Prince of fire ga-5 Page 8

  “And your theory?”

  “I believe Arafat prepared him to follow in the footsteps of his famous father and grandfather. I believe he’s been activated.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Arafat is trying to make himself relevant again, and he’s doing it the only way he knows how, with violence and terrorism. He’s using Khaled as his weapon.”

  “You have no proof,” said Yaakov. “There’s a terrorist cell in Europe preparing to hit us again. We can’t afford to waste time looking for a phantom.”

  Dina placed a new photograph on the overhead projector. It showed the wreckage of a building.

  “Buenos Aires, 1994. A truck bomb flattens the Jewish Community Center during a Shabbat meal. Eighty-seven dead. No claim of responsibility.”

  A new slide, more wreckage.

  “Istanbul, 2003. Two car bombs explode simultaneously outside the city’s main synagogue. Twenty-eight dead. No claim of responsibility.”

  Dina turned to Yossi and asked him to turn on the lights.

  “You told me you had evidence linking Khaled to Rome,” Gabriel said, squinting in the sudden brightness. “But thus far, you’ve given me nothing but conjecture.”

  “Oh, but I do have evidence, Gabriel.”

  “So what’s the connection?”

  “Beit Sayeed.”

  They set out from King Saul Boulevard in an Office transit van a few minutes before dawn. The windows of the van were tinted and bulletproof, and so inside it remained dark long after the sky began to grow light. By the time they reached Petah Tikvah, the sun was peeking over the ridgeline of the Judean Hills. It was a modern suburb of Tel Aviv now, with large homes and green lawns, but Gabriel, as he peered out the tinted windows, pictured the original stone cottages and Russian settlers huddled against yet another pogrom, this one led by Sheikh Asad and his holy warriors.

  Beyond Petah Tikvah lay a broad plain of open farmland. Dina directed the driver onto a two-lane road that ran along the edge of a new superhighway. They followed the road for a few miles, then turned into a dirt track bordering a newly planted orchard.

  “Here,” she said suddenly. “Stop here.”

  The van rolled to a stop. Dina climbed down and hastened into the trees. Gabriel came next, Yossi and Rimona at his shoulder, Yaakov trailing a few paces behind. They came to the end of the orchard. Fifty yards in the distance lay a field of row crops. Between the orchard and field was a wasteland overgrown with green winter grass. Dina stopped and turned to face the others.

  “Welcome to Beit Sayeed,” she said.

  She beckoned them forward. It soon became apparent they were walking amid the remains of the village. Its footprint was clearly visible in the gray earth: the cottages and the stone walls, the little square and the circular wellhead. Gabriel had seen villages like it in the Jezreel Valley and the Galilee. No matter how hard the new owners of the land tried to erase the Arab villages, the footprint remained, like the memory of a dead child.

  Dina stopped next to the wellhead and the others gathered round her. “On April 18, 1948, at approximately seven o’clock in the evening, a Palmach brigade surrounded Beit Sayeed. After a brief firefight the Arab militiamen fled, leaving the village undefended. Wholesale panic ensued. And why not? Three days earlier, more than a hundred residents of Deir Yassin had been killed by members of the Irgun and Stern Gang. Needless to say, the Arabs of Beit Sayeed weren’t anxious to meet a similar fate. It probably didn’t take much encouragement to get them to pack their bags and flee. When the village was deserted, the Palmach men dynamited the houses.”

  “What’s the connection with Rome?” Yaakov asked impatiently.

  “Daoud Hadawi.”

  “By the time Hadawi was born this place had been wiped from the face of the earth.”

  “That’s true,” Dina said. “Hadawi was born in the Jenin refugee camp, but his clan came from here. His grandmother, his father, and various aunts, uncles, and cousins fled Beit Sayeed the night of April 18, 1948.”

  “And his grandfather?” asked Gabriel.

  “He’d been killed a few days earlier, near Lydda. You see, Daoud Hadawi’s grandfather was one of Sheikh Asad’s most trusted men. He was guarding the sheikh the night Shamron killed him. He was the one Shamron stabbed before entering the cottage.”

