Gabriel Allon 01 - Kill Artist Read online

  They crossed the lobby, started up the stairs. A man passed them on the second-floor landing: Gabriel, head down, rucksack over his shoulder.

  Jacqueline flinched involuntarily. She regained her composure, but not before Yusef noticed that she was rattled. He stopped and watched Gabriel walking down the stairs, then looked at Jacqueline. He took her by the arm and led her to the door. When they entered the flat, he looked around the room quickly, then walked to the window and watched Gabriel walking away through the darkness.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Lisbon

  A dense Atlantic fog rolled up the Rio Tejo as Kemel picked his way through the teeming streets of the Bairro Alto. Early evening, workers streaming home from jobs, bars and cafés filling up, Lisboans lining the counters of the cervejarias for an evening meal. Kemel crossed a small square: old men drinking red wine in the chill night air; varinas, the fishwives, washing sea bass in their big baskets. He negotiated a narrow alley lined with vendors selling cheap clothing and trinkets. A blind beggar asked him for money. Kemel dropped a few escudos in the black wooden box around his neck. A gypsy offered to tell his fortune. Kemel politely declined and kept walking. The Bairro Alto reminded him of Beirut in the old days—Beirut and the refugee camps, he thought. By comparison, Zürich seemed cold and sterile. No wonder Tariq liked Lisbon so much.

  He entered a crowded fado house and sat down. A waiter placed a green-tinted bottle of house wine in front of him along with a glass. He lit a cigarette, poured himself a glass of the wine. Ordinary, no complexity, but surprisingly satisfying.

  A moment later the same waiter went to the front of the cramped room and stood next to a pair of guitarists. When the guitarists strummed the first dark chords of the piece, the waiter closed his eyes and began to sing. Kemel couldn’t understand the words but soon found himself swept away by the haunting melody.

  In the middle of the piece, a man sat down next to Kemel. Thick woolen sweater, shabby reefer coat, kerchief knotted at his throat, unshaven. Looked like a dockworker from the waterfront. He leaned over, muttered a few words to Kemel in Portuguese. Kemel shrugged his shoulders. “I’m afraid I don’t speak the language.”

  He turned his attention back to the singer. The piece was reaching its emotional climax, but, in the tradition of fado, the singer remained ramrod straight, as though he were standing at attention.

  The dockworker tapped Kemel’s elbow and spoke Portuguese to him a second time. This time Kemel simply shook his head and kept his eyes on the singer.

  Then the dockworker leaned over and said in Arabic: “I asked you whether you liked fado music.”

  Kemel turned and looked carefully at the man seated next to him.

  Tariq said, “Let’s go somewhere quiet where we can talk.”

  They walked from the Bairro Alto to the Alfama, a warren of narrow alleys and stone steps winding among whitewashed houses. Kemel was always amazed at Tariq’s uncanny ability to blend into his surroundings. Walking the steep hills seemed to tire him. Kemel wondered how much longer he could go on.

  Tariq said, “You never answered my question.”

  “Which question was that?”

  “Do you like fado music?”

  “I suppose it’s an acquired taste.” He smiled and added, “Like Lisbon itself. For some reason it reminds me of home.”

  “Fado is a music devoted to suffering and pain. That’s why it reminds you of home.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  They passed an old woman sweeping the front step of her home.

  Tariq said, “Tell me about London.”

  “It looks as though Allon has made his first move.”

  “That didn’t take long. What happened?”

  Kemel told him about Yusef and the girl from the art gallery. “Yusef noticed a strange man in his block of flats last night. He thinks the man may have been an Israeli. He thinks he may have planted a bug in his flat.”

  Kemel could see that Tariq was already calculating the possibilities. “Is this agent of yours a man who can be trusted with an important assignment?”

  “He’s a very intelligent young man. And very loyal. I knew his father. He was killed by the Israelis in ‘eighty-two.”

  “Has he looked for the bug?”

  “I told him not to.”

  “Good,” Tariq said. “Leave it in place. We can use it to our advantage. What about this girl? Is she still in the picture?”

