As an Israeli, Ayala’s mother was a leper in the community, and stayed indoors for most of the day. Meanwhile, Ayala was forced to survive by becoming her surroundings. The first fights and struggles of her days at school made her extraordinarily tough. She discovered inside her an innate ability to fit in, and two years and two different schools later, she walked and talked like all of her new Arab friends. Her mother went slowly insane, grief at her fate and her daughter’s denial of her roots wrenching at her in her long days behind closed doors and drawn curtains.
By the time Ayala was eighteen, there was nothing left of the mother she had once loved; fear, grief, and paranoia driving her to fits of rage.
But Ayala’s mother was wrong about the young Ayala. She had not forgotten her roots in Tel Aviv, either in HaKirya or even in Kerem HaTeimanim. She had not forgotten who she was. She had done what was necessary to survive. To this day she still thought of it as her first mission, and her most complete success. Her ability to fool even her own mother into believing she was something she was not giving her the confidence she would later need to walk into a den of hornets, look them in the eye, and say, “I am one of you.”
To her mother’s surprise, she had announced on her eighteenth birthday that she was returning to Israel to fulfill her commitment to the armed forces there. The day they had parted, she had looked into her mother’s eyes and given her some measure of peace. Speaking in their mother tongue, she had told her she was a Yemenite and she was returning to the homeland to take up arms in its defense. She had left and never looked back. To this day she had no idea what had happened to her mother or stepfather, they were a sadness necessarily left in the past.
While her Israeli colleagues in the army may have been standoffish about the apparently Arab woman in their midst, her superiors had seen her value immediately. She had been earmarked for recruitment into the Mossad from the start, and her performance in her first few months of service had only heightened the ardency of her unseen suitors. They approached her after close combat training one day and asked her why she fought with such vigor.
The nineteen-year-old dark-set Ayala had not hesitated, “Because no one will come to my aide but me.” If she had been looking to impress them, she could not have said anything more apropos. But she had no idea what they had in store for her.
She was a Jew who could speak fluent Arabic, both the Standard, Nadji, and Hijazi dialects, and she had no close relatives in Israel. The only hesitation they had was the fear that she was simply too perfect. Their test: she had been forced to return to her old district of Kerem HaTeimanim and find one person who recognized her. The difficulty of finding one had almost broken her, but a cousin had eventually seen in her now-hardened eyes the nine-year-old who had left the district with her shamed mother and they had even spent one strange afternoon reminiscing of old times.
But it had been a brief reunion. After setting their considerable resources to vetting the cousin in question the Mossad had been satisfied. And Ayala’s course would not be of her own choosing for the next thirty years. As the years passed, she developed a way of envisioning herself that helped her to remember who she was. This helped her center when she needed to, and more importantly, to forget when she needed to as well. She saw herself like a Matryoshka doll, her consecutive lives and personas piled atop each other like rings in a tree, dating back to her earliest memories.
It had been twenty years since she had last walked the streets Kerem HaTeimanim, and now she sat looking at the passing people of her childhood. The place had been gentrified and developed since she had been here. But it was still the old neighborhood. Unlike many Western cultures, the Jews tended to change less than their surroundings, not more, and many of these people looked shockingly similar to their parents and grandparents so many years ago, even as the buildings around them had evolved.
But there were many more unorthodox people here now than there had been in her childhood, and she was one of them. She sat in a café, outside. The dry, pleasant heat of the Israeli afternoon on her, and she allowed herself a rare luxury. She opened the many layers of her Matryoshka doll, and shed light on the very smallest core of her. A nine-year-old girl looked out on the surroundings she had once called home and smiled.
