The Fallen Angel

17 BEN GURION AIRPORT, ISRAEL

IN THE ARRIVALS HALL OF Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport is a special reception room reserved for Office personnel. As Gabriel and Chiara entered late the following afternoon, they were surprised to find it occupied by a single man. He was seated in one of the faux-leather lounge chairs with his thick legs crossed, reading the contents of a manila file folder by the glow of a halogen lamp. He wore a charcoal-gray suit, an open-neck dress shirt, and a pair of stylish silver eyeglasses that were far too small for his face. The overall impression was of a busy executive catching up on a bit of paperwork between flights, which was not far from the truth. Since taking control of the Office, Uzi Navot had spent a great deal of time on airplanes.

“To what do we owe the honor?” asked Gabriel.

Navot looked up from the file as if surprised by the interruption. “It’s not every day someone tries to kill a pair of Office agents in the middle of Rome,” he said. “In fact, it only seems to happen whenever you’re in town.”

Navot placed the file in his secure briefcase and rose slowly to his feet. He was several pounds heavier than the last time Gabriel had seen him, evidence he was not adhering to the strict diet and exercise regime imposed by his demanding wife, Bella. Or perhaps, thought Gabriel, looking at the additional gray in Navot’s cropped hair, he was merely feeling the stress of his enormous job. He had a right to. The State of Israel was confronted by an Arab world in turmoil and faced threats too numerous to count. Topping the list was the prospect that Iran’s nuclear program was about to bear fruit despite the secret war of sabotage and assassination waged by the Office and its allies.

“Actually,” Navot said, raising one eyebrow, “you don’t look half bad for someone who narrowly survived an assassination attempt.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you could see the bruises on my shoulder.”

“That’s what you get for walking into the home of a man like Carlo Marchese without a gun in your pocket.” Navot pulled a disapproving frown. “You should have had a word with Shimon Pazner before accepting that invitation. He could have told you a few things about Carlo that even your friend Monsignor Donati doesn’t know.”

“Such as?”

“Let’s just say the Office has had its eye on Carlo for some time.”

“Why?”

“Because Carlo’s never been terribly discerning about the company he keeps. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Navot added. “The Old Man wants to tell you the rest. He’s been counting the minutes until your arrival.”

“Is there any chance you would let us get on the next plane out of the country?”

Navot placed his heavy hand on Gabriel’s shoulder and squeezed. “I’m afraid you’re not going anywhere,” he said. “At least, not yet.”

In the heart of Jerusalem, not far from the Old City, was a quiet, leafy lane known as Narkiss Street. The apartment house at Number 16 was small, just three stories in height, and partially concealed behind a sturdy limestone wall. An overgrown eucalyptus tree shaded the tiny balconies; the garden gate screeched when opened. In the foyer was an intercom panel with three buttons and three corresponding nameplates. Few people ever called upon the occupants of the unit on the top floor, for they were rarely there. The neighbors had been told that the husband, a taciturn man with ash-colored temples and vivid green eyes, was an artist who traveled often and jealously guarded his privacy. They no longer believed that to be true.

The sitting room of the apartment was hung with paintings. There were three canvases by Gabriel’s grandfather, the renowned German Expressionist Viktor Frankel, and several more works by his mother. There was also a three-quarter-length portrait, unsigned, of a gaunt young man who appeared haunted by the shadow of death. Gazing up at it, as though lost in memories, was Ari Shamron. He was dressed, as usual, in pressed khaki trousers, a white oxford cloth shirt, and a leather jacket with an unrepaired tear in the left shoulder. As Gabriel, Chiara, and Navot entered, he hastily crushed out his filterless Turkish cigarette and placed the butt in the decorative dish he was using as an ashtray.

“How did you get in here?” asked Gabriel.

Shamron held up a key.

“I thought I took that away from you.”

“You did,” answered Shamron with a shrug. “Housekeeping was good enough to give me another copy.”

Housekeeping was the Office division that managed safe houses and other secure properties. The apartment on Narkiss Street had once fallen into that category, but Shamron had bequeathed it to Gabriel as payment for services rendered—an act of generosity that, in Shamron’s opinion, entitled him to enter the apartment whenever he pleased. He slipped the key into his pocket and scrutinized Gabriel with his rheumy blue eyes. His liver-spotted hands were bunched atop the crook of his olive wood cane. They looked as though they had been borrowed from a man twice his size.

“I was beginning to think we would never see each other again,” he said after a moment. “Now it seems Carlo has reunited us.”

“I didn’t realize you two were on a first-name basis.”

“Carlo?” Shamron squeezed his deeply lined face into an expression of profound disdain. “Carlo Marchese has occupied a special place in our hearts for some time. He’s the transnational threat of tomorrow, a criminal without borders, creed, or conscience who’s willing to do business with anyone as long as the money keeps rolling in.”

“Who are his partners?”

“As you might expect, Carlo prefers his crime organized. He’s also something of a globalist, which I admire. He does business with the Russian mafiya, the Japanese yakuza, and the Chinese gangs that control Hong Kong and Taiwan. But what concerns us most are his ties to numerous criminal gangs from southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. Their members come almost entirely from the Shiite branch of Islam. They also happen to be affiliated with the world’s most dangerous terrorist group.”

“Hezbollah?”

Shamron nodded slowly. “Now that I have your attention, I’m wondering whether you will indulge me by listening to the rest of the story.”

“I suppose that depends on the ending.”

“It ends the way it always ends.”

Shamron gave a seductive smile, the one he reserved for recruitments, and ignited another cigarette.

Housekeeping had taken the liberty of provisioning the depleted pantry with all the supplies required for a war party. Chiara saw to the coffee while Gabriel prepared a tray of cookies and other assorted sweets. He placed it directly in front of Navot and then pushed open the French doors leading to the terrace. The chill afternoon air smelled of eucalyptus and pine and faintly of jasmine. He stood there for a moment, watching the shadows lengthening in the quiet street, as Shamron described the origins of the unholy alliance between Carlo Marchese and the Shiite fanatics of Hezbollah.

It began, he said, shortly after the brief but destructive war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006. The conflict left Hezbollah’s military forces in ruins. It also destroyed much of the extensive social infrastructure—the schools, hospitals, and housing—that Hezbollah used to purchase the support of Lebanon’s traditionally impoverished Shiites. Hezbollah’s leadership needed a large infusion of money to quickly rebuild and rearm. Not surprisingly, they turned to their two most reliable patrons, Syria and Iran.

“The money poured in for a while,” Shamron continued, “but then the ground shifted suddenly under Hezbollah’s feet. The so-called Arab Spring came to Syria with a vengeance. And the international community finally decided it was time to impose real sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program. The mullahs were forced to pinch their pennies. Once they had funded Hezbollah to the tune of two hundred million dollars a year. Now it’s a fraction of that.”

Shamron lapsed into silence. He was seated with his arms folded across his chest and his head cocked slightly to one side, as though he had just heard a familiar voice outside in the street. Navot was seated next to him in an identical pose. But unlike Shamron, who was staring at Gabriel, Navot was gazing down at a plate of Viennese butter cookies with an expression of studied indifference. Gabriel shook his head slowly. It had been many months since his last operation with the Office, yet in his absence it seemed nothing had changed except the color of Navot’s hair.

“Hezbollah realized it had a serious long-term problem,” Navot said, picking up where Shamron had left off. “Since it could no longer count on the benevolence of its patrons, it had to develop an independent, reliable means of financing its operations. It didn’t take long for them to decide how to proceed.”

“Crime,” said Gabriel.

“Big-time crime,” said Navot, snatching one of the cookies from the tray. “Hezbollah is like the Gambino family on steroids. But they tend to operate like limpets.”

“Meaning they attach themselves to other criminal organizations?”

Navot nodded and treated himself to another cookie. “They’re involved in everything from the cocaine trade in South America to diamond smuggling in West Africa. They also do a brisk business in counterfeit goods ranging from Gucci handbags to pirated DVDs.”

“And they’re good at it,” Shamron added. “Hezbollah is now in possession of at least eighty thousand rockets and missiles capable of reaching every square inch of Israel. You can rest assured they didn’t get them by clipping coupons. Its rearmament is being funded in large part by a global crime wave. And Carlo is one of Hezbollah’s most reliable partners.”

“How did you find out about him?”

Shamron studied his hands before answering. “About six months ago, we were able to identify a senior operative in Hezbollah’s criminal fund-raising apparatus. His name is Muhammad Qassem. At the time, he was employed by something called the Lebanon Byzantine Bank. We lured him to Cyprus with a woman. Then we put him in a box and brought him back here.”

Shamron slowly crushed out his cigarette. “Under questioning, Qassem gave us chapter and verse on Hezbollah’s criminal enterprises, including its partnership with a heretofore unknown Italian organized crime figure named Carlo Marchese. According to Qassem, the relationship is multifaceted, but it’s centered on the trade in looted antiquities.”

“What does Hezbollah bring to the relationship?”

“You’re the expert in the dirty antiquities trade. You tell me.”

Gabriel recalled what General Ferrari had told him during their meeting in the Piazza di Sant’Ignazio, that the network was receiving looted goods from someone in the Middle East. “Hezbollah brings a steady stream of product to the relationship,” he said. “It’s active in some of the most archaeologically significant lands in the world. Southern Lebanon alone is a treasure trove of Phoenician, Greek, and Roman antiquities.”

“But those antiquities aren’t worth much unless they can be brought to market with an acceptable provenance,” Shamron said. “That’s where Carlo and his network come in. Apparently, both sides are doing quite well for themselves.”

“Does Carlo know who he’s doing business with?”

“Carlo is, as we say, a man of the world.”

“Who runs the Hezbollah side of the operation?”

“Qassem wasn’t able to tell us that.”

“Why haven’t you gone to the Italians with what you know?”

“We did,” replied Uzi Navot. “In fact, I did it personally.”

“What was their response?”

“Carlo has friends in high places. Carlo is close to the Vatican. We can’t touch a man like Carlo based on the word of a Hezbollah banker who was handled in a rather extrajudicial manner.”

“So you let it go.”

“We needed Italian cooperation on other issues,” Navot replied. “Since then, I’m afraid we’ve had only limited success in interdicting the flow of money from Hezbollah’s criminal networks. They’re incredibly adaptive and resistant to outside penetration. They also tend to operate in countries that are not exactly friendly to our interests.”

“Which means,” Shamron said, “your friend Carlo has presented us with a unique opportunity.” He stared at Gabriel through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “The question is, are you willing to help us?”

And there it was, thought Gabriel—the open door. As usual, Shamron had left him no choice but to walk through it.

“What exactly do you have in mind?”

“We’d like you to eliminate a major source of funding for an enemy who has sworn to wipe us off the face of the earth.”

“Is that all?”

“No,” said Shamron. “We think it would be best for everyone involved if you put Carlo Marchese out of business, too.”

18 JERUSALEM

THE NEXT DAY WAS A FRIDAY, which meant Jerusalem, God’s fractured citadel upon a hill, was more jittery than usual. Along the eastern rim of the Old City, from Damascus Gate to the Garden of Gethsemane, metal barricades sparkled in the sharp winter sun, watched over by hundreds of blue-uniformed Israeli police. Inside the walls, Muslim faithful crowded the portals to the Haram al-Sharif, Islam’s third-holiest site, waiting to see whether they would be permitted to pray at the al-Aqsa Mosque. Due to a recent string of Hamas rocket attacks, the restrictions were tighter than usual. Females and middle-aged men were allowed to pass, but al-shabaab, the youth, were turned away. They seethed in the tiny courtyards along Lions’ Gate Street or outside the walls on the Jericho Road. There a bearded Salafist imam assured them that their days of humiliation were numbered, that the Jews, the former and current overlords of the twice-promised land, were once again living on borrowed time.

Gabriel paused to listen to the sermon and then set out along the footpath leading into the basin of the Kidron Valley. As he passed Absalom’s Tomb, he saw an extended family of Arabs coming toward him from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. The women all were veiled, and the eldest boy bore a striking resemblance to a Palestinian terrorist whom Gabriel had killed many years earlier on a quiet street in the heart of Zurich. The family was walking four abreast, leaving no room for Gabriel. Rather than provoke a religious incident, he stepped to the side of the path and allowed the family to pass, an act of public etiquette that elicited not so much as a glance or nod of thanks. The veiled women and the patriarch climbed the hill toward the walls of the Old City. The boys remained behind, in the makeshift radical mosque on the Jericho Road.

By now the amplified prayers from al-Aqsa were echoing across the valley, mingling with the tolling of church bells on the Mount of Olives. As two of the city’s three Abrahamic faiths engaged in a quarrel of profound beauty, Gabriel gazed across the endless headstones of the Jewish cemetery and debated whether he had the strength to visit the grave of his son, Daniel. Twenty years earlier, on a snowy January night in Vienna, Gabriel had wrenched the child’s lifeless body from the inferno of a bombed car. His first wife, Leah, miraculously survived the attack despite suffering catastrophic burns over most of her body. She lived now in a psychiatric hospital atop Mount Herzl, trapped in a prison of memory and a body destroyed by fire. Afflicted with a combination of post-traumatic stress syndrome and psychotic depression, she relived the bombing constantly. Occasionally, however, she experienced flashes of lucidity. During one such interlude, in the garden of the hospital, she had granted Gabriel permission to marry Chiara. Look at me, Gabriel. There’s nothing left of me. Nothing but a memory. It was just one of the visions that stalked Gabriel each time he walked the streets of Jerusalem. Here in a city he loved he could find no peace. He saw the endless conflict between Arab and Jew in every word and gesture, and heard it on the edge of every muezzin’s call to prayer. In the faces of children, he glimpsed the ghosts of the men he had killed. And from the gravestones of the Mount of Olives, he heard the last cries of a child sacrificed for a father’s sins.

It was that memory, the memory of Daniel dying in his arms, that compelled Gabriel into the cemetery. He remained at the grave for nearly an hour, thinking about the kind of man his son might have been, whether he would have been an artist like his ancestors or whether he would have found something more practical to do. Finally, as the church bells tolled one o’clock, he placed stones atop the grave and made his way across the Kidron Valley to Dung Gate. A group of Israeli schoolchildren from the Negev waited at the security checkpoint, their brightly colored knapsacks open for inspection. Gabriel briefly joined them. Then, after speaking a few words into the ear of a policeman, he slipped around the magnetometers and entered the Jewish Quarter.

Directly before him, across a broad plaza, rose the honey-colored Herodian stones of the Western Wall, the much-disputed remnant of the ancient retaining barrier that had once surrounded the great Temple of Jerusalem. In AD 70, after a ruthless siege lasting many months, the Roman Emperor Titus ordered the Temple destroyed and the rebellious Jews of Roman Palestine obliterated. Hundreds of thousands perished in the bloodletting that followed, while the contents of the Holy of Holies, including the great golden menorah, were carried back to Rome in one of history’s most infamous episodes of looting. Six centuries later, when the Arabs conquered Jerusalem, the ruins of the Temple were no longer visible—and the Holy Mountain, the place regarded by Jews as the dwelling place of God on Earth, was little more than an elevated garbage dump. The Arabs erected the golden Dome of the Rock and the great al-Aqsa Mosque, thus establishing Islamic religious authority over the world’s most sacred parcel of real estate. The Crusaders seized the Mount from the Muslims in 1099 and turned the shrines into churches, a tactical mistake the Israelis chose not to repeat after capturing East Jerusalem in 1967. Israeli authorities now maintained tight control over access to the Mount, but administration of the Muslim holy sites, and the sacred land beneath them, remained in the hands of the Islamic religious authority known as the Waqf.

The portion of the Western Wall visible from the plaza was 187 feet wide and 62 feet high. The actual western retaining wall of the Temple Mount plateau, however, was much larger, descending 42 feet below the plaza and stretching more than a quarter mile into the Muslim Quarter, where it was concealed behind residential structures. After years of politically and religiously charged archaeological excavations, it was now possible to walk nearly the entire length of the wall via the Western Wall Tunnel, an underground passageway running from the plaza to the Via Dolorosa. Waiting for Gabriel at the entrance was a young woman dressed in the modest skirt and headscarf of an Orthodox Jew. “He’s been working nonstop at a spot near the Cave,” she said in a confiding tone. “Apparently, he’s found something important, because he’s a complete wreck.”

“How can you tell?”

The woman laughed and then led Gabriel to the top of a narrow aluminum staircase. It bore him downward beneath the Old City and backward through history. He paused for a moment beneath Wilson’s Arch, the bridge that had linked the Temple Mount and Jerusalem’s Upper City in the time of Jesus, and then set out along a newly paved walkway at the base of the wall. The massive foundation stones were aglow with lamplight and cool to the touch. Just a few feet above were the chaotic market streets of the modern Muslim Quarter, but here in the basement of time the silence was absolute.

