Prince of Fire

8 NEAR AIX-EN-PROVENCE, FRANCE

“I THINK WE MAY HAVE FOUND ANOTHER ONE, Professor.”

Paul Martineau, crouched on all fours in the deep shadows of the excavation pit, twisted his head slowly round and searched for the origin of the voice that had disturbed his work. It fell upon the familiar form of Yvette Debré, a young graduate student who had volunteered for the dig. Lit from behind by the sharp mid-morning Provençal sun, she was a mere silhouette. Martineau had always considered her something of a well-concealed artifact. Her short dark hair and square features left the impression of an adolescent boy. Only when his eye traveled down her body-across the ample breasts, the slender waist, the rounded hips-was her remarkable beauty fully revealed. He had probed her body with his skilled hands, sifted the soil of its secret corners, and found hidden delights and the pain of ancient wounds. No one else on the dig suspected their relationship was anything more than professor and pupil. Paul Martineau was very good at keeping secrets.

“Where is it?”

“Behind the meeting house.”

“Real or stone?”

“Stone.”

“The attitude?”

“Face up.”

Martineau stood. Then he placed his palms on either side of the narrow pit and, with a powerful thrust of his shoulders, pushed himself back up to the surface. He patted the reddish Provençal earth from his palms and smiled at Yvette. He was dressed, as usual, in faded denim jeans and suede boots that were cut a bit more stylishly than those favored by lesser archaeologists. His woolen pullover was charcoal gray, and a crimson handkerchief was knotted rakishly at his throat. His hair was dark and curly, his eyes were large and deep brown. A colleague had once remarked that in Paul Martineau’s face one could see traces of all the peoples who had once held sway in Provence-the Celts and the Gauls, the Greeks and the Romans, the Visigoths and Teutons, the Franks and the Arabs. He was undeniably handsome. Yvette Debré had not been the first admiring graduate student to be seduced by him.

Officially, Martineau was an adjunct professor of archaeology at the prestigious University of Aix-Marseille III, though he spent most of his time in the field and served as an adviser to more than a dozen local archaeological museums scattered across the south of France. He was an expert on the pre-Roman history of Provence, and although only thirty-five, was regarded as one of the finest French archaeologists of his generation. His last paper, a treatment on the demise of Ligurian hegemony in Provence, had been declared the standard academic work on the subject. Currently he was in negotiation with a French publisher for a mass-market work on the ancient history of the region.

His success, his women, and rumors of wealth had made him the source of considerable professional resentment and gossip. Martineau, though hardly talkative about his personal life, had never made a secret of his provenance. His late father, Henri Martineau, had dabbled in business and diplomacy and failed spectacularly at both. Martineau, upon the death of his mother, had sold the family’s large home in Avignon, along with a second property in the rural Vaucluse. He had been living comfortably on the proceeds ever since. He had a large flat near the university in Aix, a comfortable villa in the Lubéron village of Lacoste, and a small pied-à-terre in Montmartre in Paris. When asked why he had chosen archaeology, he would reply that he was fascinated by the question of why civilizations came and went and what brought about their demise. Others sensed in him a certain restiveness, a quiet fury that seemed to be calmed, at least temporarily, by physically plunging his hands into the past.

Martineau followed the girl through the maze of excavation trenches. Located atop a mount overlooking the broad plain of the Chaine de l’Étoile, the site was an oppidum, or walled hill fort, built by the powerful Celto-Ligurian tribe known as the Salyes. Initial excavations had concluded that the fort contained two distinct sections, one for a Celtic aristocracy and another for what was thought to be a Ligurian underclass. But Martineau had put forward a new theory. The hasty addition of the poorer section of the fort had coincided with a round of fighting between the Ligurians and the Greeks near Marseilles. On this dig, Martineau had proven conclusively that the annex had been the equivalent of an Iron Age refugee camp.

Now he sought to answer three questions: Why had the hill fort been abandoned after only a hundred years? What was the significance of the large number of severed heads, some real and some rendered in stone, that he had discovered in the vicinity of the central meeting house? Were they merely the battle trophies of a barbarian Iron Age people, or were they religious in nature, linked somehow to the mysterious Celtic “severed head” cult? Martineau suspected the cult may have had a hand in the hill fort’s rapid demise, which is why he had ordered the other members of the team to alert him the moment a “head” was discovered-and why he handled the excavations personally. He had learned through hard experience that no clue, no matter how insignificant, could be ignored. What was the disposition of the head? What other artifacts or fragments were found in the vicinity? Was there trace evidence contained in the surrounding soil? Such matters could not be left in the hands of a graduate student, even one as talented as Yvette Debré.

They arrived at an excavation trench, about six feet in length and shoulder-width across. Martineau lowered himself in, careful not to disturb the surrounding earth. Protruding from the hard subsoil was the easily recognizable shape of a human nose. Martineau, from his back pocket, removed a small hand pick and a brush and went to work.

For the next six hours he did not rise from his pit. Yvette sat cross-legged at the edge. Occasionally she offered him mineral water or coffee, which he also refused. Every few minutes one of the other team members would wander by and inquire about his progress. Their questions were met by silence. Only the sound of Martineau’s work emanated from the trench. Pick, pick, brush, brush, blow. Pick, pick, brush, brush, blow…

Slowly the face rose toward him from the depths of the ancient soil, mouth drawn in final anguish, eyes closed in death. As the morning wore on he probed deeper into the soil and found, as he had expected, that the head was held by a hand. Those gathered on the edge of the excavation trench did not realize that for Paul Martineau, the face represented more than an intriguing artifact from the distant past. Martineau, in the dark soil, saw the face of his enemy-and one day soon, he thought, he too would be holding a severed head in the palm of his hand.

THE STORM CAME DOWN from the Rhône Valley at midday. The rain, cold and driven by a harsh wind, swept over the excavation site like a Vandal raiding party. Martineau climbed out of his trench and hastened up the hill, where he found the rest of his team sheltering in the lee of the ancient wall.

“Pack up,” he said. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

Martineau bid them good day and started toward the carpark. Yvette detached herself from the others and followed after him.

“How about dinner tonight?”

“I’d love to, but I’m afraid I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Another dreary faculty reception,” Martineau said. “The dean has demanded my presence.”

“Tomorrow night?”

“Perhaps.” Martineau touched her hand. “See you in the morning.”

On the opposite side of the wall was a grassy carpark. Martineau’s new Mercedes sedan stood out from the battered cars and motor scooters of the volunteers and the less noteworthy archaeologists working on the dig. He climbed behind the wheel and set out along the D14 toward Aix. Fifteen minutes later he was pulling into a parking space outside his apartment house, just off the cours Mirabeau, in the heart of the city.

It was a fine, eighteenth-century house, with an iron balcony on each window and a door on the left side of the facade facing the street. Martineau removed his post from the mailbox, then rode the small lift up to the fourth floor. It emptied into a small vestibule with a marble floor. The pair of Roman water vessels that stood outside his door were real, though anyone who asked about their origin was told they were clever reproductions.

The apartment he entered seemed more suited to a member of the Aixois aristocracy than an archaeologist and part-time professor. Originally it had been two apartments, but Martineau, after the untimely accidental death of his widower neighbor, had won the right to combine them into a single flat. The living room was large and dramatic, with a high ceiling and large windows overlooking the street. The furnishings were Provençal in style, though less rustic than the pieces at his villa in Lacoste. On one wall was a landscape by Cézanne; on another a pair of sketches by Degas. A pair of remarkably intact Roman pillars flanked the entrance to a large study, which contained several hundred archaeological monographs and a remarkable collection of original field notes and manuscripts from some of the greatest minds in the history of the discipline. Martineau’s home was his sanctuary. He never invited colleagues here, only women-and lately only Yvette.

He showered quickly and changed into clean clothing. Two minutes later he was behind the wheel of the Mercedes once more, speeding along the cours Mirabeau. He did not drive toward the university. Instead, he made his way across the city and turned onto the A51 Autoroute toward Marseilles. He had lied to Yvette. It was not the first time.

MOST AIXOIS TENDED to turn up their nose at Marseilles. Paul Martineau had always been seduced by it. The port city the Greeks had called Massalia was now the second largest in France, and it remained the point of entry for the majority of immigrants to the country, most of whom now came from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Divided roughly in half by the thunderous boulevard de la Canebière, it had two distinct faces. South of the boulevard, on the edge of the old port, lay a pleasant French city with broad pedestrian walks, exclusive shopping streets, and esplanades dotted with outdoor cafés. But to the north were the districts known as Le Panier and the Quartier Belsunce. Here it was possible to walk the pavements and hear only Arabic. Foreigners and native Frenchmen, easy prey for street criminals, rarely strayed into the Arab neighborhoods after dark.

Paul Martineau had no such misgivings about his security. He left his Mercedes on the boulevard d’Anthènes, near the base of the steps that led to the St-Charles train station, and set out down the hill toward rue de la Canebière. Before reaching the thoroughfare he turned right, into a narrow street called the rue des Convalescents. Barely wide enough to accommodate a car, it sloped downward toward the port, into the heart of the Quartier Belsunce.

It was dark in the street, and Martineau, at his back, felt the first gusts of a mistral. The night air smelled of charcoal smoke and turmeric and faintly of honey. A pair of old men, seated on spindly chairs outside the doorway of a tenement house, shared a hubble-bubble water pipe and studied Martineau indifferently as he trod past. A moment later a soccer ball, deflated and nearly the color of the pavement, bounded toward him out of the darkness. Martineau put a foot on it and sent it adroitly back in the direction from which it came. It was scooped up by a sandaled boy, who, upon seeing the tall stranger in Western clothes, turned and vanished into the mouth of an alleyway. Martineau had a vision of himself, thirty years earlier. Charcoal smoke, turmeric, honey… For an instant he felt as though he was walking the streets of south Beirut.

He came to the intersection of two streets. On one corner was a shwarma stand, on another a tiny café that promised Cuisine Tunisienne. A trio of teenage boys eyed Martineau provocatively from the doorway of the café. In French he wished them good evening, then lowered his gaze and turned to the right.

The street was narrower than the rue des Convalescents, and most of the pavement was consumed by market stalls filled with cheap carpets and aluminum pots. At the other end was an Arab coffeehouse. Martineau went inside. At the back of the coffeehouse, near the toilet, was a narrow flight of unlit stairs. Martineau climbed slowly upward through the gloom. At the top was a door. As Martineau approached, it swung open suddenly. A man, clean-shaven and dressed in a galabia gown, stepped onto the landing.

“Maa-salaamah,” he said. Peace be upon you.

“As-salaam alaykum,” replied Martineau, as he slipped past the man and entered the apartment.

9 JERUSALEM

JERUSALEM IS QUITE LITERALLY A CITY ON A HILL. It stands high atop the Judean Mountains and is reached from the Coastal Plain by a staircase-like road that climbs through the twisting mountain gorge known as the Sha’ar Ha’Gai. Gabriel, like most Israelis, still referred to it by its Arab name, the Bab al-Wad. He lowered the window of his Office Skoda and rested his arm in the opening. The evening air, cool and soft and scented with cypress and pine, tugged at his shirtsleeve. He passed the rusted carcass of an armored personnel carrier, a memorial relic of the fighting in 1948, and thought of Sheikh Asad and his campaign to sever the lifeline to Jerusalem.

He switched on the radio, hoping to find a bit of music to take his mind off the case, but instead heard a bulletin that a suicide bomber had just struck a bus in the affluent Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia. He listened to the updates for a time; then, when the somber music began, he switched off the radio. Somber music meant fatalities. The more music, the higher the number of dead.

Highway One changed suddenly from a four-lane motorway into a broad urban boulevard, the famed Jaffa Road that ran from the northwest corner of Jerusalem to the walls of the Old City. Gabriel followed the road to the left, then down a long, gentle sweep, past the chaotic New Central Bus Station. In spite of the bombing, commuters streamed across the road toward the entrance. Most had no choice but to board their bus and hope that tonight the roulette ball didn’t land on their number.

He passed the entrance of the sprawling Makhane Yehuda Market. An Ethiopian girl in police uniform stood watch at a metal barricade, checking the bag of each person who entered. When Gabriel stopped for a traffic light, clusters of black-coated Haredi men drifted between the cars like swirling leaves.

A series of turns brought him to Narkiss Street. There were no parking spaces to be had, so he left the car around the corner and walked slowly back to his apartment beneath the protective awning of the eucalyptus trees. He had a bittersweet memory of Venice, of gliding home upon the silken waters of a canal and tying his boat to the dock at the back of his house.

The Jerusalem limestone apartment block was set back a few meters from the street and reached by a cement walkway through a tangled little garden. The foyer was lit by a greenish light and smelled heavily of new oil-based paint. He didn’t bother checking the mailbox-no one knew he lived there, and the utility bills went directly to an ersatz property management company run by Housekeeping.

The block contained no elevator. Gabriel climbed the cement stairs wearily to the fourth floor and opened the door. The flat was large by Israeli standards-two bedrooms, a galley kitchen, a small study off the combination living room and dining room-but a far cry from the piano nobile of Gabriel’s canal house in Venice. Housekeeping had offered to sell it to him. The value of Jerusalem apartments seemed to sink with each suicide bombing, and at the moment it could be had for a good price. Chiara had decided not to wait for a deed to make it her own. With little else to do, she spent much of her time shopping and was steadily turning the functional but cheerless place into something like a home. A new rug had appeared since Gabriel had been home; so had a circular brass coffee table with a lacquered wood pedestal. He hoped she’d bought it somewhere reputable and not from one of those hucksters who sold Holy Land air in a bottle.

