Prince of Fire

1 ROME: MARCH 4

THERE HAD BEEN WARNING SIGNS-THE SHABBAT bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that left eighty-seven people dead; the bombing of an Istanbul synagogue, precisely one year later, that killed another twenty-eight-but Rome would be his coming-out party, and Rome would be the place where he left his calling card.

Afterward, within the corridors and executive suites of Israel ’s vaunted intelligence service, there was considerable and sometimes belligerent debate over the time and place of the conspiracy’s genesis. Lev Ahroni, the ever-cautious director of the service, would claim that the plot was hatched not long after the Israeli army knocked down Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah and stole his secret files. Ari Shamron, the legendary Israeli master spy, would find this almost laughable, though Shamron often disagreed with Lev simply as a matter of sport. Only Shamron, who had fought with the Palmach during the War of Independence and who tended to view the conflict as a continuum, understood intuitively that the outrage in Rome had been inspired by deeds dating back more than a half century. Eventually, evidence would prove both Lev and Shamron correct. In the meantime, in order to achieve peaceful working conditions, they agreed on a new starting point: the day a certain Monsieur Jean-Luc arrived in the hills of Lazio and settled himself in a rather handsome eighteenth-century villa on the shore of Lake Bracciano.

As for the exact date and time of his arrival, there was no doubt. The owner of the villa, a dubious Belgian aristocrat called Monsieur Laval, said the tenant appeared at two-thirty in the afternoon on the final Friday of March. The courteous but intense young Israeli who called on Monsieur Laval at his home in Brussels wondered how it was possible to recall the date so clearly. The Belgian produced his lavish leather-bound personal calendar and pointed to the date in question. There, penciled on the line designated for 2:30 P.M., were the words: Meet M. Jean-Luc at Bracciano villa.

“Why did you write Bracciano villa instead of just villa?” asked the Israeli visitor, his pen hovering over his open notebook.

“To differentiate it from our St. Tropez villa, our Portuguese villa, and the chalet we own in the Swiss Alps.”

“I see,” said the Israeli, though the Belgian found that his visitor’s tone lacked the humility adopted by most civil servants when confronted by men of great wealth.

And what else did Monsieur Laval remember of the man who rented his villa? That he was punctual, intelligent, and extremely well-mannered. That he was strikingly good-looking, that his scent was noticeable but not obtrusive, that his clothing was expensive but restrained. That he drove a Mercedes car and had two large suitcases with gold buckles and a famous label. That he paid the entire monthlong lease in advance and in cash, which Monsieur Laval explained was not unusual in that part of Italy. That he was a good listener who didn’t need to be told things twice. That he spoke French with the accent of a Parisian from a well-heeled arrondissement. That he seemed like a man who could handle himself well in a fight and who treated his women well. “He was of noble birth,” Laval concluded, with the certainty of one who knows of what he speaks. “He comes from a good bloodline. Write that in your little book.”

Slowly, additional details would emerge about the man called Jean-Luc, though none conflicted with Monsieur Laval’s flattering portrait. He hired no cleaning woman and demanded the gardener arrive punctually at nine o’clock and leave by ten. He shopped in nearby market squares and attended Mass in the medieval lakeside village of Anguillara. He spent much time touring the Roman ruins of Lazio and seemed particularly intrigued by the ancient necropolis at Cerveteri.

Sometime in the middle of March-the date could never be reliably established-he vanished. Even Monsieur Laval could not be certain of the departure date, because he was informed after the fact by a woman in Paris who claimed to be the gentleman’s personal assistant. Though two weeks remained on the lease, the handsome tenant did not embarrass himself, or Monsieur Laval, by asking for a refund. Later that spring, when Monsieur Laval visited the villa, he was surprised to discover, in a crystal bowl on the dining room sideboard, a brief thank-you note, typewritten, along with a hundred euros to pay for broken wineglasses. A thorough search of the villa’s stemware collection, however, revealed nothing was missing. When Monsieur Laval tried to call Jean-Luc’s girl in Paris to return the money, he found that her telephone line had been disconnected.

ON THE FRINGES of the Borghese gardens there are elegant boulevards and quiet leafy side streets that bear little resemblance to the scruffy, tourist-trodden thoroughfares of the city center. They are avenues of diplomacy and money, where traffic moves at a nearly reasonable speed and where the blare of car horns sounds like a rebellion in distant lands. One such street is a cul-de-sac. It falls away at a gentle pitch and bends to the right. For many hours each day, it is in shadow, a consequence of the towering stone pine and eucalyptus that loom over the villas. The narrow sidewalk is broken by tree roots and perpetually covered by pine needles and dead leaves. At the end of the street is a diplomatic compound, more heavily fortified than most in Rome.

Survivors and witnesses would recall the perfection of that late-winter morning: bright and clear, cold enough in the shadows to bring on a shiver, warm enough in the sun to unbutton a wool coat and dream of an alfresco lunch. The fact it was also a Friday served only to heighten the leisurely atmosphere. In diplomatic Rome, it was a morning to dawdle over a cappuccino and cornetto, to take stock of one’s circumstances and ponder one’s mortality. Procrastination was the order of the day. Many mundane meetings were canceled. Much routine paperwork was put off till Monday.

On the little cul-de-sac near the Borghese gardens there were no outward signs of the catastrophe to come. The Italian police and security agents guarding the perimeter fortifications chatted lazily in the patches of brilliant sunshine. Like most diplomatic missions in Rome, it officially contained two embassies, one dealing with the Italian government, the second with the Vatican. Both embassies opened for business at their appointed times. Both ambassadors were in their offices.

At ten-fifteen a tubby Jesuit waddled down the hill, a leather satchel in his hand. Inside was a diplomatic démarche from the Vatican Secretariat of State, condemning the Israeli army’s recent incursion into Bethlehem. The courier deposited the document with an embassy clerk and puffed his way back up the hill. Afterward, the text would be made public, and its sharp language would prove a temporary embarrassment to the men of the Vatican. The courier’s timing would prove providential. Had he arrived five minutes later, he would have been vaporized, along with the original text of the démarche.

Not so fortunate were the members of an Italian television crew who had come to interview the ambassador on the current state of affairs in the Middle East. Or the delegation of local Jewish crusaders who had come to secure the ambassador’s public condemnation of a neo-Nazi conference scheduled for the following week in Verona. Or the Italian couple, sickened by the new rise of European anti-Semitism, who were about to inquire about the possibility of emigrating to Israel. Fourteen in all, they were standing in a tight cluster at the business entrance, waiting to be body-searched by the embassy’s short-haired security toughs, when the white freight truck made a right turn into the cul-de-sac and began its death run toward the compound.

Most heard the truck before they saw it. The convulsive roar of its diesel engine was a violent intrusion on the otherwise still morning. It was impossible to ignore. The Italian security men paused in mid-conversation and looked up, as did the group of fourteen strangers gathered outside the entrance of the embassy. The tubby Jesuit, who was waiting for a bus at the opposite end of the street, lifted his round head from his copy of L’Osservatore Romano and searched for the source of the commotion.

The gentle slope of the street helped the truck gather speed at an astonishing rate. As it rounded the bend, the massive load in its cargo container pushed the truck heavily onto two wheels. For an instant it seemed it might topple. Then somehow it righted itself and began the final straight-line plunge toward the compound.

The driver was briefly visible through the windshield. He was young and clean-shaven. His eyes were wide, his mouth agape. He seemed to be standing atop the gas pedal, and he seemed to be shouting at himself. For some reason the wipers were on.

The Italian security forces reacted immediately. Several took cover behind the reinforced concrete barriers. Others dived for the protection of the steel-and-glass guard posts. Two officers could be seen pouring automatic fire toward the marauding truck. Sparks exploded on the grille, and the windshield shattered, but the truck continued unhindered, gathering speed until the point of impact. Afterward, the government of Israel would commend the heroism shown by the Italian security services that morning. It would be noted that none fled their positions, though if they had, their fate would have been precisely the same.

The explosion could be heard from St. Peter’s Square to the Piazza di Spagna to the Janiculum Hill. Those on the upper floors of buildings were treated to the remarkable sight of a red-and-orange fireball rising over the northern end of the Villa Borghese, followed quickly by a pitch-black mushroom cloud of smoke. Windows a mile from the blast point were shattered by the thunderclap of the shock wave, including the stained-glass windows in a nearby church. Plane trees were stripped of their leaves. Birds died in mid-flight. Geologists at a seismic monitoring station first feared that Rome had been shaken by a moderate earthquake.

None of the Italian security men survived the initial blast. Nor did any of the fourteen visitors waiting to be admitted to the mission, or the embassy personnel who happened to be working in offices closest to the spot where the truck exploded.

Ultimately, though, it was the second vehicle that inflicted the most loss of life. The Vatican courier, who had been knocked to the ground by the force of the blast, saw the car turn into the cul-de-sac at high speed. Because it was a Lancia sedan, and because it was carrying four men and traveling at a high rate of speed, he assumed it was a police vehicle responding to the bombing. The priest got to his feet and started toward the scene through the dense black smoke, hoping to be of assistance to the wounded and the dead alike. Instead he saw a scene from a nightmare. The doors of the Lancia opened simultaneously, and the four men he assumed to be police officers began firing into the compound. Survivors who staggered from the burning wreckage of the embassy were mercilessly cut down.

The four gunmen ceased firing at precisely the same time, then clambered back into the Lancia. As they sped away from the burning compound, one of the terrorists aimed his automatic weapon at the Jesuit. The priest made the sign of the cross and prepared himself to die. The terrorist just smiled and disappeared behind a curtain of smoke.

2 TIBERIAS, ISRAEL

FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER THE LAST SHOT WAS FIRED in Rome, the secure telephone rang in the large, honey-colored villa overlooking the Sea of Galilee. Ari Shamron, the twice former director-general of the Israeli secret service, now special adviser to the prime minister on all matters dealing with security and intelligence, took the call in his study. He listened in silence for a moment, his eyes closed tightly in anger. “I’m on my way,” he said, and hung up the phone.

Turning around, he saw Gilah standing in the doorway of the study. She was holding his leather bomber jacket in her hand, and her eyes were damp with tears.

“It just came on the television. How bad?”

“Very bad. The prime minister wants me to help him prepare a statement to the country.”

“Then you shouldn’t keep the prime minister waiting.”

She helped Shamron into his jacket and kissed his cheek. There was simple ritual in this act. How many times had he separated from his wife after hearing that Jews had been killed by a bomb? He had lost count long ago. He had resigned himself, late in life, that it would never end.

“You won’t smoke too many cigarettes?”

“Of course not.”

“Try to call me.”

“I’ll call when I can.”

He stepped out the front door. A blast of cold wet wind greeted him. A storm had stolen down from the Golan during the night and laid siege to the whole of the Upper Galilee. Shamron had been awakened by the first crack of thunder, which he had mistaken for a gunshot, and had lain awake for the rest of the night. For Shamron, sleep was like contraband. It came to him rarely and, once interrupted, never twice in the same night. Usually he found himself wandering the secure file rooms of his memory, reliving old cases, walking old battlefields and confronting enemies vanquished long ago. Last night had been different. He’d had a premonition of imminent disaster, an image so clear that he’d actually placed a call to the night desk of his old service to see if anything had happened. “Go back to sleep, Boss,” the youthful duty officer had said. “Everything’s fine.”

His black Peugeot, armored and bulletproof, waited at the top of the drive. Rami, the dark-haired head of his security detachment, stood next to the open rear door. Shamron had made many enemies over the years, and because of the tangled demographics of Israel, many lived uncomfortably close to Tiberias. Rami, quiet as a lone wolf and far more lethal, rarely left his master’s side.

Shamron paused for a moment to light a cigarette, a vile Turkish brand he’d been smoking since the Mandate days, then stepped off the veranda. He was short of stature, yet even in old age, powerful in build. His hands were leathery and liver-spotted and seemed to have been borrowed from a man twice his size. His face, full of cracks and fissures, looked like an aerial view of the Negev Desert. His remaining fringe of steel-gray hair was cropped so short as to be nearly invisible. Infamously hard on his eyeglasses, he had resigned himself to ugly frames of indestructible plastic. The thick lenses magnified blue eyes that were no longer clear. He walked as though anticipating an assault from behind, with his head down and his elbows out defensively. Within the corridors of King Saul Boulevard, the headquarters of his old service, the walk was known as “the Shamron shuffle.” He knew of the epithet and he approved.

He ducked into the backseat of the Peugeot. The heavy car lurched forward and headed down the treacherously steep drive to the lakeshore. It turned right and sped toward Tiberias, then west, across the Galilee toward the Coastal Plain. Shamron’s gaze, for much of the journey, was focused on the scratched face of his wristwatch. Time was now his enemy. With each passing minute the perpetrators were slipping farther and farther away from the scene of the crime. Had they attempted an attack such as this in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, they would have been snared in a web of checkpoints and roadblocks. But it had occurred in Italy, not Israel, and Shamron was at the mercy of the Italian police. It had been a long time since the Italians had dealt with a major act of terrorism. What’s more, Israel ’s link to the Italian government-its embassy-was in ruins. So, too, Shamron suspected, was a very important station of the Israeli secret service. Rome was the regional headquarters for southern Europe. It was led by a katsa named Shimon Pazner, a man whom Shamron had personally recruited and trained. It was quite possible the Office had just lost one of its most competent and experienced officers.

The journey seemed to last an eternity. They listened to the news on Israel Radio, and with each update the situation in Rome seemed to grow worse. Three times, Shamron anxiously reached for his secure cellular phone and three times he snapped it back into its cradle without dialing a number. Leave them to it, he thought. They know what they’re doing. Because of you, they’re well-trained. Besides, it was no time for the special adviser to the prime minister on matters of security and terrorism to be weighing in with helpful suggestions.

Special Adviser… How he loathed the title. It stank of ambiguity. He had been the Memuneh: the one in charge. He had seen his blessed service, and his country, through triumph and adversity. Lev and his band of young technocrats had regarded him as a liability and had banished him to the Judean wilderness of retirement. He would have remained there were it not for the lifeline thrown to him by the prime minister. Shamron, master manipulator and puppeteer, had learned that he could exercise nearly as much power from the prime minister’s office as he could from the executive suite of King Saul Boulevard. Experience had taught him to be patient. Eventually it would end up in his lap. It always seemed to.

