Prince of Fire

15 MARSEILLES

FOR THE SECOND TIME IN TEN DAYS PAUL MARTINEAU made the drive from Aix-en-Provence to Marseilles. Once again he entered the coffeehouse on the small street off the rue des Convalescents and climbed the narrow stairs to the flat on the first floor, and once again he was greeted on the landing by the gowned figure who spoke to him quietly in Arabic. They sat, propped on silk pillows, on the floor of the tiny living room. The man slowly loaded hashish into a hubble-bubble and touched a lighted match to the bowl. In Marseilles he was known as Hakim el-Bakri, a recent immigrant from Algiers. Martineau knew him by another name, Abu Saddiq. Martineau did not refer to him by that name, just as Abu Saddiq did not call Martineau by the name he’d been given by his real father.

Abu Saddiq drew heavily on the mouthpiece of the pipe, then inclined it in Martineau’s direction. Martineau took a long pull at the hashish and allowed the smoke to drift out his nostrils. Then he finished the last of his coffee. A veiled woman took away his empty cup and offered him another. When Martineau shook his head, the woman slipped silently from the room.

He closed his eyes as a wave of pleasure washed over his body. The Arab way, he thought-a bit of smoke, a cup of sweet coffee, the subservience of a woman who knew her place in life. Though he had been raised a proper Frenchman, it was Arab blood that flowed in his veins and Arabic that felt most comfortable on his tongue. The poet’s language, the language of conquest and suffering. There were times when the separation from his people was almost too painful to bear. In Provence he was surrounded by people like himself, yet he could not touch them. It was as if he had been condemned to wander among them, as a damned spirit drifts among the living. Only here, in Abu Saddiq’s tiny flat, could he behave as the man he truly was. Abu Saddiq understood this, which was why he seemed in no hurry to get around to business. He loaded more hashish into the water pipe and struck another match.

Martineau took another draw from the pipe, this one deeper than the last, and held the smoke until it seemed his lungs might burst. Now his mind was floating. He saw Palestine, not with his own eyes but as it had been described to him by those who had actually seen it. Martineau, like his father, had never set foot there. Lemon trees and olives groves-that’s what he imagined. Sweet springs and goats pulling on the tan hills of the Galilee. A bit like Provence, he thought, before the arrival of the Greeks.

The image disintegrated, and he found himself wandering across a landscape of Celtic and Roman ruins. He came to a village, a village on the Coastal Plain of Palestine. Beit Sayeed, they had called it. Now there was nothing but a footprint in the dusty soil. Martineau, in his hallucination, fell to his knees and with his spade clawed at the earth. It surrendered nothing, no tools or pottery, no coins or human remains. It was as if the people had simply vanished.

He forced open his eyes. The vision dissipated. His mission would soon be over. The murders of his father and grandfather would be avenged, his birthright fulfilled. Martineau was confident he would not spend his final days as a Frenchman in Provence but as an Arab in Palestine. His people, lost and scattered, would be returned to the land, and Beit Sayeed would rise once more from its grave. The days of the Jews were numbered. They would leave like all those who had come to Palestine before them-the Greeks and Romans, the Persians and the Assyrians, the Turks and the British. One day soon, Martineau was convinced, he would be searching for artifacts amid the ruins of a Jewish settlement.

Abu Saddiq was pulling at his shirtsleeve and calling him by his real name. Martineau turned his head slowly and fixed Abu Saddiq in a heavy-lidded gaze. “Call me Martineau,” he said in French. “I’m Paul Martineau. Doctor Paul Martineau.”

“You were far away for a moment.”

“I was in Palestine,” Martineau murmured, his speech heavy with the drug. “Beit Sayeed.”

“We’ll all be there soon,” Abu Saddiq said.

Martineau treated himself to a smile-not one of arrogance but of quiet confidence. Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Rome -three attacks, each flawlessly planned and executed. The teams had delivered their explosives to the target and had vanished without a trace. In each operation, Martineau had concealed himself with archaeological work and had operated through a cutout. Abu Saddiq was handling the Paris operation. Martineau had conceived and planned it; Abu Saddiq, from his coffeehouse in the Quartier Belsunce, moved the chess pieces at Martineau’s command. When it was over Abu Saddiq would suffer the same fate as all those Martineau had used. He had learned from the mistakes of his ancestors. He would never allow himself to be undone by an Arab traitor.

Abu Saddiq offered Martineau the pipe. Martineau lifted his hand in surrender. Then, with a slow nod of his head, he instructed Abu Saddiq to get on with the final briefing. For the next half hour Martineau remained silent while Abu Saddiq spoke: the locations of the teams, the addresses in Paris where the suitcase bombs were being assembled, the emotional state of the three shaheeds. Abu Saddiq stopped talking while the veiled woman poured more coffee. When she was gone again Abu Saddiq mentioned that the last member of the team would arrive in Marseilles in two days’ time.

“She wants to see you,” Abu Saddiq said. “Before the operation.”

Martineau shook his head. He knew the girl-they had been lovers once-and he knew why she wanted to see him. It was better they not spend time together now. Otherwise Martineau might have second thoughts about what he had planned for her.

“We stay to the original plan,” he said. “Where do I meet her?”

“The Internet café overlooking the harbor. Do you know it?”

Martineau did.

“She’ll be there at twelve-thirty.”

Just then, from the minaret of a mosque up the street, the muezzin summoned the faithful to prayer. Martineau closed his eyes as the familiar words washed over him.

God is most great. I testify that there is no god but God. I testify that Muhammad is the Prophet of God. Come to prayer. Come to success. God is most great. There is no god but God.

Martineau, when the call to prayer had ended, stood and prepared to take his leave.

“Where’s Hadawi?” he asked.

“ Zurich.”

“He’s something of a liability, wouldn’t you say?”

Abu Saddiq nodded. “Should I move him?”

“No,” said Martineau. “Just kill him.”

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

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

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

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

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

The telephone rang. Martineau answered.

“Monsieur Véran?”

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

16 ROME

THE TELEPHONE WOKE HIM. LIKE ALL SAFE FLAT phones, it had no ringer, only a flashing light, luminous as a channel marker, that turned his eyelids to crimson. He reached out and brought the receiver to his ear.

“Wake up,” said Shimon Pazner.

“What time is it?”

“Eight-thirty.”

Gabriel had slept twelve hours.

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

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

“Yes, you do.”

“Why?”

“It’ll piss you off.”

“What good will that do?”

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

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

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

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

“How’d you do it?”

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

“How many doses did you take?”

“Three.”

“Poor bastard.”

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

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

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

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

“Who told you to bring me here?”

“It was my idea.”

“Who?”

“The old man,” Pazner said quietly.

“Why?”

“I don’t know why.”

Gabriel stopped. “Why, Shimon?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Excuse me, but are you Wadal Zwaiter?”

“No! Please, no!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staff parking was in the rear courtyard. She propped the bike on its kickstand, then removed her backpack from the seat storage compartment and left her helmet in its place. Two girls were just coming off duty. Amira bid them good night, then used her badge to unlock the secure staff entrance. The time clock was mounted to the wall of the foyer. She found her card, third slot from the bottom, and punched in: 5:56 P.M.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That big bloke still hanging round her?”

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

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

“Confidential, my sweet. Highly confidential.”

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

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

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

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

“Wherever she goes, I go.”

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

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

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

17 BOSA, SARDINIA

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

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

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

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

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

“Where did you get it?”

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

“Who chose it?”

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

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

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

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

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

Gabriel had carried out the sentences of such proceedings, but he had never actually been present at one. They were trials of sorts, but they were weighted profoundly in favor of the prosecution and conducted under conditions so secret that the accused did not even know they were taking place. The defendants were granted no lawyers in this courtroom; their fates were decided not by a jury of their peers but of their mortal enemies. Evidence of guilt went unchallenged. Exculpatory evidence was never introduced. There were no transcripts and no means of appeal. Only one sentence was possible, and it was irrevocable.

“Since I’m the investigating officer, would you mind if I offer an opinion about the case?”

“If you must.”

“The case against Khaled is wholly circumstantial, and tenuous at best.”

“The trail of evidence is clear,” Shamron said. “And we started down that trail based on information given to us by a Palestinian source.”

“That’s what concerns me.”

Yaakov joined them at the table. “Mahmoud Arwish has been one of our top assets inside the Palestinian Authority for several years now. Everything he’s told us has been proven correct.”

“But even Arwish isn’t certain the man in that photograph is Khaled. The case is a house of cards. If one of the cards turns out not to be true, then the entire case collapses-and we end up with a dead man on a French street.”

“The one thing we know about Khaled’s appearance is that it was said he bore a striking resemblance to his grandfather,” Shamron said. “I’m the only person in this room who ever saw the sheikh face-to-face, and I saw him under circumstances that are impossible to forget.” Shamron held up the photograph for the others to see. “The man in this photograph could be Sheikh Asad’s twin brother.”

“That still doesn’t prove he’s Khaled. We are talking about killing a man.”

Shamron turned the photograph directly toward Gabriel. “Will you acknowledge that if this man walks into the apartment building at 56 boulevard St-Rémy, he is, in all likelihood, Khaled al-Khalifa?”

“I will acknowledge that.”

“So we put the building under watch. And we wait. And we hope he comes before the next massacre. If he does, we get his photograph as he enters the building. If our experts are damned sure he’s the same man, we put him out of business.” Shamron folded his arms across his chest. “Of course, there is one other method of identification-the same one we used during the Wrath of God operation.”

An image flashed in Gabriel’s memory.

“Excuse me, but are you Wadal Zwaiter?”

“No! Please, no!”

“It takes a very cool customer not to respond to his real name in a situation like that,” Shamron said. “And an even cooler one not to reach for his gun when confronted with a man who’s about to kill him. Either way, if it’s truly Khaled, he’ll identify himself, and your mind will be at peace when you pull the trigger.”

Shamron pushed his spectacles onto his forehead. “I want Fidelity in Marseilles by nightfall. Are you going to be on it?”

“WE’LL USE THE Wrath of God model,” Shamron began. “Aleph, Bet, Ayin, Qoph. It has two advantages. It will seem familiar to you and it works.”

Gabriel nodded.

“Out of necessity, we’ve made some minor alterations and combined some of the roles, but once the operation is set in motion, it will feel the same to you. You, of course, are the Aleph, the gunman. The Ayin teams, the watchers, are already moving into place. If Khaled comes to that flat, two of the watchers will switch to the role of Bet and cover your escape route.”

“And Yaakov?”

“You two seem to have established something of a rapport. Yaakov will be your deputy team leader. On the night of the hit, should we be so fortunate, he will be your driver.”

“What about Dina?”

“Qoph,” Shamron said. “Communications. She’ll consult with King Saul Boulevard on the identification of the target. She’ll also serve as Yaakov’s bat leveyha. You’ll remain concealed on the boat until the hit. When Khaled is down, everyone leaves town by separate routes and makes their way out of the country. You and Yaakov will travel to Geneva and fly home from there. Dina will take the boat out of port. Once she’s out in open waters, we’ll put a team aboard and bring it home.”

Shamron spread a map of central Marseilles over the table. “A slip has been reserved for you here”-he tapped the map with his stubby forefinger-“on the east side of the old port, along the Quai de Rive-Neuve. The boulevard St-Rémy is here”-another tap-“six streets to the east. It runs from the Place de la Préfecture, south to the Jardin Pierre Puget.”

Shamron placed a satellite photograph of the street atop the map.

“It is, quite frankly, a perfect street for us to operate. Number 56 is located here, on the east side of the street. It has only one entrance, which means that we won’t miss Khaled if he comes. As you can see from the photograph, the street is busy-lots of traffic, people on the sidewalks, shops and offices. The entrance to Number 56 is visible from this large esplanade in front of the Palais de Justice. The park is home to a colony of derelicts. We’ve got a pair of watchers there now.”

Shamron adjusted the angle of the photograph.

“But here’s the best feature, the payage parking lot in the median. This space here is now occupied by a car rented by one of the watchers. We have five other cars. At this moment they’re all being fitted with miniature high-resolution cameras. The cameras transmit their images by scrambled wireless signal. You have the only decoder.”

Shamron nodded at Yaakov, who pressed a button. A large plasma-screen television rose slowly from the entertainment console.

“You’ll keep watch on the entrance from here,” Shamron said. “The watchers will rotate the cars at irregular intervals in case Khaled or one of his men keeps an eye on the payage. They’ve worked out the timing, so that when one car leaves, the next can pull into the same space.”

“Ingenious,” Gabriel murmured.

“Actually, it was Yaakov’s suggestion. He’s done this sort of thing in places where it’s much more difficult to conceal the surveillance teams.” Shamron lit a cigarette. “Show him the computer program.”

Yaakov sat down in front of a laptop computer and typed in a command. A virtual animation of the boulevard St-Rémy and the surrounding streets appeared on the screen.

“Because they know your face, you can’t leave the boat until the night of the hit. That means you can’t familiarize yourself with the neighborhood. But at least you can do it here. Technical created this so you can walk the boulevard St-Rémy from right here in the salon of Fidelity.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Granted,” said Shamron, “but it will have to suffice.” He lapsed into a contemplative silence. “So what happens when you see an Arab man, mid-thirties, entering the apartment house at Number 56?” He allowed the question to hang on the air for a moment, then answered it himself. “You and Dina will make a determination whether it could be him. If you make such a determination, you’ll send a flash to King Saul Boulevard over the secure link. Then you’ll transmit the video. If we’re satisfied, we’ll give you the order to go. You and Yaakov will leave Fidelity and head toward the Place de la Préfecture by motorcycle-Yaakov driving, of course, you on the back. You’ll find someplace to wait. Perhaps you’ll just park in the square or have a beer in a sidewalk café. If he stays for some time, you’ll have to keep moving. It’s a busy part of town that stays up late. You’re both experienced operatives. You know what to do. When Dina sees Khaled step out that door, she’ll signal you by radio. You need to be back on the boulevard St-Rémy in no more than thirty seconds.”

Shamron slowly crushed out his cigarette.

“I don’t care if it’s broad daylight,” he said evenly. “I don’t care if he’s with a friend. I don’t care if the act is witnessed by a crowd of people. When Khaled al-Khalifa steps out of that apartment house, I want you to put him on the ground and be done with it.”

“The escape route?”

“Up the boulevard Notre-Dame, over the avenue du Prado. Head east at high speed. The Ayin will leave a car for you in the parking lot of the Vélodrome. Then get to Geneva as quickly as possible. We’ll put you in a flat there and move you when it’s safe.”

