45

Tiberias, Israel

Tiberias, one of Judaism’s four holy cities, lies on the western shore of the body of water that most of the world refers to as the Sea of Galilee and Israelis call Lake Kinneret. Just beyond its outskirts there is the small moshav of Kfar Hittim, which stands on the spot where the real Saladin, on a blazing summer afternoon in 1187, defeated the thirst-crazed armies of the Crusaders in a climactic battle that would leave Jerusalem once again in Muslim hands. He had shown his vanquished enemies no mercy. In his tent he had personally sliced off the arm of Raynald of Chatillon after the Frenchman refused to convert to Islam. The rest of the surviving Crusaders he condemned to execution by decapitation, the prescribed punishment for unbelievers.

A kilometer or so to the north of Kfar Hittim was a rocky escarpment that overlooked both the lake and the scalding plain where the ancient battle had occurred. And it was there, of all places, that Ari Shamron had chosen to make his home. He claimed that when the wind was right he could hear the clashing of swords and the screams of the dying. They reminded him, or so he said, of the transient nature of political and military power in this turbulent corner of the eastern Mediterranean. Canaanites, Hittites, Amalekites, Moabites, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs, Turks, British: all had come and gone. Against overwhelming odds, the Jews had managed to pull off one of history’s greatest second acts. Two millennia after the fall of the Second Temple, they had come back for a return engagement. But if history were a guide, they were already on borrowed time.

There are few people who can claim to have helped to build a country, and fewer still an intelligence service. Ari Shamron, however, had managed to accomplish both. Born in eastern Poland, he immigrated to British-ruled Palestine in 1937 as disaster loomed over the Jews of Europe, and had fought in the war that followed the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. In the aftermath of the conflict, with the Arab world vowing to strangle the new Jewish state in its infancy, he joined a small organization that insiders referred to only as “the Office.” Among his first assignments was to identify and assassinate several Nazi scientists who were helping Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser build an atomic bomb. But the crowning achievement of his career as a field operative would come not in the Middle East but on a street corner in the industrial Buenos Aires suburb of San Fernando. There, on a rainy night in May 1960, he dragged Adolf Eichmann, the stationmaster of the Final Solution, into the back of a waiting car, the first stop on a journey that for Eichmann would end in an Israeli noose.

For Shamron, however, it was only the beginning. Within a few short years, the intelligence service he joined at its creation would be his to run, and the country would be his to protect. From his lair inside King Saul Boulevard, with its gunmetal-gray filing cabinets and permanent stench of Turkish tobacco, he penetrated the courts of kings, stole the secrets of tyrants, and killed countless enemies. His tenure as chief lasted longer than any of his predecessors’. And in the late 1990s, after a string of botched operations, he was dragged happily out of retirement to right the ship and restore the Office to its former glory. He found an accomplice in a grieving field operative who had locked himself away in a small cottage at the edge of the Helford Passage in Cornwall. Now, at long last, the field operative was the chief. And the burden of protecting Shamron’s two creations, a country and an intelligence service, was his to bear.

Shamron had been chosen for the Eichmann mission because of his hands, which were unusually large and powerful for so small a man. They were bunched atop his olive wood cane when Gabriel entered the house with a child in each arm. He entrusted them to Shamron and returned to his armored SUV to collect three platters of food that Chiara had spent the afternoon preparing. Gilah, Shamron’s long-suffering wife, lit the Shabbat candles at sundown while Shamron, in the Yiddish intonations of his Polish youth, recited the blessings of the bread and the wine. For a brief moment it seemed to Gabriel that there was no operation and no Saladin, only his family and his faith.

It did not last long. Indeed, throughout the meal, as the others gossiped about politics and lamented the matsav, the situation, Gabriel’s attention wandered time and again to his mobile phone. Shamron, watching from his place at the head of the table, smiled. He offered no words of sympathy over Gabriel’s obvious discomfort. For Shamron, operations were like oxygen. Even a bad operation was better than no operation at all.

When the meal was over, Gabriel followed Shamron downstairs to the room that doubled as his study and workshop. The innards of an antique radio lay scattered across his worktable like the debris of a bombing. Shamron sat down and with a snap of his old Zippo lighter ignited one of his wretched Turkish cigarettes. Gabriel batted away the smoke and pondered the memorabilia arranged neatly on the shelves. His eye fell instantly upon a framed photograph of Shamron and Golda Meir, taken on the day she ordered him to “send forth the boys” to avenge the eleven Israeli coaches and athletes murdered at the Munich Olympic Games. Next to the photograph was a glass case, about the size of a cigar box. Inside, mounted on a background of black cloth, were eleven .22-caliber shell casings.

“I’ve been saving those for you,” said Shamron.

“I don’t want them.”

“Why not?”

“They’re macabre.”

“You were the one who figured out how to squeeze eleven rounds into a ten-shot magazine, not me.”