As if to prove them wrong, he rose from his bed and took a few hesitant steps along the corridor. He walked a little farther the following day, and by the end of the week he was able to make a complete circuit of the critical care unit. This earned him the privilege of a room with a window overlooking Twenty-Third Street. Chiara and the children waved to him from the sidewalk, watched over by a team of embassy security guards in khaki vests.
The new president telephoned that evening. He said he had been receiving daily updates and was pleased by Gabriel’s progress. He asked whether there was anything he could do.
“Impose crushing sanctions on Russia,” answered Gabriel.
“I’m announcing them tomorrow along with the seizure of several billion dollars’ worth of looted assets hidden here in the United States. We’ll hit them with another round of sanctionsonce the intelligence community determines to their satisfaction that the Kremlin was behind the attempt on your life.”
“Better mine than yours, Mr. President. I only hope you can forgive me for ruining your inauguration by getting myself shot.”
He allowed himself to be debriefed by a team from Langley and submitted to a video interview with the FBI. Agent Emily Barnes of the Secret Service, who was on administrative leave pending an internal review of her actions, rang him from her apartment in Arlington.
“Sorry, Director Allon. I should have put her on the ground the instant she raised that gun.”
“Why were you even there?”
“She walked right past me at the Capitol. We’re trained to spot people who are contemplating an act of violence. She might as well have been wearing a neon sign. When she followed you down the hill to New Jersey Avenue, I knew you were in trouble, but...” Her voice trailed off.
“She was a member of Congress.”
The following morning, he walked five full circuits of the floor, which earned him a rousing ovation from the nursing staff. For his reward, he was poked and prodded by the doctors, who signed the papers authorizing his release. The bill for his care was astronomical. The president insisted on paying. It was, he said, the least he could do.
For the first time in three weeks, Gabriel dressed himself in proper clothing. Downstairs, a CIA security man helped him into the backseat of an armored SUV. The driver took him on a final tour of the snow-covered city—the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Capitol, the corner of NewJersey and Louisiana Avenues. The sidewalk was stained with blood, his or hers, Gabriel could not tell. He stood there for a moment, hoping to hear his mother’s voice, but she was lost to him once more.
Their last stop was the old redbrick safe house on N Street in Georgetown. During the drive to Dulles Airport, Chiara rested her head on Gabriel’s shoulder and wept. At times like these, he thought, there was comfort in familiar routines.
66
Narkiss Street, Jerusalem
For a month after his return to Israel, he remained hidden away in his apartment in Narkiss Street, surrounded by a small army of security men. Most of his neighbors viewed the additional barriers and checkpoints as a small price to pay to live in close proximity to a national treasure, but a few chafed under the restrictions. There was even a small band of heretics who wondered, not without some justification, whether the shooting in Washington had really happened. After all, they pointed out, he had once misled his enemies, and his fellow countrymen, into believing he was dead. Another grand deception on his part was hardly beyond the realm of possibility.
The skeptics hastily withdrew their objections, however, on the day he made his first appearance. The occasion was amuch-anticipated meeting with the prime minister at Kaplan Street. The video of his arrival shocked the country. Yes, he was still strikingly handsome, but his hair was a touch grayer, and it was evident from his deliberate movements that his body had been invaded by a large-caliber bullet.
He met with the prime minister for more than an hour. Afterward, the two men fielded questions from reporters. It was the prime minister, as usual, who did most of the talking. No, he answered bluntly, there would be no changes in leadership at King Saul Boulevard at this time. Day-to-day control of the Office would remain in the hands of deputy director Uzi Navot until Gabriel was sufficiently recovered. His doctors had set a tentative date of June 1 for his return to duty, which would leave seven months on his term. He had informed the prime minister he would not serve a second term and had suggested a possible successor. The prime minister, when asked for his reaction, described the candidate as “an interesting choice.”
Unbeknownst to the Israeli public, Gabriel and the prime minister used the meeting to add their signatures to a document known as a Red Page, an authorization for the use of lethal force. It was executed a week later in downtown Tehran. A man on a motorcycle, a limpet mine, another dead Iranian nuclear scientist. Regional analysts interpreted the operation as a pointed message to Israel’s enemies that the Office was functioning normally, and for once the analysts were right. The new administration in Washington, which was trying to lure the Iranians back to the nuclear negotiating table, offered only a muted expression of disapproval. Gabriel’s near-deathexperience on Inauguration Day, declared the analysts, had paid dividends at the White House and the State Department.
Much to Chiara’s dismay, Gabriel insisted on overseeing the assassination from the ops center at King Saul Boulevard. But for the most part, he made the Office come to him. Uzi Navot was a frequent visitor to Narkiss Street, as were Yossi Gavish, Eli Lavon, Rimona Stern, Yaakov Rossman, and Mikhail Abramov. Once or twice a week they gathered in the sitting room, or around one of Chiara’s lavish dinners, to review current operations and plan new ones. Occasionally, they pressed Gabriel to reveal the name he had whispered into the ear of the prime minister, but he steadfastly refused. They were confident, however, that he would never entrust the Office to an outsider, which meant that one of them would have the misfortune of following in the footsteps of a legend.
But it was clear the legend was not himself. He tried to hide the pain from his troops, and from his wife and children, but sometimes the smallest movement brought a grimace to his face. His weekly visit to Hadassah Medical Center rarely passed without one of the doctors remarking that he was lucky to be alive. Had the slug entered his chest a few millimeters lower, he would have bled to death before the ambulance arrived. A few millimeters lower still, they declared, and he would have died instantly.
They prescribed for him a set of exercises to regain his strength. He read stacks of classified documents instead. And when he felt up to it, he painted. The works were filled with power and emotion, the sort of paintings for which he would have been known had he become an artist instead of an assassin. One was a portrait of a madwoman clutching a gun.
“It’s much better than she deserves,” said Chiara.
“It’s total crap.”
“You’re too hard on yourself.”
“It runs in the family.”
It was then, standing before his easel, that he told Chiara for the first time how he had heard his mother’s voice as he was dying. And how he had tried to convince the madwoman depicted in the painting, a congresswoman from America’s heartland, to lay down her gun.
“Did she say anything to you?”
“She called me a bloodsucker. And it was quite obvious she believed it to be true. I almost felt sorry for her. Even if I’d had a gun...”
Chiara finished the thought for him. “You’re not sure you would have been able to use it.”
