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

by Daniel Silva

  “From where?”

  “Egypt,” said Shamron. “Our most important asset inside the SSI sent us a signal early this morning that he had something for us.”

  The full name of the SSI was the General Directorate of State Security Investigations, a polite way of saying the Egyptian secret police.

  “Who is he?” Gabriel asked.

  “Wazir al-Zayyat, chief of the Department for Combatting Religious Activity. Wazir has one of the toughest jobs in the Middle East: making certain Egypt’s homegrown Islamic extremists don’t bring down the regime. Egypt is the spiritual heartland of Islamic fundamentalism, and of course the Egyptian Islamists are a major component of al-Qaeda. Wazir knows more about the state of the global jihadist movement than anyone in the world. He keeps us apprised of the stability of the Mubarak regime and passes along any intelligence that suggests Egyptian terrorists are targeting us.”

  “What does he have for us?”

  “We won’t know until we sit down with him,” Shamron said. “We meet with him outside the country.”

  “Where?”

  “Cyprus.”

  “Who’s his case officer?”

  “Shimon Pazner.”

  Pazner was the chief of station in Rome, which doubled as the headquarters for Office operations throughout the Mediterranean.

  “When is Pazner going to Cyprus?”

  “He leaves in the morning.”

  “Tell him to stay put in Rome.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because I’m going to Cyprus to meet with the Egyptian.”

  Shamron greeted Gabriel’s declaration with an obstinate silence. “Your involvement in this affair is officially over,” he said finally. “This is an American and British problem now. We have enough of our own to worry about.”

  Gabriel pushed back. “I was there when it happened, Ari. I want us to do anything we can to find her.”

  “And we will. Shimon Pazner has been handling Wazir for three years now. He’s more than capable of going to Cyprus and conducting a crash debriefing.”

  “I’m sure he is, but I’m going to go to Cyprus for him.”

  Shamron’s old stainless steel lighter flared in the darkness. “You’re not the Memuneh yet, my son. Besides, have you forgotten that your picture is in all the newspapers?”

  “I’m not going behind the Iron Curtain, Ari.”

  Shamron touched his cigarette to the flame and extinguished it with a flick of his sturdy wrist. “You use my own words against me,” he said. “Go ahead, Gabriel, go to Cyprus tomorrow. Just make sure Identity does something about that face of yours. You made yourself another enemy with your actions in Hyde Park.”

  “Graham Seymour said the same thing.”

  “Well,” Shamron said reflectively, “at least he was right about something.”

  When Gabriel entered his apartment twenty minutes later, he found lights burning in the sitting room and a faint trace of vanilla on the air. He tossed his bag onto the new couch and walked into the bedroom. Chiara was perched at the end of the bed, scrutinizing her toes with considerable interest. Her body was wrapped in bath towels, and her skin was very dark from the sun. She looked up at Gabriel and smiled. It was as if it had been several minutes since they had seen each other last and not several weeks.

  “You’re here,” she said in mock surprise.

  “Shamron didn’t mention that I was coming home tonight?”

  “He may have.”

  Gabriel walked over and removed the towel from her hair. Heavy and wet, it tumbled riotously onto her dark shoulders. She lifted her face to be kissed and loosened the towel around her body. Maybe Shamron was right, Gabriel thought as she pulled him onto the bed. Maybe he would let Pazner go to Cyprus to meet with the Egyptian after all.

  They were both famished after making love. Gabriel sat at the small table in the kitchen, watching the news on television, while Chiara made fettuccine and mushrooms. She was wearing one of Gabriel’s dress shirts, unbuttoned to her abdomen, and nothing else.

  “How did you find out that I’d been arrested?”

  “I read it in the newspapers like everyone else.” She poured him a glass of red wine. “You were all the rage in Buenos Aires.”

  “What kind of work were you doing there?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “I know you were watching members of a Hezbollah cell. I just want to know whether you were part of the actual surveillance team or just an escort officer?”

  “I was part of the team,” she said. “I don’t do much escort work anymore.”

