The Defector

were secretly in love with the emerald-eyed stranger and flirted with him shamelessly on those rare occasions when he ventured into town.
    Among his most ardent admirers was the girl who presided over the gleaming glass counter of Pasticceria Massimo. She wore the cateye spectacles of a librarian and a permanent smile of mild rebuke. Gabriel ordered a cappuccino and a selection of pastries and walked over to a table at the far end of the room. It was already occupied by a man with strawberry blond hair and the heavy shoulders of a wrestler. He was pretending to read a local newspaper—pretending, Gabriel knew, because Italian was not one of his languages.
    “Anything interesting, Uzi?” Gabriel asked in German.
    Uzi Navot glared at Gabriel for a few seconds before resuming his appraisal of the paper. “If I’m not mistaken, there seems to be some sort of political crisis in Rome,” he responded in the same language.
    Gabriel sat in the empty seat. “The prime minister is involved in a rather messy financial scandal at the moment.”
    “Another one?”
    “Something to do with kickbacks on several large construction projects up north. Predictably, the opposition is demanding his resignation. He’s vowing to stay in office and fight it out.”
    “Maybe it would be better if the Church were still running the place.”
    “Are you proposing a reconstitution of the Papal States?”
    “Better a pope than a playboy prime minister with shoe-polish hair. He’s raised corruption to an art form.”
    “Our last prime minister had serious ethical shortcomings of his own.”
    “That’s true. But fortunately, he isn’t the one protecting the country from its enemies. That job still belongs to King Saul Boulevard.”
    King Saul Boulevard was the address of Israel’s foreign intelligence service. The service had a long and deliberately misleading name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Those who worked there referred to it as “the Office” and nothing else.
    The girl placed the cappuccino in front of Gabriel and a plate of pastries in the center of the table. Navot grimaced.
    “What’s wrong, Uzi? Don’t tell me Bella has you on a diet again?”
    “What makes you think I was ever off it?”
    “Your expanding waistline.”
    “We all can’t be blessed with your trim physique and high metabolism, Gabriel. My ancestors were plump Austrian Jews.”
    “So why fight nature? Have one, Uzi—for the sake of your cover, if nothing else.”
    Navot’s selection, a trumpet-shaped pastry filled with cream, disappeared in two bites. He hesitated, then chose one filled with sweet almond paste. It vanished in the time it took Gabriel to pour a packet of sugar into his coffee.
    “I didn’t get a chance to eat on the plane,” Navot said sheepishly. “Order me a coffee.”
    Gabriel asked for another cappuccino, then looked at Navot. He was staring at the pastries again.
    “Go ahead, Uzi. Bella will never know.”
    “That’s what you think. Bella knows everything.”
    Bella had worked as an analyst on the Office’s Syria Desk before taking a professorship in Levantine history at Ben-Gurion University. Navot, a veteran agent-runner and covert operative schooled in the art of manipulation, was incapable of deceiving her.
    “Is the rumor true?” Gabriel asked.
    “What rumor is that?”
    “The one about you and Bella getting married. The one about a quiet wedding by the sea in Caesarea with only a handful of close friends and family in attendance. And the Old Man, of course. There’s no way the chief of Special Ops could get married without Shamron’s blessing.”
    Special Ops was the dark side of a dark service. It carried out the assignments no one else wanted, or dared, to do. Its operatives were executioners and kidnappers; buggers and blackmailers; men of intellect and ingenuity with a criminal streak wider than the criminals themselves; multilinguists and chameleons who were at home in the finest hotels and salons in Europe or the worst back alleys of Beirut and Baghdad. Navot had never managed to get over the fact he had been given command of the unit because Gabriel had turned it down. He was competence to Gabriel’s brilliance, caution to Gabriel’s occasional recklessness. In any other service, in any other land, he would have been a star. But the Office had always valued operatives like Gabriel, men of creativity unbound by orthodoxy. Navot was the first to admit he was a mere