“When do we leave Sardinia?”

“Now,” Shamron said. “Head due north, toward Corsica. On the southwest corner of the island is the port of Propriano. The Marseilles ferry leaves from there. You can shadow it across the Mediterranean. It’s nine hours from Propriano. Slip into the port after dark and register with the harbormaster. Then make contact with the watchers and establish the link with the surveillance camera.”

“And you?”

“The last thing you need in Marseilles is an old man looking over your shoulder. Rami and I will leave you here. We’ll be back in Tel Aviv by tomorrow evening.”

Gabriel picked up the satellite image of the boulevard St-Rémy and studied it carefully.

“Aleph, Bet, Ayin, Qoph,” said Shamron. “It will be just like the old days.”

“Yes,” Gabriel replied. “What on earth could go wrong?”

YAAKOV AND DINA waited aboard Fidelity while Gabriel took Shamron and Rami ashore. Rami leapt onto the quay and held the dinghy steady while Shamron climbed slowly out.

“This is the end,” Gabriel said. “The last time. After this, it’s over.”

“For both of us, I’m afraid,” Shamron said. “You’ll come home, we’ll grow old together.”

“We’re already old.”

Shamron shrugged. “But not too old for one last fight.”

“We’ll see.”

“If you get the shot, don’t hesitate. Do your duty.”

“To whom?”

“To me, of course.”

Gabriel brought the dinghy around and headed out into the harbor. He looked over his shoulder once and glimpsed Shamron standing motionless on the quay with his arm raised in a gesture of farewell. When he turned a second time the old man was gone. Fidelity was already under way. Gabriel opened the throttle and followed after it.

18 MARSEILLES

WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS OF FIDELITY’S ARRIVAL in Marseilles, Gabriel had grown to loathe the doorway of the apartment house at 56 boulevard St-Rémy. He loathed the door itself. He loathed the latch and the frame. He detested the graystone of the building and iron bars on the ground-floor windows. He resented all those who trod past on the pavement, especially Arab-looking men in their mid-thirties. More than anything, though, he despised the other tenants: the distinguished gentleman in a Cardin blazer who practiced law from an office up the street; the gray-haired grande dame whose terrier shat first thing each morning on the pavement; and the woman named Sophie who shopped for a living and bore more than a passing resemblance to Leah.

They monitored the screen in shifts-one hour on, two hours off. Each adopted a unique posture for watching. Yaakov would smoke and scowl at the screen, as though, through sheer force of will, he could compel Khaled to appear on it. Dina would sit meditatively on the salon couch, legs crossed, hands on her knees, motionless except for the tapping of her right forefinger. And Gabriel, who was used to standing for hours on end before the object of his devotion, would pace slowly before the screen, his right hand to chin, his left hand supporting his right elbow, his head tilted to one side. Had Francesco Tiepolo from Venice appeared suddenly on board Fidelity, he would have recognized Gabriel’s pose, for it was the same one he adopted when contemplating whether a painting was finished.

The changing of the surveillance cars provided a welcome break in the tedium of the watching. The Ayin had perfected the sequence so that it unfolded with the precision of ballet. The replacement car would approach the entrance of the payage from the south. The old car would back out and drive off, then the new car would slide into the empty space. Once, the two Ayin purposely tapped bumpers and engaged in a convincing shouting match for the benefit of any watchers from the other side. There were always a few tense seconds when the old camera went black and the new one came on line. Gabriel would order any necessary adjustments in the angle and the focus, and then it would be done.

Though Gabriel remained a prisoner of Fidelity, he ordered Dina and Yaakov to behave as ordinary tourists. He pulled double and triple shifts at the screen so they could eat lunch in a quayside restaurant or tour the outer reaches of the city by motorcycle. Yaakov made a point of driving the escape route at different periods of the day to familiarize himself with the traffic patterns. Dina would shop for clothing in one of the boutique-lined pedestrian streets or don a swimsuit and sun herself on the aft deck. Her body bore the marks of the nightmare on Dizengoff Square, a thick red scar across the right side of her abdomen, a long jagged scar on her right thigh. On the streets of Marseilles she shrouded them with clothing, but aboard Fidelity she made no attempt to conceal the damage from Gabriel and Yaakov.

At night Gabriel ordered three-hour shifts so that those who were not watching could get some meaningful sleep. He soon came to regret that decision, because three hours seemed an eternity. The street would grow quiet as death. Each figure who flashed across the screen seemed filled with possibility. To relieve the boredom, Gabriel would whisper greetings to the Ayin officers on duty in the esplanade in front of the Palais de Justice-or he would raise the duty officer on the Operations Desk at King Saul Boulevard on the pretext he was testing the satellite connection, just so he could hear a voice from home.

Dina was Gabriel’s relief. Once she had settled herself yoga-like in front of the screen, he would wander back to his stateroom and try to sleep, but in his mind he would see the door; or Sabri walking down the boulevard St-Germain with his hand in the pocket of his lover; or the Arabs of Beit Sayeed trudging off to exile; or Shamron, on the waterfront in Sardinia, reminding him to do his duty. And sometimes he would wonder whether he still possessed the reservoir of emotional coldness necessary to walk up to a man on a street and fill his body with chunks of searing metal. In moments of self-obsession he would find himself hoping that Khaled never again set foot on the boulevard St-Rémy. And then he would picture the ruins of the embassy in Rome, and remember the scent of burnt flesh that hung on the air like the spirits of the dead, and he would see Khaled’s death, glorious and graceful, rendered in the passionate stillness of a Bellini. He would kill Khaled. Khaled had left him with no other choice, and for that Gabriel hated him.

On the fourth night he slept not at all. At 7:45 in the morning he rose from his bed to prepare for his eight o’clock shift. He drank coffee in the galley and stared at the calendar hanging from the door of the refrigerator. Tomorrow was the anniversary of Beit Sayeed’s fall. Today was the last day. He went into the salon. Yaakov, wreathed in cigarette smoke, was looking at the screen. Gabriel tapped his shoulder and told him to get a couple hours’ sleep. He stood in the same place for a few minutes, finishing his coffee, then he assumed his usual position-right hand to his chin, left hand supporting his right elbow-and paced the carpet in front of the screen. The lawyer stepped out of the door at 8:15. The grande dame came ten minutes later. Her terrier shat for Gabriel’s camera. Sophie, Leah’s wraith, came last. She paused for a moment in front of the door to fish a pair of sunglasses from her bag before floating prettily out of view.

“YOU LOOK TERRIBLE,” Dina said. “Take the rest of the night off. Yaakov and I will cover for you.”

It was early evening, the harbor was quiet except for the throb of French technopop from another yacht. Gabriel, yawning, confessed to Dina that he had slept little, if at all, since their arrival in Marseilles. Dina suggested he take a pill.

“And if Khaled comes while I’m lying unconscious in my room?”

“Maybe you’re right.” She settled herself cross-legged on the couch and fixed her gaze on the television screen. The pavement of the boulevard St-Rémy was busy with the early-evening foot traffic. “So why can’t you sleep?”

“Do you really need me to explain it to you?”

She kept her eyes on the screen. “Because you’re worried he won’t come? Because you’re concerned you might not get a shot at him? Because you’re afraid we’ll all be caught and arrested?”

“I don’t like this work, Dina. I never have.”

“None of us do. If we did, they’d run us out of the service. We do it because we have no choice. We do it because they force us to do it. Tell me something, Gabriel. What would happen if tomorrow they decided to stop the bombings, and the stabbings and shootings? There would be peace, right? But they don’t want peace. They want to destroy us. The only difference between Hamas and Hitler is that Hamas lacks the power and the means to carry out an extermination of the Jews. But they’re working on it.”

“There’s a clear moral distinction between the Palestinians and the Nazis. There is a certain justice in Khaled’s cause. Only his means are abhorrent and immoral.”

“Justice? Khaled and his ilk could have had peace time and time again, but they don’t want it. His cause is our destruction. If you believe he wants peace, you’re deluding yourself.” She pointed toward the screen. “If he comes to that street, you have a right, indeed a moral duty, to make certain he never leaves there to kill and maim again. Do it, Gabriel, or so help me God, I’ll do it for you.”

“Would you really? Do you truly think you’d be capable of killing him in cold blood, right there on that street? Would it really be so easy for you to pull the trigger?”

She was silent for a time, her gaze fixed on the flickering screen of the television. “My father came from the Ukraine,” she said. “ Kiev. He was the only member of his family to survive the war. The rest were marched out to Babi Yar and shot to death along with thirty thousand other Jews. After the war he came to Palestine. He took the Hebrew name Sarid, which means remnant. He married my mother, and together they had six children, one child for every million killed in the Shoah. I was the last. They named me Dina: avenged.”

The volume of the music rose suddenly, then died away. When it was gone, all that remained was the lapping of a wake against the hull of the yacht. Dina’s eyes narrowed suddenly, as if remembering physical pain. Her gaze remained on the image of the boulevard St-Rémy, but Gabriel could see that it was Dizengoff Street that occupied her thoughts.

“On the morning of October 19, 1994, I was standing at the corner of Dizengoff and Queen Esther streets with my mother and two of my sisters. When the Number Five bus came, I kissed my mother and sisters and watched them climb on board. While the doors were open, I saw him.” She paused and turned her head to look at Gabriel. “He was sitting just behind the driver, with a bag at his feet. He actually looked at me. He had the sweetest face. No, I thought, it couldn’t be possible. Not the Number Five bus on Dizengoff Street. So I said nothing. The doors closed, and the bus started to drive away.”

Her eyes clouded with tears. She folded her hands and laid them over the scar on her leg.

“So what did this boy have in his bag, this boy who I saw but said nothing about? He had the shell of an Egyptian land mine, that’s what he had in the bag. He had twenty kilograms of military-grade TNT and bolts soaked with rat poison. The flash came first, then the sound of the explosion. The bus rose several feet into the air and crashed to the street again. I was knocked to the ground. I could see people screaming all round me, but I couldn’t hear anything-the blast wave had damaged my eardrums. I noticed a human leg lying in the street next to me. I assumed it was mine, but then I saw that both my legs were still attached. The leg had come from someone in the bus.”

Gabriel, listening to her, thought suddenly of Rome; of standing next to Shimon Pazner and gazing at the wreckage of the embassy. Was Dina’s presence aboard Fidelity serendipitous, he wondered, or had she been placed here intentionally by Shamron as a living reminder about the importance of doing his duty?

“The first policemen who came to the scene were sickened by the blood and the stench of burning flesh. They fell to their knees in the street and vomited. As I lay there, waiting for someone to help me, blood began to drip on me. I looked up and saw blood and scraps of flesh hanging on the leaves of the chinaberry trees. It rained blood that morning on Dizengoff Street. Then the rabbis from Hevra Kadisha arrived. They collected the largest body parts by hand, including those scraps of flesh in the trees. Then they used tweezers to pick up the smallest pieces. I watched rabbis pick up the remains of my mother and two sisters with tweezers and place them in a plastic bag. That’s what we buried. Scraps. Remnants.”

She wrapped her arms around her legs and drew her knees beneath her chin. Gabriel sat on the couch next to her and settled his gaze on the screen to make certain they missed nothing. His hand reached out for hers. She took it as a tear spilled down her cheek.

“I blamed myself. If I’d known that the sweet-looking boy was really Abdel Rahim al-Souwi, member of Hamas’s Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, I would have been able to warn them. If I’d known that Abdel’s brother had been killed in a shoot-out with the IDF in 1989, I would have understood why he was riding the Number Five bus in North Tel Aviv with a bag at his feet. I decided I would fight back, not with a gun, but with my brain. I vowed that next time I saw one of them, I would know, and I’d be able to warn the people before it was too late. That’s why I volunteered for the Office. That’s why I was able to make the connection between Rome and Beit Sayeed. I know them better than they know themselves.”

Another tear. This time Gabriel wiped it away.

“Why did he kill my mother and sisters, Gabriel? Was it because we stole his land? Was it because we were occupiers? No, it was because we wanted to make peace. If I hate them, you’ll forgive me. If I beg you to show Khaled no mercy, you’ll grant me leniency for my crimes. I’m Dina Sarid, the avenged remnant. I’m the sixth million. And if Khaled comes here tonight, don’t you dare let him get on that bus.”

LEV HAD OFFERED HIM use of a Jerusalem safe flat. Shamron had politely declined. Instead he’d instructed Tamara to find a folding camp bed in the storeroom and asked Gilah to send a suitcase with clean clothes and a shaving kit. Like Gabriel, he had slept little the past week. Some nights he would pace the hallways all hours or sit outside and smoke with the Shabak bodyguards. Mostly he lay on his folding cot, staring at the red glow of the digital clock on his desk and calculating the minutes that remained until the anniversary of Beit Sayeed’s destruction. He filled the empty hours by recalling operations past. The waiting. Always the waiting. Some officers were driven mad by it. For Shamron it was a narcotic, akin to the first pangs of intense love. The hot flashes, the sudden chills, the gnawing of the stomach-he had endured it countless times over the years. In the back alleys of Damascus and Cairo, in the cobbled streets of Europe, and in a derelict suburb of Buenos Aires, where he’d waited for Adolf Eichmann, stationmaster of the Holocaust, to step off a city bus and into the grasp of the very people he had tried to annihilate. A fitting way for it to end, Shamron thought. One last night vigil. One final wait for a telephone to ring. When finally it did, the harsh electronic tone sounded like music to his ears. He closed his eyes and allowed it to ring a second time. Then he reached out in the darkness and brought the receiver to his ear.

THE DIGITAL READOUT on the television monitor had said 12:27 A.M. Technically it had been Yaakov’s shift, but it was the last night before the deadline, and no one was going to sleep. They had been seated on the couch in the salon, Yaakov in his usual confrontational pose, Dina in a posture of meditation, and Gabriel as though he were awaiting word of an expected death. The boulevard St-Rémy had been quiet that night. The couple who had strolled past the door at 12:27 were the first to appear in the camera shot in nearly fifteen minutes. Gabriel had looked at Dina, whose eyes had remained locked on the screen.

“Did you see that?”

“I saw it.”

Gabriel stood and went to the console. He removed the cassette from the video recorder and put a fresh tape in its place. Then he placed the cassette in a playback deck and rewound the tape. With Dina looking over his shoulder, he pressed PLAY. The couple entered the shot and walked past the doorway without giving it a glance.

