The Black Widow
The Black Widow
Daniel Silva
No. 1 New York Times bestselling author Daniel Silva delivers another stunning thriller in his latest tale of high-stakes international intrigue featuring the inimitable Gabriel Allon.Legendary spy Gabriel Allon is poised to become the chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service. But on the eve of his promotion, ISIS detonate a massive bomb in the Marais district of Paris, and a desperate French government wants Gabriel to eliminate the man responsible.They call him Saladin…He is a terrorist mastermind, whose network communicates in total secrecy, leaving Gabriel no choice but to insert an agent into the most dangerous terrorist group the world has ever known. An extraordinary young doctor, she must pose as an ISIS recruit in waiting, a ticking time bomb, a black widow out for blood.
Daniel Silva
The Black Widow
Copyright (#u22dd4819-ba07-5eee-bd80-f28ab77d73ca)
This is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Copyright © Daniel Silva 2016
Daniel Silva asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Cover photographs © Elisabeth Ansley/Trevillion Images (figure);
©Shutterstock.com (https://www.shutterstock.com) (background)
Map designed by Nick Springer
Islamic pattern © DamienGeso/Shutterstock, Inc.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Ebook Edition © JULY 2016 ISBN: 9780007552375
Source ISBN: 9780007552382
Version: 2018-09-24
Dedication (#u22dd4819-ba07-5eee-bd80-f28ab77d73ca)
For Stephen L. Carter, for friendship and faith.
And, as always, for my wife, Jamie, and my children, Lily and Nicholas.
Epigraph (#u22dd4819-ba07-5eee-bd80-f28ab77d73ca)
The black flags will come from the East, led by mighty men, with long hair and beards, their surnames taken from their home towns.
—THE HADITH
Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.
—MURIEL SPARK, THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE
Table of Contents
Cover (#u2ab4bdce-2fa1-5dd7-b4ba-01e318226141)
Title Page (#u275e622d-161e-5251-a55c-12ed64e8e0f8)
Copyright (#uba1899fc-707e-5eff-907a-4eaa9acdfc2d)
Dedication (#ud95ba510-2d60-519b-945a-dbb32638e7e0)
Epigraph (#u07340144-5da9-5b9d-8522-1cd4c2086e7b)
Foreword (#ud720a3a2-7545-5ca9-b533-4c2c9c469822)
Map (#ud9b880b2-4ef1-5d38-80bb-69e94ebeb7ed)
Part One (#u388ed053-d21d-5239-990b-e365bfe025cc)
Chapter 1: The Marais, Paris (#u9fbaff36-53b5-513d-89a6-87810d94f663)
Chapter 2: Rue de Grenelle, Paris (#u2ab18125-4b6a-5e96-b781-3ba4130edd69)
Chapter 3: Beirut (#u3acd4222-ae85-5ef9-bdf8-d444dcb434b1)
Chapter 4: Beirut—Tel Aviv (#uf274c3f3-28d4-5588-8447-71b9af8700b1)
Chapter 5: Israel Museum, Jerusalem (#u0a707ff4-0a29-5b0e-bfe0-d51d339e36b3)
Chapter 6: Ma’ale Hahamisha, Israel (#u38970e44-9805-56d0-a46e-061fc245ea82)
Chapter 7: Ma’ale Hahamisha, Israel (#u7b20e195-18d3-5e21-9c67-97f01f03542e)
Chapter 8: Narkiss Street, Jerusalem (#u98d2ce7e-a3f2-5404-b01e-9f3019334954)
Chapter 9: The Marais, Paris (#u0e6b4c9f-c09b-5176-a391-8152cf8761ad)
Chapter 10: Rue Pavée, Paris (#ub27cb2f9-4927-505e-9032-c579549402bc)
Chapter 11: Amsterdam—Paris (#u71d56f22-06f5-56e9-9d5b-ef16a3d12699)
Chapter 12: Paris (#u7ecb4965-5434-59ba-ae1c-9462a9fcb600)
Chapter 13: Amman, Jordan (#uec1eee31-8ad0-5e90-97ab-b9f5e1955793)
Chapter 14: Gid Headquarters, Amman (#ucbbbfa15-7c69-5fa5-aa68-b884777c71bf)
Chapter 15: Gid Headquarters, Amman (#u0b21f1ef-650d-5963-bd6e-47acff367086)
Chapter 16: Jerusalem (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17: Jezreel Valley, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18: Nahalal, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19: Nahalal, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20: Nahalal, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21: Nahalal, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22: Nahalal, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23: Aubervilliers, France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24: Rue du Lombard, Brussels (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25: Northern France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26: Northern France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27: Seraincourt, France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28: Paris (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29: Aubervilliers, France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30: La Courneuve, France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31: Aubervilliers, France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32: Santorini, Greece (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33: Santorini, Greece (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34: N Street, Georgetown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35: N Street, Georgetown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36: Raqqa, Syria (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37: Eastern Syria (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38: Palmyra, Syria (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39: Palmyra, Syria (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40: Anbar Province, Iraq (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41: Anbar Province, Iraq (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42: Anbar Province, Iraq (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43: Anbar Province, Iraq (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44: Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45: Seraincourt, France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46: Paris—Tiberias, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47: Amman, Jordan (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48: Arlington, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49: Alexandria, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50: Georgetown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51: Aubervilliers, France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52: Hume, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53: Liberty Crossing, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54: Dulles International Airport (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55: Arlington, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56: Key Bridge Marriott, Arlington (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57: The White House (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58: Alexandria, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59: Key Bridge Marriott (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60: The White House (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61: The Lincoln Memorial (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62: Liberty Crossing, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 63: Georgetown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 64: Café Milano, Georgetown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 65: Wisconsin Avenue, Georgetown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 66: Wisconsin Avenue, Georgetown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 67: Café Milano, Georgetown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 68: King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 69: Hume, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 70: Arlington, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 71: Hume, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 72: Arlington, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 73: Hume, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 74: Hume, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 75: Washington—Jerusalem (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 76: Nahalal, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 77: Petah Tikva, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 78: Jerusalem (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 79: Jerusalem—Tiberias (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 80: Bethnal Green, London (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also Written by Daniel Silva (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
FOREWORD (#u22dd4819-ba07-5eee-bd80-f28ab77d73ca)
I COMMENCED WORK ON THIS NOVEL before the Islamic terrorist group known as ISIS carried out a wave of shootings and bombings in Paris and Brussels that left more than 160 people dead. After briefly considering setting aside the typescript, I chose to complete it as originally conceived, as though the tragic events had not yet occurred in the imaginary world where my characters live and work. The similarities between the real and fictitious attacks, including the links to the Brussels district of Molenbeek, are entirely coincidental. I take no pride in my prescience. I only wish that the murderous, millenarian terrorism of the Islamic State lived solely on the pages of this story.
(#u22dd4819-ba07-5eee-bd80-f28ab77d73ca)
1 (#u22dd4819-ba07-5eee-bd80-f28ab77d73ca)
THE MARAIS, PARIS (#u22dd4819-ba07-5eee-bd80-f28ab77d73ca)
IT WAS TOULOUSE THAT WOULD prove to be Hannah Weinberg’s undoing. That night she telephoned Alain Lambert, a contact at the Interior Ministry, and told him that this time something would have to be done. Alain promised a swift response. It would be bold, he assured Hannah, boldness being the default response of a fonctionnaire when in reality he planned to do nothing at all. The following morning the minister himself paid a visit to the site of the attack and issued a vague call for “dialogue and healing.” To the parents of the three victims he offered only regrets. “We will do better,” he said before returning hastily to Paris. “We must.”
They were twelve years of age, the victims, two boys and a girl, all Jewish, though the French media neglected to mention their religion in the first reports. Nor did they bother to point out that the six attackers were Muslim, only that they were youths who resided in a suburb, a banlieue, east of the city center. The description of the attack was vague to the point of inaccuracy. According to French radio, an altercation of some sort had occurred outside a patisserie. Three were injured, one seriously. The police were investigating. No arrests had been made.
In truth, it had not been an altercation but a well-planned ambush. And the attackers were not youths, they were men in their early twenties who had ventured into the center of Toulouse in search of Jews to harm. That their victims were children seemed to trouble them not. The two young boys were kicked, spat upon, and then beaten bloody. The girl was pinned to the pavement and her face slashed with a knife. Before fleeing, the six attackers turned to a group of stunned bystanders and shouted, “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya-Yahud!” Though the witnesses did not know it, the Arabic chant was a reference to the seventh-century Muslim conquest of a Jewish oasis near the holy city of Medina. Its message was unmistakable. The armies of Muhammad, the six men were saying, were coming for the Jews of France.
Regrettably, the attack in Toulouse was not without precedent or ample warning. France was presently in the grip of the worst spasm of violence against Jews since the Holocaust. Synagogues had been firebombed, gravestones toppled, shops looted, homes vandalized and marked with threatening graffiti. In all, there had been more than four thousand documented attacks during the past year alone, each carefully recorded and investigated by Hannah and her team at the Isaac Weinberg Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism in France.
Named for Hannah’s paternal grandfather, the center had opened its doors under heavy security ten years earlier. It was now the most respected such institution in France, and Hannah Weinberg was regarded as the foremost chronicler of the country’s new wave of anti-Semitism. Her supporters referred to her as a “memory militant,” a woman who would stop at nothing to pressure France into protecting its besieged Jewish minority. Her detractors were far less charitable. Consequently, Hannah had long ago stopped reading the things that were written about her in the press or in the sewers of the Internet.
The Weinberg Center stood on the rue des Rosiers, the most prominent street in the city’s most visible Jewish neighborhood. Hannah’s apartment was around the corner on the rue Pavée. The nameplate on the intercom read MME BERTRAND, one of the few steps she took to safeguard her security. She resided in the flat alone, surrounded by the possessions of three generations of her family, including a modest collection of paintings and several hundred antique lunettes, her secret passion. At fifty-five, she was unmarried and childless. Occasionally, when work permitted, she allowed herself a lover. Alain Lambert, her contact at the Interior Ministry, had once been a pleasant distraction during a particularly tense period of anti-Jewish incidents. He rang Hannah at home late after his master’s visit to Toulouse.
“So much for boldness,” she said acidly. “He should be ashamed of himself.”
“We did the best we could.”
“Your best wasn’t good enough.”
“It’s better not to throw oil on the fire at a time like this.”
“That’s the same thing they said in the summer of nineteen forty-two.”
“Let’s not get overly emotional.”
“You leave me no choice but to issue a statement, Alain.”
“Choose your words carefully. We’re the only ones standing between you and them.”
Hannah hung up the phone. Then she opened the top drawer of the writing desk and removed a single key. It unlocked a door at the end of the hall. Behind it was the room of a child, Hannah’s room, frozen in time. A four-poster bed with a lace canopy. Shelves stacked with stuffed animals and toys. A faded pinup of a heartthrob American actor. And hanging above the French provincial dresser, invisible in the darkness, was a painting by Vincent van Gogh. Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table . . . Hannah trailed a fingertip over the brushstrokes and thought of the man who had carried out the painting’s one and only restoration. How would he respond at a time like this? No, she thought, smiling. That wouldn’t do.
She climbed into her childhood bed and, much to her surprise, fell into a dreamless sleep. And when she woke she had settled on a plan.
For the better part of the next week, Hannah and her team toiled under conditions of strict operational security. Potential participants were quietly approached, arms were twisted, donors were tapped. Two of Hannah’s most reliable sources of funding demurred, for like the minister of the interior they thought it better to not jeter de l’huile sur le feu—throw oil on the fire. To make up for the shortfall, Hannah had no choice but to dip into her personal finances, which were considerable. This, too, was fodder for her enemies.
Lastly, there was the small matter of what to call Hannah’s endeavor. Rachel Lévy, head of the center’s publicity department, thought blandness and a trace of obfuscation would be the best approach, but Hannah overruled her. When synagogues were burning, she said, caution was a luxury they could not afford. It was Hannah’s wish to sound an alarm, to issue a clarion call for action. She scribbled a few words on a slip of notepaper and placed it on Rachel’s cluttered desk.
“That should get their attention.”
At that point, no one of any consequence had agreed to attend—no one but a gadfly American blogger and cable television commentator who would have accepted an invitation to his own funeral. But then Arthur Goldman, the eminent historian of anti-Semitism from Cambridge, said he might be willing to make the trip down to Paris—provided, of course, that Hannah agreed to put him up for two nights in his favorite suite at the Crillon. With Goldman’s commitment, Hannah snared Maxwell Strauss from Yale, who never passed up an opportunity to appear on the same stage as his rival. The rest of the participants quickly fell into place. The director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum signed on, as did two important memoirists of survival and an expert on the French Holocaust from Yad Vashem. A novelist was added, more for her immense popularity than her historical insight, along with a politician from the French far right who rarely had a kind word to say about anyone. Several Muslim spiritual and community leaders were invited to attend. All declined. So, too, did the interior minister. Alain Lambert broke the news to Hannah personally.
“Did you really think he would attend a conference with so provocative a title?”
“Heaven forbid your master ever do anything provocative, Alain.”
“What about security?”
“We’ve always looked after ourselves.”
“No Israelis, Hannah. It will give the entire affair a bad odor.”
Rachel Lévy issued the press release the next day. The media were invited to cover the conference; a limited number of seats were made available to the public. A few hours later, on a busy street in the Twentieth Arrondissement, a religious Jew was set upon by a man with a hatchet and gravely wounded. Before making his escape, the assailant waved the bloody weapon and shouted, “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya-Yahud!” The police were said to be investigating.
For reasons of both haste and security, a period of just five busy days separated the press release from the start of the conference itself. Consequently, Hannah waited until the last minute to prepare her opening remarks. On the eve of the gathering, she sat alone in her library, a pen scratching furiously across a yellow legal pad.
It was, she thought, an appropriate place to compose such a document, for the library had once been her grandfather’s. Born in the Lublin district of Poland, he had fled to Paris in 1936, four years before the arrival of Hitler’s Wehrmacht. On the morning of July 16, 1942—the day known as Jeudi Noir, or Black Thursday—French police officers carrying stacks of blue deportation cards arrested Isaac Weinberg and his wife, along with nearly thirteen thousand other foreign-born Jews. Isaac Weinberg had managed to conceal two things before the dreaded knock at the door: his only child, a young son named Marc, and the van Gogh. Marc Weinberg survived the war in hiding, and in 1952 he managed to reclaim the apartment on the rue Pavée from the French family who had settled into it after Jeudi Noir. Miraculously, the painting was precisely where Isaac Weinberg had left it, hidden under the floorboards of the library, beneath the desk where Hannah now sat.
Three weeks after their arrest, Isaac Weinberg and his wife were deported to Auschwitz and gassed upon arrival. They were just two of the more than 75,000 Jews from France who perished in the death camps of Nazi Germany, a permanent stain on French history. But could it ever happen again? And was it time for the 475,000 Jews of France, the third-largest Jewish community in the world, to pack their bags and leave? This was the question Hannah had posed in the title of her conference. Many Jews had already abandoned France. Fifteen thousand had immigrated to Israel during the past year, and more were leaving every day. Hannah, however, had no plans to join them. Regardless of what her enemies might say, she considered herself French first and Jewish second. The idea of living somewhere other than the Fourth Arrondissement of Paris was abhorrent to her. Still, she felt duty-bound to warn her fellow French Jews of the gathering storm. The threat was not yet existential. But when a building is burning, Hannah wrote now, the best course of action is to find the nearest exit.
She finished a first draft shortly before midnight. It was too strident, she thought, and perhaps a bit too angry. She softened its roughest edges and added several depressing statistics to bolster her case. Then she typed it into her laptop, printed a copy, and managed to find her bed by two. The alarm woke her at seven; she drank a bowl of café au lait on the way to the shower. Afterward, she sat before her vanity in a toweling robe, staring at her face in the mirror. Her father, in a moment of brutal honesty, had once said of his only daughter that God had been generous when giving her brains but parsimonious with her looks. Her hair was wavy and dark and streaked with gray that she had allowed to encroach without resistance. Her nose was prominent and aquiline, her eyes were wide and brown. It had never been a particularly pretty face, but no one had ever mistaken her for a fool, either. At a moment like this, she thought, her looks were an asset.
She applied a bit of makeup to hide the circles beneath her eyes and arranged her hair with more care than usual. Then she dressed quickly—a dark woolen skirt and sweater, dark stockings, a pair of low-heeled pumps—and headed downstairs. After crossing the interior courtyard, she opened the main doorway of the building a few inches and peered into the street. It was a few minutes after eight; Parisians and tourists were making their way swiftly along the pavement beneath a gray early-spring sky. No one, it seemed, was waiting for an intelligent-looking woman in her mid-fifties to emerge from the apartment building at Number 24.
She did so now and headed past a row of chic clothing boutiques to the rue des Rosiers. For a few paces it seemed like an ordinary Paris street in a rather upscale arrondissement. Then Hannah came upon a kosher pizzeria and several falafel stands with signs written in Hebrew, and the true character of the street was revealed. She imagined how it must have looked early on the morning of Jeudi Noir. The helpless detainees clambering into open-top trucks, each clutching their allotted one suitcase. The neighbors staring down from open windows, some silent and ashamed, others barely able to contain their glee at the misfortune of a reviled minority. Hannah clung to this image—the image of Parisians waving good-bye to doomed Jews—as she moved through the flat light, her heels tapping rhythmically over the paving stones.
The Weinberg Center stood at the quiet end of the street, in a four-story building that before the war had housed a Yiddish-language newspaper and a coat factory. A line of several dozen people stretched from the doorway where two dark-suited security guards, young men in their twenties, were carefully searching all those who wished to enter. Hannah slipped past them and made her way upstairs to the VIP reception. Arthur Goldman and Max Strauss were eyeing each other warily across the room over cups of weak américain. The famous novelist was speaking seriously to one of the memoirists; the head of the Holocaust Museum was exchanging notes with the specialist from Yad Vashem, who was a longtime friend. Only the gadfly American commentator seemed to have no one to talk to. He was piling croissants and brioche onto his plate as though he hadn’t seen food in days. “Don’t worry,” said Hannah, smiling. “We’re planning to take a break for lunch.”
She spent a moment or two with each of the panelists before heading down the hall to her office. Alone, she reread her opening remarks until Rachel Lévy poked her head through the doorway and pointed to her wristwatch.
“What’s the crowd like?” asked Hannah.
“More than we can handle.”
“And the media?”
“Everyone came, including the New York Times and the BBC.”
Just then, Hannah’s mobile phone chimed. It was a text from Alain Lambert at the Interior Ministry. Reading it, she frowned.
“What does it say?” asked Rachel.
“Just Alain being Alain.”
Hannah placed the mobile on her desk and, gathering her papers, went out. Rachel Lévy waited until she was gone before picking up the mobile and entering Hannah’s not-so-secret security code. The text from Alain Lambert appeared, four words in length.
BE CAREFUL MY DEAR …
The Weinberg Center had insufficient space for a formal auditorium, but the room on its uppermost floor was one of the finest in the Marais. A row of greenhouse-like windows gave it a magnificent view across the rooftops toward the Seine, and upon its walls hung several large black-and-white photographs of life in the district before the morning of Jeudi Noir. All those depicted had perished in the Holocaust, including Isaac Weinberg, who had been photographed in his library three months before disaster struck. As Hannah passed the picture, she trailed a forefinger over its surface, as she had touched the brushstrokes of the van Gogh. Only Hannah knew of the secret connection between the painting, her grandfather, and the center that bore his name. No, she thought suddenly. That wasn’t quite true. The restorer knew of the connection, too.
A long rectangular table had been placed atop a raised platform in front of the windows, and two hundred chairs had been arranged on the open floor like soldiers on a parade ground. Each of the chairs was occupied, and another hundred or so spectators lined the rear wall. Hannah took her assigned seat—she had volunteered to serve as a separation barrier between Goldman and Strauss—and listened as Rachel Lévy instructed the audience to silence their mobile phones. Finally, her turn came to speak. She switched on her microphone and looked down at the first line of her opening statement. It is a national tragedy that a conference such as this is even taking place . . . And then she heard the sound in the street below, a popping, like the snap of firecrackers, followed by a man shouting in Arabic.
“Khaybar, Khaybar, ya-Yahud!”
Hannah stepped from the platform and moved quickly to the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“Dear God,” she whispered.
Turning, she shouted at the panelists to move away from the windows, but the roar of the detonation swallowed her warning. Instantly, the room was a tornado of flying glass, chairs, masonry, articles of clothing, and human limbs. Hannah knew she was toppling forward, though she had no sense of whether she was rising or falling. Once, she thought she glimpsed Rachel Lévy spinning like a ballerina. Then Rachel, like all else, was lost to her.
At last, she came to rest, perhaps on her back, perhaps on her side, perhaps in the street, perhaps in a tomb of brick and concrete. The silence was oppressive. So, too, was the smoke and the dust. She tried to wipe the grit from her eyes, but her right arm would not respond. Then Hannah realized she had no right arm. Nor did she seem to have a right leg. She turned her head slightly and saw a man lying beside her. “Professor Strauss, is that you?” But the man said nothing. He was dead. Soon, thought Hannah, I’ll be dead, too.
All at once she was frightfully cold. She supposed it was the loss of blood. Or perhaps it was the breath of wind that briefly cleared the black smoke from in front of her face. She realized then that she and the man who might have been Professor Strauss were lying together amid the rubble in the rue des Rosiers. And standing over them, peering downward over the barrel of a military-style automatic rifle, was a figure dressed entirely in black. A balaclava masked the face, but the eyes were visible. They were shockingly beautiful, two kaleidoscopes of hazel and copper. “Please,” said Hannah softly, but the eyes behind the mask only brightened with zeal. Then there was a flash of white light, and Hannah found herself walking along a hallway, her missing limbs restored. She passed through the door of her childhood bedroom and groped in the darkness for the van Gogh. But the painting, it seemed, was already gone. And in a moment Hannah was gone, too.
2 (#ulink_86b70fd4-ee25-5f49-818d-25ac3b019842)
RUE DE GRENELLE, PARIS (#ulink_86b70fd4-ee25-5f49-818d-25ac3b019842)
LATER, THE FRENCH AUTHORITIES WOULD determine that the bomb weighed in excess of five hundred kilograms. It had been contained in a white Renault Trafic transit van and was detonated, according to numerous security cameras along the street, at ten o’clock precisely, the scheduled start time of the Weinberg Center conference. The attackers, it seemed, were nothing if not punctual.
In retrospect, the weapon was unnecessarily large for so modest a target. The French experts concluded that a charge of perhaps two hundred kilograms would have been more than sufficient to level the offices and kill or wound all those inside. At five hundred kilograms, however, the bomb toppled buildings and shattered windows the entire length of the rue des Rosiers. The shock wave was so violent—Paris actually recorded an earthquake for the first time in longer than anyone could remember—that the damage extended below ground as well. Water and gas mains cracked throughout the arrondissement, and a Métro train jumped the tracks while approaching the station at the Hôtel de Ville. More than two hundred passengers were injured, many severely. The Paris police initially thought the train had been bombed, too, and in response they ordered an evacuation of the entire Métro system. Life in the city quickly ground to a halt. For the attackers, it was an unexpected windfall.
The enormous force of the blast dug a crater in the rue des Rosiers twenty feet in depth. Nothing remained of the Renault Trafic, though the left rear cargo door, curiously intact, was found floating in the Seine near Notre-Dame, having traveled a distance of nearly a kilometer. In time, investigators would determine that the vehicle had been stolen in Vaulx-en-Velin, a bleak Muslim-majority suburb of Lyon. It had been driven to Paris on the eve of the attack—by whom, it was never established—and left outside a kitchen-and-bath store on the boulevard Saint-Germain. There it would remain until ten minutes past eight the following morning, when a man collected it. He was clean-shaven, approximately five foot ten inches in height, and was wearing a billed cap and sunglasses. He drove the streets of central Paris—aimlessly, or so it appeared—until nine twenty, when he picked up an accomplice outside the Gare du Nord. Initially, the French police and intelligence services operated under the assumption that the second attacker was male, too. Later, after analyzing all available video images, they concluded that the accomplice was in fact a woman.
By the time the Renault reached the Marais, both occupants had concealed their faces with balaclava masks. And when they emerged from the vehicle outside the Weinberg Center, both were heavily armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, handguns, and grenades. The center’s two security guards were killed instantly, as were four other people who had yet to be cleared into the building. A passerby bravely attempted to intervene and was mercilessly slaughtered. The remaining pedestrians in the narrow street wisely fled.
The gunfire outside the Weinberg Center ceased at 9:59:30, and the two masked attackers moved calmly west along the rue des Rosiers to the rue Vieille-du-Temple, where they entered a popular boulangerie. Eight customers were waiting in an orderly queue. All were killed, including the woman behind the counter, who pleaded for her life before being shot several times.
It was at that instant, as the woman was collapsing to the floor, that the bomb inside the van exploded. The force of the blast shattered the windows of the boulangerie, but otherwise the building remained undamaged. The two attackers did not immediately flee the carnage they had inflicted. Instead, they returned to the rue des Rosiers, where a single surviving security camera recorded them moving methodically through the debris, executing the wounded and the dying. Among their victims was Hannah Weinberg, who was shot twice despite the fact that she had almost no chance of survival. The attackers’ cruelty was matched only by their competence. The woman was seen calmly clearing a jammed round from her Kalashnikov before killing a badly wounded man who, a moment earlier, had been seated on the fourth floor of the building.
For several hours after the attack, the Marais remained cordoned off, inaccessible to all but emergency workers and investigators. Finally, in late afternoon, when the last of the fires had been extinguished and the site was determined to be free of secondary explosives, the French president arrived. After touring the devastation, he declared it “a Holocaust in the heart of Paris.” The remark did not meet with a favorable reception in some of the more restive banlieues. In one, there erupted a spontaneous celebration that was quickly snuffed out by riot police. Most of the newspapers ignored the incident. A senior French police official called it “an unpleasant distraction” from the immediate task at hand, which was finding the perpetrators.
Their escape from the Marais, like everything else about the operation, had been meticulously planned and executed. A Peugeot Satelis motorbike had been left for them on a nearby street, along with a pair of black helmets. They traveled north, the male driving, the woman clinging to his waist, passing unnoticed through the stream of approaching police cars and ambulances. A traffic camera photographed them for the last time near the hamlet of Villeron, in the Val-d’Oise department. By midday they were the targets of the largest manhunt in French history.
The National Police and the gendarmerie saw to the roadblocks, the identity checks, the smashed windows of abandoned warehouses, and the severed padlocks of suspected hideouts. But inside a graceful old building located on the rue de Grenelle, eighty-four men and women were engaged in a search of a far different kind. Known only as the Alpha Group, they were members of a secret unit of the DGSI, France’s internal security service. The Group, as it was known informally, had been formed six years earlier, in the aftermath of a jihadist suicide bombing outside a landmark restaurant on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. It specialized in human penetration of France’s sprawling jihadist underground and had been granted the authority to take “active measures” to remove potential Islamic terrorists from circulation before the Islamic terrorists could take active measures against the Republic or its citizenry. It was said of Paul Rousseau, Alpha Group’s chief, that he had plotted more bombings than Osama bin Laden, a charge he did not dispute, though he was quick to point out that none of his bombs actually exploded. The officers of Alpha Group were skilled practitioners in the art of deception. And Paul Rousseau was their undisputed leader and lodestar.
With his tweed jackets, tousled gray hair, and ever-present pipe, Rousseau seemed more suited to the role of absentminded professor than ruthless secret policeman, and not without good reason. Academia was where he began his career and where, in darker moments, he sometimes longed to return. A respected scholar of nineteenth-century French literature, Rousseau had been serving on the faculty of Paris-Sorbonne University when a friend in French intelligence asked him to take a job with the DST, France’s internal security service. The year was 1983, and the country was beset by a wave of bombings and assassinations carried out by the left-wing terrorist group known as Direct Action. Rousseau joined a unit dedicated to Direct Action’s destruction and, with a series of brilliant operations, brought the group to its knees.
He remained with the DST, battling successive waves of leftist and Middle East–based terrorism, until 2004, when his beloved wife Collette died after a long struggle with leukemia. Inconsolable, he retired to his modest villa in the Luberon and commenced work on a planned multivolume biography of Proust. Then came the bombing on the Champs-Élysées. Rousseau agreed to lay down his pen and return to the fight, but only on one condition. He had no interest in tailing suspected terrorists, listening to their telephone conversations, or reading their maniacal musings on the Internet. He wanted to go on offense. The chief agreed, as did the interior minister, and Alpha Group was born. In the six years of its existence, it had foiled more than a dozen major attacks on French soil. Rousseau viewed the bombing of the Weinberg Center not merely as a failure of intelligence but as a personal affront. Late that afternoon, with the French capital in turmoil, he rang the chief of the DGSI to offer his resignation. The chief, of course, refused it. “But for your penance,” he said, “you shall find the monster responsible for this outrage and bring me his head on a plate.”
Rousseau did not care for the allusion, for he had no intention of emulating the conduct of the very creatures he was fighting. Even so, he and his unit threw themselves into the task with a devotion that matched the religious zealotry of their adversaries. Alpha Group’s specialty was the human factor, and it was to humans they turned for information. In cafés, train stations, and back alleys across the country, Rousseau’s case officers met quietly with their agents of penetration—the preachers, the recruiters, the streetwise hustlers, the well-meaning moderates, the blank-eyed lost souls who had found a home in radical Islam’s global Ummah of death. Some spied out of conscience. Others spied for money. And there were some who spied because Rousseau and his operatives had given them no other choice. Not one claimed to know that an attack had been in the planning—not even the hustlers, who claimed to know everything, especially when money was involved. Nor could any of Alpha Group’s assets identify the two perpetrators. It was possible they were self-starters, lone wolves, followers of a leaderless jihad who had constructed a five-hundred-kilogram bomb under the noses of French intelligence and then delivered it expertly to their target. Possible, thought Rousseau, but highly unlikely. Somewhere, there was an operational mastermind, a man who had conceived the attack, recruited the operatives, and guided them skillfully to their target. And it was the head of this man that Paul Rousseau would deliver to his chief.
