“Where is she?” He repeated the question in Arabic. “Answer me! Don’t speak to me in French. Speak to me in your real language. Speak to me in Arabic.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“So you
He pushed her a fraction of an inch closer to the edge. Her hand reached back for the handrail but found only air. Gabriel shook her once violently.
“If you kill me, you’ll destroy yourself-and your wife. I’m your only hope.”
“And if I do as you say?”
“You’ll save her life.”
“What about mine?”
She left the question unanswered.
“Tell the rest of your team to back off. Tell them to leave Marseilles immediately. Otherwise we’ll tell the French that you’re here, and that will only make the situation worse.”
He looked over her shoulder and saw Yaakov coming slowly up the steps toward him. Gabriel, with his left hand, signaled for him to stop. Just then Dina came on the air:
Gabriel looked back into the girl’s eyes. “And if I tell them to back off?”
“I’ll take you to her.”
Gabriel shook her again. “So you
“No, we’ll be told where to go. One destination at a time, very small steps. If we miss one deadline, your wife dies. If your agents try to follow us, your wife dies. If you kill me, your wife dies. If you do exactly what we say, she’ll live.”
“And what happens to me?”
“Hasn’t she suffered enough? Save your wife, Allon. Come with me, and do exactly as I say. It’s your only chance.”
He looked down the steps and saw Yaakov shaking his head. Dina was whispering in his ear.
He looked into her eyes. Shamron had trained him to read the emotions of others, to tell truthfulness from deception, and in the dark eyes of Khaled’s girl he saw only the abiding forthrightness of a fanatic, the belief that past suffering justified any act, no matter how cruel. He also noticed an unsettling tranquillity. She was trained, this girl, not merely indoctrinated. Her training would make her a worthy opponent, but it was her fanaticism that would leave her vulnerable.
Did they really have Leah? He had no reason to doubt it. Khaled had destroyed an embassy in the heart of Rome. Surely he could manage to kidnap an infirm woman from an English mental hospital. To abandon Leah now, after all she had suffered, was unthinkable. Perhaps she would die. Perhaps they both would. Perhaps, if they were lucky, Khaled might permit them to die together.
He had played it well, Khaled. He had never intended to kill Gabriel in Venice. The Milan dossier had been only the opening gambit in an elaborate plot to lure Gabriel here, to this spot in Marseilles, and to present him with a path he had no choice but to follow. Fidelity nudged him forward. He pulled her away from the edge of the stairs and released his grip on her throat.
“Back off,” Gabriel said directly into his wrist-microphone. “Leave Marseilles.”
When Yaakov shook his head, Gabriel snapped, “Do as I say.”
A car came down the hill from the direction of the church. It was the Mercedes that had blocked their path a few minutes earlier on the boulevard St-Remy. It stopped in front of them. The girl opened the back door and got in. Gabriel looked one final time at Yaakov, then climbed in after her.
“HE’S OFF THE AIR, ” Lev said. “His beacon has been stationary for five minutes.”
His beacon, thought Shamron, is lying in a Marseilles gutter. Gabriel had vanished from their screens. All the planning, all the preparation, and Khaled had beaten them with the oldest of Arab ploys-a hostage.
“Is it true about Leah?” Shamron asked.
“ London station has called the security officer several times. So far they haven’t been able to raise him.”
“That means they’ve got her,” Shamron said. “And I suspect we have a dead security agent somewhere inside the Stratford Clinic.”
“If that’s all true, a very serious storm is going to break in England in the next few minutes.” There was a bit too much composure in Lev’s voice for Shamron’s taste, but then Lev always did place a high premium on self- control. “We need to reach out to our friends in MI5 and the Home Office to keep things as quiet as possible for as long as possible. We also need to bring the Foreign Ministry into the picture. The ambassador will have to do some serious hand-holding.”
“Agreed,” Shamron said, “but I’m afraid there’s something we have to do first.”
He looked at his wristwatch. It was 7:28 A.M. local time, 6:28 in France -twelve hours until the anniversary of the evacuation of Beit Sayeed.
“BUT WE CAN’T just leave him here,” Dina said.
“He’s not
“There must be something we can do to help him.”
“You can’t be any help to him if you’re sitting in a French jail.”
Yaakov raised his wrist-microphone to his lips and ordered the
She listened to it all again: Yaakov and Gabriel wordlessly mounting the bike; Yaakov firing the engine and accelerating away; the sound of the tires locking up and skidding along the asphalt of the boulevard St-Remy; Gabriel’s voice, calm and without emotion:
Twenty seconds later, the woman:
How long had Khaled spent planning it? Years, she thought. He had dropped the clues for her to find, and she had followed them, from Beit Sayeed to Buenos Aires, from Istanbul to Rome, and now Gabriel was in their hands. They would kill him, and it was her fault.
She pressed PLAY and listened again to Gabriel’s quarrel with the Palestinian woman, then picked up the satellite phone and raised King Saul Boulevard on the secure link.
“I need a voice identification.”
“You have a recording?”
“Yes.”
“Quality?”
Dina explained the circumstances of the intercept.
“Play the recording, please.”
She pressed PLAY.
“Stand by, please.”
Two minutes later: “No match on file.”
MARTINEAU MET Abu Saddiq one last time on the boulevard d’Athenes, at the base of the broad steps that led to the Gare Saint-Charles. Abu Saddiq was dressed in Western clothing: neat gabardine trousers and a pressed cotton shirt. He told Martineau a boat had just left the port at great haste.
“What was it called?”
