Gabriel Allon: Prince of Fire, the Messenger, the Secret Servant Page 24

  30

  PARIS

  The thin rain that had greeted Gabriel upon his emergence from 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-plate on 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 relieved to 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 instant her 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 burning. 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 worried to 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 horrible business alone.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve had a terribly long day, Madame Touzet. I’m going to turn in early.”

  “A Paris landmark, in ruins. What’s next, Professor? Who could do such a thing?”

  “Muslims, I suppose, although one never knows the motivations of someone who could commit an act as barbaric as this. I suspect we may never know the truth.”

  “Do you think it might have been a conspiracy?”

  “Drink your chocolate, Madame Touzet. If you need anything, I’ll be upstairs.”

  “Good night, Professor Martineau.”

  The bodel, a fawn-eyed Moroccan Jew from the Marais named Moshe, arrived at the safe flat an hour later. He carried two bags. One contained a change of clothing for Gabriel, the other groceries for the pantry. Gabriel went into the bedroom and stripped off the clothing the girl had given him in the house in Martigues, then stood for a long time beneath the showerhead and watched the blood of Khaled’s victims swirling down the drain. He changed into the fresh clothing and placed the old things into the bag. The living room, when he went out again, was in semidarkness. Leah was asleep on the couch. Gabriel adjusted the flowered quilt that covered her body, then went into the kitchen. Navot was standing in front of the stove, with a spatula in one hand and a tea cloth tucked into the waistband of his trousers. The bodel was sitting at the table, contemplating a glass of red wine. Gabriel handed him the bag of dirty clothing.

  “Get rid of these things,” he said. “Someplace where no one’s going to find them.”

  The bodel nodded, then slipped out of the safe flat. Gabriel took his place at the table and looked at Navot. The Paris katsa was a compact man, no taller than Gabriel, with a wrestler’s heavy shoulders and thick arms. Gabriel had always seen something of Shamron in Navot, and he suspected that Shamron did, too. They’d clashed in the past, Gabriel and Navot, but Gabriel had come to regard the younger officer as a thoroughly competent field man. They’d worked together most recently on the Radek case.

  “There’s going to be a shit storm over this.” Navot handed Gabriel a glass of wine. “We might as well break out the hip-waders now.”

  “How much warning did we give them?”

  “The French? Two hours. The prime minister called Grey Poupon directly. Grey Poupon had a few choice words. Then he raised the terror alert status to Level Red. You didn’t hear any of it?”

  Gabriel told Navot about the disabled car radio. “The first time I sensed any increase in security was the moment I was walking into the station.” He swallowed some of the wine. “How much did the prime minister tell them?”

  Navot relayed to Gabriel what details of the conversation he knew.

  “How did they explain my presence in Marseilles?”

  “They said you were looking for someone in connection with the Rome bombing.”

  “Khaled?”

  “I don’t think they went into specifics.”

  “Something tells me we need to get our stories straight. Why did they wait so long to alert the French?”

  “They were hoping you’d turn up, obviously. They also needed to make sure all the members of the Marseilles team had left French soil.”

  “Had they?”

  Navot nodded.

  “I suppose we could consider ourselves lucky the prime minister went on the record with Élysée Palace.”

  “Why is that?”

  Gabriel told Navot about the three shaheeds. “We were at the same table in Cairo together. I’m sure someone made a very nice photograph of
the occasion.”

  “A setup?”

  “Designed to make it look as though I was somehow involved in the conspiracy.”

  Navot inclined his head in the direction of the living room. “Will she eat anything?”

  “Let her sleep.”

  Navot slid an omelet onto a plate and placed it in front of Gabriel.

  “Specialty of the house: mushrooms, Gruyère, fresh herbs.”

  “I haven’t eaten in thirty-six hours. When I’m finished with the eggs, I plan on eating the plate.”

  Navot began breaking more eggs into his mixing bowl. His work was interrupted by the flashing red light atop the telephone. He snatched up the receiver, listened for a moment, then murmured a few words in Hebrew and rang off. Gabriel looked up from his food.

  “What was that?”

  “King Saul Boulevard. The escape plan will be ready in an hour.”