And so, as the whole of the French security establishment searched for the two perpetrators of the Weinberg Center attack, Rousseau’s gaze was already fixed resolutely upon a distant shore. Like all good captains in times of trouble, he remained on the bridge of his vessel, which in Rousseau’s case was his office on the fifth floor. An air of academic clutter hung over the room, along with the fruited scent of Rousseau’s pipe tobacco, a habit he indulged in violation of numerous official edicts regarding smoking in government offices. Beneath his bulletproof windows—they had been forced upon him by his chief—lay the intersection of the rue de Grenelle and the tranquil little rue Amélie. The building itself had no street entrance, only a black gate that gave onto a small courtyard and car park. A discreet brass plaque proclaimed that the building housed something called the International Society for French Literature, a particularly Rousseauian touch. For the sake of the unit’s cover, it published a thin quarterly, which Rousseau insisted on editing himself. At last count it had a readership of twelve. All had been thoroughly vetted.
Inside the building, however, all subterfuge ended. The technical support staff occupied the basement; the watchers, the ground floor. On the second floor was Alpha Group’s overflowing Registry—Rousseau preferred old-fashioned paper dossiers to digital files—and the third and fourth floors were the preserve of the agent runners. Most came and went through the gate on the rue de Grenelle, either on foot or by government car. Others entered through a secret passageway linking the building and the dowdy little antique shop next door, which was owned by an elderly Frenchman who had served in a secret capacity during the war in Algeria. Paul Rousseau was the only member of Alpha Group who had been allowed to read the shopkeeper’s appalling file.
A visitor to the fifth floor might have mistaken it for the office of a private Swiss bank. It was somber and shadowed and quiet, save for the Chopin that occasionally drifted through Paul Rousseau’s open door. His long-suffering secretary, the implacable Madame Treville, occupied an orderly desk in the anteroom, and at the opposite end of a narrow hall was the office of Rousseau’s deputy, Christian Bouchard. Bouchard was all things Rousseau was not—young, fit, sharply dressed, and far too good-looking. Most of all, Bouchard was ambitious. The chief of the DGSI had foisted him upon Rousseau, and it was widely assumed he would one day be Alpha Group’s chief. Rousseau resented him only a little, for Bouchard, despite his obvious shortcomings, was extremely good at his job. Ruthless, too. When there was bureaucratic dirty work to be done, invariably it was Bouchard who saw to it.
Three days after the Weinberg Center bombing, with the terrorists still at large, there was a meeting of department heads at the Interior Ministry. Rousseau loathed such gatherings—they invariably devolved into political point-scoring contests—so he sent Bouchard in his stead. It was approaching eight that evening when the deputy finally returned to the rue de Grenelle. Entering Rousseau’s office, he wordlessly placed two photographs on the desk. They showed an olive-skinned woman in her mid-twenties with an oval face and eyes that were like kaleidoscopes of hazel and copper. In the first photo her hair was shoulder length and brushed straight back from her unblemished forehead. In the second it was covered by a hijab of unadorned black silk.
“They’re calling her the black widow,” said Bouchard.
“Catchy,” said Rousseau with a frown. He picked up the second photo, the one where the woman was piously attired, and stared into the bottomless eyes. “What’s her real name?”
“Safia Bourihane.”
“Algerian?”
“By way of Aulnay-sous-Bois.”
Aulnay-sous-Bois was a banlieue north of Paris. Its crime-ridden public housing estates—in France they were known as HLMs, or habitation à loyer modéré—were some of the most violent in the country. The police rarely ventured there. Even Rousseau advised his streetwise case officers to meet their Aulnay-based sources on less dangerous ground.
“She’s twenty-nine years old and was born in France,” Bouchard was saying. “Even so, she’s always described herself as a Muslim first and a Frenchwoman second.”
“Who found her?”
“Lucien.”
Lucien Jacquard was the chief of the DGSI’s counterterrorism division. Nominally, Alpha Group was under his control. In practice, however, Rousseau reported over Jacquard’s head to the chief. To avoid potential conflicts, he briefed Jacquard on active Alpha Group cases but jealously guarded the names of his sources and the unit’s operational methods. Alpha Group was essentially a service within a service, one that Lucien Jacquard wished to bring firmly under his control.
“How much does he have on her?” asked Rousseau, still staring into the eyes of the woman.
“She popped up on Lucien’s radar about three years ago.”
“Why?”
“Her boyfriend.”
Bouchard placed another photograph on the desk. It showed a man in his early thirties with cropped dark hair and the wispy beard of a devout Muslim.
“Algerian?”
“Tunisian, actually. He was the real thing. Good with electronics. Computers, too. He spent time in Iraq and Yemen before making his way to Syria.”
“Al-Qaeda?”
“No,” said Bouchard. “ISIS.”
Rousseau looked up sharply. “Where is he now?”
“Paradise, apparently.”
“What happened?”
“Killed in a coalition air strike.”
“And the woman?”
“She traveled to Syria last year.”
“How long was she there?”
“At least six months.”
“Doing what?”
“Obviously, she did a bit of weapons training.”
“And when she returned to Paris?”
“Lucien put her under surveillance. And then …” Bouchard shrugged.
“He dropped it?”
Bouchard nodded.
“Why?”
“The usual reasons. Too many targets, too few resources.”
“She was a ticking time bomb.”
“Lucien didn’t think so. Apparently, she cleaned up her act when she came back to France. She wasn’t associating with known radicals, and her Internet activity was benign. She even stopped wearing the hijab.”
“Which is exactly what she was told to do by the man who masterminded the attack. She was obviously part of a sophisticated network.”
“Lucien concurs. In fact, he advised the minister that it’s only a matter of time before they hit us again.”
“How did the minister take the news?”
“By ordering Lucien to turn over all his files to us.”
Rousseau permitted himself a brief smile at the expense of his rival. “I want everything, Christian. Especially the watch reports after her return from Syria.”
“Lucien promised to send the files over first thing in the morning.”
“How good of him.” Rousseau looked down at the photograph of the woman they were calling “la veuve noire”—the black widow. “Where do you suppose she is?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say she’s back in Syria by now, along with her accomplice.”
“One wonders why they didn’t wish to die for the cause.” Rousseau gathered up the three photographs and returned them to his deputy. “Any other news?”
“An interesting development regarding the Weinberg woman. It seems her art collection included a lost painting by Vincent van Gogh.”
“Really?”
“And guess who she decided to leave it to.”
By his expression, Rousseau made it clear he was in no mood for games, so Bouchard quickly supplied the name.
“I thought he was dead.”
“Apparently not.”
“Why didn’t he attend the funeral?”
“Who’s to say he didn’t?”
“Have we told him about the painting?”
“The ministry would prefer that it remain in France.”
“So the answer is no?”
Bouchard was silent.
“Someone should remind the ministry that four of the victims of the Weinberg Center bombing were citizens of the State of Israel.”
“Your point?”
“I suspect we’ll be hearing from him soon.”
Bouchard withdrew, leaving Rousseau alone. He dimmed his desk lamp and pressed the play button on his bookshelf stereo system, and in a moment the opening notes of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor crept into the silence. Traffic moved along the rue de Grenelle, and to the east, rising above the Seine embankments, glowed the lights of the Eiffel Tower. Rousseau saw none of it; in his thoughts he was watching a young man moving swiftly across a courtyard with a gun in his outstretched hand. He was a legend, this man, a gifted deceiver and assassin who had been fighting terrorists longer than even Rousseau. It would be an honor to work with him rather than against him. Soon, Rousseau thought with certainty. Soon …
3 (#ulink_0db4fdb6-f7cf-5280-974e-17a5294a8d2b)
BEIRUT (#ulink_0db4fdb6-f7cf-5280-974e-17a5294a8d2b)
THOUGH PAUL ROUSSEAU DID NOT know it then, the seeds for just such an operational union had already been sown. For on that very same evening, as Rousseau was walking toward his sad little bachelor’s apartment on the rue Saint-Jacques, a car was speeding along Beirut’s seafront Corniche. The car was black in color, German in manufacture, and imposing in size. The man in back was long and lanky, with pale, bloodless skin and eyes the color of glacial ice. His expression projected a sense of profound boredom, but the fingers of his right hand, which were tapping lightly on the armrest, betrayed the true state of his emotions. He wore a pair of slim-fitting jeans, a dark woolen pullover, and a leather jacket. Beneath the jacket, wedged inside the waistband of the trousers, was a 9mm Belgian-made pistol he had collected from a contact at the airport—there being no shortage of weapons, large or small, in Lebanon. In his breast pocket was a billfold filled with cash, along with a well-traveled Canadian passport that identified him as David Rostov. Like most things about the man, the passport was a lie. His real name was Mikhail Abramov, and he was employed by the secret intelligence service of the State of Israel. The service had a long and deliberately misleading name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Men such as Mikhail referred to it as the Office and nothing else.
He looked into the rearview mirror and waited for the eyes of the driver to meet his. The driver’s name was Sami Haddad. He was a Maronite, a former member of the Lebanese Forces Christian militia, and a longtime contract employee of the Office. He had the gentle forgiving eyes of a priest and the swollen hands of a prizefighter. He was old enough to remember when Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East—and old enough to have fought in the long civil war that had torn the country to pieces. There was nothing Sami Haddad didn’t know about Lebanon and its dangerous politics, and nothing he couldn’t lay his hands on in a hurry—weapons, boats, cars, drugs, girls. He had once procured a mountain lion on short notice because the target of an Office recruitment, an alcoholic prince from a Gulf Arab dynasty, admired predatory cats. His loyalty to the Office was beyond question. So were his instincts for trouble.
“Relax,” said Sami Haddad, finding Mikhail’s eyes in the mirror. “We’re not being followed.”
Mikhail peered over his shoulder at the lights of the traffic following them along the Corniche. Any one of the cars might have contained a team of killers or kidnappers from Hezbollah or one of the extreme jihadist organizations that had taken root in the Palestinian refugee camps of the south—organizations that made al-Qaeda seem like dowdy old Islamic moderates. It was his third visit to Beirut in the past year. Each time, he had entered the country with the same passport, protected by the same cover story. He was David Rostov, an itinerant businessman of Russian-Canadian descent who acquired illicit antiquities in the Middle East for a largely European clientele. Beirut was one of his favorite hunting grounds, for in Beirut anything was possible. He had once been offered a seven-foot Roman statue, remarkably intact, of a wounded Amazon. The cost of the piece was $2 million, shipping included. Over endless cups of sweet Turkish coffee, he convinced the seller, a prominent dealer from a well-known family, to drop his price by half a million. And then he walked away, earning for himself the reputation of both a shrewd negotiator and a tough customer, which was a good reputation to have in a place like Beirut.
He checked the time on his Samsung mobile. Sami Haddad noticed. Sami noticed everything.
“What time is he expecting you?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“Late.”
“Money never sleeps, Sami.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Shall we go straight to the hotel, or do you want to take a drive first?”
“Your call.”
“Let’s go to the hotel.”
“Let’s take a drive.”
“No problem.”
Sami Haddad turned off the Corniche into a street lined with colonial French buildings. Mikhail knew it well. Twelve years earlier, while serving in the Sayeret Matkal special forces, he had killed a terrorist from Hezbollah as he lay sleeping in the bed of a safe house. To be a member of such an elite unit was the dream of every Israeli boy, and it was a particularly noteworthy achievement for a boy from Moscow. A boy who had to fight every day of his life because his ancestors happened to be Jewish. A boy whose father, an important Soviet academic, had been locked away in a psychiatric hospital because he dared to question the wisdom of the Party. The boy had arrived in Israel at the age of sixteen. He had learned to speak Hebrew in a month and within a year had lost all traces of a Russian accent. He was like the millions who had come before him, the early Zionist pioneers who had fled to Palestine to escape the persecution and pogroms of Eastern Europe, the human wrecks who came spilling out of the death camps after the war. He had shed the baggage and the weakness of his past. He was a new person, a new Jew. He was an Israeli.
“We’re still clean,” said Sami Haddad.
“Then what are you waiting for?” replied Mikhail.
Sami wound his way back to the Corniche and headed to the marina. Rising above it were the twin glass-and-steel towers of the Four Seasons Hotel. Sami guided the car into the drive and looked into the mirror for instructions.
“Call me when he arrives,” said Mikhail. “Let me know whether he has a friend.”
“He never goes anywhere without a friend.”
Mikhail collected his briefcase and overnight bag from the opposite seat and opened the door.
“Be careful in there,” said Sami Haddad. “Don’t talk to strangers.”
Mikhail climbed out and, whistling tunelessly, breezed past the valets into the lobby. A dark-suited security man eyed him warily but allowed him to enter without a search. He crossed a thick carpet that swallowed his footfalls and presented himself at the imposing reception desk. Standing behind it, illuminated by a cone of overhead light, was a pretty black-haired woman of twenty-five. Mikhail knew that the woman was a Palestinian and that her father, a fighter from the old days, had fled Lebanon with Arafat in 1982, long before she was born. Several other employees of the hotel also had troubling connections. Two members of Hezbollah worked in the kitchen, and there were several known jihadis in housekeeping. Mikhail reckoned that approximately ten percent of the staff would have killed him if informed of his true identity and occupation.
He smiled at the woman, and the woman smiled coolly in return.
“Good evening, Mr. Rostov. So good to see you again.” Her painted nails clattered on a keyboard while Mikhail grew light-headed from the stench of overripe azaleas. “We have you for just one night.”
“A pity,” said Mikhail with another smile.
“Do you require assistance with your luggage?”
“I can manage.”
“We’ve upgraded you to a deluxe sea-view room. It’s on the fourteenth floor.” She handed him his packet of room keys and gestured toward the elevators like a flight attendant pointing out the location of the emergency exits. “Welcome back.”
Mikhail carried his bag and briefcase into the elevator foyer. An empty carriage waited, its doors open. He stepped inside and, grateful for the solitude, pressed the call button for the fourteenth floor. But as the doors were closing, a hand poked through the breach and a man entered. He was thickset, with a heavy ridge over his brow and a jawbone built to take a punch. His eyes met Mikhail’s briefly in the reflection of the doors. A nod was exchanged, but no words passed between them. The man pressed the button for the twentieth floor, almost as an afterthought, and picked at his thumbnail as the carriage rose. Mikhail pretended to check his e-mail on his mobile and while doing so surreptitiously snapped the blunt-headed man’s photograph. He forwarded the photo to King Saul Boulevard, the location of the Office’s anonymous Tel Aviv headquarters, while walking along the corridor to his room. A glance around the door frame revealed no evidence of tampering. He swiped his card key and, bracing himself for attack, entered.
The sound of Vivaldi greeted him—a favorite of arms smugglers, heroin dealers, and terrorists the world over, he thought as he switched off the radio. The bed had already been turned down, a chocolate lay on the pillow. He went to the window and saw the roof of Sami Haddad’s car parked along the Corniche. Beyond was the marina, and beyond the marina the blackness of the Mediterranean. Somewhere out there was his back door. He was no longer allowed to come to Beirut without an offshore escape hatch. The next chief had plans for him—or so he had heard through the Office grapevine. For a secure institution, it was a notoriously gossipy place.
Just then, Mikhail’s mobile blossomed with light. It was a message from King Saul Boulevard stating that the computers could not identify the man who had joined him in the elevator. It advised him to proceed with caution, whatever that meant. He drew the blackout shade and the curtains and switched off the room lights one by one until the darkness was absolute. Then he sat at the foot of the bed, his gaze focused on the thin strip of light at the bottom of the door, and waited for the phone to ring.
It was not unusual for the source to be late. He was, as he reminded Mikhail at every opportunity, a very busy man. Therefore, it was no surprise that ten o’clock came and went with no call from Sami Haddad. Finally, at quarter past, the mobile flared.
“He’s entering the lobby. He has two friends, both armed.”
Mikhail killed the call and remained seated for an additional ten minutes. Then, gun in hand, he moved to the entrance hall and placed his ear against the door. Hearing nothing outside, he returned the gun to the small of his back and stepped into the corridor, which was deserted except for a single male member of the housekeeping staff. Upstairs, the roof bar was the usual scene—rich Lebanese, Emiratis in their flowing white kanduras, Chinese businessmen flushed with drink, drug dealers, whores, gamblers, adventure seekers, fools. The sea wind toyed with the hair of the women and made wavelets in the pool. The throbbing music, spun by a professional DJ, was a sonic crime against humanity.
Mikhail made his way to the farthest corner of the rooftop, where Clovis Mansour, scion of the Mansour antiquities-dealing dynasty, sat alone on a white couch facing the Mediterranean. He was posed as if for a magazine shoot, with a glass of champagne in one hand and a cigarette smoldering in the other. He wore a dark Italian suit and a white open-neck shirt that was handmade for him by his man in London. His gold wristwatch was the size of a sundial. His cologne hung around him like a cloak.
“You’re late, habibi,” he said as Mikhail lowered himself onto the couch opposite. “I was about to leave.”
“No, you weren’t.”
Mikhail surveyed the interior of the bar. Mansour’s two bodyguards were picking at a bowl of pistachios at an adjacent table. The man from the elevator was leaning against the balustrade. He was pretending to admire the view of the sea while holding a mobile phone to his ear.
“Know him?” asked Mikhail.
“Never seen him before. Drink?”
“No, thanks.”
“It’s better if you drink.”
Mansour flagged down a passing waiter and ordered a second glass of champagne. Mikhail drew a buff-colored envelope from his coat pocket and placed it on the low table.
“What’s that?” asked Mansour.
“A token of our esteem.”
“Money?”
Mikhail nodded.
“I don’t work for you because I need the money, habibi. After all, I have plenty of money. I work for you because I want to stay in business.”
“My superiors prefer it if money changes hands.”
“Your superiors are cheap blackmailers.”
“I’d look inside the envelope before calling them cheap.”
Mansour did. He raised an eyebrow and slipped the envelope into the breast pocket of his suit jacket.
“What have you got for me, Clovis?”
“Paris,” said the antiquities dealer.
“What about Paris?”
“I know who did it.”
“How?”
“I can’t say for certain,” said Mansour, “but it’s possible I helped him pay for it.”
4 (#ulink_e353a5f6-aa0f-5017-b785-a83abaa354d2)
BEIRUT—TEL AVIV (#ulink_e353a5f6-aa0f-5017-b785-a83abaa354d2)
IT WAS HALF PAST TWO in the morning by the time Mikhail finally returned to his room. He saw no evidence to suggest it had been disturbed in his absence; even the little foiled chocolate lay at precisely the same angle atop his pillow. After sniffing it for traces of arsenic, he nibbled at a corner thoughtfully. Then, in an uncharacteristic fit of nerves, he hauled every piece of furniture that wasn’t bolted down into the entrance hall and piled it against the door. His barricade complete, he opened the curtains and the blackout shade and searched for his bolt-hole among the shipping lights in the Mediterranean. Instantly, he reproached himself for entertaining such a thought. The escape hatch was to be utilized only in cases of extreme emergency. Possession of a piece of intelligence did not fall into that category, even if the piece of intelligence had the potential to prevent another catastrophe like Paris.
They call him Saladin …
Mikhail stretched out on the bed, his back propped against the headboard, the gun at his side, and stared at the shadowy mass of his fortifications. It was, he thought, a truly undignified sight. He switched on the television and surfed the airwaves of a Middle East gone mad until boredom drove him toward the doorstep of sleep. To keep himself alert he guzzled a cola from the fridge bar and thought about a woman he had foolishly let slip through his fingers. She was a beautiful American of flawless Protestant pedigree who had worked for the CIA and, occasionally, for the Office. She was living in New York now, where she oversaw a special collection of paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. He’d heard she was seeing a man quite seriously, a bond trader, of all things. He contemplated calling her, just to hear the sound of her voice, but decided it would be unwise. Like Russia, she was lost to him.
What’s his real name, Clovis?
I’m not sure he ever had one.
Where’s he from?
He might have been from Iraq once, but now he’s a son of the caliphate …
Finally, the sky beyond Mikhail’s window turned blue-black with the coming dawn. He put his room in order and thirty minutes later slumped bleary-eyed into the back of Sami Haddad’s car.
“How did it go?” asked the Lebanese.
“Total waste of time,” replied Mikhail through an elaborate yawn.
“Where now?”
“Tel Aviv.”
“It’s not such an easy drive, my friend.”
“Then perhaps you should take me to the airport instead.”
His flight was at half past eight. He sailed through passport control as a smiling, somewhat drowsy Canadian and settled into his first-class seat aboard a Middle East Airlines jet bound for Rome. To shield himself from his neighbor, a Turkish salesman of disreputable appearance, he pretended to read the morning papers. In reality, he was considering all the possible reasons why an aircraft operated by the government of Lebanon might fail to reach its destination safely. For once, he thought glumly, his death would have consequences, for the intelligence would die with him.
How much money are we talking about, Clovis?
Four million, maybe five.
Which is it?
Closer to five …
The plane landed in Rome without incident, though it took Mikhail the better part of two hours to clear the organized stampede that was Fiumicino’s passport control. His stay in Italy was brief, long enough for him to switch identities and board another airplane, an El Al flight bound for Tel Aviv. An Office car waited at Ben Gurion; it whisked him north to King Saul Boulevard. The building at the western end of the street was, like Paul Rousseau’s outpost on the rue de Grenelle, a lie in plain sight. No emblem hung over its entrance, no brass lettering proclaimed the identity of its occupant. In fact, there was nothing at all to suggest it was the headquarters of one of the world’s most feared and respected intelligence services. A closer inspection of the structure, however, would have revealed the existence of a building within a building, one with its own power supply, its own water and sewer lines, and its own secure communications system. Employees carried two keys. One opened an unmarked door in the lobby; the other operated the lift. Those who committed the unpardonable sin of losing one or both of their keys were banished to the Judean Wilderness, never to be seen or heard from again.
Like most field agents, Mikhail entered the building through the underground parking garage and then made his way upward to the executive floor. Because the hour was late—the security cameras recorded the time as half past nine—the corridor was as quiet as a school that had been emptied of children. From the half-open door at the end of the hall stretched a slender rhombus of light. Mikhail knocked softly and, hearing no reply, entered. Stuffed into an executive leather chair behind a desk of smoked glass was Uzi Navot, the soon-to-be former chief of the Office. He was frowning at an open file as though it were a bill he could not afford to pay. At his elbow was an open box of Viennese butter cookies. Only two remained, not a good sign.
At length, Navot looked up and with a dismissive movement of his hand instructed Mikhail to sit. He wore a striped dress shirt that had been cut for a thinner man and a pair of the rimless spectacles beloved by German intellectuals and Swiss bankers. His hair, once strawberry blond, was gray stubble; his blue eyes were bloodshot. He rolled up his shirtsleeves, exposing his massive forearms, and contemplated Mikhail for a long moment with thinly veiled hostility. It wasn’t the reception Mikhail had expected, but then one never knew quite what to expect when one encountered Uzi Navot these days. There were rumors his successor intended to keep him on in some capacity—blasphemy in a service that regarded regular turnover at the top almost as a matter of religious doctrine—but officially his future was unclear.
“Any problems on the way out of Beirut?” Navot asked at last, as though the question had occurred to him suddenly.
“None,” answered Mikhail.
Navot snared a stray cookie crumb with the tip of a thick forefinger. “Surveillance?”
“Nothing we could see.”
“And the man who rode the hotel elevator with you? Did you ever see him again?”
“At the roof bar.”
“Anything suspicious?”
“Everyone in Beirut looks suspicious. That’s why it’s Beirut.”
Navot flicked the cookie crumb onto the plate. Then he removed a photograph from the file and dealt it across the desktop toward Mikhail. It showed a man sitting in the front seat of a luxury automobile, at the edge of a seaside boulevard. The windows of the car were shattered. The man was a bloody tattered mess, and quite obviously dead.
“Recognize him?” asked Navot.
Mikhail squinted in concentration.
“Look carefully at the car.”
Mikhail did. And then he understood. The dead man was Sami Haddad.
“When did they get him?”
“Not long after he dropped you at the airport. And they were just getting started.”
Navot spun another photo across the desk, a ruined building on an elegant street in downtown Beirut. It was Gallerie Mansour on the rue Madame Curie. Limbs and heads littered the pavement. For once the carnage wasn’t human. It was Clovis Mansour’s magnificent professional inventory.
“I was hoping,” Navot resumed after a moment, “that my last days as chief would pass without incident. Instead, I have to deal with the loss of our best contract employee in Beirut and an asset we spent a great deal of time and effort recruiting.”
“Better than a dead field agent.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.” Navot accepted the two photographs and returned them to the file. “What did Mansour have for you?”
“The man who was behind Paris.”
“Who is he?”
“They call him Saladin.”
“Saladin? Well,” Navot said, closing the file, “at least that’s a start.”
Navot remained in his office long after Mikhail had taken his leave. The desk was empty except for his leather-bound executive notepad, on which he had scrawled a single word. Saladin … Only a man of great self-esteem would grant himself a code name like that, only a man of great ambition. The real Saladin had united the Muslim world under the Ayyubid dynasty and recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders. Perhaps this new Saladin was similarly inclined. For his coming-out party he had flattened a Jewish target in the middle of Paris, thus attacking two countries, two civilizations, at the same time. Surely, thought Navot, the success of the attack had only whetted his lust for infidel blood. It was only a matter of time before he struck again.
For the moment, Saladin was a French problem. But the fact that four Israeli citizens had perished in the attack gave Navot standing in Paris. So, too, did the name that Clovis Mansour had whispered into Mikhail’s ear in Beirut. In fact, with a bit of skilled salesmanship, the name alone might be enough to secure the Office a seat at the operational table. Navot was confident in his powers of persuasion. A former field agent and recruiter of spies, he had the ability to spin straw into gold. All he needed was someone to look after the Office’s interest in any joint Franco-Israeli undertaking. He had but one candidate in mind, a legendary field agent who had been running operations on French soil since he was a boy of twenty-two. What’s more, the operative in question had known Hannah Weinberg personally. Unfortunately, the prime minister had other plans for him.
Navot checked the time; it was ten fifteen. He reached for his phone and dialed Travel.
“I need to fly to Paris tomorrow morning.”
“The six o’clock or the nine?”
“The six,” said Navot despondently.
“When are you coming back?”
“Tomorrow night.”
“Done.”
Navot rang off and then placed a final call. The question he posed was one he had asked many times before.
“How long before he’s finished?”
“He’s close.”
“How close?”
“Maybe tonight, tomorrow at the latest.”
Navot replaced the receiver and allowed his gaze to wander the spacious office that soon would no longer be his.
Tomorrow at the latest …
Maybe, he thought, or maybe not.
5 (#ulink_fc6c680c-7eee-524f-8c5a-df5d8ede5fca)
ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM (#ulink_fc6c680c-7eee-524f-8c5a-df5d8ede5fca)
IN THE FAR CORNER OF the conservation lab, a black curtain stretched from the white ceiling to the white floor. Behind it was a matching pair of oaken Italian easels, two halogen lamps, a Nikon camera mounted atop a tripod, a palette, a tiny bale of cotton wool, an ancient CD player smudged with several different colors of paint, and a trolley laden with pigments, medium, solvents, wooden dowels, and several Winsor & Newton Series 7 sable-hair paintbrushes. For the better part of the past four months, the restorer had labored there alone, sometimes late at night, sometimes long before dawn. He wore no museum credentials, for his true place of employment was elsewhere. The staff conservators had been advised not to mention his presence or even to speak his name. Nor were they to discuss the large painting, an Italian Old Master altarpiece, propped upon his easels. The painting, like the restorer, had a dangerous and tragic past.
He was below average in height—five foot eight, perhaps, no more—and slender of build. His face was high at the forehead and narrow at the chin, with wide prominent cheekbones and a long, bony nose that looked as though it had been carved from wood. The dark hair was cropped short and stained with gray at the temples, the eyes were an unnatural shade of green. His age was one of the most closely guarded secrets in Israel. Not long ago, when his obituary appeared in newspapers around the world, no verifiable date of birth ever found its way into print. The reports of his death had been part of an elaborate operation to deceive his enemies in Moscow and Tehran. They had believed the stories to be true, a miscalculation that allowed the restorer to take vengeance against them. Not long after his return to Jerusalem, his wife gave birth to a set of twins, a girl named Irene after his mother, and a son called Raphael. They were now—mother, daughter, son—three of the most closely guarded people in the State of Israel. So, too, was the restorer. He came and went in an armored American-made SUV, accompanied by a bodyguard, a fawn-eyed killer of twenty-five, who sat outside the door of the conservation lab whenever he was present.
His appearance at the museum, on a black and wet Wednesday in December a few days after the birth of his children, had come as a shock, and a profound relief, to the rest of the conservation staff. They had been warned he did not like to be observed while working. Still, they routinely poked their heads into his little curtained grotto merely to glimpse the altarpiece with their own eyes. Truth be told, he couldn’t blame them. The painting, Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence, was arguably the world’s most famous missing work of art. Stolen from the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Palermo in October 1969, it was now formally in the possession of the Vatican. The Holy See had wisely decided to withhold news of the painting’s recovery until the restoration was complete. Like many Vatican pronouncements, the official version of events would bear little resemblance to the truth. It would not mention the fact that a legendary Israeli intelligence officer named Gabriel Allon had found the missing painting hanging in a church in the northern Italian town of Brienno. Nor would it mention that the same legendary intelligence officer had been entrusted with the task of restoring it.
