The Messenger

10.

GILAH SHAMRON’S LIFE HAD been a succession of tense vigils. She had endured the secret missions to dangerous lands, the wars and the terror, the crises and the Security Cabinet meetings that never seemed to end before midnight. She had always feared an enemy from Shamron’s past would one day rise and take his revenge. She had always known that one day Ari would force her to wait for word of whether he was going to live or die.

Gabriel found her seated calmly in a private waiting room in the intensive care unit of the Hadassah Medical Center. Shamron’s famous bomber jacket lay across her lap, and she was absently plucking at the tear in the right breast that Shamron had never seen fit to repair. Gabriel had always seen something of Golda Meir in Gilah’s sad gaze and wild gray hair. He could not look at Gilah without thinking of the day Golda pinned a medal on his chest in secret and, with tears in her eyes, thanked him for avenging the eleven Israelis murdered at Munich.

“What happened, Gabriel? How did they get to Ari in the middle of Jerusalem?”

“He’s probably been under surveillance for a very long time. When he left my apartment tonight, he told me he was going back to the Prime Minister’s Office to do a bit of work.” Gabriel sat down and took Gilah’s hand. “They hit him at a traffic signal on King George Street.”

“A suicide bomber?”

“We think there were two men. They were in a van and disguised as haredi Jews. The bomb was abnormally large.”

She looked up at the television mounted high on the wall. “I can see that from the pictures. It’s remarkable anyone survived.”

“A witness saw Ari’s car accelerate suddenly an instant before the bomb went off. Rami or the driver must have seen something that made them suspicious. The armor plating withstood the force of the blast, but the car was thrown into the air. Apparently it rolled at least twice.”

“Who did this? Was it Hamas? Islamic Jihad? The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades?”

“There’s been a claim by the Brotherhood of Allah.”

“The same people who did the Vatican?”

“Yes, Gilah.”

“Do you believe them?”

“It’s early,” Gabriel said. “What have the doctors told you?”

“He’s going to be in surgery for at least another three hours. They say we’ll be able to see him when he comes out, but only for a minute or two. They’ve warned me he won’t look good.”

Gilah studied him for a moment, then looked up at the television again. “You’re worried he’s not going to live, aren’t you, Gabriel?”

“Of course I am.”

“Don’t worry,” said Gilah. “Shamron is indestructible. Shamron is eternal.”

“What did they tell you about his injuries?”

She recited them calmly. The inventory of damaged organs, head trauma, and broken bones made clear to Gabriel that Shamron’s survival was by no means assured.

“Ari came through it the best of the three,” Gilah said. “Apparently Rami and the driver were hurt much worse. Poor Rami. He’s been standing guard over Ari for years. And now this.”

“Where’s Yonatan?”

“He was on duty in the north tonight. He’s on his way.”

Shamron’s only son was a colonel in the Israel Defense Force. Ronit, his wayward daughter, had moved to New Zealand in order to get away from her domineering father. She was living there on a chicken farm with a gentile. It had been years since she and Shamron had spoken.

“Ronit’s coming, too,” Gilah said. “Who knows? Maybe something good can come out of all this. Ronit’s absence has been very hard on him. He blames himself, as well he should. Ari’s very hard on his children. But then you know that, don’t you, Gabriel?”

Gilah stared directly into Gabriel’s eyes for a moment, then looked suddenly away. For years she had thought him a deskman of some sort who knew much about art and spent a great deal of time in Europe. Like the rest of the country she had learned the true nature of his work by reading the newspapers. Her demeanor toward him had changed since his unmasking. She was quiet around him, careful never to upset him, and incapable of looking him too long in the eye. Gabriel had seen behavior like Gilah’s before, as a child, whenever people had entered the Allon home. Death had left its mark on Gabriel’s face, just as Birkenau had stained the face of his mother. Gilah couldn’t gaze long into his eyes because she feared what she might see there.

“He wasn’t well before this. He’s been hiding it, of course-even from the prime minister.”

Gabriel wasn’t surprised. He knew Shamron had been covertly battling various ailments for years. The old man’s health, like almost every other aspect of his life, was a closely held secret.

“Is it the kidneys?”

Gilah shook her head. “The cancer is back.”

“I thought they got it all.”

“So did Ari,” she said. “And that’s not all. His lungs are a mess from the cigarettes. Tell him not to smoke so much.”

“He never listens to me.”

“You’re the only one he listens to. He loves you like a son, Gabriel. Sometimes I think he loves you more than Yonatan.”

“Don’t be silly, Gilah.”

“He’s never happier than when you’re sitting on the terrace together in Tiberias.”

“We’re usually arguing.”

“He likes arguing with you, Gabriel.”

“I’ve gathered that.”

On the television cabinet ministers and security chiefs were arriving at the Prime Minister’s Office for an emergency session. Under ordinary circumstances Shamron would have been among them. Gabriel looked at Gilah. She was pulling at the torn leather of Shamron’s jacket. “It was Ari, wasn’t it?” she asked. “It was Ari who dragged you into this life…after Munich.”

Gabriel looked at the emergency lights flashing on the television screen and nodded absently.

“You were in the army?”

“No, I’d finished with the army. I was studying at the Bezalel Academy of Art by then. Ari came to see me a few days after the hostages had been killed. No one knew it then, but Golda had already given the order to kill everyone involved.”

“Why did he select you?”

“I spoke languages, and he saw things in my army fitness reports-qualities he thought would make me suitable for the kind of work he had in mind.”

“Killing at close range, face-to-face. That’s how you did it, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Gilah.”

“How many?”

“Gilah.”

“How many, Gabriel?”

“Six,” he said. “I killed six of them.”

She touched the gray hair at his temples. “But you were just a boy.”

“It’s easier when you’re a boy. It gets harder as you get older.”

“But you did it anyway. You were the one they sent to kill Abu Jihad, weren’t you? You walked into his villa in Tunis and killed him in front of his wife and children. And they took their revenge, not on the country but on you. They put a bomb beneath your car in Vienna.”

She was pulling harder at the tear in Shamron’s coat. Gabriel took her hand. “It’s all right, Gilah. It was a long time ago.”

“I remember when the call came. Ari told me a bomb had gone off beneath a diplomat’s car in Vienna. I remember going into the kitchen to make him some coffee and coming back to the bedroom to find him crying. He said, ‘It’s all my fault. I killed his wife and child.’ It’s the only time I’ve ever seen him cry. I didn’t see him for a week. When he finally came home, I asked him what had happened. He wouldn’t answer, of course. He’d regained his composure by then. But I know it’s eaten away at him all these years. He blames himself for what happened.”

“He shouldn’t,” Gabriel said.

“You weren’t even allowed to grieve properly, were you? The government told the world that the wife and child of the Israeli diplomat were both dead. You buried your son in secret on the Mount of Olives-just you, Ari, and a rabbi-and you hid your wife away in England under a false name. But Khaled found her. Khaled kidnapped your wife and used her to lure you to the Gare de Lyon.” A tear spilled down Gilah’s cheek. Gabriel brushed it away and found her wrinkled skin was still as soft as velvet. “All because my husband came to see you one afternoon in September so long ago. You could have had such a different life. You could have been a great artist. Instead we turned you into a killer. Why aren’t you bitter, Gabriel? Why don’t you hate Ari like his children do?”

“The course of my life was charted the day the Germans chose the little Austrian corporal to be their chancellor. Ari was just the helmsman on the night watch.”

“Are you that fatalistic?”

“Believe me, Gilah, I went through a period of time where I couldn’t bear to look at Ari. But I’ve come to realize I’m more like him than I ever knew.”

“Maybe that’s the quality he saw in your army fitness report.”

Gabriel smiled briefly. “Maybe it was.”

Gilah fingered the tear in Shamron’s jacket. “Do you know the story about how this happened?”

“It’s one of the great mysteries inside the Office,” Gabriel said. “There are all sorts of wild theories about how it happened, but he always refused to tell us the truth.”

“It was the night of the bombing in Vienna. Ari was in a hurry to get to King Saul Boulevard. As he was climbing into his car, the coat got caught on the door, and he tore it.” She ran her finger along the wound. “I tried to fix it for him many times, but he would never let me. It was for Leah and Dani, he said. He’s been wearing a ripped coat all these years because of what happened to your wife and son.”

The telephone rang. Gabriel brought the receiver to his ear and listened in silence for a moment. “I’ll be right there, sir,” he said a moment later, then rang off.

“That was the prime minister. He wants to see me right away. I’ll come back when I’m finished.”

“Don’t worry, Gabriel. Yonatan will be here soon.”

“I’ll be back, Gilah.”

His tone was too forceful. He kissed her cheek apologetically and stood. Gilah seized his arm as he moved toward the door. “Take this,” she said, holding out Shamron’s coat. “He would have wanted you to have it.”

“Don’t talk like he’s not going to make it.”

“Just take the jacket and go.” She gave him a bittersweet smile. “You mustn’t keep the prime minister waiting.”

Gabriel went into the corridor and hurried to the elevators. You mustn’t keep the prime minister waiting. It was what Gilah always said to Shamron whenever he left her.

A CAR AND security detail were waiting downstairs in the drive. It took them only five minutes to reach the Prime Minister’s Office at 3 Kaplan Street. The guards took Gabriel into the building through an underground entrance and shepherded him upstairs, into the large unexpectedly plain office on the top floor. The room was in semidarkness; the prime minister was seated at his desk in a pool of light, dwarfed by the towering portrait of the Zionist leader Theodore Herzl that hung on the wall at his back. It had been more than a year since Gabriel had been in his presence. In that time his hair had turned from silver to white, and his brown eyes had taken on the rheumy look of an old man. The meeting of the Security Cabinet had just broken up, and the prime minister was alone except for Amos Sharret, the new director-general of the Office, who was seated tensely in a leather armchair. Gabriel shook his hand for the first time. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” Amos said. “I wish the circumstances were different.”

Gabriel sat down.

“You’re wearing Shamron’s jacket,” the prime minister said.

“Gilah insisted I take it.”

“It becomes you.” He smiled distantly. “You know, you’re even beginning to look a little like him.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“He was very handsome when he was a young man.”

“He was never young, Prime Minister.”

“None of us were. We were all old before our time. We gave up our youth to build this country. Shamron hasn’t taken a day off since 1947. And this is how it ends?” The prime minister shook his head. “No, he’ll live. Trust me, Gabriel, I’ve known him longer than even you.”

“Shamron is eternal. That’s what Gilah says.”

“Maybe not eternal, but he’s not going to be killed by a bunch of terrorists.”

The prime minister scowled at his wristwatch.

“You had something you wanted to discuss with me, sir?”

“Your promotion to chief of Special Ops.”

“I’ve agreed to take the position, sir.”

“I realize that, but perhaps now isn’t the best time for you to be running the division.”

“May I ask why not?”

“Because all your attention needs to be focused on tracking down and punishing the men who did this to Shamron.”

The prime minister lapsed into a sudden silence, as if giving Gabriel an opportunity to mount an objection. Gabriel sat motionless, his gaze downward toward his hands.

“You surprise me,” the prime minister said.

“How so?”

“I was afraid you were going to tell me to find someone else.”

“One doesn’t turn down the prime minister, sir.”

“But surely there’s more to it than that.”

“I was in Rome when the terrorists attacked the Vatican, and I put Shamron in his car tonight. I heard the bomb go off.” He paused. “This network, whoever they are and whatever their goals, needs to be put out of business-and soon.”

“You sound as though you want vengeance.”

Gabriel looked up from his hands. “I do, Prime Minister. Perhaps under those circumstances, I’m the wrong man for the job.”

“Actually, under the circumstances, you are exactly the right man.”

It was Amos who had spoken these words. Gabriel turned and regarded him carefully for the first time. He was a small, broad man, shaped like a square, with a monkish fringe of dark hair and a heavy brow. He still carried the rank of general in the IDF but was dressed now in a pale-gray suit. His candor was a refreshing change. Lev had been a dental probe of a man, forever prodding and searching for weakness and decay. Amos was more like a tack hammer. Gabriel would have to watch his step around him, lest the hammer fall on him.

“Just make certain your anger doesn’t cloud your judgment,” Amos added.

“It never has before,” Gabriel said, holding Amos’s dark gaze.

Amos gave him a humorless smile, as if to say, There’ll be no shooting up French train stations on my watch, no matter what the circumstances. The prime minister leaned forward and braced himself on his elbows.

“Do you believe Saudis are behind this?”

“We have some evidence that points to a Saudi connection to the Brotherhood of Allah,” Gabriel said judiciously, “but we’ll need more intelligence before we start looking for a specific individual.”

“Ahmed bin Shafiq, for example.”

“Yes, Prime Minister.”

“And if it is him?”

“In my opinion, we’re dealing with a network, not a movement. A network bought and paid for with Saudi money. If we lop off the head, the network will die. But it won’t be easy, Prime Minister. We know very little about him. We don’t even know what he really looks like. It will also be complicated politically because of the Americans.”

“It’s not complicated at all. Ahmed bin Shafiq tried to kill my closest adviser. And so Ahmed bin Shafiq must die.”

“And if he’s acting at the behest of Prince Nabil or someone in the Royal Family-a family with close historic and economic ties to our most important ally?”

“We’ll know soon enough.”

The prime minister gave a sideways glance at Amos.

“Adrian Carter of the CIA would like a word with you,” Amos said.

“I was supposed to go to Washington tomorrow to brief him on what we’ve learned about the attack on the Vatican.”

“Carter has requested a change of venue.”

“Where does he want to meet?”

“ London.”

“Why London?”

“It was Carter’s suggestion,” Amos said. “He wanted a convenient neutral location.”

“Since when is a CIA safe house in London neutral ground?” Gabriel looked at the prime minister, then Amos. “I don’t want to leave Jerusalem -not until we know whether Shamron is going to live.”

“Carter says it’s urgent,” Amos said. “He wants to see you tomorrow night.”

“Send someone else then.”

“We can’t,” said the prime minister. “You’re the only one invited.”

11.

HOW’S THE OLD MAN?” asked Adrian Carter. They were walking side by side in Eaton Place, sheltering from a thin night rain beneath Carter’s umbrella. They had met five minutes earlier, as if by chance encounter, in Belgrave Square. Carter had been the one wearing the mackintosh raincoat and holding a copy of The Independent. He was orthodox when it came to the conventions of tradecraft. According to the office wits at Langley, Adrian Carter left chalk marks on the bedpost when he wanted to make love to his wife.

“Still unconscious,” Gabriel replied, “but he made it through the night, and he’s not losing any more blood.”

“Is he going to make it?”

“Last night, I would have said no.”

“And now?”

“I’m more worried about how he’s going to come out of it. If he’s left with brain damage or trapped in a body that won’t obey his orders…” Gabriel’s voice trailed off. “Shamron has only one thing in his life, and that’s his work. If he can’t work, he’s going to be miserable-and so will everyone around him.”

“So what else is new?” Carter glanced toward the doorway of the Georgian house at Number 24. “The flat is in there. Let’s take a walk around the block once, shall we? I like to do things by the book.”

“Haven’t you heard, Adrian? The Soviet Union collapsed a few years back. The KGB are out of business. You and the Russians are friends now.”

“One can never be too careful, Gabriel.”

“Didn’t your security boys set up a surveillance detection route?”

“There are no boys, Gabriel.”

“Is that an Agency safe flat?”

“Not exactly,” Carter said. “It belongs to a friend.”

“A friend of the Agency?”

“A friend of the president’s, actually.”

Carter gave a gentle tug on Gabriel’s coat sleeve and led him down the darkened street. They made a slow tour of Eaton Square, which was silent except for the grumble of the evening traffic on the King’s Road. Carter moved at a ponderous pace, like a man bound for an appointment he would rather not keep. Gabriel was wrestling with a single thought: Why did the deputy director for operations of the Central Intelligence Agency want to talk in a place where his own government wouldn’t be listening?

They made their way back to Eaton Place. This time Carter led Gabriel down the steps to the basement entrance. As Carter inserted the key into the lock, Gabriel quietly lifted the lid of the rubbish bin and saw it was empty. Carter opened the door and led them inside, into the sort of kitchen that real estate brochures routinely describe as “gourmet.” The countertops were granite and agreeably lit by halogen lamps concealed beneath the custom cabinetry. The floor was covered in the Jerusalem limestone so admired by English and American sophisticates who wish to connect to their Mediterranean roots. Carter walked over to the stainless-steel range and filled the electric teakettle with water. He didn’t bother asking Gabriel whether he wanted something stronger. He knew Gabriel drank nothing but the occasional glass of wine and never mixed alcohol with business, except for reasons of cover.

“It’s a maisonette,” Carter said. “The drawing room’s upstairs. Go make yourself comfortable.”

“Are you giving me permission to have a look round, Adrian?”

Carter was now opening and closing the cabinet doors with a befuddled expression on his face. Gabriel walked over to the pantry, found a box of Earl Grey tea, and tossed it to Carter before heading upstairs. The drawing room was comfortably furnished but with an air of anonymity common in a pied-à-terre. It seemed to Gabriel that no one had ever loved or quarreled or grieved here. He picked up a framed photograph from a side table and saw a bluff, prosperous American with three well-fed children and a wife who’d had too much cosmetic surgery. Two more photographs showed the American standing stiffly at the side of the president. Both were signed: To Bill with gratitude.

Carter came upstairs a moment later, a tea tray balanced between his hands. He had a head of thinning curly hair and the sort of broad mustache once worn by American college professors. Little about Carter’s demeanor suggested he was one of the most powerful members of Washington ’s vast intelligence establishment-or that before his ascension to the rarified atmosphere of Langley ’s seventh floor, he had been a field man of the highest reputation. Carter’s natural inclination to listen rather than speak led most to conclude he was a therapist of some sort. When one thought of Adrian Carter, one pictured a man enduring confessions of affairs and inadequacies, or a Dickensian figure hunched over thick books with long Latin words. People tended to underestimate Carter. It was one of his most potent weapons.

“Who’s behind it, Adrian?” Gabriel asked.

“You tell me, Gabriel.” Carter placed the tea tray on the center table and removed his raincoat as if weary from too much travel. “It’s your neighborhood.”

“It’s our neighborhood, but something tells me it’s your problem. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here in London ”-Gabriel looked around the room-“in a borrowed safe flat, with no microphones and no backup from the local station.”

“You don’t miss much, do you? Humor me, Gabriel. Tell me his name.”

“He’s a former Saudi GID agent named Ahmed bin Shafiq.”

“Bravo, Gabriel. Well done.” Carter threw his coat over the back of a chair. “Well done, indeed.”

CARTER LIFTED the lid of the teapot, savored the aroma, and decided it needed to steep a moment longer.

“How did you know?”

“We didn’t know,” Gabriel said. “It was an educated guess, based on a few threads of evidence.”

“Such as?”

Gabriel told Carter everything he knew. The blown operation against Professor Ali Massoudi. The surveillance photos and Zurich bank account information found on Massoudi’s computer. The links between Ibrahim el-Banna and the Saudi agent who called himself Khalil. The reports of a Saudi by the same name trolling the refugee camps of southern Lebanon for recruits. All the while Carter was fussing with the tea. He poured the first cup and handed it to Gabriel plain. His own required more elaborate preparation: a careful measure of milk, then the tea, then a lump of sugar. Interrogators referred to such obvious playing for time as displacement activity. Carter was a pipe smoker. Gabriel feared it would make an appearance soon.

“And what about you?” Gabriel asked. “When did you know it was bin Shafiq?”

Carter snared a second lump with the tongs and briefly debated adding it to the cup before plopping it unceremoniously back into the bowl. “Maybe I knew the day we asked His Majesty to shut down Group 205,” he said. “Or maybe it was the day bin Shafiq seemed to vanish from the face of the earth. You see, Gabriel, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this business, it’s that for every action we take there’s bound to be a negative reaction. We drove the Russian bear out of Afghanistan and created a Hydra in the process. We smashed the corporate headquarters of al-Qaeda and now the branch offices are running their own affairs. We shut down bin Shafiq’s shop inside the GID, and now it seems bin Shafiq has gone into private practice.”

“Why?”

“You’re asking what drove him over the edge?” Carter shrugged and stirred his tea mournfully. “It didn’t take much. Ahmed bin Shafiq is a true Wahhabi believer.”

“Grandson of an Ikhwan warrior,” said Gabriel, which earned him an admiring nod from Carter.

“One may argue about why the Saudis support terrorism,” Carter said. “One may have a learned debate as to whether they truly support the goals of the murderers they arm and finance or whether they are engaged in a clever and cynical policy to control the environment around them and thus ensure their own survival. One may not have such a debate about the man the GID chose to carry out that policy. Ahmed bin Shafiq is a believer. Ahmed bin Shafiq hates the United States, the West, and Christianity, and he would be much happier if your country no longer existed. It was why we insisted that His Majesty shut down his little shop of terror.”

“So when you forced the king to shut down Group 205, bin Shafiq snapped? He decided to use all the contacts he’d made over the years and launch a wave of terrorism of his own? Surely there’s more to it than that, Adrian.”

“I’m afraid we may have given him a little shove,” Carter said. “We invaded Iraq against the wishes of the Kingdom and most of its inhabitants. We’ve captured members of al-Qaeda and locked them away in secret prisons where they belong. This doesn’t look good to the Muslim world, and it adds fuel to the fires of jihad. You’ve had a hand in it as well. The Saudis see your Separation Fence for what it is, a unilateral final border, and they’re not pleased with it.”

“This might come as a shock to you, Adrian, but we don’t care what the Saudis think of our fence. If they hadn’t poured millions into the coffers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, we wouldn’t need one.”

“Back to my original point,” said Carter, pausing for a moment to sip his tea. “The Islamic world is seething with anger, and Ahmed bin Shafiq, true Wahhabi believer, has stepped forward to raise the flag of jihad against the infidel. He’s used his contacts from his Group 205 days to construct a new network. He’s doing what bin Laden is no longer capable of doing, which is plan and carry out large-scale terror spectaculars like the attack on the Vatican. His network is small, extremely professional, and, as he’s proven conclusively, very lethal.”

“And it’s bought and paid for with Saudi money.”

“Most definitely,” said Carter.

“How high does it go, Adrian?”

“Very high,” said Carter. “Damned near to the top.”

“Where’s he operating? Who’s footing the bill? Where’s the money coming from?”

“AAB Holdings of Riyadh, Geneva, and points in between,” said Carter unequivocally. “Ahmed bin Shafiq is one of AAB’s most successful investments. Can I freshen up your tea?”

THERE WAS ANOTHER break in the proceedings, this time while Carter tried to divine how to light the gas fire. He stood mystified before the grate for a moment, then, with a glance toward Gabriel, appealed for assistance. Gabriel found the key on the mantel, used it to start the flow of gas, then ignited it with an ornamental match.

“How many years do you give them, Gabriel? How long before the House of Saud collapses and the Islamic Republic of Arabia rises in its place? Five years? Ten? Or is it more like twenty? We’ve never been really good about making predictions like that. We thought the Soviet empire would last forever.”

“And we thought Hamas could never win an election.”

Carter chuckled mirthlessly. “Our best minds give them seven years at the most. His Majesty is prepared to spend that seven years playing the game by the old rules: provide cheap oil and pseudofriendship to us while at the same time paying lip service to the forces of Islam and bribing them not to attack him. And when it’s over, he’ll flee to his string of palaces along the Riviera and live out the rest of his days in a luxury that is too grotesque even to contemplate, hopefully with his head still attached to his body.”

Carter lifted his palms toward the fire. “It’s not hot,” he said.

“The logs are made of ceramic. Give it a minute to heat up.”

