3
ASSISI, ITALY
Few Italian cities handle the crush of summer tourists more gracefully than Assisi. The packaged pilgrims arrive in mid-morning and shuffle politely through the sacred streets until dusk, when they are herded once more onto air-conditioned coaches and whisked back to their discount hotels in Rome. Propped against the western ramparts of the city, the restorer watched a group of overfed German stragglers tramp wearily through the stone archway of the Porto Nuova. Then he walked over to a newspaper kiosk and bought a day-old copy of the International Herald Tribune. The purchase, like his visit to Assisi, was professional in nature. The Herald Tribune meant his tail was clean. Had he purchased La Repubblica, or any other Italian-language paper, it would have signified that he had been followed by agents of the Italian security service, and the meeting would have been called off.
He tucked the newspaper beneath his arm, with the banner facing out, and walked along the Corso Mazzini to the Piazza del Commune. At the edge of a fountain sat a girl in faded blue jeans and a gauzy cotton top. She pushed her sunglasses onto her forehead and peered across the square toward the entrance of the Via Portica. The restorer dropped the paper into a rubbish bin and set off down the narrow street.
The restaurant where he had been instructed to come was about a hundred yards from the Basilica di San Francesco. He told the hostess he was meeting a man called Monsieur Laffont and was immediately shown onto a narrow terrace with sweeping views of the Tiber River valley. At the end of the terrace, reached by a flight of narrow stone steps, was a small patio with a single private table. Potted geraniums stood along the edge of the balustrade and overhead stretched a canopy of flowering vines. Seated before an open bottle of white wine was a man with cropped strawberry blond hair and the heavy shoulders of a wrestler. Laffont was only a work name. His real name was Uzi Navot, and he held a senior post in the secret intelligence service of the State of Israel. He was also one of the few people in the world who knew that the Italian art restorer known as Alessio Vianelli was actually an Israeli from the Valley of Jezreel named Gabriel Allon.
“Nice table,” said Gabriel as he took his seat.
“It’s one of the fringe benefits of this life. We know all the best tables in all the best restaurants in Europe.”
Gabriel poured himself a glass of wine and nodded slowly. They did know all the best restaurants, but they also knew all the dreary airport lounges, all the stinking rail platforms, and all the moth-eaten transit hotels. The supposedly glamorous life of an Israeli intelligence agent was actually one of near-constant travel and mind-numbing boredom broken by brief interludes of sheer terror. Gabriel Allon had endured more such interludes than most agents. By association, so had Uzi Navot.
“I used to bring one of my sources here,” Navot said. “A Syrian who worked for the state-run pharmaceutical company. His job was to secure supplies of chemicals and equipment from European manufacturers. That was just a cover, of course. He was really working on behalf of Syria’s chemical and biological weapons program. We met here twice. I’d give him a suitcase filled with money and three bottles of this delicious Umbrian sauvignon blanc and he’d tell me the regime’s darkest secrets. Headquarters used to complain bitterly about the size of the checks.” Navot smiled and shook his head slowly. “Those idiots in the Banking section would hand me a briefcase containing a hundred thousand dollars without a second thought, but if I exceeded my meal allowance by so much as a shekel, the heavens would open up. Such is the life of an accountant at King Saul Boulevard.”
King Saul Boulevard was the longtime address of Israel’s foreign intelligence service. The service had a long name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Men like Gabriel and Uzi Navot referred to it as “the Office” and nothing else.
“Is he still on the payroll?”
“The Syrian?” Navot, playing the role of Monsieur Laffont, pulled his lips into a Parisian frown. “I’m afraid he had something of a mishap a few years back.”
“What happened?” Gabriel asked cautiously. He knew that when individuals associated with the Office had mishaps, it was usually fatal.
“A team of Syrian counterintelligence agents photographed him entering a bank in Geneva. He was arrested at the airport in Damascus the next day and taken to the Palestine Branch.” The Palestine Branch was the name of Syria’s main interrogation center. “They tortured him viciously for a month. When they’d wrung everything out of him they could, they put a bullet in his head and threw his body in an unmarked grave.”
Gabriel looked down toward the other tables. The girl from the piazza was now seated alone near the entrance. Her menu was open but her eyes were slowly scanning the other patrons. An oversize handbag lay at her feet with the zipper open. Inside the bag, Gabriel knew, was a loaded gun.
“Who’s the bat leveyha?”
“Tamara,” said Navot. “She’s new.”
“She’s also very pretty.”
“Yes,” said Navot, as though he’d never noticed that before.
“You could have selected someone who was over thirty.”