The section of the tunnel known as the Cave was actually a tiny grotto-like synagogue, set against the portion of the wall thought to be the nearest point to the ancient location of the Holy of Holies. As usual, a small group of Orthodox women were praying in the synagogue, their fingers pressed reverently to the stone. Gabriel slipped quietly past them and made his way toward a tarpaulin curtain hanging a few yards away. A small handwritten sign warned of danger and instructed visitors to stay away. Gabriel parted the curtains and peered down into an excavation trench approximately twenty feet deep. At the bottom, bathed in the glow of harsh white lights, a single archaeologist picked gently at the black earth with a tiny hand trowel.

“What is it?” Gabriel asked, his voice echoing into the void.

“It’s not an it,” replied Eli Lavon. He moved aside to reveal the focus of his labors—the shoulder, arm, and hand of a human skeleton. “We call her Rivka,” he said. “And unless I’m mistaken, which is highly unlikely, she died the same night as the Temple.”

“Proof, Professor Lavon,” Gabriel said, challenging him playfully. “Where’s the proof?”

“It’s all around her,” said Lavon, pointing to the rectangular stones embedded in the soil. “They’re from the Temple itself, and they’re lying here because the Romans hurled them over the wall the night they laid waste to the House of God. The fact that Rivka’s remains lie amid the stones rather than under them suggests she was thrown over the wall at the same time. So do the fractures all over her body.”

Lavon gazed respectfully at the remains for a moment without speaking. “According to Josephus, our only source for what happened that night, several thousand Jews rushed into the Temple after the Romans set it ablaze. I suspect Rivka was one of them. Who knows?” he added with a sigh. “It’s possible she saw Titus himself entering the Holy of Holies to claim his sacred loot. After that . . . it was hell on earth.”

“Titus wasn’t the world’s first looter,” Gabriel said. “And, unfortunately, he wasn’t the last.”

“So I hear.” Lavon looked up. “I also hear someone tried to take a shot at you the other night in Rome.”

“Actually, I think he was aiming for my wife.”

“That was rather unwise. Is he still alive?”

“For the moment.”

“Any idea who sent him?”

Gabriel dropped the shard of Greek pottery into the excavation pit. Lavon snatched it deftly out of the air before it could shatter on the stones of the Temple and examined it in the glow of his work lamps.

“Red-figure Attic, fifth century BC, probably by the Menelaos Painter.”

“Very impressive.”

“Thank you,” replied Lavon. “But don’t ever drop it again.”

The Old City of Jerusalem was once again connected to the new by a footbridge. It stretched from the Jaffa Gate to the sparkling Mamilla Mall, one of the few places in the country where Arab and Jew mingled with relatively little tension. As usual, Gabriel and Lavon bickered over where to eat before finally settling on a fashionable European-style café. The Israel of their youth had been a land without television. Now it had all the creature comforts of the West, everything except peace.

The volume of the techno-pop music made conversation impossible inside, so they sat on the sunlit terrace at a table with a gunner’s view of the Old City walls. Lavon’s wispy hair moved in the breeze. He popped an antacid tablet before touching his food.

“Still?” asked Gabriel.

“It’s eternal, just like Jerusalem.”

Gabriel smiled. Sometimes even he found it hard to imagine that the bookish, hypochondriacal figure seated before him was regarded as the finest street surveillance specialist the Office had ever produced. He had worked with Lavon for the first time during Operation Wrath of God. For three years, they had been near-constant companions, killing both at night and in broad daylight, living in fear that at any moment they would be arrested by European police. When the unit finally disbanded, Lavon was afflicted with numerous stress disorders, including a notoriously fickle stomach. He settled in Vienna, where he opened a small investigative bureau called Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Operating on a shoestring budget, he managed to track down millions of dollars’ worth of looted Holocaust assets and played a significant role in prying a multibillion-dollar settlement from the banks of Switzerland. But when a bomb destroyed his office and killed two of his employees, Lavon returned to Israel to pursue his first love, archaeology. He now served as an adjunct professor of biblical archaeology at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and regularly took part in digs around the country, such as the one in the Western Wall Tunnel.

“It’s almost hard to remember what this place was like before the Six-Day War,” Lavon said, gesturing toward the valley beneath the terrace. “My parents used to bring me here to see the barbed wire and the Jordanian gun emplacements along the ’forty-nine armistice line. Jews weren’t allowed to pray at the Western Wall or visit the cemetery on the Mount of Olives. Even Christians had to present proof of baptism before they were allowed to visit their holy sites. And now our friends in the West would like us to surrender sovereignty over the Wall to the Palestinians.” Lavon shook his head slowly. “For the sake of peace, of course.”

“It’s a pile of stones, Eli.”

“Those stones are drenched in the blood of your ancestors. And it’s because of those stones that we have a right to a homeland here. The Palestinians understand that, which explains why they like to pretend the Temple never existed.”

“Temple Denial,” said Gabriel.

Lavon nodded thoughtfully. “It’s a first cousin to Holocaust Denial, and it’s now just as widespread in the Arab and Islamic world. The calculus is quite simple. No Holocaust, no Temple . . .”

“No Jews in Palestine.”

“Precisely. But it’s not just talk. Using the religious authority of the Waqf, the Palestinians are systematically trying to erase any evidence that there was ever an actual temple on the Temple Mount. We’re fighting an archaeological war here in Jerusalem every day. One side is trying to preserve the past, and the other is trying to destroy it, primarily under the guise of construction projects like the Marwani Mosque.”

Capable of accommodating more than seven thousand worshipers, the mosque was located in the southeastern corner of the Temple Mount, in an ancient underground chamber known as Solomon’s Stables. The massive construction project had destabilized the sacred plateau and created a precarious bulge in the southern wall. Under a negotiated agreement between the Israeli government and the Waqf, an engineering firm from Jordan had made the repairs, leaving behind an unsightly patch of white that was clearly visible from across the city.

“Naturally,” Lavon continued, “a construction project the size of the Marwani Mosque displaced several tons of earth and debris. And what do you suppose the Waqf did with it?” Lavon quickly answered his own question. “They took it to the municipal dump or simply threw it over the walls into the Kidron Valley. I was part of the team that sifted through it. We found hundreds of artifacts dating from the First and Second Temples. They lacked proper archaeological context, of course, because they’d been ripped from their original settings.” He paused, then added, “Just like that shard of Greek pottery you’re walking around with.”

“A man like you can often tell a great deal from a single fragment.”

“Where did you get it?”

“From the home of a tomb raider in Cerveteri.”

“Roberto Falcone?”

Gabriel nodded.

“Please tell me you weren’t the one who pushed him into that vat of hydrochloric acid.”

“Acid isn’t my style, Eli. It’s far too slow.”

“And messy,” Lavon added with a nod. “I suppose the next thing you’re going to say is that there’s a link between Falcone and the woman who fell from the dome of the Basilica.”

“His name is Carlo Marchese,” Gabriel said. “Carlo controls the global trade in looted antiquities. He’s also in bed with Hezbollah. We’re going to put him out of business.”

“We?”

“I can’t do it alone, Eli. I need an archaeologist who can read a balance sheet and knows how to track dirty money. It would also be nice if he can handle himself on the street.”

“I thought you were retired.”

“So did I,” Gabriel said, “but for some reason I never seem to stay retired.”

Lavon looked out at the walls of the Old City.

“What are you thinking about, Eli?”

“It’s not a what. It’s a who.”

“Rivka?”

Lavon nodded.

“She’s waited for two thousand years,” Gabriel said. “She can wait a little longer.”

19 KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV

THERE WAS ANOTHER THING THAT had not changed in Gabriel’s absence: King Saul Boulevard. It was drab, featureless, and, best of all, anonymous. No emblem hung over its entrance, no brass lettering proclaimed the identity of its occupant. In fact, there was nothing at all to suggest it was the headquarters of one of the world’s most feared and respected intelligence services. A closer inspection of the structure, however, would have revealed the existence of a building within a building, one with its own power supply, its own water and sewer lines, and its own secure communications system. Employees carried two keys. One opened an unmarked door in the lobby; the other operated the lift. Those who committed the unpardonable sin of losing one or both of their keys were banished to the Judean Wilderness, never to be seen or heard from again.

Gabriel had come through the lobby just once, the day after his first encounter with Shamron. From that point forward, he had only entered the building “black,” through the underground garage. He did so again now, with Chiara and Eli Lavon at his side. They made their way down three flights of stairs, then followed an empty corridor to a doorway marked 456C. The room on the other side had once been a dumping ground for obsolete computers and worn-out furniture, often used by the night staff as a clandestine meeting place for romantic trysts. It was now known throughout King Saul Boulevard only as Gabriel’s Lair. The keyless cipher lock was set to the numeric version of his date of birth. According to one Office wit, it was the most closely guarded secret in all of Israel.

“What’s wrong?” Eli Lavon asked when Gabriel’s hand hesitated over the keypad.

“A senior moment.”

“You can’t remember your own birthday?”

“No,” said Gabriel, punching in the code. “I just can’t believe it was that long ago.”

He entered the room, switched on the overhead lights, and looked around at the walls. They were littered with the debris and the ghosts of operations past. All had resulted in innocent lives being saved, and all were soaked in blood, much of it Gabriel’s. He went to the chalkboard, the last chalkboard in the entire building, and saw faint traces of his own handwriting—the outlines of an operation known by the code name Masterpiece. It had resulted in the successful sabotage of Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities, and had purchased Israel and the West several years of critical time. Now it seemed that time was running out. The Iranians were once again on the doorstep of realizing their nuclear dreams. And it appeared they intended to punish anyone who tried to stand in their way, using Hezbollah, their eager proxy, as their instrument of vengeance.

“If the Office ever builds a museum,” Lavon said, “it won’t be complete unless it contains a replica of this room.”

“What would they call the exhibit?”

“The village of the damned.”

The response had come not from Lavon but from the tall, tweedy figure standing in the doorway, a thin file folder beneath his arm. Yossi Gavish was a senior officer from Research, the Office’s analytical division. Born in London and educated at All Souls, he still spoke Hebrew with a pronounced English accent and was incapable of working without a steady supply of Earl Grey tea and McVitie’s digestive biscuits.

“I can’t believe I’m back here again,” he said.

“Neither can I.” Gabriel nodded toward the file and asked, “What have you got there?”

“The sum total of what the Office currently knows about Carlo Marchese.” He dropped the file onto one of the worktables and looked around. “Does Uzi expect the four of us to take on Carlo and Hezbollah on our own?”

“Don’t worry,” Gabriel said, smiling. “The others will be here soon.”

It took the better part of the morning for Personnel to track down the remaining members of Gabriel’s team and cast them downward into his windowless little dungeon. For the most part, the extractions went smoothly, but in a handful of cases they encountered unexpectedly stiff local resistance. All complaints were forwarded directly to Uzi Navot, who made it clear he would tolerate no dissent. “This is not the Arab world,” he told one disgruntled division chief. “This is the Office. And we are still totalitarians.”

They arrived at irregular intervals, like members of an infiltration team returning to base after a successful night raid. First came Yaakov Rossman, a pockmarked former counterterrorism officer from Shabak, Israel’s internal security service, who was now running agents in Syria and Lebanon. Then it was a pair of all-purpose field hands named Oded and Mordecai, followed by Rimona Stern, a former military intelligence officer who now dealt with issues related to Iran’s nuclear program. A Rubenesque woman with sandstone-colored hair, Rimona also happened to be Shamron’s niece. Gabriel had known her since she was a child. His fondest memories of Rimona were of a fearless young girl on a kick scooter careening down the steep drive of her famous uncle’s house.

Next there appeared in the doorway a petite, dark-haired woman named Dina Sarid. A human database, she could recite the time, place, perpetrators, and casualty toll of every act of terrorism committed against Israeli and Western targets, including the long list of atrocities carried out by the highly skilled murderers of Hezbollah. For many years, she focused her considerable analytic skills on Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s military commander and high priest of terror. Indeed, thanks in large measure to Dina’s work, Mughniyah met his much-deserved end in Damascus in 2008 when a bomb exploded beneath his car. Dina marked Mughniyah’s demise by paying a visit to the graves of her mother and two of her sisters. They were killed on October 19, 1994, when a suicide bomber from Hamas, Iran’s other proxy, detonated himself on a Number 5 bus in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street. Dina was seriously wounded in the attack and still walked with a slight limp.

As usual, Mikhail Abramov arrived last. Lanky and fair with a fine-boned face and eyes the color of glacial ice, he had immigrated to Israel from Russia as a teenager and joined the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s elite special operations unit. Once described by Ari Shamron as “Gabriel without a conscience,” he had personally assassinated several of the top terror masterminds from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He now carried out similar missions on behalf of the Office, though his enormous talents were not limited strictly to the gun.

Within the corridors and conference rooms of King Saul Boulevard, the nine men and women gathered in Room 456C were known by the code name “Barak”—the Hebrew word for lightning—for their ability to gather and strike quickly. They had fought together, often under conditions of unbearable stress, on secret battlefields stretching from Moscow to the Caribbean to the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. Gabriel had been lucky to survive their last operation, but now he stood before them once again, looking none the worse for wear, holding them spellbound with a story. It featured a museum curator whose father had been a tomb robber, a priest with a dangerous secret, and a glorified mobster named Carlo Marchese who was doing business with the world’s most dangerous terrorist group. The goal of the operation, said Gabriel, would be simple. They were going to assemble a dossier that would destroy Carlo and in the process blow a hole in Hezbollah’s bottom line. But it wouldn’t be sufficient simply to prove that Carlo Marchese was a criminal. They were going to find the cordata, the rope, linking him directly to Hezbollah. And then they were going to wrap it around his neck.

They were a family of sorts, and like all families there were petty jealousies, unspoken resentments, and various other forms of sibling dysfunction. Even so, they managed to divide themselves into subunits and settle down to work with a minimum of bickering. Yossi, Chiara, and Mordecai saw to Carlo, while responsibility for Hezbollah’s criminal fund-raising networks fell to Dina, Rimona, Yaakov, and Mikhail. Gabriel and Eli Lavon floated somewhere in between, for it was their task to find the nexus between the two organizations—or, as Lavon put it, the wedding band that joined Carlo and Hezbollah in criminal matrimony.

Before long, the walls of Room 456C reflected the unique nature of their undertaking. On one side were the outlines of Carlo Marchese’s overt business empire; on the other, the known elements of Hezbollah, Inc. It had but one task—to supply a steady stream of money to the most dangerous terrorist group the world had ever known. It was Hezbollah, not al-Qaeda, that first turned human beings into bombs, and Hezbollah that first developed a truly global capability. Indeed, on two occasions, it was able to reach its tentacles across the Atlantic and attack targets in Buenos Aires—first in 1992, when it bombed the Israeli Embassy, killing twenty-nine people, and again in 1994, when it destroyed the AMIA Jewish community center, leaving another ninety-five dead. Hezbollah’s ranks were filled with several thousand highly trained terrorists, many hidden within the worldwide Lebanese diaspora, and its vast arsenal of weaponry included several Scuds, making it the only terrorist group in the world to possess ballistic missiles. In short, Hezbollah had the ability to carry out a cataclysmic terrorist attack at the time and place of its choosing. All it required was the blessing of its Shiite clerical masters in Tehran.

It was Allah who provided Hezbollah’s inspiration, but mere mortals saw to its financial needs. Their faces scowled from Dina’s side of the room. At the center of the web she placed the Lebanon Byzantine Bank. Then, with the help of Unit 8200, she assembled a communication matrix and phone tree that stretched from Beirut to London to the lawless Tri-Border Area of South America. Lebanon Byzantine Bank—or LBB in the lexicon of the team—was the glue that held it all together. Thanks to the cybersleuths from Unit 8200, the team perused its ledger sheets at will. Indeed, Yaakov joked that he knew more about LBB’s operations and investments than even the bank’s president. It quickly became apparent that the institution—“And I do use that term loosely,” scoffed Yaakov—was little more than a front for Hezbollah. “Follow the money,” Gabriel instructed the team, “and with a bit of luck, it will lead us to Hezbollah’s man inside the network.”

