Prince of Fire (21 page)

“She wants to see you,” Abu Saddiq said. “
Before
the operation.”

Martineau shook his head. He knew the girl—they had been lovers once—and he knew why she wanted to see him. It was better they not spend time together now. Otherwise Martineau might have second thoughts about what he had planned for her.

“We stay to the original plan,” he said. “Where do I meet her?”

“The Internet café overlooking the harbor. Do you know it?”

Martineau did.

“She’ll be there at twelve-thirty.”

Just then, from the minaret of a mosque up the street, the muezzin summoned the faithful to prayer. Martineau closed his eyes as the familiar words washed over him.

God is most great. I testify that there is no god but God. I testify that Muhammad is the Prophet of God. Come to prayer. Come to success. God is most great. There is no god but God.

Martineau, when the call to prayer had ended, stood and prepared to take his leave.

“Where’s Hadawi?” he asked.

“Zurich.”

“He’s something of a liability, wouldn’t you say?”

Abu Saddiq nodded. “Should I move him?”

“No,” said Martineau. “Just kill him.”

M
ARTINEAU
’
S HEAD
had cleared by the time he reached the Place de la Préfecture. How different things were on this side of Marseilles, he thought. The streets were cleaner, the shops more plentiful. Martineau the archaeologist could not help but reflect on the nature of the two worlds that existed side by side in this ancient city. One was focused on devotion, the other on consumption. One had many children, the other found children to be a financial burden. The French, Martineau knew, would soon be a minority in their own country,
colons
in their own land. Someday soon, a century, perhaps a bit longer, France would be a Muslim country.

He turned into the boulevard St-Rémy. Tree-lined and split by a
payage
parking lot in the median, the street rose at a slight pitch toward a small green park with a view of the old port. The buildings on each side were fashioned of stately graystone and uniform in height. Iron bars covered the ground-floor windows. Many of the buildings contained professional offices—lawyers, doctors, estate agents—and farther up the street there were a couple of banks and a large interior-design store. At the base of the street, on the edge of the Place de la Préfecture, were a pair of opposing kiosks—one selling newspapers, the other sandwiches. During the day there was a small market in the street, but now that it was dusk the vendors had packed up their cheese and fresh vegetables and gone home.

The building at Number 56 was residential only. The foyer was clean, the stairway wide with a wood banister and a new runner. The flat was empty except for a single white couch and a telephone on the floor. Martineau bent down, lifted the receiver, and dialed a number. An answering machine, just as he’d expected.

“I’m in Marseilles. Call me when you have a chance.”

He hung up the phone, then sat on the couch. He felt the pressure of his gun pushing into the small of his back. He leaned forward and drew it from the waist of his jeans. A Stechkin nine-millimeter—his father’s gun. For many years after his father’s death in Paris, the weapon had gathered dust in a police lockup, evidence for a trial that would never take place. An agent of French intelligence spirited the gun to Tunis
in 1985 and made a gift of it to Arafat. Arafat had given it to Martineau.

The telephone rang. Martineau answered.

“Monsieur Véran?”

“Mimi, my love,” Martineau said. “So good to hear the sound of your voice.”

T
HE TELEPHONE WOKE HIM
. L
IKE ALL SAFE FLAT
phones, it had no ringer, only a flashing light, luminous as a channel marker, that turned his eyelids to crimson. He reached out and brought the receiver to his ear.

“Wake up,” said Shimon Pazner.

“What time is it?”

“Eight-thirty.”

Gabriel had slept twelve hours.

“Get dressed. There’s something you should see since you’re in town.”

“I’ve analyzed the photographs, I’ve read all the reports. I don’t need to see it.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Why?”

“It’ll piss you off.”

“What good will that do?”

“Sometimes we need to be pissed off,” Pazner said. “I’ll meet you on the steps of the Galleria Borghese in an hour. Don’t leave me standing there like an idiot.”

Pazner hung up. Gabriel climbed out of bed and stood beneath the shower for a long time, debating whether to shave his beard. In the end he decided to trim it instead. He dressed in one of Herr Klemp’s dark suits and went to the Via Veneto for coffee. One hour after hanging up with Pazner he was walking along a shaded gravel footpath toward the steps of the galleria. The Rome
katsa
sat on a marble bench in the forecourt, smoking a cigarette.

“Nice beard,” said Pazner. “Christ, you look like hell.”

“I needed an excuse to stay in my hotel room in Cairo.”

“How’d you do it?”

Gabriel answered: a common pharmaceutical product that, when ingested instead of used properly, had a disastrous but temporary effect on the gastrointestinal tract.

“How many doses did you take?”

“Three.”

“Poor bastard.”

They headed north through the gardens—Pazner like a man marching to a drum only he could hear, Gabriel at his side, weary from too much travel and too many worries. On the perimeter of the park, near the botanical gardens, was the entrance to the cul-de-sac. For days after the bombing the world’s media had camped out in the intersection. The ground was still
littered with their cigarette ends and crushed Styrofoam coffee cups. It looked to Gabriel like a patch of farmland after the annual harvest festival.

They entered the street and made their way down the slope of the hill, until they arrived at a temporary steel barricade, watched over by Italian police and Israeli security men. Pazner was immediately admitted, along with his bearded German acquaintance.

