Prince of fire ga-5

by Daniel Silva

  Though Gabriel remained a prisoner of Fidelity, he ordered Dina and Yaakov to behave as ordinary tourists. He pulled double and triple shifts at the screen so they could eat lunch in a quayside restaurant or tour the outer reaches of the city by motorcycle. Yaakov made a point of driving the escape route at different periods of the day to familiarize himself with the traffic patterns. Dina would shop for clothing in one of the boutique-lined pedestrian streets or don a swimsuit and sun herself on the aft deck. Her body bore the marks of the nightmare on Dizengoff Square, a thick red scar across the right side of her abdomen, a long jagged scar on her right thigh. On the streets of Marseilles she shrouded them with clothing, but aboard Fidelity she made no attempt to conceal the damage from Gabriel and Yaakov.

  At night Gabriel ordered three-hour shifts so that those who were not watching could get some meaningful sleep. He soon came to regret that decision, because three hours seemed an eternity. The street would grow quiet as death. Each figure who flashed across the screen seemed filled with possibility. To relieve the boredom, Gabriel would whisper greetings to the Ayin officers on duty in the esplanade in front of the Palais de Justice-or he would raise the duty officer on the Operations Desk at King Saul Boulevard on the pretext he was testing the satellite connection, just so he could hear a voice from home.

  Dina was Gabriel’s relief. Once she had settled herself yoga-like in front of the screen, he would wander back to his stateroom and try to sleep, but in his mind he would see the door; or Sabri walking down the boulevard St-Germain with his hand in the pocket of his lover; or the Arabs of Beit Sayeed trudging off to exile; or Shamron, on the waterfront in Sardinia, reminding him to do his duty. And sometimes he would wonder whether he still possessed the reservoir of emotional coldness necessary to walk up to a man on a street and fill his body with chunks of searing metal. In moments of self-obsession he would find himself hoping that Khaled never again set foot on the boulevard St-Remy. And then he would picture the ruins of the embassy in Rome, and remember the scent of burnt flesh that hung on the air like the spirits of the dead, and he would see Khaled’s death, glorious and graceful, rendered in the passionate stillness of a Bellini. He would kill Khaled. Khaled had left him with no other choice, and for that Gabriel hated him.

  On the fourth night he slept not at all. At 7:45 in the morning he rose from his bed to prepare for his eight o’clock shift. He drank coffee in the galley and stared at the calendar hanging from the door of the refrigerator. Tomorrow was the anniversary of Beit Sayeed’s fall. Today was the last day. He went into the salon. Yaakov, wreathed in cigarette smoke, was looking at the screen. Gabriel tapped his shoulder and told him to get a couple hours’ sleep. He stood in the same place for a few minutes, finishing his coffee, then he assumed his usual position-right hand to his chin, left hand supporting his right elbow-and paced the carpet in front of the screen. The lawyer stepped out of the door at 8:15. The grande dame came ten minutes later. Her terrier shat for Gabriel’s camera. Sophie, Leah’s wraith, came last. She paused for a moment in front of the door to fish a pair of sunglasses from her bag before floating prettily out of view.

  “You look terrible,” Dina said. “Take the rest of the night off. Yaakov and I will cover for you.”

  It was early evening, the harbor was quiet except for the throb of French technopop from another yacht. Gabriel, yawning, confessed to Dina that he had slept little, if at all, since their arrival in Marseilles. Dina suggested he take a pill.

  “And if Khaled comes while I’m lying unconscious in my room?”

  “Maybe you’re right.” She settled herself cross-legged on the couch and fixed her gaze on the television screen. The pavement of the boulevard St-Remy was busy with the early-evening foot traffic. “So why can’t you sleep?”

  “Do you really need me to explain it to you?”

  She kept her eyes on the screen. “Because you’re worried he won’t come? Because you’re concerned you might not get a shot at him? Because you’re afraid we’ll all be caught and arrested?”

  “I don’t like this work, Dina. I never have.”