They began the ascent toward Jerusalem. Shamron could not make this remarkable drive without thinking of old battles. The premonition came to him again. Was it Rome he had seen the night before or something else? Something bigger than even Rome? An old enemy, he was sure of it. A dead man, risen from his past.

THE OFFICE OF the Israeli prime minister is located at 3 Kaplan Street, in the Kiryat Ben-Gurion section of West Jerusalem. Shamron entered the building through the underground parking garage, then went up to his office. It was small but strategically located on the hallway that led to the prime minister’s, which allowed him to see when Lev, or any of the other intelligence and security chiefs, were making their way into the inner sanctum for a meeting. He had no personal secretary, but shared a girl named Tamara with three other members of the security staff. She brought him coffee and switched on the bank of three televisions.

“Varash is scheduled to meet in the prime minister’s office at five o’clock.”

Varash was the Hebrew-language acronym for the Committee of the Heads of the Services. It included the director-general of Shabak, the internal security service; the commander of Aman, military intelligence; and, of course, the chief of Israel ’s secret intelligence service, which was referred to only as “the Office.” Shamron, by charter and reputation, had a permanent seat at the table.

“In the meantime,” Tamara said, “he wants a briefing in twenty minutes.”

“Tell him a half hour would be better.”

“If you want a half hour, you tell him.”

Shamron sat down at his desk and, remote in hand, spent the next five minutes scanning the world’s television media for as many overt details as he could. Then he picked up the telephone and made three calls, one to an old contact at the Italian Embassy named Tommaso Naldi; the second to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, located a short distance away on Yitzhak Rabin Boulevard; and the third to Office headquarters on King Saul Boulevard.

“He can’t talk to you now,” said Lev’s secretary. Shamron had anticipated her reaction. It was easier to get through an army checkpoint than Lev’s secretary.

“Put him on the phone,” Shamron said, “or the next call will be from the prime minister.”

Lev kept Shamron waiting five minutes.

“What do you know?” Shamron asked.

“The truth? Nothing.”

“Do we have a Rome station any longer?”

“Not to speak of,” said Lev, “but we do have a Rome katsa. Pazner was in Naples on business. He just checked in. He’s on his way back to Rome now.”

Thank God, thought Shamron. “And the others?”

“It’s hard to tell. As you might imagine, the situation is rather chaotic.” Lev had a grating passion for understatement. “Two clerks are missing, along with the communications officer.”

“Is there anything in the files that might be compromising or embarrassing?”

“The best we can hope for is that they went up in smoke.”

“They’re stored in cabinets built to withstand a missile strike. We’d better get to them before the Italians do.”

Tamara poked her head inside the door. “He wants you. Now.”

“I’ll see you at five o’clock,” Shamron said to Lev, and rang off.

He collected his notes, then followed Tamara along the corridor toward the prime minister’s office. Two members of his Shabak protective detail, large boys with short-cropped hair and shirts hanging outside their trousers, watched Shamron’s approach. One of them stepped aside and opened the door. Shamron slipped past and went inside.

The shades were drawn, the room cool and in semidarkness. The prime minister was seated behind his large desk, dwarfed by a towering portrait of the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl that hung on the wall at his back. Shamron had been in this room many times, yet it never failed to quicken his pulse. For Shamron this chamber represented the end of a remarkable journey, the reconstitution of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. Birth and death, war and Holocaust-Shamron, like the prime minister, had played a leading role in the entire epic. Privately, they regarded it as their State, their creation, and they guarded it jealously against all those-Arab, Jewish, or Gentile-who sought to weaken or destroy it.

The prime minister, without a word, nodded for Shamron to sit. Small at the head and very wide at the waist, he looked rather like a formation of volcanic rock. His stubby hands lay folded on the desktop; his heavy jowls hung over his shirt collar.

“How bad, Ari?”

“By the end of the day, we’ll have a clearer picture,” Shamron said. “I can say one thing for certain. This will go down as one of the worst acts of terrorism ever committed against the State, if not the worst.”

“How many dead?”

“Still unclear.”

“The ambassadors?”

“Officially, they’re still listed as unaccounted for.”

“And unofficially?”

“It’s believed they’re dead.”

“Both?”

Shamron nodded. “And their deputies.”

“How many dead for certain?”

“The Italians report twelve police and security personnel dead. At the moment, the Foreign Ministry is confirming twenty-two personnel killed, along with thirteen family members from the residence complex. Eighteen people remain unaccounted for.”

“Fifty-two dead?”

“At least. Apparently there were several visitors standing at the entrance waiting to be admitted to the building.”

“What about the Office station?”

Shamron repeated what he’d just learned from Lev. Pazner was alive. Three Office employees were feared to be among the dead.

“Who did it?”

“Lev hasn’t reached any-”

“I’m not asking Lev.”

“The list of potential suspects, unfortunately, is long. Anything I might say now would be speculation, and at this point, speculation does us no good.”

“Why Rome?”

“Hard to say,” Shamron said. “Perhaps it was just a target of opportunity. Maybe they saw a weakness, a chink in our armor, and they decided to exploit it.”

“But you don’t believe that?”

“No, Prime Minister.”

“Could it have something to do with that affair at the Vatican a couple of years ago-that business with Allon?”

“I doubt it. All the evidence thus far suggests it was a suicide attack carried out by Arab terrorists.”

“I want to make a statement after Varash meets.”

“I think that would be wise.”

“And I want you to write it for me.”

“If you wish.”

“You know about loss, Ari. We both do. Put some heart into it. Tap that reservoir of Polish pain you’re always carrying around with you. The country will need to cry tonight. Let them cry. But assure them that the animals who did this will be punished.”

“They will, Prime Minister.”

Shamron stood.

“Who did this, Ari?”

“We’ll know soon enough.”

“I want his head,” the prime minister said savagely. “I want his head on a stick.”

“And you shall have it.”

FORTY-EIGHT HOURS would pass before the first break in the case, and it would come not in Rome but in the northern industrial city of Milan. Units of the Polizia di Stato and Carabinieri, acting on a tip from a Tunisian immigrant informant, raided a pensione in a workers’ quarter north of the city center where two of the four surviving attackers were thought to be hiding. The men were no longer there, and based on the condition of the room, they had fled in a hurry. Police discovered a pair of suitcases filled with clothing and a half-dozen cellular telephones, along with false passports and stolen credit cards. The most intriguing item, however, was a compact disk sewn into the lining of one of the bags. Italian investigators at the national crime laboratory in Rome determined that the disk contained data but were unable to penetrate its sophisticated security firewall. Eventually, after much internal debate, it was decided to approach the Israelis for help.

And so it was that Shimon Pazner received his summons to the headquarters of the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Democratica, Italy ’s Intelligence and Democratic Security Service. He arrived a few minutes after ten in the evening and was shown immediately into the office of the deputy chief, a man named Martino Bellano. They were a mismatched pair: Bellano, tall and lean and dressed as though he had just stepped off the pages of an Italian fashion magazine; Pazner, short and muscular with hair like steel wool and a crumpled sports jacket. “A pile of yesterday’s laundry” is how Bellano would describe Pazner after the encounter, and in the aftermath of the affair, when it became clear that Pazner had behaved less than forthrightly, Bellano routinely referred to the Israeli as “that kosher shylock in a borrowed blazer.”

On that first evening, however, Bellano could not have been more solicitous of his visitor. Pazner was not the type to elicit sympathy from strangers, but as he was shown into Bellano’s office, his eyes were heavy with exhaustion and a profound case of survivor’s guilt. Bellano spent several moments expressing his “profound grief” over the bombing before getting round to the reason for Pazner’s late-night summons: the computer disk. He placed it ceremoniously on the desktop and slid it toward Pazner with the tip of a manicured forefinger. Pazner accepted it calmly, though later he would confess to Shamron that his heart was beating a chaotic rhythm against his breastbone.

“We’ve been unable to pick the lock,” Bellano said. “Perhaps you’ll have a bit more luck.”

“We’ll do our best,” replied Pazner modestly.

“Of course, you’ll share with us any material you happen to find.”

“It goes without saying,” said Pazner as the disk disappeared into his coat pocket.

Another ten minutes would elapse before Bellano saw fit to conclude the meeting. Pazner remained stoically in his seat, gripping the arms of his chair like a man in the throes of a nicotine fit. Those who witnessed his departure down the grandiose main corridor took note of his unhurried pace. Only when he was outside, descending the front steps, was there any hint of urgency in his stride.

Within hours of the attack, a team of Israeli bomb specialists, regrettably well-experienced in their trade, had arrived in Rome to begin the task of sifting the wreckage for evidence of the bomb’s composition and origin. As luck would have it, the military charter that had borne them from Tel Aviv was still on the apron at Fiumicino. Pazner, with Shamron’s approval, commandeered the plane to take him back to Tel Aviv. He arrived a few minutes after sunrise and walked directly into the arms of an Office greeting party. They headed immediately to King Saul Boulevard, driving at great haste but with no recklessness, for the cargo was too precious to risk on that most dangerous element of Israeli life: its roadways. By eight that morning, the computer disk was the target of a coordinated assault by the best minds of the service’s Technical division, and by nine the security barriers had been successfully breached. Ari Shamron would later boast that the Office computer geniuses cracked the code in the span of an average Italian coffee break. Decryption of the material took another hour, and by ten a printout of the disk’s contents was sitting on Lev’s immaculate desk. The material remained there for only a few moments, because Lev immediately tossed it into a secure briefcase and headed to Kaplan Street in Jerusalem to brief the prime minister. Shamron, of course, was at his master’s side.

“Someone needs to bring him in,” said Lev. He spoke with the enthusiasm of a man offering his own eulogy. Perhaps, thought Shamron, that was precisely how he felt, for he viewed the man in question as a rival, and Lev’s preferred method of dealing with rivals, real or potential, was exile. “Pazner is heading back to Italy tonight. Let him take along a team from Extraction.”

Shamron shook his head. “He’s mine. I’ll bring him home.” He paused. “Besides, Pazner has something more important to do at the moment.”

“What’s that?”

“Telling the Italians we couldn’t break the lock on that disk, of course.”

Lev made a habit of never being the first to leave the room, and so it was with great reluctance that he uncoiled himself from his chair and moved toward the exit. Shamron looked up and saw that the prime minister’s eyes were on him.

“He’ll have to stay here until this blows over,” the prime minister said.

“Yes, he will,” agreed Shamron.

“Perhaps we should find something for him to do to help pass the time.”

Shamron nodded once, and it was done.

3 LONDON

THE QUEST FOR GABRIEL WAS NEARLY AS INTENSE as the search for the perpetrators of the massacre in Rome. He was a man who never telegraphed his movements and was no longer under Office discipline, so it surprised no one, least of all Shamron, that he’d left Venice without bothering to tell anyone where he was going. As it turned out, he’d gone to England to see his wife, Leah, who was living in a private psychiatric hospital in a secluded corner of Surrey. His first stop, however, was New Bond Street, where, at the behest of a London art dealer named Julian Isherwood, he’d agreed to attend an Old Master sale at Bonhams auction house.

Isherwood arrived first, clutching a battered attaché case in one hand and the throat of his Burberry raincoat with the other. A few other dealers were huddled in the lobby. Isherwood murmured an insincere greeting and loped off to the cloakroom. A moment later, relieved of his sodden Burberry, he took up watch near the window. Tall and precarious, he was clad in his customary auction attire, a gray chalk-stripe suit and his lucky crimson necktie. He arranged his windblown gray locks to cover his bald spot and briefly examined his own face reflected in the glass. Hungover, a stranger might have assumed, perhaps a bit drunk. Isherwood was neither. He was stone-cold sober. Sharp as his mother’s tongue. He flung out his arm, pushed his French cuff from his wrist, and shot a glance at his watch. Late. Not like Gabriel. Punctual as the Nine O’clock News. Never one to keep a client cooling his heels. Never one to fall behind on a restoration-unless, of course, it was due to circumstances beyond his control.

Isherwood straightened his necktie and lowered his narrow shoulders, so that the figure peering back at him had the easy grace and confidence that seemed the birthright of Englishmen of a certain class. He moved in their circles, disposed of their collections, and acquired new ones on their behalf, yet he would never truly be one of them. And how could he? His backbone-of-England surname and lanky English bearing concealed the fact that he was not, at least technically, English at all. English by nationality and passport, yes, but German by birth, French by upbringing, and Jewish by religion. Only a handful of trusted friends knew that Isherwood had staggered into London as a child refugee in 1942 after being carried across the snowbound Pyrenees by a pair of Basque shepherds. Or that his father, the renowned Berlin art dealer Samuel Isakowitz, had ended his days on the edge of a Polish forest, in a place called Sobibor.

There was something else Julian Isherwood kept secret from his competitors in the London art world-and from nearly everyone else, for that matter. Over the years he had done the occasional favor for a certain gentleman from Tel Aviv named Shamron. Isherwood, in the Hebrew-based jargon of Shamron’s irregular outfit, was a sayan, an unpaid volunteer helper, though most of his encounters with Shamron had been closer to blackmail than voluntarism.

Just then Isherwood spotted a flash of leather and denim amid the fluttering mackintoshes of New Bond Street. The figure vanished for a moment, then reappeared suddenly, as though he had stepped through a curtain onto a lighted stage. Isherwood, as always, was taken aback by his unimpressive physical stature-five-eight, perhaps, a hundred and fifty pounds fully clothed. His hands were thrust into the pockets of a car-length black-leather jacket, his shoulders were slumped slightly forward. His walk was smooth and seemingly without effort, and there was a slight outward bend to his legs that Isherwood always associated with men who could run very fast or were good at football. He wore a pair of neat suede brogues with rubber soles and, despite the steady rain, carried no umbrella. The face came into focus-long, high at the forehead, narrow at the chin. The nose looked as though it had been carved from wood, the cheekbones were wide and prominent, and there was a hint of the Russian steppes in the green, restless eyes. The black hair was cropped short and very gray at the temples. It was a face of many possible national origins, and Gabriel had the linguistic gifts to put it to good use. Isherwood never quite knew who to expect when Gabriel walked through the door. He was no one, he lived nowhere. He was the eternal wandering Jew.