  “That’s all?” asked Yaakov.

  Dina shook her head. “The bombings in Buenos Aires and Istanbul both took place on April eighteenth at seven o’clock.”

  “My God,” murmured Rimona.

  “There’s one more thing,” Dina said, turning to Gabriel. “The date you killed Sabri in Paris? Do you remember it?”

  “It was early March,” he said, “but I can’t remember the date.”

  “It was March fourth,” Dina said.

  “The same day as Rome,” said Rimona.

  “That’s right.” Dina looked around at the remnants of the old village. “It started right here in Beit Sayeed more than fifty years ago. It was Khaled who masterminded Rome, and he’s going to hit us again in twenty-eight days.”

  PART TWO

  THE COLLABORATOR

  8

  NEAR AIX-EN-PROVENCE, FRANCE

  “I think we may have found another one, Professor.”

  Paul Martineau, crouched on all fours in the deep shadows of the excavation pit, twisted his head slowly round and searched for the origin of the voice that had disturbed his work. It fell upon the familiar form of Yvette Debre, a young graduate student who had volunteered for the dig. Lit from behind by the sharp mid-morning Provencal sun, she was a mere silhouette. Martineau had always considered her something of a well-concealed artifact. Her short dark hair and square features left the impression of an adolescent boy. Only when his eye traveled down her body-across the ample breasts, the slender waist, the rounded hips-was her remarkable beauty fully revealed. He had probed her body with his skilled hands, sifted the soil of its secret corners, and found hidden delights and the pain of ancient wounds. No one else on the dig suspected their relationship was anything more than professor and pupil. Paul Martineau was very good at keeping secrets.

  “Where is it?”

  “Behind the meeting house.”

  “Real or stone?”

  “Stone.”

  “The attitude?”

  “Face up.”

  Martineau stood. Then he placed his palms on either side of the narrow pit and, with a powerful thrust of his shoulders, pushed himself back up to the surface. He patted the reddish Provencal earth from his palms and smiled at Yvette. He was dressed, as usual, in faded denim jeans and suede boots that were cut a bit more stylishly than those favored by lesser archaeologists. His woolen pullover was charcoal gray, and a crimson handkerchief was knotted rakishly at his throat. His hair was dark and curly, his eyes were large and deep brown. A colleague had once remarked that in Paul Martineau’s face one could see traces of all the peoples who had once held sway in Provence-the Celts and the Gauls, the Greeks and the Romans, the Visigoths and Teutons, the Franks and the Arabs. He was undeniably handsome. Yvette Debre had not been the first admiring graduate student to be seduced by him.

  Officially, Martineau was an adjunct professor of archaeology at the prestigious University of Aix-Marseille III, though he spent most of his time in the field and served as an adviser to more than a dozen local archaeological museums scattered across the south of France. He was an expert on the pre-Roman history of Provence, and although only thirty-five, was regarded as one of the finest French archaeologists of his generation. His last paper, a treatment on the demise of Ligurian hegemony in Provence, had been declared the standard academic work on the subject. Currently he was in negotiation with a French publisher for a mass-market work on the ancient history of the region.

  His success, his women, and rumors of wealth had made him the source of considerable professional resentment and gossip. Martineau, though hardly talkative about his personal life, had never made a secret of his
provenance. His late father, Henri Martineau, had dabbled in business and diplomacy and failed spectacularly at both. Martineau, upon the death of his mother, had sold the family’s large home in Avignon, along with a second property in the rural Vaucluse. He had been living comfortably on the proceeds ever since. He had a large flat near the university in Aix, a comfortable villa in the Luberon village of Lacoste, and a small pied-a-terre in Montmartre in Paris. When asked why he had chosen archaeology, he would reply that he was fascinated by the question of why civilizations came and went and what brought about their demise. Others sensed in him a certain restiveness, a quiet fury that seemed to be calmed, at least temporarily, by physically plunging his hands into the past.

