This is how the three of us pieced the story together after Lady Chief laid bare her carefully calculated affair with Ian. Micha Harretz and Mossad between them had concluded that there had to be two GLCIS deep covers in the Zone. One spying on the Matriarchal Cabinet, the other in Sec/Spy itself.
When Henry Peterson went on the run after making Micha, Helen inadvertently said something in a face to face meeting with Micha that convinced Micha that Helen was the GLCIS spy and a Zone traitor. Maybe it was because Helen didn’t even mention her terrible cane in a meeting where Micha should have come out caned and crying. Whatever Helen said started Micha planning to kill her, as soon as it was convenient. Helen sent Ian a detailed report on the meeting, and Ian saw immediately that she was blown, which Helen didn’t.
With Helen blown and Henry blown, then killed, Ian needed to destroy Sec/Spy to keep Micha Haaretz from rolling up Helen and taking Sec/Spy over. All GLCIS assets in the Zone would be at high risk without Helen in the driver’s seat at Sec/Spy, which was now no longer possible. Micha would be good enough as director of Sec/Spy, even with the sloppy tradecraft of her subordinates, to pick off the GLCIS agents in medium and light cover, one by one, since they were all non-citizens, GPS chipped, and all their movements could be traced retroactively. She also would be able to have them killed by Mossad whenever necessary; so, sooner or later, Lady Chief, Ian’s deep cover Sec/Spy interrogator and younger bed mate, would be discovered, too.
Ian could have extracted Helen as well as Lady Chief, but he had another, final, use for her, a bold ploy that would turn espionage disaster into triumph by completely eradicating Sec/Spy. After Micha then killed Henry Peterson, Ian ordered Helen to meet secretly with a representative of the World Negotiations Agency to tell them the whole story of Sec/Spy, it’s secret court, and it’s heinous Black Widow torturing. They met in the same GLCIS safehouse of the dream and where Helen was killed. Ian knew that since the information was coming straight from the Director of Sec/Spy herself, WNA would have no hesitation about acting on it. When they revealed it to the world and threatened to annul the Compact, there was no way the Matriarchs could deny any of it.
Everyone thought that Mossad was keeping Sec/Spy impoverished in tradecraft and full of marginal and dullard administration. We were wrong. It was Ian, through Helen, that had done so. The evidence staring us in the face should have told us that Mossad really needed a useful counterintelligence service for Micha to take over. They couldn’t have started from scratch with Israeli women as we thought they would. Micha was the only known Israeli in the whole country.
After she had killed Helen, the GLCIS agent and traitor, Micha thought that she would have enough cashet, with Mossad’s sponsorship to the Matriarchal Cabinet, that she would take over Sec/Spy. But Micha had to have something better to work with than Sec/Spy as it stood, so she would have to rebuild it into effectiveness by firing the dullards and cowards and replacing them with some more intelligent women citizens from the Zone. They were all she would have available to shape it up into a real agency, which Mossad both needed, and needed to control, for their planned infiltration of the Zone to begin.
When Sec/Spy disintegrated Micha knew that even this was now impossible and that Mossad’s time table to start infiltrating the Zone had been delayed by years. Her family ties in Israel had died long ago. That’s part of why she had emigrated to the Zone. That, and despondency over losing Henry, kept her there even though she knew GLCIS would kill her and that Helen would set her up for the killing while they waited, despondently, at the Sec/Spy safehouse mansion in Rutland. She simply no longer cared enough to even kill Helen.
It was Helen, at Ian’s direction, that had kept Sec/Spy spinning it’s wheels. All her immediate subordinates were terrified of her cane and kept the lowest, least risky, working profile possible. Mossad told Helen, through the Chief Matriarch, to promote Micha to Sec/Spy senior staff but Ian told Helen to do all she could to render Micha ineffective. We should have guessed this by the way Micha was treated. Helen assigned her to the worst possible place for an up and coming subordinate, but one where Helen could foment jealousy and hatred of Micha by the rest of her staff.
