CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

Milan, Italy, Thursday afternoon

Marc Rosenthal had killed the enemies of Israel in a variety of ways, by knife, by bullet, even by poison once, but his instrument of choice over the years had been explosives. There were several reasons for this. To start with he found it practical. Explosives enabled him to maximize damage while maintaining his cover. A machine gun could be just as lethal in the right hands, but to stand in the open and hose down a group of people was to open oneself up to return fire. And that was just the start. Such an act made escape very difficult. No, Rosenthal liked bombs. He could study the habits of his targets and get the device into place before they arrived.

He'd pulled off some bold operations during his years with Mossad. Rosenthal knew that during a time when Mossad had had a streak of bad luck, he was one of the few bright stars. That was in great part due to the keen instincts of Ben Freidman. Freidman had sent Rosenthal into the occupied territories to gather information. The baby-faced Jew had proven to be so effective at penetrating the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas that Freidman couldn't resist using Rosenthal to strike back. The first bomb Rosenthal planted took out several midlevel lieutenants of the organization, but it was his second bombing that proved to Freidman that Rosenthal was an astonishingly brave warrior. The second bombing took place at a streetside cafe in Hebron. Rosen that had planted the device in the bottom of a trash can early the same morning and then that afternoon he met several of his Hamas compatriots at the cafe for lunch. During the meal Rosenthal got up and went to the bathroom. In his pocket he carried a pen that doubled as a trigger for the bomb. Before leaving the bathroom he depressed the pen cap and threw it into the garbage. The bomb was now on a twenty second delay. Rosenthal then walked back and sat down at the table. He had picked his spot carefully. Between him and the bomb was a palm tree in a concrete planter. Rosenthal calmly counted the time and at eighteen seconds he bent over as if to pick up something he'd dropped.

The blast instantly killed three of the four men he was dining with and two other patrons. Rosenthal escaped with a severe concussion, some lacerations from the flying debris and some hearing loss. The fact that he himself had almost died in the bombing served to cement his standing as a soldier of Hamas.

It was this bold move that allowed him to get close to Hamas leader Yehya Ayyash. Rosenthal was brought into the inner circle, and five months later on a bright sunny day he took a call for Ayyash on a cell phone that had been modified by the technicians back at Mossad. When Rosenthal handed Ayyash the phone, he walked away and left the group. Once again he had a pen in his pocket, but this time there was no delayed fuse. Rosenthal never looked back. He pressed the top of the pen with his thumb and the explosion was instantaneous. The shaped plastic charge in the phone tore intoayyash's head and killed him. That was the end of rosenthal's undercover work in the occupied territories. He was hated by all of Palestine.

Freidman had taken significant interest in honing Rosenthal's skills as an assassin. The director general of Mossad had significant experience in the arena. In 1972 eleven Israeli athletes were taken hostage during the Munich Olympics by the Palestinian group Black September. Two of the athletes were killed right away when the terrorists burst into their dormitory at the Olympic Village. The terrorists demanded the release of 234 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. Golda Meir, Israel's prime minister at the time, refused to release the prisoners because she believed it would only invite future disasters. After a tense five-day standoff, the German authorities made their move at the airport while the terrorists were transferring their hostages to a plane. The rescue operation was a disaster. The nine remaining hostages were all killed, as were six of the eight terrorists. To add insult to injury, the two surviving terrorists were later released.

Ben Freidman had been at the airport that dreaded day in 1972. He had been standing next to one of his idols, Zvi Zarnir. Zamir had been the director general of Mossad at the time, and after the massacre in Munich, it was Zamir who had convinced the prime minister that it was time to take the gloves off. Golda Meir directed Zamir to hunt down the masterminds behind Black September and kill them. Over the next nine months the blood flowed and Ben Freidman proved himself to be one of Mossad most efficient assassins. His first hit was barely a month after the massacre of the Olympic athletes. Mossad wanted to send a signal to everyone, and their first target was wael Zwaiter, a PLO representative in Rome. On October 16 Freidman came up behind Zwaiter, put two bullets into the back of his head and left him for dead on the street. Not even two months later Freidman was part of a team that killed Mahmoud Hamshari by placing a bomb in the phone of his Paris apartment. The bomb was detonated by remote control and the PLO representative was decapitated.

Blood continued to flow and Freidman's crowning achievement came on April 13, 1973. He was part of a select force of Mossad agents and Army commandos that launched a raid into the heart of Beirut. The targets that night were three of the PLO's most senior officials. Muhammad Nayar, Kamal Adwan and Kamal Nasser were all gunned down in their homes. The success of the raid had implications far beyond the deaths of the three leaders. Information seized during the raids led to the assassination of three more terrorists with ties to Black September. The success of the raid was short-lived, however.

Just two months after Mossad had experienced one of its greatest successes it experienced its worst nightmare. The disaster occurred in the sleepy Norwegian ski village of Lillehammer. A team of Mossad agents was sent to investigate a possible sighting of the terrorist All Has san Salameh. The inexperienced group incorrectly identified the target and then proceeded to kill Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter. If that wasn't bad enough, six of the team members were subsequently captured while trying to escape. The men and women were put on trial and five of the six were jailed. The international outcry was deafening, and Mossad was officially ordered to get out of the assassination business.

But unofficially, they stayed very much involved in the dirty business and Ben Freidman continued to be one of Mossad's best. He had used those years of experience to train Rosenthal. They studied why certain operations succeeded and why others failed. The Lillehammer fiasco was easy to dissect. After all, they'd killed the wrong man. Everything started with the misidentification of the target. The entire mess could have easily been avoided with some thorough checking. After that there was one other glaring flaw; there were too many agents involved in the operation. This was the result of too much oversight from Tel Aviv. Freidman knew that for a mission to be successful, the man or woman pulling the trigger had to have as much autonomy as possible, but they must always remember to not embarrass Israel.

It was for that reason that there would be no explosives this time. It was one thing to set off a bomb in Gaza or Jerusalem. As strange as it might seem, the people of the Middle East were used to such things. But a bomb in Milan would draw too much attention. The authorities and the press would start to dig and eventually fingers would be pointed at Israel. There were better, quieter ways to handle the situation. Donatella Rahn would have to be killed up close. Preferably a silenced bullet delivered to the back of her head.