Gabriel pressed STOP.

“Look how he put the girl on his right side facing the street. He’s using her as a shield. And look at his right hand. It’s in the girl’s pocket, just like Sabri.”

REWIND . PLAY . STOP .

“My God,” Gabriel said, “he moves just like his father.”

“Are you sure?”

Gabriel went to the radio and raised the watcher outside the Palais de Justice.

“Did you see that couple who just walked by the building?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are they now?”

“Hold on.” A silence while the Ayin changed position. “Heading up the street, toward the gardens.”

“Can you follow them?”

“It’s dead quiet down here. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Damn it.”

“Just a minute.”

“What?”

“Hold on.”

“What’s going on?”

“They’re turning around.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. They’re retracing their steps.”

Gabriel looked up at the monitor just as they entered the shot again, this time from the opposite direction. Once again the woman was facing the street, and once again the man had his hand in the back pocket of her jeans. They stopped at the door of Number 56. The man drew a key from his pocket.

19 SURREY, ENGLAND

AT THE STRATFORD CLINIC IT WAS JUST AFTER TEN in the evening when Amira Assaf came out of the elevator and set off down the fourth-floor corridor. Rounding the first corner, she spotted the bodyguard, sitting on a chair outside Miss Martinson’s room. He looked up as Amira approached and closed the book he was reading.

“I need to make sure she’s sleeping comfortably,” Amira said.

The bodyguard nodded and got to his feet. He wasn’t surprised by Amira’s request. She’d been stopping by the room every night at this time for the past month.

She opened the door and went inside. The bodyguard followed after her and closed the door behind him. A lamp, dimmed to its lowest setting, was burning softly. Amira went to the side of the bed and looked down. Miss Martinson was sound asleep. Hardly a surprise-Amira had given her twice her usual dosage of sedative. She’d be out for several more hours.

Amira adjusted the blankets, then opened the top drawer of the bedside table. The gun, a silenced Walther nine-millimeter, was precisely where she had left it earlier that afternoon while Miss Martinson was still in the solarium. She seized the weapon by the grip, then spun round and leveled the gun at the bodyguard’s chest. He reached inside his jacket in a lightning-fast movement. Before his hand emerged, Amira fired twice, the double-tap of a trained killer. Both shots struck the upper chest. The bodyguard tumbled backward onto the floor. Amira stood over him and fired two more shots.

SHE DREW A SERIES of deep breaths to quell the intense wave of nausea that washed over her. Then she went to the telephone and dialed an internal hospital extension.

“Would you please ask Hamid to come up to Miss Martinson’s room? There’s some linen that needs to be collected before the truck leaves.”

She hung up the phone, then took the dead man by the arms and dragged him into the bathroom. The carpet was smeared with blood. Amira was not concerned by this. Her intention was not to conceal the crime, only to delay its discovery by a few hours.

There was a knock at the door.

“Yes?”

“It’s Hamid.”

She unlocked the door and opened it. Hamid wheeled in a laundry cart.

“You all right?”

Amira nodded. Hamid wheeled the cart next to the bed while Amira pulled away the blankets and sheets. Miss Martinson, frail and scarred, lay motionless. Hamid lifted her by her torso, Amira by her legs, and together they lowered her gently into the laundry cart. Amira concealed her beneath a layer of sheets.

She went out into the corridor to make certain it was clear, then looked back at Hamid and motioned for him to join her. Hamid rolled the cart out of the room and started toward the elevator. Amira closed the door, then inserted her passkey into the lock and snapped it off.

She met Hamid at the elevator and pressed the call button. The wait seemed an eternity. When finally the doors opened, they wheeled the cart into the empty chamber. Amira pressed the button for the ground floor and they sunk slowly downward.

The ground-floor foyer was deserted. Hamid went out first and turned to the right, toward the doorway that led to the rear courtyard. Amira followed after him. Outside, a van was idling with its rear cargo doors open. On the side was stenciled the name of a local laundry supply company. The usual driver was lying in a stand of beech trees two miles from the hospital with a bullet in his neck.

Hamid lifted the laundry bag out of the cart and placed it gently into the back of the van, then closed the doors and climbed into the front passenger seat. Amira watched the van roll off, then she went back inside and walked to the head nurse’s station. Ginger was on duty.

“I’m not feeling terribly well tonight, Ginger. Think you can get by without me?”

“No problem, luv. Need a ride?”

Amira shook her head. “I can manage on the bike. See you tomorrow night.”

Amira went to the staff locker room. Before stripping off her uniform she hid the gun inside her backpack. Then she changed into jeans, a heavy woolen sweater, and a leather jacket. A moment later she was walking across the rear courtyard with her bag across her back.

She climbed on the bike and started the engine, then accelerated out of the courtyard. As she rounded the back of the old mansion she glanced up at Miss Martinson’s window: one light burning softly, no sign of trouble. She raced along the drive and rolled to a stop at the guardhouse. The man on duty bid her a good night, then opened the gate. Amira turned onto the road and twisted the throttle. Ten minutes later she was racing along the A24 motorway, heading south to the sea.

20 MARSEILLES

GABRIEL SLIPPED INTO HIS STATEROOM AND CLOSED the door. He went to the closet and peeled back a parcel of loose carpet, exposing the door of the floor safe. He worked the tumbler and lifted the lid. Inside were three handguns: a Beretta 92FS, a Jericho 941PS Police Special, and a Barak SP-21. Carefully he lifted each of the weapons out and laid them on the bed. The Beretta and the Jericho were both nine-millimeter weapons. The magazine for the Beretta had a fifteen-round capacity, the Jericho sixteen. The Barak-squat, black, and ugly-fired a larger and more destructive.45-caliber round, though it held only eight shots.

He field-stripped the guns, beginning with the Beretta and ending with the Barak. Each weapon appeared in perfect working order. He reassembled and loaded the weapons, then tested the weight and balance of each, deliberating over which to use. The hit was not likely to be a covert and quiet affair. It would probably take place on a busy street, perhaps in broad daylight. Making certain Khaled was dead was the first priority. For that, Gabriel needed power and reliability. He selected the Barak as his primary weapon and the Beretta 92FS as his backup. He also decided he would work without a silencer. A silencer made the weapon too difficult to conceal and too unwieldy to draw and fire. Besides, what was the point of using a silencer if the act was witnessed by a crowd of people on the street?

He went into the bathroom and stood for a moment before the mirror, examining his face. Then he opened the medicine cabinet and removed a pair of scissors, a razor, and a can of shaving cream. He trimmed the beard down to stubble, then removed the rest with the razor. His hair was still dyed gray. Nothing to be done about that.

He stripped off his clothes and showered quickly, then went back into the stateroom to dress. He pulled on his underwear and socks, then a pair of dark-blue denim trousers and rubber-soled suede brogues. He attached his radio unit to the waistband of his jeans on the left hip, then ran a wire to his ear and a second one to his left wrist. After securing the wires with strips of black tape, he pulled on a long-sleeved black shirt. The Beretta he shoved down the waistband of his jeans, at the small of his back. The Barak was compact enough to fit in the pocket of his leather jacket. His GPS tracking beacon, a small disk about the size of a one-euro coin, he slipped into the front pocket of his jeans.

He sat on the end of the bed and waited. Five minutes later there was a knock at the door. The clock read 2:12 A.M.

“HOW CERTAIN ARE your experts?”

The prime minister looked up at the bank of video monitors and waited for an answer. In one of the monitors was Lev’s image. The director-general of Shabak, Moshe Yariv, occupied the second; General Amos Sharret, chief of Aman, the third.

“There’s no doubt whatsoever,” replied Lev. “The man in the photo given to us by Mahmoud Arwish is the same man who just walked into the apartment building in Marseilles. All we need now is your approval for the final phase of the operation to commence.”

“You have it. Give the order to Fidelity.”

“Yes, Prime Minister.”

“I assume you’ll be able to hear the radio traffic?”

“Fidelity will send it to us via the secure link. We’ll maintain operational control until the final second.”

“Send it here, too,” the prime minister said. “I don’t want to be the last to know.”

Then he pressed a button on his desk, and the three screens turned to black.

THE MOTORBIKE WAS a Piaggio X9 Evolution, charcoal gray, with a twist-and-go throttle and a listed top speed of 160 kilometers per hour-though Yaakov, on a practice escape run the previous day, had topped out at 190. The saddle sloped severely downward from back to front so that the passenger sat several inches above the driver, which made it a perfect bike for an assassin, though surely its designers had not had that in mind when they’d conceived it. The engine, as usual, fired without hesitation. Yaakov headed toward the spot along the quay where the helmeted figure of Gabriel awaited him. Gabriel climbed onto the passenger seat and settled in.

“Take me to the boulevard St-Rémy.”

“You sure?”

“One pass,” he said. “I want to see it.”

Yaakov banked hard to the left and raced up the hill.

IT WAS A GOOD BUILDING on the Corniche, with a marble floor in the lobby and an elevator that worked most of the time. The flats facing the street had a fine view of the Nile. The ones on the back looked down into the walled grounds of the American embassy. It was a building for foreigners and rich Egyptians, another world from the drab cinder-block tenement in Heliopolis where Zubair lived, but then being a policeman in Egypt didn’t pay much, even if you were a secret policeman working for the Mukhabarat.

He took the stairs. They were wide and curved, with a faded runner held in place by tarnished brass fittings. The apartment was on the top floor, the tenth. Zubair cursed silently as he trod upward. Two packs of Cleopatra cigarettes a day had ravaged his lungs. Three times he had to pause on a landing to catch his breath. It took him a good five minutes to reach the flat.

He pressed his ear to the door and heard no sound from within. Hardly surprising. Zubair had followed the Englishman last night during a liquor-soaked excursion through the hotel bars and nightclubs along the river. Zubair was confident he was still sleeping.

He reached into his pocket and came out with the key. The Mukhabarat had a fine collection: diplomats, dissidents, Islamists, and especially foreign journalists. He inserted the key into the lock and turned, then pushed open the door and stepped inside.

The flat was cool and dark, the curtains tightly drawn against the early-morning sun. Zubair had been in the flat many times and found his way to the bedroom without bothering to switch on the lights. Quinnell slept soundly in sheets soaked with sweat. On the stagnant air hung the overpowering stench of whiskey. Zubair drew his gun and walked slowly across the room toward the foot of the bed. After a few paces his right foot fell upon something small and hard. Before he could relieve the downward pressure something snapped, emitting a sharp crack. In the deep silence of the room it sounded like a splintering tree limb. Zubair looked down and saw that he’d stepped on Quinnell’s wristwatch. The Englishman, in spite of his drunkenness, sat bolt-upright in bed. Shit, thought Zubair. He was not a professional assassin. He’d hoped to kill Quinnell in his sleep.

“What the devil are you doing in here?”

“I bring a message from our friend,” Zubair said calmly.

“I don’t want anything more to do with him.”

“The feeling is mutual.”

“So then what in God’s name are you doing in my flat?”

Zubair raised the gun. A moment later he let himself out of the flat and started back down the stairs. Halfway down he was breathing like a marathoner and sweating hard. He stopped and leaned against the balustrade. The damned Cleopatras. If he didn’t quit soon they’d be the death of him.

MARSEILLES: 5:22 A.M. The door of the apartment house swings open. A figure steps into the street. Dina’s verbal alert is heard in the Operations Center of King Saul Boulevard and in Jerusalem by Shamron and the prime minister. And it is also heard in the dirty esplanade along the cours Belsunce, where Gabriel and Yaakov are sitting on the edge of a stagnant fountain, surrounded by drug addicts and immigrants with nowhere else to sleep.

“Who is it?” Gabriel asks.

“The girl,” Dina says, then she adds quickly: “Khaled’s girl.”

“Which way is she going?”

“North, toward the Place de la Préfecture.”

There follows several empty seconds of dead air. In Jerusalem, Shamron is pacing the carpet in front of the prime minister’s desk and waiting anxiously for Gabriel’s order. “Don’t try it,” he murmurs. “If she spots the watcher, she’ll warn Khaled, and you’ll lose him. Let her go.”

Ten more seconds pass before Gabriel’s voice comes back on the air.

“It’s too risky,” he whispers. “Let her go.”

IN RAMALLAH THE MEETING broke up at dawn. Yasir Arafat was in high good humor. To those in attendance he seemed a bit like the Arafat of old, the Arafat who could argue ideology and strategy all night with his closest comrades, then sit down for a meeting with a head of state. As his lieutenants filed out of the room, Arafat motioned for Mahmoud Arwish to remain.

“It’s begun,” Arafat said. “Now we can only hope that Allah has blessed Khaled’s sacred endeavor.”

“It is your endeavor, too, Abu Amar.”

“True,” said Arafat, “and it wouldn’t have been possible without you, Mahmoud.”

Arwish nodded cautiously. Arafat held him in his gaze.

“You played your role well,” said Arafat. “Your clever deception of the Israelis almost makes up for your betrayal of me and the rest of the Palestinian people. I’m tempted to overlook your crime, but I cannot.”

Arwish felt his chest tighten. Arafat smiled.

“Did you really think your treachery would ever be forgiven?”

“My wife,” Arwish stammered. “The Jews made me-”

Arafat waved his hand dismissively. “You sound like a child, Mahmoud. Don’t compound your humiliation by begging for your life.”

Just then the door swung open, and two uniformed security men stepped into the room, guns at the ready. Arwish tried to get his sidearm out of its holster, but a rifle butt slammed into his kidney, and a burst of blinding pain sent him to the floor.

“Today you die the death of a collaborator,” Arafat said. “A death fit for a dog.”

The security men hauled Arwish to his feet and frogmarched him out of the office and down the stairs. Arafat went to the window and looked down into the courtyard as Arwish and the security men emerged into view. Another rifle butt to the kidney drove Arwish to the ground for a second time. Then the firing began. Slow and rhythmic, they started with the feet and worked their way slowly upward. The Mukata echoed with the popping of the Kalashnikovs and the screams of the dying traitor. To Arafat it was a most satisfying sound-the sound of a revolution. The sound of revenge.

When the screaming stopped there was one final shot to the head. Arafat drew the blind. One enemy had been dealt with. Soon another would meet with a similar fate. He switched off the lamp and sat there in the half-light, waiting for the next update.

