picture?”
“I’ve instructed Yusef to continue seeing her.”
“What’s she like?”
“Apparently quite attractive.”
“Do you have the resources in London to follow her?”
“Absolutely.”
“Do it. And get me a photograph of her.”
“You have an idea?”
They passed through a small square, then started up a long, steep hill. By the time they had reached the top, Tariq had explained the entire thing.
“It’s brilliant,” Kemel said. “But it has one flaw.”
“What’s that?”
“You won’t survive it.”
Tariq smiled sadly and said, “That’s the best news I’ve heard in a very long time.”
He turned and walked away. A moment later he had vanished into the fog. Kemel shivered. He turned up the collar of his coat and walked back to the Bairro Alto to listen to fado.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Bayswater, London
The operation settled into a comfortable if rather dull routine. Gabriel spent endless stretches of time with nothing to do but listen to the trivial details of Yusef’s life, which played out on his monitors like a dreadful radio drama. Yusef chatting on the telephone. Yusef arguing politics over cigarettes and Turkish coffee with his Palestinian friends. Yusef telling a heartbroken girl he could no longer see her because he was seriously involved with another. Gabriel found his life moving to the rhythm of Yusef’s. He ate when Yusef ate, slept when Yusef slept, and when Yusef made love to Jacqueline, Gabriel made love to her too.
But after ten days, Gabriel’s bugs had picked up nothing of value. There were several possible explanations. Perhaps Shamron had simply made a mistake. Perhaps Yusef really was just a waiter and a student. Perhaps he was an agent but was inactive. Or perhaps he was an active agent but was talking with his comrades through other means: signal sights and other forms of impersonal communication. To detect that, Gabriel would have to mount a full-scale round-the-clock surveillance operation. It would require multiple teams, at least a dozen officers-safe flats, vehicles, radios… An operation like that would be difficult to conceal from MI5, the British security service.
But there was one other possibility that troubled Gabriel most: the possibility that the operation was already blown. Perhaps his surveillance had turned up nothing because Yusef already suspected he was being watched. Perhaps he suspected that his flat was bugged and his telephones tapped. And perhaps he suspected that the beautiful French girl from the art gallery was actually an Israeli agent.
Gabriel decided it was time for another face-to-face meeting with Shamron in Paris.
He met Shamron the following morning in a tea shop on the rue Mouffetard. Shamron paid his tab, and they walked slowly up the hill through the markets and street vendors. “I want to pull her out,” Gabriel said.
Shamron paused at a fruit stand, picked up an orange, studied it for a moment before placing it gently back in the bin. Then he said, “Tell me you didn’t bring me all the way to Paris for this insanity.”
“Something doesn’t feel right. I want her out before it’s too late.”
“She’s not blown, and the answer is still no.” Shamron looked at Gabriel carefully and added, “Why is your face fallen, Gabriel? Are you listening to the tapes before you send them to me?”
“Of course I am.”
“Can’t you hear what’s going on? The endless lectures on the suffering of the Palestinians? The ruthlessness of the Israelis? The recitation of Palestinian poetry? All the old folklore about how beautiful life was in Palestine before the Jews?”
“What’s your point?”
“Either the boy is in love, or he has something else on his mind.”
“It’s the second possibility that concerns me.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe Yusef thinks of her as more than just a pretty girl? Has it ever occurred to you that he thinks of her as an impressionable girl who might be useful to Tariq and his organization?”
“It has, but she’s not prepared for that kind of operation. And frankly, neither are we.”
“So you want to fold up your tent and go home?”
“No, I just want to pull Jacqueline out.”
“And then what happens? Yusef gets nervous. Yusef gets suspicious and tears apart his flat. If he’s disciplined, he throws out every electrical appliance in the place. And your microphones go with them.”
“If we handle her departure skillfully, he’ll never suspect a thing. Besides, when I hired her, I promised her a short-term job. You know she has other commitments.”
“None more important than this. Pay her wages, full price. She stays, Gabriel. End of discussion.”
“If she stays, I go.”
“Then go!” Shamron snapped. “Go back to Cornwall and bury your head in your Vecellio. I’ll send in someone to take over for you.”
“You know I’m not going to leave her in your hands.”
Shamron quickly moved for appeasement. “You’ve been working around the clock for a long time. You don’t look so good. I haven’t forgotten what it’s like. Forget about Yusef for a few hours. He’s not going anywhere. Take a drive. Do something to clear your head. I need you at your best.”
On the train back to London, Gabriel entered the lavatory and locked the door. He stood for a long time in front of the mirror. There were new lines around his eyes, a sudden tightness at the corners of his mouth, a knife edge to his cheekbones. Beneath his eyes were dark circles, like smudges of charcoal.
“I haven’t forgotten what it’s like.”
The Black September operation… They had all come down with something: heart problems, high blood pressure, skin rashes, chronic colds. The assassins suffered the worst. After the first job in Rome, Gabriel found it impossible to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes he heard bullets tearing through flesh and shattering bone, saw fig wine mingling with blood on a marble floor. Shamron found a doctor in Paris, a sayan, who gave Gabriel a bottle of powerful tranquilizers. Within a few weeks he was addicted to them.
The pills and the stress made Gabriel look shockingly older. His skin hardened, the corners of his mouth turned down, his eyes turned the color of ash. His black hair went gray at the temples. He was twenty-two at the time but looked at least forty. When he went home, Leah barely recognized him. When they made love she said it was like sleeping with another man-not an older version of Gabriel but a complete stranger.
He splashed cold water on his face, scrubbed vigorously with a paper towel, then studied his reflection once more. He contemplated the chain of events-the bizarre roulette wheel of fate-that had led him to this place. Had there been no Hitler, no Holocaust, his parents would have remained in Europe instead of fleeing to a dusty agricultural settlement in the Jezreel Valley. Before the war his father had been an essayist and historian in Munich, his mother a gifted painter in Prague, and neither had adjusted well to the collectivism of the settlement or the Zionist zeal for manual labor. They had treated Gabriel more as a miniature adult than a boy with needs different from their own. He was expected to entertain and look after himself. His earliest childhood memory was of their small two-room house on the settlement: his father reading in his chair, his mother at her easel, Gabriel on the floor between them, building cities with crude blocks.
His parents detested Hebrew, so when they were alone they used the languages they had spoken in Europe: German, French, Czech, Russian, Yiddish. Gabriel absorbed them all. To his European languages he added Hebrew and Arabic. From his father he also took a flawless memory, from his mother unshakable patience and attention to detail. Their disdain for the collective had bred in him arrogance and a lone wolf attitude. Their secular agnosticism had encumbered him with no sense of Jewish morality or ethics. He preferred hiking to football,