Suddenly he was standing at Isherwood’s side. He offered no greeting, and his hands remained jammed in his coat pockets. The manners Gabriel had acquired working for Shamron in the secret world had left him ill-equipped to function in the overt one. Only when he was playing a role did he appear animated. In those rare flashes when an outsider glimpsed the real Gabriel-such as now, thought Isherwood-the man they saw was silent and sullen and clinically shy. Gabriel made people supremely uncomfortable. It was one of his many gifts.

They walked across the lobby toward the registrar’s desk. “Who are we today?” Isherwood asked sotto voce, but Gabriel just leaned over and scrawled something illegible in the logbook. Isherwood had forgotten that he was left-handed. Signed his name with his left hand, held a paintbrush with his right, handled his knife and fork with either. And his Beretta? Thankfully, Isherwood did not know the answer to that.

They climbed the stairs, Gabriel at Isherwood’s shoulder, quiet as a bodyguard. His leather coat did not rustle, his jeans did not whistle, his brogues seemed to float over the carpet. Isherwood had to brush against Gabriel’s shoulder to remind himself he was still there. At the top of the stairs a security guard asked Gabriel to open his leather shoulder bag. He unzipped the flap and showed him the contents: a Binomag visor, an ultraviolet lamp, an infrascope, and a powerful halogen flashlight. The guard, satisfied, waved them forward.

They entered the salesroom. Hanging from the walls and mounted on baize-covered pedestals were a hundred paintings, each bathed in carefully focused light. Scattered amid the works were roving bands of dealers-jackals, thought Isherwood, picking over the bones for a tasty morsel. Some had their faces pressed to the paintings, others preferred the long view. Opinions were being formed. Money was on the table. Calculators were producing estimates of potential profit. It was the unseemly side of the art world, the side Isherwood loved. Gabriel seemed oblivious. He moved like a man accustomed to the chaos of the souk. Isherwood did not have to remind Gabriel to keep a low profile. It came naturally to him.

Jeremy Crabbe, the tweedy director of Bonhams’ Old Master department, was waiting near a French school landscape, an unlit pipe wedged between his yellowed incisors. He shook Isherwood’s hand joylessly and looked at the younger man in leather at his side. “Mario Delvecchio,” Gabriel said, and as always, Isherwood was astonished by the pitch-perfect Venetian accent.

“Ahhh,” breathed Crabbe. “The mysterious Signore Delvecchio. Know you by reputation, of course, but we’ve never actually met.” Crabbe shot Isherwood a conspiratorial glance. “Something up your sleeve, Julian? Something you’re not telling me?”

“He cleans for me, Jeremy. It pays to have him look before I leap.”

“This way,” Crabbe said skeptically, and led them into a small, windowless chamber just off the main saleroom floor. The exigencies of the operation had required Isherwood to express a modicum of interest in other works-otherwise Crabbe might be tempted to let it slip to one of the others that Isherwood had his eye on a particular piece. Most of the pieces were mediocre-a lackluster Madonna and child by Andrea del Sarto, a still life by Carlo Magini, a Forge of Vulcan by Paolo Pagani-but in the far corner, propped against the wall, was a large canvas without a frame. Isherwood noticed that Gabriel’s well-trained eye was immediately drawn to it. He also noticed that Gabriel, the consummate professional, immediately looked the other way.

He started with the others first and spent precisely two minutes on each canvas. His face was a mask, betraying neither enthusiasm nor displeasure. Crabbe gave up trying to read his intentions and passed the time chewing his pipe stem instead.

Finally he turned his attention to Lot No. 43, Daniel in the Lions’ Den, Erasmus Quellinus, 86 inches by 128 inches, oil on canvas, abraded and extremely dirty. So dirty, in fact, that the cats at the edge of the image seemed entirely concealed by shadow. He crouched and tilted his head in order to view the canvas with raked lighting. Then he licked three fingers and scrubbed at the figure of Daniel, which caused Crabbe to cluck and roll his bloodshot eyes. Ignoring him, Gabriel placed his face a few inches from the canvas and examined the manner in which Daniel’s hands were folded and the way one leg was crossed over the other.

“Where did this come from?”

Crabbe removed his pipe and looked into the bowl. “A drafty Georgian pile in the Cotswolds.”

“When was it last cleaned?”

“We’re not quite sure, but by the looks of it, Disraeli was prime minister.”

Gabriel looked up at Isherwood, who in turn looked at Crabbe. “Give us a moment, Jeremy.”

Crabbe slipped from the room. Gabriel opened his bag and removed the ultraviolet lamp. Isherwood doused the lights, casting the room into pitch darkness. Gabriel switched on the lamp and shone the bluish beam toward the painting.

“Well?” asked Isherwood.

“The last restoration was so long ago it doesn’t show up in ultraviolet.”

Gabriel removed the infrascope from his bag. It bore an uncanny resemblance to a pistol, and Isherwood felt a sudden chill as Gabriel wrapped his hand around the grip and switched on the luminescent green light. An archipelago of dark blotches appeared on the canvas, the retouching of the last restoration. The painting, though extremely dirty, had suffered only moderate losses.

He switched off the infrascope, then slipped on his magnifying visor and studied the figure of Daniel in the searing white glow of the halogen flashlight.

“What do you think?” asked Isherwood, squinting.

“Magnificent,” Gabriel replied distantly. “But Erasmus Quellinus didn’t paint it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure enough to bet two hundred thousand pounds of your money.”

“How reassuring.”

Gabriel reached out and traced his forefinger along the muscular, graceful figure. “He was here, Julian,” he said, “I can feel him.”

THEY WALKED TO St. James’s for a celebratory lunch at Green’s, a gathering place for dealers and collectors in Duke Street, a few paces from Isherwood’s gallery. A bottle of chilled white burgundy awaited them in their corner booth. Isherwood filled two glasses and pushed one across the tablecloth toward Gabriel.

“Mazel tov, Julian.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I won’t be able to make a positive authentication until I get a look beneath the surface with infrared reflectography. But the composition is clearly based on Rubens, and I have no doubt the brushwork is his.”

“I’m sure you’ll have a wonderful time restoring it.”

“Who said I was going to restore it?”

“You did.”

“I said I’d authenticate it, but I said nothing about restoring it. That painting needs at least six months of work. I’m afraid I’m in the middle of something.”

“There’s one person I trust with that painting,” said Isherwood, “and that’s you.”

Gabriel accepted the professional compliment with a slight cock of his head, then resumed his apathetic examination of the menu. Isherwood had meant what he said. Gabriel Allon, had he been brought into this world under a different star, might very well have been one of his generation’s finest artists. Isherwood thought of the first time they had met-a brilliant September afternoon in 1978, a bench overlooking the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Gabriel had been little more than a boy then, though his temples, Isherwood remembered, were already shot with gray. The stain of a boy who’d done a man’s job, Shamron had said.

“He left the Bezalel Academy of Art in seventy-two. In seventy-five, he went to Venice to study restoration under the great Umberto Conti.”

“Umberto’s the best there is.”

“So I’m told. It seems our Gabriel made quite an impression on Signore Conti. He says Gabriel’s hands are the most talented he’s ever seen. I would have to concur.”

Isherwood had made the mistake of asking what exactly Gabriel had been doing between 1972 and 1975. Gabriel had turned to watch a pair of lovers walking hand in hand along the edge of the lake. Shamron had absently picked a splinter from the bench.

“Think of him as a stolen painting that has been quietly returned to its rightful owner. The owner doesn’t ask questions about where the painting has been. He’s just happy to have it hanging on his wall again.”

Then Shamron had requested his first “favor.”

“There’s a certain Palestinian gentleman who’s taken up residence in Oslo. I fear this gentleman’s intentions are less than honorable. I’d like Gabriel to keep an eye on him, and I’d like you to find him some respectable work. A simple restoration, perhaps-something that might take two weeks or so. Can you do that for me, Julian?”

Isherwood was brought back to the present by the appearance of the waiter. He ordered bisque and a boiled lobster, Gabriel green salad and plain grilled sole with rice. He’d been living in Europe for the better part of the last thirty years, but he still had the simple tastes of a Sabra farm boy from the Jezreel Valley. Food and wine, fine clothing and fast cars-these things were lost on him.

“I’m surprised you were able to make it today,” Isherwood said.

“Why is that?”

“ Rome.”

Gabriel kept his eyes on the menu. “That’s not my portfolio, Julian. Besides, I’m retired. You know that.”

“Please,” said Isherwood in a confessional murmur. “So what are you working on these days?”

“I’m finishing the San Giovanni Crisostomo altarpiece.”

“Another Bellini? You’re going to make quite a name for yourself.”

“I already have.”

Gabriel’s last restoration, Bellini’s San Zaccaria altarpiece, had ignited a sensation in the art world and set the standard against which all future Bellini restorations would be judged.

“Isn’t Tiepolo’s firm handling the Crisostomo project?”

Gabriel nodded. “I’m working exclusively for Francesco now, more or less.”

“He can’t afford you.”

“I like working in Venice, Julian. He pays me enough to make ends meet. Don’t worry, I’m not exactly living the way I did when I was doing my apprenticeship with Umberto.”

“From what I hear, you’ve been a busy boy lately. According to the rumor mill, they nearly took the San Zaccaria altarpiece away from you because you left Venice on a personal matter.”

“You shouldn’t listen to rumors, Julian.”

“Oh, really. I also hear that you’re shacked up in a palazzo in Cannaregio with a lovely young woman named Chiara.”

The sharp look, delivered over the rim of a wineglass, confirmed for Isherwood that the rumors of Gabriel’s romantic entanglement were true.

“Does the child have a last name?”

“Her family name is Zolli, and she’s not a child.”

“Is it true her father is the chief rabbi of Venice?”

“He’s the only rabbi in Venice. It’s not exactly a thriving community. The war ended that.”

“Does she know about your other line of work?”

“She’s Office, Julian.”

“Just promise me you’re not going to break this girl’s heart like all the others,” Isherwood said. “My God, the women you’ve let slip through your fingers. I still have the most marvelous fantasies about that creature Jacqueline Delacroix.”

Gabriel leaned forward across the table, his face suddenly quite serious. “I’m going to marry her, Julian.”

“And Leah?” Isherwood asked gently. “What are you planning to do about Leah?”

“I have to tell her. I’m going to see her tomorrow morning.”

“Will she understand?”

“To be honest, I’m not sure, but I owe it to her.”

“God forgive me for saying this, but you owe it to yourself. It’s time you got on with your life. I don’t need to remind you that you’re not a boy of twenty-five anymore.”

“You’re not the one who has to look her in the eye and tell her that you’re in love with another woman.”

“Forgive my impertinence. It’s the burgundy talking-and the Rubens. Want some company? I’ll drive you down.”

“No,” said Gabriel. “I need to go alone.”

The first course arrived. Isherwood tucked into his bisque. Gabriel speared a piece of lettuce.

“What kind of fee did you have in mind for the Rubens cleaning?”

“Off the top of my head? Somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand pounds.”

“Too bad,” Gabriel said. “For two hundred, I’d consider taking it on.”

“All right, two hundred, you bastard.”

“I’ll call you next week and let you know.”

“What’s stopping you from making a commitment now? The Bellini?”

No, thought Gabriel. It wasn’t the Bellini. It was Rome.

THE STRATFORD CLINIC, one of the most prestigious and private psychiatric hospitals in Europe, was located an hour’s drive from the center of London on a rambling old Victorian estate in the hills of Surrey. The patient population included a distant member of the British royal family and the second cousin of the current prime minister, and so the staff were accustomed to unusual demands by visitors. Gabriel passed through the front security gate after identifying himself as “Mr. Browne.”

He parked his rented Opel in the visitors’ carpark in the forecourt of the old redbrick manor house. Leonard Avery, Leah’s physician, greeted him in the entrance hall, a windblown figure dressed in a Barbour coat and Wellington boots. “Once a week I lead a select group of patients on a nature walk in the surrounding countryside,” he said, explaining his appearance. “It’s extremely therapeutic.” He shook Gabriel’s hand without removing his glove and inquired about the drive from London as if he did not truly wish to know the answer. “She’s waiting for you in the solarium. She still likes the solarium the best.”

They set out down a corridor with a pale linoleum floor, Avery as though he were still pounding along a Surrey footpath. He was the only one at the hospital who knew the truth about the patient named Lee Martinson-or at least part of the truth. He knew that her true family name was Allon and that her terrible burns and near-catatonic state were not the result of a motor accident-the explanation that appeared in Leah’s hospital records-but of a car bombing in Vienna. He also knew that the bombing had claimed the life of her young son. He believed Gabriel was an Israeli diplomat and did not like him.

As they walked, he provided Gabriel with a terse update on Leah’s condition. There had been no change to speak of-Avery did not seem overly concerned by this. He was never one for false optimism and had always maintained low expectations about Leah’s prognosis. He had been proven correct. In the thirteen years since the bombing, she had never once uttered a word to Gabriel.

At the end of the corridor was a set of double doors, with round porthole-like windows clouded by moisture. Avery opened one and led Gabriel into the solarium. Gabriel, greeted by the oppressive humidity, immediately removed his coat. A gardener was watering the potted orange trees and chatting with a nurse, an attractive dark-haired woman whom Gabriel had never before seen.

“You can go now, Amira,” Dr. Avery said.

The nurse went out, followed by the gardener.

“Who’s that?” Gabriel asked.

“She’s a graduate of the King’s College school of nursing and a specialist in the care of the acutely mentally ill. Very accomplished at what she does. Your wife is quite fond of her.”

Avery gave Gabriel an avuncular pat on the shoulder, then saw himself out as well. Gabriel turned around. Leah was seated in a straight-backed wrought-iron chair, her eyes lifted toward the dripping windows of the solarium. She wore white trousers made from flimsy institutional cotton and a high-necked sweater that helped conceal her frail body. Her hands, scarred and twisted, held a sprig of blossom. Her hair, once long and black as a raven’s wing, was cropped short and nearly all gray. Gabriel leaned down and kissed her cheek. His lips fell upon cool, firm scar tissue. Leah seemed not to sense his touch.

He sat down and took hold of what remained of Leah’s left hand. He felt no life within. Her head swiveled slowly round until her eyes found his. He searched for some sign of recognition, but saw nothing. Her memory had been stolen. In Leah’s mind only the bombing remained. It played ceaselessly, like a loop of videotape. All else had been erased or pushed to some inaccessible corner of her brain. To Leah, Gabriel was no more important than the nurse who had brought her here or the gardener who cared for the plants. Leah had been punished for his sins. Leah was the price a decent man had paid for climbing into the sewer with murderers and terrorists. For Gabriel, a man blessed with the ability to heal beautiful things, Leah’s situation was doubly painful. He longed to strip away the scars and restore her glory. But Leah was beyond repair. Too little remained of the original.

