Prince of Fire

looked fatally wounded.
    He climbed down the steps and made his way toward the platform. What had been there just a few seconds earlier was now unrecognizable. He looked up and saw that a large portion of the roof was gone. Had all three bombs exploded simultaneously, the entire station would likely have come down.
    He slipped and fell hard to the ground. The platform was drenched with blood. All around him were severed limbs and pieces of human flesh. He got to his feet, lifted Leah, and stumbled forward. What was he stepping on? He couldn’t bear to look. He slipped a second time, near the telephone kiosk, and found himself staring into the lifeless eyes of Palestina. Was it Gabriel’s blow that had killed her or the shrapnel of Tayyib’s bomb? Gabriel didn’t much care.
    He got to his feet again. The station exits were jammed: terrified passengers trying to get out, police forcing their way in. If Gabriel tried to go that way, there was a good chance someone would identify him as the man who had been firing a gun before the bomb went off. He had to find some other way out. He remembered the walk from the car to the station, waiting for the light to change at the intersection of the rue de Lyon and the boulevard Diderot. There had been an entrance to the Métro there.
    He carried Leah toward the escalator. It was no longer running. He stepped over two dead bodies and started downward. The Métro station was in tumult, passengers screaming, startled attendants trying in vain to keep the situation calm, but at least there was no more smoke, and the floors were no longer wet with blood. Gabriel followed the signs through the arched passageways toward the rue de Lyon. Twice he was asked whether he needed help, and twice he shook his head and kept walking. The lights flickered and dimmed, then by some miracle came back to life again.
    Two minutes later he came to a flight of steps. He mounted them and climbed steadily upward, emerging into a thin, chill rain. He’d come out on the rue de Lyon. He looked back over his shoulder toward the station. The traffic circle was ablaze with emergency lights, and smoke was pouring from the roof. He turned and started walking.
    Another offer of help: “Are you all right, monsieur? Does that person need a doctor?”
    No, thank you, he thought. Just please get out of my way, and please let that Mercedes be waiting for me.
    He rounded the corner into the rue Parrot. The car was still there: Khaled’s only mistake. He carried Leah across the street. For an instant she clung anxiously to his neck. Did she know it was him, or did she think him an orderly in her hospital in England? A moment later she was seated in the front passenger seat, staring calmly out the window as Gabriel pulled away from the curb and rolled up to the corner of the rue de Lyon. He glanced once to the left, toward the burning station, then turned right and sped up the wide avenue toward the Bastille. He reached into the girl’s handbag again and pulled out her satellite phone. By the time he rounded the traffic circle in the Place de la Bastille, King Saul Boulevard had come on the line.

30

P ARIS
    T HE THIN RAIN THAT HAD GREETED G ABRIEL upon his emergence from the Gare de Lyon had turned to a spring downpour. It was dark now, and for that he was grateful. He had parked in a quiet leafy street near the Place de Colombie and shut down the engine. Because of the darkness, and the drenching rain, he was confident no one could see into the car. He rubbed a porthole in the fogged front windshield and peered through it. The building that contained the safe flat was on the opposite side of the street and a few doors up. Gabriel knew the flat well. He knew it was apartment 4B and that the nameplate on the buzzer read Guzman in faded blue script. He also knew that there was no place to safely hide a key, which meant that it had to be opened in advance by someone from the Paris station. Usually such tasks were handled by a bodel, the Office terminology for local hires who do the spadework required to keep a foreign station running. But ten minutes later Gabriel was relieved to see the familiar figure of Uzi Navot, the Paris katsa, pounding past his window with his strawberry blond hair plastered to his large round skull and a key to the flat in his hand.
    Navot entered the apartment building and a moment later lights came on in the fourth-floor window. Leah stirred. Gabriel turned and looked at her, and for an