Gabriel Allon 01 - The Kill Artist Read online

  She collided with the river and slipped below the surface. She opened her mouth, and her lungs filled with frigid water. She could taste her own blood. She saw a flash of brilliant white, heard her mother calling her name. Then there was only darkness. A vast, silent darkness. And the cold.

  3

  TIBERIAS, ISRAEL

  Despite the events in Paris, the stranger might have managed to remain in seclusion but for the resurrection of the legendary spymaster Ari Shamron. It was not necessary to awaken Shamron that night, for he had long ago lost the gift of sleep. Indeed, he was so restless at night that Rami, the young head of his personal security detail, had christened him the Phantom of Tiberias. At first Shamron suspected it was age. He had turned sixtyfive recently and for the first time had contemplated the possibility that someday he might actually die. During a grudging annual physical his doctor had had the audacity to suggest—“And this is just a suggestion, Ari, because God knows I’d never try to actually give you an order”—that Shamron reduce his daily intake of caffeine and tobacco: twelve cups of black coffee and sixty strong Turkish cigarettes. Shamron had found these suggestions mildly amusing.

  It was only during an uncharacteristic period of introspection, brought on by his forced retirement from the service, that Shamron had settled on the causes of his chronic sleeplessness. He had told so many lies, spun so many deceptions, that sometimes he could no longer tell fact from fiction, truth from untruth. And then there was the killing. He had killed with his own hands, and he had ordered other men, younger men, to kill for him. A life of betrayal and violence had taken its toll. Some men go crazy, some burn out. Ari Shamron had been sentenced to remain forever awake.

  Shamron had made an uneasy peace with his affliction, the way some people accommodate madness or terminal disease. He had become a night wanderer, roaming his sandstone-colored villa overlooking the Sea of Galilee, sitting on the terrace when the nights were fine and soft, staring at the lake and the moonlit expanse of the Upper Galilee. Sometimes he would slip down to his studio and engage in his great passion, repairing old radios—the only activity that completely released his mind from thoughts of work.

  And sometimes he would wander down to the security gate and pass a few hours sitting in the shack with Rami and the other boys, telling stories over coffee and cigarettes. Rami liked the story of Eichmann’s capture the best. Each time a new boy joined the detail, Rami urged Shamron to tell it again, so the new boy would understand that he had been given a great privilege: the privilege of protecting Shamron, the Sabra superman, Israel’s avenging angel.

  Rami had made him tell the story again that night. As usual it had dredged up many memories, some of them not so pleasant. Shamron had no old radios in which to lose himself, and it was too cold and rainy to sit outside, so he lay in bed, wide-eyed, sorting through new operations, remembering old ones, dissecting opponents for frailty, plotting their destruction. So when the special telephone on his bedside table emitted two sharp rings, Shamron reached out with the relieved air of an old man grateful for company and slowly pulled the receiver to his ear.

  Rami stepped outside the guardhouse and watched the old man pounding down the drive. He was bald and thick, with steel-rimmed spectacles. His face was dry and deeply creviced—like the Negev, thought Rami. As usual he wore khaki trousers and an ancient leather bomber jacket with a tear on the right breast, just below the arm-pit. Within the service there were two theories about the tear. Some believed the jacket had been pierced by a bullet during a reprisal raid into Jordan in the fifties. Others argued that it had been torn by the dying fingers of a terrorist whom Shamron garroted in a Cairo back alley. Shamron always insisted gruffly that the truth was much more prosaic—the jacket had been torn on the corner of a car door—but no one within the service took him seriously.

  He walked as if he were anticipating an assault from behind, elbows out, head down. The Shamron shuffle, the walk that said, “Get the fuck out of my way or I’ll have your balls for breakfast.” Rami felt his pulse quicken at the sight of the old man. If Shamron told him to jump off a cliff, he’d jump. If the old man told him to stop in midair, he’d figure out some way to do it.

