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

  In the days that followed, the Surrey safe house was visited by what were known in the Office as “experts with handles.” The first was a woman from Hebrew University who spent two nights lecturing Sarah on Saudi social customs. Next came a psychiatrist who spent two more nights counseling her on ways to combat fear and anxiety while working undercover. A specialist in communications gave her a primer on elementary forms of secret writing. A martial arts trainer taught her the basics of Israeli-style hand-to-hand combat. Gabriel chose Lavon, the greatest watcher in the history of the Office, to give her a crash course in the art of human and electronic surveillance. “You will be entering a hostile camp,” he told her in summation. “Assume they’re watching your every move and listening to your every word. If you do that, nothing can go wrong.”

  Gabriel, for the most part, remained a spectator to her training. He greeted her when she arrived at the house each evening, joined the team for dinner, then saw her off again at midnight when she set out for London with Yossi. As the days wore on, they began to detect a restlessness in him. Lavon, who had worked with him more than the others, diagnosed Gabriel’s mood as impatience. “He wants to put her into play,” Lavon said, “but he knows she’s not ready.” He began spending extended periods before the canvas, painstakingly repairing the damage done to Marguerite. The intensity of the work only increased his restiveness. Lavon advised him to take breaks now and again, and Gabriel reluctantly agreed. He found a pair of Wellington boots in the mudroom and ventured out on solitary marches over the footpaths surrounding the village. He dug a rod and reel from a storage room in the cellar and used it to haul an enormous brown trout from the stock pond. In the barn, concealed beneath a tarpaulin, he found an ancient MG motorcar that looked as though it hadn’t been driven in twenty years. Three days later the others heard a sputtering sound emanating from the barn, followed by an explosion that reverberated over the countryside. Yaakov came running down from the house, fearful Gabriel had blown himself to bits, but instead found him standing over the open hood of the MG, covered in engine grease up to his elbows and smiling for the first time since they’d come to Surrey. “It works,” he shouted over the thunderous rattle of the motor. “The damned thing still runs.”

  That evening he joined in Sarah’s training session for the first time. Lavon and Yaakov were not surprised, for the topic of discussion was none other that Ahmed bin Shafiq, the man who had become Gabriel’s personal bête noire. He chose Dina, with her pleasant voice and patina of early widowhood, to deliver the briefings. On the first night she lectured on Group 205, bin Shafiq’s secret unit within the GID, and showed how the combination of Wahhabi ideology and Saudi money had wreaked havoc across the Middle East and South Asia. On the second night she recounted bin Shafiq’s journey from loyal servant of the Saudi state to mastermind of the Brotherhood of Allah. Then she described in detail the operation against the Vatican, though she made no mention of the fact that Gabriel had been present at the scene of the crime. Gabriel realized that much of the information was superfluous, but he wanted Sarah to have no doubt in her mind that Ahmed bin Shafiq had earned the fate that awaited him.

  On the final night they showed her a series of computer-generated photo illustrations of how bin Shafiq might look now. Bin Shafiq with a beard. Bin Shafiq with a balding pate. Bin Shafiq with a gray wig. With a black wig. With curly hair. With no hair at all. With his sharp Bedouin features softened by a plastic surgeon. But it was the wounded arm that would be her most valuable clue to his identity, Gabriel told her. The scar on the inside of his forearm he would never show. The slightly withered hand that he would never offer and keep safely tucked away, hidden from infidel eyes.

  “We know he’s concealed somewhere within Zizi’s empire,” Gabriel said. “He might come as an investment banker or a portfolio manager. He might come as a real estate developer or a pharmaceutical executive. He might come in a month. He might come in a year. He might never come. But if he does come, you can be certain he’ll be well mannered and worldly and seem like anything but a professional terrorist. Don’t look for a terrorist or someone who acts like a terrorist. Just look for a man.”

