15. The Marais, Paris

16. McLean, Virginia

17. Georgetown

18. London

19. London

20. London

21. London

PART THREE The Night Journey

22. Harbor Island, Bahamas

23. Off the Bahamas

24. Gustavia, Saint-Barthélemy

25. Gustavia, Saint-Barthélemy

26. Pointe Mangin, Saint-Barthélemy

27. Gustavia Harbor, Saint-Barthélemy

28. CIA Headquarters

29. Off Saint Maarten

30. Saint Maarten

31. Kloten, Switzerland

32. Zurich

33. Zug, Switzerland

34. Canton Uri, Switzerland

35. Canton Uri, Switzerland

36. Zug, Switzerland

37. Vatican City

38. Rome

PART FOUR The Witness

39. Washington

40. Tiberias, Israel

41. Paris: August

42. Istanbul: August

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART ONE The Door of Death

PART ONE

The Door of Death

1. London

London

IT WAS ALI MASSOUDI who unwittingly roused Gabriel Allon from his brief and restless retirement: Massoudi, the great Europhile intellectual and freethinker, who, in a moment of blind panic, forgot that the English drive on the left side of the road.

The backdrop for his demise was a rain-swept October evening in Bloomsbury. The occasion was the final session of the first annual Policy Forum for Peace and Security in Palestine, Iraq, and Beyond. The conference had been launched early that morning amid great hope and fanfare, but by day’s end it had taken on the quality of a traveling production of a mediocre play. Even the demonstrators who came in hope of sharing some of the flickering spotlight seemed to realize they were reading from the same tired script. The American president was burned in effigy at ten. The Israeli prime minister was put to the purifying flame at eleven. At lunchtime, amid a deluge that briefly turned Russell Square into a pond, there had been a folly having something to do with the rights of women in Saudi Arabia. At eight-thirty, as the gavel came down on the final panel, the two dozen stoics who had stayed to the end filed numbly toward the exits. Organizers of the affair detected little appetite for a return engagement next autumn.

A stagehand stole forward and removed a placard from the rostrum that read: GAZA IS LIBERATED—WHAT NOW? The first panelist on his feet was Sayyid of the London School of Economics, defender of the suicide bombers, apologist for al-Qaeda. Next was the austere Chamberlain of Cambridge, who spoke of Palestine and the Jews as though they were still the quandary of gray-suited men from the Foreign Office. Throughout the discussion the aging Chamberlain had served as a sort of Separation Fence between the incendiary Sayyid and a poor soul from the Israeli embassy named Rachel who had drawn hoots and whistles of disapproval each time she’d opened her mouth. Chamberlain tried to play the role of peacekeeper now as Sayyid pursued Rachel to the door with taunts that her days as a colonizer were drawing to an end.