The Kill Artist

days and our bad days."
    Gabriel switched on the bank of fluorescent lights and turned the lights on Shamron.
    Shamron squinted. "Gabriel, shut that thing off."
    "I know you prefer to work in the dark, Herr Heller, but I want to see your face. What do you want?"
    "Let's take a drive."
    They sped along a narrow road lined with tall hedgerows. Gabriel drove one-handed and very fast. When Shamron asked him to slow down, Gabriel pressed the accelerator even harder. Shamron tried to punish him with smoke, but Gabriel lowered the windows, filling the car with freezing air. Shamron signaled his surrender by tossing his cigarette into the darkness.
    "You know about Paris?"
    "I saw the television and read the papers."
    "They were good, the people who did Paris-better than anything we've seen for a long time. They were good like Black September was good. These were not stone throwers or boys who walk into a market with fifty pounds of Semtex strapped to their bodies. These were professionals, Gabriel."
    Gabriel concentrated on his driving and not the drumbeat cadence of Shamron's speech. He didn't like the reaction it had already provoked within him. His pulse had quickened and his palms were damp.
    "They had a large team-ten, maybe twelve operatives. They had money, transport, false passports. They planned the hit down to the last detail. The entire thing was over and done in thirty seconds. Within a minute every member of the hit team was off the bridge. They all managed to escape. The French have come up with nothing."
    "What does this have to do with me?"
    Shamron closed his eyes and recited a verse from Scripture: "And the enemy shall know I am Lord when I can lay down my vengeance upon them."
    "Ezekiel," said Gabriel.
    "I believe that if someone kills one of my people, I should kill him in return. Do you believe that, Gabriel?"
    "I used to believe it."
    "Better yet, I believe that if a boy picks up a stone to throw at me, I should shoot him before it ever leaves his hand." Shamron's lighter flared in the dark, making shadows in the fissures of his face. "Maybe I'm just a relic. I remember huddling against my mother's breast while the Arabs burned and looted our settlement. The Arabs killed my father during the general strike in 'thirty-seven. Did I ever tell you that?"
    Gabriel kept his eyes fastened on the winding Cornish road and said nothing.
    "They killed your father, too. In the Sinai. And your mother, Gabriel? How long did she live after your father's death? Two years? Three?"
    Actually it was a little more than a year, thought Gabriel, remembering the day they laid her cancer-ridden body into a hillside overlooking the Jezreel Valley. "What's your point?"
    "My point is that revenge is good. Revenge is healthy. Revenge is purifying."
    "Revenge only leads to more killing and more revenge. For every terrorist we kill, there's another boy waiting to step forward and pick up the stone or the gun. They're like sharks' teeth: break one and another will rise in its place."
    "So we should do nothing? Is that what you mean to say, Gabriel? We should stand aside and wring our hands while these bastards kill our people?"
    "You know that's not what I'm saying."
    Shamron fell silent as the Mercedes flashed through a darkened village.
    "It's not my idea, you know. It's the prime minister's. He wants his peace with the Palestinians, but he can't make peace if the extremists are throwing tomatoes onto the stage from the balcony."
    "Since when did you become such a peacenik, Ari?"
    "My own opinions are irrelevant. I am merely a secret servant who does what he is told."
    "Bullshit."
    "All right, if you want my opinion, I believe we will be no more secure after a peace deal than before it. If you want my opinion, I believe the fire in the Palestinian heart will never be extinguished until the Jews are driven into the sea. And I'll tell you one other thing, Gabriel. I would much rather do battle with a sworn enemy than with an enemy who finds expediency in posing as a friend."
    Shamron rubbed the spot on the bridge of his nose where his elegant tortoiseshell glasses were pinching him. He had aged; Gabriel could see it at the edges of his eyes when he removed the little spectacles. Even the great Shamron was not immune to the ravages of time.
    "You know what happened in Amman?" Shamron asked.
    "I read about it in the newspapers. I also know what happened in Switzerland."
    "Ah, Switzerland," Shamron said mildly, as if Switzerland were