If her father had not passed away, she would no doubt still be here now. Married, probably with children. No doubt happy, but also completely innocent of the way the world really worked. She would think of herself as a woman, no doubt, but she would still be a child compared to the woman she had been forced to become. She would never have killed. She would never have known the horrors, or the power, or the fear, or the truth. She would never have shot a man in the face even as he leapt on her, knife ready, to have his head explode over her. She would never have allowed a target and his guards to rape her so they would eventually sleep, allowing her to wrap her legs around his neck and rip the life from him, killing his cohorts next as they slumbered, slitting their throats one by one with unparalleled satisfaction.
She shook her head. In so many ways she would still be that nine-year-old child. Ignorant even of how much she did not know, perhaps even longing for some adventure. She smiled coldly and sipped her coffee.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw him. He was not looking at her, nor would he. He would have seen her sitting at the café table from a distance and now he would walk by her, on the other side of the street. Maintaining this same lack of open acknowledgement, she stood, finished her Turkish coffee in one swig, left some money for it, and started to walk in the same direction as him, the bitter taste of the thick coffee grinds still in her mouth. He walked for a while. She stayed on the other side of the street, but soon he crossed in front of her and walked down a side street to her left. She followed, pretending to dial a number on her cell phone and start a conversation. He turned into an alley about three doors down, and for the first time glanced back to check that she was there, only momentarily, but confirming she had followed him, he walked into the alley and disappeared from view.
She stopped by its entrance, still talking into her phone, and looked up and down the street like she was receiving directions from her fictional caller, then, comfortable that she had not been followed and that she recognized no face from the café where she had picked up his trail, she turned and followed the man. He was waiting in a deep-set doorway ten meters down the alley, its stone arch ample cover in the slim, dark space.
“Ayala Zubaideh, I didn’t really believe it was you until this moment.” said the man.
“Saul, how have you been?” She hugged the older man who had been her handler for the majority of her career. He was in his sixties now, but handlers tended to live much longer than agents, and retirement was rarely an option for them. There was simply no way to fully transition an asset from one to another without great risk to both parties.
But unlike him, Ayala had indeed retired, hoping that she would return to America to her husband and he would forgive her the lies she had told him. But she had not been completely surprised when he hadn’t. So she had gone into a kind of mental hibernation. Her days had consisted of running and writing, she had found she was very good at crosswords in any of the five languages she spoke fluently, and had even started to write them for a local newspaper in Denver. But now she had been reborn with a new purpose. She was her own handler now, but this man was still an important man in the Mossad, and a man who could be useful to her.
She had called the man she knew as Saul from a payphone after landing in Tel Aviv that morning, and he had not missed a beat at hearing her voice. It was difficult to surprise a man who had sent as many people to their deaths as he had. He had simply set the time and place of their meeting as he always had, using the old code words she knew so well. She had suggested a different spot, using the code word for the café in her old neighborhood and he had agreed, then they had hung up.
“You disappeared, ’yala, I assumed you would be living in wedded bliss by now.” he smiled, his broad bearded face and wise eyes full of genuine affection, despite the lie he had just told.
“You know as well as I that I never got what I went to find in America, old friend.” she looked at him with pensive eyes, but they were not as sad as he would have expected given that his reports on her told him that her relationship with Barrett had failed. He had been faced with the potential for having to order her termination after her retirement from the service. He knew her well and he had been relatively sure that she would confess her true job in Israel to Barrett once she had retired. But despite that fact, Saul also knew that the Ayala he knew would never tell the man any details, or betray any of her colleagues. This fact, combined with the fact that he also knew from the agency’s extensive file on her unsuspecting husband that he was not a threat to them had led him to let her go in peace.
He had let her live as a reward for thirty years of unfailing service to Israel. It had been a rare concession on his part.
But now here she was, standing in front of him. And she had a secret in her eyes, one he knew she was not going to tell him. Well, ’yala, he thought, let’s see what you have come for. What do you know that you want me to know, and, more importantly, what do you know that you do
not
want me to know.