He spoke to her. He reminded her that he was living in Venice these days, working for a firm that restored churches. He did not tell her that, occasionally, he still ran the odd errand for Ari Shamron, or that two months previously he had engineered the capture of an Austrian war criminal named Erich Radek and returned him to Israel to face justice. When finally he screwed up the nerve to tell her that he was in love with another woman and wished to dissolve their marriage so he could marry her, he could not go through with it. Talking to Leah was like talking to a gravestone. There seemed no point.

When a half hour had elapsed, he left Leah’s side and poked his head into the corridor. The nurse was waiting there, leaning against the wall with her arms folded across the front of her tunic.

“Are you finished?” she asked.

Gabriel nodded. The woman brushed past and went wordlessly inside.

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when the flight from Heathrow Airport touched down in Venice. Gabriel, riding into town in a water taxi, stood in the cockpit with the driver, his back to the cabin door, watching the channel markers of the lagoon rising out of the mist like columns of defeated soldiers returning home from the front. Soon the edges of Cannaregio appeared. Gabriel felt a fleeting sense of tranquillity. Venice, crumbling, sagging, sodden Venice, always had that effect on him. She’s an entire city in need of restoration, Umberto Conti had said to him. Use her. Heal Venice, and she’ll heal you.

The taxi dropped him at the Palazzo Lezze. Gabriel walked westward across Cannaregio along the banks of a broad canal called the Rio della Misericordia. He came to an iron bridge, the only one in all of Venice. In the Middle Ages there had been a gate in the center of the bridge, and at night a Christian watchman had stood guard so that those imprisoned on the other side could not escape. Gabriel crossed the bridge and entered an underground sottoportego. At the other end of the passageway a broad square opened before him: the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo, the center of the ancient ghetto of Venice. At its height it had been the cramped home to more than five thousand Jews. Now only twenty of the city’s four hundred Jews lived in the old ghetto, and most of those were elderly who resided in the Casa Israelitica di Riposo.

Gabriel made for the modern glass doorway at the opposite side of the square and went inside. To his right was the entrance to a small bookstore that specialized in books dealing with Jewish history and the Jews of Venice. It was warm and brightly lit, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the canal that encircled the ghetto. Behind the counter, seated atop a wooden stool in a cone of halogen light, was a girl with short blond hair. She smiled at him as he entered and greeted him by his work name.

“She left about an hour ago.”

“Really? Where is she?”

The girl shrugged elaborately. “Didn’t say.”

Gabriel looked at his wristwatch. Four-fifteen. He decided to put in a few hours on the Bellini before dinner.

“If you see her, tell her I’m at the church.”

“No problem. Ciao, Mario.”

He walked to the Rialto Bridge. One street over from the canal he turned to the left and headed for a small terra-cotta church. He paused. Standing at the entrance of the church, in the shelter of the lunette, was a man Gabriel recognized, an Office security agent named Rami. His presence in Venice could mean but one thing. He caught Gabriel’s eye and glanced toward the doorway. Gabriel slipped past and went inside.

The church was in the final stages of restoration. The pews had been removed from the Greek Cross nave and pushed temporarily against the eastern wall. The cleaning of Sebastiano del Piombo’s main altarpiece was complete. Unlit, it was barely visible in the late-afternoon shadow. The Bellini hung in the Chapel of Saint Jerome, on the right side of the church. It should have been concealed behind a tarpaulin-draped scaffold, but the scaffolding had been moved aside and the painting was ablaze with harsh fluorescent lights. Chiara turned to watch Gabriel’s approach. Shamron’s hooded gaze remained fixed on the painting.

“You know something, Gabriel, even I have to admit it’s beautiful.”

The old man’s tone was grudging. Shamron, an Israeli primitive, had no use for art or entertainment of any kind. He saw beauty only in a perfectly conceived operation or the destruction of an enemy. But Gabriel took note of something else-the fact that Shamron had just spoken to him in Hebrew and committed the unpardonable sin of uttering his real name in an insecure location.

“Beautiful,” he repeated, then he turned to Gabriel and smiled sadly. “It’s a pity you’ll never be able to finish it.”

4 VENICE

SHAMRON EASED HIS BODY WEARILY ONTO A CHURCH pew and, with a liver-spotted hand, motioned for Gabriel to adjust the angle of the fluorescent lights. From a metal briefcase he removed a manila envelope and from the envelope three photographs. He placed the first wordlessly into Gabriel’s outstretched hand. Gabriel looked down and saw himself walking in the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo with Chiara at his side. He examined the image calmly, as if it was a painting in need of restoration, and tried to determine when it had been taken. Their clothing, the sharp contrast of the afternoon light, and the dead leaves on the paving stones of the square suggested late autumn. Shamron held up a second photo-Gabriel and Chiara again, this time in a restaurant not far from their house in Cannaregio. The third photograph, Gabriel leaving the Church of San Giovanni Crisostomo, turned his spinal cord to ice. How many times? he wondered. How many times had an assassin been waiting in the campo when he left work for the night?

“It couldn’t last forever,” Shamron said. “Eventually they were going to find you here. You’ve made too many enemies over the years. We both have.”

Gabriel handed the photographs back to Shamron. Chiara sat down next to him. In this setting, in this light, she reminded Gabriel of Raphael’s Alba Madonna. Her hair, dark and curly and shimmering with highlights of chestnut and auburn, was clasped at the nape of her neck and spilled riotously about her shoulders. Her skin was olive and luminous. Her eyes, deep brown with flecks of gold, shone in the lamplight. They tended to change color with her mood. Gabriel, in Chiara’s dark gaze, could see there was more bad news to come.

Shamron reached into the briefcase a second time. “This is a dossier, summarizing your career, uncomfortably accurate, I’m afraid.” He paused. “Seeing one’s entire life reduced to a succession of deaths can be difficult. Are you sure you want to read it?”

Gabriel held out his hand. Shamron had not bothered to have the dossier translated from Arabic into Hebrew. The Jezreel Valley contained many Arab towns and villages. Gabriel’s Arabic, while not fluent, was good enough to read a recitation of his own professional exploits.

Shamron was right-somehow his enemies had managed to assemble a tellingly complete account of his career. The dossier referred to Gabriel by his real name. The date of his recruitment was correct, as was the reason, though it credited him with killing eight members of Black September when in truth he had killed only six. Several pages were devoted to Gabriel’s assassination of Khalil el-Wazir, the PLO’s second-in-command, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Jihad. Gabriel had killed him inside his seaside villa in Tunis in 1988. The description of the operation had been provided by Abu Jihad’s wife, Umm Jihad, who had been present that night. The entry for Vienna was terse and noteworthy for its one glaring factual error: Wife and son killed by car bomb, Vienna, January 1991. Reprisal ordered by Abu Amar. Abu Amar was none other than Yasir Arafat. Gabriel had always suspected Arafat’s personal involvement. Until now he had never seen evidence confirming it.

He held up the pages of the dossier. “Where did you get this?”

“ Milan,” Shamron said. He then told Gabriel about the raid on the pensione and the computer disk found in one of the suspects’ bags. “When the Italians couldn’t break the security code, they turned to us. I suppose we should consider ourselves fortunate. If they’d been able to get inside that disk they would have been able to solve a thirty-year-old Roman murder in a matter of minutes.”

Contained in the dossier was the fact that he had killed a Black September operative named Wadal Abdel Zwaiter in a Rome apartment house in 1972. It was that killing, Gabriel’s first, which had caused his temples to gray virtually overnight. He handed the dossier back to Shamron.

“What do we know about the men who were hiding in that pensione?”

“Based on fingerprints discovered on the material and in the room, along with the photos in the false passports, we’ve managed to identify one of them. His name is Daoud Hadawi, a Palestinian, born in the Jenin refugee camp. He was a ringleader during the first intifada and was in and out of prison. At seventeen he joined Fatah, and when Arafat came to Gaza after Oslo, Hadawi went to work for Al-Amn Al-Ra’isah, the Presidential Security Service. You may know that organization by its previous name, the name it used before Oslo: Force 17, Arafat’s praetorian guard. Arafat’s favorite killers.”

“What else do we know about Hadawi?”

Shamron reached into his coat pocket for his cigarettes. Gabriel stopped him and explained that the smoke was harmful to the paintings. Shamron sighed and carried on with his briefing.

“We were convinced he was involved in terror operations during the second intifada. We placed him on a list of wanted suspects, but the Palestinian Authority refused to hand him over. We assumed he was hiding inside the Mukata with Arafat and the rest of the senior men.” The Mukata was the name of Arafat’s walled, militarized compound in Ramallah. “But when we smashed into the Mukata during Operation Defense Shield, Hadawi was not among the men we found hiding there.”

“Where was he?”

“Shabak and Aman assumed he’d fled to Jordan or Lebanon. They turned the case file over to the Office. Unfortunately, locating Hadawi was not high on Lev’s list of priorities. It turned out to be a very costly mistake.”

“Is Hadawi still a member of Force 17?”

“Unclear.”

“Does he still have links to Arafat?”

“We simply don’t know yet.”

“Does Shabak think Hadawi was capable of pulling off something like this?”

“Not really. He was considered a foot soldier, not a mastermind. Rome was planned and executed by a class act. Someone very smart. Someone capable of pulling off a shocking act of terrorism on the world stage. Someone with experience in this sort of thing.”

“Like who?”

“That’s what we want you to find out.”

“Me?”

“We want you to find the animals who carried out this massacre, and we want you to put them down. It will be just like seventy-two, except this time you’ll be the one in command instead of me.”

Gabriel shook his head slowly. “I’m not an investigator. I was the executioner. Besides, this isn’t my war any longer. It’s Shabak’s war. It’s the Sayaret’s war.”

“They’ve come back to Europe,” Shamron said. “ Europe is Office turf. This is your war.”

“Why don’t you lead the team?”

“I’m a mere adviser with no operational authority.” Shamron’s tone was heavy with irony. He enjoyed playing the role of the downtrodden civil servant who’d been put out to pasture before his time, even if the reality was far different. “Besides, Lev wouldn’t hear of it.”

“And he would let me lead the team?”

“He doesn’t have a choice. The prime minister has already spoken on the matter. Of course I was whispering in his ear at the time.” Shamron paused. “Lev did make one demand, however, and I’m afraid I was in no position to challenge it.”

“What’s that?”

“He insists that you come back on the payroll and return to full-time duty.”

Gabriel had left the Office after the bombing in Vienna. His missions in the intervening years had been essentially freelance affairs orchestrated by Shamron. “He wants me under Office discipline so he can keep me under his control,” Gabriel said.

“His motives are rather transparent. For a man of the secret world, Lev does a terrible job covering his own tracks. But don’t take it personally. It’s me who Lev despises. You, I’m afraid, are guilty by association.”

A sudden clamor rose from the street, children running and shouting. Shamron remained silent until the noise dissipated. When he spoke again, his voice took on a new tone of gravity.

“That disk contains more than just your dossier,” he said. “We also found surveillance photographs and detailed security analyses of several potential future targets in Europe.”

“What sorts of targets?”

“Embassies, consulates, El Al offices, major synagogues, Jewish community centers, schools.” Shamron’s final word echoed in the apses of the church for a moment before dying away. “They’re going to hit us again, Gabriel. You can help us stop them. You know them as well as anyone at King Saul Boulevard.” He turned his gaze toward the altarpiece. “You know them like the brushstrokes of that Bellini.”

Shamron looked at Gabriel. “Your days in Venice are over. There’s a plane waiting on the other side of the lagoon. You’re getting on it, whether you like it or not. What you do after that is your business. You can sit around a safe flat, pondering the state of your life, or you can help us find these murderers before they strike again.”

Gabriel could muster no challenge. Shamron was right: he had no choice but to leave. Still, there was something in the self-satisfied tone of Shamron’s voice that Gabriel found irritating. Shamron had been pleading with him for years to forsake Europe and return to Israel, preferably to assume control of the Office, or at least Operations. Gabriel couldn’t help but feel Shamron, in his Machiavellian way, was deriving a certain satisfaction from the situation.

He stood and walked to the altarpiece. Attempting to hurriedly finish it was out of the question. The figure of Saint Christopher, with the Christ Child straddling his shoulders, still required substantial inpainting. Then the entire piece required a new coat of varnish. Four weeks minimum, probably more like six. He supposed Tiepolo would have to give it to someone else to finish, a thought that made Gabriel’s stomach churn with acid. But there was something else: Israel wasn’t exactly flooded with Italian Old Master paintings. Chances were he would never again touch a Bellini.

“My work is here,” Gabriel said, though his voice was heavy with resignation.

“No, your work was here. You’re coming home”-Shamron hesitated-“to King Saul Boulevard. To Eretz Yisrael.”

“Leah, too,” Gabriel said. “It’s going to take some time to make the arrangements. Until then, I want a man at the hospital. I don’t care if the dossier says she’s dead.”

“I’ve already dispatched a Security agent from London station.”

Gabriel looked at Chiara.

“She’s coming, too,” Shamron said, reading his thoughts. “We’ll leave a team from Security in Venice as long as necessary to look after her family and the community.”

“I have to tell Tiepolo that I’m leaving.”

“The fewer people who know, the better.”

“I don’t care,” said Gabriel. “I owe it to him.”

“Do what you need to do. Just do it quickly.”

“What about the house? There are things-”

“Extraction will see to your things. By the time they finish, there’ll be no trace of you here.” Shamron, in spite of Gabriel’s admonition against smoking, lit a cigarette. He held the match aloft for a moment, then ceremoniously blew it out. “It will be as though you never existed.”

SHAMRON GRANTED HIM one hour. Gabriel, with Chiara’s Beretta in his pocket, slipped from the back door of the church and made his way to Castello. He had lived there during his apprenticeship and knew the tangled streets of the sestière well. He walked in a section where tourists never went and many of the houses were uninhabited. His route, deliberately circuitous, took him through several underground sottoportegi, where it was impossible for a pursuer to hide. Once he purposely led himself into an enclosed corte, from which there was only one way to enter and leave. After twenty minutes, he was certain no one was following him.