Carter appeared incredulous. Gabriel drifted over to the window and peered into the street as a car rolled slowly past and vanished around the next corner. Carter gave up on the fire and returned to his seat.

“And then there are those in the Royal Family who are willing to play the game by a different set of rules. We’ll call them the True Believers. They think the only way the al-Saud can survive is to renew the covenant they formed with Muhammad Abdul Wahhab two centuries ago in the Najd. But this new covenant has to take into account new realities. The monster that the al-Saud created two hundred years ago now holds all the cards, and the True Believers are prepared to give the monster what it wants. Infidel blood. Jihad without end. Some of these True Believers want to go further. The expulsion of all infidels from the Peninsula. An embargo on oil sales to America and any other country that does business with yours. They believe oil should no longer be treated as simply an unending pool of liquid money that flows from the terminals of Ras Tanura into the Zurich bank accounts of the al-Saud. They want to use it as a weapon-a weapon that could be used to cripple the American economy and make the Wahhabis masters of the planet, just as Allah intended when he placed that sea of oil beneath the sands of the al-Hassa. And some of these True Believers, such as the chairman and CEO of AAB Holdings of Riyadh, Geneva, and points in between, are actually willing to shed a little infidel blood themselves.”

“You’re referring to Abdul Aziz al-Bakari?”

“I am indeed,” said Carter. “Know much about him?”

“At last accounting, he was something like the fifteenth richest man in the world, with a personal fortune in the vicinity of ten billion dollars.”

“Give or take a billion or two.”

“He’s the president, chairman, and lord high emperor of AAB Holdings-A for Abdul, A for Aziz, and B for al-Bakari. AAB owns banks and investment houses. AAB does shipping and steel. AAB is cutting down the forests of the Amazon and strip-mining the Andes of Peru and Bolivia. AAB has a Belgian chemical company and a Dutch pharmaceutical. AAB’s real estate and development division is one of the world’s largest. Abdul Aziz al-Bakari owns more hotels than anyone else in the world.”

Carter picked up where Gabriel left off. “He has a palace in Riyadh he rarely visits and two former wives there he never sees. He owns a mansion on the Île de la Cité in Paris, a princely estate in the English countryside, a townhouse in Mayfair, oceanfront villas in Saint-Tropez, Marbella, and Maui, ski chalets in Zermatt and Aspen, a Park Avenue apartment recently appraised at forty million dollars, and a sprawling compound overlooking the Potomac that I pass every day on the way to work.”

Carter seemed to find the mansion on the Potomac the most grievous of al-Bakari’s sins. Carter’s father had been an Episcopal minister from New Hampshire, and beneath his placid exterior beat the heart of a Puritan.

“Al-Bakari and his entourage travel the world in a gold-plated 747,” he continued. “Twice a year, once in February and again in August, AAB’s operations go seaborne when al-Bakari and his entourage set up shop aboard Alexandra, his three-hundred-foot yacht. Have I forgotten anything?”

“His friends call him Zizi,” Gabriel replied. “He has one of the world’s largest private collections of French Impressionist art, and we’ve been telling you for years that he’s up to his eyeballs in funding terrorism, especially against us.”

“I didn’t realize that.”

“Realize what?”

“That Zizi’s a collector.”

“A very aggressive one, actually.”

“Ever had the pleasure of meeting him?”

“I’m afraid Zizi and I are at different ends of the trade.” Gabriel frowned. “So what’s the connection between Zizi al-Bakari and Ahmed bin Shafiq?”

Carter blew thoughtfully on his tea, a sign that he was not yet ready to answer Gabriel’s question.

“An interesting fellow, al-Bakari. Did you know that his father was Ibn Saud’s personal banker? As you might expect, Papa al-Bakari did quite well-well enough to give his son ten million dollars to start his own company. That was nothing compared to the seed money he got from the al-Saud when things started to take off. A hundred million, if the rumor mill is to be believed. AAB is still a favorite dumping ground for Saudi Royal cash, which is one of the reasons why Zizi is so interested in making sure the House of Saud survives.”

Gabriel’s heart sank as Carter reached for the tobacco pouch.

“He’s among the world’s richest men,” Carter said, “and one of the world’s most charitable. He’s built mosques and Islamic centers all across Europe. He’s financed development projects in the Nile Delta and famine relief in Sudan. He’s given millions to the Palestinian refugees and millions more to development projects in the West Bank and Gaza.”

“And more than thirty million dollars to that Saudi telethon to raise money for suicide bombers,” Gabriel added. “Zizi was the largest single donor. Now answer my question, Adrian.”

“Which question is that?”

“What’s the connection between Zizi and bin Shafiq?”

“You’re a quick study, Gabriel. You tell me.”

“Obviously Zizi is bankrolling bin Shafiq’s network.”

“Obviously,” said Carter in agreement.

“But bin Shafiq is a Saudi. He can get money anywhere. Zizi has something more valuable than money. Zizi has a global infrastructure through which bin Shafiq can move men and matériel. And Zizi has a perfect place for a mastermind like bin Shafiq to hide.”

“AAB Holdings of Riyadh, Geneva, and points in between.”

A SILENCE FELL between them like a curtain while Carter drowsily loaded his pipe. Gabriel was still standing in the window, peering into the street. He was tempted to remain there, for Carter’s tobacco, when ignited, smelled like a combination of burning hay and wet dog. He knew, however, that the conversation had passed the point where it might be conducted in front of an insecure window. Reluctantly he lowered himself into the chair opposite Carter and they gazed at each other in silence, Carter puffing contemplatively and Gabriel wearily waving the smoke from his eyes.

“How sure are you?”

“Very.”

“How do you know?”

“Sources and methods,” said Carter mechanically. “Sources and methods.”

“How do you know, Adrian?”

“Because we listen to him,” Carter said. “The National Security Agency is a wonderful thing. We also have sources inside the moderate wing of the House of Saud and the GID who are willing to tell us things. Ahmed bin Shafiq is living largely in the West under an assumed identity. He is buried somewhere within Zizi’s financial empire and the two of them confer on a regular basis. Of this, we are certain.”

There was a manila file folder on the center table, next to Carter’s tea tray. Inside was a single photograph, which Carter handed to Gabriel. It showed a man in a woolen overcoat and trilby, standing at a wrought-iron gate. The face was in left profile, and the features were somewhat gauzy. Judging from the compression of the image, the photograph had been snapped from some distance.

“Is this him?”

“We think so,” Carter replied.

“Where was it taken?”

“Outside Zizi’s house on the ˆ

Ile de la Cité in Paris. The cameraman was on the other side of the Seine, on the Quai de l’Hôtel de Ville, which accounts for a certain lack of clarity of the image.”

“How long ago?”

“Six months.”

Carter rose slowly to his feet and wandered over to the fireplace. He was about to rap his pipe against the grate when Gabriel reminded him that it was a fake. He sat down again and emptied the pipe into a large cut-glass ashtray.

“How many Americans were killed at the Vatican?” Gabriel asked.

“Twenty-eight, including a Curial bishop.”

“How much money has Zizi al-Bakari given to the terrorists over the years?”

“Hundreds of millions.”

“Go after him,” Gabriel said. “Make a case against him and put him on trial.”

“Against Zizi al-Bakari?”

“Section 18 U.S.C. 2339B-have you ever heard of it, Adrian?”

“You’re quoting American law to me now?”

“It’s a violation of American law to give money to designated terrorist groups, regardless of whether the money was used for specific attacks. You could have probably prosecuted dozens of wealthy Saudis for giving material support to your enemies, including Zizi al-Bakari.”

“You disappoint me, Gabriel. I always thought of you as a fairly reasonable fellow-a bit too concerned with questions of right and wrong at times, but reasonable. We can’t go after Zizi al-Bakari.”

“Why?”

“Money,” said Carter, then added, “And oil, of course.”

“Of course.”

Carter toyed with his lighter. “The Saudi Royal Family has a lot of friends in Washington -the kind of friends only money can buy. Zizi has friends as well. He’s endowed academic chairs and filled them with associates and supporters. He’s underwritten the creation of Arab studies departments at a half dozen major American universities. He almost single-handedly financed a major renovation of the Kennedy Center. He gives to the pet charitable projects of influential senators and invests in the business ventures of their friends and relatives. He owns a chunk of one of our most prominent banks and bits and pieces of several other prominent American companies. He’s also served as a middleman on countless Saudi-American business deals. Is the picture becoming clear to you now?”

It was, but Gabriel wanted to hear more.

“If Zizi’s battalion of Washington lawyers even suspected he was the target of a criminal probe, Zizi would call His Majesty, and His Majesty would call Ambassador Bashir, and Ambassador Bashir would pop over to the White House for a little chat with the president. He would remind the president that a twist or two on the oil spigots would send the price of gasoline over five dollars a gallon. He might even point out that a price spike of that magnitude would surely hurt people in the heartland, who tend to drive long distances, and who also tend to vote for the president’s party.”

“So Zizi gets away with murder-literally.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Ask not about things which, if made plain to you, may cause you trouble.”

“You know your Quran,” Carter said.

“One of the reasons you can’t operate against Zizi or prosecute him is because you’re afraid of what you might find: business entanglements with prominent Americans, shady dealings with Washington insiders. Imagine the reaction of the American people if they learned that a Saudi billionaire with business ties to prominent figures in Washington is actually financing the activities of your enemies. The relationship barely survived the first 9/11. I doubt it would survive a second.”

“No, it wouldn’t-at least not in its present form. There’s already a movement on Capitol Hill to isolate Saudi Arabia because of its support of the global Islamic extremism. A scandal involving Zizi al-Bakari would only add fuel to the fire. Several foreign policy lights in Congress are considering legislation that would put the screws to Saudi Arabia. They have that luxury. They won’t take the fall if the American economy goes into the toilet because of higher fuel prices. The president will.”

“So what do you want from us, Adrian? What do you wish to say to me, in this room where no one is listening?”

“The president of the United States would like a favor,” Carter said, gazing into the fire. “The sort of favor you happen to be very good at. He’d like you to run an agent into the House of Zizi. He’d like you to find out who’s coming and going. And if Ahmed bin Shafiq happens to walk by, he’d like you to take a shot at him. It will be your operation, but we’ll give you whatever support you need. We’ll be over the horizon-far enough over to make certain that we can maintain plausible deniability in Riyadh.”

“You disappoint me, Adrian. I always thought of you as a reasonable fellow.”

“What have I done now?”

“I thought you were going to ask me to kill Zizi al-Bakari and be done with it.”

“Kill Zizi?” Carter shook his head. “Zizi is untouchable. Zizi is radioactive.”

GABRIEL RETURNED TO his outpost by the window and peered into the street as a pair of lovers hurried along the pavement through the swirling rain. “We’re not contract killers,” he said. “We can’t be hired to do dirty jobs you can’t do yourself. You want bin Shafiq dead but you’re not willing to risk the fallout. You’re setting us up to take the fall.”

“I could remind you of a few salient facts,” said Carter. “I could remind you that this president has remained steadfastly at your side while the rest of the world has treated you as the Jew among nations. I could remind you that he allowed you to build the Separation Fence while the rest of the world accused you of behaving like South Africans. I could remind you that he allowed you to lock Arafat away in the Mukata while the rest of the world accused you of behaving like Nazi storm troopers. I could remind you of the many other times this president has carried your dirty water, but I won’t, because that would be impolitic. It would also suggest that this request is a quid pro quo of some sort, which it most certainly is not.”

“Then what is it?”

“A recognition,” said Carter. “A recognition that we Americans don’t have the stomach or the backbone to do the things we have to do to win this fight. Our fingers have been burned. Our image has taken a terrible beating. We’ve taken a look in the mirror, and we don’t like what we see. Our politicians would like us to make reservations on the first flight out of Iraq so they can start spending money on the sorts of things that win votes. Our people want to go back to their fat, happy lives. They want to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that there really isn’t an organized force in their world that is actively plotting and planning their destruction. We’ve paid a terrible price for climbing into the gutter with the terrorists and fighting them on their level, but I’m sure you always knew we would. No one’s paid a higher price than you.”

“So you want us to do it for you. I suppose that’s what they call outsourcing. How American of you, Adrian.”

“Under the current circumstances, the United States cannot target a former high-ranking Saudi intelligence officer for assassination because to do so would shatter our relationship with Riyadh. Nor can we arrest and prosecute Zizi al-Bakari, for the reasons I’ve given you.”

“So you want the problem to go away?”

“Precisely.”

“Sweep it under the rug? Postpone the reckoning until a more convenient date?”

“In so many words.”

“You think this is the way to defeat your Hydra? Chop off a head and hope for the best? You have to burn out the roots, the way Hercules did. You have to attack the beast with arrows dipped in gall.”

“You want to take on the House of Saud?”

“Not just the House of Saud,” Gabriel said. “The Wahhabi fanatics with whom they made a covenant of blood two hundred years ago on the barren plateau of Najd. They’re your real enemy, Adrian. They’re the ones who created Hydra in the first place.”

“A wise prince chooses the time and place of the battle, and this is not the time to tear down the House of Saud.”

Gabriel lapsed into a moody silence. Carter was peering into the bowl of his pipe and making minor adjustments in the disposition of his tobacco, like a don waiting for an answer from a dull student.

“Do I need to remind you that they targeted Shamron?”

Gabriel gave Carter a dark look that said he most certainly did not.

“Then why the hesitation? I would have thought you’d be straining at the leash to get bin Shafiq after what he did to the old man.”

“I want him more than anyone, Adrian, but I never strain at the leash. This is a dangerous operation-too dangerous for you even to attempt. If something goes wrong, or if we’re caught in the act, it will end badly-for all three of us.”

“Three?”

“You, me, and the president.”

“So obey Shamron’s Eleventh Commandment, and you’ll be fine. Thou shalt not get caught.”

“Bin Shafiq is a ghost. We don’t even have a picture.”

“That’s not entirely true.” Carter reached into his manila file folder again and came out with another photograph, which he dropped onto the coffee table for Gabriel to see. It showed a man with narrow black eyes, his face partially concealed by a kaffiyeh. “That’s bin Shafiq, almost twenty years ago, in Afghanistan. He was our friend then. We were on the same side. We supplied the weapons. Bin Shafiq and his masters in Riyadh supplied the money.”

“And the Wahhabi ideology that helped give birth to the Taliban,” Gabriel said.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” said Carter contritely. “But we have something more valuable than a twenty-year-old photograph. We have his voice.”

Carter picked up a small black remote, aimed it at a Bose Wave radio, and pressed the Play button. A moment later two men began to converse in English: one with the accent of an American, the other of an Arab.

“I take it the Saudi is bin Shafiq?”

Carter nodded.

“When was it recorded?”

“In 1988,” Carter said. “In a safe house in Peshawar.”

“Who’s the American?” Gabriel asked, though he knew the answer already. Carter hit the Stop button and looked into the fire. “Me,” he said distantly. “The American at the CIA safe house in Peshawar was me.”

“Would you recognize bin Shafiq if you saw him again?”

“I might, but our sources tell us he had several rounds of plastic surgery before going operational. I would recognize the scar on his right forearm, though. He got hit by a piece of shrapnel during a trip to Afghanistan in 1985. The scar runs from just above the wrist to just below the elbow. No plastic surgeon could have done anything about that.”

“Inside the arm or outside?”

“Inside,” Carter said. “The injury left him with a bit of a withered hand. He had several operations to try to repair it, but nothing ever worked. He tends to keep it in his pocket. He doesn’t like to shake hands. He’s a proud Bedouin, bin Shafiq. He doesn’t respect physical infirmity.”

“I don’t suppose your sources in Riyadh can tell us where he’s hiding within Zizi’s empire?”

“Unfortunately they can’t. But we know he’s there. Put an agent into the House of Zizi, and eventually bin Shafiq will walk through the back door.”

“Put an agent close to Zizi al-Bakari? How do you propose we do that, Adrian? Zizi has more security than most heads of state.”

“I wouldn’t dream of interfering in matters operational,” Carter said. “But rest assured that we’re willing to be patient and that we intend to see it through to the end.”

“Patience and follow-through aren’t typical American virtues. You like to make a mess and move on to the next problem.”

There was another long silence, broken this time by the clatter of Carter’s pipe against the rim of the ashtray.

“What do you want, Gabriel?”

“Guarantees.”

“There are no guarantees in our business. You know that.”

“I want everything you have on bin Shafiq and al-Bakari.”

“Within reason,” Carter said. “I’m not going to give you a truckload of dirt on prominent figures in Washington.”

“I want protection,” Gabriel said. “When this thing goes down, we’ll be the number-one suspect. We always are, even when we’re not responsible. We’re going to need your help weathering the storm.”

“I can speak only for the DO,” said Carter. “And I can assure you that we’ll be there for you.”

“We take out bin Shafiq at the time and place of our choosing, with no interference from Langley.”

“The president would be grateful if you could avoid doing it on American soil.”

“There are no guarantees in our business, Adrian.”

“Touché.”

“You might find this hard to believe, but I can’t make this decision on my own. I need to speak to Amos and the prime minister.”

“Amos and the prime minister will do what you tell them.”

“Within reason.”

“So what are you going to tell them?”

“That the American president needs a favor,” Gabriel said. “And I want to help him.”

12.

THE PRIME MINISTER GRANTED Gabriel his operational charter at two-thirty the following afternoon. Gabriel headed straight for Armageddon. He reckoned it was a fine place to start.

The weather seemed perversely glorious for such an occasion: cool temperatures, a pale blue sky, a soft Judean breeze that plucked at his shirt-sleeves as he sped along the Jaffa Road. He switched on the radio. The mournful music that had saturated the airwaves in the hours after the attempt on Shamron’s life was now gone. A news bulletin came suddenly on the air. The prime minister had promised to do everything in his power to track down and punish those responsible for the attempt on Shamron’s life. He made no mention of the fact that he already knew who was responsible, or that he had granted Gabriel the authority to kill him.

Gabriel plunged down the Bab al-Wad toward the sea, weaving impatiently through the slower traffic, then raced the setting sun northward along the Coastal Plain. There was a security alert near Hadera-according to the radio, a suspected suicide bomber had managed to slip through a crossing in the Separation Fence near Tulkarm-and Gabriel was forced to wait by the side of the road for twenty minutes before heading into the Valley of Jezreel. Five miles from Afula a rounded hillock appeared on his left. In Hebrew it was known as Tel Megiddo, or the Mound of Megiddo. The rest of the world knew it as Armageddon, forecast in the Book of Revelation to be the site of the final earthly confrontation between the forces of good and evil. The battle had not yet begun, and the parking lot was empty except for a trio of dusty pickup trucks, a sign that the archaeological team was still at work.

Gabriel climbed out of his car and headed up the steep footpath to the summit. Tel Megiddo had been under periodic archaeological excavation for more than a century, and the top of the hill was cut by a maze of long, narrow trenches. Evidence of more than twenty cities had been discovered beneath the soil atop the tel, including one believed to have been built by King Solomon.

He stopped at the edge of a trench and peered down. Crouched on all fours was a small figure in a tan bush jacket, picking at the soil with a hand trowel. Gabriel thought of the last time he had stood over a man in an excavation pit and felt as though a lump of ice had been placed suddenly at the back of his neck. The archaeologist looked up and regarded him with a pair of clever brown eyes, then looked down again and resumed his work. “I’ve been waiting for you,” said Eli Lavon. “What took you so long?”

Gabriel sat in the dirt at the edge of the pit and watched Lavon work. They had known each other since the Black September operation. Eli Lavon had been an ayin, a tracker. His job was to follow the terrorists and learn their habits. In many respects his assignment had been more dangerous even than Gabriel’s, for Lavon had sometimes been exposed to the terrorists for days and weeks on end with no backup. After the unit disbanded, he’d settled in Vienna and opened a small investigative bureau called Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Operating on a shoestring budget, he had managed to track down millions of dollars’ worth of looted Jewish assets and had played a significant role in prying a multibillion-dollar settlement from the banks of Switzerland. These days Lavon was working the dig at Megiddo and teaching archaeology part-time at Hebrew University.

“What have you got there, Eli?”

“A piece of pottery, I suspect.” A gust of wind took his wispy, unkempt hair and blew it across his forehead. “What about you?”

“A Saudi billionaire who’s trying to destroy the civilized world.”

“Haven’t they already done that?”

Gabriel smiled. “I need you, Eli. You know how to read balance sheets. You know how to follow the trail of money without anyone else knowing it.”

“Who’s the Saudi?”

“The chairman and CEO of Jihad Incorporated.”

“Does the chairman have a name?”

“Abdul Aziz al-Bakari.”

“Zizi al-Bakari?”

“One and the same.”

“I suppose this has something to do with Shamron?”

“And the Vatican.”

“What’s Zizi’s connection?”

Gabriel told him.

“I guess I don’t need to ask what you intend to do with bin Shafiq,” Lavon said. “Zizi’s business empire is enormous. Bin Shafiq could be operating from anywhere in the world. How are we going to find him?”

“We’re going to put an agent into Zizi’s inner circle and wait for bin Shafiq to walk into it.”

“An agent in Zizi’s camp?” Lavon shook his head. “Can’t be done.”

“Yes, it can.”

“How?”

“I’m going to find something Zizi wants,” Gabriel said. “And then I’m going to give it to him.”

“I’m listening.”

Gabriel sat down at the edge of the excavation trench with his legs dangling over the side and explained how he planned to penetrate Jihad Incorporated. From the bottom of the trench came sound of Lavon’s work-pick, pick, brush, brush, blow…

“Who’s the agent?” he asked when Gabriel had finished.

“I don’t have one yet.”

Lavon was silent for a moment-pick, pick, brush, brush, blow…

“What do you want from me?”

“Turn Zizi al-Bakari and AAB Holdings inside out. I want a complete breakdown of every company he owns or controls. Profiles of all his top executives and the members of his personal entourage. I want to know how each person got there and how they’ve stayed. I want to know more about Zizi than Zizi knows about himself.”

“And what happens when we go operational?”

“You’ll go, too.”

“I’m too old and tired for any rough stuff.”

“You’re the greatest surveillance artist in the history of the Office, Eli. I can’t do this without you.”

Lavon sat up and brushed his hands on his trousers. “Run an agent into Zizi al-Bakari’s inner circle? Madness.” He tossed Gabriel a hand trowel. “Get down here and help me. We’re losing the light.”

Gabriel climbed down into the pit and knelt beside his old friend. Together they scratched at the ancient soil, until night fell like a curtain over the valley.

IT WAS AFTER nine o’clock by the time they arrived at King Saul Boulevard. Lavon was long retired from the Office but still gave the odd lecture at the Academy and still had credentials to enter the building whenever he pleased. Gabriel cleared him into the file rooms of the Research division, then headed down to a gloomy corridor two levels belowground. At the end of the hall was Room 456C. Affixed to the door was a paper sign, written in Gabriel’s own stylish Hebrew hand: TEMPORARY COMMITTEE FOR THE STUDY OF TERROR THREATS IN WESTERN EUROPE. He decided to leave it for now.

He opened the combination lock, switched on the lights, and went inside. The room seemed frozen in time. They’d had several names for it: the Pod, the Quad, the Tank. Yaakov, a pockmarked tough from the Arab Affairs Department of Shabak, had christened it the Hellhole. Yossi from Research had called it the Village of the Damned, but then Yossi had read classics at Oxford and always brought an air of erudition to his work, even when the subjects weren’t worthy of it.

Gabriel paused at the trestle table that Dina and Rimona had shared. Their constant squabbling over territory had driven him to near madness. The separation line he had drawn down the center of the table was still there, along with the warning Rimona had written on her side of the border: Cross at your own risk. Rimona was a captain in the IDF and worked for Aman, military intelligence. She was also Gilah Shamron’s niece. She believed in defensible borders and had responded with retaliatory raids each time Dina had strayed over the line. At Dina’s place now was the short note she had left there on the final day of the operation: May we never have to return here again. How naïve, thought Gabriel. Dina, of all people, should have known better.

