The Pure

again when you have already passed all the tests. But you know how it is.’ He shrugged. ‘The bosses are paranoid.’ He opened a laptop on the table and began to boot it up.
    ‘First a lie, as before, please,’ said the man in the white coat. ‘Are you now in Syria?’
    ‘No,’ said Uzi, watching Leila make the tea, inwardly begging her to look up at him. The machine beeped.
    ‘Very good. And now please tell the truth. Are you an Israeli national?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Uzi, aware of the brief expression of triumph that flitted across the face of everyone in the room – even, he thought, Leila.
    ‘Very good,’ said the man again. Then he nodded to Ghasem, who turned the laptop slowly around to face Uzi. On the screen was a cable – an intercepted Mossad cable. Uzi could tell it was written in top-level code. Alongside it was the translation that the MOIS code breakers had produced. Uzi had to admit: they had done a very good job.
    ‘Look through the translation, please,’ said Ghasem quietly. ‘Take your time. You will see a recurring code word, each time in capitals, which we have been unable to break. This is the target of Operation Desert Rain. When you are ready, please tell us the real name of this target.’
    ‘A computer would usually do this,’ said Uzi. ‘Luckily I’ve been trained to do it manually as well.’
    He pored over the document, drawing it close to his face, his movements made awkward by the wires connecting his hand to the PCASS device. Meditatively he lit a cigarette. The smoke rose in a lazy double helix towards the ceiling. An almost religious silence fell in the room as he concentrated. Even the Kol fell silent. Uzi noticed that a silver-lipped glass of tea had appeared by his elbow, together with two pieces of sugar. He glanced up at Leila and saw that she was gazing at him now, her eyes aflame.
    ‘Take your time, please,’ said Ghasem again.
    The PCASS device was humming almost imperceptibly. A tiny fruit fly that nobody had noticed before crawled at a diagonal across the screen of the laptop, then spiralled up into the air. The man with the beard swatted his palm at it automatically. The soft scent of orange still hung gently in the air. Uzi took a long drag on his cigarette and concentrated.
    ‘Can I have a pencil and paper?’ he said. In an instant, one appeared beside him. He began to sketch out some tables, filling each cell with a syllable – scores of them – from memory. ‘The Mossad uses a phonetic, syllable-by-syllable code,’ he said, almost to himself, ‘and they wrap that within a sleeve code which is numeric.’ He didn’t look up from his work but was aware of his companions exchanging glances. ‘In the special case of target names, the sleeve code is encased once again within a phonetic code, and this is once again rendered into figures.’ He jotted down a column of numbers. ‘Has anybody got a calculator?’ Again, one appeared instantly. He noticed Ghasem sneaking a look at his watch. The air strikes were hours away; but if the yellowcake needed to be moved, there wouldn’t be very much time.
    Uzi punched numbers into the calculator, his cigarette clamped between his teeth, eyes slitted against the stinging smoke. Then, slowly, he copied down the digits that were glowing on the screen and ran his finger down the table of syllables. A puzzled expression came over his face and he went through the calculations again, and again. Then he sat back, frowning. The atmosphere tightened. He stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette, placed a piece of sugar on his tongue, and sipped from the small glass of tea, not removing his eyes from the piece of paper in front of him.
    ‘No,’ he said softly, ‘this isn’t working. This isn’t right. I’ve made a mistake somewhere.’ For what seemed like an age he sat there without moving, like a chess player examining a complicated board. He hunched over, crossed out a few figures, scribbled some more, shook his head.
    Following a sip of tea, he pressed his palm to his forehead and exclaimed, ‘Of course, of course. They’ve put it in three sleeves. Three sleeves.’ Feverishly he hunched over the pad of paper, making notes and punching digits into the calculator with a single hooked finger. Around the room, people shifted in their chairs. Uzi continued to write, continued to scrawl, relating his figures repeatedly to the table of syllables like a mad scientist. Finally – finally – he breathed a profound