Opening paragraphs....................

     For something so unprecedented, so fraught with institutional risk, it was all handled with a minimum of fuss.  And quietly, too.  That was the remarkable thing about it, the operational silence with which it was carried out.  Yes, there had been the dramatic announcement broadcast live to the nation, and the splashy first Cabinet meeting, and the lavish party at Ari Shamron's lakeside villa in Tiberias where all the friends and collaborators from his remarkable past - the spymasters, the politicians, the Vatican priests, the London art dealers, even an inveterate art thief from Paris - had come to wish him well.  But otherwise it came to pass with scarcely a ripple.  One day Uzi Navot was seated behind his large smoked-glass desk in the chief's office, and the next, Gabriel was in his place.  Absent Navot's modern desk, mind you, for glass wasn't Gabriel's style.

-Daniel Silva,  House of Spies