He called Chiara’s name but received only silence in reply. He wandered down the hall to their bedroom. It had been furnished for operatives rather than lovers. Gabriel had pushed the twin beds together, but invariably he would awaken in the middle of the night to find himself falling into the crevasse, clinging to the edge of the precipice. At the foot of the bed rested a small cardboard box. Chiara had packed away most of their things; this was all that remained. He supposed the psychologist at King Saul Boulevard would have read deep analytical insight into his failure to unpack the box. The truth was far more prosaic-he’d been too busy at work. Still, it was depressing to think that his entire life could fit into this box, just as it is hard to fathom a small metallic urn can contain the ashes of a human being. Most of the things weren’t even his. They’d belonged to Mario Delvecchio, a role he had played for some time to moderate acclaim.

He sat down and with his thumbnail sliced open the packing tape. He was relieved to find a small wooden case, the traveling restoration kit containing pigments and brushes that Umberto Conti had given him as a gift at the end of his apprenticeship. The rest was mainly rubbish, things with which he should have parted long ago: old check stubs, notes on restorations, a harsh review he’d received in an Italian art magazine for his work on Tintoretto’s Christ on the Sea of Galilee. He wondered why he’d bothered to read it, let alone keep it.

At the bottom of the box he found a manila envelope no bigger than a checkbook. He loosened the flap and turned the envelope over. Out fell a pair of eyeglasses. They had belonged to Benjamin Stern, a former Office agent who’d been murdered. Gabriel could still make out Benjamin’s oily fingerprints on the dirty lenses.

He started to place the glasses back into the envelope but noticed something lodged at the bottom. He turned it over and tapped on the base. An object fell to the floor, a strand of leather on which hung a piece of red coral shaped like a hand. Just then he heard Chiara’s footfalls on the landing. He scooped up the talisman and slipped it into his pocket.

By the time he arrived in the front room, she’d managed to get the door open and was in the process of carrying several bags of groceries over the threshold. She looked up at Gabriel and smiled, as though surprised to find him there. Her dark hair was braided into a heavy plait, and the early spring Mediterranean sun had left a trace of color across her cheeks. She looked to Gabriel like a native-born Sabra. Only when she spoke Hebrew with her outrageous Italian accent did she betray her country of origin. Gabriel no longer spoke to her in Italian. Italian was the language of Mario, and Mario was dead. Only in bed did they speak to each other in Italian, and that was a concession to Chiara, who believed Hebrew was not a proper language for lovers.

Gabriel closed the door and helped carry the plastic bags of groceries into the kitchen. They were mismatched, some white, some blue, a pinkish bag bearing the name of a well-known kosher butcher. He knew Chiara once again had ignored his admonition to stay out of the Makhane Yehuda Market.

“Everything is better there, especially the produce,” she said defensively, reading the look of disapproval on his face. “Besides, I like the atmosphere. It’s so intense.”

“Yes,” Gabriel agreed. “You should see it when a bomb goes off.”

“Are you saying that the great Gabriel Allon is afraid of suicide bombers?”

“Yes, I am. You can’t stop living, but there are sensible things you can do. How did you get home?”

Chiara looked at him sheepishly.

“Damn it, Chiara!”

“I couldn’t find a cab.”

“Do you know a bus was just bombed in Rehavia?”

“Of course. We heard the explosion inside Makhane Yehuda. That’s why I decided to take the bus home. I figured the odds were in my favor.”

Such macabre calculations, Gabriel knew, were a daily facet of modern Israeli life.

“From now on, take bus number eleven.”

“Which one is that?”

He pointed two fingers toward the floor and moved them in a walking motion.

“Is that an example of your fatalistic Israeli sense of humor?”

“You have to have a sense of humor in this country. It’s the only way to keep from going crazy.”

“I liked you better when you were an Italian.” She pushed him gently from the kitchen. “Go take a shower. We’re having guests for dinner.”

ARI SHAMRON HAD ALIENATED all those who loved him most. He had wagered, foolishly as it turned out, that his lifelong commitment to the defense of his country granted him immunity when it came to his children and his friends. His son, Yonatan, was a tank commander in the Israel Defense Forces and seemed gripped by an almost suicidal need to die in battle. His daughter had moved to New Zealand and was living on a chicken farm with a gentile. She avoided his calls and refused his repeated demands to return to the land of her birth.

Only Gilah, his long-suffering wife, had remained faithfully at his side. She was as calm as Shamron was temperamental and blessed with a myopic ability to see only the good in him. She was the only person who ever dared to scold him, though to spare him needless embarrassment she usually did so in Polish-as she did when Shamron tried to light a cigarette at the dinner table after finishing his plate of roasted chicken and rice pilaf. She knew only the vaguest details of her husband’s work and suspected his hands were unclean. Shamron had spared her the worst, for he feared that Gilah, if she knew too much, would abandon him the way his children had. She viewed Gabriel as a restraining influence and treated him kindly. She also sensed that Gabriel loved Shamron in the turbulent way in which a son loves a father, and she loved him in return. She did not know that Gabriel had killed men on orders from her husband. She believed he was a clerk of some sort who had spent a great deal of time in Europe and knew much about art.

Gilah helped Chiara with the dishes while Gabriel and Shamron adjourned to the study to talk. Shamron, shielded from Gilah’s gaze, lit a cigarette. Gabriel opened the window. Night rain beat a gentle rhythm on the street, and the sharp scent of wet eucalyptus leaves filled the room.

“I hear you’re chasing Khaled,” Shamron said.

Gabriel nodded. He had briefed Lev on Dina’s findings that morning, and Lev had immediately gone to Jerusalem to see the prime minister and Shamron.

“To be honest with you, I never put much stock in the Khaled myth,” Shamron said. “I always assumed the boy had changed his name and had chosen to live out his life free from the shadow of his grandfather and father-free of the shadow of this land.”

“So did I,” said Gabriel, “but the case is compelling.”

“Yes, it is. Why didn’t anyone ever make the connection between the dates of Buenos Aires and Istanbul?”

“It was assumed to be a coincidence,” Gabriel said. “Besides, there wasn’t enough evidence to close the circle. No one ever thought to look at Beit Sayeed until now.”

“She’s very good, this girl Dina.”

“I’m afraid it’s something of an obsession with her.”

“You’re referring to the fact she was at Dizengoff Square the day the Number Five exploded?”

“How did you know that?”

“I took the liberty of reviewing the personnel files of your team. You chose well.”

“She knows a lot about you, including a few things you never told me.”

“Such as?”

“I never knew it was Rabin who drove the getaway car after you killed Sheikh Asad.”

“We were very close after that, Rabin and I, but I’m afraid we parted company over Oslo. Rabin believed that Arafat was down and that it was time to strike a deal. I told him Arafat was striking a deal because he was down, that Arafat intended to use Oslo as a way to wage war against us by other means. I was right, of course. For Arafat, Oslo was just another step in his ‘phased strategy’ to bring about our destruction. He said so in his own words, when he was speaking in Arabic to his people.”

Shamron closed his eyes. “I take no satisfaction in being proven correct. Rabin’s death was a terrible blow to me. His opponents called him a traitor and a Nazi, and then they killed him. We murdered one of our own. We succumbed to the Arab disease.” He shook his head slowly. “Still, I suppose it was all necessary, this delusional attempt to make peace with our sworn enemies. It’s steeled our spine for the steps we’ll need to take if we are to survive in this land.”

The next subject, the demolition of Beit Sayeed, Gabriel approached with great caution.

“It was a Palmach operation, was it not?”

“What exactly do you want to know, Gabriel?”

“Were you there?”

Shamron exhaled heavily, then nodded once. “We had no choice. Beit Sayeed was a base of operations for Sheikh Asad’s militia. We couldn’t leave such a hostile village in our midst. After the sheikh’s death, it was necessary to deal the remnants of his force a fatal blow.”

Shamron’s gaze grew suddenly distant. Gabriel could see he wished to discuss the matter no further. Shamron drew heavily on his cigarette, then told Gabriel about the premonition of disaster he’d had the night before the bombing. “I knew it was something like this. I could feel it the moment it happened.” Then he corrected himself. “I could feel it before it happened.”

“If Khaled is trying to punish us, why didn’t he kill me in Venice when he had the chance?”

“Maybe he intended to. Daoud Hadawi was only a few miles up the road in Milan when the Italians found him. Maybe Hadawi was the one who was supposed to kill you.”

“And Rome?” Gabriel asked. “Why did Khaled choose Rome?”

“Maybe it was because Rome served as the European headquarters of Black September.” Shamron looked at Gabriel. “Or maybe he was trying to speak directly to you.”

Wadal Abdel Zwaiter, thought Gabriel. The Piazza Annabaliano.

“Keep in mind something else,” Shamron said. “Within a week of the bombing, there was a massive demonstration in central Rome, not against Palestinian terror, but against us. The Europeans are the best friends the Palestinians have. The civilized world has abandoned us to our fate. We would never have come back to this land if we weren’t pushed here by the hatred of Europe’s Christians, and now that we’re here, they won’t let us fight, lest we antagonize the Arabs in their midst.”

A silence fell between them. From the kitchen came the clatter of china and the gentle laughter of the women. Shamron sank lower into his chair. The patter of the rain and the strong scent of the eucalyptus trees seemed to have the effect of a sedative on him.

“I brought some papers for you to sign,” he said.

“What sort of papers?”

“The kind that will quietly dissolve your marriage to Leah.” Shamron placed a hand on Gabriel’s forearm. “It’s been fourteen years. She’s lost to you. She’s never coming back. It’s time for you to get on with your life.”

“It’s not as easy as that, Ari.”

“I don’t envy you,” Shamron said. “When are you planning to bring her home?”

“Her doctor is opposed to the idea. He’s concerned that being back in Israel will only make her condition worse. I finally managed to convey to him that it’s nonnegotiable, but he’s insisting she be given adequate time to prepare for the transition.”

“When?”

“A month,” Gabriel said. “Maybe a bit less.”

“Tell her doctor she’ll be well cared for here. Unfortunately, we have a fair amount of experience when it comes to treating the victims of terrorist bombs.”

Shamron abruptly changed course. “Are you comfortable in this flat?”

Gabriel indicated that he was.

“It’s big enough for a child or two.”

“Let’s not get carried away, Ari. I’ll never see fifty again.”

“Chiara will want children, if you marry, of course. Besides, you have to do your patriotic duty. Haven’t you heard about the demographic threat? Soon we’ll be a minority people between the River Jordan and the sea. The prime minister is encouraging all of us to contribute by having more children. Thank God for the Haredim. They’re the only reason we’re still in the game.”

“I’ll try to contribute in other ways.”

“It’s yours, you know,” Shamron said.

“What?”

“The flat.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You own it now. It was purchased on your behalf by a friend of the Office.”

Gabriel shook his head. He had always been amazed at Shamron’s gangster-like access to money.

“I can’t accept it.”

“It’s too late. The deed is being sent over in the morning.”

“I don’t want to be in anyone’s debt.”

“It is we who are in your debt. Accept it graciously and in the spirit with which it is given.” Shamron patted Gabriel’s shoulder. “And fill it with children.”

Gilah poked her head around the half-open door. “Dessert is on the table,” she said, then she looked at Shamron and, in Polish, ordered him to put out his cigarette.

“April eighteenth,” he murmured, when Gilah had gone. “That’s not much time.”

“I’m already watching the clock.”

“It’s occurred to me there’s one person who might know where Khaled is.”

“Arafat?”

“He is Khaled’s father. Besides, he owes you a favor. You did save his life once.”

“Yasir Arafat is the last person I want to see. Besides, he’s a liar.”

“Yes, but sometimes his lies can lead us in the direction of the truth.”

“He’s off-limits. Lev would never grant me authorization.”

“So don’t tell him.”

“I don’t think it would be wise for me to just show up and knock on Arafat’s front door. And the only way I’m going to Ramallah is in an armored personnel carrier.”

“Arafat doesn’t really have a door. The IDF took care of that.” Shamron permitted himself to smile at the sinking fortunes of his old adversary. “As for the armored car, leave that to me.”

GABRIEL CLIMBED INTO BED and inched carefully toward the middle. He reached out in the darkness and draped his arm across Chiara’s abdomen. She remained motionless.

“What were you and Ari talking about in the study?”

“The case,” he replied absently.

“Is that all?”

He told her that the apartment was now theirs.

“How did that happen?”

“Shamron and his moneyed friends. I’ll tell Housekeeping to remove the old furniture. Tomorrow, you can buy us a proper bed.”

Chiara’s arm rose slowly. Gabriel, in the darkness, could see the talisman swinging from her fingertips.

“What is this?”

“A Corsican good-luck charm. They say it wards off the evil eye.”

“Where did you get it?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s classified.”

He reached for the talisman. Chiara, with a deft movement of her hand, twirled the talisman so that it wrapped securely around her fingertips, in the manner in which Arabs often toy with their prayer beads.

“A gift from one of your old lovers?” she asked.