For the most part, Gabriel spent those days putting himself through a crash course on the global trade in illicit antiquities—specifically, how glittering treasures from the past made their way from the dirty hands of tomb robbers and thieves onto the legitimate market. Much of the work involved a mind-numbing review of monographs, catalogues, museum databases, auction house records, and published inventories of antiquities dealers around the world. But occasionally he would head over to the Rockefeller Museum with Eli Lavon in tow to sit at the feet of a looting expert from the Israel Antiquities Authority. In addition, he phoned an old friend in the London art world who had a number of acquaintances who dabbled in what he liked to call “the naughty end of the trade.” Finally, he quietly renewed contact with General Ferrari, who immediately sent along copies of some of his most closely guarded files, despite the fact that Gabriel pointedly refused to identify his target. It was now an operation, and operational rules applied.

And so it went for twelve days and twelve seemingly endless nights, as each group labored to assemble its piece of the puzzle. Lavon, the biblical archaeologist, couldn’t help but compare the quest to the construction of the ancient underground aqueduct beneath the City of David that linked the Gihon Spring with the Pool of Siloam. More than seventeen hundred feet in length, it had been hastily carved out of the bedrock in the eighth century BC as the city prepared itself for a siege by the approaching Assyrian army. To speed the process, King Hezekiah ordered two separate teams to tunnel toward each other simultaneously. Somehow they managed to meet in the middle, and the life-saving water flowed into the city.

The team experienced a similar episode shortly after midnight on the thirteenth day, when Gabriel’s team took delivery of the nightly packet of material from Unit 8200. It included a list of all cash wire transfers that had flowed to and from the accounts of Lebanon Byzantine Bank that day. The document revealed that, at 4:17 p.m., LBB received a transfer of one and a half million euros from the Galleria Naxos of St. Moritz, Switzerland. Then, a few minutes after five o’clock Beirut time, a sum of one hundred and fifty thousand euros, ten percent of the original payment, was forwarded from LBB to an account at the Institute for Religious Works, otherwise known as the Vatican Bank. Eli Lavon would later describe the atmosphere in the room as a bit like the moment Hezekiah’s workmen first heard each other chiseling through the bedrock. Gabriel ordered his own teams to dig a little more, and by dawn they knew they had their man.

20 KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV

“HE CALLS HIMSELF DAVID GIRARD. But like almost everything else about him, it’s a lie.”

Gabriel dropped the file folder onto Uzi Navot’s preposterously large executive desk. It was fashioned of smoked glass and stood near the floor-to-ceiling bulletproof windows overlooking downtown Tel Aviv and the sea. Hazy sunlight filtered through the vertical blinds, imprisoning Navot in bars of shadow. He left the file untouched and with a wave of his hand invited Gabriel to elaborate.

“His real name is Daoud Ghandour. He was born in the village of Tayr Dibba in southern Lebanon, the same town as Imad Mughniyah, which means they probably knew each other when they were growing up.”

“How did he get from a shithole like Tayr Dibba to an antiquities gallery in St. Moritz?”

“The Lebanese way,” replied Gabriel. “In 1970, when Arafat and the PLO set up shop in southern Lebanon, the Ghandour family moved to Beirut. Apparently, Daoud was an exceptionally bright child. He went to a good school and learned to speak French and English. When it came time for him to attend university, he moved to Paris to study ancient history at the Sorbonne.”

“Is that when Daoud Ghandour became David Girard?”

“That wasn’t until he moved on to Oxford,” Gabriel answered. “After completing his PhD in classical archaeology, he went to work in the antiquities department of Sotheby’s in London. He was there in the late nineties when Sotheby’s was accused of selling unprovenanced antiquities. He left London under something of a cloud.”

“And went into business for himself?”

Gabriel nodded.

“How much does it cost to open a gallery in St. Moritz?”

“A lot.”

“Where did he get the money?”

“Good question.”

Gabriel removed a photograph from the file and dealt it across the desktop. It showed a slender figure in his late forties leaning against a glass display case filled with Greek and Etruscan pottery. He wore a dark pullover and a dark blazer. His gaze was soft and thoughtful. His posed smile managed to appear genuine.

“Handsome devil,” said Navot. “Where’d you get the photo?”

“From the Web site of the gallery. His official bio has a couple of glaring holes in it, such as his given name and place of birth.”

“What flavor passport is he carrying these days?”

“Swiss. He has a Swiss wife, too.”

“Which variety?”

“German speaker.”

“How cosmopolitan.” Navot frowned at the photograph. “What do we know about his travel habits?”

“Like most people in the antiquities trade, he spends a great deal of time on airplanes and in hotel rooms.”

“Lebanon?”

“He pops into Beirut at least twice a month.” Gabriel paused, then added, “He also spends a fair amount of time here in Israel.”

Navot looked up sharply but said nothing.

“According to Eli’s friends over at the Israel Antiquities Authority, Daoud Ghandour, aka David Girard, is a frequent visitor to the Temple Mount. Actually,” Gabriel corrected himself, “he spends most of his time under the Mount.”

“Doing what?”

“He’s an unpaid adviser to the Palestinian Authority and the Waqf on issues related to archaeological matters. By the way, that’s not in his official bio, either.”

Navot stared at the photo for a moment. “What’s your theory?”

“I think he’s Hezbollah’s man in Carlo’s network. He sells looted goods out of his gallery in St. Moritz, sends the profits back home through LBB, and gives a ten percent cut to his godfather Carlo Marchese.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Not yet. Which is why I’m proposing we go into business with him.”

“How?”

“I’m going to offer him something irresistible, and see if he bites.”

“I probably shouldn’t ask,” Navot sighed, “but just where do you intend to get something so irresistible?”

“I’m going to steal it, of course.”

“Of course,” said Navot, smiling. “Is there anything you need from me?”

“Money, Uzi. Lots of money.”

Office doctrine dictates that field agents departing for missions abroad spend their final night in Israel at a safe flat known as a jump site. There, free from the distractions of spouses, lovers, children, and pets, they assume the identities they will wear like body armor until they return home again. Only Gabriel and Eli Lavon chose not to participate in this enduring operational ritual, for by their own calculation, they had spent more time living under false names than their own.

As it turned out, both chose to pass at least part of that last evening in the company of damaged women. Lavon headed to the Western Wall Tunnel to spend a few hours with his beloved Rivka, while Gabriel made a pilgrimage to the Mount Herzl Psychiatric Hospital to see Leah. As usual, he arrived after normal visiting hours. Leah’s doctor was waiting in the lobby. A rabbinical-looking man with a kippah and a long gray beard, he was the only person in Israel not connected to the Office who knew precisely what had happened that night in Vienna.

“It’s been a while since your last visit.” The doctor gave a forgiving smile. “She’s looking forward to seeing you.”

“How is she?”

“The same. At this stage of her life, that’s the best we can hope for.”

The doctor took Gabriel by the arm and guided him along a corridor of Jerusalem limestone to a common room with windows overlooking the hospital’s garden. It was there, in the shade of a stone pine, that Gabriel had sought Leah’s permission to marry Chiara. The moment was only partially imprinted in Leah’s watery memory. At times, she seemed to realize that Gabriel was no longer her husband, but for the most part she remained a prisoner of the past. In Leah’s bewildered mind, there was nothing unusual about Gabriel’s long absences. Thanks to Shamron, he had always entered and departed her world with little or no warning.

She was seated in her wheelchair with the twisted remnants of her hands resting in her lap. Her hair, once long and dark like Chiara’s, was now cut institutional short and shot with gray. Gabriel kissed the cool, firm scar tissue of her cheek before lowering himself into the armless little chair the doctor had placed at her side. Leah seemed unaware of his presence. She was staring sightlessly into the darkened garden.

“Do you love this girl?” she asked suddenly, her gaze still straight ahead.

“Which girl?” asked Gabriel. And then, when he realized Leah was merely reliving the conversation that had dissolved their marriage, his heart gave a sideways lurch. “I love you,” he said softly, squeezing her frozen hands. “I’ll always love you, Leah.”

A smile briefly graced her lips. Then she looked directly at Gabriel for a moment with an expression of wifely disapproval. “You’re working for Shamron again,” she said.

“How can you tell?”

“I can see it in your eyes. You’re someone else.”

“I’m Gabriel,” he said.

“Only a part of you is Gabriel.” She turned her face toward the glass.

“Don’t go yet, Leah.”

She came back to him. “Who are you fighting this time? Black September?”

“There is no Black September anymore.”

“Who is it then?”

“Hezbollah,” he answered after a moment’s hesitation. “It’s Hezbollah, Leah.”

The name appeared to mean nothing to her. “Tell me about it,” she said.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s secret.”

“Like before?”

“Yes, Leah, like before.”

Leah frowned. She hated secrets. Secrets had destroyed her life.

“Where will you go this time?”

“Paris,” Gabriel replied truthfully.

Her expression darkened. “Why Paris?”

“There’s a man there who can help me.”

“A spy?”

“A thief.”

“What does he steal?”

“Paintings.”

She seemed genuinely troubled. “Why would a man like you want to work with someone who steals paintings?”

“Sometimes it’s necessary to work with bad people to accomplish good things.”

“Is this man bad?”

“Not really.”

“Tell me about him.”

Gabriel could see no harm in it, so he complied with her request. But after a moment, she appeared to lose interest, and her face turned once again toward the window.

“Look at the snow,” she said, gazing at the cloudless evening sky. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Yes, Leah, it’s beautiful.”

Her hands began to tremble. Gabriel closed his eyes.

When Gabriel returned to Narkiss Street, he found Chiara stretched on the couch in the half-light, a glass of red wine balanced on her abdomen. She offered him the wine and watched him carefully as he drank, as though searching for evidence of betrayal. Then she led him into the bedroom and wordlessly removed her clothing. Her body was feverishly warm. She made love as though it were for the last time.

“Take me with you to Paris.”

“No.”

She didn’t press the issue. She knew there was no point. Not after what had happened in Rome. And not after what had happened in Vienna before that.

“Did she remember you this time?”

“She remembered.”

“Which version of you?”

“Both,” he answered.

Chiara was silent for a moment. Then she asked, “Does she know you love me, Gabriel?”

“She knows.”

A pause. “Do you?” she asked.

“What?”

“Love me.”

“Chiara . . .”

She turned her back to him. “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment.

“For what?”

“The baby. If I hadn’t lost the baby, you wouldn’t be going to Paris without me.”

Gabriel made no reply. Chiara climbed slowly atop his body.

“Do you love me?” she asked again.

“More than anything.”

“Show me.”

“How?”

She kissed his lips and whispered, “Show me, Gabriel.”

21 RUE DE MIROMESNIL, PARIS

ANTIQUITÉS SCIENTIFIQUES OCCUPIED A LONELY outpost at the end of rue de Miromesnil where tourists rarely ventured. There were some in the Parisian antiques trade who had urged its owner, the fastidious Maurice Durand, to relocate to the rue de Rivoli or perhaps even the Champs-Élysées. But Monsieur Durand had always resisted for fear he would spend his days watching overweight Americans pawing his precious antique microscopes, cameras, spectacles, barometers, and surveyors, only to depart the shop empty-handed. Besides, Durand had always preferred his tidy little life at the quiet end of the arrondissement. There was a good brasserie across the street where he took his coffee in the morning and drank his wine at night. And then there was Angélique Brossard, a seller of glass figurines who was always willing to change the sign in her window from OUVERT to FERMÉ whenever Durand came calling.

But there was another reason why Maurice Durand had resisted the lure of Paris’s busier streets. Antiquités Scientifiques, while reasonably profitable, operated largely as a front for his primary occupation. Durand specialized in conveying paintings and other objets d’art from homes, galleries, and museums into the hands of collectors who did not care about meddlesome details such as a clean provenance. There were some in law enforcement who might have described Durand as an art thief, though he would have quibbled with that characterization, for it had been many years since he had actually stolen a painting himself. He now operated solely as a broker in the process known as commissioned theft—or, as Durand liked to describe it, he managed the acquisition of paintings that were not technically for sale. His clients tended to be the sort of men who did not like to be disappointed, and Durand rarely failed them. Working with a stable of Marseille-based professional thieves, he had been the linchpin in some of history’s greatest art heists. Topping his list of achievements, at least in monetary terms, was Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear. Stolen from the Courtauld Gallery in London, it was now hanging in the palace of a Saudi sheikh who had a penchant for violence involving knives.

But it was Maurice Durand’s link to a lesser-known work—Portrait of a Young Woman, oil on canvas, by Rembrandt van Rijn—that had led to his unlikely alliance with the secret intelligence service of the State of Israel. After accepting a commission to steal the painting, Durand had discovered that hidden within it was a list of numbered Swiss bank accounts filled with looted assets from the Holocaust. The list had allowed Gabriel to blackmail a Swiss billionaire named Martin Landesmann into sending a shipment of sabotaged industrial centrifuges to his steady customers in the Islamic Republic of Iran. At the conclusion of the operation, Gabriel had decided to take no action against Durand lest the Office ever require the services of a professional thief.

All of which goes some way to explaining why, twenty-four hours after arriving in Paris, Eli Lavon presented himself at the entrance of the little shop at 106 rue de Miromesnil. The buzzer, when pressed, emitted an inhospitable howl. Then the deadbolts snapped open with a thud, and Lavon, shaking the rain from his sodden overcoat, slipped inside.

“Stolen anything lately, Monsieur Durand?”

“Not even a kiss, Monsieur Lavon.”

The two men appraised each other for a moment without speaking. They were roughly equals in height and build, but the similarities ended there. While Lavon wore an outfit he called Left Bank revolutionary chic, Durand was impeccably attired in a somber chalk-stripe suit and lavender necktie. His bald head shone like polished glass in the restrained overhead lighting. His dark eyes were expressionless and unblinking.

“How can I assist you?” he asked, as though helping Lavon was the last thing in the world he wished to do.

“I’m looking for something special,” Lavon replied.

“Well, then, you’ve certainly come to the right place.” Durand walked over to a display case filled with microscopes. “This just arrived,” he said, running his hand over one of the instruments. “It was made by Nachet & Sons of Paris in 1890. The optics and mechanics are all in good condition. So is the walnut case.”

“Not that kind of something, Monsieur Durand.”

Durand’s hand had yet to move from the oxidized surface of the microscope. “It seems my debt has come due,” he said.

“You make us sound like blackmailers,” Lavon said, hoisting his most benevolent smile. “But I assure you that’s not the case.”

“What do you want?”

“Your expertise.”

“It’s expensive.”

“Don’t worry, Maurice. Money isn’t the problem.”

The rain chased them across the Place de la Concorde and along the Seine embankments. It was not the pleasing Parisian rain of songwriters and poets but a frigid torrent that clawed its way through their overcoats. Durand, thoroughly miserable, pleaded for the warmth of a taxi, but Lavon wanted to make certain they were not being followed, and so they slogged on. Finally, they entered the foyer of a luxury apartment building overlooking the Pont Marie and climbed the spiral staircase to a flat on the fourth floor. Seated in the living room, looking comfortable and relaxed, was Gabriel. With only a slight movement of his emerald-colored eyes, he invited Durand to join him. The Frenchman hesitated. Then, after receiving a nudge from Lavon, he approached with the slowness of a condemned man being led to the gallows.

“You obviously recognize me,” Gabriel said, watching Durand intently as he settled into his seat. “That’s usually a liability in our business. But not in this case.”

“How so?”

“Because you know I’m a professional, just like you. You also know I’m not someone who would waste valuable time by making idle threats.”

Gabriel looked down at the coffee table. On it were two matching attaché cases.

“Time bombs?” asked Durand.

“Your future.” Gabriel placed his hand on one of the attaché cases. “This one contains enough evidence to put a man in prison for the rest of his life.”

“And the other?”

“One million euros in cash.”

“What do I have to do for it?”

Gabriel smiled. “What you do best.”

22 QUAI DES CÉLESTINS, PARIS

THERE WAS A BOTTLE OF Armagnac on the sideboard. After hearing Gabriel’s proposal, Maurice Durand poured himself a very large glass. He hesitated before drinking it.

“Don’t worry, Maurice,” said Gabriel reassuringly. “We save the poisoned brandy for special occasions.”

Durand took a guarded sip. “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” he said after a moment. “Why not just steal this object yourself or borrow an item from one of your museums?”

“Because I’m going to tell a story,” replied Gabriel. “And like all good stories, it requires verisimilitude. If an object of great value were to appear suddenly out of thin air, our target would rightly suspect a trap. But if he believes the object has recently been stolen by a band of thieves with a long track record . . .”

“He will assume he’s dealing with professional criminals rather than professional spies.”

Gabriel was silent.

“How clever,” Durand said, raising his glass a fraction of an inch in a mock toast. “What exactly are you looking for?”

“A red-figure Attic vessel, fourth or fifth century BC, something large enough to turn heads on the illicit market.”

“Would you like it to come from a public source or private?”

“Private,” replied Gabriel. “No museums.”

“It’s not as difficult as you think.”

“Robbing a museum?”

