Gabriel Allon 01 - The Kill Artist Read online

  “Are you sure, Jacqueline? Are you sure you still have what it takes for this kind of work?”

  She took a long drink of the wine, leaned her head against Marcel’s shoulder. “Actually, I’m not quite sure I do.”

  “Do me a favor, sweetheart. Go to your house in the south for a few days. Or take one of those long trips like you used to take. You know—the ones you were always so mysterious about. Get some rest. Clear your head. Do some serious thinking. I’ll try to talk some sense into Robert. But you have to decide whether this is really what you want.”

  She closed her eyes. Perhaps it was time to get out while she still had some shred of dignity. “You’re right,” she said. “I could use a few days in the countryside. But I want you to call that fucking Robert Leboucher right now and tell him that you expect him to keep his word about the shoot in Mustique.”

  “And what if I can’t make him change his mind?”

  “Tell him I’ll kick him in the cock too.”

  Marcel smiled. “Jacqueline, darling, I’ve always liked your style.”

  12

  BAYSWATER, LONDON

  Fiona Barrows looked a great deal like the block of flats she managed in Sussex Gardens: broad and squat with a bright coat of paint that could not conceal the fact she was aging and not terribly gracefully. The short walk from the lift to the entrance of the vacant flat left her slightly out of breath. She shoved the key into the lock with her plump hand, pushed open the door with a little grunt. “Here we are,” she sang.

  She led him on a brief tour: a sitting room furnished with well-worn couches and chairs, two identical bedrooms with double beds and matching bedside tables, a small dining room with a modern table of tinted gray glass, a cramped galley kitchen with a two-burner stove and a microwave oven.

  He walked back into the sitting room, stood in the window, opened the blinds. Across the road was another block of flats.

  “If you want my opinion, you couldn’t ask for a better location in London for the price,” Fiona Barrows said. “Oxford Street is very close, and of course Hyde Park is just around the corner. Do you have children?”

  “No, I don’t,” Gabriel said absently, still looking at the block of flats across the street.

  “What kind of work do you do, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “I’m an art restorer.”

  “You mean you spruce up old paintings?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You do the frames as well? I have an old frame in my flat that needs patching up.”

  “Just the paintings, I’m afraid.”

  She looked at him as he stood in the window, gazing into space. A handsome man, she thought. Nice hands. Good hands were sexy in a man. Imagine, an art restorer, right here in the building. It would be nice to have a touch of class around for a change. Oh, that she were still single—single, twenty years younger, twenty pounds lighter. He was a cautious fellow; she could see that. A man who never made a move without thinking through every angle. He would probably want to see a dozen more flats before making up his mind. “So, what do you think?”

  “It’s perfect,” he said to the window.

  “When would you like it?”

  Gabriel closed the blind. “Right now.”

  For two days Gabriel watched him.

  On the first day he saw him just once—when he rose shortly after noon and appeared briefly in the window wearing only a pair of black underpants. He had dark, curly hair, angular cheekbones, and full lips. His body was lean and lightly muscled. Gabriel pulled open Shamron’s file and compared the face in the window with the photograph clipped to the manila cover.

  Same man.

  Gabriel could feel an operational coldness spreading over him as he studied the figure in the window. Suddenly everything seemed brighter and sharper in contrast. Noises seemed louder and more distinct—a car door closing, lovers quarreling in the next flat, a telephone ringing unanswered, his teakettle screaming in the kitchen. One by one he tuned out these intrusions and focused all his attention on the man in the window across the street.

  Yusef al-Tawfiki, part-time Palestinian nationalist poet, part-time student at University College London, part-time waiter at a Lebanese restaurant called the Kebab Factory on the Edgware Road, full-time action agent for Tariq’s secret army.

  A hand appeared on Yusef’s abdomen: pale skin, luminous against his dark complexion. A woman’s hand. Gabriel saw a flash of short blond hair. Then Yusef vanished behind the curtains.

  The girl left an hour later. Before climbing into the taxi, she looked up toward the flat to see if her lover was watching. The window was empty and the curtains drawn. She closed the door, a little harder than necessary, and the taxi drove away.

