“And if I give you a name?” she asked. “What happens then?”
Gabriel looked at his watch. “I think it’s time Sarah and I had a word in private. Would you all excuse us?”
HE LED HER upstairs to his studio and switched on the halogen lamps. Marguerite Gachet glowed seductively under the intense white light. Sarah sat down in an ancient wingchair; Gabriel slipped on his magnifying visor and prepared his palette.
“How much longer?” she asked.
It was the same question Shamron had posed to him that windswept afternoon in October, when he had come to Narkiss Street to haul Gabriel out of exile. A year, he should have said to Shamron that day. And then he wouldn’t be here, in a safe house in Surrey, about to send a beautiful American girl into the heart of Jihad Incorporated.
“I’ve removed the surface dirt and pressed the creases back into place with a warm, damp spatula,” Gabriel said. “Now I have to finish the inpainting and apply a light coat of varnish-just enough to bring out the warmth of Vincent’s original colors.”
“I wasn’t talking about the painting.”
He looked up from his palette. “I suppose that depends entirely on you.”
“I’m ready when you are,” she said.
“Not quite.”
“What happens if Zizi doesn’t bite? What happens if he doesn’t like the painting-or me?”
“No serious collector with money like Zizi is going to turn down a newly discovered van Gogh. And as for you, he won’t have much choice in the matter. We’re going to make you irresistible.”
“How?”
“There are some things it’s better you not know.”
“Like what happens to Ahmed bin Shafiq if I see him?”
He added pigment to a puddle of medium and mixed it with a brush. “You know what happens to Ahmed bin Shafiq. I made that very clear to you in Washington the night we met.”
“Tell me everything,” she said. “I need to know.”
Gabriel lowered his visor and lifted his brush to the canvas. When he spoke again, he spoke not to Sarah but to Marguerite. “We’ll watch him. We’ll listen to him if we can. We’ll take his photograph and get his voice on tape and send it to our experts for analysis.”
“And if your experts determine it’s him?”
“At a time and place of our choosing, we’ll put him down.”
“Put him down?”
“Assassinate him. Kill him. Liquidate him. You choose the word that makes you most comfortable, Sarah. I’ve never found one.”
“How many times have you done this?”
He put his face close to the painting and murmured, “Many times, Sarah.”
“How many have you killed? Ten? Twenty? Has it solved the problem of terrorism? Or has it just made things worse? If you find Ahmed bin Shafiq and kill him, what will it accomplish? Will it end, or will another man step forward and take his place?”
“Eventually another murderer will take his place. In the meantime, lives will be saved. And justice will be done.”
“Is it really justice? Can justice really be done with a silenced pistol or a booby-trapped car?”
He lifted the visor and turned around, his green eyes flashing in the glare of the lamps. “Are you enjoying this little debate about the moral relevancy of counterterrorism? Is it making you feel better? You can rest assured Ahmed bin Shafiq never wastes time wrestling with these questions of morality. You can be certain that if he ever manages to acquire a nuclear device, the only debate he’ll have is whether to use it against New York or Tel Aviv.”
“Is it justice, Gabriel? Or only vengeance?”
Again he saw himself and Shamron. This time the setting was not Gabriel’s flat in Narkiss Street but a warm afternoon in September 1972-the day Shamron first came for him. Gabriel had posed the same question.
“It’s not too late, Sarah. You can get out if you want. We can find someone else to take your place.”
“There is no one else like me. Besides, I don’t want out.”
“Then what do you want?”
“Permission to sleep at night.”
“Sleep, Sarah. Sleep very well.”
“And you?”
“I have a painting to finish.”
He turned around and lowered his visor again. Sarah was not done with him.
“Was it true?” she asked. “All the things written about you in the newspapers after the Gare de Lyon attack?”
“Most of it.”
“You killed the Palestinians from Black September who carried out the Munich Massacre?”
“Some of them.”
“Would you do it again, knowing everything you know now?”
He hesitated a moment. “Yes, Sarah, I would do it again. And I’ll tell you why. It wasn’t about vengeance. Black September was the most lethal terror group the world had ever seen, and it needed to be put out of business.”
“But look at what it cost you. You lost your family.”
“Everyone who engages in this fight loses something. Take your country, for example. You were innocent, a shining beacon of freedom and decency. Now you have blood on your hands and men in secret prisons. We don’t do this sort of work because we enjoy it. We do it because we have to. We do it because we have no choice. You think I have a choice? You think Dina Sarid has a choice? We don’t. And neither do you.” He looked at her for a moment. “Unless you’d like me to find someone else to go in your place.”
“There is no one else like me,” she repeated. “When will I be ready?”
Gabriel turned and lifted his brush to the painting. Soon, he thought. One or two days more of inpainting. Then a coat of varnish. Then she would be ready.
ALL THAT REMAINED was her field training. Lavon and Uzi Navot put her through her paces. For three days and nights they took her into the streets of London and drilled her on the basic tenets of tradecraft. They taught her how to make a clandestine meeting and how to determine if a site was compromised. They taught her how to spot physical surveillance and simple techniques for shaking it. They taught her how to make a dead drop and how to hand material to a live courier. They taught her how to dial the Office emergency lines on ordinary pay telephones and how to signal them with her body if she were blown and required extraction. Lavon would later describe her as the finest natural amateur field agent he had ever trained. He could have completed the course in two days, but Gabriel, if only for his own peace of mind, insisted on a third. When Lavon finally returned to Surrey that afternoon he found Gabriel standing morosely at the edge of the stock pond, with a rod in one hand and his eyes trained on the surface of the water as though willing a fish to rise. “She’s ready,” Lavon said. “The question is, are you?” Gabriel slowly reeled in his line and followed Lavon back to the house.
LATER THAT SAME evening the lights went dark in the melancholy little travel agency in Mason’s Yard. Miss Archer, clutching a batch of old files, paused for a moment on the landing and peered through the sparkling glass entrance of Isherwood Fine Arts. Seated behind the receptionist desk was Elena, Mr. Isherwood’s scandalously pretty Italian secretary. She glanced up from her computer screen and blew Miss Archer an elaborate farewell kiss, then looked down again and resumed her work.