  “I’ve instructed Yusef to continue seeing her.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Apparently quite attractive.”

  “Do you have the resources in London to follow her?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Do it. And get me a photograph of her.”

  “You have an idea?”

  They passed through a small square, then started up a long, steep hill. By the time they had reached the top, Tariq had explained the entire thing.

  “It’s brilliant,” Kemel said. “But it has one flaw.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You won’t survive it.”

  Tariq smiled sadly and said, “That’s the best news I’ve heard in a very long time.”

  He turned and walked away. A moment later he had vanished into the fog. Kemel shivered. He turned up the collar of his coat and walked back to the Bairro Alto to listen to fado.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Bayswater, London

  The operation settled into a comfortable if rather dull routine. Gabriel spent endless stretches of time with nothing to do but listen to the trivial details of Yusef’s life, which played out on his monitors like a dreadful radio drama. Yusef chatting on the telephone. Yusef arguing politics over cigarettes and Turkish coffee with his Palestinian friends. Yusef telling a heartbroken girl he could no longer see her because he was seriously involved with another. Gabriel found his life moving to the rhythm of Yusef’s. He ate when Yusef ate, slept when Yusef slept, and when Yusef made love to Jacqueline, Gabriel made love to her too.

  But after ten days, Gabriel’s bugs had picked up nothing of value. There were several possible explanations. Perhaps Shamron had simply made a mistake. Perhaps Yusef really was just a waiter and a student. Perhaps he was an agent but was inactive. Or perhaps he was an active agent but was talking with his comrades through other means: signal sights and other forms of impersonal communication. To detect that, Gabriel would have to mount a full-scale round-the-clock surveillance operation. It would require multiple teams, at least a dozen officers—safe flats, vehicles, radios… An operation like that would be difficult to conceal from MI5, the British security service.

  But there was one other possibility that troubled Gabriel most: the possibility that the operation was already blown. Perhaps his surveillance had turned up nothing because Yusef already suspected he was being watched. Perhaps he suspected that his flat was bugged and his telephones tapped. And perhaps he suspected that the beautiful French girl from the art gallery was actually an Israeli agent.

  Gabriel decided it was time for another face-to-face meeting with Shamron in Paris.

  He met Shamron the following morning in a tea shop on the rue Mouffetard. Shamron paid his tab, and they walked slowly up the hill through the markets and street vendors. “I want to pull her out,” Gabriel said.

  Shamron paused at a fruit stand, picked up an orange, studied it for a moment before placing it gently back in the bin. Then he said, “Tell me you didn’t bring me all the way to Paris for this insanity.”

  “Something doesn’t feel right. I want her out before it’s too late.”

  “She’s not blown, and the answer is still no.” Shamron looked at Gabriel carefully and added, “Why is your face fallen, Gabriel? Are you listening to the tapes before you send them to me?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Can’t you hear what’s going on? The endless lectures on the suffering of the Palestinians? The ruthlessness of the Israelis? The recitation of Palestinian poetry?
All the old folklore about how beautiful life was in Palestine before the Jews?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Either the boy is in love, or he has something else on his mind.”

  “It’s the second possibility that concerns me.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe Yusef thinks of her as more than just a pretty girl? Has it ever occurred to you that he thinks of her as an impressionable girl who might be useful to Tariq and his organization?”

  “It has, but she’s not prepared for that kind of operation. And frankly, neither are we.”

  “So you want to fold up your tent and go home?”

  “No, I just want to pull Jacqueline out.”

  “And then what happens? Yusef gets nervous. Yusef gets suspicious and tears apart his flat. If he’s disciplined, he throws out every electrical appliance in the place. And your microphones go with them.”

  “If we handle her departure skillfully, he’ll never suspect a thing. Besides, when I hired her, I promised her a short-term job. You know she has other commitments.”

  “None more important than this. Pay her wages, full price. She stays, Gabriel. End of discussion.”

  “If she stays, I go.”

  “Then go!” Shamron snapped. “Go back to Cornwall and bury your head in your Vecellio. I’ll send in someone to take over for you.”

  “You know I’m not going to leave her in your hands.”