“An old enemy, actually. A man who’d been hired to kill me and a woman I was protecting.”

“Anna Rolfe?”

Yes, Gabriel said, Anna Rolfe.

“Why did you keep it?” she asked. “To remind you of her?”

“Chiara, don’t be ridiculous.”

She tossed the talisman in his direction. The red-coral hand landed on his chest.

“Is something wrong, Chiara?”

“What were those papers that Shamron gave you before he left tonight? Or is that classified, too?”

Gabriel answered the question truthfully.

“Did you sign them yet?”

“I thought I should read them first.”

“You know what they say.”

“I’ll sign them,” Gabriel said.

“When?”

“When I’m ready to sign them.”

Just then the apartment block shook with the clap of a thunderous explosion. Chiara climbed out of bed and rushed to the window. Gabriel remained motionless on the bed.

“It’s close,” she said.

“Ben Yehuda Mall, I’d say. Probably a café.”

“Turn on the radio.”

“Just count the sirens, Chiara. You can tell how bad it is by the number of ambulances they call.”

A moment passed, still and deathly quiet. Gabriel closed his eyes and imagined, with the clarity of videotape, the nightmare taking place a few blocks from his new home. The first siren sounded, then a second, a third, a fourth. After seventeen, he lost count, for the night had become a symphony of sirens. Chiara returned to bed and clung to his chest.

“Sign the papers when you’re ready,” she said. “I’ll be here. I’ll always be here.”

10 JERUSALEM: MARCH 22

THE ARMY COLONEL WAITING NEAR THE WALLS OF the Old City did not look much like Ari Shamron, but then Gabriel did not find this at all surprising. There was something about Israel -the sunlight, the intense social cohesiveness, the crackling tension of the atmosphere-that had the power to dramatically alter the appearance of its citizenry even within the space of a single generation. Yonatan Shamron was six inches taller than his famous father, strikingly handsome, and possessed none of the old man’s natural physical defensiveness-a result, Gabriel knew, of having been raised here instead of Poland. Only when the colonel leapt from the armored jeep and advanced on Gabriel with his hand out like a trench knife did Gabriel catch a faint glimpse of Shamron the Elder. His gait was not so much a walk as a death charge, and when he shook Gabriel’s hand fiercely and clapped him between the shoulder blades, Gabriel felt as though he’d been struck by a chunk of Herodion stone.

They set out along Road Number One, the old border between East and West Jerusalem. Ramallah, the nominal seat of Palestinian power, lay just ten miles to the north. A checkpoint appeared before them. On the opposite side lay the Kalandiya refugee camp-ten thousand Palestinians piled into a few hundred square yards of breeze-block apartments. To the right, spread over a small hill, were the orderly red roofs of the Psagot Jewish settlement. Rising above it all was an enormous portrait of Yasir Arafat. The inscription, in Arabic, read: ALWAYS WITH YOU.

Yonatan jerked his thumb toward the backseat and said, “Put those things on.”

Gabriel, looking over his shoulder, saw an armored vest with a high collar and a metal combat helmet. He’d not worn a helmet since his brief stint in the IDF. The one Yonatan had brought along was too big, and it fell forward over his eyes. “Now you look like a real soldier,” Yonatan said. Then he smiled. “Well, almost.”

An infantryman waved them through the checkpoint, then, seeing who was behind the wheel, smiled and said, “Hey, Yonatan.” Discipline within the ranks of the IDF, like the Office, was notoriously lax. First names were the norm, and a salute was almost unheard of.

Gabriel, through his cloudy bulletproof window, studied the scene on the other side of the checkpoint. A pair of soldiers, weapons leveled, were ordering men to open their coats and lift their shirts to make certain they weren’t wearing bomb belts beneath their clothing. Women underwent the same search behind a barrier that shielded them from the eyes of their men. Beyond the checkpoint snaked a line several hundred yards in length-a wait, Gabriel calculated, of three to four hours. The suicide bombers had inflicted misery on both sides of the Green Line, but it was the honest Palestinians-the workers trying to get to jobs in Israel, the farmers who wanted only to sell their produce-who had paid the highest price in sheer inconvenience.

Gabriel looked beyond the checkpoint, toward the Separation Fence.

“What do you think of it?” Yonatan asked.

“It’s certainly nothing to be proud of.”

“I think it’s an ugly scar across this beautiful land of ours. It’s our new Wailing Wall, much longer than the first, and different because now people are wailing on both sides of the wall. But I’m afraid we have no other choice. With good intelligence we’ve managed to stop most of the suicide attacks, but we’ll never be able to stop them all. We need this fence.”

“But it’s not the only reason we’re building it.”

“That’s true,” Yonatan said. “When it’s finished, it will allow us to turn our backs on the Arabs and walk away. That’s why they’re so afraid of it. It’s in their interest to remain chained to us in conflict. The wall will let us disengage, and that’s the last thing they want.”

Road Number One turned to Highway 60, a ribbon of smooth black asphalt that ran northward through the dusty gray landscape of the West Bank. More than thirty years had passed since Gabriel had last been to Ramallah. Then, as now, he had come by way of armored vehicle, with an IDF helmet on his head. Those early years of the occupation had been relatively calm-indeed, Gabriel’s biggest challenge each week had been finding a ride from his post back home to his mother’s house in the Jezreel Valley. For most West Bank Arabs, the end of Jordanian occupation had led to a marked improvement in the quality of their lives. With the Israelis had come access to a vibrant economy, running water, electricity, and education. Infant mortality rates, once among the highest in the world, plummeted. Literacy rates, among the world’s lowest, increased dramatically. Radical Islam and the influence of the PLO would eventually turn the West Bank into a seething cauldron and place IDF soldiers in daily confrontations with rock-throwing children, but for Gabriel, army service had been largely an exercise in boredom.

“So you’re going to see the Irrelevant One,” said Yonatan, intruding on Gabriel’s thoughts.

“Your father arranged a meeting for me.”

“The man’s seventy-five years old, and he’s still pulling the strings like a puppet master.” Yonatan smiled and shook his head. “Why doesn’t he just retire and take it easy?”

“He’d go insane,” said Gabriel. “And so would your poor mother. He asked me to say hello to you, by the way. He’d like you to come to Tiberias for Shabbat.”

“I’m on duty,” Yonatan said hastily.

Duty, it seemed, was Yonatan’s ready-made excuse to avoid spending time with his father. Gabriel was reluctant to involve himself in the tangled internal disputes of the Shamron family, yet he knew how badly the old man had been hurt by the estrangement of his children. He had a selfish motive for intervention as well. If Yonatan were a larger presence in Shamron’s life, it might relieve some of the pressure on Gabriel. Now that Gabriel was living in Jerusalem instead of Venice, Shamron felt free to telephone at all hours to swap Office gossip or dissect the latest political developments. Gabriel needed his space back. Yonatan, if skillfully handled, could act as a sort of Separation Fence.

“He wants to see more of you, Yonatan.”

“I can only take him in small doses.” Yonatan took his eyes from the road a moment to look at Gabriel. “Besides, he always liked you better.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“All right, so it’s a bit of an exaggeration. But it’s not all that far from the truth. He certainly thinks of you as a son.”

“Your father’s a great man.”

“Yes,” Yonatan said, “and great men are hard on their sons.”

Gabriel glimpsed a pair of large tan-colored armored personnel carriers parked ahead of them at the edge of the road. “It’s best not to enter town without a bit of muscle,” Yonatan said. They formed a small convoy, with Yonatan’s jeep in the middle position, and drove on.

The first evidence of the approaching city was the stream of Arabs walking along the edge of the highway. The hijabs of the women fluttered like pennants in the midday breeze. Then Ramallah, low and drab, rose out of the arid landscape. Jerusalem Street bore them into the heart of the city. The faces of the “martyrs” glared at Gabriel from every passing lamppost. There were streets named for the dead, squares and markets for the dead. A kiosk dispensed key chains with faces of the dead attached. An Arab moved among the traffic, hawking a martyrs’ calendar. The newest posters bore the seductive image of a beautiful young girl, the Arab teenager who had detonated herself in the Ben Yehuda Mall two nights previously.

Yonatan turned right into Broadcast Street and followed it for about a mile, until they reached a roadblock manned by a half-dozen Palestinian Security officers. Ramallah was technically under Palestinian control again. Gabriel had come at the invitation of the Authority’s president, the equivalent of entering a Sicilian village with the blessing of the local don. There was little tension in evidence as Yonatan, in fluent Arabic, spoke to the leader of the Palestinian detail.

Several minutes elapsed while the Palestinian consulted with his superiors over a handheld radio. Then he tapped the roof of the jeep and waved them forward. “Slowly, Colonel Shamron,” he cautioned. “Some of these boys were here the night the Egoz Battalion broke down the gate and started shooting up the place. We wouldn’t want there to be any misunderstandings.”

Yonatan weaved his way through a maze of concrete barriers, then accelerated gently. A cement wall, about twelve feet in height and pockmarked by heavy-caliber machine-gun fire, appeared on their right. In places it had been knocked down, so that the effect was of a mouth of bad teeth. Palestinian security units, some in pickup trucks, others in jeeps, patrolled the perimeter. They eyed Gabriel and Yonatan provocatively but kept their weapons down. Yonatan braked to a halt at the entrance. Gabriel removed his helmet and body armor.

Yonatan asked, “How long will you be?”

“That depends on him, I suppose.”

“Prepare yourself for a tirade. He’s usually in a foul mood these days.”

“Who could blame him?”

“He has only himself to blame, Gabriel, remember that.”

Gabriel opened the door and climbed out. “Are you going to be all right here alone?”

“No problem,” Yonatan said. Then he waved to Gabriel and said, “Give him my best.”

A PALESTINIAN SECURITY OFFICER greeted Gabriel through the bars of the gate. He wore an olive drab uniform, a flat cap, and a black patch over his left eye. He opened the gate wide enough for Gabriel to pass and beckoned him forward. His hand was missing the last three fingers. On the other side of the gate, Gabriel was set upon by two more uniformed men, who subjected him to a rigorous and intrusive body search while One-Eye looked on, grinning as though the whole thing had been arranged for his private amusement.

One-Eye introduced himself as Colonel Kemel and led Gabriel into the compound. It was not the first time Gabriel had set foot in the Mukata. During the Mandate period it had been a British army fortress. After the Six-Day War, the IDF had taken it over from the Jordanians and used it throughout the occupation as a West Bank command post. Gabriel, when he was a soldier, had often reported for duty in the same place Yasir Arafat now used as his headquarters.

Arafat’s office was located in a square two-story building huddled against the northern wall of the Mukata. Heavily damaged, it was one of the few buildings still standing in the compound. In the lobby Gabriel endured a second search, this time at the hands of a mustachioed giant in plain clothes with a compact submachine gun across his chest.

The search complete, the security man nodded to Colonel Kemel, who prodded Gabriel up a narrow flight of stairs. On the landing, seated on a fragile-looking chair balanced precariously on two legs, was another Security man. He cast Gabriel an apathetic glance, then reached up and rapped his knuckle against the wooden door. An irritated voice on the other side said, “Come.” Colonel Kemel turned the latch and led Gabriel inside.

THE OFFICE GABRIEL ENTERED was not much larger than his own at King Saul Boulevard. There was a modest wood desk and a small camp bed with a handsome leather-bound copy of the Koran laying atop the starched white pillowcase. Heavy velveteen curtains covered the window; a desk lamp, angled severely downward toward a stack of paperwork, was the only source of light. Along one wall, almost lost in the heavy shadows, hung row upon row of framed photographs showing the Palestinian leader with many famous people, including the American president who had bestowed de facto recognition upon his miniature state and whom Arafat had rewarded by stabbing in the back at Camp David and walking away from a peace deal.

Behind the desk, elfin and sickly looking, sat Arafat himself. He wore a pressed uniform and a black-and-white checkered kaffiyeh. As usual, it was draped over his right shoulder and secured to the front of his uniform in such a way that it resembled the land of Palestine-Arafat’s version of Palestine, Gabriel noted, for it looked very much like the State of Israel. His hand, when he gestured for Gabriel to sit, shook violently, as did his pouting lower lip when he asked Gabriel whether he wished to have tea. Gabriel knew enough of Arab custom to realize that a refusal would get things off on the wrong foot, so he readily accepted the tea and watched, with a certain amount of pleasure, as Arafat dispatched Colonel Kemel to fetch it.

Alone for the first time, they eyed each other silently over the small desk. The shadow of their last encounter hung over them. It had taken place in the study of a Manhattan apartment, where Tariq al-Hourani, the same man who had planted a bomb beneath Gabriel’s car in Vienna, had tried to murder Arafat for his supposed “betrayal” of the Palestinian people. Tariq, before fleeing the apartment house, had put a bullet into Gabriel’s chest, a wound that very nearly killed him.

Seated now in Arafat’s presence, Gabriel’s chest ached for the first time in many years. No single person, other than perhaps Shamron, had influenced the course of Gabriel’s life more than Yasir Arafat. For thirty years they had been swimming together in the same river of blood. Gabriel had killed Arafat’s most trusted lieutenants;Arafat had ordered the “reprisal” against Gabriel in Vienna. But were Leah and Dani the targets or had the bomb actually been meant for him? Gabriel had been obsessed by the question for thirteen years. Arafat certainly knew the answer. It was one of the reasons why Gabriel had so readily accepted Shamron’s suggestion to visit Ramallah.

