The Fallen Angel

had conspired to turn him into a facilitator of mass murder. Even so, Gabriel couldn’t help but feel a grudging respect for him. To anesthetize himself, he glanced frequently at the enlarged photographs of Massoud’s handiwork. So did Massoud. He seemed proudest of one in particular—the one that showed smoke rising from the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. The event, he said, had been a watershed in the history of American involvement in the Middle East. It had shown America to be a paper tiger that would cut and run at the first sight of blood. And it had made a profound impression on a young Lebanese Shiite named Daoud Ghandour.
    “Within a few hours of the attack, he went to see the Hezbollah recruiter in his neighborhood in south Beirut. But there was one problem,” Massoud added. “Ghandour had just been accepted at the Sorbonne in Paris. He said he wanted to stay in Lebanon to fight the Jews and the Americans instead. The recruiter had a better idea. He told Ghandour to get his education. And then he called me.”
    “So Ghandour was an Iranian asset from the beginning?”
    “You’re being far too linear in your thinking, Allon. Remember, we were active at nearly every level of Hezbollah from the beginning. Hezbollah itself was an Iranian asset.”
    “Who ran him?”
    “Our station in Paris. When he wasn’t studying, he helped us keep tabs on all the Iranian exiles and dissidents who set up shop in France after the fall of the Shah.”
    “And when he went to England?”
    “London handled him while he finished his doctorate at Oxford. By the time he started working at Sotheby’s, I’d shed my fatigues and was a respectable diplomat.”
    “You took control of him?”
    Massoud nodded. “But now, he was no longer Daoud Ghandour, a poor boy from southern Lebanon. He was David Girard, an antiquities expert who traveled the world on behalf of a respected international auction house.”
    “Your dream come true.”
    “Yours, too, I imagine.”
    “How did you use him?”
    “Carefully. He could go places I couldn’t go and talk to people who couldn’t come within a mile of me.”
    “So you used him as a courier?”
    “He was my own private Federal Express. If VEVAK wanted a Hezbollah cell in, say, Istanbul to carry out an attack, we could do it at arm’s length through David. He would serve as the conduit for communications with the cell and see to its financial needs. In some cases, he even coordinated the shipment of explosives and other weapons. It was perfect.” Massoud paused. “And then there was the money.”
    “From trading in illicit antiquities?”
    Massoud nodded. “David came up with the idea while he was working at Sotheby’s. He knew there was a great deal of money to be made by those willing to ignore the law. He also knew that much of the trade was controlled by one man.”
    “Carlo Marchese.”
    “Friend of the Vatican,” Massoud added contemptuously. “But Carlo’s organization had one flaw. It was very strong in Europe, but it needed product from the Middle East.”
    “Product that Hezbollah was able to supply.”
    “Not only Hezbollah. Many of the antiquities were pieces from the Persian Empire that had come out of the ground in Iran. Within a short time, the operation was generating several million dollars a month, all of which went directly into Hezbollah’s coffers.”
    “Then a curator at the Vatican started asking too many questions.”
    “Yes,” Massoud agreed. “And the party was over.”
     
     
    When Massoud requested a cigarette a second time, Gabriel relented and gave him one of Yaakov’s Marlboros. He smoked it slowly, as though he suspected he would not receive another, and was careful to direct his exhalations away from Gabriel. VEVAK, it seemed, was aware of Gabriel’s aversion to tobacco.
    But that was not all it knew about him. It knew, Massoud boasted, that Monsignor Luigi Donati, private secretary to His Holiness Pope Paul VII, had asked Gabriel to investigate the death of Claudia Andreatti. It also knew that Gabriel had discovered the body of a tomb raider named Roberto Falcone. It knew this, Massoud said, because Carlo Marchese had told his business partner David Girard.
    “Carlo was aware of your investigation from the very beginning,” Massoud explained. “And he believed correctly that you were a threat to him. When the other members of the network started to get jumpy, he told them not to worry, that he would find an Italian