Prince of fire ga-5 Read online

  At sunset he was summoned to the executive suite for the final ritual of his return. The light above Lev’s door shone green. His secretary, an attractive girl with suntanned legs and hair the color of cinnamon, pressed an unseen button, and the door swung silently open under its own power like the entrance of a bank vault.

  Gabriel stepped inside and paused before advancing farther. He felt a peculiar sense of dislocation, like a man who returns to his childhood bedroom only to find it turned into his father’s den. The office had been Shamron’s once. Gone were the scarred wooden desk and steel file cabinets and the German shortwave radio on which he had monitored the bellicose voices of his enemies. Now the motif was modern and monochrome gray. The old linoleum floor had been torn up and covered by a plush executive rug. Strategically placed around the room were several expensive-looking Oriental carpets. From high in the ceiling a recessed halogen bulb shone down upon a seating area of contemporary black leather furniture that reminded Gabriel of a first-class airport lounge. The wall nearest the seating area had been transformed into a giant plasma video display, from which the world’s media flickered silently in high definition. The remote control, resting on the glass coffee table, was the size of a prayer book and looked as though it required an advanced engineering degree to operate.

  Whereas Shamron had placed his desk barrier-like in front of the door, Lev had chosen to reside near the windows. The pale gray blinds were drawn but angled in such a way that it was just possible to make out the ragged skyline of downtown Tel Aviv and a large orange sun sinking slowing into the Mediterranean. Lev’s desk, a large expanse of smoky glass, was vacant except for a computer and a pair of telephones. He was seated before the monitor, with his hands folded praying mantis-like beneath his defiant chin. His bald head glowed softly in the restrained light. Gabriel noted that Lev’s eyeglasses cast no reflection. He wore special lenses so that his enemies-meaning anyone within the Office who opposed him-could not see what he was reading.

  “Gabriel,” he said, as though surprised by his presence. He came out from behind the desk and shook Gabriel’s hand carefully, then, with a bony finger pressed to Gabriel’s spine like a pistol, guided him across the room to the seating area. As he was lowering himself into a chair, one of the images on the video wall caught his attention, which one Gabriel could not tell. He sighed heavily, then turned his head slowly and studied Gabriel with a predatory gaze.

  The shadow of their last meeting fell between them. It had taken place not in this room but in Jerusalem, in the office of the prime minister. There had been but one item on the agenda: whether the Office should capture Erich Radek and bring him back to Israel to face justice. Lev had steadfastly opposed the idea, despite the fact that Radek had very nearly killed Gabriel’s mother during the death march from Auschwitz in January 1945. The prime minister had overruled Lev and mandated that Gabriel be placed in charge of the operation to seize Radek and spirit him out of Austria. Radek now resided in a police detention facility in Jaffa, and Lev had spent much of the last two months trying to undo the damage caused by his initial opposition to Radek’s capture. Lev’s standing among the troops at King Saul Boulevard had fallen to dangerously low levels. In Jerusalem, some were beginning to wonder whether Lev’s time had come and gone.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of assembling your team,” said Lev. He pressed the intercom button on the telephone and summoned his secretary. She entered the room with a file beneath her arm. Lev’s meetings were always well-choreographed. He adored nothing more than standing before a complicated chart, pointer in hand, and decoding its secrets for a mystified audience.

  As the secretary headed toward the door, Lev looked at Gabriel to see if he was watching her walk away. Then he handed the files wordlessly to Gabriel and turned his gaze once more toward the video wall. Gabriel lifted the cover and found several sheets of paper, each containing the thumbnail sketch of a team member: name, section, area of expertise. The sun had slipped below the horizon, and the office had grown very dark. Gabriel, in order to read the file, had to lean slightly to his left and hold the pages directly beneath the halogen ceiling lamp. After a few moments he looked up at Lev.

  “You forgot to add representatives from Hadassah and the Maccabee Youth Sports League.”

  Gabriel’s irony bounced off Lev like a stone thrown at a speeding freight train.

  “Your point, Gabriel?”

  “It’s too big. We’ll be tripping over each other.” It occurred to Gabriel that perhaps Lev wanted precisely that. “I can carry out the investigation with half these people.”

  Lev, with a languid wave of his long hand, invited Gabriel to reduce the size of the team. Gabriel began removing pages and placing them on the coffee table. Lev frowned. Gabriel’s cuts, while random, had clearly dislodged Lev’s informant.

  “This will do,” Gabriel said, handing the personnel files back to Lev. “We’ll need a place to meet. My office is too small.”

  “Housekeeping has set aside Room 456C.”

  Gabriel knew it well. Three levels belowground, 456C was nothing more than a dumping ground for old furniture and obsolete computer equipment, often used by members of the night staff as a spot for romantic trysts.

  “Fine,” said Gabriel.

  Lev crossed one long leg over the other and picked a piece of invisible lint from his trousers. “You’ve never worked at headquarters before, have you, Gabriel?”

  “You know exactly where I’ve worked.”

  “Which is why I feel I should give you a helpful reminder. The progress of your investigation, assuming you make any, is not to be shared with anyone outside this service. You will report to me and only me. Is that clear?”

