“Precisely.”

“Sweep it under the rug? Postpone the reckoning until a more convenient date?”

“In so many words.”

“You think this is the way to defeat your Hydra? Chop off a head and hope for the best? You have to burn out the roots, the way Hercules did. You have to attack the beast with arrows dipped in gall.”

“You want to take on the House of Saud?”

“Not just the House of Saud,” Gabriel said. “The Wahhabi fanatics with whom they made a covenant of blood two hundred years ago on the barren plateau of Najd. They’re your real enemy, Adrian. They’re the ones who created Hydra in the first place.”

“A wise prince chooses the time and place of the battle, and this is not the time to tear down the House of Saud.”

Gabriel lapsed into a moody silence. Carter was peering into the bowl of his pipe and making minor adjustments in the disposition of his tobacco, like a don waiting for an answer from a dull student.

“Do I need to remind you that they targeted Shamron?”

Gabriel gave Carter a dark look that said he most certainly did not.

“Then why the hesitation? I would have thought you’d be straining at the leash to get bin Shafiq after what he did to the old man.”

“I want him more than anyone, Adrian, but I never strain at the leash. This is a dangerous operation-too dangerous for you even to attempt. If something goes wrong, or if we’re caught in the act, it will end badly-for all three of us.”

“Three?”

“You, me, and the president.”

“So obey Shamron’s Eleventh Commandment, and you’ll be fine. Thou shalt not get caught.”

“Bin Shafiq is a ghost. We don’t even have a picture.”

“That’s not entirely true.” Carter reached into his manila file folder again and came out with another photograph, which he dropped onto the coffee table for Gabriel to see. It showed a man with narrow black eyes, his face partially concealed by a kaffiyeh. “That’s bin Shafiq, almost twenty years ago, in Afghanistan. He was our friend then. We were on the same side. We supplied the weapons. Bin Shafiq and his masters in Riyadh supplied the money.”

“And the Wahhabi ideology that helped give birth to the Taliban,” Gabriel said.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” said Carter contritely. “But we have something more valuable than a twenty-year-old photograph. We have his voice.”

Carter picked up a small black remote, aimed it at a Bose Wave radio, and pressed the Play button. A moment later two men began to converse in English: one with the accent of an American, the other of an Arab.

“I take it the Saudi is bin Shafiq?”

Carter nodded.

“When was it recorded?”

“In 1988,” Carter said. “In a safe house in Peshawar.”

“Who’s the American?” Gabriel asked, though he knew the answer already. Carter hit the Stop button and looked into the fire. “Me,” he said distantly. “The American at the CIA safe house in Peshawar was me.”

“Would you recognize bin Shafiq if you saw him again?”

“I might, but our sources tell us he had several rounds of plastic surgery before going operational. I would recognize the scar on his right forearm, though. He got hit by a piece of shrapnel during a trip to Afghanistan in 1985. The scar runs from just above the wrist to just below the elbow. No plastic surgeon could have done anything about that.”

“Inside the arm or outside?”

“Inside,” Carter said. “The injury left him with a bit of a withered hand. He had several operations to try to repair it, but nothing ever worked. He tends to keep it in his pocket. He doesn’t like to shake hands. He’s a proud Bedouin, bin Shafiq. He doesn’t respect physical infirmity.”

“I don’t suppose your sources in Riyadh can tell us where he’s hiding within Zizi’s empire?”

“Unfortunately they can’t. But we know he’s there. Put an agent into the House of Zizi, and eventually bin Shafiq will walk through the back door.”

“Put an agent close to Zizi al-Bakari? How do you propose we do that, Adrian? Zizi has more security than most heads of state.”

“I wouldn’t dream of interfering in matters operational,” Carter said. “But rest assured that we’re willing to be patient and that we intend to see it through to the end.”

“Patience and follow-through aren’t typical American virtues. You like to make a mess and move on to the next problem.”

There was another long silence, broken this time by the clatter of Carter’s pipe against the rim of the ashtray.

“What do you want, Gabriel?”

“Guarantees.”

“There are no guarantees in our business. You know that.”

“I want everything you have on bin Shafiq and al-Bakari.”

“Within reason,” Carter said. “I’m not going to give you a truckload of dirt on prominent figures in Washington.”

“I want protection,” Gabriel said. “When this thing goes down, we’ll be the number-one suspect. We always are, even when we’re not responsible. We’re going to need your help weathering the storm.”

“I can speak only for the DO,” said Carter. “And I can assure you that we’ll be there for you.”

“We take out bin Shafiq at the time and place of our choosing, with no interference from Langley.”

“The president would be grateful if you could avoid doing it on American soil.”

“There are no guarantees in our business, Adrian.”

“Touché.”

“You might find this hard to believe, but I can’t make this decision on my own. I need to speak to Amos and the prime minister.”

“Amos and the prime minister will do what you tell them.”

“Within reason.”

“So what are you going to tell them?”

“That the American president needs a favor,” Gabriel said. “And I want to help him.”

THE PRIME MINISTER GRANTED Gabriel his operational charter at two-thirty the following afternoon. Gabriel headed straight for Armageddon. He reckoned it was a fine place to start.

The weather seemed perversely glorious for such an occasion: cool temperatures, a pale blue sky, a soft Judean breeze that plucked at his shirt-sleeves as he sped along the Jaffa Road. He switched on the radio. The mournful music that had saturated the airwaves in the hours after the attempt on Shamron’s life was now gone. A news bulletin came suddenly on the air. The prime minister had promised to do everything in his power to track down and punish those responsible for the attempt on Shamron’s life. He made no mention of the fact that he already knew who was responsible, or that he had granted Gabriel the authority to kill him.

Gabriel plunged down the Bab al-Wad toward the sea, weaving impatiently through the slower traffic, then raced the setting sun northward along the Coastal Plain. There was a security alert near Hadera-according to the radio, a suspected suicide bomber had managed to slip through a crossing in the Separation Fence near Tulkarm-and Gabriel was forced to wait by the side of the road for twenty minutes before heading into the Valley of Jezreel. Five miles from Afula a rounded hillock appeared on his left. In Hebrew it was known as Tel Megiddo, or the Mound of Megiddo. The rest of the world knew it as Armageddon, forecast in the Book of Revelation to be the site of the final earthly confrontation between the forces of good and evil. The battle had not yet begun, and the parking lot was empty except for a trio of dusty pickup trucks, a sign that the archaeological team was still at work.

Gabriel climbed out of his car and headed up the steep footpath to the summit. Tel Megiddo had been under periodic archaeological excavation for more than a century, and the top of the hill was cut by a maze of long, narrow trenches. Evidence of more than twenty cities had been discovered beneath the soil atop the tel, including one believed to have been built by King Solomon.