Portrait of a Spy
Portrait of a Spy
Daniel Silva
Gabriel Allon, secret agent, assassin and master art restorer, returns in a spellbinding novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling authorEurope is exploding. And one man must find out why.For Gabriel Allon and his wife Chiara, it was supposed to be the start of a romantic weekend in London. But nothing is ever that simple when you’re an off-duty spy and assassin.Bombings in Paris and Copenhagen have put him on edge and when Gabriel notices a man exhibiting several traits common to suicide bombers, he follows him into the Covent Garden throng. He’s determined to prevent the carnage he fears is about to take place, but before Gabriel can draw his sidearm, he is knocked to the pavement by two plain-clothes police officers.A moment later he looks up to find a scene from his nightmares.From the streets of New York and London,to the unforgiving landscape of the Saudi desert,Gabriel Allon is in a race to the death against a calculating mass-murderer that he dare not lose…
PORTRAIT OF A SPY
DANIEL SILVA
Dedication
For my wonderful children, Nicholas and Lily,
whom I love and admire more than they will
ever know. And, as always, for my wife, Jamie, who
makes everything possible.
Epigraph
Jihad is becoming as American as apple pie
and as British as afternoon tea.
ANWAR AL-AWLAKI, AL-QAEDA PREACHER AND RECRUITER
One person of integrity can make a difference,
a difference of life and death.
ELIE WIESEL
Contents
Title Page (#ub56baa50-a824-5125-9164-619c841110dd)
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE
Chapter 1 - The Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall
Chapter 2 - Paris
Chapter 3 - St. James’s, London
Chapter 4 - Covent Garden, London
Chapter 5 - Covent Garden, London
Chapter 6 - Covent Garden, London
Chapter 7 - New Scotland Yard, London
Chapter 8 - New York City
Chapter 9 - The Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall
Chapter 10 - Lizard Point, Cornwall
Chapter 11 - Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 12 - Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 13 - Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 14 - Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 15 - Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 16 - Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 17 - Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 18 - Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 19 - Volta Park, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 20 - The Palisades, Washington, D.C.
PART TWO
Chapter 21 - New York City
Chapter 22 - Madrid-Paris
Chapter 23 - Paris
Chapter 24 - Paris
Chapter 25 - Seraincourt, France
Chapter 26 - Montmartre, Paris
Chapter 27 - Paris
Chapter 28 - Seraincourt, France
Chapter 29 - Seraincourt, France
Chapter 30 - Seraincourt, France
Chapter 31 - Seraincourt, France
Chapter 32 - Seraincourt, France
Chapter 33 - Seraincourt, France
Chapter 34 - St. James’s, London
Chapter 35 - Zurich
Chapter 36 - Lake Zurich
Chapter 37 - Lake Zurich
Chapter 38 - Paris
Chapter 39 - Zurich
Chapter 40 - Langley, Virginia
Chapter 41 - Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Chapter 42 - Nejd, Saudi Arabia
Chapter 43 - Nejd, Saudi Arabia
Chapter 44 - St. James’s, London
Chapter 45 - St. James’s, London
Chapter 46 - Langley, Virginia
Chapter 47 - The Palisades, Washington, D.C.
PART THREE
Chapter 48 - The Plains, Virginia
Chapter 49 - The Plains, Virginia
Chapter 50 - The Plains, Virginia
Chapter 51 - The City, London
Chapter 52 - The City, London
Chapter 53 - The City, London
Chapter 54 - Dubai
Chapter 55 - Dubai International Airport
Chapter 56 - Burj Al Arab Hotel, Dubai
Chapter 57 - Langley, Virginia
Chapter 58 - Burj Al Arab Hotel, Dubai
Chapter 59 - Burj Al Arab Hotel, Dubai
Chapter 60 - Burj Al Arab Hotel, Dubai
Chapter 61 - Dubai
Chapter 62 - Deira, Dubai
Chapter 63 - The Empty Quarter, Saudi Arabia
Chapter 64 - The Empty Quarter, Saudi Arabia
Chapter 65 - The Empty Quarter, Saudi Arabia
Chapter 66 - The Empty Quarter, Saudi Arabia
PART FOUR
Chapter 67 - Paris-Langley-Riyadh
Chapter 68 - The Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall
Chapter 69 - New York City
Chapter 70 - Langley, Virginia
Chapter 71 - The Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Daniel Silva
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE
DEATH IN THE GARDEN
Chapter 1
The Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall
IT WAS THE REMBRANDT THAT solved the mystery once and for all. Afterward, in the quaint shops where they did their marketing and the dark little seaside pubs where they did their drinking, they would chide themselves for having missed the telltale signs, and they would share a good-natured laugh at some of their more outlandish theories about the true nature of his work. Because in their wildest dreams there was not one among them who ever considered the possibility that the taciturn man from the far end of Gunwalloe Cove was an art restorer, and a world-famous art restorer at that.
He was not the first outsider to wander down to Cornwall with a secret to keep, yet few had guarded theirs more jealously, or with more style and intrigue. A case in point was the peculiar manner in which he had secured lodgings for himself and his beautiful but much younger wife. Having chosen the picturesque cottage at the edge of the cliffs—by all accounts, sight unseen—he had paid the entire twelve-month lease in advance, with all the paperwork handled discreetly by an obscure lawyer in Hamburg. He settled into the cottage a fortnight later as if he were conducting a raid on a distant enemy outpost. Those who met him during his first forays into the village were struck by his notable lack of candor. He seemed to have no name—at least not one he was willing to share—and no country of origin that any of them could place. Duncan Reynolds, thirty years retired from the railroad and regarded as the worldliest of Gunwalloe’s residents, described him as “a cipher of a man” while other reviews ranged from “standoffish” to “unbearably rude.” Even so, all agreed that, for better or worse, the little west Cornish village of Gunwalloe had become a far more interesting place.
With time, they were able to establish that his name was Giovanni Rossi and that, like his beautiful wife, he was of Italian descent. Which made it all the more curious when they began to notice government-issue cars filled with government-issue men prowling the streets of the village late at night. And then there were the two blokes who sometimes fished the cove. Opinion was universal that they were the worst fishermen anyone had ever seen. In fact, most assumed they were not fishermen at all. Naturally, as is wont to happen in a small village like Gunwalloe, there began an intense debate about the true identity of the newcomer and the nature of his work—a debate that was finally resolved by Portrait of a Young Woman, oil on canvas, 104 by 86 centimeters, by Rembrandt van Rijn.
Precisely when it arrived would never be clear. They assumed it was sometime in mid-January because that was when they noticed a dramatic change in his daily routine. One day he was marching along the rugged cliff tops of the Lizard Peninsula as though wrestling with a guilty conscience; the next he was standing before an easel in his living room, a paintbrush in one hand, a palette in the other, and opera music blasting so loudly you could hear the wailing clear across Mount’s Bay in Marazion. Given the proximity of his cottage to the Coastal Path, it was possible—if one paused in just the right spot, mind you, and craned one’s neck at just the right angle—to see him in his studio. At first, they assumed he was working on a painting of his own. But as the weeks ground slowly past, it became clear he was involved in the craft known as conservation or, more commonly, as restoration.
“Hell’s that mean?” Malcolm Braithwaite, a retired lobsterman who smelled perpetually of the sea, asked one evening at the Lamb and Flag pub.
“It means he’s fixing the bloody thing,” said Duncan Reynolds. “A painting is like a living, breathing thing. When it gets old, it flakes and sags—just like you, Malcolm.”
“I hear it’s a young girl.”
“Pretty,” said Duncan, nodding his head. “Cheeks like apples. She looks positively edible.”
“Do we know the artist?”
“Still working on that.”
And work on it they did. They consulted many books, searched many sites on the Internet, and sought out people who knew more about art than they did—a category that included most of the population of West Cornwall. Finally, in early April, Dottie Cox from the village store screwed up the nerve to simply ask the beautiful young Italian woman about the painting when she came into town to do her marketing. The woman evaded the question with an ambiguous smile. Then, with her straw bag slung over her shoulder, she sauntered back down to the cove, her riotous dark hair tossed by the springtime wind. Within minutes of her arrival, the wailing of the opera ceased and the window shades of the cottage fell like eyelids.
They remained tightly closed for the next week, at which point the restorer and his beautiful wife disappeared without warning. For several days, the residents of Gunwalloe feared they might not be planning to return, and a few actually berated themselves for having snooped and pried into the couple’s private affairs. Then, while leafing through the Times one morning at the village store, Dottie Cox noticed a story from Washington, D.C., about the unveiling of a long-lost portrait by Rembrandt—a portrait that looked precisely like the one that had been in the cottage at the far end of the cove. And thus the mystery was solved.
Coincidentally, that same edition of the Times contained a front-page article about a series of mysterious explosions at four secret Iranian nuclear facilities. No one in Gunwalloe imagined there might be any connection. At least not yet.
The restorer was a changed man when he came back from America; they could see that. Though he remained guarded in his personal encounters—and he was still not the sort you would want to surprise in the dark—it was obvious a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders. They saw a smile on his angular face every now and again, and the light emitted by his unnaturally green eyes seemed a shade less defensive. Even his long daily walks had a different quality. Where once he had pounded along the footpaths like a man possessed, he now seemed to float atop the mist-covered cliffs like an Arthurian spirit who had come home after a long time in a distant land.
“Looks to me as if he’s been released from a sacred vow,” observed Vera Hobbs, owner of the village bakeshop. But when asked to venture a guess as to what that vow might have been, or to whom he had sworn it, she refused. Like everyone else in town, she had made a fool of herself trying to divine his occupation. “Besides,” she advised, “it’s better to leave him in peace. Otherwise, the next time he and his pretty wife leave the Lizard, it might be for good.”
Indeed, as that glorious summer slowly faded, the restorer’s future plans became the primary preoccupation of the entire village. With the lease on the cottage running out in September, and with no tangible evidence he was planning to renew it, they embarked on a covert effort to persuade him to stay. What the restorer needed, they decided, was something to keep him tethered to the Cornish coast—a job that utilized his unique set of skills and gave him something to do other than walk the cliffs. Exactly what that job might entail, and who would give it to him, they had no idea, but they entrusted to themselves the delicate task of trying to find it.
After much deliberation, it was Dottie Cox who finally hit upon the idea of the First Annual Gunwalloe Festival of Fine Arts, with the famous art restorer Giovanni Rossi serving as honorary chairman. She made the suggestion to the restorer’s wife the following morning when she popped into the village store at her usual time. The woman actually laughed for several minutes. The offer was flattering, she said after regaining her composure, but she didn’t think it was the sort of thing Signor Rossi would agree to. His official rejection came soon after, and the Gunwalloe Festival of Fine Arts quietly withered on the vine. It was no matter; a few days later, they learned that the restorer had taken the cottage for another year. Once again, the lease was paid in full, with all the paperwork handled by the same obscure lawyer in Hamburg.
With that, life returned to something like normal. They would see the restorer in mid-morning when he came to the village with his wife to do their marketing, and they would see him again in mid-afternoon when he hiked along the cliff tops in his Barbour coat and his flat cap pulled low over his brow. And if he failed to give them a proper greeting, they took no offense. And if he seemed uneasy about something, they gave him room to work it out on his own. And if a stranger came to town, they tracked his every move until he was gone. The restorer and his wife might have come from Italy originally, but they belonged to Cornwall now, and heaven help the fool who ever tried to take them away again.
There were, however, some on the Lizard who believed there was more to the story—and one man in particular who believed he knew what it was. His name was Teddy Sinclair, owner of a rather good pizzeria in Helston and a subscriber to conspiracy theories large and small. Teddy believed the moon landings were a hoax. Teddy believed 9/11 was an inside job. And Teddy believed the man from Gunwalloe Cove was hiding more than a secret ability to heal paintings.
To prove his case once and for all, he summoned the villagers to the Lamb and Flag on the second Thursday of November and unveiled a chart that looked a bit like the periodic table of elements. It purported to establish, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the explosions at the Iranian nuclear facilities were the work of a legendary Israeli intelligence officer named Gabriel Allon—and that the same Gabriel Allon was now living peacefully in Gunwalloe under the name Giovanni Rossi. When the laughter finally died down, Duncan Reynolds called it the dumbest thing he’d heard since some Frenchman decided that Europe should have a common currency. But this time Teddy stood his ground, which in hindsight was the right thing to do. Because Teddy might have been wrong about the moon landings, and wrong about 9/11, but when it came to the man from Gunwalloe Cove, his theory was in every respect true.
The next morning, Remembrance Day, the village woke to the news that the restorer and his wife had disappeared. In a panic, Vera Hobbs hurried down to the cove and peered through the windows of the cottage. The restorer’s supplies were scattered across a low table, and propped on the easel was a painting of a nude woman stretched upon a couch. It took Vera a moment to realize that the couch was identical to the one in the living room, and that the woman was the same one she saw each morning in her bakeshop. Despite her embarrassment, Vera couldn’t seem to summon the will to look away, because it happened to be one of the most strikingly beautiful paintings she had ever seen. It was also a very good sign, she thought as she headed back to the village. A painting like that was not the sort of thing a man left behind when he was making a run for it. Eventually, the restorer and his wife would come back. And heaven help that bloody Teddy Sinclair if they didn’t.
Chapter 2
Paris
THE FIRST BOMB EXPLODED AT 11:46 a.m., on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris. The director of the French security service would later say he received no warning of the impending attack, a statement his detractors might have found laughable were the death toll not so high. The warning signs were plain to see, they said. Only the blind or the willfully ignorant could have possibly missed them.
From Europe’s point of view, the timing of the attack could not have been worse. After decades of lavish social spending, much of the Continent was teetering on the brink of fiscal and monetary disaster. Its debt was soaring, its treasuries were empty, and its pampered citizenry was aging and disillusioned. Austerity was the order of the day. In the current climate, no cow was considered too sacred; health care, university tuition, support for the arts, and even pension benefits were all undergoing drastic cuts. Along Europe’s so-called periphery, the smaller economies were falling like dominoes. Greece was sinking slowly into the Aegean, Spain was on life support, and the Irish Miracle had turned out to be nothing more than a mirage. In the smart salons of Brussels, many Eurocrats were daring to say aloud what had once been unthinkable—that the dream of European integration was dying. And in their darker moments, a few of them actually wondered whether Europe as they knew it might be dying, too.
Another article of faith lay in tatters that November—the belief that Europe could absorb an endless tide of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies while preserving its culture and basic way of life. What had started as a temporary program to relieve a postwar labor shortage had now permanently altered the face of an entire continent. Restive Muslim suburbs ringed nearly every city, and several countries appeared demographically fated to Muslim majorities before the end of the century. No one in a position of power had bothered to consult the native population of Europe before throwing open the doors, and now, after years of relative passivity, the natives were beginning to push back. Denmark had imposed draconian restrictions on immigrant marriages. France had banned the wearing of the full facial veil in public. And the Swiss, who barely tolerated one another, had decided they wanted to keep their tidy little cities and towns free of unsightly minarets. The leaders of Britain and Germany had declared multiculturalism, the virtual religion of post-Christian Europe, a dead letter. No longer would the majority bend to the will of the minority, they declared. Nor would it turn a blind eye to the extremism that flourished within its midst. Europe’s age-old contest with Islam, it seemed, had entered a new and potentially dangerous phase. There were many who feared it would be an uneven fight. One side was old, tired, and largely content with itself. The other could be driven into a murderous frenzy by a doodle in a Danish newspaper.
Nowhere were the problems facing Europe on clearer display than in Clichy-sous-Bois, the volatile Arab banlieue located just outside Paris. The flashpoint for the deadly riots that swept France in 2005, the suburb had one of the country’s highest unemployment rates, along with one of the highest rates of violent crime. So dangerous was Clichy-sous-Bois that even the French police refrained from entering its seething public housing estates—including the one where Nazim Kadir, a twenty-six-year-old Algerian employed by the celebrated Fouquet’s restaurant, lived with twelve other members of his extended family.
On that morning in November, he left his apartment in darkness to purify himself at a mosque built with Saudi money and staffed by a Saudi-trained imam who spoke no French. After completing this most important pillar of Islam, he rode a 601AB bus to the suburb of Le Raincy and then boarded an RER train to the Gare Saint-Lazare. There he switched to the Paris Métro for the final leg of his journey. At no point did he arouse the suspicions of the authorities or his fellow passengers. His heavy coat concealed the fact he was wearing an explosive vest.
He emerged from the George V stop at his usual time, 11:40, and started up the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Those lucky enough to survive the inferno to come would later say there was nothing unusual in his appearance, though the owner of a popular flower shop claimed to notice a curious determination in his gait as he closed in on the entrance of the restaurant. Among those standing outside were a deputy minister of justice, a newsreader from French television, a fashion model currently gracing the cover of Vogue magazine, a Gypsy beggar clutching the hand of a small child, and a noisy group of Japanese tourists. The bomber made one final check of his watch. Then he unzipped his coat.
It was never clearly established whether the act was preceded by the traditional scream of “Allahu Akbar.” Several survivors claimed to have heard it; several others swore the bomber detonated his device in silence. As for the sound of the explosion itself, those closest had no memory of it at all, for their eardrums were too badly damaged. To a person, all recalled seeing a blinding white flash of light. It was the light of death, said one. The light one sees at the moment he confronts God for the first time.
The bomb itself was a marvel of design and construction. It was not the kind of device built from Internet manuals or the how-to pamphlets floating around the Salafist mosques of Europe. It had been perfected under battle conditions in Palestine and Mesopotamia. Packed with nails soaked in rat poison—a practice borrowed from the suicide bombers of Hamas—it carved through the crowd like a circular saw. So powerful was the explosion that the Louvre Pyramid, located a mile and a half to the east, shivered with the blast wave. Those closest to the bomber were blown to pieces, sheared in half, or decapitated, the preferred punishment for unbelievers. Even at forty paces, limbs were lost. At the farthest edge of the kill zone, the dead appeared pristine. Spared outward trauma, they had been killed by the shock wave, which ravaged their internal organs like a tsunami. Providence had granted them the tender mercy of bleeding to death in private.
The first gendarmes to arrive were instantly sickened by what they saw. Extremities littered the paving stones, along with shoes, smashed wristwatches frozen at 11:46, and mobile phones that rang unanswered. In one final insult, the murderer’s remains were scattered among his victims—everything but the head, which came to rest on a delivery truck more than a hundred feet away, the bomber’s expression oddly serene.
The French interior minister arrived within ten minutes of the explosion. Seeing the carnage, he declared, “Baghdad has come to Paris.” Seventeen minutes later, it came to the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, where, at 12:03 p.m., a second suicide bomber detonated himself amid a large group of children waiting impatiently to board the park’s roller coaster. The Danish security service, the PET, quickly established that the shahid had been born in Copenhagen, had attended Danish schools, and was married to a Danish woman. It seemed not to trouble him that his own children attended the same school as his victims.
For the security professionals across Europe it was the nightmare scenario come true—coordinated and highly sophisticated attacks that appeared to have been planned and executed by a skilled mastermind. They feared the terrorists would strike again soon, though two critical pieces of information eluded them. They did not know where. And they did not know when.
Chapter 3
St. James’s, London
LATER, THE COUNTERTERRORISM COMMAND OF London’s Metropolitan Police Service would expend much valuable time and effort trying to reconstruct the movements that morning of one Gabriel Allon, the legendary but wayward son of Israeli intelligence, now formally retired and living quietly in the United Kingdom. It is known, based on eyewitness accounts from his meddlesome neighbors, that he departed his cottage in Cornwall a few minutes after dawn and climbed into his Range Rover, accompanied by his beautiful Italian-born wife, Chiara. It is also known, due to Britain’s Orwellian system of CCTV cameras, that the couple reached central London in near-record time, and that, through an act of divine intervention, they managed to find a somewhat legal parking space in Piccadilly. From there they proceeded on foot to Mason’s Yard, a tranquil quadrangle of paving stones and commerce in St. James’s, and presented themselves at the door of Isherwood Fine Arts. According to the CCTV camera in the yard, they were admitted into the premises at 11:40 London time, though Maggie, Isherwood’s latest mediocre secretary, would erroneously record the time in her logbook as 11:45.
Purveyors of museum-quality Italian and Dutch Old Master paintings since 1968, the gallery had once occupied a lofty perch on tony New Bond Street in Mayfair. Driven into St. Jamesian exile by the likes of Hermès, Burberry, and Cartier, it had taken refuge in three floors of a sagging warehouse once owned by Fortnum & Mason. Among the incestuous, backbiting villagers of St. James’s, the gallery had always been regarded as rather good theater—comedy and tragedy, stunning highs and seemingly bottomless lows, and always a whiff of conspiracy lying just beneath the surface. This was, in large measure, a consequence of the owner’s personality. Julian Isherwood was cursed with a near fatal flaw for an art dealer—he liked to possess art more than he liked to sell it. As a result, he was burdened with a large inventory of what is affectionately known in the trade as dead stock—paintings for which no buyer would ever pay a fair price. It was rumored that Isherwood’s personal holdings rivaled those of the British royal family. Even Gabriel, who had restored paintings for the gallery for more than thirty years, had only the vaguest idea of Isherwood’s true holdings.
They found him in his office—a tall, slightly precarious figure tilted against the front of a desk piled with old catalogs and monographs. He wore a gray chalk-stripe suit and a lavender necktie that had been given to him the previous evening by his latest love interest. As usual, he appeared slightly hungover, a look he cultivated. His eyes were fixed mournfully on the television.
“I take it you’ve heard the news?”
Gabriel nodded slowly. He and Chiara had heard the first bulletins on the radio as they were passing through the western suburbs of London. The images playing out on the screen were remarkably similar to the ones that had formed in Gabriel’s own mind—the dead covered in plastic sheeting, the bloodied survivors, the onlookers with their palms pressed to their faces in horror. It never changed. He supposed it never would.
“I had lunch at Fouquet’s last week with a client,” Isherwood said, running a hand through his longish gray locks. “We parted company on the very spot where that maniac detonated his bomb. What if the client had scheduled the lunch for today? I might have been—”
Isherwood stopped himself. It was a typical reaction after an attack, thought Gabriel. The living always sought to find some connection, however tenuous, to the dead.
“The bomber in Copenhagen killed children,” Isherwood said. “Will you please explain to me what cause is served by the murder of innocent children?”
“Fear,” said Gabriel. “They want us to be afraid.”
“When is this going to end?” Isherwood asked, shaking his head in disgust. “When in God’s name is this madness going to end?”
“You should know better than to ask a question like that, Julian.” Gabriel lowered his voice and added, “After all, you’ve had a ringside seat at this war for a very long time.”
Isherwood gave a melancholy smile. His backbone-of-England surname and English scale concealed the fact that he was not, at least technically, English at all. British by nationality and passport, yes, but German by birth, French by upbringing, and Jewish by religion. Only a handful of trusted friends knew that Isherwood had staggered into London as a child refugee in 1942 after being carried across the snowbound Pyrenees by a pair of Basque shepherds. Or that his father, the renowned Paris art dealer Samuel Isakowitz, had been murdered at the Sobibor death camp along with Isherwood’s mother. Though Isherwood had carefully guarded the secrets of his past, the story of his dramatic escape from Nazi-occupied Europe had reached the ears of Israel’s secret intelligence service. And in the mid-1970s, during a wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli targets in Europe, he was recruited as a sayan, a volunteer helper. Isherwood had but one assignment—to assist in building and maintaining the operational cover of an art restorer and assassin named Gabriel Allon.
“Just keep one thing in mind,” Isherwood said. “You work for me now, not them. This isn’t your problem, petal. Not anymore.” He aimed his remote at the television and the mayhem in Paris and Copenhagen vanished, at least for the moment. “Let’s have a look at something beautiful, shall we?”
The limited space of the gallery had compelled Isherwood to arrange his empire vertically—storerooms on the ground floor, business offices on the second, and on the third, a glorious formal exhibition room modeled on Paul Rosenberg’s famous gallery in Paris, where young Julian had spent many happy hours as a child. As they entered the room, midday sun was slanting through the overhead skylight, illuminating a large oil painting propped on a baize-covered pedestal. It was a depiction of the Madonna and Child with Mary Magdalene, set against an evening backdrop, quite obviously of the Venetian School. Chiara removed her car-length leather coat and sat on the museum-style ottoman at the center of the room. Gabriel stood directly before the canvas, one hand resting on his narrow chin, his head tilted to one side.
“Where did you find it?”
“In a great limestone pile along the Norfolk coast.”
“Does the pile have an owner?”
“Insists on anonymity. Suffice it to say he descends from a family of title, his property holdings are enormous, and his cash reserves are dwindling at an alarming rate.”
“So he asked you to take a few paintings off his hands to keep him afloat for another year.”
“At the rate he goes through money, I’d give him two months at the outside.”
“How much did you pay for it?”
“Twenty thousand.”
“How charitable of you, Julian.” Gabriel glanced at Isherwood and added, “I assume you covered your tracks by taking a few other pictures as well.”
“Six worthless pieces of crap,” Isherwood confessed. “But if my hunch about this one is correct, they were well worth the investment.”
“Provenance?” asked Gabriel.
“It was purchased in the Veneto by one of the owner’s ancestors while he was doing his Grand Tour in the early nineteenth century. It’s been in the family ever since.”
“Current attribution?”
“Workshop of Palma Vecchio.”
“Really?” asked Gabriel skeptically. “According to whom?”
“The Italian art expert who brokered the sale.”
“Was he blind?”
“Only in one eye.”
Gabriel smiled. Many of the Italians who had advised British nobility during their travels were charlatans who did a brisk trade in worthless copies falsely attributed to the masters of Florence and Venice. Occasionally, they erred in the opposite direction. Isherwood suspected that the painting on the pedestal fell into the second category. So, too, did Gabriel. He dragged the tip of his forefinger over the face of the Magdalene, dislodging a century’s worth of surface grime.
“Where was it hung? In a coal mine?”
He picked at the heavily discolored varnish. In all likelihood, it was composed of a mastic or dammar resin that had been dissolved with turpentine. Removing it would be a painstaking process involving the use of a carefully calibrated mixture of acetone, methyl proxitol, and mineral spirits. Gabriel could only imagine the horrors that awaited him once the old varnish had been stripped away: archipelagos of pentimento, a desert of surface cracks and creases, wholesale paint losses concealed by previous restorations. And then there was the condition of the canvas, which was sagging dramatically with age. The remedy was a relining, a perilous procedure involving the application of heat, moisture, and pressure. Any restorer who had ever performed a relining had the scars to prove it. Gabriel had once destroyed a large portion of a painting by Domenico Zampieri by using an iron with a faulty temperature gauge. The fully restored painting, while pristine to the untrained eye, was definitely a collaborative effort between Zampieri and the Studio of Gabriel Allon.
“Well?” asked Isherwood again. “Who painted the bloody thing?”
Gabriel made a show of deliberation. “I’ll need X-rays to make a definitive attribution.”
“My man is dropping by later this afternoon to take the pictures. But we both know that you don’t need them to make a preliminary attribution. You’re like me, petal. You’ve been around paintings for a hundred thousand years. You know it when you see it.”
Gabriel fished a small magnifying glass from his coat pocket and used it to examine the brushstrokes. Leaning slightly forward, he could feel the familiar shape of a Beretta 9mm pistol digging into the flesh of his left hip. Having worked with British intelligence to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program, he was now permitted to carry a weapon at all times for protection. He had also been granted a British passport, which he was free to use for foreign travel, provided he was not working for his old service. There was no chance of that. The illustrious career of Gabriel Allon was finally over. He was no longer Israel’s avenging angel. He was an art restorer employed by Isherwood Fine Arts, and England was his home.
“You have a hunch,” said Isherwood. “I can see it in those green eyes of yours.”
“I do,” replied Gabriel, still entranced by the brushstrokes, “but I’d like a second opinion first.”
He glanced over his shoulder at Chiara. She was toying with a strand of her unruly hair, a slightly bemused expression on her face. Posed as she was now, she bore a striking resemblance to the woman in the painting. It was hardly surprising, thought Gabriel. The descendant of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, Chiara had been raised in the ancient ghetto of Venice. It was quite possible some of her ancestors had served as models for masters such as Bellini, Veronese, and Tintoretto.
“What do you think?” he asked.
Chiara joined Gabriel before the canvas and clucked her tongue in disapproval at its deplorable condition. Though she had studied the Roman Empire at university, she had assisted Gabriel on a number of restorations and, in the process, had become a formidable art historian in her own right.
“It’s an excellent example of a Holy Conversation, or Sacra Conversazione, an idyllic scene in which subjects are grouped against an aesthetically pleasing landscape. And as any oaf knows, Palma Vecchio is regarded as the originator of the form.”
“What do you think of the draftsmanship?” Isherwood asked, a lawyer leading a sympathetic witness.
“It’s awfully good for Palma,” Chiara replied. “His palette was unrivaled, but he was never regarded as a particularly skilled draftsman, even by his contemporaries.”
“And the woman who posed as the Madonna?”
“Unless I’m mistaken, which is highly unlikely, her name is Violante. She appears in a number of Palma’s paintings. But there was another famous painter in Venice at the time who was said to be quite fond of her. His name was—”
“Tiziano Vecellio,” Isherwood said, completing the thought for her. “Better known as Titian.”
“Congratulations, Julian,” Gabriel said, smiling. “You just snared a Titian for the paltry sum of twenty thousand pounds. Now you just need to find a restorer capable of knocking it into shape.”
“How much?” Isherwood asked.
Gabriel pulled a frown. “It’s going to take a great deal of work.”
“How much?” Isherwood repeated.
“Two hundred thousand.”
“I could find someone else for half that.”
“That’s true. But we both remember what happened the last time you tried that.”
“How soon can you start?”
“I’ll have to check my calendar before making any commitments.”
“I’ll give you an advance of one hundred thousand.”
“In that case, I can start right away.”
“I’ll send it to Cornwall the day after tomorrow,” Isherwood said. “The question is, when will I have it back?”
Gabriel made no response. He stared at his wristwatch for a moment, as though it were no longer keeping proper time, then tilted his face thoughtfully toward the skylight.
Isherwood placed a hand gently on his shoulder. “It’s not your problem, petal,” he said. “Not anymore.”
Chapter 4
Covent Garden, London
A POLICE CHECKPOINT NEAR LEICESTER SQUARE had brought the traffic on Charing Cross Road to a standstill. Gabriel and Chiara hurried through a fogbank of exhaust fumes and set out along Cranbourn Street. It was lined with pubs and coffee bars catering to the herds of tourists who seemed to wander aimlessly through Soho at all hours, regardless of the season. For now, Gabriel seemed oblivious to them. He was staring at the screen of his mobile phone. The death tolls in Paris and Copenhagen were rising.
“How bad?” asked Chiara.
“Twenty-eight on the Champs-Élysées and another thirty-seven at the Tivoli Gardens.”
“Do they have any idea who’s responsible?” asked Chiara.
“It’s still too early,” Gabriel said, “but the French think it might be al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.”
“Could they have pulled off a pair of coordinated attacks like this?”
“They have cells scattered across Europe and North America, but the analysts at King Saul Boulevard have always been skeptical of their ability to carry out a Bin Laden–style spectacular.”
King Saul Boulevard was the address of Israel’s foreign intelligence service. It had a long and deliberately misleading name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Those who worked there referred to it as the Office and nothing else. Even retired agents like Gabriel and Chiara never uttered the organization’s real name.
“It doesn’t feel like Bin Laden to me,” Chiara said. “It feels more like—”
“Baghdad,” said Gabriel. “These death tolls are high for open-air attacks. It suggests the bomb maker knew what he was doing. If we’re lucky, he left behind his signature.”
“We?” asked Chiara.
Gabriel wordlessly returned the phone to his coat pocket. They had reached the chaotic traffic circle at the end of Cranbourn Street. There were two Italian restaurants—the Spaghetti House and Bella Italia. He looked at Chiara and asked her to choose.
“I’m not going to start my long weekend in London at Bella Italia,” she said, frowning. “You promised to take me to a proper lunch.”
