Prince of Fire Page 23

  “I see her.”

  “When the clock on the departure board turns to six fifty-eight, she’s going to hang up. You and I will walk over and take her place. She’ll pause for a moment to give us time to get there.”

  “What if someone else gets there first?”

  “The girl and I will take care of it. You’re going to dial a number. Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t forget the number. If you do, I won’t tell it to you again, and your wife will die. Are you sure you’re ready?”

  “Give me the fucking number.”

  She recited it, then gave him a few coins as the clock turned to six-fifty-eight. The girl vacated her place. Gabriel walked over, lifted the receiver and fed coins through the slot. He dialed the number deliberately, fearful that if he made a mistake the first time he would not be able to summon the number correctly again. Somewhere a telephone began to ring. One ring, a second,a third . . .

  “There’s no answer.”

  “Be patient. Someone will pick up.”

  “It’s rung six times. No one’s answering.”

  “Are you sure you dialed the proper number? Maybe you made a mistake. Maybe your wife is about to die because you—”

  “Shut your mouth,” Gabriel snapped.

  The telephone had stopped ringing.

  29

  PARIS

  “Good evening, Gabriel.”

  A woman’s voice, shockingly familiar.

  “Or should I call you Herr Klemp? That’s the name you used when you came to my club, isn’t it? And the name you used when you ransacked my apartment.”

  Mimi Ferrere. The Little Moon.

  “Where is she? Where’s Leah?”

  “She’s close.”

  “Where? I don’t see her.”

  “You’ll find out in a minute.”

  A minute . . . He looked up at the departure board. The clock rolled over: six-fifty-nine p.m. A pair of soldiersstrolled past. One of them looked at him. Gabriel turned away and lowered his voice.

  “You told me if I came, you’d let her live. Now where is she?”

  “Everything will be clear to you in just a few seconds.”

  The voice: he latched on to it. It drew him back to Cairo, back to the evening he’d spent at the wine bar in Zamalek. He’d been lured to Cairo for a reason—to plant a bug on Mimi’s telephone, so he could overhear a conversation with a man named Tony and capture the telephone number for an apartment in Marseilles. But had he been brought to Cairo for another reason?

  She started to speak again, but the sound of her voice was drowned out by the blare of a station announcement:Train number 765 for Marseilles is now boarding on Track D. . . . Gabriel covered the mouthpieceof the receiver. Train number 765 for Marseilles is now boarding on Track D. . . . He could hear it through the telephone—he was sure of it. Mimi was somewhere in the station. He spun around and glimpsed her girlishhips flowing calmly toward the exit. Walking on her left, with his hand in the back pocket of her trousers, was a man with square shoulders and dark curly hair. Gabriel had seen the same walk earlier that morning in Marseilles. Khaled had come to the Gare de Lyon to witness Gabriel’s death.

  He watched them slip through the exit.

  Train number 765 for Marseilles is now boarding on Track D.

  He glanced at Palestina. She was looking at the clock. Judging from her expression, she knew now that Gabriel had told her the truth. She was a few seconds away from becoming a shaheed in Khaled’s jihad of revenge.

  “Are you listening to me, Gabriel?”

  Traffic noise: Mimi and Khaled were moving hastily away from the station.

  “I’m listening,” he said—and I’m wondering why you seated me with three Arabs in your nightclub.

  Train number 765 for Marseilles is now boarding on Track D.

  Track D . . . Track Dalet . . . Tochnit Dalet . . .

  “Where is she, Mimi? Tell me what—”

  And then he saw him, standing at a newspaper rack at the Relay newsstand at the east end of the station. His suitcase, a rolling rectangular bag of black nylon, identicalto Gabriel’s, stood upright next to him. They’d called him Bashir that night in Cairo. Bashir liked Johnnie Walker Red on the rocks and smoked Silk Cut cigarettes. Bashir wore a gold TAG Heuer watch on his right wrist and had a thing for one of Mimi’s waitresses. Bashir was also a shaheed. In a few seconds Bashir’s bag would explode,and so would several dozen people around him.