Durand nodded.

“But it would be bad manners.”

“Suit yourself.” Durand sat down and stared into his drink thoughtfully. “There’s a villa outside Saint-Tropez. It’s located on the Baie de Cavalaire, not far from the estate that used to be owned by that Russian oligarch. His name escapes me.”

“Ivan Kharkov?”

“Yes, that’s him. Know him?”

“Only by reputation.”

“He was killed outside his favorite restaurant in Saint-Tropez. Very messy.”

“So I heard. But you were telling me about his neighbor’s house.”

“It’s not as big as Ivan’s old place, but its owner has impeccable taste.”

“Who is he?”

“Belgian,” said Durand disdainfully. “He inherited an industrial fortune and is doing his level best to spend every last centime of it. A couple of years ago, we relieved him of a Cézanne. It was a replacement job.”

“You left a copy behind.”

“Quite a good one, actually. In fact, our Belgian friend apparently still believes the painting is genuine because to my knowledge he’s never reported the theft to the police.”

“What was it?”

“The House of the Jas de Bouffan.”

“Who handled the forgery?”

“You have your secrets, Mr. Allon, I have mine.”

“Go on.”

“The Belgian has several other Cézannes. He also has a very impressive collection of antiquities. One piece in particular is quite lovely, a terra-cotta hydria by the Amykos Painter, fifth century BC. It depicts two young women presenting gifts to two nude male athletes. Very sensual.”

“You obviously know your Greek pottery.”

“It is a passion of mine.”

“How often is the Belgian at the villa?”

“July and August,” Durand said. “The rest of the year it’s unoccupied except for the caretaker. He has a small cottage on the property.”

“What about security?”

“Surely a man such as yourself realizes there’s no such thing as security. As long as there are no surprises, my men will be in and out of the house within a few minutes. And you will have your Greek pot in short order.”

“I think I’d like a Cézanne, too.”

“Verisimilitude?”

“It’s all in the details, Maurice.”

Durand smiled. He was a detail man himself.

He made but one request, that they resist the temptation to monitor his movements as he went about the business of fulfilling their contract. They readily agreed, despite the fact they had absolutely no intention of living up to their end of the bargain. Maurice Durand had once stolen several hundred million dollars’ worth of paintings in the span of a single summer. One could utilize the services of a criminal like Durand, but only a fool would ever turn his back on him.

For three days, he kept to his beau quartier at the northern end of the eighth arrondissement. His schedule, like his shop, was filled with pleasant oddities from another time. He drank two café crèmes each morning at the same table of the same brasserie with no company other than a stack of newspapers, which he purchased from the same tabac. After that, he would cross the narrow street and, at the stroke of ten, disappear into his gilded little cage. Occasionally, he was obliged to open its doors to a client or a deliveryman, but for the most part Durand’s confinement remained solitary. Lunch was taken at one and lasted until half past two, when he would return to the shop for the remainder of the afternoon. At five, he would pay a brief visit to Madame Brossard. Then it was back to his table at the brasserie for a glass of Côtes du Rhône, which he drank always with an air of supreme contentment.

For those unlucky souls who were forced to keep watch over this seemingly charmed life, Maurice Durand was the subject of both endless fascination and passionate resentment. Not surprisingly, there were a few members of the team, most notably Yaakov, who believed that Gabriel had erred by placing the opening stage of the operation in the hands of such a man. “Look at the watch reports,” Yaakov demanded over dinner at the team’s primary safe flat near the Bois de Boulogne. “It’s obvious that Maurice has salted away our million euros and has no intention of ever delivering the goods.” Gabriel, however, was unconcerned. Durand had shown himself in the past to be a man of some principle. “He’s also a natural thief,” said Gabriel. “And there’s nothing a thief enjoys more than stealing from the very rich.”

Gabriel’s faith was rewarded the following morning, when Unit 8200 overheard Durand booking first-class accommodations on the midday TGV train to Marseille. Yaakov and Oded made the trip with him, and at five that evening, they observed their quarry make a mildly clandestine meeting in the Old Port with a local fisherman. Later, they would identify the “fisherman” as Pascal Rameau, leader of one of Marseille’s many criminal organizations.

It was at this point that the operation appeared to gather its first momentum, for within twenty-four hours of Durand’s visit, members of Rameau’s crew were casing the Belgian’s lavish villa. Gabriel knew this because two members of his own crew, Yossi and Rimona, had taken a short-term lease on a villa in the hills above the property and were watching it constantly with the help of long-lens cameras and video recorders. They never saw Rameau’s men again. But two nights later, as a violent storm laid siege to the entire length of the Côte d’Azur, they were awakened by the wail of sirens along the coast road. For the next several hours, they watched blue lights flashing despondently in the drive of the Belgian’s seaside palace. The police scanner told them everything they needed to know. One Cézanne, one Greek vase, no arrests. C’est la vie.

It was in all the papers, which is exactly what they had hoped for. The Cézanne was the main attraction; the Greek vase, a lovely hydria by the Amykos Painter, a mere afterthought. The distraught Belgian owner offered a substantial reward for information leading to the recovery of his goods, while his insurers, the great Lloyd’s of London, quietly let it be known that they would consider making a ransom payment. The French police knocked on a few doors and questioned a few of the usual suspects, but after a week they decided they had more important things to do than chase down a swath of canvas and a very old lump of clay. Besides, they had dealt with this band of thieves before. These men were pros, not adventurers, and when they stole something, it never reappeared.

The theft sent the usual tremors of apprehension through the art galleries of Paris, but in Maurice Durand’s world it was but a pebble cast upon an otherwise tranquil surface. They overheard him discussing the case with his favorite waitress at the brasserie, but otherwise his life moved at the same monotonous rhythm. He opened his shop at ten. He lunched at one. And at five o’clock sharp, he treated himself to the pleasures of Madame Brossard and then drank his red wine for the sake of his guiltless little heart.

Finally, a week after the theft, he rang Gabriel on a prearranged number to say the items he had requested—an early twentieth-century Swiss pocket barometer and a brass-and-wood telescope by Merz of Munich—had arrived safely. At Gabriel’s request, Durand delivered the items that evening to the flat overlooking the Pont Marie and departed as quickly as he could. The painting, a landscape of Cézanne’s beloved Mont Saint-Victoire, had been expertly removed from its stretcher and placed in a cardboard tube. The hydria was packed into a nylon Adidas sports bag. Eli Lavon removed it and placed it carefully on the kitchen table. Then he sat there for several minutes with Gabriel at his side, staring at the image of the Greek maidens attending to the nude athletes.

“Someone has to do it,” Lavon said finally, “but it’s not going to be me.”

“I’m a restorer,” said Gabriel. “I couldn’t possibly.”

“And I’m an archaeologist,” Lavon replied defensively. “Besides, I’ve never been one for the rough stuff.”

“I’ve never assassinated a vase.”

“Don’t worry,” Lavon said. “Unlike your previous work, it will only be temporary.”

Gabriel exhaled heavily, returned the hydria to the Adidas sports bag, and gently pushed it over the edge of the table. The sound it made on impact was like the shattering of bone. Lavon slowly opened the zipper and peered mournfully inside.

“Murderer,” he whispered softly.

“Someone had to do it.”

The Cézanne, however, received no such maltreatment. Indeed, during the final hours of the team’s stay in Paris, Gabriel ministered tenderly to its wounds as though it were a patient in intensive care. His goal was to stabilize the image so that the painting could one day be returned to its owner in the same condition in which it had been found. No ordinary art thief would ever have taken such a step, but Gabriel’s commitment to operational verisimilitude went only so far. He was a restorer first and foremost, and caring for the Cézanne helped to relieve his guilt over breaking the vase.

He briefly considered returning the canvas to a stretcher, but ruled out such a procedure on the grounds it would make the painting too difficult to move securely. Instead, he adhered a protective layer of tissue paper to the surface using a rabbit-skin glue that he concocted in the kitchen of the Bois de Boulogne safe flat. Next morning, when the glue had dried, he returned the canvas carefully to its cardboard tube and ferried it to the Israeli Embassy at 3 rue Rabelais. The Office station chief was understandably apprehensive about accepting stolen property, but he relented after receiving a phone call from Uzi Navot. Gabriel tucked the painting into a moisture-free corner of the station’s vault and set the thermostat to a comfortable sixty-eight degrees. Then he headed to the Gare de Lyon and boarded the midday train for Zurich.

He passed the four-hour journey plotting the next phase of the operation, and by six that evening, he was guiding a rented Audi sedan down the graceful sweep of Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse. Seated next to him, the Adidas sports bag between his feet, was Eli Lavon. “Switzerland,” he said, staring glumly out his window. “Why does it always have to be Switzerland?”

23 ST. MORITZ, SWITZERLAND

BY THEN IT WAS MARCH, which meant that St. Moritz, the quaint former spa town in the Upper Engadine valley, was once more in the grip of madness. On the Via Serlas, perhaps the world’s costliest shopping street, faded aristocrats wandered aimlessly from Chopard to Gucci to Chanel to Bulgari, along with film stars, supermodels, politicians, tycoons, and all their entourages and assorted hangers-on. They fought over the best tables at La Marmite or the Terrace and at night smiled their way into the private rooms at Dracula or the King’s Club. Only a handful ever bothered to put on a pair of skis. In St. Moritz, skiing was the pastime of those who didn’t have something better to do.

But tucked away on a quiet side street like an island of reason was the stately old Jägerhof Hotel. She was dowdy and dour and, most of all, unfashionable, which troubled her not one whit. Indeed, she seemed to revel in it. Her restaurants were without note; her amenities, such as they were, were second to everyone. She had no spa or indoor swimming pool and no nightclub to lure those who liked to see their names in boldface. The only music one ever heard at the Jägerhof was the sound of the string quartet that sawed away in the salon each afternoon during the drowsy lull euphemistically referred to as après ski.

Her rooms, like her manners, were dusty relics from another time. Returning guests tended to request the lower floors because the lift was forever breaking down, while those seeking a bargain gravitated to the cramped garrets. Staying in one was a tall, lanky Russian with gray eyes and bloodless skin the color of the snow atop the Piz Bernina. Sadly, he had severely twisted his knee on the first day of his holiday and had been largely confined to his room ever since. Occasionally, he would sit in the tiny arrow slit of a window and gaze longingly into the street, but for the most part he remained in his bed with his injured leg elevated. To pass the time, he watched movies and listened to music on his notebook computer. The chambermaids described him as polite to a fault, which was unusual for a Russian.

The same could not be said, however, of the doctor who appeared at the Jägerhof four days after the Russian’s unfortunate accident. He was of medium height and build with a full head of silvery hair and watchful brown eyes that were partially concealed by thick spectacles. Those members of the Jägerhof staff who were unfortunate enough to encounter him during his brief visit would later remark that he seemed better suited to inflicting wounds than healing them.

“How’s your knee?” asked Gabriel.

“It still hurts if I put too much weight on it.”

“It doesn’t look so good.”

“You should have seen it two days ago.”

The knee was propped upon a pair of pillows embroidered with the Jägerhof’s discreet crest. Gabriel winced mildly as he inspected the swelling.

“Where did all those bruises come from?”

“I had to hit it a few times.”

“With what? A sledgehammer?”

“I used the bottle of complimentary champagne.”

“How was it?”

“As a blunt instrument, it was fine.”

Gabriel went to the window and peered down at the postcard-perfect Swiss square. On one side, a limousine was docking with the slowness of a luxury liner at the doorway of one of the resort’s pricier hotels. On the other, three fur-drenched women were posing for a photograph next to a horse-drawn carriage. After a moment, the carriage moved off to the gentle clatter of snow-muffled hoof beats, revealing the understated entrance of Galleria Naxos. Through the large front display window, Gabriel could see David Girard speaking to a customer about one of the gallery’s better pieces, a first-century Roman statue of a now-limbless adolescent boy posed in recline. The soundtrack of the conversation, which was being conducted in German, issued softly from the speakers of Mikhail’s notebook computer.

“Where’s the transmitter hidden?”

“On his desk.”

“How did you manage that?”

“During my one and only visit to the shop, I left behind a very costly gold pen. Monsieur Girard has been good enough to hold on to it for me until I have a chance to drop by again. The only problem is that it’s right next to the telephone. Every time someone calls the gallery, it sounds like a fire alarm is going off.”

“How’s business?”

“Slow. He generally sees one or two customers in the morning and a few more in the late afternoon when the slopes start to close down. By five o’clock, the place is dead.”

“Any employees?”

“The wife usually spends a couple of hours in the gallery after she drops off Hansel and Gretel at the daycare center. They live a few miles from St. Moritz in a town called Samedan. Nice place. I have a feeling Daoud is the only member of Hezbollah who lives there.”

“His name is David,” Gabriel said pointedly. “And for the moment, we can’t prove he’s a member of anything except the Swiss Association of Dealers in Art and Antiques.”

“Until he sees that pretty Greek pot.”

“It’s possible he won’t bite.”

“He’ll bite,” Mikhail said assuredly. “Then we’ll burn him to a crisp and turn him around, just the way you drew it up on the chalkboard at King Saul Boulevard.”

“Sometimes operations don’t go as planned.”

“Tell me about it.” Mikhail examined Gabriel for a moment. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea for you to be playing footsy with someone from Hezbollah right now.”

“I barely recognize myself in this getup.”

“Your famous face isn’t the only reason you should think twice about walking into that gallery.”

Gabriel turned and looked at Mikhail directly. “You don’t think I’m up to it? Is that what you’re saying?”

“It hasn’t been that long since Nadia al-Bakari died in your arms in the Empty Quarter. Maybe you should let someone else go in there and dangle the bait.”

“Like who?”

“Me.”

“You can barely walk.”

“I’ll take some aspirin.”

“How much do you know about red-figure Attic vases?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“That might be a problem.”

Mikhail was silent.

“Are we finished?” asked Gabriel.

“We’re finished.”

Gabriel opened the aluminum attaché case he had brought with him into the hotel. Inside was a single fragment of the hydria, carefully wrapped in baize cloth, along with several eight-by-ten photographs of the remaining pieces of the vase. With the flip of a small interior switch, Gabriel activated the case’s audio and video transmission system. Then he closed the case and looked at Mikhail.

“Are you picking up the signal?”

“Got it.”

Gabriel walked over to the mirror and inspected the unfamiliar face reflected in the glass. Satisfied with his appearance, he departed the room without another word and headed downstairs to the Jägerhof’s dreary lobby. By the time he stepped into the street, he was no longer the taciturn physician who had come to treat an injured Russian; he was Anton Drexler of Premier Antiquities Services, Hamburg, Germany. Ten minutes later, having performed a thorough check for surveillance, he presented himself at the entrance of Galleria Naxos. In the window lay the limbless Roman boy, looking perversely like the victim of a roadside bomb. Herr Drexler examined the statue for a moment with the discerning gaze of a professional. Then, after ringing the bell and announcing his intentions, he was admitted without further delay.

24 ST. MORITZ, SWITZERLAND

THE EXHIBITION ROOM WAS BRILLIANTLY lit and artfully staged to avoid the impression of clutter—here a selection of Greek kraters and amphorae, here a litter of Egyptian bronze cats, here a gathering of marble amputees and disembodied heads, price available on request. In the back corner of the gallery was a Chinese lacquer-finished table where David Girard, aka Daoud Ghandour, sat waiting to receive him. He wore a dark blazer, a zippered sweater, and trim-cut trousers that looked as though they were made of velvet. A sleek black telephone was wedged between his shoulder and his ear, and he was scribbling something illegible on a piece of paper using Mikhail’s expensive gold pen. Gabriel could only imagine the scraping sound it was making in the garret room of the Jägerhof Hotel.

Finally, Girard murmured a few words of French into the phone and replaced the receiver. He appraised his visitor in silence for a moment with his soft brown eyes, then, without rising, asked to see a business card. Gabriel wordlessly granted his wish.

“Your card has no address and no telephone number,” Girard said in German.

“I’m something of a minimalist.”

“Why haven’t I heard of you?”

“I try not to make waves,” Gabriel responded with a docile smile. “High seas make it harder for me to do my job.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“I find things. Lost dogs, loose change behind the couch cushions, hidden gems in cellars and attics.”

“You’re a dealer?”

“Not like you, of course,” Gabriel said with as much modesty as he could muster.

“Who sent you?”

“A friend in Rome.”

“Does the friend have a name?”

“The friend is like me,” Gabriel said. “He prefers calm waters.”

“Does he find things, too?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Girard returned the business card and, with a movement of his eyes, asked to see the contents of Herr Drexler’s attaché case.

“Perhaps you have some place a bit more private,” suggested Gabriel, glancing briefly toward the gallery’s large window overlooking the crowded square.