  “None of us do. If we did, they’d run us out of the service. We do it because we have no choice. We do it because they force us to do it. Tell me something, Gabriel. What would happen if tomorrow they decided to stop the bombings, and the stabbings and shootings? There would be peace, right? But they don’t want peace. They want to destroy us. The only difference between Hamas and Hitler is that Hamas lacks the power and the means to carry out an extermination of the Jews. But they’re working on it.”

  “There’s a clear moral distinction between the Palestinians and the Nazis. There is a certain justice in Khaled’s cause. Only his means are abhorrent and immoral.”

  “Justice? Khaled and his ilk could have had peace time and time again, but they don’t want it. His cause is our destruction. If you believe he wants peace, you’re deluding yourself.” She pointed toward the screen. “If he comes to that street, you have a right, indeed a moral duty, to make certain he never leaves there to kill and maim again. Do it, Gabriel, or so help me God, I’ll do it for you.”

  “Would you really? Do you truly think you’d be capable of killing him in cold blood, right there on that street? Would it really be so easy for you to pull the trigger?”

  She was silent for a time, her gaze fixed on the flickering screen of the television. “My father came from the Ukraine,” she said. “Kiev. He was the only member of his family to survive the war. The rest were marched out to Babi Yar and shot to death along with thirty thousand other Jews. After the war he came to Palestine. He took the Hebrew name Sarid, which means remnant. He married my mother, and together they had six children, one child for every million killed in the Shoah. I was the last. They named me Dina: avenged.”

  The volume of the music rose suddenly, then died away. When it was gone, all that remained was the lapping of a wake against the hull of the yacht. Dina’s eyes narrowed suddenly, as if remembering physical pain. Her gaze remained on the image of the boulevard St-Remy, but Gabriel could see that it was Dizengoff Street that occupied her thoughts.

  “On the morning of October 19, 1994, I was standing at the corner of Dizengoff and Queen Esther streets with my mother and two of my sisters. When the Number Five bus came, I kissed my mother and sisters and watched them climb on board. While the doors were open, I saw him.” She paused and turned her head to look at Gabriel. “He was sitting just behind the driver, with a bag at his feet. He actually looked at me. He had the sweetest face. No, I thought, it couldn’t be possible. Not the Number Five bus on Dizengoff Street. So I said nothing. The doors closed, and the bus started to drive away.”

  Her eyes clouded with tears. She folded her hands and laid them over the scar on her leg.

  “So what did this boy have in his bag, this boy who I saw but said nothing about? He had the shell of an Egyptian land mine, that’s what he had in the bag. He had twenty kilograms of military-grade TNT and bolts soaked with rat poison. The flash came first, then the sound of the explosion. The bus rose several feet into the air and crashed to the street again. I was knocked to the ground. I could see people screaming all round me, but I couldn’t hear anything-the blast wave had damaged my eardrums. I noticed a human leg lying in the street next to me. I assumed it was mine, but then I saw that both my legs were still attached. The leg had come from someone in the bus.”

  Gabriel, listening to her, thought suddenly of Rome; of standing next to Shimon Pazner and gazing at the wreckage of the embassy. Was Dina’s presence aboard Fidelity serendipitous, he wondered, or had she been placed here intentionally by Shamron as a living reminder about the importance of doing his duty?

  “The first policemen who came to the scene were sickened by the blood and the stench of burning flesh. They fell to their knees in the street and vomited. As I lay there, waiting for someone to help me, blood began to drip on me. I looked up and saw blood and scraps of flesh hanging on the leaves of the chi
naberry trees. It rained blood that morning on Dizengoff Street. Then the rabbis from Hevra Kadisha arrived. They collected the largest body parts by hand, including those scraps of flesh in the trees. Then they used tweezers to pick up the smallest pieces. I watched rabbis pick up the remains of my mother and two sisters with tweezers and place them in a plastic bag. That’s what we buried. Scraps. Remnants.”

