2
BEN-GURION AIRPORT, ISRAEL
What are you doing here, Uzi?” Gabriel asked. “You’re the boss now. Bosses don’t make midnight airport runs. They leave that sort of work to the flunkies in Transport.”
“I had nothing better to do.”
“Nothing better to do than hang around the airport waiting for me to come off a plane from Rome? What’s wrong? You didn’t think I’d really come back this time?”
Uzi Navot didn’t respond. He was now peering through the one-way glass window of the VIP reception room into the arrivals hall, where the other passengers from the Rome flight were queuing up at passport control. Gabriel looked around: the same faux-limestone walls, the same tired-looking leather couches, the same smell of male tension and burnt coffee. He had been coming to this room, or versions of it, for more than thirty years. He had entered it in triumph and staggered into it in failure. He had been fêted in this room and consoled by a prime minister; and once, he had been wheeled into it with a bullet wound in his chest. But it never changed.
“Bella needed an evening to herself,” Navot said, still facing the glass. He looked at Gabriel. “Last week she confessed that she liked it better when I was in the field. We saw each other once a month, if we were lucky. Now…” He frowned. “I think Bella’s starting to have buyer’s remorse. Besides, I miss hanging around in airport lounges. By my calculation I’ve spent two-thirds of my career waiting in airport terminals, train stations, restaurants, and hotel rooms. They promise you glamour and excitement, but it’s mostly mind-numbing boredom with brief interludes of sheer terror.”
“I like the boring parts better. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a boring country?”
“But then it wouldn’t be Israel.”
Navot relieved Gabriel of his leather garment bag and led him out into a long, harshly lit corridor. They were roughly equal in height and walked with the same purposeful gait, but the similarities ended there. Where Gabriel was angular and narrow, Navot was squat and powerfully built, with a round, turretlike head mounted atop wrestler’s shoulders and a thick waist that attested to an affinity for heavy food. For years Navot had roamed western Europe as a katsa, an undercover case officer. He was now chief of Special Operations. In the words of the celebrated Israeli spymaster Ari Shamron, Special Ops was “the dark side of a dark service.” They were the ones who did the jobs no one else wanted, or dared, to do. They were executioners and kidnappers, buggers and blackmailers; men of intellect and ingenuity with a criminal streak wider than the criminals themselves; multilinguists and chameleons who were at home in the finest hotels and salons in Europe or the worst back alleys of Beirut and Baghdad. Navot was new to the job and had been granted the promotion only because Gabriel had turned it down. There was no animosity between them. Navot was the first to admit he was a mere field hand. Gabriel Allon was a legend.
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.”