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

by Daniel Silva

  “Which is why I feel I should give you a helpful reminder. The progress of your investigation, assuming you make any, is not to be shared with anyone outside this service. You will report to me and only me. Is that clear?”

  “I take it you’re referring to the old man.”

  “You know exactly who I’m referring to.”

  “Shamron and I are personal friends. I won’t cut off my relationship with him just to put your mind at ease.”

  “But you will refrain from discussing the case with him. Have I made myself clear?”

  Lev had neither mud on his boots nor blood on his hands, but he was a master in the art of boardroom thrust and parry.

  “Yes, Lev,” Gabriel said. “I know exactly where you stand.”

  Lev got to his feet, signaling that the meeting had ended, but Gabriel remained seated.

  “There’s something else I needed to discuss with you.”

  “My time is limited,” said Lev, looking down.

  “It won’t take but a minute. It’s about Chiara.”

  Lev, rather than suffer the indignity of retaking his seat, walked over to the window and looked down at the lights of Tel Aviv. “What about her?”

  “I don’t want her used again until we determine who else saw the contents of that computer disk.”

  Lev rotated slowly, as if he were a statue on a pedestal. With the light behind him, he appeared as nothing more than a dark mass against the horizontal lines of the blinds.

  “I’m glad you feel comfortable enough to walk into this office and make demands,” he said acidly, “but Chiara’s future will be determined by Operations and, ultimately, by me.”

  “She’s only a bat leveyha. Are you telling me you can’t find any other girls to serve as escort officers?”

  “She’s got an Italian passport, and she’s damned good at her job. You know that better than anyone.”

  “She’s also burned, Lev. If you put her in the field with an agent, you’ll put the agent at risk. I wouldn’t work with her.”

  “Fortunately, most of our field officers aren’t as arrogant as you.”

  “I never knew a good field man who wasn’t arrogant, Lev.”

  A silence fell between them. Lev walked over to his desk and pressed a button on his telephone. The door swung open automatically, and a wedge of bright light entered from Lev’s reception area.

  “It’s been my experience that field agents don’t take well to the discipline of headquarters. In the field, they’re a law unto themselves, but in here, I’m the law.”

  “I’ll try to keep that in mind, Sheriff.”

  “Don’t fuck this up,” Lev said as Gabriel headed toward the open door. “If you do, not even Shamron will be able to protect you.”

  They convened at nine o’clock the following morning. Housekeeping had made a halfhearted attempt at putting the room in order. A chipped wooden conference table stood in the center, surrounded by several mismatched chairs. The excess debris had been piled against the far wall. Gabriel, as he entered, was reminded of the pews stacked against the wall of the Church of San Giovanni Crisostomo. Everything about the setting suggested impermanence, including the misleading paper sign, affixed to the door with packing tape, that read: TEMPORARY COMMITTEE FOR THE STUDY OF TERROR THREATS IN WESTERN EUROPE. Gabriel embraced the disarray. From adversity, Shamron always said, comes cohesion.

  His team numbered four in all, two boys and two girls, all eager and adoring and unbearably young. From Research came Yossi, a pedantic but brilliant intelligence analyst who had read Greats at Oxford; from History, a dark-eyed girl named Dina who could recite the time, place, and butcher’s bill of every act of terrorism ever committed against the State of Israel. She walked with a very slight limp and was treated with unfailing tenderness by the others. Gabriel found the reason why in her personnel file. Dina had been standing in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street the day in October 1994 when a Hamas suicide bomber turned the Number 5 bus into a coffin for twenty-one people. Her mother and two of her sisters were killed that day. Dina had been seriously wounded.

  The two other members of the team came from outside the Office. The Arab Affairs Department of Shabak lent Gabriel a pockmarked tough named Yaakov, who had spent the better part of the last decade trying to penetrate the Palestinian Authority’s apparatus of terror. Military Intelligence gave him a captain named Rimona, who was Shamron’s niece. The last time Gabriel had seen Rimona, she’d been tearing fearlessly down Shamron’s steep driveway on a kick scooter. These days Rimona could usually be found in a secure aircraft hangar north of Tel Aviv, poring over the papers seized from Yasir Arafat’s compound in Ramallah.