  Shamron quickly moved for appeasement. “You’ve been working around the clock for a long time. You don’t look so good. I haven’t forgotten what it’s like. Forget about Yusef for a few hours. He’s not going anywhere. Take a drive. Do something to clear your head. I need you at your best.”

  On the train back to London, Gabriel entered the lavatory and locked the door. He stood for a long time in front of the mirror. There were new lines around his eyes, a sudden tightness at the corners of his mouth, a knife edge to his cheekbones. Beneath his eyes were dark circles, like smudges of charcoal.

  “I haven’t forgotten what it’s like.”

  The Black September operation… They had all come down with something: heart problems, high blood pressure, skin rashes, chronic colds. The assassins suffered the worst. After the first job in Rome, Gabriel found it impossible to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes he heard bullets tearing through flesh and shattering bone, saw fig wine mingling with blood on a marble floor. Shamron found a doctor in Paris, a sayan, who gave Gabriel a bottle of powerful tranquilizers. Within a few weeks he was addicted to them.

  The pills and the stress made Gabriel look shockingly older. His skin hardened, the corners of his mouth turned down, his eyes turned the color of ash. His black hair went gray at the temples. He was twenty-two at the time but looked at least forty. When he went home, Leah barely recognized him. When they made love she said it was like sleeping with another man—not an older version of Gabriel but a complete stranger.

  He splashed cold water on his face, scrubbed vigorously with a paper towel, then studied his reflection once more. He contemplated the chain of events—the bizarre roulette wheel of fate—that had led him to this place. Had there been no Hitler, no Holocaust, his parents would have remained in Europe instead of fleeing to a dusty agricultural settlement in the Jezreel Valley. Before the war his father had been an essayist and historian in Munich, his mother a gifted painter in Prague, and neither had adjusted well to the collectivism of the settlement or the Zionist zeal for manual labor. They had treated Gabriel more as a miniature adult than a boy with needs different from their own. He was expected to entertain and look after himself. His earliest childhood memory was of their small two-room house on the settlement: his father reading in his chair, his mother at her easel, Gabriel on the floor between them, building cities with crude blocks.

  His parents detested Hebrew, so when they were alone they used the languages they had spoken in Europe: German, French, Czech, Russian, Yiddish. Gabriel absorbed them all. To his European languages he added Hebrew and Arabic. From his father he also took a flawless memory, from his mother unshakable patience and attention to detail. Their disdain for the collective had bred in him arrogance and a lone wolf attitude. Their secular agnosticism had encumbered him with no sense of Jewish morality or ethics. He preferred hiking to football, reading to agriculture. He had an almost pathological fear of getting his hands dirty. He had many secrets. One of his teachers described him as “cold, selfish, unfeeling, and altogether brilliant.” When Ari Shamron went looking for soldiers in the new secret war against Arab terror in Europe, he came upon the boy from the Jezreel Valley who, like his namesake, the Archangel Gabriel, had an unusual gift for languages and the patience of Solomon. Shamron found one other valuable personality trait: the emotional coldness of a killer.

  Gabriel left the lavatory and went back to his seat. Beyond his window was East London: rows of crumbling Victorian warehouses, all shattered windows and broken brick. He closed his eyes. Something else had made them all sick during the Black September operation: fear. The longer they remained in the field, the higher the risk of exposure—not only to the intelligence services of Europe but to the terrorists themselves. That point was driven home in the middle of the operation, when Black September murdered a katsa in Madrid. Suddenly every member of the team knew that he too was vulnerable. And it taught Gabriel the most valuable lesson of his career: when agents are operating far from home, in hostile territory, hunters can easily become the hunted.

  The train pulled into Waterloo. Gabriel strode across the platform, sliced his way through the crowded arrivals hall. He had left his car in an underground car park. He dropped his keys, engaged in his ritualistic inspection, then climbed inside and drove to Surrey.