  As it turned out, they had only forty minutes to wait for the plan. It was transmitted to the safe flat by way of secure fax—three sheets of Hebrew text, composed in Naka, the field code of the Office. Navot, seated next to Gabriel at the kitchen table, handled the decryption.

  “There’s an El Al charter on the ground in Warsaw right now,” Navot said.

  “Polish Jews visiting the old country?”

  “Actually, visiting the scene of the crime. It’s a packaged tour of the death camps.” Navot shook his head. He had been at Treblinka that night with Gabriel and Radek and had walked among the ashes at the side of the murderer. “Why anyone would want to go to such a place is beyond me.”

  “When does the flight depart?”

  “Tomorrow night. One of the passengers will be asked to volunteer for a rather special assignment—traveling home on a false Israeli passport from a different point of departure.”

  “And Leah will take her place on the charter?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Does King Saul Boulevard have a candidate?”

  “Three, actually. They’re making the final decision now.”

  “How will they explain Leah’s condition?”

  “Illness.”

  “How will we get her to Warsaw?”

  “We?” Navot shook his head. “You’re going home by a different route: overland to Italy, then a nighttime pickup on the beach at Fiumicino. Apparently you’re familiar with that spot?”

  Gabriel nodded. He knew the beach well. “So how does Leah get to Warsaw?”

  “I’ll take her.” Navot saw the reluctance in Gabriel’s eyes. “Don’t worry. I won’t let anything happen to your wife. I’ll accompany her home on the flight. Three doctors are on the tour. She’ll be in good hands.”

  “And when she gets to Israel?”

  “A team from the Mount Herzl Psychiatric Hospital will be ready to receive her.”

  Gabriel spent a moment thinking it over. He was in no position to raise objections to the plan.

  “How will I get over the border?”

  “Do you remember the Volkswagen van we used in the Radek affair?”

  Gabriel did. It had a hidden compartment beneath the rear foldout bed. Radek, drugged and unconscious, had been concealed there when Chiara had driven him over the Austrian-Czech border.

  “I brought it back to Paris after the operation,” Navot said. “It’s stored in a garage over in the seventeenth.”

  “Did you delouse it?”

  Navot laughed. “It’s clean,” he said. “More important, it’ll get you over the border and down to Fiumicino.”

  “Who’s taking me to Italy?”

  “Moshe can handle it.”

  “Him? He’s a kid.”

  “He knows how to handle himself,” Navot said. “Besides, who better than Moses to lead you home to the Promised Land?”

  31

  FIUMICINO, ITALY

  “There’s the signal.Two short flashes followed by a long one.”

  Moshe flicked the wipers and leaned forward over the wheel of the Volkswagen. Gabriel sat placidly in the passenger seat. He was tempted to tell the kid to relax but decided instead to let him enjoy the moment. Moshe’s previous assignments had involved stocking the pantries of safe flats and cleaning up the mess after the agents had left town. A midnight rendezvous on a rainswept Italian beach was going to be the highlight of his association with the Office.

  “There it is again,” the bodel said. “Two short flashes—”

  “Followed by a long one. I heard you the first time.” Gabriel clapped the kid on the back. “Sorry, it’s been a long couple of days. Thanks for the ride. Be careful on the way home, and use—”

  “A different border crossing,” he said. “I heard you the first four times.”

  Gabriel climbed out of the van and crossed the carpark overlooking the beach, then he saddle-stepped a short stone wall and struck out across the sand to the water’s edge. He waited there, the waves lapping over his shoes, and watched the dinghy drawing closer. A moment later he was seated in the prow, with his back to Yaakov and his eyes on Fidelity.

  “You shouldn’t have gone,” Yaakov shouted over the buzz of the outboard.

  “If I’d stayed in Marseilles, I would have never got Leah back.”

  “You don’t know that. Maybe Khaled would have played the game differently.”

  Gabriel twisted his head round. “You’re right, Yaakov. He would have played it differently. First he would have killed Leah and left her body on some road in the south of England. Then he would have sent his three shaheeds into the Gare de Lyon and turned it into rubble.”

  Yaakov backed off on the throttle. “That was the dumbest move I’ve ever seen,” Yaakov said, then, in a concessionary tone, he added: “And by far the bravest. They’d better pin a medal on you when we get back to King Saul Boulevard.”

