This isn’t just small talk. Alan took a chair and sat opposite Ben. “I guess I thought everyone served.”
“That’s the myth. Here’s the reality—the kids getting hit by rocks in the West Bank aren’t the kids whose parents are in Parliament.”
“That sounds familiar.” Alan was surprised he let that slip. He didn’t criticize his own country to foreigners. It was a rule, a navy rule.
Ben’s eyes were back on the screen. “A lot of this is pure shit, you know?”
Alan got to his feet. “Look—”
“Don’t get on your tall horse, Commander.” He looked over the screen again. “Your President is a good friend of Israel, but he’s a terrible intelligence manager. Yes?”
“He’s the commander-in-chief,” Alan said without too much emphasis.
“Politics and intelligence, they go so naturally together and they are terrible bed mates, yes? You know what I am saying, Commander?”
Not a clue, unless this is another recruitment attempt. What the hell is he talking about? “Not sure I do, Ben. Call me Alan. Okay?”
“Sure. I’m saying that good intelligence is the truth, yes? The truth we see on the ground? And good intelligence officers tell the truth.”
Alan gave a cautious nod, already worried about where this was going. Was it yesterday making him shy? He was growing anxious because a friendly foreign officer was trying to make professional talk in a hotel room.
He caught himself watching out the window. Ben read on. He began to read snatches aloud.
It didn’t take Alan long to understand what the man meant when he said “shit.” He read a report summary on an interrogation conducted in an unknown location. The target of the location was referred to as “the terrorist.” The summary sounded as if it had been written for a Hollywood movie. Ben read several of these without comment, although his English was good enough to convey his amusement—and his disgust.
Alan fought with anxiety. Followed a train of thought out of the room. Back to Afghanistan. Brought himself back to the room.
After twenty minutes of this, Ben went on as if he had never stopped. “Politicians want the truth to serve their own ends—their own ends. Not the truth. Not the truth you saw. And they never see the people—the dead ones, the results of prolonged interrogations.” He pressed a key. “Okay, you brought what your people said you’d bring. Not your fault that it’s shit, but it is. My contact says you’ll be the officer in charge on this operation—one of the pieces in Perpetual Justice. Who makes up these names, eh?” He took the bifocals off his nose and wiped them carefully on his bush jacket’s tail. Then he pressed a few keys and spun the laptop to Alan, so that he had the keyboard under his hands and the screen lit up before him. It was an older model IBM, he noted.
“What we’re giving you is shit, too.” Ben’s voice had an edge. “Political shit, just like yours. I wanted to talk to you—really talk. You think this is a set-up, don’t you? It’s not. We’re providing a lot of the material to support these Perpetual Justice ops—and some of it is a pile of crap.”
Alan tried to feign unconcern, but his shoulders were tight and he felt as if he’d been strapped in an ejection seat for seven hours. “I’m uncomfortable with your choice of topics, maybe.”
Ben polished his glasses again. “Will I surprise you if I say we know you quite well, Commander? Africa, Silver Star, some not-so-secret decorations. You are an operator, yes? And my guess is, you are a believer.” He smiled, changing his round head into the face of everyone’s friend. The perfect friend. “As I am. A true believer in a complex canon of—of what we are.” His turn to look out the window.
Alan started through the files to cover his mixture of pleasure and fear. How could he not be flattered that they knew his career? And why did this seem so much like a recruitment attempt?
The reality outlined in the files drew him away from Ben’s words. His part of Perpetual Justice was a snatch operation against a suspected al-Qaida moneyman, and for the first time he saw a parallel between what had happened to him yesterday and what he was about to do. That hadn’t really pushed through Alan’s conscience until that very moment, a twinge:
The big SUV had powered through the streets as two men in the front shouted at each other. A big man in the back had had a gun. Alan had registered these things at a distance because he couldn’t form a coherent thought. When his brain had finally turned over, it had started on an endless loop of threat and fear. Captured. Torture. He had been conscious of just how many secrets he knew and could betray—operations, Afghanistan, fear—panic. Who has me? Why? I’ve been captured! Torture. Prepare myself Who has me?
He snapped back to the computer. His hands were trembling. He did not raise his eyes to meet Ben’s.
The documents in front of him were recent surveillance findings of the target, clearly much altered. They’d had a certain amount of information deleted, but they were thorough, carefully annotated. Exactly what he’d need to plan his operation.
The next file was a clean summary of the target’s ties to al-Qaida and his location in the financial hierarchy. To Alan, it was like reading an academic paper with no footnotes. Everything was neat and tidy—the target’s role, his family relations, his bank accounts. To Alan, it stank. Intelligence was never that simple. Terrorists were never that simple. He looked up, straight into Ben’s smile.
“Okay, you pass. You really are an intel officer. You had me worried.”
“This is like a document you send to a briefer.”
“Give that man a cigar.” Ben paused, clearly pleased with his phrase. “There’s more of the same. It was pushed on us. We decided to tell your people through you. I’m going to talk out of school—that’s your phrase, yes? Okay, out of school, under the rose—we’re a secretive lot, we have a great many phrases for this. Okay? The surveillance reports, his location—I’ll back those. My people, or people I know, did those. The background, the bank accounts, the summary—not ours, okay? I can guess, but I won’t—you don’t want to criticize your president. Same-same. Right?”
Alan was scrolling down the summary, looking at an Excel spreadsheet on banking that looked impressive as hell. Except that it was unsourced.
“Jesus.” Alan looked up self-consciously. “Ah, sorry.”
Ben smiled. “I think I’ve heard the name before.”
Alan’s eyes went back to the document and he grimaced. “I don’t get it. All this unsourced stuff.”
“But when you deliver it to your Central Command, it will become sourced. From Israeli military intelligence. Very trustworthy, yes? Maybe in some circles, more trustworthy than your own CIA?”
Alan murmured “Jesus” again without thinking.
“We decided we wouldn’t do it without telling somebody—and somebody is you, Commander. They try and fuck us. Okay, we’re proud in the military. We don’t trade shit unless we mean to fuck somebody. We ask for you. ‘Send the guy running the operation.’
