Free Dead Line by Stella Rimington Page A

It was no surprise that he was having an affair - he’d had affairs before, often - but this time he wanted a divorce. All those shared years, the experiences, the help she’d given him as he built up his business… all gone in the forty-five seconds it had taken him to deliver his prepared speech. It was over, he’d said, and that was final.
    After the first shock came the anger and it was anger that had fuelled her through the drawn-out wrangling of the divorce proceedings. She had finally been awarded her twenty million dollars, enough for a complete change of life. She could have gone to live anywhere. She could have come to London, where her son David lived with his wife and small children. But she’d finally chosen Israel, though it was not the obvious choice. She was proud to be Jewish, but she was increasingly upset by the way Israel behaved. The situation in that part of the world seemed to be worsening every year, and she simply couldn’t believe that none of it was Israel’s fault. The settlements seemed to her to be madness and the unwillingness of many Israelis to concede that the Palestinians had a grievance, more madness still.
    If she was honest, she’d really chosen to live there because she thought it might give her the chance to do something in her own right. She wasn’t naïve enough to think she could change the world single-handed, and she knew she would come across people who disagreed strongly with her. But she hoped that she could have some influence by working for moderation and compromise and listening to the other side’s point of view.
    And so far she was convinced she was doing some good in her new homeland. She had joined a peace movement and was taking an active part in organising meetings and debates and helping to write the literature they put out. She had even practically forgotten about Saul - that is, until Mr Teitelbaum had come her way.
    It had all started at a drinks party in Tel Aviv given by one of her new friends, another American woman called Sara. Hannah had met a man there, Sidney something, who at first had asked her the usual polite questions about how she found life in Israel, but as they’d talked he had seemed much more interested to hear about her former husband’s doings - particularly about the satellite communications company that Saul had founded and still ran.
    After the party, Sara had told her that Sidney was a Mossad officer, and when he’d subsequently rung and asked Hannah to meet him for what he called ‘a chat’, she’d known his interest wasn’t social and had politely but firmly declined.
    But then news had come of Saul’s remarriage, and Hannah had learned in a phone call from one of her less tactful Californian friends that the new Mrs Gold was a tall, twenty-three-year-old blonde with a golden tan. For Hannah, who was short and dark and didn’t like the sun, that was the last straw. Twenty minutes later she had rung Sidney and agreed to meet him, though when she’d turned up at the outdoor cafe he’d named, she’d found another man waiting for her.
    His name was Mr Teitelbaum- she knew only his surname, and since she was Mrs Gold to them, she reciprocated with a ‘mister’, which gave an old-fashioned flavour to their meetings. Teitelbaum was short and squat and reminded Hannah of a toad. His bald head, which gleamed in the sunshine, sat like a bowling ball on massive shoulders, and his hands were rough as a peasant’s. From the open neck of his shirt, hair sprouted like dark, curly weeds. He said very little, but he listened hard, apparently mentally recording everything Hannah had to say, for he took no notes. There had been a lot for him to remember.
    Her ex-husband’s company sold satellite systems all over the world - Saul had never been choosy about his customers. Many of them were in the Middle East and some were the enemies of Israel. It was these customers Mr Teitelbaum had wanted to hear about, and since Hannah had been the