by Daniel Silva
But a personal stake in an operation was oftentimes perilous. No one recognized this more than Gabriel; his career spoke for itself. Therefore, he leaned heavily on Uzi Navot and the other members of his staff to vet every detail. Organizationally, it was Yaakov Rossman, the chief of Special Ops, who bore responsibility for planning and executing the mission. And with Gabriel looking over his shoulder, he hastily put the pieces in place. Morocco was not Lebanon or Syria, but it was still hostile territory. More than twenty times the size of Israel, it was a vast country with a varied terrain of agricultural plains, rugged mountains, Saharan sand deserts, and several large cities, including Casablanca, Rabat, Tangier, Fez, and Marrakesh. Finding Saladin, even with the help of Jean-Luc Martel, was going to be a difficult undertaking. Killing him with no collateral casualties—and then getting out of the country safely—would be one of the sternest tests the Office had ever faced.
The coastline would be their collaborator, just as it had been in Tunis in April 1988. On that night, Gabriel and a team of twenty-six elite Sayeret Matkal commandos had come ashore in rubber rafts not far from Abu Jihad’s villa, and after completing their mission they had departed in the same fashion. During the weeks prior to the raid, they had rehearsed the landing countless times on an Israeli beach. They had even built a mock-up of Abu Jihad’s seaside villa in the middle of the Negev so that Gabriel could practice making his way from the front door to the upstairs study where the PLO’s second-in-command habitually spent his evenings. Such meticulous preparation, however, would not be possible for the operation against Saladin, for they had no idea where in Morocco he was hiding. Truth be told, they could not say for certain he was actually there. What they knew was that a man matching his appearance had been in Morocco several months earlier, after the attack on Washington. In short, they had much less than the Americans had before the raid on Abbottabad. And much more to lose.
Which meant they had to be prepared for any eventuality, or at least as many as reasonably possible. A large team would be required, larger than operations past, and each member would need a passport. Identity, the division of the Office that maintained agent legends, quickly exhausted its existing stock, thus requiring Gabriel to ask his partners—the French, the British, and the Americans—to make up the shortfall. All initially balked. But under Gabriel’s unrelenting pressure, all eventually capitulated. The Americans even agreed to reactivate an old U.S. passport that bore the name Jonathan Albright and a photograph that looked vaguely like Gabriel’s.
“You’re not actually thinking of going?” asked Adrian Carter over a secure video link.
“In summer? Oh, no,” said Gabriel. “I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s far too hot in Morocco at this time of year.”
There were cars and motorcycles to rent, open-ended airline tickets to book, and lodgings to acquire. Most of the team would stay in hotels, where they would be under the nose of Morocco’s internal security service: the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, or DST. But for the field command post, Gabriel required a proper safe house. It was Ari Shamron, from his fortress-like home in Tiberias, who offered a solution. He had a friend—a well-to-do Moroccan Jewish businessman who had fled the country in 1967 after the cataclysm of the Six-Day War—who still owned a large villa in the old colonial section of Casablanca. At present, the villa was unoccupied, save for a pair of guardians who lived in a guesthouse on the property. Shamron recommended an outright sale over a short-term rental, and Gabriel readily agreed. Fortunately, money was not an issue; Dmitri Antonov, despite his recent spending spree, was still dripping with it. He wrote a check for the entirety of the purchase price and dispatched a French lawyer—in point of fact, he was an officer of Alpha Group—to Casablanca to collect the deed. By day’s end the Office had taken possession of a forward operating base in the heart of the city. All it needed now was Saladin.
His network was quiet during those long days of planning—there were no attacks, directed or lone wolf—but ISIS’s many social media channels were ablaze with chatter that something big was coming. Something that would eclipse the attacks on Washington and London. It only added to the pressure inside King Saul Boulevard, and at Langley and Vauxhall Cross. Saladin needed to be removed from circulation, sooner rather than later.
But would his demise put a stop to the bloodshed? Would his network die with him? “Unlikely,” said Dina Sarid. In fact, her greatest fear was that Saladin had built the equivalent of a dead man’s switch into the network—a switch that would automatically set off a string of murderous strikes in the event of his passing. What’s more, ISIS had already demonstrated a remarkable adaptability. If the physical caliphate in Iraq and Syria were lost, said Dina, a virtual caliphate would arise in its place. A “cybercaliphate,” as she called it. Here the old rules would not apply. Martyrs-in-waiting would be radicalized in hidden corners of the dark Web and then guided toward their targets by masterminds they had never met. Such was the brave new world that the Internet, social media, and encrypted messaging had brought about.
