ELI LAVON had watched Gabriel’s performance from the parking lot, and so it was Lavon who described it for the rest of the team that evening at the villa. Gabriel was slowly pacing the tiled floor, nursing a club soda for his hangover and holding a bag of ice to a swollen left elbow. His thoughts were on the scene now taking place half a world away in Tel Aviv, where a team of specialists in the science of voice identification was deciding whether the man known as Alain al-Nasser would live or die. Gabriel knew what the answer would be. He had known it the instant his quarry had risen from his table in a killing rage. And he had seen proof of it a few seconds later, when he’d managed to lift the right sleeve of his quarry’s shirt and sneak a glance at the ugly shrapnel scar on his forearm. At 11:30 the lights came on in the villa across the inlet. Gabriel went out onto the terrace, and on the opposite point Ahmed bin Shafiq did the same. To Mikhail it seemed that the two men were staring at each other over the darkened divide. At 11:35 the satellite phone purred softly. Yaakov answered it, listened a moment in silence, then rang off and called Gabriel inside.

26. Pointe Mangin, Saint-Barthélemy

Pointe Mangin, Saint-Barthélemy

THEY GATHERED IN THE open-air living room of the villa and sprawled on the sailcloth couches and wicker chairs. Dina made the first pot of coffee, while Lavon taped a large-scale map of the island onto the wall. Gabriel stared at it gloomily for a long time in silence. When finally he spoke, he uttered a single word: “Zwaiter.” Then he looked at Lavon. “Do you remember Zwaiter, Eli?”

Lavon raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Of course Lavon remembered Zwaiter. Chief of Black September in Italy. First to die for Munich. Gabriel could almost see him now, a skinny intellectual in a plaid jacket, crossing the Piazza Annibaliano in Rome with a bottle of fig wine in one hand and a copy of A Thousand and One Nights in the other.

“How long did you watch him, Eli? Two weeks?”

“Nearly three.”

“Tell them what you learned about Wadal Zwaiter before we even thought about killing him.”

“That he stopped each evening in the same small market. That he always went to the Trieste Bar to make a few phone calls, and that he always went into his apartment building through Entrance C. That the lights in the foyer operated on a timer, and that he always stood in the dark for a moment, searching his pockets for a ten-lira coin to operate the lift. That’s where you did it, wasn’t it, Gabriel? In front of the lift?”

“Excuse me, but are you Wadal Zwaiter?”

“No! Please, no!”