The English Girl: A Novel (3 page)

Which left only the identity of the operative who would conduct the search. Like Lancaster before him, Graham Seymour had only one candidate. He did not share the name with the prime minister. Instead, using funds from one of MI5’s many secret operational accounts, he booked a seat on that evening’s British Airways flight to Tel Aviv. As the plane eased from the gate, he considered how best to make his approach. Personal loyalty counted for much at times like these, he thought, but leverage was far more practical.

3

JERUSALEM

I
n the heart of Jerusalem, not far from the Ben Yehuda Mall, was a quiet, leafy lane known as Narkiss Street. The apartment house at Number Sixteen was small, just three stories in height, and was partially concealed behind a sturdy limestone wall and a towering eucalyptus tree growing in the front garden. The uppermost flat differed from the others in the building only in that it had once been owned by the secret intelligence service of the State of Israel. It had a spacious sitting room, a tidy kitchen filled with modern appliances, a formal dining room, and two bedrooms. The smaller of the two bedrooms, the one meant for a child, had been painstakingly converted into a professional artist’s studio. But Gabriel still preferred to work in the sitting room, where the cool breeze from the open French doors carried away the stench of his solvents.

At the moment, he was using a carefully calibrated solution of acetone, alcohol, and distilled water, first taught to him in Venice by the master art restorer Umberto Conti. The mixture was strong enough to dissolve the surface contaminants and the old varnish but would do no harm to the artist’s original brushwork. Now he dipped a hand-fashioned cotton swab into the solution and twirled it gently over the upturned breast of Susanna. Her gaze was averted and she seemed only vaguely aware of the two lecherous village elders watching her bathe from beyond her garden wall. Gabriel, who was unusually protective of women, wished he could intervene and spare her the trauma of what was to come—the false accusations, the trial, the death sentence. Instead, he worked the cotton swab gently over the surface of her breast and watched as her yellowed skin turned a luminous white.

When the swab became soiled, Gabriel placed it in an airtight flask to trap the fumes. As he prepared another, his eyes moved slowly over the surface of the painting. At present, it was attributed only to a follower of Titian. But the painting’s current owner, the renowned London art dealer Julian Isherwood, believed it had come from the studio of Jacopo Bassano. Gabriel concurred—indeed, now that he had exposed some of the brushwork, he saw evidence of the master himself, especially in the figure of Susanna. Gabriel knew Bassano’s style well; he had studied his paintings extensively while serving his apprenticeship and had once spent several months in Zurich restoring an important Bassano for a private collector. On the final night of his stay, he had killed a man named Ali Abdel Hamidi in a wet alleyway near the river. Hamidi, a Palestinian master terrorist with much Israeli blood on his hands, had been posing as a playwright, and Gabriel had given him a death worthy of his literary pretensions.

Gabriel dipped the new swab into the solvent mixture, but before he could resume work he heard the familiar rumble of a heavy car engine in the street. He stepped onto the terrace to confirm his suspicions and then opened the front door an inch. A moment later Ari Shamron was perched atop a wooden stool at Gabriel’s side. He wore khaki trousers, a white oxford cloth shirt, and a leather jacket with an unrepaired tear in the left shoulder. His ugly spectacles shone with the light of Gabriel’s halogen work lamps. His face, with its deep cracks and fissures, was set in an expression of profound distaste.

“I could smell those chemicals the instant I stepped out of the car,” Shamron said. “I can only imagine the damage they’ve done to your body after all these years.”

“Rest assured it’s nothing compared to the damage you’ve done,” Gabriel replied. “I’m surprised I can still hold a paintbrush.”

Gabriel placed the moistened swab against the flesh of Susanna and twirled it gently. Shamron frowned at his stainless steel wristwatch, as though it were no longer keeping proper time.

“Something wrong?” asked Gabriel.

“I’m just wondering how long it’s going to take you to offer me a cup of coffee.”

“You know where everything is. You practically live here now.”