Of more immediate concern, however, was the three hundred grams of cesium chloride resting in a French government laboratory outside Paris. The cesium chloride that, as far as Saladin was concerned, was still aboard an impounded cargo ship in the port of Toulon. But had he entrusted his entire stockpile to a single clandestine shipment? Was a portion of it already in the hands of an attack cell? Would the next bomb that exploded in a European city contain a radioactive core? As the days passed with no contact from Jean-Luc Martel’s Moroccan supplier, Paul Rousseau and his minister wondered whether it was time to warn their European counterparts of the elevated threat. But Gabriel, with the help of Graham Seymour and the Americans, convinced them to remain quiet. A warning, even if it were couched in routine language, risked exposing the operation. Inevitably, there would be a leak. And if it leaked, Saladin would conclude there was a link between the seizure of his drugs and the seizure of the radioactive powder hidden inside a spool of insulated wire.
“Maybe he’s already reached that conclusion,” said Rousseau dejectedly. “Maybe he’s beaten us yet again.”
Secretly, Gabriel feared the same. So, too, did the Americans. And during a heated secure videoconference on the second Friday of August, they renewed their demand that Gabriel hand over Jean-Luc Martel, and thus his operation, to Langley’s control. Gabriel objected, and when the Americans pressed their case he took the only course available to him. He wished the Americans a pleasant weekend. Then he rang Chiara and informed her they were going to Tiberias for Shabbat dinner.
45
Tiberias, Israel
Tiberias, one of Judaism’s four holy cities, lies on the western shore of the body of water that most of the world refers to as the Sea of Galilee and Israelis call Lake Kinneret. Just beyond its outskirts there is the small moshav of Kfar Hittim, which stands on the spot where the real Saladin, on a blazing summer afternoon in 1187, defeated the thirst-crazed armies of the Crusaders in a climactic battle that would leave Jerusalem once again in Muslim hands. He had shown his vanquished enemies no mercy. In his tent he had personally sliced off the arm of Raynald of Châtillon after the Frenchman refused to convert to Islam. The rest of the surviving Crusaders he condemned to execution by decapitation, the prescribed punishment for unbelievers.
A kilometer or so to the north of Kfar Hittim was a rocky escarpment that overlooked both the lake and the scalding plain where the ancient battle had occurred. And it was there, of all places, that Ari Shamron had chosen to make his home. He claimed that when the wind was right he could hear the clashing of swords and the screams of the dying. They reminded him, or so he said, of the transient nature of political and military power in this turbulent corner of the eastern Mediterranean. Canaanites, Hittites, Amalekites, Moabites, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs, Turks, British: all had come and gone. Against overwhelming odds, the Jews had managed to pull off one of history’s greatest second acts. Two millennia after the fall of
the Second Temple, they had come back for a return engagement. But if history were a guide, they were already on borrowed time.
There are few people who can claim to have helped to build a country, and fewer still an intelligence service. Ari Shamron, however, had managed to accomplish both. Born in eastern Poland, he immigrated to British-ruled Palestine in 1937 as disaster loomed over the Jews of Europe, and had fought in the war that followed the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. In the aftermath of the conflict, with the Arab world vowing to strangle the new Jewish state in its infancy, he joined a small organization that insiders referred to only as “the Office.” Among his first assignments was to identify and assassinate several Nazi scientists who were helping Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser build an atomic bomb. But the crowning achievement of his career as a field operative would come not in the Middle East but on a street corner in the industrial Buenos Aires suburb of San Fernando. There, on a rainy night in May 1960, he dragged Adolf Eichmann, the stationmaster of the Final Solution, into the back of a waiting car, the first stop on a journey that for Eichmann would end in an Israeli noose.
For Shamron, however, it was only the beginning. Within a few short years, the intelligence service he joined at its creation would be his to run, and the country would be his to protect. From his lair inside King Saul Boulevard, with its gunmetal-gray filing cabinets and permanent stench of Turkish tobacco, he penetrated the courts of kings, stole the secrets of tyrants, and killed countless enemies. His tenure as chief lasted longer than any of his predecessors’. And in the late 1990s, after a string of botched operations, he was dragged happily out of retirement to right the ship and restore the Office to its former glory. He found an accomplice in a grieving field operative who had locked himself away in a small cottage at the edge of the Helford Passage in Cornwall. Now, at long last, the field operative was the chief. And the burden of protecting Shamron’s two creations, a country and an intelligence service, was his to bear.
Shamron had been chosen for the Eichmann mission because of his hands, which were unusually large and powerful for so small a man. They were bunched atop his olive wood cane when Gabriel entered the house with a child in each arm. He entrusted them to Shamron and returned to his armored SUV to collect three platters of food that Chiara had spent the afternoon preparing. Gilah, Shamron’s long-suffering wife, lit the Shabbat candles at sundown while Shamron, in the Yiddish intonations of his Polish youth, recited the blessings of the bread and the wine. For a brief moment it seemed to Gabriel that there was no operation and no Saladin, only his family and his faith.
It did not last long. Indeed, throughout the meal, as the others gossiped about politics and lamented the matsav, the situation, Gabriel’s attention wandered time and again to his mobile phone. Shamron, watching from his place at the head of the table, smiled. He offered no words of sympathy over Gabriel’s obvious discomfort. For Shamron, operations were like oxygen. Even a bad operation was better than no operation at all.