“In my opinion, one can do far worse in London than Bella Italia.”
“Unless one was born in Venice.”
Gabriel smiled. “We have a reservation at a lovely place called Orso in Wellington Street. It’s very Italian. I thought we could walk through Covent Garden on our way.”
“Do you still feel up to it?”
“We have to eat,” he said, “and the walk will do us both good.”
They hurried across the traffic circle into Garrick Street where two Metropolitan Police officers in lime green coats were questioning the Arab-looking driver of a white panel van. The anxiety of the pedestrians was almost palpable. In some of the faces Gabriel saw genuine fear; in others, a grim resolution to carry on as normal. Chiara held his hand tightly as they strolled past the shop windows. She had been looking forward to this weekend for a long time and was determined not to let the news from Paris and Copenhagen spoil it.
“You were a bit hard on Julian,” she said. “Two hundred thousand is twice your usual fee.”
“It’s a Titian, Chiara. Julian is going to do quite nicely.”
“The least you could’ve done is accept his invitation to a celebratory lunch.”
“I didn’t want to have lunch with Julian. I wanted to have lunch with you.”
“He has an idea he wants to discuss.”
“What sort of idea?”
“A partnership,” Chiara said. “He wants us to become partners in the gallery.”
Gabriel slowed to a stop. “Let me make this as clear as possible,” he said. “I have absolutely no interest in becoming a partner in the sometimes-solvent firm of Isherwood Fine Arts.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing,” he said, walking again, “we have no idea how to run a business.”
“You’ve run several very thriving enterprises in the past.”
“It’s easy when you have the backing of an intelligence service.”
“You’re not giving yourself enough credit, Gabriel. How hard can it be to run an art gallery?”
“Incredibly hard. And as Julian has proven time and time again, it’s easy to get into trouble. Even the most successful gallery can go under if it places a bad bet.” Gabriel gave her a sidelong look and asked, “When did you and Julian concoct this little arrangement?”
“You make it sound as if we were conspiring behind your back.”
“That’s because you were.”
With a smile, Chiara conceded the point. “It happened when we were in Washington for the unveiling of the Rembrandt. Julian pulled me aside and said he was beginning to think about the possibility he might actually retire. He wants the gallery to end up in the hands of someone he trusts.”
“Julian will never retire.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”
“Where was I when this deal was being hatched?”
“I believe you’d slipped outside for a private conversation with a British investigative reporter.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about any of this until now?”
“Because Julian asked me not to.”
With his edgy silence, Gabriel made it clear that Chiara had violated one of the fundamental tenets of their marriage. Secrets, even undeniably trivial ones, were forbidden.
“I’m sorry, Gabriel. I should have said something, but Julian was adamant. He knew your first instinct would be to say no.”
“He could sell the gallery to Oliver Dimbleby in a heartbeat and retire to an island in the Caribbean.”
“Have you considered what that might mean for us? Do you really want to clean pictures for Oliver Dimbleby? Or Giles Pittaway? Or were you thinking you could scrape up a bit of freelance work from the Tate or the National Gallery?”
“It sounds as if you and Julian have it all worked out.”
“We do.”
“Then perhaps you should become Julian’s partner.”
“Only if you clean pictures for me.”
Gabriel could see that Chiara was serious. “Running a gallery isn’t all about attending glamorous auctions and having long lunches in fancy restaurants in Jermyn Street. And it’s not something that should be considered a hobby.”
“Thank you for dismissing me as a dilettante.”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
“You’re not the only one who’s retired from the Office, Gabriel. I am, too. But unlike you, I don’t have damaged Old Masters to occupy my time.”
“So you want to become an art dealer? You’ll spend your days rummaging through piles of mediocre paintings, looking for another lost Titian. And chances are you’ll never find one.”
“It doesn’t sound that bad to me.” Chiara looked around the street. “And it means we could live here.”
“I thought you liked Cornwall.”
“I adore it,” she said. “Just not in winter.”
Gabriel lapsed into silence. He had been bracing himself for a conversation like this for some time. “I thought we were going to have a baby,” he said.
“So did I,” Chiara said. “But I’m beginning to think it might not be possible. Nothing I try seems to be working.”
There was a note of resignation in her voice that Gabriel had never heard before. “So we’ll keep trying,” he said.
“I just don’t want you to be disappointed. It was the miscarriage. It’s going to make it much harder for me to ever conceive again. Who knows? A change of scenery might help. Just think about it,” she said, squeezing his hand. “That’s all I’m saying, darling. We might actually enjoy living here.”
In the broad Italianate piazza of the Covent Garden Market, a street comedian was arranging a pair of unsuspecting German tourists into a pose suggestive of sexual intimacy. Chiara leaned against a pillar to watch the performance while Gabriel fell into an undignified sulk, his eyes scanning the large crowd gathered in the square and atop the balcony bar of the Punch and Judy. He was not angry with Chiara but with himself. For years, their relationship had revolved around Gabriel and his work. It had never occurred to him that Chiara might have career aspirations of her own. If they were a normal couple, he might have considered the opportunity. But they were not a normal couple. They were former operatives of one of the world’s most celebrated intelligence services. And they had a past that was far too bloody to lead so public a life.
As they headed into the soaring glass arcade of the market, any residual tension from their quarrel quickly dissipated. Even Gabriel, who detested shopping in all its forms, took pleasure in roaming the colorful shops and stalls with Chiara at his side. Intoxicated by the smell of her hair, he imagined the afternoon that lay ahead—a quiet lunch followed by a pleasant walk back to their hotel. There, in the cool shadows of their room, Gabriel would slowly undress Chiara and make love to her in the enormous bed. For a moment, it was almost possible for Gabriel to imagine his past had been erased, that his exploits were mere fables gathering dust in the file rooms of King Saul Boulevard. Only the watchfulness remained—the instinctive, gnawing vigilance that made it impossible for him to ever feel completely at peace in public. It forced him to make a mental charcoal sketch of every passing face in the crowded market. And in Wellington Street, as they were approaching the restaurant, it caused him to freeze in his tracks. Chiara tugged playfully at his arm. Then she stared directly into his eyes and realized something was wrong.
“You look as though you just saw a ghost.”
“Not a ghost. A dead man.”
“Where?”
Gabriel nodded toward a figure in a gray woolen overcoat.
“Right there.”
Chapter 5
Covent Garden, London
THERE ARE TELLTALE INDICATORS COMMON to suicide bombers. Lips can move involuntarily as final prayers are recited. Eyes can have a glassy thousand-yard stare. And the face can sometimes appear unnaturally pale, evidence that an unkempt beard has been hastily removed in preparation for a mission. The dead man exhibited none of these traits. His lips were pursed. His eyes were clear and focused. And his face was evenly colored. He had been shaving regularly for a long time.
What set him apart was the thin tributary of sweat leaking from his left sideburn. Why was he perspiring on a crisp autumn afternoon? If he was warm, why were his hands buried in the pockets of his woolen overcoat? And why was the overcoat—a size too large, in Gabriel’s opinion—still tightly buttoned? And then there was his walk. Even a physically fit man in his late twenties will have difficulty feigning a normal gait when saddled with fifty pounds of high explosives, nails, and ball bearings. As the dead man walked past Gabriel in Wellington Street, he appeared unusually erect, as if he were trying to compensate for the added weight around his abdomen and kidneys. The fabric of his gabardine trousers vibrated with each step, as though the joints in his hips and knees were shuddering beneath the burden of the bomb. It was possible that the perspiring young man with the oversized coat was an innocent who simply needed to do a bit of midday shopping, but Gabriel suspected otherwise. He believed the man walking a few paces ahead represented the finale of a continent-wide day of terror. First Paris, then Copenhagen, and now London.
Gabriel ordered Chiara to take shelter in the restaurant and quickly crossed to the opposite pavement. He shadowed the dead man for approximately a hundred yards, then watched as he rounded the corner into the entrance of the Covent Garden Market. There were two cafés on the eastern side of the piazza, each filled with lunchtime patrons. Standing between them in a patch of sunlight were three uniformed Metropolitan Police Service officers. None took notice of the dead man as he entered the market arcade.
Gabriel now had a decision to make. The most obvious course of action was to tell the police of his suspicions—obvious, he thought, but not necessarily optimal. In all likelihood, the police would respond to Gabriel’s approach by pulling him aside for questioning, wasting several precious seconds. Worse still, they might confront the man, a ploy that would almost certainly cause him to detonate his weapon. Although virtually every officer on the Met had been given basic instruction in counterterrorism tactics, few had the experience or firepower necessary to take down a committed jihadist bent on martyrdom. Gabriel had both, and he had acted against suicide bombers before. He glided past the three officers and slipped inside the arcade.
The dead man was now twenty yards ahead, moving at a parade-ground clip along the elevated walkway of the main hall. Gabriel reckoned he was carrying enough explosives and shrapnel to kill everyone within a seventy-five-foot radius. Doctrine dictated that Gabriel remain beyond the lethal blast zone until it was time to make his move. The environment, however, compelled him to close the distance and place himself in greater danger. A headshot from seventy-five feet was difficult under the best of circumstances, even for a gunman with the skills of Gabriel Allon. In a crowded shopping arcade, it would be next to impossible.
Gabriel felt his mobile phone vibrate softly in his coat pocket. Ignoring it, he watched as the dead man paused along the railing of the walkway to check his watch. Gabriel took note of the fact it was worn on the left wrist, which meant the detonator switch was almost certainly in the right hand. But why would a suicide bomber stop on his way to martyrdom to check the time? The most likely explanation was that he had been ordered to end his life and the lives of many innocent people at a precise moment. Gabriel suspected there might be some sort of symbolism involved. There usually was. The terrorists of al-Qaeda and its offshoots loved symbolism, especially when it involved numbers.
Gabriel was now close enough to the dead man to see his eyes. They were clear and focused, an encouraging sign. It meant he was still thinking about his mission rather than the carnal delights awaiting him in Paradise. When he started dreaming of the perfumed, dark-eyed houris, it would show on his face. Then Gabriel would have a choice to make. For now, he needed the dead man to stay in this world a little longer.
The dead man made another check of the time. Gabriel glanced quickly at his own watch: 2:34. He ran the numerals through the database of his memory, looking for any connection. He added them, subtracted them, multiplied them, reversed them, and rearranged their order. Then he thought about the two previous attacks. The first occurred at 11:46, the second at 12:03. It was possible the times were representative of years on the Gregorian calendar, but Gabriel could find no connection.
He mentally erased the hours of the attacks and focused only on the minutes. Forty-six minutes past, three minutes past. Then he understood. The times were as familiar to him as the brushstrokes of Titian. Forty-six minutes past, three minutes past. They were two of the most famous moments in the history of terrorism—the exact times at which the two hijacked airliners struck the World Trade Center on 9/11. American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. The third plane to successfully hit its target that morning was American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the western side of the Pentagon. The local time had been 9:37 a.m., 2:37 p.m. in London.
Gabriel checked his digital watch. It was now a few seconds past 2:35. Looking up, he saw the man in the gray overcoat was once again moving at a brisk pace, hands in his pockets, seemingly oblivious to the people around him. As Gabriel followed, his mobile began to vibrate again. This time, he answered and heard the voice of Chiara. He told her that a suicide bomber was about to detonate himself in Covent Garden and instructed her to make contact with MI5. Then he slipped the phone back into his pocket and began closing the distance between himself and the target. He feared that many innocent people were about to die. And he wondered whether there was anything he could do to stop it.
Chapter 6
Covent Garden, London
THERE WAS ONE OTHER POSSIBILITY, of course—the possibility that the man walking several paces ahead of Gabriel had nothing beneath his coat but a few extra pounds of body fat. Inevitably, Gabriel recalled the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian-born electrician who was shot to death by British police in London’s Stockwell tube station after being mistaken for a wanted Islamic militant. British prosecutors declined to bring charges against the officers involved in the killing, a decision that provoked outrage among human rights activists and civil libertarians around the world. Gabriel knew that, under similar circumstances, he could expect no such leniency. It meant he would have to be certain before acting. He was confident of one thing. He believed the bomber, like a painter, would sign his name before pressing his detonator switch. He would want his victims to know that their imminent deaths were not without purpose, that they were being sacrificed in the name of the sacred jihad and in the name of Allah.
For the moment, though, Gabriel had no choice but to follow the man and wait. Slowly, carefully, he closed the gap, making small adjustments in his own course to maintain an unobstructed firing lane. His eyes were focused on the lower portion of the man’s skull. A few centimeters beneath it was the brain stem, essential for controlling the motor and sensory systems of the rest of the body. Destroy the brain stem with several rounds of ammunition, and the bomber would lack the means to press his detonator button. Miss the brain stem, and it was possible the martyr could carry out his mission with a dying twitch. Gabriel was one of the few men in the world who had actually killed a terrorist before he could carry out his attack. He knew the difference between success and failure would come down to a fraction of a second. Success meant only one would die. Failure would result in the deaths of scores of innocent people, perhaps even Gabriel himself.
The dead man passed through the doorway leading to the piazza. It was far more crowded now. A cellist was playing a suite by Bach. A Jimi Hendrix impersonator was grappling with an amplified electric guitar. A well-dressed man standing atop a wooden crate was shouting something about God and the Iraq War. The dead man headed directly toward the center of the square, where the comedian’s performance had sunk to new depths of depravity, much to the delight of the large crowd of spectators. Using techniques learned in his youth, Gabriel mentally silenced the noises around him one by one, starting with the faint strains of the Bach suite and ending with the uproarious laughter of the crowd. Then he glanced one last time at his wristwatch and waited for the dead man to sign his name.
It was 2:36. The dead man had reached the outer edge of the large crowd. He paused for a few seconds, as if searching for a weak point to make his entry, then shouldered his way between two startled women. Gabriel entered at a different spot several yards to the man’s right, slipping virtually unnoticed through a family of American tourists. The crowd was four-deep in most places and tightly packed, which presented Gabriel with yet another dilemma. The ideal ammunition for a situation like this was a hollow-point round, which would inflict greater tissue damage on the target and substantially reduce the risk of collateral casualties due to over-penetration. But Gabriel’s Beretta pistol was loaded with ordinary 9mm Parabellum rounds. As a result, he would have to position himself to fire at an extreme downward trajectory. Otherwise, there was a high probability he might inadvertently take innocent life in an attempt to save it.
The dead man had breached the inner wall of the crowd and was now headed directly toward the street comedian. The eyes had taken on the glassy thousand-yard stare. The lips were moving. Final prayers . . . The street comedian wrongly assumed the dead man wished to take part in the performance. Smiling, he took two steps toward him but froze when he saw the hands emerge from the pockets of the overcoat. The left was slightly open. The right was bunched into a fist, with the thumb cocked at a right angle. Still, Gabriel hesitated. What if there was no detonator? What if it was a pen or a cylinder of lip balm? He had to be sure. Tell me your intentions, he thought. Sign your name.
The dead man turned to face the market. The patrons looking down from the balcony of the Punch and Judy laughed nervously, as did a few of the spectators gathered in the piazza. In his mind, Gabriel silenced the laughter and froze the image. The scene appeared to him as though painted by the hand of Canaletto. The figures were stock-still; only Gabriel, the restorer, was free to move among them. He slipped through the front row of the spectators and focused his gaze on the spot at the back of the skull. Firing at a downward angle was not possible. But there was another potential solution to prevent collateral casualties: an upward line of fire would carry Gabriel’s round safely over the heads of the spectators and into the façade of the adjacent building. He pictured the maneuver in sequence—the cross-handed draw, the crouch, the shot, the advance—and waited for the dead man to sign his name.
The silence in Gabriel’s head was broken by a drunken shout from the balcony of the Punch and Judy—a command for the martyr to move out of the way and allow the performance to continue. The dead man responded by lifting his arms above his head like a long-distance runner breaking the finishing tape. On the inside of the right wrist was a thin wire leading from the detonator switch to the explosives. It was all the evidence Gabriel needed. He reached into his jacket and seized the butt of his Beretta. Then, as the dead man screamed “Allahu Akbar,” Gabriel dropped to one knee and leveled the weapon toward his target. Remarkably, the shot was clear, with no chance of secondary casualties. But as Gabriel was about to squeeze the trigger, two powerful hands pulled the gun downward, and the weight of two men drove him toward the paving stones.
At the instant he hit the ground, he heard a sound like the crack of thunder and felt a wave of scorching air wash over him. For a few seconds, Gabriel heard nothing more. Then the screaming started, a single shriek, followed by an aria of wailing. Gabriel lifted his head and saw a scene from his nightmares. It was body parts and blood. It was Baghdad on the Thames.
Chapter 7
New Scotland Yard, London
THERE ARE FEW MORE GRIEVOUS sins for a professional intelligence officer, even a retired one, than to land in the custody of the local authorities. Because Gabriel had long occupied a nether region between the overt and secret worlds, he had suffered such a fate more often than most of his fellow travelers. Experience had taught him there was an established ritual for such occasions, a sort of Kabuki dance that must be allowed to reach its conclusion before higher authority can intervene. He knew the steps well. Fortunately, so did his hosts.
He had been taken into custody within minutes of the attack and driven at high speed to New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of London’s Metropolitan Police Service. Upon arrival, he was delivered to a windowless interrogation room where he was treated for numerous cuts and abrasions and given a cup of tea, which he left untouched. A detective superintendent from the Counterterrorism Command arrived in short order. He examined Gabriel’s identification with the skepticism it deserved and then tried to determine the chain of events that led “Mr. Rossi” to draw a concealed firearm in Covent Garden the instant before a terrorist detonated his suicide belt. Gabriel had been tempted to pose a few questions of his own. Namely, he wanted to know why two Special Firearms Officers of the Met’s SO19 division had chosen to neutralize him rather than an obvious terrorist about to commit an act of indiscriminate mass murder. Instead, he responded to each of the detective’s inquiries by reciting a telephone number. “Call it,” he said, tapping the spot where the detective had written the number in his notebook. “It will ring in a very large building not far from here. You’ll know the name of the man who answers. At least you should.”
Gabriel did not know the identity of the officer who finally dialed the number, nor did he know precisely when the call was placed. He only knew that his internment inside New Scotland Yard lasted far longer than was necessary. Indeed, it was approaching midnight by the time the detective escorted him down a series of brightly lit corridors toward the entrance of the building. In the detective’s left hand was a manila envelope filled with Gabriel’s possessions. Judging from the size and shape, it did not contain a 9mm Beretta pistol.
Outside, the pleasant weather of the afternoon had given way to a driving rain. Waiting beneath the shelter of the glass portico, engine idling softly, was a dark Jaguar limousine. Gabriel accepted the envelope from the detective and opened the rear door of the car. Seated inside, one leg crossed elegantly over the other, was a man who looked as though he had been designed for the task. He wore a perfectly fitted charcoal gray suit and a silver necktie that matched the color of his hair. Normally, his pale eyes were inscrutable, but now they revealed the strain of a long and difficult night. As deputy director of MI5, Graham Seymour bore a heavy responsibility for protecting the British mainland from the forces of extremist Islam. And once again, despite the best efforts of his department, extremist Islam had won.
Though the two men had a long professional history, Gabriel knew little of Graham Seymour’s personal life. He knew that Seymour was married to a woman named Helen whom he adored and that he had a son who managed other people’s money for the New York branch of an important British financial house. Beyond that, Gabriel’s knowledge of Seymour’s private affairs was drawn from the Office’s voluminous file. He was a relic of Britain’s glorious past, a by-product of the upper middle classes who had been bred, educated, and programmed to lead. He believed in God but not with much fervor. He believed in his country but wasn’t blind to its shortcomings. He was good at golf and other games but was willing to lose to a lesser opponent in service of a worthy cause. He was a man admired and, most important, a man who could be trusted—an attribute rare among spies and secret policemen.
Graham Seymour was not, however, a man with unlimited patience, as evidenced by his dour expression as the Jaguar pulled into the street. He removed a copy of the next morning’s Telegraph from the seatback pocket and dropped it in Gabriel’s lap. The headline read REIGN OF TERROR. Beneath it were three photographs depicting the aftermath of the three attacks. Gabriel searched the photo of Covent Garden for any sign of his presence but saw only the victims. It was a picture of failure, he thought—eighteen people dead, dozens more critically injured, including one of the officers who had tackled him. And it was all because of the shot Gabriel had not been allowed to take.
“Bloody awful day,” Seymour said wearily. “I suppose the only way it could get any worse is if the press finds out about you. By the time the conspiracy theorists are finished, they’ll have the Islamic world believing that the attacks were plotted and carried out by the Office.”
“You can be sure that’s already the case.” Gabriel returned the newspaper and asked, “Where’s my wife?”
“She’s at your hotel. I have a team staying just down the hall.” Seymour paused, then added, “Needless to say, she’s not terribly pleased with you.”
“How can you tell?” Gabriel’s ears were still ringing from the concussion of the blast. He closed his eyes and asked how the SO19 teams had been able to locate him so quickly.
“As you might imagine, we have a wide array of technical means at our disposal.”
“Such as my mobile phone and your network of CCTV cameras?”
“Precisely,” Seymour said. “We were able to pinpoint you within a few seconds of receiving Chiara’s call. We forwarded the information to Gold Command, the Met’s operational crisis center, and they immediately dispatched two teams of Specialist Firearms Officers.”
“They must have been in the vicinity.”
“They were,” Seymour confirmed. “We were on high alert after the attacks in Paris and Copenhagen. A number of teams were already deployed in the financial district and spots where tourists tend to congregate.”
“So why did they take me down instead of the suicide bomber?”
“Because neither Scotland Yard nor the Security Service wanted a rerun of the Menezes fiasco. As a result of his death, a number of new guidelines and procedures were put in place to make sure nothing like it ever happens again. Suffice it to say a single warning does not meet the threshold for taking lethal action—even if the source happens to be named Gabriel Allon.”
“So eighteen innocent people died as a result?”
“What if he wasn’t a terrorist? What if he was another street performer, or someone with mental problems? We would have been burned at the stake.”
“But he wasn’t a street performer or a mental patient, Graham. He was a suicide bomber. And I told you so.”
“How did you know?”
“He might as well have been wearing a sign declaring his intentions.”
“Was it that obvious?”
Gabriel listed the attributes that first raised his suspicions and then explained the calculations that led him to conclude the terrorist intended to detonate his device at 2:37. Seymour shook his head slowly.
“I’ve lost count of how many hours we’ve spent training our police officers to spot potential terrorists, not to mention the millions of pounds we’ve poured into behavior-recognition software for CCTV. And yet a jihadi suicide bomber walked straight into Covent Garden, and no one seemed to notice. No one but you, of course.”
Seymour lapsed into a brooding silence. They were headed north along the floodlit white canyon of Regent Street. Gabriel leaned his head wearily against the window and asked whether the bomber had been identified.
“His name is Farid Khan. His parents immigrated to the United Kingdom from Lahore in the late seventies, but Farid was born in London. Stepney Green, to be precise,” Seymour said. “Like many British Muslims of his generation, he rejected the mild, apolitical religious beliefs of his parents and became an Islamist. By the late nineties, he was spending far too much time at the East London Mosque in Whitechapel Road. Before long, he was a member in good standing of the radical groups Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun.”
“It sounds to me as if you had a file on him.”
“We did,” Seymour said, “but not for the reasons you might think. You see, Farid Khan was a ray of sunlight, our hope for the future. Or so we thought.”
“You thought you’d turned him around?”
Seymour nodded. “Not long after 9/11, Farid joined a group called New Beginnings. Its goal was to deprogram militants and reintegrate them into the mainstream of Islam and British public opinion. Farid was considered one of their great successes. He shaved his beard. He severed ties to his old friends. He graduated near the top of his class at King’s College and landed a well-paying job with a small London ad agency. A few weeks ago, he became engaged to a woman from his old neighborhood.”
“So you checked him off your list?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Seymour said. “Now it appears it was all a clever deception. Farid was literally a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.”
“Any idea who activated him?”
“We’re poring over his telephone and computer records as we speak, along with the suicide video he left behind. It’s clear his attack was connected to the bombings in Paris and Copenhagen. Whether they were coordinated by the remnants of al-Qaeda Central or a new network is now a matter of intense debate. Whatever the case, it’s none of your concern. Your role in this affair is officially over.”
The Jaguar crossed Cavendish Place and stopped outside the entrance of the Langham Hotel.
“I’d like my gun back.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Seymour said.
“How long do I have to stay here?”
“Scotland Yard would like you to remain in London for the rest of the weekend. On Monday morning, you can go back to your cottage by the sea and think of nothing other than your Titian.”
“How do you know about the Titian?”
“I know everything. Everything except how to prevent a British-born Muslim from carrying out an act of mass murder in Covent Garden.”
“I could have stopped him, Graham.”
“Yes,” Seymour said distantly. “And we would have repaid the favor by tearing you to pieces.”
Gabriel stepped from the car without another word. “Your role in this affair is officially over,” he murmured as he entered the lobby. He repeated it, again and again, like a mantra.
Chapter 8
New York City
THAT SAME EVENING, THE OTHER universe inhabited by Gabriel Allon was also on edge but for decidedly different reasons. It was the fall auction season in New York, the anxious time when the art world, in all its folly and excess, convenes for two weeks of frenzied buying and selling. It was, as Nicholas Lovegrove liked to say, one of the few remaining occasions when it was still considered fashionable to be vastly rich. It was also, however, a deadly serious business. Great collections would be built, great fortunes made and lost. A single transaction could launch a brilliant career. It could also destroy one.
Lovegrove’s professional reputation, like Gabriel Allon’s, was by that evening firmly established. British-born and educated, he was regarded as the most sought-after art consultant in the world—a man so powerful he could move markets with an offhand remark or a wrinkle of his elegant nose. His knowledge of art was legendary, as was the size of his bank account. Lovegrove no longer had to troll for clients; they came to him, usually on bended knee and with promises of vast commissions. The secret of Lovegrove’s success lay in his unfailing eye and in his discretion. Lovegrove never betrayed a confidence; Lovegrove never gossiped or engaged in double-dealing. He was the rarest of birds in the art trade—a man of his word.
His reputation notwithstanding, Lovegrove was beset by his usual case of pre-auction jitters as he hurried along Sixth Avenue. After years of falling prices and anemic sales, the art market was at last beginning to show signs of renewal. The season’s first auctions had been respectable but had fallen short of expectations. Tonight’s sale, the Postwar and Contemporary at Christie’s, had the potential to set the art world ablaze. As usual, Lovegrove had clients at both ends of the action. Two were sellers—vendors, in the lexicon of the trade—while a third was looking to acquire Lot 12, Ocher and Red on Red, oil on canvas, by Mark Rothko. The client in question was unique in that Lovegrove did not know his name. He dealt only with a certain Mr. Hamdali in Paris, who in turn dealt with the client. The arrangement was unorthodox but, from Lovegrove’s perspective, highly lucrative. During the past twelve months alone, the collector had acquired more than two hundred million dollars’ worth of paintings. Lovegrove’s commissions on those sales were in excess of twenty million dollars. If things went according to plan tonight, his net worth would rise substantially.
He rounded the corner onto West Forty-ninth Street and walked a half block to the entrance of Christie’s. The soaring glass-walled lobby was a sea of diamonds, silk, ego, and collagen. Lovegrove paused briefly to kiss the perfumed cheek of a German packaging heiress before making his way to the coat check line, where he was promptly set upon by a pair of secondary dealers from the Upper East Side. He put them off with a defensive movement of his hand, then collected his bidding paddle and headed upstairs to the salesroom.
For all its intrigue and glamour, it was a surprisingly ordinary room, a cross between the United Nations General Assembly hall and the church of a television evangelist. The walls were a drab shade of gray-beige, as were the folding chairs, which were smashed tightly together to maximize the limited space. Behind the pulpitlike rostrum was a revolving display case and, next to the case, a bank of telephones staffed by a half-dozen Christie’s employees. Lovegrove glanced up at the sky suites, hoping to glimpse a face or two behind the tinted glass, then turned warily toward the reporters penned like cattle in the back corner. Concealing his paddle number, he hurried past them and headed to his usual seat at the front of the room. It was the Promised Land, the place where all dealers, consultants, and collectors hoped one day to sit. It was not a spot for the faint of heart or the short of cash. Lovegrove referred to it as “the kill zone.”
The auction was scheduled to begin at six. Francis Hunt, Christie’s chief auctioneer, granted his fidgety audience five additional minutes to find their seats before taking his place. He had polished manners and a droll English urbanity that for some inexplicable reason still made Americans feel inferior. In his right hand was the famous “black book” that held the secrets of the universe, at least as far as this evening was concerned. Each lot in the sale had its own page containing information such as the seller’s reserve, a seating chart showing the location of expected bidders, and Hunt’s strategy for extracting the highest possible price. Lovegrove’s name appeared on the page devoted to Lot 12, the Rothko. During a private presale viewing, Lovegrove had hinted he might be interested, but only if the price was right and the stars were in proper alignment. Hunt knew Lovegrove was lying, of course. Hunt knew everything.
He wished the audience a pleasant evening, then, with all the fanfare of a maître d’ summoning a party of four, said, “Lot One, the Twombly.” The bidding commenced immediately, moving swiftly upward in hundred-thousand-dollar increments. The auctioneer deftly managed the process with the help of two immaculately coiffed spotters who strutted and posed behind the rostrum like a pair of male models at a photo shoot. Lovegrove might have been impressed with the performance had he not known it was all carefully choreographed and rehearsed in advance. At one million five, the bidding stalled, only to be revived by a telephone bid for one million six. Five more bids followed in quick succession, at which point the bidding paused for a second time. “The bid is two point one million, with Cordelia on the telephone,” Hunt intoned, eyes moving seductively from bidder to bidder. “It’s not with you, madam. Nor with you, sir. Two point one, on the telephone, for the Twombly. Fair warning now. Last chance.” Down came the gavel with a sharp crack. “Thank you,” murmured Hunt as he recorded the transaction in his black book.
After the Twombly, it was the Lichtenstein, followed by the Basquiat, the Diebenkorn, the De Kooning, the Johns, the Pollock, and a parade of Warhols. Each work fetched more than the presale estimate and more than the previous lot. It was no accident; Hunt had cleverly stacked the deck to create an ascending scale of excitement. By the time Lot 12 slid onto the display case, he had the audience and the bidders exactly where he wanted them.
“On my right we have the Rothko,” he announced. “Shall we start the bidding at twelve million?”
It was two million above the presale estimate, a signal that Hunt expected the work to go big. Lovegrove drew a mobile phone from the breast pocket of his Brioni suit jacket and dialed a number in Paris. Hamdali answered. He had a voice like warm tea sweetened with honey.
“My client would like to get a sense of the room before making a first bid.”
“Wise move.”
Lovegrove placed the phone on his lap and folded his hands. It quickly became apparent they were in for a tough fight. Bids flew at Hunt from all corners of the room and from the Christie’s staff manning the telephones. Hector Candiotti, art adviser to a Belgian industrial magnate, was holding his paddle in the air like a crossing guard, a blusterous bidding technique known as steamrolling. Tony Berringer, who worked for a Russian aluminum oligarch, was bidding as though his life depended on it, which was not beyond the realm of possibility. Lovegrove waited until the price reached thirty million before picking up the phone again.
“Well?” he asked calmly.
“Not yet, Mr. Lovegrove.”
This time, Lovegrove kept the phone pressed to his ear. In Paris, Hamdali was speaking to someone in Arabic. Unfortunately, it was not one of the several languages Lovegrove spoke fluently. Biding his time, he surveyed the sky suites, searching for secret bidders. In one he noticed a beautiful young woman holding a mobile phone. After a few seconds, Lovegrove noticed something else. When Hamdali was speaking, the woman was sitting silently. And when the woman was speaking, Hamdali was saying nothing. It was probably a coincidence, he thought. But then again, maybe not.
“Perhaps it’s time to test the waters,” suggested Lovegrove, his eyes on the woman in the skybox.
