by Daniel Silva
“I hear he’s planning to spend the night in a cottage outside Lydda. It’s in the middle of an orange grove. Asad, the murderous dog, is surrounded by bodyguards. They’re hiding in the orchards. If you try to attack the cottage with a large force, the guards will sound the alert and Asad will flee like the coward that he is.”
“And what do you recommend?” Shamron asked, playing to the Arab’s vanity.
“A single assassin, a man who can slip through the defenses and kill Asad before he can escape. For another one hundred pounds, I’ll be that man.”
Shamron did not wish to insult his informant, so he spent a moment pretending to consider the offer, even though his mind was already made up. The assassination of Sheikh Asad was too important to be trusted to a man who would betray his own people for money. He hurried back to Palmach headquarters in Tel Aviv and broke the news to the deputy commander, a handsome man with red hair and blue eyes named Yitzhak Rabin.
“Someone needs to go to Lydda alone tonight and kill him,” Shamron said.
“Chances are whoever we select won’t come out of that house alive.”
“I know,” Shamron said, “that’s why it has to be me.”
“You’re too important to risk on a mission like this.”
“If this goes on much longer, we’ll lose Jerusalem-and then we’ll lose the war. What’s more important than that?”
Rabin could see that there was no talking him out of it. “What can I do to help you?”
“Make certain there’s a car and driver waiting for me on the edge of that orange grove after I kill him.”
At midnight, Shamron climbed on a motorbike and rode from Tel Aviv to Lydda. He left the bike a mile from town and walked the rest of the way to the edge of the orchard. Such assaults, Shamron had learned from experience, were best carried out shortly before dawn, when the sentries were fatigued and at their least attentive. He entered the orchard a few minutes before sunrise, armed with a Sten gun and a steel trench knife. In the first gray light of the day, he could make out the faint shadows of the guards, propped against the trunks of the orange trees. One slept soundly as Shamron crept past. A single guard stood watch in the dusty forecourt of the cottage. Shamron killed him with a silent thrust of his knife, then he entered the cottage.
It had but one room. Sheikh Asad lay sleeping on the floor. Two of his senior lieutenants were seated cross-legged next to him, drinking coffee. Caught off guard by Shamron’s silent approach, they did not react to the opening of the door. Only when they looked up and saw an armed Jew did they attempt to reach for their weapons. Shamron killed them both with a single burst of his Sten gun.
Sheikh Asad awakened with a start and reached for his rifle. Shamron fired. Sheikh Asad, as he was dying, gazed into his killer’s eyes.
“Another will take my place,” he said.
“I know,” replied Shamron, then he fired again. He slipped from the cottage as the sentries came running. In the half-light of dawn he picked his way through the trees, until he came to the edge of the orange grove. The car was waiting; Yitzhak Rabin was behind the wheel.
“Is he dead?” Rabin asked as he accelerated away.
Shamron nodded. “It’s done.”
“Good,” said Rabin. “Let the dogs lap up his blood.”
7
TEL AVIV
Dina had lapsed into a long silence. Yossi and Rimona, entranced, watched her with the intensity of small children. Even Yaakov seemed to have fallen under her spell, not because he had been converted to Dina’s cause but because he wanted to know where the story was taking them. Gabriel, had he wished, could have told him. And when Dina placed a new image on the screen-a strikingly handsome man seated in an outdoor cafe wearing wraparound sunglasses-Gabriel saw it not in the grainy black-and-white of the photograph but as the scene appeared in his own memory: oil on canvas, abraded and yellowed with age. Dina began to speak again, but Gabriel was no longer listening. He was scrubbing away at the soiled varnish of his memory, watching a younger version of himself rushing across the bloodstained courtyard of a Parisian apartment building with a Beretta in his hand. “This is Sabri al-Khalifa,” Dina was saying. “The setting is the Boulevard St-Germain in Paris, the year is 1979. The photograph was snapped by an Office surveillance team. It was the last ever taken of him.”