He continued his slow tour of the room. In the corner stood the same pile of outmoded computer equipment that no one had ever bothered to remove. Before becoming the headquarters of Group Khaled, Room 456C had been nothing more than a dumping ground for old furniture and obsolete electronics, often used by the members of the night staff as a spot for romantic trysts. Gabriel’s chalkboard was still there, too. He could scarcely decipher the last words he had written. He gazed up at the walls, which were covered with photographs of young Palestinian men. One photograph seized his attention, a boy with a beret on his head and a kaffiyeh draped over his shoulders, seated on the lap of Yasir Arafat: Khaled al-Khalifa at the funeral of his father, Sabri. Gabriel had killed Sabri, and he had killed Khaled as well.

He cleared the walls of the old photographs and put two new ones in their place. One showed a man in a kaffiyeh in the mountains of Afghanistan. The other showed the same man in a cashmere overcoat and trilby hat standing before a billionaire’s home in Paris.

Group Khaled was now Group bin Shafiq.

FOR THE FIRST forty-eight hours Gabriel and Lavon worked alone. On the third day they were joined by Yossi, a tall balding man with the bearing of an English intellectual. Rimona came on the fourth day, as did Yaakov, who arrived from Shabak headquarters carrying a box filled with material on the terrorists who had attacked Shamron’s car. Dina was the last to arrive. Small and dark-haired, she had been standing in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street on October 19, 1994, when a Hamas suicide bomber had turned the Number 5 bus into a coffin for twenty-one people. Her mother and two of her sisters were among those killed; Dina had been seriously wounded and now walked with a slight limp. She had dealt with the loss by becoming an expert in terrorism. Indeed, Dina Sarid could recite the time, place, and butcher’s bill of every act of terror ever committed against the State of Israel. She had once told Gabriel she knew more about the terrorists than they knew about themselves. Gabriel had believed her.

They divided into two areas of responsibility. Ahmed bin Shafiq and the Brotherhood of Allah became the province of Dina, Yaakov, and Rimona, while Yossi joined Lavon’s excavation of AAB Holdings. Gabriel, at least for the moment, worked largely alone, for he had given himself the unenviable task of attempting to identify every painting ever acquired or sold by Zizi al-Bakari.

As the days wore on, the walls of Room 456C began to reflect the operation’s unique nature. Upon one wall slowly appeared the murky outlines of a lethal new terrorist network led by a man who was largely a ghost. To the best of their ability they retraced bin Shafiq’s long journey through the bloodstream of Islamic extremism. Wherever there had been trouble, it seemed, there had been bin Shafiq, handing out Saudi oil money and Wahhabi propaganda by the fistful: Afghanistan, Lebanon, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Pakistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, and, of course, the Palestinian Authority. They were not without significant leads, however, because in carrying out two major attacks, bin Shafiq and the Brotherhood had surrendered more than a dozen names that could be investigated for connections and associations. And then there was Ibrahim el-Banna, the Egyptian imam of death, and Professor Ali Massoudi, the recruiter and talent spotter.

On the opposite wall there appeared another network: AAB Holdings. Using open sources and some that were not so open, Lavon painstakingly sifted through the layers of Zizi’s financial empire and assembled the disparate pieces like bits of an ancient artifact. At the top of the structure was AAB itself. Beneath it was an intricate financial web of subholding companies and corporate shells that allowed Zizi to extend his influence to nearly every corner of the globe under conditions of near-perfect corporate secrecy. With most of his companies registered in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, Lavon likened Zizi to a financial stealth fighter, capable of striking at will while avoiding detection by enemy radar. Despite the opaque nature of Zizi’s empire, Lavon came to the conclusion the numbers didn’t add up. “Zizi couldn’t possibly have earned enough from his early investments to justify the size of his later acquisitions,” he explained to Gabriel. “AAB Holdings is a front for the House of Saud.” As for trying to find Ahmed bin Shafiq anywhere within Zizi’s financial octopus, Lavon likened it to finding a needle in the Arabian Desert. “Not impossible,” he said, “but you’re likely to die of thirst trying.”

Yossi saw to Zizi’s personnel. He focused on the relatively small team that worked inside Zizi’s Geneva headquarters, along with companies wholly owned or controlled by AAB. Most of his time, though, was devoted to Zizi’s large personal entourage. Their photographs soon covered the wall above Yossi’s workspace and stood in stark contrast to those of bin Shafiq’s terror network. New photographs arrived each day as Yossi monitored Zizi’s frenetic movements around the globe. Zizi arriving for a meeting in London. Zizi consulting with German automakers in Stuttgart. Zizi enjoying the view of the Red Sea from his new hotel in Sharm el-Sheik. Zizi conferring with the king of Jordan about a possible construction deal. Zizi opening a desalination plant in Yemen. Zizi collecting a humanitarian award from an Islamic group in Montreal whose Web site, Yossi pointed out, contained an open call for the destruction of the State of Israel.

As for Gabriel’s corner of the room, it was a sanctuary from the realms of terror and finance. His wall was covered not with the faces of terrorists or business executives but with dozens of photographs of French Impressionist prints. And while Lavon and Yossi spent their days digging through dreary ledger sheets and computer printouts, Gabriel could often be seen leafing through old catalogs, Impressionist monographs, and press clippings describing Zizi’s exploits on the world art scene.

By the end of the tenth day, Gabriel had decided how he was going to slip an agent into Jihad Incorporated. He walked over to Yossi’s collage of photographs and gazed at a single image. It showed a gaunt, gray-haired Englishman, seated next to Zizi six months earlier at the Impressionist and Modern Art auction at Christie’s in New York. Gabriel removed the photograph and held it up for the others to see. “This man,” he said. “He has to go.” Then he called Adrian Carter on a private secure number at Langley and told him how he planned to penetrate the House of Zizi. “All you need now is a painting and a girl,” Carter said. “You find the painting. I’ll get you the girl.”

GABRIEL LEFT King Saul Boulevard a little earlier than usual and drove to Ein Kerem. There were still security guards posted outside the intensive care unit of the Hadassah Medical Center, but Shamron was alone when Gabriel entered his room. “The prodigal son has decided to pay me a visit,” he said bitterly. “It’s a good thing we’re a desert people. Otherwise you would put me on an ice floe and cast me out to sea.”

Gabriel sat down next to the bed. “I’ve been here at least a half dozen times.”

“When?”

“Late at night when you’re asleep.”

“You hover over me? Like Gilah and the doctors? Why can’t you come during the day like a normal person?”

“I’ve been busy.”

“The prime minister isn’t too busy to come see me at a reasonable hour.” Shamron, his injured neck immobilized by a heavy plastic brace, gave Gabriel a vindictive sideways glance. “He told me he’s allowing Amos to find his own man for Special Ops so that you can run this fool’s errand for Adrian Carter and the Americans.”

“I take it you disapprove.”

“Vehemently.” Shamron closed his eyes for a long moment-long enough for Gabriel to cast a nervous glance at the bank of monitors next to his bed. “Blue and white,” he said finally. “We do things for ourselves. We don’t ask others for help, and we don’t help others with problems of their own making. And we certainly don’t volunteer to serve as a patsy for Adrian Carter.”

“You’re in this hospital bed instead of at your desk in the Prime Minister’s Office. That makes Zizi al-Bakari and Ahmed bin Shafiq my problem, too. Besides, the world has changed, Ari. We need to work together to survive. The old rules don’t apply.”

Shamron lifted his heavily veined hand and pointed toward the plastic water cup on his bedside table. Gabriel held it to Shamron’s lips while he sipped water through the straw.

“At whose request are you undertaking this errand?” Shamron asked. “Is it Adrian Carter, or higher up the chain of command?” Greeted by Gabriel’s silence, Shamron angrily pushed the water cup away. “Is it your intention to treat me as some sort of invalid? I’m still the prime minister’s special adviser on all matters dealing with security and intelligence. I’m still the…” His voice trailed off with a sudden fatigue.

“You’re still the memuneh,” Gabriel said, finishing the sentence for him. In Hebrew, memuneh meant the one in charge. For many years the title had been reserved for Shamron.

“You’re not going after some kid from Nablus, Gabriel. You have Ahmed bin Shafiq and Zizi al-Bakari in your sights. If something goes wrong, the world will fall on you from a very great height. And your friend Adrian Carter won’t be there to help scrape you up. You might want to consider taking me into your confidence. I’ve done this sort of thing a time or two.”

Gabriel poked his head into the corridor and asked the protective agents posted there to make certain any audio or visual surveillance of Shamron was switched off. Then he sat down again in the bedside chair and, with his mouth close to Shamron’s ear, told him everything. Shamron’s gaze, for a moment at least, seemed a little more focused. When he posed his first question it was almost possible for Gabriel to conjure an image of the iron bar of a man who had walked into his life one September afternoon in 1972.

“You’ve made up your mind about using a woman?”

Gabriel nodded.

“You’re going to need someone whose story will withstand the scrutiny of Zizi’s well-paid security staff. You can’t use one of our girls, and you can’t use a non-Israeli Jew. If Zizi even suspects he’s looking at a Jewish girl, he’ll steer clear of her. You need a gentile.”

“What I need,” said Gabriel, “is an American girl.”

“Where are you going to get one?”

Gabriel’s one-word answer caused Shamron to frown. “I don’t like the idea of us being responsible for one of their agents. What if something goes wrong?”

“What could go wrong?”

“Everything,” Shamron said. “You know that better than anyone.”

Shamron seemed suddenly weary. Gabriel lowered the dimmer on the bedside lamp.

“What are you going to do?” Shamron asked. “Read me a bedtime story?”

“I’m going to sit with you until you fall asleep.”

“Gilah can do that. Go home and get some rest. You’re going to need it.”

“I’ll stay for a while.”

“Go home,” Shamron insisted. “There’s someone waiting there who’s anxious to see you.”

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, when Gabriel turned into Narkiss Street, he saw lights burning in his apartment. He parked his Skoda around the corner and stole quietly up the darkened walkway into the building. As he slipped inside the apartment the air was heavy with the scent of vanilla. Chiara was seated cross-legged atop his examination table in the harsh light of his halogen work lamps. She scrutinized Gabriel as he came inside, then turned her gaze once more to what had once been a meticulously decorated living room.

“I like what you’ve done with the place, Gabriel. Please tell me you didn’t give away our bed, too.”

Gabriel shook his head, then kissed her.

“How long are you in town?” she asked.

“I leave tomorrow morning.”

“As usual, my timing is perfect. How long will you be gone?”

“Hard to say.”

“Can you take me with you?”

“Not this time.”

“Where are you going?”

Gabriel eased her off the examination table and switched off the lights.

13.

I NEED A VAN Gogh, Julian.”

“Don’t we all, petal.”

Isherwood pushed back his coat sleeve and glanced at his wristwatch. It was ten in the morning. He was usually in his gallery by now, not strolling along the lakeshore in St. James’s Park. He paused for a moment to watch a flotilla of ducks slicing through the calm water toward the island. Gabriel used the opportunity to cast his eyes around the park to see if they were being followed. Then he hooked Isherwood by the inside of the elbow and towed him toward the Horse Guards Road.

They were a mismatched pair, figures from different paintings. Gabriel wore dark jeans and suede brogues that made no sound as he walked. His hands were thrust into the pockets of his leather jacket, his shoulders were slouched forward, and his green eyes were flickering restlessly about the park. Isherwood, fifteen years older than Gabriel and several inches taller, wore a chalk-striped suit and woolen overcoat. His gray locks hung over the back of his coat collar and floated up and down with each lanky, loose-limbed stride. There was something precarious about Julian Isherwood. Gabriel, as always, had to resist an urge to reach out and steady him.

They had known each other for thirty years. Isherwood’s backbone-of-England surname and English scale concealed the fact that he was not, at least technically, English at all. British by nationality and passport, yes, but German by birth, French by upbringing, and Jewish by religion. Only a handful of trusted friends knew that Isherwood had staggered into London as a child refugee in 1942 after being carried across the snowbound Pyrenees by a pair of Basque shepherds. Or that his father, the renowned Paris art dealer Samuel Isakowitz, had been murdered at the Sobibor death camp along with Isherwood’s mother. There was something else Isherwood kept secret from his competitors in the London art world-and from nearly everyone else, for that matter. In the lexicon of the Office, Julian Isherwood was a sayan, a volunteer Jewish helper. He had been recruited by Ari Shamron for a single purpose: to help build and maintain the cover of a single very special agent.

“How’s my friend Mario Delvecchio?” Isherwood asked.

“Vanished without a trace,” said Gabriel. “I hope my unveiling didn’t cause you any problems.”

“None whatsoever.”

“No rumors on the street? No awkward questions at the auctions? No visits from the men of MI5?”

“Are you asking me whether people in London regard me as a poisonous Israeli spy?”

“That’s exactly what I’m asking you.”

“All quiet on this front, but then we were never very flashy about our relationship, were we? That’s not your way. You’re not flashy about anything. One of the two or three best art restorers in the world, and no one really knows who you are. It’s a shame, that.”

They came to the corner of Great George Street. Gabriel led them to the right, into Birdcage Walk.

“Who knows about us in London, Julian? Who knows that you had a professional relationship with Mario?”

Isherwood looked up at the dripping trees along the pavement. “Very few people, really. There’s Jeremy Crabbe over at Bonhams, of course. He’s still miffed at you for stealing that Rubens from under his nose.” Isherwood placed a long, bony hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “I have a buyer for it. All I need now is the painting.”

“I put the varnish on yesterday before I left Jerusalem,” Gabriel said. “I’ll use one of our front shippers to get it here as quickly as possible. You could have it by the end of the week. By the way, you owe me a hundred and fifty thousand pounds.”

“Check’s in the mail, petal.”

“Who else?” Gabriel asked. “Who else knows about us?”

Isherwood made a show of thought. “The wretched Oliver Dimbleby,” he said. “You remember Oliver. I introduced you to him at Green’s one afternoon when we were having lunch. Tubby little dealer from King Street. Tried to buy my gallery out from under me one time.”

Gabriel remembered. Somewhere he still had the showy gold-plated business card Oliver had pressed upon him. Oliver had barely looked in Gabriel’s direction. Oliver was that way.

“I’ve done many a favor for Crabbe over the years,” Isherwood said. “The sorts of favors we don’t like to talk about in our line of work. As for Oliver Dimbleby, I helped him clean up a terrible mess he made with a girl who worked in his gallery. I took the poor waif in. Gave her a job. She left me for another dealer. Always do, my girls. What is it about me that drives women away? I’m an easy mark, that’s it. Women see that. So did your little outfit. Herr Heller certainly did.”

Herr Rudolf Heller, venture capitalist from Zurich, was one of Shamron’s favorite aliases. It was the one he had used when recruiting Isherwood.

“How is he, by the way?”

“He sends his best.”

Gabriel lowered his eyes to the damp pavement of Birdcage Walk. A breath of cold wind rose from the park. Dead leaves rattled across their path.

“I need a van Gogh,” Gabriel said again.

“Yes, I heard you the first time. The problem is, I don’t have a van Gogh. In case you’ve forgotten, Isherwood Fine Arts specializes in Old Masters. If you want Impressionists, you’ll have to look elsewhere.”

“But you know where I can get one.”

“Unless you’re planning on stealing one, there’s nothing on the market right now-at least not that I’m aware of.”

“But that’s not true, is it, Julian? You do know about a van Gogh. You told me about it once a hundred years ago-a story about a previously unknown painting your father had seen in Paris between the wars.”

“Not just my father,” Isherwood said. “I’ve seen it, too. Vincent painted it in Auvers, during the final days of his life. There’s a rumor it might have been his undoing. The problem is, the painting isn’t for sale, and it probably never will be. The family has made it clear to me they’ll never part with it. They’re also bound and determined to keep its very existence a secret.”

“Tell me the story again.”

“I don’t have time now, Gabriel. I have a ten-thirty appointment at the gallery.”

“Cancel your appointment, Julian. Tell me about that painting.”

ISHERWOOD CROSSED the footbridge over the lake and headed toward his gallery in St. James’s. Gabriel shoved his hands a little deeper into his coat pockets and followed after him.

“Ever cleaned him?” Isherwood asked.

“Vincent? Never.”

“How much do you know about his final days?”

“About what everyone knows, I suppose.”

“Bollocks, Gabriel. Don’t try to play the fool with me. Your brain is like the Grove Dictionary of Art.”

“It was the summer of 1890, wasn’t it?”

Isherwood gave a professorial nod of his head. “Please continue.”

“After Vincent left the asylum in Saint-Rémy, he came to Paris to see Theo and Johanna. He visited several galleries and exhibits, and stopped at Père Tanguy’s artists’ supply store to check on some canvases he had in storage there. After three days he began to get restless, so he boarded a train for Auvers-sur-Oise, about twenty miles outside Paris. He thought Auvers would be ideal, a quiet country setting for his work but still close to Theo, his financial and emotional lifeline. He took a room above Café Ravoux and placed himself in the care of Dr. Paul Gachet.”

Gabriel took Isherwood’s arm and together they darted through an opening in the traffic on the Mall and entered the Marlborough Road.

“He started painting immediately. His style, like his mood, was calmer and more subdued. The agitation and violence that characterized much of his work at Saint-Rémy and Arles was gone. He was also incredibly prolific. In the two months Vincent stayed in Auvers he produced more than eighty paintings. A painting a day. Some days two.”

They turned into King Street. Gabriel stopped suddenly. Ahead of them, waddling along the pavement toward the entrance of Christie’s auction house, was Oliver Dimbleby. Isherwood turned suddenly into Bury Street and picked up where Gabriel had left off.

“When Vincent wasn’t at his easel, he could usually be found in his room above Café Ravoux or at the home of Gachet. Gachet was a widower with two children, a boy of fifteen and a daughter who turned twenty-one during Vincent’s stay in Auvers.”

“Marguerite.”

Isherwood nodded. “She was a pretty girl and she was also deeply infatuated with Vincent. She agreed to pose for him-unfortunately with out her father’s permission. He painted her in the garden of the family home, dressed in a white gown.”

“Marguerite Gachet in the Garden,” Gabriel said.

“And when her father found out, he was furious.”

“But she posed for him again.”

“Correct,” Isherwood said. “The second painting is Marguerite Gachet at the Piano. She also appears in Undergrowth with Two Figures, a deeply symbolic work that some art historians saw as a prophecy of Vincent’s own death. But I believe it’s Vincent and Marguerite walking down the aisle-Vincent’s premonition of marriage.”

“But there was a fourth painting of Marguerite?”

“Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table,” said Isherwood. “It’s the best of the lot by far. Only a handful of people have ever seen it or even know it exists. Vincent painted it a few days before his death. And then it disappeared.”

THEY WALKED TO Duke Street, then slipped through a narrow passageway, into a brick quadrangle called Mason’s Yard. Isherwood’s gallery occupied an old Victorian warehouse in the far corner, wedged between the offices of a minor Greek shipping company and a pub that was inevitably filled with pretty office girls who rode motor scooters. Isherwood started across the yard toward the gallery, but Gabriel snared his lapel and pulled him in the opposite direction. As they strolled the perimeter through the cold shadows, Isherwood talked of Vincent’s death.

“On the evening of July 27, Vincent returned to Café Ravoux in obvious pain and struggled up the stairs to his room. Madame Ravoux followed after him and discovered he’d been shot. She sent for a doctor. The doctor, of course, was Gachet himself. He decided to leave the bullet in Vincent’s abdomen and summoned Theo to Auvers. When Theo arrived the following morning, he found Vincent sitting up in bed smoking his pipe. He died later that day.”

They came into a patch of brilliant sunshine. Isherwood shaded his eyes with his long hand.

“There are many unanswered questions about Vincent’s suicide. It’s not clear where he got the gun or the precise place where he shot himself. There are questions, too, about his motivation. Was his suicide the culmination of his long struggle with madness? Was he distraught over a letter he’d just received from Theo suggesting that Theo could no longer afford to support Vincent along with his own wife and child? Did Vincent take his own life as part of a plan to make his work relevant and commercially viable? I’ve never been satisfied with any of those theories. I believe it has to do with Gachet. More to the point, with Dr. Gachet’s daughter.”

They slipped into the shadows of the yard once more. Isherwood lowered his hand.

“The day before Vincent shot himself, he came to Gachet’s house. The two quarreled violently, and Vincent threatened Gachet with a gun. What was the reason for the argument? Gachet later claimed that it had something to do with a picture frame, of all things. I believe it was over Marguerite. I think it’s possible it had something to do with Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table. It’s an exquisite work, one of Vincent’s better portraits. The pose and the setting are clearly representative of a bride on her wedding night. Its significance would not have been lost on a man like Paul Gachet. If he’d seen the painting-and there’s no reason to believe he didn’t-he would have been incensed. Perhaps Gachet told Vincent that marriage to his daughter was out of the question. Perhaps he forbade Vincent ever to paint Marguerite again. Perhaps he forbade Vincent ever to see Marguerite again. What we do know is that Marguerite Gachet wasn’t present at Vincent’s funeral, though she was spotted the next day tearfully placing sunflowers on his grave. She never married, and lived as something of a recluse in Auvers until her death in 1949.”

They passed the entrance to Isherwood’s gallery and kept walking.

“After Vincent’s death his paintings became the property of Theo. He arranged for a shipment of the works Vincent had produced at Auvers and stored them at Père Tanguy’s in Paris. Theo, of course, died not long after Vincent, and the paintings became the property of Johanna. None of Vincent’s other relatives wanted any of his work. Johanna’s brother thought them worthless and suggested they be burned.” Isherwood stopped walking. “Can you imagine?” He propelled himself forward again with a long stride. “Johanna catalogued the inventory and worked tirelessly to establish Vincent’s reputation. It’s because of Johanna that Vincent van Gogh is regarded as a great artist. But there’s a glaring omission in her list of Vincent’s known works.”

“Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table.”

“Precisely,” said Isherwood. “Was it an accident or intentional? We’ll never know, of course, but I have a theory. I believe Johanna knew that the painting may have contributed to Vincent’s death. Whatever the case, it was sold for a song from the storeroom at Père Tanguy’s within a year or so of Vincent’s death and never seen again. Which is where my father enters the story.”

THEY COMPLETED THEIR first circuit of the yard and started a second. Isherwood’s pace slowed as he began to talk of his father.

“He was always a Berliner at heart. He would have stayed there forever. That wasn’t possible, of course. My father saw the storm clouds coming and didn’t waste any time getting out of town. By the end of 1936, we’d left Berlin and moved to Paris.” He looked at Gabriel. “Too bad your grandfather didn’t do the same thing. He was a great painter, your grandfather. You come from a good bloodline, my boy.”

Gabriel quickly changed the subject. “Your father’s gallery was on the rue de la Boétie, wasn’t it?”

“Of course,” Isherwood replied. “The rue de la Boétie was the center of the art world at that time. Paul Rosenberg had his gallery at Number Twenty-one. Picasso and Olga lived on the other side of the courtyard at Number Twenty-three. Georges Wildenstein, Paul Guillaume, Josse Hessel, Étienne Bignou-everyone was there. Isakowitz Fine Arts was next door to Paul Rosenberg’s. We lived in an apartment above the exposition rooms. Picasso was my ‘Uncle Pablo.’ He used to let me watch him paint, and Olga would give me chocolates until I was sick.”

Isherwood permitted himself a brief smile, which faded quickly as he resumed the story of his father in Paris.