Francesco Tiepolo kept his office in San Marco, on the Viale 22 Marzo. Gabriel found him seated behind the large oaken table he used as his desk, his large body folded over a stack of paperwork. Were it not for the notebook computer and electric light, he might have been a figure in a Renaissance painting. He looked up at Gabriel and smiled through his tangled black beard. On the streets of Venice, tourists often mistook him for Luciano Pavarotti. Lately he’d taken to posing for photographs and singing a few lines of “Non ti scordar di me” very badly.

He had been a great restorer once; now he was a businessman. Indeed, Tiepolo’s was the most successful restoration firm in the entire Veneto. He spent most of his day preparing bids for various projects or locked in political battles with the Venetian officials charged with the care of the city’s artistic and architectural treasures. Once a day he popped into the Church of San Crisostomo to prod his gifted chief restorer, the recalcitrant and reclusive Mario Delvecchio, into working faster. Tiepolo was the only person in the art world other than Julian Isherwood who knew the truth about the talented Signore Delvecchio.

Tiepolo suggested they walk around the corner for a glass of prosecco, then, confronted with Gabriel’s reluctance to leave the office, he fetched a bottle of ripasso from the next room instead. Gabriel scanned the framed photographs arrayed on the wall behind the Venetian’s desk. There was a new photograph of Tiepolo with his good friend, His Holiness Pope Paul VII. Pietro Lucchesi had been the Patriarch of Venice before reluctantly moving to the Vatican to become leader of the world’s one billion Roman Catholics. The photo showed Tiepolo and the pope seated in the dining room of Tiepolo’s gloriously restored palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal. What it didn’t show was that Gabriel, at that moment, had been seated to the pope’s left. Two years earlier, with a bit of help from Tiepolo, he had saved the pope’s life and destroyed a grave threat to his papacy. He hoped that Chiara and the team from Extraction had found the Hanuka card the Holy Father had sent him in December.

Tiepolo poured out two glasses of the blood-red ripasso and slid one across the tabletop toward Gabriel. Half of his own wine disappeared in one swallow. Only in his work was Tiepolo meticulous. In all other things-food, drink, his many women-Francesco Tiepolo was prone to extravagance and excess. Gabriel leaned forward and quietly told Tiepolo the news-that his enemies had found him in Venice, that he had no choice but to leave the city immediately, before he could finish the Bellini. Tiepolo smiled sadly and closed his eyes.

“Is there no other way?”

Gabriel shook his head. “They know where I live. They know where I work.”

“And Chiara?”

Gabriel answered the question truthfully. Tiepolo, in Italian, was an uomo di fiducia, a man of trust.

“I’m sorry about the Bellini,” Gabriel said. “I should have finished it months ago.” He would have, were it not for the Radek affair.

“To hell with the Bellini! It’s you I care about.” Tiepolo stared into his wine. “I’m going to miss Mario Delvecchio, but I’m going to miss Gabriel Allon more.”

Gabriel raised his glass in Tiepolo’s direction. “I know I’m not in any position to ask for a favor…” His voice trailed off.

Tiepolo looked at the photograph of the Holy Father and said, “You saved my friend’s life. What do you want?”

“Finish the Bellini for me.”

“Me?”

“We shared the same teacher, Francesco. Umberto Conti taught you well.”

“Yes, but do you know how long it’s been since I’ve put a brush to a painting?”

“You’ll do just fine. Trust me.”

“That’s quite a vote of confidence, coming from a man like Mario Delvecchio.”

“Mario’s dead, Francesco. Mario never was.”

GABRIEL MADE HIS WAY back to Cannaregio through the gathering darkness. He took a short detour so he could walk, one final time, through the ancient ghetto. In the square, he watched proprietarily as a pair of boys, clad all in black with wispy untrimmed beards, hurried across the paving stones toward the yeshiva. He looked at his watch. An hour had elapsed since he’d left Shamron and Chiara in the church. He turned and started walking toward the house that would soon bear no trace of him, and the plane that would carry him home again. As he walked, two questions ran ceaselessly in his mind. Who had found him in Venice? And why was he being allowed to leave alive?

5 TEL AVIV: MARCH 10

GABRIEL ARRIVED AT KING SAUL BOULEVARD AT eight o’clock the following morning. Two officers from Personnel were waiting for him. They wore matching cotton shirts and matching smiles-the tight, humorless smiles of men who are empowered to ask embarrassing questions. In the eyes of Personnel, Gabriel’s return to discipline was long overdue. He was like fine wine, to be savored slowly and with much commentary. He placed himself in their hands with the melancholy air of a fugitive surrendering after a long time on the run and followed them upstairs.

There were declarations to sign, oaths to swear, and unapologetic questions about the state of his bank account. He was photographed and issued an identification badge, which was hung like an albatross around his neck. New fingerprints were taken because no one could seem to find the originals from 1972. He was examined by a medical doctor who, upon seeing the scars all over his body, seemed surprised to find a pulse in his wrist and blood pressure in his veins. He even endured a mind-numbing session with an Office psychologist, who jotted a few notes in Gabriel’s file and hurriedly fled the room. Motor Pool granted him temporary use of a Skoda sedan; Housekeeping assigned him a windowless cell in the basement and living accommodations until he could find a place of his own. Gabriel, who wished to maintain a buffer between himself and King Saul Boulevard, chose a disused safe flat on Narkiss Street in Jerusalem, not far from the old campus of the Bezalel Academy of Art.

At sunset he was summoned to the executive suite for the final ritual of his return. The light above Lev’s door shone green. His secretary, an attractive girl with suntanned legs and hair the color of cinnamon, pressed an unseen button, and the door swung silently open under its own power like the entrance of a bank vault.

Gabriel stepped inside and paused before advancing farther. He felt a peculiar sense of dislocation, like a man who returns to his childhood bedroom only to find it turned into his father’s den. The office had been Shamron’s once. Gone were the scarred wooden desk and steel file cabinets and the German shortwave radio on which he had monitored the bellicose voices of his enemies. Now the motif was modern and monochrome gray. The old linoleum floor had been torn up and covered by a plush executive rug. Strategically placed around the room were several expensive-looking Oriental carpets. From high in the ceiling a recessed halogen bulb shone down upon a seating area of contemporary black leather furniture that reminded Gabriel of a first-class airport lounge. The wall nearest the seating area had been transformed into a giant plasma video display, from which the world’s media flickered silently in high definition. The remote control, resting on the glass coffee table, was the size of a prayer book and looked as though it required an advanced engineering degree to operate.

Whereas Shamron had placed his desk barrier-like in front of the door, Lev had chosen to reside near the windows. The pale gray blinds were drawn but angled in such a way that it was just possible to make out the ragged skyline of downtown Tel Aviv and a large orange sun sinking slowing into the Mediterranean. Lev’s desk, a large expanse of smoky glass, was vacant except for a computer and a pair of telephones. He was seated before the monitor, with his hands folded praying mantis-like beneath his defiant chin. His bald head glowed softly in the restrained light. Gabriel noted that Lev’s eyeglasses cast no reflection. He wore special lenses so that his enemies-meaning anyone within the Office who opposed him-could not see what he was reading.

“Gabriel,” he said, as though surprised by his presence. He came out from behind the desk and shook Gabriel’s hand carefully, then, with a bony finger pressed to Gabriel’s spine like a pistol, guided him across the room to the seating area. As he was lowering himself into a chair, one of the images on the video wall caught his attention, which one Gabriel could not tell. He sighed heavily, then turned his head slowly and studied Gabriel with a predatory gaze.

The shadow of their last meeting fell between them. It had taken place not in this room but in Jerusalem, in the office of the prime minister. There had been but one item on the agenda: whether the Office should capture Erich Radek and bring him back to Israel to face justice. Lev had steadfastly opposed the idea, despite the fact that Radek had very nearly killed Gabriel’s mother during the death march from Auschwitz in January 1945. The prime minister had overruled Lev and mandated that Gabriel be placed in charge of the operation to seize Radek and spirit him out of Austria. Radek now resided in a police detention facility in Jaffa, and Lev had spent much of the last two months trying to undo the damage caused by his initial opposition to Radek’s capture. Lev’s standing among the troops at King Saul Boulevard had fallen to dangerously low levels. In Jerusalem, some were beginning to wonder whether Lev’s time had come and gone.

“I’ve taken the liberty of assembling your team,” said Lev. He pressed the intercom button on the telephone and summoned his secretary. She entered the room with a file beneath her arm. Lev’s meetings were always well-choreographed. He adored nothing more than standing before a complicated chart, pointer in hand, and decoding its secrets for a mystified audience.

As the secretary headed toward the door, Lev looked at Gabriel to see if he was watching her walk away. Then he handed the files wordlessly to Gabriel and turned his gaze once more toward the video wall. Gabriel lifted the cover and found several sheets of paper, each containing the thumbnail sketch of a team member: name, section, area of expertise. The sun had slipped below the horizon, and the office had grown very dark. Gabriel, in order to read the file, had to lean slightly to his left and hold the pages directly beneath the halogen ceiling lamp. After a few moments he looked up at Lev.

“You forgot to add representatives from Hadassah and the Maccabee Youth Sports League.”

Gabriel’s irony bounced off Lev like a stone thrown at a speeding freight train.

“Your point, Gabriel?”

“It’s too big. We’ll be tripping over each other.” It occurred to Gabriel that perhaps Lev wanted precisely that. “I can carry out the investigation with half these people.”

Lev, with a languid wave of his long hand, invited Gabriel to reduce the size of the team. Gabriel began removing pages and placing them on the coffee table. Lev frowned. Gabriel’s cuts, while random, had clearly dislodged Lev’s informant.

“This will do,” Gabriel said, handing the personnel files back to Lev. “We’ll need a place to meet. My office is too small.”

“Housekeeping has set aside Room 456C.”

Gabriel knew it well. Three levels belowground, 456C was nothing more than a dumping ground for old furniture and obsolete computer equipment, often used by members of the night staff as a spot for romantic trysts.

“Fine,” said Gabriel.

Lev crossed one long leg over the other and picked a piece of invisible lint from his trousers. “You’ve never worked at headquarters before, have you, Gabriel?”

“You know exactly where I’ve worked.”

“Which is why I feel I should give you a helpful reminder. The progress of your investigation, assuming you make any, is not to be shared with anyone outside this service. You will report to me and only me. Is that clear?”

“I take it you’re referring to the old man.”

“You know exactly who I’m referring to.”

“Shamron and I are personal friends. I won’t cut off my relationship with him just to put your mind at ease.”

“But you will refrain from discussing the case with him. Have I made myself clear?”

Lev had neither mud on his boots nor blood on his hands, but he was a master in the art of boardroom thrust and parry.

“Yes, Lev,” Gabriel said. “I know exactly where you stand.”

Lev got to his feet, signaling that the meeting had ended, but Gabriel remained seated.

“There’s something else I needed to discuss with you.”

“My time is limited,” said Lev, looking down.

“It won’t take but a minute. It’s about Chiara.”

Lev, rather than suffer the indignity of retaking his seat, walked over to the window and looked down at the lights of Tel Aviv. “What about her?”

“I don’t want her used again until we determine who else saw the contents of that computer disk.”

Lev rotated slowly, as if he were a statue on a pedestal. With the light behind him, he appeared as nothing more than a dark mass against the horizontal lines of the blinds.

“I’m glad you feel comfortable enough to walk into this office and make demands,” he said acidly, “but Chiara’s future will be determined by Operations and, ultimately, by me.”

“She’s only a bat leveyha. Are you telling me you can’t find any other girls to serve as escort officers?”

“She’s got an Italian passport, and she’s damned good at her job. You know that better than anyone.”

“She’s also burned, Lev. If you put her in the field with an agent, you’ll put the agent at risk. I wouldn’t work with her.”

“Fortunately, most of our field officers aren’t as arrogant as you.”

“I never knew a good field man who wasn’t arrogant, Lev.”

A silence fell between them. Lev walked over to his desk and pressed a button on his telephone. The door swung open automatically, and a wedge of bright light entered from Lev’s reception area.

“It’s been my experience that field agents don’t take well to the discipline of headquarters. In the field, they’re a law unto themselves, but in here, I’m the law.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind, sheriff.”

“Don’t fuck this up,” Lev said as Gabriel headed toward the open door. “If you do, not even Shamron will be able to protect you.”

THEY CONVENED AT nine o’clock the following morning. Housekeeping had made a halfhearted attempt at putting the room in order. A chipped wooden conference table stood in the center, surrounded by several mismatched chairs. The excess debris had been piled against the far wall. Gabriel, as he entered, was reminded of the pews stacked against the wall of the Church of San Giovanni Crisostomo. Everything about the setting suggested impermanence, including the misleading paper sign, affixed to the door with packing tape, that read: TEMPORARY COMMITTEE FOR THE STUDY OF TERROR THREATS IN WESTERN EUROPE. Gabriel embraced the disarray. From adversity, Shamron always said, comes cohesion.

His team numbered four in all, two boys and two girls, all eager and adoring and unbearably young. From Research came Yossi, a pedantic but brilliant intelligence analyst who had read Greats at Oxford; from History, a dark-eyed girl named Dina who could recite the time, place, and butcher’s bill of every act of terrorism ever committed against the State of Israel. She walked with a very slight limp and was treated with unfailing tenderness by the others. Gabriel found the reason why in her personnel file. Dina had been standing in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street the day in October 1994 when a Hamas suicide bomber turned the Number 5 bus into a coffin for twenty-one people. Her mother and two of her sisters were killed that day. Dina had been seriously wounded.

The two other members of the team came from outside the Office. The Arab Affairs Department of Shabak lent Gabriel a pockmarked tough named Yaakov, who had spent the better part of the last decade trying to penetrate the Palestinian Authority’s apparatus of terror. Military Intelligence gave him a captain named Rimona, who was Shamron’s niece. The last time Gabriel had seen Rimona, she’d been tearing fearlessly down Shamron’s steep driveway on a kick scooter. These days Rimona could usually be found in a secure aircraft hangar north of Tel Aviv, poring over the papers seized from Yasir Arafat’s compound in Ramallah.

