“He can say what he wants, you didn’t need to confirm it. I cannot tell you the ramifications of that slip, they reach far beyond the mission to which we were assigned.”
“I’m the problem? I’m the fuckup here—because of that call? What about what we just made happen, you and I? What about that murdered family?” Joshua, as if absorbing what he’s said only after saying it, drops his face in his hands and lets out a moan. He looks back to Sander, who is unfazed. “I thought I was selling computers,” Joshua says. “I thought I was opening a pipeline so we could listen in. It would have been a dream, that kind of access.”
“You? No, you are not selling anything, or opening anything. You are just an idiot, who screwed up a simple, simple conversation. It was Joshua. Joshua was selling the computers. He was the one on the job.”
“Yes?” Joshua says.
“Joshua, for you, is done.”
Joshua doesn’t dare say that he doesn’t understand. As a workaround, he goes with “I am trying to grasp,” which seems to enrage Sander in exactly the same way.
Taking the arms of Joshua’s chair, Sander turns it from the table, pulling it forcefully, the chair’s feet shrieking against the tile.
Sander does not release his grip, even when the two are facing each other, knee to knee.
“Listen carefully,” he says, bringing his face close, as if to aid comprehension. “For you, Joshua is gornisht. The Gaza deal is gornisht. Berlin itself is gornisht. And, depending on how these next hours go, the Mossad is maybe gornisht for us both.”
“Like that? For one single slip?”
“Yes. For one treaty-breaching, illegal-action-on-foreign-soil-stating, possibly Geneva-Convention-violating admission of a slip. Now, you need to run upstairs and get me Joshua’s passport and the international license and the business cards right away. Go get me everything with his name written on it. You don’t want to miss your train.” Before Joshua can ask, Sander says, “We’ve got you on the seven forty-six out of Hauptbahnhof, switching at Hannover and then at Karlsruhe. If you make it, and if you’re lucky, you’ll be back in Paris by tonight, as if none of this ever happened. Tomorrow morning, you’ll be at your old front, selling printer paper and mouse pads to the Iranians all day. The people of Tel Aviv will again be able to rest easy.”
“How can it have been worth blowing the operation for one man? We could have kept it going. They’d have bought everything. Printers, scanners, laptops, copy machines. We could have been completely tapped in. Total access to all communication,” Joshua says. “I’ve only just finished the first part of the deal!”
“This, we’ve been over,” Sander says, impatient. “Someone else is already Joshua this morning. Someone better and smarter and much more dangerous than you. I’m sure he’d have loved to explain it all himself. Unfortunately, Joshua had to run. He has some pressing business to attend to in Shanghai.” Sander looks at his watch. “By now, he’s already boarded his flight at Tegel and is busy telling the person stuck next to him all about what Joshua does.”
“And you?”
“Which me?” Sander says.
“Any you.”
“I’m still belligerent, bossy, Hebrew-speaking Sander for about an hour. I’m sorry you won’t be here to watch me finish molting. To see what bird I turn into next.”
“And Farid?”
“Don’t trouble yourself. Farid is already someone else’s headache. And don’t be fooled by the man you met. He’s as bad as his brother. The only difference is Farid fights from a yacht.”
He does think that he is beginning to understand what Sander-who-is-Sander-for-but-one-more-hour has just told him. He understands that Farid is the enemy. He understands that Joshua is right now buckled into his seat and taking off on a plane.
Thinking hard, he also understands that, while he slept, he’d participated in something violent, and terrible, and deadly. And that, with one slip of the tongue, he’d turned back into himself.
“You should feel good,” Sander says. “The General feels good. He has already released a statement to the news. You fucked up, but you’re also a hero. This was a hugely valuable mission, target-wise. So if your exit goes smoothly, tomorrow you’ll be balanced on your hemorrhoids in Paris, making cold calls, and saving the Jews.”
“How do I go back? After this? What we just did—it’s not what I signed up for.”
“Actually, if you think about it even for a nanosecond, it kind of, exactly, is. It’s just what you signed up for.”
“I signed up to prevent violence. To disrupt technological advances that will lead to war. To collect data—harmless data, by selling our adversaries the machines that will catch it. I joined up to gather intelligence from our enemies.”
“And what the fuck do you think we do with the intelligence you gather?”
Sander then reaches behind and brings forward a manila envelope bent, the long way, in half. “Here are your tickets, and a replacement passport, fresh from the embassy—still warm as toast.”
Z accepts the envelope. Z accepts what has just transpired. He opens the cover to the passport to see who he will be for his return to France. He flips through the visas and exit and entry stamps.
While he does so, Sander gets up and goes over to the wall, where he presses down on a large metal toggle. With the grinding hum of some ancient engine, the shades in front of Z’s beautiful view slowly draw down.
“That’s it?” Z says. “We’re just done?”
“The moment that bomb hit, we were done. It’s your indiscretion that has also made our decamping a bit of a rush.” Sander, staring out at the lake as the shades cut into his outlook, sighs deeply. “Prepare as we might in this business, we don’t work in a sterile field. Always we must be ready for change. Now go upstairs and get your things sorted. In the meantime, I’ll make you a peanut butter sandwich and cut some cucumber for the train.”
“You’re packing me lunch?”
“That is Plan A. If you hurry down with your bag, and the things I asked for. If not, I switch to Plan B. And instead of the sandwich, I will knock you over the head and drag you into the kitchen, where I will, with great speed, chop you into pieces and feed you into the industrial food processor. Then I will spend the morning waving at the neighbors over the back hedge as I pour you, bucket after bucket, around the gardens and into the lake for all the happy little fish to eat.”
2014, Black Site (Negev Desert)
“Take it,” the guard says, calling in from the hallway. “It’s point-two-five milligrams. If you were free, you could still operate a backhoe after. It’s just to cut the edge.”
From the looks of it, it would seem that Prisoner Z is not currently interested in having any edge removed. He stands on the bed, yelling down at the guard through the peek-a-boo window in the cell door.