  She wrapped her arms around her legs and drew her knees beneath her chin. Gabriel sat on the couch next to her and settled his gaze on the screen to make certain they missed nothing. His hand reached out for hers. She took it as a tear spilled down her cheek.

  “I blamed myself. If I’d known that the sweet-looking boy was really Abdel Rahim al-Souwi, member of Hamas’s Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, I would have been able to warn them. If I’d known that Abdel’s brother had been killed in a shoot-out with the IDF in 1989, I would have understood why he was riding the Number Five bus in North Tel Aviv with a bag at his feet. I decided I would fight back, not with a gun, but with my brain. I vowed that next time I saw one of them, I would know, and I’d be able to warn the people before it was too late. That’s why I volunteered for the Office. That’s why I was able to make the connection between Rome and Beit Sayeed. I know them better than they know themselves.”

  Another tear. This time Gabriel wiped it away.

  “Why did he kill my mother and sisters, Gabriel? Was it because we stole his land? Was it because we were occupiers? No, it was because we wanted to make peace. If I hate them, you’ll forgive me. If I beg you to show Khaled no mercy, you’ll grant me leniency for my crimes. I’m Dina Sarid, the avenged remnant. I’m the sixth million. And if Khaled comes here tonight, don’t you dare let him get on that bus.”

  Lev had offered him use of a Jerusalem safe flat. Shamron had politely declined. Instead he’d instructed Tamara to find a folding camp bed in the storeroom and asked Gilah to send a suitcase with clean clothes and a shaving kit. Like Gabriel, he had slept little the past week. Some nights he would pace the hallways all hours or sit outside and smoke with the Shabak bodyguards. Mostly he lay on his folding cot, staring at the red glow of the digital clock on his desk and calculating the minutes that remained until the anniversary of Beit Sayeed’s destruction. He filled the empty hours by recalling operations past. The waiting. Always the waiting. Some officers were driven mad by it. For Shamron it was a narcotic, akin to the first pangs of intense love. The hot flashes, the sudden chills, the gnawing of the stomach-he had endured it countless times over the years. In the back alleys of Damascus and Cairo, in the cobbled streets of Europe, and in a derelict suburb of Buenos Aires, where he’d waited for Adolf Eichmann, stationmaster of the Holocaust, to step off a city bus and into the grasp of the very people he had tried to annihilate. A fitting way for it to end, Shamron thought. One last night vigil. One final wait for a telephone to ring. When finally it did, the harsh electronic tone sounded like music to his ears. He closed his eyes and allowed it to ring a second time. Then he reached out in the darkness and brought the receiver to his ear.

  The digital readout on the television monitor had said 12:27 A.M. Technically it had been Yaakov’s shift, but it was the last night before the deadline, and no one was going to sleep. They had been seated on the couch in the salon, Yaakov in his usual confrontational pose, Dina in a posture of meditation, and Gabriel as though he were awaiting word of an expected death. The boulevard St-Remy had been quiet that night. The couple who had strolled past the door at 12:27 were the first to appear in the camera shot in nearly fifteen minutes. Gabriel had looked at Dina, whose eyes had remained locked on the screen.

  “Did you see that?”

  “I saw it.”

  Gabriel stood and went to the console. He removed the cassette from the video recorder and put a fresh tape in its place. Then he placed the cassette in a playback deck and rewound the tape. With Dina looking over his shoulder, he pressed PLAY. The couple entered the shot and walked past the doorway without giving it a glance.

  Gabriel pressed STOP.

  “Look how he put the girl on his right side facing the street. He’s using her as a shield. And look at his right hand. It’s in the girl’s pocket, just like Sabri.”

  REWIND. PLAY. STOP.

  “My God,” Gabriel said, “he moves just like his father.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Gabriel went to the radio and raised the watcher outside the Palais de Justice.

  “Did you see that couple who just walked by the building?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Hold on.” A silence while the Ayin changed position. “Heading up the street, toward the gardens.”

  “Can you follow them?”

  “It’s dead quiet down here. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “Damn it.”

  “Just a minute.”

  “What?”

