The Confessor

TIBERIAS, ISRAEL

The call from Lev did not awaken Shamron. Indeed, he had not closed his eyes since the first urgent flash from Rome that Gabriel and the girl were missing. He lay in bed, the telephone a few inches from his ear, listening to Lev's histrionics while Ge'ulah stirred softly in her sleep. The indignity of aging, he thought. Not long ago, Lev was a green recruit, and Shamron was the one who did the screaming. Now, the old man had no choice but to hold his tongue and bide his time.

When the tirade ended, the line went dead. Shamron swung his feet to the floor, pulled on a robe, and walked outside to his terrace overlooking the lake. The sky in the east was beginning to turn pale blue with the coming dawn, but the sun had not yet appeared over the ridge of the hills. He dug through the pockets of the robe, looking for cigarettes, hoping against hope that Ge'ulah hadn't found them. It filled him with a sense of great personal victory when his stubby fingers came upon a crumpled packet.

He lit one and savored the bite of the harsh Turkish tobacco on his tongue. Then he lifted his gaze and let it wander for a moment over the view. He never tired of it, this window on his private corner of the Promised Land. It was no accident the vista faced eastward. That way Shamron, the eternal sentinel, could keep watch on Israel's enemies.

The air smelled of a coming storm. Soon the rains would arrive, and once more the land would run with floodwater. How many more floods would he see? In his most pessimistic moments, Shamron wondered how many more the children of Israel would see. Like most Jews, he was gripped by an unwavering fear that his generation would be the last. A man much wiser than Shamron had called the Jews the ever-dying people, a people forever on the verge of ceasing to be. It had been Shamron's mission in life to rid his people of that fear, to wrap them in a blanket of security and make them feel safe. He was haunted by the realization that he had failed.

He scowled at his stainless-steel wristwatch. Gabriel and the girl had been missing for eight hours. It was Shamron's affair, but it was blowing up in Lev's face. Gabriel was getting closer to identifying the killers of Benjamin Stern, but Lev wanted no part of it. Little Lev, thought Shamron derisively. The craven bureaucrat. A man whose innate sense of caution rivaled the daring and audacity of Shamron.

"Do I need this, Ari?" Lev had screamed. "The Europeans are accusing us of behaving like Nazis in the territories, and now one of your old killers is accused of trying to assassinate the Pope! Tell me where I can find him. Help me bring him in before this thing destroys this beloved service of yours once and for all."

Perhaps Lev was right, though it pained Shamron to even consider such a thought. Israel had enough problems at the moment. The shaheeds were turning markets into bloodbaths. The thief of Baghdad was still trying to forge his nuclear sword. Perhaps now was not the best time to pick a fight with the Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps now was not the best time to go wading in old waters. The water was dirty and filled with unseen hazards, potholes and rocks, hidden brush where a man could become entangled and drown.

And then an image appeared in his thoughts. A muddy village outside Krakow. A rampaging crowd. Shop windows smashed. Homes set ablaze. Men beaten bloody with clubs. Women raped. Christ-Fillers! Jewish filth! Kill the Jews! A child's village, a young child's memories of Poland. The boy would be sent to Palestine to live with relatives on a settlement in the Upper Galilee. The parents would stay behind. The boy would join the Haganah and fight in Israel's war of rebirth. When the new state was putting together an intelligence service, the boy, now a young man, would be invited to join. In a shabby suburb north of Buenos Aires, he would become an almost mythical figure by seizing the throat of the man who had sent his parents, and six million others, to the camps of death.

Shamron found that his eyes were squeezed tightly shut and that his hands were gripping the top of the balustrade. Slowly, finger by finger, he relaxed his grip.

A line of Eliot ran through his head: "In my beginning is my end."

Eichmann . . .

How had this puppeteer of death, this murdering bureaucrat who made the trains of genocide run on time--how had it come to pass that he was living quietly in a hard scrabble suburb of Buenos Aires when six million had perished? Shamron knew the answer, of course, for every page of the Eichmann file was engraved in his

memory. Like hundreds of other murderers, he had escaped via "the convent route"--a chain of monasteries and Church properties stretching from Germany to the Italian port of Genoa. In Genoa he had been given shelter by Franciscans and, through the auspices of Church charitable organizations was provided with false papers describing him as a refugee. On June 14, 1950, he emerged from the shelter of the Franciscan convent long enough to board the Giovanna C, bound for Buenos Aires. Bound for a new life in the New World, thought Shamron. The leader of the Church had not been able to find the words to condemn the murder of six million, but his bishops and priests had given comfort and sanctuary to the greatest mass killer in history. This was a fact that Shamron could never comprehend, a sin for which there was no absolution.

He thought of Lev's voice screeching down the secure line from Tel Aviv. No, thought Shamron, I will not help Lev find Gabriel. Quite the opposite, he was going to help him discover what happened in that convent by the lake--and who killed Benjamin Stern.

He walked back into the house, his step crisp and surefooted, and went to his bedroom. Ge'ulah was lying in bed watching television. Shamron packed a suitcase. Every few seconds, she would glance up from the screen and look at him, but she did not speak. It had been this way for more than forty years. When his bag was packed, Shamron sat on the bed next to her and held her hand.

