Prince of Fire

hand on Yossi’s arm and adroitly changed the subject. Sometimes, when Gabriel was speaking, he would see Dina gazing at him as though he were a hero’s monument come to life. He realized that he, like Shamron before him, had crossed the line between mortal and myth.
    Radek intrigued them the most. Gabriel understood the reason for this all too well. They lived in a country where it was not safe to eat in a restaurant or to ride a bus, yet it was the Holocaust that occupied a special place in their nightmares. Is it true you made him walk through Treblinka? Did you touch him? How could you stand the sound of his voice in that place? Were you ever tempted to take matters into your own hands? Yaakov wanted to know only one thing: “Was he sorry he murdered our grandmothers?” And Gabriel, though he was tempted to lie, told him the truth. “No, he wasn’t sorry. In fact, I had the distinct impression he was still rather proud of it.” Yaakov nodded grimly, as if this fact seemed to confirm his rather pessimistic view of mankind.
    On Shabbat, Dina lit a pair of candles and recited the blessing. That night, instead of wandering Gabriel’s dark past, they spoke of their dreams. Yaakov wanted only to sit in a Tel Aviv café without fear of the shaheed . Yossi wanted to trek the Arab world from Morocco to Baghdad and chronicle his experiences. Rimona longed to turn on the radio in the morning and hear that no one had been killed the night before. And Dina? Gabriel suspected that Dina’s dreams, like his own, were a private screening room of blood and fire.
    After dinner Gabriel slipped from the room and wandered off down the corridor. He came to a flight of stairs, climbed them, then became disoriented and was pointed in the right direction by a night janitor. The entrance was under guard. Gabriel tried to show his new ID badge, but the Security officer just laughed and opened the door to him.
    The room was dimly lit and, because of the computers, unbearably cold. The duty officers wore fleece pullovers and moved with the quiet efficiency of night staff in an intensive care ward. Gabriel climbed up to the viewing platform and leaned his weight against the aluminum handrail. Arrayed before him was a massive computer-generated map of the world, ten feet in height, thirty in width. Scattered across the globe were pinpricks of light, each depicting the last known location of a terrorist on Israel’s watch list. There were clusters in Damascus and Baghdad and even in supposedly friendly places like Amman and Cairo. A river of light flowed from Beirut to the Bekaa Valley to the refugee camps along Israel’s northern border. The West Bank and Gaza were ablaze. A string of lights lay across Europe like a diamond necklace. The cities of North America glowed seductively.
    Gabriel felt a sudden weight of depression pushing down against his shoulders. He had given his life to the protection of the State and the Jewish people, and yet here, in this frigid room, he was confronted with the stark reality of the Zionist dream: a middle-aged man, gazing upon a constellation of enemies, waiting for the next one to explode.
    D INA WAS WAITING for him in the corridor in her stocking feet.
    “It feels familiar to me, Gabriel.”
    “What’s that?”
    “The way they carried it off. The way they moved. The planning. The sheer audacity of the thing. It feels like Munich and Sabena.” She paused and pushed a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear. “It feels like Black September.”
    “There is no Black September, Dina—not anymore, at least.”
    “You asked us to look for the thing that’s missing. Does that include Khaled?”
    “Khaled is a rumor. Khaled is a ghost story.”
    “I believe in Khaled,” she said. “Khaled keeps me awake at night.”
    “You have a hunch?”
    “A theory ,” she said, “and some interesting evidence to support it. Would you like to hear it?”

6

T EL A VIV : M ARCH 20
    T HEY RECONVENED AT TEN THAT EVENING . T HE mood, Gabriel would recall later, was that of a university study group, too exhausted for serious enterprise but too anxious to part company. Dina, in order to add credence to her hypothesis, stood behind a small tabletop lectern. Yossi sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by his precious files from Research. Rimona, the only one in uniform, propped her sandaled feet on the back of Yossi’s empty chair. Yaakov sat next to Gabriel, his body still as granite.
    Dina switched