Free The Moses Legacy by Adam Palmer Page A

unpunished?’
    â€˜No, but right now the most urgent priority is tracking down this Goliath. We don’t actually know his real name. And at the moment, we don’t even know where he is.’
    â€˜So what do we know?’
    Â 
    Sarit and Dov went back together some four years, when she was the eager young twenty-year-old immigrant from Ireland, fresh out of her two-year army service. In those days, she was called Siobhan Stewart. At eighteen, she had left her sheltered middle-class life in Cork and volunteered to work in Israel and ended up staying. The trigger for her decision had been a visit to the Holy Land the previous year with her family during which her brother had been killed in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem along with twenty-one other people. She herself had been one of the 135 wounded, albeit comparatively mildly.
    After that she had tried to understand both sides in the conflict and not merely jump to a conclusion based on emotions alone. But what she found particularly galling were the one-sided condemnations when Israel retaliated against the organizers and planners of a whole spate of similar suicide bombings that followed.
    So the following year, bypassing the more traditional picking-apples-on-a-kibbutz option, she had volunteered for eight weeks of equally menial duty on an Israeli army base under the auspices of an organization called Sar-El. It was soon discovered that she had a sharp mind and was a fast learner and so she ended up being given duties that a foreign volunteer would not normally be trusted with.
    This was followed by her bold decision to apply forpermanent residence and volunteer for a full two years of service in the Israeli army, much to the horror of her parents. After some gruelling interviews to test her sincerity, and in the face of plaintive appeals to come home, she was accepted by the Israeli army and spent the next two years serving in communications. She also changed her name in that time to the more Israeli-sounding Sarit Shalev.
    In the course of her two-year stint, she was based at the Urim monitoring unit in the Negev Desert – a vast array of large satellite dishes that picked up information from telecommunications satellites over the region, covering everything from India and China to Europe. This enabled them to monitor not only cell phones but also intercontinental landlines and shipping. Ultra-fast supercomputers and highly sophisticated software analysed the voice and text messages for keywords and particular phone numbers of interest.
    Upon leaving the army, she was planning to go to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to study psychology. But she took the fateful decision of responding to an ad for a job interview involving ‘interesting work abroad’. After passing that interview and several more – where they looked at motivation as well as intelligence – she went through a rigorous initial training course, that was itself part of the selection procedure. Only then was she inducted into the Mossad and the real hard work began.
    One of the first lessons she learnt was that the hunter can all too easily become the hunted if alertness flags, even for a moment. This was a lesson that she learnt all too well on one of her training exercises, when her designated target turned the tables on her. She had assumed that she had an advantage, because the targets were not told which of the ‘hunters’ in the exercise had been assigned to them. But he had been alert andset an ingeniously baited trap, making himself look careless so that she made her move with insufficient preparation.
    He had punished her for the error by capturing her and then twisted the knife by subjecting her to the embarrassment of being marched hogtied back to the field HQ for the exercise. It was a humiliation that she resolved never to be exposed to again. And she never had. But more than that: it was a humiliation that she was determined to avenge. The problem