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didn’tneed them there, and it wasn’t for this that they had recalled Ehud to the service. “Tell me about her,” he suggested, explaining that they needed to look for her in another way.
    â€œIt’s been a long time since I saw her, and in spite of the picture I showed you, she’s the same Rachel as she was then. A young woman with green eyes, round mouth, hair with a part, and an innocent cast of features that made you want to help her. I think her phone call to me was a cry for help. In a certain sense, she wants me to look after her as I once did, so she’ll again be the little girl who came to work for us.
    â€œAfter I was appointed her case officer, I sat and read everything that was written in her personal file. I searched for her motivation in wanting to join us. I knew it wasn’t some epiphany she had. Such things only happen rarely and usually in movies, although in recruitment interviews some of the candidates talk about the juncture at which they chose this path. I’m a skeptic about those stories, and when I was on the interviewing panel I would ask a candidate who tried to sell me this line what it would take to make him or her change his mind again and leave us. There was nothing exceptional with Rachel, and I was satisfied. A reasonable student. A mother who died young and a stern father who it was difficult to love up close.
    â€œThe relationship with the father was never smooth. When she was already an operative I asked her to contact him every time she came off an assignment, to reassure him that all was well and promise to visit him. I pleaded with her to write to him and she refused that as well, said he wasn’t interested and he didn’t care. I reminded her of the checks that he was sending her, and she said the little notes he enclosed with the checks were prepared a year in advance. I had no option but to write to him myself after he went to the embassy to report that she’d disappeared. I wrote the first letter so he’d stop interfering.I stressed how important she was to the security of the nation of Israel and insisted he not talk to anyone about this. I had to write him the second letter after she left the Unit because he asked about her as if she were still working for us. As if we needed to explain to him why she was reluctant to write letters and never got in touch. Then I wrote to him exactly what I was told to write, the truth, that she was no longer a part of our organization.
    â€œBut all of this came later. What drew my attention was her ability to get up and go to another place. She certainly studied exactly as her father wanted, but at the age of seventeen she left and came here as a volunteer for a few months. Then she went away to a university in the north of England, and after her mother died it was as if she divorced him and came to this country as an immigrant. A girl alone, nineteen years old. I saw energy in this, I saw in this a quest for something more than a profession. I also read the other reports about her, though I didn’t attach much importance to them, unless I knew the assessor. What was conspicuous was her ability to adapt, to be one of the group, and also to get what she wanted. The only thing that disturbed me was the fact that she spent only about a year in each place, and I wondered how she would cope with a long stay in an Arab city, living undercover.
    â€œI asked her why she joined. Why after finishing university and already having a job she preferred to leave everything behind, including the boyfriend, and put her life on hold with a kind of extended intermission that would put her back, years later, at square one. She said we approached her and she was curious, and she always wanted to do more to further the Zionist project, and one thing led to another. I didn’t believe a word of it. I knew she only wanted to put my mind at rest and give me a standard and predictable response, the kind they