“Shamron said you wished to discuss an important matter with me,” Arafat said. “I agreed to see you only as a courtesy to him. We are the same age, Shamron and I. History threw us together in this land, and unfortunately we have fought many battles. Sometimes I got the better of him, sometimes he bested me. Now we are both growing old. I had hopes we might see a few days of peace before we died. My hopes are fading.”

If that was the case, thought Gabriel, why then did you walk away from a deal that would have given you a state in Gaza and 97 percent of the West Bank with East Jerusalem as its capital? Gabriel knew the answer, of course. It was evidenced in the cloth map of “ Palestine ” Arafat wore on his shoulder. He’d wanted it all.

Gabriel had no chance to respond, because Colonel Kemel returned holding a small silver tray with two glasses of tea. The colonel then settled himself in a chair and glared at Gabriel with his one good eye. Arafat explained that the aide spoke fluent Hebrew and would assist with any translation. Gabriel had hoped to meet with Arafat alone, but a translator would probably prove useful. Gabriel’s Arabic, while passable, did not possess the nuance or flexibility necessary for a conversation with a man like Yasir Arafat.

Arafat, with a trembling hand, placed his glass of tea back into its saucer and asked Gabriel what had brought him to Ramallah. Gabriel’s one-word answer left Arafat momentarily off balance, just as Gabriel had intended.

“Khaled?” Arafat repeated, recovering his footing. “I know many men named Khaled. I’m afraid it is a rather common Palestinian name. You’ll have to be more specific.”

Feigned ignorance, Gabriel well knew, was one of Arafat’s favorite negotiating tactics. Gabriel pressed his case.

“The Khaled I’m looking for, Chairman Arafat, is Khaled al-Khalifa.”

“President Arafat,” said the Palestinian.

Gabriel nodded indifferently. “Where is Khaled al-Khalifa?”

The blotchy skin of Arafat’s face colored suddenly, and his lower lip began to tremble. Gabriel looked down and contemplated his tea. From the corner of his eye, he noticed Colonel Kemel shifting nervously in his seat. Arafat, when he spoke again, managed to keep his legendary temper in check.

“I take it you’re referring to the son of Sabri al-Khalifa?”

“Actually, he’s your son now.”

“My adopted son,” Arafat said, “because you murdered his father.”

“His father was killed on the field of battle.”

“He was murdered in cold blood on the streets of Paris.”

“It was Sabri who turned Paris into a battlefield, President Arafat, with your blessing.”

A silence fell between them. Arafat seemed to choose his next words carefully. “I always knew that, one day, you would come up with some sort of provocation to target Khaled for elimination. That’s why, after Sabri’s funeral, I sent the boy far away from here. I gave him a new life, and he took it. I haven’t seen or heard from Khaled since he was a young man.”

“We have evidence to suggest Khaled al-Khalifa was involved in the attack on our embassy in Rome.”

“Nonsense,” said Arafat dismissively.

“Since Khaled had nothing to do with Rome, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind telling us where we can find him.”

“As I said before, I don’t know where Khaled is.”

“What’s his name?”

A guarded smile. “I went to extraordinary lengths to protect the boy from you and your vengeful service. What on earth makes you think I would tell you his name now? Do you really believe that I would play the role of Judas Iscariot and hand over my son to you for trial and execution?” Arafat shook his head slowly. “We have many traitors in our midst, many who work right here in the Mukata, but I am not one of them. If you want to find Khaled, you’ll do it without my help.”

“There was a raid on a pensione in Milan shortly after the bombing. One of the men hiding there was named Daoud Hadawi, a Palestinian who used to be a member of your Presidential Security Service.”

“So you say.”

“I would appreciate a copy of Hadawi’s personnel file.”

“Several hundred men work in the Presidential Security Service. If this man-” He faltered. “What was his name?”

“Daoud Hadawi.”

“Ah, yes, Hadawi. If he ever worked for the service, and if we still have a personnel file on him, I’ll be glad to give it to you. But I think the odds of us finding something are rather slim.”

“Really?”

“Let me make this clear to you,” Arafat said. “We Palestinians had nothing to do with the attack on your embassy. Maybe it was Hezbollah or Osama. Maybe it was neo-Nazis. God knows, you have many enemies.”

Gabriel placed his palms on the arms of the chair and prepared to stand. Arafat raised his hand. “Please, Jibril,” he said, using the Arabic version of Gabriel’s name. “Don’t leave yet. Stay a little longer.”

Gabriel, for the moment, relented. Arafat fidgeted with his kaffiyeh, then looked at Colonel Kemel and in quiet Arabic instructed him to leave them alone.

“You’ve not touched your tea, Jibril. Can I get you something else? Some sweets, perhaps.”

Gabriel shook his head. Arafat folded his tiny hands and regarded Gabriel in silence. He was smiling slightly. Gabriel had the distinct sense Arafat was enjoying himself.

“I know what you did for me in New York a few years ago. If it weren’t for you, Tariq might very well have killed me in that apartment. In another time you might have hoped for him to succeed.” A wistful smile. “Who knows? In another time it might have been you, Jibril, standing there with a gun in your hand.”

Gabriel made no reply. Kill Arafat? In the weeks after Vienna, when he had been unable to picture anything but the charred flesh of his wife and the mutilated body of his son, he had thought about it many times. Indeed, at his lowest point, Gabriel would have gladly traded his own life for Arafat’s.

“It’s strange, Jibril, but for a brief time we were allies, you and I. We both wanted peace. We both needed peace.”

“Did you ever want peace, or was it all part of your phased strategy to destroy Israel and take the whole thing?”

This time it was Arafat who allowed a question to hang in the air unanswered.

“I owe you my life, Jibril, and so I will help you in this matter. There is no Khaled. Khaled is a figment of your imagination. If you keep chasing him, the real killers will escape.”

Gabriel stood abruptly, terminating the meeting. Arafat came out from behind the desk and placed his hands on Gabriel’s shoulders. Gabriel’s flesh seemed ablaze, but he did nothing to sever the Palestinian’s embrace.

“I’m glad we finally met formally,” Arafat said. “If you and I can sit down together in peace, perhaps there’s hope for us all.”

“Perhaps,” said Gabriel, though his tone revealed his pessimism.

Arafat released Gabriel and started toward the door, then stopped himself suddenly. “You surprise me, Jibril.”

“Why is that?”

“I expected you to use this opportunity to clear the air about Vienna.”

“You murdered my wife and son,” Gabriel said, deliberately misleading Arafat over Leah’s fate. “I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to ‘clear the air,’ as you put it.”

Arafat shook his head. “No, Jibril, I didn’t murder them. I ordered Tariq to kill you to avenge Abu Jihad, but I specifically told him that your family was not to be touched.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Because you deserved it. You conducted yourself with a certain honor that night in Tunis. Yes, you killed Abu Jihad, but you made certain no harm came to his wife and children. In fact, you stopped on the way out of the villa to comfort Abu Jihad’s daughter and instruct her to look after her mother. Do you remember that, Jibril?”

Gabriel closed his eyes and nodded. The scene in Tunis, like the bombing in Vienna, hung in a gallery of memory that he walked each night in his dreams.

“I felt you deserved the same as Abu Jihad, to die a soldier’s death witnessed by your wife and child. Tariq didn’t agree with me. He felt you deserved a more severe punishment, the punishment of watching your wife and child die, so he planted the bomb beneath their car and made certain you were on hand to witness the detonation. Vienna was Tariq’s doing, not mine.”

The telephone on Arafat’s desk rang, tearing Gabriel’s memory of Vienna as a knife shreds canvas. Arafat turned suddenly and left Gabriel to see himself out. Colonel Kemel was waiting on the landing. He escorted Gabriel wordlessly through the debris of the Mukata. The harsh light, after the gloom of Arafat’s office, was nearly unbearable. Beyond the broken gate Yonatan Shamron was playing football with a few of the Palestinian guards. They climbed back into the armored jeep and drove through streets of death. When they were clear of Ramallah, Yonatan asked Gabriel whether he had learned anything useful.

“Khaled al-Khalifa bombed our embassy in Rome,” Gabriel said with certainty.

“Anything else?”

Yes, he thought. Yasir Arafat had personally ordered Tariq al-Hourani to murder his wife and son.

11 JERUSALEM: MARCH 23

GABRIEL’S BEDSIDE TELEPHONE RANG AT TWO A.M. It was Yaakov.

“Looks like your visit to the Mukata has stirred the hornet’s nest.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m outside in the street.”

The connection went dead. Gabriel sat up in bed and dressed in the dark.

“Who was that?” Chiara asked, her voice heavy with sleep.

Gabriel told her.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

He bent to kiss her forehead. Chiara’s arm rose from the blankets, curled around the back of his neck, and drew him to her mouth. “Be careful,” she whispered, her lips against his cheek.

A moment later he was buckled into the passenger seat of Yaakov’s unmarked Volkswagen Golf, racing westward across Jerusalem. Yaakov drove ludicrously fast, in true Sabra fashion, with the wheel in one hand and coffee and a cigarette in the other. The headlamps of the oncoming traffic threw an unkind light on the pockmarked features of his uncompromising face.

“His name is Mahmoud Arwish,” Yaakov said. “One of our most important assets inside the Palestinian Authority. He works in the Mukata. Very close to Arafat.”

“Who made the approach?”

“Arwish sent up a flare a couple of hours ago and said he wanted to talk.”

“About what?”

“Khaled, of course.”

“What does he know?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

“Why do you need me? Why isn’t he talking to his controller?”

“I’m his controller,” Yaakov said, “but the person he really wants to talk to is you.”

They had reached the western edge of the New City. To Gabriel’s right, bathed in the silver light of a newly risen moon, lay the flatlands of the West Bank. Old hands called it “Shabak country.” It was a land where the usual rules did not apply-and where the few conventions that did exist could be bent or broken whenever it was deemed necessary to combat Arab terror. Men such as Yaakov were the mailed fist of Israeli security, foot soldiers who engaged in the dirty work of counterterrorism. Shabakniks had the power to arrest without cause and search without warrants, to shut down businesses and dynamite houses. They lived on nerves and nicotine, drank too much coffee and slept too little. Their wives left them, their Arab informants feared and hated them. Gabriel, though he had dispensed the ultimate sanction of the State, always considered himself fortunate that he had been asked to join the Office and not Shabak.

Shabak’s methods were sometimes at odds with the principles of a democratic state, and, like the Office, public scandals had damaged its reputation both at home and abroad. The worst was the infamous Bus 300 Affair. In April 1984, bus No. 300, en route from Tel Aviv to the southern city of Ashkelon, was hijacked by four Palestinians. Two were killed during the military rescue operation; the two surviving terrorists were led into a nearby wheat field and never seen again. Later it was revealed that the hijackers had been beaten to death by Shabak officers acting under orders from their director-general. A series of scandals followed in quick succession, each exposing some of Shabak’s most ruthless methods: violence, coerced confessions, blackmail, and deception. Shabak’s defenders were fond of saying that interrogations of suspected terrorists cannot be conducted over a pleasant cup of coffee. Its goals, regardless of the scandals, remained unchanged. Shabak was not interested in catching terrorists after blood was shed. It wanted to stop the terrorists before they could strike, and, if possible, to frighten young Arabs from ever going the way of violence.

Yaakov applied the brakes suddenly to avoid colliding with a slow-moving transit van. Simultaneously he flashed his lights and pounded on the car horn. The van responded by changing lanes. As Yaakov shot past, Gabriel glimpsed a pair of Haredim conducting an animated conversation as though nothing had happened.

Yaakov tossed a kippah onto Gabriel’s lap. It was larger than most and loosely knitted, with an orange-and-amber pattern against a black background. Gabriel understood the significance of its design.

“We’ll cross the line as settlers, just in case anyone from PA Security or Hamas is watching the checkpoints.”

“Where are we from?”

“Kiryat Devorah,” Yaakov replied. “It’s in the Jordan Valley. We’re never going to set foot there.”

Gabriel held up the skullcap. “I take it we’re not terribly popular with the local population.”

“Let’s just say that the residents of Kiryat Devorah take their commitment to the Land of Israel quite seriously.”

Gabriel slipped the kippah onto his head and adjusted the angle. Yaakov briefed Gabriel as he drove: the procedures for crossing into the West Bank, the route they would take to the Arab village where Arwish was waiting, the method of extraction. When Yaakov finished, he reached into the backseat and produced an Uzi miniature submachine gun.

“I prefer this,” said Gabriel, holding up his Beretta.

Yaakov laughed. “This is the West Bank, not the Left Bank. Don’t be a fool, Gabriel. Take the Uzi.”

Gabriel reluctantly took the weapon and rammed a magazine of ammunition into the butt. Yaakov covered his head with a kippah identical to the one he’d given Gabriel. A few miles beyond Ben-Gurion Airport he exited the motorway and followed a two-lane road eastward toward the West Bank. The Separation Fence, looming before them, cast a black shadow across the landscape.