Shamron muttered something in Polish about the ingratitude of children. Then he nudged himself off the stool and, leaning heavily on his cane, made his way into the kitchen. He managed to fill the teakettle with tap water but appeared perplexed by the various buttons and dials on the stove. Ari Shamron had twice served as the director of Israel’s secret intelligence service and before that had been one of its most decorated field officers. But now, in old age, he seemed incapable of the most basic of household tasks. Coffeemakers, blenders, toasters: these were a mystery to him. Gilah, his long-suffering wife, often joked that the great Ari Shamron, if left to his own devices, would find a way to starve in a kitchen filled with food.

Gabriel ignited the stove and then resumed his work. Shamron stood in the French doors, smoking. The stench of his Turkish tobacco soon overwhelmed the pungent odor of the solvent.

“Must you?” asked Gabriel.

“I must,” said Shamron.

“What are you doing in Jerusalem?”

“The prime minister wanted a word.”

“Really?”

Shamron glared at Gabriel through a cloud of blue-gray smoke. “Why are you surprised the prime minister would want to see me?”

“Because—”

“I am old and irrelevant?” Shamron asked, cutting him off.

“You are unreasonable, impatient, and at times irrational. But you have never been irrelevant.”

Shamron nodded in agreement. Age had given him the ability to at least see his own shortcomings, even if it had robbed him of the time needed to remedy them.

“How is he?” asked Gabriel.

“As you might imagine.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Our conversation was wide ranging and frank.”

“Does that mean you yelled at each other?”

“I’ve only yelled at one prime minister.”

“Who?” asked Gabriel, genuinely curious.

“Golda,” answered Shamron. “It was the day after Munich. I told her we had to change our tactics, that we had to terrorize the terrorists. I gave her a list of names, men who had to die. Golda wanted none of it.”

“So you yelled at her?”

“It was not one of my finer moments.”

“What did she do?”

“She yelled back, of course. But eventually she came around to my way of thinking. After that, I put together another list of names, the names of the young men I needed to carry out the operation. All of them agreed without hesitation.” Shamron paused, and then added, “All but one.”

Gabriel silently placed the soiled swab into the airtight flask. It trapped the noxious fumes of the solvent but not the memory of his first encounter with the man they called the Memuneh, the one in charge. It had taken place just a few hundred yards from where he stood now, on the campus of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Gabriel had just left a lecture on the paintings of Viktor Frankel, the noted German Expressionist who also happened to be his maternal grandfather. Shamron was waiting for him at the edge of a sunbaked courtyard, a small iron bar of a man with hideous spectacles and teeth like a steel trap. As usual, he was well prepared. He knew that Gabriel had been raised on a dreary agricultural settlement in the Valley of Jezreel and that he had a passionate hatred of farming. He knew that Gabriel’s mother, a gifted artist in her own right, had managed to survive the death camp at Birkenau but was no match for the cancer that ravaged her body. He knew, too, that Gabriel’s first language was German and that it remained the language of his dreams. It was all in the file he was holding in his nicotine-stained fingers. “The operation will be called Wrath of God,” he had said that day. “It’s not about justice. It’s about vengeance, pure and simple—vengeance for the eleven innocent lives lost at Munich.” Gabriel had told Shamron to find someone else. “I don’t want someone else,” Shamron had responded. “I want you.”

For the next three years, Gabriel and the other Wrath of God operatives stalked their prey across Europe and the Middle East. Armed with a .22-caliber Beretta, a soft-spoken weapon suitable for killing at close range, Gabriel personally assassinated six members of Black September. Whenever possible he shot them eleven times, one bullet for each Israeli butchered in Munich. When he finally returned home, his temples were the color of ash and his face was that of a man twenty years his senior. No longer able to produce original work, he went to Venice to study the craft of restoration. Then, when he was rested, he went back to work for Shamron. In the years that followed, he carried out some of the most fabled operations in the history of Israeli intelligence. Now, after many years of restless wandering, he had finally returned to Jerusalem. No one was more pleased by this than Shamron, who loved Gabriel as a son and treated the apartment on Narkiss Street as though it were his own. Once, Gabriel might have chafed under the pressure of Shamron’s constant presence, but no more. The great Ari Shamron was eternal, but the vessel in which his spirit resided would not last forever.

Nothing had done more damage to Shamron’s health than his relentless smoking. It was a habit he acquired as a young man in eastern Poland, and it had grown worse after he had come to Palestine, where he fought in the war that led to Israel’s independence. Now, as he described his meeting with the prime minister, he flicked open his old Zippo lighter and used it to ignite another one of his foul-smelling cigarettes.

