Prince of Fire

shots.
    He field-stripped the guns, beginning with the Beretta and ending with the Barak. Each weapon appeared in perfect working order. He reassembled and loaded the weapons, then tested the weight and balance of each, deliberating over which to use. The hit was not likely to be a covert and quiet affair. It would probably take place on a busy street, perhaps in broad daylight. Making certain Khaled was dead was the first priority. For that, Gabriel needed power and reliability. He selected the Barak as his primary weapon and the Beretta 92FS as his backup. He also decided he would work without a silencer. A silencer made the weapon too difficult to conceal and too unwieldy to draw and fire. Besides, what was the point of using a silencer if the act was witnessed by a crowd of people on the street?
    He went into the bathroom and stood for a moment before the mirror, examining his face. Then he opened the medicine cabinet and removed a pair of scissors, a razor, and a can of shaving cream. He trimmed the beard down to stubble, then removed the rest with the razor. His hair was still dyed gray. Nothing to be done about that.
    He stripped off his clothes and showered quickly, then went back into the stateroom to dress. He pulled on his underwear and socks, then a pair of dark-blue denim trousers and rubber-soled suede brogues. He attached his radio unit to the waistband of his jeans on the left hip, then ran a wire to his ear and a second one to his left wrist. After securing the wires with strips of black tape, he pulled on a long-sleeved black shirt. The Beretta he shoved down the waistband of his jeans, at the small of his back. The Barak was compact enough to fit in the pocket of his leather jacket. His GPS tracking beacon, a small disk about the size of a one-euro coin, he slipped into the front pocket of his jeans.
    He sat on the end of the bed and waited. Five minutes later there was a knock at the door. The clock read 2:12 A . M .
    “H OW CERTAIN ARE your experts?”
    The prime minister looked up at the bank of video monitors and waited for an answer. In one of the monitors was Lev’s image. The director-general of Shabak, Moshe Yariv, occupied the second; General Amos Sharret, chief of Aman, the third.
    “There’s no doubt whatsoever,” replied Lev. “The man in the photo given to us by Mahmoud Arwish is the same man who just walked into the apartment building in Marseilles. All we need now is your approval for the final phase of the operation to commence.”
    “You have it. Give the order to Fidelity. ”
    “Yes, Prime Minister.”
    “I assume you’ll be able to hear the radio traffic?”
    “ Fidelity will send it to us via the secure link. We’ll maintain operational control until the final second.”
    “Send it here, too,” the prime minister said. “I don’t want to be the last to know.”
    Then he pressed a button on his desk, and the three screens turned to black.
    T HE MOTORBIKE WAS a Piaggio X9 Evolution, charcoal gray, with a twist-and-go throttle and a listed top speed of 160 kilometers per hour—though Yaakov, on a practice escape run the previous day, had topped out at 190. The saddle sloped severely downward from back to front so that the passenger sat several inches above the driver, which made it a perfect bike for an assassin, though surely its designers had not had that in mind when they’d conceived it. The engine, as usual, fired without hesitation. Yaakov headed toward the spot along the quay where the helmeted figure of Gabriel awaited him. Gabriel climbed onto the passenger seat and settled in.
    “Take me to the boulevard St-Rémy.”
    “You sure?”
    “One pass,” he said. “I want to see it.”
    Yaakov banked hard to the left and raced up the hill.
    I T WAS A GOOD BUILDING on the Corniche, with a marble floor in the lobby and an elevator that worked most of the time. The flats facing the street had a fine view of the Nile. The ones on the back looked down into the walled grounds of the American embassy. It was a building for foreigners and rich Egyptians, another world from the drab cinder-block tenement in Heliopolis where Zubair lived, but then being a policeman in Egypt didn’t pay much, even if you were a secret policeman working for the Mukhabarat.
    He took the stairs. They were wide and curved, with a faded runner held in place by tarnished brass fittings. The apartment was on the top floor, the tenth. Zubair cursed silently as he trod upward. Two packs of