During his long career he had carried out several unusual restorations—he had once repaired a Rembrandt portrait that had been pierced by a bullet—but the Caravaggio altarpiece propped upon Gabriel’s easels was without question the most damaged canvas he had ever seen. Little was known of its long journey from the Oratorio di San Lorenzo to the church where he had found it. The stories, however, were legion. It had been kept by a Mafia don as a prize and brought out for important meetings of his henchmen. It had been chewed by rats, damaged in a flood, and burned in a fire. Gabriel was certain of only one thing: the painting’s wounds, while grievous, were not fatal. But Ephraim Cohen, the museum’s chief of conservation, was dubious. Upon seeing the painting for the first time, he advised Gabriel to administer last rites and return the altarpiece to the Vatican in the same wooden coffin in which it had arrived.
“Ye of little faith,” Gabriel had said.
“No,” replied Cohen. “Me of limited talent.”
Cohen, like the other members of the staff, had heard the stories—the stories of deadlines missed, of commissions abandoned, of church reopenings delayed. The snail-like pace of Gabriel’s work habits was legendary, almost as legendary as his exploits on the secret battlefields of Europe and the Middle East. But they soon discovered that his slowness was voluntary rather than instinctive. The craft of restoration, he explained to Cohen one evening while swiftly repairing the tattered face of Saint Francis, was a bit like making love. It was best done slowly and with painstaking attention to detail, with occasional breaks for rest and refreshment. But in a pinch, if the craftsman and his subject matter were adequately acquainted, a restoration could be done at extraordinary speed, with more or less the same result.
“You and Caravaggio are old friends?” asked Cohen.
“We’ve collaborated in the past.”
“So the rumors are true then?”
Gabriel had been painting with his right hand. Now he moved the brush to his left and worked with equal dexterity.
“What rumors are those?” he asked after a moment.
“That you were the one who restored the Deposition for the Vatican Museums a few years ago.”
“You should never listen to rumors, Ephraim, especially when they concern me.”
“Or the news,” said Cohen darkly.
His hours were erratic and unpredictable. An entire day might pass with no sign of him. Then Cohen would arrive at the museum to find a large portion of the canvas miraculously restored. Surely, he thought, he had a secret helper. Or perhaps Caravaggio himself was stealing into the museum at night, a sword in one hand, a brush in the other, to assist with the work. After one nocturnal session—a particularly productive visit during which the Virgin was returned to her former glory—Cohen actually checked the security footage. He found that Gabriel had entered the lab at half past ten in the evening and had departed at seven twenty the next morning. Not even the fawn-eyed bodyguard had been with him. Perhaps it was true, thought Cohen, as he watched the ghostly figure moving at one frame per second along a half-lit hall. Perhaps he was an archangel after all.
When he was present during normal business hours, there was always music. La Bohème was a particular favorite. Indeed, he played it so often that Cohen, who spoke not a word of Italian, could soon sing “Che gelida manina” from memory. Once Gabriel entered his curtained grotto, he never reappeared until the session was complete. There were no strolls in the museum’s sculpture garden to clear his head, no trips to the staff lunchroom for a jolt of caffeine. Only the music, and the soft tap-tap-tap of his brush, and the occasional click of his Nikon camera as he recorded his relentless progress. Before leaving the laboratory he would clean his brushes and his palette and put his trolley in order—precisely, noted Cohen, so he would be able to detect whether anyone touched his things in his absence. Then the music would go silent, the halogen lamps would dim, and with little more than a cordial nod to the others he would be gone.
By early April, with the winter rains a memory and the days warm and bright, he was hurling himself headlong toward a finish line only he could see. All that remained was the winged angel of the Lord, an ivory-skinned boy who floated in the upper reaches of the composition. It was a curious choice to leave for last, thought Cohen, for the boy angel had suffered serious injury. His limbs were scarred by heavy paint losses, his white garment was in tatters. Only his right hand, which was pointed heavenward, was undamaged. Gabriel restored the angel in a series of marathon sessions. They were noteworthy for their silence—there was no music during this period—and for the fact that, as he was repairing the angel’s auburn hair, a large bomb exploded in Paris. He stood for a long time before the lab’s small television, his palette slowly drying, watching as the bodies were pulled from the rubble. And when a photograph of a woman named Hannah Weinberg appeared on the screen, he flinched as though struck by an invisible blow. Afterward, his expression darkened and his green eyes seemed to burn with anger. Cohen was tempted to ask the legend whether he had known the woman, but decided against it. One could talk to him about paintings and the weather, but when bombs exploded it was probably better to keep one’s distance.
On the last day, the day of Uzi Navot’s journey to Paris, Gabriel arrived at the lab before dawn and remained in his little grotto long after the museum had closed for the night. Ephraim Cohen found an excuse to stay late because he sensed the end was near and wanted to be present to witness it. Shortly after eight o’clock he heard the familiar sound of the legend laying his brush—a Winsor & Newton Series 7—on the aluminum tray of his trolley. Cohen peered furtively through the slender gap in the curtain and saw him standing before the canvas, a hand resting against his chin, his head tilted slightly to the side. He remained in the same position, motionless as the figures in the painting, until the fawn-eyed bodyguard entered the lab and pressed a mobile phone urgently into his palm. Reluctantly, he lifted it to his ear, listened in silence, and murmured something Cohen couldn’t quite make out. A moment later both he and the bodyguard were gone.
Alone, Ephraim Cohen slipped through the curtain and stood before the canvas, scarcely able to draw a breath. Finally, he plucked the Winsor & Newton paintbrush from the trolley and slipped it into the pocket of his smock. It wasn’t fair, he thought, as he doused the halogen lamps. Perhaps he really was an archangel after all.
6 (#ulink_34f1be81-4a9f-54a0-a83a-1f748916c343)
MA’ALE HAHAMISHA, ISRAEL (#ulink_34f1be81-4a9f-54a0-a83a-1f748916c343)
THE OLD KIBBUTZ OF MA’ALE HAHAMISHA occupied a strategic hilltop in the craggy western approaches to Jerusalem, not far from the Arab town of Abu Ghosh. Founded during the Arab Revolt of 1936–39, it was one of fifty-seven so-called tower and stockade settlements hastily erected across British-ruled Palestine in a desperate bid to secure the Zionist endeavor and, ultimately, reclaim the ancient kingdom of Israel. It derived its name and very identity from an act of revenge. Translated into English, Ma’ale Hahamisha meant “the Ascent of the Five.” It was a not-so-subtle reminder that an Arab terrorist from a nearby village had died at the hands of five of the kibbutz’s Jews.
Despite the violent circumstances of its birth, the kibbutz grew prosperous from its cauliflower and peaches and its charming mountain hotel. Ari Shamron, the twice-former chief of the Office and éminence grise of Israeli intelligence, often used the hotel as a meeting place when King Saul Boulevard or a safe flat wouldn’t do. One such meeting occurred on a brilliant afternoon in September 1972. On that occasion Shamron’s reluctant guest was a promising young painter named Gabriel Allon, whom Shamron had plucked from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. The Palestinian terrorist group Black September had just murdered eleven Israeli athletes and coaches at the Olympic games in Munich, and Shamron wanted Gabriel, a native German speaker who had spent time in Europe, to serve as his instrument of vengeance. Gabriel, with the defiance of youth, had told Shamron to find someone else. And Shamron, not for the last time, had bent him to his will.
The operation was code-named Wrath of God, a phrase chosen by Shamron to give his undertaking the patina of divine sanction. For three years Gabriel and a small team of operatives stalked their prey across Western Europe and the Middle East, killing at night and in broad daylight, living in fear that at any moment they might be arrested by local authorities and charged as murderers. In all, twelve members of Black September died at their hands. Gabriel personally killed six of the terrorists with a .22-caliber Beretta pistol. Whenever possible, he shot his victims eleven times, one bullet for each murdered Jew. When finally he returned to Israel, his temples were gray from stress and exhaustion. Shamron called them smudges of ash on the prince of fire.
It had been Gabriel’s intention to resume his career as an artist, but each time he stood before a canvas he saw only the faces of the men he had killed. And so with Shamron’s blessing he traveled to Venice as an expatriate Italian named Mario Delvecchio to study restoration. When his apprenticeship was complete, he returned to the Office and to the waiting arms of Ari Shamron. Posing as a gifted if taciturn European-based art restorer, he eliminated some of Israel’s most dangerous foes—including Abu Jihad, Yasir Arafat’s talented second-in-command, whom he killed in front of his wife and children in Tunis. Arafat returned the favor by ordering a terrorist to place a bomb beneath Gabriel’s car in Vienna. The explosion killed his young son Daniel and seriously wounded Leah, his first wife. She resided now in a psychiatric hospital on the other side of the ridge from Ma’ale Hahamisha, trapped in a prison of memory and a body ravaged by fire. The hospital was located in the old Arab village of Deir Yassin, where Jewish fighters from the Irgun and Lehi paramilitary organizations massacred more than a hundred Palestinians on the night of April 9, 1948. It was a cruel irony—that the shattered wife of Israel’s avenging angel should reside among the ghosts of Deir Yassin—but such was life in the twice-Promised Land. The past was inescapable. Arab and Jew were bound together by hatred, blood, and victimhood. And for their punishment they would be forced to live together as feuding neighbors for all eternity.
The years after the bombing in Vienna were for Gabriel the lost years. He lived as a hermit in Cornwall, he wandered Europe quietly restoring paintings, he tried to forget. Eventually, Shamron came calling yet again, and the bond between Gabriel and the Office was renewed. Acting at his mentor’s behest, he carried off some of the most celebrated operations in the history of Israeli intelligence. His was the career against which all others would be measured, especially Uzi Navot’s. Like the Arabs and Jews of Palestine, Gabriel and Navot were inextricably bound. They were the sons of Ari Shamron, the trusted heirs of the service he had built and nurtured. Gabriel, the elder son, had been confident of the father’s love, but Navot had always struggled to win his approval. He had been given the job as chief only because Gabriel had turned it down. Now, remarried, a father once more, Gabriel was finally ready to assume his rightful place in the executive suite of King Saul Boulevard. For Uzi Navot it was a nakba, the word the Arabs used to describe the catastrophe of their flight from the land of Palestine.
The old hotel in Ma’ale Hahamisha was less than a mile from the 1967 border, and from its terrace restaurant it was possible to see the orderly yellow lights of Jewish settlements spilling down the hillside into the West Bank. The terrace was in darkness, except for a few windblown candles flickering dimly on the empty tables. Navot sat alone in a distant corner, the same corner where Shamron had been waiting on that September afternoon in 1972. Gabriel sat down next to him and turned up the collar of his leather jacket against the cold. Navot was silent. He was staring down at the lights of Har Adar, the first Israeli settlement over the old Green Line.
“Mazel tov,” he said at last.
“For what?”
“The painting,” said Navot. “I hear it’s almost finished.”
“Where did you hear a thing like that?”
“I’ve been monitoring your progress. So has the prime minister.” Navot regarded Gabriel through his small rimless spectacles. “Is it really done?”
“I think so.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I want to take one more look at it in the morning. If I like what I see, I’ll apply a coat of varnish and send it back to the Vatican.”
“And only ten days past your deadline.”
“Eleven, actually. But who’s counting?”
“I was.” Navot gave a rueful smile. “I enjoyed the reprieve, however brief.”
A silence descended between them. It was far from companionable.
“In case it’s slipped your mind,” Navot said at last, “it’s time for you to sign your new contract and move into my office. In fact, I was planning to pack up my things today, but I had to make one more trip as chief.”
“Where?”
“I had a piece of intelligence that I needed to share with our French brethren about the bombing of the Weinberg Center. I also wanted to make certain they were pursuing the perpetrators with appropriate vigor. After all, four Israeli citizens were killed, not to mention a woman who once did a very large favor for the Office.”
“Do they know about our links to her?”
“The French?”
“Yes, Uzi, the French.”
“I sent a team into her apartment to have a look around after the attack.”
“And?”
“The team found no mention of a certain Israeli intelligence officer who once borrowed her van Gogh in order to find a terrorist. Nor was there any reference to one Zizi al-Bakari, investment manager for the House of Saud and CEO of Jihad, Incorporated.” Navot paused, then added, “May he rest in peace.”
“What about the painting?”
“It was in its usual place. In hindsight, the team should have taken it.”
“Why?”
“As you no doubt remember, our Hannah was never married. No siblings, either. Her will was quite explicit when it came to the painting. Unfortunately, French intelligence got to her lawyer before he could make contact with us.”
“What are you talking about, Uzi?”
“It seems Hannah trusted only one person in the world to look after her van Gogh.”
“Who?”
“You, of course. But there’s just one problem,” Navot added. “The French have taken the painting hostage. And they’re asking a rather high ransom.”
“How much?”
“The French don’t want money, Gabriel. The French want you.”
7 (#ulink_29c4349a-0753-5624-9040-a4af7af7ce0e)
MA’ALE HAHAMISHA, ISRAEL (#ulink_29c4349a-0753-5624-9040-a4af7af7ce0e)
NAVOT LAID A PHOTOGRAPH ON the table, a street in Beirut littered with the ancient debris of an antiquities gallery.
“I assume you saw this.”
Gabriel nodded slowly. He had read about Clovis Mansour’s death in the newspapers. Given the events in Paris, the bombing in Beirut had received only minor press coverage. Not a single news outlet attempted to link the two events, nor was there any suggestion in the media that Clovis Mansour was on the payroll of any foreign intelligence service. In point of fact, he received money from at least four: the CIA, MI6, the Jordanian GID, and the Office. Gabriel knew this because, in preparation for taking over as chief, he had been devouring briefing books on all current operations and assets.
“Clovis was one of our best sources in Beirut,” Navot was saying, “especially when it came to matters involving money. Lately, he’d been keeping an eye on ISIS’s involvement in the illicit antiquities trade, which is why he requested a crash meeting the day after the bomb exploded in Paris.”
“Who did you send?”
Navot answered.
“Since when is Mikhail an agent runner?”
Navot laid another photograph on the table. It had been taken by an overhead security camera and was of moderate quality. It showed two men sitting at a small round table. One was Clovis Mansour. As usual he was impeccably attired, but the man opposite looked as though he had borrowed clothing for the occasion. In the center of the table, resting on what appeared to be a swath of baize cloth, was a head, life-size, its eyes staring blankly into space. Gabriel recognized it as Roman in origin. He reckoned the poorly dressed man had more of the statue, perhaps the entire piece. The perfectly intact head was merely his calling card.
“There’s no date or time code.”
“It was the twenty-second of November, at four fifteen in the afternoon.”
“Who’s the chap with the Roman head?”
“His business card identified him as Iyad al-Hamzah.”
“Lebanese?”
“Syrian,” answered Navot. “Apparently, he rolled into town with a truckload of antiquities to sell—Greek, Roman, Persian, all high-quality, many bearing the telltale signs of recent excavation. Among the places he attempted to unload his wares was Gallerie Mansour. Clovis expressed interest in several items, but after making a few quiet inquiries he decided to take a pass.”
“Why?”
“Because the word on the street was that the gentleman from Syria was using the sale of looted antiquities to raise money for the Islamic State. Evidently, the money wasn’t intended for ISIS’s general fund. The Syrian gentleman was working on behalf of a high-ranking ISIS leader who was building a terror network capable of attacking targets in the West.”
“Does the ISIS leader have a name?”
“They call him Saladin.”
Gabriel looked up from the photograph. “How grandiose.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“I don’t suppose Clovis managed to learn his real name?”
“No such luck.”
“Where’s he from?”
“The senior ISIS commanders are all Iraqis. They regard the Syrians as pack mules.”
Gabriel looked down at the photograph again. “Why didn’t Clovis tell us about this sooner?”
“It seems to have slipped his mind.”
“Or maybe he’s lying.”
“Clovis Mansour? Lying? How could you suggest such a thing?”
“He’s a Lebanese antiquities dealer.”
“What’s your theory?” asked Navot.
“I have a feeling Clovis made a great deal of money selling those antiquities. And when a bomb exploded in the heart of Paris, he thought it might be wise to hedge his bets. So he came to us with a pretty story about how he was too virtuous to deal with the likes of ISIS.”
“That pretty story,” said Navot, “cost Clovis his life.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they killed Sami Haddad, too. I’ll spare you the photo.”
“Why just Clovis and Sami? Why not Mikhail, too?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same question.”
“And?”
“I don’t know why. I’m just glad they didn’t kill him. It would have ruined my going-away party.”
Gabriel returned the photograph. “How much did you tell the French?”
“Enough to let them know that the plot against the Weinberg Center originated in the caliphate. They weren’t surprised. In fact, they were already well aware of the Syrian connection. Both of the attackers traveled there during the past year. One is a Frenchwoman of Algerian descent. Her male accomplice is a Belgian national from the Molenbeek district of Brussels.”
“Belgium? How shocking,” said Gabriel derisively.
Thousands of Muslims from France, Britain, and Germany had traveled to Syria to fight alongside ISIS, but tiny Belgium had earned the dubious distinction of being Western Europe’s largest per capita supplier of manpower to the Islamic caliphate.
“Where are they now?” asked Gabriel.
“In a few minutes the French interior minister is going to announce they’re back in Syria.”
“How did they get there?”
“Air France to Istanbul on borrowed passports.”
“But of course.” There was a silence. Finally, Gabriel asked, “What does this have to do with me, Uzi?”
“The French are concerned that ISIS has managed to construct a sophisticated network on French soil.”
“Is that so?”
“The French are also concerned,” said Navot, ignoring the remark, “that this network intends to strike again in short order. Obviously, they would like to roll it up before the next attack. And they’d like you to help them do it.”
“Why me?”
“It seems you have an admirer inside the French security service. His name is Paul Rousseau. He runs a small operational unit called Alpha Group. He wants you to fly to Paris tomorrow morning for a meeting.”
“And if I don’t?”
“That painting will never leave French soil.”
“I’m supposed to meet with the prime minister tomorrow. He’s going to tell the world that I wasn’t killed in that bombing on the Brompton Road. He’s going to announce that I’m the new chief of the Office.”
“Yes,” said Navot dryly, “I know.”
“Maybe you should be the one to work with the French.”
“I suggested that.”
“And?”
“They only want you.” Navot paused, then added, “The story of my life.”
Gabriel tried and failed to suppress a smile.
“There is a silver lining to this,” Navot continued. “The prime minister thinks a joint operation with the French will help to repair our relations with a country that was once a valuable and trusted ally.”
“Diplomacy by special ops?”
“In so many words.”
“Well,” said Gabriel, “you and the prime minister seem to have it all worked out.”
“It was Paul Rousseau’s idea, not ours.”
“Was it really, Uzi?”
“What are you suggesting? That I engineered this to hold on to my job a little longer?”
“Did you?”
Navot waved his hand as though he were dispersing a foul odor. “Take the operation, Gabriel—for Hannah Weinberg, if for no other reason. Get inside the network. Find out who Saladin really is and where he’s operating. And then put him down before another bomb explodes.”
Gabriel gazed northward, toward the distant black mass of mountains separating Israel from what remained of Syria. “You don’t even know whether he really exists, Uzi. He’s only a rumor.”
“Someone planned that attack and moved the pieces into place under the noses of the French security services. It wasn’t a twenty-nine-year-old woman from the banlieues and her friend from Brussels. And it wasn’t a rumor.”
Navot’s phone flared like a match in the darkness. He raised it briefly to his ear before offering it to Gabriel.
“Who is it?”
“The prime minister.”
“What does he want?”
“An answer.”
Gabriel stared at the phone for a moment. “Tell him I have to have a word with the most powerful person in the State of Israel. Tell him I’ll call first thing in the morning.”
Navot relayed the message and rang off.
“What did he say?”
Navot smiled. “Good luck.”
8 (#ulink_beb5890c-5d8b-59f5-b82f-cb1266e424b6)
NARKISS STREET, JERUSALEM (#ulink_beb5890c-5d8b-59f5-b82f-cb1266e424b6)
THE GRUMBLE OF GABRIEL’S SUV disturbed the resolute quiet of Narkiss Street. He alighted from the backseat, passed through a metal gate, and headed up the garden walk to the entrance of a Jerusalem limestone apartment building. On the third-floor landing, he found the door to his flat slightly ajar. He opened it slowly, silently, and in the half-light saw Chiara seated at one end of the white couch, a child to her breast. The child was wrapped in a blanket. Only when Gabriel crept closer could he see it was Raphael. The boy had inherited his father’s face and the face of a half-brother he would never know. Gabriel toyed with the downy dark hair and then leaned down to kiss Chiara’s warm lips.
“If you wake him,” she whispered, “I’ll kill you.”
Smiling, Gabriel slipped off his suede loafers and in stocking feet padded down the corridor to the nursery. Two cribs stood end to end against a wall covered by clouds. They had been painted by Chiara and then hastily repainted by Gabriel upon his return to Israel, after what was supposed to be his last operation. He stood at the railing of one of the cribs and gazed down at the child sleeping below. He didn’t dare touch her. Raphael was already sleeping through the night, but Irene was a nocturnal creature who had learned how to blackmail her way into her parents’ bed. She was smaller and trimmer than her corpulent sibling, but far more stubborn and determined. Gabriel thought she had the makings of a perfect spy, though he would never permit it. A doctor, a poet, a painter—anything but a spy. He would have no successor, there would be no dynasty. The House of Allon would fade with his passing.
Gabriel peered upward toward the spot where he had painted Daniel’s face among the clouds, but the darkness rendered the image invisible. He left the nursery, closing the door soundlessly behind him, and went into the kitchen. The savor of meat braising in red wine and aromatics hung decadently in the air. He peered through the oven window and saw a covered orange casserole centered on the rack. Next to the stove, arranged as if for a recipe book, were the makings of Chiara’s famous risotto: Arborio rice, grated cheese, butter, white wine, and a large measuring cup filled with homemade chicken stock. There was also a bottle of Galilean Syrah, unopened. Gabriel eased the cork from the neck, poured a glass, and returned to the sitting room.
Quietly, he settled into the armchair opposite Chiara. And he thought, not for the first time, that the little apartment in the old neighborhood of Nachlaot was too small for a family of four, and too far from King Saul Boulevard. It would be better to have a house in the secular belt of suburbs along the Coastal Plain, or a large apartment in one of the smart new towers that seemed to sprout overnight along the sea in Tel Aviv. But long ago, Jerusalem, God’s fractured city upon a hill, had cast a spell over him. He loved the limestone buildings and the smell of the pine and the cold wind and rains in the winter. He loved the churches and the pilgrims and the Haredim who shouted at him because he drove a motorcar on the Sabbath. He even loved the Arabs in the Old City who eyed him warily as he passed their stalls in the souk, as if somehow they knew that he was the one who had eliminated so many of their patron saints of terror. And while not religious by practice, he loved to slip into the Jewish Quarter and stand before the weighty ashlars of the Western Wall. Gabriel was willing to accept territorial compromises in order to secure a lasting and viable peace with the Palestinians and the broader Arab world, but privately he regarded the Western Wall as nonnegotiable. There would never again be a border through the heart of Jerusalem, and Jews would never again have to request permission to visit their holiest site. The Wall was part of Israel now, and it would remain so until the day the country ceased to exist. In this volatile corner of the Mediterranean, kingdoms and empires came and went like the winter rains. One day the modern reincarnation of Israel would disappear, too. But not while Gabriel was alive, and certainly not while he was chief of the Office.
He drank some of the earthy, peppery Syrah and contemplated Chiara and Raphael as though they were figures in his own private nativity. The child had released his hold on his mother’s breast and was lying drunken and sated in her arms. Chiara was staring down at him, her long curly hair, with its auburn and chestnut highlights, tumbling over one shoulder, her angular nose and jaw in semi-profile. Chiara’s was a face of timeless beauty. In it Gabriel saw traces of Arabia and North Africa and Spain and all the other places her ancestors had wandered before finding themselves in the ancient Jewish ghetto of Venice. It was there, ten years earlier, in a small office off the ghetto’s broad piazza, that Gabriel had seen her for the first time—the beautiful, opinionated, overeducated daughter of the city’s chief rabbi. Unbeknownst to Gabriel, she was also an Office field agent, a bat leveyha female escort officer. She revealed herself to him a short time later in Rome, after an incident involving gunplay and the Italian police. Trapped alone with Chiara in a safe flat, Gabriel had wanted desperately to touch her. He had waited until the case was resolved and they had returned to Venice. There, in a canal house in Cannaregio, they made love for the first time, in a bed prepared with fresh linen. It was like making love to a figure painted by the hand of Veronese.
She was far too young for him, and he was much too old to be a father again—or so he had thought until the moment his two children, first Raphael, then Irene, emerged in a blur from the incision in Chiara’s womb. Instantly, all that had come before seemed like stops along a journey to this place: the bombing in Vienna, the years of self-imposed exile, the long Hamlet-like struggle over whether it was proper for him to remarry and start another family. The shadow of Leah would always hang over this little home in the heart of Jerusalem, and the face of Daniel would always peer down on his half-siblings from his heavenly perch on the wall of the nursery. But after years of wandering in the wilderness, Gabriel Allon, the eternal stranger, the lost son of Ari Shamron, was finally home. He drank more of the blood-red Syrah and tried to compose the words he would use to tell Chiara that he was leaving for Paris because a woman she had never met had left him a van Gogh painting worth more than a hundred million dollars. The woman, like too many others he had met along his journey, was dead. And Gabriel was going to find the man responsible.
They call him Saladin …
Chiara placed a finger to her lips. Then, rising, she carried Raphael into the nursery. She returned a moment later and took the glass of wine from Gabriel’s hand. She lifted it to her nose and breathed deeply of its rich scent but did not drink.
“It won’t hurt them if you take a small sip.”
“Soon.” She returned the glass to Gabriel. “Is it finished?”
“Yes,” he answered. “I think it is.”
“That’s good.” She smiled. “What now?”
“Have you considered the possibility,” asked Chiara, “that this is all an elaborate plot by Uzi to hang on to his job a little longer?”
“I have.”
“And?”
“He swears it was all Paul Rousseau’s idea.”
Chiara skeptically folded the butter and the cheese into the risotto mixture. Then she spooned the rice onto two plates and to each added a thick slice of the osso buco Milanese.
“More juice,” said Gabriel. “I like the juice.”
“It’s not stew, darling.”
Gabriel tore away a crust of bread and swirled it along the bottom of the casserole pot.
“Peasant,” sneered Chiara.
“I come from a long line of peasants.”
“You? You’re as bourgeois as they come.”
Chiara dimmed the overhead lights, and they sat down at a small candlelit table in the kitchen.
“Why candles?” asked Gabriel.
“It’s a special occasion.”
“My last restoration.”
“For a while, I suppose. But you can always restore paintings after you retire as chief.”
“I’ll be too old to hold a brush.”
Gabriel poked the tines of his fork into the veal, and it fell from the thick bone. He prepared his first bite carefully, an equal amount of meat and risotto drenched in the rich marrowy juice, and slipped it reverently into his mouth.
“How is it?”
“I’ll tell you after I regain consciousness.”
The candlelight was dancing in Chiara’s eyes. They were the color of caramel and flecked with honey, a combination that Gabriel had never been able to reproduce on canvas. He prepared another bite of the risotto and veal but was distracted by an image on the television. Rioting had erupted in several Parisian banlieues after the arrest of several men on terrorism-related charges, none in direct connection with the attack on the Weinberg Center.
“ISIS must be enjoying this,” said Gabriel.
“The rioting?”
“It doesn’t look like rioting to me. It looks like …”
“What, darling?”
“An intifada.”
Chiara switched off the television and turned up the volume on the baby monitor. Designed by the Office’s Technology department, it had a heavily encrypted signal so that Israel’s enemies could not eavesdrop on the domestic life of its spy chief. For the moment it emitted only a low electrical hum.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked.
“I’m going to eat every bite of this delicious food. And then I’m going to soak up every last drop of juice in that pot.”
“I was talking about Paris.”
“Obviously, we have two choices.”
“You have two choices, darling. I have two children.”
Gabriel laid down his fork and stared levelly at his beautiful young wife. “Either way,” he said after a conciliatory silence, “my paternity leave is over. I can assume my duties as chief, or I can work with the French.”
“And thus take possession of a van Gogh painting worth at least a hundred million dollars.”
“There is that,” said Gabriel, picking up his fork again.
“Why do you suppose she decided to leave it to you?”
“Because she knew I would never do anything foolish with it.”
“Like what?”
“Put it up for sale.”
Chiara made a face.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“One can dream, can’t one?”
“Only about osso buco and risotto.”
Rising, Gabriel went to the counter and helped himself to another portion. Then he doused both rice and meat in juice, until his plate was in jeopardy of brimming over. Behind his back, Chiara hissed in disapproval.
“There’s one more,” he said, gesturing toward the casserole.
“I still have five kilos to lose.”
“I like you the way you are.”
“Spoken like a true Italian husband.”
“I’m not Italian.”
“What language are you speaking to me right now?”
“It’s the food talking.”
Gabriel sat down again and laid siege to the veal. From the monitor came the short cry of a child. Chiara cocked a vigilant ear toward the device and listened intently, as if to the footsteps of an intruder. Then, after a satisfactory interlude of silence, she relaxed again.
“So you intend to take the case—is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m inclined to,” answered Gabriel judiciously.
Chiara shook her head slowly.
“What have I done now?”
“You’ll do anything to avoid taking over the Office, won’t you?”