  As Shamron drew closer, Rami caught sight of his face. The lines around his mouth were a little deeper. He was angry—Rami could see it in his eyes—but there seemed to be a hint of a smile across his arid lips. What the hell is he smiling about? Chiefs aren’t disturbed after midnight unless it’s urgent or very bad news. Then Rami hit upon the reason: the Phantom of Tiberias simply was relieved he had been spared another sleepless night with no enemies to fight.

  Forty-five minutes later Shamron’s armored Peugeot slipped into the underground garage of a cheerless office block looming over King Saul Boulevard in northern Tel Aviv. He stepped into a private elevator and rode up to his office suite on the top floor. Queen Esther, his long-suffering senior secretary, had left a fresh packet of cigarettes on the desk next to a thermos bottle of coffee. Shamron immediately lit a cigarette and sat down.

  His first action after returning to the service had been to remove the pompous Scandinavian furnishings of his predecessor and donate them to a charity for Russian émigrés. Now the office looked like the battlefield headquarters of a fighting general. It stressed mobility and function over style and grace. For his desk Shamron used a large, scarred library table. Along the wall opposite the window was a row of gunmetal file cabinets. On the shelf behind his desk was a thirty-year-old German-made shortwave radio. Shamron had no need for the daily summaries of the Office radio-monitoring department, because he spoke a half-dozen languages fluently and understood a half-dozen more. He could also repair the radio himself when it broke down. In fact, he could fix almost anything electronic. Once his senior staff had arrived for a weekly planning meeting to find Shamron peering into the entrails of Queen Esther’s videocassette player.

  The only hint of modernity in the office was the row of large television sets opposite his desk. Using his remote controls, he switched them on one by one. He had lost the hearing in one ear, so he turned up the volume quite loud, until it sounded as if three men—a Frenchman, an Englishman, and an American—were having a violent row in his office.

  Outside, in the chamber between Esther’s office and his own, Shamron’s senior staff had gathered like anxious acolytes awaiting an audience with their master. There was the whippetlike Eli from Planning and the Talmudic Mordecai, the service’s executive officer. There was Yossi, the genius from the Europe Desk who had read the Greats at Oxford, and Lev, the highly flammable chief of Operations, who filled his precious empty hours by collecting predatory insects. Only Lev seemed to have no physical fear of Shamron. Every few minutes he would thrust his angular head through the doorway and shout, “For God’s sake, Ari! When? Sometime tonight, I hope!”

  But Shamron was in no particular hurry to see them, for he was quite certain he knew more about the terrible events that evening in Paris than they ever would.

  For one hour Shamron sat in his chair, stone-faced, smoking one cigarette after another, watching CNN International on one television, the BBC on another, French state television on the third. He didn’t particularly care what the correspondents had to say—they knew next to nothing at this point, and Shamron knew he could put words in their mouths with one five-minute phone call. He wanted to hear from the witnesses, the people who had seen the assassination with their own eyes. They would tell him what he wanted to know.

  A German girl, interviewed on CNN, described the auto accident that preceded the assault: “There were two vehicles, a van of some sort, and a sedan. Maybe it was a Peugeot, but I can’t be sure. Traffic on the bridge came to a standstill in a matter of seconds.”

  Shamron used his remote to mute CNN and turn up the volume on the BBC. A taxi driver from the Ivory Coast described the killer: dark hair, well dressed, good-looking, cool. The killer had been with a girl on the bridge when the accident occurred: “A blond girl, a li
ttle heavy, a foreigner, definitely not French.” But the taxi driver saw nothing else, because he took cover beneath the dashboard when the bomb went off and didn’t look up again until the shooting stopped.

  Shamron removed a scuffed leather-bound notebook from his shirt pocket, laid it carefully on the desk, and opened it to a blank page. In his small precise hand he wrote a single word.

  GIRL.

  Shamron’s gaze returned to the television. An attractive young Englishwoman called Beatrice was recounting the attack for a BBC correspondent. She described a traffic accident involving a van and a car that brought traffic on the bridge to a standstill, trapping the ambassador’s car. She described how the killer walked away from his girlfriend and drew a weapon from his bag. How he then tossed the bag beneath the undercarriage of the limousine and waited for it to detonate before calmly walking forward and killing everyone inside.