“The Germans came in May 1940 and started looting the place. My father rented a chateau in Bordeaux on the Vichy side of the line and moved most of his important pieces there. We followed him soon after. The Germans crossed over into the Unoccupied Zone in 1942, and the roundups and deportations began. We were trapped. My father paid a pair of Basque shepherds to take me over the mountains to Spain. He gave me some documents to carry with me, a professional inventory and a couple of diaries. It was the last time I ever saw him.”

A horn sounded loudly in Duke Street; a squadron of pigeons burst into flight over the shadowed yard.

“It was years before I got around to reading the diaries. In one of them I found an entry about a painting my father had seen in Paris one night at the home of man named Isaac Weinberg.”

“Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table.”

“Weinberg told my father he’d bought the painting from Johanna not long after Vincent’s death and had given it to his wife as a birthday gift. Apparently Mrs. Weinberg bore a resemblance to Marguerite. My father asked Isaac whether he would be willing to sell, and Isaac said he wasn’t. He asked my father not to mention the painting to anyone, and my father was all too happy to oblige him.”

Isherwood’s mobile phone chirped. He ignored it.

“In the early seventies, right before I met you, I was in Paris on business. I had a few hours to kill between appointments and decided to look up Isaac Weinberg. I went to the address in the Marais that was listed in my father’s notebooks, but Weinberg wasn’t there. He hadn’t survived the war. But I met his son, Marc, and told him about the entry in my father’s notes. He denied the story at first, but finally relented and allowed me to see the painting after swearing me to eternal secrecy. It was hanging in his daughter’s bedroom. I asked whether he might be interested in parting with it. He refused, of course.”

“You’re certain it’s Vincent?”

“Without a doubt.”

“And you haven’t been back since?”

“Monsieur Weinberg made it quite clear the painting would never be for sale. I didn’t see the point.” Isherwood stopped walking and turned to face Gabriel. “All right, petal. I’ve told you the story. Now suppose you tell me what this is all about.”

“I need that van Gogh, Julian.”

“Whatever for?”

Gabriel took Isherwood’s sleeve and led him toward the door of the gallery.

THERE WAS an intercom panel next to the glass door, with four buttons and four corresponding nameplates. One read: ISHER OO FINE AR S: BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. Isherwood opened the door with a key and led Gabriel up a flight of stairs covered in a threadbare brown carpet. On the landing were two more doors. To the left was a melancholy little travel agency. The owner, a spinster named Miss Archer, was seated at her desk beneath a poster of a happy couple splashing in azure water. Isherwood’s door was on the right. His latest secretary, an apologetic-looking creature named Tanya, glanced up furtively as Isherwood and Gabriel came inside. “This is Mr. Klein,” said Isherwood. “He’d like to have a look at something upstairs. No interruptions, please. That’s a good girl, Tanya darling.”

They entered a lift the size of a phone booth and rode it upward, standing so close to one another that Gabriel could smell last night’s claret on Isherwood’s breath. A few seconds later the lift shuddered to a stop and the door opened with a groan. Isherwood’s exposition room was in semidarkness, illuminated only by the mid-morning sun filtering through the skylight. Isherwood settled himself on the velvet-covered divan in the center of the room while Gabriel led himself on a slow tour. The paintings were nearly invisible in the deep shadows, but he knew them well: a Venus by Luini, a nativity by Perino del Vaga, a baptism of Christ by Bordone, a luminous landscape by Claude.

Isherwood opened his mouth to speak, but Gabriel raised a finger to his lips and from his coat pocket removed what appeared to be an ordinary Nokia cellular telephone. It was indeed a Nokia, but it contained several additional features not available to ordinary customers, such as a GPS beacon and a device that could detect the presence of hidden transmitters. Gabriel toured the room again, this time with his eyes on the display panel of the phone. Then he sat down next to Isherwood and, in a low voice, told him why he needed the van Gogh.

“Zizi al-Bakari?” asked Isherwood incredulously. “A bloody terrorist? Are you sure?”

“He’s not planting the bombs, Julian. He’s not even making the bombs. But he’s footing the bill, and he’s using his business empire to facilitate the movement of the men and matériel around the globe. In today’s world that’s just as bad. Worse.”

“I met him once, but not so he’d remember. Went to a party at his estate out in Gloucestershire. Huge party. Sea of people. Zizi was nowhere to be found. Came down at the end like bloody Gatsby. Surrounded by bodyguards, even inside his own home. Strange chap. Voracious collector, though, isn’t he? Art. Women. Anything money can buy. Predatory, from what I hear. Never had any dealings with him, of course. Zizi’s tastes don’t run to the Old Masters. Zizi goes for the Impressionists and a bit of other Modern stuff. All the Saudis are like that. They don’t hold with the Christian imagery of the Old Masters.”

Gabriel sat down next to Isherwood. “He doesn’t have a van Gogh, Julian. He’s dropped hints from time to time that he’s looking for one. And not just any van Gogh. He wants something special.”

“From what I hear, he buys very carefully. He spends buckets of money, but he does it wisely. He’s got a museum-quality collection, but I didn’t realize it was sans van Gogh.”

“His art adviser is an Englishman named Andrew Malone. Know him?”

“Unfortunately, Andrew and I are well acquainted. He’s burrowed his way deeply into Zizi’s pockets. Spends holidays on Zizi’s yacht. Big as the bloody Titanic, from what I hear. Andrew is as slippery as they come. Dirty, too.”

“In what way?”

“He’s taking it on both ends, petal.”

“What do you mean, Julian?”

“Andrew has an exclusive agreement with Zizi, which means he’s not supposed to take money from any other dealer or collector. It’s the way big boys like Zizi ensure that the advice they’re being given is untainted by any conflicts of interest.”

“What’s Malone up to?”

“Shakedowns, double commissions, you name it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive, petal. Everyone in town knows that in order to do business with Zizi, you have to pay a toll to Andrew Malone.”

Isherwood was suddenly off the divan and pacing the length of the exposition room.

“So what’s your plan then? Lure Zizi out of his hole with a van Gogh? Dangle it in front of him and hope he takes it hook, line, and sinker? But there’ll be something at the other end of the line, won’t there? One of your agents?”

“Something like that.”

“And where are you planning to stage this extravaganza? Here, I take it?”

Gabriel looked around the room approvingly. “Yes,” he said. “I think this will do quite nicely.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“I need a dealer,” Gabriel said. “Someone well known in the trade. Someone I can trust.”

“I’m Old Masters, not Impressionists.”

“It won’t matter for a quiet deal like this.”

Isherwood didn’t argue the point. He knew Gabriel was right. “Have you considered the consequences for moi if your little gambit proves successful? I’ll be a marked man. I can deal with the likes of Oliver Dimbleby, but al-bloody-fucking-Qaeda is another thing altogether.”

“Obviously, we’ll have to make some postoperational provisions for your security.”

“I love your euphemisms, Gabriel. You and Shamron always resort to euphemisms when the truth is too awful to say aloud. They’ll put a fatwa on my head. I’ll have to close up shop. Go into bloody hiding.”

Gabriel appeared unmoved by Isherwood’s protests. “You’re not getting any younger, Julian. You’re nearing the end of the road. You have no children. No heirs. Who’s going to take over the gallery? Besides, have you taken a moment to calculate your commission on the private sale of a previously unknown van Gogh? Add to that your earnings on a fire sale of your existing stock. Things could be a lot worse, Julian.”

“I’m picturing a nice villa in the south of France. A new name. A team of Office security boys to look after me in my dotage.”

“Make sure you have a spare room for me.”

Isherwood sat down again. “Your plan has one serious flaw, petal. It will be easier for you to snare your terrorist than it will be to land that van Gogh. Assuming it’s still in the possession of the Weinberg family, what makes you think they’re going to give it up?”

“Who said anything about giving it up?”

Isherwood smiled. “I’ll get you the address.”

14.

YOU SHOULD EAT SOMETHING,” said Uzi Navot.

Gabriel shook his head. He’d eaten lunch on the train from London.

“Have the borscht,” Navot said. “You can’t come to Jo Goldenberg and not have the borscht.”

“Yes I can,” Gabriel said. “Purple food makes me nervous.”

Navot caught the waiter’s eye and ordered an extra-large bowl of borscht and a glass of kosher red wine. Gabriel frowned and looked out the window. A steady rain was drumming against the paving stones of the rue des Rosiers, and it was nearly dark. He had wanted to meet Navot someplace other than the most famous delicatessen in the most visible Jewish district of Paris, but Navot had insisted on Jo Goldenberg, based on his long-held belief that the best place to hide a pine tree was in a forest.

“This place is making me nervous,” Gabriel murmured. “Let’s take a walk.”

“In this weather? Forget it. Besides, no one is going to recognize you in that getup. Even I nearly didn’t notice you when you came through the door.”

Gabriel looked at the ghostly face reflected in the glass. He wore a dark corduroy flat cap, contact lenses that turned his green eyes to brown, and a false goatee that accentuated his already narrow features. He had traveled to Paris on a German passport bearing the name Heinrich Kiever. After arriving at the Gare du Nord he’d spent two hours walking the Seine embankments, checking his tail for surveillance. In his shoulder bag was a worn volume of Voltaire he’d purchased from a bouquiniste on the Quai Montebello.

He turned his head and looked at Navot. He was a heavy-shouldered man, several years younger than Gabriel, with short strawberry-blond hair and pale blue eyes. In the lexicon of the Office, he was a katsa, an undercover field operative and case officer. Armed with an array of languages, a roguish charm, and a fatalistic arrogance, he had penetrated Palestinian terrorist cells and recruited agents in Arab embassies scattered across western Europe. He had sources in nearly all the European security and intelligence services and oversaw a vast network of sayanim. He could always count on getting the best table in the grill room at the Ritz in Paris because the maître d’hôtel was a paid informant, as was the chief of the maid staff. He was dressed now in a gray tweed jacket and black rollneck sweater, for his identity in Paris was one Vincent Laffont, a freelance travel writer of Breton descent who spent most of his time living out of a suitcase. In London he was known as Clyde Bridges, European marketing director of an obscure Canadian business-software firm. In Madrid he was a German of independent means who idled away the hours in cafés and bars and traveled to relieve the burdens of a restless and complex soul.

Navot reached into his briefcase and produced a manila file folder, which he placed on the table in front of Gabriel. “There’s the owner of your van Gogh,” he said. “Have a look.”

Gabriel discreetly lifted the cover. The photograph inside showed an attractive middle-aged woman with dark wavy hair, olive skin, and a long aquiline nose. She was holding an umbrella above her head and descending a flight of stone steps in Montmartre.

“Hannah Weinberg,” Navot said. “Forty-four, unmarried, childless. Jewish demographics in microcosm. An only child with no children. At this rate, we won’t need a state.” Navot looked down and picked morosely at a bowl of potted chicken and vegetables. He was prone to fits of despondency, especially when it came to the future of the Jewish people. “She owns a small boutique up in Montmartre on the rue Lepic. Boutique Lepic is the name of it. I snapped that photo of her earlier this afternoon as she was walking to lunch. One is left with the impression the boutique is more of a hobby than a vocation. I’ve seen her bank accounts. Marc Weinberg left his daughter very well off.”

The waiter approached and placed a bowl of purple dreck in front of Gabriel. He immediately pushed it toward the center of the table. He couldn’t bear the smell of borscht. Navot dropped a lump of bread into his broth and prodded it with his spoon.

“Weinberg was an interesting fellow. He was a prominent lawyer here in Paris. He was also something of a memory militant. He brought a great deal of pressure on the government to come clean about the role of the French in the Holocaust. As a result he wasn’t terribly popular in some circles here in Paris.”

“And the daughter? What are her politics?”

“Moderate Eurosocialist, but that’s no crime in France. She also inherited a bit of militancy from her father. She’s involved with a group that’s trying to combat the anti-Semitism here. She actually met with the French president once. Look underneath that photograph.”

Gabriel found a clipping from a French magazine about the current wave of anti-Semitism in France. The accompanying photograph showed Jewish protesters marching across one of the Seine bridges. At the head of the column, carrying a sign that read STOP THE HATRED NOW, was Hannah Weinberg.

“Has she ever been to Israel?”

“At least four times. Shabak is working that end of things to make certain she wasn’t sitting up in Ramallah plotting with the terrorists. I’m sure they’ll turn up nothing on her. She’s golden, Gabriel. She’s a gift from the intelligence gods.”

“Sexual preferences?”

“Men, as far as we can tell. She’s involved with a civil servant.”

“Jewish?”

“Thank God.”

“Have you been inside her flat.”

“I went in with the neviot team myself.”

Neviot teams specialized in gathering intelligence from hard targets such as apartments, offices, and hotel rooms. The unit employed some of the best break-in artists and thieves in the world. Gabriel had other plans for them later in the operation-provided, of course, Hannah Weinberg agreed to part with her van Gogh.

“Did you see the painting?”

Navot nodded. “She keeps it in her childhood bedroom.”

“How did it look?”

“You want my assessment of a van Gogh?” Navot shrugged his heavy shoulders. “It’s a very nice painting of a girl sitting at a dressing table. I’m not artistic like you. I’m potted chicken and a nice love story at the movies. You’re not eating your soup.”

“I don’t like it, Uzi. I told you I don’t like it.”

Navot took Gabriel’s spoon and swirled the dab of sour cream, lightening the hue of the purple mixture.

“We had a peek at her papers,” Navot said. “We rummaged through her closets and drawers. We left a little something on her phone and computer as well. One can never be too careful in a situation like this.”

“Room coverage?”

Navot appeared hurt by the question. “Of course,” he said.

“What are you using for a listening post?”

“A van for the moment. If she agrees to help us, we’re going to need something more permanent. One of the neviot boys is already scouting the neighborhood for a suitable flat.”

Navot pushed the remnants of his potted chicken to one side and started in on Gabriel’s borscht. For all his European sophistication, he was at heart still a peasant from the shtetl.

“I can see where this is going,” he said between spoonfuls. “You get to track down the bad guy, and I get to spend the next year watching a girl. But that’s the way it’s always been with us, hasn’t it? You get all the glory while the field hands like me do all the spade work. My God, you saved the Pope himself. How’s a mere mortal like me supposed to compete with that?”

“Shut up and eat your soup, Uzi.”

Being Shamron’s chosen one had not come without a price. Gabriel was used to the professional jealousy of his colleagues.

“I have to leave Paris tomorrow,” Navot said. “I’ll be gone only a day.”

“Where are you going?”

“Amos wants a word with me.” He paused, then added, “I think it’s about the Special Ops job. The job you turned down.”

It made sense, Gabriel thought. Navot was an extremely capable field agent who’d taken part in several major operations, including a few with Gabriel.

“Is that what you want, Uzi? A job at King Saul Boulevard?”

Navot shrugged. “I’ve been out here in the field a long time. Bella wants to get married. It’s hard to have a stable home life when you live like this. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I never know where I’m going to wind up at the end of the day. I can have breakfast in Berlin, lunch in Amsterdam, and be sitting in King Saul Boulevard at midnight briefing the director.” Navot gave Gabriel a conspiratorial smile. “That’s what the Americans don’t understand about us. They put their case officers into little boxes and slap their wrists when they step outside the lines. The Office isn’t that way. It never was. That’s what makes it the greatest job in the world-and that’s why our service is so much better than theirs. They wouldn’t know what to do with a man like you.”

Navot had lost interest in the borscht. He pushed it across the table, so that it looked as though Gabriel had eaten it. Gabriel reached for the glass of wine but thought better of it. He had a headache from the train ride and the rainy Paris weather, and the kosher wine smelled about as appealing as paint thinner.

“But it takes its toll on marriages and relationships, doesn’t it, Gabriel? How many of us are divorced? How many of us have had affairs with girls out there in the field? At least if I’m working in Tel Aviv, I’ll be around more often. There’s still a lot of travel with the job but less than this. Bella has a place near the beach in Caesarea. It will be a nice life.” He shrugged again. “Listen to me. I’m acting as though Amos has offered me the job. Amos hasn’t offered me anything. For all I know, he’s bringing me to King Saul Boulevard to fire me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the most qualified man for the job. You’ll be my boss, Uzi.”

“Your boss? Please. No one is your boss, Gabriel. Only the old man.” Navot’s expression turned suddenly grave. “How is he? I hear it’s not good.”

“He’s going to be fine,” Gabriel assured him.

They lapsed into silence as the waiter came to the table and cleared away the dishes. When he was gone again, Gabriel gave the file folder to Navot, who slipped it back into his briefcase.

“So how are you going to play it with Hannah Weinberg?”

“I’m going to ask her to give up a painting that’s worth eighty million dollars. I have to tell her the truth-or at least some version of the truth. And then we’ll have to deal with the security consequences.”

“What about the approach? Are you going to dance for a while or go straight in for the kill?”

“I don’t dance, Uzi. I’ve never had time for dancing.”

“At least you won’t have any trouble convincing her who you are. Thanks to the French security service, everyone in Paris knows your name and your face. When do you want to start?”

“Tonight.”

“You’re in luck then.”

Navot looked toward the window. Gabriel followed his gaze and saw a woman with dark hair walking down the rue des Rosiers beneath the shelter of an umbrella. He stood without a word and headed toward the door. “Don’t worry, Gabriel,” Navot muttered to himself. “I’ll take care of the check.”

AT THE END of the street she turned left and disappeared. Gabriel paused on the corner and watched black-coated Orthodox men filing into a large synagogue for evening prayers. Then he looked down the rue Pavée and saw the silhouette of Hannah Weinberg receding gently into the shadows. She stopped at the doorway of an apartment building and reached into her handbag for the key. Gabriel set out down the pavement and stopped a few feet from her, as her hand was outstretched toward the lock.

“Mademoiselle Weinberg?”

She turned and regarded him calmly in the darkness. Her eyes radiated a calm and sophisticated intelligence. If she was startled by his approach, she gave no sign of it.

“You are Hannah Weinberg, are you not?”

“What can I do for you, Monsieur?”

“I need your help,” Gabriel said. “I was wondering whether we might have a word in private.”

“Are we acquainted, Monsieur?”

“No,” said Gabriel.

“Then how can I possibly help you?”

“It would be better if we discussed this in private, Mademoiselle.”

“I don’t make a habit of going to private places with strange men, Monsieur. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

She turned away and raised the key toward the lock again.

“It’s about your painting, Mademoiselle Weinberg. I need to talk to you about your van Gogh.”

She froze and looked at him again. Her gaze was still placid.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Monsieur, but I don’t have a van Gogh. If you’d like to see some paintings by Vincent, I suggest you visit the Musée d’Orsay.”

She looked away again.

“Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table,” said Gabriel calmly. “It was purchased by your grandfather from Theo van Gogh’s widow, Johanna, and given to your grandmother as a birthday present. Your grandmother bore a vague resemblance to Mademoiselle Gachet. When you were a child, the painting hung in your bedroom. Shall I go on?”

Her composure disappeared. Her voice, when she spoke again after a moment of stunned silence, was unexpectedly vehement. “How do you know about the painting?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Of course not.” She said this as an insult. “My father always warned me that one day a greedy French art dealer would try to get the painting away from me. It is not for sale, and if it ever turns up missing, I’ll make certain to give the police your description.”

“I’m not an art dealer-and I’m not French.”

“Then who are you?” she asked. “And what do you want with my painting?”

15.

THE COURTYARD WAS EMPTY and dark, lit only by the lights burning in the windows of the apartments above. They crossed it in silence and entered the foyer, where an old-fashioned cage lift stood ready to receive them. She mounted a flight of wide stairs instead and led him up to the fourth floor. On the landing were two stately mahogany doors. The door on the right was absent a nameplate. She opened it and led him inside. Gabriel took note of the fact that she punched the code into the keypad before switching on the lights. Hannah Weinberg, he decided, was good at keeping secrets.

It was a large apartment, with a formal entrance hall and a library adjoining the sitting room. Antique furniture covered in faded brocade stood sedately about, thick velvet curtains hung in the windows, and an ormolu clock set to the wrong time ticked quietly on the mantel. Gabriel’s professional eye went immediately to the six decent oil paintings that hung on the walls. The effect of the decor was to create the impression of a bygone era. Indeed Gabriel would scarcely have been surprised to see Paul Gachet reading the evening newspapers by gaslight.

Hannah Weinberg removed her coat, then disappeared into the kitchen. Gabriel used the opportunity to look inside the library. Leather-bound legal volumes lined formal wooden bookcases with glass doors. There were more paintings here-prosaic landscapes, a man on horseback, the obligatory sea battle-but nothing that suggested the owner might also be in possession of a lost van Gogh.

He returned to the sitting room as Hannah Weinberg emerged from the kitchen with a bottle of Sancerre and two glasses. She handed him the bottle and a corkscrew and watched his hands carefully as he removed the cork. She was not as attractive as she had appeared in Uzi Navot’s photograph. Perhaps it had been a trick of the nickeled Parisian light, or perhaps almost any woman looked attractive descending a flight of steps in Montmartre. Her pleated wool skirt and heavy sweater concealed what Gabriel suspected was a somewhat chunky figure. Her eyebrows were very wide and lent a profound seriousness to her face. Seated as she was now, surrounded by the dated furnishings of the room, she looked much older than her forty-four years.

“I’m surprised to see you in Paris, Monsieur Allon. The last time I read your name in the newspaper you were still wanted for questioning by the French police.”

“I’m afraid that’s still the case.”

“But you still came-just to see me? It must be very important.”

“It is, Mademoiselle Weinberg.”

Gabriel filled two glasses with wine, handed one to her, and raised his own in a silent toast. She did the same, then lifted the glass to her lips.

“Are you aware of what happened here in the Marais after the bombing?” She answered her own question. “Things were very tense. Rumors were flying that it had been carried out by Israel. Everyone believed it was true, and unfortunately the French government was very slow to do anything about the situation, even after they knew it was all a lie. Our children were beaten in the streets. Rocks were thrown through the windows of our homes and shops. Terrible things were spray-painted on the walls of the Marais and other Jewish neighborhoods. We suffered because of what happened inside that train station.” She gave him a scrutinizing look, as though trying to determine whether he was really the man she had seen in the newspapers and on television. “But you suffered, too, didn’t you? Is it true your wife was involved in it?”

The directness of her question surprised Gabriel. His first instinct was to lie, to conceal, to guide the conversation back onto ground of his choosing. But this was a recruitment-and a perfect recruitment, Shamron always said, is at its heart a perfect seduction. And when one was seducing, Gabriel reminded himself, one had to reveal something of oneself.

“They lured me to Gare de Lyon by kidnapping my wife,” he said. “Their intention was to kill us both, but they also wanted to discredit Israel and make things unbearable for the Jews of France.”

“They succeeded…for a little while, at least. Don’t misunderstand me, Monsieur Allon, things are still bad for us here. Just not as bad as they were during those days after the bombing.” She drank some more of the wine, then crossed her legs and smoothed the pleats of her skirt. “This might sound like a silly question, considering who you work for, but how did you find out about my van Gogh?”

Gabriel was silent for a moment, then he answered her truthfully. The mention of Isherwood’s visit to this very apartment more than thirty years earlier caused her lips to curl into a vague smile of remembrance.

“I think I remember him,” she said. “A tall man, quite handsome, full of charm and grace but at the same time somehow vulnerable.” She paused, then added, “Like you.”

“Charm and grace are words that are not often applied to me.”

“And vulnerability?” She gave him another slight smile. It served to soften the serious edges of her face. “All of us are vulnerable to some degree, are we not? Even someone like you? The terrorists found where you were vulnerable, and they exploited that. That’s what they do best. They exploit our decency. Our respect for life. They go after the things we hold dear.”