21 MARSEILLES

LATER, WHEN IT WAS OVER, DINA WOULD SEARCH in vain for any symbolism in the time Khaled chose to make his appearance. As for the exact words she used to convey this news to the teams, she had no memory of it, though they were captured for eternity on audiotape: “It’s him. He’s on the street. Heading south toward the park.” All those who heard Dina’s summons were struck by its composure and lack of emotion. So tranquil was her delivery that for an instant Shamron did not comprehend what had just happened. Only when he heard the roar of Yaakov’s motorbike, followed by the sound of Gabriel’s rapid breathing, did he understand that Khaled was about to get his due.

Within five seconds of hearing Dina’s voice, Yaakov and Gabriel had pulled on their helmets and were racing eastward at full throttle along the cours Belsunce. At the Place de la Préfecture, Yaakov leaned the bike hard to the right and sped across the square toward the entrance of the boulevard St-Rémy. Gabriel clung to Yaakov’s waist with his left hand. His right was shoved into his coat pocket and wrapped around the chunky grip of the Barak. It was just beginning to get light, but the street was still in shadow. Gabriel saw Khaled for the first time, walking along the pavement like a man late for an important meeting.

The bike slowed suddenly. Yaakov had a decision to make-cross over to the wrong side of the street and approach Khaled from behind, or stay on the right side of the street and loop around for the kill. Gabriel spurred him to the right with a jab of the gun barrel. Yaakov twisted the throttle, and the bike shot forward. Gabriel fastened his eyes on Khaled. The Palestinian was walking faster.

Just then a dark-gray Mercedes car nosed out of a cross street and blocked their path. Yaakov slammed on the brakes to avoid a collision, then blew his horn and waved at the Mercedes to get out of the way. The driver, a young Arab-looking man, stared coldly back at Yaakov and punished him for his recklessness by inching slowly out of their path. By the time Yaakov was under way again, Khaled had turned the corner and disappeared from Gabriel’s sight.

Yaakov sped to the end of the street and turned left, into the boulevard André Aune. It rose sharply away from the old port, toward the looming tower of the Church of Notre Dame de la Garde. Khaled had already crossed the street and at that moment was slipping into the entrance of a covered passageway. Gabriel had used the computer program to memorize the route of every street in the district. He knew that the passageway led to a flight of steeply pitched stone steps called the Montée de l’Oratoire. Khaled had rendered the motorbike useless.

“Stop here,” Gabriel said. “Don’t move.”

Gabriel leapt from his bike and, with his helmet still on his head, followed the path Khaled had taken. There were no lights in the passage, and for a few paces in the center Gabriel was in pitch darkness. At the opposite end he emerged back into the dusty pink light. The steps began-wide and very old, with a painted metal handrail down the middle. To Gabriel’s left was the khaki-colored stucco facade of an apartment house; to his right a tall limestone wall overhung with olive trees and flowering vines.

The steps curved to the left. As Gabriel came around the corner he saw Khaled again. He was halfway to the top and bounding upward at a trot. Gabriel started to draw the Barak but stopped himself. At the top of the steps was another apartment building. If Gabriel missed Khaled, the errant round would almost certainly plunge into the building. He could hear voices through his earpiece: Dina asking Yaakov what was going on; Yaakov telling Dina about the car that had blocked their way and the flight of steps that had forced them to separate.

“Can you see him?”

“No.”

“How long has he been out of sight?”

“A few seconds.”

“Where’s Khaled going? Why is he walking so far? Where’s his protection? I don’t like it. I’m going to tell him to back off.”

“Leave him to it.”

Khaled gained the top and disappeared from sight. Gabriel took the steps two at a time and arrived no more than ten seconds after Khaled had. Confronting him was a V-shaped intersection of two streets. One of them, the one to Gabriel’s right, ran up the hill directly toward the front of the church. It was empty of cars or pedestrians. Gabriel hurried to his left and looked up the second street. There was no sign of Khaled here either, only a pair of red taillights, receding rapidly into the distance.

“EXCUSE ME, MONSIEUR, are you lost?”

Gabriel turned and raised the visor of his helmet. She was standing at the head of the stairs, young, no more than thirty, with large brown eyes and short dark hair. She had spoken to him in French. Gabriel responded in the same language.

“No, I’m not lost.”

“Perhaps you’re looking for someone?”

And why are you, an attractive woman, speaking to a strange man wearing a motorcycle helmet? He took a step toward her. She held her ground, but Gabriel detected a trace of apprehension in her dark gaze.

“No, I’m not looking for anyone.”

“Are you sure? I could have sworn you were looking for someone.” She tilted her head slightly to one side. “Perhaps you’re looking for your wife.”

Gabriel felt as though the back of his neck was ablaze. He looked at the woman’s face more carefully and realized he’d seen it before. She was the woman who’d come to the apartment with Khaled. His right hand tightened its grip on the Barak pistol.

“Her name is Leah, isn’t it? She lives in a psychiatric hospital in the south of England -at least she used to. The Stratford Clinic, wasn’t that the name of it? She was registered under the name of Lee Martinson.”

Gabriel lunged forward and seized the woman by the throat.

“What have you done to her? Where is she?”

“We have her,” the woman gasped, “but I don’t know where she is.”

Gabriel pushed her backward, toward the top of the steps.

“Where is she?” He repeated the question in Arabic. “Answer me! Don’t speak to me in French. Speak to me in your real language. Speak to me in Arabic.”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“So you can speak Arabic. Where is she? Answer me, or you’re going down.”

He pushed her a fraction of an inch closer to the edge. Her hand reached back for the handrail but found only air. Gabriel shook her once violently.

“If you kill me, you’ll destroy yourself-and your wife. I’m your only hope.”

“And if I do as you say?”

“You’ll save her life.”

“What about mine?”

She left the question unanswered.

“Tell the rest of your team to back off. Tell them to leave Marseilles immediately. Otherwise we’ll tell the French that you’re here, and that will only make the situation worse.”

He looked over her shoulder and saw Yaakov coming slowly up the steps toward him. Gabriel, with his left hand, signaled for him to stop. Just then Dina came on the air: “Let her go, Gabriel. We’ll find Leah. Don’t play it Khaled’s way.”

Gabriel looked back into the girl’s eyes. “And if I tell them to back off?”

“I’ll take you to her.”

Gabriel shook her again. “So you do know where she is?”

“No, we’ll be told where to go. One destination at a time, very small steps. If we miss one deadline, your wife dies. If your agents try to follow us, your wife dies. If you kill me, your wife dies. If you do exactly what we say, she’ll live.”

“And what happens to me?”

“Hasn’t she suffered enough? Save your wife, Allon. Come with me, and do exactly as I say. It’s your only chance.”

He looked down the steps and saw Yaakov shaking his head. Dina was whispering in his ear. “Please, Gabriel, tell her no.”

He looked into her eyes. Shamron had trained him to read the emotions of others, to tell truthfulness from deception, and in the dark eyes of Khaled’s girl he saw only the abiding forthrightness of a fanatic, the belief that past suffering justified any act, no matter how cruel. He also noticed an unsettling tranquillity. She was trained, this girl, not merely indoctrinated. Her training would make her a worthy opponent, but it was her fanaticism that would leave her vulnerable.

Did they really have Leah? He had no reason to doubt it. Khaled had destroyed an embassy in the heart of Rome. Surely he could manage to kidnap an infirm woman from an English mental hospital. To abandon Leah now, after all she had suffered, was unthinkable. Perhaps she would die. Perhaps they both would. Perhaps, if they were lucky, Khaled might permit them to die together.

He had played it well, Khaled. He had never intended to kill Gabriel in Venice. The Milan dossier had been only the opening gambit in an elaborate plot to lure Gabriel here, to this spot in Marseilles, and to present him with a path he had no choice but to follow. Fidelity nudged him forward. He pulled her away from the edge of the stairs and released his grip on her throat.

“Back off,” Gabriel said directly into his wrist-microphone. “Leave Marseilles.”

When Yaakov shook his head, Gabriel snapped, “Do as I say.”

A car came down the hill from the direction of the church. It was the Mercedes that had blocked their path a few minutes earlier on the boulevard St-Rémy. It stopped in front of them. The girl opened the back door and got in. Gabriel looked one final time at Yaakov, then climbed in after her.

“HE’S OFF THE AIR, ” Lev said. “His beacon has been stationary for five minutes.”

His beacon, thought Shamron, is lying in a Marseilles gutter. Gabriel had vanished from their screens. All the planning, all the preparation, and Khaled had beaten them with the oldest of Arab ploys-a hostage.

“Is it true about Leah?” Shamron asked.

“ London station has called the security officer several times. So far they haven’t been able to raise him.”

“That means they’ve got her,” Shamron said. “And I suspect we have a dead security agent somewhere inside the Stratford Clinic.”

“If that’s all true, a very serious storm is going to break in England in the next few minutes.” There was a bit too much composure in Lev’s voice for Shamron’s taste, but then Lev always did place a high premium on self-control. “We need to reach out to our friends in MI5 and the Home Office to keep things as quiet as possible for as long as possible. We also need to bring the Foreign Ministry into the picture. The ambassador will have to do some serious hand-holding.”

“Agreed,” Shamron said, “but I’m afraid there’s something we have to do first.”

He looked at his wristwatch. It was 7:28 A.M. local time, 6:28 in France -twelve hours until the anniversary of the evacuation of Beit Sayeed.

“BUT WE CAN’T just leave him here,” Dina said.

“He’s not here any longer,” Yaakov replied. “He’s gone. He was the one who made the decision to go with her. He gave us the order to evacuate and so has Tel Aviv. We have no other choice. We’re leaving.”

“There must be something we can do to help him.”

“You can’t be any help to him if you’re sitting in a French jail.”

Yaakov raised his wrist-microphone to his lips and ordered the Ayin teams to pull out. Dina went reluctantly down onto the dock and loosened the lines. When the last line was untied, she climbed back onto Fidelity and stood with Yaakov atop the flying bridge as he guided the vessel into the channel. As they passed the Fort of Saint Nicholas, she went back down the companionway to the salon. She sat down at the communications pod, typed in a command to access the memory, then set the time-code for 6:12 A.M. A few seconds later she heard her own voice.

“It’s him. He’s on the street. Heading south toward the park.”

She listened to it all again: Yaakov and Gabriel wordlessly mounting the bike; Yaakov firing the engine and accelerating away; the sound of the tires locking up and skidding along the asphalt of the boulevard St-Rémy; Gabriel’s voice, calm and without emotion: “Stop here. Don’t move.”

Twenty seconds later, the woman: “Excuse me, monsieur, are you lost?”

STOP .

How long had Khaled spent planning it? Years, she thought. He had dropped the clues for her to find, and she had followed them, from Beit Sayeed to Buenos Aires, from Istanbul to Rome, and now Gabriel was in their hands. They would kill him, and it was her fault.

She pressed PLAY and listened again to Gabriel’s quarrel with the Palestinian woman, then picked up the satellite phone and raised King Saul Boulevard on the secure link.

“I need a voice identification.”

“You have a recording?”

“Yes.”

“Quality?”

Dina explained the circumstances of the intercept.

“Play the recording, please.”

She pressed PLAY.

“If we miss one deadline, your wife dies. If your agents try to follow us, your wife dies. If you kill me, your wife dies. If you do exactly what we say, she’ll live.”

STOP .

“Stand by, please.”

Two minutes later: “No match on file.”

MARTINEAU MET Abu Saddiq one last time on the boulevard d’Athènes, at the base of the broad steps that led to the Gare Saint-Charles. Abu Saddiq was dressed in Western clothing: neat gabardine trousers and a pressed cotton shirt. He told Martineau a boat had just left the port at great haste.

“What was it called?”

Abu Saddiq answered.

“Fidelity,” Martineau repeated. “An interesting choice.”

He turned and started trudging up the steps, Abu Saddiq at his side. “The shaheeds have been given their final orders,” Abu Saddiq said. “They’ll proceed to their target as scheduled. Nothing can be done to stop them now.”

“And you?”

“The midday ferry to Algiers.”

They arrived at the top of the steps. The train station was brown and ugly and in a state of severe disrepair. “I must say,” Abu Saddiq said, “that I will not miss this place.”

“Go to Algiers, and bury yourself deep. We’ll bring you back to the West Bank when it’s safe.”

“After today…” He shrugged. “It will never be safe.”

Martineau shook Abu Saddiq’s hand. “Maa-salaamah.”

“As-salaam alaykum, Brother Khaled.”

Abu Saddiq turned and headed down the steps. Martineau entered the train station and paused in front of the departure board. The 8:15 TGV for Paris was departing from Track F. Martineau crossed the terminal and went onto the platform. He walked alongside the train until he found his carriage, then climbed aboard.

Before going to his seat, he went to the toilet. He stood for a long time in front of the mirror, examining his own reflection in the glass. The Yves Saint Laurent jacket, the dark-blue end-on-end shirt, the designer spectacles-Paul Martineau, Frenchman of distinction, archaeologist of note. But not today. Today Martineau was Khaled, son of Sabri, grandson of Sheikh Asad. Khaled, avenger of past wrongs, sword of Palestine.

The shaheeds have been given their final orders. Nothing can be done to stop them now.

Another order had been given. The man who would meet Abu Saddiq in Algiers that evening would kill him. Martineau had learned from the mistakes of his ancestors. He would never allow himself to be undone by an Arab traitor.

A moment later he was sitting in his first-class seat as the train eased out of the station and headed north through the Muslim slums of Marseilles. Paris was 539 miles away, but the high-speed TGV would cover the distance in a little more than three hours. A miracle of Western technology and French ingenuity, Khaled thought. Then he closed his eyes and was soon asleep.

22 MARTIGUES, FRANCE

THE HOUSE WAS IN A WORKING-CLASS ARAB QUARTER on the southern edge of town. It had a red tile roof, a cracked stucco exterior, and a weedy forecourt littered with broken plastic toys in primary colors. Gabriel, when he was pushed through the broken front door, had expected to find evidence of a family. Instead, he found a ransacked residence with rooms empty of furniture and walls stripped bare. Two men awaited him, both Arab, both well-fed. One held a plastic bag bearing the name of a discount department store popular with the French underclass. The other was swinging a rusted golf club, one-handed, like a cudgel.

“Take off your clothes.”

The girl had spoken to him in Arabic. Gabriel remained motionless with his hands hanging against the seam of his trousers, like a soldier at attention. The girl repeated the command, more forcefully this time. When Gabriel still made no response, the one who’d driven the Mercedes slapped him hard across the cheek.