  He gathered up the photo illustrations. “We want to know about everyone who moves in and out of Zizi’s orbit. We want you to gather as many names as you can. But this is the man we’re looking for.” Gabriel placed a photograph on the table in front of her. “This is the man we want.” Another photograph. “This is the man we’re after.” Another. “He’s the reason we’re all here instead of being home with our families and our children.” Another. “He’s the reason we asked you to give up your life and join us.” Another. “If you see him, you’re to get us the name he’s using and the company he’s working for. Get the country of his passport if you can.” Another photograph. “If you’re not sure it’s him, it doesn’t matter. Tell us. If it doesn’t turn out to be him, it doesn’t matter. Tell us. Nothing happens based on your word alone. No one gets hurt because of you, Sarah. You’re only the messenger.”

  “And if I give you a name?” she asked. “What happens then?”

  Gabriel looked at his watch. “I think it’s time Sarah and I had a word in private. Would you all excuse us?”

  HE LED HER upstairs to his studio and switched on the halogen lamps. Marguerite Gachet glowed seductively under the intense white light. Sarah sat down in an ancient wingchair; Gabriel slipped on his magnifying visor and prepared his palette.

  “How much longer?” she asked.

  It was the same question Shamron had posed to him that windswept afternoon in October, when he had come to Narkiss Street to haul Gabriel out of exile. A year, he should have said to Shamron that day. And then he wouldn’t be here, in a safe house in Surrey, about to send a beautiful American girl into the heart of Jihad Incorporated.

  “I’ve removed the surface dirt and pressed the creases back into place with a warm, damp spatula,” Gabriel said. “Now I have to finish the inpainting and apply a light coat of varnish—just enough to bring out the warmth of Vincent’s original colors.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the painting.”

  He looked up from his palette. “I suppose that depends entirely on you.”

  “I’m ready when you are,” she said.

  “Not quite.”

  “What happens if Zizi doesn’t bite? What happens if he doesn’t like the painting—or me?”

  “No serious collector with money like Zizi is going to turn down a newly discovered van Gogh. And as for you, he won’t have much choice in the matter. We’re going to make you irresistible.”

  “How?”

  “There are some things it’s better you not know.”

  “Like what happens to Ahmed bin Shafiq if I see him?”

  He added pigment to a puddle of medium and mixed it with a brush. “You know what happens to Ahmed bin Shafiq. I made that very clear to you in Washington the night we met.”

  “Tell me everything,” she said. “I need to know.”

  Gabriel lowered his visor and lifted his brush to the canvas. When he spoke again, he spoke not to Sarah but to Marguerite. “We’ll watch him. We’ll listen to him if we can. We’ll take his photograph and get his voice on tape and send it to our experts for analysis.”

  “And if your experts determine it’s him?”

  “At a time and place of our choosing, we’ll put him down.”

  “Put him down?”

  “Assassinate him. Kill him. Liquidate him. You choose the word that makes you most comfortable, Sarah. I’ve never found one.”

  “How many times have you done this?”

  He put his face close to the painting and murmured, “Many times, Sarah.”

  “How many have you killed? Ten? Twenty? Has it solved the problem of terrorism? Or has it just made things worse? If you find Ahmed bin Shafiq and kill him, what will it accomplish? Will it end, or will another man step forward and take his place?”

  “Eventually another murderer w
ill take his place. In the meantime, lives will be saved. And justice will be done.”

  “Is it really justice? Can justice really be done with a silenced pistol or a booby-trapped car?”

  He lifted the visor and turned around, his green eyes flashing in the glare of the lamps. “Are you enjoying this little debate about the moral relevancy of counterterrorism? Is it making you feel better? You can rest assured Ahmed bin Shafiq never wastes time wrestling with these questions of morality. You can be certain that if he ever manages to acquire a nuclear device, the only debate he’ll have is whether to use it against New York or Tel Aviv.”

  “Is it justice, Gabriel? Or only vengeance?”

  Again he saw himself and Shamron. This time the setting was not Gabriel’s flat in Narkiss Street but a warm afternoon in September 1972—the day Shamron first came for him. Gabriel had posed the same question.

  “It’s not too late, Sarah. You can get out if you want. We can find someone else to take your place.”

