Three Days to Never Read Online Free PDF Page A

lights flickered.
    Lepidopt sipped his coffee and looked nervously toward the front window while Bozzaris clicked his way through now familiar passwords and directories. This telephone line was routed through a number of locations, and if Bozzaris’s intrusions were fingered by the National Security Agency, there would probably be a warning soon enough for them to abandon this safe house.
    And Bozzaris, for all his youth, was meticulous about security, always checking his computers for unsuspected “back doors” and intrusions. Only Bozzaris touched the machine, but he had told Lepidopt about all sorts of computer perils, such as programs that would mimic the IBM opening screen and ask for the user’s password, and when the password had been entered would store it, and then flash “INVALID PASSWORD. TRY AGAIN,” so that the user would assume he had typed the password wrong, and enter it again, at which point the real log-in sequence would start, and the user would never know that the intruder had copied his password. Bozzaris watched for intrusive programs and changed his passwords all the time. He even made allowances for the possibility of microphones in the room, and made sure to hit each key of his passwords in a measured pace, not hitting a double letter with two fast clicks; and, just to make any inquisitive listeners think his passwords included more characters than they actually did, he always hit a couple of random keys after pressing carriage-return.
    Now Bozzaris sat back. “I see no unusual activity among the ‘special Arabic’ crowd at the NSA.” This was the NSA euphemism for their Hebrew linguists monitoring Israel. Lepidopt was relieved to see him hit H-> again, terminating the phone connection.
    A moment later Bozzaris began typing again, and Lepidopt sat down on the pebbled gray-steel safe that sat against the wall next to the stove.
    He got up when the daisy-wheel printer on the counter beside him started chattering.
    Bozzaris pushed his chair back and stood up, yawning cavernously. He waved at the printer. “The billing addresses the New Jersey guys have booked to or from LAX so far today. Not likely to be anything, and probably not worth checking out now—but we can keep them in the safe and see if they show up in anything that develops.”
    â€œCompare them against all Los Angeles lists we’ve got, of anything. And send a copy to Tel Aviv.”
    â€œTo who, in Tel Aviv? Who are we working for? Who are we, anymore?”
    â€œTo Admoni, as usual.”
    Lepidopt wished it were still Isser Harel instead of Nahum Admoni, though Harel had resigned as director general of the Mossad in 1963, four years before Lepidopt had been recruited into the Israeli secret service. It had been Harel who had instituted this off-paper “Halomot” division, the agents of which used target-country passports—American, in this case—and didn’t work through the Israeli embassies. The Halomot was even more insulated from the rest of the Mossad than the Kidon, the assassin division.
    Young Bozzaris had a point, though, when he had asked, Who are we, anymore? Since 1960 the Halomot had been concealed as a succession of anonymous committees in the LAKAM, the Israeli Bureau of Scientific Liaison; but the LAKAM had been shut down amid international scandal a year and a half ago after the FBI arrested Jonathan Pollard, the LAKAM’s paid spy in the U. S. Naval Investigations Service. The LAKAM had not been part of the Mossad, but its chief had once been a Mossad agent, and any Mossad activity in the United States was now potential diplomatic catastrophe.
    The Halomot was left with no cover identity at all, and Lepidopt was afraid that Nahum Admoni didn’t share Isser Harel’s conviction that the Halomot function was necessary, or even real.
    Lepidopt held up a loop of the continuous sheet that was ratcheting out of the printer, another inch