Prince of Fire Page 17

  “And Yaakov?”

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

  “What about Dina?”

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

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

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

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

  Shamron adjusted the angle of the photograph.

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

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

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

  “Ingenious,” Gabriel murmured.

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

  Yaakov sat down in front of a laptop computer and typed in a command. An animated version of the boulevardSt-Rémy and the surrounding streets appeared on the screen.

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

  “It’s not the same.”

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

  Shamron slowly crushed out his cigarette.

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

  “The escape route?”

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

  “When do we leave Sardinia?”

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

  “And you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “We’re already old.”

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

  “We’ll see.”

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

  “To whom?”

  “To me, of course.”

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

  18

  MARSEILLES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You look terrible,” Dina said. “Take the rest of the night off. Yaakov and I will cover for you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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