When the meal was over, Gabriel followed Shamron downstairs to the room that doubled as his study and workshop. The innards of an antique radio lay scattered across his worktable like the debris of a bombing. Shamron sat down and with a snap of his old Zippo lighter ignited one of his wretched Turkish cigarettes. Gabriel batted away the smoke and pondered the memorabilia arranged neatly on the shelves. His eye fell instantly upon a framed photograph of Shamron and Golda Meir, taken on the day she ordered him to “send forth the boys” to avenge the eleven Israeli coaches and athletes murdered at the Munich Olympic Games. Next to the photograph was a glass case, about the size of a cigar box. Inside, mounted on a background of black cloth, were eleven .22-caliber shell casings.
“I’ve been saving those for you,” said Shamron.
“I don’t want them.”
“Why not?”
“They’re macabre.”
“You were the one who figured out how to squeeze eleven rounds into a ten-shot magazine, not me.”
“Maybe I’m afraid that one day someone will have a box like that on his shelf with my name on it.”
“Someone already does, my son.” Shamron switched on his magnifying work lamp.
“You’re showing remarkable restraint.”
“How so?”
“You haven’t asked me once about the operation.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you’re pathologically incapable of minding your own business.”
“Which is why I’m a spy.” He adjusted the magnifying lamp and scrutinized a worn-out piece of circuitry.
“What kind of radio is it?”
“An RCA Art Deco model with a marbleized Catalin polymer covering. Standard and shortwave. It was manufactured in 1946. Imagine,” said Shamron, pointing out the original paper sticker on the base, “somewhere in America in 1946, someone was putting together this radio while people like your mother and father were trying to put together their lives.”
“It’s a radio, Ari. It had nothing to do with the Shoah.”
“I was just making an observation.” Shamron smiled. “You seem tense. Is something bothering you?”
“No, not at all.”
They lapsed into silence while Shamron tinkered. Repairing old radios was his only hobby, other than meddling in Gabriel’s life.
“Uzi tells me you’re thinking about going to Morocco,” he said at last.
“Why would he do a thing like that?”
“Because he couldn’t talk you out of it, and he thought I could.”
“I haven’t made a final decision.”
“But you’ve asked the Americans to renew your passport.”
“Reactivate,” said Gabriel.
“Renew, reactivate—what difference does it make? You never should have accepted it in the first place. It belongs in a little glass coffin like those shell casings.”
“It’s proven useful on numerous occasions.”
“Blue and white,” said Shamron. “We do things for ourselves, and we don’t help others with problems of their own making.”
“Maybe once,” answered Gabriel, “but we can’t operate like that any longer. We need partners.”
“Partners have a way of disappointing you. And that passport won’t protect you if something goes wrong in Morocco.”
Gabriel picked up the little display case with the spent .22 rounds. “If my memory is correct, and I’m sure it is, you were in the backseat of a car in the Piazza Annibaliano while I was inside that apartment house dealing with Zwaiter.”
“I was the chief of Special Ops then. It was my place to be in the field. A more appropriate analogy,” Shamron went on, “would be Abu Jihad. I was the chief then, and I stayed aboard that naval vessel while you and the rest of the team went ashore.”
“With the defense minister, as I recall.”
“It was an important operation. Almost as important,” said Shamron quietly, “as the one you’re about to carry out. It’s time for Saladin to leave the stage, with no encores or curtain calls. Just make sure you don’t give him what he really wants.”
“What’s that?”
“You.”
Gabriel returned the case to its place on the shelf.
“Will you permit me a question or two?” asked Shamron.
“If it will make you happy.”
“Bolt-holes?”
Gabriel explained that there would be two. One was an Israeli corvette. The other was the Neptune, a Liberian-registered cargo vessel that in reality was a floating radar and eavesdropping station operated by AMAN, Israel’s military intelligence service. The Neptune would be stationed off Agadir, on Morocco’s Atlantic coast.
“And the corvette?” asked Shamron.
“A little Mediterranean port called El Jebha.”
“I assume that’s where the Sayeret team will come ashore.”
“If I require it. After all,” said Gabriel, “I have a former Sayeret officer and a veteran of the British Special
Air Service at my disposal.”
“Both of whom will have their hands full maintaining control of this Jean-Luc Martel character.” Shamron shook his head slowly. “Sometimes the worst thing about a successful recruitment is that you’re stuck with the asset. Whatever you do, don’t trust him.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Shamron’s cigarette had extinguished itself. He lit another and returned to work on the radio while Gabriel stared at the photograph on the shelf, trying to reconcile the black-and-white image of a spymaster in his prime with the elderly figure before him. It had happened so quickly. Soon, he thought, it would happen to him. Not even Raphael and Irene could stave off the inevitable.
“Aren’t you going to get that?” Shamron asked suddenly.
“Get what?”
“Your phone. It’s driving me to distraction.”
Gabriel looked down. He had been so lost in thought he hadn’t noticed the message from the Ramatuelle safe house.