Once beyond the fence they could see the first signs of damage: the scorched stone pine stripped clean of their needles; the blown-out windows in the neighboring villas; the pieces of twisted debris lying about like scraps of discarded paper. A few more paces and the bomb crater came into view, ten feet deep at least and surrounded by a halo of burnt pavement. Little remained of the buildings closest to the blast point; deeper in the compound, the structures remained standing, but the sides facing the explosion had been sheared away, so that the effect was of a child’s dollhouse. Gabriel glimpsed an intact office with framed photographs still propped on the desk and a bathroom with a towel still hanging from the rod. The air was heavy with the stench of ash and, Gabriel feared, the lingering scent of burning flesh. From deep within the compound came the scrape and grumble of backhoes and bulldozers. The crime scene, like the corpse of a murder victim, had given up its final clues. Now it was time for the burial.

Gabriel stayed longer than he’d thought he would. No past wound, real or perceived, no grievance or political dispute justified an act of murder on this scale. Pazner was right—the very sight of it moved him to intense anger. But there was something else, something more than anger. It made him hate. He turned and started walking back up the hill. Pazner followed silently after him.

“Who told you to bring me here?”

“It was my idea.”

“Who?”

“The old man,” Pazner said quietly.

“Why?”

“I don’t know why.”

Gabriel stopped. “
Why
, Shimon?”

“Varash met last night after you checked in from Frankfurt. Go back to the safe flat. Wait there for further instructions. Someone will be in touch soon.”

And with that Pazner crossed the street and disappeared into the Villa Borghese.

B
UT HE DID NOT
return to the safe flat. Instead, he headed in the opposite direction, into the residential districts of north Rome. He found the Via Trieste and followed it west, until he arrived, ten minutes later, in an untidy little square called the Piazza Annabaliano.

Little about it had changed in the thirty years since Gabriel had first seen it—the same stand of melancholy trees in the center of the square, the same dreary shops catering to customers of the working classes. And at the northern edge, wedged between two streets, was the same apartment house, shaped like a slice of pie, with the point facing the square and the Bar Trieste on the ground floor. Zwaiter used to stop in the bar to use the telephone before heading upstairs to his room.

Gabriel crossed the square, picking his way through the cars and motorbikes parked haphazardly in the center, and entered the apartment house through a doorway marked “Entrance C.” The foyer was cold and in darkness. The lights, Gabriel
remembered, operated on a timer to save electricity. Surveillance of the building had noted that residents, including Zwaiter, rarely bothered to switch them on—a fact that would prove to be an operational asset for Gabriel, because it had virtually assured him the advantage of working in the dark.

Now he paused in front of the elevator. Next to the elevator was a mirror. Surveillance had neglected to mention it. Gabriel, seeing his own reflection in the glass that night, had nearly drawn his Beretta and fired. Instead he had calmly reached into his jacket pocket for a coin and was holding it out toward the payment slot on the elevator when Zwaiter, dressed in a plaid jacket and clutching a paper sack containing a bottle of fig wine, walked through Entrance C for the last time.

“Excuse me, but are you Wadal Zwaiter?”

“No! Please, no!”

Gabriel had allowed the coin to fall from his fingertips. Before it had struck the floor he had drawn his Beretta and fired the first two shots. One of the rounds pierced the paper sack before striking Zwaiter in the chest. Blood and wine had mingled at Gabriel’s feet as he poured fire into the Palestinian’s collapsing body.

Now he looked into the mirror and saw himself as he had been that night, a boy angel in a leather jacket, an artist who had no comprehension of how the act he was about to commit would forever alter the course of his life. He had become someone else. He had remained someone else ever since. Shamron had neglected to tell him that would happen. He had taught him how to draw a gun and fire in one second, but he had done nothing to prepare him for what would happen afterward. Engaging the terrorist on his terms, on his battlefield, comes at a
terrible price. It changes the men who do it, along with the society that dispatches them. It is the terrorist’s ultimate weapon. For Gabriel, the changes were visible as well. By the time he’d staggered into Paris for his next assignment, his temples were gray.

He looked into the mirror again and saw the bearded figure of Herr Klemp looking back at him. Images of the case flashed through his mind: a flattened embassy, his own dossier,
Khaled . . .
Was Shamron right? Was Khaled sending him a message? Had Khaled chosen Rome because of what Gabriel had done thirty years ago, on this very spot?

He heard the soft shuffle of footfalls behind him—an old woman, dressed in the black of widowhood, clutching a plastic sack of groceries. She stared directly at him. Gabriel, for an instant, feared she somehow remembered him. He bid her a pleasant morning and went back out into the sunlit piazza.

He felt suddenly feverish. He walked for a time on the Via Trieste, then flagged down a taxi and asked the driver to take him to the Piazza di Spagna. Entering the safe flat he saw a copy of that morning’s
La Repubblica
newspaper lying on the floor of the entrance hall. On page six was a large advertisement for an Italian sports car. Gabriel looked at the ad carefully and saw that it had been cut from another edition of the newspaper and glued over the corresponding page. He trimmed away the edges of the page and discovered, hidden between the two pages, a sheet of paper containing the coded text of the message. After reading it he burned it in the kitchen sink and went out again.

On the Via Condotti he bought a new suitcase and spent the next hour purchasing clothing appropriate to his next
destination. He returned to the safe flat long enough to pack his new bag, then went to lunch at Nino on the Via Borgognona. At two o’clock he took a taxi to Fiumicino Airport, and at five-thirty he boarded a flight to Sardinia.

A
S
G
ABRIEL
’
S PLANE
was taxiing toward the runway, Amira Assaf rolled up to the front gate of the Stratford Clinic and showed her ID badge to the security guard. He inspected it carefully, then waved her onto the grounds. She twisted the throttle of her motorbike and sped down the quarter-mile gravel drive toward the mansion. Dr. Avery was just leaving for the night, racing toward the gate in his big silver Jaguar. Amira tapped her horn and waved, but he ignored her and swept past in a shower of dust and gravel.