Navot was right, Gabriel thought. She was a gift from the intelligence gods. He placed his glass on the coffee table. Hannah’s eyes followed his every movement.

“What happened to this man Samuel Isakowitz?” she asked. “Did he make it out?”

Gabriel shook his head. “He and his wife were captured in Bordeaux when the Germans moved south.”

“Where did they send them?”

“Sobibor.”

She knew what that meant. Gabriel needn’t say anything more.

“And your grandfather?” he said.

She peered into her Sancerre for a moment before answering. “Jeudi Noir,” she said. “Do you know this term?”

Gabriel nodded solemnly. Jeudi Noir. Black Thursday.

“On the morning of July 16, 1942, four thousand French police officers descended on the Marais and other Jewish districts in Paris with orders to seize twenty-seven thousand Jewish immigrants from Germany, Austria, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia. My father and grandparents were on the list. You see, my grandparents were originally from the Lublin district of Poland. The two policemen who knocked on the door of this very apartment took pity on my father and told him to run. A Catholic family who lived a floor below took him in, and he stayed there until liberation. My grandparents weren’t so lucky. They were sent to the detention camp at Drancy. Five days after that, a sealed railcar to Auschwitz. Of course, that was the end for them.”

“And the van Gogh?”

“There wasn’t any time to make arrangements for it, and there was no one in Paris that my grandfather felt he could trust. It was war, you know. People were betraying each other for stockings and cigarettes. When he heard the roundups were coming, he removed the painting from the stretcher and hid it beneath a floorboard in the library. After the war it took my father years to get the apartment back. A French family had moved in after my grandparents were arrested, and they were reluctant to give up a nice apartment on the rue Pavée. Who could blame them?”

“What year did your father regain possession of the apartment?”

“It was 1952.”

“Ten years,” Gabriel said. “And the van Gogh was still there?”

“Just as my grandfather had left it, hidden under the floorboards of the library.”

“Amazing.”

“Yes,” she said. “The painting has remained in the Weinberg family for more than a century, through war and Holocaust. And now you’re asking me to give it up.”

“Not give it up,” said Gabriel.

“Then what?”

“I just need to-” He paused, searching for the appropriate word. “I need to rent it.”

“Rent it? For how long?”

“I can’t say. Perhaps a month. Perhaps six months. Maybe a year or longer.”

“For what purpose?”

Gabriel was not ready to answer her. He picked up the cork and used his thumbnail to scratch away a torn edge.

“Do you know how much that painting is worth?” she asked. “If you’re asking me to give it up, even for a brief period, I believe I’m entitled to know the reason why.”

“You are,” Gabriel said, “but you should also know that if I tell you the truth, your life will never be the same.”

She poured more wine for herself and held the glass for a moment against her body without drinking from it. “Two years ago, there was a particularly vicious attack here in the Marais. A young Orthodox boy was set upon by a gang of North Africans as he was walking home from school. They set his hair on fire and carved a swastika into his forehead. He still bears the scar. We organized a demonstration to bring pressure on the French government to do something about the anti-Semitism. As we were marching in the place de la République, there was an anti-Israeli counter-demonstration. Do you know what they were shouting at us?”

“Death to the Jews.”

“And do you know what the French president said?”

“There is no anti-Semitism in France.”

“My life has never been the same since that day. Besides, as you might have surmised, I’m very good at keeping secrets. Tell me why you want my van Gogh, Monsieur Allon. Perhaps we can come to some accommodation.”

THE NEVIOT SURVEILLANCE van was parked at the edge of the Parc Royal. Uzi Navot rapped his knuckles twice on the one-way rear window and was immediately admitted. One neviot man was seated behind the wheel. The other was in the back, hunched over an electronic console with a pair of headphones over his ears.

“What’s going on?” Navot asked.

“Gabriel has her in his sights,” the neviot man said. “And now he’s going in for the kill.”

Navot slipped on a pair of headsets and listened while Gabriel told Hannah Weinberg how he was going to use her van Gogh to track down the most dangerous man in the world.

THE KEY WAS hidden in the top drawer of the writing desk in the library. She used it to unlock the door at the end of the unlit corridor. The room behind it was a child’s room. Hannah’s room, thought Gabriel, frozen in time. A four-poster bed with a lace canopy. Shelves stacked with stuffed animals and toys. A poster of an American heartthrob actor. And hanging above a French provincial dresser, shrouded in heavy shadow, a lost painting by Vincent van Gogh.

GABRIEL MOVED SLOWLY forward and stood motionless before it, right hand on his chin, head tilted slightly to one side. Then he reached out and gently fingered the lavish brushstrokes. They were Vincent’s-Gabriel was sure of it. Vincent on fire. Vincent in love. The restorer calmly assessed his target. The painting appeared as though it had never been cleaned. It was covered with a fine layer of surface grime, and there were three horizontal cracks-a result, Gabriel suspected, of having been rolled too tightly by Isaac Weinberg the night before Jeudi Noir.

“I suppose we should talk about the money,” Hannah said. “How much does Julian think it will fetch?”

“In the neighborhood of eighty million. I’ve agreed to let him keep a ten-percent commission as compensation for his role in the operation. The remainder of the money will be immediately transferred to you.”

“Seventy-two million dollars?”

“Give or take a few million, of course.”

“And when your operation is over?”

“I’m going to get the painting back.”

“How do you intend to do that?”

“Leave that to me, Mademoiselle Weinberg.”

“And when you return the painting to me, what happens to the seventy-two million? Give or take a few million, of course.”

“You may keep any interest accrued. In addition, I will pay you a rental fee. How does five million dollars sound?”

She smiled. “It sounds fine, but I have no intention of keeping the money for myself. I don’t want their money.”

“Then what do you intend to do with it?”

She told him.

“I like the sound of that,” he said. “Do we have a deal, Mademoiselle Weinberg?”

“Yes,” she said. “I believe we have a deal.”

AFTER LEAVING Hannah Weinberg’s apartment Gabriel went to an Office safe flat near the Bois de Boulogne. They watched her for three days. Gabriel saw her only in surveillance photographs and heard her voice only in the recordings. Each evening he scoured the tapes for signs of betrayal or indiscretion but found only fidelity. On the night before she was to surrender the painting, he heard her sobbing softly and realized she was saying good-bye to Marguerite.

Navot brought the painting the next morning, wrapped in an old quilt he had taken from Hannah’s apartment. Gabriel considered sending it back to Tel Aviv by courier, but in the end decided to carry it out of France himself. He removed it from the frame, then pried the canvas off the stretcher. As he rolled it carefully he thought of Isaac Weinberg the night before Jeudi Noir. This time, instead of being hidden beneath a floorboard, it was tucked securely into the false lining of Gabriel’s suitcase. Navot drove him to the Gare du Nord.

“An agent from London Station will be waiting for you at Waterloo,” Navot said. “He’ll run you out to Heathrow. El Al is expecting you. They’ll make sure you have no problems with your baggage.”

“Thanks, Uzi. You won’t be making my travel arrangements much longer.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Things didn’t go well with Amos?”

“He’s hard to read.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he needs a few days to think it over.”

“You didn’t expect him to offer it to you on the spot, did you?”

“I don’t know what I expected.”

“Don’t worry, Uzi. You’ll get the job.”

Navot pulled over to the side of the street a block from the station.

“You’ll put in a good word for me at King Saul Boulevard, won’t you, Gabriel? Amos likes you.”

“What gave you that impression?”

“I could just tell,” he said. “Everyone likes you.”

Gabriel climbed out, took his suitcase from the backseat, and disappeared into the station. Navot waited at the curb until five minutes after Gabriel’s scheduled departure, then pulled out into the traffic and drove away.

THE APARTMENT WAS in darkness when Gabriel arrived. He switched on a halogen lamp and was relieved to see his studio was still intact. Chiara was sitting up in bed as he entered their room. Her hair was newly washed and drawn back from her face by a velvet elastic band. Gabriel removed it and loosened the buttons of her nightgown. The painting lay next to them as they made love. “You know,” she said, “most men just come home from Paris with an Hermès scarf and some perfume.”

The telephone rang at midnight. Gabriel answered it before it could ring a second time. “I’ll be there tomorrow,” he said a moment later, then hung up the phone.

“Who was that?” Chiara asked.

“Adrian Carter.”

“What did he want?”

“He wants me to come to Washington right away.”

“What’s in Washington?”

“A girl,” said Gabriel. “Carter’s found the girl.”

16.

HOW WAS THE FLIGHT?”

“Eternal.”

“It’s the autumn jet-stream patterns,” Carter said pedantically. “It adds at least two hours to flights from Europe to America.”

“ Israel isn’t in Europe, Adrian. Israel is in the Middle East.”

“Really?”

“You can ask your director of intelligence. He’ll clear up the confusion for you.”

Carter gave Gabriel a contemptuous look, then returned his eyes to the road. They were driving toward Washington along the Dulles Access Road in Carter’s battered Volvo. Carter was wearing a corduroy sport jacket with patches on the elbows. It reinforced his professorial image. All that was missing was the canvas book bag and the NPR coffee mug. He was driving well below the posted speed limit and making repeated glances into his rearview mirror.

“Are we being followed?” Gabriel asked.

“Traffic cops,” said Carter. “They’re fanatical on this road. Any problems at passport control?”

“None,” Gabriel said. “In fact, they seemed very happy to see me.”

It was something Gabriel had never understood about America -the geniality of its border policemen. He’d always found something reassuring in the bored surliness of the Israelis who stamped passports at Ben-Gurion Airport. American customs agents were far too cordial.

He looked out the window. They had left the Dulles Access Road and were driving now through McLean. He’d been to Virginia just once before, a brief visit to a CIA safe house deep in the horse country near Middleburg. He found McLean to be an archetypal American suburb, neat and prosperous but somehow lifeless. They skirted the downtown commercial district, then entered a residential section with large tract homes. The developments had names like Merrywood and Colonial Estates. A road sign floated toward them: GEORGE BUSH CENTER FOR INTELLIGENCE.

“You’re not actually thinking about taking me into Headquarters, are you?”

“Of course not,” Carter said. “We’re going into the District.”

The District, Gabriel knew, was the way Washingtonians referred to their little village on the Potomac. They crossed a highway overpass and entered an area of rolling hills and dense woods. Gabriel, through the trees, glimpsed great houses overlooking the river.

“What’s her name?”

“Sarah Bancroft,” Carter replied. “Her father was a senior executive in the international division of Citibank. For the most part Sarah was raised in Europe. She’s comfortable abroad in a way that most Americans aren’t. She speaks languages. She knows which fork to use when.”

“Education?”

“She came back here for college. Did a bachelor’s in art history at Dartmouth, then a stretch at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. I take it you’re familiar with the Courtauld?”

Gabriel nodded. It was one of the world’s most prestigious schools of art. Its graduates included an art dealer from St. James’s named Julian Isherwood.

“After the Courtauld she did her doctorate at Harvard,” Carter said. “Now she’s a curator at the Phillips Collection in Washington. It’s a small museum near-”

“I know the Phillips Collection, Adrian.”

“Sorry,” Carter said earnestly.

A large whitetail deer darted from the trees and crossed their path. Carter let his foot off the gas and watched the animal bound silently away through the darkening woods.

“Who brought her to your attention?” Gabriel asked, but Carter made no response. He was hunched over the wheel now and scanning the trees along the edge of the road for more deer. “Where there’s one,” he said, “there’s usually another.”

“Just like the terrorists,” Gabriel said. He repeated his question.

“She applied to join us a few months after 9/11,” Carter said. “She’d just finished her Ph.D. She looked interesting on paper, so we brought her in and gave her to the psychiatrists in Personnel. They put her through the wringer and didn’t like what they saw. Too independent-minded, they said. Maybe even a bit too smart for her own good. When we turned her down, she landed at the Phillips.”

“So you’re offering me one of your rejects?”

“The word hardly applies to Sarah Bancroft.” Carter reached into the pocket of his corduroy blazer and handed Gabriel a photograph. Sarah Bancroft was a strikingly beautiful woman, with shoulder-length blond hair, wide cheekbones, and large eyes the color of a cloudless summer sky.

“How old?”

“Thirty-one.”

“Why isn’t she married?”

Carter hesitated a moment.

“Why isn’t she married, Adrian?”

“She had a boyfriend while she was at Harvard, a young lawyer named Ben Callahan. It ended badly.”

“What happened to Ben?”

“He boarded a flight to Los Angeles at Logan Airport on the morning of September 11, 2001.”

Gabriel held out the photograph toward Carter. “Zizi’s not going to be interested in hiring someone touched by 9/11. You brought me here for nothing, Adrian.”

Carter kept his hands on the wheel. “Ben Callahan was a college boyfriend, not a husband. Besides, Sarah never talks about him to anyone. We practically had to beat it out of her. She was afraid Ben’s death would follow her around for the rest of her life, that people would treat her like a widow at age twenty-six. She keeps it very much inside. We did some sniffing around for you this week. No one knows.”

“Zizi’s security hounds are going to do more than sniff around, Adrian. And if they catch one whiff of 9/11, he’s going to run from her as fast as he can.”

“Speaking of Zizi, his house is just ahead.”

Carter slowed to negotiate a bend. A large brick-and-iron security gate appeared on their left. Beyond the gate a long paved drive rose to an enormous faux-chateau mansion overlooking the river. Gabriel looked away as they sped past.

“Zizi will never find out about Ben,” Carter said.

“Are you willing to bet Sarah’s life on that?”

“Meet her, Gabriel. See what you think.”

“I already know what I think. She’s perfect.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“If we make one mistake, Zizi’s going to drop her down a very deep hole. That’s the problem, Adrian.”

THE SUDDENNESS with which they reached the center of Washington took Gabriel by surprise. One moment they were on a two-lane rural road at the edge of the Potomac gorge, the next they were crawling along Q Street through the Georgetown evening rush. Carter, playing the role of tour guide, pointed out the homes of the neighborhood’s most celebrated residents. Gabriel, head against the window, couldn’t summon the energy even to feign interest. They crossed a short bridge, guarded at each end by a pair of enormous tarnished buffalos, and entered the city’s diplomatic quarter. Just beyond Massachusetts Avenue, Carter pointed to a turreted redbrick structure on the left side of the street. “That’s the Phillips,” he said helpfully. Gabriel looked to his right and saw a bronze version of Mohandas Gandhi hiking across a tiny triangular park. Why Gandhi? he wondered. What did the ideals of the Mahatma have to do with this patch of American global power?

Carter drove another block and parked in a restricted diplomatic zone outside a tired-looking Latin American embassy. He left the engine running and made no movement to indicate he intended to get out of the car. “This part of town is called Dupont Circle,” he said, still in tour guide mode. “It’s what passes for avant-garde in Washington.”

An officer of the Secret Service Uniformed Division rapped his knuckle on Carter’s window and gestured for him to move along. Carter, eyes straight ahead, held his ID against the glass, and the officer walked back to his squad car. A moment later something caught Carter’s attention in the rearview mirror. “Here she comes,” he said.

Gabriel looked out his window as Sarah Bancroft floated virtuously past, dressed in a long dark overcoat with a narrow waist. She held a leather briefcase in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Gabriel heard her voice briefly as she passed. Low, sophisticated, a trace of an English accent-a remnant, no doubt, of her time at the Courtauld and a childhood spent in international schools abroad.

“What do you think?” asked Carter.

“I’ll let you know in a minute.”

She came to the corner of Q Street and 20th Street. On the opposite corner was an esplanade filled with sidewalk vendors and a pair of escalators leading to the Dupont Circle Metro station. The traffic light in Sarah’s direction was red. Without stopping she stepped from the curb and started across. When a taxi driver sounded his car horn in protest, she shot him a look that could melt ice and carried on with her conversation. Then she continued slowly across the intersection and stepped onto the down escalator. Gabriel watched with admiration as she sank slowly from view.

“Do you have two more just like her?”

Carter fished a mobile phone from his pocket and dialed. “We’re on,” he said. A moment later a large black Suburban rounded the corner and parked illegally on Q Street adjacent to the escalators. Five minutes after that Gabriel saw her again, this time rising slowly out of the depths of the Metro station. She was no longer speaking into her telephone, nor was she alone. Two of Carter’s agents were with her, a man and a woman, one on each arm, in case she had a sudden change of heart. The back door of the Suburban swung open, and Sarah Bancroft vanished from sight. Carter started the engine and headed back to Georgetown.

17.

THE BLACK SUBURBAN CAME to a stop fifteen minutes later outside a large Federal-style town house on N Street. As Sarah mounted the curved redbrick steps, the door opened suddenly and a figure appeared in the shadows of the portico. He wore creaseless khaki trousers and a corduroy blazer with patches on the elbow. His gaze had a curious clinical detachment that reminded Sarah of the grief counselor she’d seen after Ben’s death. “I’m Carter,” he said, as if the thought had occurred to him suddenly. He didn’t say whether it was his first name or his last, only that it was genuine. “I don’t do funny names anymore,” he said. “I’m Headquarters now.”

He smiled. It was an ersatz smile, like his brief ersatz handshake. He suggested she come inside and once again managed to leave the impression of sudden inspiration. “And you’re Sarah,” he informed her, as he conveyed her down the wide center hall. “Sarah Bancroft, a curator at the well-regarded Phillips Collection. Sarah Bancroft who courageously offered us her services after 9/11 but was turned away and told she wasn’t needed. How’s your father?”

She was taken aback by the sudden change in course. “Do you know my father?”

“Never met him actually. Works for Citicorp, doesn’t he?”

“You know exactly who he works for. Why are you asking about my father?”

“Where is he these days? London? Brussels? Hong Kong?”

“ Paris,” she said. “It’s his last post. He’s retiring next year.”

“And then he’s coming home?”

She shook her head. “He’s staying in Paris. With his new wife. My parents divorced two years ago. My father remarried right away. He’s a time-is-money sort of man.”

“And your mother? Where is she?”

“ Manhattan.”

“See your father much?”

“Holidays. Weddings. The occasional awkward lunch when he’s in town. My parents divorced badly. Everyone took sides, the children included. Why are you asking me these questions? What do you want from-”

“You believe in that?” he asked, cutting her off.

“Believe in what?”

“Taking sides.”

“Depends on the circumstances, I suppose. Is this part of the test? I thought I failed your tests.”

“You did,” said Carter. “With flying colors.”

They entered the sitting room. It was furnished with the formal but anonymous elegance usually reserved for hotel hospitality suites. Carter helped her off with her coat and invited her to sit.

“So why am I back?”

“It’s a fluid world, Sarah. Things change. So tell me something. Under what circumstances do you think it’s right to take sides?”

“I haven’t given it much thought.”

“Sure you have,” Carter said, and Sarah, for the second time, saw her grief counselor, sitting in his floral wingchair with his ceramic mug balanced on his knee, dully prodding her to visit places she’d rather not go. “Come on, Sarah,” Carter was saying. “Give me just one example of when you believe it’s all right to take sides.”

“I believe in right and wrong,” she said, lifting her chin a little. “Which probably explains why I flunked your little tests. Your world is shades of gray. I tend to be a bit too black and white.”

“Is that what your father told you?”

No, she thought, it was Ben who accused her of that failing.

“What’s this all about?” she asked. “Why am I here?”

But Carter was still turning over the implications of her last response. “And what about the terrorists?” he asked, and once again it seemed to Sarah as if the thought had just popped into his head. “That’s what I’m wondering about. How do they fit into Sarah Bancroft’s world of right and wrong? Are they evil, or is their cause legitimate? Are we the innocent victims, or have we brought this calamity upon ourselves? Must we sit back and take it, or do we have the right to resist them with all the force and anger we can muster?”

“I’m an assistant curator at the Phillips Collection,” she said. “Do you really want me to wax lyrical on the morals of counterterrorism?”

“Let’s narrow the focus of our question then. I always find that helpful. Let’s take for an example the man who drove Ben’s plane into the World Trade Center.” Carter paused. “Remind me, Sarah, which plane was Ben on?”

“You know which plane he was on,” she said. “He was on United Flight 175.”

“Which was piloted by…”

“Marwan al-Shehhi.”

“Suppose for a moment that Marwan al-Shehhi had managed somehow to survive. I know it’s crazy, Sarah, but play along with me for argument’s sake. Suppose he managed to make his way back to Afghanistan or Pakistan or some other terrorist sanctuary. Suppose we knew where he was. Should we send the FBI with a warrant for his arrest, or should we deal with him in a more efficient manner? Men in black? Special forces? A Hellfire missile fired from a plane without a pilot?”

“I think you know what I would do to him.”

“Suppose I’m interested in hearing it from your own lips before we go further.”

“The terrorists have declared war on us,” she said. “They’ve attacked our cities, killed our citizens, and tried to disrupt the continuity of our government.”

“So what should be done to them?”

“They should be dealt with harshly.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Men in black. Special forces. A Hellfire missile fired from a plane without a pilot.”

“And what about a man who gives them money? Is he guilty, too? And if so, to what degree?”

“I suppose it depends on whether he knew what the money would be used for.”

“And if he knew damned well what it would be used for?”

“Then he’s as guilty as the man who flew the plane into the building.”

“Would you feel comfortable-indeed justified-in operating against such an individual?”

“I offered to help you five years ago,” she said contentiously. “You told me I wasn’t qualified. You told me I wasn’t suited for this sort of work. And now you want my help?”

Carter appeared unmoved by her protest. Sarah felt a sudden empathy for his wife.

“You offered to help us, and we treated you shabbily. I’m afraid that’s what we do best. I suppose I could go on about how we were wrong. Perhaps I might try to soothe your feelings with an insincere apology. But frankly, Miss Bancroft, there isn’t time.” His voice contained an edge that had been absent before. “So I suppose what I need now is a straight answer. Do you still feel like helping us? Do you want to fight the terrorists, or would you prefer to go on with your life and hope it never happens again?”

“Fight?” she asked. “I’m sure you can find people better suited for that than me.”

“There are different ways to fight them, Sarah.”

She hesitated. Carter filled the sudden silence by engaging in a prolonged study of his own hands. He wasn’t the kind of man who asked things twice. In that regard he was very much like her father. “Yes,” she said finally. “I’d be willing.”

“And what if it involved working with an intelligence service other than the Central Intelligence Agency?” he asked, as though discussing an abstract theory. “An intelligence service that is closely allied with us in this fight against the Islamic terrorists?”

“And who might that be?”

Carter was good at evading questions. He proved it again now.

“There’s someone I’d like you to meet. He’s a serious chap. A little rough around the edges. He’s going to ask you a few questions. Actually, he’s going to put you under the lights for the next few hours. It’s going to get rather personal at times. If he likes what he sees, he’s going to ask you to help us in a very important endeavor. This endeavor is not without risk, but it is critical to the security of the United States, and it has the Agency’s full support. If you’re interested, remain where you are. If not, walk out the door, and we’ll pretend you stumbled in here by mistake.”

SARAH WOULD NEVER be sure how Carter had summoned him or from where he came. He was small and spare, with short-cropped hair and gray temples. His eyes were the greenest Sarah had ever seen. His handshake, like Carter’s, was fleeting but probing as a doctor’s touch. His English was fluent but heavily accented. If he had a name, it wasn’t yet relevant.

They settled at the long table in the formal dining room, Carter and his nameless collaborator on one side and Sarah on the other like a suspect in an interrogation room. The collaborator was now in possession of her CIA file. He was leafing slowly through the pages as if seeing them for the first time, which she doubted was the case. His first question was put to her as a mild accusation.

“You wrote your doctoral dissertation at Harvard on the German Expressionists.”

It seemed a peculiar place to begin. She was tempted to ask why he was interested in the topic of her dissertation, but instead she simply nodded her head and said, “Yes, that’s correct.”

