Gabriel Allon: Prince of Fire, the Messenger, the Secret Servant

by Daniel Silva

  The corridor led to a secure door, and the door to a restricted area just off the main traffic circle outside the terminal. A dented Renault sedan stood in the reserved parking place. Navot opened the trunk and tossed Gabriel’s bag inside. “I gave my driver the night off,” he said. “I wanted a word in private. You know how the drivers can be. They sit around down there in the motor pool all day with nothing to do but gossip. They’re worse than a sewing circle.”

  Gabriel got into the passenger seat and closed the door. He looked into the backseat. It was stacked with Bella’s books and files. Bella was an academic who specialized in Syria and drifted in and out of government service. She was far more intelligent than Navot, an openly acknowledged fact that had been a source of considerable tension in their long and turbulent relationship. Navot started her car with a hostile twist of the key and drove it too hard toward the airport exit ramp.

  “How did the painting turn out?” he asked.

  “It turned out just fine, Uzi.”

  “It was a Botticelli, wasn’t it?”

  “Bellini,” Gabriel corrected him. “Lament over the Dead Christ.” He might have added that the sublime panel had once formed the cyma of Bellini’s remarkable altarpiece in the Church of San Francesco in Pesaro, but he didn’t. The fact that Gabriel was one of the world’s finest art restorers had always made him the target of professional envy among his colleagues. He rarely discussed his work with them, even with Navot, who had become a close friend.

  “Botticelli, Bellini—it’s all the same to me.” Navot shook his head. “Imagine, a nice Jewish boy like you restoring a Bellini masterpiece for the pope. I hope he paid you well.”

  “He paid me the standard fee—and then a little more.”

  “It’s only fair,” Navot said. “After all, you did save his life.”

  “You had a hand in it, too, Uzi.”

  “But I wasn’t the one who got his picture in the paper doing it.”

  They came to the end of the ramp. Overhead was a blue-and-white traffic sign. To the left was Tel Aviv, to the right, Jerusalem. Navot turned to the right and headed toward the Judean Hills.

  “How’s the mood at King Saul Boulevard?” Gabriel asked.

  King Saul Boulevard was the longtime address of Israel’s foreign intelligence service. The service had a long name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Men like Gabriel and Uzi Navot referred to it as “the Office” and nothing else.

  “Consider yourself fortunate you’ve been away.”

  “That bad?”

  “It’s the night of the long knives. Our adventure in Lebanon was an unmitigated disaster. None of our institutions came out of it with their reputations intact, including the Office. You know how these things work. When mistakes of this magnitude are made, heads must roll, the more the better. No one is safe, especially Amos. The Commission of Inquiry wants to know why the Office didn’t realize Hezbollah was so well armed and why our vast network of well-paid collaborators couldn’t seem to find Hezbollah’s leadership once the fighting started.”

  “The last thing the Office needs now is another power struggle and battle for succession—not with Hezbollah gearing up for another war. Not with Iran on the verge of a nuclear weapon. And not with the territories about to explode.”

  “The decision has already been made by Shamron and the rest of the wise men that Amos must die. The only question is, will it be an execution, or will Amos be allowed to do the deed himself after a decent interval?”

  “How do you know where Shamron stands on all this?”

  Navot, by his edgy silence, made clear that his source was Shamron himself. It had been years now since Shamron had done his last tour as chief, yet the Office was still very much his private fiefdom. It was filled with officers like Gabriel and Navot, men who had been recruited and groomed by Shamron, men who operated by a creed, even spoke a language, written by him. Shamron was known in Israel as the Memuneh, the one in charge, and he would remain so until the day he finally decided the country was safe enough for him to die.

  “You’re playing a dangerous game, Uzi. Shamron is getting on. That bomb attack on his motorcade took a lot out of him. He’s not the man he used to be. There’s no guarantee he’ll prevail in a showdown with Amos, and I don’t need to remind you that the door to King Saul Boulevard for men like you is one way. If you and Shamron lose, you’ll be the one who ends up on the street hawking your services to the highest bidder, just like the rest of the Office’s washed-up field men.”

  Navot nodded his head in agreement. “And I won’t have a pope to throw me a little work on the side.”

  They started the ascent into the Bab al-Wad, the staircaselike gorge that leads from the Coastal Plain to Jerusalem. Gabriel felt his ears pop from the altitude change.

  “Does Shamron have a successor in mind?”

  “He wants the Office to be run by someone other than a soldier.”

  It was one of the many peculiarities about the Office that made little sense to outsiders. Like the Americans, the Israelis nearly always chose men with no intelligence experience to be their chief spies. The Americans preferred politicians and party apparatchiks, while in Israel the job usually went to an army general like Amos. Shamron was the last man to ascend to the throne from the ranks of Operations, and he had been manipulating every occupant since.

  “So that’s why you’re conspiring with Shamron? You’re angling for Amos’s job? You and Shamron are using the debacle in Lebanon as grounds for a coup d’état. You’ll seize the palace, and Shamron will pull the strings from his villa in Tiberias.”

  “I’m flattered you think Shamron would trust me with the keys to his beloved Office, but that’s not the case. The Memuneh has someone else in mind for the job.”