  “I take it you’re referring to the old man.”

  “You know exactly who I’m referring to.”

  “Shamron and I are personal friends. I won’t cut off my relationship with him just to put your mind at ease.”

  “But you will refrain from discussing the case with him. Have I made myself clear?”

  Lev had neither mud on his boots nor blood on his hands, but he was a master in the art of boardroom thrust and parry.

  “Yes, Lev,” Gabriel said. “I know exactly where you stand.”

  Lev got to his feet, signaling that the meeting had ended, but Gabriel remained seated.

  “There’s something else I needed to discuss with you.”

  “My time is limited,” said Lev, looking down.

  “It won’t take but a minute. It’s about Chiara.”

  Lev, rather than suffer the indignity of retaking his seat, walked over to the window and looked down at the lights of Tel Aviv. “What about her?”

  “I don’t want her used again until we determine who else saw the contents of that computer disk.”

  Lev rotated slowly, as if he were a statue on a pedestal. With the light behind him, he appeared as nothing more than a dark mass against the horizontal lines of the blinds.

  “I’m glad you feel comfortable enough to walk into this office and make demands,” he said acidly, “but Chiara’s future will be determined by Operations and, ultimately, by me.”

  “She’s only a bat leveyha. Are you telling me you can’t find any other girls to serve as escort officers?”

  “She’s got an Italian passport, and she’s damned good at her job. You know that better than anyone.”

  “She’s also burned, Lev. If you put her in the field with an agent, you’ll put the agent at risk. I wouldn’t work with her.”

  “Fortunately, most of our field officers aren’t as arrogant as you.”

  “I never knew a good field man who wasn’t arrogant, Lev.”

  A silence fell between them. Lev walked over to his desk and pressed a button on his telephone. The door swung open automatically, and a wedge of bright light entered from Lev’s reception area.

  “It’s been my experience that field agents don’t take well to the discipline of headquarters. In the field, the
y’re a law unto themselves, but in here, I’m the law.”

  “I’ll try to keep that in mind, sheriff.”

  “Don’t fuck this up,” Lev said as Gabriel headed toward the open door. “If you do, not even Shamron will be able to protect you.”

  They convened at nine o’clock the following morning. Housekeeping had made a halfhearted attempt at putting the room in order. A chipped wooden conference table stood in the center, surrounded by several mismatched chairs. The excess debris had been piled against the far wall. Gabriel, as he entered, was reminded of the pews stacked against the wall of the Church of San Giovanni Crisostomo. Everything about the setting suggested impermanence, including the misleading paper sign, affixed to the door with packing tape, that read: TEMPORARY COMMITTEE FOR THE STUDY OF TERROR THREATS IN WESTERN EUROPE. Gabriel embraced the disarray. From adversity, Shamron always said, comes cohesion.

  His team numbered four in all, two boys and two girls, all eager and adoring and unbearably young. From Research came Yossi, a pedantic but brilliant intelligence analyst who had read Greats at Oxford; from History, a dark-eyed girl named Dina who could recite the time, place, and butcher’s bill of every act of terrorism ever committed against the State of Israel. She walked with a very slight limp and was treated with unfailing tenderness by the others. Gabriel found the reason why in her personnel file. Dina had been standing in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street the day in October 1994 when a Hamas suicide bomber turned the Number 5 bus into a coffin for twenty-one people. Her mother and two of her sisters were killed that day. Dina had been seriously wounded.

  The two other members of the team came from outside the Office. The Arab Affairs Department of Shabak lent Gabriel a pockmarked tough named Yaakov, who had spent the better part of the last decade trying to penetrate the Palestinian Authority’s apparatus of terror. Military Intelligence gave him a captain named Rimona, who was Shamron’s niece. The last time Gabriel had seen Rimona, she’d been tearing fearlessly down Shamron’s steep driveway on a kick scooter. These days Rimona could usually be found in a secure aircraft hangar north of Tel Aviv, poring over the papers seized from Yasir Arafat’s compound in Ramallah.

  Instinctively, Gabriel approached the case as though it was a painting. He was reminded of a restoration he had performed not long after his apprenticeship, a crucifixion by an early Renaissance Venetian named Cima. Gabriel, after removing the yellowed varnish, had discovered that virtually nothing remained of the original. He had then spent the next three months piecing together filaments of the obscure painter’s life and work. When finally he began the retouching, it was as if Cima was standing at his shoulder, guiding his hand.

  The artist, in this case, was the one member of the terrorist team who had been positively identified: Daoud Hadawi. Hadawi was their porthole onto the operation, and slowly, over the next several days, his brief life began to take shape on the walls of Gabriel’s lair. It ran from a ramshackle refugee camp in Jenin, through the stones and burning tires of the first intifada, and into the ranks of Force 17. No corner of Hadawi’s life remained unexplored: his schooling and his religious fervor, his family and his clan, his associations and his influences.

  Known Force 17 personnel were located and accounted for. Those thought to possess the skills or education necessary to build the bomb that leveled the Rome embassy were singled out for special attention. Arab informants were called in and questioned from Ramallah to Gaza City, from Rome to London. Communications intercepts stretching two years into the past were filtered through the computers and sifted for any reference to a large-scale operation in Europe. Old surveillance and watch reports were reexamined, old airline passenger lists scoured again. Rimona returned to her hangar each morning to search for traces of Rome in the captured files of Arafat’s intelligence services.

