Free Fear the Survivors by Stephen Moss Page B

every agent learns quickly that the slightest facial tick or inflection of voice is all a trained spy needs to read you like a book. So you learn to keep a phenomenally tight rein on your reactions if you hope to live very long. So tight, that in the course of normal life you find yourself having to remember how you are supposed to react to important news, consciously triggering smiles and laughter as friends and loved ones share themselves with you, unaware of the calculated method behind your responses.
    He had shown no such emotion when Ayala had called. He had greeted her offhandedly, and they had agreed to a meeting, using the long-outdated codes she had used in her time as an active asset. They had met, and they had spoken, and it had taken Saul a few hours to realize that Ayala, his former agent, had just turned the tables, and had activated him, the handler.
    He had spent the next few weeks travelling around Israel, contacting agents, speaking with former colleagues, spreading an inoculating contagion that Ayala had given to him to administer. He had been spreading the antigen, and his work had gone a long way toward inoculating the region. But that had been but the first of two tasks given him by Ayala. He had also been given the name of an innocent-seeming junior officer in the Israeli Air Force and been told that she was the single greatest threat to Israel in the nation’s short and bloody history.
    It had been hard to believe, and Saul had known that he was only being told half the truth, but he had also trusted his old ally enough to believe that the measure she was not giving away would not be something he needed to know in order to survive. Sure enough, she had told him to keep his distance, and he had. She had told him that the woman was not as she seemed and soon enough that had been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. Finally Ayala had warned him that the woman was part of something far larger, something that spanned the globe, and that one day he would know why he had been kept in the dark.
    And when the world had gone mad on that strange autumn night, the sky alight with missiles and explosions, stories of deadly dogfights over Afghanistan, and nuclear hell breaking loose in America, Raz Shellet had fled. He had been watching her, as was his mandate, from a distance. He had used his not inconsiderable talents to gain an understanding of her movements without triggering any unwanted alarms, and he had watched, almost expectantly, as she had calmly walked off the base and vanished from her old life.
    He had followed her. It had not been easy. He had not been prepared for her flight and had not been carrying any but the most basic amenities, not nearly enough for a prolonged pursuit. Most of all he had been unprepared for where she was going. But he should have known. Israel had allies in most of the civilized nations of the world, and information sharing treaties came as part of those allegiances. If you wanted to hide from Israel’s eyes, you needed to do so among her enemies. And there were few places with more enmity toward mother Israel than in the Islamic strongholds of Gaza and the West Bank.
    The city of Gaza, the largest of all the Palestinian cities, held more than four hundred thousand souls spread along the coast almost to the border with Israel, only fifty miles south of Tel Aviv. But the trip had taken days, days marked by long nights and hitchhiked rides, at first with dubious and mistrusting Jews and then, as they got closer to the fortified border with the Gaza Strip, the rides had become even less savory.
    It had been an exhausted Saul, showing all of his sixty-five years in his gray tufted beard, who had called upon an old colleague in the middle of the night in Gaza. The friend had been startled and afraid but he had granted his colleague shelter and food. Saul knew he had ruined his colleague’s cover and probably endangered the man’s life, but every part of him had told him that