  Gabriel looked to his left, toward the opposite side of the platform: another Relay newsstand, another shaheed with a bag identical to Gabriel’s. He’d been called Naji that night. Naji: survivor. Not tonight, Naji.

  A few feet away from Gabriel, purchasing a sandwich he would never eat, was Tayyib. Same suitcase, same glassy look of death in his eyes. He was close enough for Gabriel to see the configuration of the bomb. A black wire had been run along the inside of one arm of the pull handle. Gabriel reckoned that the release button on the handle itself was the trigger. Press the button, and it would strike the contact plate. That meant that the three shaheeds had to press their buttons simultaneously. But how were they to be signaled? The time, of course. Gabriel looked at Tayyib’s eyes and saw they were now focused on the digital clock of the departure board. 6:59:28 . . .

  “Where is she, Mimi?”

  The soldiers sauntered past again, chatting casually.Three Arabs had entered the station with suitcases packed with explosives, but the security forces hadn’t seemed to notice. How long would it take the soldiers to get their automatics off their shoulders and into firingposition? If they were Israelis? Two seconds at most. But these French boys? Their reaction time would be slower.

  He glanced at Palestina. She was growing more anxious.Her eyes were damp and she was pulling on the strap of her shoulder bag. Gabriel’s eyes flickered about the station, calculating angles and lines of fire.

  Mimi intruded on his thoughts. “Are you listening to me?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “As you’ve probably guessed by now, the station is about to explode. By my calculation, you have fifteen seconds. You have two choices. You can warn the people around you and try to save as many lives as possible, or you can selfishly save the life of your wife. But you cannotpossibly do both, because if you warn the people, there will be pandemonium, and you’ll never be able to get your wife out of the station before the bombs go off. The only way to save her is to allow hundreds of other people to die—hundreds of deaths in order to save a wreck of a human being. Quite a moral dilemma, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Where is she?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Track D,” Gabriel said. “Track Dalet.”

  “Very good.”

  “She’s not there. I don’t see her.”

  “Look harder. Fifteen seconds, Gabriel. Fifteen seconds.”

  And then the line went dead.

  Time seemed to crawl to a stop. He saw it all as a streetscape, rendered in the vibrant palette of Renoir—the shaheeds, their eyes on the departure clock; the soldiers, their shoulders slung with submachine guns; Palestina, clutching the handbag that held a loaded Tanfolgio nine-millimeter.And in the center of it all he saw the pretty Arab girl walking away from a woman in a wheelchair. On the track stood a train bound for Marseilles, and five feet from the spot where the woman waited to die was an open door to the last carriage. Above him a clock read 6:59:50. Mimi had cheated him, but Gabriel knew better than most men that ten seconds was an eternity. In the span of ten seconds, he had followed Khaled’s father into a Paris courtyard and filled his body with eleven bullets. In less than ten seconds, on a snowy night in Vienna, his son was murdered and his wife forever lost to him.

  His first move was so compact and rapid that no one seemed to notice it—a blow to the left side of Palestina’s skull that landed with such force that Gabriel, when he pulled the handbag off her shoulder, was not sure whether she was still alive. As the girl colla
psed at his feet, he reached inside the bag and wrapped his hand around the grip of the Tanfolgio. Tayyib, the shaheed closest to him at the snack bar, had seen none of it, for his eyes were fixed on the clock. Gabriel drew the weapon from the bag and leveled it, one-handed, at the bomber. He squeezed the trigger twice, tap-tap.Both shots struck the bomber high in the chest, flinging him backward, away from the explosive-laden suitcase.

  The sound of gunfire in the vast echo chamber of the station had the effect Gabriel had expected. Across the platform, people crouched or dropped to the ground. Twenty feet away, the two soldiers were pulling their submachine guns off their shoulders. And at either end of the platform the last two shaheeds, Bashir and Naji, were still standing, their eyes fixed on the clock. There wasn’t time for both.

  Gabriel, in French, shouted: “Bomber! Get down! Get down!”

  A firing lane opened as Gabriel aimed the Tanfolgio at the one called Naji. The French soldiers, confused by what they were witnessing, hesitated. He squeezed the trigger, saw a flash of pink, then watched as Naji spiraled lifelessly to the floor.