  “Me?” Gabriel shook his head slowly. “I’m an assassin, Uzi, and they don’t make assassins the director.”

  “You’re more than just an assassin.”

  Gabriel looked silently out the window at the orderly yellow streetlights of a Jewish settlement spreading down the hillside toward the flatlands of the West Bank. In the distance a crescent moon hung over Ramallah. “What makes Shamron think I’d want to be the chief?” he asked. “I wriggled off the hook when he wanted to make me chief of Special Ops.”

  “Are you trying to drop a not-so-subtle reminder that I got the job only because you didn’t want it?”

  “What I’m trying to say, Uzi, is that I’m not fit for Headquarters—and I certainly don’t want to spend my life in endless Security Cabinet meetings in the Prime Minister’s Office. I don’t play well with others, and I won’t be a party to your little conspiracy against Amos.”

  “So what do you intend to do? Sit around and wait for the pope to give you more work?”

  “You’re starting to sound like Shamron.”

  Navot ignored the remark. “Sit around while the missiles rain down on Haifa? While the mullahs in Tehran build their nuclear bomb? Is that your plan? To leave the fighting to others?” Navot took a long look into the rearview mirror. “But why should you be any different? At the moment it’s a national affliction. Fortress Israel is cracking under the strain of this war without end. The founding fathers are dying off, and the people aren’t sure they trust the new generation of leaders with their future. Those with the resources are creating escape hatches for themselves. It’s the Jewish instinct, isn’t it? It’s in our DNA because of the Holocaust. One hears things now that one didn’t hear even ten years ago. People wonder openly whether the entire enterprise was a mistake. They delude themselves into thinking that the Jewish national home is not in Palestine but in America.”

  “America?”

  Navot fixed his eyes back on the road. “My sister lives in Bethesda, Maryland. It’s very nice there. You can eat your lunch in an outdoor café without fear that the next person who walks by your table is a shaheed who’s going to blow you to bits.” He glanced at Gabriel. “Maybe that’s why you
like Italy so much. You want to make a new life for yourself away from Israel. You want to leave the blood and tears to mere mortals.”

  Gabriel’s dark look made clear he had shed more blood and tears for his country than most. “I’m an art restorer who specializes in Italian Old Masters. The paintings are in Italy, Uzi, not here.”

  “Art restoration was your cover job, Gabriel. You are not an art restorer. You are a secret servant of the State of Israel, and you have no right to leave the fighting to others. And if you think you’re going to find a quiet life for yourself in Europe, forget it. The Europeans condemned us for Lebanon, but what they don’t understand is that Lebanon is merely a preview of coming attractions. The movie will soon be showing in theaters all across Europe. It’s the next battleground.”

  The next battleground? No, thought Gabriel, it had been his battleground for more than thirty years. He looked up at the looming shadow of Mount Herzl, where his former wife resided in a psychiatric hospital, locked in a prison of memory and in a body destroyed by Gabriel’s enemies. His son was on the other side of Jerusalem, in a hero’s grave on the Mount of Olives. Between them lay the Valley of Hinnom, an ancient burning ground believed by both Jews and Muslims to be the fiery place where the wicked are punished after death. Gabriel had spent the better part of his life traversing the valley. It was clear that Uzi Navot wanted him to return again.

  “What’s on your mind, Uzi? Surely you didn’t come all the way to the airport just to ask me to join your plot against Amos.”

  “We have an errand we’d like you to run for us,” Navot said.

  “I’m not an errand boy.”

  “No offense, Gabriel.”

  “None taken. Where’s the errand?”

  “Amsterdam.”

  “Why Amsterdam?”

  “Because we’ve had a death in the family there.”

  “Who?”

  “Solomon Rosner.”

  “Rosner? I never knew Rosner was ours.”

  “He wasn’t ours,” said Navot. “He was Shamron’s.”

  3

  JERUSALEM

  They drove to Narkiss Street, a quiet, leafy lane in the heart of Jerusalem, and parked outside the limestone apartment house at Number 16. It was three floors in height and largely concealed by a towering eucalyptus tree growing in the front garden. Gabriel led Navot through the small foyer and mounted the stairs. Despite his long absence he didn’t bother to check the postbox. He never received mail, and the name on the box was false. As far as the bureaucracy of the State of Israel was concerned, Gabriel Allon did not exist. He lived only in the Office, and even there he was a part-time resident.

  His flat was on the top floor. As always he hesitated before opening the door. The room that greeted him was not the same one he had walked out of six months earlier. It had been a small but fully functioning art studio; now it was meticulously decorated in the subtle beiges and soft whites that Chiara Zolli, his Venetian-born fiancée, so adored. She’d been busy while he was away. Somehow she’d neglected to mention the redecoration during her last visit to Italy.

  “Where are my things?”

  “Housekeeping has them in storage until you can find some proper studio space.” Navot smiled at Gabriel’s discomfort. “You didn’t expect your wife to live in an apartment without furniture, did you?”

  “She’s not my wife yet.” He laid his bag on the new couch. It looked expensive. “Where is she?”

