House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(32)

But there was more intrigue to come. Indeed, on the day after the bombing, questions arose over whether the casualties inside the building were restricted solely to officers of the Alpha Group. The source of the controversy was a report that witnesses had seen two men—young, sturdy, and armed with pistols—frantically scouring the rubble in the immediate aftermath while repeatedly shouting a name. The name was Gavriel, which happened to be the Hebrew version of the name of the current chief of the Israeli secret intelligence service. This gave rise to speculation that the man in question, whose history in France was long and sordid, had been inside the building when the bomb detonated. The interior minister and the chief of the DGSI denied he had been present, or that he had even been in France. Given their recent track record, the statements were met with the skepticism they deserved.

In point of fact the man in question had indeed been inside the Alpha Group headquarters at the time of the attack and had spent forty-five long minutes buried in the rubble, bent and twisted like a contortionist, before finally being pried loose by his bodyguards and a French rescue team. Bloodied and coated in dust, he was taken to the nearby Val-de-Grace military hospital, where he was sewn and patched and treated for several badly broken ribs, two fractured vertebrae in his lower back, and a severe concussion. Doctors would recall that he spoke fluent if slightly accented French, had been unfailingly polite if somewhat dazed, and had refused all pain medication despite the intense discomfort of his injuries. Later, however, after a visit from French intelligence officials, the doctors and attending nurses would deny all knowledge of him.

In truth, he remained at the hospital for three days, in a room next to the one occupied by Paul Rousseau and Christian Bouchard, cared for by a joint French-Israeli team of doctors and watched over by an identically composed team of bodyguards. Finally, after a round of X-rays and MRIs confirmed it was safe to move him, he was dressed in a clean suit and shirt and driven by ambulance to Charles de Gaulle Airport. There, after refusing all offers of assistance, he climbed a steep flight of stairs, stopping several times to rest and regain his balance, and entered the first-class cabin of an El Al jetliner. It was empty except for a beautiful woman with riotous dark hair. He lowered himself into the seat next to hers, rested his head on her shoulder, and closed his eyes. The woman’s hair smelled of vanilla. Only then was he certain he was still alive.



Upon his return to Israel, Gabriel went directly to Narkiss Street and remained there, hidden from view, for the better part of the next week. At first, he kept mainly to his bed, rising only to catch the few minutes of late-winter sun that fell each afternoon on the little terrace. The pain of his injuries, while manageable, was immense. Each breath was an ordeal and even the smallest movement seemed to drive a hot iron spike into the base of his spine. And then there were the lingering effects of the concussion—the chronic headache, the sensitivity to light and sound, the inability to concentrate for more than a minute or two. He was most comfortable in a darkened room, behind a closed door. Alone, with only his muddled thoughts for company, he fretted that his condition was permanent, that he had suffered one wound too many, that he had exhausted his allotted ability to heal. No amount of retouching could restore him. He was a canvas beyond repair.

The rest of Israel, however, was blissfully unaware of the fact that its legendary intelligence chief was lying incapacitated in his bed, with four broken ribs, two cracked vertebrae, and a catastrophic headache without end. True, there were rumors, fed mainly by the press in France, but they were put to rest by fourteen seconds of video released by the prime minister’s office and broadcast on Israeli television. It purported to show a meeting at Kaplan Street. In it, the prime minister wore a satisfied smile and a blue necktie; Gabriel wore gray and looked none the worse for wear. The video had been shot not long after he became chief and put in cold storage for an occasion such as this. There were other videos as well, different clothing, altered lighting conditions, lest Gabriel ever find it necessary to spend a significant period out of the public eye. He reckoned that time had come, though it had arrived far earlier in his tenure than he ever imagined. The chief of the Office had nearly died in a coldly calculated attack on the headquarters of a trusted friend and ally in the war on terror. Therefore, the chief had no recourse but to respond in kind. Such were the rules of the neighborhood. Gabriel would not delegate the task of vengeance to others. Nor would he lash out against meaningless targets in the deserts of Iraq and Syria. His target was a man. A man who had built a network of death that had laid siege to the great cities of the civilized world. A man who was financing his operations through the sale of narcotics in Western Europe. He was going to find this man and wipe him from the face of the earth. He would be painstaking in his approach, meticulous. For there was nothing more dangerous, he thought, than a patient man.

But he could not wage war against his enemy without a body and a brain. The pain gradually receded, like the waters of a severe flood, but his thoughts remained a jumble. The operation was somewhere out there, he knew it, but its plotlines and central characters were lost in the fog of the concussion. He determined that vigorous exercise was in order, not physical but mental, so he played Shamron’s old memory games and, in his head, reread dense monographs on Titian, Bellini, Tintoretto, and Veronese. The effort fatigued him—it was exercise, after all—but slowly the operation came into sharper relief. Only the denouement eluded him. He saw a wealthy man, broken, exposed, and willing to do his bidding. But how would he maneuver the man to this place? Slowly, he reminded himself. Beware the fury of a patient man.