Gabriel Allon: Prince of Fire, the Messenger, the Secret Servant

  Martineau’s head had cleared by the time he reached the Place de la Préfecture. How different things were on this side of Marseilles, he thought. The streets were cleaner, the shops more plentiful. Martineau the archaeologist could not help but reflect on the nature of the two worlds that existed side by side in this ancient city. One was focused on devotion, the other on consumption. One had many children, the other found children to be a financial burden. The French, Martineau knew, would soon be a minority in their own country, colons in their own land. Someday soon, a century, perhaps a bit longer, France would be a Muslim country.

  He turned into the boulevard St-Rémy. Tree-lined and split by a payage parking lot in the median, the street rose at a slight pitch toward a small green park with a view of the old port. The buildings on each side were fashioned of stately gray stone and uniform in height. Iron bars covered the ground-floor windows. Many of the buildings contained professional offices—lawyers, doctors, estate agents—and farther up the street there were a couple of banks and a large interior-design store. At the base of the street, on the edge of the Place de la Préfecture, were a pair of opposing kiosks—one selling newspapers, the other sandwiches. During the day there was a small market in the street, but now that it was dusk the vendors had packed up their cheese and fresh vegetables and gone home.

  The building at Number 56 was residential only. The foyer was clean, the stairway wide with a wood banister and a new runner. The flat was empty except for a single white couch and a telephone on the floor. Martineau bent down, lifted the receiver, and dialed a number. An answering machine, just as he’d expected.

  “I’m in Marseilles. Call me when you have a chance.”

  He hung up the phone, then sat on the couch. He felt the pressure of his gun pushing into the small of his back. He leaned forward and drew it from the waist of his jeans. A Stechkin nine-millimeter—his father’s gun. For many years after his father’s death in Paris, the weapon had gathered dust in a police lockup, evidence for a trial that would never take place. An agent of French intelligence spirited the gun to Tunis in 1985 and made a gift of it to Arafat. Arafat had given it to Martineau.

  The telephone rang. Martineau answered.

  “Monsieur Véran?”

  “Mimi, my love,” Martineau said. “So good to hear the sound of your voice.”

  16

  ROME

  The telephone woke him. Like all safe flat phones, it had no ringer, only a flashing light, luminous as a channel marker, that turned his eyelids to crimson. He reached out and brought the receiver to his ear.

  “Wake up,” said Shimon Pazner.

  “What time is it?”

  “Eight-thirty.”

  Gabriel had slept twelve hours.

  “Get dressed. There’s something you should see since you’re in town.”

  “I’ve analyzed the photographs, I’ve read all the reports. I don’t need to see it.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Why?”

  “It’ll piss you off.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “Sometimes we need to be pissed off,” Pazner said. “I’ll meet you on the steps of the Galleria Borghese in an hour. Don’t leave me standing there like an idiot.”

  Pazner hung up. Gabriel climbed out of bed and stood beneath the shower for a long time, debating whether to shave his beard. In the end he decided to trim it instead. He dressed in one of Herr Klemp’s dark suits and went to the Via Veneto for coffee. One hour after hanging up with Pazner he was walking along a shaded gravel footpath toward the steps of the galleria. The Rome katsa sat on a marble bench in the forecourt, smoking a cigarette.

  “Nice beard,” said Pazner. “Christ, you look like hell.”

  “I needed an excuse to stay in my hotel room in Cairo.”

  “How’d you do it?”

  Gabriel answered: a common pharmaceutical product that, when ingested instead of used properly, had a disastrous but temporary effect on the gastrointestinal tract.

  “How many doses did you take?”

  “Three.”

  “Poor bastard.”

  They headed north through the gardens—Pazner like a man marching to a drum only he could hear, Gabriel at his side, weary from too much travel and too many worries. On the perimeter of the park, near the botanical gardens, was the entrance to the cul-de-sac. For days after the bombing the world’s media had camped out in the intersection. The ground was still littered with their cigarette ends and crushed Styrofoam coffee cups. It looked to Gabriel like a patch of farmland after the annual harvest festival.

