The Secret Servant

smile, the same smile he had used on a searing afternoon in September 1972, when he had come to see Gabriel at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem. Gabriel had been a promising young painter; Shamron was a brash operations man who had just been ordered by Prime Minister Golda Meir to hunt down and kill the members of Black September, perpetrators of the Munich Massacre. The operation was code-named Wrath of God, but in reality it was the Wrath of Gabriel. Of the twelve members of Black September killed by the Office, six were dispatched by Gabriel at close range with a .22 caliber Beretta.
    “I flew to Amsterdam and took Rosner to dinner in a quiet restaurant overlooking the Amstel. I told stories about the old days—the War of Independence, the Eichmann capture. You know the ones, Gabriel, the stories you and Uzi have heard a thousand times before. At the end of the evening, I laid a contract on the table. He signed without reservation.”
    Shamron was interrupted by the sudden scream of the teakettle. Gabriel went into the kitchen and prepared the coffee. When he returned, he placed the French press on the coffee table, along with three mugs and a sugar bowl. Navot gave him a disapproving look. “You’d better put something under that,” he said. “If you leave a ring, Chiara will kill you.”
    “I’ll take my chances, Uzi.” Gabriel looked at Shamron. “Who serviced him? You, I suppose.”
    “Rosner was my creation,” Shamron said somewhat defensively. “Naturally I was reluctant to turn over the reins to anyone else. I gave him a bit of money to hire an assistant, and when Rosner had something to report I was the one who went to see him.”
    “In Amsterdam?”
    “Never,” said Shamron. “Usually we met across the border, in Antwerp.”
    “And when they ran you out of the Office for the second time?”
    “I hung onto a few bits and pieces to keep me occupied in my dotage. Rosner was one of those bits. Another was you , of course. I didn’t trust you with anyone else.” He spooned sugar into his coffee and gave it a melancholy stir. “When I went to work for the prime minister as his senior security adviser, I had to surrender control of Rosner.” He glanced at Navot. “I entrusted him to Uzi. After all, he was our western European katsa. ”
    “And your protégé,” Gabriel added.
    “It wasn’t exactly heavy lifting,” Navot conceded. “Ari had already done all that. I just had to handle Rosner’s reports. Eighteen months ago, he gave me a nugget of pure gold. According to one of Rosner’s sources inside the Muslim community, an al-Qaeda-affiliated cell operating in west Amsterdam had got their hands on a missile and was planning to shoot down an El Al jetliner on approach at Schiphol Airport. That evening we diverted the flight to Brussels and tipped off the Dutch. They arrested four men sitting in a parked car at the end of the runway. In the trunk was an antiaircraft missile that had been smuggled into Amsterdam from Iraq.”
    “How did Rosner know about the plot?”
    “He had sources,” said Shamron. “Very good sources. I tried on a number of occasions to convince him to turn them over to us, but he always refused. He said his sources talked to him because he wasn’t a professional. Well, not quite a professional, but no one else in Holland knew that.”
    “And you’re sure about that?” asked Gabriel. “You’re certain Rosner didn’t die because of his links to us?”
    “Unfortunately, there was no shortage of people in Amsterdam who wanted Solomon dead. Some of the city’s most prominent jihadist imams had been openly calling for a volunteer to step forward. They finally found their man in Muhammad Hamza, a housepainter from north Amsterdam who just happened to be working on a project across the street from Rosner’s home. The Amsterdam police found a videotape inside Hamza’s apartment after his arrest. It was shot the morning of Rosner’s murder. On it Hamza calmly says that today would be the day he killed his Jew.”
    “So what type of errand do you want me to run in Amsterdam?”
    Navot and Shamron looked at each other, as if trying to get their story straight. Shamron let Navot answer. He was, after all, chief of Special Ops.
    “We’d like you to go to Amsterdam and clean out his files. We want the names of all those golden sources, of course, but we also want to make sure there’s nothing there that might link him to us.”
    “It would be