Israeli intelligence were greatly exaggerated. It took several years on the job before he appreciated how he had slipped through the cracks due to the complex rules of intelligence compiling and how the three basic means of the process of information gathering were applied. The first was to direct precise interrogatives towards precise focuses for precise answers, usually because those answers were already known. In Raz’s case, no one in Shin Bet had considered if he had ever had an affair with a Palestinian woman and so there was no specific investigation of that nature.The second was the collation of data, which needed to be sorted, cross-referenced and placed in correct acquisition pools with the correct links. There were countless stories of Israeli soldiers fraternising with locals, but, again, in Raz’s case, since he had called himself David and was just a regular conscript, the spies inside Rafah had produced nothing that pointed a finger directly at him. Finally, piecing together information from the multitude of sources to form a picture relied on many things and one of those was luck, and Raz appeared to have had an adequate amount of that. His past, or that one small part of it, had been overlooked. The information was there somewhere that could link him to a Palestinian woman and her son, but it had not been pieced together.
By the time he received his first promotion and had taken up a new posting on the Lebanese border, one of the most dangerous and interesting offices of all the divisions that assured promotion if successful, he was confident enough to once more make contact with the girl and open up a bank account for her and their child. Despite his politics and, since being in Shin Bet, developing an unhealthy hatred for the Arab in general, his sense of honour and duty to the child he had seen only a handful of times was startling and ensured he watched over the young Abed as best he could. Raz did many vile things throughout his career in the name of national survival but, strangely, the hand he reached out to Abed and his mother remained a precious redemption of his soul and served in part to forgive him some of his sins.
Raz monitored Abed for over twenty years and not once was he disappointed in the boy who had managed to grow up so wise. Because of Abed’s strength of character, due to or despite his difficult existence, he had become far more fascinating to Raz than his Israeli children had ever been. Raz’s marriage was one of convenience, arranged by his and his wife’s families, which Raz went along with in his inimitable way - it was not important enough for him to go against. Raz believed he would never again have the love he shared with his Palestinian girl, and a normal family life was important for his chosen career.
He went to extraordinary lengths to keep his son safe, even placing his name on a secret intelligence list as a potential spy, which saved him on more than one occasion from being brutalised during incursions. The day Raz learned of the death sentence placed on Abed by the IDF officer he found himself fearing for the life of his Palestinian son more than he imagined possible. He went immediately into high gear as he considered various ways of getting the death sentence removed. His options included abducting Abed and his mother and placing them in a safe house much like a witness protection programme, but even in his high position within Shin Bet that would be too difficult to engineer and maintain for long without drawing suspicion. Another option was to place Abed on record as actually being an insider, a confirmed spy for Shin Bet, but that was fraught with danger too. It would expose Abed to other agent handlers and then create all kinds of complications if Raz was ever asked to ‘loan’ him out, since Abed was not really a spy. When the day came that Raz learned the officer had decided to carry out the assassination of Abed himself, he was motivated into taking action that was drastic but unavoidable if he was to save his son’s life.
Raz took full advantage of his senior position to mount a relatively small operation aimed at establishing a covert observation hide in the attic of a derelict building that just happened to be next to Abed’s new metal shop. The operation