  Gabriel made his first operational assessment: Yusef didn’t treat his women well.

  The next day Gabriel decided to mount a loose physical surveillance.

  Yusef left the flat at midday. He wore a white shirt, black trousers, and a black leather jacket. As he stepped onto the pavement, he paused to light a cigarette and scan the parked cars for any sign of surveillance. He waved out the match and started walking toward the Edgware Road. After about a hundred yards he stopped suddenly, turned around, and walked back to the entrance of the block of flats.

  Standard countersurveillance move, thought Gabriel. He’s a professional.

  Five minutes later Yusef was back outside and walking in the direction of the Edgware Road. Gabriel went into the bathroom, rubbed styling oil into his short hair, and slipped on a pair of red-tinted spectacles. Then he pulled on his coat and went out.

  Across the street from the Kebab Factory was a small Italian restaurant. Gabriel went inside and sat down at a table next to the window. He remembered the lectures at the Academy. If you’re watching a target from a café, don’t do things that make you look like you’re watching a target from a café, such as sitting alone for hours pretending to read a newspaper. Too obvious.

  Gabriel transformed himself. He became Cedric, a writer for an upstart Paris cultural magazine. He spoke English with a nearly impenetrable French accent. He claimed to be working on a story about why London was so exciting these days and Paris so dreary. He smoked Gitane cigarettes and drank a great deal of wine. He carried on a tiresome conversation with a pair of Swedish girls at the next table. He invited one of them to his hotel room. When she refused he asked the other. When she refused he asked them both. He spilled a glass of Chianti. The manager, Signor Andriotti, appeared at the table and warned Cedric to keep quiet or he would have to leave.

  Yet all the while Gabriel was watching Yusef across the street. He watched him while he skillfully handled the lunch crowd. Watched him when he left the restaurant briefly and walked up the road to a newsstand that stocked Arabic-language newspapers. Watched while a pretty dark-haired girl jotted her telephone number on the back of a napkin and slipped it into his shirt pocket for safekeeping. Watched while he carried on a long conversation with a vigilant-looking Arab. In fact, at the moment Gabriel was spilling his Chianti, he was memorizing the make and registration number of the Arab’s Nissan car. And while he was fending off the exasperated Signor Andriotti, he was watching Yusef talking on the telephone. Who was he talking to? A woman? A cousin in Ramallah? His control officer?

  After an hour Gabriel decided it was no longer wise to remain in the café. He paid his check, left a generous tip, and apologized for his boorish behavior. Signor Andriotti guided him to the door and cast him gently out to sea.

  That evening Gabriel sat in the chair next to his window, waiting for Yusef to return home. The street shone with the night rain. A motorcycle sped past, boy driving, girl on the back, pleading with him to slow down. Probably nothing, but he made a note of it in his logbook, along with the time: eleven-fifteen.

  He had a headache from the wine. Already the flat was beginning to depress him. How many nights had he spent like this? Sitting in a sterile Office safe flat or a shabby re
nted room, watching, waiting. He craved something beautiful, so he slipped a compact disc of La Bohème into the portable stereo at his feet and lowered the volume to a whisper. Intelligence work is patience, Shamron always said. Intelligence work is tedium.

  He got up, went into the kitchen, took aspirin for his headache. Next door a mother and a daughter began to quarrel in Lebanese-accented Arabic. A glass shattered, then another, a door slamming, running outside in the corridor.

  Gabriel sat down again and closed his eyes, and after a moment he was back in North Africa, twelve years earlier.

  The rubber dinghies came ashore with the gentle surf at Rouad. Gabriel climbed out into warm shin-deep water and pulled the dinghy onto the sand. The team of Sayaret commandos followed him across the beach, weapons at their sides. Somewhere a dog was barking. The scent of woodsmoke and grilling meat hung on the air. The girl waited behind the wheel of the Volkswagen minibus. Four of the commandos climbed into the Volkswagen with Gabriel. The rest slipped into a pair of Peugeot station wagons parked behind the minibus. A few seconds later the engines started in unison, and they sped off through the cool April evening.