He removed his jacket and black pullover. The radio and the guns were already gone-the girl had taken those while they were still in Marseilles. She examined the scars on his chest and back, then ordered him to remove the rest of his clothing.

“What about your Muslim modesty?”

For his insolence he received a second blow to the face, this one with the back of the hand. Gabriel, his head swimming, stepped out of his shoes and peeled off his socks. Then he unbuttoned his jeans and pulled them off over his bare feet. A moment later he was standing before the four Arabs in his briefs. The girl reached out and snapped the elastic. “These, too,” she said. “Take them off.”

They found his nakedness amusing. The men made comments about his penis while the woman made slow circuits about him and appraised his body as though he were a statue on a pedestal. It occurred to him that he was a legend to them, a beast who had come in the middle of the night and killed young warriors. Look at him, they seemed to be saying with their eyes. He’s so small, so ordinary. How could he have killed so many of our brothers?

The girl grunted something in Arabic that Gabriel could not comprehend. The three men set upon his discarded clothing with box cutters and scissors and tore it to shreds. No seam, no hem, no collar survived their onslaught. Only God knew what they were looking for. A second beacon? A hidden radio transmitter? A devilish Jewish device that would render them all lifeless and permit him to escape at the time and place of his choosing? For a moment the girl observed this silliness with great seriousness, then she looked again at Gabriel. Twice more she circled his naked body, with one small hand pressed thoughtfully against her lips. Each time she passed before him, Gabriel looked directly into her eyes. There was something clinical in her gaze, something professional and analytical. He half expected her at any moment to produce a minicassette recorder and begin dictating diagnostic notes. Puckered scarring on upper left chest quadrant, result of the bullet fired into him by Tariq al-Hourani, Allah praise his glorious name. Sand-paper-like scarring across much of the back. Source of scarring unknown.

The search of his clothing produced nothing but a pile of shredded cotton cloth and denim. One of the Arabs gathered up the scraps and tossed them on the fireplace grate, then doused them with kerosene and set them alight. As Gabriel’s clothing turned to ash they assembled around him once more, the girl facing him, the two big Arabs on either side, and the one who had served as the driver at his back. The Arab to his right was lazily swinging a golf club.

There was a ritual to situations like these. The beating, he knew, was a part of it. The girl set it in motion with a ceremonial slap to his face. Then she stepped away and allowed the men to do the heavy lifting. A well-aimed strike with the golf club caused his knees to buckle and sent him to the floor. Then the real blows began, a barrage of kicks and punches that seemed to target every portion of his body. He avoided crying out. He did not want to give them the satisfaction, nor did he want to derail their plan by alerting the neighbors-not that anyone in this part of the city would care much about three men beating the daylights out of a Jew. It ended as suddenly as it began. In retrospect it was not so bad-indeed, he had endured worse at the hands of Shamron and his goons at the Academy. They went easy on his face, which told him that he needed to remain presentable.

He had come to rest on his right side, with his hands protectively over his genitals and his knees to his chest. He could taste blood on his lips, and his left shoulder felt frozen in place, the result of having been stomped on several times in succession by the largest of the three Arabs. The girl tossed the plastic bag in front of his face and ordered him to get dressed. He made a forthright attempt at movement but could not seem to roll over or sit up or lift his hands. Finally, one of the Arabs seized him by the left arm and pulled him into a seated position. His injured shoulder revolted, and for the first time he groaned in pain. This, like his nudity, was an occasion for laughter.

They helped him to dress. Clearly they had been expecting a bigger man. The neon-yellow T-shirt with MARSEILLES ! emblazoned across the chest was several sizes too large. The white chinos were too big in the waist and too long in the legs. The cheap leather slip-ons barely stayed on his feet.

“Can you stand up?” the girl asked.

“No.”

“If we don’t leave now, you’ll be late for your next checkpoint. And if you’re late for your next checkpoint, you know what happens to your wife.”

He rolled over onto his hands and knees and, after two failed attempts managed to get to his feet. The girl gave him a push between the shoulder blades and sent him stumbling toward the door. He thought of Leah and wondered where she was. Zipped into a body bag? Locked into a car trunk? Hammered into a wooden crate? Did she know what was happening to her, or, mercifully, did she believe it was just another episode in her nightmare without end? It was for Leah that he remained upright and for Leah that he placed one foot in front of the other.

The three men remained behind in the house. The girl walked a half step behind him, with a leather satchel over her shoulder. She gave him another shove, this time in the direction of the Mercedes. He stumbled forward, across the dusty forecourt strewn with toys. The overturned Matchbox cars, the rusted fire truck, the armless doll and headless toy soldier-to Gabriel it seemed like the carnage wrought by one of Khaled’s expertly crafted bombs. He went instinctively to the passenger side of the car.

“No,” said the woman. “You’re going to drive.”

“I’m in no condition.”

“But you must,” she said. “Otherwise we’ll miss our deadline, and your wife will die.”

Gabriel reluctantly climbed behind the wheel. The woman sat next to him. After closing the door, she reached inside the satchel and produced a weapon, a Tanfolgio TA-90, and aimed it at his abdomen.

“I know you can take this from me anytime you wish,” she conceded. “If you choose such a course of action, it will do you no good. I assure you that I do not know the location of your wife, nor do I know our ultimate destination. We’re going on this journey together, you and I. We’re partners in this endeavor.”

“How noble of you.”

She hit him across the cheek with the gun.

“Be careful,” he said, “it might go off.”

“You know France very well, yes? You’ve worked here. You’ve killed many Palestinians here.”

Greeted by Gabriel’s silence, she hit him a second time. “Answer me! You’ve worked here, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve killed Palestinians here, yes?”

He nodded.

“Are you ashamed? Say it aloud.”

“Yes,” he said, “I’ve killed Palestinians here. I killed Sabri here.”

“So you know the roads of France well. You won’t need to waste time consulting a map. That’s a good thing, because we don’t have much time.”

She gave him the keys. “Go to Nîmes. You have one hour.”

“It’s a hundred kilometers, at least.”

“Then I suggest you stop talking and start driving.”

HE WENT BY WAY of Arles. The Rhône, silver-blue and swirling with eddies, slid beneath them. On the other side of the river. Gabriel pressed the accelerator toward the floor and started the final run into Nîmes. The weather was perversely glorious: the sky cloudless and intensely blue, the fields ablaze with lavender and sunflowers, the hills awash with a light so pure it was possible for Gabriel to make out the lines and fissures of rock formations twenty miles in the distance.

The girl sat calmly with her ankles crossed and the gun lying in her lap. Gabriel wondered why Khaled had chosen her to escort him to his death. Because her youth and beauty stood in sharp contrast to Leah’s ravaged infirmity? Or was it an Arab insult of some sort? Did he wish to further humiliate Gabriel by making him take orders from a beautiful young girl? Whatever Khaled’s motives, she was nonetheless thoroughly trained. Gabriel had sensed it during their first encounter in Marseilles and again at the house in Martigues-and he could see it now in her muscular arms and shoulders and in the way she handled the gun. But it was her hands that intrigued him most. She had the short, dirty fingernails of a potter or someone who worked outdoors.

She hit him again without warning. The car swerved, and Gabriel had to battle to get it under control again.

“Why did you do that?”

“You were looking at the gun?”

“I was not.”

“You’re thinking about taking it away from me.”

“No.”

“Liar! Jewish liar!”

She raised the gun to strike him again, but his time Gabriel lifted his hand defensively and managed to deflect the blow.

“You’d better hurry,” she said, “or we won’t make it to Nîmes in time.”

“I’m going nearly two hundred kilometers an hour. I can’t drive any faster without killing us both. Next time Khaled calls, tell him he’s going to have to extend the deadlines.”

“Who?”

“Khaled,” Gabriel repeated. “The man you’re working for. The man who’s running this operation.”

“I’ve never heard of a man named Khaled.”

“My mistake.”

She studied him for a moment. “You speak Arabic very well. You grew up in the Jezreel Valley, yes? Not far from Afula. I’m told there are many Arabs there. People who refused to leave or be driven out.”

Gabriel didn’t rise to her baiting. “You’ve never seen it?”

“ Palestine?” A flicker of a smile. “I’ve seen it from a distance,” she said.

Lebanon , thought Gabriel. She’s seen it from Lebanon.

“If we’re going to make this journey together, I should have a name to call you.”

“I don’t have a name. I’m just a Palestinian. No name, no face, no land, no home. My suitcase is my country.”

“Fine,” he said, “I’ll call you Palestine.”

“It’s not a proper name for a woman.”

“All right, then I’ll call you Palestina.”

She looked at the road and nodded. “You may call me Palestina.”

A MILE BEFORE NÎMES, she directed him into the gravel parking lot of a roadside store that sold earthenware planters and garden statuary. For five unbearable moments they waited in silence for her satellite telephone to ring. When it finally did, the electronic chime sounded to Gabriel like a fire alarm. The girl listened without speaking. From her blank expression Gabriel could not discern whether she’d been ordered to keep going or to kill him. She severed the connection and nodded toward the road.

“Get on the Autoroute.”

“Which direction?”

“North.”

“Where are we going?”

A hesitation, then: “ Lyon.”

Gabriel did as he was told. As they neared the Autoroute tollbooth, the girl slipped the Tanfolgio into her satchel. Then she handed him some change for the toll. When they were back on the road, the gun came out again. She placed it on her lap. Her forefinger, with her short, dirty nail, lay noncommittally across the trigger.

“What’s he like?”

“Who?”

“Khaled,” Gabriel said.

“As I told you before, I don’t know anyone named Khaled.”

“You spent the night with him in Marseilles.”

“Actually, I spent the night with a man named Monsieur Véran. You’d better drive faster.”

“He’s going to kill us, you know. He’s going to kill us both.”

She said nothing.

“Were you told that this was a suicide mission? Have you prepared yourself to die? Have you prayed and made a farewell videotape for your family?”

“Please drive, and don’t talk anymore.”

“We’re shaheeds, you and I. We’re going to die together-for different causes, mind you, but together.”

“Please, shut up.”

And there it was, he thought. The crack. Khaled had lied to her.

“We’re going to die tonight,” he said. “At seven o’clock. He didn’t mention that to you?”

Another silence. Her finger was moving over the surface of the trigger.

“I guess he forgot to tell you,” Gabriel resumed. “But then it’s always been that way. It’s the poor kids who die for Palestine, the kids from the camps and the slums. The elite just give the orders from their villas in Beirut and Tunis and Ramallah.”

She swung the gun toward his face again. This time he snatched it and twisted it from her grasp.

“When you hit me with this, it makes it hard to drive.”

He held out the gun to her. She took it and placed it back in her lap.

“We’re shaheeds, Palestina. We’re driving toward destruction, and Khaled is giving us directions. Seven o’clock, Palestina. Seven o’clock.”

ON THE ROAD between Valence and Lyon, he pushed Leah from his mind and thought of nothing but the case. Instinctively, he approached it as though it were a painting. He stripped away the varnish and dissolved the paint, until there was nothing left but the fragmentary charcoal lines of the underdrawing; then he began building it back up again, layer by layer, tone and texture. For the moment he was unable to affix a reliable authentication. Was Khaled the artist, or had Khaled been only an apprentice in the workshop of the Old Master himself, Yasir Arafat? Had Arafat ordered it to avenge the destruction of his power and authority, or had Khaled undertaken the work on his own to avenge the death of a father and grandfather? Was it another battle in the war between two peoples or just an outbreak in the long-simmering feud between two families, the al-Khalifas and the Shamron-Allons? He suspected it was a combination of both, an intersection of shared needs and goals. Two great artists had cooperated on a single work-Titian and Bellini, he thought. The Feast of the Gods.

The date of the painting’s commission remained elusive to him as well, though. Of one thing he was sure: the work had taken several years and much blood to produce. He had been deceived, and skillfully so. They all had. The dossier found in Milan had been planted by Khaled in order to lure Gabriel into the search. Khaled had dropped a trail of clues and wound the clock, so that Gabriel had had no choice but to desperately pursue them. Mahmoud Arwish, David Quinnell, Mimi Ferrere-they’d all been a part of it. Gabriel saw them now, silent and still, as minor figures at the edges of a Bellini, allegorical in nature but supportive of the focal point. But what was the point? Gabriel knew that the painting was unfinished. Khaled had one more coup in store, one more spectacular of blood and fire. Somehow Gabriel had to survive it. He was certain the clue to his survival lay somewhere along the path he’d already traveled. And so, as he raced northward toward Lyon, he saw not the Autoroute but the case-every minute, every setting, every encounter, oil on canvas. He would survive it, he thought, and someday he would come back to Khaled on his own terms. And the girl, Palestina, would be his doorway.

“PULL OVER TO THE side of the road.”

Gabriel did as he was told. They were a few miles from the center of Lyon. This time, only two minutes elapsed before the telephone rang.

“Get back on the road,” she said. “We’re going to Chalon. It’s a-”

“I know where Chalon is. It’s just south of Dijon.”

He waited for an opening in the traffic, then accelerated back onto the Autoroute.

“I can’t decide whether you’re a very courageous man or a fool,” she said. “You could have walked away from me in Marseilles. You could have saved yourself.”

“She’s my wife,” he said. “She’ll always be my wife.”

“And you’re willing to die for her?”

“You’re going to die for her, too.”

“At seven o’clock?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you make up this time? Why seven o’clock?”

“You don’t know anything about the man you’re working for, do you? I feel sorry for you, Palestina. You’re a very foolish girl. Your leader has betrayed you, and you’re the one who’ll pay the price.”

She lifted the gun to hit him again, but thought better of it. Gabriel kept his eyes on the road. The door was ajar.

THEY STOPPED FOR GAS south of Chalon. Gabriel filled the tank and paid with cash given to him by the girl. When he was behind the wheel again, she ordered him to park next to the toilets.

“I’ll be back.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

She was gone only a moment. Gabriel slid the car into gear, but the girl removed the satellite phone from her bag and ordered him to wait. It was 2:55 P.M.

“We’re going to Paris,” he said.

“Oh, really?”

“He’ll send us one of two ways. The Autoroute splits at Beaune. If we take that cutoff, we can head straight into the southern suburbs. Or we can stay to the east- Dijon to Troyes, Troyes to Reims -and come in from the northeast.”

“You seem to know everything. Tell me which way he’s going to send us.”

Gabriel made a show of consulting his watch.

“He’ll want to keep us moving, and he won’t want us at the target too early. I’m betting for the eastern route. I say he sends us to Troyes and tells us to wait there for instructions. He’ll have options if he sends us to Troyes.”

