but there were too many people on the street, so I slowed down and waited for her to find the damned key. I passed by them as she slid it into the lock. Sabri looked at me again, and I looked back. They stepped into the passageway. I turned and caught the door before it could close. Sabri and the girl were in the middle of the courtyard by now. He heard my footfall and turned around. His hand was coming out of his coat pocket and I could see the butt. Sabri carried a Stechkin. It was a gift from a friend in the KGB. I hadn’t drawn my gun yet. Shamron’s rule, we called it. ‘We do not walk around in the street like gangsters with our guns drawn,’ Shamron always said. ‘One second, Gabriel. That’s all you’ll have. One second. Only a man with truly gifted hands can get his gun off his hip and into firing position in one second.’ ”
Gabriel looked around the room and held the gaze of each team member briefly before resuming.
“The Beretta had an eight-shot magazine, but I discovered that if I packed the rounds in tightly, I could squeeze in ten. Sabri never got his gun into position. He was turning to face me as I fired. His target profile was reduced-I think my first and second shots hit him in the left arm. I moved forward and put him on the ground. The girl was screaming, hitting me across the back with her handbag. I put ten shots in him, then released the magazine and rammed my backup into the butt. It had only one round, the eleventh. One round for every Jew Sabri murdered at Munich. I put the barrel into his ear and fired. The girl collapsed over his body and called me a murderer. I went back through the passageway, out into the street. A motorcycle pulled up. I climbed on the back.”
ONLY YAAKOV, who had seen his share of killing operations in the Occupied Territories, dared break the silence that had descended over the room. “What do Asad al-Khalifa and his boy Sabri have to do with Rome?”
Gabriel looked at Dina, and with his eyes posed the same question. Dina removed the photograph of Sabri and replaced it with the one showing Khaled at his father’s funeral.
“When Sabri’s wife, Rima, heard that he’d been killed in Paris, she walked into the bathroom of her apartment in Beirut and slit her wrists. Khaled found his mother lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood. He was now an orphan, his parents dead, his clan scattered to the four winds. Arafat adopted the boy, and after the funeral, Khaled disappeared.”
“Where did he go?” asked Yossi.
“Arafat saw the child as a potent symbol of the revolution and wanted him protected at all costs. We think he shipped him off to Europe under an assumed name to live with a wealthy Palestinian exile family. What we do know is this: In twenty-five years, Khaled al-Khalifa has never resurfaced. Two years ago I asked Lev for permission to start a quiet search for him. I can’t find him. It’s as if he vanished into thin air after the funeral. It’s as if he’s dead, too.”
“And your theory?”
“I believe Arafat prepared him to follow in the footsteps of his famous father and grandfather. I believe he’s been activated.”
“Why?”
“Because Arafat is trying to make himself relevant again, and he’s doing it the only way he knows how, with violence and terrorism. He’s using Khaled as his weapon.”
“You have no proof,” said Yaakov. “There’s a terrorist cell in Europe preparing to hit us again. We can’t afford to waste time looking for a phantom.”
Dina placed a new photograph on the overhead projector. It showed the wreckage of a building.
“ Buenos Aires, 1994. A truck bomb flattens the Jewish Community Center during a Shabbat meal. Eighty- seven dead. No claim of responsibility.”
A new slide, more wreckage.
“ Istanbul, 2003. Two car bombs explode simultaneously outside the city’s main synagogue. Twenty-eight dead. No claim of responsibility.”
Dina turned to Yossi and asked him to turn on the lights.
“You told me you had evidence linking Khaled to Rome,” Gabriel said, squinting in the sudden brightness. “But thus far, you’ve given me nothing but conjecture.”
“Oh, but I do have evidence, Gabriel.”
“So what’s the connection?”
“Beit Sayeed.”
THEY SET OUT from King Saul Boulevard in an Office transit van a few minutes before dawn. The windows of the van were tinted and bulletproof, and so inside it remained dark long after the sky began to grow light. By the time they reached Petah Tikvah, the sun was peeking over the ridgeline of the Judean Hills. It was a modern suburb of Tel Aviv now, with large homes and green lawns, but Gabriel, as he peered out the tinted windows, pictured the original stone cottages and Russian settlers huddled against yet another pogrom, this one led by Sheikh Asad and his holy warriors.
Beyond Petah Tikvah lay a broad plain of open farmland. Dina directed the driver onto a two-lane road that ran along the edge of a new superhighway. They followed the road for a few miles, then turned into a dirt track bordering a newly planted orchard.
“Here,” she said suddenly. “Stop here.”
The van rolled to a stop. Dina climbed down and hastened into the trees. Gabriel came next, Yossi and Rimona at his shoulder, Yaakov trailing a few paces behind. They came to the end of the orchard. Fifty yards in the distance lay a field of row crops. Between the orchard and field was a wasteland overgrown with green winter grass. Dina stopped and turned to face the others.
“Welcome to Beit Sayeed,” she said.
She beckoned them forward. It soon became apparent they were walking amid the remains of the village. Its footprint was clearly visible in the gray earth: the cottages and the stone walls, the little square and the circular wellhead. Gabriel had seen villages like it in the Jezreel Valley and the Galilee. No matter how hard the new owners of the land tried to erase the Arab villages, the footprint remained, like the memory of a dead child.
Dina stopped next to the wellhead and the others gathered round her. “On April 18, 1948, at approximately seven o’clock in the evening, a Palmach brigade surrounded Beit Sayeed. After a brief firefight the Arab militiamen fled, leaving the village undefended. Wholesale panic ensued. And why not? Three days earlier, more than a hundred residents of Deir Yassin had been killed by members of the Irgun and Stern Gang. Needless to say, the Arabs of Beit Sayeed weren’t anxious to meet a similar fate. It probably didn’t take much encouragement to get them to pack their bags and flee. When the village was deserted, the Palmach men dynamited the houses.”
“What’s the connection with Rome?” Yaakov asked impatiently.
“Daoud Hadawi.”
“By the time Hadawi was born this place had been wiped from the face of the earth.”
“That’s true,” Dina said. “Hadawi was born in the Jenin refugee camp, but his clan came from here. His grandmother, his father, and various aunts, uncles, and cousins fled Beit Sayeed the night of April 18, 1948.”
“And his grandfather?” asked Gabriel.
“He’d been killed a few days earlier, near Lydda. You see, Daoud Hadawi’s grandfather was one of Sheikh Asad’s most trusted men. He was guarding the sheikh the night Shamron killed him. He was the one Shamron stabbed before entering the cottage.”
“That’s all?” asked Yaakov.
Dina shook her head. “The bombings in Buenos Aires and Istanbul both took place on April eighteenth at seven o’clock.”
“My God,” murmured Rimona.
“There’s one more thing,” Dina said, turning to Gabriel. “The date you killed Sabri in Paris? Do you remember it?”
“It was early March,” he said, “but I can’t remember the date.”
“It was March fourth,” Dina said.
“The same day as Rome,” said Rimona.
“That’s right.” Dina looked around at the remnants of the old village. “It started right here in Beit Sayeed more than fifty years ago. It was Khaled who masterminded Rome, and he’s going to hit us again in twenty-eight days.”