“Is there a problem?”

“Not at all,” answered Gabriel in his most reassuring tone. “It’s just that St. Moritz isn’t what it used to be.”

Girard studied Gabriel before rising to his feet and walking over to a cipher-protected door. On the other side was a climate-controlled storage room filled with inventory that had yet to find its way onto the gallery’s main exhibition floor, and probably never would. Gabriel led himself on a brief tour before popping the combination locks of the attaché case. Then he unveiled the fragment of the hydria with a magician’s flourish and laid it carefully on an examination table so Girard could see the image clearly.

“I don’t deal in fragments,” he said.

“Neither do I.”

Gabriel handed him the stack of photographs. The last showed the hydria pieced loosely together.

“It’s missing a few small surface fragments here and there,” Gabriel said, “but it’s nothing that can’t be repaired by a good restorer. I have a man who can do the work if you’re interested.”

“I prefer to use my own restorer,” Girard responded.

“I assumed that would be the case.”

Girard pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and examined the fragment of pottery with a professional-grade magnifier. “It looks to me like the work of the Amykos Painter. Probably about 420 BC.”

“I concur.”

“Where did you find it?”

“Here and there,” answered Gabriel. “Most of the pieces came from old family collections in Germany and here in Switzerland. It took me five years to track them all down.”

“Really?”

Girard returned the fragment and without another word walked over to a computer. After a few keystrokes, a single sheet of paper came shooting out of the color printer. It was an alert, issued by the Swiss Association of Dealers in Art and Antiques. The subject was a red-figure Attic hydria by the Amykos Painter that had been stolen two weeks earlier from a private home in the South of France. Girard placed the alert on the table next to the photos and looked to Herr Drexler for an explanation.

“As you know,” Gabriel said, reciting words that had been written for him by Eli Lavon, “the Amykos Painter was a prolific artist who created numerous stock figures that appear many times throughout his body of work. My hydria is simply a copy of the vessel that was stolen in France.”

“So it’s coincidental?”

“Entirely.”

Girard emitted a dry, humorous laugh. “I’m afraid your friend in Rome has led you astray, because this gallery does not trade in stolen or looted antiquities. It is a violation of our association’s code of ethics, not to mention Swiss law.”

“Actually, Swiss law allows you to acquire a piece if you believe in good faith that it’s not stolen. And I am giving you my assurance, Herr Girard, that this hydria is the result of five years’ work on my part.”

“Forgive me if I’m not willing to accept the word of a man who has no address and no telephone number.”

It was an impressive performance but flawed by the fact that David Girard’s eyes were now fixed on the fragment of pottery. Gabriel had spent enough time around art dealers to see that his target was already calculating an offer. All he needed, thought Gabriel, was a small crack of the whip.

“In fairness, Herr Girard,” Gabriel said, “I should tell you that other parties are interested in acquiring the hydria. But I came to St. Moritz because I was told you had the ability to move merchandise like this with a single phone call.”

“I’m afraid you overestimate my abilities.”

Gabriel smiled as if to say he was having none of it. “Your list of Middle Eastern clients is legendary in the trade, Herr Girard. Surely, you have the means to produce a provenance that will satisfy one of them. By my estimate, the reassembled and restored hydria is worth four hundred thousand Swiss francs. I’d be willing to accept one hundred thousand for the fragments, leaving you a profit of three hundred thousand.” Another smile. “Not bad for the price of a long-distance call to Riyadh or Dubai.”

The dealer lapsed into a contemplative silence, thus surrendering any pretense that he was unwilling to handle the hydria. “Fifty thousand,” he countered, “payable on completion of the sale.”

Gabriel returned the fragment to its baize blanket. “If you want the hydria, Herr Girard, you will pay me the money up front. The price is not negotiable.”

“I need some time.”

“You have twenty-four hours.”

“How do I reach you?”

“You don’t. I’ll call you tomorrow at five for your answer. If it is yes, I will deliver the fragments at six and expect payment in full. If the answer is no, I will hang up, and you will never hear from me again.”

For their safe house, they had rented a handsome, timbered chalet on a snow-covered mountainside above the village, a bargain at five thousand Swiss francs a night. When Gabriel arrived, the entire team greeted him with a standing ovation. Then they played a recording of a phone call David Girard had just placed to a colleague in Hamburg, looking for information about a bottom feeder named Anton Drexler. “I could be mistaken,” Eli Lavon said, smiling, “but it sounds as if we are most definitely in play.”

It seemed no one had ever heard of him. Not a rumor in Zurich. Not a whisper in Geneva. Not so much as a peep in Basel or New York. In fact, the closest thing David Girard found to an actual sighting of a creature called Anton Drexler was a blurry story about someone matching his description trying to sell a couple of forged Greek goddesses to Sotheby’s a few years back. “Or did he call himself Dresden? Sorry I can’t be of more help, David. Lunch next time you’re in town?”

Finding nothing to discourage him from moving forward, Girard began making inquires of a different kind, namely, trying to locate a potential buyer for his potential new acquisition. As Gabriel had predicted, it took but a single phone call to Riyadh, where a lowly prince immediately threw his ghutra into the ring for three hundred thousand Swiss francs. Not content to rest there, Girard then rang a collector in Abu Dhabi who said he was in for three-twenty. A subsequent call to Moscow brought in a Russian oil trader at three-forty, at which point the real bidding began. It ended a few hours later with the Saudi prince reigning supreme at four and a quarter, payable on delivery.

It was then Girard phoned his man at the St. Moritz branch of Bank Julius Baer to request one hundred thousand Swiss francs in cash. He collected the money at four and by four-fifteen was back at the gallery, tapping the tip of Mikhail’s expensive gold pen nervously against the surface of his desk. In the garret room of the Jägerhof Hotel, it sounded like a jackhammer.

“How long do you think he’s going to do that?” Mikhail groaned.

“I suppose until I call him at five o’clock,” answered Gabriel.

“Why don’t you just get it over with?”

“Because Herr Drexler is a man of his word. And he said he would call at five.”

And so they sat together, Mikhail propped on the bed, Gabriel perched in the arrow slit window, David Girard banging away at his desk in anticipation of Herr Drexler’s call. Finally, at the stroke of five, Gabriel dialed the gallery on a disposable cell phone and in terse German posed a simple question.

“Yes or no?” After hearing Girard’s answer, he said, “I’ll be there in an hour. Make sure no one is around when I arrive.”

Gabriel severed the connection and removed the SIM card from the phone. For a moment, there was silence in the room. Then the staccato tapping started up again, even louder than before.

“If he doesn’t stop,” Mikhail said, “I’m going to walk over there and shoot him.”

“We need him to get inside Hezbollah’s funding network,” said Gabriel. “Then you can shoot him.”

During the next sixty minutes, Gabriel and Mikhail would be granted two reprieves from the tapping. The first occurred at 5:10, when Girard’s Swiss wife dropped by unexpectedly for a glass of champagne to celebrate the sale of the hydria. The second came at 5:40, when a guest from the adjacent hotel, apparently having nothing better to do, asked whether he might have a look at the merchandise. He was tall, French speaking, and deeply tanned, and dangling on his arm like a piece of jewelry was a ravishing young girl with short dark hair and a face that looked as though it had been painted by El Greco. They remained inside for fifteen minutes, though the girl spent most of that time studying her reflection in Girard’s windows. Leaving the gallery, they seemed to quarrel briefly until a few words whispered directly into the girl’s ear brought a smile to her childlike face. As they set off arm in arm across the square, they walked past Herr Anton Drexler, dealer of suspect antiquities, as though he were invisible.

After making one final check of his wristwatch, Gabriel presented himself at the entrance of Girard’s gallery and, at six precisely, placed his thumb upon the call button. He expected to hear the soothing purr of Girard’s buzzer but instead saw a flash of blinding white light. Then the limbless Roman boy came hurtling toward him through a wall of fire, and together they descended into darkness.

25 ST. MORITZ, SWITZERLAND

THE BOMB HAD BEEN EXPERTLY assembled and planted with care. Initially, the Swiss Federal Police concluded it had been detonated with a timing device, only to discover later it had been set off by a cell phone. The explosion blew out hundreds of windows in the center of the village, triggered a series of avalanches on the highest ski slopes, and collapsed a display of Dom Pérignon bottles in the ornate lobby of the Badrutt’s Palace Hotel. The broken glass was removed with typical Swiss efficiency, and order soon restored. Even so, everyone agreed that St. Moritz, the quaint former spa town in the Upper Engadine valley, would never be the same.

Despite the power of the explosion, only three people lost their lives, including the owner of the antiquities gallery where the bomb had been planted. An additional fifty-four people were wounded, including the president of a major Swiss bank, a famous English footballer, and a Czech supermodel who had come to St. Moritz to console herself after the dissolution of her third marriage. Most of the injured sustained only minor cuts and bruises, but there were numerous broken bones suffered by those blown from their feet by the force of the blast wave.

One of the most seriously injured victims could not be identified. He had been carrying no passport or credit cards at the time of the explosion and afterward could not seem to recall his name or why he was in St. Moritz to begin with. Suffering from numerous lacerations and a severe concussion, he remained hospitalized for several days after the incident, unaware, or so it seemed, that he was the subject of intense interest on the part of the Swiss police.

There was, for a start, the video footage showing him standing at the entrance of the gallery at the time the bomb exploded, wearing a wig and false eyeglasses, and holding an aluminum attaché case—all of which were eventually recovered by crime-scene investigators. And then there was the tall, gray-eyed man with a Russian accent who had tried to carry him from the square before being stopped by police. And the large, multilingual group of tourists who had fled a luxury slope-side chateau just three nights into a weeklong booking. A thorough search of the chateau produced not a single scrap of paper that would indicate the names and identities of those who had stayed there. The same was true of the Russian’s garret room at the Jägerhof Hotel.

The most intriguing piece of evidence, however, was the injured man’s distinctive face, which revealed itself slowly as the swelling receded and the bruising began to fade. It was well known to Swiss intelligence; in fact, there was an entire shelf in the file rooms of the DAP, the Swiss security service, devoted solely to his exploits on the soil of their blessed little land. And now, at long last, he had been delivered helpless into their hands. There were some who wanted to throw a net over him lest he slip through their fingers yet again, but cooler heads prevailed. And so they stood watch outside his door and waited for his injuries to heal. And when he was fit enough to leave the hospital, they placed him in handcuffs and took him away.

They bundled him into a helicopter without bothering to tell the local kantonspolizei and flew him at high speed to the headquarters of the Swiss Federal Police on the Nussbaumstrasse in Bern. After fingerprinting him and photographing his face from every conceivable angle, they locked him away in a holding cell. It had a small flat-screen television, a writing desk stocked with pens and stationery, and a comfortable bed with starched linens. Even the Swiss police, thought Gabriel, were excellent hoteliers.

They left him alone for several hours to ponder his predicament, then, without warning or legal representation, brought him handcuffed to an interrogation room. Waiting there was the officer in charge of Gabriel’s case. He called himself Ziegler. No first name, no rank, no small talk—just Ziegler. He was tall and Alpine, with the broad, square shoulders of a cross-country skier and a ruddy complexion. Arrayed on the table before him were many photographs of Gabriel at different stages of his career, and in various levels of disguise. They showed him entering and leaving banks, crossing hotel lobbies and borders, and, in one, walking along the embankment of a leaden Zurich canal in the company of the renowned Swiss violinist Anna Rolfe. Ziegler seemed especially proud of the display. Obviously, he had put a great deal of thought into it.

“We have a theory,” he began as Gabriel sat.

“I can hardly wait.”

Ziegler’s face remained as placid as a bottomless Swiss lake. “It seems that before coming to St. Moritz, you made a brief stop in France, where you stole a painting by Cézanne and a two-thousand-year-old Greek hydria. You then transported the vase in pieces across the border and attempted to sell it to David Girard of the Galleria Naxos. What Girard didn’t realize, however, is that you never had any intention of delivering the vase, since the true purpose of your little ruse de guerre was to kill him.”

“Why would I want to kill a Swiss antiquities dealer?”

“Because, as you already know, that antiquities dealer wasn’t Swiss. Well,” Ziegler added with a xenophobic frown, “not truly Swiss. He was born in southern Lebanon. And from what we’ve learned, he was apparently still doing plenty of business there. Which is why Israeli intelligence wanted him dead.”

“If we’d wanted him dead, we would have done it in a way that didn’t kill two innocent people in the process.”

“How noble of you, Herr Allon.”

“You seem to be forgetting one other minor detail,” said Gabriel wearily.

“What’s that?”

“That bomb nearly killed me.”

“Yes,” Ziegler replied matter-of-factly. “Perhaps the legendary Gabriel Allon has lost a step.”

Gabriel was returned to his holding cell and fed a proper Swiss meal of potato raclette and breaded veal. Afterward, he watched the evening news in German on SF 1. Fifteen minutes elapsed before they got around to a follow-up report on the bombing in St. Moritz. It was a feature piece about how the affair had adversely impacted holiday bookings. The story made no mention of David Girard’s connections to Hezbollah. Nor did it refer to any arrests in the case, which Gabriel regarded as an encouraging sign.

After dinner, a doctor silently inspected his cuts and changed a few of his bandages. Then he was taken back to the interrogation room for an evening session. This time, Ziegler was nowhere to be found. In his place was a thin officer with the pallor of a man who had no time for outdoor pursuits. He introduced himself as Christoph Bittel of the DAP’s counterterror division, which meant he was more spy than policeman. It was another encouraging sign. Policemen made arrests. Spies made deals.

“Before we begin,” he said evenly, “you should know that Ziegler and the Federal Department of Justice and Police intend to file formal charges against you tomorrow morning. They have more than enough evidence to ensure that you spend the rest of your life in a Swiss jail. You should also know that there are numerous people here in Bern who would love to be granted the honor of escorting you to your cell.”

“I had nothing to do with planting that bomb.”

“I know.”

Bittel picked up a remote control and pointed at a video monitor in the corner of the room. A few seconds later, two figures appeared on the screen—the tall French-speaking man and the girl with an El Greco face. Gabriel watched again as the man whispered intimately into her ear.

“These are the real bombers,” Bittel said, pausing the video. “The girl concealed the device in the gallery’s powder room while her colleague kept Girard busy.”

“Who are they?”

“We were hoping you’d be able to tell us.”

“I’d never seen them before that night.”

Bittel scrutinized Gabriel dubiously for a moment before switching off the video monitor. “You are a very lucky man, Allon. It seems you have a number of friends in high places. One of them has interceded on your behalf.”

“So that’s it? I’m free to go?”

“Not quite yet. You did violate numerous laws prohibiting foreign espionage activity—laws we take very seriously. We are a welcoming country,” he added, as though he were sharing highly classified information, “but we insist that visitors show us the courtesy of signing the guestbook on the way in, preferably under their own names.”

“And what would you have done if we’d asked for your help?”

“We would have sent you away and dealt with it ourselves,” Bittel said. “We’re Swiss. We don’t like outsiders meddling in our affairs.”

“Neither do we. But unfortunately we have to put up with it on a daily basis.”

“I’m afraid that’s what it means to be an Israeli,” Bittel said with a philosophical nod. “History dealt you a lousy hand, but that doesn’t mean you have the right to treat our country as some sort of intelligence resort.”

“My visits to your country were never all that enjoyable.”

“But they were always productive. And that’s all that counts. You’re industrious, Allon. We admire that.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“We would like you to close out your Swiss accounts.”

“Meaning?”

“I ask questions about your past operations, and you answer them. Truthfully, for a change,” he added pointedly.

“That could take a while.”

“I have nowhere else to go. And neither do you, Allon.”

“And if I refuse?”

“You will be formally charged with espionage, terrorism, and murder. And you will spend your hard-earned retirement here in Switzerland.”

Gabriel made a momentary show of thought. “I’m afraid it’s not good enough.”

“What’s not good enough?”

“The deal,” said Gabriel. “I want a better deal.”

“You’re in no position to make demands, Allon.”

“You’ll never put me on trial, Bittel. I know far too much about the sins of your bankers and industrialists. It would be a public-relations disaster for Switzerland, just like the Holocaust accounts scandal.” He paused. “You remember that, don’t you? It was in all the papers.”

This time it was Bittel who made a display of deliberation. “All right, Allon. What do you want?”

“I think it’s time to open a new chapter in Israeli-Swiss relations.”

“And how might we do that?”

“You’d obviously been monitoring David Girard for some time,” Gabriel said. “I want copies of your files, including all the telephone and e-mail intercepts.”

“Out of the question.”

“It’s a brave new world, Bittel.”

