Prince of Fire Page 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Yaakov looked up sharply.

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

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

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

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

  “This.”

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

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

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

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

  “And?”

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

  “When was that call recorded?”

  “Six weeks ago.”

  “Do you know where the call was placed?”

  Natan smiled.

  There was a row, but then no Office operation was completewithout one. Lev wanted to keep Gabriel locked in the basement on punishment rations of bread and water, and he briefly held the upper hand. Gabriel was blown and no longer fit for fieldwork, Lev argued. Besides, the telephone intercepts suggested Khaled was hiding in the Arab world, somewhere the Europhile Gabriel, except for his brief foray into Tunis, had never operated. As a last resort, Lev sought refuge in bureaucratic twaddle, arguing that Gabriel’s committee possessed no foreign operational charter. The matter reached Shamron, as most matters eventually did. Lev sidestepped, but too late to ward off the fatal blow, for advice from Shamron had the authority of God’s commandments chiseled in stone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  13

  CAIRO: MARCH 31

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

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

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

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

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

  “Good morning, Herr Klemp.”

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

  “Does Herr Klemp require a car this morning?”

  “No, he does not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Third floor,” he said in English.

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

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

  “My name is Johannes Klemp.”

  “Is Mr. Quinnell expecting you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “As ever,” said Gabriel.

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

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

  “Your office is under surveillance.”

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

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

  “Yes, but you’re no ordinary hack.”

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