  “I fell into Khaled’s trap. They don’t pin medals on officers who walk into traps. They leave them in the desert to be picked over by the vultures and the scorpions.”

  Yaakov brought the dinghy to the stern of Fidelity. Gabriel climbed out onto the swim platform and scaled the ladder up the aft deck. Dina awaited him there. She was wearing a heavy sweater, and the wind was tossing about her dark hair. She rushed forward and threw her arms around his neck.

  “Her voice,” Gabriel said. “I want to hear the sound of her voice.”

  Dina loaded the tape and pressed PLAY.

  “What have you done to her? Where is she?”

  “We have her, but I don’t know where she is.”

  “Where is she? Answer me! Don’t speak to me in French. Speak to me in your real language. Speak to me in Arabic.”

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “So you can speak Arabic. Where is she? Answer me, or you’re going down.”

  “If you kill me, you’ll destroy yourself—and your wife. I’m your only hope.”

  Gabriel pressed STOP, then REWIND, then PLAY.

  If you kill me, you’ll destroy yourself—and your wife. I’m your only hope.”

  STOP. REWIND. PLAY.

  “I’m your only hope.”

  STOP.

  He looked up at Dina. “Did you run it through the database?”

  She nodded. “No match on file.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Gabriel said. “I have something better than her voice.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Her story.”

  He told Dina how the girl’s story of pain and loss had virtually tumbled out of her during the final miles before Paris. How her family had come from Sumayriyya in the Western Galilee; how they had been driven out during Operation Ben-Ami and forced into exile in Lebanon.

  “Sumayriyya? It was a small place, wasn’t it? A thousand people?”

  “Eight hundred, according to the girl. She seemed to know her history.”

  “Not everyone from Sumayriyya obeyed the orders to flee,” Dina said. “Some of them stayed behind.”

  “And some of them managed to sneak back across the bord
er before it was sealed. If her grandfather was truly a village elder, someone would remember him.”

  “But even if we’re able to learn the girl’s name, what good will it do? She’s dead. How can she help us find Khaled?”

  “She was in love with him.”

  “She told you this?”

  “I just know it.”

  “How perceptive of you. What else do you know about this girl?”

  “I remember how she looked,” he said. “I remember exactly how she looked.”

  The notepad of unlined paper she found on the flying bridge; the two ordinary lead pencils in the junk drawer of the galley. He settled himself on the couch and worked by the glow of a halogen reading lamp. Dina tried to peer over his shoulder, but he cast her a severe look and sent her out onto the windswept deck to wait until he had finished. She stood at the rail and watched the lights of the Italian coast growing faint on the horizon. Ten minutes later she returned to the salon and found Gabriel asleep on the couch. The portrait of the dead girl lay next to him. Dina switched off the lamp and let him sleep on.

  The Israeli frigate appeared off Fidelity’s starboard side in the afternoon of the third day. Two hours after that, Gabriel, Yaakov, and Dina were touching down on the helipad of a secure air base north of Tel Aviv. An Office greeting party awaited them. They stood in a circle and looked ill at ease, like strangers at a funeral. Lev was not among them, but then Lev could never be bothered with something as commonplace as greeting agents returning from dangerous missions. Gabriel, as he stepped off the helicopter, was relieved to see the armored Peugeot turning through the gates and coming across the tarmac at high speed. Without a word he separated himself from the others and made for the car.

  “Where are you going, Allon?” shouted one of Lev’s men.

  “Home.”

  “The boss wants to see you now.”

  “Then maybe he should have canceled a meeting or two and come here to greet us personally. Tell Lev I’ll try to squeeze him in tomorrow morning. I have to move a couple of things around. Tell him that.”

  The rear door of the Peugeot swung open, and Gabriel climbed inside. Shamron regarded him silently. He seemed to have aged noticeably during Gabriel’s absence. His next cigarette was lit by a hand that shook more than usual. As the car lurched forward, he placed a copy of Le Monde in Gabriel’s lap. Gabriel looked down and saw two pictures of himself—one in the Gare de Lyon, moments before the explosion, and the other at Mimi Ferrere’s nightclub in Cairo, seated with the three shaheeds.