Gabriel, for the most part, remained a spectator to her training. He greeted her when she arrived at the house each evening, joined the team for dinner, then saw her off again at midnight when she set out for London with Yossi. As the days wore on, they began to detect a restlessness in him. Lavon, who had worked with him more than the others, diagnosed Gabriel’s mood as impatience. “He wants to put her into play,” Lavon said, “but he knows she’s not ready.” He began spending extended periods before the canvas, painstakingly repairing the damage done to Marguerite. The intensity of the work only increased his restiveness. Lavon advised him to take breaks now and again, and Gabriel reluctantly agreed. He found a pair of Wellington boots in the mudroom and ventured out on solitary marches over the footpaths surrounding the village. He dug a rod and reel from a storage room in the cellar and used it to haul an enormous brown trout from the stock pond. In the barn, concealed beneath a tarpaulin, he found an ancient MG motorcar that looked as though it hadn’t been driven in twenty years. Three days later the others heard a sputtering sound emanating from the barn, followed by an explosion that reverberated over the countryside. Yaakov came running down from the house, fearful Gabriel had blown himself to bits, but instead found him standing over the open hood of the MG, covered in engine grease up to his elbows and smiling for the first time since they’d come to Surrey. “It works,” he shouted over the thunderous rattle of the motor. “The damned thing still runs.”
That evening he joined in Sarah’s training session for the first time. Lavon and Yaakov were not surprised, for the topic of discussion was none other that Ahmed bin Shafiq, the man who had become Gabriel’s personal bête noire. He chose Dina, with her pleasant voice and patina of early widowhood, to deliver the briefings. On the first night she lectured on Group 205, bin Shafiq’s secret unit within the GID, and showed how the combination of Wahhabi ideology and Saudi money had wreaked havoc across the Middle East and South Asia. On the second night she recounted bin Shafiq’s journey from loyal servant of the Saudi state to mastermind of the Brotherhood of Allah. Then she described in detail the operation against the Vatican, though she made no mention of the fact that Gabriel had been present at the scene of the crime. Gabriel realized that much of the information was superfluous, but he wanted Sarah to have no doubt in her mind that Ahmed bin Shafiq had earned the fate that awaited him.
On the final night they showed her a series of computer-generated photo illustrations of how bin Shafiq might look now. Bin Shafiq with a beard. Bin Shafiq with a balding pate. Bin Shafiq with a gray wig. With a black wig. With curly hair. With no hair at all. With his sharp Bedouin features softened by a plastic surgeon. But it was the wounded arm that would be her most valuable clue to his identity, Gabriel told her. The scar on the inside of his forearm he would never show. The slightly withered hand that he would never offer and keep safely tucked away, hidden from infidel eyes.
“We know he’s concealed somewhere within Zizi’s empire,” Gabriel said. “He might come as an investment banker or a portfolio manager. He might come as a real estate developer or a pharmaceutical executive. He might come in a month. He might come in a year. He might never come. But if he does come, you can be certain he’ll be well mannered and worldly and seem like anything but a professional terrorist. Don’t look for a terrorist or someone who acts like a terrorist. Just look for a man.”
He gathered up the photo illustrations. “We want to know about everyone who moves in and out of Zizi’s orbit. We want you to gather as many names as you can. But this is the man we’re looking for.” Gabriel placed a photograph on the table in front of her. “This is the man we want.” Another photograph. “This is the man we’re after.” Another. “He’s the reason we’re all here instead of being home with our families and our children.” Another. “He’s the reason we asked you to give up your life and join us.” Another. “If you see him, you’re to get us the name he’s using and the company he’s working for. Get the country of his passport if you can.” Another photograph. “If you’re not sure it’s him, it doesn’t matter. Tell us. If it doesn’t turn out to be him, it doesn’t matter. Tell us. Nothing happens based on your word alone. No one gets hurt because of you, Sarah. You’re only the messenger.”
“And if I give you a name?” she asked. “What happens then?”
Gabriel looked at his watch. “I think it’s time Sarah and I had a word in private. Would you all excuse us?”
HE LED HER upstairs to his studio and switched on the halogen lamps. Marguerite Gachet glowed seductively under the intense white light. Sarah sat down in an ancient wingchair; Gabriel slipped on his magnifying visor and prepared his palette.
“How much longer?” she asked.
It was the same question Shamron had posed to him that windswept afternoon in October, when he had come to Narkiss Street to haul Gabriel out of exile. A year, he should have said to Shamron that day. And then he wouldn’t be here, in a safe house in Surrey, about to send a beautiful American girl into the heart of Jihad Incorporated.
“I’ve removed the surface dirt and pressed the creases back into place with a warm, damp spatula,” Gabriel said. “Now I have to finish the inpainting and apply a light coat of varnish-just enough to bring out the warmth of Vincent’s original colors.”
“I wasn’t talking about the painting.”
He looked up from his palette. “I suppose that depends entirely on you.”
“I’m ready when you are,” she said.
“Not quite.”
“What happens if Zizi doesn’t bite? What happens if he doesn’t like the painting-or me?”
“No serious collector with money like Zizi is going to turn down a newly discovered van Gogh. And as for you, he won’t have much choice in the matter. We’re going to make you irresistible.”
“How?”
“There are some things it’s better you not know.”
“Like what happens to Ahmed bin Shafiq if I see him?”
He added pigment to a puddle of medium and mixed it with a brush. “You know what happens to Ahmed bin Shafiq. I made that very clear to you in Washington the night we met.”
“Tell me everything,” she said. “I need to know.”
Gabriel lowered his visor and lifted his brush to the canvas. When he spoke again, he spoke not to Sarah but to Marguerite. “We’ll watch him. We’ll listen to him if we can. We’ll take his photograph and get his voice on tape and send it to our experts for analysis.”
“And if your experts determine it’s him?”
“At a time and place of our choosing, we’ll put him down.”
“Put him down?”
“Assassinate him. Kill him. Liquidate him. You choose the word that makes you most comfortable, Sarah. I’ve never found one.”
“How many times have you done this?”
He put his face close to the painting and murmured, “Many times, Sarah.”
“How many have you killed? Ten? Twenty? Has it solved the problem of terrorism? Or has it just made things worse? If you find Ahmed bin Shafiq and kill him, what will it accomplish? Will it end, or will another man step forward and take his place?”
“Eventually another murderer will take his place. In the meantime, lives will be saved. And justice will be done.”
“Is it really justice? Can justice really be done with a silenced pistol or a booby-trapped car?”
He lifted the visor and turned around, his green eyes flashing in the glare of the lamps. “Are you enjoying this little debate about the moral relevancy of counterterrorism? Is it making you feel better? You can rest assured Ahmed bin Shafiq never wastes time wrestling with these questions of morality. You can be certain that if he ever manages to acquire a nuclear device, the only debate he’ll have is whether to use it against New York or Tel Aviv.”