“She was the only girl available on short notice.”
“Just make sure you behave yourself, Monsieur Laffont.”
“The days of torrid affairs with my female escort officers are officially over.” Navot removed his spectacles and laid them on the table. They were highly fashionable and far too small for his large face. “Bella has decided it’s time we finally get married.”
“So that explains the new eyeglasses. You’re the chief of Special Ops now, Uzi. You really should be able to choose your own glasses.”
Special Ops, in the words of the celebrated Israeli spymaster Ari Shamron, was “the dark side of a dark service.” They were the ones who did the jobs no one else wanted, or dared, to do. They were executioners and kidnappers, buggers and blackmailers; men of intellect and ingenuity with a criminal streak wider than the criminals themselves; multi-linguists and chameleons who were at home in the finest hotels and salons in Europe or the worst back alleys of Beirut and Baghdad.
“I thought Bella had grown weary of you,” Gabriel said. “I thought you two were in the final throes.”
“Your wedding to Chiara managed to rekindle her belief in love. At the moment, we are in tense negotiations over the time and place.” Navot frowned. “I’m confident it will be easier to reach agreement with the Palestinians over the final status of Jerusalem than it will be for Bella and me to come to terms over wedding plans.”
Gabriel raised his wineglass a few inches from the white tablecloth and murmured, “Mazel tov, Uzi.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Navot said gloomily. “You see, Gabriel, you’ve set the bar rather high for the rest of us. Imagine, a surprise wedding, perfectly planned and executed—the dress, the food, even the place settings, exactly what Chiara wanted. And now you’re spending your honeymoon at an isolated villa in Umbria restoring a painting for the pope. How’s a mere mortal like me ever supposed to live up to that?”
“I had help.” Gabriel smiled. “Special Ops really did do a lovely job with the arrangements, didn’t they?”
“If our enemies ever find out Special Ops planned a wedding, our vaunted reputation will be ruined.”
A waiter mounted the steps and started up toward the table. Navot stilled him with a small movement of his hand and added wine to Gabriel’s glass.
“The Old Man sends his love.”
“I’m sure he does,” Gabriel said absently. “How is he?”
“He’s beginning to grumble.”
“What’s bothering him now?”
“Your security arrangements at the villa. He thinks they’re less than satisfactory.”
“Precisely five people know I’m in the country: the Italian prime minister, the chiefs of his intelligence and security services, the pope, and the pope’s private secretary.”
“He still thinks the security is inadequate.” Navot
hesitated. “And I’m afraid that, given recent developments, I must concur.”
“What recent developments?”
Navot placed his big arms on the table and leaned forward a few inches. “We’re picking up some rumblings from our sources in Egypt. It seems Sheikh Tayyib is rather upset with you for foiling his well-laid plan to bring down the Mubarak government. He’s instructed all Sword of Allah operatives in Europe and the Middle East to begin looking for you at once. Last week, a Sword agent crossed into Gaza and asked Hamas to join in the search.”
“I take it our friends in Hamas agreed to help.”
“Without hesitation.” Navot’s next words were spoken not in French but in quiet Hebrew. “As you might imagine, the Old Man is hearing these reports about the gathering threats to your life, and he is fixated on one single thought: Why is Gabriel Allon, Israel’s avenging angel and most capable secret servant, sitting on a cattle ranch in the hills of Umbria restoring a painting for His Holiness Pope Paul the Seventh?”
Gabriel looked out at the view. The sun was sinking toward the distant hills in the west and the first lights were coming up on the valley floor. An image flashed in his memory: a man with a gun in his outstretched hand, firing bullets into the face of a fallen terrorist, beneath the North Tower of Westminster Abbey. It appeared to him in oil on canvas, as if painted by the hand of Caravaggio.
“The angel is on his honeymoon,” he said, his gaze still focused on the valley. “And the angel is in no condition to work again.”
“We don’t get honeymoons, Gabriel—not proper ones, in any case. As for your physical condition, God knows you went through hell at the hands of the Sword of Allah. No one would blame you if you left the Office for good this time.”
“No one but Shamron, of course.”
Navot picked at the tablecloth but made no reply. It had been nearly a decade since Ari Shamron had done his last tour as chief, yet he still meddled with the affairs of the Office as though it were his personal fiefdom. For several years, he had done so from Kaplan Street in Jerusalem, where he had served as the prime minister’s chief adviser on matters of security and counterterrorism. Now, aged and still recovering from a terrorist attack on his official car, he pulled the levers of influence from his fortresslike villa overlooking the Sea of Galilee.