“Not anything.”
“Running an operation isn’t exactly a nine-to-five job.”
“Neither is running the Office.”
“But the Office is in Tel Aviv. The operation is in Paris.”
“Paris is a four-hour flight.”
“Four and a half,” she corrected him.
“Besides,” Gabriel plowed on, “just because the operation starts in Paris, that doesn’t mean it will end there.”
“Where will it end?”
Gabriel tilted his head to the left.
“In Mrs. Lieberman’s apartment?”
“Syria.”
“Ever been?”
“Only to Majdal Shams.”
“That doesn’t count.”
Majdal Shams was a Druze town in the Golan Heights. Along its northern edge was a fence topped by swirls of razor wire, and beyond the fence was Syria. Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate, controlled the territory along the border, but a two-hour car ride to the northeast was ISIS and the caliphate. Gabriel wondered how the American president would feel if ISIS were two hours from Indiana.
“I thought,” said Chiara, “that we were going to stay out of the Syrian civil war. I thought we were going to sit by and do nothing while all our enemies killed each other.”
“The next chief of the Office feels that policy would be unwise in the long term.”
“Does he?”
“Have you ever heard of a man named Arnold Toynbee?”
“I have a master’s degree in history. Toynbee was a British historian and economist, one of the giants of his day.”
“And Toynbee,” said Gabriel, “believed there were two great pivot points in the world that influenced events far beyond their borders. One was the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin in modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, or Af-Pak as our friends in America are fond of calling it.”
“And the other?”
Again, Gabriel tilted his head to the left. “We hoped the problems of Syria would remain in Syria, but I’m afraid hope is not an acceptable strategy when it comes to national security. While we’ve been twiddling our thumbs, ISIS has been developing a sophisticated terror network with the ability to strike in the heart of the West. Maybe it’s led by a man who calls himself Saladin. Maybe it’s someone else. Either way, I’m going to tear the network to pieces, hopefully before they can strike again.”
Chiara started to respond but was interrupted by the cry of an infant. It was Irene; her two-note wail was as familiar to Gabriel as the sound of a French siren on a wet Paris night. He started to rise but Chiara was on her feet first.
“Finish your dinner,” she said. “I hear the food in Paris is terrible.”
Gabriel heard her voice next over the monitor, speaking soothingly in Italian to an infant who was no longer crying. Alone, he switched on the television and finished his supper while, four and a half hours to the northwest by airplane, Paris burned.
For thirty minutes she did not return. Gabriel saw to the dishes and wiped down the kitchen counters, thoroughly, so that Chiara would not feel it necessary to reprise his efforts, which was usually the case. He added coffee and water to the automatic maker and then stole softly down the hall to the master bedroom. There he found his wife and daughter, Chiara supine atop the bed, Irene prone across her breasts, both sleeping soundly.
Gabriel stood in the doorway, his shoulder leaning against the woodwork, and allowed his eyes to travel slowly across the walls of the room. They were hung with paintings—three paintings by Gabriel’s grandfather, the only three he had been able to track down, and several more by his mother. There was also a large portrait of a young man with prematurely gray temples and a gaunt, weary face haunted by the shadow of death. One day, thought Gabriel, his children would ask him about the troubled young man depicted in the portrait, and about the woman who had painted it. It was not a conversation he was looking forward to. Already, he feared their reaction. Would they pity him? Would they fear him? Would they think him a monster, a murderer? It was no matter; he had to tell them. It was better to hear the unhappy details of such a life from the lips of the man who had led it rather than from someone else. Mothers often portrayed fathers in too flattering a light. Obituaries rarely told the whole story, especially when their subjects led classified lives.
Gabriel lifted his daughter from Chiara’s breast and carried her into the nursery. He placed her gently in her crib, covered her with a blanket, and stood over her for a moment until he was sure she was settled. Finally, he returned to the master bedroom. Chiara was still sleeping soundly, watched over by the brooding young man in the portrait. It’s not me, he would tell his children. It’s just someone I had to become. I am not a monster or a murderer. You exist in this place, you sleep peacefully in this land tonight, because of people like me.
9 (#ulink_30cb09d6-fd29-5c65-b7b7-c58e48490781)
THE MARAIS, PARIS (#ulink_30cb09d6-fd29-5c65-b7b7-c58e48490781)
AT TWENTY MINUTES PAST TEN the following morning, Christian Bouchard was standing in the arrivals hall of Charles de Gaulle, a tan raincoat over his crisp suit, a paper sign in his hand. The sign read SMITH. Even Bouchard found it less than convincing. He was watching the conveyor belt of humanity flowing into the hall from passport control—the international peddlers of goods and services, the seekers of asylum and employment, the tourists who had come to see a country that no longer existed. It was the job of the DGSI to sift through this daily deluge, identify the potential terrorists and agents of foreign intelligence, and monitor their movements until they left French soil. It was a near-impossible task. But for men such as Christian Bouchard, it meant there was no shortage of work or opportunities for career advancement. For better or worse, security was one of the few growth industries in France.
Just then, Bouchard’s mobile vibrated in his coat pocket. It was a text message stating that the reason for his visit to Charles de Gaulle had just been admitted into France on an Israeli passport bearing the name Gideon Argov. Two minutes later Bouchard spotted the selfsame Monsieur Argov, black leather jacket, black nylon overnight bag, adrift on the current of arriving passengers. Bouchard had seen him in surveillance photographs—there was that famous shot taken in the Gare de Lyon a few seconds before the explosion—but never had he seen the legend in the flesh. Bouchard had to admit he was sorely disappointed. The Israeli was five foot nothing and maybe, maybe, a hundred and fifty pounds. Still, there was a predatory swiftness in his gait and a slight outward bend to his legs that suggested speed and agility in his youth, which, thought Bouchard with misplaced arrogance, was quite some time ago.
Two paces behind him was a much younger man of nearly identical height and weight: dark hair, dark skin, the alert dark eyes of a Jew whose ancestors had lived in Arab lands. An employee of the Israeli Embassy was there to greet them, and together the three men—legend, bodyguard, and embassy functionary—filed outside to a waiting car. It headed directly into the center of Paris, followed by a second car in which Bouchard was the only passenger. He had anticipated his quarry would proceed directly to Madame Weinberg’s apartment on the rue Pavée, where Paul Rousseau was at that moment waiting. Instead, the legend made a stop on the rue des Rosiers. At the far western end of the street was a barricade. Behind it were the ruins of the Weinberg Center.
By Bouchard’s wristwatch, the Israeli remained at the barricade for three minutes. Then he headed eastward along the street, trailed by his bodyguard. After a few paces he paused in a shop window, a crude but effective touch of tradecraft that compelled Bouchard, who was discreetly following, to seek shelter in the boutique opposite. Instantly, a cloying saleswoman accosted him, and by the time he’d managed to extricate himself, the Israeli and his bodyguard had vanished. Bouchard stood frozen for a moment, staring up the length of the street. Then he wheeled round and saw the Israeli standing behind him, one hand pressed to his chin, head tilted to one side.
“Where’s your sign?” he asked finally in French.
“My what?”
“Your sign. The one you were holding at the airport.” The green eyes probed. “You must be Christian Bouchard.”
“And you must be—”
“I must be,” he interrupted with the terseness of a nail gun. “And I was assured there would be no surveillance.”
“I wasn’t watching you.”
“Then what were you doing?”
“Rousseau asked me to make sure you arrived safely.”
“You’re here to protect me—is that what you’re saying?”
Bouchard was silent.
“Allow me to make one thing clear from the outset,” said the legend. “I don’t need protection.”
They walked side by side along the pavement, Bouchard in his smart suit and raincoat, Gabriel in his leather jacket and his grief, until they arrived at the entrance of the apartment house at Number 24. When Bouchard opened the outer door, he inadvertently opened a door in Gabriel’s memory, too. It was ten years ago, early evening, a light rain falling like tears from the sky. Gabriel had come to Paris because he needed a van Gogh as bait in order to insert an agent into the entourage of Zizi al-Bakari, and he had heard from an old friend in London, a wildly eccentric art dealer named Julian Isherwood, that Hannah Weinberg was in possession of one. He had approached her without introduction on the very spot where he and Christian Bouchard stood now. She was holding an umbrella in one hand and with the other was stretching a key toward the lock. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she had lied with admirable composure, “but I don’t have a van Gogh. If you’d like to see some paintings by Vincent, I suggest you visit the Musée d’Orsay.”
The memory dissipated. Gabriel followed Bouchard across an internal courtyard, into a foyer, and up a flight of carpeted stairs. On the fourth floor, nickeled light leaked weakly through a soiled window, illuminating two stately mahogany doors facing each other like duelists across the chessboard floor of the landing. The door on the right was absent a nameplate. Bouchard unlocked it and, stepping to one side, motioned for Gabriel to enter.
He paused in the formal entrance hall and surveyed his surroundings, as if for the first time. The room was decorated precisely as it had been on the morning of Jeudi Noir: stately brocaded furniture, heavy velvet curtains, an ormolu clock, still ticking away five minutes slow on the mantel. Again, the door to Gabriel’s memory opened, and he glimpsed Hannah seated on the couch in a rather dowdy woolen skirt and thick sweater. She had just handed him a bottle of Sancerre and was watching intently as he removed the cork—watching his hands, he remembered, the hands of the avenger. “I’m very good at keeping secrets,” she was saying. “Tell me why you want my van Gogh, Monsieur Allon. Perhaps we can reach some accommodation.”
From the adjoining library there came the faint rustle of paper, like the turning of a page. Gabriel peered inside and saw a rumpled figure standing before a bookcase, a large leather-bound volume in his hand. “Dumas,” the figure said without looking up. “And quite valuable.”
He closed the book, returned it to the shelf, and studied Gabriel as if contemplating a rare coin or a cage bird. Gabriel returned the gaze without expression. He had expected another version of Bouchard, a slick, cocky bastard who took wine with his midday meal and left the office promptly at five so he could spend an hour with his mistress before rushing home to his wife. Therefore, Paul Rousseau was a pleasant surprise.
“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” he said. “I only wish the circumstances were different. Madame Weinberg was a friend, was she not?”
Gabriel was silent.
“Is something wrong?” asked Rousseau.
“I’ll let you know when I see the van Gogh.”
“Ah, yes, the van Gogh. It’s in the room at the end of the hall,” said Rousseau. “But I suppose you already knew that.”
She had kept a key, Gabriel recalled, in the top drawer of the desk. Obviously, Rousseau and his men had not discovered it, because the lock had been dismantled. Otherwise, the room was as Gabriel remembered it: the same bed with a lace canopy, the same toys and stuffed animals, the same provincial dresser, above which hung the same painting, Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table, oil on canvas, by Vincent van Gogh. Gabriel had carried out the painting’s only restoration, in a rambling Victorian safe house outside London, shortly before its sale—private, of course—to Zizi al-Bakari. His work, he thought now, had held up well. The painting was perfect except for a thin horizontal line near the top of the image that Gabriel had made no attempt to repair. The line was Vincent’s fault; he had leaned another canvas against poor Marguerite before she was sufficiently dry. Zizi al-Bakari, a connoisseur of art as well as jihadist terror, had regarded the line as proof of the painting’s authenticity—and of the authenticity of the beautiful young American woman, a Harvard-educated art historian, who had sold it to him.
Of this, Paul Rousseau knew nothing. He was staring not at the painting but at Gabriel, his cage bird, his curio. “One wonders why she chose to hang it here rather than in her parlor,” he said after a moment. “And why, in death, she chose to leave it to you, of all people.”
Gabriel lifted his eyes from the painting and fixed them squarely on the face of Paul Rousseau. “Perhaps we should make one thing clear at the outset,” he said. “We’re not going to be closing out old accounts. Nor are we going to take any strolls down memory lane.”
“Oh, no,” Rousseau agreed hastily, “we haven’t time for that. Still, it would be an interesting exercise, if only for its entertainment value.”
“Be careful, Monsieur Rousseau. Memory lane is just around the next corner.”
“So it is.” Rousseau gave a capitulatory smile.
“We had a deal,” said Gabriel. “I come to Paris, you give me the picture.”
“No, Monsieur Allon. First you help me find the man who bombed the Weinberg Center, and then I give you the painting. I was very clear with your friend Uzi Navot.” Rousseau looked quizzically at Gabriel. “He is a friend of yours, is he not?”
“He used to be,” said Gabriel coolly.
They fell into a comfortable silence, each staring at the van Gogh, like strangers in a gallery.
“Vincent must have loved her very much to paint something so beautiful,” Rousseau said at last. “And soon it will belong to you. I’m tempted to say you’re a very lucky man, but I won’t. You see, Monsieur Allon,” he said, smiling sadly, “I’ve read your file.”
10 (#ulink_cd8e2346-1de6-567d-9a4d-9e96c5e9f2c3)
RUE PAVÉE, PARIS (#ulink_cd8e2346-1de6-567d-9a4d-9e96c5e9f2c3)
INTELLIGENCE SERVICES FROM DIFFERENT NATIONS do not cooperate because they enjoy it. They do so because, like divorced parents of small children, they sometimes find it necessary to work together for the greater good. Old rivalries do not vanish overnight. They slumber just beneath the surface, like the wounds of infidelities, forgotten anniversaries, and unmet emotional needs. The challenge for the two intelligence services is to create a zone of trust, a room where there are no secrets. Outside that room they are free to pursue their own interests. But once inside, each is compelled to lay bare its most cherished sources and methods for the other to see. Gabriel had much experience in this realm. A natural restorer, he had repaired the Office’s relations with both the CIA and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. France, however, was a more difficult proposition. It had long been an important operational theater for the Office, especially for Gabriel, whose litany of secret sins on French soil was long. What’s more, France was an unabashed supporter of many of Israel’s most implacable foes. In short, the intelligence services of Israel and France did not like each other much.
It was not always so. France armed Israel in its infancy, and without French help Israel would have never developed the nuclear deterrent that allowed it to survive in the hostile Middle East. But in the 1960s, after the disastrous war in Algeria, Charles de Gaulle set out to repair France’s strained relations with the Arab world—and when Israel, largely with French aircraft, launched the Six-Day War with a surprise attack on Egypt’s airfields, de Gaulle condemned it. He referred to Jews as “an elite people, sure of itself, domineering,” and the rupture was complete.
Now, over coffee in the salon of the Weinberg family apartment on the rue Pavée, Gabriel and Rousseau set out to repair, at least temporarily, the legacy of mistrust. Their first order of business was to hammer out a basic operational accord, a blueprint for how the two services would work together, a division of labor and authority, the rules of the road. It was to be a true partnership, though for obvious reasons Rousseau would retain preeminence over any aspects of the operation that touched French soil. In return, Gabriel would be granted complete and total access to France’s voluminous files on the thousands of Islamic extremists living within its borders: the watch reports, the e-mail and phone intercepts, the immigration records. That alone, he would say much later, had been worth the price of admission.
There were bumps in the road, but for the most part the negotiations went more smoothly than either Gabriel or Rousseau could have imagined. Perhaps it was because the two men were not so different. They were men of the arts, men of culture and learning who had devoted their lives to protecting their fellow citizens from those who would shed the blood of innocents over ideology or religion. Each had lost a spouse—one to illness, the other to terror—and each was well respected by their counterparts in Washington and London. Rousseau was no Gabriel Allon, but he had been fighting terrorists almost as long, and had the notches in his belt to prove it.
“There are some in the French political establishment,” said Gabriel, “who would like to see me behind bars because of my previous activities.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“If I am to function here without cover, I require a document giving me blanket immunity, now and forever, amen.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“And I’ll see if I can find Saladin before he attacks again.”
Rousseau frowned. “Too bad you weren’t the one to negotiate the Iran nuclear deal.”
“Too bad,” agreed Gabriel.
By then, it was approaching four o’clock. Rousseau stood, yawned elaborately, stretched his arms wide, and suggested a walk. “Doctor’s orders,” he said. “It seems I’m too fat for my own good.” They slipped from the entrance of Hannah Weinberg’s apartment house and, with Bouchard and Gabriel’s bodyguard in tow, walked along the Seine embankments toward Notre-Dame. They were a mismatched pair, the lumpy, tweedy former professor from the Sorbonne, the smallish figure in leather who seemed to float slightly above the surface of the paving stones. The sun was low in the western sky, blazing through a slit in the clouds. Rousseau shaded his eyes.
“Where do you intend to start?”
“The files, of course.”
“You’ll need help.”
“Obviously.”
“How many officers do you intend to bring into the country?”
“The exact number I need.”
“I can give you a room in our headquarters on the rue de Grenelle.”
“I prefer something a bit more private.”
“I can arrange a safe house.”
“So can I.”
Gabriel paused at a news kiosk. On the front page of Le Monde were two photographs of Safia Bourihane, the Frenchwoman of Muslim heritage, the veiled killer from the caliphate. The headline was one word in length: CATASTROPHE!
“Whose catastrophe was it?” asked Gabriel.
“The inevitable inquiry will undoubtedly find that elements of my service made terrible mistakes. But are we truly to blame? We, the humble secret servants who stand with our fingers in the dike? Or does the blame lie elsewhere?”
“Where?”
“In Washington, for example.” Rousseau set off along the embankment. “The invasion of Iraq turned the region into a cauldron. And when the new American president decided the time had come to withdraw, the cauldron boiled over. And then there was this folly we called the Arab Spring. Mubarak must go! Gaddafi must go! Assad must go!” He shook his head slowly. “It was madness, absolute madness. And now we are left with this. ISIS controls a swath of territory the size of the United Kingdom, right on the doorstep of Europe. Even Bin Laden would have never dared to dream of such a thing. And what does the American president tell us? ISIS is not Islamic. ISIS is the jayvee team.” He frowned. “What does this mean? Jayvee?”
“I think it has something to do with basketball.”
“And what does basketball have to do with a subject as serious as the rise of the caliphate?”
Gabriel only smiled.
“Does he truly believe this drivel, or is it an ignorantia affectata?”
“A willful ignorance?”
“Yes.”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“Do you know him?”
“We’ve met.”
Rousseau was obviously tempted to ask Gabriel about the circumstances of his one and only meeting with the American president, but he carried on with his lecture on ISIS instead. “The truth is,” he said, “ISIS is indeed Islamic. And it has more in common with Muhammad and his earliest followers—al salaf al salih—than some of the so-called experts care to admit. We are horrified when we read accounts of ISIS using crucifixion. We tell ourselves that these are the actions of barbarians, not men of faith. But ISIS doesn’t crucify only because it is cruel. It crucifies because, according to the Koran, crucifixion is one of the proscribed punishments for the enemies of Islam. It crucifies because it must. We civilized Westerners find this almost impossible to comprehend.”
“We don’t,” said Gabriel.
“That’s because you live in the region. You are a people of the region,” Rousseau added. “And you know full well what will happen if the likes of ISIS are ever let loose within the walls of your fortress. It will be …”
“A holocaust,” said Gabriel.
Rousseau nodded thoughtfully. Then he led Gabriel across the Pont Notre-Dame, to the Île de la Cité. “So in the words of Lenin,” he asked, “what is to be done?”
“I am merely a spy, Monsieur Rousseau, not a general or a prime minister.”
“And if you were?”
“I would tear them out root and branch. I would turn them into losers instead of winners. Take away the land,” Gabriel added, “and there can be no Islamic State. And if there is no state, the caliphate will recede once more into history.”
“Invasion didn’t work in Iraq or Afghanistan,” replied Rousseau, “and it won’t work in Syria. Better to chip away at them from the air and with the help of regional allies. In the meantime, contain the infection so it doesn’t spread to the rest of the Middle East and Europe.”
“It’s too late for that. The contagion is already here.”
They crossed another bridge, the Petit Pont, and entered the Latin Quarter. Rousseau knew it well. He walked now with a purpose other than his health, down the boulevard Saint-Germain, into a narrow side street, until finally he stopped outside the doorway of an apartment building. It was as familiar to Gabriel as the entrance of Hannah Weinberg’s building on the rue Pavée, though it had been many years since his last visit. He glanced at the intercom. Some of the names were still the same.
Presently, the door swung open and two people, a man and a woman in their mid-twenties, emerged. Rousseau caught the door before it could close and led Gabriel into the half-light of the foyer. A passageway gave onto the shadowed internal courtyard, where Rousseau paused for a second time and pointed toward a window on the uppermost floor.
“My wife and I lived right there. When she died I gave up the apartment and headed south. There were too many memories, too many ghosts.” He pointed toward a window overlooking the opposite side of the courtyard. “A former student of mine lived over there. She was quite brilliant. Quite radical, too, as were most of my students in those days. Her name,” he added, with a sidelong glance at Gabriel, “was Denise Jaubert.”
Gabriel stared without expression at Rousseau, as though the name meant nothing to him. In truth, he suspected he knew more about Denise Jaubert than did her former professor. She was indeed a radical. More important, she was the occasional lover of one Sabri al-Khalifa, leader of the Palestinian terror group Black September, mastermind of the Munich Olympics massacre.
“Late one afternoon,” Rousseau resumed, “I was working at my desk when I heard laughter in the courtyard. It was Denise. She was with a man. Black hair, pale skin, strikingly handsome. Walking a few steps behind them was a smaller fellow with short hair. I couldn’t see much of his face. You see, in spite of the overcast weather he was wearing dark glasses.”
Rousseau looked at Gabriel, but Gabriel, in his thoughts, was walking across a Parisian courtyard, a few paces behind the man for whom the Office had spent seven long years searching.
“I wasn’t the only one who noticed the man in the sunglasses,” Rousseau said after a moment. “Denise’s handsome companion noticed him, too. He tried to draw a pistol, but the smaller man drew first. I’ll never forget how he moved forward while he was firing. It was … beautiful. There were ten shots. Then he inserted a second magazine into his weapon, placed the barrel of the gun against the man’s ear, and fired one last shot. It’s odd, but I don’t recall him leaving. He just seemed to vanish.” Rousseau looked at Gabriel. “And now he stands beside me.”
Gabriel said nothing. He was staring down at the cobbles of the courtyard, the cobbles that had once run red with the blood of Sabri al-Khalifa.
“I must admit,” said Rousseau, “that for a long time I thought you a murderer. The civilized world condemned your actions. But now the civilized world finds itself in the very same fight, and we are using the very same tactics. Drones, missiles, men in black in the middle of the night.” He paused, then added, “It seems history has absolved you of your sins.”
“I committed no sins,” said Gabriel. “And I seek no absolution.”
Just then, Rousseau’s mobile chimed in his coat pocket, followed a few seconds later by Gabriel’s. Once again, it was Gabriel who drew first. It was a priority message from King Saul Boulevard. The DGSI had sent a similar message to Rousseau.
“It appears the attack on the Weinberg Center was only the beginning.” Rousseau returned the phone to his coat pocket and stared at the cobbles where Sabri al-Khalifa had fallen. “Will it end the same way for the one they call Saladin?”
“If we’re lucky.”
“How soon can you start?”
“Tonight.”
11 (#ulink_4b609465-44c3-5bf3-9f74-b7327c1da6df)
AMSTERDAM—PARIS (#ulink_4b609465-44c3-5bf3-9f74-b7327c1da6df)
LATER, IT WOULD BE DETERMINED with near certainty that the Paris and Amsterdam bombs were the lethal handiwork of the same man. Once again the mode of delivery was an ordinary white panel van, though in Amsterdam it was a Ford Transit rather than a Renault. It detonated at half past four precisely, in the center of Amsterdam’s bustling Albert Cuyp Market. The vehicle had entered the market early that morning and had remained there undetected throughout the day as thousands of shoppers strolled obliviously past through the pale spring sunshine. The driver of the van was a woman, approximately thirty years of age, blond hair, long legs, narrow hips, blue jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, a fleece vest. This was established not with the help of witnesses but with closed-circuit video surveillance cameras. Police found no one among the living who could recall seeing her.
The market, regarded as Europe’s largest, is located in the Old Side of the city. Opposing rows of stalls line the street, and behind the stalls are terraces of saddle-brown brick houses with shops and restaurants on the ground floor. Many of the vendors are from the Middle East and North Africa, a fact that several reporters and terrorism analysts were quick to point out during the first hours of the coverage. They saw it as evidence that the perpetrators were inspired by a creed other than radical Islam, though when pressed to name one, they could not. Finally, a scholar of Islam from Cambridge explained the seeming paradox. The Muslims of Amsterdam, she said, were living in a city of legalized drugs and prostitution where the laws of men held sway rather than the laws of Allah. In the eyes of the Muslim extremists, they were apostates. And the only punishment for apostasy was death.
Witnesses would recall not the thunderous bellow of the explosion but the deep, wintry silence that followed. In time, there was a moan, and a childlike sob, and the electronic pulse of a mobile phone pleading to be answered. For several minutes thick black smoke obscured the horror. Then, gradually, the smoke lifted and the devastation was revealed: the limbless and the lifeless, the sooty-faced survivors wandering dazed and partially disrobed through the debris, the shoes of a vendor scattered among the shoes of the dead. Everywhere there was split fruit and spilled blood and the aroma, suddenly nauseating, of roasted lamb seasoned with cumin and turmeric.
The claims of responsibility were not long in coming. The first was from an obscure cell in lawless Libya, followed soon after by al-Shabaab, the Somalia-based group that had terrorized East Africa. Finally, there appeared a video on a popular social media site. In it, a black-hooded man who spoke English with an East London accent declared that the attack was the work of ISIS, and that more attacks were to come. He then embarked, in a mixture of English and Arabic, on a rambling homily about the armies of Rome and a Syrian village called Dabiq. The television commentators were perplexed. The learned expert from Cambridge was not.
The reaction ranged from outrage to disbelief to smug recriminations. In Washington the American president condemned the bombing as “a wanton act of murder and barbarism,” though, curiously, he made no mention of the perpetrators’ motives or of Islam, radical or otherwise. His congressional opponents quickly laid blame for the attack squarely at his feet. Had he not precipitously withdrawn American troops from Iraq, they said, ISIS would never have taken root in neighboring Syria. The president’s spokesman later dismissed suggestions that the time had come for American ground troops to take the fight directly to ISIS. “We have a strategy,” he said. Then, with a straight face, he added, “It is working.”
In the Netherlands, however, Dutch authorities had no interest in apportioning blame, for they were far too busy searching for survivors amid the rubble, and for the woman, approximately thirty years of age, blond hair, long legs, narrow hips, blue jeans, hooded sweatshirt, fleece vest, who had driven the bomb van into the market. For two days her name remained a mystery. Then a second video appeared on the same social media Web site, narrated by the same man who spoke with an East London accent. This time, he was not alone. Two veiled women stood next to him. One remained silent, the other spoke. She identified herself as Margreet Janssen, a convert to Islam from the Dutch coastal city of Noordwijk. She had planted the bomb, she said, to punish the blasphemers and the infidels in the name of Allah and Muhammad, peace be upon him.
Later that day the AIVD, the Dutch security and intelligence service, confirmed that Margreet Janssen had traveled to Syria eighteen months previously, had remained there for approximately six months, and had been allowed to return to the Netherlands after convincing the Dutch authorities that she had renounced her ties to ISIS and the global jihadist movement. The security service placed the woman under electronic and physical surveillance, but the surveillance was subsequently dropped when she exhibited no signs of continued involvement in radical Islamic activities. Obviously, said an AIVD spokesman, it was an error in judgment.
Within minutes the cyberrooms of the digital caliphate were ablaze with excited chatter. Margreet Janssen was suddenly the new symbol of the global jihad, a former Christian from a European country who was now a lethal member of the community of believers. But who was the other woman in the video? The one who did not speak? The answer came not from Amsterdam but from a fortress-like building in the Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret. The second woman, said the chief of the DGSI, was Safia Bourihane, one of the perpetrators of the attack on the Weinberg Center.
Before terminating its surveillance of Margreet Janssen, the AIVD had assembled a dense dossier of watch reports, photographs, e-mails, text messages, and Internet browsing histories, along with secondary files on friends, family members, associates, and fellow travelers in the global jihadist movement. Paul Rousseau received a copy of the dossier during a meeting at AIVD headquarters in The Hague, and upon his return to Paris he presented it to Gabriel in a quiet brasserie on the rue de Miromesnil, in the Eighth Arrondissement. The dossier had been digitized and stored on a secure flash drive. Rousseau slid it across the table beneath a napkin, with all the discretion of a gunshot in an empty chapel. It was no matter; the brasserie was deserted except for a small bald man wearing a well-cut suit and a lavish lavender necktie. He was drinking a glass of Côtes du Rhone and reading a copy of Le Figaro. It was filled with the news from Amsterdam. Gabriel slipped the flash drive into his coat pocket, making no effort to conceal his action, and asked Rousseau about the mood at AIVD headquarters.
“Somewhere between panic and resignation,” answered Rousseau. “They’re ramping up their surveillance of known Islamic extremists and searching for the man who built the bomb and the other elements of the network.” He lowered his voice and added, “They were wondering whether I had any ideas.”
“Did you mention Saladin?”
“It might have slipped my mind,” said Rousseau with a sly smile. “But at some point we’re going to have to go on the record with our friends here in Europe.”
“They’re your friends, not mine.”
“You have a history with the Dutch services?”
“I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting the Netherlands.”
“Somehow, I find that difficult to believe.” Rousseau glanced at the small bald man sitting on the other side of the brasserie. “A friend of yours?”
“He runs a shop across the street.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw him leave and lock the door.”
“How observant of you.” Rousseau peered into the darkening street. “Antiquités Scientifiques?”
“Old microscopes and the like,” explained Gabriel.
“Interesting.” Rousseau contemplated his coffee cup. “It seems I wasn’t the only foreign visitor to AIVD headquarters yesterday. An American came, too.”
