Prince of Fire

him to read the emotions of others, to tell truthfulness from deception, and in the dark eyes of Khaled’s girl he saw only the abiding forthrightness of a fanatic, the belief that past suffering justified any act, no matter how cruel. He also noticed an unsettling tranquillity. She was trained, this girl, not merely indoctrinated. Her training would make her a worthy opponent, but it was her fanaticism that would leave her vulnerable.
    Did they really have Leah? He had no reason to doubt it. Khaled had destroyed an embassy in the heart of Rome. Surely he could manage to kidnap an infirm woman from an English mental hospital. To abandon Leah now, after all she had suffered, was unthinkable. Perhaps she would die. Perhaps they both would. Perhaps, if they were lucky, Khaled might permit them to die together.
    He had played it well, Khaled. He had never intended to kill Gabriel in Venice. The Milan dossier had been only the opening gambit in an elaborate plot to lure Gabriel here, to this spot in Marseilles, and to present him with a path he had no choice but to follow. Fidelity nudged him forward. He pulled her away from the edge of the stairs and released his grip on her throat.
    “Back off,” Gabriel said directly into his wrist-microphone. “Leave Marseilles.”
    When Yaakov shook his head, Gabriel snapped, “Do as I say.”
    A car came down the hill from the direction of the church. It was the Mercedes that had blocked their path a few minutes earlier on the boulevard St-Rémy. It stopped in front of them. The girl opened the back door and got in. Gabriel looked one final time at Yaakov, then climbed in after her.
    “H E ’ S OFF THE AIR , ” Lev said. “His beacon has been stationary for five minutes.”
    His beacon, thought Shamron, is lying in a Marseilles gutter. Gabriel had vanished from their screens. All the planning, all the preparation, and Khaled had beaten them with the oldest of Arab ploys—a hostage.
    “Is it true about Leah?” Shamron asked.
    “London station has called the security officer several times. So far they haven’t been able to raise him.”
    “That means they’ve got her,” Shamron said. “And I suspect we have a dead security agent somewhere inside the Stratford Clinic.”
    “If that’s all true, a very serious storm is going to break in England in the next few minutes.” There was a bit too much composure in Lev’s voice for Shamron’s taste, but then Lev always did place a high premium on self-control. “We need to reach out to our friends in MI5 and the Home Office to keep things as quiet as possible for as long as possible. We also need to bring the Foreign Ministry into the picture. The ambassador will have to do some serious hand-holding.”
    “Agreed,” Shamron said, “but I’m afraid there’s something we have to do first.”
    He looked at his wristwatch. It was 7:28 A . M . local time, 6:28 in France—twelve hours until the anniversary of the evacuation of Beit Sayeed.
    “B UT WE CAN ’ T just leave him here,” Dina said.
    “He’s not here any longer,” Yaakov replied. “He’s gone. He was the one who made the decision to go with her. He gave us the order to evacuate and so has Tel Aviv. We have no other choice. We’re leaving.”
    “There must be something we can do to help him.”
    “You can’t be any help to him if you’re sitting in a French jail.”
    Yaakov raised his wrist-microphone to his lips and ordered the Ayin teams to pull out. Dina went reluctantly down onto the dock and loosened the lines. When the last line was untied, she climbed back onto Fidelity and stood with Yaakov atop the flying bridge as he guided the vessel into the channel. As they passed the Fort of Saint Nicholas, she went back down the companionway to the salon. She sat down at the communications pod, typed in a command to access the memory, then set the time-code for 6:12 A . M . A few seconds later she heard her own voice.
    “It’s him. He’s on the street. Heading south toward the park.”
    She listened to it all again: Yaakov and Gabriel wordlessly mounting the bike; Yaakov firing the engine and accelerating away; the sound of the tires locking up and skidding along the asphalt of the boulevard St-Rémy; Gabriel’s voice, calm and without emotion: “Stop here. Don’t move.”
    Twenty seconds later, the woman: “Excuse me, monsieur, are you lost?”
    STOP .
    How long had Khaled spent planning it? Years, she thought. He had dropped the clues for