AMMAN, JORDAN: JUNE 1967
It was eleven in the morning when the handsome young man with pale skin and black hair walked into a Fatah recruiting office in downtown Amman. The officer seated behind the desk in the lobby was in a foul mood. The entire Arab world was. The second war for Palestine had just ended. Instead of liberating the land from the Jews, it had precipitated yet another catastrophe for the Palestinians. In just six days the Israeli military had routed the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank were now in Jewish hands, and thousands more Palestinians had been turned into refugees.
“Name?” the recruiter snapped.
“Sabri al-Khalifa.”
The Fatah man looked up, startled. “Yes, of course you are,” he said. “I fought with your father. Come with me.”
Sabri was immediately placed in a car and chauffeured at high speed across the Jordanian capital to a safe house. There he was introduced to a small, unimpressive-looking man named Yasir Arafat.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Arafat said. “I knew your father. He was a great man.”
Sabri smiled. He was used to hearing compliments about his father. All his life he had been told stories about the heroic deeds of the great warlord from Beit Sayeed, and how the Jews, to punish the villagers who had supported his father, razed the village and forced its inhabitants into exile. Sabri al-Khalifa had little in common with most of his refugee brethren. He had been raised in a pleasant district of Beirut and educated at the finest schools and universities in Europe. Along with his native Arabic, he spoke French, German, and English fluently. His cosmopolitan upbringing had made him a valuable asset to the Palestinian cause. Yasir Arafat wasn’t about to let him go to waste.
“Fatah is riddled with traitors and collaborators,” Arafat said. “Every time we send an assault team across the border, the Jews are lying in wait. If we’re ever going to be an effective fighting force, we have to purge the traitors from our midst. I would think a job such as that would appeal to you, given what happened to your father. He was undone by a collaborator, was he not?”
Sabri nodded gravely. He’d been told that story, too.
“Will you work for me?” Arafat said. “Will you fight for your people, like your father did?”
Sabri immediately went to work for the Jihaz al Razd, the intelligence branch of Fatah. Within a month of accepting the assignment, he’d unmasked twenty Palestinian collaborators. Sabri made a point of attending their executions and always personally fired a symbolic coup de grace into each victim as a warning to those considering treason against the revolution.
After six months at the Jihaz al Razd, Sabri was summoned to a second meeting with Yasir Arafat. This one took place in a different safe house from the first. The Fatah leader, fearful of Israeli assassins, slept in a different bed every night. Though Sabri didn’t know it then, he would soon be living the same way.
“We have plans for you,” Arafat said. “Very special plans. You will be a great man. Your feats will rival even those of your father. Soon, the whole world will know the name Sabri al-Khalifa.”
“What sort of plans?”
“In due time, Sabri. First, we must prepare you.”
He was sent to Cairo for six months of intense terrorist training under the tutelage of the Egyptian secret service, the Mukhabarat. While in Cairo, he was introduced to a young Palestinian woman named Rima, the daughter of a senior Fatah officer. It seemed a perfect match, and the two were hastily married in a private ceremony attended only by Fatah members and officers of Egyptian intelligence. A month later, Sabri was recalled to Jordan to begin the next phase
of his preparation. He left Rima in Cairo with her father, and though he didn’t realize it at the time, she was pregnant with a son. The date of his birth was an ominous one for the Palestinians: September 1970.
For some time, King Hussein of Jordan had been concerned about the growing power of the Palestinians living in his midst. The western portion of his country had become a virtual state within a state, with a chain of refugee camps ruled by heavily armed Fatah militants who openly flouted the authority of the Hashemite monarch. Hussein, who had lost half his kingdom already, feared he would lose the rest unless he removed the Palestinians from Jordanian soil. In September 1970 he ordered his fierce Bedouin soldiers to do precisely that.
Arafat’s fighters were no match for the Bedouin. Thousands were massacred, and once more the Palestinians were scattered, this time to camps in Lebanon and Syria. Arafat wanted revenge against the Jordanian monarch and against all those who had betrayed the Palestinian people. He wanted to carry out bloody and spectacular acts of terrorism on the world stage-acts that would place the plight of the Palestinians before a global audience and quench the Palestinian thirst for revenge. The attacks would be carried out by a secret unit so the PLO could maintain the charade that it was a respectable revolutionary army fighting for the liberation of an oppressed people. Abu Iyad, Arafat’s number two, was given overall command, but the operational mastermind would be the son of the great Palestinian warlord from Beit Sayeed, Sabri al-Khalifa. The unit would be called Black September to honor the Palestinian dead in Jordan.
