Few people noticed Eli Lavon’s arrival in Amsterdam the following day, and those who did mistook him for someone else. It was his special talent. Regarded as the finest street surveillance artist the Office had ever produced, Lavon was a ghost of a man who possessed a chameleon-like ability to change his appearance. His greatest asset was his natural anonymity. On the surface, he appeared to be one of life’s downtrodden. In reality, he was a natural predator who could follow a highly trained intelligence officer or hardened terrorist down any street in the world without attracting even a flicker of interest. Ari Shamron liked to say that Lavon could disappear while shaking your hand. It was not far from the truth.

It was Shamron himself, in September 1972, who introduced Lavon to a promising young artist named Gabriel Allon. Though they did not realize it then, both had been selected to take part in what would become one of the most celebrated and controversial missions ever undertaken by Israeli intelligence—Wrath of God, the secret operation to hunt down and assassinate the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre. In the Hebrew-based lexicon of the team, Lavon was an ayin, a tracker and surveillance specialist. Gabriel was an aleph. Armed with a .22 caliber Beretta pistol, he personally assassinated six of the Black September terrorists responsible for Munich. Under Shamron’s unrelenting pressure, they stalked their prey across Western Europe for three years, killing both at night and in broad daylight, living in fear that at any moment they would be arrested and charged as murderers. When they finally returned home, Gabriel’s temples were the color of ash, his face that of a man twenty years his senior. Eli Lavon, who had been exposed to the terrorists for long periods of time with no backup, suffered innumerable stress disorders, including a notoriously fickle stomach that troubled him to this day.