At the checkpoint a Shabak man stood among the IDF soldiers. As Yaakov approached, the Shabak man murmured a few words to the soldiers and the Volkswagen was allowed to pass without inspection. Yaakov, clear of the checkpoint, raced along the moon-washed road at high speed. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder and saw a pair of headlights. The lights floated there for a time, then receded into the night. Yaakov seemed to take no notice of them. The second car, Gabriel suspected, belonged to a Shabak countersurveillance team.

A sign warned that Ramallah lay four kilometers ahead. Yaakov turned off the road, onto a dirt track that ran through the bed of an ancient wadi. He doused his headlamps and navigated the wadi with only the amber glow of his parking lights. After a moment he brought the car to a stop.

“Open the glove box.”

Gabriel did as he was told. Inside was a pair of kaffiyehs.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Cover your face,” Yaakov said. “All of it, the way they do.”

Yaakov, in a practiced motion, bound his head in the kaffiyeh and tied it at his throat, so that his face was concealed except for a thin slit for his eyes. Gabriel did the same. Yaakov started driving again, plunging along the darkened wadi with both hands wrapped around the wheel, leaving Gabriel with the uncomfortable feeling he was seated next to an Arab militant on a suicide run. A mile farther on, they came to a narrow paved road. Yaakov turned onto the road and followed it north.

The village was small, even by West Bank standards, and gripped by an air of sudden desertion-a collection of squat, dun-colored houses crouched around the narrow spire of a minaret, with scarcely a light burning anywhere. In the center of the village lay a small market square. There were no other cars and no pedestrians, only a flock of goats nosing amid fallen produce.

The house where Yaakov stopped was on the northern edge. The window facing the street was shuttered. One of the shutters hung aslant from a broken hinge. A few feet from the front door was a child’s tricycle. The bike was pointed toward the door, which meant the meeting was still on. Had it been pointed in the opposite direction, they would have been forced to abort and head for the backup location.

Yaakov snatched an Uzi submachine gun from the floorboard and climbed out of the car. Gabriel did the same, then pulled open the rear passenger-side door, just as Yaakov had instructed. He turned his back to the house and watched the street for any sign of movement. “If anyone approaches the car while I’m inside, shoot in their direction,” Yaakov had said. “If they don’t get the message, put them on the ground.”

Yaakov hurdled the tricycle and drove his right foot against the door. Gabriel heard the crack of splintering wood but kept his eyes trained on the street. From inside came the sound of a voice shouting in Arabic. Gabriel recognized it as Yaakov’s. The next voice was unfamiliar to him.

A light appeared in a nearby cottage, then another. Gabriel released the safety on his Uzi and slipped his forefinger inside the trigger guard. He heard footfalls behind him and turned in time to see Yaakov leading Arwish through the broken door, hands in the air, face shrouded by a black hood, an Uzi pressed to the back of his head.

Gabriel turned his gaze once more toward the street. A man, dressed in a pale gray galabia, had stepped outside his cottage and was shouting at Gabriel in Arabic. Gabriel, in the same language, ordered him to stay back, but the Palestinian advanced closer. “Shoot at him!” Yaakov snapped, but Gabriel calmly held fire.

Yaakov shoved Arwish headlong into the back of the car. Gabriel scrambled in after him and drove the informant toward the floor. Yaakov ran around the front of the car to the driver’s side door, pausing long enough to spray a volley of rounds a few yards from the feet of the Palestinian villager, who scurried back into the shelter of his house.

Yaakov jumped behind the wheel, then reversed down the narrow street. Reaching the market square, he turned around and sped through the village. The gunfire and the roaring of the car engine had alerted the villagers to trouble. Faces appeared in windows and doorways, but no one dared challenge them.

Gabriel kept watch out the rear window until the village vanished into the darkness. A moment later Yaakov was once again racing along the rutted wadi, this time in the opposite direction. The collaborator was still pressed to the floor, wedged into the narrow space between the backseat and the front.

“Let me up, you jackass!”

Gabriel pressed his forearm against the side of the Arab’s neck and subjected his body to a rough and thorough search for weapons or explosives. Finding nothing, he pulled the Arab onto the seat and tore away the black hood. A single eye glared malevolently back at him-the eye of Yasir Arafat’s translator, Colonel Kemel.

THE CITY OF HADERA, an early Zionist farm settlement turned drab Israeli industrial town, lies on the Coastal Plain halfway between Haifa and Tel Aviv. In a working-class section of the city, adjacent to a sprawling tire factory, stands a row of wheat-colored apartment buildings. One of the buildings, the one nearest the factory, stinks always of burning rubber. On the top floor of this building is a Shabak safe flat. For most officers it is a meeting place of last resort. Yaakov actually preferred it. The acrid smell, he believed, lent an air of urgency to the proceedings, for few men who came here wished to linger long. But then Yaakov was driven by other ghosts. His great-grandparents, Russian Jews from Kovno, had been among the founders of Hadera. They had turned a worthless malarial swamp into productive farmland. For Yaakov, Hadera was truth. Hadera was Israel.

The flat was devoid of comfort. The sitting room was furnished with folding metal chairs, and the linoleum floor was buckled and bare. On the kitchen counter stood a cheap plastic electric kettle; in the rust-stained basin a quartet of dirty cups. Mahmoud Arwish, alias Colonel Kemel, had turned down Yaakov’s rather disingenuous offer of tea. He had also requested that Yaakov leave the lights off. The neatly pressed uniform he’d been wearing that morning at the Mukata had been replaced by a pair of gabardine trousers and a white cotton shirt, which glowed softly in the moonlight streaming through the window. Between the two remaining fingers of his right hand rested one of Yaakov’s American cigarettes. With the other hand he was massaging the side of his neck. His single eye was fixed on Gabriel, who had forsaken his folding chair and was seated on the floor with his back propped against the wall and his legs crossed before him. Yaakov was a formless shadow against the window.

“I see you’ve learned a thing or two from your Shabak friend,” Arwish said, rubbing his jaw. “They have a reputation of being good with their fists.”

“You said you wanted to see me,” said Gabriel. “I don’t like when people ask to see me.”

“What did you think I was planning to do? Kill you?”

“It’s not without precedent,” Gabriel replied calmly.

Shabak agents, he knew, were at their most vulnerable while meeting with assets from the other side. In recent years, several had been killed during meetings. One had been hacked to death with an ax in a Jerusalem safe flat.

“If we’d wanted to kill you, we’d have done it this morning in Ramallah. Our people would have celebrated your death. Your hands are stained with the blood of Palestinian heroes.”

“Celebration of death is what you’re good at these days,” Gabriel replied. “Sometimes it seems to be the only thing. Offer your people something instead of suicide. Lead them instead of following the most extreme elements of your society. Build something.”

“We tried to build something,” Arwish replied, “and you tore it down with your tanks and bulldozers.”

Gabriel glimpsed Yaakov’s shadow stirring in the window. The Shabak man wanted the topic moved onto less contentious ground. Mahmoud Arwish, judging from the menacing manner in which he lit a second cigarette, was not ready to concede. Gabriel looked away from the Arab’s single glaring eye and absently trailed his forefinger through the dust on the linoleum floor. Let him rant, Shamron would have counseled. Let him cast you as the oppressor and villain. It helps to assuage the guilt of betrayal.

“Yes, we celebrate death,” Arwish said, closing the lid of Yaakov’s old-fashioned lighter with a snap. “And some of us collaborate with our enemy. But that’s the way it always is in war, isn’t it? Unfortunately, we Palestinians are easily bought. Shabak calls it the three K’s: kesef, kavod, kussit. Money, respect, woman. Imagine, betraying your people for the affection of an Israeli whore.”

Gabriel, silent, continued doodling in the dust. He realized he was tracing the outline of a Caravaggio-Abraham, knife in hand, preparing to slay his own son in service to the Lord.

Arwish went on. “Do you know why I collaborate, Jibril? I collaborate because my wife became ill. The doctor at the clinic in Ramallah diagnosed her with cancer and said she would die unless she received treatment in Jerusalem. I requested permission from the Israeli authorities to enter the city, which brought me into contact with Shabak and my dear friend.” He inclined his head toward Yaakov, who was now seated on the window ledge with his arms folded. “In front of me he calls himself Solomon. I know his real name is Yaakov, but I always refer to him as Solomon. It is one of the many games we play.”

Arwish contemplated the end of his cigarette. “Needless to say, my wife received permission to travel to Jerusalem for treatment, but it came at a steep price, the price of collaboration. Solomon jails my sons from time to time, just to keep the information flowing. He’s even jailed a relative who lives on the Israeli side of the Green Line. But when Solomon truly wants to turn the screws on me, he threatens to tell my wife of my treachery. Solomon knows she would never forgive me.”

Gabriel looked up from his Caravaggio. “Are you finished?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Then why don’t you tell me about Khaled?”

“Khaled,” Arwish repeated, shaking his head. “Khaled is the least of your problems.” He paused and looked toward the darkened ceiling. “ ‘ Israel is bewildered. They have now become among the nations like an unwanted vessel, like a lonely wild ass.’ ” His gaze settled on Gabriel once more. “Do you know who wrote those words?”

“Hosea,” Gabriel replied indifferently.

“Correct,” said Arwish. “Are you a religious man?”

“No,” answered Gabriel truthfully.

“Neither am I,” confessed Arwish, “but perhaps you should heed the advice of Hosea. What is Israel ’s solution to her problems with the Palestinians? To build a fence. To act, in the words of Hosea, like shifters of field boundaries. The Jews complain bitterly about the centuries they spent in the ghetto, and yet what are you doing with that Separation Fence? You are building the first Palestinian ghetto. Worse still, you’re building a ghetto for yourselves.”

Arwish started to raise his cigarette to his lips, but Yaakov stepped away from the window and slapped the cigarette from the Palestinian’s ruined hand. Arwish treated himself to the victim’s superior smile, then he twisted his head around and asked Yaakov for a cup of tea. Yaakov returned to the window and remained motionless.

“No tea today,” Arwish said. “Only money. To get my money, I must sign Solomon’s ledger and affix to it my own thumbprint. That way, if I betray Solomon, he can punish me. There is but one fate for collaboration in our part of this land. Death. And not a gentleman’s death. A biblical death. I’ll be stoned or hacked to pieces by Arafat’s fanatical killers. That’s how Yaakov ensures I tell him nothing but the truth, and on a timely basis.”

Yaakov leaned forward and whispered into Arwish’s ear, like a lawyer instructing a witness under hostile questioning.

“Solomon grows irritated with my speeches. Solomon would like me to get down to business.” Arwish studied Gabriel for a moment. “But not you, Jibril. You are the patient one.”

Gabriel looked up. “Where’s Khaled?”

“I don’t know. I only know that Arafat misled you this morning. You’re right. Khaled does exist, and he’s taken up the sword of his father and grandfather.”

“Did he do Rome?”

A moment of hesitation, a glance toward the dark figure of Yaakov, then a slow nod.

“Is he acting at Arafat’s behest?”

“I couldn’t say for certain.”

“What can you say for certain?”

“He’s in communication with the Mukata.”

“How?”

“A number of different ways. Sometimes he uses faxes. They’re bounced from a number of different machines, and by the time they arrive in the Territories, they’re almost impossible to read.”

“What else?”

“Sometimes he uses coded e-mails, which are routed through a number of different addresses and servers. Sometimes he sends messages to Arafat via courier or through the visiting delegations. Most of the time, though, he just uses the telephone.”

“Could you identify his voice?”

“I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him speak.”

“Have you ever seen him?”

“I believe I met him once, many years ago in Tunis. A young man came to visit and stayed in Arafat’s compound for a few days. He had a French name and passport, but he spoke Arabic like a Palestinian.”

“What makes you think it was Khaled?”

“The way Arafat was acting. He glowed in the presence of this young man. He was positively giddy.”

“That’s all?”

“No, there was something about his appearance. They always said Khaled looked like his grandfather. This man certainly bore a striking resemblance to Sheikh Asad.”

Arwish stood suddenly. Yaakov’s arm swung up, and he leveled his Uzi at the Arab’s head. Arwish smiled and pulled his shirt out of his trousers. Taped to his lower back was an envelope. Gabriel had missed it during his rapid search for weapons in the back of the car. Arwish removed the envelope and flipped it to Gabriel, who pried open the flap and shook the photograph out onto his lap. It showed a young man, strikingly handsome, seated next to Arafat at a table. He seemed unaware that his picture was being taken.

“Arafat has a habit of secretly photographing anyone who meets with him,” Arwish said. “You have photographs of Khaled as a child. Perhaps your computers can confirm that this man is truly him.”

“It’s not likely,” Gabriel said. “What else do you have?”

“When he calls the Mukata, it’s not his voice on the line.”

“How does he do that?”

“He has someone else do the talking. A woman-a European woman.”

“What’s her name?”

“She uses different names and different telephones.”

“Where?”

Arwish shrugged.

“What’s her native language?”

“Hard to tell, but her Arabic is perfect.”

“Accent?”

“Classical. Upper-crust Jordanian. Maybe Beirut or Cairo. She refers to Khaled as Tony.”

“Tony who?” Gabriel asked calmly. “Tony where?”

“I don’t know,” Arwish said, “but find the woman, and maybe you’ll find Khaled.”

12 TEL AVIV

“SHE CALLS HERSELF MADELEINE, BUT ONLY WHEN she’s posing as a Frenchwoman. When she wants to be British, she calls herself Alexandra. When Italian, she’s Lunetta-Little Moon.”