  Instinctively, Gabriel approached the case as though it was a painting. He was reminded of a restoration he had performed not long after his apprenticeship, a crucifixion by an early Renaissance Venetian named Cima. Gabriel, after removing the yellowed varnish, had discovered that virtually nothing remained of the original. He had then spent the next three months piecing together filaments of the obscure painter’s life and work. When finally he began the retouching, it was as if Cima was standing at his shoulder, guiding his hand.

  The artist, in this case, was the one member of the terrorist team who had been positively identified: Daoud Hadawi. Hadawi was their porthole onto the operation, and slowly, over the next several days, his brief life began to take shape on the walls of Gabriel’s lair. It ran from a ramshackle refugee camp in Jenin, through the stones and burning tires of the first intifada, and into the ranks of Force 17. No corner of Hadawi’s life remained unexplored: his schooling and his religious fervor, his family and his clan, his associations and his influences.

  Known Force 17 personnel were located and accounted for. Those thought to possess the skills or education necessary to build the bomb that leveled the Rome embassy were singled out for special attention. Arab informants were called in and questioned from Ramallah to Gaza City, from Rome to London. Communications intercepts stretching two years into the past were filtered through the computers and sifted for any reference to a large-scale operation in Europe. Old surveillance and watch reports were reexamined, old airline passenger lists scoured again. Rimona returned to her hangar each morning to search for traces of Rome in the captured files of Arafat’s intelligence services.

  Gradually, Room 456C began to resemble the command bunker of a besieged army. There were so many photographs pinned to the walls it seemed their search was being monitored by an Arab mob. The girls from the data rooms took to leaving their deliveries outside in the corridor. Gabriel requisitioned the room next door, along with cots and bedding. He also requested an easel and a chalkboard. Yossi contemptuously pointed out that no one had seen a chalkboard inside King Saul Boulevard in twenty years, and for his impertinence he was ordered to find one. It came the next morning. “I had to call in a lot of favors,” said Yossi. “The stone tablets and carving tools arrive next week.”

  Gabriel began each day by posing the same series of questions: Who built the bomb? Who conceived and planned the attack? Who directed the teams? Who secured the safe houses and the transport? Who handled the money? Who was the mastermind? Was there a state sponsor in Damascus or Tehran or Tripoli?

  A week into the investigation, none of the questions had been answered. Frustration began to set in. Gabriel instructed them to change their approach. “Sometimes these puzzles are solved by the piece you discover, and sometimes they’re solved by finding the piece that’s missing.” He stood before his chalkboard and wiped it until it was a blank slate. “Start looking for the piece that’s missing.”

  They ate supper together each night as a family. Gabriel encouraged them to set aside the case to talk about something else. He naturally became the focus of their curiosity, for they had studied his exploits at the Academy and even read about some of them in their history books at school. He was reticent at first, but they coaxed him from his shell, and he played the role that Shamron, on countless other
occasions, had played before him. He told them about Black September and Abu Jihad; his foray into the heart of the Vatican and his capture of Erich Radek. Rimona drew him out on the role restoration had played in his cover and the maintenance of his sanity. Yossi started to ask about the bombing in Vienna, but Dina, scholar of terror and counterterror, placed a restraining hand on Yossi’s arm and adroitly changed the subject. Sometimes, when Gabriel was speaking, he would see Dina gazing at him as though he were a hero’s monument come to life. He realized that he, like Shamron before him, had crossed the line between mortal and myth.

  Radek intrigued them the most. Gabriel understood the reason for this all too well. They lived in a country where it was not safe to eat in a restaurant or to ride a bus, yet it was the Holocaust that occupied a special place in their nightmares. Is it true you made him walk through Treblinka? Did you touch him? How could you stand the sound of his voice in that place? Were you ever tempted to take matters into your own hands? Yaakov wanted to know only one thing: “Was he sorry he murdered our grandmothers?” And Gabriel, though he was tempted to lie, told him the truth. “No, he wasn’t sorry. In fact, I had the distinct impression he was still rather proud of it.” Yaakov nodded grimly, as if this fact seemed to confirm his rather pessimistic view of mankind.

