Prince of fire ga-5, Page 2

  “Varash is scheduled to meet in the prime minister’s office at five o’clock.”

  Varash was the Hebrew-language acronym for the Committee of the Heads of the Services. It included the director-general of Shabak, the internal security service; the commander of Aman, military intelligence; and, of course, the chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service, which was referred to only as “the Office.” Shamron, by charter and reputation, had a permanent seat at the table.

  “In the meantime,” Tamara said, “he wants a briefing in twenty minutes.”

  “Tell him a half hour would be better.”

  “If you want a half hour, you tell him.”

  Shamron sat down at his desk and, remote in hand, spent the next five minutes scanning the world’s television media for as many overt details as he could. Then he picked up the telephone and made three calls, one to an old contact at the Italian Embassy named Tommaso Naldi; the second to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, located a short distance away on Yitzhak Rabin Boulevard; and the third to Office headquarters on King Saul Boulevard.

  “He can’t talk to you now,” said Lev’s secretary. Shamron had anticipated her reaction. It was easier to get through an army checkpoint than Lev’s secretary.

  “Put him on the phone,” Shamron said, “or the next call will be from the prime minister.”

  Lev kept Shamron waiting five minutes.

  “What do you know?” Shamron asked.

  “The truth? Nothing.”

  “Do we have a Rome station any longer?”

  “Not to speak of,” said Lev, “but we do have a Rome katsa. Pazner was in Naples on business. He just checked in. He’s on his way back to Rome now.”

  Thank God, thought Shamron. “And the others?”

  “It’s hard to tell. As you might imagine, the situation is rather chaotic.” Lev had a grating passion for understatement. “Two clerks are missing, along with the communications officer.”

  “Is there anything in the files that might be compromising or embarrassing?”

  “The best we can hope for is that they went up in smoke.”

  “They’re stored in cabinets built to withstand a missile strike. We’d better get to them before the Italians do.”

  Tamara poked her head inside the door. “He wants you. Now.”

  “I’ll see you at five o’clock,” Shamron said to Lev, and rang off.

  He collected his notes, then followed Tamara along the corridor toward the prime minister’s office. Two members of his Shabak protective detail, large boys with short-cropped hair and shirts hanging outside their trousers, watched Shamron’s approach. One of them stepped aside and opened the door. Shamron slipped past and went inside.

  The shades were drawn, the room cool and in semidarkness. The prime minister was seated behind his large desk, dwarfed by a towering portrait of the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl that hung on the wall at his back. Shamron had been in this room many times, yet it never failed to quicken his pulse. For Shamron this chamber represented the end of a remarkable journey, the reconstitution of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. Birth and death, war and Holocaust-Shamron, like the prime minister, had played a leading role in the entire epic. Privately, they regarded it as their State, their creation, and they guarded it jealously against all those-Arab, Jewish, or Gentile-who sought to weaken or destroy it.

  The prime minister, without a word, nodded for Shamron to sit. Small at the head and very wide at the waist, he looked rather like a formation of volcanic rock. His stubby hands lay folded on the desktop; his heavy jowls hung over his shirt collar.

  “How bad, Ari?”

  “By the end of the day, we’ll have a clearer picture,” Shamron said. “I can say one thing for certain. This will go down as one of the worst acts of terrorism ever committed against the State, if not the worst.”

  “How many dead?”

  “Still unclear.”

  “The ambassadors?”

  “Officially, they’re still listed as unaccounted for.”

  “And unofficially?”

  “It’s believed they’re dead.”

  “Both?”

  Shamron nodded. “And their deputies.”

  “How many dead for certain?”

  “The Italians report twelve police and security personnel dead. At the moment, the Foreign Ministry is confirming twenty-two personnel killed, along with thirteen family members from the residence complex. Eighteen people remain unaccounted for.”

  “Fifty-two dead?”

  “At least. Apparently there were several visitors standing at the entrance waiting to be admitted to the building.”

  “What about the Office station?”

  Shamron repeated what he’d just learned from Lev. Pazner was alive. Three Office employees were feared to be among the dead.