  They entered the street and made their way down the slope of the hill, until they arrived at a temporary steel barricade, watched over by Italian police and Israeli security men. Pazner was immediately admitted, along with his bearded German acquaintance.

  Once beyond the fence they could see the first signs of damage: the scorched stone pine stripped clean of their needles; the blown-out windows in the neighboring villas; the pieces of twisted debris lying about like scraps of discarded paper. A few more paces and the bomb crater came into view, ten feet deep at least and surrounded by a halo of burnt pavement. Little remained of the buildings closest to the blast point; deeper in the compound, the structures remained standing, but the sides facing the explosion had been sheared away, so that the effect was of a child’s dollhouse. Gabriel glimpsed an intact office with framed photographs still propped on the desk and a bathroom with a towel still hanging from the rod. The air was heavy with the stench of ash and, Gabriel feared, the lingering scent of burning flesh. From deep within the compound came the scrape and grumble of backhoes and bulldozers. The crime scene, like the corpse of a murder victim, had given up its final clues. Now it was time for the burial.

  Gabriel stayed longer than he’d thought he would. No past wound, real or perceived, no grievance or political dispute justified an act of murder on this scale. Pazner was right—the very sight of it moved him to intense anger. But there was something else, something more than anger. It made him hate. He turned and started walking back up the hill. Pazner followed silently after him.

  “Who told you to bring me here?”

  “It was my idea.”

  “Who?”

  “The old man,” Pazner said quietly.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why.”

  Gabriel stopped. “Why, Shimon?”

  “Varash met last night after you checked in from Frankfurt. Go back to the safe flat. Wait there for further instructions. Someone will be in touch soon.”

  And with that‚ Pazner crossed the street and disappeared into the Villa Borghese.

  But he did not return to the safe flat. Instead, he headed in the opposite direction, into the residential districts of north Rome. He found the Via Trieste and followed it west, until he arrived, ten minutes later, in an untidy little square called the Piazza Annabaliano.

  Little about it had changed in the thirty years since Gabriel had first seen it—the same stand of melancholy trees in the center of the square, the same dreary shops catering to customers of the working classes. And at the northern edge, wedged between two streets, was the same apartment house, shaped like a slice of pie, with the point facing the square and the Bar Trieste on the ground floor. Zwaiter used to stop in the bar to use the telephone before heading upstairs to his room.

  Gabriel crossed the square, picking his way through the cars and motorbikes parked haphazardly in the center, and entered the apartment house through a doorway marked ENTRANCE C. The foyer was cold and in darkness. The lights, Gabriel remembered, operated on a timer to save electricity. Surveillance of the building had noted that residents, including Zwaiter, rarely bothered to switch them on—a fact that would prove to be an operational asset for Gabriel, because it had virtually assured him the advantage of working in the dark.

  Now he paused in front of the elevator. Next to the elevator was a mirror. Surveillance had neglected to mention it.
Gabriel, seeing his own reflection in the glass that night, had nearly drawn his Beretta and fired. Instead he had calmly reached into his jacket pocket for a coin and was holding it out toward the payment slot on the elevator when Zwaiter, dressed in a plaid jacket and clutching a paper sack containing a bottle of fig wine, walked through Entrance C for the last time.

  “Excuse me, but are you Wadal Zwaiter?”

  “No! Please, no!”

  Gabriel had allowed the coin to fall from his fingertips. Before it had struck the floor he had drawn his Beretta and fired the first two shots. One of the rounds pierced the paper sack before striking Zwaiter in the chest. Blood and wine had mingled at Gabriel’s feet as he poured fire into the Palestinian’s collapsing body.

  Now he looked into the mirror and saw himself as he had been that night, a boy angel in a leather jacket, an artist who had no comprehension of how the act he was about to commit would forever alter the course of his life. He had become someone else. He had remained someone else ever since. Shamron had neglected to tell him that would happen. He had taught him how to draw a gun and fire in one second, but he had done nothing to prepare him for what would happen afterward. Engaging the terrorist on his terms, on his battlefield, comes at a terrible price. It changes the men who do it, along with the society that dispatches them. It is the terrorist’s ultimate weapon. For Gabriel, the changes were visible as well. By the time he’d staggered into Paris for his next assignment, his temples were gray.