  “She didn’t tell you where we were sending her?”

  “She takes rules of compartmentalization and need to know very seriously.”

  “So do I.”

  “Where is she, Uzi?”

  Navot opened his mouth to reply, but a voice from the kitchen answered for him. It was familiar to Gabriel, as was the elderly figure who emerged a moment later, dressed in khaki trousers and a leather bomber jacket with a tear in the left breast. His head was shaped like a bullet and bald, except for a monkish fringe of cropped white hair. His face was more gaunt than Gabriel remembered, and his ugly wire-framed spectacles magnified pale blue eyes that were no longer clear. He was leaning heavily on a handsome olive-wood cane. The hand that held it seemed to have been borrowed from a man twice his size.

  “Argentina,” said Ari Shamron for a second time. “Your wife-to-be is in Argentina.”

  “What type of job is it?”

  “Surveillance of a known terrorist operative.”

  Gabriel didn’t have to ask the affiliation of the operative. The answer lay in the location of the operation. Argentina, like the rest of South America, was a hotbed of Hezbollah activity.

  “We think it’s only a matter of time before Hezbollah tries to take its revenge for the damage we inflicted on them in Lebanon. A terror attack that leaves no fingerprints is the most likely scenario. The only question in our mind is the target. Will it be us or our supporters in America?”

  “When will she be finished?”

  Shamron shrugged noncommittally. “This is a war without end, Gabriel. It is forever. But then you know that better than any of us, don’t you?” He touched Gabriel’s face. “See if you can find us some coffee. We need to talk.”

  Gabriel found a tin of coffee in the pantry. The seal had been broken and a single sniff of the grinds confirmed his suspicions that it was long past its prime. He poured some into the French press and set a kettle of water to boil, then returned to the sitting room. Navot was pondering a ceramic dish on the end table; Shamron had settled himself into an armchair and was in the process of lighting one of his vile-smelling Turkish cigarettes. Gabriel had been gone six months, but in his absence it seemed nothing had changed but the furniture.

  “No coffee?” Shamron asked.

  “It takes more than a minute to make coffee, Ari.”

  Shamron glared at his big stainless-steel wristwatch. Time had always been his enemy, but now more so than ever. It was the bombing, Gabriel thought. It had finally forced Shamron to confront the possibility of his own mortality.

  “Solomon Rosner was an Office asset?” Gabriel asked.

  “A very valuable one, actually.”

  “How long?”

  Shamron tilted his head back and blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling before answering. “Back in the mid-nineties, during my second tour as chief, we began to realize the Netherlands was going to be a problem for us down the road. The demographics of the country were changing rapidly. Amsterdam was well on its way to becoming a Muslim city. The young men were unemployed and angry, and they were being fed a steady diet of hate by their imams, most of whom were imported and funded by our friends in Saudi Arabia. There were a number of attacks against the local community. Small stuff, mostly—a broken window, a bloody nose, the odd Molotov cocktail. We wanted to make sure those small incidents didn’t turn into something more serious. We also wanted to know whether any of our more determined enemies were using Amsterdam as a base of operations for major attacks against Israeli targets in Europe. We needed eyes and ears on the ground, but we didn’t have the resources to mount any sort of operation on our own.”

  Gabriel opened the doors leading onto his small balcony. The smell of the eucalyptus tree in the front garden filled the apartment. “So you turned to Rosner?”

  “Not right away. We tried the traditional route first, a liaison relationship with the AIVD, the Dutch security service. We courted them for months, but the Dutch at that time weren’t interested in dancing with us. After the last rejection, I authorized an attempt to get into the AIVD through the back door. Our local chief of station made a rather clumsy pass at the AIVD deputy in charge of monitoring the Muslim community and it blew up in our faces. You remember the scandal, don’t you, Gabriel?”

  He did. The affair had been splashed all over the pages of the Dutch and Israeli newspapers. There had been heated exchanges between the foreign ministries of both countries and angry threats of expulsions.

  “When the storm died down, I decided to try agai
n. This time, though, I chose a different target.”

  “Rosner,” Gabriel put in, and Shamron nodded his head in agreement.

  “He monitored what was being said in the mosques when no one else in Amsterdam was listening, and read the filth running through the sewers of the Internet when everyone else averted their eyes. On more than one occasion, he supplied information to the police that prevented violence. He also happened to be Jewish. As far as the Office was concerned, Rosner was the answer to our prayers.”

  “Who handled the recruitment?”

  “I did,” Shamron said. “After the AIVD scandal, I wasn’t about to entrust the job to anyone else.”

  “And besides,” said Gabriel, “there’s nothing you love better than a good recruitment.”

  Shamron responded with a seductive smile, the same smile he had used on a searing afternoon in September 1972, when he had come to see Gabriel at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem. Gabriel had been a promising young painter; Shamron was a brash operations man who had just been ordered by Prime Minister Golda Meir to hunt down and kill the members of Black September, perpetrators of the Munich Massacre. The operation was code-named Wrath of God, but in reality it was the Wrath of Gabriel. Of the twelve members of Black September killed by the Office, six were dispatched by Gabriel at close range with a .22 caliber Beretta.