  Then Beatrice described how the killer walked slowly toward the girl—the girl who seconds before he had been passionately kissing—and fired several bullets into her chest.

  Shamron licked the tip of his pencil and below the word GIRL he wrote a name:

  TARIQ.

  Shamron picked up his secure telephone and dialed Uzi Navot, the head of his Paris station. “They had someone inside that reception. Someone who alerted the team outside that the ambassador was leaving. They knew his route. They staged an accident to tie up traffic and leave the driver with no way to escape.”

  Navot agreed. Navot made it a habit to agree with Shamron.

  “There’s a great deal of very valuable artwork inside that building,” Shamron continued. “I would suspect there’s a rather sophisticated video surveillance system, wouldn’t you, Uzi?”

  “Of course, boss.”

  “Tell our friends in the French service that we’d like to dispatch a team to Paris immediately to monitor the investigation and provide any support they require. And then get your hands on those videotapes and send them to me in the pouch.”

  “Done.”

  “What about the bridge? Are there police surveillance cameras covering that bridge? With any luck we may have a recording of the entire attack—and their preparation.”

  “I’ll look into it.”

  “Anything left of the limousine?”

  “Not much. The fuel tank exploded, and the fire consumed just about everything, including the bodies, I’m afraid.”

  “How did he get away?”

  “He hopped on the back of a motorcycle. Gone in a matter of seconds.”

  “Any sign of him?”

  “Nothing, boss.”

  “Any leads?”

  “If there are any, the Paris police aren’t sharing them with me.”

  “What about the other members of the team?”

  “Gone too. They were good, boss. Damned good.”

  “Who’s the dead girl?”

  “An American.”

  Shamron closed his eyes and swore softly. The last thing he needed now was the involvement of the Americans. “Have the Americans been told yet?”

  “Half the embassy staff is on the bridge now.”

  “Does this girl have a name?”

  “Emily Parker.”

  “What was she doing in Paris?”

  “Apparently she was taking a few months off after graduation.”

  “How wonderful. Where was she living?”

  “Montmartre. A team of French detectives is working the neighborhood: poking around, asking questions, trying to pick up anything they can.”

  “Have they learned anything interesting?”

  “I haven’t heard anything else, boss.”

  “Go to Montmartre in the morning. Have a look around for yourself. Ask a few questions. Quietly, Uzi. Maybe someone in her building or in a local café got a look at lover boy.”

  “Good idea, boss.”

  “And do me one other favor. Take the file photographs of Tariq with you.”

  “You think he was behind this?”

  “I prefer to keep my options open at this point.”

  “Even if they got a look at him, those old photographs won’t be any help. He’s changed his appearance a hundred times since then.”

  “Humor me.” Shamron jabbed at the winking green light on the telephone and killed the connection.

  It was still dark as Shamron’s Peugeot limousine sped across the coastal plain and rose into the Judean Mountains toward Jerusalem. Shamron removed his spectacles and rubbed the raw red skin beneath his eyes. It had been six months since he had been pulled from retirement and given a simple mission: bring stability to an intelligence service badly damaged by a series of highly publicized operational blunders and personnel scandals. His job was to rebuild morale. Restore the esprit de corps that had characterized the Office in the old days.

  He had managed to stem the bleeding—there had been no more humiliations, like the bungled attempt to assassinate a violent Moslem cleric in Amman that had been orchestrated by his predecessor—but there had been no stunning successes either. Shamron knew better than anyone that the Office had not earned its fearsome reputation by playing it safe. In the old days it had stolen MiGs, planted spies in the palaces of its friends and its enemies, rained terror on those who dared to terrorize the people of Israel. Shamron did not want his legacy to be an Office that no longer made mistakes. He wanted to leave behind an Office that could reach out and strike at will. An Office that could make the other services of the world shake their heads in wonder.