Just then the telephone rang. She listened in silence, then severed the connection.

“Get back on the Autoroute,” she said.

“Where are we going?”

“Just drive,” she said.

HE ASKED FOR PERMISSION to turn on the radio.

“Sure,” she said affably.

He pressed the power button, but nothing happened. A slight smile appeared on her lips.

“Nicely played,” said Gabriel.

“Thank you.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Surely you’re joking.”

“Actually, I’m quite serious.”

“I’m Palestina,” she said. “I have no choice.”

“You’re wrong. You do have a choice.”

“I know what you’re doing,” she said. “You’re trying to wear me down with your suggestions of death and suicide. You think you can make me have a change of heart, that you can make me lose my nerve.”

“Actually, I wouldn’t dream of such a thing. We’ve been fighting each other for a long time. I know that you’re intensely courageous and that you rarely lose your nerve. I just want to know why: Why are you here? Why not get married and raise a family? Why not live your life?”

Another smile, this one mocking. “Jews,” she said. “You think you have a patent on pain. You think you have the market cornered on human suffering. My Holocaust is as real as yours, and yet you deny my suffering and exonerate yourself of guilt. You claim my wounds are self-inflicted.”

“So tell me your story.”

“Mine is a story of Paradise lost. Mine is a story of a simple people forced by the civilized world to give up their land so that Christendom could alleviate its guilt over the Holocaust.”

“No, no,” Gabriel said. “I don’t want a propaganda lecture. I want to hear your story. Where are you from?”

“A camp,” she said, then added: “A camp in Lebanon.”

Gabriel shook his head. “I’m not asking where you were born, or where you grew up. I’m asking you where you’re from.”

“I’m from Palestine.”

“Of course you are. Which part?”

“The north.”

“That explains Lebanon. Which part of the north?”

“The Galilee.”

“Western? Upper?”

“The Western Galilee.”

“Which village?”

“It’s not there anymore.”

“What was it called?”

“I’m not allowed to-”

“Did it have a name?”

“Of course it had a name.”

“Was it Bassa?”

“No.”

“What about Zib?”

“No.”

“Maybe it was Sumayriyya?”

She made no reply.

“So, it was Sumayriyya.”

“Yes,” she said. “My family came from Sumayriyya.”

“It’s a long way to Paris, Palestina. Tell me your story.”

23 JERUSALEM

WHEN VARASH CONVENED AGAIN, THEY DID SO IN person in the office of the prime minister. Lev’s update took only a moment, since nothing much had changed since the last time they’d met by video conference. Only the clock had advanced. It was now five in the afternoon in Tel Aviv, and four o’clock in Paris. Lev wanted to sound the alarm.

“We have to assume that in three hours, there is going to be a major terrorist attack in France, probably in Paris, and that one of our agents is going to be in the middle of it. Given the situation, I’m afraid we have no recourse but to tell the French.”

“But what about Gabriel and his wife?” said Moshe Yariv of Shabak. “If the French issue a nationwide alert, Khaled might very well view it as an excuse to kill them both.”

“He doesn’t need an excuse,” Shamron said. “That’s precisely what he intends to do. Lev is right. We have to tell the French. Morally, and politically, we have no other choice.”

The prime minister shifted his large body uneasily in his chair. “But I can’t tell them that we sent a team of agents to Marseilles to kill a Palestinian terrorist.”

“That’s not necessary,” Shamron said. “But any way we play our hand, the outcome is going to be bad. We have an agreement with the French not to operate on their soil without consulting them first. It’s an agreement we violate all the time, with the tacit understanding of our brethren in the French services. But a tacit understanding is one thing, and getting caught red-handed is quite another.”

“So what do I tell them?”

“I recommend staying as close to the truth as possible. We tell them that one of our agents has been abducted by a Palestinian terror cell operating out of Marseilles. We tell them the agent was in Marseilles investigating the bombing of our embassy in Rome. We tell them that we have credible evidence suggesting that Paris is going to be the target of an attack this evening at seven. Who knows? If the French sound the alarm loudly enough, it might force Khaled to postpone or cancel his attack.”

The prime minister looked at Lev. “What’s the status of the rest of the team?”

“Fidelity is out of French territorial waters, and the rest of the team members have all crossed international borders. The only one still on French soil is Gabriel.”

The prime minister punched a button on his telephone console. “Get the French president on the line. And get a translator as well. I don’t want there to be any misunderstandings.”

THE PRESIDENT OF THE French Republic was at that moment meeting with the German chancellor in the ornate Lounge of Portraits in the Élysée Palace. An aide-de-camp slipped quietly into the room and murmured a few words directly into his ear. The French leader could not hide his irritation at being interrupted by a man he loathed.

“Does it have to be now?”

“He says it’s a security matter of the highest priority.”

The president stood and looked down at his guest. “Will you excuse me, Chancellor?”

Tall and elegant in his dark suit, the Frenchman followed his aide into a private anteroom. A moment later the call was routed through.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Prime Minister. I take it this isn’t a social call?”

“No, Mr. President, it isn’t. I’m afraid I have become aware of a grave threat against your country.”

“I assume this threat is terrorist in nature?”

“It is, indeed.”

“How imminent? Weeks? Days?”

“Hours, Mr. President.”

“Hours? Why am I being told of this only now?”

“We’ve just become aware of the threat ourselves.”

“Do you know any operational details?”

“Only the time. We believe a Palestinian terror cell intends to strike at seven this evening. Paris is the most likely target, but we can’t say for certain.”

“Please, Mr. Prime Minister. Tell me everything you know.”

The prime minister spoke for two minutes. When he was finished, the French president said, “Why do I get the sense I’m being told only part of the story?”

“I’m afraid we know only part of the story.”

“Why didn’t you tell us you were pursuing a suspect on French soil?”

“There wasn’t time for a formal consultation, Mr. President. It fell into the category of a hot pursuit.”

“And what about the Italians? Have you informed them that you have a suspect in a bombing that took place on Italian soil?”

“No, Mr. President, we haven’t.”

“What a surprise,” the Frenchman said. “Do you have photographs that might help us identify any of the potential bombers?”

“I’m afraid we do not.”

“I don’t suppose you’d care to send along a photo of your missing agent.”

“Under the circumstances-”

“I thought that would be your answer,” the Frenchman said. “I’m dispatching my ambassador to your office. I’m confident he will receive a full and frank briefing on this entire matter.”

“He will indeed, sir.”

“Something tells me there will be fallout from this affair, but first things first. I’ll be in touch.”

“Good luck, Mr. President.”

The French leader slammed down the phone and looked at his aide. “Convene the Group Napoleon immediately,” he said. “I’ll deal with the chancellor.”

TWENTY MINUTES AFTER hanging up, the president of France was taking his usual seat at the cabinet table in the Salon Murat. Gathered around him were the members of Group Napoleon, a streamlined team of senior intelligence and security officials and cabinet ministers, designed for dealing with imminent threats to the French homeland. Seated directly across the expansive table was the prime minister. Between the two men was an ornate double-faced brass clock. It read 4:35 P.M.

The president opened the meeting with a concise recounting of what he had just learned. There followed several minutes of somewhat heated discussion, for the source of the information, the Israeli prime minister, was a distinctly unpopular man in Paris. In the end, though, every member of the group concluded that the threat was too credible to ignore. “Obviously, gentlemen, we need to increase the threat level and take precautions,” the president said. “How high do we go?”

In the aftermath of al-Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the government of France devised a four-tiered color-coded system similar to that of the United States. On that afternoon the level stood at Orange, the second level, with only Yellow being lower. The third level, Red, would automatically close vast stretches of French airspace and put in place additional security precautions in the transit systems and at French landmarks such as the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. The highest level, Scarlet, would virtually shut down the country, including its water supply and power grid. No member of Group Napoleon was prepared to do that based on a warning from the Israelis. “The target of the attack is likely to be Israeli or Jewish in nature,” said the interior minister. “Even if it’s on the scale of Rome, it doesn’t justify increasing the level to Scarlet.”

“I concur,” the president said. “We’ll raise it to Red.”

Five minutes later, when the meeting of Group Napoleon adjourned, the French interior minister strode out of the Salon Murat to face the cameras and the microphones. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, his facial expression grave, “the government of France has received what it believes is credible evidence of a pending terrorist attack against Paris this evening…”

THE APARTMENT HOUSE was on the rue de Saules, in the quiet northern end of Montmartre, several streets away from the tourist morass around Sacré-Coeur. The flat was small but comfortable, a perfect pied-à-terre for those occasions when work or romantic pursuits brought Paul Martineau from Provence to the capital. After arriving in Paris, he’d gone to the Luxembourg Quarter to have lunch with a colleague from the Sorbonne. Then it was over to St-Germain for a meeting with a prospective publisher for his book on the pre-Roman history of ancient Provence. At 4:45 he was strolling across the quiet courtyard of the building and letting himself into the foyer. Madame Touzet, the concierge, poked her head out of her door as Martineau came inside.

“Bonjour, Professor Martineau.”

Martineau kissed her powdered cheeks and presented her with a bunch of lilies he’d bought from a stall on the rue Caulaincourt. Martineau never came to his Paris flat without bringing a small treat for Madame Touzet.

“For me?” she asked elaborately. “You shouldn’t have, Professor.”

“I couldn’t help myself.”

“How long are you in Paris?”

“Only for one night.”

“A tragedy! I’ll get your mail.”

She returned a moment later with a stack of cards and letters, neatly bound, as always, with a scented pink ribbon. Martineau went upstairs to his apartment. He switched on the television, turned to Channel 2, then went into the kitchen to make coffee. Over the sound of running water, he heard the familiar voice of the French Interior minister. He shut off the tap and went calmly into the sitting room. He remained there, standing frozen before the television screen, for the next ten minutes.

The Israelis had chosen to alert the French. Martineau had expected they might resort to that. He knew that the increase in the threat level would mean a change in security tactics and procedures at critical sites all around Paris, a development that required one minor adjustment in his plans. He picked up the telephone and dialed.

“I’d like to change a reservation, please.”

“Your name?”

“Dr. Paul Martineau.”

“Ticket number?”

Martineau recited it.

“At the moment you’re scheduled to return to Aix-en-Provence from Paris tomorrow morning.”

“That’s right, but I’m afraid something has come up and I need to return earlier than expected. Can I still get on an early-evening train tonight?”

“There are seats available on the seven-fifteen.”

“First class?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll take one, please.”

“Are you aware of the government’s terror warning?”

“I’ve never put much stock in those sorts of things,” Martineau said. “Besides, if we stop living, the terrorists win, do they not?”

“How true.”

Martineau could hear the tapping of fingers upon a computer keyboard.

“All right, Dr. Martineau. Your booking has been changed. Your train departs at seven-fifteen from the Gare de Lyon.”

Martineau hung up the phone.

24 TROYES, FRANCE

“SUMAYRIYYA? YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT Sumayriyya? It was Paradise on Earth. Eden. Fruit orchards and olive groves. Melons and bananas, cucumbers and wheat. Sumayriyya was simple. Pure. Our life moved to the rhythms of the planting and the harvest. The rains and the drought. We were eight hundred in Sumayriyya. We had a mosque. We had a school. We were poor, but Allah blessed us with everything we needed.”

Listen to her, thought Gabriel as he drove. We… Our… She was born twenty-five years after Sumayriyya was wiped from the face of the map, but she spoke of the village as though she’d lived there her entire life.

“My grandfather was an important man. Not a muktar, mind you, but a man of influence among the village elders. He had forty dunams of land and a large flock of goats. He was considered wealthy.” A satirical smile. “To be wealthy in Sumayriyya meant that you were only a little bit poor.”

Her eyes darkened. She looked down at the gun, then at the French farmland rushing past her window.

“Nineteen forty-seven marked the beginning of the end for my village. In November the United Nations voted to partition my land and give half of it to the Jews. Sumayriyya, like the rest of the Western Galilee, was destined to be part of the Arab state in Palestine. But, of course, that wasn’t to be the case. The war started the day after the vote, and as far as the Jews were concerned, all of Palestine was now theirs for the taking.”

It was the Arabs who had started the war, Gabriel wanted to say-Sheikh Asad al-Khalifa, warlord of Beit Sayeed, who’d opened the floodgates of blood with his terrorist attack on the Netanya-to-Jerusalem bus. But now was not the time to quibble over the historical record. The narrative of Sumayriyya had cast its spell over her, and Gabriel wanted to do nothing to break it.

She turned her gaze toward him. “You’re thinking of something.”

“I’m listening to your story.”

“With one part of your brain,” she said, “but with the other you’re thinking of something else. Are you thinking about taking my gun? Are you planning your escape?”

“There is no escape, Palestina-for either one of us. Tell me your story.”

She looked out the window. “On the night of May 13, 1948, a column of armored Haganah vehicles set out up the coast road from Acre. Their action was code-named Operation Ben-Ami. It was part of Tochnit Dalet.” She looked at him. “Do you know this term, Tochnit Dalet? Plan D?”

Gabriel nodded and thought of Dina, standing amid the ruins of Beit Sayeed. How long ago had it been? Only a month, but it seemed a lifetime ago.

“The stated objective of Operation Ben-Ami was the reinforcement of several isolated Jewish settlements in the Western Galilee. The real objective, however, was conquest and annexation. In fact, the orders specifically called for the destruction of three Arab villages: Bassa, Zib, and Sumayriyya.”

She paused, looked to see if her remarks had provoked any reaction, and resumed her lecture. Sumayriyya was the first of the three villages to die. The Haganah surrounded it before dawn and illuminated the village with the headlamps of their armored vehicles. Some of the Haganah men wore red checkered kaffiyehs. A village watchman saw the kaffiyehs and assumed that the attacking Jews were actually Arab reinforcements. He fired shots of celebration into the air and was immediately cut down by Haganah fire. The news that the Jews were disguised as Arabs sowed panic inside the village. The defenders of Sumayriyya fought bravely, but they were no match for the better-armed Haganah. Within a few minutes, the exodus had begun.

“The Jews wanted us to leave,” she said. “They intentionally left the eastern side of the village unguarded to give us an escape route. We had no time to pack any clothing or even to take something to eat. We just started running. But still the Jews weren’t satisfied. They fired at us as we fled across the fields we had tilled for centuries. Five villagers died in those fields. The Haganah sappers went in right away. As we were running away, we could hear the explosions. The Jews were turning our Paradise into a pile of uninhabitable rubble.”