“Perhaps you’re right,” answered Hamdali. “One moment, please.”
Hamdali murmured a few words in Arabic. A few seconds later, the woman in the skybox spoke into her mobile phone. Then, in English, Hamdali said, “The client agrees, Mr. Lovegrove. Please make your first bid.”
The current bid was thirty-four million. With the arch of a single eyebrow, Lovegrove raised it by another million.
“We have thirty-five,” said Hunt, in a tone that indicated a serious new predator had entered the fray. Hector Candiotti immediately countered, as did Tony Berringer. A pair of sparring telephone bidders pushed the price across the forty-million-dollar threshold. Then Jack Chambers, the real estate king, casually bid forty-one. Lovegrove wasn’t terribly worried about Jack. The affair with that little tart in New Jersey had cost him dearly in the divorce. Jack wasn’t liquid enough to go the distance.
“The bid is forty-one against you,” Lovegrove murmured into the telephone.
“The client believes there is a great deal of posturing going on.”
“It’s an art auction at Christie’s. Posturing is de rigueur.”
“Patience, Mr. Lovegrove.”
Lovegrove kept his eyes on the woman in the skybox as the bidding cracked the fifty-million-dollar threshold. Jack Chambers made a final bid at sixty; Tony Berringer and his Russian gangster did the honors at seventy. Hector Candiotti responded by waving the white flag.
“It looks like it’s down to us and the Russian,” Lovegrove said to the man in Paris.
“My client doesn’t care for Russians.”
“What would your client like to do about it?”
“What is Rothko’s record at auction?”
“Seventy-two and change.”
“Please bid seventy-five.”
“It’s too much. You’ll never—”
“Place the bid, Mr. Lovegrove.”
Lovegrove arched an eyebrow and raised five fingers. “The bid is seventy-five million,” said Hunt. “It’s not with you, sir. Nor with you. Seventy-five million, for the Rothko. Fair warning now. Last chance. All done?”
Crack.
A gasp rose in the room. Lovegrove looked up at the skybox, but the woman was gone.
Chapter 9
The Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall
WITH THE APPROVAL OF SCOTLAND YARD, the Home Office, and the British prime minister himself, Gabriel and Chiara returned to Cornwall three days after the bombing in Covent Garden. Madonna and Child with Mary Magdalene, oil on canvas, 110 by 92 centimeters, arrived at ten the following morning. After carefully removing the painting from its protective coffin, Gabriel placed it on an antique oak easel in the living room and spent the remainder of the afternoon studying the X-rays. The ghostly images only strengthened his opinion that the painting was indeed a Titian, and a very good Titian at that.
It had been several months since Gabriel had laid hands on a painting, and he was eager to begin work right away. Rising early the following morning, he prepared a bowl of café au lait and immediately threw himself into the delicate task of relining the canvas. The first step involved adhering tissue paper over the image to avoid further paint losses during the procedure. There were a number of over-the-counter glues suitable for the task, but Gabriel always preferred to mix his own adhesive using the recipe he had learned in Venice from the master restorer Umberto Conti—pellets of rabbit-skin glue dissolved in a mixture of water, vinegar, ox bile, and molasses.
He simmered the noxious-smelling concoction on the kitchen stove until it was the consistency of syrup, and watched the morning news on the BBC while waiting for the mixture to cool. Farid Khan was now a household name in the United Kingdom. Given the precise timing of his attack, Scotland Yard and British intelligence were operating under the assumption it was linked to the bombings in Paris and Copenhagen. Still unclear was the terrorist affiliation of the bombers. Debate among the television experts was intense, with one camp proclaiming the attacks were orchestrated by al-Qaeda’s old-line leadership in Pakistan and another declaring that they were clearly the work of a new network that had yet to produce a blip on the radar screens of Western intelligence. Whatever the case, European authorities were bracing for more bloodshed. MI5’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Center had raised the threat level to “critical,” meaning another attack was expected imminently.
Gabriel focused most intently on a report dealing with questions over Scotland Yard’s conduct in the minutes before the attack. In a carefully worded statement, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police acknowledged receiving a warning about a suspicious man in an oversized coat headed toward Covent Garden. Regrettably, said the commissioner, the tip did not rise to the level of specificity required for lethal action. He then confirmed that two SO19 officers had been dispatched to Covent Garden but said they had no choice under existing policy but to hold their fire. As for reports of a weapon being drawn, police had questioned the man involved and determined it was not a gun but a camera. For reasons of privacy, the man’s identity would not be revealed. The press appeared to accept the Met’s version of events, as did the civil libertarians, who applauded the restraint shown by the police even if it had meant the loss of eighteen innocent lives.
Gabriel switched off the television as Chiara entered the kitchen. She immediately opened a window to drive out the stench of the ox bile and vinegar and berated Gabriel for fouling her favorite stainless steel saucepan. Gabriel only smiled and dipped the tip of his forefinger into the mixture. It was now cool enough to use. With Chiara peering over his shoulder, he applied the glue evenly over the yellowed varnish and adhered several rectangles of tissue paper to the surface. Titian’s handiwork was now invisible and would remain so for the next several days, until the relining was complete.
Gabriel could do no more work that morning except to check on the painting periodically to make certain the glue was drying properly. He sat in the covered gazebo overlooking the sea, a notebook computer on his lap, and scoured the Internet for more information about the three bombings. He was tempted to check in with King Saul Boulevard but thought better of it. He had neglected to inform Tel Aviv of his brush with terror in Covent Garden, and to do so now would only give his former colleagues an excuse to intrude on his life. Gabriel had learned from experience it was best to treat the Office like a jilted lover. Contact had to be kept to a minimum and was best conducted in public places where a messy scene would be inappropriate.
Shortly before noon, the last remnants of a midnight gale passed over Gunwalloe Cove, leaving in its wake a clear sky of crystalline blue. After making one final check of the painting, Gabriel pulled on an anorak and a pair of hiking boots and headed out for his daily march along the cliffs. The previous afternoon he had trooped north along the Coastal Path to Praa Sands. Now he mounted the small rise behind the cottage and headed south toward Lizard Point.
It did not take long for the magic of the Cornish coast to chase away the memories of the dead and wounded in Covent Garden. Indeed, by the time Gabriel had reached the fringes of Mullion Golf Club, the last terrible image was safely concealed beneath a layer of obliterating paint. As he pressed farther south, past the rocky outcropping of the Polurrian Cliffs, he thought only of the work to be done on the Titian. Tomorrow he would carefully remove the painting from its stretcher and then adhere the weakened canvas to a swath of fresh Italian linen, pressing it firmly into place with a heavy tailoring iron. Next came the longest and most arduous phase of the restoration—removing the cracked and yellowed varnish and retouching those portions of the painting lost to time and stress. While some restorers tended to be aggressive in their retouching, Gabriel was known throughout the art world for the lightness of his touch and his uncanny ability to mimic the brushstrokes of the Old Masters. He believed it was the duty of a restorer to come and go without being seen, leaving no evidence of his presence other than a painting returned to its original glory.
By the time Gabriel reached the northern end of Kynance Cove, a line of dark clouds had obscured the sun, and the sea wind had turned markedly colder. A keen observer of Cornwall’s capricious weather, he could see that the “bright interval,” as British meteorologists liked to call periods of sunshine, was about to come to an abrupt end. He paused for a moment, debating where to take shelter. To the east, across a patchwork-quilt landscape, was Lizard village. Directly ahead was the point. Gabriel chose the second option. He didn’t want to shorten his walk over something as trivial as a passing squall. Besides, there was a good café atop the cliffs where he could wait out the storm over a freshly baked scone and a pot of tea.
He turned up the collar of his anorak and headed along the rim of the cove as the first rain began to fall. The café appeared, veiled in mist. At the base of the cliffs, sheltering against the leeward side of the derelict boathouse, was a man in his mid-twenties with short hair and sunglasses propped on his head. A second man was loitering atop the observation point, his eye pressed to a coin-operated telescope. Gabriel knew with certainty it had been inoperative for months.
He slowed to a stop and looked toward the café just as a third man stepped onto the terrace. He wore a waterproof hat pulled close to his brow and a pair of rimless eyeglasses favored by German intellectuals and Swiss bankers. His expression was one of impatience—a busy executive who had been forced by his wife to take a holiday. He stared directly at Gabriel for a long moment before lifting his thick wrist toward his face and consulting his watch. Gabriel was tempted to turn in the opposite direction. Instead, he lowered his gaze to the footpath and walked on. Better to do it in public, he thought. It would reduce the chances of a messy scene.
Chapter 10
Lizard Point, Cornwall
DID YOU REALLY HAVE TO order scones?” asked Uzi Navot resentfully.
“They’re the best in Cornwall. So is the clotted cream.”
Navot made no movement. Gabriel gave a perceptive smile.
“How much more weight does Bella want you to lose?”
“Five pounds. Then I get to go on maintenance,” Navot added gloomily, as though it were a prison sentence. “What I wouldn’t give for your metabolism. You’re married to one of the world’s greatest cooks, but you still have the body of a twenty-five-year-old. Me? I’m married to one of the country’s foremost experts on Syria, and if I even smell a pastry, I have to let my trousers out.”
“Maybe it’s time you told Bella to lighten up on the dietary restrictions.”
“You tell her,” Navot said. “All those years studying the Baathists in Damascus have left a mark on her. Sometimes I feel as though I’m living in a police state.”
They were seated at an isolated table near the rain-spattered windows. Gabriel was facing the interior; Navot, the sea. He was wearing a pair of corduroy trousers and a beige sweater that still smelled of the men’s department at Harrods. He placed his cap on an adjacent chair and ran a hand over his cropped strawberry-blond hair. It had a bit more gray in it than Gabriel remembered, but that was understandable. Uzi Navot was now the chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service. Gray hair was one of the many fringe benefits of the job.
Were Navot’s brief tenure to end now, it would almost certainly be regarded as among the most successful directorships in the long and storied history of the Office. The accolades that had been bestowed upon him were the result of Operation Masterpiece, the joint Anglo-American-Israeli undertaking that had resulted in the destruction of four secret Iranian nuclear facilities. Much of the credit rightly belonged to Gabriel, though Navot preferred not to dwell on that aspect of the affair. He had been awarded the job as chief only because Gabriel had repeatedly turned it down. And the four enrichment facilities would still be spinning away if Gabriel hadn’t identified and recruited the Swiss businessman who was covertly selling component parts to the Iranians.
For the moment, however, Navot’s thoughts seemed focused only on the plate of scones. Unable to resist any longer, he selected one, split it with great care, and smothered it with strawberry preserves and a dollop of the clotted cream. Gabriel poured himself a cup of tea from an aluminum pot and quietly asked about the purpose of Navot’s unannounced visit. He did so in fluent German, which he spoke with the Berlin accent of his mother. It was one of five languages he and Navot had in common.
“I had a number of housekeeping issues to discuss with my British counterparts. Included on the agenda was a somewhat perplexing report about one of our former agents who’s now living in retirement here under MI5 protection. There was a wild rumor going around about this agent and the bombing in Covent Garden. To be honest, I was a bit dubious when I heard it. Knowing this agent well, I couldn’t imagine that he would endanger his position in Britain by doing something so foolish as drawing his weapon in public.”
“What should I have done, Uzi?”
“You should have called your MI5 minder and washed your hands of it.”
“And if you had found yourself in a similar position?”
“If I were in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, I wouldn’t have hesitated to put the bastard down. But here . . .” Navot’s voice trailed off. “I suppose I would have considered the potential consequences of my actions first.”
“Eighteen people died, Uzi.”
“Consider yourself lucky the death toll wasn’t nineteen.” Navot removed his spindly eyeglasses, something he often did before embarking on an unpleasant conversation. “I’m tempted to ask whether you actually intended to take the shot. But given your training and your past exploits, I’m afraid I know the answer. An Office agent draws his weapon in the field for one reason and one reason only. He doesn’t wave it around like a gangster or make idle threats. He pulls the trigger and shoots to kill.” Navot paused, then added, “Do unto others before they have a chance to do unto you. I believe those words can be found on page twelve of Shamron’s little red book.”
“He knows about Covent Garden?”
“You know better than to ask a question like that. Shamron knows everything. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he heard about your little adventure before I did. Despite my attempts to ease him into permanent retirement, he insists on staying in contact with his sources from the old days.”
Gabriel added a few drops of milk to his tea and stirred it slowly. Shamron . . . The name was nearly synonymous with the history of Israel and its intelligence services. After fighting in the war that led to Israel’s reconstitution, Ari Shamron had spent the subsequent sixty years protecting the country from a host of enemies bent on its destruction. He had penetrated the courts of kings, stolen the secrets of tyrants, and killed countless foes, sometimes with his own hands, sometimes with the hands of men such as Gabriel. Only one secret had eluded Shamron—the secret of contentment. Aged now and in dreadful health, he clung desperately to his role as the éminence grise of Israel’s security establishment and still meddled in the internal affairs of the Office as though it were his private fiefdom. It was not arrogance that drove Shamron but a nagging fear that his entire life’s work had been in vain. Though economically prosperous and militarily strong, Israel remained surrounded by a world that was, for the most part, hostile to its very existence. The fact that Gabriel had chosen to reside in this world was among Shamron’s greatest disappointments.
“I’m surprised he didn’t come here himself,” Gabriel said.
“He was tempted.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“It’s not so easy for him to travel.”
“What’s wrong now?”
“Everything,” Navot said, shrugging his heavy shoulders. “He rarely leaves Tiberias these days. He just sits on his terrace staring out at the lake. He’s driving Gilah to distraction. She’s been begging me to give him something to do.”
“Should I go see him?”
“He’s not on his deathbed, if that’s what you’re implying. But you should pay a visit sometime soon. Who knows? You might actually decide that you like your country again.”
“I love my country, Uzi.”
“Just not enough to live there.”
“You always did remind me a bit of Shamron,” Gabriel said with a frown, “but now the resemblance is uncanny.”
“Gilah told me the same thing not long ago.”
“I didn’t mean it as a compliment.”
“Neither did she.” Navot added another spoonful of clotted cream to his scone with exaggerated care.
“So why are you here, Uzi?”
“I want to present you with a unique opportunity.”
“You sound like a salesman.”
“I’m a spy,” Navot said. “There’s not much of a difference.”
“What are you offering?”
“A chance to atone for a mistake.”
“What mistake was that?”
“You should have shot Farid Khan through the back of the head before he hit his detonator switch.” Navot lowered his voice and added confidingly, “That’s what I would have done, if I’d been in your shoes.”
“And how might I make amends for this lapse in judgment?”
“By accepting an invitation.”
“From whom?”
Navot gazed silently westward.
“The Americans?” asked Gabriel.
Navot smiled. “More tea?”
The rain ceased as abruptly as it began. Gabriel left money on the table and led Navot down the steep footpath to Polpeor Cove. The bodyguard was still leaning against the crumbled lifeboat ramp. He watched with feigned indifference as Gabriel and Navot made their way slowly across the rocky beach to the water’s edge. Navot cast a distracted glance at his stainless steel wristwatch and turned up his coat collar against the gusty wind rising from the sea. Gabriel was once again struck by the uncanny resemblance to Shamron. The likeness went beyond the superficial. It was as if Shamron, by the sheer force of his indomitable will, had somehow managed to take possession of Navot, body and soul. It was not the Shamron who had been weakened by age and infirmity, thought Gabriel, but Shamron in his prime. All that was missing were the wretched Turkish cigarettes that had ravaged Shamron’s health. Bella had never permitted Navot to smoke, not even for the sake of his cover.
“Who’s behind the bombings, Uzi?”
“Thus far, we’ve been unable to make a firm attribution. The Americans, however, seem to think he’s the future face of global jihadist terror—the new Bin Laden.”
“Does this new Bin Laden have a name?”
“The Americans insist on sharing that information with you face-to-face. They’d like you to come to Washington, all expenses paid, of course.”
“How was this invitation extended?”
“Adrian Carter called me personally.”
Adrian Carter was the director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service.
“What’s the dress code?”
“Black,” said Navot. “Your visit to America will be entirely off the books.”
Gabriel regarded Navot in silence for a moment. “You obviously want me to go, Uzi. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“It couldn’t hurt,” Navot said. “At the very least, it will give us an opportunity to hear what the Americans have to say about the bombings. But there are other fringe benefits as well.”
“Such as?”
“Our relationship could use a bit of retouching.”
“What sort of retouching?”
“Haven’t you heard? There’s a new wind blowing through Washington. Change is in the air,” Navot added sarcastically. “The new American president is an idealist. He believes he can repair relations between the West and Islam, and he’s convinced himself that we’re part of the problem.”
“So the solution is to send me, a former assassin with the blood of several Palestinian and Islamic terrorists on his hands?”
“When spies play nicely together, it tends to spill over into the political realm, which is why the prime minister is eager for you to make the trip as well.”
“The prime minister? The next thing you’re going to tell me is that Shamron is involved, too.”
“He is.” Navot picked up a stone and hurled it into the sea. “After the Iran op, I allowed myself to think Shamron might finally fade gracefully into the background. I was wrong. He has no intention of allowing me to run the Office without his constant interference. But that’s not surprising, is it, Gabriel? We both know Shamron had someone else in mind for the job. I’m fated to go down in the history of our illustrious service as the accidental chief. And you’ll always be the chosen one.”
“Choose someone else, Uzi. I’m retired. Remember? Send someone else to Washington.”
“Adrian won’t hear of it,” Navot said, rubbing his shoulder. “And neither will Shamron. As for your so-called retirement, it ended the moment you decided to follow Farid Khan into Covent Garden.”
Gabriel stared out at the sea and pictured the aftermath of the shot not taken: body parts and blood, Baghdad on the Thames. Navot seemed to sense what he was thinking. He pressed his advantage.
“The Americans would like you in Washington first thing in the morning. There’s a Gulfstream waiting for you outside London. It was one of the planes they used for the rendition program. They’ve assured me the handcuffs and hypodermic needles have been removed.”
“What about Chiara?”
“The invitation is for one.”
“She can’t stay here alone.”
“Graham has agreed to send a security team from London.”
“I don’t trust them, Uzi. Take her back to Israel with you. She can help Gilah look after the old man for a few days until I get back.”
“She might be there awhile.”
Gabriel looked at Navot carefully. He clearly knew more than he was saying. He usually did.
“I just agreed to restore a picture for Julian Isherwood.”
“A Madonna and Child with Mary Magdalene, formerly attributed to the Studio of Palma Vecchio, now tentatively attributed to Titian, pending peer review.”
“Very impressive, Uzi.”
“Bella’s been trying to broaden my horizons.”
“The painting can’t stay in an empty cottage by the sea.”
“Julian’s agreed to take it back. As you might expect, he’s rather disappointed.”
“I was supposed to be paid two hundred thousand pounds for that piece.”
“Don’t look at me, Gabriel. The cupboard is bare. I’ve been forced to institute across-the-board cuts in every department. The accountants are even after me to reduce my personal expenses. My per diem is a pittance.”
“Good thing you’re on a diet.”
Navot absently touched his midsection, as if checking to see whether it had expanded since leaving home.
“It’s a long drive back to London, Uzi. Maybe you should take along some of those scones.”
“Don’t even think about it.”
“You’re afraid Bella will find out?”
“I know she will.” Navot glared at the bodyguard leaning against the lifeboat ramp. “Those bastards tell her everything. It’s like living in a police state.”
Chapter 11
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
THE HOUSE STOOD IN THE 3300 BLOCK OF N STREET, one of an elegant terrace of Federal-style residences priced far beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest of Washingtonians. Gabriel climbed the curved front steps in the gray half-light of dawn and, as instructed, entered without ringing the bell. Adrian Carter waited in the foyer, dressed in wrinkled chinos, a crewneck sweater, and a tan corduroy blazer. The attire, combined with his tousled thinning hair and unfashionable mustache, gave him the air of a professor from a minor university, the sort who championed noble causes and was a constant thorn in the side of his dean. As director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, Carter had no cause these days other than keeping the American homeland safe from another terrorist attack—though twice each month, schedule permitting, he could be found in the basement of his Episcopal church in suburban Reston preparing meals for the homeless. For Carter, the volunteer work was a meditation, a rare opportunity to thrust his hands into something other than the internecine warfare that raged constantly in the conference rooms of America’s sprawling intelligence community.
He greeted Gabriel with the circumspection that comes naturally to men of the clandestine world and ushered him inside. Gabriel paused for a moment in the center hallway and looked around. Secret protocols had been made and broken in these drably furnished rooms; men had been seduced into betraying their countries for suitcases filled with American money and promises of American protection. Carter had used the property so often it was known throughout Langley as his Georgetown pied-à-terre. One Agency wit had christened it the Dar-al-Harb, Arabic for the “House of War.” It was covert war, of course, for Carter knew no other way to fight.
Adrian Carter had not actively sought power. It had been foisted upon his narrow shoulders block by unwanted block. Recruited by the Agency while still an undergraduate, he had spent most of his career waging secret war against the Russians—first in Poland, where he funneled money and mimeograph machines to Solidarity; then in Moscow, where he served as station chief; and finally in Afghanistan, where he encouraged and armed the soldiers of Allah, even though he knew that one day they would rain fire and death upon him. If Afghanistan would prove to be the Evil Empire’s undoing, it would provide Carter with a ticket to career advancement. He monitored the collapse of the Soviet Union not from the field but from a comfortable office at Langley, where he had recently been promoted to chief of the European Division. While his subordinates openly cheered the demise of their enemy, Carter watched the events unfold with a sense of foreboding. His beloved Agency had failed to predict Communism’s collapse, a blunder that would haunt Langley for years. Worse still, in the blink of an eye, the CIA had lost its very reason for existence.
That changed on the morning of September 11, 2001. The war that would follow would be a war fought in the shadows, a place Adrian Carter knew well. While the Pentagon had struggled to come up with a military response to the horror of 9/11, it was Carter and his staff at the Counterterrorism Center who produced a bold plan to destroy al-Qaeda’s Afghan sanctuary with a CIA-funded guerrilla war guided by a small force of American special operatives. And when the commanders and foot soldiers of al-Qaeda began falling into American hands, it was Carter, from his desk at Langley, who often served as their judge and jury. The black sites, the extraordinary renditions, the enhanced interrogation methods—they all bore Carter’s fingerprints. He felt no remorse over his actions; he hadn’t that luxury. For Adrian Carter, every morning was September 12. Never again, he vowed, would he watch Americans hurling themselves from burning skyscrapers because they could no longer bear the heat of a terrorist fire.
For ten years, Carter had managed to keep that promise. No one had done more to protect the American homeland from the much-anticipated second attack, and for his many secret sins, he had been pilloried in the press and threatened with criminal prosecution. On the advice of Agency lawyers, he had retained the services of a high-priced Washington attorney, an extravagance that had steadily drained his savings and forced his wife, Margaret, to return to teaching. Friends had urged Carter to forsake the Agency and take a lucrative position in Washington’s flourishing private security industry, but he refused. His failure to prevent the attacks of 9/11 haunted him still. And the ghosts of the three thousand compelled him to keep fighting until his enemy was vanquished.
The war had taken its toll on Carter—not only on his family life, which was a shambles, but on his health as well. His face was gaunt and drawn, and Gabriel noticed a slight tremor in Carter’s right hand as he joylessly filled a plate with the government-issue treats arrayed atop the sideboard in the dining room. “High blood pressure,” Carter explained, as he drew coffee from a pump-action thermos. “It started on Inauguration Day, and it rises and falls in relation to the terrorist threat level. It’s sad to say, but after ten years of fighting Islamic terror, I seem to have become a living, breathing National Threat Advisory.”
“What level are we today?”
“Didn’t you hear?” asked Carter. “We’ve abandoned the old color-coded system.”
“What’s your blood pressure telling you?”
“Red,” said Carter dourly. “Bright red.”
“Not according to your director of homeland security. She says there’s no immediate threat.”
“She doesn’t always write her own lines.”
“Who does?”
“The White House,” said Carter. “And the president doesn’t like to needlessly alarm the American people. Besides, raising the threat level would conflict with the convenient narrative making its way around the Washington chattering classes these days.”
“Which narrative is that?”
“The one that says America overreacted to 9/11. The one that says al-Qaeda is no longer a threat to anyone, let alone the most powerful nation on the face of the earth. The one that says it’s time to declare victory in the global war on terror and turn our attention inward.” Carter frowned. “God, but I hate it when journalists use the word ‘narrative.’ There was a time when novelists wrote narrative and journalists were content to report facts. And the facts are quite simple. There exists in the world today an organized force that seeks to weaken or even destroy the West through acts of indiscriminate violence. This force is a part of a broader radical movement to impose sharia law and restore the Islamic Caliphate. And no amount of wishful thinking will make it go away.”
They sat on opposite sides of the rectangular table. Carter picked at the edge of a stale croissant, his thoughts clearly elsewhere. Gabriel knew better than to rush the proceedings. In conversation, Carter could be a bit of a wanderer. Eventually, he would make his way to the point, but there would be several detours and digressions along the way, all of which would undoubtedly prove useful to Gabriel at a later date.
“In some respects,” Carter continued, “I’m sympathetic to the president’s desire to turn the page of history. He views the global war on terrorism as a distraction from his larger goals. You might find this difficult to believe, but I’ve seen him on just two occasions. He calls me Andrew.”
“But at least he’s given us hope.”
“Hope is not an acceptable strategy when lives are at stake. Hope is what led to 9/11.”
“So who’s pulling the strings inside the administration?”
“James McKenna, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, also known as the terrorism czar, which is interesting since he’s issued an edict banning the word ‘terrorism’ from all our public pronouncements. He even discourages its use behind closed doors. And heaven forbid if we happen to place the word ‘Islamic’ anywhere near it. As far as James McKenna is concerned, we aren’t engaged in a war against Islamic terrorists. We’re engaged in an international effort against a small band of transnational extremists. These extremists, who just happen to be Muslims, are an irritant, but pose no real threat to our existence or way of life.”
“Tell that to the families of those who died in Paris, Copenhagen, and London.”
“That’s an emotional response,” Carter said sardonically. “And James McKenna doesn’t tolerate emotion when it comes to talking about terrorism.”
“You mean extremism,” said Gabriel.
“Forgive me,” Carter said. “McKenna is a political animal who fancies himself an expert on intelligence. He worked on the staff of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee in the nineties and came to Langley shortly after the Greek arrived. He lasted only a few months, but that doesn’t stop him from describing himself as a veteran of the CIA. To hear McKenna tell it, he’s an Agency man who has the best interests of the Agency at heart. The truth is somewhat different. He loathes the Agency and all those who toil within its walls. Most of all, he despises me.”
“Why?”
“Apparently, I embarrassed him during a senior staff meeting. I don’t remember the incident, but it seems McKenna has never gotten over it. Beyond that, I’m told McKenna regards me as a monster who’s done irreparable harm to America’s image in the world. Nothing would make him happier than to see me behind bars.”
“It’s good to know the U.S. intelligence community is functioning smoothly again.”
“Actually, McKenna is under the impression it’s working just fine now that he’s running the entire show. He even managed to get himself appointed chairman of our new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group. If a major terrorist figure is captured anywhere in the world, under any circumstances, James McKenna will be in charge of questioning him. It’s a great deal of power to place in the hands of a single person, even if that person were competent. But, unfortunately, James McKenna doesn’t fall into that category. He’s ambitious, he’s well intentioned, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing. And if he isn’t careful, he’s going to get us all killed.”
“Sounds charming,” said Gabriel. “When do I get to meet him?”
“Never.”
“So why am I here, Adrian?”
“You’re here because of Paris, Copenhagen, and London.”
“Who carried it out?”
“A new branch of al-Qaeda,” said Carter. “But I’m afraid they had support from a person who occupies a sensitive and powerful position in Western intelligence.”
“Who?”
Carter said nothing more. His right hand was shaking.
Chapter 12
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
THEY ADJOURNED TO THE REAR terrace and settled into a pair of wrought-iron chairs along the balustrade. Carter balanced a coffee cup on his knee and gazed toward the gray spires rising gracefully above Georgetown University. Paradoxically, he was speaking of a shabby district of San Diego, where, on a summer day in 1999, there arrived a young Yemeni cleric named Rashid al-Husseini. With money provided by a Saudi-based Islamic charity, the Yemeni purchased a run-down commercial property, established a mosque, and went in search of a congregation. He did most of his hunting on the campus of San Diego State University, where he acquired a devoted following among Arab students who had come to America to escape the stifling social oppression of their homelands, only to find themselves lost and adrift in the ghurba, the land of strangers. Rashid was uniquely qualified to serve as their guide. The only son of a former Yemeni government minister, he had been born in America, spoke colloquial American English, and was the not-so-proud owner of an American passport.
“All sorts of strays and lost souls began stumbling into Rashid’s mosque, including a pair of Saudis named Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.” Carter glanced at Gabriel and added, “I trust you’re familiar with the names.”
“They were two of the muscle hijackers from American Flight 77, personally selected by none other than Osama Bin Laden himself. In January 2000, they were present at the planning meeting in Kuala Lumpur, after which the Bin Laden Unit of the CIA managed to lose track of them. Later, it was discovered that both had flown to Los Angeles and were probably still in the United States—a fact you neglected to tell the FBI.”
“Much to my everlasting shame,” said Carter. “But this isn’t a story about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi.”
It was a story, Carter resumed, about Rashid al-Husseini, who soon developed a reputation in the Islamic world as a magnetic preacher, a man to whom Allah had granted a beautiful and seductive tongue. His sermons became required listening, not only in San Diego but also in the Middle East, where they were distributed by audiotape. In the spring of 2001, he was offered a clerical position at an influential Islamic center outside Washington, in suburban Falls Church, Virginia. Before long, Nawaf al-Hazmi was praying there, along with a young Saudi from Taif named Hani Hanjour.
“Coincidentally,” said Carter, “the mosque is located on Leesburg Pike. If you hang a left onto Columbia Pike and go a couple of miles, you run smack into the western façade of the Pentagon, which is exactly what Hani Hanjour did on the morning of 9/11. Rashid was in his office at the time. He actually heard the plane pass overhead a few seconds before impact.”
It did not take long for the FBI to connect al-Hazmi and Hanjour to the Falls Church mosque, said Carter, or for the news media to beat a path to Rashid’s door. What they discovered was an eloquent and enlightened young cleric, a man of moderation who condemned the attacks of 9/11 without equivocation and urged his Muslim brethren to forsake violence and terrorism in all its forms. The White House was so impressed with the charismatic imam that he was invited to join several other Muslim scholars and clerics for a private meeting with the president. The State Department thought Rashid might be the perfect sort of figure to help build a bridge between America and one and a half billion skeptical Muslims. The Agency, however, had another idea.
“We thought Rashid could help us to penetrate the camp of our new enemy,” said Carter. “But before we made our approach, we had to answer a few questions. Namely, was he somehow involved in the 9/11 plot, or were his contacts with the three hijackers purely coincidental? We looked at him from every conceivable angle, starting from the assumption that he had a great deal of American blood on his hands. We looked at timetables. We looked at who was where and when. And at the end of the process, we concluded that Imam Rashid al-Husseini was clean.”
“And then?”
“We dispatched an emissary to Falls Church to see whether Rashid might be willing to put his words into action. His response was positive. We picked him up the next day and took him to a secure location near the Pennsylvania border. And then the real fun began.”
“You started the assessment process all over again.”
Carter nodded. “But this time, we had the subject seated before us, strapped to a polygraph. We questioned him for three days, pulling apart his past and his associations, piece by piece.”
“And his story held up.”
“He passed with flying colors. So we placed our proposition on the table, accompanied by a great deal of money. It was a simple operation. Rashid would tour the Islamic world, preaching tolerance and moderation while at the same time supplying us with the names of other potential recruits to our cause. In addition, he was to be on the lookout for angry young men who appeared vulnerable to the siren song of the jihadis. We took him on a domestic test drive, working closely with the FBI. And then we went international.”