  “Who did it?”

  “Lev hasn’t reached any-”

  “I’m not asking Lev.”

  “The list of potential suspects, unfortunately, is long. Anything I might say now would be speculation, and at this point, speculation does us no good.”

  “Why Rome?”

  “Hard to say,” Shamron said. “Perhaps it was just a target of opportunity. Maybe they saw a weakness, a chink in our armor, and they decided to exploit it.”

  “But you don’t believe that?”

  “No, Prime Minister.”

  “Could it have something to do with that affair at the Vatican a couple of years ago-that business with Allon?”

  “I doubt it. All the evidence thus far suggests it was a suicide attack carried out by Arab terrorists.”

  “I want to make a statement after Varash meets.”

  “I think that would be wise.”

  “And I want you to write it for me.”

  “If you wish.”

  “You know about loss, Ari. We both do. Put some heart into it. Tap that reservoir of Polish pain you’re always carrying around with you. The country will need to cry tonight. Let them cry. But assure them that the animals who did this will be punished.”

  “They will, Prime Minister.”

  Shamron stood.

  “Who did this, Ari?”

  “We’ll know soon enough.”

  “I want his head,” the prime minister said savagely. “I want his head on a stick.”

  “And you shall have it.”

  Forty-eight hours would pass before the first break in the case, and it would come not in Rome but in the northern industrial city of Milan. Units of the Polizia di Stato and Carabinieri, acting on a tip from a Tunisian immigrant informant, raided a pensione in a workers’ quarter north of the city center where two of the four surviving attackers were thought to be hiding. The men were no longer there, and based on the condition of the room, they had fled in a hurry. Police discovered a pair of suitcases filled with clothing and a half-dozen cellular telephones, along with false passports and stolen credit cards. The most intriguing item, however, was a compact disk sewn into the lining of one of the bags. Italian investigators at the national crime laboratory in Rome determined that the disk contained data but were unable to penetrate its sophisticated security firewall. Eventually, after much internal debate, it was decided to approach the Israelis for help.

  And so it was that Shimon Pazner received his summons to the headquarters of the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Democratica, Italy’s Intelligence and Democratic Security Service. He arrived a few minutes after ten in the evening and was shown immediately into the office of the deputy chief, a man named Martino Bellano. They were a mismatched pair: Bellano, tall and lean and dressed as though he had just stepped off the pages of an Italian fashion magazine; Pazner, short and muscular with hair like steel wool and a crumpled sports jacket. “A pile of yesterday’s laundry” is how Bellano would describe Pazner after the encounter, and in the aftermath of the affair, when it became clear that Pazner had behaved less than forthrightly, Bellano routinely referred to the Israeli as �
��that kosher shylock in a borrowed blazer.”

  On that first evening, however, Bellano could not have been more solicitous of his visitor. Pazner was not the type to elicit sympathy from strangers, but as he was shown into Bellano’s office, his eyes were heavy with exhaustion and a profound case of survivor’s guilt. Bellano spent several moments expressing his “profound grief” over the bombing before getting round to the reason for Pazner’s late-night summons: the computer disk. He placed it ceremoniously on the desktop and slid it toward Pazner with the tip of a manicured forefinger. Pazner accepted it calmly, though later he would confess to Shamron that his heart was beating a chaotic rhythm against his breastbone.

  “We’ve been unable to pick the lock,” Bellano said. “Perhaps you’ll have a bit more luck.”

  “We’ll do our best,” replied Pazner modestly.

  “Of course, you’ll share with us any material you happen to find.”

  “It goes without saying,” said Pazner as the disk disappeared into his coat pocket.

  Another ten minutes would elapse before Bellano saw fit to conclude the meeting. Pazner remained stoically in his seat, gripping the arms of his chair like a man in the throes of a nicotine fit. Those who witnessed his departure down the grandiose main corridor took note of his unhurried pace. Only when he was outside, descending the front steps, was there any hint of urgency in his stride.