  “There is no one else like me. Besides, I don’t want out.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “Permission to sleep at night.”

  “Sleep, Sarah. Sleep very well.”

  “And you?”

  “I have a painting to finish.”

  He turned around and lowered his visor again. Sarah was not done with him.

  “Was it true?” she asked. “All the things written about you in the newspapers after the Gare de Lyon attack?”

  “Most of it.”

  “You killed the Palestinians from Black September who carried out the Munich Massacre?”

  “Some of them.”

  “Would you do it again, knowing everything you know now?”

  He hesitated a moment. “Yes, Sarah, I would do it again. And I’ll tell you why. It wasn’t about vengeance. Black September was the most lethal terror group the world had ever seen, and it needed to be put out of business.”

  “But look at what it cost you. You lost your family.”

  “Everyone who engages in this fight loses something. Take your country, for example. You were innocent, a shining beacon of freedom and decency. Now you have blood on your hands and men in secret prisons. We don’t do this sort of work because we enjoy it. We do it because we have to. We do it because we have no choice. You think I have a choice? You think Dina Sarid has a choice? We don’t. And neither do you.” He looked at her for a moment. “Unless you’d like me to find someone else to go in your place.”

  “There is no one else like me,” she repeated. “When will I be ready?”

  Gabriel turned and lifted his brush to the painting. Soon, he thought. One or two days more of inpainting. Then a coat of varnish. Then she would be ready.

  ALL THAT REMAINED was her field training. Lavon and Uzi Navot put her through her paces. For three days and nights they took her into the streets of London and drilled her on the basic tenets of tradecraft. They taught her how to make a clandestine meeting and how to determine if a site was compromised. They taught her how to spot physical surveillance and simple techniques for shaking it. They taught her how to make a dead drop and how to hand material to a live courier. They taught her how to dial the Office emergency lines on ordinary pay telephones and how to signal them with her body if she were blown and required extraction. Lavon would later describe her as the finest natural amateur field agent he had ever trained. He could have completed the course in two days, but Gabriel, if only for his own peace of mind, insisted on a third. When Lavon finally returned to Surrey that afternoon he found Gabriel standing morosely at the edge of the stock pond, with a rod in one hand and his eyes trained on the surface of the water as though willing a fish to rise. “She’s ready,” Lavon said. “The question is, are you?” Gabriel slowly reeled in his line and followed Lavon back to the house.

  LATER THAT SAME evening the lights went dark in the melancholy little travel agency in Mason’s Yard. Miss Archer, clutching a batch of old files, paused for a moment on the landing and peered through the sparkling glass entrance of Isherwood Fine Arts. Seated behind the receptionist desk was Elena, Mr. Isherwood’s scandalously pretty Italian secretary. She glanced up from her computer screen and blew Miss Archer an elaborate farewell kiss, then looked down again and resumed her work.

  Miss Archer smiled sadly and headed down the stairway. There were no tears in her eyes. She’d done her crying in private, the way she did most things. Nor was there hesitation in her step. For twenty-seven years she’d been coming to this office five mornings a week. Saturdays, too, if there was housekeeping to be done. She was looking forward to retirement, even if it had come a bit earlier than expected. Maybe she’d take a long holiday. Or maybe she’d take a cottage in the countryside. She’d had her eye on a little place in the Chilterns for some time. She was certain of only one thing: She wasn’t sorry to be leaving. Mason’s Yard would never be the same again, not with the flashy Miss Bancroft in residence. It wasn’t that Miss Archer had anything against Americans personally. She just wasn’t terribly interested in living next door to one.

  As she neared the bottom of the stairs a buzzer groaned, and the automatic locks on the outer door snapped open. Thank you, Elena, she thought as she stepped outside into the chill evening air. Can’t get off your shapely little backside to give a proper good-bye, and now you’re practically shoving me out the door. She was tempted to violate Mr. Isherwood’s long-standing edict about waiting for the door to lock again, but, professional to the end, she stayed ten more seconds, until the dull thump of the deadbolts sent her shuffling slowly toward the passageway.

