Defection Games (Dan Gordon Intelligence Thriller) by Haggai Carmon Read Free Book Online Page B

recruiting techniques.  The rest were told that budgetary constraints prevented their going. Luckily, I was chosen to go -- not as a scientist, since I was too young to pass as one, but as the son of a 56 year old microbiology professor who attended a convention called “An Annual Update in Allergy and Autoimmune Diseases," that was held in Joao, Paraiba, one of the oldest cities in Brazil. The hotel was constructed as a circle; each room had either a view of the internal gardens, or of the beach—the sand was bone-white and stretched as far as the eye could see. My window faced the beach. During my entire time there, I saw absolutely no one on it. This was a convention of serious scientists who, it seemed, preferred the semi-dark interior of the hotel’s lecture halls.
    My legend for this convention described me as sociology major at UCLA, joining my Canadian mother who was attending the convention. Professor Janice Webber, my “mother,” was a tall, willowy woman, who kept her hair back in a bun. She could have been an aging model, but she wasn’t. She was the real thing, a genuine scientist who didn’t ask too many questions when her close friend, a Mossad confidant, asked her to allow me to pose as her son. “He’s doing research on interactions among strangers during short term multinational conventions, and how social barriers are removed. He couldn’t ask the organizers to enroll because he doesn’t qualify as a natural sciences researcher, and couldn’t reveal he was doing research, fearing that any disclosure could tilt the results.” To this day, I don’t know if she bought the story, although she had no reason to suspect any ulterior motive. Once, she looked at me with probing eyes and asked me about my research methods. Luckily, I was fresh out of the Tel Aviv University Political Science faculty. One of the most hated classes there was Research Methods. But now it came to my aid.              
    Now: whom do you recruit in a scientific convention when you are not a scientist, but a man in his late 20s posing as a student who came to meet his mother? The answer is, recruit a young man or a woman in a similar situation.
    During breakfast, I carefully viewed the tables to see if there were any young men or women who were too young to be university professors. There were three tables with such individuals. I passed by their tables and identified the nametag of a young woman sitting next to an elderly man. Their last names were identical. She must be his daughter, I assumed. She was rather plain, blonde with a Russian name, and stout in that way some Russian women seem to get, though it seemed the process has started early with her: she couldn’t have been more than 25. I later examined the list of the convention participants and saw the man’s name, Professor Igor Malshenkov from Ukraine. The woman, Anya Malshenkova, was not on the list. OK, I said to myself, Russia and Ukraine share a border, so maybe she was Russian after all, as if it mattered. During lunch, I found an excuse to approach and befriend her. She was happy to talk to me, and soon we were walking in the hotel’s gardens, walking and talking. I told her what I knew about “my mother’s” research and then asked her about the area of expertise of her father.
    “Father?” she giggled, “Igor is my husband.”
    When she saw me embarrassed, she smiled and said, “Never mind, many people make that mistake. I was his student and we got married.” We stopped at the pool bar; she ordered a drink I didn’t catch the name of, but it was blue and came with a shish-ka-bob of tropical fruits. I ordered soda water – I never drink alcohol while on assignment unless it is part of the role I’m playing.
    It became clear why she was happy to talk to me; she was deeply bored. She made vague allusions to the “difficulties” that come with having a much older husband, she’d relinquished her studies to keep house, and was trying