The Kill Artist

everything Lev wanted to see in himself, and he hated you for it."
    "He wanted to be part of the Black September team."
    "Lev is brilliant, but he was never field material. Lev is a headquarters man."
    "Does he know you're here?"
    "He knows nothing," Shamron said coldly. "And if you decide to come back, he'll know nothing about that either. I'll handle you personally, just like the old days."
    "Killing Tariq isn't going to bring back Dani. Or Leah. Haven't you learned anything? While we were busy killing the members of Black September, we didn't notice that the Egyptians and the Syrians were preparing to drive us into the sea. And they nearly succeeded. We killed thirteen members of Black September, and it didn't bring back one of the boys they slaughtered in Munich."
    "Yes, but it felt good."
    Gabriel closed his eyes: an apartment block in Rome's Piazza Annabaliano, a darkened stairwell, a painfully thin Palestinian translator named Wadal Abdel Zwaiter. Black September's chief of operations in Italy. He remembered the sound of a neighbor practicing piano-a rather tedious piece he didn't recognize-and the sickening thud of the bullets tearing through tissue and cracking bone. One of Gabriel's shots missed Zwaiter's body and shattered a bottle of fig wine that he had purchased moments earlier. For some reason Gabriel always thought of the wine, dark, purple and brown, flowing over the stone floor, mingling with the blood of the dying man.
    He opened his eyes, and Rome was gone. "It feels good for a while," he said. "But then you start to think you're as bad as the people you're killing."
    "War always takes a toll on the soldiers."
    "When you look into a man's eyes while pouring lead into his body, it feels more like murder than war."
    "It's not murder, Gabriel. It was never murder."
    "What makes you think I can find Tariq?"
    "Because I've found someone who works for him. Someone I believe will lead us to Tariq."
    "Where is he?"
    "Here in England."
    "Where?"
    "London, which presents me with a problem. Under our agreements with British intelligence, we're obligated to inform them when we are operating on their soil. I would prefer not to live up to that agreement, because the British will inform their friends at Langley, and Langley will pressure us to knock it off for the sake of the peace process."
    "You do have a problem."
    "Which is why I need you. I need someone who can run an operation in England without arousing suspicion among the natives. Someone who can run a simple surveillance operation without fucking it up."
    "I watch him, and he leads me to Tariq?"
    "Sounds simple, doesn't it?"
    "It's never that simple, Ari. Especially when you're involved."
    Gabriel slipped into the cottage and tossed his jacket onto the cot in the sitting room. Immediately he felt the Vecellio pulling at him. It was always this way. He never left the house without first spending one more moment before his work, never returned home without going directly to his studio to gaze at the painting. It was the first thing he saw each afternoon when he awoke, the last thing he saw each morning before he went to sleep. It was something like obsession, but Gabriel believed only an obsessive could be a good restorer. Or a good assassin, for that matter.
    He climbed the stairs to his studio, switched on the fluorescent lamp, gazed at the painting. God, how long had he been at it already? Six months? Seven? Vecellio had probably completed the altarpiece in a matter of weeks. It would take Gabriel ten times that long to repair it.
    He thought of everything he had done so far. Two weeks studying Vecellio himself. Life, influences, techniques. A month analyzing The Adoration of the Shepherd with several pieces of high-tech equipment: the Wild microscope to view the surface, X-ray photography to peer below the surface, ultraviolet light to expose previous retouching. After the assessment, four months removing the dirty, yellowed varnish. It was not like stripping a coffee table; it was tedious, time-consuming work. Gabriel first had to create the perfect solvent, one that would dissolve the varnish but leave the paint intact. He would dip a homemade cotton swab into the solvent and then twirl it over the surface of the painting until it became soiled with dirty varnish. Then make another swab and start all over again. Dip… twirl… discard. Dip… twirl… discard. Like swabbing the deck of a battleship with a toothbrush. On a good day he could remove