Instinctively, Gabriel approached the case as though it was a painting. He was reminded of a restoration he had performed not long after his apprenticeship, a crucifixion by an early Renaissance Venetian named Cima. Gabriel, after removing the yellowed varnish, had discovered that virtually nothing remained of the original. He had then spent the next three months piecing together filaments of the obscure painter’s life and work. When finally he began the retouching, it was as if Cima was standing at his shoulder, guiding his hand.

The artist, in this case, was the one member of the terrorist team who had been positively identified: Daoud Hadawi. Hadawi was their porthole onto the operation, and slowly, over the next several days, his brief life began to take shape on the walls of Gabriel’s lair. It ran from a ramshackle refugee camp in Jenin, through the stones and burning tires of the first intifada, and into the ranks of Force 17. No corner of Hadawi’s life remained unexplored: his schooling and his religious fervor, his family and his clan, his associations and his influences.

Known Force 17 personnel were located and accounted for. Those thought to possess the skills or education necessary to build the bomb that leveled the Rome embassy were singled out for special attention. Arab informants were called in and questioned from Ramallah to Gaza City, from Rome to London. Communications intercepts stretching two years into the past were filtered through the computers and sifted for any reference to a large-scale operation in Europe. Old surveillance and watch reports were reexamined, old airline passenger lists scoured again. Rimona returned to her hangar each morning to search for traces of Rome in the captured files of Arafat’s intelligence services.

Gradually, Room 456C began to resemble the command bunker of a besieged army. There were so many photographs pinned to the walls it seemed their search was being monitored by an Arab mob. The girls from the data rooms took to leaving their deliveries outside in the corridor. Gabriel requisitioned the room next door, along with cots and bedding. He also requested an easel and a chalkboard. Yossi contemptuously pointed out that no one had seen a chalkboard inside King Saul Boulevard in twenty years, and for his impertinence he was ordered to find one. It came the next morning. “I had to call in a lot of favors,” said Yossi. “The stone tablets and carving tools arrive next week.”

Gabriel began each day by posing the same series of questions: Who built the bomb? Who conceived and planned the attack? Who directed the teams? Who secured the safe houses and the transport? Who handled the money? Who was the mastermind? Was there a state sponsor in Damascus or Tehran or Tripoli?

A week into the investigation, none of the questions had been answered. Frustration began to set in. Gabriel instructed them to change their approach. “Sometimes these puzzles are solved by the piece you discover, and sometimes they’re solved by finding the piece that’s missing.” He stood before his chalkboard and wiped it until it was a blank slate. “Start looking for the piece that’s missing.”

THEY ATE SUPPER together each night as a family. Gabriel encouraged them to set aside the case to talk about something else. He naturally became the focus of their curiosity, for they had studied his exploits at the Academy and even read about some of them in their history books at school. He was reticent at first, but they coaxed him from his shell, and he played the role that Shamron, on countless other occasions, had played before him. He told them about Black September and Abu Jihad; his foray into the heart of the Vatican and his capture of Erich Radek. Rimona drew him out on the role restoration had played in his cover and the maintenance of his sanity. Yossi started to ask about the bombing in Vienna, but Dina, scholar of terror and counterterror, placed a restraining hand on Yossi’s arm and adroitly changed the subject. Sometimes, when Gabriel was speaking, he would see Dina gazing at him as though he were a hero’s monument come to life. He realized that he, like Shamron before him, had crossed the line between mortal and myth.

Radek intrigued them the most. Gabriel understood the reason for this all too well. They lived in a country where it was not safe to eat in a restaurant or to ride a bus, yet it was the Holocaust that occupied a special place in their nightmares. Is it true you made him walk through Treblinka? Did you touch him? How could you stand the sound of his voice in that place? Were you ever tempted to take matters into your own hands? Yaakov wanted to know only one thing: “Was he sorry he murdered our grandmothers?” And Gabriel, though he was tempted to lie, told him the truth. “No, he wasn’t sorry. In fact, I had the distinct impression he was still rather proud of it.” Yaakov nodded grimly, as if this fact seemed to confirm his rather pessimistic view of mankind.

On Shabbat, Dina lit a pair of candles and recited the blessing. That night, instead of wandering Gabriel’s dark past, they spoke of their dreams. Yaakov wanted only to sit in a Tel Aviv café without fear of the shaheed. Yossi wanted to trek the Arab world from Morocco to Baghdad and chronicle his experiences. Rimona longed to turn on the radio in the morning and hear that no one had been killed the night before. And Dina? Gabriel suspected that Dina’s dreams, like his own, were a private screening room of blood and fire.

After dinner Gabriel slipped from the room and wandered off down the corridor. He came to a flight of stairs, climbed them, then became disoriented and was pointed in the right direction by a night janitor. The entrance was under guard. Gabriel tried to show his new ID badge, but the Security officer just laughed and opened the door to him.

The room was dimly lit and, because of the computers, unbearably cold. The duty officers wore fleece pullovers and moved with the quiet efficiency of night staff in an intensive care ward. Gabriel climbed up to the viewing platform and leaned his weight against the aluminum handrail. Arrayed before him was a massive computer-generated map of the world, ten feet in height, thirty in width. Scattered across the globe were pinpricks of light, each depicting the last known location of a terrorist on Israel ’s watch list. There were clusters in Damascus and Baghdad and even in supposedly friendly places like Amman and Cairo. A river of light flowed from Beirut to the Bekaa Valley to the refugee camps along Israel ’s northern border. The West Bank and Gaza were ablaze. A string of lights lay across Europe like a diamond necklace. The cities of North America glowed seductively.

Gabriel felt a sudden weight of depression pushing down against his shoulders. He had given his life to the protection of the State and the Jewish people, and yet here, in this frigid room, he was confronted with the stark reality of the Zionist dream: a middle-aged man, gazing upon a constellation of enemies, waiting for the next one to explode.

DINA WAS WAITING for him in the corridor in her stocking feet.

“It feels familiar to me, Gabriel.”

“What’s that?”

“The way they carried it off. The way they moved. The planning. The sheer audacity of the thing. It feels like Munich and Sabena.” She paused and pushed a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear. “It feels like Black September.”

“There is no Black September, Dina-not anymore, at least.”

“You asked us to look for the thing that’s missing. Does that include Khaled?”

“Khaled is a rumor. Khaled is a ghost story.”

“I believe in Khaled,” she said. “Khaled keeps me awake at night.”

“You have a hunch?”

“A theory,” she said, “and some interesting evidence to support it. Would you like to hear it?”

6 TEL AVIV: MARCH 20

THEY RECONVENED AT TEN THAT EVENING. THE mood, Gabriel would recall later, was that of a university study group, too exhausted for serious enterprise but too anxious to part company. Dina, in order to add credence to her hypothesis, stood behind a small tabletop lectern. Yossi sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by his precious files from Research. Rimona, the only one in uniform, propped her sandaled feet on the back of Yossi’s empty chair. Yaakov sat next to Gabriel, his body still as granite.

Dina switched off the lights and placed a photograph on the overhead projector. It showed a child, a young boy, with a beret on his head and a kaffiyeh draped over his shoulders. The boy was seated on the lap of a distraught older man: Yasir Arafat.

“This is the last confirmed photograph of Khaled al-Khalifa,” Dina said. “The setting is Beirut, the year is 1979. The occasion is the funeral of his father, Sabri al-Khalifa. Within days of the funeral, Khaled vanished. He has never been seen again.”

Yaakov stirred in the darkness. “I thought we were going to deal with reality,” he grumbled.

“Let her finish,” snapped Rimona.

Yaakov appealed his case to Gabriel, but Gabriel’s gaze was locked on the accusatory eyes of the child.

“Let her finish,” he murmured.

Dina removed the photograph of the child and dropped a new one in its place. Black and white and slightly out of focus, it showed a man on horseback with bandoliers across his chest. A pair of dark defiant eyes, barely visible through the small opening in his kaffiyeh, stared directly into the camera lens.

“To understand Khaled,” Dina said, “one must first know his celebrated lineage. This man is Asad al-Khalifa, Khaled’s grandfather, and the story begins with him.”

TURKISH-RULED PALESTINE: OCTOBER 1910

He was born in the village of Beit Sayeed to a desperately poor fellah who had been cursed with seven daughters. He named his only son Asad: Lion. Doted on by his mother and sisters, cherished by his weak and aging father, Asad al-Khalifa was a lazy child who never learned to read or write and refused his father’s demand to memorize the Koran. Occasionally, when he wanted a bit of spending money, he would walk up the rutted track that led to the Jewish settlement of Petah Tikvah and work all day for a few piasters. The Jewish foreman was named Zev. “It’s Hebrew for wolf,” he told Asad. Zev spoke Arabic with a strange accent and always asked Asad questions about life in Beit Sayeed. Asad hated the Jews, as did everyone in Beit Sayeed, but the work wasn’t backbreaking, and he was happy to take Zev’s money.

Petah Tikvah made an impression on the young Asad. How was it that the Zionists, newcomers to this land, had made so much progress when most of the Arabs were still living in squalor? After seeing the stone villas and clean streets of the Jewish settlement, Asad felt ashamed when he returned to Beit Sayeed. He wanted to live well, but he knew he would never become a rich and powerful man working for the Jew named Wolf. He stopped going to Petah Tikvah and devoted his time to thinking about a new career.

One evening, while playing dice in the village coffeehouse, he heard an older man make a lewd remark about his sister. He walked over to the man’s table and calmly asked if he had heard the remark correctly. “You did indeed,” the man said. “And what’s more, the unfortunate girl has the face of a donkey.” With that the coffeehouse erupted into laughter. Asad, without another word, walked back to his table and resumed his game of dice. The next morning, the man who had insulted his sister was found in a nearby orchard with his throat slit and a shoe stuffed into his mouth, the ultimate Arab insult. A week later, when the man’s brother publicly vowed to avenge the death, he too was found in the orchard in the same state. After that, no one dared insult young Asad.

The incident in the coffeehouse helped Asad find his calling. He used his newfound notoriety to recruit an army of bandits. He chose only men from his tribe and clan, knowing that they would never betray him. He wanted the ability to strike far from Beit Sayeed, so he stole a stable full of horses from the new rulers of Palestine, the British army. He wanted the ability to intimidate rivals, so he stole guns from the British as well. When his raids began they were like nothing Palestine had seen for generations. He and his band struck towns and villages from the Coastal Plain to the Galilee to the hills of Samaria and then vanished without a trace. His victims were mostly other Arabs, but occasionally he would raid a poorly defended Jewish settlement-and sometimes, if he was in the mood for Jewish blood, he would kidnap a Zionist and kill him with his long, curved knife.

Asad al-Khalifa soon became a wealthy man. Unlike other successful Arab criminals, he did not draw attention to himself by flaunting his newfound riches. He wore the galabia and kaffiyeh of an ordinary fellah and spent most nights in his family’s mud-and-straw hut. To ensure his protection he spread money and loot among his clan. To the world outside Beit Sayeed, he appeared to be just an ordinary peasant, but inside the village he was now called Sheikh Asad.

He would not remain a mere bandit and highwayman for long. Palestine was changing-and from the vantage point of the Arabs, not for the better. By the mid-1930s, the Yishuv, the Jewish population of Palestine, had reached nearly a half million, compared with approximately a million Arabs. The official emigration rate was sixty thousand per year, but Sheikh Asad had heard the actual rate was far higher than that. Even a poor boy with no formal schooling could see that the Arabs would be a minority in their own country. Palestine was like a tinder-dry forest. A single spark might set it ablaze.

The spark occurred on April 15, 1936, when a gang of Arabs shot three Jews on the road east of Tulkarm. Members of the Jewish Irgun Bet retaliated by killing two Arabs not far from Beit Sayeed. Events spiraled rapidly out of control, culminating with an Arab rampage through the streets of Jaffa that left nine Jews dead. The Arab Revolt had begun.

There had been periods of unrest in Palestine, times when Arab frustration would boil over into rioting and killing, but never had there been anything like the coordinated violence and unrest that swept the land that spring and summer of 1936. Jews all across Palestine became targets of Arab rage. Shops were looted, orchards uprooted, homes and settlements burned. Jews were murdered on buses and in cafés, even inside their own homes. In Jerusalem, the Arab leaders convened and demanded an end to all Jewish immigration and the immediate installation of an Arab-majority government.

Sheikh Asad, though a thief, considered himself first and foremost a shabab, a young nationalist, and he saw the Arab Revolt as a chance to destroy the Jews once and for all. He immediately ceased all his criminal activities and transformed his gang of bandits into a jihaddiyya, a secret holy war fighting cell. He then unleashed a series of deadly attacks against Jewish and British targets in the Lydda district of central Palestine, using the same tactics of stealth and surprise he’d employed as a thief. He attacked the Jewish settlement of Petah Tikvah, where he’d worked as a boy, and killed Zev, his old boss, with a gunshot to the head. He also targeted the men he viewed as the worst traitors to the Arab cause, the effendis who had sold large tracts of land to the Zionists. Three such men he killed himself with his long, curved knife.

Despite the secrecy surrounding his operations, the name Asad al-Khalifa was soon known to the men of the Arab Higher Council in Jerusalem. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti and chairman of the council, wanted to meet this cunning Arab warrior who had shed so much Jewish blood in the Lydda district. Sheikh Asad traveled to Jerusalem disguised as a woman and met the red-bearded mufti in an apartment in the Old City, not far from the Al-Aksa mosque.

“You are a great warrior, Sheikh Asad. Allah has given you great courage-the courage of a lion.”

“I fight to serve God,” Sheikh Asad said, then quickly added: “And you, of course, Haj Amin.”

Haj Amin smiled and stroked his neat red beard. “The Jews are united. That is their strength. We Arabs have never known unity. Family, clan, tribe-that is the Arab way. Many of our warlords, like you, Sheikh Asad, are former criminals, and I’m afraid many of them are using the Revolt as a means of enriching themselves. They’re raiding Arab villages and extorting tribute from the elders.”

Sheikh Asad nodded. He had heard of such things. To ensure that he maintained the loyalty of the Arabs in the Lydda district, he had forbidden his men to steal. He’d gone so far as to lop off the hand of one of his own men for the crime of taking a chicken.

“I fear that as the Revolt wears on,” Haj Amin continued, “our old divisions will begin to tear us apart. If our warlords act on their own, they will be mere arrows against the stone wall of the British army and the Jewish Haganah. But together”-Haj Amin joined his hands-“we can knock down their walls and liberate this sacred land from the infidels.”