Ayala looked at the man and knew he was going to try and get from her everything she had, whether she was willing to give it or not. She was, to some degree, prepared for that, but she was not here to recruit the man. He could not be relied upon to act as he said he would, and the chances that he would attempt to verify what she said if she told him the truth were just too great to be risked. But knowing she should keep the details of their plot from him was not the same as actually succeeding in doing so. This was no pompous executive or political buffoon, he was her intellectual match in every way and she would have to be careful.
She would have to give him just enough information for him to be useful to her, and hint at the severity of what he did not know so that he would not feel comfortable researching too vigorously the facts of her story. Most important of all, she had to use his own perceptiveness against him. She would not for a second expect him to believe her lie, but she would try to make him worried enough at what the truth was behind that lie that he would not go alerting the ever vigilant satellites above them to the fact that their presence was known to her and her colleagues.
“Saul, I have asked you here today to tell you I have become aware of something while in America that affects Israel. The people I am working with intend Israel harm, and I have discovered an aspect of their plot that worries me deeply.”
He looked at her. This was, perhaps, not a topic for an alleyway, but he had used this block on occasion, and unbeknownst to her he knew that the doorway they were standing in was the back door to an old safehouse of his, and was in fact bricked up. Their hushed voices would not be overheard here with the sound of the busy streets of Tel Aviv in the background.
She continued, “There is a plot afoot to spread a biological weapon in Israel. It may not come to fruition, and there are those of us who are trying to stop it, but my being here endangers us both. They have the ability to listen with ease to both our e-mails and our telephone calls.”
While his face remained impassive and pleasantly curious, his mind raced with this information, just as Ayala’s mind had when Barrett had first told her of the plot in Neal’s basement. He, too, quickly surmised that there were only a few countries that could monitor them that way, and among them, only Russia had ever shown any enmity toward Israel. Even Russia could not truly keep tabs on them in the way that Ayala was describing. But who could. He knew who could, of course, and he knew where Ayala now lived, and this was very disturbing to Saul.
She carried on, “I cannot tell you much, not yet, but there are some things I need you to do. Firstly, there is a woman in the Israeli armed forces who works for this group. I need you to work on holding her back from advancement, and I need you to do it without being discovered.”
He nodded, “And the name of this agent?”
“Raz Shellet, she is a new officer training to be a pilot in the Israeli armed forces. When the time comes, she will be in charge of distributing the virus. As long as she is ground based, she cannot do any harm. The people I am working against cannot get a military plane into our airspace without being destroyed by our extremely extensive defenses. Slow her, and you slow them. But do not try and kill her, they will simply replace her, and I may not know who that replacement is. Better the enemy we know.”
He nodded again, what she said seemed reasonable, for a lie. “So, ’yala, are you going to tell me what this is really about, or are you going to lie to me all day?”
She smiled, then opened her bag. He flinched as he saw the syringe she was taking out, and fear momentarily took him. He reached for the small revolver in his jacket pocket involuntarily and she smiled.
“Saul, really?” she laughed a little, holding the syringe up and flicking its end, “If I wanted to hurt you do you really think you could protect yourself from me?” she looked at him with the implied threat and he lowered his hand. God, this woman, she was serious. What was she doing here? For that matter, what was
he
doing here?
“This is an antidote to the drug they intend to spread. I am going to inject you with it now.” she said this as the fact it was, and he clearly took it as such, nodding somewhat reluctantly and rolling up his sleeve. “It will not hurt, and within a week you will begin spreading this cure to others, I do not have time to explain how or why.”
He saw she was serious, and they locked eyes as she expertly jabbed him and depressed the needle. “Now, once again I will stress that if I wanted to hurt you I would have to come to you in the night and done what I wished to do. You now live, as you always have, at 55 Kersiliya Street.” Why had he thought for even a moment that she did not know as much about him as he did about her? He thought about it and concluded that it was, indeed, highly unlikely that this was just some method of hurting him. Good, he thought, as he watched the plunger go down, forcing the thick grey liquid into his muscle.