The Defector

upon Israel’s enemies. Occasionally, it was necessary to deceive one’s own. Gabriel was sorry for them; they were good boys, with bright futures. They had just drawn the wrong assignment at the wrong time.
    Their names were Lior and Motti—Lior being the older and more experienced of the pair, Motti a youthful probationer barely a year out of the Academy. Both boys had studied the exploits of the legend and had leapt at the opportunity to escort him safely back to Israel. Unlike Uzi Navot, they viewed the three additional days of duty at the beautiful villa in Umbria as a windfall. And when Chiara asked them to tread lightly so that Gabriel might finish his painting before returning home, they agreed without protest. They were simply honored to be in his presence. They would stand a distant post.
    They spent that night in the drafty little guest cottage, sleeping in shifts and keeping a careful watch on the window of his studio, which was aglow with a searing white light. If they listened carefully, they could just make out the faint sound of music—first Tosca , then Madame Butterfly , and finally, as dawn was breaking over the estate, La Bohème . As the villa stirred to life around eight, they wandered up to the kitchen and found three women—Chiara, Anna, Margherita—sharing breakfast around the island. The door to the sitting room was tightly closed, and two vigilant hounds were curled on the floor before it. Accepting a bowl of steaming coffee, Lior wondered whether it might be possible to have a look at him. “I wouldn’t recommend it,” Chiara said sotto voce. “He tends to get a bit grouchy when he’s on deadline.” Lior, the child of a writer, understood completely.
    The bodyguards spent the remainder of that day trying to keep themselves occupied. They went out on the odd reconnaissance mission and had a pleasant lunch with the staff, but for the most part they remained prisoners of their little stucco bunker. Every few hours, they would poke their heads inside the main villa to see if they could catch just a glimpse of the legend. Instead, they saw only the closed doors, watched over by the hounds. “He’s working at a feverish pace,” Chiara explained late that afternoon, when Lior again screwed up the courage to request permission to enter the studio. “There’s no telling what will happen if you disturb him. Trust me, it’s not for the faint of heart.”
    And so they returned to their outpost like good soldiers and sat outside on the little veranda as night began to fall. And they stared despondently at the white light and listened to the faint sound of music. And they waited for the legend to emerge from his cave. At six o’clock, having seen no evidence of him since the previous evening, they reached the conclusion that they had been duped. They didn’t dare enter his studio to confirm their suspicions. Instead, they spent several minutes quarreling over who should break the news to Uzi Navot. In the end, it was Lior, the older and more experienced of the two, who placed the call. He was a good boy with a bright future. He had just drawn the wrong assignment at the wrong time.

    THERE WERE far worse places for a grounded defector to spend his final days than Bristol Mews. It was reached by a passageway off Bristol Gardens, flanked on one side by a Pilates exercise studio that promised to strengthen and empower its clients and on the other by a disconsolate little restaurant called D Place. Its courtyard was long and rectangular, paved with gray cobblestone and trimmed in red brick. The spire of St. Saviour Church peered into it from the north, the windows of a large terrace house from the east. The door of the tidy little cottage at No. 8, like its neighbor at No. 7, was painted a cheerful shade of bright yellow. The shades were drawn in the ground-floor window. Even so, Gabriel could see a light burning from within.
    He had arrived in London in midafternoon, having flown to the British capital directly from Rome using a false Italian passport and a ticket purchased for him by a friend at the Vatican. After performing a routine check for surveillance, he had entered a phone box near Oxford Circus and dialed from memory a number that rang inside Thames House, headquarters of MI5. As instructed, he had called back thirty minutes later and had been given an address, No. 8 Bristol Mews, along with a time: 7 p.m. It was now approaching 7:30. His tardiness was intentional. Gabriel