The shower of glass ended, the echo of the explosion receded into the distance. Gabriel resisted the impulse to look over his shoulder at the devastation. He had seen the results of a street bomb before and could imagine the scene behind him. Burning cars, blackened buildings, a devastated café, bodies, and blood, the stunned looks on the faces of the survivors. So he removed his hands from his face and hid them in the pockets of his jacket, and he kept walking, head down, ears ringing with the awful silence.

18

PARIS HAD SUFFERED its unfair share of terrorist bombings over the years, and the French police and security services had become quite efficient at dealing with the aftermath. Within two minutes of the explosion, the first units arrived. Within five minutes, the surrounding streets were sealed. Gabriel’s car had been caught inside the cordon, so he had been forced to flee on foot. It was nearly dusk by the time he reached the sprawling rail yard on the southern edge of the city.

Now, sheltering in the loading bay of an abandoned factory, he took mental inventory of the things in the trunk. A suitcase, a few items of clothing, a camera, a tape recorder, the radio he had used to communicate with the surveillance team. If the car was not collected soon, the police would impound it, break open the trunk, and examine the contents. They would play the audiotape and discover that Werner Müller’s gallery and telephones had been bugged. They would develop exposed rolls of film and discover photographs of the gallery’s exterior. They would calculate the angle of the photographs and surmise that they had been taken from a window of the Hôtel Laurens. They would question the staff at the hotel and discover that the room in question had been occupied by a rude German writer.

Gabriel’s right hand began to throb. The strain was catching up with him. He’d stayed on the move after the bombing, ridden a dozen Métro trains, walked countless miles along the crowded boulevards. From a public telephone near the Luxembourg Gardens, he had made contact with Uzi Navot on the emergency channel.

Gabriel looked up now and saw two cars moving slowly along a narrow service road bordered by a sagging chain-link fence. The headlights were doused. The cars stopped about fifty yards away. Gabriel jumped down from the loading dock-the landing sent shock waves of pain through his hands-and walked toward them. The rear door of the first car flew open. Navot was slumped in the backseat. “Get in,” he grumbled. Clearly, he had watched too many American movies about the Mafia.

Navot had brought a doctor, one of Ari Shamron’s sayanim. He was sitting in the front passenger seat. He made an operating table of the center armrest, spreading a sterile cloth over it and switching on the dome light. The doctor cut away the dressing and examined the wound. He pulled his lips into a mild frown-Not so bad. You bring me here for this?“ Something for the pain?” he asked, but Gabriel shook his head. Another frown, another tip of the head-As you wish.

The doctor flushed the wound with an antiseptic solution and went to work. Gabriel, the restorer, watched him intently. Insert, pull, tug, snip. Navot lit a cigarette and pretended to look out the window. When the doctor had finished the suturing, he dressed the wound carefully and nodded that he was done. Gabriel laid his right hand upon the sterile towel. As the doctor cut away the dirty dressing, he emitted a very French sigh of disapproval, as if Gabriel had ordered the wrong wine for fish with saffron butter sauce. “This one will take a few minutes, yes?” Navot waved his hand impatiently.

The doctor didn’t care for Navot’s attitude, and he took his time about it. This time he didn’t bother to ask Gabriel whether he wanted anything for the pain. He simply prepared a syringe and injected an anesthetic into Gabriel’s hand. He worked slowly and steadily for almost a half-hour. Then he looked up. “I did the best I could, under the circumstances.” A hostile glance toward Navot-I do this for free, boy. Shamron is going to hear about this.“ You need proper surgery on that wound. The muscles, the tendons-” A pause, a shake of the head. “Not good. You’re likely to experience some stiffness, and your range of motion will never be quite the same.”

“Leave us,” Navot said. “Go to the other car and wait there.” Navot dismissed the driver too. When they were alone, he looked at Gabriel. “What the hell happened?”

“How many dead?” Gabriel asked, ignoring Navot’s question.

“Three, so far. Four more in bad shape.”

“Have you heard from the rest of the team?”

“They’ve left Paris. Shamron is bringing everyone home. This could get ugly.”

“The car?”

“We’ve got a man watching it. So far, the police haven’t made a move on it.”

“Eventually, they will.”

“What are they going to find when they do?”

Gabriel told him. Navot closed his eyes and swayed a bit, as though he had just been told of a death. “What about Müller’s apartment?”

“There’s a glass on his telephone.”

“Shit.”

“Any chance of getting inside and cleaning things up?”

Navot shook his head. “The police are already there. If they find your car and establish that Müller was under surveillance of some sort they’ll tear apart his flat. It won’t take them long to find the bug.”

“Any friends on the force that might be able to help us?”

“Not for something like this.”

“That bug is like a calling card.”

“I know, Gabriel, but I wasn’t the one who put it there.”

Gabriel fished the roll of film from his pocket and handed it to Navot. “I got a picture of the man who left the bomb at the gallery. Get it to King Saul Boulevard tonight. Tell the troglodytes in Research to run it through the database. Maybe they can put a name to his face.”

The film disappeared into Navot’s big paw.

“Contact Shamron and tell him to get a security detail up to Anna Rolfe’s villa right away.” Gabriel opened the car door and put his foot on the ground. “Which car is mine?”

“Shamron wants you to come home.”

“I can’t find the man who planted that bomb if I’m sitting in Tel Aviv.”

“You won’t be able to find him if you’re sitting in a French jail cell, either.”

“Which car is mine, Uzi?”

“All right! Take this one. But you’re on your own.”

“Someday, I’ll try to repay the favor.”

“Have a good time, Gabriel. I’ll stay here and clean up your fucking mess.”

“Just get the film to Tel Aviv. Good dog.”

ON the Costa de Prata, Anna Rolfe lowered her violin and switched off the metronome. Her practice room was in shadow, the breeze from the open window cool and moist with the Atlantic. A professional-quality microphone hung over her stool from a chrome-colored stand. It was connected to a German-made tape deck. Today she had recorded much of her practice session. She played back the tape while she packed the Guarneri into its case and straightened her sheet music.

As always, she found it uncomfortable to listen to herself play, but she did it now for a very specific reason. She wanted to know exactly how she sounded; which passages of the piece were acceptable and which needed additional attention. She liked much of what she heard but picked out three or four sections in the second and third movements where the effects of her long layoff were apparent to her highly critical ear. Tonight, in her second practice session, she would focus exclusively on those passages. For now, she needed to clear her mind.

She went to her bedroom, removed a pale yellow sweater from her dresser drawer, and wrapped it around her shoulders. Then she went downstairs. A moment later, she slipped through the gate of her villa and set out along the winding track down toward the village. At the halfway point, she spotted a tiny Fiat station wagon coming up the track through the trees. Inside were four men. They were not Portuguese. Anna stepped to the side to allow the car to pass, but it stopped instead, and the man seated in the front passenger seat got out.