  Gabriel wore a lip microphone connected to a small transmitter in his jacket pocket. The radio broadcast over a secure wavelength to a specially equipped Boeing 707 flying just off the Tunisian coastline in a civilian air corridor, masquerading as an El Al charter. If anything went wrong, they could abort the mission within seconds.

  “Mother has arrived safely,” Gabriel murmured. He released the talk button and heard the words “Proceed to Mother’s house.”

  Gabriel held his Beretta between his knees during the drive, smoked for his nerves. The girl kept both hands on the wheel, eyes fixed on the darkened streets. She was tall, taller than Leah, with black eyes and a mane of dark hair held in place by a simple silver clasp at the nape of her neck. She knew the route as well as Gabriel. When Shamron dispatched Gabriel to Tunis to study the target, the girl had gone with him and posed as his wife. Gabriel reached out and gently squeezed her shoulder as she drove. Her muscles were rigid. “Relax,” he said softly, and she smiled briefly and let out a long breath. “You’re doing fine.”

  They entered Sidi Boussaid, a wealthy Tunis suburb not far from the sea, and parked outside the villa. The Peugeots pulled in behind them. The girl killed the engine. Twelve-fifteen. Exactly on schedule.

  Gabriel knew the villa as well as he knew his own home. He had studied it and photographed it from every conceivable vantage point during the surveillance operation. They had built a perfect duplicate in the Negev, where he and the rest of the team rehearsed the assault countless times. During the final session they had managed to carry out the mission in twenty-two seconds.

  “We’ve arrived at Mother’s house,” Gabriel murmured over the radio.

  “Pay Mother a visit.”

  Gabriel turned and said, “Go.”

  He opened the door of the minibus and crossed the street, walking swiftly, not running. He could hear the quiet footfalls of the Sayaret team behind him. Gabriel drew several even breaths to try to slow his heart rate. The villa belonged to Khalil el-Wazir, better known as Abu Jihad, the PLO’s chief of operations and Yasir Arafat’s most trusted lieutenant.

  Just outside the villa, Abu Jihad’s driver was sleeping behind the wheel of a Mercedes, a gift from Arafat. Gabriel shoved the end of a silenced Beretta into the driver’s ear, pulled the trigger, kept walking.

  At the entrance of the villa, Gabriel stepped aside as a pair of Sayaret men attached a special silent plastique to the heavy door. The explosive detonated, emitting less sound than a handclap, and the door blew open. Gabriel led the team into the entrance hall, the Beretta in his outstretched hands.

  A Tunisian security guard appeared. As he reached for his weapon, Gabriel shot him several times through the chest.

  Gabriel stood over the dying man and said, “Tell me where he is, and I won’t shoot you in the eye.”

  But the security guard just grimaced in pain and said nothing.

  Gabriel shot him twice in the face.

  He mounted the stairs, ramming a fresh clip into his Beretta as he moved, and headed toward the study where Abu Jihad spent most nights working. He burst through the door and found the Palestinian seated in front of a television set, watching news footage of the intifada, which he was helping to direct from Tunis. Abu Jihad reached for a pistol. Gabriel charged forward as he fired, just as Shamron had trained him to do. Two of the shots struck Abu Jihad in the chest. Gabriel stood over him, pressed the gun against his temple, and fired two more times. The body convulsed in a death spasm.

  Gabriel darted from the room. In the hallway was Abu Jihad’s wife, clutching their small son in her arms, and his teenage daughter. She closed her eyes and held the boy more tightly, waiting for Gabriel to shoot her.

  “Go back to your room!” he shouted in Arabic. Then he turned to the daughter. “Go and take care of your mother.”

  Gabriel dashed from the house, followed by the entire Sayaret team. They piled into the minibus and the Peugeots and sped away. They drove through Sidi Boussaid back to Rouad, where they abandoned the vehicles at the beach and boarded the dinghies. A moment later they were speeding over the black surface of the Mediterranean toward the lights of a waiting Israeli patrol boat.

  “Thirteen seconds, Gabriel! You did it in thirteen seconds!”

