Daniel Silva - The Kill Artist

Jacqueline had been given her first taste of intelligence work. She found it exhilarating. She had played a small role in an operation that had dealt a blow to Iraq ’s nuclear ambitions. She had helped protect the State of Israel from an enemy that would do anything to destroy it. And in a small way she had avenged the deaths of her grandparents.

She had to wait another year for her next assignment: seducing and blackmailing a Syrian intelligence officer in London. It was another stunning success. Nine months later she was sent to Cyprus to seduce a German chemical company executive who was selling his wares to Libya. This time there was a twist. Shamron wanted her to drug the German and photograph the documents in his briefcase while he was unconscious. Once again she pulled off the job without a hitch.

After the operation Shamron flew her to Tel Aviv, presented her with a secret citation, told her she was finished. It didn’t take long for things to circulate through the intelligence underground. Her next target might suspect that the pretty French model was more than she appeared to be. And she might very well end up dead.

She begged him for one more job. Shamron reluctantly agreed.

Three months later he sent her to Tunis.

Jacqueline had thought it was strange that Shamron instructed her to meet Gabriel Allon in a church in Turin. She found him standing atop a platform, restoring a fresco depicting the Ascension. She worked with good-looking men every day in her overt life, but there was something about Gabriel that took her breath away. It was the intense concentration in his eyes. Jacqueline wanted him to look at her the way he was looking at the fresco. She decided she was going to make love to this man before the operation was over.

They traveled to Tunis the following morning and checked into a hotel on the beach. For the first few days he left her alone while he worked. He would return to the hotel each evening. They would have dinner, stroll the souk or the corniche along the beach, then go back to their room. They would talk like lovers in case the room was bugged. He slept in his clothing, stayed rigorously on his side of the bed, a wall of Plexiglas separating them.

On the fourth day he took her with him while he worked. He showed her the beach where the commandos would come ashore and the villa owned by the target. Her passion for him deepened. Here was a man who had devoted his life to defending Israel from its enemies. She felt insignificant and frivolous by comparison. She also found that she couldn’t take her eyes off him. She wanted to run her hands through his short hair, touch his face and his body. As they lay in bed together that night, she rolled on top of him without warning and kissed his lips, but he pushed her away and made a Bedouin’s camp bed for himself on the floor.

Jacqueline thought: My God, I’ve made a complete fool of myself.

Five minutes later he came back to the bed and sat down by her side. Then he leaned forward and whispered into her ear: “I want to make love to you too, but I can’t. I’m married.”

“I don’t care.”

“When the operation is over, you’ll never see me again.”

“I know.”

He was just as she imagined: skilled and artful, meticulous and gentle. In his hands she felt like one of his paintings. She could almost feel his eyes touching her. She felt a stupid pride that she had been able to break through his walls of self-control and seduce him. She wanted the operation to go on forever. It couldn’t, of course, and the night they left Tunis was the saddest of her life.

After Tunis she threw herself into her modeling. She told Marcel to accept every offer that came in. She worked nonstop for six months, pushing herself to the point of exhaustion. She even tried dating other men. None of it worked. She thought about Gabriel and Tunis constantly. For the first time in her life she felt obsession, yet she was absolutely helpless to do anything about it. At her wits’ end, she went to Shamron and asked him to put her in touch with Gabriel. He refused. She began to have a terrible fantasy about the death of Gabriel’s wife. And when Shamron told her what had happened in Vienna, she felt unbearable guilt.

She had not seen or spoken to Gabriel since that night in Tunis. She couldn’t imagine why he would want to see her now. But one hour later, as she watched his car pulling into her drive, she felt a smile spreading across her face. She thought: Thank God you’re here, Gabriel, because I can use a little restoration myself.

Tel Aviv

The CIA’s executive director, Adrian Carter, was a man who was easily underestimated. It was a trait he had used to great effect during his long career. He was short and thin as a marathoner. His sparse hair and rimless spectacles gave him a slightly clinical air, his trousers and blazer looked like they’d been slept in. He seemed out of place in the cold, modern conference room at King Saul Boulevard, as if he had wandered into the building by mistake. But Ari Shamron had worked with Carter when he was the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. He knew Carter was a seasoned operative-a man who spoke six languages fluently and could melt into the back alleys of Warsaw or Beirut with equal ease. He also knew that his talents in the field were matched only by his skills in the bureaucratic trenches. A worthy opponent indeed.

“Any breaks in the Paris investigation?” Carter asked.

Shamron shook his head slowly. “I’m afraid not.”

“Nothing at all, Ari? I find that difficult to believe.”

“The moment we hear anything you’ll be the first to know. And what about you? Any interesting intercepts you’d care to share? Any friendly Arab services tell you anything they’d be reluctant to share with the Zionist entity?”

Carter had just completed a two-week regional tour, conferring with intelligence chiefs from the Persian Gulf to North Africa. King Saul Boulevard was his last stop. “Nothing, I’m afraid,” he said. “But we’ve heard a few whispers from some of our other sources.”

Shamron raised an eyebrow. “Oh, really?”

“They tell us that the word on the street is that Tariq was behind the attack in Paris.”

“Tariq has been quiet for some time. Why would he pull something like Paris now?”

“Because he’s desperate,” Carter said. “Because the two sides are getting closer to a deal, and Tariq would like nothing better than to spoil the party. And because Tariq sees himself as a man of history, and history is about to pass him by.”

“It’s an interesting theory, but we’ve seen no evidence to suggest Tariq was involved.”

“If you did receive such evidence, you’d share it with us, of course.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t need to remind you that an American citizen was murdered along with your ambassador. The president has made a promise to the American people that her killer will be brought to justice. I plan to help him keep that promise.”

“You can count on the support of this service,” Shamron said piously.

“If it was Tariq, we’d like to find him and bring him to the United States for trial. But we won’t be able to do that if he turns up dead someplace, filled with twenty-two-caliber bullet holes.”

“ Adrian, what are you trying to say to me?”

“What I’m saying is that the man in the big white house on Pennsylvania Avenue wants the situation handled in a civilized fashion. If it turns out Tariq was the one who killed Emily Parker in Paris, he wants him tried in an American courtroom. No eye-for-an-eye bullshit on this one, Ari. No back-alley execution.”

“We obviously have a difference of opinion about how best to deal with a man like Tariq.”