“I’ll need the approval of my superiors.”

“I can wait,” Gabriel replied. “As you said, I have nowhere else to go.”

Bittel rose and left the interrogation room. Two minutes later, he returned. The Swiss were nothing if not efficient.

“I think it would be easier if we did this in reverse chronological order,” Bittel said, opening his notebook. “A few months ago, a resident of Zurich was beheaded in a hotel room in Dubai. We were wondering whether you could tell us why.”

Many years earlier, a Swiss dissident named Professor Emil Jacobi had given Gabriel a sound piece of advice. “When you’re dealing with Switzerland,” he explained, “it’s best to keep one thing in mind. Switzerland is not a real country. It’s a business, and it’s run like a business.”

Therefore, it came as no surprise to Gabriel that Bittel conducted the debriefing with the cold formality of a financial transaction. His manner was that of a private banker—polite but distant, thorough but discreet. He did his due diligence, but not with undue malice. Gabriel had the distinct impression the security man wanted nothing on the books that might cause him a problem later, that he was merely checking boxes and tallying up a ledger. But then, that was the way of the Swiss banker. The banker wanted the client’s money, but he didn’t necessarily care to know where it had come from.

The two men worked their way backward in time until they arrived at the Augustus Rolfe affair, Gabriel’s first foray into the deplorable conduct of the Swiss banks during the Second World War. He was careful to say nothing incriminatory, and even more careful not to betray Office sources or tradecraft. When pushed by Bittel to reveal more, he gently pushed back. And when threatened, he issued threats of his own. He offered no apology for his actions and sought no absolution. His was a confession without guilt or atonement. It was a business transaction, nothing more.

“Have I left anything out?” asked Bittel.

“You don’t really expect me to answer that, do you?”

Bittel closed the notebook and summoned a warder to take Gabriel back to his cell. A proper Swiss breakfast was waiting, along with a toiletry kit and a change of clothing. He ate while watching the morning news. Once again, there was no mention of his detainment. In fact, the only news from St. Moritz had to do with an important World Cup ski race.

After breakfast, he was escorted to the showers and told he had one hour to bathe and dress. Bittel was waiting when he returned to his cell. He had two aluminum attaché cases of Swiss manufacture. In one was the material Gabriel had requested. In the other were the fragments of the broken hydria. “If you prefer,” Bittel offered, “we can tell the French police we found it in an airport locker.”

“Thanks,” Gabriel said, “but I’ll take care of it.”

“Sooner rather than later,” Bittel admonished. “Let’s go. Your ride is here.”

They headed upstairs to the main lobby of the building. Outside a Mercedes sedan waited in the drive, its tailpipes gently smoking. Bittel shook Gabriel’s hand warmly, as if they had spent the night watching old movies together. Then Gabriel turned and ducked into the back of the car. Seated opposite, a mobile phone pressed to his ear, was Uzi Navot. He looked at the bandages on Gabriel’s face and frowned.

“Looks like they gave you a good going-over.”

“It was worth it.”

“What did you get?”

“A suitcase full of help from my new best friends in the DAP.”

“Good,” Navot said. “Because at this moment, we need all the help we can get.”

26 BERN, SWITZERLAND

GABRIEL AND NAVOT ASSUMED the Swiss had planted transmitters in both attaché cases, so they said nothing more until they were safely inside the Israeli Embassy. It was located in a brooding old house in the diplomatic quarter, on a narrow street that was closed to normal civilian traffic. In anticipation of their arrival, the staff had filled the secure communications room with finger sandwiches and Swiss chocolates. Navot swore softly to himself as he lowered his thick frame into a chair.

“When Shamron was running the Office, the local station chiefs always made certain to have a few packs of his Turkish cigarettes on hand. But whenever I arrive, they put out a platter of food. Sometimes I get the distinct impression I’m being fattened up for slaughter.”

“You’re the most popular chief since Shamron, Uzi. The troops adore you. More important, they respect you. And so does the prime minister.”

“But all that could change in the blink of an eye if I don’t get Iran right,” Navot said. “Thanks to you, we were able to slow them down for a while, but sabotage and assassinations won’t work forever. At some point in the near future, the Iranians will cross a red line, beyond which it will be impossible to stop them from becoming a nuclear power. I’m supposed to tell the prime minister when that’s about to happen. And if I’m wrong by so much as a few days, we’ll have no choice but to live under the threat of an Iranian bomb.” Navot looked at Gabriel seriously. “How would you like to have that hanging over your head?”

“I wouldn’t. That’s why I told Shamron to make you the chief instead of me.”

“Any chance you might reconsider?”

“I’m afraid I’d be a letdown after you, Uzi.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence.” Navot pushed the tray of food toward Gabriel. “Eat something. You must be starving after everything you went through.”

“Actually, they took good care of me.”

“What did they feed you?”

Gabriel told him.

“Was it any good?”

“The raclette was delicious.”

“I’ve always loved raclette.”

“It’s potatoes smothered in cheese. What’s not to love?”

Navot plucked an egg and watercress sandwich from the tray and popped it into his mouth. “I’m sorry about having to leave you behind in St. Moritz, but I figured it would be easier to get one agent out of Swiss custody than nine. Thankfully, we had some help.”

“Who?”

“Your friends at the Vatican.”

“Donati?”

“Higher up.”

“Please don’t tell me you got His Holiness involved in this.”

“I’m afraid he involved himself,” Navot said.

“How?”

“He had Alois Metzler of the Swiss Guard place a few discreet calls to Bern. Once Metzler got involved, it was only a matter of time before they let you out. The Office was able to stay entirely on the sidelines.”

“I had to pay a toll to get out.”

“How heavy?”

Gabriel told him about the debriefing.

“Was any of what you said actually true?”

“A little.”

“Good boy.” Another sandwich disappeared into Navot’s mouth.

“I don’t suppose you’ve managed to identify the two people who arrived at the gallery before me.”

“Of course we have,” Navot said, brushing the crumbs from his fingertips. “The girl is a fresh-faced newcomer, but her boyfriend is well known to us. His name is Ali Montazeri.”

“Iranian?”

Navot nodded. “Ali is a proud alumnus of the Qods Force. He’s now employed by VEVAK as a hired gun and assassin. He’s responsible for the murder of dozens of Iranian dissidents in Europe and the Middle East. In fact, he actually tried to kill me once when I was working out of Paris.”

“Why would the Iranians send one of their best assassins to Switzerland to kill a Hezbollah operative?”

“Good question.” Navot was silent for a moment. “While you were eating veal and raclette in your Swiss jail cell, the Office was overwhelmed with a new wave of intelligence suggesting Hezbollah is about to hit us. We’re talking about something big, Gabriel.”

“How big?”

“Nine-eleven big,” said Navot. “Big enough to start a war. And based on what we’re seeing in southern Lebanon, it looks like Hezbollah is preparing for one. They’re deploying their battle-hardened fighters close to our border. Their missiles are on the move, too.”

“Do we know anything more about potential targets?”

“All the chatter still points to Europe, which is why the timing of David Girard’s death is so interesting. Dina has a funny feeling there might be a connection.”

“I get nervous when Dina has a funny feeling.”

“So do I.”

“How certain are you that the man who planted that bomb was Ali Montazeri?”

“One hundred percent.”

“I suppose we should probably tell our new friends the Swiss about this.”

“It would be the honorable thing to do,” Navot said. “But for the moment, I’d rather borrow a page from the Iranian playbook.”

“Which one?”

“Khod’eh.”

“Tricking one’s enemies into a misjudgment of one’s true position?”

“Correct.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“First we deceive the Iranians into thinking they got away with one in St. Moritz. Then we take that load of material the Swiss gave us back to King Saul Boulevard and put it in Dina’s hands.”

“There’s something else we should do,” said Gabriel.

“What’s that?”

“Find someone to put that Greek vase back together.”

“Can’t you do it?”

“Apples and oranges.”

Navot looked down at the plate of sandwiches. “You sure you’re not hungry? They’re really quite good.”

“You go ahead, Uzi.”

“Maybe we should wrap them up for the ride home. The food on El Al isn’t what it used to be.”

They made the 12:45 flight out of Zurich’s Kloten Airport, and by half past five they were touching down at Ben Gurion. Navot’s armored Peugeot limousine was waiting on the tarmac, surrounded by twice the usual number of bodyguards. Leaning against the hood, her blue-jeaned legs crossed at the ankles, her arms folded beneath her breasts, was Chiara. She held Gabriel silently for a long time, her tearstained face buried against the side of his neck. Then she kissed his lips and gently touched the bandages on his cheeks.

“You look terrible.”

“Actually, I feel much worse.”

“I’d tell you to go home and get a few hours of sleep, but I’m afraid there isn’t time for that.”

“What’s wrong?”

She handed a slip of paper to Navot. He read it by the glow of the limousine’s headlamps.

“Hezbollah’s military commander is telling his forces to prepare for a massive Israeli retaliation within the next two weeks.” Navot squeezed the message into a ball. “That means it’s for real. They’re going to hit us, Gabriel. Very hard. And very soon.”

As it happened, Gabriel’s interrogator from the Swiss security service was true to his word, and then some. Eli Lavon likened the treasure trove of intelligence to the discovery of a hill town from a previously unknown civilization. What made it all the more remarkable, he said, was that it had been supplied by a service that had always been profoundly hostile to Israel’s interests, even its very existence. “Perhaps we’re not alone after all,” he told the team over dinner that night. “If the Swiss can open their doors to us in our hour of need, anything is possible.”

It seemed that David Girard, aka Daoud Ghandour, had popped up on the DAP’s internal radar not long after he was granted the bright red Swiss passport that allowed him to enter and leave the countries of the Middle East at will. Included in the material was the original memo from the chief of Onyx, Switzerland’s sophisticated electronic eavesdropping service, raising concerns about the phone and e-mail traffic of the Galleria Naxos, not to mention its financial transactions. The DAP was good enough to include the attached report, along with all subsequent updates from Onyx. When added to the intelligence already in the team’s possession, the material provided incontrovertible proof that Galleria Naxos had been little more than a fund-raising front for Hezbollah. Just as clear, however, was the link between the gallery and Carlo Marchese. The team was able to trace no fewer than fifty wire transfers that had flowed from David Girard, through the Lebanon Byzantine Bank, and eventually to accounts controlled by Carlo at the Vatican Bank. Here was the cordata that Gabriel had been looking for—the rope linking Carlo to the terrorists of Hezbollah. The Swiss had the proof all along. They simply didn’t possess the key to unlock the code.

For the moment, however, Carlo was of secondary concern to the team, because with each passing day it became evident that David Girard had been involved in more than just fund-raising. There was the phone call he made, six months earlier, to a number in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon that the Office had linked to a local Hezbollah chieftain. And the one he made, two weeks after that, to a number in Cairo linked to one of the numerous Hezbollah cells that had taken root in chaotic postrevolutionary Egypt. And the two hundred thousand dollars he paid to a dealer of Thai antiquities in Bangkok, a hotbed of Hezbollah activity in Southeast Asia.

“If I had to guess,” said Dina, “the late David Girard was a postman. He was using his job in the antiquities biz as cover to deliver secret mail to Hezbollah cells scattered around the world.”

“So why would the Iranians want him dead?”

“Maybe the mail he was carrying had something to do with the attack that’s coming. Or maybe . . .”

“What, Dina?”

“Maybe it had a Tehran postmark.”

In the end, it was not Swiss high technology that would provide the answer, but a good old-fashioned surveillance photograph. Snapped with a concealed camera, it showed David Girard riding a streetcar in Zurich, apparently alone. For three days, it hung on a cluttered wall in Room 456C, more for decoration than anything else, until Dina passed by it on her way to the file rooms and froze suddenly in her tracks. Ripping the photo from the wall, she stared not at Girard but at the lightly bearded figure seated next to him. The man’s head was turned away from Girard, as were his powerfully built shoulders, and the sun streaming through the streetcar’s windows appeared to set fire to the crystal of the heavy dive watch he was wearing on his right wrist. As a result, it drew Dina’s eyes to the back of his hand, and it was then she noticed the bandage. “It’s him,” she whispered. “It’s none other than the devil himself.”

They compared the photograph of the man on the Zurich streetcar to every known image they had of him in the library, but the computers said there was insufficient data to make a positive identification. Dina lifted her delicate chin resolutely and declared the computers mistaken. It was him; she was certain of it. She would stake her career on it. “Besides,” she added, “don’t look at the face. Look at the hand.” The hand that had been pierced by an Israeli round in Lebanon when he was helping to turn a ragtag bunch of Shiites into the world’s most formidable terrorist force. The hand that was drenched in blood. It was Massoud, she said. Massoud, the lucky one.

And so Gabriel marched her upstairs and allowed her to state her case directly to Uzi Navot. Her words drained the color from his face and caused his eyes to move involuntarily toward the latest stack of intelligence suggesting an attack was imminent. At the conclusion of the briefing, Navot asked for recommendations, and Gabriel gave him only one. There were obvious risks, he said, but they far outweighed the risks of doing nothing.

Navot hurried up the hill to Jerusalem to seek the approval of the prime minister, and within an hour he had his operational charter. All that remained was the obligatory courtesy call on the Americans, a job he happily assigned to Gabriel. “Whatever you do,” he said during the drive to Ben Gurion, “don’t ask for their permission. Just find out whether there are any landmines that are going to blow up in our face. This is not some faction of the PLO we are talking about. This is the fucking Persian Empire.”

27 HERNDON, VIRGINIA

IT HAD BEEN FARMLAND ONCE, but long ago it had been swallowed up by metropolitan Washington’s seemingly unstoppable westward expansion. Now the only things that grew there were large tract homes of shrinking value and wholesome-looking children who spent far too much time roaming the darkest corners of the Internet. The names of the meandering cul-de-sacs spoke of boundless American optimism—Sunnyside and Apple Blossom, Fairfield and Crest View—but they could not conceal the fact that America, Israel’s last friend in the world, had entered a state of decline.

The two-story brick home near the end of Stillwater Court differed from the adjacent residences only in that its windows were bulletproof. For many years, the neighbors had been led to believe that the man who lived there worked in one of the high-tech companies that lined the Dulles Corridor. Then came the promotion that required him to travel in an armored Escalade, and before long the neighbors realized they had a spy in their midst. But not just any spy; Adrian Carter was the chief of the National Clandestine Service, the CIA’s operational division. In fact, Carter had served in the post longer than any of his predecessors, a feat he attributed more to stubbornness than talent. But then, that was typical of Carter. One of the last Agency executives to come from New England Protestant stock, he believed vanity was a sin exceeded only by cheating at golf.

Despite the fact it was only March, a warm sun baked Gabriel’s neck as he crossed Carter’s broad lawn, a CIA minder at his side. Carter was waiting in the open doorway. He had the tousled, thinning hair of a university professor and a mustache that had gone out of fashion with disco music, Crock-Pots, and the nuclear freeze. His tan chinos were in need of a pressing. His cotton crewneck pullover was starting to fray at the elbow.

“Forgive me for dragging you to my home,” he said, shaking Gabriel’s hand, “but this is my first day off in a month, and I couldn’t face going to Langley or to one of our safe houses.”

“I’d be happy to never see the inside of another safe house again.”

“So why are you back?” Carter asked seriously. “And what the hell happened to your face?”

“I was standing too close to a Swiss antiquities gallery when a bomb exploded inside.”

“St. Moritz?”

Gabriel nodded.

“I knew this was going to be good.”

“You haven’t heard the best part yet.”

Carter smiled. “Come inside,” he said, closing the door behind them. “I sent my wife out for a long walk. And don’t worry. She took Molly with her.”

“Who’s Molly?”

“Woof, woof.”

A buffet lunch waited on the screened-in porch overlooking Carter’s green patch of the American dream. Gabriel dutifully filled his plate with cold cuts and pasta salad but left it untouched as he recounted the strange journey that had taken him from St. Peter’s Basilica to the home of America’s most senior spy. At the conclusion of the briefing, he handed over two photographs. The first showed Ali Montazeri and the El Greco girl departing the Galleria Naxos in St. Moritz. The second showed the gallery’s owner sitting in the carriage of a Zurich streetcar, apparently alone.

“Look carefully at the man seated to his left,” said Gabriel. “Do you recognize him?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“How about now?”

Gabriel gave Carter another photograph of the man. This time, it showed him entering the Iranian Embassy in Berlin.

Carter looked up sharply. “Massoud?”

“In the flesh.”

The son of an Episcopal minister, Carter swore under his breath.

“Our sentiments exactly.”

