It was at this point that Christian Bouchard, ever alert to danger or opportunity, poked his well-groomed head from the door of his lair and, seeing the stack of recently delivered files on Madame Treville’s desk, wandered over to have a look.

“JLM? Who ordered these?”

“Monsieur Rousseau.”

“Why?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

“Where is he?”

“The secure conference room.” She lowered her voice and added, “With the Israeli.”

“Allon?”

Madame Treville nodded gravely.

“Why wasn’t I included?”

“You were at lunch when he arrived.” She made this sound like an accusation. “Monsieur Rousseau asked me to deliver the files the moment they arrived. Perhaps you would like to do it for me.”

Bouchard seized the stack of paper and carried it along the corridor to the secure conference room, where he found Gabriel and Rousseau behind a wall of soundproof glass, deep in conversation. He punched the code into the cipher lock, entered, and dropped the heavy files onto the table as though they were proof of a conspiracy.

It was then, the instant the five hundred pages landed with a leaden thud, that the bomb detonated. In fact, the timing was such that Gabriel initially thought the documents themselves had somehow exploded. Mercifully, he would have only a vague memory of what came next. He was aware that he was falling through a blizzard of glass and masonry and human blood, and that Paul Rousseau and Christian Bouchard were falling with him. When finally he came to rest, he felt as though he were in the confines of his own coffin. His last conscious thoughts were of his funeral, a knot of mourners surrounding an open grave on the Mount of Olives, two young children, a daughter who was called Irene after her grandmother, a boy who bore the name of a great painter. They would have no memory of him, his children. To them he was a man who had come and gone in darkness. And it was to the darkness he returned.

Part Two

A Girl Like That

18

Paris—Jerusalem

It was the paper—the dossiers, the watch reports, the intercepted text messages and e-mails, the case histories—that would expose the true nature of the secretive enterprise housed inside the graceful old building on the rue de Grenelle. For several hours after the attack it swirled through the streets of the seventh arrondissement, from the Eiffel Tower to Les Invalides to the gardens of the Musée Rodin, adrift on an uncertain wind. There were numerous reports of uniformed police officers and agents in plain clothes frantically collecting the documents, even as rescue workers and paramedics were pulling stunned survivors from the rubble. By early evening, however, photographs of recovered documents, each bearing the logo of the DGSI, began appearing on Twitter and other social media. Le Monde broke the story first, followed soon after by the rest of the mainstream French media. Finally, having no other recourse but the truth, the interior minister confirmed the obvious. The target of the second major bombing in Paris in less than a year was not an obscure society dedicated to the promotion of French literature; it was an elite unit of the DGSI whose very existence the minister had recently denied. He then asked the citizens of the Republic to surrender all recovered documents to the authorities and to cease posting images of them on the Internet. Compliance with the request was despairingly low.

Regrettably, the ensuing political scandal, and the many questions surrounding the Alpha Group’s tactics, would overshadow the coldly calculated precision and brutality of the bombing itself. There was symbolism not only in the target but in the mode of delivery for the bomb—a white Renault Trafic transit van, the same model used in the attack on the Isaac Weinberg Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism in France ten months earlier. At just two hundred kilograms, however, it was far smaller than the Weinberg Center device. Even so, it was comparable in explosive power, which suggested to the experts that Saladin’s bomb maker, whomever he was, had perfected his craft. The force of the blast left the Alpha Group headquarters in ruins and damaged buildings for several hundred meters up and down the length of the rue de Grenelle. Four pedestrians who happened to be walking past the van when it exploded were killed instantly, as were a mother and her six-year-old daughter who were entering the pharmacy across the street. Otherwise, the only fatalities were officers of the Alpha Group.

Of the van itself, almost nothing remained. A door came to rest near a boucherie in the rue Cler; a portion of the roof, in a playground in the Champ de Mars. Later, it would be established that the vehicle had been reported stolen three weeks earlier in a suburb of Brussels and that it had entered Paris from the northwest on the A13. Where the bomb had been assembled would never be reliably determined. Nor would the French authorities ever identify the man who parked the van directly beneath the window of Paul Rousseau’s fifth-floor office. He was last seen climbing onto a motorcycle left for him in the Square de la Tour-Maubourg. The motorcycle, like the man, would never be found.

Fortunately, half of the Alpha Group’s staff were off duty or in the field when the bomb exploded. Hardest hit were the technical staff and the watchers, whose workspaces occupied the basement and ground floor. Two young women from Registry were lost, as were nine of the Alpha Group’s most experienced agent-runners. Paul Rousseau and Christian Bouchard suffered only moderate injuries, due in part to the fact they were in the secure conference room when the bomb exploded. Sadly, Madame Treville had chosen that very moment to tidy up Rousseau’s cluttered office and was exposed to the full force of the detonation. She was pulled from the rubble alive, but died later that night as the rest of France wallowed in political intrigue.