  Within hours of the attack, a team of Israeli bomb specialists, regrettably well-experienced in their trade, had arrived in Rome to begin the task of sifting the wreckage for evidence of the bomb’s composition and origin. As luck would have it, the military charter that had borne them from Tel Aviv was still on the apron at Fiumicino. Pazner, with Shamron’s approval, commandeered the plane to take him back to Tel Aviv. He arrived a few minutes after sunrise and walked directly into the arms of an Office greeting party. They headed immediately to King Saul Boulevard, driving at great haste but with no recklessness, for the cargo was too precious to risk on that most dangerous element of Israeli life: its roadways. By eight that morning, the computer disk was the target of a coordinated assault by the best minds of the service’s Technical division, and by nine the security barriers had been successfully breached. Ari Shamron would later boast that the Office computer geniuses cracked the code in the span of an average Italian coffee break. Decryption of the material took another hour, and by ten a printout of the disk’s contents was sitting on Lev’s immaculate desk. The material remained there for only a few moments, because Lev immediately tossed it into a secure briefcase and headed to Kaplan Street in Jerusalem to brief the prime minister. Shamron, of course, was at his master’s side.

  “Someone needs to bring him in,” said Lev. He spoke with the enthusiasm of a man offering his own eulogy. Perhaps, thought Shamron, that was precisely how he felt, for he viewed the man in question as a rival, and Lev’s preferred method of dealing with rivals, real or potential, was exile. “Pazner is heading back to Italy tonight. Let him take along a team from Extraction.”

  Shamron shook his head. “He’s mine. I’ll bring him home.” He paused. “Besides, Pazner has something more important to do at the moment.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Telling the Italians we couldn’t break the lock on that disk, of course.”

  Lev made a habit of never being the first to leave the room, and so it was with great reluctance that he uncoiled himself from his chair and moved toward the exit. Shamron looked up and saw that the prime minister’s eyes were on him.

  “He’ll have to stay here until this blows over,” the prime minister said.

  “Yes, he will,” agreed Shamron.

  “Perhaps we should find something for him to do to help pass the time.”

  Shamron nodded once, and it was done.

  3

  LONDON

  The Quest for Gabriel was nearly as intense as the search for the perpetrators of the massacre in Rome. He was a man who never telegraphed his movements and was no longer under Office discipline, so it surprised no one, least of all Shamron, that he’d left Venice without bothering to tell anyone where he was going. As it turned out, he’d gone to England to see his wife, Leah, who was living in a private psychiatric hospital in a secluded corner of Surrey. His first stop, however, was New Bond Street, where, at the behest of a London art dealer named Julian Isherwood, he’d agreed to attend an Old Master sale at Bonhams auction house.

  Isherwood arrived first, clutching a battered attache case in one hand and the throat of his Burberry raincoat with the other. A few other dealers were huddled in the lobby. Isherwood murmured an insincere greeting and loped off to the cloakroom. A moment later, relieved of his sodden Burberry, he took up watch near the window. Tall and precarious, he was clad in his customary auction attire, a gray chalk-stripe suit and his lucky crimson necktie. He arranged his windblown gray locks to cover his bald spot and briefly examined his own face reflected in the glass. Hungover, a stranger might have assumed, perhaps a bit drunk. Isherwood was neither. He was stone-cold sober. Sharp as his mother’s tongue. He flung out his arm, pushed his French cuff from his wrist, and shot a glance at his watch. Late. Not like Gabriel. Punctual as the Nine O’clock News. Never one to keep a client cooling his heels. Never one to fall behind on a restoration-unless, of course, it was due to circumstances beyond his control.

  Isherwood straightened his necktie and lowered his narrow shoulders, so that the figure peering back at him had the easy grace and confidence that seemed the birthright of Englishmen of a certain class. He moved in their circles, disposed of their collections, and acquired new ones on their behalf, yet he would never truly be one of them. And how could he? His backbone-of-England surname and lanky English bearing concealed the fact that he was not, at least technically, English at all. English by nationality and passport, yes, but German by birth, French by upbringing, and Jewish by religion. Only a handful of trusted friends knew that Isherwood had staggered into London as a child refugee in 1942 after being carried across the snowbound Pyrenees by a pair of Basque shepherds. Or that his father, the renowned Berlin art dealer Samuel Isakowitz, had ended his days on the edge of a Polish forest, in a place called Sobibor.