  He looked into the mirror again and saw the bearded figure of Herr Klemp looking back at him. Images of the case flashed through his mind: a flattened embassy, his own dossier, Khaled . . . Was Shamron right? Was Khaled sending him a message? Had Khaled chosen Rome because of what Gabriel had done thirty years ago, on this very spot?

  He heard the soft shuffle of footfalls behind him—an old woman, dressed in the black of widowhood, clutching a plastic sack of groceries. She stared directly at him. Gabriel, for an instant, feared she somehow remembered him. He bid her a pleasant morning and went back out into the sunlit piazza.

  He felt suddenly feverish. He walked for a time on the Via Trieste, then flagged down a taxi and asked the driver to take him to the Piazza di Spagna. Entering the safe flat he saw a copy of that morning’s La Repubblica newspaper lying on the floor of the entrance hall. On page six was a large advertisement for an Italian sports car. Gabriel looked at the ad carefully and saw that it had been cut from another edition of the newspaper and glued over the corresponding page. He trimmed away the edges of the page and discovered, hidden between the two pages, a sheet of paper containing the coded text of the message. After reading it he burned it in the kitchen sink and went out again.

  On the Via Condotti he bought a new suitcase and spent the next hour purchasing clothing appropriate to his next destination. He returned to the safe flat long enough to pack his new bag, then went to lunch at Nino on the Via Borgognona. At two o’clock he took a taxi to Fiumicino airport, and at five-thirty he boarded a flight to Sardinia.

  As Gabriel’s plane was taxiing toward the runway, Amira Assaf rolled up to the front gate of the Stratford Clinic and showed her ID badge to the security guard. He inspected it carefully, then waved her onto the grounds. She twisted the throttle of her motorbike and sped down the quarter-mile gravel drive toward the mansion. Dr. Avery was just leaving for the night, racing toward the gate in his big silver Jaguar. Amira tapped her horn and waved, but he ignored her and swept past in a shower of dust and gravel.

  Staff parking was in the rear courtyard. She propped the bike on its kickstand, then removed her backpack from the seat storage compartment and left her helmet in its place. Two girls were just coming off duty. Amira bid them good night, then used her badge to unlock the secure staff entrance. The time clock was mounted to the wall of the foyer. She found her card, third slot from the bottom, and punched in: five-fifty-six a.m.

  The locker room was a few paces down the hall. Amira went inside and changed into her uniform: white trousers, white shoes, and a peach-colored tunic that Dr. Avery believed was soothing to the patients. Five minutes later she reported for duty at the window of the head nurse’s station. Ginger Hall, peroxide blond and crimson-lipped, looked up and smiled.

  “New haircut, Amira? Very fetching. My goodness, what I wouldn’t do for that thick raven hair of yours.”

  “You can have it, along with the brown skin, the black eyes, and all the other shit that comes with it.”

  “Ah, rubbish, petal. We’re all nurses here. Just doing our job and trying to make a decent living.”

  “Maybe, but out there it’s different. What have you got for me?”

  “Lee Martinson. She’s in the solarium. Get her back up to her room. Settle her in for the night.”

  “That big bloke still hanging round her?”

  “The bodyguard? Still here. Dr. Avery reckons he’ll be here awhile.”

  “Why would a woman like Miss Martinson need a bodyguard?”

  “Confidential, my sweet. Highly confidential.”

  Amira set off down the corridor. A moment later she came to the entrance of the solarium. As she went inside the humidity greeted her like a wet blanket. Miss Martinson was in her wheelchair, staring at the blackened windows. The bodyguard, hearing Amira’s approach, got to his feet. He was a large, heavily built man in his twenties, with short hair and blue eyes. He spoke with a British accent, but Amira doubted he was truly British. She looked down at Miss Martinson.

