Alvey said nothing, but he knew Aurbach well enough to imagine it wasn’t very difficult at all for him to leave his man swinging in the breeze. Hawthorn was an asset for Aurbach, after all, not one of his children.
Aurbach continued. “I left him in detainment, said nothing to the Americans about knowing the man, unsure if he would ever see the light of freedom. Fortunately the CIA decided he possessed no value, and he was eventually released. As it turned out, his detainment was the best thing that could have happened to him operationally. He joined al Qaeda in Iraq with his newfound credibility, and he began passing us critical intelligence, some of which we traded with the U.S., some of which we used to influence matters in other ways.
“Soon the idea came to me that we should grow Hawthorn into a long-term deep-penetration asset of al Qaeda. To get him as close to the core leadership as possible. When much of AQ was rolled up by the Americans during their surge in Iraq, we protected Hawthorn.”
Alvey was impressed. “Incredible. That was many years ago. How far has he gotten since then?”
Aurbach crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray, taking his time in doing so. It seemed to Alvey as if his boss was hesitating with his story. Finally the old man looked up. “Yanis, why, in God’s name, are we not drinking?”
“I beg your pardon?”
Aurbach shouted to the men outside the room, surprising Alvey. “A bottle of scotch, please! Whatever you have lying around will do. And two glasses.”
When the booze came, Menachem Aurbach drank, and while he drank, he told Yanis Alvey everything.
—
The director of the Mossad took an entire hour to finish his story, and then he went to the toilet. Yanis Alvey remained in his chair, his eyes unfixed, generally pointing to a spot on the wall, but focusing on nothing. After a long time, time enough for Aurbach to return and to light another cigarette, Alvey’s head slowly collapsed down, like he was an inflatable doll with a leak. Finally his head settled, forehead down, on the table. He covered his head with his hands.
He spoke in a whisper. “I did not know.”
“Of course you didn’t. You can’t know everything, can you? That’s why there is a chain of command. That’s why unilateral actions like the one you took are dangerous. Foolish.”
“I am truly sorry.”
Alvey sat up straight now, his eyes rimmed with red, glassy and blurring with tears of shame.
Before he could speak, Menachem said, “You are free to leave here. You will not be held, you will not be prosecuted. Just know that by your actions you have hurt your nation. You are a good man, so knowing this is punishment enough.”
Alvey’s water-rimmed eyes returned to the wall.
The older man stood. “Go home, Yanis. Take some more time off, look inside yourself. Try to put this behind you. After some period you and I together will decide if you can continue in your career in some fashion.” He turned back to the younger man, still seated. “But know this. It won’t be the same. Nothing will ever be the same.”
Without another word the director of the Mossad left the little room, leaving the door open behind him.
Yanis sat still for a long time before he rose and walked through the open door.
46
As usual, the eight p.m. Wednesday night class at Georgetown Yoga had been a full house, and Catherine had been lucky to find a spot to lay her mat, arriving as she had at the last minute. She’d almost canceled her session tonight due to the Ohlhauser murder in nearby Dupont Circle, but after spending the entire day and early evening in her office, and the realization that she’d probably be pulling an all-nighter to get an article together, she gave herself permission to rush out for an hour and a half to attend to herself and make her favorite class of the week.
As soon as her hour-long practice was over Catherine rolled up her mat, zipped up her orange hoodie, and headed for the door. She didn’t even bother to make small talk with the other ladies, the vast majority of whom were roughly half her age, and almost none of whom could perform a forearm stand scorpion pose half as well as she could. Catherine stood at the curb, hoping to catch a cab back to her office. Spying a taxi a block to the east she stepped into the street with her hand raised, but before the cab even saw her wave, a black Mercedes sedan pulled to a stop in front of her. An older man with a beard sat behind the wheel, and a young bald-headed man in a gray suit climbed out of the passenger’s side, hurried around the front, and opened the back door, right next to Catherine.
With a pleasant smile he said, “Ms. King? How are you? I’m a big fan. Been reading your column since junior high.”
She looked at the car and the beckoning open door, then back up to the bald-headed man. “Um . . . Thanks?”
Sheepishly he added, “I just had to get that out first.”
“Before what?”