“In your research did you ever come across a man named Viktor Frankel?”

“He was a disciple of Max Beckmann,” she said. “Frankel is little known today, but at the time he was considered extremely influential and was highly regarded by his contemporaries. In 1936 the Nazis declared his work degenerate, and he was forbidden to continue painting. Unfortunately, he decided to remain in Germany. By the time he decided to leave, it was too late. He was deported to Auschwitz in 1942, along with his wife and teenaged daughter, Irene. Only Irene survived. She went to Israel after the war and was one of the country’s most influential artists in the fifties and sixties. I believe she died several years ago.”

“That’s correct,” said Carter’s collaborator, his eyes still on Sarah’s file.

“Why are you interested in whether I knew about Viktor Frankel?”

“Because he was my grandfather.”

“You’re Irene’s son?”

“Yes,” he said. “Irene was my mother.”

She looked at Carter, who was gazing at his own hands. “I guess I know who’s running this endeavor of yours.” She looked back at the man with gray temples and green eyes. “You’re Israeli.”

“Guilty as charged. Shall we continue, Sarah, or would you like me to leave now?”

She hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Do I get a name, or are names forbidden?”

He gave her one. It was vaguely familiar. And then she remembered where she had seen it before. The Israeli agent who was involved in the bombing of the Gare de Lyon in Paris…

“You’re the one who-”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m the one.”

He looked down at the open file again and turned to a new page. “But let’s get back to you, shall we? We have a lot of ground to cover and very little time.”

HE STARTED SLOWLY, a climber plodding his way through the foothills, conserving his strength for the unseen perils that lay ahead. His questions were short and efficient and methodically posed, as though he were reading them from a prepared list, which he wasn’t. He devoted the first hour to her family. Her father, the high-flying Citicorp executive who’d had no time for his children but plenty of time for other women. Her mother, whose life had crumbled after the divorce and who was now living like a hermit in her classic-eight Manhattan apartment on Fifth Avenue. Her older sister, whom Sarah described as “the one who got all the brains and beauty.” Her little brother, who had checked out of life early and, much to her father’s disappointment, was now working for pennies in a ski-rental shop somewhere in Colorado.

After family came another hour devoted solely to her expensive European schooling. The American in St. John’s Wood, where she’d done her elementary years. The international middle school in Paris, where she’d learned how to speak French and get into trouble. The all-girls boarding school outside Geneva, where she’d been incarcerated by her father for the purpose of “sorting herself out.” It was in Switzerland, she volunteered, where she discovered her passion for art. Each of her answers was greeted by the scratching of his pen. He wrote in red ink on a legal pad the color of sunflowers. At first she thought he was scribbling in shorthand or some form of hieroglyphics. Then she realized he was making notes in Hebrew. The fact that it was written right to left-and that he could write with equal speed with either hand-served to reinforce her impression that she had passed through the looking glass.

At times he seemed to have all the time in the world; at others he would glare at his wristwatch and frown, as though calculating how much farther they could push on before making camp for the night. From time to time he slipped into other languages. His French was quite good. His Italian faultless but tinged with a vague accent that betrayed the fact he was not a native speaker. When he addressed her in German a change came over him. A straightening of his back. A hardening of his severe features. She answered him in the language of his question, though invariably her words were recorded in Hebrew on his yellow legal pad. For the most part he did not challenge her, though any inconsistencies, real or imagined, were pursued with a prosecutorial zeal.

“This passion for art,” he said. “Where do you think it came from? Why art? Why not literature or music? Why not film or drama?”

“Paintings became a refuge for me. A sanctuary.”

“From what?”

“Real life.”

“You were a rich girl going to the finest schools in Europe. What was wrong with your life?” He switched from English into German in mid-accusation. “What were you running from?”

“You judge me,” she responded in the same language.

“Of course.”

“May we speak in English?”

“If you must.”

“Paintings are other places. Other lives. An instant in time that exists on the canvas and nowhere else.”

“You like to inhabit these places.”

It was an observation, not a question. She nodded in response.

“You like to lead other lives? Become other people? You like to walk through Vincent’s wheat fields and Monet’s flower gardens?”

“And even through Frankel’s nightmares.”

He laid down his pen for the first time. “Is that why you applied to join the Agency? Because you wanted to lead another life? Because you wanted to become another person?”

“No, I did it because I wanted to serve my country.”

He gave her a disapproving frown, as if he found her response naïve, and then shot another glance at his wristwatch. Time was his enemy.

“Did you meet Arabs when you were growing up in Europe?”

“Of course.”

“Boys? Girls?”

“Both?”

“What sort of Arabs?”

“Arabs who walk on two legs. Arabs from Arab countries.”

“You’re more sophisticated than that, Sarah.”

“Lebanese. Palestinians. Jordanians. Egyptians.”

“What about Saudis? Did you ever go to school with Saudis?”

“There were a couple of Saudi girls at my school in Switzerland.”

“They were rich, these Saudi girls?”

“We were all rich.”

“Were you friends with them?”

“They were hard to get to know. They were standoffish. They kept to themselves.”

“And what about Arab boys?”

“What about them?”

“Were you ever friends with any of them?”

“I suppose.”

“Ever date any of them? Ever sleep with any of them?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I guess my taste didn’t run to Arab men.”

“You had French boyfriends?”

“A couple.”

“British?”

“Sure.”

“But no Arabs?”

“No Arabs.”

“Are you prejudiced against Arabs?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“So it’s conceivable you could have dated an Arab. You just didn’t.”

“I hope you’re not going to ask me to serve as bait in a honey trap because-”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Then why are you asking me these questions?”

“Because I want to know whether you’d be comfortable in a social and professional setting with Arab men.”

“The answer is yes.”

“You don’t automatically see a terrorist when you see an Arab man?”

“No.”

“Are you sure about that, Sarah?”

“I suppose it depends on the sort of Arab you have in mind.”

He looked at his watch. “It’s getting late,” he said to no one in particular. “I’m sure poor Sarah is famished.” He drew a heavy red line across his page of hieroglyphics. “Let’s order some food, shall we? Sarah will feel better after she has something to eat.”

THEY ORDERED KEBABS from a carryout in the heart of Georgetown. The food came twenty minutes later, delivered by the same black Suburban that had brought Sarah to the town house three hours earlier. Gabriel treated its arrival as a signal to begin the night session. For the next ninety minutes he focused on her education and her knowledge of art history. His questions came at such a rapid-fire pace she scarcely had time for her food. As for his own, it sat untouched next to his yellow legal pad. He’s an ascetic, she thought. He can’t be bothered with food. He lives in a bare room and subsists on coarse bread and a few drops of water a day. Shortly after midnight he carried his plate into the kitchen and deposited it on the counter. When he returned to the dining room he stood for a moment behind his chair, with one hand pressed to his chin and his head tilted slightly to one side. The light from the chandelier had turned his eyes to emerald, and they were flashing restlessly over her like searchlights. He can see the summit, she thought. He’s preparing himself for the final assault.

“I SEE FROM YOUR file that you’re unmarried.”

“Correct.”

“Are you involved with anyone at the moment?”

“No.”

“Sleeping with anyone?”

She looked at Carter, who gazed sadly back at her, as if to say, I told you things might get personal.

“No, I’m not sleeping with anyone.”

“Why not?”

“Have you ever lost someone close to you?”

The dark look that came suddenly over his face, combined with Carter’s restless shifting in his chair, alerted her that she had strayed into some forbidden zone.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t-”

“It’s Ben, I take it? Ben is the reason you’re not involved with anyone?”

“Yes, it’s Ben. Of course it’s Ben.”

“Tell me about him.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “You don’t get to know about Ben. Ben is mine. Ben isn’t part of the deal.”

“How long did you date?”

“I told you-”

“How long did you see him, Sarah? It’s important, or I wouldn’t be asking.”

“About nine months.”

“And then it ended?”

“Yes, it ended.”

“You ended it, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Ben was in love with you. Ben wanted to marry you.”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t feel the same way. You weren’t interested in marriage. Maybe you weren’t interested in Ben.”

“I cared about him very much…”

“But?”

“But I wasn’t in love with him.”

“Tell me about his death.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I’m quite serious.”

“I don’t talk about his death. I never talk about Ben’s death. Besides, you know how Ben died. He died at nine-oh-three A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, live on television. Everyone in the world watched Ben die. Did you?”

“Some of the passengers from Flight 175 managed to make phone calls.”

“That’s correct.”

“Was Ben one of them?”

“Yes.”

“Did he call his father?”

“No.”

“Did he call his mother?”

“No.”

“His brother? His sister?”

“No.”

“Who did he call, Sarah?”

Her eyes welled with tears.

“He called me, you son of a bitch.”

“What did he say to you?”

“He told me the plane had been hijacked. He told me they’d killed the flight attendants. He told me the plane was making wild movements. He told me he loved me and that he was sorry. He was about to die, and he told me he was sorry. And then we lost the connection.”

“What did you do?”

“I turned on the television and saw the smoke pouring from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It was a few minutes after Flight 11 struck. No one was really sure then what had happened. I called the FAA and told them about Ben’s call. I called the FBI. I called the Boston police. I felt so utterly fucking helpless.”

“And then?”

“I watched television. I waited for the phone to ring again. It never did. At 9:03 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, the second plane hit the World Trade Center. The South Tower was burning. Ben was burning.”

A single tear spilled onto her cheek. She punched it away and glared at him.

“Are you satisfied?”

He was silent.

“Now it’s my turn to ask a question, and you’d better answer it truthfully, or I’m leaving.”

“Ask me anything you like, Sarah.”

“What do you want from me?”

“We want you to quit your job at the Phillips Collection and go to work for Jihad Incorporated. Are you still interested?”

IT WAS LEFT to Carter to place the contract in front of her. Carter with his Puritan righteousness and corduroy blazer. Carter with his therapeutic demeanor and American-accented English. Gabriel slipped out like a night thief and crossed the street to Carter’s battered Volvo. He knew what Sarah’s answer would be. She had given it to him already. The South Tower was burning, she had said. Ben was burning. And so Gabriel was not concerned by the gallows expression on her face, twenty minutes later, when she emerged stoically from the town house and descended the steps to the waiting Suburban. Nor was he disturbed by the sight of Carter, five minutes after that, ambling morosely across the street like a pallbearer making for the casket. He climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. “We have a plane at Andrews waiting to take you back to Israel,” he said. “We need to make one stop along the way. There’s someone who’d like a word with you before you leave.”

IT WAS AFTER midnight; K Street had been abandoned to the overnight delivery trucks and the taxicabs. Carter was driving at a faster pace than usual and making repeated glances at his wristwatch. “She doesn’t come for free, you know. There’ll be costs to using her. She’ll have to be resettled when this is over and protected for a long time.”

“But you’ll handle that, won’t you, Adrian? You’re the one with all the money. The budget for the American intelligence community alone is far more than the budget of our entire country.”

“Have you forgotten that this operation does not exist? Besides, you’re going to walk away with a great deal of Zizi’s money.”

“Fine,” said Gabriel. “You can be the one to tell Sarah Bancroft that she’s going to spend the next ten years living on a kibbutz in the Galilee hiding from the forces of global jihad.”

“All right, we’ll pay for her resettlement.”

Carter made a series of turns. For a moment Gabriel lost track of what street they were on. They passed the façade of a large neoclassical building, then turned into an official-looking driveway. On the left was a fortified guardhouse with bulletproof glass. Carter lowered his window and handed over his badge to the guard.

“We’re expected.”

The guard consulted a clipboard, then handed back Carter’s ID.

“Pull through, then stop in front of the barricade on the left. The dogs will give the car the once-over, then you can head on in.”

Carter nodded and raised his window. Gabriel said, “Where are we?”

Carter wound his way through the barricades and stopped where he’d been told. “The back door of the White House,” he said.

“Who are we seeing?” Gabriel asked, but Carter was now speaking to another officer, this one struggling to control a large German shepherd straining at a thick leather leash. Gabriel, whose fear of dogs was legendary within the Office, sat motionless while the animal prowled the perimeter of the Volvo, searching for concealed explosives. A moment later they were directed through another security gate. Carter pulled into an empty parking space on East Executive Drive and shut down the engine.

“This is as far as I go.”

“Who am I seeing, Adrian?”

“Go through that gate over there and walk up the drive toward the house. He’ll be out in a minute.”

THE DOGS came first, two coal-black terriers that shot from the Diplomatic Entrance like bullets from a gun barrel and launched a preemptive strike on Gabriel’s trousers. The president emerged a few seconds later. He advanced on Gabriel with one hand out while the other was gesturing for the terriers to break off their onslaught. The two men shook hands briefly, then set off along the footpath that ran around the periphery of the South Lawn. The terriers launched one more sortie against Gabriel’s ankles. Carter watched as Gabriel turned and murmured something in Hebrew that sent the dogs scurrying toward the protection of a Secret Service agent.

Their conversation lasted just five minutes, and to Carter it seemed the president did most of the talking. They moved at a brisk pace, stopping only once in order to settle what appeared to be a minor disagreement. Gabriel removed his hands from his coat pockets and used them to illustrate whatever point he was trying to make. The president appeared unconvinced at first, then he nodded and clapped Gabriel hard on the shoulders.

They completed their circuit and parted at the Diplomatic Entrance. As Gabriel started back toward East Executive Drive the dogs trotted after him, then turned and darted into the White House after their master. Gabriel slipped through the open gate and climbed into Carter’s car.

“How was he?” Carter asked as they turned into 15th Street.

“Resolute.”

“It looked like you had a bit of an argument.”

“I’d characterize it as a polite disagreement.”

“About what?”

“Our conversation was private, Adrian, and it will remain so.”

“Good man,” said Carter.

18.

THE ANNOUNCEMENT THAT Isherwood Fine Arts had sold Daniel in the Lions’ Den by Peter Paul Rubens for the sum of ten million pounds came on the first Wednesday of the new year. By Friday the clamor had been eclipsed by a rumor that Isherwood was bringing aboard a partner.

It was Oliver Dimbleby, Isherwood’s tubby nemesis from King Street, who heard it first, though later even Dimbleby would be hard pressed to pin down its precise origin. To the best of his recollection the seeds were planted by Penelope, the luscious hostess from the little wine bar in Jermyn Street where Isherwood could often be seen whiling away slow afternoons. “She’s blond,” Penelope had said. “Natural blond, Oliver. Not like your girls. Pretty. American with a bit of an English accent.” At first Penelope suspected Isherwood was once again making a fool of himself with a younger woman, but she soon realized that she was witnessing a job interview. “And not just any job, Oliver. Sounded like something big.”

Dimbleby would have thought nothing of it had he not received a report of a second sighting, this one from Percy, a notorious gossip who waited tables in the breakfast room at the Dorchester Hotel. “They definitely weren’t lovers,” he told Dimbleby with the assurance of a man who knew his material. “It was all salary and benefits. There was a fair amount of haggling. She was playing hard to get.” Dimbleby slipped Percy ten quid and asked whether he’d caught the woman’s name. “Bancroft,” said Percy. “Sarah Bancroft. Stayed two nights. Bill paid in its entirety by Isherwood Fine Arts, Mason’s Yard, St. James’s.”

A third sighting, a cozy dinner at Mirabelle, confirmed to Dimbleby that something was definitely afoot. The next evening he bumped into Jeremy Crabbe, director of the Bonhams Old Masters department, at the bar in Greene’s restaurant. Crabbe was drinking a very large whiskey and still licking his wounds over Isherwood’s monumental coup. “I had that Rubens, Oliver, but Julie outfoxed me. He’s ten million richer, and I’m facing a firing squad at dawn. And now he’s expanding operations. Getting himself a flashy new front man, from what I hear. But don’t quote me, Oliver. It’s nothing but malicious talk.” When Dimbleby asked whether Isherwood’s flashy front man might in fact be an American woman named Sarah Bancroft, Crabbe gave him a sideways smile. “Anything’s possible, love. Remember, we are talking about Juicy Julie Isherwood.”

For the next forty-eight hours Oliver Dimbleby devoted his copious spare time to researching the provenance of one Sarah Bancroft. A drinking companion on the faculty of the Courtauld described her as “a meteor.” The same companion learned from an acquaintance at Harvard that her dissertation was considered required reading for anyone serious about the German Expressionists. Dimbleby then dialed up an old chum who cleaned paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and asked him to poke around the Phillips for clues about her departure. It was a squabble over money, reported the chum. Two days later he called Dimbleby back and said it had something to do with an office love affair gone bad. A third call brought the news that Sarah Bancroft had parted company with the Phillips Collection on good terms and that the motive for her departure was nothing more than a desire to spread her wings. As for her personal life, meaning her marital status, she was described as single and unavailable.

Which left but one unanswered question: Why was Isherwood suddenly taking on a partner? Jeremy Crabbe heard he was ill. Roddy Hutchinson heard he had a tumor in his abdomen the size of a honeydew melon. Penelope, the girl from Isherwood’s wine bar, heard he was in love with a wealthy Greek divorcee and was planning to spend his remaining days in blessed fornication on a beach in Mykonos. Dimbleby, though he found the lavish rumors entertaining, suspected that the truth was far more prosaic. Julian was getting on. Julian was tired. Julian had just pulled off a coup. Why not bring someone on board to help lighten the load?

His suspicions were confirmed, three days later, when a small item appeared at the bottom of the Times arts page, announcing that Sarah Bancroft, formerly of the Phillips Collection in Washington, would be joining Isherwood Fine Arts as its first associate director. “I’ve been at this for forty years,” Isherwood told The Times. “I needed someone to help shoulder the burden, and the angels sent me Sarah.”

SHE ARRIVED the following week, on the Monday. By coincidence Oliver Dimbleby was waddling along Duke Street at the precise moment she turned through the passageway into Mason’s Yard, wearing a Burberry trench coat, her blond hair swept back so that it hung between her shoulder blades like a satin cape. Dimbleby did not realize then who she was, but Oliver being Oliver, he poked his head through the passageway for a look-see at her backside. To his surprise she was making a beeline toward Isherwood’s gallery in the far corner of the quadrangle. She rang the bell that first day and had to wait two very long minutes for Tanya, Isherwood’s lethargic secretary, to buzz her up. It was Tanya’s initiation of the new girl, thought Dimbleby. Tanya, he suspected, would be gone by Friday.

Her impact was instantaneous. Sarah was a whirlwind. Sarah was a much-needed breath of fresh air. Sarah was all things Isherwood was not: prompt, regimented, disciplined, and, of course, very American. She started arriving at the gallery at eight each morning. Isherwood, who was used to strolling into work at the Italianate hour of ten, was forced to trim his sails accordingly. She put his disgraceful books in order and spruced up the large common office they shared. She replaced the missing letters on the intercom and the soiled brown carpeting on the stairs. She began the painful process of liquidating Isherwood’s vast pile of dead stock and entered into quiet negotiations to take over the adjacent office space currently occupied by Miss Archer’s dreary little travel agency. “She’s an American,” said Dimbleby. “She’s expansionist by nature. She’ll conquer your country and afterwards tell you it’s for your own good.”

Tanya, as it turned out, did not survive till Friday and was last seen leaving the gallery on the Wednesday evening. Her departure was handled by Sarah and was therefore accomplished with a smoothness not usually seen at Isherwood Fine Arts. The generous severance package-“Very generous from what I hear,” said Dimbleby-permitted her to take a long, well-deserved winter holiday in Morocco. By the next Monday there was a new girl on duty in Isherwood’s anteroom, a tall olive-skinned Italian woman with riotous dark hair and eyes the color of caramel named Elena Farnese. An informal straw poll, conducted by Roddy Hutchinson, found that among the men of St. James’s she was regarded as even more beautiful than the fetching Sarah. The name “Isherwood Fine Arts” suddenly took on new meaning among the denizens of Duke Street, and the gallery was hit by a rash of drop-bys and pop-ins. Even Jeremy Crabbe from Bonhams started dropping by unannounced just to have a glimpse at Isherwood’s collection.

After shoring up the gallery Sarah began venturing out to meet her compatriots. She did formal meetings with the leading lights at the various London auction houses. She lunched expensively with the collectors and had quiet drinks in the late afternoon with their advisers, their consultants, and their assorted hangers-on. She popped into the galleries of Isherwood’s competitors and said hello. She stopped at the bar at Green’s once or twice and bought a round for the boys. Oliver Dimbleby finally screwed up the courage to invite her to lunch, but wisely she made it a coffee instead. Next afternoon they had a latte in a paper cup at an American chain on Piccadilly. Oliver fondled her hand and invited her to dinner. “I’m afraid I don’t do dinner,” she said. Why ever not? wondered Oliver as he waddled back to his gallery in King Street. Why ever not indeed?

UZI NAVOT had had his eye on it for some time. It was a perfect port in a storm, he’d always thought. The sort of place to stick in your back pocket for the inevitable rainy day. It was located just ten miles beyond the M25 ring road in Surrey -or, as he explained to Gabriel, an hour by Tube and car from Isherwood’s gallery in St. James’s. The house was a rambling Tudor pile with high gables and tiny leaded windows, reached by a long rutted beech drive and shielded by a forbidding brick-and-iron gate. There was a tumbledown barn and a pair of shattered greenhouses. There was a tangled garden for thinking deep thoughts, eight private acres for wrestling with one’s demons, and a stock pond that hadn’t been fished for fifteen years. The rental agent, when handing Navot the keys, had referred to it as Winslow Haven. To a field hand like Navot it was Nirvana.

Dina, Rimona, and Yaakov worked in the dusty library; Lavon and Yossi set up shop in a rambling rumpus room hung with the heads of many dead animals. As for Gabriel, he made a shakedown studio for himself in a light-filled second-floor drawing room overlooking the garden. Because he could not show his face round the art world of London, he dispatched others to procure his supplies. Their missions were special operations unto themselves. Dina and Yossi made separate trips to L. Cornelissen amp; Sons in Russell Street, carefully dividing the order between them so that the girls who worked there would not realize they were filling the order of a professional restorer. Yaakov went to a lighting shop in Earl’s Court to purchase Gabriel’s halogen lamps and then to a master carpenter in Camden Town to collect a custom easel. Eli Lavon saw to the frame. A newly minted expert in all things al-Bakari, he took issue with Gabriel’s decision to go antique Italian. “Zizi’s taste is haute French,” he said. “The Italian will clash with Zizi’s sense of style.” But Gabriel always found that the more muscular carving of the Italian frames best suited Vincent’s impasto style, and so it was an Italian frame that Lavon ordered from the enchanted Bury Street premises of Arnold Wiggins amp; Sons.

Sarah came to them early each evening, always by a different route, and always with Lavon handling the countersurveillance. She was a quick study and, as Gabriel had anticipated, was blessed with a flawless memory. Still, he was careful not to smother her beneath an avalanche of information. They started usually by seven, broke at nine for a family dinner in the formal dining room, then carried on until nearly midnight, when she was shuttled back to her apartment in Chelsea by Yossi, who was staying in a flat across the street.

They spent a week on Zizi al-Bakari himself before branching off into his associates and the other members of his entourage and inner circle. Special attention was paid to Wazir bin Talal, the omnipresent chief of AAB security. Bin Talal was an intelligence service unto himself, with a staff of security agents inside AAB and a network of paid informants scattered around the world that fed him reports about potential threats to AAB properties or Zizi himself. “If Zizi likes the merchandise, it’s bin Talal who does the due diligence,” explained Lavon. “No one gets near the chief without first passing muster with bin Talal. And if anyone steps out of line, it’s bin Talal who lowers the boom.” Yossi’s research uncovered no fewer than a half dozen former al-Bakari associates who had died under mysterious circumstances, a fact that was withheld from Sarah at Gabriel’s request.