“The prime minister is on edge, more so than usual. I suppose he has a right to be. The great Arab Awakening has plunged the entire region into chaos. And the Iranians are growing closer to realizing their nuclear dreams. At some point soon, they will enter a zone of immunity, making it impossible for us to act militarily without the help of the Americans.” Shamron closed his lighter with a snap and looked at Gabriel, who had resumed work on the painting. “Are you listening to me?”

“I’m hanging on your every word.”

“Prove it.”

Gabriel repeated Shamron’s last statement verbatim. Shamron smiled. He regarded Gabriel’s flawless memory as one of his finest accomplishments. He twirled the Zippo lighter in his fingertips. Two turns to the right, two turns to the left.

“The problem is that the American president refuses to lay down any hard-and-fast red lines. He says he will not allow the Iranians to build nuclear weapons. But that declaration is meaningless if the Iranians have the
capability
to build them in a short period of time.”

“Like the Japanese.”

“The Japanese aren’t ruled by apocalyptic Shia mullahs,” Shamron said. “If the American president isn’t careful, his two most important foreign policy achievements will be a nuclear Iran and the restoration of the Islamic caliphate.”

“Welcome to the post-American world, Ari.”

“Which is why I think we’re foolish to leave our security in their hands. But that’s not the prime minister’s only problem,” Shamron added. “The generals aren’t sure they can destroy enough of the program to make a military strike effective. And King Saul Boulevard, under the tutelage of your friend Uzi Navot, is telling the prime minister that a unilateral war with the Persians would be a catastrophe of biblical proportions.”

King Saul Boulevard was the address of Israel’s secret intelligence service. It had a long and deliberately misleading name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Even retired agents like Gabriel and Shamron referred to it as “the Office” and nothing else.

“Uzi is the one who sees the raw intelligence every day,” said Gabriel.

“I see it, too. Not all of it,” Shamron added hastily, “but enough to convince me that Uzi’s calculations about how much time we have might be flawed.”

“Math was never Uzi’s strong suit. But when he was in the field, he never made mistakes.”

“That’s because he rarely put himself in a position where it was possible to make a mistake.” Shamron lapsed into silence and watched the wind moving in the eucalyptus tree beyond the balustrade of Gabriel’s terrace. “I’ve always said that a career without controversy is not a proper career at all. I’ve had my share, and so have you.”

“And I have the scars to prove it.”

“And the accolades, too,” Shamron said. “The prime minister is concerned the Office is too cautious when it comes to Iran. Yes, we’ve inserted viruses into their computers and eliminated a handful of their scientists, but nothing has gone boom lately. The prime minister would like Uzi to produce another Operation Masterpiece.”

Masterpiece was the code name for a joint Israeli, American, and British operation that resulted in the destruction of four secret Iranian enrichment facilities. It had occurred on Uzi Navot’s watch, but within the corridors of King Saul Boulevard, it was regarded as one of Gabriel’s finest hours.

“Opportunities like Masterpiece don’t come along every day, Ari.”

“That’s true,” Shamron conceded. “But I’ve always believed that most opportunities are earned rather than bestowed. And so does the prime minister.”

“Has he lost confidence in Uzi?”

“Not yet. But he wanted to know whether I’d lost mine.”

“What did you say?”

“What choice did I have? I was the one who recommended him for the job.”

“So you gave him your blessing?”

“It was conditional.”

“How so?”

“I reminded the prime minister that the person I
really
wanted in the job wasn’t interested.” Shamron shook his head slowly. “You are the only man in the history of the Office who has turned down a chance to be the director.”

“There’s a first for everything, Ari.”

“Does that mean you might reconsider?”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“I thought you might enjoy the pleasure of my company,” Shamron countered. “And the prime minister and I were wondering whether you might be willing to do a bit of outreach to one of our closest allies.”

“Which one?”

“Graham Seymour dropped into town unannounced. He’d like a word.”

Gabriel turned to face Shamron. “A word about what?” he asked after a moment.

“He wouldn’t say, but apparently it’s urgent.” Shamron walked over to the easel and squinted at the pristine patch of canvas where Gabriel had been working. “It looks new again.”