As the secretary headed toward the door, Lev looked at Gabriel to see if he was watching her walk away. Then he handed the files wordlessly to Gabriel and turned his gaze once more toward the video wall. Gabriel lifted the cover and found several sheets of paper, each containing the thumbnail sketch of a team member: name, section, area of expertise. The sun had slipped below the horizon, and the office had grown very dark. Gabriel, in order to read the file, had to lean slightly to his left and hold the pages directly beneath the halogen ceiling lamp. After a few moments he looked up at Lev.
“You forgot to add representatives from Hadassah and the Maccabee Youth Sports League.”
Gabriel’s irony bounced off Lev like a stone thrown at a speeding freight train.
“Your point, Gabriel?”
“It’s too big. We’ll be tripping over each other.” It occurred to Gabriel that perhaps Lev wanted precisely that. “I can carry out the investigation with half these people.”
Lev, with a languid wave of his long hand, invited Gabriel to reduce the size of the team. Gabriel began removing pages and placing them on the coffee table. Lev frowned. Gabriel’s cuts, while random, had clearly dislodged Lev’s informant.
“This will do,” Gabriel said, handing the personnel files back to Lev. “We’ll need a place to meet. My office is too small.”
“Housekeeping has set aside Room 456C.”
Gabriel knew it well. Three levels belowground, 456C was nothing more than a dumping ground for old furniture and obsolete computer equipment, often used by members of the night staff as a spot for romantic trysts.
“Fine,” said Gabriel.
Lev crossed one long leg over the other and picked a piece of invisible lint from his trousers. “You’ve never worked at headquarters before, have you, Gabriel?”
“You know exactly where I’ve worked.”
“Which is why I feel I should give you a helpful reminder. The progress of your investigation, assuming you make any, is not to be shared with anyone outside this service. You will report to me and only me. Is that clear?”
“I take it you’re referring to the old man.”
“You know exactly who I’m referring to.”
“Shamron and I are personal friends. I won’t cut off my relationship with him just to put your mind at ease.”
“But you will refrain from discussing the case with him. Have I made myself clear?”
Lev had neither mud on his boots nor blood on his hands, but he was a master in the art of boardroom thrust and parry.
“Yes, Lev,” Gabriel said. “I know exactly where you stand.”
Lev got to his feet, signaling that the meeting had ended, but Gabriel remained seated.
“There’s something else I needed to discuss with you.”
“My time is limited,” said Lev, looking down.
“It won’t take but a minute. It’s about Chiara.”
Lev, rather than suffer the indignity of retaking his seat, walked over to the window and looked down at the lights of Tel Aviv. “What about her?”
“I don’t want her used again until we determine who else saw the contents of that computer disk.”
Lev rotated slowly, as if he were a statue on a pedestal. With the light behind him, he appeared as nothing more than a dark mass against the horizontal lines of the blinds.
“I’m glad you feel comfortable enough to walk into this office and make demands,” he said acidly, “but Chiara’s future will be determined by Operations and, ultimately, by me.”
“She’s only a bat leveyha. Are you telling me you can’t find any other girls to serve as escort officers?”
“She’s got an Italian passport, and she’s damned good at her job. You know that better than anyone.”
“She’s also burned, Lev. If you put her in the field with an agent, you’ll put the agent at risk. I wouldn’t work with her.”
“Fortunately, most of our field officers aren’t as arrogant as you.”
“I never knew a good field man who wasn’t arrogant, Lev.”
A silence fell between them. Lev walked over to his desk and pressed a button on his telephone. The door swung open automatically, and a wedge of bright light entered from Lev’s reception area.
“It’s been my experience that field agents don’t take well to the discipline of headquarters. In the field, they’re a law unto themselves, but in here, I’m the law.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind, sheriff.”
“Don’t fuck this up,” Lev said as Gabriel headed toward the open door. “If you do, not even Shamron will be able to protect you.”
THEY CONVENED AT nine o’clock the following morning. Housekeeping had made a halfhearted attempt at putting the room in order. A chipped wooden conference table stood in the center, surrounded by several mismatched chairs. The excess debris had been piled against the far wall. Gabriel, as he entered, was reminded of the pews stacked against the wall of the Church of San Giovanni Crisostomo. Everything about the setting suggested impermanence, including the misleading paper sign, affixed to the door with packing tape, that read: TEMPORARY COMMITTEE FOR THE STUDY OF TERROR THREATS IN WESTERN EUROPE. Gabriel embraced the disarray. From adversity, Shamron always said, comes cohesion.
His team numbered four in all, two boys and two girls, all eager and adoring and unbearably young. From Research came Yossi, a pedantic but brilliant intelligence analyst who had read Greats at Oxford; from History, a dark-eyed girl named Dina who could recite the time, place, and butcher’s bill of every act of terrorism ever committed against the State of Israel. She walked with a very slight limp and was treated with unfailing tenderness by the others. Gabriel found the reason why in her personnel file. Dina had been standing in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street the day in October 1994 when a Hamas suicide bomber turned the Number 5 bus into a coffin for twenty-one people. Her mother and two of her sisters were killed that day. Dina had been seriously wounded.
The two other members of the team came from outside the Office. The Arab Affairs Department of Shabak lent Gabriel a pockmarked tough named Yaakov, who had spent the better part of the last decade trying to penetrate the Palestinian Authority’s apparatus of terror. Military Intelligence gave him a captain named Rimona, who was Shamron’s niece. The last time Gabriel had seen Rimona, she’d been tearing fearlessly down Shamron’s steep driveway on a kick scooter. These days Rimona could usually be found in a secure aircraft hangar north of Tel Aviv, poring over the papers seized from Yasir Arafat’s compound in Ramallah.
Instinctively, Gabriel approached the case as though it was a painting. He was reminded of a restoration he had performed not long after his apprenticeship, a crucifixion by an early Renaissance Venetian named Cima. Gabriel, after removing the yellowed varnish, had discovered that virtually nothing remained of the original. He had then spent the next three months piecing together filaments of the obscure painter’s life and work. When finally he began the retouching, it was as if Cima was standing at his shoulder, guiding his hand.
The artist, in this case, was the one member of the terrorist team who had been positively identified: Daoud Hadawi. Hadawi was their porthole onto the operation, and slowly, over the next several days, his brief life began to take shape on the walls of Gabriel’s lair. It ran from a ramshackle refugee camp in Jenin, through the stones and burning tires of the first intifada, and into the ranks of Force 17. No corner of Hadawi’s life remained unexplored: his schooling and his religious fervor, his family and his clan, his associations and his influences.
Known Force 17 personnel were located and accounted for. Those thought to possess the skills or education necessary to build the bomb that leveled the Rome embassy were singled out for special attention. Arab informants were called in and questioned from Ramallah to Gaza City, from Rome to London. Communications intercepts stretching two years into the past were filtered through the computers and sifted for any reference to a large-scale operation in Europe. Old surveillance and watch reports were reexamined, old airline passenger lists scoured again. Rimona returned to her hangar each morning to search for traces of Rome in the captured files of Arafat’s intelligence services.