“What is it you want me to do, Haj Amin?”

The grand mufti supplied Sheikh Asad with a list of targets in the Lydda district, and the sheikh’s men attacked them with ruthless efficiency: Jewish settlements, bridges and power lines, police outposts. Sheikh Asad soon became Haj Amin’s favorite warlord, and just as the grand mufti had predicted, other warlords grew envious of the accolades being heaped on the man from Beit Sayeed. One of them, a brigand from Nablus called Abu Fareed, decided to lay a trap. He dispatched an emissary to meet with a Jew from the Haganah. The emissary told the Jew that Sheikh Asad and his men would attack the Zionist settlement of Hadera in three nights’ time. As Sheikh Asad and his men approached Hadera that night, they were ambushed by Haganah and British forces and torn to pieces in a murderous cross fire.

Sheikh Asad, badly wounded, managed to make his way on horseback across the border into Syria. He recuperated in a village on the Golan Heights and pieced together what had gone wrong at Hadera. Obviously, he had been betrayed by someone within the Arab camp, someone who had known when and where he was going to strike. He had two choices, to remain in Syria or return to the battlefield. He had no men and no weapons, and someone close to Haj Amin wanted him dead. Returning to Palestine to fight on was the courageous thing to do, but hardly the wise course of action. He remained in the Golan for a week longer, then he went to Damascus.

The Arab Revolt was soon in tatters, torn from within, just as Haj Amin had predicted, by feuding and clan rivalries. By 1938 more Arabs were dying at the hands of the rebels than Jews, and by 1939 the situation had disintegrated into a tribal war for power and prestige among the warlords themselves. By May 1939, three years after it had begun, the great Arab Revolt was over.

Wanted by the British and Haganah, Sheikh Asad decided to remain in Damascus. He bought a large apartment in the city center and married the daughter of another Palestinian exile. She bore him a son, whom he named Sabri. She became barren after that and gave him no more children. He considered divorcing her or taking another wife, but by 1947 his thoughts were occupied by things other than women and children.

Once again Sheikh Asad was summoned by his old friend, Haj Amin. He too was living in exile. During the Second World War the mufti had thrown in his lot with Adolf Hitler. From his lavish palace in Berlin, the Islamic religious leader had served as a valuable Nazi propaganda tool, exhorting the Arab masses to support Nazi Germany and calling for the destruction of the Jews. An acquaintance of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, the mufti had even planned to construct a gas chamber and crematoria in Palestine to exterminate the Jews there. As Berlin was falling, he boarded a Luftwaffe plane and flew to Switzerland. Refused entry, he went next to France. The French realized that he could be a valuable ally in the Middle East and granted him sanctuary, but by 1946, with pressure mounting to put the mufti on trial for war crimes, he was permitted to “escape” to Cairo. By the summer of 1947 the mufti was living in Alayh, a resort in the mountains of Lebanon, and it was there that he met his trusted warlord, Sheikh Asad.

“You’ve heard the news from America?”

Sheikh Asad nodded. The special session of the new world body called the United Nations had convened to take up the issue of the future of Palestine.

“Clearly,” said the mufti, “we are going to be made to suffer for the crimes of Hitler. Our strategy for dealing with the United Nations will be a complete boycott of the proceedings. But if they decide to award one square inch of Palestine to the Jews, we must be prepared to fight. Which is why I need you, Sheikh Asad.”

Sheikh Asad asked Haj Amin the same question he’d put to him eleven years earlier in Jerusalem. “What do you want me to do?”

“Return to Palestine and prepare for the war that is surely coming. Raise your fighting force, draw up your battle plans. My cousin, Abdel-Kader, will be responsible for the Ramallah area and the hills east of Jerusalem. You will be in command of the central district: the Coastal Plain, Tel Aviv and Jaffa, and the Jerusalem Corridor.”

“I’ll do it,” Sheikh Asad said, then he quickly added: “On one condition.”

The grand mufti was taken aback. He knew that Sheikh Asad was a fierce and proud man, but no Arab ever dared to speak to him like that, especially a former fellah. Still, he smiled and asked the warlord to name his price.

“Tell me the name of the man who betrayed me in Hadera.”

Haj Amin hesitated, then answered truthfully. Sheikh Asad was more valuable to his cause than Abu Fareed.

“Where is he?”

That night Sheikh Asad traveled to Beirut and slit the throat of Abu Fareed. Then he returned to Damascus to bid farewell to his wife and son and see to their financial needs. A week later he was back in his old straw-and-mud cottage in Beit Sayeed.

He spent the remaining months of 1947 raising his force and planning his strategy for the coming conflict. Frontal assaults against heavily defended Jewish population centers would prove futile, he concluded. Instead, he would strike the Jews where they were most vulnerable. Jewish settlements were scattered around Palestine and dependent on the roads for supplies. In many cases, such as the vital Jerusalem Corridor, those roads were dominated by Arab towns and villages. Sheikh Asad immediately understood the opportunity before him. He could strike soft targets with complete tactical surprise; then, when the engagement was over, his forces could melt into the sanctuaries of the villages. The settlements would slowly whither, and so too would the Jewish will to remain in Palestine.

On November 29, the United Nations declared that British rule in Palestine would soon end. There were to be two states in Palestine, one Arab, the other Jewish. For the Jews, it was a night of celebration. The two-thousand-year-old dream of a state in the ancient home of the Jews had come true. For the Arabs, it was a night of bitter tears. Half of their ancestral home was to be given to the Jews. Sheikh Asad al-Khalifa spent that night planning his first strike. The following morning, his men attacked a bus as it made its way from Netanya to Jerusalem, killing five people. The battle for Palestine had begun.

Throughout the winter of 1948, Sheikh Asad and the other Arab commanders turned the roads of central Palestine into a Jewish graveyard. Buses, taxis, and supply trucks were attacked, drivers and passengers massacred without mercy. As winter turned to spring, Haganah losses in men and materiel mounted at an alarming rate. During a two-week span in late March, Arab forces killed hundreds of the Haganah’s best fighters and destroyed the bulk of its fleet of armored vehicles. By the end of the month, the settlements of the Negev were cut off. More importantly, so too were the hundred thousand Jews of West Jerusalem. For the Jews, the situation was growing desperate. The Arabs had seized the initiative-and Sheikh Asad was almost single-handedly winning the war for Palestine.

On the night of March 31, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Yishuv, met in Tel Aviv with senior officers of the Haganah and the elite Palmach strike force and ordered them to go on the offensive. The days of trying to protect vulnerable convoys against overwhelming odds were over, Ben-Gurion said. The entire Zionist enterprise faced imminent collapse unless the battle of the roads was won and the interior of the country secured. In order to achieve that goal, the conflict had to be taken to a new level of violence. The Arab villages that Sheikh Asad and the other warlords used as bases for their operations had to be conquered and destroyed-and if there was no other option, the inhabitants had to be expelled. The Haganah had already drawn up a master plan for just such an operation. It was called Tochnit Dalet: Plan D. Ben-Gurion ordered it to begin in two days with Operation Nachshon, an assault on the villages lining the besieged Jerusalem Corridor. “And one more thing,” he said to his commanders as the meeting adjourned. “Find Sheikh Asad as quickly as possible-and kill him.”

The man chosen to hunt down Sheikh Asad, a young Palmach intelligence officer named Ari Shamron, knew that Sheikh Asad would not be easy to find. The warlord maintained no fixed military headquarters and was rumored to sleep in a different house each night. Shamron, though he had immigrated to Palestine from Poland in 1935, knew the Arab mind well. He knew that, to the Arabs, some things were more important than an independent Palestine. Somewhere during his rise to power, Sheikh Asad had surely made an enemy-and somewhere in Palestine was an Arab thirsting for revenge.

It took Shamron ten days to find him, a man from Beit Sayeed who, many years earlier, had lost two of his brothers to Sheikh Asad over an insult in the village coffeehouse. Shamron offered the Arab a hundred Palestinian pounds if he would betray the whereabouts of the warlord. A week later, on a hillside near Beit Sayeed, they met for a second time. The Arab told Shamron where their common enemy could be found.

“I hear he’s planning to spend the night in a cottage outside Lydda. It’s in the middle of an orange grove. Asad, the murderous dog, is surrounded by bodyguards. They’re hiding in the orchards. If you try to attack the cottage with a large force, the guards will sound the alert and Asad will flee like the coward that he is.”

“And what do you recommend?” Shamron asked, playing to the Arab’s vanity.

“A single assassin, a man who can slip through the defenses and kill Asad before he can escape. For another one hundred pounds, I’ll be that man.”

Shamron did not wish to insult his informant, so he spent a moment pretending to consider the offer, even though his mind was already made up. The assassination of Sheikh Asad was too important to be trusted to a man who would betray his own people for money. He hurried back to Palmach headquarters in Tel Aviv and broke the news to the deputy commander, a handsome man with red hair and blue eyes named Yitzhak Rabin.

“Someone needs to go to Lydda alone tonight and kill him,” Shamron said.

“Chances are whoever we select won’t come out of that house alive.”

“I know,” Shamron said, “that’s why it has to be me.”

“You’re too important to risk on a mission like this.”

“If this goes on much longer, we’ll lose Jerusalem -and then we’ll lose the war. What’s more important than that?”

Rabin could see that there was no talking him out of it. “What can I do to help you?”

“Make certain there’s a car and driver waiting for me on the edge of that orange grove after I kill him.”

At midnight, Shamron climbed on a motorbike and rode from Tel Aviv to Lydda. He left the bike a mile from town and walked the rest of the way to the edge of the orchard. Such assaults, Shamron had learned from experience, were best carried out shortly before dawn, when the sentries were fatigued and at their least attentive. He entered the orchard a few minutes before sunrise, armed with a Sten gun and a steel trench knife. In the first gray light of the day, he could make out the faint shadows of the guards, propped against the trunks of the orange trees. One slept soundly as Shamron crept past. A single guard stood watch in the dusty forecourt of the cottage. Shamron killed him with a silent thrust of his knife, then he entered the cottage.

It had but one room. Sheikh Asad lay sleeping on the floor. Two of his senior lieutenants were seated cross-legged next to him, drinking coffee. Caught off guard by Shamron’s silent approach, they did not react to the opening of the door. Only when they looked up and saw an armed Jew did they attempt to reach for their weapons. Shamron killed them both with a single burst of his Sten gun.

Sheikh Asad awakened with a start and reached for his rifle. Shamron fired. Sheikh Asad, as he was dying, gazed into his killer’s eyes.

“Another will take my place,” he said.

“I know,” replied Shamron, then he fired again. He slipped from the cottage as the sentries came running. In the half-light of dawn he picked his way through the trees, until he came to the edge of the orange grove. The car was waiting; Yitzhak Rabin was behind the wheel.

“Is he dead?” Rabin asked as he accelerated away.

Shamron nodded. “It’s done.”

“Good,” said Rabin. “Let the dogs lap up his blood.”

7 TEL AVIV

DINA HAD LAPSED INTO A LONG SILENCE. YOSSI and Rimona, entranced, watched her with the intensity of small children. Even Yaakov seemed to have fallen under her spell, not because he had been converted to Dina’s cause but because he wanted to know where the story was taking them. Gabriel, had he wished, could have told him. And when Dina placed a new image on the screen-a strikingly handsome man seated in an outdoor café wearing wraparound sunglasses-Gabriel saw it not in the grainy black-and-white of the photograph but as the scene appeared in his own memory: oil on canvas, abraded and yellowed with age. Dina began to speak again, but Gabriel was no longer listening. He was scrubbing away at the soiled varnish of his memory, watching a younger version of himself rushing across the bloodstained courtyard of a Parisian apartment building with a Beretta in his hand. “This is Sabri al-Khalifa,” Dina was saying. “The setting is the Boulevard St-Germain in Paris, the year is 1979. The photograph was snapped by an Office surveillance team. It was the last ever taken of him.”

AMMAN, JORDAN: JUNE 1967

It was eleven in the morning when the handsome young man with pale skin and black hair walked into a Fatah recruiting office in downtown Amman. The officer seated behind the desk in the lobby was in a foul mood. The entire Arab world was. The second war for Palestine had just ended. Instead of liberating the land from the Jews, it had precipitated yet another catastrophe for the Palestinians. In just six days the Israeli military had routed the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank were now in Jewish hands, and thousands more Palestinians had been turned into refugees.

“Name?” the recruiter snapped.

“Sabri al-Khalifa.”

The Fatah man looked up, startled. “Yes, of course you are,” he said. “I fought with your father. Come with me.”

Sabri was immediately placed in a car and chauffeured at high speed across the Jordanian capital to a safe house. There he was introduced to a small, unimpressive-looking man named Yasir Arafat.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Arafat said. “I knew your father. He was a great man.”

Sabri smiled. He was used to hearing compliments about his father. All his life he had been told stories about the heroic deeds of the great warlord from Beit Sayeed, and how the Jews, to punish the villagers who had supported his father, razed the village and forced its inhabitants into exile. Sabri al-Khalifa had little in common with most of his refugee brethren. He had been raised in a pleasant district of Beirut and educated at the finest schools and universities in Europe. Along with his native Arabic, he spoke French, German, and English fluently. His cosmopolitan upbringing had made him a valuable asset to the Palestinian cause. Yasir Arafat wasn’t about to let him go to waste.

“Fatah is riddled with traitors and collaborators,” Arafat said. “Every time we send an assault team across the border, the Jews are lying in wait. If we’re ever going to be an effective fighting force, we have to purge the traitors from our midst. I would think a job such as that would appeal to you, given what happened to your father. He was undone by a collaborator, was he not?”

Sabri nodded gravely. He’d been told that story, too.

“Will you work for me?” Arafat said. “Will you fight for your people, like your father did?”

Sabri immediately went to work for the Jihaz al Razd, the intelligence branch of Fatah. Within a month of accepting the assignment, he’d unmasked twenty Palestinian collaborators. Sabri made a point of attending their executions and always personally fired a symbolic coup de grâce into each victim as a warning to those considering treason against the revolution.

After six months at the Jihaz al Razd, Sabri was summoned to a second meeting with Yasir Arafat. This one took place in a different safe house from the first. The Fatah leader, fearful of Israeli assassins, slept in a different bed every night. Though Sabri didn’t know it then, he would soon be living the same way.

