A Death in Vienna

objects to be manipulated by higher beings. Gabriel walked one step ahead of him.
    “The boss wants to see you.”
    “I’m sure he does, but I haven’t slept in two days, and I’m tired.”
    “The boss doesn’t care if you’re tired. Who the hell do you think you are, Allon?”
    Gabriel, even in the sanctuary of Ben-Gurion Airport, did not appreciate the use of his real name. He wheeled around. The headquarters man held up his palms in surrender. Gabriel turned and kept walking. The headquarters man had the good sense not to follow.
    Outside, rain was hammering against the pavement. Lev’s doing, no doubt. Gabriel sought shelter beneath the taxi stand and thought about where to go. He had no residence in Israel; the Office was his only home. Usually he stayed at a safe flat or Shamron’s villa in Tiberias.
    A black Peugeot turned into the traffic circle. The weight of the armor made it ride low on the heavy-duty suspension. It stopped in front of Gabriel, the bulletproof rear window slid down. Gabriel smelled the bitter, familiar scent of Turkish tobacco. Then he saw the hand, liver-spotted and blue-veined, gesturing wearily for him to come out of the rain.
    THE CAR LURCHEDforward even before Gabriel could close the door. Shamron was never one for standing still. He crushed out his cigarette for Gabriel’s sake and lowered the windows for a few seconds in order to clear the air. When the windows were closed again, Gabriel told him of Lev’s hostile reception. He spoke to Shamron in English at first; then, remembering where he was, he switched to Hebrew.
    “Apparently, he wants to have a word with me.”
    “Yes, I know,” Shamron said. “He’d like to see me as well.”
    “How did he find out about Vienna?”
    “It seems Manfred Kruz paid a courtesy call on the embassy after your deportation and threw something of a fit. I’m told it wasn’t pretty. The Foreign Ministry is furious, and the entire top floor of King Saul Boulevard is baying for my blood—and yours.”
    “What can they do to me?”
    “Nothing, which is why you’re my perfect accomplice—that and your obvious talents, of course.”
    The car sped out of the airport and turned onto the highway. Gabriel wondered why they were heading toward Jerusalem, but was too exhausted to care. After a while, they began to climb into the Judean Mountains. Soon the car was filled with the scent of eucalyptus and wet pine. Gabriel looked out the rain-spattered window and tried to remember the last time he had set foot in his country. It was after he had hunted down Tariq al-Hourani. He’d spent a month in a safe flat just outside the walls of the Old City, recovering from a bullet wound in his chest. That was more than three years ago. He realized that the threads that bound him to this place were fraying. He wondered whether he, like Francesco Tiepolo, would die in Venice and suffer the indignity of a mainland burial.
    “Something tells me Lev and the Foreign Ministry are going to beslightly less annoyed with me when they find out what’s inside this.” Shamron held up an envelope. “Looks like you were a very busy boy during your brief stay in Vienna. Who’s Ludwig Vogel?”
    Gabriel, his head propped against the window, told Shamron everything, beginning with his encounter with Max Klein, and ending with his tense confrontation with Manfred Kruz in his hotel room. Shamron was soon smoking again, and though Gabriel could not see his face clearly in the back of the darkened limousine, the old man was actually smiling. Umberto Conti may have given Gabriel the tools to become a great restorer, but Shamron was responsible for his flawless memory.
    “No wonder Kruz was so anxious to get you out of Austria,” Shamron said. “The Islamic Fighting Cells?” He emitted a burst of derisive laughter. “How convenient. The government accepts the claim of responsibility and sweeps the affair under the rug as an act of Islamic terror on Austrian soil. That way the trail doesn’t get too close to Austrians—or to Vogel and Metzler, especially so near to the election.”
    “But what about the documents from the Staatsarchiv? According to them, Ludwig Vogel is squeaky clean.”
    “So why did he plant a bomb in Eli’s office and murder Max Klein?”
    “We don’t know if he did either one of those things.”
    “True, but the facts certainly suggest that’s a possibility. We might not be able to prove it in court, but the story would sell a lot