The Kill Artist

by Daniel Silva

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me he had survived Shatila? Why didn’t you tell me his family had been butchered like that?”

  “What difference would it have made?”

  “I just wish I had known!” She lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Is it true? Are the things he told me true?”

  “Which part?”

  “All of it, Gabriel! Don’t play fucking games with me.”

  “Yes, it’s true! His family died at Shatila. He’s suffered. So what? We’ve all suffered. It doesn’t give him the right to murder innocent people because history didn’t go his way!”

  “He was an innocent, Gabriel! He was just a boy!”

  “We’re in the middle of an operation, Jacqueline. Now is not the time for a debate on moral equivalence and the ethics of counterterrorism.”

  “I apologize for permitting the question of morality to enter my thoughts. I forgot you and Shamron never get tripped up over something so trivial.”

  “Don’t lump me in with Shamron.”

  “Why not? Because he gives orders, and you follow them?”

  “What about Tunis?” Gabriel asked. “You knew Tunis was an assassination job, but you willingly took part in it. You even volunteered to go back the night of the killing.”

  “That’s because the target was Abu Jihad. He had the blood of hundreds of Israelis and Jews on his hands.”

  “This one has blood on his hands too. Don’t forget that.”

  “He’s just a boy, a boy whose family was butchered while the Israeli army looked on and did nothing.”

  “He’s not a boy. He’s a twenty-five-year-old man who helps Tariq kill people.”

  “And you’re going to use him to get to Tariq, because of what Tariq did to you? When does it end? When there’s no more blood to shed? When, Gabriel?”

  He stood up and pulled on his jacket.

  Jacqueline said, “I want out.”

  “You can’t leave now.”

  “Yes, I can. I don’t want to sleep with Yusef anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? You have the nerve to ask me why?”

  “I’m sorry, Jacqueline. That didn’t come out—”

  “You think of me as a whore, don’t you, Gabriel! You think it doesn’t bother me to sleep with a man I don’t care for.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Is that what I was to you in Tunis? Just a whore?”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  “Then tell me what I was.”

  “What are you going to do? Are you going back to France? Back to your villa in Valbonne? Back to your Parisian parties and your photo shoots and your fashion shows, where the most difficult question is deciding what shade of lipstick to wear?”

  She slapped him across the left side of his face. He stared back at her, eyes cold, color rising in the skin over his cheekbone. She drew back her hand to slap him again, but he casually lifted his left hand and deflected her blow.

  “Can’t you hear what’s going on?” Gabriel said. “He told you the story of what happened to him at Shatila for a reason. He’s testing you. He wants you for something.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I thought you were someone I could depend on. Not someone who was going to fall apart in the middle of the game.”

  “Shut up, Gabriel!”

  “I’ll contact Shamron—tell him we’re out of business.”

  He reached out for the door. She grabbed his hand. “Killing Tariq won’t make it right. That’s just an illusion. You think it will be like fixing a painting: you find the damage, retouch it, and everything is fine again. But it’s not like that for a human being. In fact it’s not even like that for a painting. If you look carefully you can always see where it’s been retouched. The scars never go away. The restorer doesn’t heal a painting. He just hides the wounds.”

  “I need to know if you’re willing to continue.”

  “And I want to know if I was just your whore in Tunis.”

  Gabriel reached out and touched her cheek. “You were my lover in Tunis.” His hand fell to his side. “And my family was destroyed because of it.”

  “I can’t change the past.”

  “I know.”

  “Did you care for me?”

  He hesitated a moment, then said, “Yes, very much.”

  “Do you care for me now?”

  He closed his eyes. “I need to know whether you can go on.”

  THIRTY

  Hyde Park, London

  Karp said, “Your friend picked a damned lousy place for a meeting.”

  They were sitting in the back of a white Ford van on the Bayswater Road a few yards from Lancaster Gate, Karp hunched over a console of audio equipment, adjusting his levels. Gabriel could scarcely hear himself think over the riotous din of cars, taxis, lorries, and double-decker buses. Overhead the trees lining the northern edge of the park writhed in the wind. Through Karp’s microphones the air rushing through the branches sounded like white water. Beyond Lancaster Gate the fountains of the Italian Gardens splashed and danced. Through the microphones it sounded like a monsoonal downpour.

  Gabriel said, “How many listeners do you have out there?”

  “Three,” Karp said. “The guy on the bench who looks like a banker, the pretty girl tossing bread to the ducks, and the guy selling ice cream just inside the gate.”

  “Not bad,” Gabriel said.

  “Under these conditions don’t expect any miracles.”

  Gabriel looked at his wristwatch: three minutes past two. He thought: He’s not going to show. They’ve spotted Karp’s team, and they’re aborting. He said, “Where the fuck is he?”

  “Be patient, Gabe.”

  A moment later Gabriel saw Yusef emerge from Westbourne Street and dart across the road in front of a charging delivery truck. Karp snapped a couple of photographs as Yusef entered the park and strolled around the fountains. During the middle of his second circuit, he was joined by a man wearing a gray woolen overcoat, face obscured by sunglasses and a felt hat. Karp switched to a longer lens, took several more photographs.

