Prince of Fire

do have a choice.”
    “I know what you’re doing,” she said. “You’re trying to wear me down with your suggestions of death and suicide. You think you can make me have a change of heart, that you can make me lose my nerve.”
    “Actually, I wouldn’t dream of such a thing. We’ve been fighting each other for a long time. I know that you’re intensely courageous and that you rarely lose your nerve. I just want to know why: Why are you here? Why not get married and raise a family? Why not live your life?”
    Another smile, this one mocking. “Jews,” she said. “You think you have a patent on pain. You think you have the market cornered on human suffering. My Holocaust is as real as yours, and yet you deny my suffering and exonerate yourself of guilt. You claim my wounds are self-inflicted.”
    “So tell me your story.”
    “Mine is a story of Paradise lost. Mine is a story of a simple people forced by the civilized world to give up their land so that Christendom could alleviate its guilt over the Holocaust.”
    “No, no,” Gabriel said. “I don’t want a propaganda lecture. I want to hear your story. Where are you from?”
    “A camp,” she said, then added: “A camp in Lebanon.”
    Gabriel shook his head. “I’m not asking where you were born, or where you grew up. I’m asking you where you’re from. ”
    “I’m from Palestine.”
    “Of course you are. Which part?”
    “The north.”
    “That explains Lebanon. Which part of the north?”
    “The Galilee.”
    “Western? Upper?”
    “The Western Galilee.”
    “Which village?”
    “It’s not there anymore.”
    “What was it called?”
    “I’m not allowed to—”
    “Did it have a name?”
    “Of course it had a name.”
    “Was it Bassa?”
    “No.”
    “What about Zib?”
    “No.”
    “Maybe it was Sumayriyya?”
    She made no reply.
    “So, it was Sumayriyya.”
    “Yes,” she said. “My family came from Sumayriyya.”
    “It’s a long way to Paris, Palestina. Tell me your story.”

23

J ERUSALEM
    W HEN V ARASH CONVENED AGAIN , THEY DID SO IN person in the office of the prime minister. Lev’s update took only a moment, since nothing much had changed since the last time they’d met by video conference. Only the clock had advanced. It was now five in the afternoon in Tel Aviv, and four o’clock in Paris. Lev wanted to sound the alarm.
    “We have to assume that in three hours, there is going to be a major terrorist attack in France, probably in Paris, and that one of our agents is going to be in the middle of it. Given the situation, I’m afraid we have no recourse but to tell the French.”
    “But what about Gabriel and his wife?” said Moshe Yariv of Shabak. “If the French issue a nationwide alert, Khaled might very well view it as an excuse to kill them both.”
    “He doesn’t need an excuse,” Shamron said. “That’s precisely what he intends to do. Lev is right. We have to tell the French. Morally, and politically, we have no other choice.”
    The prime minister shifted his large body uneasily in his chair. “But I can’t tell them that we sent a team of agents to Marseilles to kill a Palestinian terrorist.”
    “That’s not necessary,” Shamron said. “But any way we play our hand, the outcome is going to be bad. We have an agreement with the French not to operate on their soil without consulting them first. It’s an agreement we violate all the time, with the tacit understanding of our brethren in the French services. But a tacit understanding is one thing, and getting caught red-handed is quite another.”
    “So what do I tell them?”
    “I recommend staying as close to the truth as possible. We tell them that one of our agents has been abducted by a Palestinian terror cell operating out of Marseilles. We tell them the agent was in Marseilles investigating the bombing of our embassy in Rome. We tell them that we have credible evidence suggesting that Paris is going to be the target of an attack this evening at seven. Who knows? If the French sound the alarm loudly enough, it might force Khaled to postpone or cancel his attack.”
    The prime minister looked at Lev. “What’s the status of the rest of the team?”
    “ Fidelity is out of French territorial waters, and the rest of the team members have all crossed international borders. The only one still on French soil is Gabriel.”
    The prime minister punched a button on his telephone console. “Get the French president on the line. And get