  He ran toward Track D, toward the spot where Leah sat exposed to the coming blast wave. He clung to Palestina’s handbag, for it contained the keys to his escape. He glanced once over his shoulder. Bashir, the last of the shaheeds, was heading toward the center of the station. He must have seen his two comrades fall; now he was trying to increase the killing power of his single bomb by placing it in the center of the platform where it was still most crowded.

  To stop now meant almost certain death for himself and for Leah, so Gabriel kept running. He reached the entrance to Track D and turned to the right. The platform was empty; the gunfire and Gabriel’s warnings had driven the passengers into the trains or toward the exit of the station.Only Leah remained, helpless and immobile.

  The clock rolled over: 7:00:00

  Gabriel seized Leah by the shoulders and lifted her unresisting body from the chair, then made one final lunge toward the doorway of the waiting train as the suitcase detonated. A flash of brilliant light, a thunder-clap,a searing blast wave that seemed to press the very life out of him. Poison bolts and nails. Shattered glass and blood.

  Black smoke, an unbearable silence. Gabriel looked into Leah’s eyes. She looked directly back at him, her gaze strangely serene. He slipped the Tanfolgio into the handbag, then cradled Leah in his arms and stood. She seemed weightless to him.

  From outside the shattered carriage came the first screams. Gabriel looked around him. The windows on both sides were blown out. Those passengers who had been in their seats had been cut by the flying glass. Gabrielsaw at least six who looked fatally wounded.

  He climbed down the steps and made his way toward the platform. What had been there just a few seconds earlier was now unrecognizable. He looked up and saw that a large portion of the roof was gone. Had all three bombs exploded simultaneously, the entire station would likely have come down.

  He slipped and fell hard to the ground. The platform was drenched with blood. All around him were severed limbs and pieces of human flesh. He got to his feet, lifted Leah, and stumbled forward. What was he stepping on? He couldn’t bear to look. He slipped a second time, near the telephone kiosk, and found himself staring into the lifeless eyes of Palestina. Was it Gabriel’s blow that had killed her or the shrapnel of Tayyib’s bomb? Gabriel didn’t much care.

  He got to his feet again. The station exits were jammed: terrified passengers trying to get out, police forcing their way in. If Gabriel tried to go that way, there was a good chance someone would identify him as the man who had been firing a gun before the bomb went off. He had to find some other way out. He remembered the walk from the car to the station, waiting for the light to change at the intersection of the rue de Lyon and the boulevard Diderot. There had been an entrance to the Métro there.

  He carried Leah toward the escalator. It was no longer running. He stepped over two dead bodies and started downward. The Métro station was in tumult, passengers screaming, startled attendants trying in vain to keep the situation calm, but at least there was no more smoke, and the floors were no longer wet with blood. Gabriel followed the signs through the arched passagewaystoward the rue de Lyon. Twice he was asked whether he needed help, and twice he shook his head and kept walking. The lights flickered and dimmed, then by some miracle came back to life again.

  Two minutes later he came to a flight of steps. He mounted them and climbed steadily upward, emerginginto a thin, chill rain. He’d come out on the rue de Lyon. He looked back over his shoulder toward the station.The traffic circle was ablaze with emergency lights, and smoke was pouring from the roof. He turned and started walking.

  Another offer of help: “Are you all right, monsieur? Does that person need a doctor?”

  No, thank you, he thought. Just please get out of my way, and please let that Mercedes be waiting for me.

  He rounded the corner into the rue Parrot. The car was still there: Khaled’s only mistake. He carried Leah across the street. For an instant she clung anxiously to his neck. Did she know it was him, or did she think him an orderly in her hospital in England? A moment later she was seated in the front passenger seat, staring calmly out the window as Gabriel pulled away from the curb and rolled up to the corner of the rue de Lyon. He glanced once to the left, toward the burning station,then turned right and sped up the wide avenue toward the Bastille. He reached into the girl’s handbag again and pulled out her satellite phone. By the time he rounded the traffic circle in the Place de la Bastille, King Saul Boulevard had come on the line.