Sabri recruited a small elite force from the best units of Fatah. In the tradition of his father, he selected men like himself-Palestinians from notable families who had seen more of the world than the refugee camps. Next he set out for Europe, where he assembled a network of educated Palestinian exiles. He also established links with leftist European terror groups and intelligence services behind the Iron Curtain. By November 1971, Black September was ready to emerge from the shadows. At the top of Sabri’s hit list was King Hussein’s Jordan.
The blood flowed first in the city where Sabri had served his apprenticeship. The Jordanian prime minister, on a visit to Cairo, was gunned down in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel. More attacks followed in quick succession. The car of the Jordanian ambassador was ambushed in London. Jordanian aircraft were hijacked and Jordanian airline offices were firebombed. In Bonn, five Jordanian intelligence officers were butchered in the cellar of a house.
After settling the score with Jordan, Sabri turned his attention to the true enemies of the Palestinian people, the Zionists of Israel. In May 1972, Black September hijacked a Sabena airlines jet and forced it to land at Israel’s Lod Airport. A few days later, terrorists from the Japanese Red Army, acting on Black September’s behalf, attacked passengers in the arrival hall at Lod with machine-gun fire and hand grenades, killing twenty-seven people. Letter bombs were mailed to Israeli diplomats and prominent Jews across Europe.
But Sabri’s greatest terrorist triumph was still to come. Early on the morning of September 5, 1972, two years after the expulsion from Jordan, six Palestinian terrorists scaled the fence at the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany, and entered the apartment building at Connollystrasse 31, which housed members of the Israeli Olympic team. Two Israelis were killed in the initial assault. Nine others were rounded up and taken hostage. For the next twenty hours, with 900 million people around the world watching on television, the German government negotiated with the terrorists for the release of the Israeli hostages. Deadlines came and went, until finally, at 10:10 P.M., the terrorists and the hostages boarded two helicopters and took off for Furstenfeldbruck airfield. Shortly after arriving, West German forces launched an ill-conceived and poorly planned rescue operation. All nine of the hostages were massacred by the Black Septembrists.
Jubilation swept the Arab world. Sabri al-Khalifa, who had monitored the operation from a safe flat in East Berlin, was greeted as a conquering hero upon his return to Beirut. “You are my son!” Arafat said as he threw his arms around Sabri. “You are my son.”
In Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered her intelligence chiefs to avenge the Munich eleven by hunting down and killing the members of Black September. Code-named Wrath of God, the operation would be led by Ari Shamron, the same man who had been given the task of ending Sheikh Asad’s bloody reign of terror in 1948. For the second time in twenty-five years, Shamron was ordered to kill a man named al-Khalifa.
Dina left the room in darkness and told the rest of the story as though Gabriel were not seated ten feet away from her, at the opposite end of the table.
“One by one, the members of Black September were methodically hunted down and killed by Shamron’s Wrath of God teams. In all, twelve members were killed by Office assassins, but Sabri al-Khalifa, the one Shamron wanted most, remained beyond his reach. Sabri fought back. He killed an Office agent in Madrid. He attacked the Israeli embassy in Bangkok and murdered the American ambassador to Sudan. His attacks became more erratic, as did his behavior. Arafat was no longer able to maintain the fiction that he had no connection to Black September, and condemnation rained down upon him, even from quarters sympathetic to his cause. Sabri had brought disgrace to the movement, but Arafat still doted on him like a son.”
Dina paused and looked at Gabriel. His face, lit by the glow of Sabri al-Khalifa’s image on the projection screen, showed no emotion. His gaze was downward toward his hands, which were folded neatly on the tabletop.
“Would you care to finish the story?” she asked.
Gabriel spent a moment contemplating his hands before taking up Dina’s invitation to speak.
