Page 47 of The Collector
“Describe her.”
“Definitely not Israeli.”
The woman in question, a hacker and professional thief named Ingrid Johansen, was at that same moment experiencing her first vision of Jerusalem. Shortly before midnight she followed Gabriel into an apartment located at 16 Narkiss Street, in the heart of the city’s historic Nachlaot district. His phone rang as he was opening the French doors to the eucalyptus-scented night air. It was his successor on the line.
“I want you in my office tomorrow morning at half past ten,” she said, and the call went dead.
Gabriel showed Ingrid into the guest room, then crawled into bed. By way of deception, he thought, thou shalt do war.
He was awakened at five minutes past seven by the thunderclap of an explosion. At first he thought it was only a dream, but the distant wail of sirens—and the sight of Ingrid standing anxiously in the doorway of his bedroom—told him that was not the case. In thekitchen they watched the breaking coverage on television while waiting for the coffee to brew. The bomb had exploded at a bus stop in Givat Shaul at the western entrance of Jerusalem.
“We drove past it last night,” explained Gabriel.
“Are there casualties?”
“Several.”
“Was anyone killed?”
“We’ll know soon enough.”
A second bomb exploded while Gabriel was in the shower—another bus stop, this one in north Jerusalem, so close it shook the apartment. He dressed in one of the dark suits hanging in his closet and returned to the kitchen to find Ingrid hunched over her laptop, her brow furrowed in concentration.
He filled a stainless-steel insulated tumbler with coffee and tightened the lid. “With a bit of luck, I’ll be back in a few hours. Under no circumstances are you to leave this apartment.”
“Actually,” she answered, her fingers rattling the keyboard, “I wasn’t planning to.”
Downstairs, an armored SUV idled curbside in Narkiss Street. Ten minutes later, after clearing the snarled traffic around Givat Shaul, he was headed down Highway 1 toward Tel Aviv. His rediscovery, he thought, was nearly complete. All he required now was the consent of his successor. She was one of his better works. Girl with a volcanic temper. Girl with a will of iron.
One of the first directives that Gabriel had issued as chief of the Office was among his most enduring—his swift cancellation of a fully approved and Knesset-funded plan to move the service’s headquarters from downtown Tel Aviv to an empty plot of land along Highway 2 in Ramat HaSharon. The colossal price tag was reason enoughto kill the project, but Gabriel was also concerned by the proposed site’s proximity to a busy shopping mall and cineplex. And then there was the name of the nearest highway interchange for which the area was known. “By what metonym shall we refer to ourselves?” Gabriel had lamented. “Glilot Junction? We’ll be the laughingstocks of the intelligence world.”
Besides, the drab building at the far end of King Saul Boulevard was not without its charms, beginning with the fact that it was actually a building within a building, one with its own power supply, its own water and sewer lines, and its own secure communications system. Analytical and support staff entered the premises through a door in the lobby, but division chiefs and field operatives came and went via the underground parking garage. So, too, did current and past directors-general, who also had use of a private lift to whisk them to the top floor. As Gabriel rose slowly skyward, he inhaled the previous occupant’s cologne—Ébène Fumé Eau de Parfum by Tom Ford. Chiara had sent her a bottle of the stuff on the occasion of her last birthday, the hundred-milliliter size because fifty milliliters wouldn’t do. Four hundred euros and change. International shipping not included.
The lift deposited Gabriel directly into the reception area of the executive suite, where a slender young man in a formfitting sport jacket and stretch trousers sat behind a barren desk. He indicated a pair of chairs and Gabriel sat down.
“What happened to Orit?” he asked.
“The Iron Dome? Director Stern thought it was time for a change.”
Did she really? Gabriel would have paid serious money to see that one.
Just then the director’s door opened, and out stepped Yaakov Rossman, the chief of Special Ops, otherwise known as the dark sideof a dark service. With his steel-wool hair and pumice face, he looked like a cleaning implement for hard-to-reach areas—like eastern Syria and northern Iran, thought Gabriel.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, his tone accusatory.
“I’ll find out in a minute or two.”
“I’d love to chat, but I’m afraid we have a bit of a crisis on our hands.”
“Really? Where?”
“Nice try,” said Yaakov, and hurried out as though his crisis was taking place in a room at the end of the hall.
Gabriel looked at the receptionist, who was pondering the phone on his desk. A long moment passed before it emitted a two-note burst of tone, the signal that the director’s office was secure. “She’ll see you now, Mr. Allon.”
“Lucky me.”
Rising, he endured a wait of several seconds for the snap of the automatic locks. The room he entered was strangely unfamiliar. The desk, the seating area, the conference table: everything had been replaced and rearranged. Even the video wall, which had received a significant technological upgrade, had been relocated. The decor was trendy and sophisticated, high finance as opposed to low cunning; the lighting was subdued. Somewhere beyond the tightly drawn shades was Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean, but you would never know it. The office might have been in London or Manhattan or Silicon Valley.