“Agency?”
Rousseau nodded.
“Local or Langley?”
“The latter.”
“Did he have a name?”
“Not one that my Dutch hosts wished to share with me. They did suggest, however, that American interest was high.”
“How refreshing.”
“Apparently, the White House is concerned that an attack on the American homeland this late in the president’s second term might prove injurious to his legacy. The Agency is under enormous pressure to make sure it doesn’t happen.”
“I guess ISIS isn’t the jayvee team after all.”
“To that end,” Rousseau continued, “the Agency is expecting full and complete cooperation from America’s friends and partners here in Europe. The man from Langley is due in Paris tomorrow morning.”
“It might be wise for you to spend some time with him.”
“My name is already on the guest list.”
Gabriel handed Rousseau a slip of paper, folded in quarters.
“What’s this?”
“A list of additional files we need.”
“How much longer?”
“Soon,” said Gabriel.
“That’s what you said yesterday, and the day before.” Rousseau slipped the list into the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. “Are you ever going to tell me where you and your helpers are working?”
“You mean you haven’t figured it out yet?”
“We haven’t tried.”
“Somehow,” said Gabriel, “I find that difficult to believe.”
He rose without another word and went into the street. Rousseau watched him walk away along the darkened pavement, followed discreetly by two of Alpha Group’s best surveillance men. The little bald man with the lavender necktie laid a few bills on his table and departed, leaving Rousseau alone in the brasserie with no company other than his mobile phone. Five minutes elapsed before it finally illuminated. It was a text message from Christian Bouchard. “Merde,” said Rousseau softly. Allon had lost them again.
12 (#ulink_85e1463d-0d45-5608-beb6-674787191220)
PARIS (#ulink_85e1463d-0d45-5608-beb6-674787191220)
IT WAS WITH A PAIR of routine countersurveillance moves—a reversal of course along a one-way street, a brief stop in a bistro that had a rear service exit off the kitchen—that Gabriel slipped away from the finest watchers of Paul Rousseau’s Alpha Group. Afterward, he made his way, on foot, by Métro, and in a taxi, to a small apartment building along the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. According to the intercom panel, the occupant of 4B was someone named Guzman. Gabriel thumbed the button, waited for the snap of the automatic locks, and entered.
Upstairs, Mikhail Abramov unchained the door to him. The air was bitter with smoke. Gabriel peered into the kitchen and saw Eli Lavon attempting to extinguish a fire he had started in the microwave. Lavon was a diminutive figure, with a head of wispy unkempt hair and a face that was entirely forgettable. His looks, like most things about him, were deceiving. A natural predator and chameleon, Lavon was regarded as the finest street surveillance artist the Office ever produced. Ari Shamron had famously said of Lavon that he could disappear while shaking your hand. It wasn’t far from the truth.
“How long did it take you to lose them this time?” Lavon asked as he tossed a misshapen lump of charred plastic into the sink.
“Less time than it took you to burn down the safe flat.”
“A small mix-up with the time setting. You know me, I’ve never really been good with numbers.”
Which wasn’t true. Lavon also happened to be a skilled financial investigator who singlehandedly had managed to track down millions of dollars’ worth of looted Holocaust assets. An archaeologist by training, he was a natural digger.
Gabriel entered the sitting room. Yaakov Rossman, a veteran agent runner and a fluent speaker of Arabic, appeared to be contemplating an act of violence against his notebook computer. Yossi Gavish and Rimona Stern were sprawled on the couch like a couple of undergraduates. Yossi was a top officer in Research, which is how the Office referred to its analytical division. Tall, tweedy, and balding, he had read classics at All Souls and spoke Hebrew with a pronounced English accent. He had also done a bit of acting—Shakespearean, mainly—and was a gifted cellist. Rimona served in the Office unit that spied on Iran’s nuclear program. She had sandstone-colored hair, childbearing hips, and a temper she had inherited from Ari Shamron, who was her uncle. Gabriel had known her since she was a small 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.
The five field agents and analysts were members of an elite team of operatives known as Barak, the Hebrew word for lightning, for their ability to gather and strike quickly. They had fought and sometimes bled together on a string of secret battlefields stretching from Moscow to the Caribbean, and in the process had carried out some of the most fabled operations in the history of Israeli intelligence. Gabriel was the team’s founder and leader, but a sixth member, Dina Sarid, was its conscience and institutional memory. Dina was the Office’s top terrorism specialist, a human database who could recite the time, place, perpetrators, and casualty toll of every act of Palestinian or Islamic terrorism committed against Israel and the West. Her talent was to see connections where others saw only a blizzard of names, numbers, and words.
She was small in stature, with coal-black hair that fell about a soft, childlike face. At present, she was standing before a seemingly haphazard collage of surveillance photos, e-mails, text messages, and phone conversations. It was the same place she had been standing, three hours earlier, when Gabriel had left the safe flat for his meeting with Paul Rousseau. Dina was in the grip of the fever, the frightful creative rage that came over her each time a bomb exploded. Gabriel had induced the fever many times before. Judging by her expression, it was about to break. He crossed the room and stood beside her.
“What are you looking at?” he asked after a moment.
Dina took two steps forward, limping slightly, and pointed toward a surveillance photo of Safia Bourihane. It had been taken before her first trip to Syria, in an Arab-style café in the heavily immigrant Paris banlieue of Saint-Denis. Safia had recently taken the veil. Her companion, a young woman, was veiled, too. There were several other women in the café, along with four men, Algerians, Moroccans, sharing a table near the counter. Another man, angular face, clean-shaven, slightly out of focus, sat alone. He wore a dark business suit, no tie, and was working on a notebook computer. He might have been an Arab—or he might have been a Frenchman or an Italian. For the moment he was of no concern to Dina Sarid. She was gazing, spellbound, at the face of Safia Bourihane.
“She looks normal, doesn’t she? Happy, even. You’d never suspect she’d spent the entire morning talking to an ISIS recruiter on the Internet. The recruiter asked her to leave her family and travel to Syria to help build the caliphate. And what do you suppose Safia told him?”
“She said she wanted to stay in France. She said she wanted to marry a nice boy from a good family and have children who would grow up to be fully assimilated French citizens. She said she wanted no part of a caliphate run by men who behead and crucify and burn their enemies alive.”
“Isn’t it pretty to think so.” Dina shook her head slowly. “What went wrong, Gabriel? Why have more than five hundred young Western women joined the ranks of ISIS? Why are the bearded ones the new rock stars of Islam? Why are killers cool?” Dina had devoted her life to the study of terrorism and Islamic extremism, and yet she had no answers. “We thought they would be repulsed by the violence of ISIS. We were wrong. We assumed assimilation was the answer. But the more they assimilated, the less they liked what they saw. And so when a recruiter from ISIS comes knocking on their digital door, they’re vulnerable.”
“You’re too charitable, Dina.”
“They’re children.” She paused, then added, “Impressionable girls.”
“Not all of them.”
“That’s true. Many are educated, much more educated than the men who’ve joined ISIS. They’re forbidden to fight, the women, so they take on important support roles. In many respects, it’s the women who are actually building the caliphate. Most of them will also take a husband—a husband who’s likely to soon be a martyr. One in four women will become widows. Black widows,” she added. “Indoctrinated, embittered, vengeful. And all it takes is a good recruiter or talent spotter to turn them into ticking time bombs.” She pointed toward the slightly-out-of-focus figure seated alone in the Arab-style café. “Like him. Unfortunately, the French never noticed him. They were too busy looking at Safia’s friend.”
“Who is she?”
“She’s a girl who watched a few beheading videos on the Internet. She’s a waste of time, money, and manpower. But not Safia. Safia was trouble waiting to happen.” Dina took a step to the right and indicated a second photograph. “Three days after Safia had coffee with her friend in Saint-Denis, she came to the center of Paris to do a bit of shopping. This picture was taken as she was walking along the arcades of the rue de Rivoli. And look who’s walking a few steps behind her.”
It was the same man from the café, the clean-shaven man with an angular face who might have been an Arab or a Frenchman or an Italian.
“How did they miss him?”
“Good question. And they missed him here, too.”
Dina pointed toward a third photograph, the same day, an hour later. Safia Bourihane was leaving a women’s clothing store on the Champs-Élysées. The same man was waiting outside on the pavement, pretending to consult a tourist guidebook.
“Send the photos to King Saul Boulevard,” said Gabriel. “See if anything turns up.”
“I already have.”
“And?”
“King Saul Boulevard has never made his acquaintance.”
“Maybe this will help.” Gabriel held up the flash drive.
“What is it?”
“The life and times of Margreet Janssen.”
“I wonder how long it will take to find Safia’s secret admirer.”
“I’d hurry if I were you. The Americans have her file, too.”
“I’ll beat them,” she said. “I always do.”
It took Dina fewer than thirty minutes to find the first surveillance photograph of Margreet Janssen and the man who had shadowed Safia Bourihane in Paris. An AIVD team had snapped the picture at a quaint Italian restaurant in central Amsterdam where Margreet, having left her dreary home in Noordwijk, was waiting tables for starvation wages. It wasn’t difficult to spot him; he was dining alone with a volume of Sartre for protection. This time, the camera managed to capture him in focus, though he was somewhat different in appearance. A pair of round eyeglasses had softened the sharp edges of his face; a cardigan sweater lent him a librarian’s unthreatening air. Margreet was his server, and judging from her wide smile she found him attractive—so attractive, in fact, that she agreed to meet him for drinks later at a bar on the edge of the red-light district. The evening ended with a well-executed slap, delivered with Margreet’s right hand to the man’s left cheek and witnessed by the same surveillance team. It was, thought Gabriel, a nice touch of tradecraft. The Dutch wrote the man off as a cad and never tried to establish his identity.
But what was the connection between the two women, other than the man who might have been an Arab or a Frenchman or an Italian? Dina found that, too. It was a Web site based in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar that sold clothing for Muslim women of piety and taste. Safia Bourihane had surfed it three weeks before the man’s visit to Paris. Margreet Janssen had stopped there just ten days before the slap in Amsterdam. Dina suspected that the site contained a password-protected room where ISIS recruiters could invite promising young women for a private chat. These encrypted rooms had so far proved almost impenetrable to the intelligence services of Israel and the West. Even the mighty National Security Agency, America’s omniscient signals intelligence service, was struggling to keep pace with ISIS’s digital hydra.
There is no worse feeling for a professional spy than to be told something by an officer from another service that he should have already known himself. Paul Rousseau endured this indignity in a small café on the rue Cler, a fashionable pedestrian shopping street not far from the Eiffel Tower. The French police had erected barricades at the intersections of the cross streets and were checking the handbags and backpacks of everyone who dared to enter. Even Gabriel, who had nothing in his possession other than a manila envelope filled with photographs, was thoroughly searched before being allowed to pass.
“If this were ever to become public,” said Rousseau, “it would be deeply embarrassing for my service. Heads would roll. Remember, this is France.”
“Don’t worry, Paul, your secret is safe with me.”
Rousseau leafed again through the photos of Safia Bourihane and the man who for two days had followed her around Paris undetected by the DGSI.
“What do you suppose he was doing?”
“Watching her, of course.”
“Why?”
“To make sure she was the right kind of girl. The question is,” said Gabriel, “can you find him?”
“These photographs were taken more than a year ago.”
“Yes?” asked Gabriel leadingly.
“It will be difficult. After all,” said Rousseau, “we still haven’t been able to find out where your team is working.”
“That’s because we’re better than he is.”
“Actually, his track record is rather good, too.”
“He didn’t travel to the café in Saint-Denis on a magic carpet,” said Gabriel. “He took a train, or a bus, or he walked along a street with security cameras.”
“Our network of CCTV cameras is nowhere near as extensive as yours or the British.”
“But it exists, especially in a place like Saint-Denis.”
“Yes,” said Rousseau. “It exists.”
“So find out how he got there. And then find out who he is. But whatever you do,” Gabriel added, “do it quietly. And don’t mention any of this to our friend from Langley.”
Rousseau consulted his wristwatch.
“What time are you seeing him?”
“Eleven. His name is Taylor, by the way. Kyle Taylor. He’s the chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Apparently, Monsieur Taylor is very ambitious. He’s droned many terrorists. One more scalp, and he might be the next director of operations. At least, that’s the rumor.”
“That would come as news to the current director.”
“Adrian Carter?”
Gabriel nodded.
“I’ve always liked Adrian,” said Rousseau. “He’s a decent soul, and rather too honest for a spy. One wonders how a man like that could survive so long in a place like Langley.”
As it turned out, it took Rousseau’s Alpha Group just forty-eight hours to determine that the man from the café in Saint-Denis had traveled to Paris from London aboard a Eurostar high-speed train. Surveillance photographs showed him disembarking at the Gare du Nord in late morning and boarding a Métro a few minutes later, bound for the northern suburbs of Paris. He departed Paris the morning after he was photographed on the rue de Rivoli and the Champs-Élysées, also aboard a Eurostar train, this one bound for London.
Unlike most international trains in Western Europe, the Eurostar requires passengers to clear passport control before boarding. Alpha Group quickly found their man in the manifests. He was Jalal Nasser, born in Amman, Jordan, in 1984, currently residing in the United Kingdom, address unknown. Rousseau dispatched a cable to MI5 in London and, in the dullest language possible, asked whether the British security service had a place of residence for one Jalal Nasser and whether it had reason to suspect his involvement in any form of Islamic extremism. His address arrived two hours later: 33 Chilton Street, Bethnal Green, East London. And, no, said MI5, it had no evidence to suggest that Nasser was anything more than what he claimed to be, which was a graduate student in economics at King’s College. He had been enrolled there, on and off, for seven years.
Gabriel dispatched Mikhail to London, along with a pair of all-purpose field hands named Mordecai and Oded, and within a few hours of their arrival they managed to acquire a small flat in Chilton Street. They also managed to snap a photograph of Jalal Nasser, the eternal student, walking along Bethnal Green Road with a book bag over one shoulder. It appeared on Gabriel’s mobile phone that evening as he was standing in the nursery of his apartment in Jerusalem, staring down at the two children sleeping peacefully in their cribs.
“They missed you terribly,” said Chiara. “But if you wake them …”
“What?”
She smiled, took him by the hand, and led him into their bedroom.
“Quietly,” she whispered as she loosened the buttons on her blouse. “Very quietly.”
13 (#ulink_65b1bac1-0602-5eba-91d2-59e0fe783d71)
AMMAN, JORDAN (#ulink_65b1bac1-0602-5eba-91d2-59e0fe783d71)
EARLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING Gabriel slipped from the apartment while Chiara and the children were still sleeping and climbed into the back of his armored SUV. His motorcade contained two additional vehicles filled with well-armed Office security agents. And instead of heading west toward Tel Aviv and King Saul Boulevard, it skirted the gray Ottoman walls of the Old City and spilled down the slopes of the Judean Hills, into the unforgiving flatlands of the West Bank. Stars clung to the cloudless sky above Jerusalem, oblivious to the sun that lay low and fiery above the cleft of the Jordan Valley. A few miles before Jericho was the turnoff for the Allenby Bridge, the historic crossing between the West Bank and the British-created Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The ramp on the Israeli half had been cleared of traffic for Gabriel’s arrival; on the other side idled an impressive motorcade of Suburbans filled with mustachioed Bedouin soldiers. The head of Gabriel’s security detail exchanged a few words with his Jordanian counterpart. Then the two motorcades merged into one and set off across the desert toward Amman.
Their destination was the headquarters of Jordan’s General Intelligence Department, also known as the Mukhabarat, the Arabic word used to describe the all-pervasive secret services that safeguarded the fragile kingdoms, emirates, and republics of the Middle East. Surrounded by concentric rings of security men, a locked stainless steel attaché case in one hand, Gabriel strode swiftly across the marble lobby, up a flight of curved stairs, and into the office of Fareed Barakat, the GID’s chief. It was a vast room, four or five times the size of the director’s suite at King Saul Boulevard, and decorated with somber curtains, overstuffed chairs and couches, lustrous Persian carpets, and expensive trinkets that had been bestowed on Fareed by admiring spies and politicians around the world. It was the sort of place, thought Gabriel, where favors were dispensed, judgments were passed, and lives were destroyed. He had upgraded his usual attire for the occasion, exchanging his denim and leather for a trim gray suit and white shirt. Even so, his clothing paled in comparison to the worsted sartorial splendor that hung from the tall slender frame of Fareed Barakat. Fareed’s suits were handmade for him by Anthony Sinclair in London. Like the current king of Jordan, the man he was sworn to protect, he had been expensively educated in Britain. He spoke English like a news presenter from the BBC.
“Gabriel Allon, at long last.” Fareed’s small black eyes shone like polished onyx. His nose was like the beak of a bird of prey. “It’s good to finally meet you. After reading those stories about you in the newspaper, I was convinced I’d missed my chance.”
“Reporters,” said Gabriel disdainfully.
“Quite,” agreed Fareed. “Your first time in Jordan?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“No quiet visits to Amman on a borrowed passport? No operations against one of your many enemies?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Wise man,” said Fareed, smiling. “Better to play by the rules. You’ll discover soon enough that I can be very helpful to you.”
Israel and Jordan had more in common than a border and a shared British colonial past. They were both westward-looking countries trying to survive in a Middle East that was spinning dangerously out of control. They had fought two wars, in 1948 and 1967, but had formally made peace in the afterglow of the Oslo peace process. Even before that, however, the Office and the GID had maintained close, if cautious, ties. Jordan was universally considered the most fragile of the Arab states, and it was the job of the GID to keep the king’s head on his shoulders and the chaos of the region at bay. Israel wanted the same thing, and in the GID had found a competent and reliable partner with whom they could do business. The GID was a bit more civilized than its brutal Iraqi and Egyptian counterparts, though no less ubiquitous. A vast network of informers watched over the Jordanian people and monitored their every word and deed. Even a stray unkind remark about the king or his family could result in a sojourn of indeterminate length in the GID’s labyrinth of secret detention centers.
Uzi Navot had warned Gabriel about the rituals that accompanied any visit to Fareed’s gilded lair: the endless cups of sticky-sweet Arab coffee, the cigarettes, the long stories of Fareed’s many conquests, both professional and romantic. Fareed always spoke as though he couldn’t quite believe his own luck, which added to his considerable charm. Where some men wearied under the burden of responsibility, Fareed thrived. He was the lord of a vast empire of secrets. He was a deeply contented man.
Throughout Fareed’s monologue, Gabriel managed to keep a placid, attentive smile fixed firmly on his face. He laughed when appropriate and posed a leading question or two, and yet all the while his thoughts wandered to the photographs contained in the locked stainless steel briefcase at his ankle. He had never carried a briefcase before—not willingly at least, only for the sake of his cover. It felt like a ball and chain, an anvil. He supposed he should find someone to carry it for him. But inwardly he feared that such a move might nurture in him a taste for privilege that would spiral, inevitably, to a valet, a food taster, and a standing appointment at an exclusive Tel Aviv hair salon. Already, he missed the small thrill of piloting his own automobile down the ski-slope grade of Highway 1. Fareed Barakat would surely have found such sentiments curious. It was said of Fareed that he once jailed his own butler for allowing the Earl Grey tea to steep a minute too long.
At length, Fareed brought the topic of conversation around to the situation at King Saul Boulevard. He had heard about Gabriel’s pending promotion, and Uzi Navot’s impending demise. He had also heard—from where he refused to say—that Gabriel intended to keep Navot around in some capacity. He thought this a very bad idea, horrendous actually, and told Gabriel so. “Better to sweep the decks and make a fresh start of it.” Gabriel smiled, praised Fareed for his shrewdness and wisdom, and said nothing more on the subject.
The Jordanian had also heard that Gabriel had recently become a father again. With the press of a button he summoned an aide, who entered the office bearing two gift-wrapped boxes, one enormous, the other quite small. Fareed insisted that Gabriel open both in his presence. The large box contained a motorized Mercedes toy car; the second box, the smaller, a strand of pearls.
“I hope you’re not offended because the car is German.”
“Not at all.”
“The pearls are from Mikimoto.”
“That’s good to know.” Gabriel closed the box. “I can’t possibly accept these.”
“You must. Otherwise, I’ll be deeply offended.”
Gabriel was suddenly sorry he had come to Amman without gifts of his own. But what was one supposed to give a man who jailed his butler for misbrewing a pot of tea? He had only the photographs, which he retrieved from the attaché case. The first showed a man walking along an East London street, a book bag over one shoulder, a man who might have been an Arab or a Frenchman or an Italian. Gabriel handed the photograph to Fareed Barakat, who gave it a brief glance. “Jalal Nasser,” he said, returning the photograph to Gabriel with a smile. “What took you so long, my friend?”
14 (#ulink_d2d3c0f7-75f3-5ffc-bec6-ccf511e7628e)
GID HEADQUARTERS, AMMAN (#ulink_d2d3c0f7-75f3-5ffc-bec6-ccf511e7628e)
FAREED BARAKAT KNEW MORE ABOUT ISIS than any other intelligence officer in the world, and with good reason. The movement had its roots in the grim Amman suburb of Zarqa, where, in a two-story house overlooking a derelict cemetery, there had once lived a man named Ahmad Fadil Nazzal al-Khalayleh, a heavy drinker, a vandal, a vicious street brawler who had so many tattoos the neighborhood children referred to him as “the green man.” His mother was a devout Muslim who believed that only Islam could save her troubled son. She enrolled him for religious instruction at the al-Hussein Ben Ali Mosque, and it was there al-Khalayleh found his true calling. He quickly became a radical and a committed enemy of the Jordanian monarchy, which he was determined to topple with force. He spent several years inside the GID’s secret prisons, including a stint in the notorious desert fortress at al-Jafr. The leader of his cellblock was Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a firebrand preacher who was one of the foremost theoreticians of jihadism. In 1999, when a young, untested king ascended to the throne after the death of his father, he decided to release more than a thousand criminals and political prisoners in a traditional gesture of goodwill. Two of the men he freed were al-Maqdisi and his violent pupil from Zarqa.
By then, the former street brawler with many tattoos was known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Not long after his release, he made his way to Afghanistan and pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden. And in March 2003, with the American invasion of Iraq looming, he slipped into Baghdad and formed the resistance cells that would eventually come to be known as al-Qaeda in Iraq. The wave of beheadings and spectacular sectarian bombings carried out by Zarqawi and his associates pushed the country to the brink of all-out civil war. He was the prototype of a new kind of Islamic extremist, willing to use horrifying violence to shock and terrify. Even Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, rebuked him.
An American air strike ended Zarqawi’s life in June 2006, and by the end of the decade al-Qaeda in Iraq had been decimated. But in 2011 two events conspired to revive its fortunes: the outbreak of civil war in Syria and the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq. Now known as ISIS, the group rose from the ashes and rushed into the power vacuum along the Syria–Iraq border. The land under its control stretched from the cradle of civilization to the doorstep of Europe. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was squarely in its sights. So, too, was Israel.
Among the thousands of young Muslims from the Middle East and Europe who were drawn to the siren song of ISIS was a young Jordanian named Jalal Nasser. Like Zarqawi, Nasser was from a prominent East Bank tribe, the Bani Hassan, though his family was better off than the Khalaylehs of Zarqa. He attended a private secondary school in Amman and King’s College in London. Soon after the outbreak of civil war in Syria, however, he met with an ISIS recruiter in Amman and inquired about making his way to the caliphate. The recruiter advised Jalal that he could be more useful elsewhere.
“In Europe?” asked Gabriel.
Fareed nodded.
“How do you know this?”
“Sources and methods,” said Fareed, which meant he had no interest in answering Gabriel’s question.
“Why not take him off the streets?”
“Jalal is from a good family, a family that has been loyal to the monarchy for a long time. If we had arrested him, it would have caused problems.” A careful smile. “Collateral damage.”
“So you put him on an airplane to London and waved good-bye.”
“Not entirely. Every time he comes back to Amman, we bring him in for a little chat. And we watch him from time to time in England to make certain he isn’t plotting against us.”
“Did you tell the British about him?”
Silence.
“What about your friends at Langley?”
More silence.
“Why not?”
“Because we didn’t want to turn a small problem into a big problem. These days, that seems to be the American way.”
“Careful, Fareed. You never know who’s listening.”
“Not here,” he said, glancing around his vast office. “It’s perfectly secure.”
“Says who?”
“Langley.”
Gabriel smiled.
“So why are you so interested in Jalal?” asked Fareed.
Gabriel handed him another photograph.
“The woman from the Paris attack?”
Gabriel nodded. Then he instructed Fareed to look carefully at the man seated alone in the corner of the café, with an open laptop computer.
“Jalal?”
“In the flesh.”
“Any chance it’s a coincidence?”
Gabriel handed the Jordanian two more photos: Safia Bourihane and Jalal Nasser on the rue de Rivoli, Safia Bourihane and Jalal Nasser on the Champs-Élysées.
“I guess not.”
“There’s more.”
Gabriel gave Fareed two more photos: Jalal Nasser with Margreet Janssen at a restaurant in Amsterdam, Jalal Nasser holding his recently slapped cheek on a street in the red-light district.
“Shit,” said Fareed softly.
“The Office concurs.”
Fareed returned the photos. “Who else knows about this?”
“Paul Rousseau.”
“Alpha Group?”
Gabriel nodded.
“They’re quite good.”
“You’ve worked with them?”
“On occasion.” Fareed shrugged. “As a rule, France’s problems come from other parts of the Arab world.”
“Not anymore.” Gabriel returned the photos to his briefcase.
“I assume you have Jalal under watch.”
“As of last night.”
“Have you had a chance to peek at that laptop?”
“Not yet. You?”
“We drained it the last time we brought him in for a chat. It was clean as a whistle. But that doesn’t mean anything. Jalal is very good with computers. They’re all very good. And getting better by the day.”
Fareed started to light one of his English cigarettes but stopped. It seemed that Gabriel’s aversion to tobacco was well known to the GID.
“I don’t suppose you’ve mentioned any of this to the Americans.”
“Who?”
“What about the British?”
“In passing.”
“There’s no such thing when it comes to the British. Furthermore,” said Fareed with his newsreader formality, “I know for a fact they’re terrified that they’re going to be hit next.”
“They should be terrified.”
Fareed ignited his gold lighter and touched his cigarette to the slender flame. “So what was Jalal’s connection to Paris and Amsterdam?”
“I’m not sure yet. He might be just a recruiter or talent spotter. Or he might be the project manager.” Gabriel was silent for a moment. “Or maybe,” he said finally, “he’s the one they call Saladin.”
Fareed Barakat looked up sharply.
“Obviously,” said Gabriel, “you’ve heard the name.”
“Yes,” conceded Fareed, “I’ve heard it.”
“Is he?”
“Not a chance.”
“Does he exist?”
“Saladin?” Fareed nodded slowly. “Yes, he exists.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s our worst nightmare. Other than that,” said Fareed, “I haven’t a clue.”
15 (#ulink_45a92ee5-b2cd-54d1-a125-91139c19d43f)
GID HEADQUARTERS, AMMAN (#ulink_45a92ee5-b2cd-54d1-a125-91139c19d43f)
OF THE TERRORIST’S NAMESAKE, HOWEVER, the GID chief knew a great deal. Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, or Saladin, was born into a prominent family of Kurds, in the town of Tikrit, in approximately 1138. His father was a soldier of fortune. Young Saladin lived for a time in Baalbek, in present-day Lebanon, and in Damascus, where he drank wine, pursued women, and played polo by candlelight. Damascus was the city he preferred over all others. Later, he would describe Egypt, the financial hub of his empire, as a whore who tried to separate him from his faithful wife Damascus.
His realm stretched from Yemen to Tunisia and north to Syria. It was ruled over by a hodgepodge of princes, emirs, and greedy relatives, all held together by Saladin’s diplomatic skills and considerable charisma. He used violence to great effect, but found it distasteful. To his favorite son, Zahir, he once remarked: “I warn you against shedding blood, indulging in it and making a habit of it, for blood never sleeps.”
He was lame and sickly, watched over constantly by a team of twenty-one doctors, including the philosopher and Talmudic scholar Maimonides, who was appointed his court physician in Cairo. Lacking in personal vanity—in Jerusalem he once laughed uproariously when a courtier splashed his silk robes with mud—he had little interest in personal riches or earthly delights. He was happiest when surrounded by poets and men of learning, but mainly it was the concept of jihad, or holy war, that consumed him. He built mosques and Islamic centers of learning across his lands and lavished money and favors on preachers and religious scholars. His goal was to re-create the zeal that had allowed Islam’s earliest followers to conquer half of the known world. And once the sacred rage had been rekindled, he focused it on the one prize that had eluded him: Jerusalem.
A smallish outpost fed by springs, the city occupied a strategic high ground at the crossroads of three continents, a geographical sin for which it would be punished throughout the ages. Besieged, plundered, captured and recaptured, Jerusalem had been ruled by Jebusites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and, of course, the Jews. When Omar al-Khattab, a close confidant of Muhammad, conquered Jerusalem in 639 with a small band of Arab cameleers from the Hejaz and Yemen, it was a predominantly Christian city. Four and a half centuries later, Pope Urban II would dispatch an expeditionary force numbering several thousand European Christians to reclaim Jerusalem from the Muslims, whom he regarded as a people “alien to God.” The Christian soldiers, who would one day be known as Crusaders, breached the city’s defenses on the night of July 13, 1099, and slaughtered its inhabitants, including three thousand men, women, and children who had taken shelter inside the great al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount.