Operating from a base in a predominately Muslim neighborhood in East London, Rashid spent the next three years crisscrossing Europe and the Middle East. He spoke at conferences, preached in mosques, and sat for interviews with fawning journalists. He denounced Bin Laden as a murderer who had violated the laws of Allah and the teachings of the Prophet. He recognized the right of Israel to exist and called for a negotiated peace with the Palestinians. He condemned Saddam Hussein as thoroughly un-Islamic, though, on the advice of his CIA handlers, he stopped short of endorsing the American invasion. His message did not always go over well with his audiences, nor were his activities confined to the physical world. With CIA assistance, Rashid built a presence on the Internet, where he attempted to compete with the jihadist propaganda of al-Qaeda. Visitors to the site were identified and tracked as they moved through cyberspace.
“The operation was regarded as one of our most successful efforts to penetrate a world that, for the most part, we had found almost entirely opaque. Rashid fed his handlers a steady stream of names, good guys and potential bad guys, and even tipped them off about some plots that were brewing. At Langley, we spent a great deal of time marveling at our cleverness. We thought it would go on forever. But it all ended rather suddenly.”
The setting, fittingly enough, was Mecca. Rashid had been invited to speak at the university, a high honor for a cleric who had been cursed with an American passport. Given the fact that Mecca is closed to infidels, the CIA had no choice but to allow him to go alone. He flew from Amman to Riyadh, where he met a final time with one of his CIA handlers, then boarded an internal Saudia Airlines flight to Mecca. His speech was scheduled for eight that evening. Rashid never showed up. He had vanished without a trace.
“At first, we feared he’d been kidnapped and killed by a local branch of al-Qaeda. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case. Our prized possession resurfaced on the Internet a few weeks later. The eloquent, enlightened young man of moderation was gone. He’d been replaced by a raving fanatic who preached that the only way to deal with the West was to destroy it.”
“He deceived you.”
“Obviously.”
“For how long?”
“That remains an open question,” said Carter. “There are some at Langley who believe Rashid was bad from the beginning, others who theorize he was driven over the edge by the guilt of working as a spy for the infidels. Whatever the case, one thing is beyond dispute. During the time he was traveling the Islamic world on my dime, he recruited an impressive network of operatives, right under our noses. He’s the ultimate talent spotter and skilled in the art of deception and misdirection. We hoped he would stick to preaching and recruiting, but that hope turned out to be misplaced. The attacks in Europe were Rashid’s coming-out party. He wants to replace Osama Bin Laden as leader of the global jihadist movement. He also wants to do something Bin Laden was never able to accomplish after 9/11.”
“Strike the Far Enemy in his homeland,” said Gabriel. “Shed American blood on American soil.”
“With a network bought and paid for by the Central Intelligence Agency,” Carter added soberly. “How would you like that chiseled on your headstone? If it were ever made public that Rashid al-Husseini was once on our payroll . . .” Carter’s voice trailed off. “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”
“What do you want from me, Adrian?”
“I want you to make the bombing in Covent Garden the last attack Rashid al-Husseini ever carries out. I want you to smash his network before anyone else dies because of my folly.”
“Is that all?”
“No,” said Carter. “I want you to keep the entire operation secret from the president, James McKenna, and the rest of the American intelligence community.”
Chapter 13
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
ADRIAN CARTER WAS DOCTRINAIRE WHEN it came to matters of tradecraft, which meant he could not talk for too long within the confines of a safe house, even if it was one of his own. They descended the curved front steps and, with a single CIA security man in tow, headed westward along N Street. It was a few minutes after nine o’clock. Carter’s penny loafers tapped rhythmically on the redbrick sidewalk, but Gabriel seemed to move without a sound. A Metro bus rumbled past, filled to capacity. Gabriel pictured the same bus torn in half and engulfed in flames.
“Where did he go after leaving Mecca?”
“We believe he’s living under the protection of tribal elements in the Rafadh Valley of Yemen. It’s a completely lawless place, without schools, paved roads, or even a reliable supply of water. In fact, the entire country is dry as a bone. Sana might be the first capital city on Earth to actually run out of water.”
“But not Islamic militants,” said Gabriel.
“Oh, no,” Carter agreed. “Yemen is well on its way to becoming the next Afghanistan. For now, we’ve been content to lob the occasional Hellfire missile over the border. But it’s only a matter of time before we have to put boots on the ground and drain the swamp.” He glanced at Gabriel and added, “There actually are swamps in Yemen, by the way—a string of marshes along the coastline that produce malarial mosquitoes the size of buzzards. My God, what a dreadful place.”
Carter walked in silence for a moment with his hands clasped behind his back and his head down. Gabriel deftly sidestepped a tree root that had risen through the sidewalk and asked how Rashid managed to communicate with his network from so remote a place.
“We haven’t been able to figure that out,” Carter replied. “We assume he’s using local tribesmen to ferry messages to Sana or perhaps across the Gulf of Aden to Somalia, where he’s forged a relationship with the al-Shabaab terror group. We’re certain of one thing, though. Rashid spends no time on the phone, satellite or otherwise. He learned a great deal about American capabilities when he was on our payroll. And now that he’s gone over to the other side, he’s put that knowledge to good use.”
“I don’t suppose you also taught him how to plan and execute a synchronized series of attacks in three European countries.”
“Rashid is a talent spotter and a source of inspiration,” said Carter, “but he’s no operational mastermind. He’s clearly working with someone good. If I had to guess, the three attacks in Europe were carried out by someone who cut his teeth in—”
“Baghdad,” Gabriel said, finishing Carter’s thought for him.
“The MIT of terrorism,” Carter added, nodding in agreement. “Its graduates are all PhDs, and they served their internships by matching wits with the Agency and the American military.”
“All the more reason why you should deal with them.”
Carter made no reply.
“Why us, Adrian?”
“Because the American counterterrorism apparatus has grown so large we can’t seem to get out of our own way. At last count, we had more than eight hundred thousand people with top-secret clearances. Eight hundred thousand,” Carter repeated incredulously, “and yet we still weren’t able to prevent a single Islamic militant from planting a bomb in the heart of Times Square. Our ability to collect information is unrivaled, but we’re too big and far too redundant to be effective. We are Americans, after all, and when confronted with a threat, we throw large amounts of money at it. Sometimes, it’s better to be small and ruthless. Like you.”
“We warned you about the perils of reorganizing.”
“And we would have been wise to listen,” said Carter. “But our unwieldy size is only part of the problem. After 9/11, the gloves came off, and we adopted a whatever-it-takes attitude when it came to dealing with the enemy. These days, we try not to mention the enemy by name, lest we offend him. At Langley, counterterrorism jobs are considered politically risky. All the best officers in the Clandestine Service are learning to speak Mandarin.”
“The Chinese aren’t actively plotting to kill Americans.”
“But Rashid is,” Carter said, “and our intelligence suggests he’s planning something spectacular in the very near future. We need to break his network, and we need to do it quickly. But we can’t do that if we’re forced to operate under the new rules put in place by President Hope and his well-intentioned accomplice James McKenna.”
“So you want us to do your dirty work for you.”
“I’d do the same for you,” Carter said. “And don’t try to tell me that you lack the capability. The Office was the first Western-oriented intelligence service to establish an analytical unit dedicated to the global jihadist movement. You were also first to identify Osama Bin Laden as a major terrorist, and the first to have a go at killing him. If you’d succeeded, it’s highly likely that 9/11 would never have happened.”
They arrived at the corner of Thirty-fifth Street. The next block was closed to traffic by a barricade. On the opposite side, children from the Holy Trinity School skipped rope and tossed balls in the street, their joyous screams reverberating off the façades of the surrounding buildings. It was an idyllic scene, full of charm and life, but it made Carter visibly uneasy.
“Homeland security is a myth,” he said, gazing at the children. “It’s a bedtime story we tell our people to make them feel safe at night. Despite all our best efforts and all our billions spent, the United States is largely indefensible. The only way to prevent attacks on American soil is to snuff them out before they reach our shores. We have to rip apart their networks and kill their operatives.”
“Killing Rashid al-Husseini might not be a bad idea, either.”
“We’d love to,” said Carter. “But that won’t be possible until we can find some way into his inner circle.”
Carter led Gabriel northward along Thirty-fifth Street. He removed his pipe from the pocket of his coat and began absently loading the bowl with tobacco.
“You’ve been fighting the terrorists longer than anyone else in the business, Gabriel—anyone but Shamron, of course. You know how to penetrate their networks, something we’ve never been very good at, and you know how to turn them inside out. I want you to get inside Rashid’s network and destroy it. I want you to make it go away.”
“Penetrating jihadist terror networks isn’t the same as penetrating the PLO. They’re far too clannish to accept outsiders into their midst, and their members are largely immune to earthly temptations.”
“A rose is a rose is a rose. And a network is a network is a network.”
“Meaning?”
“I’ll grant you there are differences between jihadist and Palestinian terror networks, but the basic structure is the same. There are planners and foot soldiers, paymasters and quartermasters, couriers and safe houses. And at the points where all these pieces intersect, there is vulnerability just waiting to be exploited by someone as clever as you.”
A breath of wind carried the pipe smoke into Gabriel’s face. Blended exclusively for Carter by a tobacconist in New York, it smelled of burning leaves and wet dog. Gabriel waved it away and asked, “How would it work?”
“Does that mean you’ll do it?”
“No,” said Gabriel, “it means I want to know exactly how it would work.”
“You would operate as a virtual station of the Counterterrorism Center, in much the same way the Bin Laden Unit functioned before 9/11, but with one important difference.”
“The rest of the CTC won’t know I’m there.”
Carter nodded. “All document requests will be handled by my staff and me. And when it’s time for you to go operational, I’ll act as a clandestine traffic cop to make sure you don’t trip over any ongoing Agency operations, and they don’t trip over you.”
“I would need to see everything you have. Everything, Adrian.”
“You’ll be given access to the most sensitive intelligence available to the government of the United States, including the case files on Rashid and all the NSA intercepts. You’ll also be allowed to see all the intelligence on the three attacks that’s flowing to us from our sister services in Europe.” Carter paused. “I would think that information alone would be tempting enough for you to accept the assignment. After all, your liaison relationships with the Europeans aren’t terribly good at the moment.”
Gabriel didn’t respond directly. “It’s too much material to review on my own. I’d need help.”
“You can import as much help as you want, within reason. Given the sensitive nature of the intelligence, I’ll also need someone from the Agency looking over your shoulder. Someone who knows your mischievous ways. I have a candidate in mind.”
“Where is she?”
“Waiting in a café on Wisconsin Avenue.”
“You’re very sure of yourself, Adrian.”
Carter stopped walking and checked his pipe. “Were I to stoop to raw sentimentality,” he said after a moment, “I would remind you of the carnage you witnessed last Friday afternoon in Covent Garden and ask you to imagine it played out over and over again. But I won’t do that, because it would be unprofessional. Instead, I will tell you that Rashid has an army of martyrs just like Farid Khan waiting to do his bidding, an army he recruited with my help. I made Rashid. He’s my mistake. And I need you to destroy him before anyone else has to die.”
“You might find this difficult to believe, but I actually don’t have the authority to say yes to you. Uzi would have to sign off on it first.”
“He already has. So has your prime minister.”
“I suppose you’ve also had a quiet word with Graham Seymour.”
Carter nodded. “For obvious reasons, Graham would like to be kept abreast of your progress. He would also like advance warning if your operation happens to wash ashore in the British Isles.”
“You misled me, Adrian.”
“I’m a spy,” Carter said, relighting his pipe. “I lie as a matter of course. So do you. Now you just have to figure out a way to lie to Rashid. Just be careful how you go about it. He’s very good, our Rashid. I have the scars to prove it.”
Chapter 14
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
THE CAFÉ WAS LOCATED AT the northern end of Georgetown, at the foot of Book Hill Park. Gabriel ordered a cappuccino from the bar and carried it through a pair of open French doors into a small garden with vine-covered walls. Three of the tables were in shadow; the fourth, in brilliant sunlight. A woman sat there alone, reading a newspaper. She wore a black running suit that clung tightly to her slender frame, and a pair of spotless white training shoes. Her shoulder-length blond hair was brushed straight back from her forehead and held in place by an elastic band at the nape of her neck. Sunglasses concealed her eyes but not her remarkable beauty. She removed the glasses as Gabriel approached and tilted her face to be kissed. She seemed surprised to see him.
“I was hoping it would be you,” said Sarah Bancroft.
“Adrian didn’t tell you I was coming?”
“He’s much too old-fashioned for that,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. She had a voice and manner of speech from another age. It was like listening to a character from a Fitzgerald novel. “He dropped me a secure e-mail last night and told me to be here at nine. I was to stay until ten-thirty. If no one appeared, I was to leave and go to work as normal. It’s a good thing you came. You know how much I hate being stood up.”
“I see you brought reading material,” Gabriel said, glancing at the newspaper.
“You disapprove?”
“Office doctrine forbids agents to read newspapers in cafés. It’s far too obvious.” He paused, then added, “I thought we trained you better than that, Sarah.”
“You did. But on occasion, I like to behave like a normal person. And a normal person sometimes finds it pleasurable to read a newspaper in a café on a sunny autumn morning.”
“With a Glock concealed at the small of her back.”
“Thanks to you, it’s my constant companion.”
Sarah gave a melancholy smile. The daughter of a wealthy Citibank executive, she had spent much of her childhood in Europe, where she had acquired a Continental education along with Continental languages and impeccable Continental manners. She had returned to America to attend Dartmouth, and later, after spending a year at the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art in London, she became the youngest woman ever to earn a PhD in art history at Harvard.
But it was Sarah Bancroft’s love life, not her sterling education, that led her into the world of intelligence. While finishing her dissertation, she began dating a young lawyer named Ben Callahan who had the misfortune of boarding United Airlines Flight 175 on the morning of September 11, 2001. He managed to make one telephone call before the plane plunged into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. That call was to Sarah. With Adrian Carter’s blessing, and with the help of a lost van Gogh, Gabriel inserted her into the entourage of a Saudi billionaire named Zizi al-Bakari in a daring bid to find the terrorist mastermind lurking within it. At the conclusion of the operation, she had joined the CIA and was assigned to the Counterterrorism Center. Since then, she had maintained close contact with the Office and had worked with Gabriel and his team on numerous occasions. She had even taken an Office lover, an assassin and field operative named Mikhail Abramov. Judging by the absence of a ring on her finger, the relationship was proceeding at a slower pace than she had hoped.
“We’ve been on-again-off-again for a while,” she said, as if reading Gabriel’s thoughts.
“And at the moment?”
“Off,” she said. “Definitely off.”
“I told you not to become involved with a man who kills for his country.”
“You were right, Gabriel. You’re always right.”
“So what happened?”
“I’d rather not go into all the sordid details.”
“He told me he was in love with you.”
“He told me the same thing. Funny how that works.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“I don’t think I’m capable of being hurt any longer.” It took a moment for Sarah to smile. She wasn’t being honest; Gabriel could see that.
“Do you want me to have a word with him?”
“Heavens, no,” she said. “I’m more than capable of screwing up my life completely on my own.”
“He’s been through a couple of difficult operations, Sarah. The last one was—”
“He told me all about it,” she said. “I sometimes wish he hadn’t come out of the Alps alive.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“No,” she said grudgingly, “but it felt good to say it.”
“Maybe it’s for the better. You should find someone who doesn’t live on the other side of the world. Someone here in Washington.”
“And how should I respond when they ask me where I work?”
Gabriel said nothing.
“I’m not getting any younger, you know. I just turned—”
“Thirty-seven,” said Gabriel.
“Which means I’m rapidly approaching old-maid status,” Sarah said, frowning. “I suppose the best I can hope for at this point is a comfortable but passionless marriage to an older man of means. If I’m lucky, he’ll permit me to have a child or two, whom I’ll be forced to raise on my own because he’ll have no interest in them.”
“Surely it’s not as depressing as all that.”
She shrugged and sipped her coffee. “How are things between you and Chiara?”
“Perfect,” said Gabriel.
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Sarah murmured archly.
“Sarah . . .”
“Don’t worry, Gabriel, I got over you a long time ago.”
A pair of middle-aged women entered the garden and sat at the opposite end. Sarah leaned forward in feigned intimacy and, in French, asked Gabriel what he was doing in town. He responded by tapping the front page of her newspaper.
“Since when is our soaring national debt a problem for Israeli intelligence?” she asked playfully.
Gabriel pointed toward the front-page story about the debate raging within the American intelligence community about the provenance of the three attacks in Europe.
“How did you get dragged into it?”
“Chiara and I decided to take a stroll through Covent Garden last Friday afternoon on our way to lunch.”
Sarah’s expression darkened. “So the reports about an unidentified man drawing a weapon a few seconds before the attack—”
“Are true,” said Gabriel. “I could have saved eighteen lives. Unfortunately, the British wouldn’t hear of it.”
“So who do you think was responsible?”
“You’re the terrorism expert, Sarah. You tell me.”
“It’s possible the attacks were masterminded by the old-line al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan,” she said. “But in my opinion, we’re dealing with an entirely new network.”
“Led by whom?”
“Someone with the charisma of Bin Laden who could recruit his own operatives in Europe and call upon cells from other terror groups.”
“Any candidates?”
“Just one,” she said. “Rashid al-Husseini.”
“Why Paris?”
“The ban on the facial veil.”
“Copenhagen?”
“They’re still seething over the cartoons.”
“And London?”
“London is low-hanging fruit. London can be attacked at will.”
“Not bad for a former curator at the Phillips Collection.”
“I’m an art historian, Gabriel. I know how to connect dots. I can connect a few more, if you like.”
“Please do.”
“Your presence in Washington means the rumors are true.”
“What rumors are those?”
“The ones about Rashid being on the Agency’s payroll after 9/11. The ones about a good idea that went very bad. Adrian believed in Rashid and Rashid repaid that trust by building a network right under our noses. Now I suppose Adrian would like you to take care of the problem for him—off the books, of course.”
“Is there any other way?”
“Not where you’re concerned,” she said. “What does this have to do with me?”
“Adrian needs someone to spy on me. You were the obvious candidate.” Gabriel hesitated, then said, “But if you think it would be too awkward . . .”
“Because of Mikhail?”
“It’s possible you’ll be working together again, Sarah. I wouldn’t want personal feelings to interfere with the smooth functioning of the team.”
“Since when has your team ever functioned smoothly? You’re Israelis. You fight with one another constantly.”
“But we never allow personal feelings to influence operational decisions.”
“I’m a professional,” she said. “Given our history together, I shouldn’t think I’d need to remind you of that.”
“You don’t.”
“So where do we start?”
“We need to get to know Rashid a bit better.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“By reading his Agency files.”
“But they’re filled with lies.”
“That’s correct,” said Gabriel. “But those lies are like layers of paint on a canvas. Peel them away, and we might find ourselves staring directly at the truth.”
“No one ever speaks that way at Langley.”
“I know,” Gabriel said. “If they did, I’d still be in Cornwall working on a Titian.”
Chapter 15
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
GABRIEL AND SARAH TOOK UP residence at the house on N Street at nine the following morning. The first batch of files arrived one hour later—six stainless steel crates, all sealed with digital locks. For some unfathomable reason, Carter entrusted the combinations only to Sarah. “Rules are rules,” he said, “and Agency rules state that officers of foreign intelligence services are never to be given the combinations of document receptacles.” When Gabriel pointed out that he was being allowed to see some of the Agency’s dirtiest laundry, Carter was unyielding. Technically speaking, the material was to remain in Sarah’s possession. The taking of notes was to be kept to a minimum and photocopying was forbidden. Carter personally removed the secure fax machine and requested Gabriel’s mobile phone—a request Gabriel politely declined. The phone had been issued to him by the Office and contained several features not available commercially. In fact, he had used it the previous evening to sweep the house for listening devices. He had found four. Obviously, interservice cooperation only went so far.
The initial shipment of files all focused on Rashid’s time in America before 9/11 and his connections, nefarious or serendipitous, to the plot itself. Most of the material had been generated by Langley’s unglamorous rival, the FBI, and had been shared during the brief period when, by presidential order, the two agencies were supposed to be cooperating. It revealed that Rashid al-Husseini popped up on the Bureau’s radar within weeks of his arrival in San Diego and was the target of somewhat apathetic surveillance. There were transcripts from the court-approved wiretaps on his phones and surveillance photos shot during the brief periods when the San Diego and Washington field offices had the time and manpower to follow him. There was also a copy of the classified interagency review that officially cleared Rashid of playing any role in the 9/11 plot. It was, thought Gabriel, a profoundly naïve piece of work that chose to portray the cleric in the kindest possible light. Gabriel believed a man was the company he kept, and he had been around terror networks long enough to know an operative when he saw one. Rashid al-Husseini was almost certainly a messenger or an innkeeper. At the very least, he was a fellow traveler. And, in Gabriel’s opinion, fellow travelers should rarely be taken on by intelligence services as paid agents of influence. They should be watched and, if necessary, dealt with harshly.
The next shipment contained the transcripts and recordings of Rashid’s interrogation by the CIA, followed soon after by the detritus of the ill-fated operation in which he had played a starring role. The material concluded with a despairing after-action postmortem, written in the days following Rashid’s defection in Mecca. The operation, it said, had been poorly conceived from the outset. Much of the blame was placed squarely at the feet of Adrian Carter, who was faulted for lax oversight. Attached was Carter’s own assessment, which was scarcely less scathing. Predicting there would be blowback, he recommended a thorough review of Rashid’s contacts in the United States and Europe. Carter’s director had overruled him. The Agency was stretched too thin to go chasing after shadows, the director said. Rashid was back in Yemen where he belonged. Good riddance.
“Not exactly the Agency’s finest hour,” Sarah declared late that evening, during a break in the proceedings. “We were fools to ever use him.”
“The Agency began with the correct assumption, that Rashid was bad, but somewhere along the line it fell under his spell. It’s easy to see how it happened. Rashid was very persuasive.”
“Almost as persuasive as you.”
“But I don’t send my recruits into crowded streets to carry out acts of indiscriminate murder.”
“No,” said Sarah, “you send them onto secret battlefields to smite your enemies.”
“It’s not as biblical as all that.”
“Yes, it is. Trust me, I should know.” She looked wearily at the stacks of files. “We still have a mountain of material to go through, and it’s only the beginning. The floodgates are about to open.”
“Don’t worry,” Gabriel said, smiling. “Help is on the way.”
They arrived at Dulles Airport late the following afternoon under false names and with false passports in their pockets. They were not punished for their sins; quite the opposite, a team of Agency minders whisked them through customs and then herded them into a fleet of armored Escalades for the drive into Washington. Per Adrian Carter’s instructions, the Escalades departed Dulles at fifteen-minute intervals. As a result, the most storied team of operatives in the intelligence world settled into the house on N Street that evening with the neighbors being none the wiser.
Chiara arrived first, followed a moment later by an Office terrorism expert named Dina Sarid. Petite and dark-haired, Dina knew the horrors of extremist violence all too well. She had been standing on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street on October 19, 1994, when a Hamas suicide bomber turned the Number 5 bus into a coffin for twenty-one people. Her mother and two of her sisters were among the dead; Dina was seriously injured and still walked with a slight limp. Upon her recovery, she vowed to defeat the terrorists not with force but with her brain. A human database, she was capable of reciting the time, place, perpetrators, and casualty toll of every act of terrorism committed against Israeli and Western targets. Dina had once told Gabriel that she knew more about the terrorists than they knew about themselves. And Gabriel had believed her.
Next came a man of late middle age named Eli Lavon. Small and disheveled, with wispy gray hair and intelligent brown eyes, Lavon was regarded as the finest street surveillance artist the Office had ever produced. Blessed with a natural anonymity, he appeared to be one of life’s downtrodden. In reality, he was a predator who could follow a highly trained intelligence officer or a hardened terrorist along any street in the world without arousing a flicker of interest. Lavon’s ties to the Office, like Gabriel’s, were now tenuous at best. He still lectured at the Academy—no Office recruit was ever sent into the field without first spending a few hours at Lavon’s feet—but these days, his primary work address was Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, where he taught archaeology. With but a handful of broken pottery, Eli Lavon could unlock the darkest secrets of a Bronze Age village. And given a few strands of relevant intelligence, he could do the same for a terror network.
Yaakov Rossman, a pockmarked veteran agent-runner, appeared next, followed by a pair of all-purpose field hands named Oded and Mordecai. Then came Rimona Stern, a former military intelligence officer who now dealt with issues related to Iran’s disabled nuclear program. A Rubenesque woman with sandstone-colored hair, Rimona also happened to be Shamron’s niece. Gabriel had known her since she was a child—indeed, his fondest memories of Rimona were of a fearless young girl on a kick scooter careening down the steep drive of her famous uncle’s house. On her generous left hip was the faded scar of a wound suffered during a particularly violent spill. Gabriel had applied the field dressing; Gilah had dried Rimona’s tears. Shamron had been far too distraught to offer any assistance. The only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, he could not bear to witness the suffering of loved ones.
A few minutes behind Rimona was Yossi Gavish. A tall, balding figure dressed in corduroy and tweed, Yossi was a top officer in Research, which is how the Office referred to its analytical division. Born in London, he had read classics at All Souls and spoke Hebrew with a pronounced English accent. He had also done a bit of acting—his portrayal of Iago was still recalled with great fondness by the critics in Stratford—and was a gifted cellist as well. Gabriel had yet to exploit Yossi’s musical talents, but his skills as an actor had on more than one occasion proven useful in the field. There was a beachside café in St. Barts where the waitresses thought him a dream and a hotel in Geneva where the concierge had taken a private vow to shoot him on sight.
As usual, Mikhail Abramov arrived last. Lanky and fair, with a fine-boned face and eyes the color of glacial ice, he had immigrated to Israel from Russia as a teenager and joined the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s elite special operations unit. Once described as “Gabriel without a conscience,” he had personally assassinated several of the top terror masterminds from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Burdened with two heavy cases filled with electronic gear, he greeted Sarah with an unambiguously frigid kiss. Eli Lavon would later describe it as the frostiest embrace since Shamron, during the halcyon days of the peace process, had been forced to shake the hand of Yasser Arafat.
Known by the code name Barak, the Hebrew word for lightning, the nine men and women of Gabriel’s team had many idiosyncrasies and many traditions. Among the idiosyncrasies was a ritual childlike squabble over room assignments. Among the traditions was a lavish first-night planning meal prepared by Chiara. The one that occurred at N Street was more poignant than most, in that it was never supposed to take place. Like everyone else at King Saul Boulevard, the team had expected the operation against the Iranian nuclear program to be Gabriel’s last. They had been told as much by their chief in name only, Uzi Navot, who was not altogether displeased, and by Shamron, who was distraught. “I had no choice but to set him free,” Shamron said after his fabled encounter with Gabriel atop the cliffs of Cornwall. “This time it’s for good.”
It might have been for good if Gabriel had not spotted Farid Khan walking along Wellington Street with a bomb beneath his overcoat. The men and women gathered around the dining room table understood the toll Covent Garden had taken on Gabriel. Many years earlier, in another lifetime, under another name, he had failed to prevent a bombing in Vienna that forever altered the course of his life. On that occasion, the bomb had been hidden not beneath the overcoat of a shahid but in the undercarriage of Gabriel’s car. The victims were not strangers but loved ones—his wife, Leah, and his only son, Dani. Leah lived now in a psychiatric hospital atop Mount Herzl in Jerusalem in a prison of memory and a body destroyed by fire. She had only a vague sense that Dani was buried not far from her, on the Mount of Olives.
The members of Gabriel’s team did not mention Leah and Dani that evening, nor did they dwell long on the chain of events that led Gabriel to be an unwilling witness to Farid Khan’s martyrdom. Instead, they spoke of friends and family, of books they had read and movies they had seen, and of the remarkable changes currently sweeping the Arab world. In Egypt, Pharaoh had finally fallen, unleashing a wave of protest that was threatening to topple the kings and secular dictators who had ruled the region for generations. Whether the changes would bring Israel greater security or place it in greater peril was a topic of hot debate inside the Office and around the dinner table that night. Yossi, an optimist by nature, believed the Arabs, if given the opportunity to govern themselves, would have no truck with those who wished to make war with Israel. Yaakov, who had spent years running spies against hostile Arab regimes, declared Yossi dangerously delusional, as did nearly everyone else. Only Dina refused to venture an opinion, for her thoughts were focused on the crates of files waiting in the living room. She had a clock ticking in her formidable brain and believed that a minute wasted was a minute left to terrorists to plot and plan. The files held the promise of lives saved. They were sacred texts that contained secrets only she could decode.
It was approaching midnight by the time the meal finally came to an end. It was followed by the traditional spat over who would clear the dishes, who would wash, and who would dry. After recusing himself, Gabriel acquainted Dina with the files, then showed Chiara upstairs to their room. It was on the third floor, overlooking the rear garden. The red aircraft warning lights atop the spires of Georgetown University winked softly in the distance, a reminder of the city’s vulnerability to aviation-based terrorism.
“I suppose there are worse places to spend a few days,” Chiara said. “Where did you put Mikhail and Sarah?”
“As far apart as possible.”
“What are the chances this operation might bring them back together?”
“About the same that the Arab world is suddenly going to recognize our right to exist.”
“That bad?”
“I’m afraid so.” Gabriel lifted Chiara’s bag and placed it at the end of the bed. It sagged beneath the weight. “What have you got in here?”
“Gilah sent along a few things for you.”
“Rocks?”
“Food,” Chiara said. “You know how Gilah is. She always thought you were too thin.”
“How is she?”
“Now that Ari isn’t spending so much time around the house, she seems to be doing much better.”
“Did he finally sign up for that pottery course he’s always wanted to take?”
“Actually, he’s back at King Saul Boulevard.”
“Doing what?”
“Uzi thought he needed something to keep him occupied, so he made him your operational coordinator. He’d like you to call him first thing in the morning.” Chiara kissed his cheek and smiled. “Welcome home, darling.”
Chapter 16
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
THERE IS A TRUISM ABOUT terror networks: putting the pieces in place is not as difficult as one might imagine. But once the mastermind pulls the trigger and carries out his first attack, the element of surprise is lost and the network exposes itself. In the earliest years of the conflict against terrorism—when Black September and Carlos the Jackal were running amok, aided by useful leftist Euro-idiots such as the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Brigades—intelligence officers mainly used physical surveillance, hard wiretaps, and good old-fashioned detective work to identify the members of a cell. Now, with the advent of the Internet and global satellite communications, the contours of the battlefield had been altered. The Internet had given the terrorists a powerful tool to organize, inspire, and communicate, but it had also provided intelligence services with a means of tracking their every move. Cyberspace was like a forest in winter. The terrorists could hide there for a time, hatching their plots and organizing their forces, but they could not come or go without leaving footprints in the snow. The challenge for the counterterrorism officer was to follow the right set of tracks, for the virtual forest was a dark and confusing place where one could wander aimlessly while innocents died.
Gabriel and his team cautiously set foot there the next morning when British intelligence, under standing agreement, shared with their American cousins the preliminary results of the inquiry into the Covent Garden bombing. Included in the material were the contents of Farid Khan’s computers at home and work, a printout of every number he had dialed from his mobile phone, and a list of known Islamic extremists he had encountered while he was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun. There was also a copy of the suicide tape, along with several hundred still images captured by CCTV during the final months of his life. The last photo showed him standing in Covent Garden, his arms raised above his head, a bloom of fire erupting from the explosives belt around his waist. Lying on the ground a few feet away, shielded by two men, was Gabriel. When the picture was magnified, it was possible to see the shadow of a gun in his left hand.