  “Hold on.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “They’re turning around.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. They’re retracing their steps.”

  Gabriel looked up at the monitor just as they entered the shot again, this time from the opposite direction. Once again the woman was facing the street, and once again the man had his hand in the back pocket of her jeans. They stopped at the door of Number 56. The man drew a key from his pocket.

  19

  SURREY, ENGLAND

  At the Stratford Clinic it was just after ten in the evening when Amira Assaf came out of the elevator and set off down the fourth-floor corridor. Rounding the first corner, she spotted the bodyguard, sitting on a chair outside Miss Martinson’s room. He looked up as Amira approached and closed the book he was reading.

  “I need to make sure she’s sleeping comfortably,” Amira said.

  The bodyguard nodded and got to his feet. He wasn’t surprised by Amira’s request. She’d been stopping by the room every night at this time for the past month.

  She opened the door and went inside. The bodyguard followed after her and closed the door behind him. A lamp, dimmed to its lowest setting, was burning softly. Amira went to the side of the bed and looked down. Miss Martinson was sound asleep. Hardly a surprise-Amira had given her twice her usual dosage of sedative. She’d be out for several more hours.

  Amira adjusted the blankets, then opened the top drawer of the bedside table. The gun, a silenced Walther nine-millimeter, was precisely where she had left it earlier that afternoon while Miss Martinson was still in the solarium. She seized the weapon by the grip, then spun round and leveled the gun at the bodyguard’s chest. He reached inside his jacket in a lightning-fast movement. Before his hand emerged, Amira fired twice, the double-tap of a trained killer. Both shots struck the upper chest. The bodyguard tumbled backward onto the floor. Amira stood over him and fired two more shots.

  She drew a series of deep breaths to quell the intense wave of nausea that washed over her. Then she went to the telephone and dialed an internal hospital extension.

  “Would you please ask Hamid to come up to Miss Martinson’s room? There’s some linen that needs to be collected before the truck leaves.”

  She hung up the phone, then took the dead man by the arms and dragged him into the bathroom. The carpet was smeared with blood. Amira was not concerned by this. Her intention was not to conceal the crime, only to delay its discovery by a few hours.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Hamid.”

  She unlocked the door and opened it. Hamid wheeled in a laundry cart.

  “You all right?”

  Amira nodded. Hamid wheeled the cart next to the bed while Amira pulled away the blankets and sheets. Miss Martinson, frail and scarred, lay motionless. Hamid lifted her by her torso, Amira by her legs, and together they lowered her gently into the laundry cart. Amira concealed her beneath a layer of sheets.

  She went out into the corridor to make certain it was
clear, then looked back at Hamid and motioned for him to join her. Hamid rolled the cart out of the room and started toward the elevator. Amira closed the door, then inserted her passkey into the lock and snapped it off.

  She met Hamid at the elevator and pressed the call button. The wait seemed an eternity. When finally the doors opened, they wheeled the cart into the empty chamber. Amira pressed the button for the ground floor and they sunk slowly downward.

  The ground-floor foyer was deserted. Hamid went out first and turned to the right, toward the doorway that led to the rear courtyard. Amira followed after him. Outside, a van was idling with its rear cargo doors open. On the side was stenciled the name of a local laundry supply company. The usual driver was lying in a stand of beech trees two miles from the hospital with a bullet in his neck.

  Hamid lifted the laundry bag out of the cart and placed it gently into the back of the van, then closed the doors and climbed into the front passenger seat. Amira watched the van roll off, then she went back inside and walked to the head nurse’s station. Ginger was on duty.

  “I’m not feeling terribly well tonight, Ginger. Think you can get by without me?”

  “No problem, luv. Need a ride?”

  Amira shook her head. “I can manage on the bike. See you tomorrow night.”

  Amira went to the staff locker room. Before stripping off her uniform she hid the gun inside her backpack. Then she changed into jeans, a heavy woolen sweater, and a leather jacket. A moment later she was walking across the rear courtyard with her bag across her back.