It was Saladin, the son of a Kurdish soldier of fortune from Tikrit, who would return the favor. After humiliating the thirst-crazed Crusader force at the Battle of Hattin near Tiberias—Saladin personally sliced off the arm of Raynald of Châtillon—the Muslims reclaimed Jerusalem after a negotiated surrender. Saladin tore down the large cross that had been erected atop the Dome of the Rock, scrubbed its courts with Damascene rosewater to remove the last foul traces of the infidel, and sold thousands of Christians into slavery or the harem. Jerusalem would remain under Islamic control until 1917, when the British seized it from the Ottoman Turks. And when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1924, so, too, did the last Muslim caliphate.
But now ISIS had declared a new caliphate. At present, it included only portions of western Iraq and eastern Syria, with Raqqa as its capital. Saladin, the new Saladin, was ISIS’s chief of external operations—or so believed Fareed Barakat and the Jordanian General Intelligence Department. Unfortunately, the GID knew almost nothing else about Saladin, including his real name.
“Is he Iraqi?”
“He might be. Or he might be a Tunisian or a Saudi or an Egyptian or an Englishman or one of the other lunatics who’ve rushed to Syria to live in this new Islamic paradise of theirs.”
“Surely, the GID doesn’t believe that.”
“We don’t,” Fareed conceded. “We think he’s probably a former Iraqi military officer. Who knows? Maybe he’s from Tikrit, just like Saladin.”
“And Saddam.”
“Ah, yes, let’s not forget Saddam.” Fareed exhaled a lungful of smoke toward the high ceiling of his office. “We had our problems with Saddam, but we warned the Americans they would rue the day they toppled him. They didn’t listen, of course. Nor did they listen when we asked them to do something about Syria. Not our problem, they said. We’re putting the Middle East in our rearview mirror. No more American wars in Muslim lands. And now look at the situation. A quarter of a million dead, hundreds of thousands more streaming into Europe, Russia and Iran working together to dominate the Middle East.” He shook his head slowly. “Have I left anything out?”
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Daniel Silva
No. 1 New York Times bestselling author Daniel Silva delivers another stunning thriller in his latest tale of high-stakes international intrigue featuring the inimitable Gabriel Allon.Legendary spy Gabriel Allon is poised to become the chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service. But on the eve of his promotion, ISIS detonate a massive bomb in the Marais district of Paris, and a desperate French government wants Gabriel to eliminate the man responsible.They call him Saladin…He is a terrorist mastermind, whose network communicates in total secrecy, leaving Gabriel no choice but to insert an agent into the most dangerous terrorist group the world has ever known. An extraordinary young doctor, she must pose as an ISIS recruit in waiting, a ticking time bomb, a black widow out for blood.
Daniel Silva
The Black Widow
Copyright (#u22dd4819-ba07-5eee-bd80-f28ab77d73ca)
This is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Copyright © Daniel Silva 2016
Daniel Silva asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Cover photographs © Elisabeth Ansley/Trevillion Images (figure);
©Shutterstock.com (https://www.shutterstock.com) (background)
Map designed by Nick Springer
Islamic pattern © DamienGeso/Shutterstock, Inc.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Ebook Edition © JULY 2016 ISBN: 9780007552375
Source ISBN: 9780007552382
Version: 2018-09-24
Dedication (#u22dd4819-ba07-5eee-bd80-f28ab77d73ca)
For Stephen L. Carter, for friendship and faith.
And, as always, for my wife, Jamie, and my children, Lily and Nicholas.
Epigraph (#u22dd4819-ba07-5eee-bd80-f28ab77d73ca)
The black flags will come from the East, led by mighty men, with long hair and beards, their surnames taken from their home towns.
—THE HADITH
Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.
—MURIEL SPARK, THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE
Table of Contents
Cover (#u2ab4bdce-2fa1-5dd7-b4ba-01e318226141)
Title Page (#u275e622d-161e-5251-a55c-12ed64e8e0f8)
Copyright (#uba1899fc-707e-5eff-907a-4eaa9acdfc2d)
Dedication (#ud95ba510-2d60-519b-945a-dbb32638e7e0)
Epigraph (#u07340144-5da9-5b9d-8522-1cd4c2086e7b)
Foreword (#ud720a3a2-7545-5ca9-b533-4c2c9c469822)
Map (#ud9b880b2-4ef1-5d38-80bb-69e94ebeb7ed)
Part One (#u388ed053-d21d-5239-990b-e365bfe025cc)
Chapter 1: The Marais, Paris (#u9fbaff36-53b5-513d-89a6-87810d94f663)
Chapter 2: Rue de Grenelle, Paris (#u2ab18125-4b6a-5e96-b781-3ba4130edd69)
Chapter 3: Beirut (#u3acd4222-ae85-5ef9-bdf8-d444dcb434b1)
Chapter 4: Beirut—Tel Aviv (#uf274c3f3-28d4-5588-8447-71b9af8700b1)
Chapter 5: Israel Museum, Jerusalem (#u0a707ff4-0a29-5b0e-bfe0-d51d339e36b3)
Chapter 6: Ma’ale Hahamisha, Israel (#u38970e44-9805-56d0-a46e-061fc245ea82)
Chapter 7: Ma’ale Hahamisha, Israel (#u7b20e195-18d3-5e21-9c67-97f01f03542e)
Chapter 8: Narkiss Street, Jerusalem (#u98d2ce7e-a3f2-5404-b01e-9f3019334954)
Chapter 9: The Marais, Paris (#u0e6b4c9f-c09b-5176-a391-8152cf8761ad)
Chapter 10: Rue Pavée, Paris (#ub27cb2f9-4927-505e-9032-c579549402bc)
Chapter 11: Amsterdam—Paris (#u71d56f22-06f5-56e9-9d5b-ef16a3d12699)
Chapter 12: Paris (#u7ecb4965-5434-59ba-ae1c-9462a9fcb600)
Chapter 13: Amman, Jordan (#uec1eee31-8ad0-5e90-97ab-b9f5e1955793)
Chapter 14: Gid Headquarters, Amman (#ucbbbfa15-7c69-5fa5-aa68-b884777c71bf)
Chapter 15: Gid Headquarters, Amman (#u0b21f1ef-650d-5963-bd6e-47acff367086)
Chapter 16: Jerusalem (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17: Jezreel Valley, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18: Nahalal, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19: Nahalal, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20: Nahalal, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21: Nahalal, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22: Nahalal, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23: Aubervilliers, France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24: Rue du Lombard, Brussels (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25: Northern France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26: Northern France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27: Seraincourt, France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28: Paris (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29: Aubervilliers, France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30: La Courneuve, France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31: Aubervilliers, France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32: Santorini, Greece (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33: Santorini, Greece (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34: N Street, Georgetown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35: N Street, Georgetown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36: Raqqa, Syria (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37: Eastern Syria (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38: Palmyra, Syria (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39: Palmyra, Syria (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40: Anbar Province, Iraq (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41: Anbar Province, Iraq (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42: Anbar Province, Iraq (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43: Anbar Province, Iraq (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44: Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45: Seraincourt, France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46: Paris—Tiberias, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47: Amman, Jordan (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48: Arlington, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49: Alexandria, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50: Georgetown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51: Aubervilliers, France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52: Hume, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53: Liberty Crossing, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54: Dulles International Airport (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55: Arlington, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56: Key Bridge Marriott, Arlington (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57: The White House (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58: Alexandria, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59: Key Bridge Marriott (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60: The White House (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61: The Lincoln Memorial (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62: Liberty Crossing, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 63: Georgetown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 64: Café Milano, Georgetown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 65: Wisconsin Avenue, Georgetown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 66: Wisconsin Avenue, Georgetown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 67: Café Milano, Georgetown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 68: King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 69: Hume, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 70: Arlington, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 71: Hume, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 72: Arlington, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 73: Hume, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 74: Hume, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 75: Washington—Jerusalem (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 76: Nahalal, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 77: Petah Tikva, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 78: Jerusalem (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 79: Jerusalem—Tiberias (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 80: Bethnal Green, London (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also Written by Daniel Silva (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
FOREWORD (#u22dd4819-ba07-5eee-bd80-f28ab77d73ca)
I COMMENCED WORK ON THIS NOVEL before the Islamic terrorist group known as ISIS carried out a wave of shootings and bombings in Paris and Brussels that left more than 160 people dead. After briefly considering setting aside the typescript, I chose to complete it as originally conceived, as though the tragic events had not yet occurred in the imaginary world where my characters live and work. The similarities between the real and fictitious attacks, including the links to the Brussels district of Molenbeek, are entirely coincidental. I take no pride in my prescience. I only wish that the murderous, millenarian terrorism of the Islamic State lived solely on the pages of this story.
(#u22dd4819-ba07-5eee-bd80-f28ab77d73ca)
1 (#u22dd4819-ba07-5eee-bd80-f28ab77d73ca)
THE MARAIS, PARIS (#u22dd4819-ba07-5eee-bd80-f28ab77d73ca)
IT WAS TOULOUSE THAT WOULD prove to be Hannah Weinberg’s undoing. That night she telephoned Alain Lambert, a contact at the Interior Ministry, and told him that this time something would have to be done. Alain promised a swift response. It would be bold, he assured Hannah, boldness being the default response of a fonctionnaire when in reality he planned to do nothing at all. The following morning the minister himself paid a visit to the site of the attack and issued a vague call for “dialogue and healing.” To the parents of the three victims he offered only regrets. “We will do better,” he said before returning hastily to Paris. “We must.”
They were twelve years of age, the victims, two boys and a girl, all Jewish, though the French media neglected to mention their religion in the first reports. Nor did they bother to point out that the six attackers were Muslim, only that they were youths who resided in a suburb, a banlieue, east of the city center. The description of the attack was vague to the point of inaccuracy. According to French radio, an altercation of some sort had occurred outside a patisserie. Three were injured, one seriously. The police were investigating. No arrests had been made.
In truth, it had not been an altercation but a well-planned ambush. And the attackers were not youths, they were men in their early twenties who had ventured into the center of Toulouse in search of Jews to harm. That their victims were children seemed to trouble them not. The two young boys were kicked, spat upon, and then beaten bloody. The girl was pinned to the pavement and her face slashed with a knife. Before fleeing, the six attackers turned to a group of stunned bystanders and shouted, “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya-Yahud!” Though the witnesses did not know it, the Arabic chant was a reference to the seventh-century Muslim conquest of a Jewish oasis near the holy city of Medina. Its message was unmistakable. The armies of Muhammad, the six men were saying, were coming for the Jews of France.
Regrettably, the attack in Toulouse was not without precedent or ample warning. France was presently in the grip of the worst spasm of violence against Jews since the Holocaust. Synagogues had been firebombed, gravestones toppled, shops looted, homes vandalized and marked with threatening graffiti. In all, there had been more than four thousand documented attacks during the past year alone, each carefully recorded and investigated by Hannah and her team at the Isaac Weinberg Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism in France.
Named for Hannah’s paternal grandfather, the center had opened its doors under heavy security ten years earlier. It was now the most respected such institution in France, and Hannah Weinberg was regarded as the foremost chronicler of the country’s new wave of anti-Semitism. Her supporters referred to her as a “memory militant,” a woman who would stop at nothing to pressure France into protecting its besieged Jewish minority. Her detractors were far less charitable. Consequently, Hannah had long ago stopped reading the things that were written about her in the press or in the sewers of the Internet.
The Weinberg Center stood on the rue des Rosiers, the most prominent street in the city’s most visible Jewish neighborhood. Hannah’s apartment was around the corner on the rue Pavée. The nameplate on the intercom read MME BERTRAND, one of the few steps she took to safeguard her security. She resided in the flat alone, surrounded by the possessions of three generations of her family, including a modest collection of paintings and several hundred antique lunettes, her secret passion. At fifty-five, she was unmarried and childless. Occasionally, when work permitted, she allowed herself a lover. Alain Lambert, her contact at the Interior Ministry, had once been a pleasant distraction during a particularly tense period of anti-Jewish incidents. He rang Hannah at home late after his master’s visit to Toulouse.
“So much for boldness,” she said acidly. “He should be ashamed of himself.”
“We did the best we could.”
“Your best wasn’t good enough.”
“It’s better not to throw oil on the fire at a time like this.”
“That’s the same thing they said in the summer of nineteen forty-two.”
“Let’s not get overly emotional.”
“You leave me no choice but to issue a statement, Alain.”
“Choose your words carefully. We’re the only ones standing between you and them.”
Hannah hung up the phone. Then she opened the top drawer of the writing desk and removed a single key. It unlocked a door at the end of the hall. Behind it was the room of a child, Hannah’s room, frozen in time. A four-poster bed with a lace canopy. Shelves stacked with stuffed animals and toys. A faded pinup of a heartthrob American actor. And hanging above the French provincial dresser, invisible in the darkness, was a painting by Vincent van Gogh. Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table . . . Hannah trailed a fingertip over the brushstrokes and thought of the man who had carried out the painting’s one and only restoration. How would he respond at a time like this? No, she thought, smiling. That wouldn’t do.
She climbed into her childhood bed and, much to her surprise, fell into a dreamless sleep. And when she woke she had settled on a plan.
For the better part of the next week, Hannah and her team toiled under conditions of strict operational security. Potential participants were quietly approached, arms were twisted, donors were tapped. Two of Hannah’s most reliable sources of funding demurred, for like the minister of the interior they thought it better to not jeter de l’huile sur le feu—throw oil on the fire. To make up for the shortfall, Hannah had no choice but to dip into her personal finances, which were considerable. This, too, was fodder for her enemies.
Lastly, there was the small matter of what to call Hannah’s endeavor. Rachel Lévy, head of the center’s publicity department, thought blandness and a trace of obfuscation would be the best approach, but Hannah overruled her. When synagogues were burning, she said, caution was a luxury they could not afford. It was Hannah’s wish to sound an alarm, to issue a clarion call for action. She scribbled a few words on a slip of notepaper and placed it on Rachel’s cluttered desk.
“That should get their attention.”
At that point, no one of any consequence had agreed to attend—no one but a gadfly American blogger and cable television commentator who would have accepted an invitation to his own funeral. But then Arthur Goldman, the eminent historian of anti-Semitism from Cambridge, said he might be willing to make the trip down to Paris—provided, of course, that Hannah agreed to put him up for two nights in his favorite suite at the Crillon. With Goldman’s commitment, Hannah snared Maxwell Strauss from Yale, who never passed up an opportunity to appear on the same stage as his rival. The rest of the participants quickly fell into place. The director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum signed on, as did two important memoirists of survival and an expert on the French Holocaust from Yad Vashem. A novelist was added, more for her immense popularity than her historical insight, along with a politician from the French far right who rarely had a kind word to say about anyone. Several Muslim spiritual and community leaders were invited to attend. All declined. So, too, did the interior minister. Alain Lambert broke the news to Hannah personally.
“Did you really think he would attend a conference with so provocative a title?”
“Heaven forbid your master ever do anything provocative, Alain.”
“What about security?”
“We’ve always looked after ourselves.”
“No Israelis, Hannah. It will give the entire affair a bad odor.”
Rachel Lévy issued the press release the next day. The media were invited to cover the conference; a limited number of seats were made available to the public. A few hours later, on a busy street in the Twentieth Arrondissement, a religious Jew was set upon by a man with a hatchet and gravely wounded. Before making his escape, the assailant waved the bloody weapon and shouted, “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya-Yahud!” The police were said to be investigating.
For reasons of both haste and security, a period of just five busy days separated the press release from the start of the conference itself. Consequently, Hannah waited until the last minute to prepare her opening remarks. On the eve of the gathering, she sat alone in her library, a pen scratching furiously across a yellow legal pad.
It was, she thought, an appropriate place to compose such a document, for the library had once been her grandfather’s. Born in the Lublin district of Poland, he had fled to Paris in 1936, four years before the arrival of Hitler’s Wehrmacht. On the morning of July 16, 1942—the day known as Jeudi Noir, or Black Thursday—French police officers carrying stacks of blue deportation cards arrested Isaac Weinberg and his wife, along with nearly thirteen thousand other foreign-born Jews. Isaac Weinberg had managed to conceal two things before the dreaded knock at the door: his only child, a young son named Marc, and the van Gogh. Marc Weinberg survived the war in hiding, and in 1952 he managed to reclaim the apartment on the rue Pavée from the French family who had settled into it after Jeudi Noir. Miraculously, the painting was precisely where Isaac Weinberg had left it, hidden under the floorboards of the library, beneath the desk where Hannah now sat.
Three weeks after their arrest, Isaac Weinberg and his wife were deported to Auschwitz and gassed upon arrival. They were just two of the more than 75,000 Jews from France who perished in the death camps of Nazi Germany, a permanent stain on French history. But could it ever happen again? And was it time for the 475,000 Jews of France, the third-largest Jewish community in the world, to pack their bags and leave? This was the question Hannah had posed in the title of her conference. Many Jews had already abandoned France. Fifteen thousand had immigrated to Israel during the past year, and more were leaving every day. Hannah, however, had no plans to join them. Regardless of what her enemies might say, she considered herself French first and Jewish second. The idea of living somewhere other than the Fourth Arrondissement of Paris was abhorrent to her. Still, she felt duty-bound to warn her fellow French Jews of the gathering storm. The threat was not yet existential. But when a building is burning, Hannah wrote now, the best course of action is to find the nearest exit.
She finished a first draft shortly before midnight. It was too strident, she thought, and perhaps a bit too angry. She softened its roughest edges and added several depressing statistics to bolster her case. Then she typed it into her laptop, printed a copy, and managed to find her bed by two. The alarm woke her at seven; she drank a bowl of café au lait on the way to the shower. Afterward, she sat before her vanity in a toweling robe, staring at her face in the mirror. Her father, in a moment of brutal honesty, had once said of his only daughter that God had been generous when giving her brains but parsimonious with her looks. Her hair was wavy and dark and streaked with gray that she had allowed to encroach without resistance. Her nose was prominent and aquiline, her eyes were wide and brown. It had never been a particularly pretty face, but no one had ever mistaken her for a fool, either. At a moment like this, she thought, her looks were an asset.
She applied a bit of makeup to hide the circles beneath her eyes and arranged her hair with more care than usual. Then she dressed quickly—a dark woolen skirt and sweater, dark stockings, a pair of low-heeled pumps—and headed downstairs. After crossing the interior courtyard, she opened the main doorway of the building a few inches and peered into the street. It was a few minutes after eight; Parisians and tourists were making their way swiftly along the pavement beneath a gray early-spring sky. No one, it seemed, was waiting for an intelligent-looking woman in her mid-fifties to emerge from the apartment building at Number 24.
She did so now and headed past a row of chic clothing boutiques to the rue des Rosiers. For a few paces it seemed like an ordinary Paris street in a rather upscale arrondissement. Then Hannah came upon a kosher pizzeria and several falafel stands with signs written in Hebrew, and the true character of the street was revealed. She imagined how it must have looked early on the morning of Jeudi Noir. The helpless detainees clambering into open-top trucks, each clutching their allotted one suitcase. The neighbors staring down from open windows, some silent and ashamed, others barely able to contain their glee at the misfortune of a reviled minority. Hannah clung to this image—the image of Parisians waving good-bye to doomed Jews—as she moved through the flat light, her heels tapping rhythmically over the paving stones.
The Weinberg Center stood at the quiet end of the street, in a four-story building that before the war had housed a Yiddish-language newspaper and a coat factory. A line of several dozen people stretched from the doorway where two dark-suited security guards, young men in their twenties, were carefully searching all those who wished to enter. Hannah slipped past them and made her way upstairs to the VIP reception. Arthur Goldman and Max Strauss were eyeing each other warily across the room over cups of weak américain. The famous novelist was speaking seriously to one of the memoirists; the head of the Holocaust Museum was exchanging notes with the specialist from Yad Vashem, who was a longtime friend. Only the gadfly American commentator seemed to have no one to talk to. He was piling croissants and brioche onto his plate as though he hadn’t seen food in days. “Don’t worry,” said Hannah, smiling. “We’re planning to take a break for lunch.”
She spent a moment or two with each of the panelists before heading down the hall to her office. Alone, she reread her opening remarks until Rachel Lévy poked her head through the doorway and pointed to her wristwatch.
“What’s the crowd like?” asked Hannah.
“More than we can handle.”
“And the media?”
“Everyone came, including the New York Times and the BBC.”
Just then, Hannah’s mobile phone chimed. It was a text from Alain Lambert at the Interior Ministry. Reading it, she frowned.
“What does it say?” asked Rachel.
“Just Alain being Alain.”
Hannah placed the mobile on her desk and, gathering her papers, went out. Rachel Lévy waited until she was gone before picking up the mobile and entering Hannah’s not-so-secret security code. The text from Alain Lambert appeared, four words in length.
BE CAREFUL MY DEAR …
The Weinberg Center had insufficient space for a formal auditorium, but the room on its uppermost floor was one of the finest in the Marais. A row of greenhouse-like windows gave it a magnificent view across the rooftops toward the Seine, and upon its walls hung several large black-and-white photographs of life in the district before the morning of Jeudi Noir. All those depicted had perished in the Holocaust, including Isaac Weinberg, who had been photographed in his library three months before disaster struck. As Hannah passed the picture, she trailed a forefinger over its surface, as she had touched the brushstrokes of the van Gogh. Only Hannah knew of the secret connection between the painting, her grandfather, and the center that bore his name. No, she thought suddenly. That wasn’t quite true. The restorer knew of the connection, too.
A long rectangular table had been placed atop a raised platform in front of the windows, and two hundred chairs had been arranged on the open floor like soldiers on a parade ground. Each of the chairs was occupied, and another hundred or so spectators lined the rear wall. Hannah took her assigned seat—she had volunteered to serve as a separation barrier between Goldman and Strauss—and listened as Rachel Lévy instructed the audience to silence their mobile phones. Finally, her turn came to speak. She switched on her microphone and looked down at the first line of her opening statement. It is a national tragedy that a conference such as this is even taking place . . . And then she heard the sound in the street below, a popping, like the snap of firecrackers, followed by a man shouting in Arabic.
“Khaybar, Khaybar, ya-Yahud!”
Hannah stepped from the platform and moved quickly to the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“Dear God,” she whispered.
Turning, she shouted at the panelists to move away from the windows, but the roar of the detonation swallowed her warning. Instantly, the room was a tornado of flying glass, chairs, masonry, articles of clothing, and human limbs. Hannah knew she was toppling forward, though she had no sense of whether she was rising or falling. Once, she thought she glimpsed Rachel Lévy spinning like a ballerina. Then Rachel, like all else, was lost to her.
At last, she came to rest, perhaps on her back, perhaps on her side, perhaps in the street, perhaps in a tomb of brick and concrete. The silence was oppressive. So, too, was the smoke and the dust. She tried to wipe the grit from her eyes, but her right arm would not respond. Then Hannah realized she had no right arm. Nor did she seem to have a right leg. She turned her head slightly and saw a man lying beside her. “Professor Strauss, is that you?” But the man said nothing. He was dead. Soon, thought Hannah, I’ll be dead, too.
All at once she was frightfully cold. She supposed it was the loss of blood. Or perhaps it was the breath of wind that briefly cleared the black smoke from in front of her face. She realized then that she and the man who might have been Professor Strauss were lying together amid the rubble in the rue des Rosiers. And standing over them, peering downward over the barrel of a military-style automatic rifle, was a figure dressed entirely in black. A balaclava masked the face, but the eyes were visible. They were shockingly beautiful, two kaleidoscopes of hazel and copper. “Please,” said Hannah softly, but the eyes behind the mask only brightened with zeal. Then there was a flash of white light, and Hannah found herself walking along a hallway, her missing limbs restored. She passed through the door of her childhood bedroom and groped in the darkness for the van Gogh. But the painting, it seemed, was already gone. And in a moment Hannah was gone, too.
2 (#ulink_86b70fd4-ee25-5f49-818d-25ac3b019842)
RUE DE GRENELLE, PARIS (#ulink_86b70fd4-ee25-5f49-818d-25ac3b019842)
LATER, THE FRENCH AUTHORITIES WOULD determine that the bomb weighed in excess of five hundred kilograms. It had been contained in a white Renault Trafic transit van and was detonated, according to numerous security cameras along the street, at ten o’clock precisely, the scheduled start time of the Weinberg Center conference. The attackers, it seemed, were nothing if not punctual.
In retrospect, the weapon was unnecessarily large for so modest a target. The French experts concluded that a charge of perhaps two hundred kilograms would have been more than sufficient to level the offices and kill or wound all those inside. At five hundred kilograms, however, the bomb toppled buildings and shattered windows the entire length of the rue des Rosiers. The shock wave was so violent—Paris actually recorded an earthquake for the first time in longer than anyone could remember—that the damage extended below ground as well. Water and gas mains cracked throughout the arrondissement, and a Métro train jumped the tracks while approaching the station at the Hôtel de Ville. More than two hundred passengers were injured, many severely. The Paris police initially thought the train had been bombed, too, and in response they ordered an evacuation of the entire Métro system. Life in the city quickly ground to a halt. For the attackers, it was an unexpected windfall.
The enormous force of the blast dug a crater in the rue des Rosiers twenty feet in depth. Nothing remained of the Renault Trafic, though the left rear cargo door, curiously intact, was found floating in the Seine near Notre-Dame, having traveled a distance of nearly a kilometer. In time, investigators would determine that the vehicle had been stolen in Vaulx-en-Velin, a bleak Muslim-majority suburb of Lyon. It had been driven to Paris on the eve of the attack—by whom, it was never established—and left outside a kitchen-and-bath store on the boulevard Saint-Germain. There it would remain until ten minutes past eight the following morning, when a man collected it. He was clean-shaven, approximately five foot ten inches in height, and was wearing a billed cap and sunglasses. He drove the streets of central Paris—aimlessly, or so it appeared—until nine twenty, when he picked up an accomplice outside the Gare du Nord. Initially, the French police and intelligence services operated under the assumption that the second attacker was male, too. Later, after analyzing all available video images, they concluded that the accomplice was in fact a woman.
By the time the Renault reached the Marais, both occupants had concealed their faces with balaclava masks. And when they emerged from the vehicle outside the Weinberg Center, both were heavily armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, handguns, and grenades. The center’s two security guards were killed instantly, as were four other people who had yet to be cleared into the building. A passerby bravely attempted to intervene and was mercilessly slaughtered. The remaining pedestrians in the narrow street wisely fled.
The gunfire outside the Weinberg Center ceased at 9:59:30, and the two masked attackers moved calmly west along the rue des Rosiers to the rue Vieille-du-Temple, where they entered a popular boulangerie. Eight customers were waiting in an orderly queue. All were killed, including the woman behind the counter, who pleaded for her life before being shot several times.
It was at that instant, as the woman was collapsing to the floor, that the bomb inside the van exploded. The force of the blast shattered the windows of the boulangerie, but otherwise the building remained undamaged. The two attackers did not immediately flee the carnage they had inflicted. Instead, they returned to the rue des Rosiers, where a single surviving security camera recorded them moving methodically through the debris, executing the wounded and the dying. Among their victims was Hannah Weinberg, who was shot twice despite the fact that she had almost no chance of survival. The attackers’ cruelty was matched only by their competence. The woman was seen calmly clearing a jammed round from her Kalashnikov before killing a badly wounded man who, a moment earlier, had been seated on the fourth floor of the building.
For several hours after the attack, the Marais remained cordoned off, inaccessible to all but emergency workers and investigators. Finally, in late afternoon, when the last of the fires had been extinguished and the site was determined to be free of secondary explosives, the French president arrived. After touring the devastation, he declared it “a Holocaust in the heart of Paris.” The remark did not meet with a favorable reception in some of the more restive banlieues. In one, there erupted a spontaneous celebration that was quickly snuffed out by riot police. Most of the newspapers ignored the incident. A senior French police official called it “an unpleasant distraction” from the immediate task at hand, which was finding the perpetrators.
Their escape from the Marais, like everything else about the operation, had been meticulously planned and executed. A Peugeot Satelis motorbike had been left for them on a nearby street, along with a pair of black helmets. They traveled north, the male driving, the woman clinging to his waist, passing unnoticed through the stream of approaching police cars and ambulances. A traffic camera photographed them for the last time near the hamlet of Villeron, in the Val-d’Oise department. By midday they were the targets of the largest manhunt in French history.
The National Police and the gendarmerie saw to the roadblocks, the identity checks, the smashed windows of abandoned warehouses, and the severed padlocks of suspected hideouts. But inside a graceful old building located on the rue de Grenelle, eighty-four men and women were engaged in a search of a far different kind. Known only as the Alpha Group, they were members of a secret unit of the DGSI, France’s internal security service. The Group, as it was known informally, had been formed six years earlier, in the aftermath of a jihadist suicide bombing outside a landmark restaurant on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. It specialized in human penetration of France’s sprawling jihadist underground and had been granted the authority to take “active measures” to remove potential Islamic terrorists from circulation before the Islamic terrorists could take active measures against the Republic or its citizenry. It was said of Paul Rousseau, Alpha Group’s chief, that he had plotted more bombings than Osama bin Laden, a charge he did not dispute, though he was quick to point out that none of his bombs actually exploded. The officers of Alpha Group were skilled practitioners in the art of deception. And Paul Rousseau was their undisputed leader and lodestar.
With his tweed jackets, tousled gray hair, and ever-present pipe, Rousseau seemed more suited to the role of absentminded professor than ruthless secret policeman, and not without good reason. Academia was where he began his career and where, in darker moments, he sometimes longed to return. A respected scholar of nineteenth-century French literature, Rousseau had been serving on the faculty of Paris-Sorbonne University when a friend in French intelligence asked him to take a job with the DST, France’s internal security service. The year was 1983, and the country was beset by a wave of bombings and assassinations carried out by the left-wing terrorist group known as Direct Action. Rousseau joined a unit dedicated to Direct Action’s destruction and, with a series of brilliant operations, brought the group to its knees.
