LITMIR.BIZ

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Office. She was living in New York now, where she oversaw a special collection of paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. He’d heard she was seeing a man quite seriously, a bond trader, of all things. He contemplated calling her, just to hear the sound of her voice, but decided it would be unwise. Like Russia, she was lost to him.

       What’s his real name, Clovis?

       I’m not sure he ever had one.

       Where’s he from?

       He might have been from Iraq once, but now he’s a son of the caliphate …

      Finally, the sky beyond Mikhail’s window turned blue-black with the coming dawn. He put his room in order and thirty minutes later slumped bleary-eyed into the back of Sami Haddad’s car.

      “How did it go?” asked the Lebanese.

      “Total waste of time,” replied Mikhail through an elaborate yawn.

      “Where now?”

      “Tel Aviv.”

      “It’s not such an easy drive, my friend.”

      “Then perhaps you should take me to the airport instead.”

      His flight was at half past eight. He sailed through passport control as a smiling, somewhat drowsy Canadian and settled into his first-class seat aboard a Middle East Airlines jet bound for Rome. To shield himself from his neighbor, a Turkish salesman of disreputable appearance, he pretended to read the morning papers. In reality, he was considering all the possible reasons why an aircraft operated by the government of Lebanon might fail to reach its destination safely. For once, he thought glumly, his death would have consequences, for the intelligence would die with him.

       How much money are we talking about, Clovis?

       Four million, maybe five.

       Which is it?

       Closer to five …

      The plane landed in Rome without incident, though it took Mikhail the better part of two hours to clear the organized stampede that was Fiumicino’s passport control. His stay in Italy was brief, long enough for him to switch identities and board another airplane, an El Al flight bound for Tel Aviv. An Office car waited at Ben Gurion; it whisked him north to King Saul Boulevard. The building at the western end of the street was, like Paul Rousseau’s outpost on the rue de Grenelle, a lie in plain sight. No emblem hung over its entrance, no brass lettering proclaimed the identity of its occupant. In fact, there was nothing at all to suggest it was the headquarters of one of the world’s most feared and respected intelligence services. A closer inspection of the structure, however, would have revealed the existence of a building within a building, one with its own power supply, its own water and sewer lines, and its own secure communications system. Employees carried two keys. One opened an unmarked door in the lobby; the other operated the lift. Those who committed the unpardonable sin of losing one or both of their keys were banished to the Judean Wilderness, never to be seen or heard from again.

      Like most field agents, Mikhail entered the building through the underground parking garage and then made his way upward to the executive floor. Because the hour was late—the security cameras recorded the time as half past nine—the corridor was as quiet as a school that had been emptied of children. From the half-open door at the end of the hall stretched a slender rhombus of light. Mikhail knocked softly and, hearing no reply, entered. Stuffed into an executive leather chair behind a desk of smoked glass was Uzi Navot, the soon-to-be former chief of the Office. He was frowning at an open file as though it were a bill he could not afford to pay. At his elbow was an open box of Viennese butter cookies. Only two remained, not a good sign.

      At length, Navot looked up and with a dismissive movement of his hand instructed Mikhail to sit. He wore a striped dress shirt that had been cut for a thinner man and a pair of the rimless spectacles beloved by German intellectuals and Swiss bankers. His hair, once strawberry blond, was gray stubble; his blue eyes were bloodshot. He rolled up his shirtsleeves, exposing his massive forearms, and contemplated Mikhail for a long moment with thinly veiled hostility. It wasn’t the reception Mikhail had expected, but then one never knew quite what to expect when one encountered Uzi Navot these days. There were rumors his successor intended to keep him on in some capacity—blasphemy in a service that regarded regular turnover at the top almost as a matter of religious doctrine—but officially his future was unclear.

      “Any problems on the way out of Beirut?” Navot asked at last, as though the question had occurred to him suddenly.

      “None,” answered Mikhail.

      Navot snared a stray cookie crumb with the tip of a thick forefinger. “Surveillance?”

      “Nothing we could see.”

      “And the man who rode the hotel elevator with you? Did you ever see him again?”

      “At the roof bar.”

      “Anything suspicious?”

      “Everyone in Beirut looks suspicious. That’s why it’s Beirut.”

      Navot flicked the cookie crumb onto the plate. Then he removed a photograph from the file and dealt it across the desktop toward Mikhail. It showed a man sitting in the front seat of a luxury automobile, at the edge of a seaside boulevard. The windows of the car were shattered. The man was a bloody tattered mess, and quite obviously dead.

      “Recognize him?” asked Navot.

      Mikhail squinted in concentration.

      “Look carefully at the car.”

      Mikhail did. And then he understood. The dead man was Sami Haddad.

      “When did they get him?”

      “Not long after he dropped you at the airport. And they were just getting started.”

      Navot spun another photo across the desk, a ruined building on an elegant street in downtown Beirut. It was Gallerie Mansour on the rue Madame Curie. Limbs and heads littered the pavement. For once the carnage wasn’t human. It was Clovis Mansour’s magnificent professional inventory.

      “I was hoping,” Navot resumed after a moment, “that my last days as chief would pass without incident. Instead, I have to deal with the loss of our best contract employee in Beirut and an asset we spent a great deal of time and effort recruiting.”

      “Better than a dead field agent.”

      “I’ll be the judge of that.” Navot accepted the two photographs and returned them to the file. “What did Mansour have for you?”

      “The man who was behind Paris.”

      “Who is he?”

      “They call him Saladin.”

      “Saladin? Well,” Navot said, closing the file, “at least that’s a start.”

      Navot remained in his office long after Mikhail had taken his leave. The desk was empty except for his leather-bound executive notepad, on which he had scrawled a single word. Saladin … Only a man of great self-esteem would grant himself a code name like that, only a man of great ambition. The real Saladin had united the Muslim world under the Ayyubid dynasty and recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders. Perhaps this new Saladin was similarly inclined. For his coming-out party he had flattened a Jewish target in the middle of Paris, thus attacking two countries, two civilizations, at the same time. Surely, thought Navot, the success of the attack had only whetted his lust for infidel blood. It was only a matter of time before he struck again.

      For the moment, Saladin was a French problem. But the fact that four Israeli citizens had perished in the attack gave Navot standing in Paris. So, too, did the name that Clovis Mansour had whispered into Mikhail’s ear in Beirut. In fact, with a bit of skilled salesmanship, the name alone might

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