Daniel Silva: Moscow Rules

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.

“Is he still on the payroll?”

“The Syrian?” Navot, playing the role of Monsieur Laffont, pulled his lips into a Parisian frown. “I’m afraid he had something of a mishap a few years back.”

“What happened?” Gabriel asked cautiously. He knew that when individuals associated with the Office had mishaps, it was usually fatal.

“A team of Syrian counterintelligence agents photographed him entering a bank in Geneva. He was arrested at the airport in Damascus the next day and taken to the Palestine Branch.” The Palestine Branch was the name of Syria ’s main interrogation center. “They tortured him viciously for a month. When they’d wrung everything out of him they could, they put a bullet in his head and threw his body in an unmarked grave.”

Gabriel looked down toward the other tables. The girl from the piazza was now seated alone near the entrance. Her menu was open but her eyes were slowly scanning the other patrons. An oversize handbag lay at her feet with the zipper open. Inside the bag, Gabriel knew, was a loaded gun.

“Who’s the bat leveyha ?”

“Tamara,” said Navot. “She’s new.”

“She’s also very pretty.”

“Yes,” said Navot, as though he’d never noticed that before.

“You could have selected someone who was over thirty.”

“She was the only girl available on short notice.”

“Just make sure you behave yourself, Monsieur Laffont.”

“The days of torrid affairs with my female escort officers are officially over.” Navot removed his spectacles and laid them on the table. They were highly fashionable and far too small for his large face. “Bella has decided it’s time we finally get married.”

“So that explains the new eyeglasses. You’re the chief of Special Ops now, Uzi. You really should be able to choose your own glasses.”

Special Ops, in the words of the celebrated Israeli spymaster Ari Shamron, was “the dark side of a dark service.” They were the ones who did the jobs no one else wanted, or dared, to do. They were executioners and kidnappers, buggers and blackmailers; men of intellect and ingenuity with a criminal streak wider than the criminals themselves; multi-linguists and chameleons who were at home in the finest hotels and salons in Europe or the worst back alleys of Beirut and Baghdad.

“I thought Bella had grown weary of you,” Gabriel said. “I thought you two were in the final throes.”

“Your wedding to Chiara managed to rekindle her belief in love. At the moment, we are in tense negotiations over the time and place.” Navot frowned. “I’m confident it will be easier to reach agreement with the Palestinians over the final status of Jerusalem than it will be for Bella and me to come to terms over wedding plans.”

Gabriel raised his wineglass a few inches from the white tablecloth and murmured, “ Mazel tov , Uzi.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Navot said gloomily. “You see, Gabriel, you’ve set the bar rather high for the rest of us. Imagine, a surprise wedding, perfectly planned and executed-the dress, the food, even the place settings, exactly what Chiara wanted. And now you’re spending your honeymoon at an isolated villa in Umbria restoring a painting for the pope. How’s a mere mortal like me ever supposed to live up to that?”

“I had help.” Gabriel smiled. “Special Ops really did do a lovely job with the arrangements, didn’t they?”

“If our enemies ever find out Special Ops planned a wedding, our vaunted reputation will be ruined.”

A waiter mounted the steps and started up toward the table. Navot stilled him with a small movement of his hand and added wine to Gabriel’s glass.

“The Old Man sends his love.”

“I’m sure he does,” Gabriel said absently. “How is he?”

“He’s beginning to grumble.”

“What’s bothering him now?”

“Your security arrangements at the villa. He thinks they’re less than satisfactory.”

“Precisely five people know I’m in the country: the Italian prime minister, the chiefs of his intelligence and security services, the pope, and the pope’s private secretary.”

“He still thinks the security is inadequate.” Navot hesitated. “And I’m afraid that, given recent developments, I must concur.”

“What recent developments?”

Navot placed his big arms on the table and leaned forward a few inches. “We’re picking up some rumblings from our sources in Egypt. It seems Sheikh Tayyib is rather upset with you for foiling his well-laid plan to bring down the Mubarak government. He’s instructed all Sword of Allah operatives in Europe and the Middle East to begin looking for you at once. Last week, a Sword agent crossed into Gaza and asked Hamas to join in the search.”

“I take it our friends in Hamas agreed to help.”

“Without hesitation.” Navot’s next words were spoken not in French but in quiet Hebrew. “As you might imagine, the Old Man is hearing these reports about the gathering threats to your life, and he is fixated on one single thought: Why is Gabriel Allon, Israel ’s avenging angel and most capable secret servant, sitting on a cattle ranch in the hills of Umbria restoring a painting for His Holiness Pope Paul the Seventh?”

Gabriel looked out at the view. The sun was sinking toward the distant hills in the west and the first lights were coming up on the valley floor. An image flashed in his memory: a man with a gun in his outstretched hand, firing bullets into the face of a fallen terrorist, beneath the North Tower of Westminster Abbey. It appeared to him in oil on canvas, as if painted by the hand of Caravaggio.

“The angel is on his honeymoon,” he said, his gaze still focused on the valley. “And the angel is in no condition to work again.”

“We don’t get honeymoons, Gabriel-not proper ones, in any case. As for your physical condition, God knows you went through hell at the hands of the Sword of Allah. No one would blame you if you left the Office for good this time.”

“No one but Shamron, of course.”

Navot picked at the tablecloth but made no reply. It had been nearly a decade since Ari Shamron had done his last tour as chief, yet he still meddled with the affairs of the Office as though it were his personal fiefdom. For several years, he had done so from Kaplan Street in Jerusalem, where he had served as the prime minister’s chief adviser on matters of security and counterterrorism. Now, aged and still recovering from a terrorist attack on his official car, he pulled the levers of influence from his fortresslike villa overlooking the Sea of Galilee.

“Shamron wants me locked in a cage in Jerusalem,” Gabriel said. “He thinks that if he can make my life miserable enough, I’ll have no other choice but to take over control of the Office.”

“There are worse fates in life, Gabriel. A hundred men would give their right arm to be in your position.” Navot lapsed into silence, then added, “Including me.”

“Play your cards carefully, Uzi, and someday the job will be yours.”

“That’s the way I got the job as chief of Special Ops-because you refused to take it. I’ve spent my career living in your shadow, Gabriel. It’s not easy. It makes me feel like a consolation prize.”

“They don’t promote consolation prizes, Uzi. If they didn’t think you were worthy of the job, they would have left you in the European post and found someone else.”

Navot seemed eager to change the subject. “Let’s have something to eat,” he suggested. “Otherwise, the waiter might think we’re a couple of spies, talking business.”