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Daniel Silva
Gabriel Allon, secret agent, assassin and master art restorer, returns in a spellbinding novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling authorEurope is exploding. And one man must find out why.For Gabriel Allon and his wife Chiara, it was supposed to be the start of a romantic weekend in London. But nothing is ever that simple when you’re an off-duty spy and assassin.Bombings in Paris and Copenhagen have put him on edge and when Gabriel notices a man exhibiting several traits common to suicide bombers, he follows him into the Covent Garden throng. He’s determined to prevent the carnage he fears is about to take place, but before Gabriel can draw his sidearm, he is knocked to the pavement by two plain-clothes police officers.A moment later he looks up to find a scene from his nightmares.From the streets of New York and London,to the unforgiving landscape of the Saudi desert,Gabriel Allon is in a race to the death against a calculating mass-murderer that he dare not lose…
PORTRAIT OF A SPY
DANIEL SILVA
Dedication
For my wonderful children, Nicholas and Lily,
whom I love and admire more than they will
ever know. And, as always, for my wife, Jamie, who
makes everything possible.
Epigraph
Jihad is becoming as American as apple pie
and as British as afternoon tea.
ANWAR AL-AWLAKI, AL-QAEDA PREACHER AND RECRUITER
One person of integrity can make a difference,
a difference of life and death.
ELIE WIESEL
Contents
Title Page (#ub56baa50-a824-5125-9164-619c841110dd)
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE
Chapter 1 - The Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall
Chapter 2 - Paris
Chapter 3 - St. James’s, London
Chapter 4 - Covent Garden, London
Chapter 5 - Covent Garden, London
Chapter 6 - Covent Garden, London
Chapter 7 - New Scotland Yard, London
Chapter 8 - New York City
Chapter 9 - The Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall
Chapter 10 - Lizard Point, Cornwall
Chapter 11 - Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 12 - Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 13 - Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 14 - Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 15 - Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 16 - Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 17 - Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 18 - Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 19 - Volta Park, Washington, D.C.
Chapter 20 - The Palisades, Washington, D.C.
PART TWO
Chapter 21 - New York City
Chapter 22 - Madrid-Paris
Chapter 23 - Paris
Chapter 24 - Paris
Chapter 25 - Seraincourt, France
Chapter 26 - Montmartre, Paris
Chapter 27 - Paris
Chapter 28 - Seraincourt, France
Chapter 29 - Seraincourt, France
Chapter 30 - Seraincourt, France
Chapter 31 - Seraincourt, France
Chapter 32 - Seraincourt, France
Chapter 33 - Seraincourt, France
Chapter 34 - St. James’s, London
Chapter 35 - Zurich
Chapter 36 - Lake Zurich
Chapter 37 - Lake Zurich
Chapter 38 - Paris
Chapter 39 - Zurich
Chapter 40 - Langley, Virginia
Chapter 41 - Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Chapter 42 - Nejd, Saudi Arabia
Chapter 43 - Nejd, Saudi Arabia
Chapter 44 - St. James’s, London
Chapter 45 - St. James’s, London
Chapter 46 - Langley, Virginia
Chapter 47 - The Palisades, Washington, D.C.
PART THREE
Chapter 48 - The Plains, Virginia
Chapter 49 - The Plains, Virginia
Chapter 50 - The Plains, Virginia
Chapter 51 - The City, London
Chapter 52 - The City, London
Chapter 53 - The City, London
Chapter 54 - Dubai
Chapter 55 - Dubai International Airport
Chapter 56 - Burj Al Arab Hotel, Dubai
Chapter 57 - Langley, Virginia
Chapter 58 - Burj Al Arab Hotel, Dubai
Chapter 59 - Burj Al Arab Hotel, Dubai
Chapter 60 - Burj Al Arab Hotel, Dubai
Chapter 61 - Dubai
Chapter 62 - Deira, Dubai
Chapter 63 - The Empty Quarter, Saudi Arabia
Chapter 64 - The Empty Quarter, Saudi Arabia
Chapter 65 - The Empty Quarter, Saudi Arabia
Chapter 66 - The Empty Quarter, Saudi Arabia
PART FOUR
Chapter 67 - Paris-Langley-Riyadh
Chapter 68 - The Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall
Chapter 69 - New York City
Chapter 70 - Langley, Virginia
Chapter 71 - The Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Daniel Silva
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE
DEATH IN THE GARDEN
Chapter 1
The Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall
IT WAS THE REMBRANDT THAT solved the mystery once and for all. Afterward, in the quaint shops where they did their marketing and the dark little seaside pubs where they did their drinking, they would chide themselves for having missed the telltale signs, and they would share a good-natured laugh at some of their more outlandish theories about the true nature of his work. Because in their wildest dreams there was not one among them who ever considered the possibility that the taciturn man from the far end of Gunwalloe Cove was an art restorer, and a world-famous art restorer at that.
He was not the first outsider to wander down to Cornwall with a secret to keep, yet few had guarded theirs more jealously, or with more style and intrigue. A case in point was the peculiar manner in which he had secured lodgings for himself and his beautiful but much younger wife. Having chosen the picturesque cottage at the edge of the cliffs—by all accounts, sight unseen—he had paid the entire twelve-month lease in advance, with all the paperwork handled discreetly by an obscure lawyer in Hamburg. He settled into the cottage a fortnight later as if he were conducting a raid on a distant enemy outpost. Those who met him during his first forays into the village were struck by his notable lack of candor. He seemed to have no name—at least not one he was willing to share—and no country of origin that any of them could place. Duncan Reynolds, thirty years retired from the railroad and regarded as the worldliest of Gunwalloe’s residents, described him as “a cipher of a man” while other reviews ranged from “standoffish” to “unbearably rude.” Even so, all agreed that, for better or worse, the little west Cornish village of Gunwalloe had become a far more interesting place.
With time, they were able to establish that his name was Giovanni Rossi and that, like his beautiful wife, he was of Italian descent. Which made it all the more curious when they began to notice government-issue cars filled with government-issue men prowling the streets of the village late at night. And then there were the two blokes who sometimes fished the cove. Opinion was universal that they were the worst fishermen anyone had ever seen. In fact, most assumed they were not fishermen at all. Naturally, as is wont to happen in a small village like Gunwalloe, there began an intense debate about the true identity of the newcomer and the nature of his work—a debate that was finally resolved by Portrait of a Young Woman, oil on canvas, 104 by 86 centimeters, by Rembrandt van Rijn.
Precisely when it arrived would never be clear. They assumed it was sometime in mid-January because that was when they noticed a dramatic change in his daily routine. One day he was marching along the rugged cliff tops of the Lizard Peninsula as though wrestling with a guilty conscience; the next he was standing before an easel in his living room, a paintbrush in one hand, a palette in the other, and opera music blasting so loudly you could hear the wailing clear across Mount’s Bay in Marazion. Given the proximity of his cottage to the Coastal Path, it was possible—if one paused in just the right spot, mind you, and craned one’s neck at just the right angle—to see him in his studio. At first, they assumed he was working on a painting of his own. But as the weeks ground slowly past, it became clear he was involved in the craft known as conservation or, more commonly, as restoration.
“Hell’s that mean?” Malcolm Braithwaite, a retired lobsterman who smelled perpetually of the sea, asked one evening at the Lamb and Flag pub.
“It means he’s fixing the bloody thing,” said Duncan Reynolds. “A painting is like a living, breathing thing. When it gets old, it flakes and sags—just like you, Malcolm.”
“I hear it’s a young girl.”
“Pretty,” said Duncan, nodding his head. “Cheeks like apples. She looks positively edible.”
“Do we know the artist?”
“Still working on that.”
And work on it they did. They consulted many books, searched many sites on the Internet, and sought out people who knew more about art than they did—a category that included most of the population of West Cornwall. Finally, in early April, Dottie Cox from the village store screwed up the nerve to simply ask the beautiful young Italian woman about the painting when she came into town to do her marketing. The woman evaded the question with an ambiguous smile. Then, with her straw bag slung over her shoulder, she sauntered back down to the cove, her riotous dark hair tossed by the springtime wind. Within minutes of her arrival, the wailing of the opera ceased and the window shades of the cottage fell like eyelids.
They remained tightly closed for the next week, at which point the restorer and his beautiful wife disappeared without warning. For several days, the residents of Gunwalloe feared they might not be planning to return, and a few actually berated themselves for having snooped and pried into the couple’s private affairs. Then, while leafing through the Times one morning at the village store, Dottie Cox noticed a story from Washington, D.C., about the unveiling of a long-lost portrait by Rembrandt—a portrait that looked precisely like the one that had been in the cottage at the far end of the cove. And thus the mystery was solved.
Coincidentally, that same edition of the Times contained a front-page article about a series of mysterious explosions at four secret Iranian nuclear facilities. No one in Gunwalloe imagined there might be any connection. At least not yet.
The restorer was a changed man when he came back from America; they could see that. Though he remained guarded in his personal encounters—and he was still not the sort you would want to surprise in the dark—it was obvious a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders. They saw a smile on his angular face every now and again, and the light emitted by his unnaturally green eyes seemed a shade less defensive. Even his long daily walks had a different quality. Where once he had pounded along the footpaths like a man possessed, he now seemed to float atop the mist-covered cliffs like an Arthurian spirit who had come home after a long time in a distant land.
“Looks to me as if he’s been released from a sacred vow,” observed Vera Hobbs, owner of the village bakeshop. But when asked to venture a guess as to what that vow might have been, or to whom he had sworn it, she refused. Like everyone else in town, she had made a fool of herself trying to divine his occupation. “Besides,” she advised, “it’s better to leave him in peace. Otherwise, the next time he and his pretty wife leave the Lizard, it might be for good.”
Indeed, as that glorious summer slowly faded, the restorer’s future plans became the primary preoccupation of the entire village. With the lease on the cottage running out in September, and with no tangible evidence he was planning to renew it, they embarked on a covert effort to persuade him to stay. What the restorer needed, they decided, was something to keep him tethered to the Cornish coast—a job that utilized his unique set of skills and gave him something to do other than walk the cliffs. Exactly what that job might entail, and who would give it to him, they had no idea, but they entrusted to themselves the delicate task of trying to find it.
After much deliberation, it was Dottie Cox who finally hit upon the idea of the First Annual Gunwalloe Festival of Fine Arts, with the famous art restorer Giovanni Rossi serving as honorary chairman. She made the suggestion to the restorer’s wife the following morning when she popped into the village store at her usual time. The woman actually laughed for several minutes. The offer was flattering, she said after regaining her composure, but she didn’t think it was the sort of thing Signor Rossi would agree to. His official rejection came soon after, and the Gunwalloe Festival of Fine Arts quietly withered on the vine. It was no matter; a few days later, they learned that the restorer had taken the cottage for another year. Once again, the lease was paid in full, with all the paperwork handled by the same obscure lawyer in Hamburg.
With that, life returned to something like normal. They would see the restorer in mid-morning when he came to the village with his wife to do their marketing, and they would see him again in mid-afternoon when he hiked along the cliff tops in his Barbour coat and his flat cap pulled low over his brow. And if he failed to give them a proper greeting, they took no offense. And if he seemed uneasy about something, they gave him room to work it out on his own. And if a stranger came to town, they tracked his every move until he was gone. The restorer and his wife might have come from Italy originally, but they belonged to Cornwall now, and heaven help the fool who ever tried to take them away again.
There were, however, some on the Lizard who believed there was more to the story—and one man in particular who believed he knew what it was. His name was Teddy Sinclair, owner of a rather good pizzeria in Helston and a subscriber to conspiracy theories large and small. Teddy believed the moon landings were a hoax. Teddy believed 9/11 was an inside job. And Teddy believed the man from Gunwalloe Cove was hiding more than a secret ability to heal paintings.
To prove his case once and for all, he summoned the villagers to the Lamb and Flag on the second Thursday of November and unveiled a chart that looked a bit like the periodic table of elements. It purported to establish, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the explosions at the Iranian nuclear facilities were the work of a legendary Israeli intelligence officer named Gabriel Allon—and that the same Gabriel Allon was now living peacefully in Gunwalloe under the name Giovanni Rossi. When the laughter finally died down, Duncan Reynolds called it the dumbest thing he’d heard since some Frenchman decided that Europe should have a common currency. But this time Teddy stood his ground, which in hindsight was the right thing to do. Because Teddy might have been wrong about the moon landings, and wrong about 9/11, but when it came to the man from Gunwalloe Cove, his theory was in every respect true.
The next morning, Remembrance Day, the village woke to the news that the restorer and his wife had disappeared. In a panic, Vera Hobbs hurried down to the cove and peered through the windows of the cottage. The restorer’s supplies were scattered across a low table, and propped on the easel was a painting of a nude woman stretched upon a couch. It took Vera a moment to realize that the couch was identical to the one in the living room, and that the woman was the same one she saw each morning in her bakeshop. Despite her embarrassment, Vera couldn’t seem to summon the will to look away, because it happened to be one of the most strikingly beautiful paintings she had ever seen. It was also a very good sign, she thought as she headed back to the village. A painting like that was not the sort of thing a man left behind when he was making a run for it. Eventually, the restorer and his wife would come back. And heaven help that bloody Teddy Sinclair if they didn’t.
Chapter 2
Paris
THE FIRST BOMB EXPLODED AT 11:46 a.m., on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris. The director of the French security service would later say he received no warning of the impending attack, a statement his detractors might have found laughable were the death toll not so high. The warning signs were plain to see, they said. Only the blind or the willfully ignorant could have possibly missed them.
From Europe’s point of view, the timing of the attack could not have been worse. After decades of lavish social spending, much of the Continent was teetering on the brink of fiscal and monetary disaster. Its debt was soaring, its treasuries were empty, and its pampered citizenry was aging and disillusioned. Austerity was the order of the day. In the current climate, no cow was considered too sacred; health care, university tuition, support for the arts, and even pension benefits were all undergoing drastic cuts. Along Europe’s so-called periphery, the smaller economies were falling like dominoes. Greece was sinking slowly into the Aegean, Spain was on life support, and the Irish Miracle had turned out to be nothing more than a mirage. In the smart salons of Brussels, many Eurocrats were daring to say aloud what had once been unthinkable—that the dream of European integration was dying. And in their darker moments, a few of them actually wondered whether Europe as they knew it might be dying, too.
Another article of faith lay in tatters that November—the belief that Europe could absorb an endless tide of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies while preserving its culture and basic way of life. What had started as a temporary program to relieve a postwar labor shortage had now permanently altered the face of an entire continent. Restive Muslim suburbs ringed nearly every city, and several countries appeared demographically fated to Muslim majorities before the end of the century. No one in a position of power had bothered to consult the native population of Europe before throwing open the doors, and now, after years of relative passivity, the natives were beginning to push back. Denmark had imposed draconian restrictions on immigrant marriages. France had banned the wearing of the full facial veil in public. And the Swiss, who barely tolerated one another, had decided they wanted to keep their tidy little cities and towns free of unsightly minarets. The leaders of Britain and Germany had declared multiculturalism, the virtual religion of post-Christian Europe, a dead letter. No longer would the majority bend to the will of the minority, they declared. Nor would it turn a blind eye to the extremism that flourished within its midst. Europe’s age-old contest with Islam, it seemed, had entered a new and potentially dangerous phase. There were many who feared it would be an uneven fight. One side was old, tired, and largely content with itself. The other could be driven into a murderous frenzy by a doodle in a Danish newspaper.
Nowhere were the problems facing Europe on clearer display than in Clichy-sous-Bois, the volatile Arab banlieue located just outside Paris. The flashpoint for the deadly riots that swept France in 2005, the suburb had one of the country’s highest unemployment rates, along with one of the highest rates of violent crime. So dangerous was Clichy-sous-Bois that even the French police refrained from entering its seething public housing estates—including the one where Nazim Kadir, a twenty-six-year-old Algerian employed by the celebrated Fouquet’s restaurant, lived with twelve other members of his extended family.
On that morning in November, he left his apartment in darkness to purify himself at a mosque built with Saudi money and staffed by a Saudi-trained imam who spoke no French. After completing this most important pillar of Islam, he rode a 601AB bus to the suburb of Le Raincy and then boarded an RER train to the Gare Saint-Lazare. There he switched to the Paris Métro for the final leg of his journey. At no point did he arouse the suspicions of the authorities or his fellow passengers. His heavy coat concealed the fact he was wearing an explosive vest.
He emerged from the George V stop at his usual time, 11:40, and started up the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Those lucky enough to survive the inferno to come would later say there was nothing unusual in his appearance, though the owner of a popular flower shop claimed to notice a curious determination in his gait as he closed in on the entrance of the restaurant. Among those standing outside were a deputy minister of justice, a newsreader from French television, a fashion model currently gracing the cover of Vogue magazine, a Gypsy beggar clutching the hand of a small child, and a noisy group of Japanese tourists. The bomber made one final check of his watch. Then he unzipped his coat.
It was never clearly established whether the act was preceded by the traditional scream of “Allahu Akbar.” Several survivors claimed to have heard it; several others swore the bomber detonated his device in silence. As for the sound of the explosion itself, those closest had no memory of it at all, for their eardrums were too badly damaged. To a person, all recalled seeing a blinding white flash of light. It was the light of death, said one. The light one sees at the moment he confronts God for the first time.
The bomb itself was a marvel of design and construction. It was not the kind of device built from Internet manuals or the how-to pamphlets floating around the Salafist mosques of Europe. It had been perfected under battle conditions in Palestine and Mesopotamia. Packed with nails soaked in rat poison—a practice borrowed from the suicide bombers of Hamas—it carved through the crowd like a circular saw. So powerful was the explosion that the Louvre Pyramid, located a mile and a half to the east, shivered with the blast wave. Those closest to the bomber were blown to pieces, sheared in half, or decapitated, the preferred punishment for unbelievers. Even at forty paces, limbs were lost. At the farthest edge of the kill zone, the dead appeared pristine. Spared outward trauma, they had been killed by the shock wave, which ravaged their internal organs like a tsunami. Providence had granted them the tender mercy of bleeding to death in private.
The first gendarmes to arrive were instantly sickened by what they saw. Extremities littered the paving stones, along with shoes, smashed wristwatches frozen at 11:46, and mobile phones that rang unanswered. In one final insult, the murderer’s remains were scattered among his victims—everything but the head, which came to rest on a delivery truck more than a hundred feet away, the bomber’s expression oddly serene.
The French interior minister arrived within ten minutes of the explosion. Seeing the carnage, he declared, “Baghdad has come to Paris.” Seventeen minutes later, it came to the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, where, at 12:03 p.m., a second suicide bomber detonated himself amid a large group of children waiting impatiently to board the park’s roller coaster. The Danish security service, the PET, quickly established that the shahid had been born in Copenhagen, had attended Danish schools, and was married to a Danish woman. It seemed not to trouble him that his own children attended the same school as his victims.
For the security professionals across Europe it was the nightmare scenario come true—coordinated and highly sophisticated attacks that appeared to have been planned and executed by a skilled mastermind. They feared the terrorists would strike again soon, though two critical pieces of information eluded them. They did not know where. And they did not know when.
Chapter 3
St. James’s, London
LATER, THE COUNTERTERRORISM COMMAND OF London’s Metropolitan Police Service would expend much valuable time and effort trying to reconstruct the movements that morning of one Gabriel Allon, the legendary but wayward son of Israeli intelligence, now formally retired and living quietly in the United Kingdom. It is known, based on eyewitness accounts from his meddlesome neighbors, that he departed his cottage in Cornwall a few minutes after dawn and climbed into his Range Rover, accompanied by his beautiful Italian-born wife, Chiara. It is also known, due to Britain’s Orwellian system of CCTV cameras, that the couple reached central London in near-record time, and that, through an act of divine intervention, they managed to find a somewhat legal parking space in Piccadilly. From there they proceeded on foot to Mason’s Yard, a tranquil quadrangle of paving stones and commerce in St. James’s, and presented themselves at the door of Isherwood Fine Arts. According to the CCTV camera in the yard, they were admitted into the premises at 11:40 London time, though Maggie, Isherwood’s latest mediocre secretary, would erroneously record the time in her logbook as 11:45.
Purveyors of museum-quality Italian and Dutch Old Master paintings since 1968, the gallery had once occupied a lofty perch on tony New Bond Street in Mayfair. Driven into St. Jamesian exile by the likes of Hermès, Burberry, and Cartier, it had taken refuge in three floors of a sagging warehouse once owned by Fortnum & Mason. Among the incestuous, backbiting villagers of St. James’s, the gallery had always been regarded as rather good theater—comedy and tragedy, stunning highs and seemingly bottomless lows, and always a whiff of conspiracy lying just beneath the surface. This was, in large measure, a consequence of the owner’s personality. Julian Isherwood was cursed with a near fatal flaw for an art dealer—he liked to possess art more than he liked to sell it. As a result, he was burdened with a large inventory of what is affectionately known in the trade as dead stock—paintings for which no buyer would ever pay a fair price. It was rumored that Isherwood’s personal holdings rivaled those of the British royal family. Even Gabriel, who had restored paintings for the gallery for more than thirty years, had only the vaguest idea of Isherwood’s true holdings.
They found him in his office—a tall, slightly precarious figure tilted against the front of a desk piled with old catalogs and monographs. He wore a gray chalk-stripe suit and a lavender necktie that had been given to him the previous evening by his latest love interest. As usual, he appeared slightly hungover, a look he cultivated. His eyes were fixed mournfully on the television.
“I take it you’ve heard the news?”
Gabriel nodded slowly. He and Chiara had heard the first bulletins on the radio as they were passing through the western suburbs of London. The images playing out on the screen were remarkably similar to the ones that had formed in Gabriel’s own mind—the dead covered in plastic sheeting, the bloodied survivors, the onlookers with their palms pressed to their faces in horror. It never changed. He supposed it never would.
“I had lunch at Fouquet’s last week with a client,” Isherwood said, running a hand through his longish gray locks. “We parted company on the very spot where that maniac detonated his bomb. What if the client had scheduled the lunch for today? I might have been—”
Isherwood stopped himself. It was a typical reaction after an attack, thought Gabriel. The living always sought to find some connection, however tenuous, to the dead.
“The bomber in Copenhagen killed children,” Isherwood said. “Will you please explain to me what cause is served by the murder of innocent children?”
“Fear,” said Gabriel. “They want us to be afraid.”
“When is this going to end?” Isherwood asked, shaking his head in disgust. “When in God’s name is this madness going to end?”
“You should know better than to ask a question like that, Julian.” Gabriel lowered his voice and added, “After all, you’ve had a ringside seat at this war for a very long time.”
Isherwood gave a melancholy smile. His backbone-of-England surname and English scale concealed the fact that he was not, at least technically, English at all. British by nationality and passport, yes, but German by birth, French by upbringing, and Jewish by religion. Only a handful of trusted friends knew that Isherwood had staggered into London as a child refugee in 1942 after being carried across the snowbound Pyrenees by a pair of Basque shepherds. Or that his father, the renowned Paris art dealer Samuel Isakowitz, had been murdered at the Sobibor death camp along with Isherwood’s mother. Though Isherwood had carefully guarded the secrets of his past, the story of his dramatic escape from Nazi-occupied Europe had reached the ears of Israel’s secret intelligence service. And in the mid-1970s, during a wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli targets in Europe, he was recruited as a sayan, a volunteer helper. Isherwood had but one assignment—to assist in building and maintaining the operational cover of an art restorer and assassin named Gabriel Allon.
“Just keep one thing in mind,” Isherwood said. “You work for me now, not them. This isn’t your problem, petal. Not anymore.” He aimed his remote at the television and the mayhem in Paris and Copenhagen vanished, at least for the moment. “Let’s have a look at something beautiful, shall we?”
The limited space of the gallery had compelled Isherwood to arrange his empire vertically—storerooms on the ground floor, business offices on the second, and on the third, a glorious formal exhibition room modeled on Paul Rosenberg’s famous gallery in Paris, where young Julian had spent many happy hours as a child. As they entered the room, midday sun was slanting through the overhead skylight, illuminating a large oil painting propped on a baize-covered pedestal. It was a depiction of the Madonna and Child with Mary Magdalene, set against an evening backdrop, quite obviously of the Venetian School. Chiara removed her car-length leather coat and sat on the museum-style ottoman at the center of the room. Gabriel stood directly before the canvas, one hand resting on his narrow chin, his head tilted to one side.
“Where did you find it?”
“In a great limestone pile along the Norfolk coast.”
“Does the pile have an owner?”
“Insists on anonymity. Suffice it to say he descends from a family of title, his property holdings are enormous, and his cash reserves are dwindling at an alarming rate.”
“So he asked you to take a few paintings off his hands to keep him afloat for another year.”
“At the rate he goes through money, I’d give him two months at the outside.”
“How much did you pay for it?”
“Twenty thousand.”
“How charitable of you, Julian.” Gabriel glanced at Isherwood and added, “I assume you covered your tracks by taking a few other pictures as well.”
“Six worthless pieces of crap,” Isherwood confessed. “But if my hunch about this one is correct, they were well worth the investment.”
“Provenance?” asked Gabriel.
“It was purchased in the Veneto by one of the owner’s ancestors while he was doing his Grand Tour in the early nineteenth century. It’s been in the family ever since.”
“Current attribution?”
“Workshop of Palma Vecchio.”
“Really?” asked Gabriel skeptically. “According to whom?”
“The Italian art expert who brokered the sale.”
“Was he blind?”
“Only in one eye.”
Gabriel smiled. Many of the Italians who had advised British nobility during their travels were charlatans who did a brisk trade in worthless copies falsely attributed to the masters of Florence and Venice. Occasionally, they erred in the opposite direction. Isherwood suspected that the painting on the pedestal fell into the second category. So, too, did Gabriel. He dragged the tip of his forefinger over the face of the Magdalene, dislodging a century’s worth of surface grime.
“Where was it hung? In a coal mine?”
He picked at the heavily discolored varnish. In all likelihood, it was composed of a mastic or dammar resin that had been dissolved with turpentine. Removing it would be a painstaking process involving the use of a carefully calibrated mixture of acetone, methyl proxitol, and mineral spirits. Gabriel could only imagine the horrors that awaited him once the old varnish had been stripped away: archipelagos of pentimento, a desert of surface cracks and creases, wholesale paint losses concealed by previous restorations. And then there was the condition of the canvas, which was sagging dramatically with age. The remedy was a relining, a perilous procedure involving the application of heat, moisture, and pressure. Any restorer who had ever performed a relining had the scars to prove it. Gabriel had once destroyed a large portion of a painting by Domenico Zampieri by using an iron with a faulty temperature gauge. The fully restored painting, while pristine to the untrained eye, was definitely a collaborative effort between Zampieri and the Studio of Gabriel Allon.
“Well?” asked Isherwood again. “Who painted the bloody thing?”
Gabriel made a show of deliberation. “I’ll need X-rays to make a definitive attribution.”
“My man is dropping by later this afternoon to take the pictures. But we both know that you don’t need them to make a preliminary attribution. You’re like me, petal. You’ve been around paintings for a hundred thousand years. You know it when you see it.”
Gabriel fished a small magnifying glass from his coat pocket and used it to examine the brushstrokes. Leaning slightly forward, he could feel the familiar shape of a Beretta 9mm pistol digging into the flesh of his left hip. Having worked with British intelligence to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program, he was now permitted to carry a weapon at all times for protection. He had also been granted a British passport, which he was free to use for foreign travel, provided he was not working for his old service. There was no chance of that. The illustrious career of Gabriel Allon was finally over. He was no longer Israel’s avenging angel. He was an art restorer employed by Isherwood Fine Arts, and England was his home.
“You have a hunch,” said Isherwood. “I can see it in those green eyes of yours.”
“I do,” replied Gabriel, still entranced by the brushstrokes, “but I’d like a second opinion first.”
He glanced over his shoulder at Chiara. She was toying with a strand of her unruly hair, a slightly bemused expression on her face. Posed as she was now, she bore a striking resemblance to the woman in the painting. It was hardly surprising, thought Gabriel. The descendant of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, Chiara had been raised in the ancient ghetto of Venice. It was quite possible some of her ancestors had served as models for masters such as Bellini, Veronese, and Tintoretto.
“What do you think?” he asked.
Chiara joined Gabriel before the canvas and clucked her tongue in disapproval at its deplorable condition. Though she had studied the Roman Empire at university, she had assisted Gabriel on a number of restorations and, in the process, had become a formidable art historian in her own right.
“It’s an excellent example of a Holy Conversation, or Sacra Conversazione, an idyllic scene in which subjects are grouped against an aesthetically pleasing landscape. And as any oaf knows, Palma Vecchio is regarded as the originator of the form.”
“What do you think of the draftsmanship?” Isherwood asked, a lawyer leading a sympathetic witness.
“It’s awfully good for Palma,” Chiara replied. “His palette was unrivaled, but he was never regarded as a particularly skilled draftsman, even by his contemporaries.”
“And the woman who posed as the Madonna?”
“Unless I’m mistaken, which is highly unlikely, her name is Violante. She appears in a number of Palma’s paintings. But there was another famous painter in Venice at the time who was said to be quite fond of her. His name was—”
“Tiziano Vecellio,” Isherwood said, completing the thought for her. “Better known as Titian.”
“Congratulations, Julian,” Gabriel said, smiling. “You just snared a Titian for the paltry sum of twenty thousand pounds. Now you just need to find a restorer capable of knocking it into shape.”
“How much?” Isherwood asked.
Gabriel pulled a frown. “It’s going to take a great deal of work.”
“How much?” Isherwood repeated.
“Two hundred thousand.”
“I could find someone else for half that.”
“That’s true. But we both remember what happened the last time you tried that.”
“How soon can you start?”
“I’ll have to check my calendar before making any commitments.”
“I’ll give you an advance of one hundred thousand.”
“In that case, I can start right away.”
“I’ll send it to Cornwall the day after tomorrow,” Isherwood said. “The question is, when will I have it back?”
Gabriel made no response. He stared at his wristwatch for a moment, as though it were no longer keeping proper time, then tilted his face thoughtfully toward the skylight.
Isherwood placed a hand gently on his shoulder. “It’s not your problem, petal,” he said. “Not anymore.”
Chapter 4
Covent Garden, London
A POLICE CHECKPOINT NEAR LEICESTER SQUARE had brought the traffic on Charing Cross Road to a standstill. Gabriel and Chiara hurried through a fogbank of exhaust fumes and set out along Cranbourn Street. It was lined with pubs and coffee bars catering to the herds of tourists who seemed to wander aimlessly through Soho at all hours, regardless of the season. For now, Gabriel seemed oblivious to them. He was staring at the screen of his mobile phone. The death tolls in Paris and Copenhagen were rising.
“How bad?” asked Chiara.
“Twenty-eight on the Champs-Élysées and another thirty-seven at the Tivoli Gardens.”
“Do they have any idea who’s responsible?” asked Chiara.
“It’s still too early,” Gabriel said, “but the French think it might be al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.”
“Could they have pulled off a pair of coordinated attacks like this?”
“They have cells scattered across Europe and North America, but the analysts at King Saul Boulevard have always been skeptical of their ability to carry out a Bin Laden–style spectacular.”
King Saul Boulevard was the address of Israel’s foreign intelligence service. It had a long and deliberately misleading name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Those who worked there referred to it as the Office and nothing else. Even retired agents like Gabriel and Chiara never uttered the organization’s real name.
“It doesn’t feel like Bin Laden to me,” Chiara said. “It feels more like—”
“Baghdad,” said Gabriel. “These death tolls are high for open-air attacks. It suggests the bomb maker knew what he was doing. If we’re lucky, he left behind his signature.”
“We?” asked Chiara.
Gabriel wordlessly returned the phone to his coat pocket. They had reached the chaotic traffic circle at the end of Cranbourn Street. There were two Italian restaurants—the Spaghetti House and Bella Italia. He looked at Chiara and asked her to choose.
“I’m not going to start my long weekend in London at Bella Italia,” she said, frowning. “You promised to take me to a proper lunch.”
“In my opinion, one can do far worse in London than Bella Italia.”
“Unless one was born in Venice.”
Gabriel smiled. “We have a reservation at a lovely place called Orso in Wellington Street. It’s very Italian. I thought we could walk through Covent Garden on our way.”
“Do you still feel up to it?”
“We have to eat,” he said, “and the walk will do us both good.”