  She did not know that her departure was being monitored by a three-man neviot team waiting in a van parked on the opposite side of Duke Street. The team remained in their van for another hour, just to make certain she hadn’t forgotten anything. Then, shortly before eight, they slipped through the passageway and made their way slowly across the bricks of the old yard toward the gallery. To Julian Isherwood, who watched their unhurried approach from the window of his office, they seemed like gravediggers with a long night ahead.

  19.

  London

  THE OPERATION BEGAN IN earnest late the following morning, when Julian Isherwood, London art dealer of some repute, placed a discreet telephone call to the Knightsbridge residence of Andrew Malone, exclusive art adviser to Zizi al-Bakari. It was answered by a drowsy woman who informed Isherwood that Malone was out of the country.

  “A fugitive from justice?” he asked, trying to make light of an awkward situation.

  “Try his mobile,” the woman said before slamming down the phone.

  Fortunately, Isherwood had the number. He immediately dialed it and, as instructed, left a brief message. The better part of the day elapsed before Malone bothered to call him back.

  “I’m in Rome,” he said sotto voce. “Something big. Very big.”

  “Hardly surprising, Andrew. You only do big.”

  Malone batted away Isherwood’s attempt at flattery. “I’m afraid I only have a moment,” he said. “What can I do for you, Julie?”

  “I think I might have something for you. Something for your client, actually.”

  “My client doesn’t do the Old Masters.”

  “The something I have for your client isn’t Old Master. It’s Impressionist. And not just any Impressionist, if you’re getting my drift. It’s special, Andrew. It’s the sort of thing that only a handful of collectors in the world can even dream about owning, and your man happens to be one of them. I’m offering you a first look, Andrew—an exclusive first look. Any interest, or shall I take my business elsewhere?”

  “Do tell more, Julie.”

  “Sorry, darling, but it’s not the sort of thing one discusses over the telephone. How about lunch tomorrow? I’m buying.”

  “I’m going to Tokyo tomorrow. There’s a collector there who has a Monet my man wants.”

  “How about the day after tomorrow then?”

  “That’s
my jet-lag day. Let’s make it Thursday, shall we?”

  “You won’t regret this, Andrew.”

  “Regrets are what sustain us. Ciao, Julie.”

  Isherwood hung up the telephone and looked at the heavy-shouldered man with strawberry-blond hair seated on the opposite side of the desk. “Nicely done,” said Uzi Navot. “But next time let Zizi buy lunch.”

  IT CAME as no surprise to Gabriel that Andrew Malone was in Rome, because he had been under electronic and physical surveillance for nearly a week. He had gone to the Eternal City to acquire a certain Degas sculpture that Zizi had had his eye on for quite some time but left empty-handed on Monday night and proceeded to Tokyo. The anonymous collector whom Malone hoped to relieve of a Monet was none other than the famed industrialist Morito Watanabe. Based on the defeatist expression on Malone’s face as he was leaving Watanabe’s apartment, Gabriel concluded the negotiations had not gone well. That evening Malone phoned Isherwood to say he was staying in Tokyo a day longer than expected. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to postpone our little get-together,” he said. “Can we do it next week?” Gabriel, who was anxious to get under way, instructed Isherwood to hold fast, and the meeting was pushed back just one day, from the Thursday to the Friday, though Isherwood did agree to make it a late lunch so that Malone could catch a few hours of sleep in his own bed. Malone did in fact remain in Tokyo for an additional day, but Tokyo Station detected no further contact between him and Watanabe or any of Watanabe’s agents. He returned to London late Thursday evening, looking, according to Eli Lavon, like a cadaver in a Savile Row suit. At three-thirty the next afternoon, the cadaver crept through the doorway of Green’s restaurant in Duke Street and made his way to the quiet corner table, where Isherwood was already waiting. Isherwood poured him a very large glass of white burgundy. “All right, Julie,” said Malone. “Let’s cut the bullshit, shall we? What have you got up your sleeve? And who the fuck put it there? Cheers.”