“We have plans for you,” Arafat said. “Very special plans. You will be a great man. Your feats will rival even those of your father. Soon, the whole world will know the name Sabri al-Khalifa.”

“What sort of plans?”

“In due time, Sabri. First, we must prepare you.”

He was sent to Cairo for six months of intense terrorist training under the tutelage of the Egyptian secret service, the Mukhabarat. While in Cairo, he was introduced to a young Palestinian woman named Rima, the daughter of a senior Fatah officer. It seemed a perfect match, and the two were hastily married in a private ceremony attended only by Fatah members and officers of Egyptian intelligence. A month later, Sabri was recalled to Jordan to begin the next phase of his preparation. He left Rima in Cairo with her father, and though he didn’t realize it at the time, she was pregnant with a son. The date of his birth was an ominous one for the Palestinians: September 1970.

For some time, King Hussein of Jordan had been concerned about the growing power of the Palestinians living in his midst. The western portion of his country had become a virtual state within a state, with a chain of refugee camps ruled by heavily armed Fatah militants who openly flouted the authority of the Hashemite monarch. Hussein, who had lost half his kingdom already, feared he would lose the rest unless he removed the Palestinians from Jordanian soil. In September 1970 he ordered his fierce Bedouin soldiers to do precisely that.

Arafat’s fighters were no match for the Bedouin. Thousands were massacred, and once more the Palestinians were scattered, this time to camps in Lebanon and Syria. Arafat wanted revenge against the Jordanian monarch and against all those who had betrayed the Palestinian people. He wanted to carry out bloody and spectacular acts of terrorism on the world stage-acts that would place the plight of the Palestinians before a global audience and quench the Palestinian thirst for revenge. The attacks would be carried out by a secret unit so the PLO could maintain the charade that it was a respectable revolutionary army fighting for the liberation of an oppressed people. Abu Iyad, Arafat’s number two, was given overall command, but the operational mastermind would be the son of the great Palestinian warlord from Beit Sayeed, Sabri al-Khalifa. The unit would be called Black September to honor the Palestinian dead in Jordan.

Sabri recruited a small elite force from the best units of Fatah. In the tradition of his father, he selected men like himself-Palestinians from notable families who had seen more of the world than the refugee camps. Next he set out for Europe, where he assembled a network of educated Palestinian exiles. He also established links with leftist European terror groups and intelligence services behind the Iron Curtain. By November 1971, Black September was ready to emerge from the shadows. At the top of Sabri’s hit list was King Hussein’s Jordan.

The blood flowed first in the city where Sabri had served his apprenticeship. The Jordanian prime minister, on a visit to Cairo, was gunned down in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel. More attacks followed in quick succession. The car of the Jordanian ambassador was ambushed in London. Jordanian aircraft were hijacked and Jordanian airline offices were firebombed. In Bonn, five Jordanian intelligence officers were butchered in the cellar of a house.

After settling the score with Jordan, Sabri turned his attention to the true enemies of the Palestinian people, the Zionists of Israel. In May 1972, Black September hijacked a Sabena airlines jet and forced it to land at Israel ’s Lod Airport. A few days later, terrorists from the Japanese Red Army, acting on Black September’s behalf, attacked passengers in the arrival hall at Lod with machine-gun fire and hand grenades, killing twenty-seven people. Letter bombs were mailed to Israeli diplomats and prominent Jews across Europe.

But Sabri’s greatest terrorist triumph was still to come. Early on the morning of September 5, 1972, two years after the expulsion from Jordan, six Palestinian terrorists scaled the fence at the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany, and entered the apartment building at Connollystrasse 31, which housed members of the Israeli Olympic team. Two Israelis were killed in the initial assault. Nine others were rounded up and taken hostage. For the next twenty hours, with 900 million people around the world watching on television, the German government negotiated with the terrorists for the release of the Israeli hostages. Deadlines came and went, until finally, at 10:10 P.M., the terrorists and the hostages boarded two helicopters and took off for Fürstenfeldbrück airfield. Shortly after arriving, West German forces launched an ill-conceived and poorly planned rescue operation. All nine of the hostages were massacred by the Black Septembrists.

Jubilation swept the Arab world. Sabri al-Khalifa, who had monitored the operation from a safe flat in East Berlin, was greeted as a conquering hero upon his return to Beirut. “You are my son!” Arafat said as he threw his arms around Sabri. “You are my son.”

In Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered her intelligence chiefs to avenge the Munich eleven by hunting down and killing the members of Black September. Code-named Wrath of God, the operation would be led by Ari Shamron, the same man who had been given the task of ending Sheikh Asad’s bloody reign of terror in 1948. For the second time in twenty-five years, Shamron was ordered to kill a man named al-Khalifa.

DINA LEFT THE ROOM in darkness and told the rest of the story as though Gabriel were not seated ten feet away from her, at the opposite end of the table.

“One by one, the members of Black September were methodically hunted down and killed by Shamron’s Wrath of God teams. In all, twelve members were killed by Office assassins, but Sabri al-Khalifa, the one Shamron wanted most, remained beyond his reach. Sabri fought back. He killed an Office agent in Madrid. He attacked the Israeli embassy in Bangkok and murdered the American ambassador to Sudan. His attacks became more erratic, as did his behavior. Arafat was no longer able to maintain the fiction that he had no connection to Black September, and condemnation rained down upon him, even from quarters sympathetic to his cause. Sabri had brought disgrace to the movement, but Arafat still doted on him like a son.”

Dina paused and looked at Gabriel. His face, lit by the glow of Sabri al-Khalifa’s image on the projection screen, showed no emotion. His gaze was downward toward his hands, which were folded neatly on the tabletop.

“Would you care to finish the story?” she asked.

Gabriel spent a moment contemplating his hands before taking up Dina’s invitation to speak.

“Shamron learned through an informant that Sabri kept a girl in Paris, a left-wing journalist named Denise who believed he was a Palestinian poet and freedom fighter. Sabri had neglected to tell Denise that he was a married man with a child. Shamron briefly considered trying to enroll her but gave up on the idea. It seemed the poor girl was truly in love with Sabri. So we sent the teams to Paris and put a watch on her instead. A month later, Sabri came to town to see her.”

He paused and looked up at the screen.

“He arrived at her apartment in the middle of the night. It was too dark to confirm his identity, so Shamron decided to take a chance and wait until we could get a better look at him. They stayed in the apartment making love until the late afternoon, then they went to lunch in a café on the Boulevard St-Germain. That’s when we snapped that photo. After lunch they walked back to her apartment. It was still light, but Shamron gave the order to take him down.”

Gabriel lapsed into silence, and once more his gaze turned down, toward his hands. He closed his eyes briefly.

“I followed them on foot. He had his left arm around the girl’s waist and his hand was shoved into the back pocket of her jeans. His right hand was in his jacket pocket. That’s where he always kept his gun. He turned and looked at me once, but kept walking. He and the girl had drunk two bottles of wine over lunch-I suppose his senses weren’t terribly sharp at the time.”

Another silence; then, after a glance at Sabri’s face, another meditation over his hands. His voice, when he spoke again, had an air of detachment, as if he were describing the exploits of another man.

“They paused at the entrance. Denise was drunk and laughing. She was looking down, into her purse, looking for the key. Sabri was telling her to hurry up. He wanted to get her clothes off again. I could have done it there, but there were too many people on the street, so I slowed down and waited for her to find the damned key. I passed by them as she slid it into the lock. Sabri looked at me again, and I looked back. They stepped into the passageway. I turned and caught the door before it could close. Sabri and the girl were in the middle of the courtyard by now. He heard my footfall and turned around. His hand was coming out of his coat pocket and I could see the butt. Sabri carried a Stechkin. It was a gift from a friend in the KGB. I hadn’t drawn my gun yet. Shamron’s rule, we called it. ‘We do not walk around in the street like gangsters with our guns drawn,’ Shamron always said. ‘One second, Gabriel. That’s all you’ll have. One second. Only a man with truly gifted hands can get his gun off his hip and into firing position in one second.’ ”

Gabriel looked around the room and held the gaze of each team member briefly before resuming.

“The Beretta had an eight-shot magazine, but I discovered that if I packed the rounds in tightly, I could squeeze in ten. Sabri never got his gun into position. He was turning to face me as I fired. His target profile was reduced-I think my first and second shots hit him in the left arm. I moved forward and put him on the ground. The girl was screaming, hitting me across the back with her handbag. I put ten shots in him, then released the magazine and rammed my backup into the butt. It had only one round, the eleventh. One round for every Jew Sabri murdered at Munich. I put the barrel into his ear and fired. The girl collapsed over his body and called me a murderer. I went back through the passageway, out into the street. A motorcycle pulled up. I climbed on the back.”

ONLY YAAKOV, who had seen his share of killing operations in the Occupied Territories, dared break the silence that had descended over the room. “What do Asad al-Khalifa and his boy Sabri have to do with Rome?”

Gabriel looked at Dina, and with his eyes posed the same question. Dina removed the photograph of Sabri and replaced it with the one showing Khaled at his father’s funeral.

“When Sabri’s wife, Rima, heard that he’d been killed in Paris, she walked into the bathroom of her apartment in Beirut and slit her wrists. Khaled found his mother lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood. He was now an orphan, his parents dead, his clan scattered to the four winds. Arafat adopted the boy, and after the funeral, Khaled disappeared.”

“Where did he go?” asked Yossi.

“Arafat saw the child as a potent symbol of the revolution and wanted him protected at all costs. We think he shipped him off to Europe under an assumed name to live with a wealthy Palestinian exile family. What we do know is this: In twenty-five years, Khaled al-Khalifa has never resurfaced. Two years ago I asked Lev for permission to start a quiet search for him. I can’t find him. It’s as if he vanished into thin air after the funeral. It’s as if he’s dead, too.”

“And your theory?”

“I believe Arafat prepared him to follow in the footsteps of his famous father and grandfather. I believe he’s been activated.”

“Why?”

“Because Arafat is trying to make himself relevant again, and he’s doing it the only way he knows how, with violence and terrorism. He’s using Khaled as his weapon.”

“You have no proof,” said Yaakov. “There’s a terrorist cell in Europe preparing to hit us again. We can’t afford to waste time looking for a phantom.”

Dina placed a new photograph on the overhead projector. It showed the wreckage of a building.

“ Buenos Aires, 1994. A truck bomb flattens the Jewish Community Center during a Shabbat meal. Eighty-seven dead. No claim of responsibility.”

A new slide, more wreckage.

“ Istanbul, 2003. Two car bombs explode simultaneously outside the city’s main synagogue. Twenty-eight dead. No claim of responsibility.”

Dina turned to Yossi and asked him to turn on the lights.

“You told me you had evidence linking Khaled to Rome,” Gabriel said, squinting in the sudden brightness. “But thus far, you’ve given me nothing but conjecture.”

“Oh, but I do have evidence, Gabriel.”

“So what’s the connection?”

“Beit Sayeed.”

THEY SET OUT from King Saul Boulevard in an Office transit van a few minutes before dawn. The windows of the van were tinted and bulletproof, and so inside it remained dark long after the sky began to grow light. By the time they reached Petah Tikvah, the sun was peeking over the ridgeline of the Judean Hills. It was a modern suburb of Tel Aviv now, with large homes and green lawns, but Gabriel, as he peered out the tinted windows, pictured the original stone cottages and Russian settlers huddled against yet another pogrom, this one led by Sheikh Asad and his holy warriors.

Beyond Petah Tikvah lay a broad plain of open farmland. Dina directed the driver onto a two-lane road that ran along the edge of a new superhighway. They followed the road for a few miles, then turned into a dirt track bordering a newly planted orchard.

“Here,” she said suddenly. “Stop here.”

The van rolled to a stop. Dina climbed down and hastened into the trees. Gabriel came next, Yossi and Rimona at his shoulder, Yaakov trailing a few paces behind. They came to the end of the orchard. Fifty yards in the distance lay a field of row crops. Between the orchard and field was a wasteland overgrown with green winter grass. Dina stopped and turned to face the others.

“Welcome to Beit Sayeed,” she said.

She beckoned them forward. It soon became apparent they were walking amid the remains of the village. Its footprint was clearly visible in the gray earth: the cottages and the stone walls, the little square and the circular wellhead. Gabriel had seen villages like it in the Jezreel Valley and the Galilee. No matter how hard the new owners of the land tried to erase the Arab villages, the footprint remained, like the memory of a dead child.

Dina stopped next to the wellhead and the others gathered round her. “On April 18, 1948, at approximately seven o’clock in the evening, a Palmach brigade surrounded Beit Sayeed. After a brief firefight the Arab militiamen fled, leaving the village undefended. Wholesale panic ensued. And why not? Three days earlier, more than a hundred residents of Deir Yassin had been killed by members of the Irgun and Stern Gang. Needless to say, the Arabs of Beit Sayeed weren’t anxious to meet a similar fate. It probably didn’t take much encouragement to get them to pack their bags and flee. When the village was deserted, the Palmach men dynamited the houses.”

“What’s the connection with Rome?” Yaakov asked impatiently.

“Daoud Hadawi.”

“By the time Hadawi was born this place had been wiped from the face of the earth.”

“That’s true,” Dina said. “Hadawi was born in the Jenin refugee camp, but his clan came from here. His grandmother, his father, and various aunts, uncles, and cousins fled Beit Sayeed the night of April 18, 1948.”

“And his grandfather?” asked Gabriel.

“He’d been killed a few days earlier, near Lydda. You see, Daoud Hadawi’s grandfather was one of Sheikh Asad’s most trusted men. He was guarding the sheikh the night Shamron killed him. He was the one Shamron stabbed before entering the cottage.”

“That’s all?” asked Yaakov.

Dina shook her head. “The bombings in Buenos Aires and Istanbul both took place on April eighteenth at seven o’clock.”

“My God,” murmured Rimona.

“There’s one more thing,” Dina said, turning to Gabriel. “The date you killed Sabri in Paris? Do you remember it?”

“It was early March,” he said, “but I can’t remember the date.”

“It was March fourth,” Dina said.

“The same day as Rome,” said Rimona.

“That’s right.” Dina looked around at the remnants of the old village. “It started right here in Beit Sayeed more than fifty years ago. It was Khaled who masterminded Rome, and he’s going to hit us again in twenty-eight days.”