Daniel Silva - Prince of fire

“Monsieur Veran?”

“Mimi, my love,” Martineau said. “So good to hear the sound of your voice.”

The telephone woke him. Like all safe flat phones, it had no ringer, only a flashing light, luminous as a channel marker, that turned his eyelids to crimson. He reached out and brought the receiver to his ear.

“Wake up,” said Shimon Pazner.

“What time is it?”

“Eight-thirty.”

Gabriel had slept twelve hours.

“Get dressed. There’s something you should see since you’re in town.”

“I’ve analyzed the photographs, I’ve read all the reports. I don’t need to see it.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Why?”

“It’ll piss you off.”

“What good will that do?”

“Sometimes we need to be pissed off,” Pazner said. “I’ll meet you on the steps of the Galleria Borghese in an hour. Don’t leave me standing there like an idiot.”

Pazner hung up. Gabriel climbed out of bed and stood beneath the shower for a long time, debating whether to shave his beard. In the end he decided to trim it instead. He dressed in one of Herr Klemp’s dark suits and went to the Via Veneto for coffee. One hour after hanging up with Pazner he was walking along a shaded gravel footpath toward the steps of the galleria. The Rome katsa sat on a marble bench in the forecourt, smoking a cigarette.

“Nice beard,” said Pazner. “Christ, you look like hell.”

“I needed an excuse to stay in my hotel room in Cairo.”

“How’d you do it?”

Gabriel answered: a common pharmaceutical product that, when ingested instead of used properly, had a disastrous but temporary effect on the gastrointestinal tract.

“How many doses did you take?”

“Three.”

“Poor bastard.”

They headed north through the gardens-Pazner like a man marching to a drum only he could hear, Gabriel at his side, weary from too much travel and too many worries. On the perimeter of the park, near the botanical gardens, was the entrance to the cul-de-sac. For days after the bombing the world’s media had camped out in the intersection. The ground was still littered with their cigarette ends and crushed Styrofoam coffee cups. It looked to Gabriel like a patch of farmland after the annual harvest festival.

They entered the street and made their way down the slope of the hill, until they arrived at a temporary steel barricade, watched over by Italian police and Israeli security men. Pazner was immediately admitted, along with his bearded German acquaintance.

Once beyond the fence they could see the first signs of damage: the scorched stone pine stripped clean of their needles; the blown-out windows in the neighboring villas; the pieces of twisted debris lying about like scraps of discarded paper. A few more paces and the bomb crater came into view, ten feet deep at least and surrounded by a halo of burnt pavement. Little remained of the buildings closest to the blast point; deeper in the compound, the structures remained standing, but the sides facing the explosion had been sheared away, so that the effect was of a child’s dollhouse. Gabriel glimpsed an intact office with framed photographs still propped on the desk and a bathroom with a towel still hanging from the rod. The air was heavy with the stench of ash and, Gabriel feared, the lingering scent of burning flesh. From deep within the compound came the scrape and grumble of backhoes and bulldozers. The crime scene, like the corpse of a murder victim, had given up its final clues. Now it was time for the burial.

Gabriel stayed longer than he’d thought he would. No past wound, real or perceived, no grievance or political dispute justified an act of murder on this scale. Pazner was right-the very sight of it moved him to intense anger. But there was something else, something more than anger. It made him hate. He turned and started walking back up the hill. Pazner followed silently after him.

“Who told you to bring me here?”

“It was my idea.”

“Who?”

“The old man,” Pazner said quietly.

“Why?”

“I don’t know why.”

Gabriel stopped. “Why, Shimon?”

“Varash met last night after you checked in from Frankfurt. Go back to the safe flat. Wait there for further instructions. Someone will be in touch soon.”

And with that Pazner crossed the street and disappeared into the Villa Borghese.

But he did not return to the safe flat. Instead, he headed in the opposite direction, into the residential districts of north Rome. He found the Via Trieste and followed it west, until he arrived, ten minutes later, in an untidy little square called the Piazza Annabaliano.

Little about it had changed in the thirty years since Gabriel had first seen it-the same stand of melancholy trees in the center of the square, the same dreary shops catering to customers of the working classes. And at the northern edge, wedged between two streets, was the same apartment house, shaped like a slice of pie, with the point facing the square and the Bar Trieste on the ground floor. Zwaiter used to stop in the bar to use the telephone before heading upstairs to his room.

Gabriel crossed the square, picking his way through the cars and motorbikes parked haphazardly in the center, and entered the apartment house through a doorway marked “Entrance C.” The foyer was cold and in darkness. The lights, Gabriel remembered, operated on a timer to save electricity. Surveillance of the building had noted that residents, including Zwaiter, rarely bothered to switch them on-a fact that would prove to be an operational asset for Gabriel, because it had virtually assured him the advantage of working in the dark.

Now he paused in front of the elevator. Next to the elevator was a mirror. Surveillance had neglected to mention it. Gabriel, seeing his own reflection in the glass that night, had nearly drawn his Beretta and fired. Instead he had calmly reached into his jacket pocket for a coin and was holding it out toward the payment slot on the elevator when Zwaiter, dressed in a plaid jacket and clutching a paper sack containing a bottle of fig wine, walked through Entrance C for the last time.

“Excuse me, but are you Wadal Zwaiter?”

“No! Please, no!”

Gabriel had allowed the coin to fall from his fingertips. Before it had struck the floor he had drawn his Beretta and fired the first two shots. One of the rounds pierced the paper sack before striking Zwaiter in the chest. Blood and wine had mingled at Gabriel’s feet as he poured fire into the Palestinian’s collapsing body.

Now he looked into the mirror and saw himself as he had been that night, a boy angel in a leather jacket, an artist who had no comprehension of how the act he was about to commit would forever alter the course of his life. He had become someone else. He had remained someone else ever since. Shamron had neglected to tell him that would happen. He had taught him how to draw a gun and fire in one second, but he had done nothing to prepare him for what would happen afterward. Engaging the terrorist on his terms, on his battlefield, comes at a terrible price. It changes the men who do it, along with the society that dispatches them. It is the terrorist’s ultimate weapon. For Gabriel, the changes were visible as well. By the time he’d staggered into Paris for his next assignment, his temples were gray.

He looked into the mirror again and saw the bearded figure of Herr Klemp looking back at him. Images of the case flashed through his mind: a flattened embassy, his own dossier, Khaled… Was Shamron right? Was Khaled sending him a message? Had Khaled chosen Rome because of what Gabriel had done thirty years ago, on this very spot?

He heard the soft shuffle of footfalls behind him-an old woman, dressed in the black of widowhood, clutching a plastic sack of groceries. She stared directly at him. Gabriel, for an instant, feared she somehow remembered him. He bid her a pleasant morning and went back out into the sunlit piazza.