Prince of Fire

it in the Jezreel Valley and the Galilee. No matter how hard the new owners of the land tried to erase the Arab villages, the footprint remained, like the memory of a dead child.
    Dina stopped next to the wellhead and the others gathered round her. “On April 18, 1948, at approximately seven o’clock in the evening, a Palmach brigade surrounded Beit Sayeed. After a brief firefight the Arab militiamen fled, leaving the village undefended. Wholesale panic ensued. And why not? Three days earlier, more than a hundred residents of Deir Yassin had been killed by members of the Irgun and Stern Gang. Needless to say, the Arabs of Beit Sayeed weren’t anxious to meet a similar fate. It probably didn’t take much encouragement to get them to pack their bags and flee. When the village was deserted, the Palmach men dynamited the houses.”
    “What’s the connection with Rome?” Yaakov asked impatiently.
    “Daoud Hadawi.”
    “By the time Hadawi was born this place had been wiped from the face of the earth.”
    “That’s true,” Dina said. “Hadawi was born in the Jenin refugee camp, but his clan came from here. His grandmother, his father, and various aunts, uncles, and cousins fled Beit Sayeed the night of April 18, 1948.”
    “And his grandfather?” asked Gabriel.
    “He’d been killed a few days earlier, near Lydda. You see, Daoud Hadawi’s grandfather was one of Sheikh Asad’s most trusted men. He was guarding the sheikh the night Shamron killed him. He was the one Shamron stabbed before entering the cottage.”
    “That’s all?” asked Yaakov.
    Dina shook her head. “The bombings in Buenos Aires and Istanbul both took place on April eighteenth at seven o’clock.”
    “My God,” murmured Rimona.
    “There’s one more thing,” Dina said, turning to Gabriel. “The date you killed Sabri in Paris? Do you remember it?”
    “It was early March,” he said, “but I can’t remember the date.”
    “It was March fourth,” Dina said.
    “The same day as Rome,” said Rimona.
    “That’s right.” Dina looked around at the remnants of the old village. “It started right here in Beit Sayeed more than fifty years ago. It was Khaled who masterminded Rome, and he’s going to hit us again in twenty-eight days.”

8

N EAR A IX - EN -P ROVENCE , F RANCE
    “I THINK WE MAY HAVE FOUND ANOTHER ONE , Professor.”
    Paul Martineau, crouched on all fours in the deep shadows of the excavation pit, twisted his head slowly round and searched for the origin of the voice that had disturbed his work. It fell upon the familiar form of Yvette Debré, a young graduate student who had volunteered for the dig. Lit from behind by the sharp mid-morning Provençal sun, she was a mere silhouette. Martineau had always considered her something of a well-concealed artifact. Her short dark hair and square features left the impression of an adolescent boy. Only when his eye traveled down her body—across the ample breasts, the slender waist, the rounded hips—was her remarkable beauty fully revealed. He had probed her body with his skilled hands, sifted the soil of its secret corners, and found hidden delights and the pain of ancient wounds. No one else on the dig suspected their relationship was anything more than professor and pupil. Paul Martineau was very good at keeping secrets.
    “Where is it?”
    “Behind the meeting house.”
    “Real or stone?”
    “Stone.”
    “The attitude?”
    “Face up.”
    Martineau stood. Then he placed his palms on either side of the narrow pit and, with a powerful thrust of his shoulders, pushed himself back up to the surface. He patted the reddish Provençal earth from his palms and smiled at Yvette. He was dressed, as usual, in faded denim jeans and suede boots that were cut a bit more stylishly than those favored by lesser archaeologists. His woolen pullover was charcoal gray, and a crimson handkerchief was knotted rakishly at his throat. His hair was dark and curly, his eyes were large and deep brown. A colleague had once remarked that in Paul Martineau’s face one could see traces of all the peoples who had once held sway in Provence—the Celts and the Gauls, the Greeks and the Romans, the Visigoths and Teutons, the Franks and the Arabs. He was undeniably handsome. Yvette Debré had not been the first admiring graduate student to be seduced by him.
    Officially, Martineau was an adjunct professor of archaeology at the prestigious University of Aix-Marseille III, though he spent most of