He stopped at the edge of a trench and peered down. Crouched on all fours was a small figure in a tan bush jacket, picking at the soil with a hand trowel. Gabriel thought of the last time he had stood over a man in an excavation pit and felt as though a lump of ice had been placed suddenly at the back of his neck. The archaeologist looked up and regarded him with a pair of clever brown eyes, then looked down again and resumed his work. “I’ve been waiting for you,” said Eli Lavon. “What took you so long?”
Gabriel sat in the dirt at the edge of the pit and watched Lavon work. They had known each other since the Black September operation. Eli Lavon had been an ayin, a tracker. His job was to follow the terrorists and learn their habits. In many respects his assignment had been more dangerous even than Gabriel’s, for Lavon had sometimes been exposed to the terrorists for days and weeks on end with no backup. After the unit disbanded, he’d settled in Vienna and opened a small investigative bureau called Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Operating on a shoestring budget, he had managed to track down millions of dollars’ worth of looted Jewish assets and had played a significant role in prying a multibillion-dollar settlement from the banks of Switzerland. These days Lavon was working the dig at Megiddo and teaching archaeology part-time at Hebrew University.
“What have you got there, Eli?”
“A piece of pottery, I suspect.” A gust of wind took his wispy, unkempt hair and blew it across his forehead. “What about you?”
“A Saudi billionaire who’s trying to destroy the civilized world.”
“Haven’t they already done that?”
Gabriel smiled. “I need you, Eli. You know how to read balance sheets. You know how to follow the trail of money without anyone else knowing it.”
“Who’s the Saudi?”
“The chairman and CEO of Jihad Incorporated.”
“Does the chairman have a name?”
“Abdul Aziz al-Bakari.”
“Zizi al-Bakari?”
“One and the same.”
“I suppose this has something to do with Shamron?”
“And the Vatican.”
“What’s Zizi’s connection?”
Gabriel told him.
“I guess I don’t need to ask what you intend to do with bin Shafiq,” Lavon said. “Zizi’s business empire is enormous. Bin Shafiq could be operating from anywhere in the world. How are we going to find him?”
“We’re going to put an agent into Zizi’s inner circle and wait for bin Shafiq to walk into it.”
“An agent in Zizi’s camp?” Lavon shook his head. “Can’t be done.”
“Yes, it can.”
“How?”
“I’m going to find something Zizi wants,” Gabriel said. “And then I’m going to give it to him.”
“I’m listening.”
Gabriel sat down at the edge of the excavation trench with his legs dangling over the side and explained how he planned to penetrate Jihad Incorporated. From the bottom of the trench came sound of Lavon’s work-pick, pick, brush, brush, blow…
“Who’s the agent?” he asked when Gabriel had finished.
“I don’t have one yet.”
Lavon was silent for a moment-pick, pick, brush, brush, blow…
“What do you want from me?”
“Turn Zizi al-Bakari and AAB Holdings inside out. I want a complete breakdown of every company he owns or controls. Profiles of all his top executives and the members of his personal entourage. I want to know how each person got there and how they’ve stayed. I want to know more about Zizi than Zizi knows about himself.”
“And what happens when we go operational?”
“You’ll go, too.”
“I’m too old and tired for any rough stuff.”
“You’re the greatest surveillance artist in the history of the Office, Eli. I can’t do this without you.”
Lavon sat up and brushed his hands on his trousers. “Run an agent into Zizi al-Bakari’s inner circle? Madness.” He tossed Gabriel a hand trowel. “Get down here and help me. We’re losing the light.”
Gabriel climbed down into the pit and knelt beside his old friend. Together they scratched at the ancient soil, until night fell like a curtain over the valley.
IT WAS AFTER nine o’clock by the time they arrived at King Saul Boulevard. Lavon was long retired from the Office but still gave the odd lecture at the Academy and still had credentials to enter the building whenever he pleased. Gabriel cleared him into the file rooms of the Research division, then headed down to a gloomy corridor two levels belowground. At the end of the hall was Room 456C. Affixed to the door was a paper sign, written in Gabriel’s own stylish Hebrew hand: TEMPORARY COMMITTEE FOR THE STUDY OF TERROR THREATS IN WESTERN EUROPE. He decided to leave it for now.
He opened the combination lock, switched on the lights, and went inside. The room seemed frozen in time. They’d had several names for it: the Pod, the Quad, the Tank. Yaakov, a pockmarked tough from the Arab Affairs Department of Shabak, had christened it the Hellhole. Yossi from Research had called it the Village of the Damned, but then Yossi had read classics at Oxford and always brought an air of erudition to his work, even when the subjects weren’t worthy of it.
Gabriel paused at the trestle table that Dina and Rimona had shared. Their constant squabbling over territory had driven him to near madness. The separation line he had drawn down the center of the table was still there, along with the warning Rimona had written on her side of the border: Cross at your own risk. Rimona was a captain in the IDF and worked for Aman, military intelligence. She was also Gilah Shamron’s niece. She believed in defensible borders and had responded with retaliatory raids each time Dina had strayed over the line. At Dina’s place now was the short note she had left there on the final day of the operation: May we never have to return here again. How naïve, thought Gabriel. Dina, of all people, should have known better.
He continued his slow tour of the room. In the corner stood the same pile of outmoded computer equipment that no one had ever bothered to remove. Before becoming the headquarters of Group Khaled, Room 456C had been nothing more than a dumping ground for old furniture and obsolete electronics, often used by the members of the night staff as a spot for romantic trysts. Gabriel’s chalkboard was still there, too. He could scarcely decipher the last words he had written. He gazed up at the walls, which were covered with photographs of young Palestinian men. One photograph seized his attention, a boy with a beret on his head and a kaffiyeh draped over his shoulders, seated on the lap of Yasir Arafat: Khaled al-Khalifa at the funeral of his father, Sabri. Gabriel had killed Sabri, and he had killed Khaled as well.
He cleared the walls of the old photographs and put two new ones in their place. One showed a man in a kaffiyeh in the mountains of Afghanistan. The other showed the same man in a cashmere overcoat and trilby hat standing before a billionaire’s home in Paris.
Group Khaled was now Group bin Shafiq.
FOR THE FIRST forty-eight hours Gabriel and Lavon worked alone. On the third day they were joined by Yossi, a tall balding man with the bearing of an English intellectual. Rimona came on the fourth day, as did Yaakov, who arrived from Shabak headquarters carrying a box filled with material on the terrorists who had attacked Shamron’s car. Dina was the last to arrive. Small and dark-haired, she had been standing in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street on October 19, 1994, when a Hamas suicide bomber had turned the Number 5 bus into a coffin for twenty-one people. Her mother and two of her sisters were among those killed; Dina had been seriously wounded and now walked with a slight limp. She had dealt with the loss by becoming an expert in terrorism. Indeed, Dina Sarid could recite the time, place, and butcher’s bill of every act of terror ever committed against the State of Israel. She had once told Gabriel she knew more about the terrorists than they knew about themselves. Gabriel had believed her.