  “Why did they pull you out?”

  “Overexposure to the targets.” Elizabeth Halton’s face appeared suddenly on the television screen. “Pretty girl,” Chiara said. “Why did they take her?”

  “I may find out tomorrow.” He told her about his trip to Cyprus.

  “What about your dinner with the prime minister?”

  Gabriel looked up from the television. “How did you know about that?”

  “Shamron told me.”

  “So much for operational security,” he said. “What exactly did he say to you?”

  She placed the fettuccine in the water to boil and sat down next to him. “He said that you had agreed to succeed Amos as director.”

  “I’ve agreed to no such thing.”

  “That’s not what Shamron says.”

  “Shamron has a long history of hearing exactly what he wants to hear. What else did he say?”

  “He wants us to get our personal life in order as soon as possible. He doesn’t think it’s proper for the director to be living with a woman out of wedlock, especially one who happens to be an employee of the Office. He thinks we should accelerate our wedding plans.” She placed a finger beneath his chin and turned his face toward hers. “You agree, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” said Gabriel hastily. He had learned that any hesitation to engage in a discussion of wedding plans was always wrongly interpreted by Chiara as a reluctance to marry. “We should get married as soon as possible.”

  “When?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a very simple question, Gabriel. When do you think we should get married?”

  “Late spring,” he said. “Before it gets too hot.”

  “May?”

  “May would be perfect.”

  Chiara removed her fingertip from beneath Gabriel’s chin and nibbled nervously at her nail. “How am I going to plan a wedding in six months?”

  “Hire a professional planner to help you.”

  “A wedding isn’t an operation, Gabriel. It’s supposed to be planned by family, not a professional.”

  “What about Gilah Shamron? She’s the closest thing to a mother I have.”

  “Gilah has enough on her plate at the moment looking after her husband.”

  “All the more reason to ask her to help with the wedding. Trust me, she’ll jump at the chance.”

  “It’s not a bad idea, actually. No wonder Shamron wants you to be the chief. The first thing we have to do is settle on a guest list.”

  “That’s easy,” Gabriel said. “Just invite everyone from the Office, Shabak, AMAN, most of the Cabinet, and half of the Knesset. Oh, and don’t forget the prime minister.”

  “I’m not sure I want the prime minister to attend my wedding.”

  “You’re afraid of being overshadowed by a chubby octogenarian?”

  “Yes.”

  “The prime minister has three daughters of his own. He’ll make certain not to steal the limelight on your big day.”

  “Our big day, Gabriel.” The water began to boil over. She stood up and walked back over to the stove. “Are you sure you have to go to Cyprus tomorrow?”

  “I want to hear what the Egyptian has to say with my own ears.”

  “But you’ve only just come home.”

  “It’s just for a day or two. Why don’t you come with me? You
can work on that suntan of yours.”

  “It’s cold in Cyprus this time of year.”

  “So you want me to go alone?”

  “I’ll come,” she said. “You didn’t say anything about the way I decorated the apartment. Do you like it?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said hastily. “It’s lovely.”

  “I found a ring on the coffee table. Did you put a hot drink on it without a coaster?”

  “It was Uzi,” Gabriel said.

  Chiara poured the fettuccine into a colander and frowned. “He’s such a slob,” she said. “I don’t know how Bella can live with him.”

  14

  The items she had requested lay arranged on an adjacent cot: isopropyl alcohol, cotton swabs, rubber gloves, tweezers, needle-nose pliers, a straight razor, codeine and cephalin tablets, four-by-four sterile pads, medical tape, two eighteen-inch strips of wood, two rolls of bandaging, and two liters of bottled water. She held out her cuffed hands to the one she thought of as Cain. He shook his head.

  “I can’t do this with my hands cuffed.”

  He hesitated, then removed them.

  “The drugs you gave me after you kidnapped me—you have more, I assume.”

  Another hesitation, then a reluctant nod.

  “I need them. Otherwise, your friend is going to suffer terribly.”