"You'll be careful, won't you, Ari?"

"Of course, my love."

"You won't smoke cigarettes, will you?"

"Never!"

"Come home soon."

"Soon," Shamron said, and he kissed her forehead.

There was an indignity to his visits to King Saul Boulevard that Shamron found deeply depressing. He had to sign the logbook at the security station in the lobby and attach a laminated tag to his shirt pocket. No longer could he use his old private elevator--that was reserved for Lev now. Instead, he crowded into an ordinary lift filled with desk officers and boys and girls from the file rooms.

He rode up to the fourth floor. His ritual humiliation did not end there, for Lev still had a few more ounces of flesh to extract. There was no one to bring him coffee, so he was forced to fend for himself in the canteen, coaxing a cup of weak brew from an automated machine. Then he walked down the hall to his "office"--a bare room, not much larger than a storage closet, with a pine table, a folding steel chair, and a chipped telephone that smelled of disinfectant.

Shamron sat down, opened his briefcase, and removed the surveillance photograph from London--the one snapped by Mordecai outside Peter Malone's home. Shamron sat over it for several minutes, elbows on the table, knuckles pressed to his temples. Every few seconds, a head would poke around the edge of the door and a pair of eyes would stare at him as if he were some exotic beast. Yes, its true. The old man is roaming the halls of Headquarters once more. Shamron saw none of it. He had eyes only for the man in the photograph.

Finally, he picked up the telephone and dialed the extension for Research. It was answered by a girl who sounded as though she was barely out of high school. This is Shamron."

"Who?"

"Sham-RON," he said irritably. "I need the file on the Cyprus kidnapping case. It was 1986, if I remember correctly. That's probably before you were born, but do your best."

He slammed down the phone and waited. Five minutes later a bleary-eyed boy called Yossi appeared in Shamron's ignoble door "Sorry, boss. The girl is new." He held up a bound file. "You wanted to see this?"

Shamron held out his hand, like a beggar.

IT HAD not been one of Shamron's prouder moments. In the summer of 1986, Israeli Justice Minister Meir Ben-David set sail from Tel Aviv for a three-week Mediterranean cruise aboard a private yacht along with twelve other guests and a crew of five. On day nine of their holiday, in the harbor at Larnaca, the yacht was seized by a team of terrorists claiming to represent a group called the Fighting Palestinian Cells. A rescue attempt was ruled out, and the Cypriots wanted the messiness resolved as quickly and as quietly as possible. That left the Israeli government with no choice but to negotiate, and Shamron opened a channel of communication with the German-speaking team leader. Three days later, the siege ended. The hostages were released, the terrorists were granted safe passage, and a month later a dozen hardcore PLO killers were released from Israeli jails.

Publicly, Israel denied there had been a quid pro quo, though no one believed it. For Shamron, it had been a bitter herb indeed, and now, flipping through the pages of the file, he relived it all again. He came to a photograph, the one image they had managed to cap'ture of the team leader. It was useless, really: a long-distance shot, grainy and muddled, a face concealed behind sunglasses and a hat.

He placed the picture beside the surveillance photograph from London and spent several minutes comparing them. Same man? Impossible to tell. He picked up the phone and rang Research again. This time Yossi answered.

"Yes, boss?"

"Bring me the file on the Leopard."

He was an enigma, an educated guess, a theory. Some said he was German. Some said Austrian. Some Swiss. One linguist who listened to the tapes of his conversations with Shamron, which were conducted in English, theorized that he was from the Alsace-Lorraine. It was the West Germans who had hung the codename Leopard on him; he had done a good deal of killing there and they wanted him the most. A terrorist for hire. A man who would work for any group, any cause, as long as it conformed to his core beliefs: Communist, anti-Western, anti-Zionist. It was the Leopard who was believed to have been behind the hijacking in Cyprus and the Leopard who had murdered three other Israelis in Europe on behalf of PLO commando Abu Jihad. Shamron had wanted him dead. His wish had gone unfulfilled.

He leafed through the file, which was hopelessly thin. Here a report from the French service, here an Interpol dispatch, here a rumor of an alleged sighting in Istanbul. There were three photographs as well, though it was not clear whether any were really him. The shot from the yacht in Cyprus, a surveillance photo taken in Bucharest, another at Charles de Gaulle airport. Shamron laid the photo from London next to them and looked up at Yossi, who was watching over his shoulder.

"That one and that one, boss."

Shamron pulled the Bucharest shot out of the lineup and laid it next to London. Same angle, head-on, chin slightly to the left, obscuring half the face.

"I could be wrong, Yossi, but I think it's possible that these are the same man."

"Hard to say, boss, but the computer may be able to tell us for sure."

"Run them," Shamron said, then he picked up the files. "I want to keep these."

"You have to sign a chit."

Shamron looked at Yossi over spectacles.

Yossi said, "I'll sign the chit for you."

"Good boy."

Shamron reached for the telephone one last time and dialed Travel. When he finished with his arrangements, he placed the files in his briefcase and headed downstairs. I'm coming, Gabriel, he thought. But where in God's name are you?