Honour Among Spies (eBook)

Chapter 1

Eli Amiram, head of Mossad’s London station, stepped around the muck of discarded fast-food cartons and tried to be positive. Today was going to be a good day, he told himself despite all indications to the contrary. There was minor shit and major shit. The minor shit was spending the weekend moving apartments because of a security threat. The threat itself was negligible but the move was necessary – part of the job and as routine as checking under his car before driving. London was a level two security risk; it had history. In 1982 the Israeli ambassador had been shot in the head outside the Dorchester Hotel. After three months in a coma, he spent his remaining twenty years as a permanent patient. It was a tragic end for such a brilliant man. Then there was the car bomb in 1992 – no deaths, only casualties: the deaths had been in Buenos Aires where ninety-six Israelis died at the embassy, including people he knew.

So moving apartments when told to do so was part of the job; in other words, minor shit. Major shit was the news from back home that Eli had absorbed on his phone while brushing his teeth. The stupidity and short-sightedness of the government was breath-taking. Where was the intellect, the rationality, the problem-solving capability, the intelligence Jews were supposed to possess? Every session at the Knesset seemed to spiral into self-serving agendas that anyone with an average IQ could see was never going to solve anything.

While Eli despaired at government policy he reminded himself, yet again, he was a civil servant, his job was to serve the people of his country. Governments come, governments go. Institutions and civil servants had a duty to stay at their posts, to keep the chaos from taking over. Today would be another day of trying to do his best. It wasn’t easy. Eli might tell himself it was going to be a good day, he could repeat it as much as he liked, he could even write it down over and over again, as his psychologist wife suggested, but it didn’t change the darkness in his mind. It didn’t change the recurring dream that he, Eli Amiram, the Office’s most accomplished spy-runner, the great brain, with all his education, experience, professionalism and integrity had screwed up so badly that an agent had been blown into unrecognisable body parts. Yes, everybody lost agents, it was part of the job, but this one had been special. The man who’d died wasn’t only an agent, he was also the closest Eli had ever had to a friend. A death that could have been avoided if Eli had seen the cracks in the operation that opened into a sinkhole.

By this time Eli had reached the crossing near the entrance to West Hampstead station. He tugged his black beanie over his bald head and fished into his pocket for a mask to loop around his ears. Covid lockdowns were now a distant memory, but some people still wore masks in public places: the old, the anxious, the immune-compromised and those who wanted to conceal their identities from London’s blanket CCTV coverage – in other words, people like him.  

Once inside the station Eli slid through the barriers and onto the platform where he took his place among the other early commuters. One of them caught his eye and Eli did a double-take. The man was tall, rangy, but seemed unsteady on his feet, perhaps still drunk from the night before. A messenger bag, army boots and hair thick with grease completed the dissolute look. It was bizarre; the drunk reminded Eli of Derek, or Red Cap as he was known, the agent who’d been blown to pieces.

A rush of darkness came at Eli and he tried to push it away. He took a long breath through the mask and concentrated on his surroundings. Eli focused on the way that the rails crackled as the train approached, fellow commuters jostling their way into the carriage. He struggled to stay in the moment and edged into the train carriage, grabbing a handle as doors shut and the train pulled away. Eli closed his eyes, forced his breathing to slow and counted down from 200. He let the rattle and the hum flow around him and he started to feel better. He was being moved, hundreds of metres beneath the clay of the London bowl. He was on his way to his office with an interesting day ahead of him; it was going to be a good day.

Calm restored, Eli opened his eyes and looked around the carriage. A metre or so away the drunk hadn’t managed to get a seat either. Close up, he wasn’t at all like Derek. This creature, this cut-price doppelganger had a tattoo on the back of his hand, a spider drafted in blue ink that looked as if it had been done after lights out. Another difference between the drunk and Derek was age; the drunk was younger, around thirty, with no trace of white in the bristle on his face. 

Perhaps because he was aware that he was being studied, the man looked up and their eyes met for a moment.