  There was no sign at the gate. Gabriel had always wanted a place with no sign. Beyond the wall was a well-tended lawn with evenly spaced trees. At the end of a meandering drive stood a rambling redbrick Victorian mansion. He lowered the car window and pressed the button of the intercom. The lens of a security camera stared down at him like a gargoyle. Gabriel instinctively turned his face away from the camera and pretended to fish something from the glove compartment.

  “May I help you?” Female voice, Middle European accent.

  “I’m here to see Miss Martinson. Dr. Avery is expecting me.”

  He raised the window, waited for the automatic security gate to roll aside; then he entered the grounds and headed slowly up the drive. Late afternoon, cold and gray, light wind chasing through the trees. As he drew closer to the house, he began to see a few of the patients. A woman sitting on a bench, dressed in her Sunday best, staring blankly into space. A man in an oilskin and Wellington boots strolling on the arm of a towering Jamaican orderly.

  Avery was waiting in the entrance hall. He wore expensive corduroy trousers, the color of rust and neatly pressed, and a gray cashmere pullover sweater that looked more suited to the golf links than a psychiatric hospital. He shook Gabriel’s hand with a cold formality, as though Gabriel were the representative of an occupying power, then led him down a long carpeted hallway.

  “She’s been speaking quite a bit more this month,” Avery said. “We’ve actually had a meaningful conversation on a couple of occasions.”

  Gabriel managed a tense smile. In all these years she had never spoken to him. “And her physical health?” he asked.

  “No change, really. She’s as fit as can be expected.”

  Avery used a magnetic card to pass through a secure door. On the other side was another hall, terra-cotta tiling instead of carpet. Avery discussed her medication as they walked. He had increased the dosage of one drug, reduced another, taken her off a third altogether. There was a new drug, an experimental, that was showing some promising results in patients suffering from a similar combination of acute post-traumatic stress syndrome and psychotic depression.

  “If you think it will help.”

  “We’ll never know unless we try.”

  Clinical psychia
try, Gabriel thought, was rather like intelligence work.

  The terra-cotta hall ended in a small room. It was filled with gardening tools—pruning sheers, hand shovels, trowels—and bags of flower seed and fertilizer. At the other end of the cutting room was a pair of double doors with circular portholes.

  “She’s in her usual place. She’s expecting you. Please don’t keep her long. I should think a half hour would be appropriate. I’ll come for you when it’s time.”

  A solarium, oppressively hot and moist. Leah in the corner, seated in a straight-backed garden chair of wrought iron, young potted roses at her feet. She wore white. The white rollneck sweater Gabriel had given her for her last birthday. The white trousers he had bought for her during a summer holiday in Crete. Gabriel tried to remember the year but couldn’t. There seemed to be only Leah before Vienna and Leah after Vienna. She sat with a schoolgirl’s primness, looking away across the expanse of the lawn. Her hair had been cut institutionally short. Her feet were bare.

  She turned her head as Gabriel stepped forward. For the first time he could see the swath of scarring on the right side of her face. As always it made him feel violently cold. Then he saw her hands, or what was left of her hands. The hard white scar tissue reminded him of the exposed canvas of a damaged painting. He wished he could simply mix a bit of pigment on his palette and put her back to normal.

  He kissed her forehead, smelled her hair for the familiar traces of lavender and lemon, but instead there was only the oppressive moisture of the solarium and the stench of plants in an enclosed space. Avery had left a second chair, which Gabriel pulled a few inches closer. Leah flinched as the wrought-iron legs scraped over the floor. He murmured an apology and sat down. Leah looked away.

  It was always like this. It wasn’t Leah sitting next to him, only a monument to Leah. A gravestone. He used to try to talk to her, but now he was content to just sit in her presence. He followed her gaze across the misty landscape and wondered what she was looking at. There were days, according to Avery, when she just sat and relived it over and over again in excruciatingly vivid detail, unable, or unwilling, to make it stop. Gabriel couldn’t imagine her suffering. He had been permitted to carry on with some semblance of his life, but Leah had been stripped of everything—her child, her body, her sanity. Everything but her memory. Gabriel feared that her grip on life, however tenuous, was somehow linked to his continued fidelity. If he allowed himself to fall in love with someone else, Leah would die.