  He walked over to the van and returned a moment later with a syringe wrapped in plastic and a vial of clear liquid. Elizabeth looked at the label: KETAMINE. No wonder she’d suffered such terrible hallucinations while the drug was in her system. Anesthesiologists almost never used ketamine without a secondary sedative such as Valium. These idiots had given her several injections of the drug with nothing to blunt its side effects.

  She loaded an appropriate dosage, two hundred and fifty milligrams, and injected it into the wounded man’s upper arm. As he slipped slowly into unconsciousness, she broke the needle off the syringe and placed it in the plastic sack from the chemist shop where Cain had purchased the medical supplies. The name and address of the shop were written on the bag in blue lettering. Elizabeth recognized the village. It was located on the Norfolk coastline, northeast of London.

  She lifted the blanket and adjusted the lamp, so that the light shone directly into the wound. The round was lodged within the fracture fragments. She opened the bottle of rubbing alcohol and poured a generous amount directly into the wound, then wiped away the puss and other infectious material with a cotton swab. When the wound was sufficiently clean, she sterilized the straight razor and used it to debride the ragged necrotic material along the edges. Then she sterilized the tweezers and spent the next twenty minutes carefully removing fragments of shattered bone and filaments of embedded fabric. Finally, she sterilized the needle-nose pliers and slipped them carefully into the wound. The round was out a moment later, deformed from its impact with the terrorist’s tibia but intact.

  She gave the bullet to Cain as a souvenir and prepared for the final stage of the procedure: the dressing and the splint. First she flushed the wound thoroughly with the sterile water, then covered it with a four-by-four sterile pad. Last, she laid the two strips of wood along each side of his lower leg from the knee to the ankle and bound the splint tightly with the rolls of bandaging. When she was finished, she propped the leg on a pillow and looked at Cain.

  “When he wakes up, give him two of the cephalin tablets. Then give him one tablet every four hours. Keep the leg elevated. I’d like to see him every two hours, if that’s possible. If not, I’ve given you seventy-two hours at the most. After that he’s going to need to go into a hospital.”

  She held out her hands. Cain applied the cuffs and led her downstairs to her cell. As she lay down on her cot, she felt an almost drunken sense of elation. The crude surgery, the brisk commands: she had been in control, if only for a few moments. And she had managed to uncover a single piece of valuable information. She was still in England, still within reach of the British police and intelligence services.

  She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but an hour later she was jolted by a knock at the door. We have a present for you, the note said. Lay down on your cot. She did as she was told and watched as Cain and Abel entered her cell. They put packing tape across her mouth and a hood over her head. She fought them. She fought them even after they gave her the needle.

  15

  CYPRUS: 10:15 A.M., FRIDAY

  Much can be gleaned about the value of a source by the accommodations that are made to handle him. For the debriefings of Wazir al-Zayyat, the Office had purchased a lovely whitewashed villa on the southern coast of Cyprus with a small swimming pool and a shaded terrace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Gabriel and Chiara arrived several hours before the Egyptian was due. Gabriel had hoped to spend the time relaxing, but Chiara, alone with him for the first time in weeks, wanted to use the opportunity to discuss wedding plans. Place settings and flowers, guest lists and music—this is how Israel’s legendary secret agent passed the time before the arrival of the Egyptian spy. He wondered what Haaretz and the rest of the Israeli newspapers would write about him if they knew the truth.

  Shortly after two in the afternoon, Gabriel glimpsed a Volkswagen sedan speeding along the coast road. It passed by the villa and disappeared around a bend, then, five minutes later, approached from the opposite direction. This time it slowed and turned into the drive. Gabriel looked at Chiara. “You’d better wait upstairs in the bedroom,” he said. “From what I’ve read about Wazir, your presence will only be a distraction.”

