After an hour Gabriel decided it was no longer wise to remain in the café. He paid his check, left a generous tip, and apologized for his boorish behavior. Signor Andriotti guided him to the door and cast him gently out to sea.
That evening Gabriel sat in the chair next to his window, waiting for Yusef to return home. The street shone with the night rain. A motorcycle sped past, boy driving, girl on the back, pleading with him to slow down. Probably nothing, but he made a note of it in his logbook, along with the time: eleven-fifteen.
He had a headache from the wine. Already the flat was beginning to depress him. How many nights had he spent like this? Sitting in a sterile Office safe flat or a shabby rented room, watching, waiting. He craved something beautiful, so he slipped a compact disc of La Bohème into the portable stereo at his feet and lowered the volume to a whisper. Intelligence work is patience, Shamron always said. Intelligence work is tedium.
He got up, went into the kitchen, took aspirin for his headache. Next door a mother and a daughter began to quarrel in Lebanese-accented Arabic. A glass shattered, then another, a door slamming, running outside in the corridor.
Gabriel sat down again and closed his eyes, and after a moment he was back in North Africa, twelve years earlier.
The rubber dinghies came ashore with the gentle surf at Rouad. Gabriel climbed out into warm shin-deep water and pulled the dinghy onto the sand. The team of Sayaret commandos followed him across the beach, weapons at their sides. Somewhere a dog was barking. The scent of woodsmoke and grilling meat hung on the air. The girl waited behind the wheel of the Volkswagen mini-bus. Four of the commandos climbed into the Volkswagen with Gabriel. The rest slipped into a pair of Peugeot station wagons parked behind the minibus. A few seconds later the engines started in unison, and they sped off through the cool April evening.
Gabriel wore a lip microphone connected to a small transmitter in his jacket pocket. The radio broadcast over a secure wavelength to a specially equipped Boeing 707 flying just off the Tunisian coastline in a civilian air corridor, masquerading as an El Al charter. If anything went wrong, they could abort the mission within seconds.
“Mother has arrived safely,” Gabriel murmured. He released the talk button and heard the words “Proceed to Mother’s house.”
Gabriel held his Beretta between his knees during the drive, smoked for his nerves. The girl kept both hands on the wheel, eyes fixed on the darkened streets. She was tall, taller than Leah, with black eyes and a mane of dark hair held in place by a simple silver clasp at the nape of her neck. She knew the route as well as Gabriel. When Shamron dispatched Gabriel to Tunis to study the target, the girl had gone with him and posed as his wife. Gabriel reached out and gently squeezed her shoulder as she drove. Her muscles were rigid. “Relax,” he said softly, and she smiled briefly and let out a long breath. “You’re doing fine.”
They entered Sidi Boussaid, a wealthy Tunis suburb not far from the sea, and parked outside the villa. The Peugeots pulled in behind them. The girl killed the engine. Twelve-fifteen. Exactly on schedule.
Gabriel knew the villa as well as he knew his own home. He had studied it and photographed it from every conceivable vantage point during the surveillance operation. They had built a perfect duplicate in the Negev, where he and the rest of the team rehearsed the assault countless times. During the final session they had managed to carry out the mission in twenty-two seconds.
“We’ve arrived at Mother’s house,” Gabriel murmured over the radio.
“Pay Mother a visit.”
Gabriel turned and said, “Go.”
He opened the door of the minibus and crossed the street, walking swiftly, not running. He could hear the quiet footfalls of the Sayaret team behind him. Gabriel drew several even breaths to try to slow his heart rate. The villa belonged to Khalil el-Wazir, better known as Abu Jihad, the PLO’s chief of operations and Yasir Arafat’s most trusted lieutenant.
Just outside the villa, Abu Jihad’s driver was sleeping behind the wheel of a Mercedes, a gift from Arafat. Gabriel shoved the end of a silenced Beretta into the driver’s ear, pulled the trigger, kept walking.
At the entrance of the villa, Gabriel stepped aside as a pair of Sayaret men attached a special silent plastique to the heavy door. The explosive detonated, emitting less sound than a handclap, and the door blew open. Gabriel led the team into the entrance hall, the Beretta in his outstretched hands.
A Tunisian security guard appeared. As he reached for his weapon, Gabriel shot him several times through the chest.
Gabriel stood over the dying man and said, “Tell me where he is, and I won’t shoot you in the eye.”
But the security guard just grimaced in pain and said nothing.
Gabriel shot him twice in the face.
He mounted the stairs, ramming a fresh clip into his Beretta as he moved, and headed toward the study where Abu Jihad spent most nights working. He burst through the door and found the Palestinian seated in front of a television set, watching news footage of the intifada, which he was helping to direct from Tunis. Abu Jihad reached for a pistol. Gabriel charged forward as he fired, just as Shamron had trained him to do. Two of the shots struck Abu Jihad in the chest. Gabriel stood over him, pressed the gun against his temple, and fired two more times. The body convulsed in a death spasm.
Gabriel darted from the room. In the hallway was Abu Jihad’s wife, clutching their small son in her arms, and his teenage daughter. She closed her eyes and held the boy more tightly, waiting for Gabriel to shoot her.
“Go back to your room!” he shouted in Arabic. Then he turned to the daughter. “Go and take care of your mother.”
Gabriel dashed from the house, followed by the entire Sayaret team. They piled into the minibus and the Peugeots and sped away. They drove through Sidi Boussaid back to Rouad, where they abandoned the vehicles at the beach and boarded the dinghies. A moment later they were speeding over the black surface of the Mediterranean toward the lights of a waiting Israeli patrol boat.
“Thirteen seconds, Gabriel! You did it in thirteen seconds!”
It was the girl. She reached out to touch him, but he recoiled from her. He watched the lights of the ship drawing closer. He looked up into the ink-black sky, searching for the command plane, but saw only a fingernail moon and a spray of stars. Then he saw the faces of Abu Jihad’s wife and children, staring at him with hatred burning in their eyes.
He tossed the Beretta into the sea and began to shake.
The fight next door had gone quiet. Gabriel wanted to think about something besides Tunis, so he imagined sailing his ketch down the Helford Passage to the sea. Then he thought of the Vecellio, stripped of dirty varnish, the damage of the centuries laid bare. He thought of Peel, and for the first time that day he thought of Dani. He remembered pulling what remained of his body from the flaming wreckage of the car in Vienna, checking to see if somehow he had survived, thanking God that he had died quickly and not lingered with one arm and one leg and half a face.
He stood up and paced the room, trying to make the image go away, and for some reason found himself thinking of Peel’s mother. Several times during his stay in Port Navas he’d found himself fantasizing about her. It began the same way each time. He would bump into her in the village, and she would volunteer that Derek was out for a long walk on the Lizard trying to repair the second act. “He’ll be gone for hours,” she would say. “Would you like to come over for tea?” He would say yes, but instead of serving tea she would take him upstairs to Derek’s bed and allow him to pour nine years of self-imposed abstinence into her supple body. Afterward she would lie with her head on his stomach, damp hair spread across his chest. “You’re not really an art restorer, are you?” she would say in his fantasy. And Gabriel would tell her the truth. “I kill people for the government of Israel. I killed Abu Jihad in front of his wife and children. I killed three people in thirteen seconds that night. The prime minister gave me a medal for it. I used to have a wife and a son, but a terrorist put a bomb under their car because I had an affair with my bat leveyha in Tunis.” And Peel’s mother would run screaming from the cottage, body wrapped in a white bedsheet, the bedsheet stained with the blood of Leah.