They hurried across the traffic circle into Garrick Street where two Metropolitan Police officers in lime green coats were questioning the Arab-looking driver of a white panel van. The anxiety of the pedestrians was almost palpable. In some of the faces Gabriel saw genuine fear; in others, a grim resolution to carry on as normal. Chiara held his hand tightly as they strolled past the shop windows. She had been looking forward to this weekend for a long time and was determined not to let the news from Paris and Copenhagen spoil it.
“You were a bit hard on Julian,” she said. “Two hundred thousand is twice your usual fee.”
“It’s a Titian, Chiara. Julian is going to do quite nicely.”
“The least you could’ve done is accept his invitation to a celebratory lunch.”
“I didn’t want to have lunch with Julian. I wanted to have lunch with you.”
“He has an idea he wants to discuss.”
“What sort of idea?”
“A partnership,” Chiara said. “He wants us to become partners in the gallery.”
Gabriel slowed to a stop. “Let me make this as clear as possible,” he said. “I have absolutely no interest in becoming a partner in the sometimes-solvent firm of Isherwood Fine Arts.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing,” he said, walking again, “we have no idea how to run a business.”
“You’ve run several very thriving enterprises in the past.”
“It’s easy when you have the backing of an intelligence service.”
“You’re not giving yourself enough credit, Gabriel. How hard can it be to run an art gallery?”
“Incredibly hard. And as Julian has proven time and time again, it’s easy to get into trouble. Even the most successful gallery can go under if it places a bad bet.” Gabriel gave her a sidelong look and asked, “When did you and Julian concoct this little arrangement?”
“You make it sound as if we were conspiring behind your back.”
“That’s because you were.”
With a smile, Chiara conceded the point. “It happened when we were in Washington for the unveiling of the Rembrandt. Julian pulled me aside and said he was beginning to think about the possibility he might actually retire. He wants the gallery to end up in the hands of someone he trusts.”
“Julian will never retire.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”
“Where was I when this deal was being hatched?”
“I believe you’d slipped outside for a private conversation with a British investigative reporter.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about any of this until now?”
“Because Julian asked me not to.”
With his edgy silence, Gabriel made it clear that Chiara had violated one of the fundamental tenets of their marriage. Secrets, even undeniably trivial ones, were forbidden.
“I’m sorry, Gabriel. I should have said something, but Julian was adamant. He knew your first instinct would be to say no.”
“He could sell the gallery to Oliver Dimbleby in a heartbeat and retire to an island in the Caribbean.”
“Have you considered what that might mean for us? Do you really want to clean pictures for Oliver Dimbleby? Or Giles Pittaway? Or were you thinking you could scrape up a bit of freelance work from the Tate or the National Gallery?”
“It sounds as if you and Julian have it all worked out.”
“We do.”
“Then perhaps you should become Julian’s partner.”
“Only if you clean pictures for me.”
Gabriel could see that Chiara was serious. “Running a gallery isn’t all about attending glamorous auctions and having long lunches in fancy restaurants in Jermyn Street. And it’s not something that should be considered a hobby.”
“Thank you for dismissing me as a dilettante.”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
“You’re not the only one who’s retired from the Office, Gabriel. I am, too. But unlike you, I don’t have damaged Old Masters to occupy my time.”
“So you want to become an art dealer? You’ll spend your days rummaging through piles of mediocre paintings, looking for another lost Titian. And chances are you’ll never find one.”
“It doesn’t sound that bad to me.” Chiara looked around the street. “And it means we could live here.”
“I thought you liked Cornwall.”
“I adore it,” she said. “Just not in winter.”
Gabriel lapsed into silence. He had been bracing himself for a conversation like this for some time. “I thought we were going to have a baby,” he said.
“So did I,” Chiara said. “But I’m beginning to think it might not be possible. Nothing I try seems to be working.”
There was a note of resignation in her voice that Gabriel had never heard before. “So we’ll keep trying,” he said.
“I just don’t want you to be disappointed. It was the miscarriage. It’s going to make it much harder for me to ever conceive again. Who knows? A change of scenery might help. Just think about it,” she said, squeezing his hand. “That’s all I’m saying, darling. We might actually enjoy living here.”
In the broad Italianate piazza of the Covent Garden Market, a street comedian was arranging a pair of unsuspecting German tourists into a pose suggestive of sexual intimacy. Chiara leaned against a pillar to watch the performance while Gabriel fell into an undignified sulk, his eyes scanning the large crowd gathered in the square and atop the balcony bar of the Punch and Judy. He was not angry with Chiara but with himself. For years, their relationship had revolved around Gabriel and his work. It had never occurred to him that Chiara might have career aspirations of her own. If they were a normal couple, he might have considered the opportunity. But they were not a normal couple. They were former operatives of one of the world’s most celebrated intelligence services. And they had a past that was far too bloody to lead so public a life.
As they headed into the soaring glass arcade of the market, any residual tension from their quarrel quickly dissipated. Even Gabriel, who detested shopping in all its forms, took pleasure in roaming the colorful shops and stalls with Chiara at his side. Intoxicated by the smell of her hair, he imagined the afternoon that lay ahead—a quiet lunch followed by a pleasant walk back to their hotel. There, in the cool shadows of their room, Gabriel would slowly undress Chiara and make love to her in the enormous bed. For a moment, it was almost possible for Gabriel to imagine his past had been erased, that his exploits were mere fables gathering dust in the file rooms of King Saul Boulevard. Only the watchfulness remained—the instinctive, gnawing vigilance that made it impossible for him to ever feel completely at peace in public. It forced him to make a mental charcoal sketch of every passing face in the crowded market. And in Wellington Street, as they were approaching the restaurant, it caused him to freeze in his tracks. Chiara tugged playfully at his arm. Then she stared directly into his eyes and realized something was wrong.
“You look as though you just saw a ghost.”
“Not a ghost. A dead man.”
“Where?”
Gabriel nodded toward a figure in a gray woolen overcoat.
“Right there.”
Chapter 5
Covent Garden, London
THERE ARE TELLTALE INDICATORS COMMON to suicide bombers. Lips can move involuntarily as final prayers are recited. Eyes can have a glassy thousand-yard stare. And the face can sometimes appear unnaturally pale, evidence that an unkempt beard has been hastily removed in preparation for a mission. The dead man exhibited none of these traits. His lips were pursed. His eyes were clear and focused. And his face was evenly colored. He had been shaving regularly for a long time.
What set him apart was the thin tributary of sweat leaking from his left sideburn. Why was he perspiring on a crisp autumn afternoon? If he was warm, why were his hands buried in the pockets of his woolen overcoat? And why was the overcoat—a size too large, in Gabriel’s opinion—still tightly buttoned? And then there was his walk. Even a physically fit man in his late twenties will have difficulty feigning a normal gait when saddled with fifty pounds of high explosives, nails, and ball bearings. As the dead man walked past Gabriel in Wellington Street, he appeared unusually erect, as if he were trying to compensate for the added weight around his abdomen and kidneys. The fabric of his gabardine trousers vibrated with each step, as though the joints in his hips and knees were shuddering beneath the burden of the bomb. It was possible that the perspiring young man with the oversized coat was an innocent who simply needed to do a bit of midday shopping, but Gabriel suspected otherwise. He believed the man walking a few paces ahead represented the finale of a continent-wide day of terror. First Paris, then Copenhagen, and now London.
Gabriel ordered Chiara to take shelter in the restaurant and quickly crossed to the opposite pavement. He shadowed the dead man for approximately a hundred yards, then watched as he rounded the corner into the entrance of the Covent Garden Market. There were two cafés on the eastern side of the piazza, each filled with lunchtime patrons. Standing between them in a patch of sunlight were three uniformed Metropolitan Police Service officers. None took notice of the dead man as he entered the market arcade.
Gabriel now had a decision to make. The most obvious course of action was to tell the police of his suspicions—obvious, he thought, but not necessarily optimal. In all likelihood, the police would respond to Gabriel’s approach by pulling him aside for questioning, wasting several precious seconds. Worse still, they might confront the man, a ploy that would almost certainly cause him to detonate his weapon. Although virtually every officer on the Met had been given basic instruction in counterterrorism tactics, few had the experience or firepower necessary to take down a committed jihadist bent on martyrdom. Gabriel had both, and he had acted against suicide bombers before. He glided past the three officers and slipped inside the arcade.
The dead man was now twenty yards ahead, moving at a parade-ground clip along the elevated walkway of the main hall. Gabriel reckoned he was carrying enough explosives and shrapnel to kill everyone within a seventy-five-foot radius. Doctrine dictated that Gabriel remain beyond the lethal blast zone until it was time to make his move. The environment, however, compelled him to close the distance and place himself in greater danger. A headshot from seventy-five feet was difficult under the best of circumstances, even for a gunman with the skills of Gabriel Allon. In a crowded shopping arcade, it would be next to impossible.
Gabriel felt his mobile phone vibrate softly in his coat pocket. Ignoring it, he watched as the dead man paused along the railing of the walkway to check his watch. Gabriel took note of the fact it was worn on the left wrist, which meant the detonator switch was almost certainly in the right hand. But why would a suicide bomber stop on his way to martyrdom to check the time? The most likely explanation was that he had been ordered to end his life and the lives of many innocent people at a precise moment. Gabriel suspected there might be some sort of symbolism involved. There usually was. The terrorists of al-Qaeda and its offshoots loved symbolism, especially when it involved numbers.
Gabriel was now close enough to the dead man to see his eyes. They were clear and focused, an encouraging sign. It meant he was still thinking about his mission rather than the carnal delights awaiting him in Paradise. When he started dreaming of the perfumed, dark-eyed houris, it would show on his face. Then Gabriel would have a choice to make. For now, he needed the dead man to stay in this world a little longer.
The dead man made another check of the time. Gabriel glanced quickly at his own watch: 2:34. He ran the numerals through the database of his memory, looking for any connection. He added them, subtracted them, multiplied them, reversed them, and rearranged their order. Then he thought about the two previous attacks. The first occurred at 11:46, the second at 12:03. It was possible the times were representative of years on the Gregorian calendar, but Gabriel could find no connection.
He mentally erased the hours of the attacks and focused only on the minutes. Forty-six minutes past, three minutes past. Then he understood. The times were as familiar to him as the brushstrokes of Titian. Forty-six minutes past, three minutes past. They were two of the most famous moments in the history of terrorism—the exact times at which the two hijacked airliners struck the World Trade Center on 9/11. American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. The third plane to successfully hit its target that morning was American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the western side of the Pentagon. The local time had been 9:37 a.m., 2:37 p.m. in London.
Gabriel checked his digital watch. It was now a few seconds past 2:35. Looking up, he saw the man in the gray overcoat was once again moving at a brisk pace, hands in his pockets, seemingly oblivious to the people around him. As Gabriel followed, his mobile began to vibrate again. This time, he answered and heard the voice of Chiara. He told her that a suicide bomber was about to detonate himself in Covent Garden and instructed her to make contact with MI5. Then he slipped the phone back into his pocket and began closing the distance between himself and the target. He feared that many innocent people were about to die. And he wondered whether there was anything he could do to stop it.
Chapter 6
Covent Garden, London
THERE WAS ONE OTHER POSSIBILITY, of course—the possibility that the man walking several paces ahead of Gabriel had nothing beneath his coat but a few extra pounds of body fat. Inevitably, Gabriel recalled the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian-born electrician who was shot to death by British police in London’s Stockwell tube station after being mistaken for a wanted Islamic militant. British prosecutors declined to bring charges against the officers involved in the killing, a decision that provoked outrage among human rights activists and civil libertarians around the world. Gabriel knew that, under similar circumstances, he could expect no such leniency. It meant he would have to be certain before acting. He was confident of one thing. He believed the bomber, like a painter, would sign his name before pressing his detonator switch. He would want his victims to know that their imminent deaths were not without purpose, that they were being sacrificed in the name of the sacred jihad and in the name of Allah.
For the moment, though, Gabriel had no choice but to follow the man and wait. Slowly, carefully, he closed the gap, making small adjustments in his own course to maintain an unobstructed firing lane. His eyes were focused on the lower portion of the man’s skull. A few centimeters beneath it was the brain stem, essential for controlling the motor and sensory systems of the rest of the body. Destroy the brain stem with several rounds of ammunition, and the bomber would lack the means to press his detonator button. Miss the brain stem, and it was possible the martyr could carry out his mission with a dying twitch. Gabriel was one of the few men in the world who had actually killed a terrorist before he could carry out his attack. He knew the difference between success and failure would come down to a fraction of a second. Success meant only one would die. Failure would result in the deaths of scores of innocent people, perhaps even Gabriel himself.
The dead man passed through the doorway leading to the piazza. It was far more crowded now. A cellist was playing a suite by Bach. A Jimi Hendrix impersonator was grappling with an amplified electric guitar. A well-dressed man standing atop a wooden crate was shouting something about God and the Iraq War. The dead man headed directly toward the center of the square, where the comedian’s performance had sunk to new depths of depravity, much to the delight of the large crowd of spectators. Using techniques learned in his youth, Gabriel mentally silenced the noises around him one by one, starting with the faint strains of the Bach suite and ending with the uproarious laughter of the crowd. Then he glanced one last time at his wristwatch and waited for the dead man to sign his name.
It was 2:36. The dead man had reached the outer edge of the large crowd. He paused for a few seconds, as if searching for a weak point to make his entry, then shouldered his way between two startled women. Gabriel entered at a different spot several yards to the man’s right, slipping virtually unnoticed through a family of American tourists. The crowd was four-deep in most places and tightly packed, which presented Gabriel with yet another dilemma. The ideal ammunition for a situation like this was a hollow-point round, which would inflict greater tissue damage on the target and substantially reduce the risk of collateral casualties due to over-penetration. But Gabriel’s Beretta pistol was loaded with ordinary 9mm Parabellum rounds. As a result, he would have to position himself to fire at an extreme downward trajectory. Otherwise, there was a high probability he might inadvertently take innocent life in an attempt to save it.
The dead man had breached the inner wall of the crowd and was now headed directly toward the street comedian. The eyes had taken on the glassy thousand-yard stare. The lips were moving. Final prayers . . . The street comedian wrongly assumed the dead man wished to take part in the performance. Smiling, he took two steps toward him but froze when he saw the hands emerge from the pockets of the overcoat. The left was slightly open. The right was bunched into a fist, with the thumb cocked at a right angle. Still, Gabriel hesitated. What if there was no detonator? What if it was a pen or a cylinder of lip balm? He had to be sure. Tell me your intentions, he thought. Sign your name.
The dead man turned to face the market. The patrons looking down from the balcony of the Punch and Judy laughed nervously, as did a few of the spectators gathered in the piazza. In his mind, Gabriel silenced the laughter and froze the image. The scene appeared to him as though painted by the hand of Canaletto. The figures were stock-still; only Gabriel, the restorer, was free to move among them. He slipped through the front row of the spectators and focused his gaze on the spot at the back of the skull. Firing at a downward angle was not possible. But there was another potential solution to prevent collateral casualties: an upward line of fire would carry Gabriel’s round safely over the heads of the spectators and into the façade of the adjacent building. He pictured the maneuver in sequence—the cross-handed draw, the crouch, the shot, the advance—and waited for the dead man to sign his name.
The silence in Gabriel’s head was broken by a drunken shout from the balcony of the Punch and Judy—a command for the martyr to move out of the way and allow the performance to continue. The dead man responded by lifting his arms above his head like a long-distance runner breaking the finishing tape. On the inside of the right wrist was a thin wire leading from the detonator switch to the explosives. It was all the evidence Gabriel needed. He reached into his jacket and seized the butt of his Beretta. Then, as the dead man screamed “Allahu Akbar,” Gabriel dropped to one knee and leveled the weapon toward his target. Remarkably, the shot was clear, with no chance of secondary casualties. But as Gabriel was about to squeeze the trigger, two powerful hands pulled the gun downward, and the weight of two men drove him toward the paving stones.
At the instant he hit the ground, he heard a sound like the crack of thunder and felt a wave of scorching air wash over him. For a few seconds, Gabriel heard nothing more. Then the screaming started, a single shriek, followed by an aria of wailing. Gabriel lifted his head and saw a scene from his nightmares. It was body parts and blood. It was Baghdad on the Thames.
Chapter 7
New Scotland Yard, London
THERE ARE FEW MORE GRIEVOUS sins for a professional intelligence officer, even a retired one, than to land in the custody of the local authorities. Because Gabriel had long occupied a nether region between the overt and secret worlds, he had suffered such a fate more often than most of his fellow travelers. Experience had taught him there was an established ritual for such occasions, a sort of Kabuki dance that must be allowed to reach its conclusion before higher authority can intervene. He knew the steps well. Fortunately, so did his hosts.
He had been taken into custody within minutes of the attack and driven at high speed to New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of London’s Metropolitan Police Service. Upon arrival, he was delivered to a windowless interrogation room where he was treated for numerous cuts and abrasions and given a cup of tea, which he left untouched. A detective superintendent from the Counterterrorism Command arrived in short order. He examined Gabriel’s identification with the skepticism it deserved and then tried to determine the chain of events that led “Mr. Rossi” to draw a concealed firearm in Covent Garden the instant before a terrorist detonated his suicide belt. Gabriel had been tempted to pose a few questions of his own. Namely, he wanted to know why two Special Firearms Officers of the Met’s SO19 division had chosen to neutralize him rather than an obvious terrorist about to commit an act of indiscriminate mass murder. Instead, he responded to each of the detective’s inquiries by reciting a telephone number. “Call it,” he said, tapping the spot where the detective had written the number in his notebook. “It will ring in a very large building not far from here. You’ll know the name of the man who answers. At least you should.”
Gabriel did not know the identity of the officer who finally dialed the number, nor did he know precisely when the call was placed. He only knew that his internment inside New Scotland Yard lasted far longer than was necessary. Indeed, it was approaching midnight by the time the detective escorted him down a series of brightly lit corridors toward the entrance of the building. In the detective’s left hand was a manila envelope filled with Gabriel’s possessions. Judging from the size and shape, it did not contain a 9mm Beretta pistol.
Outside, the pleasant weather of the afternoon had given way to a driving rain. Waiting beneath the shelter of the glass portico, engine idling softly, was a dark Jaguar limousine. Gabriel accepted the envelope from the detective and opened the rear door of the car. Seated inside, one leg crossed elegantly over the other, was a man who looked as though he had been designed for the task. He wore a perfectly fitted charcoal gray suit and a silver necktie that matched the color of his hair. Normally, his pale eyes were inscrutable, but now they revealed the strain of a long and difficult night. As deputy director of MI5, Graham Seymour bore a heavy responsibility for protecting the British mainland from the forces of extremist Islam. And once again, despite the best efforts of his department, extremist Islam had won.
Though the two men had a long professional history, Gabriel knew little of Graham Seymour’s personal life. He knew that Seymour was married to a woman named Helen whom he adored and that he had a son who managed other people’s money for the New York branch of an important British financial house. Beyond that, Gabriel’s knowledge of Seymour’s private affairs was drawn from the Office’s voluminous file. He was a relic of Britain’s glorious past, a by-product of the upper middle classes who had been bred, educated, and programmed to lead. He believed in God but not with much fervor. He believed in his country but wasn’t blind to its shortcomings. He was good at golf and other games but was willing to lose to a lesser opponent in service of a worthy cause. He was a man admired and, most important, a man who could be trusted—an attribute rare among spies and secret policemen.
Graham Seymour was not, however, a man with unlimited patience, as evidenced by his dour expression as the Jaguar pulled into the street. He removed a copy of the next morning’s Telegraph from the seatback pocket and dropped it in Gabriel’s lap. The headline read REIGN OF TERROR. Beneath it were three photographs depicting the aftermath of the three attacks. Gabriel searched the photo of Covent Garden for any sign of his presence but saw only the victims. It was a picture of failure, he thought—eighteen people dead, dozens more critically injured, including one of the officers who had tackled him. And it was all because of the shot Gabriel had not been allowed to take.
“Bloody awful day,” Seymour said wearily. “I suppose the only way it could get any worse is if the press finds out about you. By the time the conspiracy theorists are finished, they’ll have the Islamic world believing that the attacks were plotted and carried out by the Office.”
“You can be sure that’s already the case.” Gabriel returned the newspaper and asked, “Where’s my wife?”
“She’s at your hotel. I have a team staying just down the hall.” Seymour paused, then added, “Needless to say, she’s not terribly pleased with you.”
“How can you tell?” Gabriel’s ears were still ringing from the concussion of the blast. He closed his eyes and asked how the SO19 teams had been able to locate him so quickly.
“As you might imagine, we have a wide array of technical means at our disposal.”
“Such as my mobile phone and your network of CCTV cameras?”
“Precisely,” Seymour said. “We were able to pinpoint you within a few seconds of receiving Chiara’s call. We forwarded the information to Gold Command, the Met’s operational crisis center, and they immediately dispatched two teams of Specialist Firearms Officers.”
“They must have been in the vicinity.”
“They were,” Seymour confirmed. “We were on high alert after the attacks in Paris and Copenhagen. A number of teams were already deployed in the financial district and spots where tourists tend to congregate.”
“So why did they take me down instead of the suicide bomber?”
“Because neither Scotland Yard nor the Security Service wanted a rerun of the Menezes fiasco. As a result of his death, a number of new guidelines and procedures were put in place to make sure nothing like it ever happens again. Suffice it to say a single warning does not meet the threshold for taking lethal action—even if the source happens to be named Gabriel Allon.”
“So eighteen innocent people died as a result?”
“What if he wasn’t a terrorist? What if he was another street performer, or someone with mental problems? We would have been burned at the stake.”
“But he wasn’t a street performer or a mental patient, Graham. He was a suicide bomber. And I told you so.”
“How did you know?”
“He might as well have been wearing a sign declaring his intentions.”
“Was it that obvious?”
Gabriel listed the attributes that first raised his suspicions and then explained the calculations that led him to conclude the terrorist intended to detonate his device at 2:37. Seymour shook his head slowly.
“I’ve lost count of how many hours we’ve spent training our police officers to spot potential terrorists, not to mention the millions of pounds we’ve poured into behavior-recognition software for CCTV. And yet a jihadi suicide bomber walked straight into Covent Garden, and no one seemed to notice. No one but you, of course.”
Seymour lapsed into a brooding silence. They were headed north along the floodlit white canyon of Regent Street. Gabriel leaned his head wearily against the window and asked whether the bomber had been identified.
“His name is Farid Khan. His parents immigrated to the United Kingdom from Lahore in the late seventies, but Farid was born in London. Stepney Green, to be precise,” Seymour said. “Like many British Muslims of his generation, he rejected the mild, apolitical religious beliefs of his parents and became an Islamist. By the late nineties, he was spending far too much time at the East London Mosque in Whitechapel Road. Before long, he was a member in good standing of the radical groups Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun.”
“It sounds to me as if you had a file on him.”
“We did,” Seymour said, “but not for the reasons you might think. You see, Farid Khan was a ray of sunlight, our hope for the future. Or so we thought.”
“You thought you’d turned him around?”
Seymour nodded. “Not long after 9/11, Farid joined a group called New Beginnings. Its goal was to deprogram militants and reintegrate them into the mainstream of Islam and British public opinion. Farid was considered one of their great successes. He shaved his beard. He severed ties to his old friends. He graduated near the top of his class at King’s College and landed a well-paying job with a small London ad agency. A few weeks ago, he became engaged to a woman from his old neighborhood.”
“So you checked him off your list?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Seymour said. “Now it appears it was all a clever deception. Farid was literally a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.”
“Any idea who activated him?”
“We’re poring over his telephone and computer records as we speak, along with the suicide video he left behind. It’s clear his attack was connected to the bombings in Paris and Copenhagen. Whether they were coordinated by the remnants of al-Qaeda Central or a new network is now a matter of intense debate. Whatever the case, it’s none of your concern. Your role in this affair is officially over.”
The Jaguar crossed Cavendish Place and stopped outside the entrance of the Langham Hotel.
“I’d like my gun back.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Seymour said.
“How long do I have to stay here?”
“Scotland Yard would like you to remain in London for the rest of the weekend. On Monday morning, you can go back to your cottage by the sea and think of nothing other than your Titian.”
“How do you know about the Titian?”
“I know everything. Everything except how to prevent a British-born Muslim from carrying out an act of mass murder in Covent Garden.”
“I could have stopped him, Graham.”
“Yes,” Seymour said distantly. “And we would have repaid the favor by tearing you to pieces.”
Gabriel stepped from the car without another word. “Your role in this affair is officially over,” he murmured as he entered the lobby. He repeated it, again and again, like a mantra.
Chapter 8
New York City
THAT SAME EVENING, THE OTHER universe inhabited by Gabriel Allon was also on edge but for decidedly different reasons. It was the fall auction season in New York, the anxious time when the art world, in all its folly and excess, convenes for two weeks of frenzied buying and selling. It was, as Nicholas Lovegrove liked to say, one of the few remaining occasions when it was still considered fashionable to be vastly rich. It was also, however, a deadly serious business. Great collections would be built, great fortunes made and lost. A single transaction could launch a brilliant career. It could also destroy one.
Lovegrove’s professional reputation, like Gabriel Allon’s, was by that evening firmly established. British-born and educated, he was regarded as the most sought-after art consultant in the world—a man so powerful he could move markets with an offhand remark or a wrinkle of his elegant nose. His knowledge of art was legendary, as was the size of his bank account. Lovegrove no longer had to troll for clients; they came to him, usually on bended knee and with promises of vast commissions. The secret of Lovegrove’s success lay in his unfailing eye and in his discretion. Lovegrove never betrayed a confidence; Lovegrove never gossiped or engaged in double-dealing. He was the rarest of birds in the art trade—a man of his word.
His reputation notwithstanding, Lovegrove was beset by his usual case of pre-auction jitters as he hurried along Sixth Avenue. After years of falling prices and anemic sales, the art market was at last beginning to show signs of renewal. The season’s first auctions had been respectable but had fallen short of expectations. Tonight’s sale, the Postwar and Contemporary at Christie’s, had the potential to set the art world ablaze. As usual, Lovegrove had clients at both ends of the action. Two were sellers—vendors, in the lexicon of the trade—while a third was looking to acquire Lot 12, Ocher and Red on Red, oil on canvas, by Mark Rothko. The client in question was unique in that Lovegrove did not know his name. He dealt only with a certain Mr. Hamdali in Paris, who in turn dealt with the client. The arrangement was unorthodox but, from Lovegrove’s perspective, highly lucrative. During the past twelve months alone, the collector had acquired more than two hundred million dollars’ worth of paintings. Lovegrove’s commissions on those sales were in excess of twenty million dollars. If things went according to plan tonight, his net worth would rise substantially.
He rounded the corner onto West Forty-ninth Street and walked a half block to the entrance of Christie’s. The soaring glass-walled lobby was a sea of diamonds, silk, ego, and collagen. Lovegrove paused briefly to kiss the perfumed cheek of a German packaging heiress before making his way to the coat check line, where he was promptly set upon by a pair of secondary dealers from the Upper East Side. He put them off with a defensive movement of his hand, then collected his bidding paddle and headed upstairs to the salesroom.
For all its intrigue and glamour, it was a surprisingly ordinary room, a cross between the United Nations General Assembly hall and the church of a television evangelist. The walls were a drab shade of gray-beige, as were the folding chairs, which were smashed tightly together to maximize the limited space. Behind the pulpitlike rostrum was a revolving display case and, next to the case, a bank of telephones staffed by a half-dozen Christie’s employees. Lovegrove glanced up at the sky suites, hoping to glimpse a face or two behind the tinted glass, then turned warily toward the reporters penned like cattle in the back corner. Concealing his paddle number, he hurried past them and headed to his usual seat at the front of the room. It was the Promised Land, the place where all dealers, consultants, and collectors hoped one day to sit. It was not a spot for the faint of heart or the short of cash. Lovegrove referred to it as “the kill zone.”
The auction was scheduled to begin at six. Francis Hunt, Christie’s chief auctioneer, granted his fidgety audience five additional minutes to find their seats before taking his place. He had polished manners and a droll English urbanity that for some inexplicable reason still made Americans feel inferior. In his right hand was the famous “black book” that held the secrets of the universe, at least as far as this evening was concerned. Each lot in the sale had its own page containing information such as the seller’s reserve, a seating chart showing the location of expected bidders, and Hunt’s strategy for extracting the highest possible price. Lovegrove’s name appeared on the page devoted to Lot 12, the Rothko. During a private presale viewing, Lovegrove had hinted he might be interested, but only if the price was right and the stars were in proper alignment. Hunt knew Lovegrove was lying, of course. Hunt knew everything.
He wished the audience a pleasant evening, then, with all the fanfare of a maître d’ summoning a party of four, said, “Lot One, the Twombly.” The bidding commenced immediately, moving swiftly upward in hundred-thousand-dollar increments. The auctioneer deftly managed the process with the help of two immaculately coiffed spotters who strutted and posed behind the rostrum like a pair of male models at a photo shoot. Lovegrove might have been impressed with the performance had he not known it was all carefully choreographed and rehearsed in advance. At one million five, the bidding stalled, only to be revived by a telephone bid for one million six. Five more bids followed in quick succession, at which point the bidding paused for a second time. “The bid is two point one million, with Cordelia on the telephone,” Hunt intoned, eyes moving seductively from bidder to bidder. “It’s not with you, madam. Nor with you, sir. Two point one, on the telephone, for the Twombly. Fair warning now. Last chance.” Down came the gavel with a sharp crack. “Thank you,” murmured Hunt as he recorded the transaction in his black book.
After the Twombly, it was the Lichtenstein, followed by the Basquiat, the Diebenkorn, the De Kooning, the Johns, the Pollock, and a parade of Warhols. Each work fetched more than the presale estimate and more than the previous lot. It was no accident; Hunt had cleverly stacked the deck to create an ascending scale of excitement. By the time Lot 12 slid onto the display case, he had the audience and the bidders exactly where he wanted them.
“On my right we have the Rothko,” he announced. “Shall we start the bidding at twelve million?”
It was two million above the presale estimate, a signal that Hunt expected the work to go big. Lovegrove drew a mobile phone from the breast pocket of his Brioni suit jacket and dialed a number in Paris. Hamdali answered. He had a voice like warm tea sweetened with honey.
“My client would like to get a sense of the room before making a first bid.”
“Wise move.”
Lovegrove placed the phone on his lap and folded his hands. It quickly became apparent they were in for a tough fight. Bids flew at Hunt from all corners of the room and from the Christie’s staff manning the telephones. Hector Candiotti, art adviser to a Belgian industrial magnate, was holding his paddle in the air like a crossing guard, a blusterous bidding technique known as steamrolling. Tony Berringer, who worked for a Russian aluminum oligarch, was bidding as though his life depended on it, which was not beyond the realm of possibility. Lovegrove waited until the price reached thirty million before picking up the phone again.
“Well?” he asked calmly.
“Not yet, Mr. Lovegrove.”
This time, Lovegrove kept the phone pressed to his ear. In Paris, Hamdali was speaking to someone in Arabic. Unfortunately, it was not one of the several languages Lovegrove spoke fluently. Biding his time, he surveyed the sky suites, searching for secret bidders. In one he noticed a beautiful young woman holding a mobile phone. After a few seconds, Lovegrove noticed something else. When Hamdali was speaking, the woman was sitting silently. And when the woman was speaking, Hamdali was saying nothing. It was probably a coincidence, he thought. But then again, maybe not.
“Perhaps it’s time to test the waters,” suggested Lovegrove, his eyes on the woman in the skybox.
“Perhaps you’re right,” answered Hamdali. “One moment, please.”
Hamdali murmured a few words in Arabic. A few seconds later, the woman in the skybox spoke into her mobile phone. Then, in English, Hamdali said, “The client agrees, Mr. Lovegrove. Please make your first bid.”
The current bid was thirty-four million. With the arch of a single eyebrow, Lovegrove raised it by another million.
