Legends

“I suppose the same thing that went wrong in the middle and late eighties when your CIA failed to predict the breakup of the Soviet empire and the demise of the communist system. Looking in from the outside, which is what I do these days, I can see that intelligence services are fatally flawed. They’re self-tasking—they define the threats and then try to neutralize them. Threats that don’t get defined slip through the mesh and suddenly turn up as full-blown disasters, at which point those who are outside the intelligence community start yapping about how we’ve been asleep on the job. We haven’t been asleep. We’ve just been defining it differently.”

“They say a camel is a horse designed by committee,” Martin said. “For my money, the CIA is an intelligence agency designed by the same committee.”

Benny shrugged. “For me, Dante, it all comes down to that dead dog at the side of the road in Lebanon, the one that exploded and decapitated my son. If we had been doing the job we were paid to do, we would have anticipated the dead dog filled with PETN, and identified the terrorist behind it. I have trouble … I have trouble getting past that reality.” Benny climbed heavily to his feet. “I think I’ll turn in now, if you don’t mind. The bed’s made in the room next to the downstairs bathroom. Sleep well.”

“I never sleep well,” Martin murmured; he, too, was having trouble getting past the dead dog that decapitated Benny’s son. “I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.”

An ugly grin deformed Benny’s lips. “Occupational disease, for which there is no known cure.”

The next morning Benny drove Martin into Jerusalem and let him off at the bus station. “One departs for Tel Aviv every twenty minutes,” he said. He handed him a slip of paper. “Phone number for Akim in Caesarea. It’s unlisted. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell him where you got it. I’ll nose around about the phone company’s magnetic tapes and let you know what I find out. By the way, Samat’s not in Israel. Shabak says he flew to London two days before the rabbi at Kiryat Arba reported him missing.”

“Thanks, Benny.”

“You’re welcome, Dante. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“I’ve trimmed my sails, Benny. I am thankful for light winds.”

From the brick guard shack atop the high wall surrounding Akim Ugor-Zhilov’s seaside villa in Caesarea, Martin could almost hear the hiss as the sun knifed into the western Mediterranean. “Great view,” Akim said, though he was standing with his back to it, sizing up his visitor, trying to figure out if his three-piece suit was custom made or off the rack. The livid sickle-shaped scar slashing across his high forehead over his right eye and vanishing into a long sideburn appeared to shimmer. “The Israelis think you are an Irishman named Pippen,” Akim was saying, his heavy Russian accent surfacing indolently from the depths of his throat. “Then someone named Odum—which was the name on the passport you used to enter the country a week ago today—calls me from a phone booth in Tel Aviv and invites himself over to my house. Needless to say, the fact that a name is on a passport does not mean nothing. So which is it, friend, Pippen or Odum?”

“The answer is complicated—”

“Simplify.”

Martin decided to stick close to the truth. “Pippen was a pseudonym I used years ago when I worked as a freelance explosive expert. Odum is the name I’ve been using since.”

Akim brightened. “Pseudonyms are something I can relate to. In Soviet Russia, everybody who was anybody used them. You have heard of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov? He was known as Lenin, after the River Lena in Siberia. Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili took the alias Stalin, which meant steel, which is how he wanted people to think of him. Lev Davidovich Bronstein escaped from prison with the help of a passport made out in the name of one of his jailers, a certain Trotsky. Me myself, I managed to avoid being sent with my two brothers to the gulag by adopting the identity of a sleight-of-hand magician named Melor Semyonovich Zhitkin. You are familiar with the gulag? That’s where temperatures fall below minus fifty and alcohol freezes and you suck on vodka icicles carefully so they do not stick to your tongue. Using the name Melor was a stroke of genius, even if it is me who says so. Melor is a Soviet name, stands for Marx-Engels-Lenin-Organizers-of-Revolution, which made the KGB think I was a diehard communist. I was diehard all right,” he added with a sinister cackle. “They could not kill me, which is what made me diehard.”

Without blinking one of his heavy lids or narrowing his eyes, Akim’s expression turned hard. Martin wondered how he did it. Perhaps it was the shadows playing on his face, perhaps the pupils of his eyes had actually grown smaller. Whatever it was, the effect was chilling.