The villagers of Sumayriyya took to the road and headed north, toward Lebanon. They were soon joined by the inhabitants of Bassa and Zib and several smaller villages to the east. “The Jews told us to go to Lebanon,” she said. “They told us to wait there for a few weeks until the fighting ended, then we would be allowed to return. Return? To what were we supposed to return? Our houses had been demolished. So we kept walking. We walked over the border, into exile. Into oblivion. And behind us the gates of Palestine were being forever barred against our return.”

REIMS: FIVE O’CLOCK.

“Pull over,” she said.

Gabriel guided the Mercedes onto the shoulder of the Autoroute. They sat in silence, the car shuddering in the turbulence of the passing traffic. Then the telephone. She listened, longer than usual. Gabriel suspected she was being given final instructions. Without so much as a word, she severed the connection, then dropped the phone back into her bag.

“Where are we going?”

“Paris,” she said. “Just as you suspected.”

“Which way does he want me to go?”

“The A4. Do you know it?”

“I know it.”

“It will take you into-”

“-into southeast Paris. I know where it will take me, Palestina.”

Gabriel accelerated back onto the motorway. The dashboard clock read: 5:05. A road sign flashed past: PARIS 145. One hundred forty-five kilometers to Paris. Ninety-one miles.

“Finish your story, Palestina.”

“Where were we?”

“Lebanon,” Gabriel said. “Oblivion.”

“WE CAMPED IN THE HILLS. We foraged for food. We survived off the charity of our Arab brethren and waited for the gates of Palestine to be opened to us, waited for the Jews to make good on the promises they’d made to us the morning we’d fled Sumayriyya. But in June, Ben-Gurion said that the refugees could not come home. We were a fifth column that could not be allowed back, he said. We would be a thorn in the side of the new Jewish state. We knew then that we would never see Sumayriyya again. Paradise lost.”

Gabriel looked at the clock. 5:10 P.M. Eighty miles to Paris.

“WE WALKED NORTH, to Sidon. We spent the long, hot summer living in tents. Then the weather turned cold and the rains came, and still we were living in the tents. We called our new home Ein al-Hilweh. Sweet Spring. It was hardest on my grandfather. In Sumayriyya he’d been an important man. He’d tended his fields and his flock. He’d provided for his family. Now his family was surviving on handouts. He had a deed to his property but no land. He had the keys to his door but no house. He took ill that first winter and died. He didn’t want to live-not in Lebanon. My grandfather died when Sumayriyya died.”

5:25 P.M. Paris: 62 miles.

“MY FATHER WAS only a boy, but he had to assume responsibility for his mother and two sisters. He couldn’t work-the Lebanese wouldn’t permit that. He couldn’t go to school-the Lebanese wouldn’t allow that, either. No Lebanese social security, no Lebanese health care. And no way out, because we had no valid passports. We were stateless. We were nonpersons. We were nothing.”

5:38 P.M. Paris: 35 miles.

“WHEN MY FATHER married a girl from Sumayriyya, the remnants of the village gathered in Ein al-Hilweh for the wedding celebration. It was just like home, except the surroundings were different. Instead of Paradise, it was the open sewers and the cinder-block huts of the camp. My mother gave my father two sons. Every night he told them about Sumayriyya, so that they would never forget their true home. He told them the story of al-Nakba, the Catastrophe, and instilled in them the dream of al-Awda, the Return. My brothers would grow up to be fighters for Palestine. There was no choice in the matter. As soon as they were old enough to hold a gun, the Fatah started training them.”

“And you?”

“I was the last child. I was born in 1975, just as Lebanon was descending into civil war.”

5:47 P.M. Paris: 25 miles.

“WE NEVER THOUGHT they would come for us again. Yes, we’d lost everything-our homes, our village, our land-but at least we were safe in Ein al-Hilweh. The Jews would never come to Lebanon. Would they?”

5:52 P.M. Paris: 19 miles.

“OPERATION PEACE FOR GALILEE-that’s what they called it. My God, even Orwell couldn’t have come up with a better name. On June 4, 1982, the Israelis invaded Lebanon to finish off the PLO once and for all. To us it all seemed so familiar. An Israeli armored column heading north up the coast road, only now the coast road was in Lebanon instead of Palestine, and the soldiers were members of the IDF instead of the Haganah. We knew things were going to get bad. Ein al-Hilweh was known as Fatahland, capital of Diaspora Palestine. On June 8, the battle for the camp began. The Israelis sent in their paratroopers. Our men fought back with the courage of lions-alley to alley, house to house, from the mosques and the hospitals. Any fighter who tried to surrender was shot. The word went out: the battle for Ein al-Hilweh was to be a fight to the last man.

“The Israelis changed their tactics. They used their aircraft and artillery to raze the camp, block by block, sector by sector. Then their paratroopers would sweep down and massacre our fighters. Every few hours the Israelis would pause and ask us to surrender. Each time the answer was the same: never. It went on like this for a week. I lost one brother on the first day of the battle, my other brother on the fourth day. On the last day of fighting, my mother was mistaken for a guerrilla as she crawled out of the rubble and was shot to death by the Israelis.

“When it was finally over, Ein al-Hilweh was a wasteland. For the second time, the Jews had turned my home into rubble. I lost my brothers, I lost my mother. You ask me why I’m here. I’m here because of Sumayriyya and Ein al-Hilweh. This is what Zionism has meant to me. I have no choice but to fight.”

“What happened after Ein al-Hilweh? Where did you go?”

The girl shook her head. “I’ve told you enough already,” she said. “Too much.”

“I want to hear the rest of it.”

“Drive,” she said. “It’s almost time to see your wife.”

Gabriel looked at the clock: 6:00 P.M. Ten miles to Paris.

25 ST-DENIS, NORTHERN PARIS

AMIRA ASSAF CLOSED THE DOOR OF THE FLAT behind her. The corridor, a long gray cement tunnel, was in semidarkness, lit only by the occasional flickering fluorescent tube. She pushed the wheelchair toward the bank of elevators. A woman, Moroccan by the sound of her accent, was yelling at her two young children. Farther on, a trio of African boys was listening to American hip-hop music on a portable stereo. This is what remained of the French empire, she thought, a few islands in the Caribbean and the human warehouses of St-Denis.

She came to the elevator and pressed the call button, then looked up and saw that one of the cars was heading her way. Thank God, she thought. It was the one part of the journey that was completely beyond her control-the rickety old elevators of the housing bloc. Twice during her preparation she’d been forced to hike down twenty-three floors because the elevators weren’t working.

A bell chimed, the doors screeched open. Amira wheeled the chair into the carriage and was greeted by the overwhelming stench of urine. As she sunk toward earth, she pondered the question of why the poor piss in their elevators. When the doors opened, she thrust the chair into the lobby and drew a deep breath. Not much better. Only when she was outside, in the cold fresh air of the quadrangle, did she escape the odor of too many people living too close together.

There was something of the Third World village square in the broad quadrangle that lay at the center of the four large housing blocs-clusters of men, divided by their country of origin, chatting in the cool twilight; women bearing sacks of groceries; children playing football. No one took notice of the attractive young Palestinian woman pushing a wheelchair-bound figure of indeterminate sex and age.

It took precisely seven minutes for her to get to the St-Denis station. It was a large station, a combination RER and Métro, and because of the hour, crowds were streaming out of the exits into the street. She entered the ticket hall and immediately spotted two policemen, the first evidence of the security alert. She had watched the news updates and knew security had been tightened at Métro and rail stations across the country. But did they know something about St-Denis? Were they looking for a disabled woman kidnapped the previous night from a psychiatric hospital in England? She kept walking.

“Excuse me, mademoiselle.”

She turned around: a station attendant, young and officious, with a neatly pressed uniform.

“Where are you going?”

The tickets were in her hand; she had to answer truthfully. “The RER,” she said, then added: “To the Gare de Lyon.”

The attendant smiled. “There’s an elevator right over there.”

“Yes, I know the way.”

“Can I be of some help?”

“I’m fine.”

“Please,” he said, “allow me.”

Just her luck, she thought. One pleasant station attendant in the entire Métro system, and he was working St-Denis tonight. To refuse would look suspicious. She nodded and handed the attendant the tickets. He led her through the turnstile, then across the crowded hall to the elevator. They rode down in silence to the RER level of the station. The attendant led her to the proper platform. For a moment she feared he intended to stay until the train arrived. Finally, he bid her a good evening and headed back upstairs.

Amira looked up at the arrivals board. Twelve minutes. She glanced at her watch, did the math. No problem. She sat on a bench and waited. Twelve minutes later the train swept into the station and came to a stop. The doors shot open with a pneumatic hiss. Amira stood and wheeled the woman into the carriage.

26 PARIS

WHERE AM I NOW? A TRAIN? AND WHO IS THIS woman? Is she the same one who worked at the hospital? I told Dr. Avery I didn’t like her, but he wouldn’t listen. She spent too much time around me. Watched me too much. You’re being delusional, Dr. Avery told me. Your reaction to her is part of your illness. Her name is Amira. She’s very kind and highly qualified. No, I tried to tell him, she’s watching me. Something’s going to happen. She’s a Palestinian girl. I can see it in her eyes. Why didn’t Dr. Avery listen to me? Or did I ever really try to tell him? I can’t be sure. I can’t be sure of anything. Look at the television, Gabriel. The missiles are falling on Tel Aviv again. Do you think Saddam has put chemicals on them this time? I can’t stand being in Vienna when missiles are falling on Tel Aviv. Eat your pasta, Dani. Look at him right now, Gabriel. He looks so much like you. This train feels like Paris, but I’m surrounded by Arabs. Where has this woman taken me? Why aren’t you eating, Gabriel? Are you feeling all right? You don’t look well. My God, your skin is burning. Are you ill? Look, another missile. Please, God, let it fall on an empty building. Don’t let it fall on my mother’s house. I want to get out of this restaurant. I want to go home and call my mother. I wonder what happened to that boy who came to the hospital to watch over me. How did I get here? Who brought me here? And where is this train going? Snow. God, how I hate this city, but the snow makes it beautiful. The snow absolves Vienna of its sins. Snow falls on Vienna while the missiles rain down on Tel Aviv. Are you working tonight? How late will you be? Sorry, I don’t know why I bothered to ask. Shit. The car is covered with snow. Help me with the windows before you go. Make sure Dani is buckled into his seat tightly. The streets are slippery. Yes, I’ll be careful. Come on, Gabriel, hurry. I want to talk to my mother. I want to hear the sound of her voice. Give me a kiss, one last kiss, then turn and walk away. I love to watch you walk, Gabriel. You walk like an angel. I hate the work you do for Shamron, but I’ll love you always. Damn, the car won’t start. I’ll try again. Why are you turning around, Gabriel? Where is this woman taking me? Why are you shouting and running toward the car? Turn the key again. Silence. Smoke and fire. Get Dani out first! Hurry, Gabriel! Please, get him out! I’m burning! I’m burning to death! Where is this woman taking me? Help me, Gabriel. Please help me.

27 PARIS

THE GARE DE LYON IS LOCATED IN THE 12TH Arrondissement of Paris, a few streets to the east of the Seine. In front of the station is a large traffic circle, and beyond the circle, the intersection of two major avenues, the rue de Lyon and the boulevard Diderot. It was there, seated in a busy sidewalk café popular with travelers, that Paul Martineau waited. He finished the last of a thin glass of Côtes du Rhône, then signaled the waiter for a check. An interval of five minutes ensued before the bill appeared. He left money and a small tip, then set out toward the entrance of the station.

There were several police cars in the traffic circle and two pairs of paramilitary police standing guard at the entrance. Martineau fell in with a small cluster of people and went inside. He was nearly into the departure hall when he felt a tap at his shoulder. He turned around. It was one of the policemen who’d been watching the main entrance.

“May I see some identification, please?”

Martineau drew his French national identity card from his wallet and handed it to the policeman. The policeman stared into Martineau’s face for a long moment before looking down at the card.

“Where are you going?”

“Aix.”

“May I see your ticket, please?”

Martineau handed it over.

“It says here you’re supposed to return tomorrow.”

“I changed my reservation this afternoon.”

“Why?”

“I needed to return early.” Martineau decided to show a bit of irritation. “Listen, what’s this all about? Are all these questions really necessary?”

“I’m afraid so, Monsieur Martineau. What brought you to Paris?”

Martineau answered: lunch with a colleague from Paris University, a meeting with a potential publisher.

“You’re a writer?”

“An archaeologist, actually, but I’m working on a book.”

The policeman handed back the identification card.

“Have a pleasant evening.”

“Thank you.”

Martineau turned and headed toward the terminal. He paused at the departure board, then climbed the stairs to Le Train Bleu, the famed restaurant overlooking the hall. The maître d’ met him at the door.

“Do you have a reservation?”

“Actually, I’m meeting someone at the bar. I believe she’s already here.”

The maître d’ stepped aside. Martineau made his way to the bar, then to a table in a window overlooking the platforms. Seated there was an attractive woman in her forties with a streak of gray in her long, dark hair. She looked up as Martineau approached. He bent and kissed the side of her neck.

“Hello, Mimi.”

“Paul,” she whispered. “So lovely to see you again.”

28 PARIS

TWO BLOCKS NORTH OF THE GARE DE LYON: THE rue Parrot. 6:53 P.M.

“Turn here,” the girl said. “Park the car.”

“There’s no place to leave it. The street’s parked up.”

“Trust me. We’ll find a space.”

Just then a car pulled away from the curb near the Hotel Lyon Bastille. Gabriel, taking no chances, went in nose first. The girl slipped the Tanfolgio into her handbag and swung the handbag over her shoulder.

“Open the trunk.”

“Why?”

“Just do as I say. Look at the clock. We haven’t much time.”

Gabriel pulled the trunk-release lever, and the hatch opened with a dull thump. The girl snatched the key from the ignition and dropped it into the bag along with the gun and the satellite phone. Then she opened her door and climbed out. She walked back to the trunk and motioned for Gabriel to join her. He looked down. Inside was a large rectangular suitcase, black nylon, with wheels and a collapsible handle.

“Take it.”

“No.”

“If you don’t take it, your wife dies.”

“I’m not going to take a bomb into the Gare de Lyon.”

“You’re entering a train station. It’s best to look like a traveler. Take the bag.”

He reached down and looked for the zipper. Locked.

“Just take it.”