“We have thirty-five,” said Hunt, in a tone that indicated a serious new predator had entered the fray. Hector Candiotti immediately countered, as did Tony Berringer. A pair of sparring telephone bidders pushed the price across the forty-million-dollar threshold. Then Jack Chambers, the real estate king, casually bid forty-one. Lovegrove wasn’t terribly worried about Jack. The affair with that little tart in New Jersey had cost him dearly in the divorce. Jack wasn’t liquid enough to go the distance.
“The bid is forty-one against you,” Lovegrove murmured into the telephone.
“The client believes there is a great deal of posturing going on.”
“It’s an art auction at Christie’s. Posturing is de rigueur.”
“Patience, Mr. Lovegrove.”
Lovegrove kept his eyes on the woman in the skybox as the bidding cracked the fifty-million-dollar threshold. Jack Chambers made a final bid at sixty; Tony Berringer and his Russian gangster did the honors at seventy. Hector Candiotti responded by waving the white flag.
“It looks like it’s down to us and the Russian,” Lovegrove said to the man in Paris.
“My client doesn’t care for Russians.”
“What would your client like to do about it?”
“What is Rothko’s record at auction?”
“Seventy-two and change.”
“Please bid seventy-five.”
“It’s too much. You’ll never—”
“Place the bid, Mr. Lovegrove.”
Lovegrove arched an eyebrow and raised five fingers. “The bid is seventy-five million,” said Hunt. “It’s not with you, sir. Nor with you. Seventy-five million, for the Rothko. Fair warning now. Last chance. All done?”
Crack.
A gasp rose in the room. Lovegrove looked up at the skybox, but the woman was gone.
Chapter 9
The Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall
WITH THE APPROVAL OF SCOTLAND YARD, the Home Office, and the British prime minister himself, Gabriel and Chiara returned to Cornwall three days after the bombing in Covent Garden. Madonna and Child with Mary Magdalene, oil on canvas, 110 by 92 centimeters, arrived at ten the following morning. After carefully removing the painting from its protective coffin, Gabriel placed it on an antique oak easel in the living room and spent the remainder of the afternoon studying the X-rays. The ghostly images only strengthened his opinion that the painting was indeed a Titian, and a very good Titian at that.
It had been several months since Gabriel had laid hands on a painting, and he was eager to begin work right away. Rising early the following morning, he prepared a bowl of café au lait and immediately threw himself into the delicate task of relining the canvas. The first step involved adhering tissue paper over the image to avoid further paint losses during the procedure. There were a number of over-the-counter glues suitable for the task, but Gabriel always preferred to mix his own adhesive using the recipe he had learned in Venice from the master restorer Umberto Conti—pellets of rabbit-skin glue dissolved in a mixture of water, vinegar, ox bile, and molasses.
He simmered the noxious-smelling concoction on the kitchen stove until it was the consistency of syrup, and watched the morning news on the BBC while waiting for the mixture to cool. Farid Khan was now a household name in the United Kingdom. Given the precise timing of his attack, Scotland Yard and British intelligence were operating under the assumption it was linked to the bombings in Paris and Copenhagen. Still unclear was the terrorist affiliation of the bombers. Debate among the television experts was intense, with one camp proclaiming the attacks were orchestrated by al-Qaeda’s old-line leadership in Pakistan and another declaring that they were clearly the work of a new network that had yet to produce a blip on the radar screens of Western intelligence. Whatever the case, European authorities were bracing for more bloodshed. MI5’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Center had raised the threat level to “critical,” meaning another attack was expected imminently.
Gabriel focused most intently on a report dealing with questions over Scotland Yard’s conduct in the minutes before the attack. In a carefully worded statement, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police acknowledged receiving a warning about a suspicious man in an oversized coat headed toward Covent Garden. Regrettably, said the commissioner, the tip did not rise to the level of specificity required for lethal action. He then confirmed that two SO19 officers had been dispatched to Covent Garden but said they had no choice under existing policy but to hold their fire. As for reports of a weapon being drawn, police had questioned the man involved and determined it was not a gun but a camera. For reasons of privacy, the man’s identity would not be revealed. The press appeared to accept the Met’s version of events, as did the civil libertarians, who applauded the restraint shown by the police even if it had meant the loss of eighteen innocent lives.
Gabriel switched off the television as Chiara entered the kitchen. She immediately opened a window to drive out the stench of the ox bile and vinegar and berated Gabriel for fouling her favorite stainless steel saucepan. Gabriel only smiled and dipped the tip of his forefinger into the mixture. It was now cool enough to use. With Chiara peering over his shoulder, he applied the glue evenly over the yellowed varnish and adhered several rectangles of tissue paper to the surface. Titian’s handiwork was now invisible and would remain so for the next several days, until the relining was complete.
Gabriel could do no more work that morning except to check on the painting periodically to make certain the glue was drying properly. He sat in the covered gazebo overlooking the sea, a notebook computer on his lap, and scoured the Internet for more information about the three bombings. He was tempted to check in with King Saul Boulevard but thought better of it. He had neglected to inform Tel Aviv of his brush with terror in Covent Garden, and to do so now would only give his former colleagues an excuse to intrude on his life. Gabriel had learned from experience it was best to treat the Office like a jilted lover. Contact had to be kept to a minimum and was best conducted in public places where a messy scene would be inappropriate.
Shortly before noon, the last remnants of a midnight gale passed over Gunwalloe Cove, leaving in its wake a clear sky of crystalline blue. After making one final check of the painting, Gabriel pulled on an anorak and a pair of hiking boots and headed out for his daily march along the cliffs. The previous afternoon he had trooped north along the Coastal Path to Praa Sands. Now he mounted the small rise behind the cottage and headed south toward Lizard Point.
It did not take long for the magic of the Cornish coast to chase away the memories of the dead and wounded in Covent Garden. Indeed, by the time Gabriel had reached the fringes of Mullion Golf Club, the last terrible image was safely concealed beneath a layer of obliterating paint. As he pressed farther south, past the rocky outcropping of the Polurrian Cliffs, he thought only of the work to be done on the Titian. Tomorrow he would carefully remove the painting from its stretcher and then adhere the weakened canvas to a swath of fresh Italian linen, pressing it firmly into place with a heavy tailoring iron. Next came the longest and most arduous phase of the restoration—removing the cracked and yellowed varnish and retouching those portions of the painting lost to time and stress. While some restorers tended to be aggressive in their retouching, Gabriel was known throughout the art world for the lightness of his touch and his uncanny ability to mimic the brushstrokes of the Old Masters. He believed it was the duty of a restorer to come and go without being seen, leaving no evidence of his presence other than a painting returned to its original glory.
By the time Gabriel reached the northern end of Kynance Cove, a line of dark clouds had obscured the sun, and the sea wind had turned markedly colder. A keen observer of Cornwall’s capricious weather, he could see that the “bright interval,” as British meteorologists liked to call periods of sunshine, was about to come to an abrupt end. He paused for a moment, debating where to take shelter. To the east, across a patchwork-quilt landscape, was Lizard village. Directly ahead was the point. Gabriel chose the second option. He didn’t want to shorten his walk over something as trivial as a passing squall. Besides, there was a good café atop the cliffs where he could wait out the storm over a freshly baked scone and a pot of tea.
He turned up the collar of his anorak and headed along the rim of the cove as the first rain began to fall. The café appeared, veiled in mist. At the base of the cliffs, sheltering against the leeward side of the derelict boathouse, was a man in his mid-twenties with short hair and sunglasses propped on his head. A second man was loitering atop the observation point, his eye pressed to a coin-operated telescope. Gabriel knew with certainty it had been inoperative for months.
He slowed to a stop and looked toward the café just as a third man stepped onto the terrace. He wore a waterproof hat pulled close to his brow and a pair of rimless eyeglasses favored by German intellectuals and Swiss bankers. His expression was one of impatience—a busy executive who had been forced by his wife to take a holiday. He stared directly at Gabriel for a long moment before lifting his thick wrist toward his face and consulting his watch. Gabriel was tempted to turn in the opposite direction. Instead, he lowered his gaze to the footpath and walked on. Better to do it in public, he thought. It would reduce the chances of a messy scene.
Chapter 10
Lizard Point, Cornwall
DID YOU REALLY HAVE TO order scones?” asked Uzi Navot resentfully.
“They’re the best in Cornwall. So is the clotted cream.”
Navot made no movement. Gabriel gave a perceptive smile.
“How much more weight does Bella want you to lose?”
“Five pounds. Then I get to go on maintenance,” Navot added gloomily, as though it were a prison sentence. “What I wouldn’t give for your metabolism. You’re married to one of the world’s greatest cooks, but you still have the body of a twenty-five-year-old. Me? I’m married to one of the country’s foremost experts on Syria, and if I even smell a pastry, I have to let my trousers out.”
“Maybe it’s time you told Bella to lighten up on the dietary restrictions.”
“You tell her,” Navot said. “All those years studying the Baathists in Damascus have left a mark on her. Sometimes I feel as though I’m living in a police state.”
They were seated at an isolated table near the rain-spattered windows. Gabriel was facing the interior; Navot, the sea. He was wearing a pair of corduroy trousers and a beige sweater that still smelled of the men’s department at Harrods. He placed his cap on an adjacent chair and ran a hand over his cropped strawberry-blond hair. It had a bit more gray in it than Gabriel remembered, but that was understandable. Uzi Navot was now the chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service. Gray hair was one of the many fringe benefits of the job.
Were Navot’s brief tenure to end now, it would almost certainly be regarded as among the most successful directorships in the long and storied history of the Office. The accolades that had been bestowed upon him were the result of Operation Masterpiece, the joint Anglo-American-Israeli undertaking that had resulted in the destruction of four secret Iranian nuclear facilities. Much of the credit rightly belonged to Gabriel, though Navot preferred not to dwell on that aspect of the affair. He had been awarded the job as chief only because Gabriel had repeatedly turned it down. And the four enrichment facilities would still be spinning away if Gabriel hadn’t identified and recruited the Swiss businessman who was covertly selling component parts to the Iranians.
For the moment, however, Navot’s thoughts seemed focused only on the plate of scones. Unable to resist any longer, he selected one, split it with great care, and smothered it with strawberry preserves and a dollop of the clotted cream. Gabriel poured himself a cup of tea from an aluminum pot and quietly asked about the purpose of Navot’s unannounced visit. He did so in fluent German, which he spoke with the Berlin accent of his mother. It was one of five languages he and Navot had in common.
“I had a number of housekeeping issues to discuss with my British counterparts. Included on the agenda was a somewhat perplexing report about one of our former agents who’s now living in retirement here under MI5 protection. There was a wild rumor going around about this agent and the bombing in Covent Garden. To be honest, I was a bit dubious when I heard it. Knowing this agent well, I couldn’t imagine that he would endanger his position in Britain by doing something so foolish as drawing his weapon in public.”
“What should I have done, Uzi?”
“You should have called your MI5 minder and washed your hands of it.”
“And if you had found yourself in a similar position?”
“If I were in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, I wouldn’t have hesitated to put the bastard down. But here . . .” Navot’s voice trailed off. “I suppose I would have considered the potential consequences of my actions first.”
“Eighteen people died, Uzi.”
“Consider yourself lucky the death toll wasn’t nineteen.” Navot removed his spindly eyeglasses, something he often did before embarking on an unpleasant conversation. “I’m tempted to ask whether you actually intended to take the shot. But given your training and your past exploits, I’m afraid I know the answer. An Office agent draws his weapon in the field for one reason and one reason only. He doesn’t wave it around like a gangster or make idle threats. He pulls the trigger and shoots to kill.” Navot paused, then added, “Do unto others before they have a chance to do unto you. I believe those words can be found on page twelve of Shamron’s little red book.”
“He knows about Covent Garden?”
“You know better than to ask a question like that. Shamron knows everything. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he heard about your little adventure before I did. Despite my attempts to ease him into permanent retirement, he insists on staying in contact with his sources from the old days.”
Gabriel added a few drops of milk to his tea and stirred it slowly. Shamron . . . The name was nearly synonymous with the history of Israel and its intelligence services. After fighting in the war that led to Israel’s reconstitution, Ari Shamron had spent the subsequent sixty years protecting the country from a host of enemies bent on its destruction. He had penetrated the courts of kings, stolen the secrets of tyrants, and killed countless foes, sometimes with his own hands, sometimes with the hands of men such as Gabriel. Only one secret had eluded Shamron—the secret of contentment. Aged now and in dreadful health, he clung desperately to his role as the éminence grise of Israel’s security establishment and still meddled in the internal affairs of the Office as though it were his private fiefdom. It was not arrogance that drove Shamron but a nagging fear that his entire life’s work had been in vain. Though economically prosperous and militarily strong, Israel remained surrounded by a world that was, for the most part, hostile to its very existence. The fact that Gabriel had chosen to reside in this world was among Shamron’s greatest disappointments.
“I’m surprised he didn’t come here himself,” Gabriel said.
“He was tempted.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“It’s not so easy for him to travel.”
“What’s wrong now?”
“Everything,” Navot said, shrugging his heavy shoulders. “He rarely leaves Tiberias these days. He just sits on his terrace staring out at the lake. He’s driving Gilah to distraction. She’s been begging me to give him something to do.”
“Should I go see him?”
“He’s not on his deathbed, if that’s what you’re implying. But you should pay a visit sometime soon. Who knows? You might actually decide that you like your country again.”
“I love my country, Uzi.”
“Just not enough to live there.”
“You always did remind me a bit of Shamron,” Gabriel said with a frown, “but now the resemblance is uncanny.”
“Gilah told me the same thing not long ago.”
“I didn’t mean it as a compliment.”
“Neither did she.” Navot added another spoonful of clotted cream to his scone with exaggerated care.
“So why are you here, Uzi?”
“I want to present you with a unique opportunity.”
“You sound like a salesman.”
“I’m a spy,” Navot said. “There’s not much of a difference.”
“What are you offering?”
“A chance to atone for a mistake.”
“What mistake was that?”
“You should have shot Farid Khan through the back of the head before he hit his detonator switch.” Navot lowered his voice and added confidingly, “That’s what I would have done, if I’d been in your shoes.”
“And how might I make amends for this lapse in judgment?”
“By accepting an invitation.”
“From whom?”
Navot gazed silently westward.
“The Americans?” asked Gabriel.
Navot smiled. “More tea?”
The rain ceased as abruptly as it began. Gabriel left money on the table and led Navot down the steep footpath to Polpeor Cove. The bodyguard was still leaning against the crumbled lifeboat ramp. He watched with feigned indifference as Gabriel and Navot made their way slowly across the rocky beach to the water’s edge. Navot cast a distracted glance at his stainless steel wristwatch and turned up his coat collar against the gusty wind rising from the sea. Gabriel was once again struck by the uncanny resemblance to Shamron. The likeness went beyond the superficial. It was as if Shamron, by the sheer force of his indomitable will, had somehow managed to take possession of Navot, body and soul. It was not the Shamron who had been weakened by age and infirmity, thought Gabriel, but Shamron in his prime. All that was missing were the wretched Turkish cigarettes that had ravaged Shamron’s health. Bella had never permitted Navot to smoke, not even for the sake of his cover.
“Who’s behind the bombings, Uzi?”
“Thus far, we’ve been unable to make a firm attribution. The Americans, however, seem to think he’s the future face of global jihadist terror—the new Bin Laden.”
“Does this new Bin Laden have a name?”
“The Americans insist on sharing that information with you face-to-face. They’d like you to come to Washington, all expenses paid, of course.”
“How was this invitation extended?”
“Adrian Carter called me personally.”
Adrian Carter was the director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service.
“What’s the dress code?”
“Black,” said Navot. “Your visit to America will be entirely off the books.”
Gabriel regarded Navot in silence for a moment. “You obviously want me to go, Uzi. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“It couldn’t hurt,” Navot said. “At the very least, it will give us an opportunity to hear what the Americans have to say about the bombings. But there are other fringe benefits as well.”
“Such as?”
“Our relationship could use a bit of retouching.”
“What sort of retouching?”
“Haven’t you heard? There’s a new wind blowing through Washington. Change is in the air,” Navot added sarcastically. “The new American president is an idealist. He believes he can repair relations between the West and Islam, and he’s convinced himself that we’re part of the problem.”
“So the solution is to send me, a former assassin with the blood of several Palestinian and Islamic terrorists on his hands?”
“When spies play nicely together, it tends to spill over into the political realm, which is why the prime minister is eager for you to make the trip as well.”
“The prime minister? The next thing you’re going to tell me is that Shamron is involved, too.”
“He is.” Navot picked up a stone and hurled it into the sea. “After the Iran op, I allowed myself to think Shamron might finally fade gracefully into the background. I was wrong. He has no intention of allowing me to run the Office without his constant interference. But that’s not surprising, is it, Gabriel? We both know Shamron had someone else in mind for the job. I’m fated to go down in the history of our illustrious service as the accidental chief. And you’ll always be the chosen one.”
“Choose someone else, Uzi. I’m retired. Remember? Send someone else to Washington.”
“Adrian won’t hear of it,” Navot said, rubbing his shoulder. “And neither will Shamron. As for your so-called retirement, it ended the moment you decided to follow Farid Khan into Covent Garden.”
Gabriel stared out at the sea and pictured the aftermath of the shot not taken: body parts and blood, Baghdad on the Thames. Navot seemed to sense what he was thinking. He pressed his advantage.
“The Americans would like you in Washington first thing in the morning. There’s a Gulfstream waiting for you outside London. It was one of the planes they used for the rendition program. They’ve assured me the handcuffs and hypodermic needles have been removed.”
“What about Chiara?”
“The invitation is for one.”
“She can’t stay here alone.”
“Graham has agreed to send a security team from London.”
“I don’t trust them, Uzi. Take her back to Israel with you. She can help Gilah look after the old man for a few days until I get back.”
“She might be there awhile.”
Gabriel looked at Navot carefully. He clearly knew more than he was saying. He usually did.
“I just agreed to restore a picture for Julian Isherwood.”
“A Madonna and Child with Mary Magdalene, formerly attributed to the Studio of Palma Vecchio, now tentatively attributed to Titian, pending peer review.”
“Very impressive, Uzi.”
“Bella’s been trying to broaden my horizons.”
“The painting can’t stay in an empty cottage by the sea.”
“Julian’s agreed to take it back. As you might expect, he’s rather disappointed.”
“I was supposed to be paid two hundred thousand pounds for that piece.”
“Don’t look at me, Gabriel. The cupboard is bare. I’ve been forced to institute across-the-board cuts in every department. The accountants are even after me to reduce my personal expenses. My per diem is a pittance.”
“Good thing you’re on a diet.”
Navot absently touched his midsection, as if checking to see whether it had expanded since leaving home.
“It’s a long drive back to London, Uzi. Maybe you should take along some of those scones.”
“Don’t even think about it.”
“You’re afraid Bella will find out?”
“I know she will.” Navot glared at the bodyguard leaning against the lifeboat ramp. “Those bastards tell her everything. It’s like living in a police state.”
Chapter 11
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
THE HOUSE STOOD IN THE 3300 BLOCK OF N STREET, one of an elegant terrace of Federal-style residences priced far beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest of Washingtonians. Gabriel climbed the curved front steps in the gray half-light of dawn and, as instructed, entered without ringing the bell. Adrian Carter waited in the foyer, dressed in wrinkled chinos, a crewneck sweater, and a tan corduroy blazer. The attire, combined with his tousled thinning hair and unfashionable mustache, gave him the air of a professor from a minor university, the sort who championed noble causes and was a constant thorn in the side of his dean. As director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, Carter had no cause these days other than keeping the American homeland safe from another terrorist attack—though twice each month, schedule permitting, he could be found in the basement of his Episcopal church in suburban Reston preparing meals for the homeless. For Carter, the volunteer work was a meditation, a rare opportunity to thrust his hands into something other than the internecine warfare that raged constantly in the conference rooms of America’s sprawling intelligence community.
He greeted Gabriel with the circumspection that comes naturally to men of the clandestine world and ushered him inside. Gabriel paused for a moment in the center hallway and looked around. Secret protocols had been made and broken in these drably furnished rooms; men had been seduced into betraying their countries for suitcases filled with American money and promises of American protection. Carter had used the property so often it was known throughout Langley as his Georgetown pied-à-terre. One Agency wit had christened it the Dar-al-Harb, Arabic for the “House of War.” It was covert war, of course, for Carter knew no other way to fight.
Adrian Carter had not actively sought power. It had been foisted upon his narrow shoulders block by unwanted block. Recruited by the Agency while still an undergraduate, he had spent most of his career waging secret war against the Russians—first in Poland, where he funneled money and mimeograph machines to Solidarity; then in Moscow, where he served as station chief; and finally in Afghanistan, where he encouraged and armed the soldiers of Allah, even though he knew that one day they would rain fire and death upon him. If Afghanistan would prove to be the Evil Empire’s undoing, it would provide Carter with a ticket to career advancement. He monitored the collapse of the Soviet Union not from the field but from a comfortable office at Langley, where he had recently been promoted to chief of the European Division. While his subordinates openly cheered the demise of their enemy, Carter watched the events unfold with a sense of foreboding. His beloved Agency had failed to predict Communism’s collapse, a blunder that would haunt Langley for years. Worse still, in the blink of an eye, the CIA had lost its very reason for existence.
That changed on the morning of September 11, 2001. The war that would follow would be a war fought in the shadows, a place Adrian Carter knew well. While the Pentagon had struggled to come up with a military response to the horror of 9/11, it was Carter and his staff at the Counterterrorism Center who produced a bold plan to destroy al-Qaeda’s Afghan sanctuary with a CIA-funded guerrilla war guided by a small force of American special operatives. And when the commanders and foot soldiers of al-Qaeda began falling into American hands, it was Carter, from his desk at Langley, who often served as their judge and jury. The black sites, the extraordinary renditions, the enhanced interrogation methods—they all bore Carter’s fingerprints. He felt no remorse over his actions; he hadn’t that luxury. For Adrian Carter, every morning was September 12. Never again, he vowed, would he watch Americans hurling themselves from burning skyscrapers because they could no longer bear the heat of a terrorist fire.
For ten years, Carter had managed to keep that promise. No one had done more to protect the American homeland from the much-anticipated second attack, and for his many secret sins, he had been pilloried in the press and threatened with criminal prosecution. On the advice of Agency lawyers, he had retained the services of a high-priced Washington attorney, an extravagance that had steadily drained his savings and forced his wife, Margaret, to return to teaching. Friends had urged Carter to forsake the Agency and take a lucrative position in Washington’s flourishing private security industry, but he refused. His failure to prevent the attacks of 9/11 haunted him still. And the ghosts of the three thousand compelled him to keep fighting until his enemy was vanquished.
The war had taken its toll on Carter—not only on his family life, which was a shambles, but on his health as well. His face was gaunt and drawn, and Gabriel noticed a slight tremor in Carter’s right hand as he joylessly filled a plate with the government-issue treats arrayed atop the sideboard in the dining room. “High blood pressure,” Carter explained, as he drew coffee from a pump-action thermos. “It started on Inauguration Day, and it rises and falls in relation to the terrorist threat level. It’s sad to say, but after ten years of fighting Islamic terror, I seem to have become a living, breathing National Threat Advisory.”
“What level are we today?”
“Didn’t you hear?” asked Carter. “We’ve abandoned the old color-coded system.”
“What’s your blood pressure telling you?”
“Red,” said Carter dourly. “Bright red.”
“Not according to your director of homeland security. She says there’s no immediate threat.”
“She doesn’t always write her own lines.”
“Who does?”
“The White House,” said Carter. “And the president doesn’t like to needlessly alarm the American people. Besides, raising the threat level would conflict with the convenient narrative making its way around the Washington chattering classes these days.”
“Which narrative is that?”
“The one that says America overreacted to 9/11. The one that says al-Qaeda is no longer a threat to anyone, let alone the most powerful nation on the face of the earth. The one that says it’s time to declare victory in the global war on terror and turn our attention inward.” Carter frowned. “God, but I hate it when journalists use the word ‘narrative.’ There was a time when novelists wrote narrative and journalists were content to report facts. And the facts are quite simple. There exists in the world today an organized force that seeks to weaken or even destroy the West through acts of indiscriminate violence. This force is a part of a broader radical movement to impose sharia law and restore the Islamic Caliphate. And no amount of wishful thinking will make it go away.”
They sat on opposite sides of the rectangular table. Carter picked at the edge of a stale croissant, his thoughts clearly elsewhere. Gabriel knew better than to rush the proceedings. In conversation, Carter could be a bit of a wanderer. Eventually, he would make his way to the point, but there would be several detours and digressions along the way, all of which would undoubtedly prove useful to Gabriel at a later date.
“In some respects,” Carter continued, “I’m sympathetic to the president’s desire to turn the page of history. He views the global war on terrorism as a distraction from his larger goals. You might find this difficult to believe, but I’ve seen him on just two occasions. He calls me Andrew.”
“But at least he’s given us hope.”
“Hope is not an acceptable strategy when lives are at stake. Hope is what led to 9/11.”
“So who’s pulling the strings inside the administration?”
“James McKenna, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, also known as the terrorism czar, which is interesting since he’s issued an edict banning the word ‘terrorism’ from all our public pronouncements. He even discourages its use behind closed doors. And heaven forbid if we happen to place the word ‘Islamic’ anywhere near it. As far as James McKenna is concerned, we aren’t engaged in a war against Islamic terrorists. We’re engaged in an international effort against a small band of transnational extremists. These extremists, who just happen to be Muslims, are an irritant, but pose no real threat to our existence or way of life.”
“Tell that to the families of those who died in Paris, Copenhagen, and London.”
“That’s an emotional response,” Carter said sardonically. “And James McKenna doesn’t tolerate emotion when it comes to talking about terrorism.”
“You mean extremism,” said Gabriel.
“Forgive me,” Carter said. “McKenna is a political animal who fancies himself an expert on intelligence. He worked on the staff of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee in the nineties and came to Langley shortly after the Greek arrived. He lasted only a few months, but that doesn’t stop him from describing himself as a veteran of the CIA. To hear McKenna tell it, he’s an Agency man who has the best interests of the Agency at heart. The truth is somewhat different. He loathes the Agency and all those who toil within its walls. Most of all, he despises me.”
“Why?”
“Apparently, I embarrassed him during a senior staff meeting. I don’t remember the incident, but it seems McKenna has never gotten over it. Beyond that, I’m told McKenna regards me as a monster who’s done irreparable harm to America’s image in the world. Nothing would make him happier than to see me behind bars.”
“It’s good to know the U.S. intelligence community is functioning smoothly again.”
“Actually, McKenna is under the impression it’s working just fine now that he’s running the entire show. He even managed to get himself appointed chairman of our new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group. If a major terrorist figure is captured anywhere in the world, under any circumstances, James McKenna will be in charge of questioning him. It’s a great deal of power to place in the hands of a single person, even if that person were competent. But, unfortunately, James McKenna doesn’t fall into that category. He’s ambitious, he’s well intentioned, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing. And if he isn’t careful, he’s going to get us all killed.”
“Sounds charming,” said Gabriel. “When do I get to meet him?”
“Never.”
“So why am I here, Adrian?”
“You’re here because of Paris, Copenhagen, and London.”
“Who carried it out?”
“A new branch of al-Qaeda,” said Carter. “But I’m afraid they had support from a person who occupies a sensitive and powerful position in Western intelligence.”
“Who?”
Carter said nothing more. His right hand was shaking.
Chapter 12
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
THEY ADJOURNED TO THE REAR terrace and settled into a pair of wrought-iron chairs along the balustrade. Carter balanced a coffee cup on his knee and gazed toward the gray spires rising gracefully above Georgetown University. Paradoxically, he was speaking of a shabby district of San Diego, where, on a summer day in 1999, there arrived a young Yemeni cleric named Rashid al-Husseini. With money provided by a Saudi-based Islamic charity, the Yemeni purchased a run-down commercial property, established a mosque, and went in search of a congregation. He did most of his hunting on the campus of San Diego State University, where he acquired a devoted following among Arab students who had come to America to escape the stifling social oppression of their homelands, only to find themselves lost and adrift in the ghurba, the land of strangers. Rashid was uniquely qualified to serve as their guide. The only son of a former Yemeni government minister, he had been born in America, spoke colloquial American English, and was the not-so-proud owner of an American passport.
“All sorts of strays and lost souls began stumbling into Rashid’s mosque, including a pair of Saudis named Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.” Carter glanced at Gabriel and added, “I trust you’re familiar with the names.”
“They were two of the muscle hijackers from American Flight 77, personally selected by none other than Osama Bin Laden himself. In January 2000, they were present at the planning meeting in Kuala Lumpur, after which the Bin Laden Unit of the CIA managed to lose track of them. Later, it was discovered that both had flown to Los Angeles and were probably still in the United States—a fact you neglected to tell the FBI.”
“Much to my everlasting shame,” said Carter. “But this isn’t a story about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi.”
It was a story, Carter resumed, about Rashid al-Husseini, who soon developed a reputation in the Islamic world as a magnetic preacher, a man to whom Allah had granted a beautiful and seductive tongue. His sermons became required listening, not only in San Diego but also in the Middle East, where they were distributed by audiotape. In the spring of 2001, he was offered a clerical position at an influential Islamic center outside Washington, in suburban Falls Church, Virginia. Before long, Nawaf al-Hazmi was praying there, along with a young Saudi from Taif named Hani Hanjour.
“Coincidentally,” said Carter, “the mosque is located on Leesburg Pike. If you hang a left onto Columbia Pike and go a couple of miles, you run smack into the western façade of the Pentagon, which is exactly what Hani Hanjour did on the morning of 9/11. Rashid was in his office at the time. He actually heard the plane pass overhead a few seconds before impact.”
It did not take long for the FBI to connect al-Hazmi and Hanjour to the Falls Church mosque, said Carter, or for the news media to beat a path to Rashid’s door. What they discovered was an eloquent and enlightened young cleric, a man of moderation who condemned the attacks of 9/11 without equivocation and urged his Muslim brethren to forsake violence and terrorism in all its forms. The White House was so impressed with the charismatic imam that he was invited to join several other Muslim scholars and clerics for a private meeting with the president. The State Department thought Rashid might be the perfect sort of figure to help build a bridge between America and one and a half billion skeptical Muslims. The Agency, however, had another idea.
“We thought Rashid could help us to penetrate the camp of our new enemy,” said Carter. “But before we made our approach, we had to answer a few questions. Namely, was he somehow involved in the 9/11 plot, or were his contacts with the three hijackers purely coincidental? We looked at him from every conceivable angle, starting from the assumption that he had a great deal of American blood on his hands. We looked at timetables. We looked at who was where and when. And at the end of the process, we concluded that Imam Rashid al-Husseini was clean.”
“And then?”
“We dispatched an emissary to Falls Church to see whether Rashid might be willing to put his words into action. His response was positive. We picked him up the next day and took him to a secure location near the Pennsylvania border. And then the real fun began.”
“You started the assessment process all over again.”
Carter nodded. “But this time, we had the subject seated before us, strapped to a polygraph. We questioned him for three days, pulling apart his past and his associations, piece by piece.”
“And his story held up.”
“He passed with flying colors. So we placed our proposition on the table, accompanied by a great deal of money. It was a simple operation. Rashid would tour the Islamic world, preaching tolerance and moderation while at the same time supplying us with the names of other potential recruits to our cause. In addition, he was to be on the lookout for angry young men who appeared vulnerable to the siren song of the jihadis. We took him on a domestic test drive, working closely with the FBI. And then we went international.”
Operating from a base in a predominately Muslim neighborhood in East London, Rashid spent the next three years crisscrossing Europe and the Middle East. He spoke at conferences, preached in mosques, and sat for interviews with fawning journalists. He denounced Bin Laden as a murderer who had violated the laws of Allah and the teachings of the Prophet. He recognized the right of Israel to exist and called for a negotiated peace with the Palestinians. He condemned Saddam Hussein as thoroughly un-Islamic, though, on the advice of his CIA handlers, he stopped short of endorsing the American invasion. His message did not always go over well with his audiences, nor were his activities confined to the physical world. With CIA assistance, Rashid built a presence on the Internet, where he attempted to compete with the jihadist propaganda of al-Qaeda. Visitors to the site were identified and tracked as they moved through cyberspace.