Carter placed the photograph on the table next to the others and stared at it in silence. Massoud Rahimi was one of those rare inhabitants of the secret world who required no introduction. In fact, most never bothered with his family name. He was just Massoud, a man whose fingerprints were on every major act of terrorism linked to Iran since the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. These days, Massoud worked from the Iranian Embassy in Berlin, which doubled as VEVAK’s main Western forward-operating base for terror. He carried a diplomatic passport under another name and claimed to be a low-level functionary in the consular section. Even the Germans, who maintained uncomfortably close trade relations with Iran, didn’t believe a word of it.

“So what’s your theory?” asked Carter.

“Let’s just say we don’t believe it was a coincidence that Massoud and David Girard were riding the same streetcar in Zurich.”

“Do you think Massoud ordered the bombing in St. Moritz?”

“That’s Massoud’s way,” said Gabriel. “He’s never been shy about inflicting a little martyrdom on his own side when he has an important secret to protect.”

“And now you want to find out the nature of that secret.”

“Exactly.”

“How?”

“We were hoping Massoud would agree to tell us himself.”

“You’re thinking about trying to buy him off?”

“Massoud would sooner slit his own wrists than accept money from Jews.”

“A coerced defection?”

“There isn’t time.”

Carter fell into a heavy silence. “I don’t need to remind you that Massoud carries a diplomatic passport,” he said after a moment. “And that makes him untouchable.”

“No one is untouchable. Not when lives are at stake.”

“Massoud is,” Carter responded. “And if you touch so much as a hair on his head, it will be open season on every Israeli diplomat in the world.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, Adrian, it already is. Besides,” Gabriel added, “I didn’t come here for advice.”

“So why are you here?”

“I want to know whether the playing field is clear.”

“I can state categorically that the Agency is nowhere near the field,” said Carter. “But you should know that the Germans thought about making a run at him a couple of years ago.”

“What kind of run?”

“Apparently, Massoud has a taste for the finer things in life. He routinely skims a bit off the top of his operational budget and squirrels it away in banks all over Europe. The BND had him cold. They were planning to sit down with Massoud for a little chat, at the end of which they would give him a simple choice: work for us, or we’ll tell your masters in Tehran that you’re embezzling state funds.”

“How do you know about this?”

“Because the Germans came to me and asked whether the Agency wanted in. They even gave me a copy of the evidence they had against him.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” Carter said. “It was during the period when the White House thought it could sweet-talk the Iranians into giving up their nuclear program. The president and his team didn’t want to do anything that might make the Iranians angry. As it turned out, neither did the German chancellor. She was afraid it might interfere with all the business her firms were doing in Iran.”

“So it died,” said Gabriel. “And a murderer sits in Berlin plotting an attack on my country.”

“So it would appear.”

“Where’s that batch of material from the BND?”

“Locked away in the file rooms of Langley.”

“I want it.”

“You can have it,” Carter replied, “but it’ll cost you.”

“How much?”

“I have a long list of questions I’d like answered.”

“Why don’t you just join us for the fun?”

“Because I don’t want to be within a hundred miles of the fun.” Carter looked at Gabriel seriously. “Will you allow me to give you two pieces of advice?”

“If you must.”

“Invent a good cover story,” said Carter. “And whatever you do, don’t screw it up. Otherwise, there’s a very good chance you’re going to start World War Three.”

Carter requested the German documents in a way that left only a wispy contrail in Langley’s atmosphere, and within an hour they were delivered to his doorstep by an Agency courier. Since Carter could not hand over the documents and still maintain any plausible deniability, Gabriel spent the remainder of that warm afternoon on Carter’s porch, committing the details of Massoud’s financial misdeeds to memory. Carter walked him through some of the finer points but devoted most of his time to the list of questions he wanted put to Massoud. He wrote them in longhand and then burned the unused pages of his yellow legal pad. Carter was a spy’s spy whose devotion to tried-and-true tradecraft was absolute. According to the wits at Langley, he left chalk marks on the bedpost when he wanted to make love to his wife.

It was approaching four when Gabriel finished reviewing all the documents, leaving him barely enough time to catch the evening Lufthansa flight to Berlin. As they headed outside to the waiting Escalade, Carter seemed disappointed that Gabriel was leaving. Indeed, he was so oddly attentive that Gabriel was somewhat surprised when he didn’t remind him to buckle his seat belt.

“Something bothering you, Adrian?”

“I was just wondering whether you’re really up for this.”

“The next person who asks me that is—”

“It’s a fair question,” Carter said, cutting Gabriel off. “If one of my men went through what you did in the Empty Quarter, he’d be on permanent vacation.”

“I tried.”

“Maybe you should try harder next time.” Carter shook Gabriel’s hand. “Drop me a postcard from Berlin. And if you happen to get arrested, please try to forget where you got the information about Massoud’s extracurricular activities.”

“It will be our little secret, Adrian. Just like everything else.”

Carter smiled and closed the door. Gabriel saw him one last time, standing curbside with his arm raised as though he were hailing a taxi. Then the Escalade rumbled round a bend, and Carter was gone. Gabriel gazed out the tinted windows at the manicured lawns and the young trees swollen with blossoms, but in his thoughts there were only numbers. The numbers of Massoud’s secret accounts. And the hours remaining until Massoud made the streets run red with blood.

28 WANNSEE, BERLIN

AMONG THE OPERATION’S MANY ENDURING mysteries was how the team’s Berlin safe house came to be located in the district of Wannsee. The head of Housekeeping would claim it was a mere coincidence, that he had chosen the property simply for reasons of availability and function. Only later, when the official history of the affair was being chiseled into stone, would he admit that his decision had been influenced by none other than Ari Shamron. Shamron had wanted to remind Gabriel and the team of what had happened in Wannsee in January 1942, when fifteen senior Nazis gathered over lunch in a lakeside villa to thrash out the bureaucratic details of the extermination of a people. And perhaps, all agreed, he had wanted to remind the team of the potential price of failure.

The safe house itself stood about a half-mile to the south of the site of the Wannsee Conference, on a densely wooded lane aptly named the Lindenstrasse. Two high walls surrounded it, one of crumbling brick, the other of overgrown greenery. The empty rooms smelled of damp and dust and faintly of brandy. Fat calico carp dozed beneath the ice cap of the fishpond.

The members of the team posed as employees of something called VisionTech, a Montreal-based firm that existed only in the imagination of a desk officer at King Saul Boulevard. According to their cover story, they had come to Berlin to launch a joint venture with a German firm, which explained the unusual number of computers and other pieces of technical equipment they had in their possession. They kept most of it in the large formal dining room, which served as their ops center. Within hours of their arrival, its walls were covered with large-scale maps and with surveillance photos of a man who pretended to be a low-level clerk at the Iranian Embassy but was in fact his country’s top mastermind of international terror.

Dina happily accepted the assignment of preparing the questions for Massoud’s long-overdue interrogation, and to enter her workspace was to enter a classroom dedicated to the evolution of modern terrorism. Massoud Rahimi had been at the center of it, beginning in November 1979, when he had been among the students and militants who stormed the American Embassy in Tehran. Several of the fifty-two hostages would later identify him as the cruelest of their tormentors. Mock executions were his favorite form of entertainment. Even then, Massoud enjoyed nothing more than seeing an American beg for his life.

His next star turn came in Lebanon in 1982, when he began working with a new Shiite militant group known as the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth. It was said that Massoud was instrumental in shortening the group’s name to the Party of God, or Hezbollah. It was also said that he personally helped to assemble the twelve-thousand-pound truck bomb that destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks at Beirut Airport at 6:22 a.m. on October 23, 1983. The explosion, the largest non-nuclear detonation since the Second World War, killed 243 American servicemen and forever changed the face of global terror. More attacks followed. Planes were hijacked, hostages were taken, embassies were bombed. All had one thing in common. They were carried out at the behest of the man who now worked from the Iranian Embassy in Berlin, protected by the shield of a diplomatic passport.

But how to convince a man such as Massoud to relinquish his most murderous secrets? And how to take possession of him in the first place? They would have to engage in the time-honored Shiite practice known as taqiyya, displaying one intention while harboring another. They were not going to kidnap Massoud, said Gabriel. They were going to be his saviors and protectors. And when they were finished wringing him dry, they were going to let him go his merry way. Catch and release, he called it. No harm, no foul.

They would have preferred to watch him for a month or more, but it wasn’t possible; the red lights were flashing at King Saul Boulevard, with all the intelligence pointing to a major attack in a week or less. They had to take Massoud into custody before the bombs exploded, or before Tehran found an excuse to summon him home. That was Gabriel’s greatest fear, that VEVAK would put Massoud on ice before the attack, leaving him beyond the reach of the Office or anyone else. And so Gabriel set a deadline of three days—three days to plan and execute the abduction of an Iranian diplomat in the heart of Berlin. When Eli Lavon placed their odds at just one in four, Gabriel took him into Dina’s makeshift office to see the photographs of what might happen if they failed. “I don’t want odds,” said Gabriel. “I want Massoud.”

Their assignment was made slightly easier by the fact that Massoud obviously felt secure on German soil. His schedule—at least in the brief time they were able to observe it—was strictly regimented. He spent most of his time inside the VEVAK station at the embassy, which was coincidentally located next door to the German Archaeological Institute, a good omen, in the opinion of the team. He arrived no later than eight a.m. and remained until late in the evening. His apartment was two miles to the north of the embassy, in the section of Berlin known as Charlottenburg. His official car appeared unarmored, though that was not true of the VEVAK-issue thug who served as his driver and bodyguard. The task of neutralizing the bodyguard on the night of the snatch fell to Mikhail. Not that he needed much convincing. After spending years dodging Iranian-supplied bullets while serving in the IDF, he was anxious to return the favor.

But where to do it? A busy street? A quiet one? A traffic signal? Massoud’s doorstep? Gabriel decreed that the spot would be determined by just one factor. It had to offer them a clear route of escape in the event of either success or failure. If they chose a spot too close to the Iranian embassy, they might find themselves in a shootout with the German police who guarded it day and night. But if they let Massoud get too close to his apartment, they could become ensnarled in Charlottenburg’s heavy traffic. In the end, the choice was clear to everyone. Gabriel marked the location on the map with a blood-red pin. To Eli Lavon, it looked like a gravestone.

With that, the operation settled into the phase the team referred to as “final approach.” They had their target, they had their plan, they had their assignments. Now all they had to do was get the aircraft on the ground without killing themselves and everyone else on board. They had no computers to guide them, so they would have to do it the old-fashioned way, with instincts and nerve and perhaps a bit of good fortune as well. They tried to keep their reliance on providence to a bare minimum. Gabriel believed that operational luck was something to be earned, not counted upon. And it usually came about as a result of meticulous planning and preparation.

In the lexicon of the Office, the operation was “wheel heavy,” meaning it would require several vehicles of different makes and models. Transport, the Office division that saw to such matters, acquired most from friendly European rental agents in ways that could not be traced back to any member of the team. The most important vehicle, however, was Office owned. A Volkswagen van with a concealed human storage compartment, it had played a starring role in one of Gabriel’s most celebrated operations—the seizure of Nazi war criminal Erich Radek from his home in the First District of Vienna. Chiara had been behind the wheel that night. Radek still made regular appearances in the worst of her nightmares.

Much to her dismay, Chiara was not among those present in Berlin, though her role in the operation remained central. Her task was to coordinate the elaborate piece of taqiyya that would cover the team’s tracks and, if successful, throw both the Germans and the Iranians off its scent. Like all good lies, it was plausible and contained elements of truth. And perhaps, said Gabriel, it also contained a thread of hope for the future—a future where Iran was no longer in the grip of a cabal of religious madmen. The mullahs and their henchmen in the Revolutionary Guard were not rational actors. They were unpredictable and apocalyptic. And the Middle East would never know true peace until they were ushered into history.

There were other lies as well, such as the canvas rucksack filled with cream-colored clay, wires, and timing devices, and the small limpet-style mine that was far more sound than fury. But they would all be for naught unless they could extract Massoud from his car with a minimum of violence. After much deliberation, it was decided that Yaakov would serve as the sharp end of the sword, with Oded, a blunt object of a man, playing a supporting role. An experienced interrogator of terrorists, Yaakov had a face and demeanor that left little doubt he meant what he said. More important, Yaakov was a descendant of German Jews and, like Gabriel, spoke fluent German. It would be Yaakov’s job to talk Massoud out of the car. And if words didn’t work, Oded would bring down a very large hammer.

They didn’t dare rehearse in public, so they conducted countless miniature dry runs within the confines of the Wannsee safe house. In the beginning, Gabriel’s demeanor was businesslike, but as the practice sessions dragged on, his mood grew brittle. Mikhail feared he was suffering an operational hangover from the bombing in St. Moritz, or perhaps from the nightmare in the Empty Quarter. But Eli Lavon knew otherwise. It was Berlin, he said. For all of them, Berlin was a city of ghosts, but it was especially true for Gabriel. It had been the home of his maternal grandparents. And in all likelihood, it would have been Gabriel’s home, too, were it not for the band of murderers who had gathered in the lakeside villa just up the road.

And so they listened with admirable patience as he challenged every aspect of the plan for what seemed like the hundredth time. And they treated themselves to a small smile when he gave Yaakov and Oded a thorough dressing-down after a particularly dreadful final walk-through. And they were careful not to creep up on him when he was alone because, despite a lifetime in the trade, he was suffering from an unusual bout of nerves. And finally, on their last afternoon in Berlin, when they could bear his ill temper no more, they darkened his distinctive gray temples and concealed his unforgettable green eyes behind a pair of glasses. Then they bundled him in a coat and scarf and, with a gentle nudge, cast him out of the safe house to walk among the souls of the dead.

The field man in him wanted to see it all at least once with his own eyes—the embassy, the watch posts, the fallback positions, the snatch point. Afterward, he boarded an S-Bahn train that bore him across Berlin to the Brandenburg Gate. Now on the old East German side of the city, he made his way along the Unter den Linden, beneath the bare limbs of the lime trees. At the Friedrichstrasse, the center of Berlin’s debauched nightlife during the 1920s, he turned right and headed into the district known as Mitte. Here and there he glimpsed a relic of the neighborhood’s Stalinist past, but for the most part the architectural stains of communism had been scrubbed away. It was as if the Cold War, like the real war that preceded it, had never happened. In modern Mitte, there were no memories, only prosperity.

At the Kronenstrasse, Gabriel turned right again and followed the street eastward until he arrived at a modern apartment house with large square windows that shone like slabs of onyx. Long ago, before communism, before the war, the spot had been occupied by a handsome neoclassical building of gray stone. On the second floor had lived a German Expressionist painter named Viktor Frankel, his wife, Sarah, and their daughter, Irene, Gabriel’s mother. Gabriel had never seen a photograph of the apartment, but once, when he was a young boy, his mother had tried to sketch it for him before breaking down in tears. Here was the place where they had lived a charmed bourgeois life filled with art, music, and afternoons in the Tiergarten. And here was the place they had stayed as the noose tightened slowly around their necks. Finally, in the autumn of 1942, they were herded by their fellow countrymen aboard a cattle car and deported east to Auschwitz. Gabriel’s grandparents were gassed upon arrival, but his mother was sent to the women’s work camp at Birkenau. She never told Gabriel of her experiences. Instead, she committed them to paper and locked them away in the archives of Yad Vashem.

I will not tell all the things I saw. I cannot. I owe this much to the dead. . . .

Gabriel closed his eyes and saw the street as it had been before the madness. And then he saw himself as a child, coming to visit grandparents who had been allowed to grow old. And he imagined how different his life might have been had he been raised here in Berlin instead of the Valley of Jezreel. And then a cloud of acrid smoke blew across his face, like the smoke of distant crematoria, and he heard a familiar voice at his back.

“What were you hoping to find here?” asked Ari Shamron.

“Strength,” said Gabriel.

“Your mother gave you strength when she named you,” Shamron said. “And then she gave you to me.”

29 BERLIN

SHAMRON HAD REGISTERED AT THE ADLON under the name Rudolf Heller, one of his favorite European aliases. Gabriel wanted to avoid the security cameras of the famous old hotel, so they walked along the edge of the Tiergarten instead. The air had turned suddenly frigid, and the wind was whistling through the columns of the Brandenburg Gate. Shamron was wearing a cashmere overcoat, a fedora, and tinted eyeglasses that made him look like the sort of businessman who made money in shady ways and never lost at baccarat. He paused at Berlin’s new Holocaust memorial, a stark landscape of rectangular gray blocks, and frowned in consternation.

“They look like containers waiting to be loaded into a cargo ship.”

“The architect wanted to create an atmosphere of discomfort and confusion. It’s supposed to represent the orderly extermination of millions amid the chaos of war.”

“Is that what you see?”

