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ex-operative, holding some of the most important secrets of the State of Israel close to her heart, had simply disappeared after attending her father’s funeral.
Of course,
the commander isn’t under any pressure, and he’ll only do the maximum, yes, the maximum, to bring her back home. “Dead or alive,” he said to Ehud, and laughed.
    And why shouldn’t he laugh? Why not try to stay loose even as they were all pissing in their pants? Why not create the impression that things are under control? This didn’t happen on his watch. It isn’this responsibility. He’s just come to rescue the commanders of the past from the mess that they caused when they enabled Rachel to live her own life and paid no attention to what their operative had been doing after leaving the service. “I don’t even know who she is,” said the commander, as the screen showed two pictures of Rachel taken from old passports. Ehud looked and kept silent as the commander’s words reverberated in his head: “Wanted: Dead or Alive.”
    â€œOf course, everything is open to you,” the commander added, “the archive, operations room, communications center, everything you ask for. This operation is Priority A, and if you need additional personnel for surveillance, kidnap, or something more drastic . . .” He left a deliberate pause, and Ehud realized he had already reported to the Mossad chief and the Prime Minister and obtained the authorizations needed for any appropriate action.

    A T AROUND TWELVE O’CLOCK Y ANIV AND Ehud entered the archive. Ehud glanced at his watch impatiently and scanned the shelves. Yaniv asked how they were going to get through all the material and what were they actually looking for. “How long has she been missing?” Ehud asked instead of answering. “A week at least,” Yaniv replied. “We know she left this country with her Israeli passport, and after the
shivah
there’s been no trace of her. We sent someone to the apartment with the estate agent. He went from room to room and found an up-to-date tourist brochure for India. Hard to draw conclusions from this, but perhaps that’s the direction. We also checked the call that you received. It was on a Belgian phone card. The phone was apparently bought at the airport, with calls prepaid. Then the people we approached”—Ehud noticed that Yaniv was holding back whatever he could—“established that she used her British passport to leaveEngland. We asked certain associates of ours to check out the airlines, where she went to, and with whom, and then it turned out she crossed the Channel by train, but they don’t keep any record of onward destinations. We checked for transactions on her credit card and bank account. We’re not sure how she got her bank to clear it, but she transferred close to a hundred thousand dollars to England, and the money was withdrawn from the Western Union office in Leicester Square. We sent our representative there, but needless to say they don’t remember anything. That’s what we have up to now.” Ehud suppressed a smile. She hasn’t forgotten, he told himself. She still knows the job.
    They lingered beside a low shelf. Gray files filled to bursting were lined up, tied together in pairs with ancient string and covered in dust. Obviously no one had touched them in years, and only firm regulations going back to the last century had deterred some efficient clerk from sending them away for incineration. At the end of the row there was an apparently new file, noticeably slimmer than the others. Yaniv pulled it out and proudly showed Ehud how they were keeping in touch with former operatives. Ehud glanced at reports of medical exams that the department asked Rachel to undergo every year, and at letters politely declining invitations to retirement parties.
    Someone had numbered the files and marked in black felt-tip the