‘Masks,’ he said directing a glare at Eli. ‘Why are you wearing a fucking mask?’

Nobody said anything but there was a sense of alertness in the carriage, as if the other commuters had been jogged out of their own thoughts. Eli looked down and didn’t respond to the drunk’s question; they’d be at a station soon enough where he could jump out. The train rattled along. 

‘Don’tcha wanna know the truth?’ the man said. ‘It’s all a mass illusion, it’s about power, it’s the way the elites try to control us. Always was, none of it was ever to do with any fucking illness.’

Eli remained silent but this just seemed to fuel the man.

‘Heard of Bobby Kennedy? Eh? Well, his son wrote a book that explains everything. That’s right, Kennedy’s son telling it how it is. You want to read it?’

Nearby, a woman with the look of a prissy banker was trying to edge away from the unravelling scene, and the young man next to her was staring so hard at his phone he might have been turned to stone. Another woman, seated, probably a care worker going home after a night shift, examined the bottom of her bag, as if she could crawl inside it. Meanwhile, the drunk had reached into his bag and pulled out a hardback book. He waved it in the air, and Eli saw The Real Anthony Fauci on the cover.

‘It’s all in here,’ the man said. ‘Y’see coercive vaccination is a CIA military objective, part of US strategy. Okay? You want to read this book. Chapter Eleven. Hyping Phony Epidemics. See – it’s all in there. There is no reason for you to wear a mask.’ The man stretched towards Eli as if he was going to remove his mask. Eli caught a whiff of body odour and tried to step back.

‘No English,’ Eli said in his thickest parody of an accent. It was a mistake.

‘Foreigner, are you? Might have guessed. Where you from? Refugee, are you? On benefits? Enjoying yourself here, are you?’

The train slowed down into Swiss Cottage Station and Eli pushed past the drunk to the doors and onto the platform. He dodged down the platform and shimmied through oncoming commuters and up a flight of stairs. But when Eli snatched a look over his shoulder he saw that the wretched man had followed him, long legs picking up speed, still holding the damn book and was gaining on him. Eli spotted an exit to a passage and as he headed there he jostled past a young woman in a hijab coming towards him.

‘I beg your pardon,’ Eli said instinctively.

Behind him Eli heard the drunk and glanced over his shoulder. It was as if the drunk had unfurled bat-like wings and grown a metre.

‘You DO speak English,’ he said. ‘And that’s another fucking foreigner in her fucked up Muslim get-up. Why don’t you bloody people just go home? Or go somewhere else? Why do you have to come here?’

The woman, wide eyes behind her specs, stood frozen in fear.

‘Come on, darlin’,’ the man said. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got under that scarf, eh?’

Eli glanced up and down the corridor and up above him. For that one split second there seemed to be no one around and no overhead camera.

‘I don’t think…’ Eli trailed off and looked down at his own feet. It was a gesture of servility and drew the man away from the woman.

‘You don’t think what?’ the man said.

‘I… um…’ Eli stammered and looked up to see the wolfish pleasure in the man’s face as he looked down at Eli. Before the drunk had the opportunity to enjoy it any further, Eli hooked his foot around the man’s ankle and yanked hard. The drunk lost balance and Eli followed through with a punch in the guts and then kneed him in the balls.

Eli stood back.

It was like watching a building collapse; the drunk’s knees folded under him. After a glance to make sure there was still no one nearby, Eli pushed the drunk’s face down to the floor, hauled one arm behind him and for good measure put his full seventy-nine kilos onto one knee and slammed it down on the man’s spine just around the L3 lumbar vertebra. The man’s scream confirmed that he had hit the sweet spot. Then Eli shifted his knee to the right and, using his hand, located a rib through the fabric of the man’s thin jacket. Down went his knee again and he heard a satisfying crack, so pressed down once more for luck.

Now Eli heard voices and steps; a straggle of commuters appeared, Eli jumped to his feet and went towards...