  They circled the fountains once in silence, then during the second circuit began to speak softly in English. Because of the noise from the wind and the fountains, Gabriel could make out only every third or fourth word.

  Karp swore softly.

  They circled the fountains for a few minutes, then walked up a small rise to a playground. The girl who had been feeding the ducks walked slowly after them. After a moment the surveillance van was filled with the joyous screams of children at play.

  Karp pressed his fists against his eyes and shook his head.

  Karp delivered the tape to Gabriel at the listening post three hours later with the resigned air of a surgeon who had done all he could to save the patient. “I fed it through the computers, filtered out the background noise, and enhanced the good stuff. But I’m afraid we got only about ten percent, and even that sounds like shit.”

  Gabriel held out his hand and accepted the cassette. He slipped it into the deck, pressed play, and listened while he paced the length of the room.

  “… needs someone… next assignment…”

  A sound, like static turned up full blast, obliterated the rest of the sentence. Gabriel paused the tape and looked at Karp.

  “It’s the fountain,” Karp said. “There’s nothing I can do with it.”

  Gabriel restarted the tape.

  “… check out her… in Paris… problems… thing’s fine.”

  Gabriel stopped the tape, pressed REWIND, then PLAY.

  “… check out her… in Paris… problems… thing’s fine.”

  “… not sure… right person for… sort of…”

  “… be persuasive… if you explain the importance…”

  “… what am I… tell her exactly?”

  “… vital diplomatic mission… cause of true
peace in the Middle East… routine security precaution…”

  “… it supposed to work…”

  The audio level dropped sharply. Karp said, “They’re walking toward the playground right now. We’ll get coverage in a moment when the girl moves into position.”

  “… meet him… de Gaulle… from there… to the final destination…”

  “… where…”

  An injured child cries out for its mother, obliterating the response.

  “… do with her after…”

  “… up to him…”

  “… what if… says no…”

  “Don’t worry, Yusef. Your girlfriend won’t say no to you.”

  STOP. REWIND. PLAY .

  “Don’t worry, Yusef. Your girlfriend won’t say no to you.”

  And the next thing Gabriel heard was a mother berating her son for scraping a lump of chewing gum off the bottom of the seesaw and putting it into his mouth.

  That evening Jacqueline picked up curry after work and brought it to Yusef’s flat. While they ate they watched an American film on television about a German terrorist on the loose in Manhattan. Gabriel watched along with them. He muted his own television and listened to Yusef’s instead. When the film was over Yusef pronounced it “total crap” and shut off the television.

  Then he said, “We need to talk about something, Dominique. I need to ask you something important.”

  Gabriel closed his eyes and listened.

  Next morning Jacqueline stepped off the carriage at the Piccadilly Underground station and floated along with the crowd across the platform. As she rode up the escalator she looked around her. They had to be following her: Yusef’s watchers. He wouldn’t let her loose on the streets of London without a secret escort, not after what he had asked her to do last night. A black-haired man was staring at her from a parallel escalator. When he caught her eye he smiled and tried to hold her gaze. She realized he was only a lecher. She turned and looked straight ahead.

  Outside, as she walked along Piccadilly, she thought she spotted Gabriel using a public telephone, but it was only a Gabriel look-alike. She thought she saw him again stepping out of a taxi, but it was only Gabriel’s nonexistent younger brother. She realized there were versions of Gabriel all around her. Boys in leather jackets. Young men in stylish business suits. Artists, students, delivery boys—with minor alterations Gabriel could pass for any of them.

  Isherwood had arrived early. He was seated behind his desk, speaking Italian over the telephone and looking hung-over. He placed his hand over the receiver and mouthed the words “Coffee, please.”

  She hung up her coat and sat down at her desk. Isherwood could survive a few more minutes without his coffee. The morning mail lay on the desk, along with a manila envelope. She tore open the flap, removed the letter from inside. I’m going to Paris. Don’t set foot outside the gallery until you hear from me. She squeezed it into a tight ball.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Paris

  Gabriel hadn’t touched his breakfast. He sat in the first-class carriage of the Eurostar train, headphones on, listening to tapes on a small portable player. The first encounters between Yusef and Jacqueline. Yusef telling Jacqueline the story of the massacre at Shatila. Yusef’s conversation with Jacqueline the previous night. He removed that tape, inserted one more: Yusef’s meeting with his contact in Hyde Park. He had lost track of how many times he had heard it by now. Ten times? Twenty? Each time it disturbed him more. He pressed the rewind button and used the digital tape counter to stop at precisely the spot he wanted to hear.

  “… check out her… in Paris… problems… thing’s fine.”

  STOP.

  He pulled off the headphones, removed a small spiral notebook from his pocket, turned to a blank page. He wrote: check out her… in Paris… problems… thing’s fine. Between the staccato phrases he left blank spaces corresponding approximately to the times of the dropouts on the tape.

  Then he wrote: We sent a man to check out her story in Paris. There were no problems. Everything’s fine.

  It was possible that’s what he had said, or it could have been this: We sent a man to check out her story in Paris. There were big problems with it. But everything’s fine.