After Micha was made by Henry and he went on the run, she was going to round up both he and Helen together. She would then interrogate them both. When they both talked in interrogation, as GLICIS agents did, being watertight from one another, she would make the case for Helen to be tried by the secret court of Sec/Spy, almost certainly sending Helen to the Black Widow. From the pattern her subordinates in Sec/Spy had revealed, and Mossad had confirmed, there MUST be at least two GLCIS deep cover agents, both with access to the matriarchal cabinet. Only two people fitted the description, and, at Micha’s last meeting with Helen, suspicion became certainty.
After Micha was hit by the GLCIS Truth Team, Ian ordered Helen to go to ground in the red brick safehouse. Then Ian flew to Israel and met with the head of Mossad. The Israeli agency believed that Helen and the Chief Matriarch had betrayed Micha to the then unknown killers, possibly from Poison Julep, who routinely used Dixieland convicts as killers, but used them ineptly most of the time. If Poison Julep had planned and pulled off that hit, Mossad needed to know how they got so smart so suddenly. They also needed to teach the Matriarchal Cabinet the real lesson of a dead Chief Matriarch.
Ian revealed, in order, the following facts: Helen, as Micha believed, was a Zone traitor turned by GLCIS; Ian had been using her for years to thwart Mossad’s plan to develop an effective Zone counterintelligence agency for Micha to take over; after Henry Peterson’s death at Micha’s hands, Ian had Helen reveal to the World Negotiations Agency the Compact violations the Zone was blithely having Sec/Spy commit, so Sec/Spy would disintegrate under WNA pressure; it was GLCIS who had hit Micha, set up for them by Helen on her own, and not in collusion with the Chief Matriarch; and, finally, that Helen was currently at a GLCIS safehouse still in the Zone; and Mossad could have the location in exchange for not killing the Chief Matiarch.
Ian was a brave man and a smart one. He certainly knew that what he was doing in Israel was putting his own liberty and his own life at grave risk. We will never know if the Chief of Mossad asked him straight out why he thought he would leave the country any way but in a coffin. But we think Ian took what was a great, but very calculated risk because, if the Chief Matriarch was not responsible for the death of Micha Haaretz, it was now in Israel’s interest to preserve the status quo of great naivety within the Zone about Mossad and it’s intentions. That simply couldn’t be sustained if the Israeli agency killed the Zone’s head of state.
The possibility that Mossad’s hand in the matter could be kept hidden was virtually nil. Any assassin or team of assassins would have to submit to non-citizen retina photographing and GPS chipping. Fem/Dom contingency planning could stop all traffic across the Zone borders within minutes of the killing. After that, all they would need was a registered non-citizen name on transportation out to trace retroactively the movements of any assassin or assassins. And, as in the case of Henry Peterson, there would be no infrastructure of Israeli agents in place to manage extractions of assassins, or Mossad safehouses where an assassin trapped inside the Zone could hide. Once Mossad was clearly traced to the killing, all plans for any subversion of the Zone would be impossible to pursue.
It was also not in the interests of Mossad to start a clandestine war with GLCIS. Ian, of course, had left his travel destination at GLCIS along with the general description of what he was trying to accomplish, preserving the life of the Chief Matriarch. If Ian were killed or somehow vanished in transit, the life of no Israeli abroad in North America would be safe, including Israeli diplomats posted in any other country but GLC. And the revelation of any Mossad activity in the Zone or in GLC would have a spy’s dead body at the end of it. The very fact that the GLCIS Truth Team had carried off Micha Haaretz’s killing so smoothly and without a hitch was evidence of capacity in killing that only Mossad alone was supposed to have. They were quite aware of that fact.
Ian returned home and received a thank you note from the Head of Mossad a few month’s after Helen Thoroughgood’s death. GLICIS analysts had already concluded that Mossad was sending a message to GLCIS with so blatant a display of Helen’s killer’s handwriting. But the meaning of that message may not have been quite what the lower level intelligence analysts assumed it to be. And the house? It’s management could have been traced to a real estate company in GLC collecting rent from a long gone tenant for a corporate owner who had no other activity or specific location anywhere except for a long closed bank account. And the agency had sold it to a Zone purchaser within 3 months after Helen’s death, remitting the balance to the nebulous GLC company
The Matriarchal Zone 