  On Shabbat, Dina lit a pair of candles and recited the blessing. That night, instead of wandering Gabriel’s dark past, they spoke of their dreams. Yaakov wanted only to sit in a Tel Aviv café without fear of the shaheed. Yossi wanted to trek the Arab world from Morocco to Baghdad and chronicle his experiences. Rimona longed to turn on the radio in the morning and hear that no one had been killed the night before. And Dina? Gabriel suspected that Dina’s dreams, like his own, were a private screening room of blood and fire.

  After dinner Gabriel slipped from the room and wandered off down the corridor. He came to a flight of stairs, climbed them, then became disoriented and was pointed in the right direction by a night janitor. The entrance was under guard. Gabriel tried to show his new ID badge, but the Security officer just laughed and opened the door to him.

  The room was dimly lit and, because of the computers, unbearably cold. The duty officers wore fleece pullovers and moved with the quiet efficiency of night staff in an intensive care ward. Gabriel climbed up to the viewing platform and leaned his weight against the aluminum handrail. Arrayed before him was a massive computer-generated map of the world, ten feet in height, thirty in width. Scattered across the globe were pinpricks of light, each depicting the last known location of a terrorist on Israel’s watch list. There were clusters in Damascus and Baghdad and even in supposedly friendly places like Amman and Cairo. A river of light flowed from Beirut to the Bekaa Valley to the refugee camps along Israel’s northern border. The West Bank and Gaza were ablaze. A string of lights lay across Europe like a diamond necklace. The cities of North America glowed seductively.

  Gabriel felt a sudden weight of depression pushing down against his shoulders. He had given his life to the protection of the State and the Jewish people, and yet here, in this frigid room, he was confronted with the stark reality of the Zionist dream: a middle-aged man, gazing upon a constellation of enemies, waiting for the next one to explode.

  Dina was waiting for him in the corridor in her stocking feet.

  “It feels familiar to me, Gabriel.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The way they carried it off. The way they moved. The planning. The sheer audacity of the thing. It feels like Munich and Sabena.” She paused and pushed a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear. “It feels like Black September.”

  “There is no Black September, Dina—not anymore, at least.”

  “You asked us to look for the thing that’s missing. Does that include Khaled?”

  “Khaled is a rumor. Khaled is a ghost story.”

  “I believe in Khaled,” she said. “Khaled keeps me awake at night.”

  “You have a hunch?”

  “A theory,” she said, “and some interesting evidence to support it. Would you like to hear it?”

  6

  TEL AVIV: MARCH 20

  They reconvened at ten that evening. The mood, Gabriel would recall later, was that of a university study group, too exhausted for serious enterprise but too anxious to part company. Dina, in order to add credence to her hypothesis, stood behind a small tabletop lectern. Yossi sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by his precious files from Research. Rimona, the only one in uniform, propped her sandaled feet on the back of Yossi’s empty chair. Yaakov sat next to Gabriel, his body still as granite.

  Dina switched off the lights and placed a photograph on the overhead projector. It showed a child, a young boy, with a beret on his head and a kaffiyeh draped over his shoulders. The boy was seated on the lap of a distraught older man: Yasir Arafat.

  “This is the last confirmed photograph of Khaled al-Khalifa,” Dina said. “The setting is Beirut, the year is 1979. The occasion is the funeral of his father, Sabri al-Khalifa. Within days of the funeral, Khaled vanished. He has never been seen again.”

  Yaakov stirred in the darkness. “I thought we were going to deal with reality,” he grumbled.

  “Let her finish,” snapped Rimona.

  Yaakov appealed his case to Gabriel, but Gabriel’s gaze was locked on the accusatory eyes of the child.

  “Let her finish,” he murmured.

  Dina removed the photograph of the child and dropped a new one in its place. Black-and-white and slightly out of focus, it showed a man on horseback with bandoliers across his chest. A pair of dark defiant eyes, barely visible through the small opening in his kaffiyeh, stared directly into the camera lens.