He remained with the DST, battling successive waves of leftist and Middle East–based terrorism, until 2004, when his beloved wife Collette died after a long struggle with leukemia. Inconsolable, he retired to his modest villa in the Luberon and commenced work on a planned multivolume biography of Proust. Then came the bombing on the Champs-Élysées. Rousseau agreed to lay down his pen and return to the fight, but only on one condition. He had no interest in tailing suspected terrorists, listening to their telephone conversations, or reading their maniacal musings on the Internet. He wanted to go on offense. The chief agreed, as did the interior minister, and Alpha Group was born. In the six years of its existence, it had foiled more than a dozen major attacks on French soil. Rousseau viewed the bombing of the Weinberg Center not merely as a failure of intelligence but as a personal affront. Late that afternoon, with the French capital in turmoil, he rang the chief of the DGSI to offer his resignation. The chief, of course, refused it. “But for your penance,” he said, “you shall find the monster responsible for this outrage and bring me his head on a plate.”
Rousseau did not care for the allusion, for he had no intention of emulating the conduct of the very creatures he was fighting. Even so, he and his unit threw themselves into the task with a devotion that matched the religious zealotry of their adversaries. Alpha Group’s specialty was the human factor, and it was to humans they turned for information. In cafés, train stations, and back alleys across the country, Rousseau’s case officers met quietly with their agents of penetration—the preachers, the recruiters, the streetwise hustlers, the well-meaning moderates, the blank-eyed lost souls who had found a home in radical Islam’s global Ummah of death. Some spied out of conscience. Others spied for money. And there were some who spied because Rousseau and his operatives had given them no other choice. Not one claimed to know that an attack had been in the planning—not even the hustlers, who claimed to know everything, especially when money was involved. Nor could any of Alpha Group’s assets identify the two perpetrators. It was possible they were self-starters, lone wolves, followers of a leaderless jihad who had constructed a five-hundred-kilogram bomb under the noses of French intelligence and then delivered it expertly to their target. Possible, thought Rousseau, but highly unlikely. Somewhere, there was an operational mastermind, a man who had conceived the attack, recruited the operatives, and guided them skillfully to their target. And it was the head of this man that Paul Rousseau would deliver to his chief.
And so, as the whole of the French security establishment searched for the two perpetrators of the Weinberg Center attack, Rousseau’s gaze was already fixed resolutely upon a distant shore. Like all good captains in times of trouble, he remained on the bridge of his vessel, which in Rousseau’s case was his office on the fifth floor. An air of academic clutter hung over the room, along with the fruited scent of Rousseau’s pipe tobacco, a habit he indulged in violation of numerous official edicts regarding smoking in government offices. Beneath his bulletproof windows—they had been forced upon him by his chief—lay the intersection of the rue de Grenelle and the tranquil little rue Amélie. The building itself had no street entrance, only a black gate that gave onto a small courtyard and car park. A discreet brass plaque proclaimed that the building housed something called the International Society for French Literature, a particularly Rousseauian touch. For the sake of the unit’s cover, it published a thin quarterly, which Rousseau insisted on editing himself. At last count it had a readership of twelve. All had been thoroughly vetted.
Inside the building, however, all subterfuge ended. The technical support staff occupied the basement; the watchers, the ground floor. On the second floor was Alpha Group’s overflowing Registry—Rousseau preferred old-fashioned paper dossiers to digital files—and the third and fourth floors were the preserve of the agent runners. Most came and went through the gate on the rue de Grenelle, either on foot or by government car. Others entered through a secret passageway linking the building and the dowdy little antique shop next door, which was owned by an elderly Frenchman who had served in a secret capacity during the war in Algeria. Paul Rousseau was the only member of Alpha Group who had been allowed to read the shopkeeper’s appalling file.
A visitor to the fifth floor might have mistaken it for the office of a private Swiss bank. It was somber and shadowed and quiet, save for the Chopin that occasionally drifted through Paul Rousseau’s open door. His long-suffering secretary, the implacable Madame Treville, occupied an orderly desk in the anteroom, and at the opposite end of a narrow hall was the office of Rousseau’s deputy, Christian Bouchard. Bouchard was all things Rousseau was not—young, fit, sharply dressed, and far too good-looking. Most of all, Bouchard was ambitious. The chief of the DGSI had foisted him upon Rousseau, and it was widely assumed he would one day be Alpha Group’s chief. Rousseau resented him only a little, for Bouchard, despite his obvious shortcomings, was extremely good at his job. Ruthless, too. When there was bureaucratic dirty work to be done, invariably it was Bouchard who saw to it.
Three days after the Weinberg Center bombing, with the terrorists still at large, there was a meeting of department heads at the Interior Ministry. Rousseau loathed such gatherings—they invariably devolved into political point-scoring contests—so he sent Bouchard in his stead. It was approaching eight that evening when the deputy finally returned to the rue de Grenelle. Entering Rousseau’s office, he wordlessly placed two photographs on the desk. They showed an olive-skinned woman in her mid-twenties with an oval face and eyes that were like kaleidoscopes of hazel and copper. In the first photo her hair was shoulder length and brushed straight back from her unblemished forehead. In the second it was covered by a hijab of unadorned black silk.
“They’re calling her the black widow,” said Bouchard.
“Catchy,” said Rousseau with a frown. He picked up the second photo, the one where the woman was piously attired, and stared into the bottomless eyes. “What’s her real name?”
“Safia Bourihane.”
“Algerian?”
“By way of Aulnay-sous-Bois.”
Aulnay-sous-Bois was a banlieue north of Paris. Its crime-ridden public housing estates—in France they were known as HLMs, or habitation à loyer modéré—were some of the most violent in the country. The police rarely ventured there. Even Rousseau advised his streetwise case officers to meet their Aulnay-based sources on less dangerous ground.
“She’s twenty-nine years old and was born in France,” Bouchard was saying. “Even so, she’s always described herself as a Muslim first and a Frenchwoman second.”
“Who found her?”
“Lucien.”
Lucien Jacquard was the chief of the DGSI’s counterterrorism division. Nominally, Alpha Group was under his control. In practice, however, Rousseau reported over Jacquard’s head to the chief. To avoid potential conflicts, he briefed Jacquard on active Alpha Group cases but jealously guarded the names of his sources and the unit’s operational methods. Alpha Group was essentially a service within a service, one that Lucien Jacquard wished to bring firmly under his control.
“How much does he have on her?” asked Rousseau, still staring into the eyes of the woman.
“She popped up on Lucien’s radar about three years ago.”
“Why?”
“Her boyfriend.”
Bouchard placed another photograph on the desk. It showed a man in his early thirties with cropped dark hair and the wispy beard of a devout Muslim.
“Algerian?”
“Tunisian, actually. He was the real thing. Good with electronics. Computers, too. He spent time in Iraq and Yemen before making his way to Syria.”
“Al-Qaeda?”
“No,” said Bouchard. “ISIS.”
Rousseau looked up sharply. “Where is he now?”
“Paradise, apparently.”
“What happened?”
“Killed in a coalition air strike.”
“And the woman?”
“She traveled to Syria last year.”
“How long was she there?”
“At least six months.”
“Doing what?”
“Obviously, she did a bit of weapons training.”
“And when she returned to Paris?”
“Lucien put her under surveillance. And then …” Bouchard shrugged.
“He dropped it?”
Bouchard nodded.
“Why?”
“The usual reasons. Too many targets, too few resources.”
“She was a ticking time bomb.”
“Lucien didn’t think so. Apparently, she cleaned up her act when she came back to France. She wasn’t associating with known radicals, and her Internet activity was benign. She even stopped wearing the hijab.”
“Which is exactly what she was told to do by the man who masterminded the attack. She was obviously part of a sophisticated network.”
“Lucien concurs. In fact, he advised the minister that it’s only a matter of time before they hit us again.”
“How did the minister take the news?”
“By ordering Lucien to turn over all his files to us.”
Rousseau permitted himself a brief smile at the expense of his rival. “I want everything, Christian. Especially the watch reports after her return from Syria.”
“Lucien promised to send the files over first thing in the morning.”
“How good of him.” Rousseau looked down at the photograph of the woman they were calling “la veuve noire”—the black widow. “Where do you suppose she is?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say she’s back in Syria by now, along with her accomplice.”
“One wonders why they didn’t wish to die for the cause.” Rousseau gathered up the three photographs and returned them to his deputy. “Any other news?”
“An interesting development regarding the Weinberg woman. It seems her art collection included a lost painting by Vincent van Gogh.”
“Really?”
“And guess who she decided to leave it to.”
By his expression, Rousseau made it clear he was in no mood for games, so Bouchard quickly supplied the name.
“I thought he was dead.”
“Apparently not.”
“Why didn’t he attend the funeral?”
“Who’s to say he didn’t?”
“Have we told him about the painting?”
“The ministry would prefer that it remain in France.”
“So the answer is no?”
Bouchard was silent.
“Someone should remind the ministry that four of the victims of the Weinberg Center bombing were citizens of the State of Israel.”
“Your point?”
“I suspect we’ll be hearing from him soon.”
Bouchard withdrew, leaving Rousseau alone. He dimmed his desk lamp and pressed the play button on his bookshelf stereo system, and in a moment the opening notes of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor crept into the silence. Traffic moved along the rue de Grenelle, and to the east, rising above the Seine embankments, glowed the lights of the Eiffel Tower. Rousseau saw none of it; in his thoughts he was watching a young man moving swiftly across a courtyard with a gun in his outstretched hand. He was a legend, this man, a gifted deceiver and assassin who had been fighting terrorists longer than even Rousseau. It would be an honor to work with him rather than against him. Soon, Rousseau thought with certainty. Soon …
3 (#ulink_0db4fdb6-f7cf-5280-974e-17a5294a8d2b)
BEIRUT (#ulink_0db4fdb6-f7cf-5280-974e-17a5294a8d2b)
THOUGH PAUL ROUSSEAU DID NOT know it then, the seeds for just such an operational union had already been sown. For on that very same evening, as Rousseau was walking toward his sad little bachelor’s apartment on the rue Saint-Jacques, a car was speeding along Beirut’s seafront Corniche. The car was black in color, German in manufacture, and imposing in size. The man in back was long and lanky, with pale, bloodless skin and eyes the color of glacial ice. His expression projected a sense of profound boredom, but the fingers of his right hand, which were tapping lightly on the armrest, betrayed the true state of his emotions. He wore a pair of slim-fitting jeans, a dark woolen pullover, and a leather jacket. Beneath the jacket, wedged inside the waistband of the trousers, was a 9mm Belgian-made pistol he had collected from a contact at the airport—there being no shortage of weapons, large or small, in Lebanon. In his breast pocket was a billfold filled with cash, along with a well-traveled Canadian passport that identified him as David Rostov. Like most things about the man, the passport was a lie. His real name was Mikhail Abramov, and he was employed by the secret intelligence service of the State of Israel. The service had a long and deliberately misleading name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Men such as Mikhail referred to it as the Office and nothing else.
He looked into the rearview mirror and waited for the eyes of the driver to meet his. The driver’s name was Sami Haddad. He was a Maronite, a former member of the Lebanese Forces Christian militia, and a longtime contract employee of the Office. He had the gentle forgiving eyes of a priest and the swollen hands of a prizefighter. He was old enough to remember when Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East—and old enough to have fought in the long civil war that had torn the country to pieces. There was nothing Sami Haddad didn’t know about Lebanon and its dangerous politics, and nothing he couldn’t lay his hands on in a hurry—weapons, boats, cars, drugs, girls. He had once procured a mountain lion on short notice because the target of an Office recruitment, an alcoholic prince from a Gulf Arab dynasty, admired predatory cats. His loyalty to the Office was beyond question. So were his instincts for trouble.
“Relax,” said Sami Haddad, finding Mikhail’s eyes in the mirror. “We’re not being followed.”
Mikhail peered over his shoulder at the lights of the traffic following them along the Corniche. Any one of the cars might have contained a team of killers or kidnappers from Hezbollah or one of the extreme jihadist organizations that had taken root in the Palestinian refugee camps of the south—organizations that made al-Qaeda seem like dowdy old Islamic moderates. It was his third visit to Beirut in the past year. Each time, he had entered the country with the same passport, protected by the same cover story. He was David Rostov, an itinerant businessman of Russian-Canadian descent who acquired illicit antiquities in the Middle East for a largely European clientele. Beirut was one of his favorite hunting grounds, for in Beirut anything was possible. He had once been offered a seven-foot Roman statue, remarkably intact, of a wounded Amazon. The cost of the piece was $2 million, shipping included. Over endless cups of sweet Turkish coffee, he convinced the seller, a prominent dealer from a well-known family, to drop his price by half a million. And then he walked away, earning for himself the reputation of both a shrewd negotiator and a tough customer, which was a good reputation to have in a place like Beirut.
He checked the time on his Samsung mobile. Sami Haddad noticed. Sami noticed everything.
“What time is he expecting you?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“Late.”
“Money never sleeps, Sami.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Shall we go straight to the hotel, or do you want to take a drive first?”
“Your call.”
“Let’s go to the hotel.”
“Let’s take a drive.”
“No problem.”
Sami Haddad turned off the Corniche into a street lined with colonial French buildings. Mikhail knew it well. Twelve years earlier, while serving in the Sayeret Matkal special forces, he had killed a terrorist from Hezbollah as he lay sleeping in the bed of a safe house. To be a member of such an elite unit was the dream of every Israeli boy, and it was a particularly noteworthy achievement for a boy from Moscow. A boy who had to fight every day of his life because his ancestors happened to be Jewish. A boy whose father, an important Soviet academic, had been locked away in a psychiatric hospital because he dared to question the wisdom of the Party. The boy had arrived in Israel at the age of sixteen. He had learned to speak Hebrew in a month and within a year had lost all traces of a Russian accent. He was like the millions who had come before him, the early Zionist pioneers who had fled to Palestine to escape the persecution and pogroms of Eastern Europe, the human wrecks who came spilling out of the death camps after the war. He had shed the baggage and the weakness of his past. He was a new person, a new Jew. He was an Israeli.
“We’re still clean,” said Sami Haddad.
“Then what are you waiting for?” replied Mikhail.
Sami wound his way back to the Corniche and headed to the marina. Rising above it were the twin glass-and-steel towers of the Four Seasons Hotel. Sami guided the car into the drive and looked into the mirror for instructions.
“Call me when he arrives,” said Mikhail. “Let me know whether he has a friend.”
“He never goes anywhere without a friend.”
Mikhail collected his briefcase and overnight bag from the opposite seat and opened the door.
“Be careful in there,” said Sami Haddad. “Don’t talk to strangers.”
Mikhail climbed out and, whistling tunelessly, breezed past the valets into the lobby. A dark-suited security man eyed him warily but allowed him to enter without a search. He crossed a thick carpet that swallowed his footfalls and presented himself at the imposing reception desk. Standing behind it, illuminated by a cone of overhead light, was a pretty black-haired woman of twenty-five. Mikhail knew that the woman was a Palestinian and that her father, a fighter from the old days, had fled Lebanon with Arafat in 1982, long before she was born. Several other employees of the hotel also had troubling connections. Two members of Hezbollah worked in the kitchen, and there were several known jihadis in housekeeping. Mikhail reckoned that approximately ten percent of the staff would have killed him if informed of his true identity and occupation.
He smiled at the woman, and the woman smiled coolly in return.
“Good evening, Mr. Rostov. So good to see you again.” Her painted nails clattered on a keyboard while Mikhail grew light-headed from the stench of overripe azaleas. “We have you for just one night.”
“A pity,” said Mikhail with another smile.
“Do you require assistance with your luggage?”
“I can manage.”
“We’ve upgraded you to a deluxe sea-view room. It’s on the fourteenth floor.” She handed him his packet of room keys and gestured toward the elevators like a flight attendant pointing out the location of the emergency exits. “Welcome back.”
Mikhail carried his bag and briefcase into the elevator foyer. An empty carriage waited, its doors open. He stepped inside and, grateful for the solitude, pressed the call button for the fourteenth floor. But as the doors were closing, a hand poked through the breach and a man entered. He was thickset, with a heavy ridge over his brow and a jawbone built to take a punch. His eyes met Mikhail’s briefly in the reflection of the doors. A nod was exchanged, but no words passed between them. The man pressed the button for the twentieth floor, almost as an afterthought, and picked at his thumbnail as the carriage rose. Mikhail pretended to check his e-mail on his mobile and while doing so surreptitiously snapped the blunt-headed man’s photograph. He forwarded the photo to King Saul Boulevard, the location of the Office’s anonymous Tel Aviv headquarters, while walking along the corridor to his room. A glance around the door frame revealed no evidence of tampering. He swiped his card key and, bracing himself for attack, entered.
The sound of Vivaldi greeted him—a favorite of arms smugglers, heroin dealers, and terrorists the world over, he thought as he switched off the radio. The bed had already been turned down, a chocolate lay on the pillow. He went to the window and saw the roof of Sami Haddad’s car parked along the Corniche. Beyond was the marina, and beyond the marina the blackness of the Mediterranean. Somewhere out there was his back door. He was no longer allowed to come to Beirut without an offshore escape hatch. The next chief had plans for him—or so he had heard through the Office grapevine. For a secure institution, it was a notoriously gossipy place.
Just then, Mikhail’s mobile blossomed with light. It was a message from King Saul Boulevard stating that the computers could not identify the man who had joined him in the elevator. It advised him to proceed with caution, whatever that meant. He drew the blackout shade and the curtains and switched off the room lights one by one until the darkness was absolute. Then he sat at the foot of the bed, his gaze focused on the thin strip of light at the bottom of the door, and waited for the phone to ring.
It was not unusual for the source to be late. He was, as he reminded Mikhail at every opportunity, a very busy man. Therefore, it was no surprise that ten o’clock came and went with no call from Sami Haddad. Finally, at quarter past, the mobile flared.
“He’s entering the lobby. He has two friends, both armed.”
Mikhail killed the call and remained seated for an additional ten minutes. Then, gun in hand, he moved to the entrance hall and placed his ear against the door. Hearing nothing outside, he returned the gun to the small of his back and stepped into the corridor, which was deserted except for a single male member of the housekeeping staff. Upstairs, the roof bar was the usual scene—rich Lebanese, Emiratis in their flowing white kanduras, Chinese businessmen flushed with drink, drug dealers, whores, gamblers, adventure seekers, fools. The sea wind toyed with the hair of the women and made wavelets in the pool. The throbbing music, spun by a professional DJ, was a sonic crime against humanity.
Mikhail made his way to the farthest corner of the rooftop, where Clovis Mansour, scion of the Mansour antiquities-dealing dynasty, sat alone on a white couch facing the Mediterranean. He was posed as if for a magazine shoot, with a glass of champagne in one hand and a cigarette smoldering in the other. He wore a dark Italian suit and a white open-neck shirt that was handmade for him by his man in London. His gold wristwatch was the size of a sundial. His cologne hung around him like a cloak.
“You’re late, habibi,” he said as Mikhail lowered himself onto the couch opposite. “I was about to leave.”
“No, you weren’t.”
Mikhail surveyed the interior of the bar. Mansour’s two bodyguards were picking at a bowl of pistachios at an adjacent table. The man from the elevator was leaning against the balustrade. He was pretending to admire the view of the sea while holding a mobile phone to his ear.
“Know him?” asked Mikhail.
“Never seen him before. Drink?”
“No, thanks.”
“It’s better if you drink.”
Mansour flagged down a passing waiter and ordered a second glass of champagne. Mikhail drew a buff-colored envelope from his coat pocket and placed it on the low table.
“What’s that?” asked Mansour.
“A token of our esteem.”
“Money?”
Mikhail nodded.
“I don’t work for you because I need the money, habibi. After all, I have plenty of money. I work for you because I want to stay in business.”
“My superiors prefer it if money changes hands.”
“Your superiors are cheap blackmailers.”
“I’d look inside the envelope before calling them cheap.”
Mansour did. He raised an eyebrow and slipped the envelope into the breast pocket of his suit jacket.
“What have you got for me, Clovis?”
“Paris,” said the antiquities dealer.
“What about Paris?”
“I know who did it.”
“How?”
“I can’t say for certain,” said Mansour, “but it’s possible I helped him pay for it.”
4 (#ulink_e353a5f6-aa0f-5017-b785-a83abaa354d2)
BEIRUT—TEL AVIV (#ulink_e353a5f6-aa0f-5017-b785-a83abaa354d2)
IT WAS HALF PAST TWO in the morning by the time Mikhail finally returned to his room. He saw no evidence to suggest it had been disturbed in his absence; even the little foiled chocolate lay at precisely the same angle atop his pillow. After sniffing it for traces of arsenic, he nibbled at a corner thoughtfully. Then, in an uncharacteristic fit of nerves, he hauled every piece of furniture that wasn’t bolted down into the entrance hall and piled it against the door. His barricade complete, he opened the curtains and the blackout shade and searched for his bolt-hole among the shipping lights in the Mediterranean. Instantly, he reproached himself for entertaining such a thought. The escape hatch was to be utilized only in cases of extreme emergency. Possession of a piece of intelligence did not fall into that category, even if the piece of intelligence had the potential to prevent another catastrophe like Paris.
They call him Saladin …
Mikhail stretched out on the bed, his back propped against the headboard, the gun at his side, and stared at the shadowy mass of his fortifications. It was, he thought, a truly undignified sight. He switched on the television and surfed the airwaves of a Middle East gone mad until boredom drove him toward the doorstep of sleep. To keep himself alert he guzzled a cola from the fridge bar and thought about a woman he had foolishly let slip through his fingers. She was a beautiful American of flawless Protestant pedigree who had worked for the CIA and, occasionally, for the Office. She was living in New York now, where she oversaw a special collection of paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. He’d heard she was seeing a man quite seriously, a bond trader, of all things. He contemplated calling her, just to hear the sound of her voice, but decided it would be unwise. Like Russia, she was lost to him.
What’s his real name, Clovis?
I’m not sure he ever had one.
Where’s he from?
He might have been from Iraq once, but now he’s a son of the caliphate …
Finally, the sky beyond Mikhail’s window turned blue-black with the coming dawn. He put his room in order and thirty minutes later slumped bleary-eyed into the back of Sami Haddad’s car.
“How did it go?” asked the Lebanese.
“Total waste of time,” replied Mikhail through an elaborate yawn.
“Where now?”
“Tel Aviv.”
“It’s not such an easy drive, my friend.”
“Then perhaps you should take me to the airport instead.”
His flight was at half past eight. He sailed through passport control as a smiling, somewhat drowsy Canadian and settled into his first-class seat aboard a Middle East Airlines jet bound for Rome. To shield himself from his neighbor, a Turkish salesman of disreputable appearance, he pretended to read the morning papers. In reality, he was considering all the possible reasons why an aircraft operated by the government of Lebanon might fail to reach its destination safely. For once, he thought glumly, his death would have consequences, for the intelligence would die with him.
How much money are we talking about, Clovis?
Four million, maybe five.
Which is it?
Closer to five …
The plane landed in Rome without incident, though it took Mikhail the better part of two hours to clear the organized stampede that was Fiumicino’s passport control. His stay in Italy was brief, long enough for him to switch identities and board another airplane, an El Al flight bound for Tel Aviv. An Office car waited at Ben Gurion; it whisked him north to King Saul Boulevard. The building at the western end of the street was, like Paul Rousseau’s outpost on the rue de Grenelle, a lie in plain sight. No emblem hung over its entrance, no brass lettering proclaimed the identity of its occupant. In fact, there was nothing at all to suggest it was the headquarters of one of the world’s most feared and respected intelligence services. A closer inspection of the structure, however, would have revealed the existence of a building within a building, one with its own power supply, its own water and sewer lines, and its own secure communications system. Employees carried two keys. One opened an unmarked door in the lobby; the other operated the lift. Those who committed the unpardonable sin of losing one or both of their keys were banished to the Judean Wilderness, never to be seen or heard from again.
Like most field agents, Mikhail entered the building through the underground parking garage and then made his way upward to the executive floor. Because the hour was late—the security cameras recorded the time as half past nine—the corridor was as quiet as a school that had been emptied of children. From the half-open door at the end of the hall stretched a slender rhombus of light. Mikhail knocked softly and, hearing no reply, entered. Stuffed into an executive leather chair behind a desk of smoked glass was Uzi Navot, the soon-to-be former chief of the Office. He was frowning at an open file as though it were a bill he could not afford to pay. At his elbow was an open box of Viennese butter cookies. Only two remained, not a good sign.
At length, Navot looked up and with a dismissive movement of his hand instructed Mikhail to sit. He wore a striped dress shirt that had been cut for a thinner man and a pair of the rimless spectacles beloved by German intellectuals and Swiss bankers. His hair, once strawberry blond, was gray stubble; his blue eyes were bloodshot. He rolled up his shirtsleeves, exposing his massive forearms, and contemplated Mikhail for a long moment with thinly veiled hostility. It wasn’t the reception Mikhail had expected, but then one never knew quite what to expect when one encountered Uzi Navot these days. There were rumors his successor intended to keep him on in some capacity—blasphemy in a service that regarded regular turnover at the top almost as a matter of religious doctrine—but officially his future was unclear.
“Any problems on the way out of Beirut?” Navot asked at last, as though the question had occurred to him suddenly.
“None,” answered Mikhail.
Navot snared a stray cookie crumb with the tip of a thick forefinger. “Surveillance?”
“Nothing we could see.”
“And the man who rode the hotel elevator with you? Did you ever see him again?”
“At the roof bar.”
“Anything suspicious?”
“Everyone in Beirut looks suspicious. That’s why it’s Beirut.”
Navot flicked the cookie crumb onto the plate. Then he removed a photograph from the file and dealt it across the desktop toward Mikhail. It showed a man sitting in the front seat of a luxury automobile, at the edge of a seaside boulevard. The windows of the car were shattered. The man was a bloody tattered mess, and quite obviously dead.
“Recognize him?” asked Navot.
Mikhail squinted in concentration.
“Look carefully at the car.”
Mikhail did. And then he understood. The dead man was Sami Haddad.
“When did they get him?”
“Not long after he dropped you at the airport. And they were just getting started.”
Navot spun another photo across the desk, a ruined building on an elegant street in downtown Beirut. It was Gallerie Mansour on the rue Madame Curie. Limbs and heads littered the pavement. For once the carnage wasn’t human. It was Clovis Mansour’s magnificent professional inventory.
“I was hoping,” Navot resumed after a moment, “that my last days as chief would pass without incident. Instead, I have to deal with the loss of our best contract employee in Beirut and an asset we spent a great deal of time and effort recruiting.”
“Better than a dead field agent.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.” Navot accepted the two photographs and returned them to the file. “What did Mansour have for you?”
“The man who was behind Paris.”
“Who is he?”
“They call him Saladin.”
“Saladin? Well,” Navot said, closing the file, “at least that’s a start.”
Navot remained in his office long after Mikhail had taken his leave. The desk was empty except for his leather-bound executive notepad, on which he had scrawled a single word. Saladin … Only a man of great self-esteem would grant himself a code name like that, only a man of great ambition. The real Saladin had united the Muslim world under the Ayyubid dynasty and recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders. Perhaps this new Saladin was similarly inclined. For his coming-out party he had flattened a Jewish target in the middle of Paris, thus attacking two countries, two civilizations, at the same time. Surely, thought Navot, the success of the attack had only whetted his lust for infidel blood. It was only a matter of time before he struck again.
For the moment, Saladin was a French problem. But the fact that four Israeli citizens had perished in the attack gave Navot standing in Paris. So, too, did the name that Clovis Mansour had whispered into Mikhail’s ear in Beirut. In fact, with a bit of skilled salesmanship, the name alone might be enough to secure the Office a seat at the operational table. Navot was confident in his powers of persuasion. A former field agent and recruiter of spies, he had the ability to spin straw into gold. All he needed was someone to look after the Office’s interest in any joint Franco-Israeli undertaking. He had but one candidate in mind, a legendary field agent who had been running operations on French soil since he was a boy of twenty-two. What’s more, the operative in question had known Hannah Weinberg personally. Unfortunately, the prime minister had other plans for him.
Navot checked the time; it was ten fifteen. He reached for his phone and dialed Travel.
“I need to fly to Paris tomorrow morning.”
“The six o’clock or the nine?”
“The six,” said Navot despondently.
“When are you coming back?”
“Tomorrow night.”
“Done.”
Navot rang off and then placed a final call. The question he posed was one he had asked many times before.
“How long before he’s finished?”
“He’s close.”
“How close?”
“Maybe tonight, tomorrow at the latest.”
Navot replaced the receiver and allowed his gaze to wander the spacious office that soon would no longer be his.
Tomorrow at the latest …
Maybe, he thought, or maybe not.
5 (#ulink_fc6c680c-7eee-524f-8c5a-df5d8ede5fca)
ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM (#ulink_fc6c680c-7eee-524f-8c5a-df5d8ede5fca)
IN THE FAR CORNER OF the conservation lab, a black curtain stretched from the white ceiling to the white floor. Behind it was a matching pair of oaken Italian easels, two halogen lamps, a Nikon camera mounted atop a tripod, a palette, a tiny bale of cotton wool, an ancient CD player smudged with several different colors of paint, and a trolley laden with pigments, medium, solvents, wooden dowels, and several Winsor & Newton Series 7 sable-hair paintbrushes. For the better part of the past four months, the restorer had labored there alone, sometimes late at night, sometimes long before dawn. He wore no museum credentials, for his true place of employment was elsewhere. The staff conservators had been advised not to mention his presence or even to speak his name. Nor were they to discuss the large painting, an Italian Old Master altarpiece, propped upon his easels. The painting, like the restorer, had a dangerous and tragic past.