  There was something else Julian Isherwood kept secret from his competitors in the London art world-and from nearly everyone else, for that matter. Over the years he had done the occasional favor for a certain gentleman from Tel Aviv named Shamron. Isherwood, in the Hebrew-based jargon of Shamron’s irregular outfit, was a sayan, an unpaid volunteer helper, though most of his encounters with Shamron had been closer to blackmail than voluntarism.

  Just then Isherwood spotted a flash of leather and denim amid the fluttering mackintoshes of New Bond Street. The figure vanished for a moment, then reappeared suddenly, as though he had stepped through a curtain onto a lighted stage. Isherwood, as always, was taken aback by his unimpressive physical stature-five-eight, perhaps, a hundred and fifty pounds fully clothed. His hands were thrust into the pockets of a car-length black-leather jacket, his shoulders were slumped slightly forward. His walk was smooth and seemingly without effort, and there was a slight outward bend to his legs that Isherwood always associated with men who could run very fast or were good at football. He wore a pair of neat suede brogues with rubber soles and, despite the steady rain, carried no umbrella. The face came into focus-long, high at the forehead, narrow at the chin. The nose looked as though it had been carved from wood, the cheekbones were wide and prominent, and there was a hint of the Russian steppes in the green, restless eyes. The black hair was cropped short and very gray at the temples. It was a face of many possible national origins, and Gabriel had the linguistic gifts to put it to good use. Isherwood never quite knew who to expect when Gabriel walked through the door. He was no one, he lived nowhere. He was the eternal wandering Jew.

  Suddenly he was standing at Isherwood’s side. He offered no greeting, and his hands remained jammed in his coat pockets. The manners Gabriel had acquired wo
rking for Shamron in the secret world had left him ill-equipped to function in the overt one. Only when he was playing a role did he appear animated. In those rare flashes when an outsider glimpsed the real Gabriel-such as now, thought Isherwood-the man they saw was silent and sullen and clinically shy. Gabriel made people supremely uncomfortable. It was one of his many gifts.

  They walked across the lobby toward the registrar’s desk. “Who are we today?” Isherwood asked sotto voce, but Gabriel just leaned over and scrawled something illegible in the logbook. Isherwood had forgotten that he was left-handed. Signed his name with his left hand, held a paintbrush with his right, handled his knife and fork with either. And his Beretta? Thankfully, Isherwood did not know the answer to that.

  They climbed the stairs, Gabriel at Isherwood’s shoulder, quiet as a bodyguard. His leather coat did not rustle, his jeans did not whistle, his brogues seemed to float over the carpet. Isherwood had to brush against Gabriel’s shoulder to remind himself he was still there. At the top of the stairs a security guard asked Gabriel to open his leather shoulder bag. He unzipped the flap and showed him the contents: a Binomag visor, an ultraviolet lamp, an infrascope, and a powerful halogen flashlight. The guard, satisfied, waved them forward.

  They entered the salesroom. Hanging from the walls and mounted on baize-covered pedestals were a hundred paintings, each bathed in carefully focused light. Scattered amid the works were roving bands of dealers-jackals, thought Isherwood, picking over the bones for a tasty morsel. Some had their faces pressed to the paintings, others preferred the long view. Opinions were being formed. Money was on the table. Calculators were producing estimates of potential profit. It was the unseemly side of the art world, the side Isherwood loved. Gabriel seemed oblivious. He moved like a man accustomed to the chaos of the souk. Isherwood did not have to remind Gabriel to keep a low profile. It came naturally to him.

  Jeremy Crabbe, the tweedy director of Bonhams’ Old Master department, was waiting near a French school landscape, an unlit pipe wedged between his yellowed incisors. He shook Isherwood’s hand joylessly and looked at the younger man in leather at his side. “Mario Delvecchio,” Gabriel said, and as always, Isherwood was astonished by the pitch-perfect Venetian accent.