This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Prince of Fire

A G. P. Putnam’s Sons Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 2005 by Daniel Silva

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ISBN: 0-7865-6002-9

A G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS BOOK®

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Electronic edition: August, 2005

ALSO BY DANIEL SILVA

A Death in Vienna

The Confessor

The English Assassin

The Kill Artist

The Marching Season

The Mark of the Assassin

The Unlikely Spy

For Neil Nyren, steady hand on the tiller, Patrick Matthiesen, who gave me Isherwood, and, as always, for my wife, Jamie, and my children, Lily and Nicholas

If you live to seek revenge, dig a grave for two.

ANCIENT JEWISH PROVERB

PART ONE THE DOSSIER

 PART ONE 

THE DOSSIER

1 ROME: MARCH 4

1

ROME: MARCH 4

THERE HAD BEEN WARNING SIGNS—THE SHABBAT bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that left eighty-seven people dead; the bombing of an Istanbul synagogue, precisely one year later, that killed another twenty-eight—but Rome would be his coming-out party, and Rome would be the place where he left his calling card.

Afterward, within the corridors and executive suites of Israel’s vaunted intelligence service, there was considerable and sometimes belligerent debate over the time and place of the conspiracy’s genesis. Lev Ahroni, the ever-cautious director of the service, would claim that the plot was hatched not long after the Israeli army knocked down Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah and stole his secret files. Ari Shamron, the legendary Israeli master spy, would find this almost laughable, though Shamron often disagreed with Lev simply as a matter of sport. Only Shamron, who had fought with the Palmach during the War of Independence and who tended to view the conflict as a continuum, understood intuitively that the outrage in Rome had been inspired by deeds dating back more than a half century. Eventually, evidence would prove both Lev and Shamron correct. In the meantime, in order to achieve peaceful working conditions, they agreed on a new starting point: the day a certain Monsieur Jean-Luc arrived in the hills of Lazio and settled himself in a rather handsome eighteenth-century villa on the shore of Lake Bracciano.