“Shamron learned through an informant that Sabri kept a girl in Paris, a left-wing journalist named Denise who believed he was a Palestinian poet and freedom fighter. Sabri had neglected to tell Denise that he was a married man with a child. Shamron briefly considered trying to enroll her but gave up on the idea. It seemed the poor girl was truly in love with Sabri. So we sent the teams to Paris and put a watch on her instead. A month later, Sabri came to town to see her.”
He paused and looked up at the screen.
“He arrived at her apartment in the middle of the night. It was too dark to confirm his identity, so Shamron decided to take a chance and wait until we could get a better look at him. They stayed in the apartment making love until the late afternoon, then they went to lunch in a cafe on the Boulevard St-Germain. That’s when we snapped that photo. After lunch they walked back to her apartment. It was still light, but Shamron gave the order to take him down.”
Gabriel lapsed into silence, and once more his gaze turned down, toward his hands. He closed his eyes briefly.
“I followed them on foot. He had his left arm around the girl’s waist and his hand was shoved into the back pocket of her jeans. His right hand was in his jacket pocket. That’s where he always kept his gun. He turned and looked at me once, but kept walking. He and the girl had drunk two bottles of wine over lunch-I suppose his senses weren’t terribly sharp at the time.”
Another silence; then, after a glance at Sabri’s face, another meditation over his hands. His voice, when he spoke again, had an air of detachment, as if he were describing the exploits of another man.
“They paused at the entrance. Denise was drunk and laughing. She was looking down, into her purse, looking for the key. Sabri was telling her to hurry up. He wanted to get her clothes off again. I could have done it there, but there were too many people on the street, so I slowed down and waited for her to find the damned key. I passed by them as she slid it into the lock. Sabri looked at me again, and I looked back. They stepped into the passageway. I turned and caught the door before it could close. Sabri and the girl were in the middle of the courtyard by now. He heard my footfall and turned around. His hand was coming out of his coat pocket and I could see the butt. Sabri carried a Stechkin. It was a gift from a friend in the KGB. I hadn’t drawn my gun yet. Shamron’s rule, we called it. ‘We do not wa
lk around in the street like gangsters with our guns drawn,’ Shamron always said. ‘One second, Gabriel. That’s all you’ll have. One second. Only a man with truly gifted hands can get his gun off his hip and into firing position in one second.’ ”
Gabriel looked around the room and held the gaze of each team member briefly before resuming.
“The Beretta had an eight-shot magazine, but I discovered that if I packed the rounds in tightly, I could squeeze in ten. Sabri never got his gun into position. He was turning to face me as I fired. His target profile was reduced-I think my first and second shots hit him in the left arm. I moved forward and put him on the ground. The girl was screaming, hitting me across the back with her handbag. I put ten shots in him, then released the magazine and rammed my backup into the butt. It had only one round, the eleventh. One round for every Jew Sabri murdered at Munich. I put the barrel into his ear and fired. The girl collapsed over his body and called me a murderer. I went back through the passageway, out into the street. A motorcycle pulled up. I climbed on the back.”
Only Yaakov, who had seen his share of killing operations in the Occupied Territories, dared break the silence that had descended over the room. “What do Asad al-Khalifa and his boy Sabri have to do with Rome?”
Gabriel looked at Dina, and with his eyes posed the same question. Dina removed the photograph of Sabri and replaced it with the one showing Khaled at his father’s funeral.
“When Sabri’s wife, Rima, heard that he’d been killed in Paris, she walked into the bathroom of her apartment in Beirut and slit her wrists. Khaled found his mother lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood. He was now an orphan, his parents dead, his clan scattered to the four winds. Arafat adopted the boy, and after the funeral, Khaled disappeared.”
“Where did he go?” asked Yossi.
“Arafat saw the child as a potent symbol of the revolution and wanted him protected at all costs. We think he shipped him off to Europe under an assumed name to live with a wealthy Palestinian exile family. What we do know is this: In twenty-five years, Khaled al-Khalifa has never resurfaced. Two years ago I asked Lev for permission to start a quiet search for him. I can’t find him. It’s as if he vanished into thin air after the funeral. It’s as if he’s dead, too.”