Prince of Fire

over an insult in the village coffeehouse. Shamron offered the Arab a hundred Palestinian pounds if he would betray the whereabouts of the warlord. A week later, on a hillside near Beit Sayeed, they met for a second time. The Arab told Shamron where their common enemy could be found.
    “I hear he’s planning to spend the night in a cottage outside Lydda. It’s in the middle of an orange grove. Asad, the murderous dog, is surrounded by bodyguards. They’re hiding in the orchards. If you try to attack the cottage with a large force, the guards will sound the alert and Asad will flee like the coward that he is.”
    “And what do you recommend?” Shamron asked, playing to the Arab’s vanity.
    “A single assassin, a man who can slip through the defenses and kill Asad before he can escape. For another one hundred pounds, I’ll be that man.”
    Shamron did not wish to insult his informant, so he spent a moment pretending to consider the offer, even though his mind was already made up. The assassination of Sheikh Asad was too important to be trusted to a man who would betray his own people for money. He hurried back to Palmach headquarters in Tel Aviv and broke the news to the deputy commander, a handsome man with red hair and blue eyes named Yitzhak Rabin.
    “Someone needs to go to Lydda alone tonight and kill him,” Shamron said.
    “Chances are whoever we select won’t come out of that house alive.”
    “I know,” Shamron said, “that’s why it has to be me.”
    “You’re too important to risk on a mission like this.”
    “If this goes on much longer, we’ll lose Jerusalem—and then we’ll lose the war. What’s more important than that?”
    Rabin could see that there was no talking him out of it. “What can I do to help you?”
    “Make certain there’s a car and driver waiting for me on the edge of that orange grove after I kill him.”
    At midnight, Shamron climbed on a motorbike and rode from Tel Aviv to Lydda. He left the bike a mile from town and walked the rest of the way to the edge of the orchard. Such assaults, Shamron had learned from experience, were best carried out shortly before dawn, when the sentries were fatigued and at their least attentive. He entered the orchard a few minutes before sunrise, armed with a Sten gun and a steel trench knife. In the first gray light of the day, he could make out the faint shadows of the guards, propped against the trunks of the orange trees. One slept soundly as Shamron crept past. A single guard stood watch in the dusty forecourt of the cottage. Shamron killed him with a silent thrust of his knife, then he entered the cottage.
    It had but one room. Sheikh Asad lay sleeping on the floor. Two of his senior lieutenants were seated cross-legged next to him, drinking coffee. Caught off guard by Shamron’s silent approach, they did not react to the opening of the door. Only when they looked up and saw an armed Jew did they attempt to reach for their weapons. Shamron killed them both with a single burst of his Sten gun.
    Sheikh Asad awakened with a start and reached for his rifle. Shamron fired. Sheikh Asad, as he was dying, gazed into his killer’s eyes.
    “Another will take my place,” he said.
    “I know,” replied Shamron, then he fired again. He slipped from the cottage as the sentries came running. In the half-light of dawn he picked his way through the trees, until he came to the edge of the orange grove. The car was waiting; Yitzhak Rabin was behind the wheel.
    “Is he dead?” Rabin asked as he accelerated away.
    Shamron nodded. “It’s done.”
    “Good,” said Rabin. “Let the dogs lap up his blood.”

7

T EL A VIV
    D INA HAD LAPSED INTO A LONG SILENCE . Y OSSI and Rimona, entranced, watched her with the intensity of small children. Even Yaakov seemed to have fallen under her spell, not because he had been converted to Dina’s cause but because he wanted to know where the story was taking them. Gabriel, had he wished, could have told him. And when Dina placed a new image on the screen—a strikingly handsome man seated in an outdoor café wearing wraparound sunglasses—Gabriel saw it not in the grainy black-and-white of the photograph but as the scene appeared in his own memory: oil on canvas, abraded and yellowed with age. Dina began to speak again, but Gabriel was no longer listening. He was scrubbing away at the soiled varnish of his memory, watching a younger version of himself rushing across the bloodstained courtyard of a