  Gradually, Room 456C began to resemble the command bunker of a besieged army. There were so many photographs pinned to the walls it seemed their search was being monitored by an Arab mob. The girls from the data rooms took to leaving their deliveries outside in the corridor. Gabriel requisitioned the room next door, along with cots and bedding. He also requested an easel and a chalkboard. Yossi contemptuously pointed out that no one had seen a chalkboard inside King Saul Boulevard in twenty years, and for his impertinence he was ordered to find one. It came the next morning. “I had to call in a lot of favors,” said Yossi. “The stone tablets and carving tools arrive next week.”

  Gabriel began each day by posing the same series of questions: Who built the bomb? Who conceived and planned the attack? Who directed the teams? Who secured the safe houses and the transport? Who handled the money? Who was the mastermind? Was there a state sponsor in Damascus or Tehran or Tripoli?

  A week into the investigation, none of the questions had been answered. Frustration began to set in. Gabriel instructed them to change their approach. “Sometimes these puzzles are solved by the piece you discover, and sometimes they’re solved by finding the piece that’s missing.” He stood before his chalkboard and wiped it until it was a blank slate. “Start looking for the piece that’s missing.”

  They ate supper together each night as a family. Gabriel encouraged them to set aside the case to talk about something else. He naturally became the focus of their curiosity, for they had studied his exploits at the Academy and even read about some of them in their history books at school. He was reticent at first, but they coaxed him from his shell, and he played the role that Shamron, on countless other occasions, had played before him. He told them about Black September and Abu Jihad; his foray into the heart of the Vatican and his capture of Erich Radek. Rimona drew him out on the role restoration had played in his cover and the maintenance of his sanity. Yossi started to ask about the bombing in Vienna, but Dina, scholar of terror and counterterror, placed a restraining hand on Yossi’s arm and adroitly changed the subject. Sometimes, when Gabriel was speaking, he would see Dina gazing at him as though he were a hero’s monument come to life. He realized that he, like Shamron before him, had crossed the line between mortal and myth.

  Radek intrigued them the most. Gabriel understood the reason for this all too well. They lived in a country where it was not safe to eat in a restaurant or to ride a bus, yet it was the Holocaust that occupied a special place in their nightmares. Is it true you made him walk through Treblinka? Did you touch him? How could you stand the sound of his voice in that place? Were you ever tempted to take matters into your own hands? Yaakov wanted to know only one thing: “Was he sorry he murdered our grandmothers?” And Gabriel, though he was tempted to lie, told him the truth. “No, he wasn’t sorry. In fact, I had the distinct impression he was still rather proud of it.” Yaakov nodded grimly, as if this fact seemed to confirm his rather pessimistic view of mankind.

  On Shabbat, Dina lit a pair of candles and recited the blessing. That night, instead of wandering Gabriel’s dark past, they spoke of their dreams. Yaakov wanted only to sit in a Tel Aviv cafe without fear of the shaheed. Yossi wanted to trek the Arab world from Morocco to Baghdad and chronicle his experiences. Rimona longed to turn on the radio in the morning and hear that no one had been killed the night before. And Dina? Gabriel suspected that Dina’s dreams, like his own, were a private screening room of blood and fire.

  After dinner Gabriel slipped from the room and wandered off down the corridor. He came to a flight of stairs, climbed them, then became disoriented and was pointed in the right direction by a night janitor. The entrance was under guard. Gabriel tried to show his new ID badge, but the Security officer just laughed and opened the door to him.

  The room was dimly lit and, because of the computers, unbearably cold. The duty officers wore fleece pullovers and moved with the quiet efficiency of night staff in an intensive care ward. Gabriel climbed up to the viewing platform and leaned his weight against the aluminum handrail. Arrayed before him was a massive computer-generated map of the world, ten feet in height, thirty in width. Scattered across the globe were pinpricks of light,
each depicting the last known location of a terrorist on Israel’s watch list. There were clusters in Damascus and Baghdad and even in supposedly friendly places like Amman and Cairo. A river of light flowed from Beirut to the Bekaa Valley to the refugee camps along Israel’s northern border. The West Bank and Gaza were ablaze. A string of lights lay across Europe like a diamond necklace. The cities of North America glowed seductively.

  Gabriel felt a sudden weight of depression pushing down against his shoulders. He had given his life to the protection of the State and the Jewish people, and yet here, in this frigid room, he was confronted with the stark reality of the Zionist dream: a middle-aged man, gazing upon a constellation of enemies, waiting for the next one to explode.

  Dina was waiting for him in the corridor in her stocking feet.

  “It feels familiar to me, Gabriel.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The way they carried it off. The way they moved. The planning. The sheer audacity of the thing. It feels like Munich and Sabena.” She paused and pushed a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear. “It feels like Black September.”

  “There is no Black September, Dina-not anymore, at least.”

  “You asked us to look for the thing that’s missing. Does that include Khaled?”