“Shamron wants me locked in a cage in Jerusalem,” Gabriel said. “He thinks that if he can make my life miserable enough, I’ll have no other choice but to take over control of the Office.”
“There are worse fates in life, Gabriel. A hundred men would give their right arm to be in your position.” Navot lapsed into silence, then added, “Including me.”
“Play your cards carefully, Uzi, and someday the job will be yours.”
“That’s the way I got the job as chief of Special Ops—because you refused to take it. I’ve spent my career living in your shadow, Gabriel. It’s not easy. It makes me feel like a consolation prize.”
“They don’t promote consolation prizes, Uzi. If they didn’t think you were worthy of the job, they would have left you in the European post and found someone else.”
Navot seemed eager to change the subject. “Let’s have something to eat,” he suggested. “Otherwise, the waiter might think we’re a couple of spies, talking business.”
“That’s it, Uzi? Surely you didn’t come all the way to Umbria just to tell me that people wanted me dead.”
“Actually, we were wondering whether you might be willing to do us a favor.”
“What sort of favor?”
Navot opened his menu and frowned. “My God, look at all this pasta.”
“You don’t like pasta, Uzi?”
“I love pasta, but Bella says it makes me fat.”
He massaged the bridge of his nose and put on his new eyeglasses.
“How much weight do you have to lose before the wedding, Uzi?”
“Thirty pounds,” Navot said sullenly. “Thirty pounds.”
4
ASSISI, ITALY
They left the restaurant in darkness and joined a procession of brown-robed Capuchin friars filing slowly along the narrow street toward the Basilica di San Francesco. A cool wind was chasing about the vast forecourt. Uzi Navot lowered himself onto a stone bench and spoke of death.
“His name was Aleksandr Lubin. He worked for a magazine called Moskovsky Gazeta. He was killed in a hotel room in Courchevel a few days after Christmas. At the time, the rest of the world didn’t take much notice. As you may recall, its attention was focused on London, where the daughter of the American ambassador had just been rescued from the clutches of the Sword of Allah.”
Gabriel sat down next to Navot and watched two boys playing football near the steps of the basilica.
“The Gazeta claimed that Lubin went to Courchevel on holiday, but the French police concluded otherwise. They said he was there on an assignment. Unfortunately, there was nothing in his room to indicate exactly what that assignment might be.”
“How did he die?”
“A single stab wound to the chest.”
“That’s not easily done.”
“Better yet, the killer managed to do it in a way that no one heard a thing. It’s a small hotel with poor security. No one even remembered seeing him.”
“A professional?”
“So it would appear.”
“Russian journalists are dropping like flies these days, Uzi. What does this have to do with us?”
“Three days ago, our embassy in Rome received a phone call. It was from a man claiming to be Boris Ostrovsky, the Gazeta’s editor in chief. He said he had an important message to pass along regarding a grave threat to the security of the West and to the State of Israel. He said he wanted to meet with someone from Israeli intelligence in order to explain the nature of this threat.”
“What is it?”
“We don’t know yet. You see, Ostrovsky wants to meet with a specific agent of Israeli intelligence, a man who has made a habit of getting his picture in the paper saving the lives of important people.”
The flash of a camera illuminated the forecourt like lightning. Navot and Gabriel stood in unison and started toward the basilica. Five minutes later, after descending a long flight of steps, they were seated in the gloom of the Lower Church before the Tomb of St. Francis. Navot spoke in a whisper.
“We tried to explain to Ostrovsky that you weren’t free to take a meeting at the moment, but I’m afraid he’s not the sort to take no for an answer.” He looked at the tomb. “Are the old boy’s bones really in there?”
Gabriel shook his head. “The Church keeps the exact location of the remains a carefully guarded secret because of relic hunters.”
Navot pondered this piece of information in silence for a moment, then continued with his briefing. “King Saul Boulevard has determined that Boris Ostrovsky is a credible figure. And they’re eager to hear what he has to say.”
“And they want me to meet with him?”
Navot gave a single nod of his big head.
“Let someone else do it, Uzi. I’m on my honeymoon, remember? Besides, it goes against every convention of tradecraft. We don’t agree to the demands of walk-ins. We meet with whom we want under circumstances of our choosing.”
“The assassin is lecturing the agent-runner about matters of tradecraft? ”
A nun in full habit materialized out of the gloom and pointed toward a sign that forbade talking in the area surrounding the tomb. Gabriel apologized and led Navot into the nave, where a group of Americans were listening intently to a lecture by a cassocked priest. No one appeared to notice the two Israeli spies conversing softly before a stand of votive candles.