In the tool well was a chrome-plated tire iron.

“What are you doing? Do you want your wife to die?”

Two sharp blows, and the lock snapped open. He unzipped the main compartment: balls of packing paper. Next he tried the outer compartments. Empty.

“Are you satisfied? Look at the clock. Take the bag.”

Gabriel lifted the bag out and placed it on the pavement. The girl had already started walking away. He extended the handle of the bag and closed the trunk, then set out after her. At the corner of the rue de Lyon they turned left. The station, set on a slight promontory, loomed before them.

“I don’t have a ticket.”

“I have a ticket for you.”

“Where are we going? Berlin? Geneva? Amsterdam?”

“Just walk.”

As they neared the corner of the boulevard Diderot, Gabriel saw police officers patrolling the perimeter of the station on foot and blue emergency lights flickering in the traffic circle.

“They’ve been warned,” he said. “We’re walking straight into a security alert.”

“We’ll be fine.”

“I don’t have a passport.”

“You don’t need it.”

“What if we’re stopped?”

“I have it. If a policeman asks you for identification, just look at me, and I’ll take care of it.”

“You’re the reason we’ll be stopped.”

At the boulevard Diderot they waited for the light to change, then crossed the street amid a swarm of pedestrians. The bag felt too light. It didn’t sound right rolling over the pavement. They should have put clothing in it to weigh it down properly. What if he were stopped? What if the bag was searched and they found that it was filled with balls of paper? What if they looked inside Palestina’s bag and found the Tanfolgio? The Tanfolgio… He told himself to forget about the empty suitcase and the gun in the girl’s bag. Instead he focused on the sensation he’d had earlier that day, the feeling that the clue to his survival lay somewhere along the path he’d already traveled.

Standing at the entrance of the station were several police officers and two soldiers in camouflage with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders. They were randomly stopping passengers, checking IDs, looking in bags. The girl threaded her arm through Gabriel’s and made him walk faster. He could feel the eyes of the policemen on him, but no one stopped them as they went inside.

The station, its roof arched and soaring, opened before them. They paused for a moment at the head of an escalator that sunk downward into the Métro level of the station. Gabriel used the time to take his bearings. To his left was a kiosk of public telephones; behind him, the stairs that led up to the Le Train Bleu. On opposite ends of the platform were two Relay newsstands. A few feet to his right was a snack bar, above which hung the large black departure board. Just then it changed over. To Gabriel the clapping of the characters sounded obscenely like applause for Khaled’s perfectly played gambit. The clock read: 6:57.

“Do you see that girl using the first telephone on this side of the kiosk?”

“Which girl?”

“Blue jeans, gray sweater, maybe French, maybe Arab, like me.”

“I see her.”

“When the clock on the departure board turns to six fifty-eight, she’s going to hang up. You and I will walk over and take her place. She’ll pause for a moment to give us time to get there.”

“What if someone else gets there first?”

“The girl and I will take care of it. You’re going to dial a number. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t forget the number. If you do, I won’t tell it to you again, and your wife will die. Are you sure you’re ready?”

“Give me the fucking number.”

She recited it, then gave him a few coins as the clock turned to 6:58. The girl vacated her place. Gabriel walked over, lifted the receiver and fed coins through the slot. He dialed the number deliberately, fearful that if he made a mistake the first time he would not be able to summon the number correctly again. Somewhere a telephone began to ring. One ring, a second, a third…

“There’s no answer.”

“Be patient. Someone will pick up.”

“It’s rung six times. No one’s answering.”

“Are you sure you dialed the proper number? Maybe you made a mistake. Maybe your wife is about to die because you-”

“Shut your mouth,” Gabriel snapped.

The telephone had stopped ringing.

29 PARIS

“GOOD EVENING, GABRIEL.”

A woman’s voice, shockingly familiar.

“Or should I call you Herr Klemp? That’s the name you used when you came to my club, isn’t it? And the name you used when you ransacked my apartment.”

Mimi Ferrere. The Little Moon.

“Where is she? Where’s Leah?”

“She’s close.”

“Where? I don’t see her.”

“You’ll find out in a minute.”

A minute… He looked up at the departure board. The clock rolled over: 6:59 P.M. A pair of soldiers strolled past. One of them looked at him. Gabriel turned away and lowered his voice.

“You told me if I came, you’d let her live. Now, where is she?”

“Everything will be clear to you in just a few seconds.”

The voice: he latched on to it. It drew him back to Cairo, back to the evening he’d spent at the wine bar in Zamalek. He’d been lured to Cairo for a reason-to plant a bug on Mimi’s telephone, so he could overhear a conversation with a man named Tony and capture the telephone number for an apartment in Marseilles. But had he been brought to Cairo for another reason?

She started to speak again, but the sound of her voice was drowned out by the blare of a station announcement: Train number 765 for Marseilles is now boarding on Track D… Gabriel covered the mouthpiece of the receiver. Train number 765 for Marseilles is now boarding on Track D… He could hear it through the telephone-he was sure of it. Mimi was somewhere in the station. He spun around and glimpsed her girlish hips flowing calmly toward the exit. Walking on her left, with his hand in the back pocket of her trousers, was a man with square shoulders and dark curly hair. Gabriel had seen the same walk earlier that morning in Marseilles. Khaled had come to the Gare de Lyon to witness Gabriel’s death.

He watched them slip through the exit.

Train number 765 for Marseilles is now boarding on Track D.

He glanced at Palestina. She was looking at the clock. Judging from her expression, she knew now that Gabriel had told her the truth. She was a few seconds away from becoming a shaheed in Khaled’s jihad of revenge.

“Are you listening to me, Gabriel?”

Traffic noise: Mimi and Khaled were moving hastily away from the station.

“I’m listening,” he said-and I’m wondering why you seated me with three Arabs in your nightclub.

Train number 765 for Marseilles is now boarding on Track D.

Track D… Track Dalet… Tochnit Dalet…

“Where is she, Mimi? Tell me what-”

And then he saw him, standing at a newspaper rack at the Relay newsstand at the east end of the station. His suitcase, a rolling rectangular bag of black nylon, identical to Gabriel’s, stood upright next to him. They’d called him Bashir that night in Cairo. Bashir liked Johnnie Walker Red on the rocks and smoked Silk Cut cigarettes. Bashir wore a gold TAG Heuer watch on his right wrist and had a thing for one of Mimi’s waitresses. Bashir was also a shaheed. In a few seconds Bashir’s bag would explode, and so would several dozen people around him.

Gabriel looked to his left, toward the opposite side of the platform: another Relay newsstand, another shaheed with a bag identical to Gabriel’s. He’d been called Naji that night. Naji: survivor. Not tonight, Naji.

A few feet away from Gabriel, purchasing a sandwich he would never eat, was Tayyib. Same suitcase, same glassy look of death in his eyes. He was close enough for Gabriel to see the configuration of the bomb. A black wire had been run along the inside of one arm of the pull handle. Gabriel reckoned that the release button on the handle itself was the trigger. Press the button, and it would strike the contact plate. That meant that the three shaheeds had to press their buttons simultaneously. But how were they to be signaled? The time, of course. Gabriel looked at Tayyib’s eyes and saw they were now focused on the digital clock of the departure board. 6:59:28…

“Where is she, Mimi?”

The soldiers sauntered past again, chatting casually. Three Arabs had entered the station with suitcases packed with explosives, but the security forces hadn’t seemed to notice. How long would it take the soldiers to get their automatics off their shoulders and into firing position? If they were Israelis? Two seconds at most. But these French boys? Their reaction time would be slower.

He glanced at Palestina. She was growing more anxious. Her eyes were damp and she was pulling on the strap of her shoulder bag. Gabriel’s eyes flickered about the station, calculating angles and lines of fire.

Mimi intruded on his thoughts. “Are you listening to me?”

“I’m listening.”

“As you’ve probably guessed by now, the station is about to explode. By my calculation, you’ll have fifteen seconds. You have two choices. You can warn the people around you and try to save as many lives as possible, or you can selfishly save the life of your wife. But you cannot possibly do both, because if you warn the people, there will be pandemonium, and you’ll never be able to get your wife out of the station before the bombs go off. The only way to save her is to allow hundreds of other people to die-hundreds of deaths in order to save a wreck of a human being. Quite a moral dilemma, wouldn’t you say?”

“Where is she?”

“You tell me.”

“Track D,” Gabriel said. “Track Dalet.”

“Very good.”

“She’s not there. I don’t see her.”

“Look harder. Fifteen seconds, Gabriel. Fifteen seconds.”

And then the line went dead.

TIME SEEMED TO CRAWL to a stop. He saw it all as a streetscape, rendered in the vibrant palette of Renoir-the shaheeds, their eyes on the departure clock; the soldiers, their shoulders slung with submachine guns; Palestina, clutching the handbag that held a loaded Tanfolgio nine-millimeter. And in the center of it all he saw the pretty Arab girl walking away from a woman in a wheelchair. On the track stood a train bound for Marseilles, and five feet from the spot where the woman waited to die was an open door to the last carriage. Above him a clock read 6:59:50. Mimi had cheated him, but Gabriel knew better than most men that ten seconds was an eternity. In the span of ten seconds he had followed Khaled’s father into a Paris courtyard and filled his body with eleven bullets. In less than ten seconds, on a snowy night in Vienna, his son was murdered and his wife forever lost to him.

His first move was so compact and rapid that no one seemed to notice it-a blow to the left side of Palestina’s skull that landed with such force that Gabriel, when he pulled the handbag off her shoulder, was not sure whether she was still alive. As the girl collapsed at his feet, he reached inside the bag and wrapped his hand around the grip of the Tanfolgio. Tayyib, the shaheed closest to him at the snack bar, had seen none of it, for his eyes were fixed on the clock. Gabriel drew the weapon from the bag and leveled it, one-handed, at the bomber. He squeezed the trigger twice, tap-tap. Both shots struck the bomber high in the chest, flinging him backward, away from the explosive-laden suitcase.

The sound of gunfire in the vast echo chamber of the station had the effect Gabriel had expected. Across the platform, people crouched or dropped to the ground. Twenty feet away, the two soldiers were pulling their submachine guns off their shoulders. And at either end of the platform the last two shaheeds, Bashir and Naji, were still standing, their eyes fixed on the clock. There wasn’t time for both.

Gabriel, in French, shouted: “Bomber! Get down! Get down!”

A firing lane opened as Gabriel aimed the Tanfolgio at the one called Naji. The French soldiers, confused by what they were witnessing, hesitated. He squeezed the trigger, saw a flash of pink, then watched as Naji spiraled lifelessly to the floor.

He ran toward Track D, toward the spot where Leah sat exposed to the coming blast wave. He clung to Palestina’s handbag, for it contained the keys to his escape. He glanced once over his shoulder. Bashir, the last of the shaheeds, was heading toward the center of the station. He must have seen his two comrades fall; now he was trying to increase the killing power of his single bomb by placing it in the center of the platform where it was still most crowded.

To stop now meant almost certain death for himself and for Leah, so Gabriel kept running. He reached the entrance to Track D and turned to the right. The platform was empty; the gunfire and Gabriel’s warnings had driven the passengers into the trains or toward the exit of the station. Only Leah remained, helpless and immobile.

The clock rolled over: 7:00:00

Gabriel seized Leah by the shoulders and lifted her unresisting body from the chair, then made one final lunge toward the doorway of the waiting train as the suitcase detonated. A flash of brilliant light, a thunderclap, a searing blast wave that seemed to press the very life out of him. Poison bolts and nails. Shattered glass and blood.

BLACK SMOKE, an unbearable silence. Gabriel looked into Leah’s eyes. She looked directly back at him, her gaze strangely serene. He slipped the Tanfolgio into the handbag, then cradled Leah in his arms and stood. She seemed weightless to him.

From outside the shattered carriage came the first screams. Gabriel looked around him. The windows on both sides were blown out. Those passengers who had been in their seats had been cut by the flying glass. Gabriel saw at least six who looked fatally wounded.

He climbed down the steps and made his way toward the platform. What had been there just a few seconds earlier was now unrecognizable. He looked up and saw that a large portion of the roof was gone. Had all three bombs exploded simultaneously, the entire station would likely have come down.

He slipped and fell hard to the ground. The platform was drenched with blood. All around him were severed limbs and pieces of human flesh. He got to his feet, lifted Leah, and stumbled forward. What was he stepping on? He couldn’t bear to look. He slipped a second time, near the telephone kiosk, and found himself staring into the lifeless eyes of Palestina. Was it Gabriel’s blow that had killed her or the shrapnel of Tayyib’s bomb? Gabriel didn’t much care.

He got to his feet again. The station exits were jammed: terrified passengers trying to get out, police forcing their way in. If Gabriel tried to go that way, there was a good chance someone would identify him as the man who had been firing a gun before the bomb went off. He had to find some other way out. He remembered the walk from the car to the station, waiting for the light to change at the intersection of the rue de Lyon and the boulevard Diderot. There had been an entrance to the Métro there.

He carried Leah toward the escalator. It was no longer running. He stepped over two dead bodies and started downward. The Métro station was in tumult, passengers screaming, startled attendants trying in vain to keep the situation calm, but at least there was no more smoke, and the floors were no longer wet with blood. Gabriel followed the signs through the arched passageways toward the rue de Lyon. Twice he was asked whether he needed help, and twice he shook his head and kept walking. The lights flickered and dimmed, then by some miracle came back to life again.

Two minutes later he came to a flight of steps. He mounted them and climbed steadily upward, emerging into a thin, chill rain. He’d come out on the rue de Lyon. He looked back over his shoulder toward the station. The traffic circle was ablaze with emergency lights, and smoke was pouring from the roof. He turned and started walking.

Another offer of help: “Are you all right, monsieur? Does that person need a doctor?”

No, thank you, he thought. Just please get out of my way, and please let that Mercedes be waiting for me.

He rounded the corner into the rue Parrot. The car was still there: Khaled’s only mistake. He carried Leah across the street. For an instant she clung anxiously to his neck. Did she know it was him, or did she think him an orderly in her hospital in England? A moment later she was seated in the front passenger seat, staring calmly out the window as Gabriel pulled away from the curb and rolled up to the corner of the rue de Lyon. He glanced once to the left, toward the burning station, then turned right and sped up the wide avenue toward the Bastille. He reached into the girl’s handbag again and pulled out her satellite phone. By the time he rounded the traffic circle in the Place de la Bastille, King Saul Boulevard had come on the line.