Natan looked at Gabriel and blinked several times. He wore his hair in a ponytail, his spectacles lay slightly askew across the end of his nose, and there were holes in his Malibu surfer’s sweatshirt. Yaakov had forewarned Gabriel about Natan’s appearance. “He’s a genius. After graduating from Cal-Tech, every high-tech firm in America and Israel wanted him. He’s a bit like you,” Yaakov had concluded, with the slightly envious tone of a man who did but one thing well.

Gabriel looked out of Natan’s glass-enclosed office, onto a large brightly lit floor lined with row upon row of computer workstations. At each station sat a technician. Most were shockingly young and most were Mizrahim, Jews who had come from Arab countries. These were the unsung warriors in Israel ’s war against terrorism. They never saw the enemy, never forced him to betray his people or confronted him across an interrogation table. To them he was a crackle of electricity down a copper wire or a whisper in the atmosphere. Natan Hofi was charged with the seemingly impossible task of monitoring all electronic communication between the outside world and the Territories. Computers did the brunt of the work, sifting the intercepts for certain words, phrases, or the voices of known terrorists, yet Natan still regarded his ears as the most reliable weapon in his arsenal.

“We don’t know her real name,” he said. “Right now she’s just Voiceprint 572/B. So far we’ve intercepted five telephone calls between her and Arafat. Care to listen?”

Gabriel nodded. Natan clicked an icon on his computer screen, and the recordings began to play. During each call the woman posed as a foreign peace activist telephoning to express support for the beleaguered Palestinian leader or to commiserate about the latest Zionist outrage. Each conversation contained a brief reference to a friend named Tony, just as Mahmoud Arwish had said.

After listening to four of the conversations, Gabriel asked, “What can you tell about her based on her voice?”

“Her Arabic is excellent, but she’s no Arab. French, I’d say. From the South, maybe the Marseilles area. Overeducated. Oversexed. She also has a small butterfly tattooed on her rear end.”

Yaakov looked up sharply.

“I’m kidding,” said Natan. “But listen to intercept number five. She’s posing as our Frenchwoman, Madeleine, head of something called the Center for a Just and Lasting Peace in Palestine. The topic of the conversation is an upcoming rally in Paris.”

“ Paris?” Gabriel asked. “You’re sure it’s Paris?”

Natan nodded. “She tells Arafat that one of the organizers, a man named Tony, is predicting a turnout of a hundred thousand. Then she hesitates and corrects herself. Tony’s prediction isn’t a hundred thousand, she says, it’s two hundred thousand.”

Natan played the intercept. When it was over, Yaakov said, “What’s so interesting about that?”

“This.”

Natan opened another audio file and played a few seconds worth of inaudible muffle.

“There was someone else in the room with her at the time. He was monitoring the conversation on another extension. When Madeleine says Tony is expecting a hundred thousand people, this fellow covers the mouthpiece and in French tells her, ‘No, no, not a hundred thousand. It’s going to be two hundred thousand.’He thinks no one can hear him, but he’s put the mouthpiece right against his vocal cords. It’s a real rookie mistake. We got the vibrations on tape. With a little filtering and scrubbing, I made that garble sound like this.”

Natan played the file again. This time it was audible-a man, perfect French. “No, no, not a hundred thousand. It’s going to be two hundred thousand.” Natan clicked his mouse and pointed to the top-right corner of his computer monitor, a grid pattern crisscrossed by a series of undulating lines.

“This is a sound spectrograph. The voiceprint. It’s a mathematical equation, based on the physical configuration of a speaker’s mouth and throat. We’ve compared this print with every voice we have on file.”

“And?”

“Not a single match. We call him Voiceprint 698/D.”

“When was that call recorded?”

“Six weeks ago.”

“Do you know where the call was placed?”

Natan smiled.

THERE WAS A ROW, but then no Office operation was complete without one. Lev wanted to keep Gabriel locked in the basement on punishment rations of bread and water, and he briefly held the upper hand. Gabriel was blown and no longer fit for fieldwork, Lev argued. Besides, the telephone intercepts suggested Khaled was hiding in the Arab world, somewhere the Europhile Gabriel, except for his brief foray into Tunis, had never operated. As a last resort, Lev sought refuge in bureaucratic twaddle, arguing that Gabriel’s committee possessed no foreign operational charter. The matter reached Shamron, as most matters eventually did. Lev sidestepped, but too late to ward off the fatal blow, for advice from Shamron had the authority of God’s commandments chiseled in stone.

Having prevailed in the bureaucratic trenches, Gabriel hurriedly dealt next with his problems of identity and appearance. He decided to travel as a German, for German was his first language and remained the language of his dreams. He chose commercial interior design as his trade and Munich as his place of residence. Operations supplied him with a passport in the name of Johannes Klemp and a wallet filled with credit cards and other personal paraphernalia, including business cards engraved with a Munich telephone number. The number, if dialed, would ring in an Office safe flat, then transfer automatically to a switchboard inside King Saul Boulevard, where Gabriel’s recorded voice would announce that he was away on holiday and would call back upon his return.

As for his appearance, the specialists in Operations suggested a beard, and Gabriel, who regarded any man with facial hair as distrustful and hiding something, reluctantly complied. To his everlasting disappointment, it came in very gray. This pleased the specialists, who colored his hair to match. They added a pair of frameless rectangular spectacles and a suitcase filled with fashionable monochrome clothing from Berlin and Milan. The wizards in Technical provided several innocent-looking consumer electronic devices that, in reality, were not so innocent at all.

One warm evening, shortly before his departure, he dressed in one of Herr Klemp’s egregious suits and stalked the discos and nightclubs along Sheinkin Street in Tel Aviv. Herr Klemp was all that he, and by extension Mario Delvecchio, was not-a loquacious bore, a womanizer, a man who liked expensive drink and techno music. He loathed Herr Klemp, yet at the same time welcomed him, for Gabriel never felt truly safe unless wearing the skin of another man.

He thought of his hasty preparation for Operation Wrath of God; of walking the streets of Tel Aviv with Shamron, stealing wallets and breaking into hotel rooms along the Promenade. Only once had he been caught, a Romanian Jewish woman who had seized Gabriel’s wrist in a Shamron-like grip and screamed for the police. “You went like a lamb to the slaughter,” Shamron had said. “What if it had been a gendarme? Or a carabiniere? Do you think I’d be able to walk in and demand your freedom? If they come for you, fight back. If you must shed innocent blood, then shed it without hesitation. But never allow yourself to be arrested. Never!”

Office tradition demanded Gabriel spend his final night in Israel at a “jump site,” the in-house idiom for a departure safe flat. Without exception they are forlorn places that stink of cigarettes and failure, so he chose instead to spend the night in Narkiss Street with Chiara. Their lovemaking was strained and awkward. Afterward, Chiara confessed that Gabriel felt a stranger to her.

Gabriel had never been able to sleep before an operation, and his last night in Jerusalem was no exception. And so he was pleased to hear, shortly before midnight, the distinctive grumble of Shamron’s armored Peugeot pulling up outside in the street-and to glimpse Shamron’s bald head floating up the garden walk with Rami at his heels. They passed the remainder of that night in Gabriel’s study, with the windows open to the chill night air. Shamron talked about the War of Independence, his search for Sheikh Asad, and of the morning he had killed him in the cottage outside Lydda. As dawn approached, Gabriel felt a reluctance to leave him, a sense that perhaps he should have taken Lev’s advice and allowed someone else to go in his place.

Only when it had grown light outside did Shamron talk about what lay ahead. “Don’t go anywhere near the embassy,” he said. “The Mukhabarat assumes, with some justification, that everyone who works there is a spy.” Then he gave Gabriel a business card. “He’s ours, bought and paid for. He knows everyone in town. I’ve told him to expect you. Be careful. He likes his drink.”

An hour later Gabriel climbed into an Office car outfitted as a Jerusalem taxi and headed down the Bab al-Wad to Ben-Gurion Airport. He cleared customs as Herr Klemp, endured a mind-numbing security examination, then went to the departure lounge. When his flight was called he set out across the bone-white tarmac toward the waiting jetliner and took his seat in the economy cabin. As the plane lifted off he looked out the window and watched the land sinking beneath him, gripped by a perverse fear that he would never see it or Chiara again. He thought of the journey ahead, a weeklong Mediterranean odyssey that would take him from Athens to Istanbul and finally to the ancient city on the western edge of the Fertile Crescent, where he hoped to find a woman named Madeleine, or Alexandra, or Lunetta, the Little Moon, and her friend named Tony.

13 CAIRO: MARCH 31

THE GENTLEMAN FROM MUNICH WAS A GUEST THE staff at the Inter-Continental Hotel would not soon forget. Mr. Katubi, the well-oiled chief concierge, had seen many like him, a man perpetually ready to take offense, a small man with a small man’s chip balanced precariously on his insignificant shoulder. Indeed, Mr. Katubi grew to loathe him so intensely that he would wince visibly at the mere sight of him. On the third day he greeted him with a tense smile and the question: “What is it now, Herr Klemp?”

The complaints had begun within minutes of his arrival. Herr Klemp had reserved a non-smoking room, but clearly, he claimed, someone had smoked there very recently-though Mr. Katubi, who prided himself on a keen sense of smell, was never able to detect even a trace of tobacco on the air. The next room was too close to the swimming pool, the next too close to the nightclub. Finally, Mr. Katubi gave him, at no additional charge, an upper-floor suite with a terrace overlooking the river, which Herr Klemp pronounced “hopelessly adequate.”

The swimming pool was too warm, his bathroom too cold. He turned up his nose at the breakfast buffet and routinely sent back his food at dinner. The valets ruined the lapels of one of his suits, his massage at the spa had left him with an injured neck. He demanded the maids clean his suite promptly at eight each morning, and he remained in the room to supervise their work-his cash had been pinched at the Istanbul Hilton, he claimed, and he was not going to let it happen again in Cairo. The moment the maids left, the DO NOT DISTURB sign would appear on his door latch, where it would remain like a battle flag for the remainder of each day. Mr. Katubi wished only that he could hang a similar sign on his outpost in the lobby.

Each morning at ten Herr Klemp left the hotel armed with his tourist maps and guidebooks. The hotel drivers took to drawing straws to determine who would have the misfortune of serving as his guide for the day, for each outing seemed more calamitous than the last. The Egyptian Museum, he announced, needed a thorough cleaning. The Citadel he wrote off as a filthy old fort. At the pyramids of Giza he was nipped by a cantankerous camel. Upon his return from a visit to Coptic Cairo, Mr. Katubi asked if he enjoyed the Church of Saint Barbara. “Interesting,” said Herr Klemp, “but not as beautiful as our churches in Germany.”

On his fourth day, Mr. Katubi was standing at the entrance of the hotel as Herr Klemp came whirling out of the revolving doors, into a dust-filled desert wind.

“Good morning, Herr Klemp.”

“That is yet to be determined, Mr. Katubi.”

“Does Herr Klemp require a car this morning?”

“No, he does not.”

And with that he set out along the corniche, the tails of his supposedly “ruined” suit jacket flapping in the breeze like the mudguards of a lorry. Cairo was a city of remarkable resiliency, Mr. Katubi thought, but even Cairo was no match for a man like Herr Klemp.

GABRIEL SAW SOMETHING OF Europe in the grimy, decaying buildings along Talaat Harb Street. Then he remembered reading, in the guidebooks of Herr Klemp, that the nineteenth-century Egyptian ruler Khedive Ismail had conceived of turning Cairo into “ Paris by the Nile” and had hired some of Europe ’s finest architects to achieve his dream. Their handiwork was still evident in the neo-Gothic facades, the wrought-iron railings, and tall rectangular shuttered windows, though it had been undone by a century’s worth of pollution, weather, and neglect.

He came to a thunderous traffic circle. A sandaled boy tugged at his coat sleeve and invited him to visit his family’s perfume shop. “Nein, nein,” said Gabriel in the German of Herr Klemp, but he pushed past the child with the detached air of an Israeli used to fending off hawkers in the alleys of the Old City.

He followed the circle counterclockwise and turned into Qasr el-Nil Street, Cairo ’s version of the Champs-Élysées. He walked for a time, pausing now and again to gaze into the garish shop windows to see if he was being followed. He left Qasr el-Nil and entered a narrow side street. It was impossible to walk on the pavements because they were jammed with parked cars, so he walked in the street like a Cairene.

He came to the address shown on the business card Shamron had given him the night before his departure. It was an Italianate building with a facade the color of Nile mud. From a third-floor window came the strains of the BBC’s hourly news bulletin theme. A few feet from the entrance a vendor dispensed paper plates of spaghetti Bolognese from an aluminum cart. Next to the vendor a veiled woman sold limes and loaves of flat bread. Across the cluttered street was a kiosk. Standing in the shade of the little roof, wearing sunglasses and a Members Only windbreaker, was a poorly concealed Mukhabarat surveillance man, who watched as Gabriel went inside.

It was cool and dark in the foyer. An emaciated Egyptian cat with hollow eyes and enormous ears hissed at him from the shadows, then disappeared through a hole in the wall. A Nubian doorman in a lemon-colored galabia and white turban sat motionless in a wooden chair. He lifted an enormous ebony hand to receive the business card of the man Gabriel wished to see.

