Daniel Silva - The Kill Artist

Finally, in the distance, she could hear the two-note song of a Paris police siren. She looked away from the motorcyclist and saw René advancing slowly toward her through the carnage. He expelled the spent magazine from his weapon, casually inserted another, pulled the slide.

Emily backpedaled until she was pressed against the parapet. She turned and looked down at the black river gliding slowly beneath her.

“You’re a monster!” she screamed in English, because in her panic her French had abandoned her. “You’re a fucking monster! Who the fuck are you?”

“Don’t try to get away from me,” he said in the same language. “It will only make things worse.”

Then he raised his gun and fired several shots into her heart. The force of the bullets drove her over the edge of the parapet. She felt herself falling toward the river. Her hands reached out, and she saw the bracelet on her wrist. The bracelet René, her lover, had given her just moments before. Such a beautiful bracelet. Such a terrible shame.

She collided with the river and slipped below the surface. She opened her mouth, and her lungs filled with frigid water. She could taste her own blood. She saw a flash of brilliant white, heard her mother calling her name. Then there was only darkness. A vast, silent darkness. And the cold.

Tiberias, Israel

Despite the events in Paris, the stranger might have managed to remain in seclusion but for the resurrection of the legendary spymaster Ari Shamron. It was not necessary to awaken Shamron that night, for he had long ago lost the gift of sleep. Indeed, he was so restless at night that Rami, the young head of his personal security detail, had christened him the Phantom of Tiberias. At first Shamron suspected it was age. He had turned sixty-five recently and for the first time had contemplated the possibility that someday he might actually die. During a grudging annual physical his doctor had had the audacity to suggest-“And this is just a suggestion, Ari, because God knows I’d never try to actually give you an order”-that Shamron reduce his daily intake of caffeine and tobacco: twelve cups of black coffee and sixty strong Turkish cigarettes. Shamron had found these suggestions mildly amusing.

It was only during an uncharacteristic period of introspection, brought on by his forced retirement from the service, that Shamron had settled on the causes of his chronic sleeplessness. He had told so many lies, spun so many deceptions, that sometimes he could no longer tell fact from fiction, truth from untruth. And then there was the killing. He had killed with his own hands, and he had ordered other men, younger men, to kill for him. A life of betrayal and violence had taken its toll. Some men go crazy, some burn out. Ari Shamron had been sentenced to remain forever awake.

Shamron had made an uneasy peace with his affliction, the way some people accommodate madness or terminal disease. He had become a night wanderer, roaming his sandstone-colored villa overlooking the Sea of Galilee, sitting on the terrace when the nights were fine and soft, staring at the lake and the moonlit expanse of the Upper Galilee. Sometimes he would slip down to his studio and engage in his great passion, repairing old radios-the only activity that completely released his mind from thoughts of work.

And sometimes he would wander down to the security gate and pass a few hours sitting in the shack with Rami and the other boys, telling stories over coffee and cigarettes. Rami liked the story of Eichmann’s capture the best. Each time a new boy joined the detail, Rami urged Shamron to tell it again, so the new boy would understand that he had been given a great privilege: the privilege of protecting Shamron, the Sabra superman, Israel ’s avenging angel.

Rami had made him tell the story again that night. As usual it had dredged up many memories, some of them not so pleasant. Shamron had no old radios in which to lose himself, and it was too cold and rainy to sit outside, so he lay in bed, wide-eyed, sorting through new operations, remembering old ones, dissecting opponents for frailty, plotting their destruction. So when the special telephone on his bedside table emitted two sharp rings, Shamron reached out with the relieved air of an old man grateful for company and slowly pulled the receiver to his ear.

Rami stepped outside the guardhouse and watched the old man pounding down the drive. He was bald and thick, with steel-rimmed spectacles. His face was dry and deeply creviced-like the Negev, thought Rami. As usual he wore khaki trousers and an ancient leather bomber jacket with a tear on the right breast, just below the armpit. Within the service there were two theories about the tear. Some believed the jacket had been pierced by a bullet during a reprisal raid into Jordan in the fifties. Others argued that it had been torn by the dying fingers of a terrorist whom Shamron garroted in a Cairo back alley. Shamron always insisted gruffly that the truth was much more prosaic-the jacket had been torn on the corner of a car door-but no one within the service took him seriously.

He walked as if he were anticipating an assault from behind, elbows out, head down. The Shamron shuffle, the walk that said, “Get the fuck out of my way or I’ll have your balls for breakfast.” Rami felt his pulse quicken at the sight of the old man. If Shamron told him to jump off a cliff, he’d jump. If the old man told him to stop in midair, he’d figure out some way to do it.

As Shamron drew closer, Rami caught sight of his face. The lines around his mouth were a little deeper. He was angry-Rami could see it in his eyes-but there seemed to be a hint of a smile across his arid lips. What the hell is he smiling about? Chiefs aren’t disturbed after midnight unless it’s urgent or very bad news. Then Rami hit upon the reason: the Phantom of Tiberias simply was relieved he had been spared another sleepless night with no enemies to fight.

Forty-five minutes later Shamron’s armored Peugeot slipped into the underground garage of a cheerless office block looming over King Saul Boulevard in northern Tel Aviv. He stepped into a private elevator and rode up to his office suite on the top floor. Queen Esther, his long-suffering senior secretary, had left a fresh packet of cigarettes on the desk next to a thermos bottle of coffee. Shamron immediately lit a cigarette and sat down.

His first action after returning to the service had been to remove the pompous Scandinavian furnishings of his predecessor and donate them to a charity for Russian émigrés. Now the office looked like the battlefield headquarters of a fighting general. It stressed mobility and function over style and grace. For his desk Shamron used a large, scarred library table. Along the wall opposite the window was a row of gunmetal file cabinets. On the shelf behind his desk was a thirty-year-old German-made shortwave radio. Shamron had no need for the daily summaries of the Office radio-monitoring department, because he spoke a half-dozen languages fluently and understood a half-dozen more. He could also repair the radio himself when it broke down. In fact, he could fix almost anything electronic. Once his senior staff had arrived for a weekly planning meeting to find Shamron peering into the entrails of Queen Esther’s videocassette player.

The only hint of modernity in the office was the row of large television sets opposite his desk. Using his remote controls, he switched them on one by one. He had lost the hearing in one ear, so he turned up the volume quite loud, until it sounded as if three men-a Frenchman, an Englishman, and an American-were having a violent row in his office.

Outside, in the chamber between Esther’s office and his own, Shamron’s senior staff had gathered like anxious acolytes awaiting an audience with their master. There was the whippetlike Eli from Planning and the Talmudic Mordecai, the service’s executive officer. There was Yossi, the genius from the Europe Desk who had read the Greats at Oxford, and Lev, the highly flammable chief of Operations, who filled his precious empty hours by collecting predatory insects. Only Lev seemed to have no physical fear of Shamron. Every few minutes he would thrust his angular head through the doorway and shout, “For God’s sake, Ari! When? Sometime tonight, I hope!”