Tommy Carmellini 02 - The Traitor Read Free Page B

customary in first class, he let him sleep.
    A half hour later as the aircraft began its descent into Amman, the seat-belt light came on. It was then that the flight attendant tried to wake his sleeping passenger. As soon as he saw the open, unfocused, frozen eyes, he knew the man was dead.
    An old hand at the business, the attendant felt for Marton's pulse. Finding none, he covered the man with a blanket and turned his head back toward the window.
    M
    The plane made a normal landing in Amman, and after the other passengers were off the plane, a doctor and two policemen came aboard. As the senior cabin attendant watched, they loaded the corpse onto a stretcher and carried it off.
    With the airplane empty of people, the senior attendant removed Marton's attache case from the storage compartment over his head and opened it. The case was crammed full, mostly letters and spreadsheets and a few printed statements. Roughly half were in French and half in Arabic. The attendant sat down and began rapidly scanning the documents.
    Three weeks after the death of Maurice Marton, a man from the American embassy entered a nondescript building in Tel Aviv and was ushered to a basement room. The walls, floor and ceiling were poured concrete. A naked bulb on a wire hung from the ceiling over the only desk, a small, scarred steel one that at some time in the historic past had been painted a robin's egg blue. Behind the desk was a tanned man with close-cropped brown hair wearing a white short-sleeved shirt. He had a comfortable tummy, and a firm grip when he shook hands.
    "Good to see you, Harris. How was Washington?"
    "A steam bath," the American said. "With a whole continent to play with, they managed to put the capital in a place that's cold, damp and miserable in the winter, and hot, humid and miserable in the summer."
    "I've never been there. Should I make the trip someday?"
    "Only if the airfare is free."
    The men were seated now. The host said, "I have a story that I thought would interest your colleagues."
    "Anything that interests the Mossad will interest my crowd," Harris replied candidly.
    "On the twenty-seventh of last month, a French intelligence agent named Maurice Marton died on an Air France flight between Paris
    and Amman. Had a heart attack, apparently, and quietly expired. In his attache case were some interesting documents that I would like to share with you." The host picked up a small stack of paper and handed it to his guest.
    The American examined the sheets carefully. They were obviously copies. After a few minutes, he remarked, "I understand most of the French, I think—it's been a few years since college—but my Arabic is a little rusty. It appears someone named Henri Rodet is buying stock in the Bank of Palestine, two million euros' worth."
    "I think so, yes," murmured the Israeli. "Do you recognize the name ?"
    "No."
    "Henri Rodet is the head of the DGSE." The Direction Generate de la Securite Exterieure was the French intelligence agency.
    Harris lowered the sheets and stared at his host. He blinked several times. "Really!"
    "Indeed."
    Harris spent another minute scanning the documents, then raised his head and said, "They'll want to know how you got these."
    "As I said, Marton, a career clerk in DGSE headquarters, was on his way to Amman, presumably to do this deal for his boss, Rodet. He died en route. One of our men got his hands on Marton's attache case, saw that these documents were of interest, and managed to run the originals through a copier and return them to the case."
    "Luck," muttered Harris.
    "On rare occasions that sprite does indeed smile," the Israeli said casually. He said that to be polite; the only kind of luck he believed in was the kind you made for yourself. The men and women of the Mossad used every morsel of wit and guile they could muster, and every penny of their budget, to keep agents in place in key positions in Cairo, Amman, Damascus, Beirut, Riyadh and two dozen other places around