Daniel Silva: The Secret Servant

The corridor led to a secure door, and the door to a restricted area just off the main traffic circle outside the terminal. A dented Renault sedan stood in the reserved parking place. Navot opened the trunk and tossed Gabriel’s bag inside. “I gave my driver the night off,” he said. “I wanted a word in private. You know how the drivers can be. They sit around down there in the motor pool all day with nothing to do but gossip. They’re worse than a sewing circle.”

Gabriel got into the passenger seat and closed the door. He looked into the backseat. It was stacked with Bella’s books and files. Bella was an academic who specialized in Syria and drifted in and out of government service. She was far more intelligent than Navot, an openly acknowledged fact that had been a source of considerable tension in their long and turbulent relationship. Navot started her car with a hostile twist of the key and drove it too hard toward the airport exit ramp.

“How did the painting turn out?” he asked.

“It turned out just fine, Uzi.”

“It was a Botticelli, wasn’t it?”

“Bellini,” Gabriel corrected him. “ Lament over the Dead Christ .” He might have added that the sublime panel had once formed the cyma of Bellini’s remarkable altarpiece in the Church of San Francesco in Pesaro, but he didn’t. The fact that Gabriel was one of the world’s finest art restorers had always made him the target of professional envy among his colleagues. He rarely discussed his work with them, even with Navot, who had become a close friend.

“Botticelli, Bellini-it’s all the same to me.” Navot shook his head. “Imagine, a nice Jewish boy like you restoring a Bellini masterpiece for the pope. I hope he paid you well.”

“He paid me the standard fee-and then a little more.”

“It’s only fair,” Navot said. “After all, you did save his life.”

“You had a hand in it, too, Uzi.”

“But I wasn’t the one who got his picture in the paper doing it.”

They came to the end of the ramp. Overhead was a blue-and-white traffic sign. To the left was Tel Aviv, to the right, Jerusalem. Navot turned to the right and headed toward the Judean Hills.

“How’s the mood at King Saul Boulevard?” Gabriel asked.

King Saul Boulevard was the longtime address of Israel ’s foreign intelligence service. The service had a long name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Men like Gabriel and Uzi Navot referred to it as “the Office” and nothing else.

“Consider yourself fortunate you’ve been away.”

“That bad?”

“It’s the night of the long knives. Our adventure in Lebanon was an unmitigated disaster. None of our institutions came out of it with their reputations intact, including the Office. You know how these things work. When mistakes of this magnitude are made, heads must roll, the more the better. No one is safe, especially Amos. The Commission of Inquiry wants to know why the Office didn’t realize Hezbollah was so well armed and why our vast network of well-paid collaborators couldn’t seem to find Hezbollah’s leadership once the fighting started.”

“The last thing the Office needs now is another power struggle and battle for succession-not with Hezbollah gearing up for another war. Not with Iran on the verge of a nuclear weapon. And not with the territories about to explode.”

“The decision has already been made by Shamron and the rest of the wise men that Amos must die. The only question is, will it be an execution, or will Amos be allowed to do the deed himself after a decent interval?”

“How do you know where Shamron stands on all this?”

Navot, by his edgy silence, made clear that his source was Shamron himself. It had been years now since Shamron had done his last tour as chief, yet the Office was still very much his private fiefdom. It was filled with officers like Gabriel and Navot, men who had been recruited and groomed by Shamron, men who operated by a creed, even spoke a language, written by him. Shamron was known in Israel as the Memuneh , the one in charge, and he would remain so until the day he finally decided the country was safe enough for him to die.

“You’re playing a dangerous game, Uzi. Shamron is getting on. That bomb attack on his motorcade took a lot out of him. He’s not the man he used to be. There’s no guarantee he’ll prevail in a showdown with Amos, and I don’t need to remind you that the door to King Saul Boulevard for men like you is one way. If you and Shamron lose, you’ll be the one who ends up on the street hawking your services to the highest bidder, just like the rest of the Office’s washed-up field men.”

Navot nodded his head in agreement. “And I won’t have a pope to throw me a little work on the side.”

They started the ascent into the Bab al-Wad, the staircaselike gorge that leads from the Coastal Plain to Jerusalem. Gabriel felt his ears pop from the altitude change.

“Does Shamron have a successor in mind?”

“He wants the Office to be run by someone other than a soldier.”

It was one of the many peculiarities about the Office that made little sense to outsiders. Like the Americans, the Israelis nearly always chose men with no intelligence experience to be their chief spies. The Americans preferred politicians and party apparatchiks, while in Israel the job usually went to an army general like Amos. Shamron was the last man to ascend to the throne from the ranks of Operations, and he had been manipulating every occupant since.

“So that’s why you’re conspiring with Shamron? You’re angling for Amos’s job? You and Shamron are using the debacle in Lebanon as grounds for a coup d’état. You’ll seize the palace, and Shamron will pull the strings from his villa in Tiberias.”

“I’m flattered you think Shamron would trust me with the keys to his beloved Office, but that’s not the case. The Memuneh has someone else in mind for the job.”

“Me?” Gabriel shook his head slowly. “I’m an assassin, Uzi, and they don’t make assassins the director.”

“You’re more than just an assassin.”

Gabriel looked silently out the window at the orderly yellow streetlights of a Jewish settlement spreading down the hillside toward the flatlands of the West Bank. In the distance a crescent moon hung over Ramallah. “What makes Shamron think I’d want to be the chief?” he asked. “I wriggled off the hook when he wanted to make me chief of Special Ops.”

“Are you trying to drop a not-so-subtle reminder that I got the job only because you didn’t want it?”

“What I’m trying to say, Uzi, is that I’m not fit for Headquarters-and I certainly don’t want to spend my life in endless Security Cabinet meetings in the Prime Minister’s Office. I don’t play well with others, and I won’t be a party to your little conspiracy against Amos.”

“So what do you intend to do? Sit around and wait for the pope to give you more work?”

“You’re starting to sound like Shamron.”

Navot ignored the remark. “Sit around while the missiles rain down on Haifa? While the mullahs in Tehran build their nuclear bomb? Is that your plan? To leave the fighting to others?” Navot took a long look into the rearview mirror. “But why should you be any different? At the moment it’s a national affliction. Fortress Israel is cracking under the strain of this war without end. The founding fathers are dying off, and the people aren’t sure they trust the new generation of leaders with their future. Those with the resources are creating escape hatches for themselves. It’s the Jewish instinct, isn’t it? It’s in our DNA because of the Holocaust. One hears things now that one didn’t hear even ten years ago. People wonder openly whether the entire enterprise was a mistake. They delude themselves into thinking that the Jewish national home is not in Palestine but in America.”