  “To understand Khaled,” Dina said, “one must first know his celebrated lineage. This man is Asad al-Khalifa, Khaled’s grandfather, and the story begins with him.”

  TURKISH-RULED PALESTINE: OCTOBER 1910

  He was born in the village of Beit Sayeed to a desperately poor fellah who had been cursed with seven daughters. He named his only son Asad: Lion. Doted on by his mother and sisters, cherished by his weak and aging father, Asad al-Khalifa was a lazy child who never learned to read or write and refused his father’s demand to memorize the Koran. Occasionally, when he wanted a bit of spending money, he would walk up the rutted track that led to the Jewish settlement of Petah Tikvah and work all day for a few piasters. The Jewish foreman was named Zev. “It’s Hebrew for wolf,” he told Asad. Zev spoke Arabic with a strange accent and always asked Asad questions about life in Beit Sayeed. Asad hated the Jews, as did everyone in Beit Sayeed, but the work wasn’t backbreaking, and he was happy to take Zev’s money.

  Petah Tikvah made an impression on the young Asad. How was it that the Zionists, newcomers to this land, had made so much progress when most of the Arabs were still living in squalor? After seeing the stone villas and clean streets of the Jewish settlement, Asad felt ashamed when he returned to Beit Sayeed. He wanted to live well, but he knew he would never become a rich and powerful man working for the Jew named Wolf. He stopped going to Petah Tikvah and devoted his time to thinking about a new career.

  One evening, while playing dice in the village coffeehouse, he heard an older man make a lewd remark about his sister. He walked over to the man’s table and calmly asked if he had heard the remark correctly. “You did indeed,” the man said. “And what’s more, the unfortunate girl has the face of a donkey.” With that, the coffeehouse erupted into laughter. Asad, without another word, walked back to his table and resumed his game of dice. The next morning, the man who had insulted his sister was found in a nearby orchard with his throat slit and a shoe stuffed into his mouth, the ultimate Arab insult. A week later, when the man’s brother publicly vowed to avenge the death, he too was found in the orchard in the same state. After that, no one dared insult young Asad.

  The incident in the coffeehouse helped Asad find his calling. He used his newfound notoriety to recruit an army of bandits. He chose only men from his
tribe and clan, knowing that they would never betray him. He wanted the ability to strike far from Beit Sayeed, so he stole a stable full of horses from the new rulers of Palestine, the British army. He wanted the ability to intimidate rivals, so he stole guns from the British as well. When his raids began they were like nothing Palestine had seen for generations. He and his band struck towns and villages from the Coastal Plain to the Galilee to the hills of Samaria and then vanished without a trace. His victims were mostly other Arabs, but occasionally he would raid a poorly defended Jewish settlement—and sometimes, if he was in the mood for Jewish blood, he would kidnap a Zionist and kill him with his long, curved knife.

  Asad al-Khalifa soon became a wealthy man. Unlike other successful Arab criminals, he did not draw attention to himself by flaunting his newfound riches. He wore the galabia and kaffiyeh of an ordinary fellah and spent most nights in his family’s mud-and-straw hut. To ensure his protection he spread money and loot among his clan. To the world outside Beit Sayeed, he appeared to be just an ordinary peasant, but inside the village he was now called Sheikh Asad.

  He would not remain a mere bandit and highwayman for long. Palestine was changing—and from the vantage point of the Arabs, not for the better. By the mid-1930s, the Yishuv, the Jewish population of Palestine, had reached nearly a half million, compared with approximately a million Arabs. The official emigration rate was sixty thousand per year, but Sheikh Asad had heard the actual rate was far higher than that. Even a poor boy with no formal schooling could see that the Arabs would be a minority in their own country. Palestine was like a tinder-dry forest. A single spark might set it ablaze.

  The spark occurred on April 15, 1936, when a gang of Arabs shot three Jews on the road east of Tulkarm. Members of the Jewish Irgun Bet retaliated by killing two Arabs not far from Beit Sayeed. Events spiraled rapidly out of control, culminating with an Arab rampage through the streets of Jaffa that left nine Jews dead. The Arab Revolt had begun.