  It was the girl. She reached out to touch him, but he recoiled from her. He watched the lights of the ship drawing closer. He looked up into the ink-black sky, searching for the command plane, but saw only a fingernail moon and a spray of stars. Then he saw the faces of Abu Jihad’s wife and children, staring at him with hatred burning in their eyes.

  He tossed the Beretta into the sea and began to shake.

  The fight next door had gone quiet. Gabriel wanted to think about something besides Tunis, so he imagined sailing his ketch down the Helford Passage to the sea. Then he thought of the Vecellio, stripped of dirty varnish, the damage of the centuries laid bare. He thought of Peel, and for the first time that day he thought of Dani. He remembered pulling what remained of his body from the flaming wreckage of the car in Vienna, checking to see if somehow he had survived, thanking God that he had died quickly and not lingered with one arm and one leg and half a face.

  He stood up and paced the room, trying to make the image go away, and for some reason found himself thinking of Peel’s mother. Several times during his stay in Port Navas he’d found himself fantasizing about her. It began the same way each time. He would bump into her in the village, and she would volunteer that Derek was out for a long walk on the Lizard trying to repair the second act. “He’ll be gone for hours,” she would say. “Would you like to come over for tea?” He would say yes, but instead of serving tea she would take him upstairs to Derek’s bed and allow him to pour nine years of self-imposed abstinence into her supple body. Afterward she would lie with her head on his stomach, damp hair spread across his chest. “You’re not really an art restorer, are you?” she would say in his fantasy. And Gabriel would tell her the truth. “I kill people for the government of Israel. I killed Abu Jihad in front of his wife and children. I killed three people in thirteen seconds that night. The prime minister gave me a medal for it. I used to have a wife and a son, but a terrorist put a bomb under their car because I had an affair with my bat leveyha in Tunis.” And Peel’s mother would run screaming from the cottage, body wrapped in a white bedsheet, the bedsheet stained with the blood of Leah.

  He returned to his chair and waited for Yusef. The face of Peel’s mother had been replaced by the face of Vecellio’s Virgin Mary. To help fill the empty hours, Gabriel dipped an imaginary brush into imaginary pigment and tenderly healed her wounded cheek.

  Yusef came home at 3:00 A.M. A girl was with him, the girl who had given him her telephone number that afternoon at the restaurant. Gabriel watched them disappear through the front entrance. Upstairs in the flat the lights flared briefly be
fore Yusef made his nightly appearance in the window. Gabriel bid him good night as he disappeared behind the curtain. Then he fell onto the couch and closed his eyes. Today he had watched. Tomorrow he would begin to listen.

  13

  AMSTERDAM

  Three hours later a slender young woman named Inge van der Hoff stepped out of a bar in the red-light district and walked quickly along a narrow alley. Black leather skirt, black leggings, black leather jacket, boots clattering over the bricks of the alley. The streets of the Old Side were still dark, a light mist falling. She lifted her face skyward. The mist tasted of salt, smelled of the North Sea. She passed two men, a drunk and a hash dealer, lowered her head, kept moving. Her boss didn’t like her walking home in the morning, but after a long night of serving drinks and fending off the advances of drunken customers, it always felt good to be alone for a few minutes.

  Suddenly she felt very tired. She needed to crash. She thought: What I really need is a fix. I hope Leila scored tonight.

  Leila. . . . She loved the sound of her name. Loved everything about her. They had met two weeks earlier at the bar. Leila had come for three consecutive nights, each time alone. She would stay for an hour, have a shot of jenever, a Grolsch, a few hits of hash, listen to the music. Each time Inge went to her table she could feel the girl’s eyes on her. Inge had to admit that she liked it. She was a stunningly attractive woman, with lustrous black hair and wide brown eyes. Finally, on the third night, Inge introduced herself and they began to talk. Leila said that her father was a businessman and that she had lived all over the world. She said she was taking a year off from her studies in Paris, just traveling and living life. She said Amsterdam enchanted her. The picturesque canals. The gabled houses, the museums, and the parks. She wanted to stay for a few months, get to know the place.

  “Where are you staying?” Inge had asked.

  “In a youth hostel in south Amsterdam. It’s horrible. Where do you live?”