The Secret Servant Read Free Page A

one of the world’s finest art restorers had always made him the target of professional envy among his colleagues. He rarely discussed his work with them, even with Navot, who had become a close friend.
    “Botticelli, Bellini—it’s all the same to me.” Navot shook his head. “Imagine, a nice Jewish boy like you restoring a Bellini masterpiece for the pope. I hope he paid you well.”
    “He paid me the standard fee—and then a little more.”
    “It’s only fair,” Navot said. “After all, you did save his life.”
    “You had a hand in it, too, Uzi.”
    “But I wasn’t the one who got his picture in the paper doing it.”
    They came to the end of the ramp. Overhead was a blue-and-white traffic sign. To the left was Tel Aviv, to the right, Jerusalem. Navot turned to the right and headed toward the Judean Hills.
    “How’s the mood at King Saul Boulevard?” Gabriel asked.
    King Saul Boulevard was the longtime address of Israel’s foreign intelligence service. The service had a long name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Men like Gabriel and Uzi Navot referred to it as “the Office” and nothing else.
    “Consider yourself fortunate you’ve been away.”
    “That bad?”
    “It’s the night of the long knives. Our adventure in Lebanon was an unmitigated disaster. None of our institutions came out of it with their reputations intact, including the Office. You know how these things work. When mistakes of this magnitude are made, heads must roll, the more the better. No one is safe, especially Amos. The Commission of Inquiry wants to know why the Office didn’t realize Hezbollah was so well armed and why our vast network of well-paid collaborators couldn’t seem to find Hezbollah’s leadership once the fighting started.”
    “The last thing the Office needs now is another power struggle and battle for succession—not with Hezbollah gearing up for another war. Not with Iran on the verge of a nuclear weapon. And not with the territories about to explode.”
    “The decision has already been made by Shamron and the rest of the wise men that Amos must die. The only question is, will it be an execution, or will Amos be allowed to do the deed himself after a decent interval?”
    “How do you know where Shamron stands on all this?”
    Navot, by his edgy silence, made clear that his source was Shamron himself. It had been years now since Shamron had done his last tour as chief, yet the Office was still very much his private fiefdom. It was filled with officers like Gabriel and Navot, men who had been recruited and groomed by Shamron, men who operated by a creed, even spoke a language, written by him. Shamron was known in Israel as the Memuneh , the one in charge, and he would remain so until the day he finally decided the country was safe enough for him to die.
    “You’re playing a dangerous game, Uzi. Shamron is getting on. That bomb attack on his motorcade took a lot out of him. He’s not the man he used to be. There’s no guarantee he’ll prevail in a showdown with Amos, and I don’t need to remind you that the door to King Saul Boulevard for men like you is one way. If you and Shamron lose, you’ll be the one who ends up on the street hawking your services to the highest bidder, just like the rest of the Office’s washed-up field men.”
    Navot nodded his head in agreement. “And I won’t have a pope to throw me a little work on the side.”
    They started the ascent into the Bab al-Wad, the staircaselike gorge that leads from the Coastal Plain to Jerusalem. Gabriel felt his ears pop from the altitude change.
    “Does Shamron have a successor in mind?”
    “He wants the Office to be run by someone other than a soldier.”
    It was one of the many peculiarities about the Office that made little sense to outsiders. Like the Americans, the Israelis nearly always chose men with no intelligence experience to be their chief spies. The Americans preferred politicians and party