The Kill Artist

made an elaborate show of lighting his next cigarette. He studied Stone through a cloud of smoke, nodding slowly while he considered the gravity of his proposition. Stone was a drowning man, and unless Shamron did something to cut him away, he would take them both straight to the bottom.
    * * *
    Gabriel tried to sleep, but it was no use. Each time he closed his eyes, images of the case appeared in his mind. Instinctively he saw them rendered as motionless reproductions captured in oil on canvas. Shamron on the Lizard, calling him back to service. Jacqueline making love to Yusef. Leah in her greenhouse prison in Surrey. Yusef meeting his contact in Hyde Park… "Don't worry, Yusef. Your girlfriend won't say no to you."
    Then he thought of the scene he had just witnessed at Charles de Gaulle. Restoration had taught Gabriel a valuable lesson. Sometimes what appears on the surface is quite different from what is taking place just below. Three years earlier he had been hired to restore a Van Dyck, a piece the artist had painted for a private chapel in Genoa depicting the Assumption of Mary. When Gabriel performed his initial analysis of the painting's surface, he thought he saw something beneath the Virgin's face. Over time the light-toned paints Van Dyck had used to render her skin had faded, and it seemed an image below was beginning to rise. Gabriel performed an extensive X-ray examination of the picture to view what was taking place beneath the surface. He discovered a completely finished work, a portrait of a rather fleshy woman clad in a white gown. The black-and-white film of the X ray made her appear specterlike. Even so Gabriel recognized the shimmering quality of Van Dyck's silks and the expressive hands that characterized the paintings he produced while living in Italy. He later learned that the work had been commissioned by a Genoese aristocrat whose wife had hated it so much that she refused to accept it. When Van Dyck was commissioned to paint the chapel piece, he simply covered up the old portrait in white paint and reused the canvas. By the time the canvas reached Gabriel's hands, more than three and a half centuries later, the wife of the Genoese aristocrat had taken her revenge on the artist by rising to the surface of his painting.
    He closed his eyes again and this time drifted into a restless sleep. The last image he saw before slipping into unconsciousness was Jacqueline and the woman seated in the airport café, rendered as an Impressionist street scene, and standing in the background was the ghostly, translucent figure of Tariq, beckoning Gabriel forward with an exquisite Van Dyck hand.
    THIRTY-SIX
    Paris
    Yusef took a taxi from the airport to the center of the city. For two hours he moved steadily about Paris-by Métro, by taxi, and on foot. When he was confident he was alone, he walked to an apartment house in the Sixteenth Arrondissement not far from the Bois de Boulogne. On the wall in the entranceway was a house phone and next to the phone a list of occupants. Yusef pressed the button for 4B, which bore the name Guzman in faded blue script. When the door opened he stepped quickly inside, crossed the foyer, and rode the lift up to the fourth floor. He knocked on the door. It was opened instantly by a stout man with steel-blue eyes and strawberry blond hair. He pulled Yusef inside and quietly closed the door.
    * * *
    It was early evening in Tel Aviv when Mordecai stepped out of his office in the top-floor executive suite and made his way down the corridor toward Operations. As he entered the room a pair of Lev's black-eyed desk officers stared at him contemptuously over their computer terminals.
    "Is he still in?"
    One of the officers pointed toward Lev's office with the tip of a chewed pencil. Mordecai turned and walked down the corridor. He felt like a stranger in a besieged village. Outsiders were not welcome in Lev's realm, even if the outsider happened to be the second-most-senior officer in the service.
    He found Lev seated in his cheerless office, hunched forward, elbows resting on the desk, long hands folded at the last knuckle and pressed against his temples. With his bald head, protruding eyes, and tentaclelike fingers, he looked very much like a praying mantis. As Mordecai moved closer, he could see that it was not a case file or field report that held Lev's attention but a large volume on the beetles of the Amazon Basin. Lev closed the book deliberately and pushed it aside.
    "Is