“I see a small miracle that such a memorial even exists on this spot. They could have tucked it away in a field in the countryside. But they put it here, in the heart of a reunited Berlin, right next to the Brandenburg Gate.”

“You give them too much credit, my son. After the war, they all pretended they hadn’t noticed their neighbors disappearing in the middle of the night. It wasn’t until we captured the man who worked right over there that Germany and the rest of the world truly understood the horror of the Holocaust.”

He was pointing across the Tiergarten, in the general direction of the Kurfürstenstrasse. It was there, in an imposing building that had once housed a Jewish mutual aid society, that Adolf Eichmann had made his headquarters. Gabriel’s eyes, however, were still fixed on the gray boxcar-shaped stones of the memorial.

“You should write it all down.” He paused and looked at Shamron. “Before it’s too late.”

“I’m not going anywhere yet.”

“Even you won’t live forever, Ari. You should spend some time with a pen in your hand.”

“I’ve always found the memoirs of spies to be tedious reading. Besides, what good would it do?”

“It would remind the world why we live in Israel instead of Germany and Poland.”

“The world doesn’t care,” Shamron responded with a dismissive wave of his hand. “And the Holocaust isn’t the only reason we have a home in the Land of Israel. We’re there because it was ours in the beginning. We belong there.”

“Even some of our friends aren’t so sure of that anymore.”

“That’s because the Palestinians and their allies have managed to convince much of the world that we are appropriators of Arab land. They like to pretend that the ancient kingdoms of Israel were a myth, that the Temple of Jerusalem was nothing but a Bible story.”

“You sound like Eli.”

Shamron gave a brief smile. “In his own way, your friend Eli is waging war in those excavation trenches beneath the Western Wall. Our Muslim brothers have conveniently forgotten that their great Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque are built on the ruins of the First and Second Jewish Temples. The political battle for Palestine is now a religious war for Jerusalem. And we have to prove to the world that we were there first.”

A gust of wind moaned amid the stones of the memorial. Shamron turned up his coat collar and rounded the corner into a street named for Hannah Arendt, the philosopher and political theorist who coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Eichmann’s role in the extermination of six million European Jews. Shamron, who had spent hours alone with the murderer in a Buenos Aires safe house, regarded the characterization as misguided at best. He entered a coffeehouse, then, after noticing the No Smoking sign, sat at a table outside.

“Healthy Germans,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “Just what the world needs.”

“I thought you’d forgiven them.”

“I have,” Shamron said, “but I’m afraid I’ll never forget. I also wish their government would consider putting some distance between itself and the Islamic Republic of Iran. But I learned long ago not to pray for impossible things.”

Shamron fell silent as the waitress, a beautiful girl with milk-white skin, delivered their coffee. When she was gone, he looked around the busy street and treated himself to a smile.

“What’s so funny?” asked Gabriel.

“When you came out of that Saudi prison, you told me you would never do another job for the Office. And now you’re about to carry out one of our most daring operations ever, all because some girl took a nasty fall in St. Peter’s Basilica.”

“She had a name,” Gabriel replied. “And she didn’t fall. She was pushed by Carlo Marchese.”

“We’ll deal with Carlo when we’re finished with Massoud.”

“I assume you’ve reviewed the plan?”

“Thoroughly. And my instincts tell me you have no more than thirty seconds to get Massoud into the first car.”

“We’ve rehearsed it at twenty. But in my experience, things always go faster when they’re live.”

“Especially when you’re involved,” Shamron quipped. “But tonight you’ll only be a spectator.”

“A very nervous spectator.”

“You should be. If this goes wrong, it will be a diplomatic disaster, not to mention a major propaganda victory for the Iranians. The world doesn’t seem to notice or care that they target our people whenever it suits them. But if we respond in kind, we’re branded as rogue gunslingers.”

“There are worse things they could call us.”

“Like what?”

“Weak,” replied Gabriel.

Shamron nodded in agreement and stirred his coffee thoughtfully. “Getting Massoud out of his car and into yours is going to be the easiest part of this operation. Convincing him to talk is going to be another thing altogether.”

“I’m sure you have a suggestion. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

Shamron acknowledged the remark with a nod of his head. “Massoud isn’t the sort of man who scares easily. The only way you’ll succeed is to present him with a fate worse than death. And then you have to throw him a lifeline and hope that he grasps it.”

“And if he does?”

“The temptation will be to get every drop of information you can. But in my humble opinion, that would be a mistake. Besides,” he added, “there isn’t time for that. Get the intelligence you need to stop this attack. And then . . .”

Shamron’s voice trailed off. Gabriel finished the thought for him.

“Let him go.”

Frowning, Shamron nodded slowly. “We are not our enemies. And that means we do not kill men who carry diplomatic passports, even if they have the blood of our children on their hands.”

“And even if we know he will kill again in the future?”

“You have no choice but to make a deal with the devil. Massoud has to believe you won’t betray him. And I’m afraid trust like that can’t be earned using blindfolds and balaclavas. You’ll have to show him that famous face of yours and look him directly in the eye.” Shamron paused, then added, “Unless you would like someone else to take your seat at the interrogation table.”

“Who?”

Shamron said nothing.

“You?”

“I’m the most logical choice. If Massoud looks across the table and sees you, he’ll have good reason to fear he might not survive the ordeal. But if he sees me instead . . .”

“He’ll feel warm all over?”

“He’ll know he’s dealing with the very top levels of the Israeli government,” Shamron answered. “And it just might make him more willing to talk.”

“I appreciate the spirit of the offer, Abba.”

“But you have no intention of accepting it.” Shamron paused, then asked, “You realize that he’s going to spend the rest of his life trying to kill you.”

“He’ll have to get in line.”

“You could always move back to Israel.”

“You never give up, do you?”

“It’s not in my nature.”

“What would I do for a living?”

“You could help me write my book.”

“We’d kill each other.”

Shamron slowly crushed out his cigarette, signaling the time had come to leave. “It’s rather appropriate, don’t you think?”

“What’s that?”

“That your last operation should take place here in the city of spies.”

“It’s a city of the dead,” Gabriel said. “And I want to get out of here as quickly as possible.”

“Take Massoud as a souvenir. And whatever you do, don’t get caught.”

“Shamron’s Eleventh Commandment.”

“Amen.”

They parted beneath the Brandenburg Gate. Shamron headed to his room at the Hotel Adlon; Gabriel, to the footpaths of the Tiergarten. He remained there until he was certain he was not being followed, then returned to the safe house in Wannsee. Entering, he found the members of his team going through a final checklist. At dusk, they began slipping out at careful intervals, and by six o’clock they were all at their final holding points. Gabriel scoured the rooms of the old house, searching for any trace of their presence. Afterward, he sat alone in the darkness, a notebook computer open on his lap. On the screen was a high-resolution shot of the Iranian Embassy, courtesy of a miniature camera concealed in a car parked legally across the street. At twelve minutes past eight o’clock, the embassy’s security gate slid slowly open, and a black Mercedes sedan nosed into view. It turned left and passed within a few inches of the camera—so close, in fact, that Gabriel felt as though he could reach out and pluck the single passenger from the backseat. Instead, he lifted a radio to his lips and informed his team the devil was heading their way.

30 BERLIN

THE TAQIYYA BEGAN TWO MINUTES LATER, at 8:14 p.m. local time, when the Berlin police received a call concerning a suspicious package found inside the Europa Center, the indoor shopping mall and office complex located next to the remnants of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. The package was actually a battered canvas rucksack of the sort often carried by goths, skinheads, anarchists, radical environmentalists, and other assorted troublemakers. It had been placed at the foot of a bench a few feet from the center’s famous water clock, a popular gathering spot, especially for young children. Later, witnesses would describe the person who left it behind as a Muslim woman in her early thirties. They were correct about her age, but not her ethnicity. They were to be forgiven for the mistake, for she had been wearing a hijab at the time.

The caller who reported the suspicious rucksack described the contents as looking like an explosive device, and the first uniformed police officers to arrive concurred. They immediately ordered an evacuation of the area around the water clock, followed soon after by the entire mall and all the surrounding buildings. By 8:25, several thousand people were streaming into the streets, and police units were converging on the scene from every quarter of Berlin.

Even within the serene and stately confines of the Hotel Adlon, it was clear Berlin was in the grips of a citywide emergency. In the famed lobby bar and lounge, where senior Nazi henchmen had once held court, nervous guests sought explanations from management, and a few stepped outside onto the sidewalk to watch the police cruisers roaring down the Unter den Linden. One guest, however, appeared oblivious to all the excitement. A well-dressed gentleman of advanced years, he calmly signed for a whisky he had scarcely touched and rode an elevator to his suite on the hotel’s uppermost floor. There he stood in the window, watching the light show as if it all had been arranged for his private amusement. After a moment, he pulled a mobile phone from the breast pocket of his suit and auto-dialed a number that had been preloaded for him by a child who understood such things. He heard a series of clicks and tones. Then a male voice greeted him with little more than a grunt.

“What am I looking at?” asked Ari Shamron.

“The prelude,” replied Uzi Navot.

“When does the curtain rise on the first act?”

“A minute, maybe less.”

Shamron severed the connection and gazed out at the blue lights flashing across the city. It was a beautiful sight, he thought. By way of deception, thou shalt do war.

At that same moment, some three miles to the west of Shamron’s unique observation post, Yossi Gavish and Mikhail Abramov sat astride a pair of motorcycles at the edge of a small park on the Hagenstrasse. At that hour, the park was long deserted, but warm lights burned in the bottle-glass windows of the miniature Teutonic castles lining the street. Mikhail was rubbing his sore knee. Yossi was so motionless he looked as though he had been cast in bronze.

“Relax, Yossi,” Mikhail said softly. “You have to relax.”

“You’re not the one with a bomb in your pocket.”

“It’s not going to explode until ten seconds after you attach it to the car.”

“What if it malfunctions?”

“They never do.”

“There’s always a first time.”

A green-and-white police van flashed past, siren screaming. Yossi had yet to move a muscle.

“Breathe,” Mikhail ordered. “Otherwise, the police are liable to think you’re about to kidnap an Iranian diplomat.”

“I don’t know why I have to attach the bomb.”

“Someone has to do it.”

“I’m an analyst,” Yossi said. “I don’t blow up cars. I read books.”

“Would you rather take out the driver instead?”

“And how am I supposed to do that? Dazzle him with my wit and intellect?”

Before Mikhail could respond, he heard a crackle in his miniature earpiece, followed by three short bursts of tone. Looking up the street, he saw the headlights of an approaching Mercedes. As it swept past their position, he could see Massoud in the backseat, catching up on a bit of paperwork by the glow of his executive reading lamp. A few seconds later came a BMW, Rimona driving, Yaakov and Oded seated ramrod straight in back. Finally, Eli Lavon rattled past in a Passat station wagon, clutching the wheel as though he were piloting an oil tanker through icy seas. Mikhail and Yossi eased into the trailing position and waited for the next signal.

They had come to the point that Shamron liked to describe as the operational fork in the road. Until now, no line had been crossed and no crime committed, save for a minor bomb scare in the Europa Center. The team could still abort, regroup, reassess, and try another night. In many respects, it was the easier decision to make—the decision to sheathe the sword rather than swing it. Shamron called it “the coward’s escape hatch.” But then, Shamron had always believed that far more operations had been sunk by hesitation than by recklessness.

On that night, however, the decision was not Shamron’s to make. Instead, it was in the hands of a battered secret warrior sitting alone in an empty house in Wannsee. He was staring at the screen of his computer, watching his team and his target as they approached the point of no return. It was the Königsallee, a street running from the parkland of the Grunewald to the busy Kurfürstendamm—and once Massoud crossed it, he would be beyond their reach. Gabriel keyed into his secure radio and asked whether anyone had any last-minute objections. Hearing nothing, he gave the order to proceed. Then he closed his eyes and listened to the sirens.

Afterward, there were some at King Saul Boulevard who would bemoan the fact that no videotape had been made. Shamron, however, took the opposite view. He believed that operational videotapes, like suicide missions, should be left to Israel’s enemies. Besides, he said, no piece of video could capture the perfection of the maneuver. It was a piece of epic poetry, a fable to be told to successive generations by the glow of a desert campfire.

It began with an almost imperceptible movement of two vehicles—one driven by Rimona, the other by Eli Lavon. Simultaneously, both slowed and moved slightly to the right, leaving Yossi a clear pathway to the rear bumper of the Mercedes. He took it with a twist of his throttle and within a few seconds was staring over the devil’s left shoulder. Carefully, he reached into his coat pocket and flipped the activation toggle on the magnetic grenade. Then he stared straight ahead and waited for the girl to step into the street.

She was wearing a neon-green jacket with reflective stripes on the sleeves and pushing a bicycle with a lamp aglow on the handlebars. An hour earlier, she had been carrying the canvas rucksack that had caused so much distress in central Berlin. Now, as she entered a well-lit pedestrian crosswalk, limping slightly, she carried nothing but a false passport and a boundless hatred for the man riding in the backseat of the approaching Mercedes sedan.

For an instant, they all feared that Massoud’s driver intended to use his diplomatic immunity to run her down. But finally, he slammed on the brakes, and the big black car came skidding to a halt amid a cloud of blue-gray smoke. Yossi swerved to his left to avoid the car’s rear bumper and then shouted a few obscenities through the driver’s-side window before covertly attaching the grenade inside the front wheel well. By now, the girl had safely reached the other side of the street. Massoud’s driver actually gave her a small wave of apology as he drove off. The girl accepted it with a smile, all the while moving away with what seemed to be inordinate haste.

Six seconds later, the device exploded. Its carefully shaped and calibrated charge sent the entire force of the detonation inward, leaving no chance of collateral damage or casualties. Its bark was definitely worse than its bite, though the blast was powerful enough to shred the car’s left-front tire and blow open its hood. Now blinded and confused, the driver lurched the car instinctively to the right. It bounded over the curb and smashed through an iron fence before beaching itself in the Hagenplatz, a small triangle of green that the team affectionately referred to as Ice Cream Square.

If the plan had a weakness, it was the bus shelter located a few feet away from the intersection. On that evening, five people waited there—an elderly German couple, two young men of Turkish descent, and a woman in her twenties who was so thin and pale she might have just stumbled from a building that had been bombed by the Allies. What they saw next appeared to be nothing more than an act of kindness carried out by three good Samaritans who just happened upon the scene. One of the men, a tall, slender motorcyclist, immediately rushed to the aid of the stricken driver—or so it seemed to the witnesses in the bus shelter. They did not notice, however, that the motorcyclist quickly removed a pistol from the driver’s shoulder holster. Nor did they notice that he injected a dose of powerful sedative into the driver’s left thigh.

The other good Samaritans focused their attention on the man riding in the backseat of the Mercedes. Owing to the fact that he was not wearing a seat belt, he was left heavily dazed by the force of the collision. An injection of sedative worsened his condition, though the witnesses did not see that, either. What they would remember was the sight of the two men lifting the injured passenger from his ruined car and placing him tenderly in their own. Instantly, the car shot forward and turned left toward the wilds of the Grunewald—odd, since the nearest hospital was to the right. The motorcyclist followed, as did a Passat station wagon driven by a meek-looking soul who appeared oblivious to the entire episode. Later, when questioned by police, the witnesses would realize that the operation had been carried out in near silence. In fact, only one of the good Samaritans, a man with dark hair and pockmarks on his cheeks, had spoken to the injured passenger. “Come with us,” he had told him. “We will protect you from the Jews.”

As Gabriel predicted, the snatch had taken less time than expected—just thirteen seconds from beginning to end, with the extraction of Massoud from the car requiring only eight. Now, alone in the Wannsee safe house, he listened as the team made the first vehicle change of the night and then watched the lights of their beacons streaking northward along the E51 Autobahn. Time was now a precious commodity. They needed every drop, every granule, they could find. A few seconds here and there could mean the difference between success and failure, between life and death. Gabriel could do nothing more. He had already set the city of his nightmares alight. Now all he could do was watch it burn.

He sent a flash message to King Saul Boulevard confirming the first phase of the operation had gone as planned. Then he stepped outside and climbed into an Audi sedan. After driving past the haunted lakeside villa where the murder of his grandparents had been planned, he headed for the Autobahn. The Berlin police were still streaming toward the Europa Center. But for how long?

On the top floor of the Hotel Adlon, Ari Shamron stood alone in his window, watching the blue police lights swirling beneath his feet. For the past several minutes, all had been streaking toward the same point in western Berlin. But at 8:36 p.m., he noticed a distinct change in the pattern. He didn’t bother to ask King Saul Boulevard for an explanation. The deception was over. Now it was a race for the border.