  Martineau followed the girl through the maze of excavation trenches. Located atop a mount overlooking the broad plain of the Chaine de l’Etoile, the site was an oppidum, or walled hill fort, built by the powerful Celto-Ligurian tribe known as the Salyes. Initial excavations had concluded that the fort contained two distinct sections, one for a Celtic aristocracy and another for what was thought to be a Ligurian underclass. But Martineau had put forward a new theory. The hasty addition of the poorer section of the fort had coincided with a round of fighting between the Ligurians and the Greeks near Marseilles. On this dig, Martineau had proven conclusively that the annex had been the equivalent of an Iron Age refugee camp.

  Now he sought to answer three questions: Why had the hill fort been abandoned after only a hundred years? What was the significance of the large number of severed heads, some real and some rendered in stone, that he had discovered in the vicinity of the central meeting house? Were they merely the battle trophies of a barbarian Iron Age people, or were they religious in nature, linked somehow to the mysterious Celtic “severed head” cult? Martineau suspected the cult may have had a hand in the hill fort’s rapid demise, which is why he had ordered the other members of the team to alert him the moment a “head” was discovered-and why he handled the excavations personally. He had learned through hard experience that no clue, no matter how insignificant, could be ignored. What was the disposition of the head? What other artifacts or fragments were found in the vicinity? Was there trace evidence contained in the surrounding soil? Such matters could not be left in the hands of a graduate student, even one as talented as Yvette Debre.

  They arrived at an excavation trench, about six feet in length and shoulder-width across. Martineau lowered himself in, careful not to disturb the surrounding earth. Protruding from the hard subsoil was the easily recognizable shape of a human nose. Martineau, from his back pocket, removed a small hand pick and a brush and went to work.

  For the next six hours he did not rise from his pit. Yvette sat cross-legged at the edge. Occasionally she offered him mineral water or coffee, which he also refused. Every few minutes one of the other team members would wander by and inquire about his progress. Their questions were met by silence. Only the sound of Martineau’s work emanated from the trench. Pick, pick, brush, brush, blow. Pick, pick, brush, brush, blow…

  Slowly the face rose toward him from the depths of the ancient soil, mouth drawn in final anguish, eyes closed in death. As the morning wore on he probed deeper into the soil and found, as he had expected, that the head was held by a hand. Those gathered on the edge of the excavation trench did not realize that for Paul Martineau, the face represented more than an intriguing artifact from the distant past. Martineau, in the dark soil, saw the face of his enemy-and one day soon, he thought, he too would be holding a severed head in the palm of his hand.

  The storm came down from the Rhone Valley at midday. The rain, cold and driven by a harsh wind, swept over the excavation site like a Vandal raiding party. Martineau climbed out of his trench and hastened up the hill, where he found the rest of his team sheltering in the lee of the ancient wall.

  “Pack up,” he said. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

  Martineau bid them good day and started toward the carpark. Yvette detached herself from the others and followed after him.

  “How about dinner tonight?”

  “I’d love to, but I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Another dreary faculty reception,” Martineau said. “The dean has demanded my presence.”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  “Perhaps.” Martineau touched her hand. “See you in the morning.”

  On the opposite side of the wall was a grassy carpark. Martineau’s new Mercedes sedan stood out from the battered cars and motor scooters of the volunteers and the less noteworthy archaeologists working on the dig. He climbed behind the wheel and set out along the D14 toward Aix. Fifteen minutes later he was pulling into a parking space outside his apartment house, just off the cours Mirabeau, in the heart of the city.

  It was a fine, eighteenth-century house, with an iron balcony on each window and a door on the left side of the facade facing the street. Martineau removed his post from the mailbox, then rode the small lift up to the fourth floor. It emptied into a small vestibule with a marble floor. The pair of Roman water vessels that stood outside his door were real, though anyone who asked about their origin was told they were clever reproductions.

  The apartment he entered seemed more suited to a member of the Aixois aristocracy than an archaeologist and part-time professor. Originally it had been two apartments, but Martineau, after the untimely accidental death of his widower neighbor, had won the right to combine them into a single flat. The living room was large and dramatic, with a high ceiling and large windows overlooking the street. The furnishings were Provencal in style, though less rustic than the pieces at his villa in Lacoste. On one wall was a landscape by Cezanne; on another a pair of sketches by Degas. A pair of remarkably intact Roman pillars flanked the entrance to a large study, which contained several hundred archaeological monographs and a remarkable collection of original field notes and manuscripts from some of the greatest minds in the history of the discipline. Martineau’s home was his sanctuary. He never invited colleagues here, only women-and lately only Yvette.

