The rest of Israel, however, was blissfully unaware of the fact that its legendary intelligence chief was lying incapacitated in his bed, with four broken ribs, two cracked vertebrae, and a catastrophic headache without end. True, there were rumors, fed mainly by the press in France, but they were put to rest by fourteen seconds of video released by the prime minister’s office and broadcast on Israeli television. It purported to show a meeting at Kaplan Street. In it, the prime minister wore a satisfied smile and a blue necktie; Gabriel wore gray and looked none the worse for wear. The video had been shot not long after he became chief and put in cold storage for an occasion such as this. There were other videos as well, different clothing, altered lighting conditions, lest Gabriel ever find it necessary to spend a significant period out of the public eye. He reckoned that time had come, though it had arrived far earlier in his tenure than he ever imagined. The chief of the Office had nearly died in a coldly calculated attack on the headquarters of a trusted friend and ally in the war on terror. Therefore, the chief had no recourse but to respond in kind. Such were the rules of the neighborhood. Gabriel would not delegate the task of vengeance to others. Nor would he lash out against meaningless targets in the deserts of Iraq and Syria. His target was a man. A man who had built a network of death that had laid siege to the great cities of the civilized world. A man who was financing his operations through the sale of narcotics in Western Europe. He was going to find this man and wipe him from the face of the earth. He would be painstaking in his approach, meticulous. For there was nothing more dangerous, he thought, than a patient man.
But he could not wage war against his enemy without a body and a brain. The pain gradually receded, like the waters of a severe flood, but his thoughts remained a jumble. The operation was somewhere out there, he knew it, but its plotlines and central characters were lost in the fog of the concussion. He determined that vigorous exercise was in order, not physical but mental, so he played Shamron’s old memory games and, in his head, reread dense monographs on Titian, Bellini, Tintoretto, and Veronese. The effort fatigued him—it was exercise, after all—but slowly the operation came into sharper relief. Only the denouement eluded him. He saw a wealthy man, broken, exposed, and willing to do his bidding. But how would he maneuver the man to this place? Slowly, he reminded himself. Beware the fury of a patient man.
Pain disturbed his sleep, as did nightmares of tumbling downward through a maelstrom of masonry and glass and blood. Nevertheless, he woke early on the fourth morning to find his headache gone and his thoughts clear. Rising before Chiara and the children, he went into the kitchen and made coffee, which he drank while watching the news on television. Afterward, he crept into the bathroom and confronted his reflection in the mirror. The image in the glass was by any objective measure disturbing. The left side of the face was reasonably intact, but the right—the side that had been turned toward the full force of the blast—was another story entirely. The eye was blackened and swollen, and there were numerous small cuts and abrasions left by flying glass and debris. It was not the face of a chief, he thought; it was the face of an avenger. He filled the basin with scalding water and slowly, painfully, scraped a week’s growth from his chin and cheeks. Each stroke of the razor sent a charge of pain into the base of his spine, and a sneeze, wholly unexpected, left him doubled over for several seconds in agony.
Showered, he returned to the bedroom to find that Chiara had risen. He pulled on a pair of gabardine trousers and a dress shirt with only minimal pain, but the effort of tying his Oxford shoes nearly drove him to the sanctuary of his bed. Smiling tightly to conceal his discomfort, he went into the kitchen where Chiara was preparing a fresh pot of coffee.
“All better?” She handed him a cup of coffee and looked him up and down. “Please tell me you’re not thinking about going to King Saul Boulevard.”
In truth, he was. But the tone of Chiara’s voice led him to reconsider. “Actually,” he said, “I was hoping to spend some time with the children, and I wanted to look like a person again rather than a patient.”
“Good recovery,” said Chiara skeptically. Just then, there came a chirp of laughter from the nursery. She smiled and whispered, “And so it begins.”
He made a brave show of it. He helped Chiara dress the children, an activity that inflicted on him no small amount of pain, and supervised the chaotic food fight otherwise known as breakfast. He spent the remainder of the morning playing games, reading stories, watching developmental videos, and changing an endless parade of soiled diapers. Mainly, he wondered how Chiara managed to care for the children alone, day after day, without collapsing with exhaustion or losing her mind. Running one of the world’s most formidable intelligence services suddenly seemed a rather trivial pursuit by comparison.
Nap time was an oasis. Gabriel slept, too, and when he woke he went onto the terrace to warm his weary body in the Jerusalem sun. This time, however, he brought a stack of reading material—the five hundred pages of Jean-Luc Martel’s file, a copy of which he had carried out of France. Martel had been the target of on-and-off French interest for more than a decade. And yet, with the exception of two minor scrapes having to do with unpaid taxes, both of which were settled far from public view, his reputation remained beyond reproach. The most recent probe of his business empire had taken place two years earlier. It had been launched after a midlevel drug dealer offered to testify against Martel in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. In the end the case was closed for lack of evidence, though the chief investigating officer, a man with an unassailable character, retired early in protest. Perhaps not coincidentally, the drug dealer whose accusation started the probe was later found dead in his prison cell, his throat slashed.
The investigation produced reams of communications intercepts—some salacious, many prosaic, all insignificant—and several hundred surveillance photos. Rousseau sent along a sampling of the best. There was Jean-Luc Martel at the Cannes Film Festival, Jean-Luc Martel at the Biennale in Venice, Jean-Luc Martel in the front row at Fashion Week in New York, Jean-Luc Martel on his 142-foot motor yacht in the Mediterranean, Jean-Luc Martel on the rue de Rh?ne in Geneva, and Jean-Luc Martel at the gala grand opening of his new restaurant in Paris, which was a smash because, according to one estimate, he dropped a cool five million euros to make certain every French celebrity of note was in attendance, along with an American reality television star who was famous for being famous, and a pair of American hip-hop artists who had unkind things to say about France’s treatment of racial minorities.