Page 44 of The Collector
“Where would you like me to begin?”
“How about the beginning?”
“In the beginning, God created—”
“Why don’t you skip to the part about Ingrid?”
“She’s a computer hacker and professional thief.”
“Sounds like my kind of girl.”
“Mine, too.”
Shamron’s old Zippo lighter flared. “Tell me the rest.”
He waited until the conclusion of Gabriel’s five-minute presentation before looking up from the radio. The expression on his face was one of profound disapproval. “You could be prosecuted, you know.”
“For the unfortunate incident involving the Armenian gangsters in Antwerp?”
“For taking your friend into a secret Office interrogation facility. If I had pulled a stunt like that, I would have never heard the end of it.”
“You know what they say about imitation, Ari.”
“I’m inimitable, my son. But it is rather rich, don’t you think? How many times did you berate me for keeping my hand in the game? How many times did you tell me that you were done with this life?” Shamron treated himself to a satisfied smile. “And now, as they say, the shoe is on the other foot.”
“Are you quite finished?”
“I’m just getting started.” He crushed out his cigarette and lit another, secure in the knowledge that Gabriel, now thoroughly on the defensive, wouldn’t dare utter a word of protest. “And what have you concluded from this inquiry of yours thus far?”
“I was trained by a wise intelligence officer never to force the pieces.”
“Because when we force the pieces, we sometimes see what we want to see rather than the truth—wouldn’t you agree?”
“Sometimes,” replied Gabriel.
“And then, of course, there is the problem of missing pieces. We don’t know what we don’t know. And I can assure you, my son, you don’t have all the pieces.”
“Which one am I missing?”
“The man who lived in the beautiful villa by the sea in Amalfi.”
“Lukas van Damme?”
“Actually,” said Shamron, “we used to call him Lucky Lukas.”
“Van Damme was an Office asset?”
“For several years.”
“Why?”
Shamron raised his hands in the shape of a mushroom cloud and whispered, “Boom.”
24
Tiberias
South Africa’s nuclear weapons program, among the most secretive ever undertaken, commenced in 1948—the same year that Israel declared its independence and three years after the United States brought a swift end to World War II by dropping a pair of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Initially, South Africa pursued a plutonium bomb, but in 1969 it switched to a uranium-enrichment program fed with domestically mined ore. By the late 1980s it had assembled a nuclear arsenal of six gun-type bombs, the last such weapons ever built.