  He knew he did not have much time. Not everyone at King Saul Boulevard had celebrated his return. There were some who believed Shamron’s time had come and gone, that Shamron should have been left in Tiberias to wrestle with his radios and his conscience while the torch was passed to the next generation. Certainly a man like Mordecai deserved to be chief after all those years slugging it out in the trenches of Operations, Shamron’s detractors had argued. Eli had the makings of a fine chief, they said. He just needed a bit more seasoning in the executive suite and he would be ready for the top job. Even Lev of Operations was thought to be suitable material, though Lev did let his temper get the better of him now and again, and Lev had made his share of enemies over the years.

  Shamron was stuck with them. Because he was only a caretaker, he had been given almost no power to make changes among the senior staff at King Saul Boulevard. As a result he was surrounded by a pack of predators who would pounce at the first sign of weakness. And the volcanic Lev was the most threatening of all, for Lev had anointed himself Shamron’s personal Brutus.

  Shamron thought: Poor little Lev. He has no idea who he’s fucking with.

  “Zev Eliyahu was a personal friend of mine,” the prime minister said as Shamron took his seat. “Who did this to him?”

  He poured coffee and slid the cup across the desk, his placid brown eyes fixed on Shamron. As usual Shamron had the feeling he was being contemplated by a sheep.

  “I can’t say for certain, but I suspect it may have been Tariq.”

  Just Tariq. No last name. None necessary. His résumé was engraved on Shamron’s brain. Tariq al-Hourani, son of a village elder from the Upper Galilee, born and raised in a refugee camp outside Sidon in southern Lebanon, educated in Beirut and Europe. His older brother had been a member of Black September, assassinated by a special unit led by Shamron himself. Tariq had dedicated his life to avenging his brother’s death. He joined the PLO in Lebanon, fought in the civil war, then accepted a coveted post in Force 17, Yasir Arafat’s personal bodyguard and covert operations unit. During the eighties he had trained extensively behind the Iron Curtain—in East Germany, Romania, and Moscow—and was transferred from Force 17 to the Jihaz el-Razd, the PLO’s intelligence and security apparatus. Eventually he led a special unit whose mission was to wage war on the Israeli secret services and diplomatic personnel. In the early nineties he split with Arafat over his decision to enter into negotiations with Israel and formed a small, tightly knit terr
or organization dedicated to one end: the destruction of Arafat’s peace process.

  Upon hearing Tariq’s name, the prime minister’s eyes flashed, then resumed their calm appraisal of Shamron. “What makes you think it was Tariq who did this?”

  “Based on the preliminary descriptions, the attack had all the hallmarks of one of his operations. It was meticulously planned and executed.” Shamron lit a cigarette and waved away the cloud of smoke. “The killer was calm and utterly ruthless. And there was a girl. It smells of Tariq.”

  “So you’re telling me that you have a hunch it was Tariq?”

  “It’s more than a hunch,” Shamron said, pressing on in the face of the prime minister’s skepticism. “Recently we received a report that suggested Tariq’s organization was about to resume its activities. You may remember that I briefed you personally, Prime Minister.”

  The prime minister nodded. “I also remember that you discouraged me from giving the report wider circulation. Zev Eliyahu might be alive this morning if we had warned the Foreign Ministry.”

  Shamron rubbed out his cigarette. “I resent the suggestion that the Office is somehow culpable in the ambassador’s death. Zev Eliyahu was a friend of mine as well. And a colleague. He worked in the Office for fifteen years, which is why I suspect Tariq targeted him. And I discouraged you from giving the report wider circulation in order to protect the source of that information. Sometimes that’s necessary when it comes to vital intelligence, Prime Minister.”

  “Don’t lecture me, Ari. Can you prove it was Tariq?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And if you can? Then what?”

  “If I can prove it was Tariq, then I’d like your permission to take him down.”

  The prime minister smiled. “Take down Tariq? You’ll have to find him first. You really think the Office is ready for something like that? We can’t afford another situation like Amman—not now, not with the peace process in such a tenuous state.”