  “It’s getting late, sweetheart. Time to go upstairs and get ready for bed.”

  She pushed the wheelchair out of the solarium, then along the corridor to the elevators. The bodyguard pressed the call button. A moment later they boarded a lift and rode silently upward to her room on the fourth floor. Before entering, Amira paused and looked at the guard.

  “I’m going to bathe her. Why don’t you wait out here until I’m finished?”

  “Wherever she goes, I go.”

  “We do this every night. The poor woman deserves a bit of privacy.”

  “Wherever she goes, I go,” he repeated.

  Amira shook her head and wheeled Miss Martinson into her room, the bodyguard trailing silently after her.

  17

  BOSA, SARDINIA

  For two days Gabriel waited for them to make contact. The hotel, small and ochre-colored, stood in the ancient port near the spot where the river Temo flowed into the sea. His room was on the top floor and had a small balcony with an iron rail. He slept late, took breakfast in the dining room, and spent mornings reading. For lunch he would eat pasta and fish in one of the restaurants in the port; then he would hike up the road to the beach north of town and spread his towel on the sand and sleep some more. After two days, his appearance had improved dramatically. He’d gained weight and strength, and the skin beneath his eyes no longer looked yellow-brown and jaundiced. He was even beginning to like the way he looked with the beard.

  On the third morning the telephone rang. He listened to the instructions without speaking, then hung up. He showered and dressed and packed his bag, then went downstairs to breakfast. After breakfast he paid his bill and placed his bag in the trunk of the car he’d rented in Cagliari and drove north, about thirty miles, to the port town of Alghero. He left the car on the street where he’d been told to, then walked along a shadowed alleyway that emptied into the waterfront.

  Dina was seated in a café on the quay, drinking coffee. She wore sunglasses, sandals, and a sleeveless dress; her shoulder-length dark hair shone in the dazzling light reflected by the sea. Gabriel descended a flight of stone steps on the quay and boarded a fifteen-foot dinghy with the word Fidelity written on the hull. He started the engine, a ninety-horsepower Yamaha, and untied the lines. Dina joined him a moment later and, in passable French, told him to make for the large white motor yacht anchored about a half-mile from the shoreline on the turquoise sea.

  Gabriel guided the dinghy slowly out of the port, then, reaching the open
water, he increased his speed and bounced toward the yacht over the gentle swells. As he drew near, Rami stepped onto the aft deck, dressed in khaki shorts and a white shirt. He climbed down to the swim step and was waiting there, hand outstretched, as Gabriel arrived.

  The main salon, when they entered, looked like a substation of the team’s headquarters in the basement of King Saul Boulevard. The walls were hung with large-scale maps and aerial photographs, and the onboard electronics had been augmented with the sort of technical communications equipment Gabriel had not seen since the Abu Jihad assassination. Yaakov looked up from a computer terminal and extended his hand. Shamron, dressed in khaki trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt, was seated at the galley table. He pushed his reading glasses onto his forehead and appraised Gabriel as though he were a document or another map. “Welcome to Fidelity ,” he said, “combination command post and safe flat.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “From a friend of the Office. It happened to be in Cannes. We took it out to sea and added the additional equipment we needed for our journey. We also changed the name.”

  “Who chose it?”

  “I did,” said Shamron. “It means loyalty and faithfulness —”

  “And a devotion to duty or to one’s obligations or vows,” Gabriel said. “I know what it means. I also know why you chose it—the same reason why you told Shimon Pazner to take me to the ruins of the embassy.”

  “I thought it was important that you see it. Sometimes, when one is in the middle of an operation like this, the enemy can become something of an abstraction. It’s easy to forget his true nature. I thought you might need a bit of a reminder.”

  “I’ve been doing this for a long time, Ari. I know the nature of my enemy, and I know what it means to be loyal.” Gabriel sat down at the table across from Shamron. “I hear Varash met after I came out of Cairo. I suppose their decision is fairly obvious.”

  “Khaled was given his trial,” Shamron said, “and Varash delivered its verdict.”