Free The Boudicca Parchments by Adam Palmer Page B

Can’t you contact the family of another prisoner and get them to do it? By offering them money?”
    Morgan didn’t even hesitate in his reply.
    “That would be almost impossible. They have CCTV cameras in British prisons. It would be very hard to kill some one undetected.”
    “But a life prisoner would have nothing to lose. They don’t have the death penalty in England.”
    Morgan smiled at HaTzadik’s naivety.
    “They don’t have life either – except in rare cases. In England, life doesn’t mean life. Sometimes they can get out in as little as five years. But not if they commit another murder. The last thing any prisoner wants to do is lengthen his sentence by committing a murder for which he’s bound to get caught.”
    Morgan could see the irritation on Shalom Tikva’s face – as well as that of his son, who spoke even better English. But there was nothing he could do. They had to face the facts.
    “Is this Daniel Klein single?”
    This made Morgan rather edgy.
    “Why?”
    “Leverage?”
    “He’s divorced. His ex-wife is in America. But I don’t think threatening her is going to make any difference. I don’t think there’s any love lost between the two of them.
    The older man turned to his son and said something in Hebrew orYiddish. The younger man replied.
    “Did they have children?”
    Morgan was becoming increasingly concerned by the direction this conversation had taken off in.
    “No.”
    Baruch Tikva said something to his father. HaTzadik replied.
    “A ni rot seh sheh’at a ti sa le’ An glia. Yesh li avo da kta na bishvil kha la’a sot .”
    Morgan didn’t understand, but a rough translation of his reply would be:
    “I want you to go to England. I have a little job that I want you to do.”
     
     

Chapter 22
    As a desk officer in the small tightly-knit Mossad, Dovi Shamir could be handling upward of a hundred cases at any one time. Often this meant little more than speed-reading a report from a katsa (field-based case officer). But at times he missed the cut and thrust of field work himself. That was why he had been only too happy to come out of retirement when a special assignment arose to eliminate a Hamas terrorist who had participated in the murder of two Israeli soldiers and who was planning a major operation in London.
    However he had been seriously compromised and could not now work in the field or indeed anywhere outside Israel. Technically wanted for murder on an Interpol warrant, he had to stay in Israel, unless he travelled in disguise under a false identity.
    But his experience made him a very good desk officer too. Of the many cases that he was covering, the one that concerned him most was the one that Daniel Klein had got caught up in. Although not a “Sayan” – i.e. a co-optee or asset, run by a field officer – Daniel was a non-Israeli Jew who had recently stumbled into a conspiracy that could have led to the deaths of millions of Israelis, had he not acted on his own initiative with courage, wisdom and haste.
    For this reason alone, Dovi Shamir considered Daniel to be under his “protective wing” and the fact that Daniel was now in a British gaol awaiting trial for a murder that he almost certainly did not commit was most displeasing to Dovi. Accordingly, he was taking a personal interest in the case.
    But there was a limit to what he could do. It had taken a lot of diplomatic string-pulling to save Dovi himself after the British police had him “bang to rights” on a charge of murdering Ismail Shahaid on British soil. The fact that his face had been plastered all over the news media made it even harder for the British to let him go, as to do so would be seen as a sign of favouritism to Israel, fuelling all the old conspiracy theories about the Zionists running the world. Even the Israeli authorities themselves had been ready to throw Dovi to the wolves.
    In the end, what saved Dovi’s neck was the fact that he had done for Britain what Daniel Klein had done