  He showered quickly and changed into clean clothing. Two minutes later he was behind the wheel of the Mercedes once more, speeding along the cours Mirabeau. He did not drive toward the university. Instead, he made his way across the city and turned onto the A51 Autoroute toward Marseilles. He had lied to Yvette. It was not the first time.

  Most Aixois tended to turn up their nose at Marseilles. Paul Martineau had always been seduced by it. The port city the Greeks had called Massalia was now the second largest in France, and it remained the point of entry for the majority of immigrants to the country, most of whom now came from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Divided roughly in half by the thunderous boulevard de la Canebiere, it had two distinct faces. South of the boulevard, on the edge of the old port, lay a pleasant French city with broad pedestrian walks, exclusive shopping streets, and esplanades dotted with outdoor cafes. But to the north were the districts known as Le Panier and the Quartier Belsunce. Here it was possible to walk the pavements and hear only Arabic. Foreigners and native Frenchmen, easy prey for street criminals, rarely strayed into the Arab neighborhoods after dark.

  Paul Martineau had no such misgivings about his security. He left his Mercedes on the boulevard d’Anthenes, near the base of the steps that led to the St-Charles train station, and set out down the hill toward rue de la Canebiere. Before reaching the thoroughfare he turned right, into a narrow street called the rue des Convalescents. Barely wide enough to accommodate a car, it sloped downward toward the port, into the heart of the Quartier Belsunce.

  It was dark in the street, and Martineau, at his back, felt the first gusts of a mistral. The night air smelled of charcoal smoke and turmeric and faintly of honey. A pair of old men, seated on spindly chairs outside the doorway of a tenement house, shared a hubble-bubble water pipe and studied Martineau indifferently as he trod past. A moment later a soccer ball, deflated and nearly the color of the pavement, bounded toward him out of
the darkness. Martineau put a foot on it and sent it adroitly back in the direction from which it came. It was scooped up by a sandaled boy, who, upon seeing the tall stranger in Western clothes, turned and vanished into the mouth of an alleyway. Martineau had a vision of himself, thirty years earlier. Charcoal smoke, turmeric, honey… For an instant he felt as though he was walking the streets of south Beirut.

  He came to the intersection of two streets. On one corner was a shwarma stand, on another a tiny cafe that promised Cuisine Tunisienne. A trio of teenage boys eyed Martineau provocatively from the doorway of the cafe. In French he wished them good evening, then lowered his gaze and turned to the right.

  The street was narrower than the rue des Convalescents, and most of the pavement was consumed by market stalls filled with cheap carpets and aluminum pots. At the other end was an Arab coffeehouse. Martineau went inside. At the back of the coffeehouse, near the toilet, was a narrow flight of unlit stairs. Martineau climbed slowly upward through the gloom. At the top was a door. As Martineau approached, it swung open suddenly. A man, clean-shaven and dressed in a galabia gown, stepped onto the landing.

  “Maa-salaamah,” he said. Peace be upon you.

  “As-salaam alaykum,” replied Martineau, as he slipped past the man and entered the apartment.

  9

  JERUSALEM

  Jerusalem is quite literally a City on a Hill. It stands high atop the Judean Mountains and is reached from the Coastal Plain by a staircase-like road that climbs through the twisting mountain gorge known as the Sha’ar Ha’Gai. Gabriel, like most Israelis, still referred to it by its Arab name, the Bab al-Wad. He lowered the window of his Office Skoda and rested his arm in the opening. The evening air, cool and soft and scented with cypress and pine, tugged at his shirtsleeve. He passed the rusted carcass of an armored personnel carrier, a memorial relic of the fighting in 1948, and thought of Sheikh Asad and his campaign to sever the lifeline to Jerusalem.