“Are you Gabriel Allon?”
“I’m afraid you have me confused with someone else.”
“You drink their blood, eat their flesh.”
“Who?”
“The children.”
Dear God, no. She was down the rabbit hole. A terrorist Gabriel might have been able to reason with, but not this one. Unprotected and unarmed, he had no choice but to try.
“You’ve been deceived,” he said in the same placid tone. “There’s no cabal. No one’s drinking the blood of children. The Storm will never happen. It’s all a lie.”
“The Storm will begin after I kill you.”
“The only thing that will happen is that you will destroy your life. Now place the gun gently on the sidewalk and walk away. I promise not to tell anyone.”
“Pedophile,” she whispered. “Bloodsucker.”
Gabriel stood with the stillness of a figure in a painting. Twenty-five thousand National Guard troops, another twenty thousand police officers and security personnel, and not one had noticed the professionally attired QAnon adherent standing on New Jersey Avenue with a loaded .357 in her hand.
Three meters separated them, no more. For now, the gun was still pointed at the ground. If he waited until she started to raise it, he would have no chance to disarm her. He had tomake the first move and hope she wasn’t law enforcement or ex-military. If she was, his life would doubtless end at the corner of New Jersey and Louisiana Avenues in Northeast Washington.
Her lips were moving, like a suicide bomber reciting a final prayer. “Trust the plan,” she was whispering. “Enjoy the show.”
Too late, Gabriel rushed forward, shouting like a madman, as the woman’s right arm levered into firing position. The powerful .357 round tore through him like an artillery shell. As death’s darkness fell over him, he heard two more shots, the double tap of a trained professional. Then there was nothing at all, only a voice calling to him from across the green fields of the Valley of Jezreel. It was the voice of his mother, begging him not to die.
Part Five
Encore
65
Washington
Twelve interminable minutes elapsed before the first ambulance was able to make its way through the military checkpoints. The EMTs were confronted with two gunshot victims, one female, the other male. The female, a compact woman wearing a woolen overcoat, had been shot twice in the back and was unresponsive. The male, moderate height and build, perhaps early sixties, was bleeding heavily from a cavernous through-and-through wound a few centimeters beneath his left clavicle. He was no longer conscious. He had a pulse, but barely.
He was still alive when the ambulance reached George Washington University Hospital, but he died in the level-one trauma center at 2:47 p.m. Resuscitated, he died a second time while undergoing surgery, but once again doctors were able torestart his heart. Shortly after six that evening, he was stable enough to be moved to the critical care unit. The hospital listed his condition as grave, which was optimistic. He was alive, but barely.
The doctors were not told the name of the patient whose life they were desperately trying to save, but the phalanx of Secret Service agents and Metropolitan Police officers standing watch outside the trauma center’s doors suggested he was a man of some importance. So, too, did the arrival of several officials from the Israeli Embassy, including the ambassador. He confirmed that the patient was a senior official of the Israeli government involved in security and intelligence. It was essential, he said, that his identity, even his presence in the hospital, remain a secret—and that he survive.
“Please,” begged the ambassador, his eyes damp with tears, “do not let this man die. Not like this.”
The comment was a reference to the identity of the woman who was allegedly responsible for the patient’s grave condition: Michelle Lambert Wright, a four-term Republican congresswoman from Indiana. According to the FBI, which had assumed responsibility for the investigation, Congresswoman Wright had followed the Israeli from the East Plaza of the Capitol to the corner of New Jersey and Louisiana Avenues, where, after a brief conversation, she shot him once with her personal .357 Glock firearm before being shot twice herself. The FBI did not identify the person who killed the congresswoman, only that the individual was an agent of the Secret Service.
At the request of the Israeli government, the FBI also withheld the name of the senior Israeli official who was lying close to death in the critical care unit. But late that evening theWashington Postidentified him as Gabriel Allon, the director-general of Israel’s vaunted secret intelligence service. ThePostalso revealed the contents of two troubling manifestos, discovered in the dead congresswoman’s Capitol Hill apartment, that suggested she was a mentally unstable adherent of the sprawling conspiracy theory known as QAnon. The first manifesto detailed her motives for assassinating the forty-sixth president of the United States on the day of his inauguration. An updated manifesto, composed the day before the ceremony, explained why she had targeted Allon instead.
The White House press secretary revealed additional shocking details during an extraordinary briefing the following afternoon. Allon, she said, had traveled to Delaware on Monday, January 18, to warn the then president-elect about a threat to his life on Inauguration Day. The plot, according to Allon, was Russian in origin and involved a figure inside the US government who held extremist views. Subsequent forensic examination of Congresswoman Wright’s phones and computers revealed that she had been in contact with someone claiming to be the shadowy Q. He had ordered the congresswoman to assassinate the new president in order to unleash the prophesized Storm and bring about the Great Awakening. But on the morning of Tuesday, January 19, he had given her a new assignment.
It was not surprising, given America’s fractured politics, that the revelations only served to widen the partisan divide. A far-right Republican congressman from Florida dismissed the so-called manifestos as clever forgeries planted by operatives of the “deep state.” His colleague from Ohio went further, suggesting that it was Congresswoman Wright, not Gabriel Allon, who had been targeted for assassination. When confronted withclosed-circuit video showing the congresswoman clearly shooting Allon first, the Ohioan held his shaky ground. The video, he declared, was a deep-state fake, too.
The battle on cable news and online was even more fierce, as rival networks and purveyors of opinion waged a holy war over the terrible incident that had stained Inauguration Day in blood. There was talk of violence in the streets, of civil war and secession, even another attack on the Capitol. Those who remained faithful to the discredited prophecies of QAnon saw evidence that the forecast Storm was brewing, with one noted Q influencer predicting it would begin the instant of Allon’s death. But those who had clawed their way out of the rabbit hole and back to reality saw something more dangerous—proof that QAnon, once dismissed as a harmless conspiracy theory, had turned lethal. They called on the remaining community of believers to switch off their social media accounts and seek professional help before it was too late.
Nearly lost in the rancor was the fact that Gabriel Allon, by inadvertently making himself the target of the Russian assassination plot, might well have saved the republic. Unconscious and on numerous means of life support, he was oblivious to the events swirling around him. Finally, three interminable days after the shooting, he opened his eyes for the first time. When asked by his doctors if he knew where he was and what had happened, he indicated that he did. He was alive, but barely.
The CIA gave Chiara and the children the run of an old safe house on N Street in Georgetown. Barred from the hospital by Covid restrictions, they anxiously awaited each updateon Gabriel’s condition. Forty-eight hours after regaining consciousness, he showed signs of marked improvement. And when another two days passed with no further complications, the doctors expressed guarded confidence the worst was behind him. That evening Chiara traveled from Georgetown to Foggy Bottom in an embassy car, just to be nearer to him. When told of her proximity, he smiled for the first time.
They spoke briefly by video call the following morning. Chiara told Gabriel that he looked wonderful, which wasn’t at all true. Drawn and gaunt, his face etched with pain, he looked positively dreadful, scarcely like himself. Nevertheless, the doctors assured her he was continuing to make good progress. The .357 round, they explained, had left a tunnel of destruction in its wake—torn blood vessels, soft tissue damage, shattered bones. His recovery, they warned, would be lengthy and difficult.
