A Spy in Exile

Ya’ara stood outside, listening to the ebb and flow of the world around her. The sky was a purplish shade of blue, solitary raindrops still fell from the leaves of the plants, and rivulets of rainwater trickled across the ground, their soft murmurings clearly audible from every direction. The concrete path shone with moisture, and she was enveloped by the intoxicating odor of earth and water and rain-washed vegetation. Her thoughts carried her back to the field operatives course she had undergone years ago at the Mossad. She remembered how excited and amazed she had felt to know that she was in, that she belonged. She knew her cadets were feeling the same right now. Two of them had gone to the nearby village to purchase groceries for dinner. The others had dispersed to their respective rooms. She wondered if her urgency was justified. Was she doing the right thing by insisting on getting to Berlin as soon as Thursday evening and thereby cutting short the weeks of preparation that she and Aslan had worked out so meticulously? It’ll do the cadets the world of good, she thought. A chance for them from the very beginning to get used to the fact that things move quickly, that plans change, that they need to think on the move. Yes, but you’re trying to rationalize it, she responded, conducting an internal debate with herself. If rocking the cadets’ boat like this from the very outset was the right thing to do, you would have planned it that way. But that’s not the real reason. The truth is you want to be in the field already. We have to act swiftly. She who hesitates is lost.

More so than anything else, she sensed the same prickling of danger that Matthias felt. Something wasn’t right. Yes, it appeared on the surface to be nothing more than an affair between a middle-aged man and a younger woman, a failed romance that had come to an expected and inevitable end. But something was telling her to think otherwise. Coincidences of that nature simply don’t exist. Neither the Law of Large Numbers nor any other law at all could explain how the station chief of an intelligence service and the granddaughter of a terrorist would suddenly fall in love. And even if the love affair had blossomed purely by chance and was indeed real, Ya’ara couldn’t come to terms with Martina’s sudden disappearance. I want to be in Germany already, she thought. She had kept her distance from active fieldwork for too long, and training her group of rookies was only something that simulated the real thing in the interim—even if the order had come from above. She closed her eyes and pictured the figure of Matthias, not as he was in the present but rather as she remembered him from their first encounter, when he, unlike many others, had seen and recognized her worth. Martina’s twenty-nine years old, she thought. I’m just five years older than her. Was their love affair really so ludicrous, doomed to failure? She remembered that night when she and Matthias had almost crossed that line—from colleagues to lovers. Who backed off first? The answer wasn’t all that clear all of a sudden.

“Coming in for a coffee?” She almost jumped out of her skin at the sound of the voice, but managed to maintain her composure. Aslan had crept up on her again unnoticed.

“One of these days you’re going to give me a heart attack. You need to give me a heads-up when you’re approaching. You can’t keep doing that.”

“That’s just me, you know.”

“You’re unbearable.” She calmed down. “Let’s get something hot to drink, I’m freezing.”

“Good idea. And the cadets meanwhile can show us what they can cook.”