Prince of Fire

to give it up just yet, Eli.”
    “So I gather. You’ve been a busy boy. I’ve been reading about you in the newspapers. That’s not a good thing in your line of work—being in the newspapers.”
    “It was your line of work, too.”
    “Once,” he said, “a long time ago.”
    Lavon had been a promising young archaeologist in September 1972 when Shamron recruited him to be a member of the Wrath of God team. He’d been an ayin, a tracker. He’d followed the Black Septembrists and learned their habits. In many ways his job had been the most dangerous of all, because he had been exposed to the terrorists for days on end with no backup. The work had left him with a nervous disorder and chronic intestinal problems.
    “How much do you know about the case, Eli?”
    “I’d heard through the grapevine you were back in the country, something to do with the Rome bombing. Then Shamron showed up at my door one evening and told me you were chasing Sabri’s boy. Is it true? Did little Khaled really do Rome?”
    “He’s not a little boy anymore. He did Rome, and he did Gare de Lyon. And Buenos Aires and Istanbul before that.”
    “It doesn’t surprise me. Terrorism is in Khaled’s veins. He drank it with his mother’s milk.” Lavon shook his head. “You know, if I’d been watching your back in France, like I did in the old days, none of this would have happened.”
    “That’s probably true, Eli.”
    Lavon’s street skills were legendary. Shamron always said that Eli Lavon could disappear while shaking your hand. Once a year he went to the Academy to pass along the secrets of his trade to the next generation. Indeed, the watchers who’d been in Marseilles had probably spent time sitting at Lavon’s feet.
    “So what brings you to Armageddon?”
    Gabriel laid a photograph on the tabletop.
    “Handsome devil,” Lavon said. “Who is he?”
    Gabriel laid a second version of the same photo on the table. This one included the figure seated at the subject’s left, Yasir Arafat.
    “Khaled?”
    Gabriel nodded.
    “What does this have to do with me?”
    “I think you and Khaled might have something in common.”
    “What’s that?”
    Gabriel looked out at the excavation trenches.
    A TRIO OF American students joined them beneath the shade of the tarpaulin. Lavon and Gabriel excused themselves and walked slowly around the perimeter of the dig. Gabriel told him everything, beginning with the dossier discovered in Milan and ending with the information Nabil Azouri had brought out of Ein al-Hilweh. Lavon listened without asking questions, but Gabriel could see, in Lavon’s clever brown eyes, that he was already making connections and searching for further avenues of exploration. He was more than just a skilled surveillance artist. Like Gabriel, Lavon was the child of Holocaust survivors. After the Wrath of God operation, he had settled in Vienna and opened a small investigative bureau called Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Operating on a shoestring budget, he had managed to track down millions of dollars in looted Jewish assets and had played a significant role in prying a multibillion-dollar settlement from the banks of Switzerland. Five months earlier a bomb had exploded at Lavon’s office. Lavon’s two assistants were killed; Lavon, seriously injured, had been in a coma for several weeks. The man who planted the bomb had been working for Erich Radek.
    “So you think Fellah al-Tamari knew Khaled?”
    “Without question.”
    “It seems a bit out of character. To remain hidden all those years, he must have been a careful chap.”
    “That’s true,” Gabriel said, “but he knew that Fellah would be killed in the bombing of the Gare de Lyon and that his secret would be protected. She was in love with him, and he lied to her.”
    “I see your point.”
    “But the most compelling piece of evidence that they knew each other comes from her father. Fellah told him to burn the letters and the photographs she’d sent over the years. That means Khaled must have been in them.”
    “As Khaled?”
    Gabriel shook his head. “It was more threatening than that. She must have mentioned him by his other name—his French name.”
    “So you think Khaled met the girl under ordinary circumstances and recruited her sometime after?”
    “That’s the way he’d play it,” Gabriel said. “That’s how his father would have played it, too.”
    “They could have met anywhere.”
    “Or they could have met somewhere just like