“Third floor,” he said in English.

Two doors greeted Gabriel on the landing. Next to the door on the right was a brass plaque that read: DAVID QUINNELL-INTERNATIONAL PRESS. Gabriel pressed the bell and was promptly admitted into a small antechamber by a Sudanese office boy, whom Gabriel addressed in measured German-accented English.

“Who shall I say is calling?” the Sudanese replied.

“My name is Johannes Klemp.”

“Is Mr. Quinnell expecting you?”

“I’m a friend of Rudolf Heller. He’ll understand.”

“Just a moment. I’ll see if Mr. Quinnell can see you now.”

The Sudanese disappeared through a set of tall double doors. A moment turned to two, then three. Gabriel wandered to the window and peered into the street. A waiter from the coffeehouse on the corner was presenting the Mukhabarat man with a glass of tea on a small silver tray. Gabriel heard the Sudanese behind him and turned round. “Mr. Quinnell will see you now.”

The room into which Gabriel was shown had the air of a Roman parlor gone to seed. The wood floor was rough for want of polish; the crown molding was nearly invisible beneath a dense layer of dust and grit. Two of the four walls were given over to bookshelves lined with an impressive collection of works dealing with the history of the Middle East and Islam. The large wood desk was buried beneath piles of yellowed newspapers and unread post.

The room was in shadow, except for a trapezoid of harsh sunlight, which slanted through the half-open French doors and shone upon a scuffed suede brogue belonging to one David Quinnell. He lowered one half of that morning’s Al-Ahram, the government-run Egyptian daily, and fixed Gabriel in a lugubrious stare. He wore a wrinkled shirt of white oxford cloth and a tan jacket with epaulettes. A lank forelock of gray-blond hair fell toward a pair of beady, bloodshot eyes. He scratched a carelessly shaved chin and lowered the volume on his radio. Gabriel, even from a distance of several paces, could smell last night’s whiskey on his breath.

“Any friend of Rudolf Heller is a friend of mine.” Quinnell’s dour expression did not match his jovial tone. Gabriel had the impression he was speaking for an audience of Mukhabarat listeners. “Herr Heller told me you might be calling. What can I do for you?”

Gabriel placed a photograph on the cluttered desktop-the photo Mahmoud Arwish had given him in Hadera.

“I’m here on holiday,” Gabriel said. “Herr Heller suggested I look you up. He said you could show me something of the real Cairo. He said you know more about Egypt than any man alive.”

“How kind of Herr Heller. How is he these days?”

“As ever,” said Gabriel.

Quinnell, without moving anything but his eyes, looked down at the photograph.

“I’m a bit busy at the moment, but I think I can be of help.” He picked up the photograph and folded it into his newspaper. “Let’s take a walk, shall we? It’s best to get out before they turn up the heat.”

“YOUR OFFICE IS under surveillance.”

They were walking along a narrow, shadowed alleyway lined with shops and vendors. Quinnell paused to admire a bolt of blood-colored Egyptian cotton.

“Sometimes,” he said indifferently. “All the hacks are under watch. When one has a security apparatus as large as the Egyptians’, it has to be used for something.”

“Yes, but you’re no ordinary hack.”

“True, but they don’t know that. To them, I’m just a bitter old English shit, trying to scratch a living from the printed word. We’ve managed to reach something of an accommodation. I’ve asked them to tidy up my flat when they finish searching it, and they’ve actually done a rather good job of it.”

Quinnell released the cloth and struck out precariously down the alleyway. Gabriel, before setting off after him, glanced over his shoulder and glimpsed Members Only listlessly examining an Arabian copper coffeepot.

Quinnell’s face, by the time Gabriel caught up with him, was already flushed with the late-morning heat. He’d been a star once, the roving correspondent for an important London daily, the sort of reporter who parachutes into the world’s hot spots and leaves before the story turns dull and the public begins to lose interest. Undone by too much drink and too many women, he’d come to Israel on assignment during the first intifada and had washed ashore on the Isle of Shamron. Over a private dinner in Tiberias, Shamron had probed and found weakness-a mountain of debt, a secret Jewish past concealed behind a sneering, drunken English exterior. By the time coffee was served on the terrace, Shamron had made his play. It would be a partnership, Shamron had promised, for Shamron regarded as his “partner” any man he could seduce or blackmail into doing his bidding. Quinnell would use his impressive array of Arab sources to provide Shamron with information and entrée. Occasionally he would print a piece of Shamron’s black propaganda. In return, Quinnell’s equally impressive debt would be quietly retired. He would also receive a few exclusive pieces of news designed to polish his fading reputation, and a publisher would be found for the book he’d always longed to write, though Shamron never revealed how he’d known Quinnell had a manuscript in his drawer. The marriage was consummated, and Quinnell, like Mahmoud Arwish, set himself on a path of betrayal for which the punishment was professional death. As public penance for his private sins, Quinnell had gone over completely to the Arab side. On Fleet Street he was referred to as the Voice of Palestine-apologist for the suicide bombers and Islamofascists. The Imperialist, oil-guzzling West and its bastard child Israel had reaped what it had sown, Quinnell often ranted. There will be no security in Piccadilly until there is justice in Palestine. He was Al-Jazeera’s favorite Western commentator and much in demand on the Cairo party circuit. Yasir Arafat once called him “a courageous man who dares to write the truth-the only man in the West who truly understands the Arab street.”

“There’s a place in Zamalek you should try. It’s called Mimi’s. Good food, good music.” Quinnell paused and added provocatively: “An interesting crowd.”

“Who’s Mimi?”

“Mimi Ferrere. She’s something of a fixture on the Zamalek social scene. Came here nearly twenty years ago and never left. Everyone knows Mimi, and Mimi knows everyone.”

“What brought her to Cairo?”

“The Harmonic Convergence.”

Quinnell, met by Gabriel’s blank look, explained.

“A bloke named Jose Arguelles wrote a book some time ago called The Mayan Factor. He claimed to have found evidence in the Bible and Aztec and Mayan calendars indicating that August 1987 was a critical juncture in the history of mankind. The world could go one of two ways. It could enter a new age or be destroyed. To avoid destruction, 144,000 people had to gather at so-called power centers around the globe and resonate positive energy. Mimi came to the pyramids, along with several thousand other lost souls. She was quite a looker back then. Still is, if you ask me. She married a rich Egyptian and settled on Zamalek. The marriage lasted about a week and a half. When it fell apart, Mimi needed money, so she opened the café.”

“Where is she from?”

Quinnell shrugged his shoulders. “Mimi’s from everywhere. Mimi’s a citizen of the world.”

“What’s the crowd like?”

“Expats, mainly. A few smart tourists. Arabs with money who still like the West. There’s a fellow I see there from time to time. His name is Tony.”

“Tony? You’re sure?”

“That’s what he calls himself. Handsome devil.” Quinnell handed Gabriel the newspaper. “Don’t go too early. The place doesn’t start to get going until midnight. And watch your step around Mimi. She might be a New Age fruitcake, but she doesn’t miss a trick.”

MR. KATUBI BOOKED a table for Herr Johannes Klemp at Mimi’s Wine and Jazz Bar for ten o’clock that evening. At nine Gabriel came down from his room and, forsaking the taxi stand, set out across the Tahrir Bridge toward Gezira Island. Reaching the island, he turned right and headed north on the river-front road, along the fringe of the old sporting club where British colonialists had played cricket and drunk gin while the empire collapsed around them.

A string of luxury high-rise apartment buildings appeared on his left, the first evidence he had entered the most sought-after address in Cairo. Foreigners lived here; so did wealthy Egyptians who took their cues not from Islam but from the trendsetters of New York and London. It was relatively clean in Zamalek, and the incessant noise of Cairo was just a discontented grumble from the other bank of the river. One could sip cappuccinos in the coffee bars and speak French in the exclusive boutiques. It was an oasis, a place where the rich could pretend they were not surrounded by a sea of unimaginable poverty.

Mimi’s occupied the ground floor of an old house just off July 26th Street. The art deco neon sign was in English, as was the entirely vegetarian menu, which was displayed under glass and framed in hand-painted wood. Next to the menu hung a large poster with a photograph of the evening’s featured entertainment, five young men with silk scarves and much jewelry. It was the sort of place Gabriel would normally enter only at gunpoint. Herr Klemp squared his shoulders and went inside.

He was greeted by a dark-skinned woman dressed in orange satin pajamas and a matching head wrap. She spoke to him in English, and he responded in kind. Hearing the name “Johannes Klemp,” she smiled warily, as though she had been forewarned by Mr. Katubi to expect the worst, and led him to a table near the bandstand. It was a low, Arabesque piece, surrounded by brightly colored, overstuffed lounge chairs. Gabriel had the distinct impression he would not be spending the evening alone. His fears were realized twenty minutes later when he was joined by three Arabs. They ordered champagne and ignored the morose-looking German with whom they were sharing a table.

It was a pleasant room, long and oval-shaped, with rough whitewashed plaster walls and swaths of silk hanging from the high ceiling. The air smelled of Eastern spice and sandalwood incense and vaguely of hashish. Along the edge of the room, and barely visible in the subdued light, were several domed alcoves, where patrons could eat and drink in relative privacy. Gabriel picked at a plate of Arab appetizers and looked in vain for anyone resembling the man in the photograph.

True to Quinnell’s word, the music didn’t start till eleven. The first act was a Peruvian who wore a sarong and played Incan-influenced New Age pieces on a nylon-stringed guitar. Between numbers he told fables of the high Andes in nearly impenetrable English. At midnight came the featured entertainers of the evening, a group of Moroccans who played atonal Arab jazz in keys and rhythms no Western ear could comprehend. The three Arabs paid no attention to the music and spent the evening in liquor-lubricated conversation. Herr Klemp smiled and applauded in appreciation of admirable solos, yet Gabriel heard none of it, for all his attention was focused on the woman holding court at the end of the bar.

She was quite a looker back then, Quinnell had said. Still is, if you ask me.

She wore white Capri pants and a satin blouse of pale blue tied at her slender waist. Viewed from behind, she might have been mistaken for a girl in her twenties. Only when she turned, revealing the wrinkles around her eyes and the streak of gray in her dark hair, did one realize she was a middle-aged woman. She wore bangles on her wrists and a large silver pendant around her long neck. Her skin was olive-complected and her eyes nearly black. She greeted everyone in the same manner, with a kiss on each cheek and a whispered confidence. Gabriel had seen many versions of her before, the woman who moves from villa to villa and party to party, who stays permanently tanned and permanently thin and cannot be bothered with a husband or children. Gabriel wondered what on earth she was doing in Cairo.

The Moroccan quintet took a break and threatened to return in ten minutes. The houselights came up slightly, as did the volume of the conversation. The woman detached herself from the bar and began working the room, moving effortlessly from table to table, alcove to alcove, as a butterfly floats from one flower to the next. Old acquaintances she greeted with kisses and a whisper. New friends were treated to a long handshake. She spoke to them in Arabic and English, in Italian and French, in Spanish and respectable German. She accepted compliments like a woman used to receiving them and left no turbulence in her wake. For the men, she was an object of cautious desire; for the women, admiration.

She arrived at the table of Herr Klemp as the band was filing back onto the stage for a second set. He stood and, bowing slightly at the waist, accepted her proffered hand. Her grip was firm, her skin cool and dry. Releasing his hand, she pushed a stray lock of hair from her face and regarded him playfully with her brown eyes. Had he not seen her give the same look to every other man in the room, he might have assumed she was flirting with him.

“I’m so glad you could join us this evening.” She spoke to him in English and in the confiding tone of a hostess who had thrown a small dinner party. “I hope you’re enjoying the music. Aren’t they wonderful? I’m Mimi, by the way.”

And with that she was gone. Gabriel turned his gaze toward the stage, but in his mind he was back in Natan Hofi’s underground lair, listening to the recordings of the mysterious woman with a friend named Tony.

I’m Mimi, by the way.

No, you’re not, thought Gabriel. You’re Madeleine. And Alexandra. And Lunetta. You’re the Little Moon.

NEXT MORNING Mr. Katubi was standing at his post in the lobby when the telephone purred. He glanced at the caller ID and exhaled heavily. Then he lifted the receiver slowly, a sapper defusing a bomb, and brought it to his ear.

“Good morning, Herr Klemp.”

“It is indeed, Mr. Katubi.”

“Do you require assistance with your bags?”

“No assistance required, Katubi. Change in plans. I’ve decided to extend my stay. I’m enchanted by this place.”

“How fortunate for us,” Mr. Katubi said icily. “For how many additional nights will you require your room?”

“To be determined, Katubi. Stay tuned for further updates.”

“Staying tuned, Herr Klemp.”

14 CAIRO

“I NEVER SIGNED UP FOR ANYTHING LIKE THIS,” Quinnell said gloomily. It was after midnight; they were in Quinnell’s tired little Fiat. Across the Nile, central Cairo stirred restlessly, but Zamalek at that hour was quiet. It had taken two hours to get there. Gabriel was certain no one had followed them.

“You’re sure about the flat number?”

“I’ve been inside,” Quinnell said. “Not in the capacity I’d hoped, mind you, just one of Mimi’s parties. She lives in flat 6A. Everyone knows Mimi’s address.”

