

As always, Eli was struck by how quiet it was when the door to the mall shut behind him. It wasn’t just a door – it was a boundary; like walking from the beach into the sea to take that first breath through the snorkel into another world. Here the atmosphere was sterile; the only colour was the lights from the bank of monitors against the white wall; the only sound, apart from human voices, was the hush and hum of electronics. Beyond the reinforced door, the mall shrieked with its discordant colours, tinny music and neon pleas to purchase.

Eli assumed his easy, affable, professional face. The one he used in the field, when he didn’t want to share his thoughts.

‘Good morning one and all,’ Eli said.

‘Morning Eli,’ Ze’ev, a curly haired blond boy didn’t look up from the machine that was scanning Eli. ‘See the game last night? Disaster.’

‘There’s only one team worth talking about; Maccabi Tel Aviv is and always has been the best.’

Ze’ev glanced away from the scanner to roll his eyes while a young woman stepped out from behind the desk and ran a second, hand scanner over Eli who stood with his legs apart and arms above his head.

Pronounced clean, Eli made his way through two more double doors to the lift and the second-floor canteen.

The canteen was modern with pale wood, stainless steel and deftly placed mirrors to give the illusion of light even though the space was enclosed by metres of blast-proof concrete. There were a few windows in Mossad’s central Tel Aviv building, but those were on the upper floors where department heads had their offices, not in the 24-hour canteen where everybody ate, from the cleaners to intelligence analysts to signal collectors, to the tech geeks, to the shrinks. The single canteen was a nod to the dim memory of kibbutz life where the cow-shed worker sat next to the nursery nurse who sat next to the kibbutz administrator.

Pushing the wooden door open, Eli caught the scent of fresh coffee. He also spotted Rafi sitting on one of the blue plastic chairs right near the coffee station.

Eli joined the queue at the pastry station for a Bulgarian cheese boureka and kept his back to Rafi to avoid eye contact. It had been four short weeks since Rafi had been let loose on the mid-Africa desk; and already he’d created something of a stir in the office. Maybe it was his leather biking jacket and white tee shirts but apparently the girls in Collections had coined a name for Rafi: ‘movie star’. Eli wondered if they had a name for him too. Best not to think too hard about that.

The server gave Eli the hot pastry wrapped in greaseproof paper. Walking towards the coffee station, Eli kept his eyes locked straight ahead as if he was lost in some meditative thought.

‘Eli, my main man,’ Rafi called over in mid-Atlantic English. ‘A’hlan,’ he continued in street Arabic, and finally in Hebrew, ‘Eli, sit for a moment, great to see you. So, tell me, what’s going on with Red Cap? I just read the London signal in the summary. Looks pretty serious to me. For this to happen two weeks after the passport fiasco in London...’

Using an outstretched leg, Rafi pushed out one of the blue chairs. It was an invitation to sit down; Eli remained standing and with deliberation helped himself to the coffee at the dispenser.

‘Patience, Rafi,’ Eli said. ‘As Tolstoy said, the two most powerful warriors are patience and time.’