LITMIR.BIZ

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Office, and to the waiting arms of Ari Shamron. Posing as a gifted if taciturn European-based art restorer, he eliminated some of Israel’s most dangerous enemies and carried off some of the most celebrated operations in Office history. Tonight’s would rank among his finest. But only if it succeeded. And if it failed? Sixteen highly trained Office agents would be arrested, tortured, and in all likelihood publicly executed. Gabriel would have no choice but to resign, an ignoble end to a career against which all others would be measured. It was even possible he might take down the prime minister with him.

      For now, there was nothing Gabriel could do but wait and worry himself half to death. The team had entered the Islamic Republic the previous evening and made their way to a network of safe houses in Tehran. At 10:15 p.m. Tehran time, Gabriel received a message from the Operations Desk at King Saul Boulevard over the secure link, informing him that the last shift of security guards had left the warehouse. Gabriel ordered the team to enter, and at 10:31 p.m. they were in. That left them six hours and twenty-nine minutes to torch their way into the targeted safes and seize the nuclear archives. It was a minute less than Gabriel had hoped they would have, a small setback. In his experience, every second counted.

      Gabriel was blessed with a natural patience, a trait that had served him well as both a restorer and an intelligence operative. But that night on the shore of the Caspian Sea, all forbearance abandoned him. He paced the half-furnished rooms of the villa, he muttered to himself, he ranted nonsense at his two long-suffering bodyguards. Mainly, he thought about all the reasons why sixteen of his finest officers would never make it out of Iran alive. He was certain of only one thing: if confronted by Iranian forces, the team would not surrender quietly. Gabriel had granted Mikhail, a former Sayeret Matkal commando, wide latitude to fight his way out of the country if necessary. If the Iranians intervened, a good many of them would die.

      Finally, at 4:45 a.m. Tehran time, a message flashed over the secure link. The team had left the warehouse with the files and computer disks and was making their escape. The next message arrived at 5:39 a.m., as the team was headed into the Alborz Mountains. It stated that one of the security guards had arrived at the warehouse early. Thirty minutes later Gabriel learned that the NAJA, Iran’s national police force, had ordered a nationwide alert and was blocking roads around the country.

      He slipped from the villa and in the half-light of dawn walked down to the shore of the lake. In the low hills at his back, the muezzin summoned the faithful. Prayer is better than sleep … At that moment in time, Gabriel couldn’t agree more.

       6

       TEL AVIV

      WHEN SARAH BANCROFT RECEIVED NO reply to her phone call or subsequent text messages, she concluded she had no choice but to leave New York and fly to Israel. Khalid saw to her travel arrangements. Consequently, she made the journey privately and in considerable luxury, with the only inconvenience being a brief refueling stop in Ireland. Forbidden to use any of her old CIA identities, she cleared passport control at Ben Gurion Airport under her real name—a name that was well known to the intelligence and security services of the State of Israel—and rode in a chauffeured car to the Tel Aviv Hilton. Khalid had booked the largest suite in the hotel.

      Upstairs, Sarah dispatched another text message to Gabriel’s private mobile, this one stating that she had come to Tel Aviv on her own initiative to discuss a matter of some urgency. The message, like all the others, went unanswered. It was not like Gabriel to ignore her. It was possible he had changed his number or had been forced to relinquish his private device. It was also possible he was simply too busy to see her. He was, after all, the director-general of Israel’s secret intelligence service, which meant he was one of the most powerful and influential figures in the country.

      Sarah, however, would always think of Gabriel Allon as the cold, unapproachable man she encountered for the first time in a graceful redbrick town house on N Street in Georgetown. He had pried into every padlocked room of her past before asking whether she would be willing to go to work for Jihad Incorporated, which was how he referred to Zizi al-Bakari, the financier and facilitator of Islamic terror. Sarah had been fortunate to survive the operation that followed and spent several months recuperating at a CIA safe house in the horse country of Northern Virginia. But when Gabriel needed one final piece of an operation against a Russian oligarch named Ivan Kharkov, Sarah leapt at the chance to work with him again.

      At some point she also managed to fall quite in love with him. And when she discovered he was unavailable, she began an ill-advised affair with an Office field operative named Mikhail Abramov. The relationship was doomed from the beginning; they were both technically forbidden to date officers from other services. Even Sarah, when she analyzed the situation honestly, admitted the affair was a transparent attempt to punish Gabriel for rejecting her. Predictably, it ended badly. Sarah had seen Mikhail only once since then, at a party celebrating Gabriel’s promotion to director-general. He had had a pretty French Jewish doctor on his arm. Sarah had coolly offered him her hand rather than her cheek.

      When another hour passed with no response from Gabriel, Sarah went downstairs to walk along the Promenade. The weather was fine and soft, and a few fat white clouds were scudding like dirigibles across the blue Levantine sky. She walked north, past trendy beachfront cafés, among the spandexed and the suntanned. With her blond hair and Anglo-Saxon features, she looked only mildly out of place. The vibe was secular and Southern Californian, Santa Monica on the shores of the Mediterranean. It was hard to imagine that the chaos and civil war of Syria lay just over the border. Or that less than ten miles to the east, atop a bony spine of hills, were some of the most restive Palestinian villages of the West Bank. Or that the Gaza Strip, a ribbon of human misery and resentment, was less than an hour’s drive to the south. In hip Tel Aviv, thought Sarah, Israelis might be forgiven for believing the dream of Zionism had been achieved without cost.

      She turned inland and wandered the streets, seemingly without purpose or destination. In truth, she was engaging in a surveillance-detection run using techniques taught to her by both the Agency and the Office. On Dizengoff Street, while leaving a pharmacy with a bottle of shampoo she did not need, she concluded she was being followed. There was nothing specific, no confirmed sighting, just a nagging sense that someone was watching her.

      She walked through the cool shadows of the chinaberry trees. The pavements were crowded with midmorning shoppers. Dizengoff Street … The name was familiar. Something awful had happened on Dizengoff Street, Sarah was certain of it. And then she remembered. Dizengoff Street had been the target of a Hamas suicide bombing in October 1994 that killed twenty-two people.

      Sarah knew someone who had been wounded, an Office terrorism analyst named Dina Sarid. She had once described the attack to Sarah. The bomb had contained more than forty pounds of military-grade TNT and nails soaked in rat poison. It exploded at nine a.m., aboard the Number 5 bus. The force of the blast hurled human limbs into the nearby cafés. For a long time afterward, blood dripped from the leaves of the chinaberry trees.

       It rained blood that morning on Dizengoff Street, Sarah …

      But where exactly had it happened? The bus had just picked up several passengers in Dizengoff Square and was heading north. Sarah checked her current position on her iPhone. Then she crossed to the opposite side of the street and continued south, until she came upon a small gray memorial at the base of a chinaberry tree. The tree was much shorter than the others on the street, and younger.

      Sarah approached the memorial and scrutinized the names of the victims. They were written in Hebrew.

      “Can you read it?”

      Startled, Sarah turned and saw a man standing on the pavement in a pool of dappled light. He was tall and long-limbed, with fair hair and pale, bloodless skin. Dark glasses concealed his eyes.

      “No,” answered Sarah at length. “I can’t.”

      “You don’t speak Hebrew?” The man’s English contained the unmistakable

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