In the days that followed, the Surrey safe house was visited by what were known in the Office as “experts with handles.” The first was a woman from Hebrew University who spent two nights lecturing Sarah on Saudi social customs. Next came a psychiatrist who spent two more nights counseling her on ways to combat fear and anxiety while working undercover. A specialist in communications gave her a primer on elementary forms of secret writing. A martial arts trainer taught her the basics of Israeli-style hand-to-hand combat. Gabriel chose Lavon, the greatest watcher in the history of the Office, to give her a crash course in the art of human and electronic surveillance. “You will be entering a hostile camp,” he told her in summation. “Assume they’re watching your every move and listening to your every word. If you do that, nothing can go wrong.”

Gabriel, for the most part, remained a spectator to her training. He greeted her when she arrived at the house each evening, joined the team for dinner, then saw her off again at midnight when she set out for London with Yossi. As the days wore on, they began to detect a restlessness in him. Lavon, who had worked with him more than the others, diagnosed Gabriel’s mood as impatience. “He wants to put her into play,” Lavon said, “but he knows she’s not ready.” He began spending extended periods before the canvas, painstakingly repairing the damage done to Marguerite. The intensity of the work only increased his restiveness. Lavon advised him to take breaks now and again, and Gabriel reluctantly agreed. He found a pair of Wellington boots in the mudroom and ventured out on solitary marches over the footpaths surrounding the village. He dug a rod and reel from a storage room in the cellar and used it to haul an enormous brown trout from the stock pond. In the barn, concealed beneath a tarpaulin, he found an ancient MG motorcar that looked as though it hadn’t been driven in twenty years. Three days later the others heard a sputtering sound emanating from the barn, followed by an explosion that reverberated over the countryside. Yaakov came running down from the house, fearful Gabriel had blown himself to bits, but instead found him standing over the open hood of the MG, covered in engine grease up to his elbows and smiling for the first time since they’d come to Surrey. “It works,” he shouted over the thunderous rattle of the motor. “The damned thing still runs.”

That evening he joined in Sarah’s training session for the first time. Lavon and Yaakov were not surprised, for the topic of discussion was none other that Ahmed bin Shafiq, the man who had become Gabriel’s personal bête noire. He chose Dina, with her pleasant voice and patina of early widowhood, to deliver the briefings. On the first night she lectured on Group 205, bin Shafiq’s secret unit within the GID, and showed how the combination of Wahhabi ideology and Saudi money had wreaked havoc across the Middle East and South Asia. On the second night she recounted bin Shafiq’s journey from loyal servant of the Saudi state to mastermind of the Brotherhood of Allah. Then she described in detail the operation against the Vatican, though she made no mention of the fact that Gabriel had been present at the scene of the crime. Gabriel realized that much of the information was superfluous, but he wanted Sarah to have no doubt in her mind that Ahmed bin Shafiq had earned the fate that awaited him.

On the final night they showed her a series of computer-generated photo illustrations of how bin Shafiq might look now. Bin Shafiq with a beard. Bin Shafiq with a balding pate. Bin Shafiq with a gray wig. With a black wig. With curly hair. With no hair at all. With his sharp Bedouin features softened by a plastic surgeon. But it was the wounded arm that would be her most valuable clue to his identity, Gabriel told her. The scar on the inside of his forearm he would never show. The slightly withered hand that he would never offer and keep safely tucked away, hidden from infidel eyes.

“We know he’s concealed somewhere within Zizi’s empire,” Gabriel said. “He might come as an investment banker or a portfolio manager. He might come as a real estate developer or a pharmaceutical executive. He might come in a month. He might come in a year. He might never come. But if he does come, you can be certain he’ll be well mannered and worldly and seem like anything but a professional terrorist. Don’t look for a terrorist or someone who acts like a terrorist. Just look for a man.”

He gathered up the photo illustrations. “We want to know about everyone who moves in and out of Zizi’s orbit. We want you to gather as many names as you can. But this is the man we’re looking for.” Gabriel placed a photograph on the table in front of her. “This is the man we want.” Another photograph. “This is the man we’re after.” Another. “He’s the reason we’re all here instead of being home with our families and our children.” Another. “He’s the reason we asked you to give up your life and join us.” Another. “If you see him, you’re to get us the name he’s using and the company he’s working for. Get the country of his passport if you can.” Another photograph. “If you’re not sure it’s him, it doesn’t matter. Tell us. If it doesn’t turn out to be him, it doesn’t matter. Tell us. Nothing happens based on your word alone. No one gets hurt because of you, Sarah. You’re only the messenger.”

“And if I give you a name?” she asked. “What happens then?”

Gabriel looked at his watch. “I think it’s time Sarah and I had a word in private. Would you all excuse us?”

HE LED HER upstairs to his studio and switched on the halogen lamps. Marguerite Gachet glowed seductively under the intense white light. Sarah sat down in an ancient wingchair; Gabriel slipped on his magnifying visor and prepared his palette.

“How much longer?” she asked.

It was the same question Shamron had posed to him that windswept afternoon in October, when he had come to Narkiss Street to haul Gabriel out of exile. A year, he should have said to Shamron that day. And then he wouldn’t be here, in a safe house in Surrey, about to send a beautiful American girl into the heart of Jihad Incorporated.

“I’ve removed the surface dirt and pressed the creases back into place with a warm, damp spatula,” Gabriel said. “Now I have to finish the inpainting and apply a light coat of varnish-just enough to bring out the warmth of Vincent’s original colors.”

“I wasn’t talking about the painting.”

He looked up from his palette. “I suppose that depends entirely on you.”

“I’m ready when you are,” she said.

“Not quite.”

“What happens if Zizi doesn’t bite? What happens if he doesn’t like the painting-or me?”

“No serious collector with money like Zizi is going to turn down a newly discovered van Gogh. And as for you, he won’t have much choice in the matter. We’re going to make you irresistible.”

“How?”

“There are some things it’s better you not know.”

“Like what happens to Ahmed bin Shafiq if I see him?”

He added pigment to a puddle of medium and mixed it with a brush. “You know what happens to Ahmed bin Shafiq. I made that very clear to you in Washington the night we met.”

“Tell me everything,” she said. “I need to know.”

Gabriel lowered his visor and lifted his brush to the canvas. When he spoke again, he spoke not to Sarah but to Marguerite. “We’ll watch him. We’ll listen to him if we can. We’ll take his photograph and get his voice on tape and send it to our experts for analysis.”

“And if your experts determine it’s him?”

“At a time and place of our choosing, we’ll put him down.”

“Put him down?”

“Assassinate him. Kill him. Liquidate him. You choose the word that makes you most comfortable, Sarah. I’ve never found one.”

“How many times have you done this?”

He put his face close to the painting and murmured, “Many times, Sarah.”

“How many have you killed? Ten? Twenty? Has it solved the problem of terrorism? Or has it just made things worse? If you find Ahmed bin Shafiq and kill him, what will it accomplish? Will it end, or will another man step forward and take his place?”

“Eventually another murderer will take his place. In the meantime, lives will be saved. And justice will be done.”

“Is it really justice? Can justice really be done with a silenced pistol or a booby-trapped car?”

He lifted the visor and turned around, his green eyes flashing in the glare of the lamps. “Are you enjoying this little debate about the moral relevancy of counterterrorism? Is it making you feel better? You can rest assured Ahmed bin Shafiq never wastes time wrestling with these questions of morality. You can be certain that if he ever manages to acquire a nuclear device, the only debate he’ll have is whether to use it against New York or Tel Aviv.”

“Is it justice, Gabriel? Or only vengeance?”

Again he saw himself and Shamron. This time the setting was not Gabriel’s flat in Narkiss Street but a warm afternoon in September 1972-the day Shamron first came for him. Gabriel had posed the same question.

“It’s not too late, Sarah. You can get out if you want. We can find someone else to take your place.”

“There is no one else like me. Besides, I don’t want out.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Permission to sleep at night.”

“Sleep, Sarah. Sleep very well.”

“And you?”

“I have a painting to finish.”

He turned around and lowered his visor again. Sarah was not done with him.

“Was it true?” she asked. “All the things written about you in the newspapers after the Gare de Lyon attack?”

“Most of it.”

“You killed the Palestinians from Black September who carried out the Munich Massacre?”

“Some of them.”

“Would you do it again, knowing everything you know now?”

He hesitated a moment. “Yes, Sarah, I would do it again. And I’ll tell you why. It wasn’t about vengeance. Black September was the most lethal terror group the world had ever seen, and it needed to be put out of business.”

“But look at what it cost you. You lost your family.”

“Everyone who engages in this fight loses something. Take your country, for example. You were innocent, a shining beacon of freedom and decency. Now you have blood on your hands and men in secret prisons. We don’t do this sort of work because we enjoy it. We do it because we have to. We do it because we have no choice. You think I have a choice? You think Dina Sarid has a choice? We don’t. And neither do you.” He looked at her for a moment. “Unless you’d like me to find someone else to go in your place.”

“There is no one else like me,” she repeated. “When will I be ready?”

Gabriel turned and lifted his brush to the painting. Soon, he thought. One or two days more of inpainting. Then a coat of varnish. Then she would be ready.

ALL THAT REMAINED was her field training. Lavon and Uzi Navot put her through her paces. For three days and nights they took her into the streets of London and drilled her on the basic tenets of tradecraft. They taught her how to make a clandestine meeting and how to determine if a site was compromised. They taught her how to spot physical surveillance and simple techniques for shaking it. They taught her how to make a dead drop and how to hand material to a live courier. They taught her how to dial the Office emergency lines on ordinary pay telephones and how to signal them with her body if she were blown and required extraction. Lavon would later describe her as the finest natural amateur field agent he had ever trained. He could have completed the course in two days, but Gabriel, if only for his own peace of mind, insisted on a third. When Lavon finally returned to Surrey that afternoon he found Gabriel standing morosely at the edge of the stock pond, with a rod in one hand and his eyes trained on the surface of the water as though willing a fish to rise. “She’s ready,” Lavon said. “The question is, are you?” Gabriel slowly reeled in his line and followed Lavon back to the house.

LATER THAT SAME evening the lights went dark in the melancholy little travel agency in Mason’s Yard. Miss Archer, clutching a batch of old files, paused for a moment on the landing and peered through the sparkling glass entrance of Isherwood Fine Arts. Seated behind the receptionist desk was Elena, Mr. Isherwood’s scandalously pretty Italian secretary. She glanced up from her computer screen and blew Miss Archer an elaborate farewell kiss, then looked down again and resumed her work.

Miss Archer smiled sadly and headed down the stairway. There were no tears in her eyes. She’d done her crying in private, the way she did most things. Nor was there hesitation in her step. For twenty-seven years she’d been coming to this office five mornings a week. Saturdays, too, if there was housekeeping to be done. She was looking forward to retirement, even if it had come a bit earlier than expected. Maybe she’d take a long holiday. Or maybe she’d take a cottage in the countryside. She’d had her eye on a little place in the Chilterns for some time. She was certain of only one thing: She wasn’t sorry to be leaving. Mason’s Yard would never be the same again, not with the flashy Miss Bancroft in residence. It wasn’t that Miss Archer had anything against Americans personally. She just wasn’t terribly interested in living next door to one.

As she neared the bottom of the stairs a buzzer groaned, and the automatic locks on the outer door snapped open. Thank you, Elena, she thought as she stepped outside into the chill evening air. Can’t get off your shapely little backside to give a proper good-bye, and now you’re practically shoving me out the door. She was tempted to violate Mr. Isherwood’s long-standing edict about waiting for the door to lock again, but, professional to the end, she stayed ten more seconds, until the dull thump of the deadbolts sent her shuffling slowly toward the passageway.

She did not know that her departure was being monitored by a three-man neviot team waiting in a van parked on the opposite side of Duke Street. The team remained in their van for another hour, just to make certain she hadn’t forgotten anything. Then, shortly before eight, they slipped through the passageway and made their way slowly across the bricks of the old yard toward the gallery. To Julian Isherwood, who watched their unhurried approach from the window of his office, they seemed like gravediggers with a long night ahead.

19.

THE OPERATION BEGAN IN earnest late the following morning, when Julian Isherwood, London art dealer of some repute, placed a discreet telephone call to the Knightsbridge residence of Andrew Malone, exclusive art adviser to Zizi al-Bakari. It was answered by a drowsy woman who informed Isherwood that Malone was out of the country.

“A fugitive from justice?” he asked, trying to make light of an awkward situation.

“Try his mobile,” the woman said before slamming down the phone.

Fortunately, Isherwood had the number. He immediately dialed it and, as instructed, left a brief message. The better part of the day elapsed before Malone bothered to call him back.

“I’m in Rome,” he said sotto voce. “Something big. Very big.”

“Hardly surprising, Andrew. You only do big.”

Malone batted away Isherwood’s attempt at flattery. “I’m afraid I only have a moment,” he said. “What can I do for you, Julie?”

“I think I might have something for you. Something for your client, actually.”

“My client doesn’t do the Old Masters.”

“The something I have for your client isn’t Old Master. It’s Impressionist. And not just any Impressionist, if you’re getting my drift. It’s special, Andrew. It’s the sort of thing that only a handful of collectors in the world can even dream about owning, and your man happens to be one of them. I’m offering you a first look, Andrew-an exclusive first look. Any interest, or shall I take my business elsewhere?”

“Do tell more, Julie.”

“Sorry, darling, but it’s not the sort of thing one discusses over the telephone. How about lunch tomorrow? I’m buying.”

“I’m going to Tokyo tomorrow. There’s a collector there who has a Monet my man wants.”

“How about the day after tomorrow then?”

“That’s my jet-lag day. Let’s make it Thursday, shall we?”

“You won’t regret this, Andrew.”

“Regrets are what sustain us. Ciao, Julie.”

Isherwood hung up the telephone and looked at the heavy-shouldered man with strawberry-blond hair seated on the opposite side of the desk. “Nicely done,” said Uzi Navot. “But next time let Zizi buy lunch.”

IT CAME as no surprise to Gabriel that Andrew Malone was in Rome, because he had been under electronic and physical surveillance for nearly a week. He had gone to the Eternal City to acquire a certain Degas sculpture that Zizi had had his eye on for quite some time but left empty-handed on Monday night and proceeded to Tokyo. The anonymous collector whom Malone hoped to relieve of a Monet was none other than the famed industrialist Morito Watanabe. Based on the defeatist expression on Malone’s face as he was leaving Watanabe’s apartment, Gabriel concluded the negotiations had not gone well. That evening Malone phoned Isherwood to say he was staying in Tokyo a day longer than expected. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to postpone our little get-together,” he said. “Can we do it next week?” Gabriel, who was anxious to get under way, instructed Isherwood to hold fast, and the meeting was pushed back just one day, from the Thursday to the Friday, though Isherwood did agree to make it a late lunch so that Malone could catch a few hours of sleep in his own bed. Malone did in fact remain in Tokyo for an additional day, but Tokyo Station detected no further contact between him and Watanabe or any of Watanabe’s agents. He returned to London late Thursday evening, looking, according to Eli Lavon, like a cadaver in a Savile Row suit. At three-thirty the next afternoon, the cadaver crept through the doorway of Green’s restaurant in Duke Street and made his way to the quiet corner table, where Isherwood was already waiting. Isherwood poured him a very large glass of white burgundy. “All right, Julie,” said Malone. “Let’s cut the bullshit, shall we? What have you got up your sleeve? And who the fuck put it there? Cheers.”

CHIARA WAS WAITING at the top of the landing ninety minutes later when Isherwood, fortified by two bottles of excellent white burgundy at Gabriel’s expense, came teetering up the newly carpeted stairs. She directed him to the left, into the former premises of Archer Travel, where he was met by one of Gabriel’s neviot listeners. He removed his coat and unbuttoned his shirt, revealing the small digital recording device secured to his chest by an elastic cummerbund.

“I don’t usually do this sort of thing on the first date,” he said.

The neviot man removed the recorder and smiled. “How was the lobster?”

“Bit chewy but otherwise fine.”

“You did well, Mr. Isherwood. Very well.”

“It’s my last deal, I suspect. Now let’s hope I don’t go out with a bang.”

THE RECORDING could have been sent by secure transmission, but Gabriel, like Adrian Carter, was still old-fashioned about some things, and he insisted that it be downloaded onto a disk and hand-carried to the Surrey safe house. As a result it was after eight by the time it finally arrived. He loaded the disk into a computer in the drawing room and clicked the Play icon. Dina was sprawled on the couch. Yaakov was seated in an armchair with his chin in his hands and elbows on his knees, hunched forward as though he were awaiting word from the front. It was Rimona’s night to cook. As Andrew Malone began to speak, she shouted at Gabriel from the kitchen to turn up the volume so she could hear it, too.

“DO YOU take me for a fool, Julian?”

“It’s the real thing, Andrew. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

“Do you have a photograph?”

“I wasn’t allowed.”

“Who’s the owner?”

“The owner wishes to remain anonymous.”

“Yes, of course, but who the hell is it, Julian?”

“I cannot divulge the name of the owner. Period. End of discussion. She’s entrusted me as her representative in this matter, and that’s as far as it goes.”

“She? So the owner is a woman?”

“The painting has been in the same family for three generations. Currently, it is in the hands of a woman.”

“What sort of family, Julian? Give me a tickle.”

“A French family, Andrew. And that’s all you’re getting from me.”

“I’m afraid that’s not going to work, Julian. You have to give me something I can hang my hat on. I can’t go to Zizi empty-handed. Zizi gets annoyed when that happens. If you want Zizi in the game, you’ll have to play by Zizi’s rules.”

“I won’t be bullied, Andrew. I came to you as a favor. Frankly I don’t give a shit about Zizi’s rules. Frankly, I don’t need Zizi at all. If I put the word on the street that I’m sitting on an undiscovered van Gogh, every major collector and museum in the world will be beating down my door and throwing money at me. Do please try to keep that in mind.”

“Forgive me, Julie. It’s been a long week. Let’s start over, shall we?”

“Yes, let’s.”

“May I pose a few harmless questions?”

“Depends on how harmless.”

“Let’s start with an easy one. Where’s the painting now? France or England?”

“It’s here in London.”

“In your gallery?”

“Not yet.”

“What sort of painting are we talking about? Landscape? Still life? Portrait?”

“Portrait.”

“Self?”

“No.”

“Male or female.”

“Female.”

“Dreamy. Early or late?”

“Very late.”

“Saint-Rémy? Auvers?”

“The latter, Andrew. It was painted during the final days of his life in Auvers.”

“You’re not sitting on an undiscovered portrait of Marguerite Gachet, are you, Julian?”

“Maybe we should have a glance at the menu.”

“Fuck the menu, Julian. Answer the question: Are you sitting on an undiscovered portrait of Marguerite?”

“I’ve gone as far as I can in terms of the content, Andrew. And that’s final. If you want to know what it is, you’ll have to take a look at it for yourself.”

“You’re offering me a look?”

“I’m offering your man a look, not you.”

“Easier said than done. Running the world keeps my man busy.”

“I’m prepared to offer you and Zizi exclusivity for seventy-two hours. After that, I’ll have to open it up to other collectors.”

“Bad form, Julian. My man doesn’t like ultimatums.”

“It’s not an ultimatum. It’s just business. He understands that.”

“What kind of price tag are we talking about?”

“Eighty-five million.”

“Eighty-five million? Then you do indeed need Zizi. You see, money’s a bit tight at the moment, isn’t it? Can’t remember the last time someone’s laid down eighty-five million for something. Can you, Julie?”

“This painting is worth every penny.”

“If it’s what you say it is, and if it’s in perfect condition, I’ll get you your eighty-five million in very short order. You see, my man has been looking for something splashy like this for a very long time. But then you knew that, didn’t you, Julie? That’s why you brought it to me first. You knew we could get the deal done in an afternoon. No auctions. No press. No nagging questions about your quiet little French woman who wants to remain anonymous. I’m the goose that lays the golden egg as far as you’re concerned, and you’re going to have to give the goose his due.”

“What on earth are you talking about, Andrew?”

“You know precisely what I’m talking about.”

“Maybe I’m a bit slow today. Mind spelling it out?”

“I’m talking about money, Julian. I’m talking about a very small slice of a very large pie.”

“You want a cut? A piece of the action, as the Americans like to say.”

“Let’s leave the Americans out of this, shall we? My man’s not terribly fond of the Americans at the moment.”

“What sort of slice are we talking about, Andrew?”

“Let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that your commission on the sale is ten percent. That means you’ll clear eight and a half million dollars for an afternoon’s work. I’m asking for ten percent of your ten percent. Actually, I’m not asking, I’m demanding it. And you’ll pay it, because that’s the way the game is played.”

“To the best of my faded recollection, you are Zizi al-Bakari’s exclusive art consultant. Zizi pays you an outrageous salary. You practically live on Zizi’s expense account. And you spend most of your free time relaxing at Zizi’s properties. He does this so that the advice you bring him remains untainted by other dealings on your part. But you’ve been playing both sides of the street, haven’t you, Andrew? How long has it been going on? How much have you been skimming? How much of Zizi’s money have you got salted away?”

“It’s not Zizi’s money. It’s my money. And what Zizi doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

“And if he finds out? He’ll drop you in the Empty Quarter and let the vultures pick over your bones.”

“Precisely, love. Which is why you’re never going to mention a word of this to Zizi. I’m offering you seven and a half million dollars for an afternoon’s work. Not bad, Julie. Take the deal. Let’s get rich together, shall we?”

“All right, Andrew. You’ll get your ten percent. But I want Zizi al-Bakari in my gallery in all his glory in seventy-two hours or the deal’s off.”

GABRIEL STOPPED THE RECORDING, reset it, and played the final bit again.

“But you’ve been playing both sides of the street, haven’t you, Andrew? How long has it been going on? How much have you been skimming? How much of Zizi’s money have you got salted away?”

“It’s not Zizi’s money. It’s my money. And what Zizi doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

“And if he finds out? He’ll drop you in the Empty Quarter and let the vultures pick over your bones.”

“Precisely, love. Which is why you’re never going to mention a word of this to Zizi.”

Gabriel closed the file and removed the disk from the computer.

“Mr. Malone has been a very bad boy,” said Yaakov.

“Yes, he has,” said Gabriel, but then Gabriel had known that for some time.

“Don’t you think that someone should tell Zizi about it?” asked Dina. “It’s only right.”

“Yes,” said Gabriel, slipping the disk into his pocket. “Someone should. But not yet.”

IT WAS among the longest seventy-two hours any of them had ever endured. There were false starts and false promises, commitments made and broken within the span of an afternoon. Malone played the role of the intimidator one minute and the supplicant the next. “Zizi’s in a bit of a bind,” he said late Saturday. “Zizi’s in the middle of a major deal. Zizi’s doing Delhi today and Singapore tomorrow. He can’t possibly make time for London until midweek.” Isherwood held firm. Zizi’s exclusive window closed Monday at 5:00 P.M., he said. After that Zizi would find himself in scrum fighting it out with all comers.

Late on Sunday evening Malone phoned with the disappointing news that Zizi was taking a pass. Gabriel was not the least bit concerned, because that very afternoon the neviot team stationed in Archer Travel had seen a well-dressed Arab in his mid-thirties making an obvious reconnaissance run of Mason’s Yard. Lavon, after viewing the surveillance photographs, identified the man as Jafar Sharuki, a former Saudi national guardsman who served as one of Zizi’s advance security men. “He’s coming,” Lavon said. “Zizi always likes to play hard to get.”