“The operation was regarded as one of our most successful efforts to penetrate a world that, for the most part, we had found almost entirely opaque. Rashid fed his handlers a steady stream of names, good guys and potential bad guys, and even tipped them off about some plots that were brewing. At Langley, we spent a great deal of time marveling at our cleverness. We thought it would go on forever. But it all ended rather suddenly.”
The setting, fittingly enough, was Mecca. Rashid had been invited to speak at the university, a high honor for a cleric who had been cursed with an American passport. Given the fact that Mecca is closed to infidels, the CIA had no choice but to allow him to go alone. He flew from Amman to Riyadh, where he met a final time with one of his CIA handlers, then boarded an internal Saudia Airlines flight to Mecca. His speech was scheduled for eight that evening. Rashid never showed up. He had vanished without a trace.
“At first, we feared he’d been kidnapped and killed by a local branch of al-Qaeda. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case. Our prized possession resurfaced on the Internet a few weeks later. The eloquent, enlightened young man of moderation was gone. He’d been replaced by a raving fanatic who preached that the only way to deal with the West was to destroy it.”
“He deceived you.”
“Obviously.”
“For how long?”
“That remains an open question,” said Carter. “There are some at Langley who believe Rashid was bad from the beginning, others who theorize he was driven over the edge by the guilt of working as a spy for the infidels. Whatever the case, one thing is beyond dispute. During the time he was traveling the Islamic world on my dime, he recruited an impressive network of operatives, right under our noses. He’s the ultimate talent spotter and skilled in the art of deception and misdirection. We hoped he would stick to preaching and recruiting, but that hope turned out to be misplaced. The attacks in Europe were Rashid’s coming-out party. He wants to replace Osama Bin Laden as leader of the global jihadist movement. He also wants to do something Bin Laden was never able to accomplish after 9/11.”
“Strike the Far Enemy in his homeland,” said Gabriel. “Shed American blood on American soil.”
“With a network bought and paid for by the Central Intelligence Agency,” Carter added soberly. “How would you like that chiseled on your headstone? If it were ever made public that Rashid al-Husseini was once on our payroll . . .” Carter’s voice trailed off. “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”
“What do you want from me, Adrian?”
“I want you to make the bombing in Covent Garden the last attack Rashid al-Husseini ever carries out. I want you to smash his network before anyone else dies because of my folly.”
“Is that all?”
“No,” said Carter. “I want you to keep the entire operation secret from the president, James McKenna, and the rest of the American intelligence community.”
Chapter 13
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
ADRIAN CARTER WAS DOCTRINAIRE WHEN it came to matters of tradecraft, which meant he could not talk for too long within the confines of a safe house, even if it was one of his own. They descended the curved front steps and, with a single CIA security man in tow, headed westward along N Street. It was a few minutes after nine o’clock. Carter’s penny loafers tapped rhythmically on the redbrick sidewalk, but Gabriel seemed to move without a sound. A Metro bus rumbled past, filled to capacity. Gabriel pictured the same bus torn in half and engulfed in flames.
“Where did he go after leaving Mecca?”
“We believe he’s living under the protection of tribal elements in the Rafadh Valley of Yemen. It’s a completely lawless place, without schools, paved roads, or even a reliable supply of water. In fact, the entire country is dry as a bone. Sana might be the first capital city on Earth to actually run out of water.”
“But not Islamic militants,” said Gabriel.
“Oh, no,” Carter agreed. “Yemen is well on its way to becoming the next Afghanistan. For now, we’ve been content to lob the occasional Hellfire missile over the border. But it’s only a matter of time before we have to put boots on the ground and drain the swamp.” He glanced at Gabriel and added, “There actually are swamps in Yemen, by the way—a string of marshes along the coastline that produce malarial mosquitoes the size of buzzards. My God, what a dreadful place.”
Carter walked in silence for a moment with his hands clasped behind his back and his head down. Gabriel deftly sidestepped a tree root that had risen through the sidewalk and asked how Rashid managed to communicate with his network from so remote a place.
“We haven’t been able to figure that out,” Carter replied. “We assume he’s using local tribesmen to ferry messages to Sana or perhaps across the Gulf of Aden to Somalia, where he’s forged a relationship with the al-Shabaab terror group. We’re certain of one thing, though. Rashid spends no time on the phone, satellite or otherwise. He learned a great deal about American capabilities when he was on our payroll. And now that he’s gone over to the other side, he’s put that knowledge to good use.”
“I don’t suppose you also taught him how to plan and execute a synchronized series of attacks in three European countries.”
“Rashid is a talent spotter and a source of inspiration,” said Carter, “but he’s no operational mastermind. He’s clearly working with someone good. If I had to guess, the three attacks in Europe were carried out by someone who cut his teeth in—”
“Baghdad,” Gabriel said, finishing Carter’s thought for him.
“The MIT of terrorism,” Carter added, nodding in agreement. “Its graduates are all PhDs, and they served their internships by matching wits with the Agency and the American military.”
“All the more reason why you should deal with them.”
Carter made no reply.
“Why us, Adrian?”
“Because the American counterterrorism apparatus has grown so large we can’t seem to get out of our own way. At last count, we had more than eight hundred thousand people with top-secret clearances. Eight hundred thousand,” Carter repeated incredulously, “and yet we still weren’t able to prevent a single Islamic militant from planting a bomb in the heart of Times Square. Our ability to collect information is unrivaled, but we’re too big and far too redundant to be effective. We are Americans, after all, and when confronted with a threat, we throw large amounts of money at it. Sometimes, it’s better to be small and ruthless. Like you.”
“We warned you about the perils of reorganizing.”
“And we would have been wise to listen,” said Carter. “But our unwieldy size is only part of the problem. After 9/11, the gloves came off, and we adopted a whatever-it-takes attitude when it came to dealing with the enemy. These days, we try not to mention the enemy by name, lest we offend him. At Langley, counterterrorism jobs are considered politically risky. All the best officers in the Clandestine Service are learning to speak Mandarin.”
“The Chinese aren’t actively plotting to kill Americans.”
“But Rashid is,” Carter said, “and our intelligence suggests he’s planning something spectacular in the very near future. We need to break his network, and we need to do it quickly. But we can’t do that if we’re forced to operate under the new rules put in place by President Hope and his well-intentioned accomplice James McKenna.”
“So you want us to do your dirty work for you.”
“I’d do the same for you,” Carter said. “And don’t try to tell me that you lack the capability. The Office was the first Western-oriented intelligence service to establish an analytical unit dedicated to the global jihadist movement. You were also first to identify Osama Bin Laden as a major terrorist, and the first to have a go at killing him. If you’d succeeded, it’s highly likely that 9/11 would never have happened.”
They arrived at the corner of Thirty-fifth Street. The next block was closed to traffic by a barricade. On the opposite side, children from the Holy Trinity School skipped rope and tossed balls in the street, their joyous screams reverberating off the façades of the surrounding buildings. It was an idyllic scene, full of charm and life, but it made Carter visibly uneasy.
“Homeland security is a myth,” he said, gazing at the children. “It’s a bedtime story we tell our people to make them feel safe at night. Despite all our best efforts and all our billions spent, the United States is largely indefensible. The only way to prevent attacks on American soil is to snuff them out before they reach our shores. We have to rip apart their networks and kill their operatives.”
“Killing Rashid al-Husseini might not be a bad idea, either.”
“We’d love to,” said Carter. “But that won’t be possible until we can find some way into his inner circle.”
Carter led Gabriel northward along Thirty-fifth Street. He removed his pipe from the pocket of his coat and began absently loading the bowl with tobacco.
“You’ve been fighting the terrorists longer than anyone else in the business, Gabriel—anyone but Shamron, of course. You know how to penetrate their networks, something we’ve never been very good at, and you know how to turn them inside out. I want you to get inside Rashid’s network and destroy it. I want you to make it go away.”
“Penetrating jihadist terror networks isn’t the same as penetrating the PLO. They’re far too clannish to accept outsiders into their midst, and their members are largely immune to earthly temptations.”
“A rose is a rose is a rose. And a network is a network is a network.”
“Meaning?”
“I’ll grant you there are differences between jihadist and Palestinian terror networks, but the basic structure is the same. There are planners and foot soldiers, paymasters and quartermasters, couriers and safe houses. And at the points where all these pieces intersect, there is vulnerability just waiting to be exploited by someone as clever as you.”
A breath of wind carried the pipe smoke into Gabriel’s face. Blended exclusively for Carter by a tobacconist in New York, it smelled of burning leaves and wet dog. Gabriel waved it away and asked, “How would it work?”
“Does that mean you’ll do it?”
“No,” said Gabriel, “it means I want to know exactly how it would work.”
“You would operate as a virtual station of the Counterterrorism Center, in much the same way the Bin Laden Unit functioned before 9/11, but with one important difference.”
“The rest of the CTC won’t know I’m there.”
Carter nodded. “All document requests will be handled by my staff and me. And when it’s time for you to go operational, I’ll act as a clandestine traffic cop to make sure you don’t trip over any ongoing Agency operations, and they don’t trip over you.”
“I would need to see everything you have. Everything, Adrian.”
“You’ll be given access to the most sensitive intelligence available to the government of the United States, including the case files on Rashid and all the NSA intercepts. You’ll also be allowed to see all the intelligence on the three attacks that’s flowing to us from our sister services in Europe.” Carter paused. “I would think that information alone would be tempting enough for you to accept the assignment. After all, your liaison relationships with the Europeans aren’t terribly good at the moment.”
Gabriel didn’t respond directly. “It’s too much material to review on my own. I’d need help.”
“You can import as much help as you want, within reason. Given the sensitive nature of the intelligence, I’ll also need someone from the Agency looking over your shoulder. Someone who knows your mischievous ways. I have a candidate in mind.”
“Where is she?”
“Waiting in a café on Wisconsin Avenue.”
“You’re very sure of yourself, Adrian.”
Carter stopped walking and checked his pipe. “Were I to stoop to raw sentimentality,” he said after a moment, “I would remind you of the carnage you witnessed last Friday afternoon in Covent Garden and ask you to imagine it played out over and over again. But I won’t do that, because it would be unprofessional. Instead, I will tell you that Rashid has an army of martyrs just like Farid Khan waiting to do his bidding, an army he recruited with my help. I made Rashid. He’s my mistake. And I need you to destroy him before anyone else has to die.”
“You might find this difficult to believe, but I actually don’t have the authority to say yes to you. Uzi would have to sign off on it first.”
“He already has. So has your prime minister.”
“I suppose you’ve also had a quiet word with Graham Seymour.”
Carter nodded. “For obvious reasons, Graham would like to be kept abreast of your progress. He would also like advance warning if your operation happens to wash ashore in the British Isles.”
“You misled me, Adrian.”
“I’m a spy,” Carter said, relighting his pipe. “I lie as a matter of course. So do you. Now you just have to figure out a way to lie to Rashid. Just be careful how you go about it. He’s very good, our Rashid. I have the scars to prove it.”
Chapter 14
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
THE CAFÉ WAS LOCATED AT the northern end of Georgetown, at the foot of Book Hill Park. Gabriel ordered a cappuccino from the bar and carried it through a pair of open French doors into a small garden with vine-covered walls. Three of the tables were in shadow; the fourth, in brilliant sunlight. A woman sat there alone, reading a newspaper. She wore a black running suit that clung tightly to her slender frame, and a pair of spotless white training shoes. Her shoulder-length blond hair was brushed straight back from her forehead and held in place by an elastic band at the nape of her neck. Sunglasses concealed her eyes but not her remarkable beauty. She removed the glasses as Gabriel approached and tilted her face to be kissed. She seemed surprised to see him.
“I was hoping it would be you,” said Sarah Bancroft.
“Adrian didn’t tell you I was coming?”
“He’s much too old-fashioned for that,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. She had a voice and manner of speech from another age. It was like listening to a character from a Fitzgerald novel. “He dropped me a secure e-mail last night and told me to be here at nine. I was to stay until ten-thirty. If no one appeared, I was to leave and go to work as normal. It’s a good thing you came. You know how much I hate being stood up.”
“I see you brought reading material,” Gabriel said, glancing at the newspaper.
“You disapprove?”
“Office doctrine forbids agents to read newspapers in cafés. It’s far too obvious.” He paused, then added, “I thought we trained you better than that, Sarah.”
“You did. But on occasion, I like to behave like a normal person. And a normal person sometimes finds it pleasurable to read a newspaper in a café on a sunny autumn morning.”
“With a Glock concealed at the small of her back.”
“Thanks to you, it’s my constant companion.”
Sarah gave a melancholy smile. The daughter of a wealthy Citibank executive, she had spent much of her childhood in Europe, where she had acquired a Continental education along with Continental languages and impeccable Continental manners. She had returned to America to attend Dartmouth, and later, after spending a year at the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art in London, she became the youngest woman ever to earn a PhD in art history at Harvard.
But it was Sarah Bancroft’s love life, not her sterling education, that led her into the world of intelligence. While finishing her dissertation, she began dating a young lawyer named Ben Callahan who had the misfortune of boarding United Airlines Flight 175 on the morning of September 11, 2001. He managed to make one telephone call before the plane plunged into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. That call was to Sarah. With Adrian Carter’s blessing, and with the help of a lost van Gogh, Gabriel inserted her into the entourage of a Saudi billionaire named Zizi al-Bakari in a daring bid to find the terrorist mastermind lurking within it. At the conclusion of the operation, she had joined the CIA and was assigned to the Counterterrorism Center. Since then, she had maintained close contact with the Office and had worked with Gabriel and his team on numerous occasions. She had even taken an Office lover, an assassin and field operative named Mikhail Abramov. Judging by the absence of a ring on her finger, the relationship was proceeding at a slower pace than she had hoped.
“We’ve been on-again-off-again for a while,” she said, as if reading Gabriel’s thoughts.
“And at the moment?”
“Off,” she said. “Definitely off.”
“I told you not to become involved with a man who kills for his country.”
“You were right, Gabriel. You’re always right.”
“So what happened?”
“I’d rather not go into all the sordid details.”
“He told me he was in love with you.”
“He told me the same thing. Funny how that works.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“I don’t think I’m capable of being hurt any longer.” It took a moment for Sarah to smile. She wasn’t being honest; Gabriel could see that.
“Do you want me to have a word with him?”
“Heavens, no,” she said. “I’m more than capable of screwing up my life completely on my own.”
“He’s been through a couple of difficult operations, Sarah. The last one was—”
“He told me all about it,” she said. “I sometimes wish he hadn’t come out of the Alps alive.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“No,” she said grudgingly, “but it felt good to say it.”
“Maybe it’s for the better. You should find someone who doesn’t live on the other side of the world. Someone here in Washington.”
“And how should I respond when they ask me where I work?”
Gabriel said nothing.
“I’m not getting any younger, you know. I just turned—”
“Thirty-seven,” said Gabriel.
“Which means I’m rapidly approaching old-maid status,” Sarah said, frowning. “I suppose the best I can hope for at this point is a comfortable but passionless marriage to an older man of means. If I’m lucky, he’ll permit me to have a child or two, whom I’ll be forced to raise on my own because he’ll have no interest in them.”
“Surely it’s not as depressing as all that.”
She shrugged and sipped her coffee. “How are things between you and Chiara?”
“Perfect,” said Gabriel.
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Sarah murmured archly.
“Sarah . . .”
“Don’t worry, Gabriel, I got over you a long time ago.”
A pair of middle-aged women entered the garden and sat at the opposite end. Sarah leaned forward in feigned intimacy and, in French, asked Gabriel what he was doing in town. He responded by tapping the front page of her newspaper.
“Since when is our soaring national debt a problem for Israeli intelligence?” she asked playfully.
Gabriel pointed toward the front-page story about the debate raging within the American intelligence community about the provenance of the three attacks in Europe.
“How did you get dragged into it?”
“Chiara and I decided to take a stroll through Covent Garden last Friday afternoon on our way to lunch.”
Sarah’s expression darkened. “So the reports about an unidentified man drawing a weapon a few seconds before the attack—”
“Are true,” said Gabriel. “I could have saved eighteen lives. Unfortunately, the British wouldn’t hear of it.”
“So who do you think was responsible?”
“You’re the terrorism expert, Sarah. You tell me.”
“It’s possible the attacks were masterminded by the old-line al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan,” she said. “But in my opinion, we’re dealing with an entirely new network.”
“Led by whom?”
“Someone with the charisma of Bin Laden who could recruit his own operatives in Europe and call upon cells from other terror groups.”
“Any candidates?”
“Just one,” she said. “Rashid al-Husseini.”
“Why Paris?”
“The ban on the facial veil.”
“Copenhagen?”
“They’re still seething over the cartoons.”
“And London?”
“London is low-hanging fruit. London can be attacked at will.”
“Not bad for a former curator at the Phillips Collection.”
“I’m an art historian, Gabriel. I know how to connect dots. I can connect a few more, if you like.”
“Please do.”
“Your presence in Washington means the rumors are true.”
“What rumors are those?”
“The ones about Rashid being on the Agency’s payroll after 9/11. The ones about a good idea that went very bad. Adrian believed in Rashid and Rashid repaid that trust by building a network right under our noses. Now I suppose Adrian would like you to take care of the problem for him—off the books, of course.”
“Is there any other way?”
“Not where you’re concerned,” she said. “What does this have to do with me?”
“Adrian needs someone to spy on me. You were the obvious candidate.” Gabriel hesitated, then said, “But if you think it would be too awkward . . .”
“Because of Mikhail?”
“It’s possible you’ll be working together again, Sarah. I wouldn’t want personal feelings to interfere with the smooth functioning of the team.”
“Since when has your team ever functioned smoothly? You’re Israelis. You fight with one another constantly.”
“But we never allow personal feelings to influence operational decisions.”
“I’m a professional,” she said. “Given our history together, I shouldn’t think I’d need to remind you of that.”
“You don’t.”
“So where do we start?”
“We need to get to know Rashid a bit better.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“By reading his Agency files.”
“But they’re filled with lies.”
“That’s correct,” said Gabriel. “But those lies are like layers of paint on a canvas. Peel them away, and we might find ourselves staring directly at the truth.”
“No one ever speaks that way at Langley.”
“I know,” Gabriel said. “If they did, I’d still be in Cornwall working on a Titian.”
Chapter 15
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
GABRIEL AND SARAH TOOK UP residence at the house on N Street at nine the following morning. The first batch of files arrived one hour later—six stainless steel crates, all sealed with digital locks. For some unfathomable reason, Carter entrusted the combinations only to Sarah. “Rules are rules,” he said, “and Agency rules state that officers of foreign intelligence services are never to be given the combinations of document receptacles.” When Gabriel pointed out that he was being allowed to see some of the Agency’s dirtiest laundry, Carter was unyielding. Technically speaking, the material was to remain in Sarah’s possession. The taking of notes was to be kept to a minimum and photocopying was forbidden. Carter personally removed the secure fax machine and requested Gabriel’s mobile phone—a request Gabriel politely declined. The phone had been issued to him by the Office and contained several features not available commercially. In fact, he had used it the previous evening to sweep the house for listening devices. He had found four. Obviously, interservice cooperation only went so far.
The initial shipment of files all focused on Rashid’s time in America before 9/11 and his connections, nefarious or serendipitous, to the plot itself. Most of the material had been generated by Langley’s unglamorous rival, the FBI, and had been shared during the brief period when, by presidential order, the two agencies were supposed to be cooperating. It revealed that Rashid al-Husseini popped up on the Bureau’s radar within weeks of his arrival in San Diego and was the target of somewhat apathetic surveillance. There were transcripts from the court-approved wiretaps on his phones and surveillance photos shot during the brief periods when the San Diego and Washington field offices had the time and manpower to follow him. There was also a copy of the classified interagency review that officially cleared Rashid of playing any role in the 9/11 plot. It was, thought Gabriel, a profoundly naïve piece of work that chose to portray the cleric in the kindest possible light. Gabriel believed a man was the company he kept, and he had been around terror networks long enough to know an operative when he saw one. Rashid al-Husseini was almost certainly a messenger or an innkeeper. At the very least, he was a fellow traveler. And, in Gabriel’s opinion, fellow travelers should rarely be taken on by intelligence services as paid agents of influence. They should be watched and, if necessary, dealt with harshly.
The next shipment contained the transcripts and recordings of Rashid’s interrogation by the CIA, followed soon after by the detritus of the ill-fated operation in which he had played a starring role. The material concluded with a despairing after-action postmortem, written in the days following Rashid’s defection in Mecca. The operation, it said, had been poorly conceived from the outset. Much of the blame was placed squarely at the feet of Adrian Carter, who was faulted for lax oversight. Attached was Carter’s own assessment, which was scarcely less scathing. Predicting there would be blowback, he recommended a thorough review of Rashid’s contacts in the United States and Europe. Carter’s director had overruled him. The Agency was stretched too thin to go chasing after shadows, the director said. Rashid was back in Yemen where he belonged. Good riddance.
“Not exactly the Agency’s finest hour,” Sarah declared late that evening, during a break in the proceedings. “We were fools to ever use him.”
“The Agency began with the correct assumption, that Rashid was bad, but somewhere along the line it fell under his spell. It’s easy to see how it happened. Rashid was very persuasive.”
“Almost as persuasive as you.”
“But I don’t send my recruits into crowded streets to carry out acts of indiscriminate murder.”
“No,” said Sarah, “you send them onto secret battlefields to smite your enemies.”
“It’s not as biblical as all that.”
“Yes, it is. Trust me, I should know.” She looked wearily at the stacks of files. “We still have a mountain of material to go through, and it’s only the beginning. The floodgates are about to open.”
“Don’t worry,” Gabriel said, smiling. “Help is on the way.”
They arrived at Dulles Airport late the following afternoon under false names and with false passports in their pockets. They were not punished for their sins; quite the opposite, a team of Agency minders whisked them through customs and then herded them into a fleet of armored Escalades for the drive into Washington. Per Adrian Carter’s instructions, the Escalades departed Dulles at fifteen-minute intervals. As a result, the most storied team of operatives in the intelligence world settled into the house on N Street that evening with the neighbors being none the wiser.
Chiara arrived first, followed a moment later by an Office terrorism expert named Dina Sarid. Petite and dark-haired, Dina knew the horrors of extremist violence all too well. She had been standing on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street on October 19, 1994, when a Hamas suicide bomber turned the Number 5 bus into a coffin for twenty-one people. Her mother and two of her sisters were among the dead; Dina was seriously injured and still walked with a slight limp. Upon her recovery, she vowed to defeat the terrorists not with force but with her brain. A human database, she was capable of reciting the time, place, perpetrators, and casualty toll of every act of terrorism committed against Israeli and Western targets. Dina had once told Gabriel that she knew more about the terrorists than they knew about themselves. And Gabriel had believed her.
Next came a man of late middle age named Eli Lavon. Small and disheveled, with wispy gray hair and intelligent brown eyes, Lavon was regarded as the finest street surveillance artist the Office had ever produced. Blessed with a natural anonymity, he appeared to be one of life’s downtrodden. In reality, he was a predator who could follow a highly trained intelligence officer or a hardened terrorist along any street in the world without arousing a flicker of interest. Lavon’s ties to the Office, like Gabriel’s, were now tenuous at best. He still lectured at the Academy—no Office recruit was ever sent into the field without first spending a few hours at Lavon’s feet—but these days, his primary work address was Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, where he taught archaeology. With but a handful of broken pottery, Eli Lavon could unlock the darkest secrets of a Bronze Age village. And given a few strands of relevant intelligence, he could do the same for a terror network.
Yaakov Rossman, a pockmarked veteran agent-runner, appeared next, followed by a pair of all-purpose field hands named Oded and Mordecai. Then came Rimona Stern, a former military intelligence officer who now dealt with issues related to Iran’s disabled nuclear program. A Rubenesque woman with sandstone-colored hair, Rimona also happened to be Shamron’s niece. Gabriel had known her since she was a child—indeed, his fondest memories of Rimona were of a fearless young girl on a kick scooter careening down the steep drive of her famous uncle’s house. On her generous left hip was the faded scar of a wound suffered during a particularly violent spill. Gabriel had applied the field dressing; Gilah had dried Rimona’s tears. Shamron had been far too distraught to offer any assistance. The only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, he could not bear to witness the suffering of loved ones.
A few minutes behind Rimona was Yossi Gavish. A tall, balding figure dressed in corduroy and tweed, Yossi was a top officer in Research, which is how the Office referred to its analytical division. Born in London, he had read classics at All Souls and spoke Hebrew with a pronounced English accent. He had also done a bit of acting—his portrayal of Iago was still recalled with great fondness by the critics in Stratford—and was a gifted cellist as well. Gabriel had yet to exploit Yossi’s musical talents, but his skills as an actor had on more than one occasion proven useful in the field. There was a beachside café in St. Barts where the waitresses thought him a dream and a hotel in Geneva where the concierge had taken a private vow to shoot him on sight.
As usual, Mikhail Abramov arrived last. Lanky and fair, with a fine-boned face and eyes the color of glacial ice, he had immigrated to Israel from Russia as a teenager and joined the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s elite special operations unit. Once described as “Gabriel without a conscience,” he had personally assassinated several of the top terror masterminds from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Burdened with two heavy cases filled with electronic gear, he greeted Sarah with an unambiguously frigid kiss. Eli Lavon would later describe it as the frostiest embrace since Shamron, during the halcyon days of the peace process, had been forced to shake the hand of Yasser Arafat.
Known by the code name Barak, the Hebrew word for lightning, the nine men and women of Gabriel’s team had many idiosyncrasies and many traditions. Among the idiosyncrasies was a ritual childlike squabble over room assignments. Among the traditions was a lavish first-night planning meal prepared by Chiara. The one that occurred at N Street was more poignant than most, in that it was never supposed to take place. Like everyone else at King Saul Boulevard, the team had expected the operation against the Iranian nuclear program to be Gabriel’s last. They had been told as much by their chief in name only, Uzi Navot, who was not altogether displeased, and by Shamron, who was distraught. “I had no choice but to set him free,” Shamron said after his fabled encounter with Gabriel atop the cliffs of Cornwall. “This time it’s for good.”
It might have been for good if Gabriel had not spotted Farid Khan walking along Wellington Street with a bomb beneath his overcoat. The men and women gathered around the dining room table understood the toll Covent Garden had taken on Gabriel. Many years earlier, in another lifetime, under another name, he had failed to prevent a bombing in Vienna that forever altered the course of his life. On that occasion, the bomb had been hidden not beneath the overcoat of a shahid but in the undercarriage of Gabriel’s car. The victims were not strangers but loved ones—his wife, Leah, and his only son, Dani. Leah lived now in a psychiatric hospital atop Mount Herzl in Jerusalem in a prison of memory and a body destroyed by fire. She had only a vague sense that Dani was buried not far from her, on the Mount of Olives.
The members of Gabriel’s team did not mention Leah and Dani that evening, nor did they dwell long on the chain of events that led Gabriel to be an unwilling witness to Farid Khan’s martyrdom. Instead, they spoke of friends and family, of books they had read and movies they had seen, and of the remarkable changes currently sweeping the Arab world. In Egypt, Pharaoh had finally fallen, unleashing a wave of protest that was threatening to topple the kings and secular dictators who had ruled the region for generations. Whether the changes would bring Israel greater security or place it in greater peril was a topic of hot debate inside the Office and around the dinner table that night. Yossi, an optimist by nature, believed the Arabs, if given the opportunity to govern themselves, would have no truck with those who wished to make war with Israel. Yaakov, who had spent years running spies against hostile Arab regimes, declared Yossi dangerously delusional, as did nearly everyone else. Only Dina refused to venture an opinion, for her thoughts were focused on the crates of files waiting in the living room. She had a clock ticking in her formidable brain and believed that a minute wasted was a minute left to terrorists to plot and plan. The files held the promise of lives saved. They were sacred texts that contained secrets only she could decode.
It was approaching midnight by the time the meal finally came to an end. It was followed by the traditional spat over who would clear the dishes, who would wash, and who would dry. After recusing himself, Gabriel acquainted Dina with the files, then showed Chiara upstairs to their room. It was on the third floor, overlooking the rear garden. The red aircraft warning lights atop the spires of Georgetown University winked softly in the distance, a reminder of the city’s vulnerability to aviation-based terrorism.
“I suppose there are worse places to spend a few days,” Chiara said. “Where did you put Mikhail and Sarah?”
“As far apart as possible.”
“What are the chances this operation might bring them back together?”
“About the same that the Arab world is suddenly going to recognize our right to exist.”
“That bad?”
“I’m afraid so.” Gabriel lifted Chiara’s bag and placed it at the end of the bed. It sagged beneath the weight. “What have you got in here?”
“Gilah sent along a few things for you.”
“Rocks?”
“Food,” Chiara said. “You know how Gilah is. She always thought you were too thin.”
“How is she?”
“Now that Ari isn’t spending so much time around the house, she seems to be doing much better.”
“Did he finally sign up for that pottery course he’s always wanted to take?”
“Actually, he’s back at King Saul Boulevard.”
“Doing what?”
“Uzi thought he needed something to keep him occupied, so he made him your operational coordinator. He’d like you to call him first thing in the morning.” Chiara kissed his cheek and smiled. “Welcome home, darling.”
Chapter 16
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
THERE IS A TRUISM ABOUT terror networks: putting the pieces in place is not as difficult as one might imagine. But once the mastermind pulls the trigger and carries out his first attack, the element of surprise is lost and the network exposes itself. In the earliest years of the conflict against terrorism—when Black September and Carlos the Jackal were running amok, aided by useful leftist Euro-idiots such as the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Brigades—intelligence officers mainly used physical surveillance, hard wiretaps, and good old-fashioned detective work to identify the members of a cell. Now, with the advent of the Internet and global satellite communications, the contours of the battlefield had been altered. The Internet had given the terrorists a powerful tool to organize, inspire, and communicate, but it had also provided intelligence services with a means of tracking their every move. Cyberspace was like a forest in winter. The terrorists could hide there for a time, hatching their plots and organizing their forces, but they could not come or go without leaving footprints in the snow. The challenge for the counterterrorism officer was to follow the right set of tracks, for the virtual forest was a dark and confusing place where one could wander aimlessly while innocents died.
Gabriel and his team cautiously set foot there the next morning when British intelligence, under standing agreement, shared with their American cousins the preliminary results of the inquiry into the Covent Garden bombing. Included in the material were the contents of Farid Khan’s computers at home and work, a printout of every number he had dialed from his mobile phone, and a list of known Islamic extremists he had encountered while he was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun. There was also a copy of the suicide tape, along with several hundred still images captured by CCTV during the final months of his life. The last photo showed him standing in Covent Garden, his arms raised above his head, a bloom of fire erupting from the explosives belt around his waist. Lying on the ground a few feet away, shielded by two men, was Gabriel. When the picture was magnified, it was possible to see the shadow of a gun in his left hand.
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Daniel Silva
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Шпионские детективы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Gabriel Allon, secret agent, assassin and master art restorer, returns in a spellbinding novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling authorEurope is exploding. And one man must find out why.For Gabriel Allon and his wife Chiara, it was supposed to be the start of a romantic weekend in London. But nothing is ever that simple when you’re an off-duty spy and assassin.Bombings in Paris and Copenhagen have put him on edge and when Gabriel notices a man exhibiting several traits common to suicide bombers, he follows him into the Covent Garden throng. He’s determined to prevent the carnage he fears is about to take place, but before Gabriel can draw his sidearm, he is knocked to the pavement by two plain-clothes police officers.A moment later he looks up to find a scene from his nightmares.From the streets of New York and London,to the unforgiving landscape of the Saudi desert,Gabriel Allon is in a race to the death against a calculating mass-murderer that he dare not lose…