  Chiara gathered up her papers and bridal magazines and vanished. Gabriel went into the kitchen and opened one of the cabinets. Inside was the control panel for the built-in recording system. He put in a fresh set of tapes and pressed the RECORD button, then went into the entrance hall and opened the front door as al-Zayyat was coming up the steps. The Egyptian froze and regarded Gabriel suspiciously for a moment through the lenses of his mirrored sunglasses. Then a trace of a smile appeared beneath his dense mustache and he extended a clublike hand in Gabriel’s direction.

  “To what do I owe the honor, Mr. Allon?”

  “Something came up in Rome,” Gabriel said. “Shimon asked me to fill in.”

  The Egyptian pushed his sunglasses onto his forehead and studied Gabriel again, this time with obvious skepticism. His eyes were dark and bottomless. They were not a pair of eyes Gabriel would ever want to see on the other side of an interrogation table.

  “Or maybe you volunteered to come here to see me,” the Egyptian said.

  “Now, why would I do that, Wazir?”

  “Because if what I read in the newspapers is true, you now have something of a personal stake in the outcome of this case.”

  “You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the newspapers.”

  “At least not the Egyptian papers.”

  Al-Zayyat followed Gabriel into the villa, then walked over to the drinks cabinet with a proprietary air and loosened the cap on a new bottle of single-malt Scotch. “You’ll join me?” he asked, waving the bottle at Gabriel.

  “I’m driving,” Gabriel replied.

  “What is it with you Jews and alcohol?”

  “It makes us do silly things with lampshades.”

  “What kind of agent-runner doesn’t have a drink with a source?” Al-Zayyat poured himself a very large glass and put the cap back on the bottle without tightening it. “But then you’re not an agent-runner, are you, Allon?” He drank half the whisky in a single swallow. “How’s the old man? Back on his feet?”

  “Shamron is fine,” Gabriel said. “He sends his regards.”

  “I hope he sent more than regards.”

  Gabriel looked at the leather briefcase laying in a rectangle of sunlight on the sailcloth couch. Al-Zayyat sat next to it and popped the latches. Satisfied by the contents, he closed the briefcase and looked at Gabriel.

  “I know who kidnapped the ambassador’s daughter,” he said. “And I know why they did it. Where would
you like me to start?”

  “The beginning,” said Gabriel. “It tends to put things in proper perspective.”

  “You’re just like Shamron.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that.”

  The Egyptian’s gaze wandered over the bag again. “There’s fifty thousand, right?”

  “You can count it if you like.”

  “That won’t be necessary. Do you want me to sign a receipt?”

  “You sign the receipt when you get your money,” Gabriel said. “And you get your money after I hear the information.”

  “Shimon always gave me the money first.”

  “I’m not Shimon.”

  The Egyptian swallowed the rest of his whisky. Gabriel refilled his glass and told him to start talking.

  The beginning, the Egyptian said, was the day in September 1970 when Nasser died and his vice president, Anwar Sadat, came to power in Egypt. Nasser had regarded Egypt’s Islamic radicals, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, as a grave threat to his regime and had used mass arrests, executions, and torture to keep them in their place. Sadat had tried a different approach.

  “Sadat had none of Nasser’s charisma and no popular base of support,” al-Zayyat said. “He was also a rather religious man. He was more afraid of the Communists and the Nasserites than the Brothers, and so he made what would turn out to be a fatal reversal of Egypt’s approach to Islamic extremism. He branded the Communists and the Nasserites as enemies of his new regime and let the Brothers out of jail.”

  And then he compounded the mistake, al-Zayyat explained. He allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to operate openly and encouraged them to spread their fiery brand of Islam abroad, especially into the newly occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. He also encouraged and funded the creation of groups that were even more radical than the Brotherhood. One was al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Group. Another was al-Jihad. In October 1981, al-Jihad turned on the man who had helped bring it into existence, assassinating Sadat as he stood on a military reviewing stand outside Cairo. In the eyes of the Islamists, Sadat’s sins were many, but none so egregious as his peace treaty with Israel. Before opening fire, Sadat’s assassin, Lieutenant Khaled Islambouli, screamed: “I have killed Pharaoh, and I do not fear death.”