The call they were all expecting came at precisely 10:22 the following morning. It was Andrew Malone, and even though they could not see him, they knew the cadaver was all smiles. Zizi was on his way to London, he said. Zizi would be at Isherwood’s gallery at 4:30. “Zizi has a few rules,” Malone said before ringing off. “No alcohol or cigarettes. And make sure those two girls of yours are properly dressed. Zizi likes pretty girls, but he likes them modestly attired. He’s a religious man, our Zizi. He’s easily offended.”

20.

MARGUERITE GACHET WAS THE first to arrive. She came in the back of an unmarked van, driven by a bodel from London Station, and was secreted into the premises of Isherwood Fine Arts through the secure loading bay. The delivery was monitored by two men from Wazir bin Talal’s security unit, who were seated in a parked car in Duke Street, and by Jafar Sharuki, the advance man, who was picking at a plate of fish and chips in the pub next door to Isherwood’s gallery. Confirmation of the painting’s safe transfer arrived at the Surrey safe house at 3:18 P.M. in the form of a secure e-mail from the neviot team. It was taken in by Dina, then read aloud to Gabriel, who was at that moment slowly pacing the threadbare carpet in the drawing room. He paused for a moment and tipped his head, as though listening to distant music, then resumed his restless journey.

He felt as helpless as a playwright on opening night. He had created the characters, given them their lines, and could see them now on a stage of his making. He could see Isherwood in his chalk-stripe suit and lucky red tie, craving a drink and nibbling on the nail of his left forefinger to relieve the tension. And Chiara seated behind her glossy new receptionist’s desk, with her hair drawn sensibly back and her long legs crossed primly at the ankle. And Sarah, in the black Chanel suit she’d bought at Harrods two weeks earlier, propped serenely on the divan in the upstairs exhibition room, with her eyes on Marguerite Gachet and her thoughts on the monster who would be coming up the lift in two hours’ time. If he could have rewritten anyone’s role, it would have been Sarah’s. It was too late for that now. The curtain was about to rise.

And so all the playwright could do now was pace the drawing room of his safe house and wait for the updates. At 3:04 Mr. Baker’s 747 was seen on low approach to Heathrow Airport, Mr. Baker being their code name for Zizi al-Bakari. At 3:32 came word that Mr. Baker and his entourage had cleared VIP customs. At 3:45 they were seen boarding their limousines, and at 3:52 those same limousines were seen trying to set a land-speed record on the A4. At 4:09 Mr. Baker’s artistic adviser, whom they code-named Marlowe, telephoned Isherwood from the motorcade to say they were running a few minutes behind schedule. That turned out not to be the case, however, because at 4:27 the same motorcade was spotted turning into Duke Street from Piccadilly.

There then followed the first stumble of the afternoon. Thankfully it was Zizi’s and not theirs. It came as the first limousine was attempting to negotiate the narrow passageway from Duke Street into Mason’s Yard. A moment into the exercise the driver determined that the cars were too large to fit through the breach. Sharuki, the advance man, had neglected to take a proper measurement. And so the final message that Gabriel received from the neviot team stated that Mr. Baker, chairman and CEO of Jihad Inc., was getting out of his car and walking to the gallery.

BUT SARAH was not waiting in the upstairs exhibition room. She was at that moment one floor below, in the office she shared with Julian, gazing out at the rather farcical scene taking place in the passageway. It was her first act of rebellion. Gabriel had wanted her to remain upstairs, hidden from view until the final moment, so that she could be unveiled along with Marguerite. She would obey his order eventually, but not until she saw Zizi once with her own eyes. She had studied his face in Yossi’s magazine clippings and had memorized the sound of his voice in the videos. But clippings and videos were no substitute for a glimpse of the real thing. And so she stood there, in blatant contravention of Gabriel’s instructions, and watched as Zizi and his entourage came filing through the passage into the darkened quadrangle.

Rafiq al-Kamal, chief of Zizi’s personal security detail, came first. He was bigger than he had appeared in the photographs, but moved with the agility of a man half his size. He had no overcoat, because an overcoat would interfere with his draw. He had no conscience either, Eli Lavon had told her. He made one quick survey of the yard, like a scout looking for signs of the enemy, then turned and with an old-fashioned hand signal beckoned the others forward.

Next came two very pretty girls with long black hair and long coats, looking peeved for having to walk the one hundred feet from the stranded cars to the gallery. The one on the right was Nadia al-Bakari, Zizi’s spoiled daughter. The one on the left was Rahimah Hamza, daughter of Daoud Hamza, the Stanford-educated Lebanese reputed to be the true financial genius behind AAB Holdings. Hamza himself was trailing a few paces behind the girls with a mobile phone pressed to his ear.

After Hamza came Herr Manfred Wehrli, the Swiss banker who handled Zizi’s money. Next to Wehrli was a child with no apparent owner, and behind the child two more beautiful women, one blond, the other with short hair the color of sandstone. When the child bolted suddenly across the yard in the wrong direction, he was snared in a pantherlike movement by Jean-Michel, the French kickboxer who now served as Zizi’s personal trainer and auxiliary bodyguard.

Abdul-Jalil and Abdul-Hakim, the American-trained lawyers, came next. Yossi had broken up one of the briefings by contemptuously pointing out that Zizi had chosen lawyers whose names meant Servant of the Great and Servant of the Wise One. After the lawyers came Mansur, chief of Zizi’s travel department, then Hassan, chief of communications, then Andrew Malone, Zizi’s soon-to-be-former exclusive art consultant. And finally, sandwiched between Wazir bin Talal and Jafar Sharuki, was Zizi himself.

Sarah turned away from the window. Under Chiara’s watchful gaze, she entered the tiny lift and pressed the button for the top floor. A moment later she was deposited into the upper exhibition room. In the center of the room, propped on a stately easel and veiled like a Muslim woman, was the van Gogh. From below she could hear Rafiq the bodyguard tramping heavily up the stairs.

You’re not to think of him as a terrorist, Gabriel had said. You’re not to wonder whether any of his money ended up in the pocket of Marwan al-Shehhi or any of the other terrorists who murdered Ben. You’re to think of him as an extraordinarily wealthy and important man. Don’t flirt with him. Don’t try to seduce him. Think of it as a job interview. You’re not going to bed with him. You’re going to work for him. And whatever you do, don’t try to give Zizi any advice. You’ll ruin the sale. Both of them.

She turned and examined her appearance in the reflection of the elevator door. She was vaguely out of focus, which she found fitting. She was still Sarah Bancroft, just a different version. A reworking of the same painting. She smoothed the front of her Chanel suit-not for Zizi, she told herself, but for Gabriel-and from below she heard the voice of the monster for the first time. “Good afternoon, Mr. Isherwood,” said the chairman and CEO of Jihad Incorporated. “I’m Abdul Aziz al-Bakari. Andrew tells me you have a picture for me.”

THE FIRST ELEVATOR dispensed only security men. Rafiq plunged into the room and groped her unabashedly with his eyes, while Sharuki peered beneath the divan for hidden weapons and Jean-Michel, the kickboxer, roamed the perimeter on the balls of his feet like a lethal ballet dancer. The next elevator brought Malone and Isherwood, who were wedged happily between Nadia and Rahimah. Zizi came on the third, with only the trusted bin Talal for company. His dark handmade suit hung gracefully over what was an otherwise paunchy physique. His beard was carefully trimmed, as was his deeply receded head of graying hair. His eyes were alert and active. They settled immediately on the one person in the room whose name he did not know.

Don’t attempt to introduce yourself, Sarah. Don’t look him directly in the eye. If there’s a move to be made, let it be Zizi who makes it.

She looked down at her shoes. The elevator doors opened again, this time disgorging Abdul amp; Abdul, Servants of the Great Wise One, and Herr Wehrli the Swiss moneyman. Sarah watched them enter, then cast a glance at Zizi, who was still staring at her.

“Forgive me, Mr. al-Bakari,” Isherwood said. “My manners are atrocious today. This is Sarah Bancroft, our assistant director. It’s because of Sarah we’re all here this afternoon.”

Don’t try to shake his hand. If he offers his, take it briefly and let go.

She stood very straight, with her hands behind her back and her eyes downward at a slight angle. Zizi’s eyes were roving over her. Finally he stepped forward and extended his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” She took it and heard herself say: “The pleasure is mine, Mr. al-Bakari. It’s an honor to meet you, sir.”

He smiled and held on to her hand a moment more than was comfortable. Then he released it suddenly and made for the painting. Sarah turned and this time was treated to a view of his back, which was soft through the shoulders and wide in the hips. “I’d like to see the painting, please,” he said to no one in particular, but Sarah was once more listening only to the voice of Gabriel. Do the presentation on Zizi’s timetable, he had said. If you force him to sit through a story, you’ll only make him angry. Remember, Zizi is the star of the show, not Marguerite.

Sarah slipped past him, careful not to brush his shoulder, then reached up and slowly removed the baize covering. She remained in front of the canvas for a moment longer, gathering up the fabric and blocking Zizi’s view, before finally stepping to one side. “May I present Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table by Vincent van Gogh,” she said formally. “Oil on canvas, of course, painted in Auvers in July 1890.”

A collective gasp rose from Zizi’s entourage, followed by an excited murmur. Only Zizi remained silent. His dark eyes were casting about the surface of the painting, his expression inscrutable. After a moment he lifted his gaze from the canvas and looked at Isherwood.

“Where did you find it?”

“I wish I could take credit for it, Mr. al-Bakari, but it was Sarah who discovered Marguerite.”

Zizi’s gaze moved to Sarah. “You?” he asked with admiration.

“Yes, Mr. al-Bakari.”

“Then I’ll ask you the same question I asked of Mr. Isherwood. Where did you find her?”

“As Julian explained to Mr. Malone, the owner wishes to remain anonymous.”

“I’m not asking for the identity of the owner, Miss Bancroft. I’d just like to know how you discovered it.”

You’ll have to give him something, Sarah. He’s entitled to it. But do it reluctantly and be discreet. A man like Zizi appreciates discretion.

“It was the result of several years of investigation on my part, Mr. al-Bakari.”

“How interesting. Tell me more, please, Miss Bancroft.”

“I’m afraid I can’t without violating my agreement with the owners, Mr. al-Bakari.”

“Owner,” said Zizi, correcting her. “According to Andrew, the painting is the property of a French woman.”

“Yes, that’s correct, sir, but I’m afraid I can’t be any more specific.”

“But I’m just curious about how you found it.” He folded his arms across his chest. “I love a good detective story.”

“I would love to indulge you, Mr. al-Bakari, but I’m afraid I can’t. All I can tell you is that it took me two years of searching in Paris and Auvers to find the painting and another year to convince the owner to give it up.”

“Perhaps someday, when sufficient time has elapsed, you’ll be gracious enough to share more of this fascinating story with me.”

“Perhaps, sir,” she said. “As for the authentication, we have determined the work is unquestionably Vincent’s and, of course, we are prepared to stand behind that authentication.”

“I’d be happy to examine the reports of your authenticators, Miss Bancroft, but quite frankly I don’t need to see them. You see, it’s quite obvious to me that this painting is truly the work of van Gogh.” He placed his hand on her shoulder. “Come here,” he said paternally. “Let me show you something.”

Sarah took a step closer to the canvas. Zizi pointed to the upper right corner.

“Do you see that slight mark on the surface? If I’m not mistaken, that’s Vincent’s thumbprint. You see, Vincent was notoriously cavalier in the way he handled his work. When he finished this one, he probably picked it up by the corner and carried it through the streets of Auvers to his room above Café Ravoux. At any given time there were dozens of paintings in his room there. He used to lean them against the wall, one atop the next. He was working so quickly that the previous paintings were never quite dry when he laid the new ones on top. If you look carefully at this one, you can see the crosshatched impression of canvas on the surface of the paint.”

His hand was still resting on her shoulder. “Very impressive, Mr. al-Bakari. But I’m not surprised, sir. Your reputation precedes you.”

“I learned a long time ago that a man in my position cannot rely on the promises of others. He must be constantly on guard against deceptive schemes and clever forgeries. I’m quite confident no one could ever slip a forgery past me, in business or in art.”

“One would be foolish even to try, Mr. al-Bakari.”

Zizi looked at Isherwood. “You have quite a knack for finding undiscovered work. Didn’t I read something the other day about a Rubens of yours?”

“You did, sir.”

“And now a van Gogh.” Zizi’s gaze moved back to the painting. “Andrew tells me you have a price in mind.”

“We do, Mr. al-Bakari. We think it’s quite reasonable.”

“So do I.” He looked over his shoulder at Herr Wehrli, the banker. “Do you think you can find eighty-five million somewhere in the accounts, Manfred?”

“I think it’s quite possible, Zizi.”

“Then we have a deal, Mr. Isherwood.” He looked at Sarah and said, “I’ll take her.”

AT 4:53 the neviot team sent word to Gabriel that the proceedings had moved to the lower offices and that Isherwood was now in discussions with Herr Wehrli and Abdul amp; Abdul over matters of payment and transfer of custody. Said discussions lasted slightly more than an hour, and at 6:05 came the flash that Mr. Baker and his party were traipsing across the darkened yard toward the motorcade parked in Duke Street. Eli Lavon handled the pursuit. For a few minutes it seemed the mansion in Mayfair was their destination, but by 6:15 it was clear that Mr. Baker and party were headed back to Heathrow and destinations unknown. Gabriel ordered Lavon to break off the chase. He didn’t care where Mr. Baker was going now. He knew they would all meet again soon.

The video recording arrived at 7:45. It had been shot by the security camera mounted in the far corner of the exhibition room above the Claude landscape. Gabriel, as he watched it, felt as though he were seated in a box high above the stage.

“…This is Sarah Bancroft, our assistant director. It’s because of Sarah we’re all here tonight…”

“…Then, we have a deal, Mr. Isherwood. I’ll take her…”

Gabriel stopped the recording and looked at Dina.

“You’ve sold him one girl,” she said. “Now you just have to sell him the other.”

Gabriel opened the audio file of Isherwood’s meeting with Andrew Malone and clicked Play.

“It’s not Zizi’s money. It’s my money. And what Zizi doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

“And if he finds out? He’ll drop you in the Empty Quarter and let the vultures pick over your bones.”

21.

THE DENUNCIATION of Andrew Malone arrived at the headquarters of AAB Holdings in Geneva at 10:22 A.M. the following Thursday. It was addressed to “Mr. Abdul Aziz al-Bakari, Esq.” and hand-delivered by a motorcycle courier wearing the uniform of a local Geneva messenger service. The sender’s name was a Miss Rebecca Goodheart, Earl’s Court, London, but inspection by an AAB security underling determined that Miss Goodheart was merely a pseudonym for an anonymous snitch. After finding no evidence of radiological, biological, or explosive material, the underling forwarded the parcel to the office of Wazir bin Talal. There it remained until late Friday afternoon, when bin Talal returned to Geneva after a one-day trip to Riyadh.

He had other more pressing matters to attend to, and so it was nearly eight o’clock before he got around to opening the envelope. He immediately regretted the delay, for the allegations were quite serious in nature. On no fewer than nine occasions, according to Miss Goodheart, Andrew Malone had taken cash payments in violation of his personal services contract with Abdul Aziz al-Bakari. The allegations were supported by a packet of corroborating evidence, including bank deposit receipts, faxes, and personal e-mails taken from Malone’s home computer. Bin Talal immediately placed a call to his superior’s lakeside Geneva mansion and by nine that evening he was placing the documents on the desk of an irate Zizi al-Bakari.

That same evening, at eleven London time, bin Talal placed a call to Malone’s Knightsbridge residence and ordered him to come to Geneva on the first available flight. When Malone protested that he had a prior commitment-and that it was a weekend, for heaven’s sake-bin Talal made it clear that the summons was mandatory and failure to appear would be regarded as a grave offense. The call was recorded by a neviot team and forwarded immediately to Gabriel at the Surrey safe house, along with the rather shaky call Malone placed to British Airways ten minutes later, reserving a seat on the 8:30 A.M. flight to Geneva.

Eli Lavon booked a seat on the flight as well. Upon arrival in Geneva the two men were met by a pair of incongruous cars, Malone by a black S-Class Mercedes driven by one of Zizi’s chauffeurs, and Lavon by a mud-spattered Opel piloted by a courier from Geneva Station. Lavon ordered the bodel to give the Mercedes wide berth. As a result they arrived at Zizi’s mansion several minutes after Malone. They found a secluded parking space farther down the street but did not have to wait long, because twenty minutes later Malone emerged from the house, looking more ashen than usual.

He proceeded directly back to the airport and booked a seat on the earliest flight back to London, which was at five o’clock. Lavon did the same. At Heathrow the two men went their separate ways, Lavon to Surrey and Malone to Knightsbridge, where he informed his wife that unless he could come up with four million pounds in extremely short order, Zizi al-Bakari was going to personally throw him off an extremely high bridge.

That was Saturday night. By the following Wednesday it was clear to Gabriel and the rest of his team that Zizi was in the market for a new exclusive art consultant. It was also clear he had his eye on someone in particular, because Sarah Bancroft, assistant director of Isherwood Fine Arts of Mason’s Yard, St. James’s, was under surveillance.

SHE BEGAN to think of them as friends. They rode with her in the Tube. They strolled in Mason’s Yard and loitered in Duke Street. They followed her to lunch and there was always one waiting in Green’s each evening when she stopped at the bar for a quick one with Oliver and the boys. They went with her to an auction at Sotheby’s and watched her pick over the dreary contents of a saleroom in Hull. They even made a long trip with her down to Devon, where she sweet-talked a dusty minor aristocrat into parting with a lovely Venetian Madonna and Child that Isherwood had coveted for years. “Zizi’s coming for you,” Gabriel told her in a brief telephone call on the Monday afternoon. “It’s only a matter of time. And don’t be alarmed if your things seem a bit out of place when you go home tonight. Sharuki broke into your flat and searched it this morning.”

The next day the first gift arrived, a Harry Winston diamond watch. Attached to the gift-wrapped box was a handwritten note: Thank you for finding Marguerite. Eternally grateful, Zizi. The earrings from Bulgari came the following day. The double strand of Mikimoto pearls the day after that. The gold mesh bangle from Tiffany on Thursday evening, just as she was preparing to leave work. She stuck it on her right wrist and walked over to Green’s, where Oliver made a clumsy pass at her. “In another lifetime,” she said, kissing his cheek, “but not tonight. Be a love, Oliver, and walk me to the Tube.”

Evenings were the hardest on her. There were no more trips to the Surrey safe house. As far as Sarah was concerned the Surrey safe house did not exist. She found she missed them all terribly. They were a family, a loud, quarrelsome, cacophonous, loving family-the sort of family Sarah had never had. All that remained of them now was the occasional cryptic phone call from Gabriel and the light in the flat on the opposite side of the street. Yossi’s light, but soon even Yossi would be lost to her. At night, when she was alone and afraid, she sometimes wished she had told them to find someone else. And sometimes she would think of poor Julian and wonder how on earth he was going to get along without her.

THE FINAL PACKAGE arrived at three o’clock the next afternoon. It was hand-delivered by a messenger dressed in a suit and tie. Inside was a handwritten note and a single airline ticket. Sarah opened the ticket jacket and looked at the destination. Ten seconds later the telephone on her desk rang.

“Isherwood Fine Arts. This is Sarah.”

“Good afternoon, Sarah.”

It was Zizi.

“Hello, Mr. al-Bakari. How are you, sir?”

“I’ll know in a moment. Did you receive the invitation and the airline tickets?”

“I did, sir. And the earrings. And the watch. And the pearls. And the bangle.”

“The bangle is my favorite.”

“Mine, too, sir, but the gifts were completely unnecessary. As is this invitation. I’m afraid I can’t accept.”

“You insult me, Sarah.”

“It’s not my intention, sir. As much as I would love to spend a few days in the sun, I’m afraid I can’t go jetting off at a moment’s notice.”

“It’s not a moment’s notice. If you look carefully at the tickets, you see that you have three days until your departure.”

“I can’t go jetting off three days from now either. I have business to attend to here at the gallery.”

“I’m sure Julian can spare you for a few days. You just made him a great deal of money.”

“This is true.”

“So how about it, Sarah? Will you come?”

“I’m afraid the answer is no, sir.”

“You should know one thing about me, Sarah, and that is I never take no for an answer.”

“I just don’t think it would be appropriate, sir.”

“Appropriate? I think you’ve misinterpreted my motives.”

“What are your motives, sir?”

“I’d like you to come to work for me.”

“As what, sir?”

“I never discuss such matters over the phone, Sarah. Will you come?”

She allowed ten seconds to elapse before she gave him her answer.

“Brilliant,” he said. “One of my men will accompany you. He’ll collect you at your flat at eight A.M. Monday morning.”

“I’m perfectly capable of traveling alone, Mr. al-Bakari.”

“I’m sure you are, but it will be easier if one of my security men comes with you. I’ll see you Monday evening.”

And then he rang off. As Sarah replaced the receiver, she realized he hadn’t asked for her address.

GABRIEL WAS breaking down his studio at the Surrey safe house when Lavon came pounding up the stairs, holding a printout of the message that had just arrived from the neviot team in Mason’s Yard. “Zizi’s made his move,” he said, handing the printout to Gabriel. “He wants to see her right away.”

Gabriel read the message, then looked up at Lavon. “Shit,” he murmured. “We’re going to need a boat.”

THEY HAD a champagne supper to celebrate, complete with a place setting for Sarah, the one member of the team who could not join them. The next morning Lavon drove Gabriel to Heathrow Airport, and by four-thirty that afternoon he was enjoying the view of the sunset from a CIA safe flat on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. Adrian Carter was wearing chinos, a cotton pullover, and penny loafers with no socks. He handed Gabriel a glass of lemonade and a photograph of a very large boat.

“She’s called Sun Dancer,” Carter said. “She’s a seventy-four-foot ocean-going luxury motor yacht. I’m sure you and your team will find her more than comfortable.”

“Where did you get it?”

“We seized it a few years ago from a Panamanian drug runner named Carlos Castillo. Mr. Castillo now resides in a federal prison in Oklahoma, and we’ve been using his boat to do the Lord’s work down here in the Caribbean.”

“How many times has it been used?”

“Five or six times by the DEA, and we’ve used it twice.”

Gabriel handed the photograph back to Carter. “It’s dirty,” he said. “Can’t you get me something with a clean provenance?”

“We’ve changed her name and registry several times. There’s no way Zizi or any of his security goons can trace it back to us.”

Gabriel sighed. “Where is it now?”

“A marina on Fisher Island,” Carter said, pointing to the south. “It’s being provisioned right now. We have a CIA crew leaving Langley tonight.”

“Nice try,” Gabriel said, “but I’ll use my own crew.”

“You?”

“We have a navy, Adrian. A very good one, in fact. I have a crew on standby in Haifa. And tell your boys to take out the listening devices. Otherwise, we’ll do it for them, and Sun Dancer won’t look very good when we give it back to you.”

“It’s already been taken care of,” Carter said. “How are you planning to get your team over here?”

“I was hoping a friend of mine from American intelligence would extend a helping hand.”

“What do you need?”

“Airlift and landing rights.”

“How quickly can your crew get from Haifa to London?”

“They can leave first thing in the morning.”

“I’ll send one of our planes to London tonight. It will collect your team and bring them back here. We’ll set it down at Homestead and dispense with passports and customs. You can put out to sea on Sunday night and rendezvous with Zizi Monday afternoon.”

“Sounds like we have ourselves a deal,” Gabriel said. “All we need now is Ahmed bin Shafiq.”

“He’ll come,” Carter said with certainty. “The only question is will your girl be there when he does?”

“She’s our girl, Adrian. Sarah belongs to all of us.”