  That made no sense. Gabriel crossed it out, then slipped on the headphones and listened to the section of the tape yet again. Wait a minute, he thought. Was Yusef’s contact saying thing’s fine or other side?

  This time he wrote: We sent a man to check out her story in Paris. There were big problems with it. We think she may be working for the other side.

  But if that were the case, why would they ask her to accompany an operative on a mission?

  Gabriel pressed the fast-forward button, then STOP, then PLAY.

  “Don’t worry, Yusef. Your girlfriend won’t say no to you.”

  STOP. REWIND. PLAY.

  “Don’t worry, Yusef. Your girlfriend won’t say no to you.”

  Gabriel caught a taxi at the train station and gave the driver an address on the avenue Foch. Five minutes later he announced he had changed his mind, handed the driver some francs, and got out. He found another taxi. In the accent of an Italian, he asked to be taken to Notre-Dame. From there he walked across the river to the St-Michel Métro station. When he was confident he was not being followed, he flagged down a taxi and gave the driver an address in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, near the Bois de Boulogne. Then he walked fifteen minutes to an apartment house on a leafy street not far from the place de Colombie.

  On the wall in the entranceway was a house phone and next to the phone a list of occupants. Gabriel pressed the button for 4B, which bore the name Guzman in faded blue script. When the phone rattled on the other end, he murmured a few words, replaced the receiver, waited for the door to open. He crossed the foyer, rode the lift to the fourth floor, and knocked softly on the door of the flat. He heard a chain sliding away, followed by a dead bolt snapping back. To Gabriel’s ears it sounded like a gunman ejecting a spent cartridge and forcing a new round into the chamber.

  The door drew back. Standing in the threshold was a man of Gabriel’s height, square of head and shoulders, with steel-blue eyes and strawberry blond hair. He seemed inordinately pleased with himself—like a man who had had too much success with women. He didn’t shake Gabriel’s hand, just drew him inside by the elbow and closed the door as if he were trying to keep out the cold.

  A large flat, dark, the smell of burning coffee and Shamron’s cigarettes hanging on the air. Big couches, reclining leather chairs, fat throw pillows—a place for agents to wait. On the wall opposite an entertainment center filled with Japanese components and American films. No pornography in safe flats: Shamron’s rule.

  Shamron came into the room. He made a vast show of looking at his watch. “Ninety minutes,” he said. “Your train arrived ninety minutes ago. Where the hell have you been? I was about to send out a search party.”

  And I never told you how I was getting to Paris or what time I would be arriving…

  “A proper surveillance detection run takes time. You remember how to do one of those, Ari, or have you stopped teaching that course at the Academy?”

  Shamron held out his parched hand. “You have the tapes?”

  But Gabriel looked at the other man. “Who’s this?”

  “This is Uzi Navot. Uzi’s our katsa in Paris now, one of my best men. He’s been working with me on this case. Meet the great Gabriel, Uzi. Shake the hand of the great Gabriel Allon.”

  Gabriel could see that Navot was one of Shamron’s acolytes. The Office was full of them: men who would do anything—betray, cheat, steal, even kill—in order to win Shamron’s approval. Navot was young and he was brash, and there was a smugness about him that made Gabriel dislike him instantly. He shone like a newly minted coin. The instructors at the Academy had told him he was a member of the elite—a prince—and Navot had believed them.

  As Gabriel handed Shamron the tapes and sank into the leather reclining chair, he
could think of only one thing: Shamron, on the Lizard in Cornwall, promising him that the operation would be a closely held secret within the halls of King Saul Boulevard. If that was the case, who the hell was Uzi Navot and what was he doing here?

  Shamron crossed the room, inserted a tape into the stereo system, and pressed play. Then he sat opposite Gabriel and folded his arms. As Yusef began to speak, he closed his eyes and cocked his head slightly to one side. To Gabriel he looked as though he were listening to the strains of distant music.

  “A friend of mine, a very important Palestinian, needs to make a trip abroad for a crucial meeting. Unfortunately, the Zionists and their friends would rather this man not attend this important meeting, and if they spot him during his journey they’ll probably seize him and send him back home.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because he has dared to question the fairness of the so-called peace process. Because he has dared to challenge the Palestinian leadership. Because he believes the only just solution to the Palestinian problem is to allow us to go back to our homes, wherever they might be, and to establish a truly binational state in the land of Palestine. Needless to say these views have made him very unpopular—not only among the Zionists and their friends but also among some Palestinians. As a result he is an exile and lives in hiding.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Because this man is under constant threat, he finds it necessary to take certain precautions. When he travels he does so under an assumed name. He’s very educated, and he speaks many languages. He can pass for several different nationalities.”

  “I still don’t know what you want from me, Yusef.”

  “The passport control officers of all Western countries use what’s known as profiling to single out travelers for closer scrutiny. Unfortunately, because of ”Arab terrorism,“ Arab men traveling alone are subject to the harshest scrutiny of all. Therefore, this man prefers to travel under a Western passport and with another person—a woman.”

  “Why a woman?”

  “Because a man and women traveling together are less suspicious than two men. This man needs a traveling companion, a partner, if you will. I’d like you to go with him on this trip.”