“You’re sure she doesn’t have a dog?”

“Just an angora cat with a weight problem. I’m sure a man who claims to be a friend of the great Herr Heller will have no problem dealing with an obese cat. I, on the other hand, have to contend with the seven-foot Nubian doorman. How did that happen?”

“You’re one of the world’s finest journalists, Quinnell. Surely you can deceive a doorman.”

“True, but this isn’t exactly journalism.”

“Think of it as an English schoolboy prank. Tell him the car’s died. Tell him you need help. Give him money. Five minutes, and not a minute longer. Understood?”

Quinnell nodded.

“And if your friend from the Mukhabarat shows up?” Gabriel asked. “What’s the signal?”

“Two short horn blasts, followed by a long one.”

Gabriel climbed out of the car, crossed the street, and descended a flight of stone steps leading to a quay along the waterfront. He paused for a moment to watch the graceful, angular sail of a felucca gliding slowly upriver. Then he turned and walked south, Herr Klemp’s smart leather satchel hanging from his right shoulder. After a few paces the upper floors of Mimi’s apartment house came into view above the rise-an old Zamalek building, whitewashed, with large terraces overlooking the river.

A hundred yards beyond the building another flight of steps rose toward the street. Gabriel, before mounting them, looked down the river to see if he had been followed but found the quay deserted. He climbed the steps and crossed the street, then made his way to the entrance of a darkened alleyway that ran along the back of the apartment houses. Had it been his first time there, he might not have found his destination, but he had walked the alley in daylight and knew with certainty that one hundred and thirty normal paces would bring him to the service entrance of Mimi Ferrere’s building.

Painted on the dented metal door, in Arabic script, were the words DO NOT ENTER. Gabriel glanced at his wristwatch. The walk from the car, as expected, had taken four minutes and thirty seconds. He tried the latch and found that it was locked, as it had been earlier that day. He removed the pair of thin metal tools from the side pocket of the satchel and crouched so that the latch was at eye level. Within fifteen seconds the lock had surrendered.

He eased open the door and looked inside. A short, cement-floored corridor stretched before him. At the other end was a half-open door, which gave onto the lobby. Gabriel stole forward and concealed himself behind the second door. From the other side he could hear the voice of David Quinnell, offering the Nubian doorman twenty pounds to push his disabled car from the street. When the conversation fell silent, Gabriel peered around the edge of the door, just in time to see the robes of the Nubian flowing into the darkness.

He entered the lobby and paused at the mailboxes. The box for apartment 6A bore the label: M. FERRERE. He mounted the staircase and climbed up to the sixth floor. The door was flanked by a pair of potted palms. Gabriel pressed his ear to the wood and heard no sound from within. From his pocket he removed a device disguised as an electric razor and ran it around the edge of the door. A small light glowed green, which meant the device had detected no evidence of an electronic security system.

Gabriel slipped the apparatus back into his pocket and inserted his old-fashioned lockpick into the keyhole. Just as he began to work, he heard female voices filtering up the stairwell from below. He proceeded calmly, his fingertips registering subtle changes in tension and torque, while another part of his mind turned over the possibilities. The building had eleven floors. The chances were slightly better than even that the women on the stairs were heading for the sixth floor or higher. He had two options: abandon his work for the moment and head down the stairs toward the lobby, or seek refuge on an upper floor. Both plans had potential pitfalls. The women might find the presence of a strange foreigner in the building suspicious, and if they happened to live on the top floor, he might find himself trapped with no route of escape.

He decided to keep working. He thought of the drills he’d done at the Academy, of Shamron standing over his shoulder, exhorting him to work as though his life and the lives of his team depended on it. He could hear the clatter of their high heels now, and when one of the women squealed with laughter his heart gave a sideways lurch.

When finally the last pin gave way, Gabriel put his hand on the latch and felt the gratifying sensation of movement. He pushed open the door and slipped inside, then closed it again just as the women were reaching the landing. He leaned his back against the door and, with only his lockpick as a weapon, held his breath as they passed in laughter. For an instant he hated them for their frivolity.

He locked the door. From the satchel he removed a cigar-sized Maglite and shone the narrow beam about the flat. He was standing in a small entrance hall, beyond which was the sitting room. Cool and white, with low comfortable furniture and an abundance of colorful pillows and throws, it reminded Gabriel vaguely of Mimi’s nightclub. He moved slowly forward but stopped suddenly when the light fell upon a pair of neon-yellow eyes. Mimi’s fat cat lay curled atop an ottoman. It looked at Gabriel without interest, then rested its chin on its paws and closed its eyes.

He had a list of targets, organized in order of importance. Highest in priority were Mimi’s telephones. He found the first in the sitting room, resting atop an end table. The second he located on the nightstand in the bedroom; the third in the room she used as an office. To each he attached a miniature device known in the lexicon of the Office as a glass, a transmitter that would provide coverage of both the telephone and the room around it. With a range of roughly a thousand yards it would permit Gabriel to use his suite at the Intercontinental as a listening post.

In the office he also found the second item on his target list, Mimi’s computer. He sat down, powered on the computer, and inserted a compact disk into the drive. The software engaged automatically and began collecting the data stored on the hard drive: mailboxes, documents, photographs, even audio and video files.

While the files downloaded, Gabriel had a look round the rest of the office. He leafed through a stack of post, opened desk drawers, glanced at the files. The absence of time permitted nothing more than a cursory examination of the items, and Gabriel found nothing that leapt to his attention.

He checked the progress of the download, then stood up and played the beam of the Maglite around the walls. One was covered with several framed photographs. Most showed Mimi with other beautiful people. In one he saw a younger version of Mimi, her shoulders wrapped in a kaffiyeh. In the background stood the pyramids of Giza. They, like her face, were washed in sienna by the sinking sun-Mimi, New Age idealist, trying to save the world from destruction through the power of positive thinking.

A second photograph caught Gabriel’s eye: Mimi, her head resting on a lavender-colored pillow, staring directly into the camera lens. Her cheek was pressed to the face of a man feigning sleep. A hat was pulled down over his eyes, so that only his nose, mouth, and chin were visible-enough of the face, Gabriel knew, for the experts in facial recognition to make a positive identification. He produced a small digital camera from Herr Klemp’s satchel and took a photograph of the photograph.

He walked back to the desk and saw that the download was complete. He removed the disk from the drive and shut down the computer. Then he glanced at his wristwatch. He’d been inside the flat for seven minutes, two minutes longer than he’d planned. He dropped the disk into his satchel, then went to the front door, pausing for a moment to make certain the landing was empty before letting himself out.

The stairwell was deserted, as was the lobby except for the Nubian doorman, who wished Gabriel a pleasant evening as he slipped past and went into the street. Quinnell, a picture of indifference, was sitting on the hood of his car, smoking a cigarette. Like a good professional, he kept his eyes to the ground as Gabriel turned to the left and started walking toward the Tahrir Bridge.

NEXT MORNING Herr Klemp fell ill. Mr. Katubi, after receiving a disagreeably detailed description of the symptoms, diagnosed the disorder as bacterial in nature and predicted the onslaught would be violent but brief. “ Cairo has betrayed me,” Herr Klemp complained. “I was seduced by her, and she repaid my affection with vengeance.”

Mr. Katubi’s forecast of a swift recovery proved erroneous. The storm in Herr Klemp’s bowels raged on for many days and nights. Doctors were summoned, medication was prescribed, but nothing seemed to work. Mr. Katubi set aside his hard feelings for Herr Klemp and personally assumed responsibility for his care. He prescribed a time-proven potion of boiled potatoes sprinkled with lemon juice and salt and delivered the concoction himself three times daily.

Illness softened Herr Klemp’s demeanor. He was pleasant to Mr. Katubi and even apologetic to the maids who had to clean his appalling bathroom. Sometimes, when Mr. Katubi entered the room, he would find Herr Klemp seated in the armchair next to the window, gazing wearily toward the river. He spent most of his time, though, stretched listlessly on the bed. To relieve the boredom of captivity he listened to music and German-language news on his shortwave radio, on tiny earphones so as not to disturb the other guests. Mr. Katubi found himself missing the old Johannes Klemp. Sometimes he would look up from his outpost in the lobby and long to see the cantankerous German pounding across the marble floor with his coattails flapping and his jaw steeled for confrontation.

One morning, a week to the day after Herr Klemp had first taken ill, Mr. Katubi knocked on Herr Klemp’s door and was surprised by the vigorous voice that ordered him to come in. He slipped his passkey into the lock and entered. Herr Klemp was packing his bags.

“The storm has ended, Katubi.”

“Are you certain?”

“As certain as one can be in a situation like this.”

“I’m sorry Cairo treated you so badly, Herr Klemp. I suppose the decision to extend your stay turned out to be a mistake.”

“Perhaps, Katubi, but then I’ve never been one to dwell on the past, and neither should you.”

“It is the Arab disease, Herr Klemp.”

“I suffer from no such affliction, Katubi.” Herr Klemp placed his shortwave radio into his bag and closed the zipper. “Tomorrow is another day.”

IT WAS RAINING in Frankfurt that evening-the Lufthansa pilot had made that abundantly clear. He’d spoken of the rain while they were still on the ground in Cairo, and twice during the flight he’d provided them tedious updates. Gabriel had latched onto the pilot’s plodding voice, for it had given him something to do besides stare at his wristwatch and calculate the hours until Khaled’s next massacre of innocents. As they neared Frankfurt he leaned his head against the glass and looked out, hoping to glimpse the first lights of the south German plain, but instead he saw only blackness. The jetliner plunged into the cloud, and his window was awash with horizontal streaks of rainwater-and Gabriel, in the scampering droplets, saw Khaled’s teams moving into position for their next strike. Then suddenly the runway appeared, a sheet of polished black marble rising slowly to receive them, and they were down.

In the terminal he went to a telephone kiosk and dialed the number for a freight forwarding company in Brussels. He identified himself as Stevens, one of his many telephone names, and asked to speak to a Mr. Parsons. He heard a series of clicks and hums, then a female voice, distant and with a slight echo. The girl, Gabriel knew, was at that moment seated on the Operations Control desk at King Saul Boulevard.

“What do you require?” she asked.

“Voice identification.”

“You have a recording?”

“Yes.”

“Quality?”

Gabriel, using Hebrew terms no listener could comprehend, tersely relayed to the girl the technical means with which he had captured and recorded the subject’s voice.

“Play the recording, please.”

Gabriel pressed PLAY and held his recorder up to the mouthpiece of the receiver. Male voice, perfect French.

“It’s me. Give me a ring when you have a chance. Nothing urgent. Ciao.”

He lowered the tape player and placed the receiver against his ear.

“No match on file,” said the woman.

“Compare to unidentified voiceprint 698/D.”

“Stand by.” Then, a moment later: “It’s a match.”

“I need a telephone number ID.”

Gabriel located the second intercept, then pressed PLAY and held the recorder up to the phone again. It was the sound of Mimi Ferrere making an international call from the phone in her office. When the last number had been dialed, Gabriel pressed PAUSE.

The woman at the other end of the line recited the number: 00 33 91 54 67 98. Gabriel knew that 33 was the country code for France and that 91 was the city code for Marseilles.

“Run it,” he said.

“Stand by.”

Two minutes later the woman said: “The telephone is registered to a Monsieur Paul Véran, 56 boulevard St-Rémy, Marseilles.”

“I need another voice identification.”

“Quality?”

“Same as before.”

“Play the recording.”

Gabriel pressed PLAY, but this time the voice was drowned out by the sound of a security announcement, in German, blaring from the speaker above his head: Achtung! Achtung! When it was over, he pressed PLAY again. This time the voice, a woman’s, was clearly audible.

“It’s me. Where are you? Call me when you can. Much love.”

STOP .

“No match on file.”

“Compare to unidentified voiceprint 572/B.”

“Stand by.” Then: “It’s a match.”

“Please note, subject goes by the name Mimi Ferrere. Her address is 24 Brazil Street, apartment 6A, Cairo.”

“I’ve added it to the file. Elapsed time of this call four minutes, thirty-two seconds. Anything else?”

“I need you to pass a message to Ezekiel.”

Ezekiel was the telephone code word for the Operations directorate.

“Message?”

“Our friend is spending time in Marseilles, at the address you gave me.”

“Number 56 boulevard St-Rémy?”

“That’s right,” Gabriel said. “I need instructions from Ezekiel on where to proceed.”

“You’re calling from Frankfurt airport?”

“Yes.”

“I’m terminating this call. Move to another location and call back in five minutes. I’ll have instructions for you then.”

Gabriel hung up the phone. He went to a newsstand, bought a German magazine, then walked a short distance through the terminal to another kiosk of telephones. Same number, same patter, same girl in Tel Aviv.

“Ezekiel wants you to go to Rome.”

“ Rome ? Why Rome?”

“You know I can’t answer that.”

It was no matter. Gabriel knew the answer.

“Where should I go?”

“The apartment near the Piazza di Spagna. Do you know it?”

Gabriel did. It was a lovely safe flat at the top of the Spanish Steps, not far from the Church of the Trinità dei Monti.

“There’s a flight from Frankfurt to Rome in two hours. We’re booking a seat for you.”

“Do you want my frequent-flyer number?”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Have a safe trip,” said the girl, and the line went dead.