  PART FOUR

  SUMAYRIYYA

  30

  PARIS

  The thin rain that had greeted Gabriel upon his emergencefrom the Gare de Lyon had turned to a spring downpour. It was dark now, and for that he was grateful.He had parked in a quiet leafy street near the Place de Colombie and shut down the engine. Because of the darkness, and the drenching rain, he was confident no one could see into the car. He rubbed a porthole in the fogged front windshield and peered through it. The building that contained the safe flat was on the opposite side of the street and a few doors up. Gabriel knew the flat well. He knew it was apartment 4B and that the name-plateon the buzzer read Guzman in faded blue script. He also knew that there was no place to safely hide a key, which meant that it had to be opened in advance by someone from the Paris station. Usually such tasks were handled by a bodel, the Office terminology for local hires who do the spadework required to keep a foreign station running. But ten minutes later Gabriel was relievedto see the familiar figure of Uzi Navot, the Paris katsa, pounding past his window with his strawberry blond hair plastered to his large round skull and a key to the flat in his hand.

  Navot entered the apartment building and a moment later lights came on in the fourth-floor window. Leah stirred. Gabriel turned and looked at her, and for an instanther gaze seemed to connect with his. He reached out and took what remained of her hand. The hard scar tissue, as always, made Gabriel feel violently cold. She’d been agitated during the drive. Now she seemed calm, the way she always looked when Gabriel visited her in the solarium. He peered through his porthole again, toward the window on the fourth floor.

  “Is it you?”

  Gabriel, startled by the sound of Leah’s voice, looked up sharply—too sharply, he feared, because her eyes seemed suddenly panicked.

  “Yes, it’s me, Leah,” he said calmly. “It’s Gabriel.”

  “Where are we?” Her voice was thin and dry, like the rustling of leaves. It was nothing like he remembered it. “This feels like Paris to me. Are we in Paris?”

  “Yes, we’re in Paris.”

  “That woman brought me here, didn’t she? My nurse. I tried to tell Dr. Avery—” She cut herself off in midsentence. “I want to go home.”

  “I’m taking you home.”

  “To the hospital?”

  “To Israel.”

  A flicker of a smile, a gentle squeeze of his hand. “Your skin is bu
rning. Are you feeling all right?”

  “I’m fine, Leah.”

  She lapsed into silence and looked out the window.

  “Look at the snow,” she said. “God, how I hate this city, but the snow makes it beautiful. The snow absolves Vienna of its sins.”

  Gabriel searched his memory for the first time he’d heard those words and then remembered. They’d been walking from the restaurant to the car. Dani had been sitting atop his shoulders. The snow absolves Vienna of its sins. Snow falls on Vienna while the missiles rain down on Tel Aviv.

  “It’s beautiful,” he agreed, trying to prevent a note of despondency from creeping into his voice. “But we’re not in Vienna. We’re in Paris. Do you remember? The girl brought you to Paris.”

  She was no longer listening to him. “Hurry, Gabriel,” she said. “I want to talk to my mother. I want to hear the sound of my mother’s voice.”

  Please, Leah, he thought. Turn back. Don’t do this to yourself.

  “We’ll call her right away,” he said.

  “Make sure Dani is buckled into his seat tightly. The streets are slippery.”

  He’s fine, Leah, Gabriel had said that night. Be careful driving home.

  “I’ll be careful,” she said. “Give me a kiss.”

  He leaned over and pressed his lips against Leah’s ruined cheek.

  “One last kiss,” she whispered.

  Then her eyes opened wide. Gabriel held her scarred hand and looked away.

  Madame Touzet poked her head from her apartment as Martineau entered the foyer.

  “Professor Martineau, thank God it’s you. I was worriedto death. Were you there? Was it terrible?”

  He had been a few hundred meters away from the station at the time of the explosion, he told her truthfully.And yes, it was terrible, though not as terrible as he had hoped. The station should have been demolished by the destructive force of three suitcase bombs. Obviously something had gone wrong.

  “I’ve just made some chocolate. Will you sit with me and watch the television? I do hate to watch such a horriblebusiness alone.”