He was below average in height—five foot eight, perhaps, no more—and slender of build. His face was high at the forehead and narrow at the chin, with wide prominent cheekbones and a long, bony nose that looked as though it had been carved from wood. The dark hair was cropped short and stained with gray at the temples, the eyes were an unnatural shade of green. His age was one of the most closely guarded secrets in Israel. Not long ago, when his obituary appeared in newspapers around the world, no verifiable date of birth ever found its way into print. The reports of his death had been part of an elaborate operation to deceive his enemies in Moscow and Tehran. They had believed the stories to be true, a miscalculation that allowed the restorer to take vengeance against them. Not long after his return to Jerusalem, his wife gave birth to a set of twins, a girl named Irene after his mother, and a son called Raphael. They were now—mother, daughter, son—three of the most closely guarded people in the State of Israel. So, too, was the restorer. He came and went in an armored American-made SUV, accompanied by a bodyguard, a fawn-eyed killer of twenty-five, who sat outside the door of the conservation lab whenever he was present.
His appearance at the museum, on a black and wet Wednesday in December a few days after the birth of his children, had come as a shock, and a profound relief, to the rest of the conservation staff. They had been warned he did not like to be observed while working. Still, they routinely poked their heads into his little curtained grotto merely to glimpse the altarpiece with their own eyes. Truth be told, he couldn’t blame them. The painting, Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence, was arguably the world’s most famous missing work of art. Stolen from the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Palermo in October 1969, it was now formally in the possession of the Vatican. The Holy See had wisely decided to withhold news of the painting’s recovery until the restoration was complete. Like many Vatican pronouncements, the official version of events would bear little resemblance to the truth. It would not mention the fact that a legendary Israeli intelligence officer named Gabriel Allon had found the missing painting hanging in a church in the northern Italian town of Brienno. Nor would it mention that the same legendary intelligence officer had been entrusted with the task of restoring it.
During his long career he had carried out several unusual restorations—he had once repaired a Rembrandt portrait that had been pierced by a bullet—but the Caravaggio altarpiece propped upon Gabriel’s easels was without question the most damaged canvas he had ever seen. Little was known of its long journey from the Oratorio di San Lorenzo to the church where he had found it. The stories, however, were legion. It had been kept by a Mafia don as a prize and brought out for important meetings of his henchmen. It had been chewed by rats, damaged in a flood, and burned in a fire. Gabriel was certain of only one thing: the painting’s wounds, while grievous, were not fatal. But Ephraim Cohen, the museum’s chief of conservation, was dubious. Upon seeing the painting for the first time, he advised Gabriel to administer last rites and return the altarpiece to the Vatican in the same wooden coffin in which it had arrived.
“Ye of little faith,” Gabriel had said.
“No,” replied Cohen. “Me of limited talent.”
Cohen, like the other members of the staff, had heard the stories—the stories of deadlines missed, of commissions abandoned, of church reopenings delayed. The snail-like pace of Gabriel’s work habits was legendary, almost as legendary as his exploits on the secret battlefields of Europe and the Middle East. But they soon discovered that his slowness was voluntary rather than instinctive. The craft of restoration, he explained to Cohen one evening while swiftly repairing the tattered face of Saint Francis, was a bit like making love. It was best done slowly and with painstaking attention to detail, with occasional breaks for rest and refreshment. But in a pinch, if the craftsman and his subject matter were adequately acquainted, a restoration could be done at extraordinary speed, with more or less the same result.
“You and Caravaggio are old friends?” asked Cohen.
“We’ve collaborated in the past.”
“So the rumors are true then?”
Gabriel had been painting with his right hand. Now he moved the brush to his left and worked with equal dexterity.
“What rumors are those?” he asked after a moment.
“That you were the one who restored the Deposition for the Vatican Museums a few years ago.”
“You should never listen to rumors, Ephraim, especially when they concern me.”
“Or the news,” said Cohen darkly.
His hours were erratic and unpredictable. An entire day might pass with no sign of him. Then Cohen would arrive at the museum to find a large portion of the canvas miraculously restored. Surely, he thought, he had a secret helper. Or perhaps Caravaggio himself was stealing into the museum at night, a sword in one hand, a brush in the other, to assist with the work. After one nocturnal session—a particularly productive visit during which the Virgin was returned to her former glory—Cohen actually checked the security footage. He found that Gabriel had entered the lab at half past ten in the evening and had departed at seven twenty the next morning. Not even the fawn-eyed bodyguard had been with him. Perhaps it was true, thought Cohen, as he watched the ghostly figure moving at one frame per second along a half-lit hall. Perhaps he was an archangel after all.
When he was present during normal business hours, there was always music. La Bohème was a particular favorite. Indeed, he played it so often that Cohen, who spoke not a word of Italian, could soon sing “Che gelida manina” from memory. Once Gabriel entered his curtained grotto, he never reappeared until the session was complete. There were no strolls in the museum’s sculpture garden to clear his head, no trips to the staff lunchroom for a jolt of caffeine. Only the music, and the soft tap-tap-tap of his brush, and the occasional click of his Nikon camera as he recorded his relentless progress. Before leaving the laboratory he would clean his brushes and his palette and put his trolley in order—precisely, noted Cohen, so he would be able to detect whether anyone touched his things in his absence. Then the music would go silent, the halogen lamps would dim, and with little more than a cordial nod to the others he would be gone.
By early April, with the winter rains a memory and the days warm and bright, he was hurling himself headlong toward a finish line only he could see. All that remained was the winged angel of the Lord, an ivory-skinned boy who floated in the upper reaches of the composition. It was a curious choice to leave for last, thought Cohen, for the boy angel had suffered serious injury. His limbs were scarred by heavy paint losses, his white garment was in tatters. Only his right hand, which was pointed heavenward, was undamaged. Gabriel restored the angel in a series of marathon sessions. They were noteworthy for their silence—there was no music during this period—and for the fact that, as he was repairing the angel’s auburn hair, a large bomb exploded in Paris. He stood for a long time before the lab’s small television, his palette slowly drying, watching as the bodies were pulled from the rubble. And when a photograph of a woman named Hannah Weinberg appeared on the screen, he flinched as though struck by an invisible blow. Afterward, his expression darkened and his green eyes seemed to burn with anger. Cohen was tempted to ask the legend whether he had known the woman, but decided against it. One could talk to him about paintings and the weather, but when bombs exploded it was probably better to keep one’s distance.
On the last day, the day of Uzi Navot’s journey to Paris, Gabriel arrived at the lab before dawn and remained in his little grotto long after the museum had closed for the night. Ephraim Cohen found an excuse to stay late because he sensed the end was near and wanted to be present to witness it. Shortly after eight o’clock he heard the familiar sound of the legend laying his brush—a Winsor & Newton Series 7—on the aluminum tray of his trolley. Cohen peered furtively through the slender gap in the curtain and saw him standing before the canvas, a hand resting against his chin, his head tilted slightly to the side. He remained in the same position, motionless as the figures in the painting, until the fawn-eyed bodyguard entered the lab and pressed a mobile phone urgently into his palm. Reluctantly, he lifted it to his ear, listened in silence, and murmured something Cohen couldn’t quite make out. A moment later both he and the bodyguard were gone.
Alone, Ephraim Cohen slipped through the curtain and stood before the canvas, scarcely able to draw a breath. Finally, he plucked the Winsor & Newton paintbrush from the trolley and slipped it into the pocket of his smock. It wasn’t fair, he thought, as he doused the halogen lamps. Perhaps he really was an archangel after all.
6 (#ulink_34f1be81-4a9f-54a0-a83a-1f748916c343)
MA’ALE HAHAMISHA, ISRAEL (#ulink_34f1be81-4a9f-54a0-a83a-1f748916c343)
THE OLD KIBBUTZ OF MA’ALE HAHAMISHA occupied a strategic hilltop in the craggy western approaches to Jerusalem, not far from the Arab town of Abu Ghosh. Founded during the Arab Revolt of 1936–39, it was one of fifty-seven so-called tower and stockade settlements hastily erected across British-ruled Palestine in a desperate bid to secure the Zionist endeavor and, ultimately, reclaim the ancient kingdom of Israel. It derived its name and very identity from an act of revenge. Translated into English, Ma’ale Hahamisha meant “the Ascent of the Five.” It was a not-so-subtle reminder that an Arab terrorist from a nearby village had died at the hands of five of the kibbutz’s Jews.
Despite the violent circumstances of its birth, the kibbutz grew prosperous from its cauliflower and peaches and its charming mountain hotel. Ari Shamron, the twice-former chief of the Office and éminence grise of Israeli intelligence, often used the hotel as a meeting place when King Saul Boulevard or a safe flat wouldn’t do. One such meeting occurred on a brilliant afternoon in September 1972. On that occasion Shamron’s reluctant guest was a promising young painter named Gabriel Allon, whom Shamron had plucked from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. The Palestinian terrorist group Black September had just murdered eleven Israeli athletes and coaches at the Olympic games in Munich, and Shamron wanted Gabriel, a native German speaker who had spent time in Europe, to serve as his instrument of vengeance. Gabriel, with the defiance of youth, had told Shamron to find someone else. And Shamron, not for the last time, had bent him to his will.
The operation was code-named Wrath of God, a phrase chosen by Shamron to give his undertaking the patina of divine sanction. For three years Gabriel and a small team of operatives stalked their prey across Western Europe and the Middle East, killing at night and in broad daylight, living in fear that at any moment they might be arrested by local authorities and charged as murderers. In all, twelve members of Black September died at their hands. Gabriel personally killed six of the terrorists with a .22-caliber Beretta pistol. Whenever possible, he shot his victims eleven times, one bullet for each murdered Jew. When finally he returned to Israel, his temples were gray from stress and exhaustion. Shamron called them smudges of ash on the prince of fire.
It had been Gabriel’s intention to resume his career as an artist, but each time he stood before a canvas he saw only the faces of the men he had killed. And so with Shamron’s blessing he traveled to Venice as an expatriate Italian named Mario Delvecchio to study restoration. When his apprenticeship was complete, he returned to the Office and to the waiting arms of Ari Shamron. Posing as a gifted if taciturn European-based art restorer, he eliminated some of Israel’s most dangerous foes—including Abu Jihad, Yasir Arafat’s talented second-in-command, whom he killed in front of his wife and children in Tunis. Arafat returned the favor by ordering a terrorist to place a bomb beneath Gabriel’s car in Vienna. The explosion killed his young son Daniel and seriously wounded Leah, his first wife. She resided now in a psychiatric hospital on the other side of the ridge from Ma’ale Hahamisha, trapped in a prison of memory and a body ravaged by fire. The hospital was located in the old Arab village of Deir Yassin, where Jewish fighters from the Irgun and Lehi paramilitary organizations massacred more than a hundred Palestinians on the night of April 9, 1948. It was a cruel irony—that the shattered wife of Israel’s avenging angel should reside among the ghosts of Deir Yassin—but such was life in the twice-Promised Land. The past was inescapable. Arab and Jew were bound together by hatred, blood, and victimhood. And for their punishment they would be forced to live together as feuding neighbors for all eternity.
The years after the bombing in Vienna were for Gabriel the lost years. He lived as a hermit in Cornwall, he wandered Europe quietly restoring paintings, he tried to forget. Eventually, Shamron came calling yet again, and the bond between Gabriel and the Office was renewed. Acting at his mentor’s behest, he carried off some of the most celebrated operations in the history of Israeli intelligence. His was the career against which all others would be measured, especially Uzi Navot’s. Like the Arabs and Jews of Palestine, Gabriel and Navot were inextricably bound. They were the sons of Ari Shamron, the trusted heirs of the service he had built and nurtured. Gabriel, the elder son, had been confident of the father’s love, but Navot had always struggled to win his approval. He had been given the job as chief only because Gabriel had turned it down. Now, remarried, a father once more, Gabriel was finally ready to assume his rightful place in the executive suite of King Saul Boulevard. For Uzi Navot it was a nakba, the word the Arabs used to describe the catastrophe of their flight from the land of Palestine.
The old hotel in Ma’ale Hahamisha was less than a mile from the 1967 border, and from its terrace restaurant it was possible to see the orderly yellow lights of Jewish settlements spilling down the hillside into the West Bank. The terrace was in darkness, except for a few windblown candles flickering dimly on the empty tables. Navot sat alone in a distant corner, the same corner where Shamron had been waiting on that September afternoon in 1972. Gabriel sat down next to him and turned up the collar of his leather jacket against the cold. Navot was silent. He was staring down at the lights of Har Adar, the first Israeli settlement over the old Green Line.
“Mazel tov,” he said at last.
“For what?”
“The painting,” said Navot. “I hear it’s almost finished.”
“Where did you hear a thing like that?”
“I’ve been monitoring your progress. So has the prime minister.” Navot regarded Gabriel through his small rimless spectacles. “Is it really done?”
“I think so.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I want to take one more look at it in the morning. If I like what I see, I’ll apply a coat of varnish and send it back to the Vatican.”
“And only ten days past your deadline.”
“Eleven, actually. But who’s counting?”
“I was.” Navot gave a rueful smile. “I enjoyed the reprieve, however brief.”
A silence descended between them. It was far from companionable.
“In case it’s slipped your mind,” Navot said at last, “it’s time for you to sign your new contract and move into my office. In fact, I was planning to pack up my things today, but I had to make one more trip as chief.”
“Where?”
“I had a piece of intelligence that I needed to share with our French brethren about the bombing of the Weinberg Center. I also wanted to make certain they were pursuing the perpetrators with appropriate vigor. After all, four Israeli citizens were killed, not to mention a woman who once did a very large favor for the Office.”
“Do they know about our links to her?”
“The French?”
“Yes, Uzi, the French.”
“I sent a team into her apartment to have a look around after the attack.”
“And?”
“The team found no mention of a certain Israeli intelligence officer who once borrowed her van Gogh in order to find a terrorist. Nor was there any reference to one Zizi al-Bakari, investment manager for the House of Saud and CEO of Jihad, Incorporated.” Navot paused, then added, “May he rest in peace.”
“What about the painting?”
“It was in its usual place. In hindsight, the team should have taken it.”
“Why?”
“As you no doubt remember, our Hannah was never married. No siblings, either. Her will was quite explicit when it came to the painting. Unfortunately, French intelligence got to her lawyer before he could make contact with us.”
“What are you talking about, Uzi?”
“It seems Hannah trusted only one person in the world to look after her van Gogh.”
“Who?”
“You, of course. But there’s just one problem,” Navot added. “The French have taken the painting hostage. And they’re asking a rather high ransom.”
“How much?”
“The French don’t want money, Gabriel. The French want you.”
7 (#ulink_29c4349a-0753-5624-9040-a4af7af7ce0e)
MA’ALE HAHAMISHA, ISRAEL (#ulink_29c4349a-0753-5624-9040-a4af7af7ce0e)
NAVOT LAID A PHOTOGRAPH ON the table, a street in Beirut littered with the ancient debris of an antiquities gallery.
“I assume you saw this.”
Gabriel nodded slowly. He had read about Clovis Mansour’s death in the newspapers. Given the events in Paris, the bombing in Beirut had received only minor press coverage. Not a single news outlet attempted to link the two events, nor was there any suggestion in the media that Clovis Mansour was on the payroll of any foreign intelligence service. In point of fact, he received money from at least four: the CIA, MI6, the Jordanian GID, and the Office. Gabriel knew this because, in preparation for taking over as chief, he had been devouring briefing books on all current operations and assets.
“Clovis was one of our best sources in Beirut,” Navot was saying, “especially when it came to matters involving money. Lately, he’d been keeping an eye on ISIS’s involvement in the illicit antiquities trade, which is why he requested a crash meeting the day after the bomb exploded in Paris.”
“Who did you send?”
Navot answered.
“Since when is Mikhail an agent runner?”
Navot laid another photograph on the table. It had been taken by an overhead security camera and was of moderate quality. It showed two men sitting at a small round table. One was Clovis Mansour. As usual he was impeccably attired, but the man opposite looked as though he had borrowed clothing for the occasion. In the center of the table, resting on what appeared to be a swath of baize cloth, was a head, life-size, its eyes staring blankly into space. Gabriel recognized it as Roman in origin. He reckoned the poorly dressed man had more of the statue, perhaps the entire piece. The perfectly intact head was merely his calling card.
“There’s no date or time code.”
“It was the twenty-second of November, at four fifteen in the afternoon.”
“Who’s the chap with the Roman head?”
“His business card identified him as Iyad al-Hamzah.”
“Lebanese?”
“Syrian,” answered Navot. “Apparently, he rolled into town with a truckload of antiquities to sell—Greek, Roman, Persian, all high-quality, many bearing the telltale signs of recent excavation. Among the places he attempted to unload his wares was Gallerie Mansour. Clovis expressed interest in several items, but after making a few quiet inquiries he decided to take a pass.”
“Why?”
“Because the word on the street was that the gentleman from Syria was using the sale of looted antiquities to raise money for the Islamic State. Evidently, the money wasn’t intended for ISIS’s general fund. The Syrian gentleman was working on behalf of a high-ranking ISIS leader who was building a terror network capable of attacking targets in the West.”
“Does the ISIS leader have a name?”
“They call him Saladin.”
Gabriel looked up from the photograph. “How grandiose.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“I don’t suppose Clovis managed to learn his real name?”
“No such luck.”
“Where’s he from?”
“The senior ISIS commanders are all Iraqis. They regard the Syrians as pack mules.”
Gabriel looked down at the photograph again. “Why didn’t Clovis tell us about this sooner?”
“It seems to have slipped his mind.”
“Or maybe he’s lying.”
“Clovis Mansour? Lying? How could you suggest such a thing?”
“He’s a Lebanese antiquities dealer.”
“What’s your theory?” asked Navot.
“I have a feeling Clovis made a great deal of money selling those antiquities. And when a bomb exploded in the heart of Paris, he thought it might be wise to hedge his bets. So he came to us with a pretty story about how he was too virtuous to deal with the likes of ISIS.”
“That pretty story,” said Navot, “cost Clovis his life.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they killed Sami Haddad, too. I’ll spare you the photo.”
“Why just Clovis and Sami? Why not Mikhail, too?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same question.”
“And?”
“I don’t know why. I’m just glad they didn’t kill him. It would have ruined my going-away party.”
Gabriel returned the photograph. “How much did you tell the French?”
“Enough to let them know that the plot against the Weinberg Center originated in the caliphate. They weren’t surprised. In fact, they were already well aware of the Syrian connection. Both of the attackers traveled there during the past year. One is a Frenchwoman of Algerian descent. Her male accomplice is a Belgian national from the Molenbeek district of Brussels.”
“Belgium? How shocking,” said Gabriel derisively.
Thousands of Muslims from France, Britain, and Germany had traveled to Syria to fight alongside ISIS, but tiny Belgium had earned the dubious distinction of being Western Europe’s largest per capita supplier of manpower to the Islamic caliphate.
“Where are they now?” asked Gabriel.
“In a few minutes the French interior minister is going to announce they’re back in Syria.”
“How did they get there?”
“Air France to Istanbul on borrowed passports.”
“But of course.” There was a silence. Finally, Gabriel asked, “What does this have to do with me, Uzi?”
“The French are concerned that ISIS has managed to construct a sophisticated network on French soil.”
“Is that so?”
“The French are also concerned,” said Navot, ignoring the remark, “that this network intends to strike again in short order. Obviously, they would like to roll it up before the next attack. And they’d like you to help them do it.”
“Why me?”
“It seems you have an admirer inside the French security service. His name is Paul Rousseau. He runs a small operational unit called Alpha Group. He wants you to fly to Paris tomorrow morning for a meeting.”
“And if I don’t?”
“That painting will never leave French soil.”
“I’m supposed to meet with the prime minister tomorrow. He’s going to tell the world that I wasn’t killed in that bombing on the Brompton Road. He’s going to announce that I’m the new chief of the Office.”
“Yes,” said Navot dryly, “I know.”
“Maybe you should be the one to work with the French.”
“I suggested that.”
“And?”
“They only want you.” Navot paused, then added, “The story of my life.”
Gabriel tried and failed to suppress a smile.
“There is a silver lining to this,” Navot continued. “The prime minister thinks a joint operation with the French will help to repair our relations with a country that was once a valuable and trusted ally.”
“Diplomacy by special ops?”
“In so many words.”
“Well,” said Gabriel, “you and the prime minister seem to have it all worked out.”
“It was Paul Rousseau’s idea, not ours.”
“Was it really, Uzi?”
“What are you suggesting? That I engineered this to hold on to my job a little longer?”
“Did you?”
Navot waved his hand as though he were dispersing a foul odor. “Take the operation, Gabriel—for Hannah Weinberg, if for no other reason. Get inside the network. Find out who Saladin really is and where he’s operating. And then put him down before another bomb explodes.”
Gabriel gazed northward, toward the distant black mass of mountains separating Israel from what remained of Syria. “You don’t even know whether he really exists, Uzi. He’s only a rumor.”
“Someone planned that attack and moved the pieces into place under the noses of the French security services. It wasn’t a twenty-nine-year-old woman from the banlieues and her friend from Brussels. And it wasn’t a rumor.”
Navot’s phone flared like a match in the darkness. He raised it briefly to his ear before offering it to Gabriel.
“Who is it?”
“The prime minister.”
“What does he want?”
“An answer.”
Gabriel stared at the phone for a moment. “Tell him I have to have a word with the most powerful person in the State of Israel. Tell him I’ll call first thing in the morning.”
Navot relayed the message and rang off.
“What did he say?”
Navot smiled. “Good luck.”
8 (#ulink_beb5890c-5d8b-59f5-b82f-cb1266e424b6)
NARKISS STREET, JERUSALEM (#ulink_beb5890c-5d8b-59f5-b82f-cb1266e424b6)
THE GRUMBLE OF GABRIEL’S SUV disturbed the resolute quiet of Narkiss Street. He alighted from the backseat, passed through a metal gate, and headed up the garden walk to the entrance of a Jerusalem limestone apartment building. On the third-floor landing, he found the door to his flat slightly ajar. He opened it slowly, silently, and in the half-light saw Chiara seated at one end of the white couch, a child to her breast. The child was wrapped in a blanket. Only when Gabriel crept closer could he see it was Raphael. The boy had inherited his father’s face and the face of a half-brother he would never know. Gabriel toyed with the downy dark hair and then leaned down to kiss Chiara’s warm lips.
“If you wake him,” she whispered, “I’ll kill you.”
Smiling, Gabriel slipped off his suede loafers and in stocking feet padded down the corridor to the nursery. Two cribs stood end to end against a wall covered by clouds. They had been painted by Chiara and then hastily repainted by Gabriel upon his return to Israel, after what was supposed to be his last operation. He stood at the railing of one of the cribs and gazed down at the child sleeping below. He didn’t dare touch her. Raphael was already sleeping through the night, but Irene was a nocturnal creature who had learned how to blackmail her way into her parents’ bed. She was smaller and trimmer than her corpulent sibling, but far more stubborn and determined. Gabriel thought she had the makings of a perfect spy, though he would never permit it. A doctor, a poet, a painter—anything but a spy. He would have no successor, there would be no dynasty. The House of Allon would fade with his passing.
Gabriel peered upward toward the spot where he had painted Daniel’s face among the clouds, but the darkness rendered the image invisible. He left the nursery, closing the door soundlessly behind him, and went into the kitchen. The savor of meat braising in red wine and aromatics hung decadently in the air. He peered through the oven window and saw a covered orange casserole centered on the rack. Next to the stove, arranged as if for a recipe book, were the makings of Chiara’s famous risotto: Arborio rice, grated cheese, butter, white wine, and a large measuring cup filled with homemade chicken stock. There was also a bottle of Galilean Syrah, unopened. Gabriel eased the cork from the neck, poured a glass, and returned to the sitting room.
Quietly, he settled into the armchair opposite Chiara. And he thought, not for the first time, that the little apartment in the old neighborhood of Nachlaot was too small for a family of four, and too far from King Saul Boulevard. It would be better to have a house in the secular belt of suburbs along the Coastal Plain, or a large apartment in one of the smart new towers that seemed to sprout overnight along the sea in Tel Aviv. But long ago, Jerusalem, God’s fractured city upon a hill, had cast a spell over him. He loved the limestone buildings and the smell of the pine and the cold wind and rains in the winter. He loved the churches and the pilgrims and the Haredim who shouted at him because he drove a motorcar on the Sabbath. He even loved the Arabs in the Old City who eyed him warily as he passed their stalls in the souk, as if somehow they knew that he was the one who had eliminated so many of their patron saints of terror. And while not religious by practice, he loved to slip into the Jewish Quarter and stand before the weighty ashlars of the Western Wall. Gabriel was willing to accept territorial compromises in order to secure a lasting and viable peace with the Palestinians and the broader Arab world, but privately he regarded the Western Wall as nonnegotiable. There would never again be a border through the heart of Jerusalem, and Jews would never again have to request permission to visit their holiest site. The Wall was part of Israel now, and it would remain so until the day the country ceased to exist. In this volatile corner of the Mediterranean, kingdoms and empires came and went like the winter rains. One day the modern reincarnation of Israel would disappear, too. But not while Gabriel was alive, and certainly not while he was chief of the Office.
He drank some of the earthy, peppery Syrah and contemplated Chiara and Raphael as though they were figures in his own private nativity. The child had released his hold on his mother’s breast and was lying drunken and sated in her arms. Chiara was staring down at him, her long curly hair, with its auburn and chestnut highlights, tumbling over one shoulder, her angular nose and jaw in semi-profile. Chiara’s was a face of timeless beauty. In it Gabriel saw traces of Arabia and North Africa and Spain and all the other places her ancestors had wandered before finding themselves in the ancient Jewish ghetto of Venice. It was there, ten years earlier, in a small office off the ghetto’s broad piazza, that Gabriel had seen her for the first time—the beautiful, opinionated, overeducated daughter of the city’s chief rabbi. Unbeknownst to Gabriel, she was also an Office field agent, a bat leveyha female escort officer. She revealed herself to him a short time later in Rome, after an incident involving gunplay and the Italian police. Trapped alone with Chiara in a safe flat, Gabriel had wanted desperately to touch her. He had waited until the case was resolved and they had returned to Venice. There, in a canal house in Cannaregio, they made love for the first time, in a bed prepared with fresh linen. It was like making love to a figure painted by the hand of Veronese.
She was far too young for him, and he was much too old to be a father again—or so he had thought until the moment his two children, first Raphael, then Irene, emerged in a blur from the incision in Chiara’s womb. Instantly, all that had come before seemed like stops along a journey to this place: the bombing in Vienna, the years of self-imposed exile, the long Hamlet-like struggle over whether it was proper for him to remarry and start another family. The shadow of Leah would always hang over this little home in the heart of Jerusalem, and the face of Daniel would always peer down on his half-siblings from his heavenly perch on the wall of the nursery. But after years of wandering in the wilderness, Gabriel Allon, the eternal stranger, the lost son of Ari Shamron, was finally home. He drank more of the blood-red Syrah and tried to compose the words he would use to tell Chiara that he was leaving for Paris because a woman she had never met had left him a van Gogh painting worth more than a hundred million dollars. The woman, like too many others he had met along his journey, was dead. And Gabriel was going to find the man responsible.
They call him Saladin …
Chiara placed a finger to her lips. Then, rising, she carried Raphael into the nursery. She returned a moment later and took the glass of wine from Gabriel’s hand. She lifted it to her nose and breathed deeply of its rich scent but did not drink.
“It won’t hurt them if you take a small sip.”
“Soon.” She returned the glass to Gabriel. “Is it finished?”
“Yes,” he answered. “I think it is.”
“That’s good.” She smiled. “What now?”
“Have you considered the possibility,” asked Chiara, “that this is all an elaborate plot by Uzi to hang on to his job a little longer?”
“I have.”
“And?”
“He swears it was all Paul Rousseau’s idea.”
Chiara skeptically folded the butter and the cheese into the risotto mixture. Then she spooned the rice onto two plates and to each added a thick slice of the osso buco Milanese.
“More juice,” said Gabriel. “I like the juice.”
“It’s not stew, darling.”
Gabriel tore away a crust of bread and swirled it along the bottom of the casserole pot.
“Peasant,” sneered Chiara.
“I come from a long line of peasants.”
“You? You’re as bourgeois as they come.”
Chiara dimmed the overhead lights, and they sat down at a small candlelit table in the kitchen.
“Why candles?” asked Gabriel.
“It’s a special occasion.”
“My last restoration.”
“For a while, I suppose. But you can always restore paintings after you retire as chief.”
“I’ll be too old to hold a brush.”
Gabriel poked the tines of his fork into the veal, and it fell from the thick bone. He prepared his first bite carefully, an equal amount of meat and risotto drenched in the rich marrowy juice, and slipped it reverently into his mouth.
“How is it?”
“I’ll tell you after I regain consciousness.”
The candlelight was dancing in Chiara’s eyes. They were the color of caramel and flecked with honey, a combination that Gabriel had never been able to reproduce on canvas. He prepared another bite of the risotto and veal but was distracted by an image on the television. Rioting had erupted in several Parisian banlieues after the arrest of several men on terrorism-related charges, none in direct connection with the attack on the Weinberg Center.
“ISIS must be enjoying this,” said Gabriel.
“The rioting?”
“It doesn’t look like rioting to me. It looks like …”
“What, darling?”
“An intifada.”
Chiara switched off the television and turned up the volume on the baby monitor. Designed by the Office’s Technology department, it had a heavily encrypted signal so that Israel’s enemies could not eavesdrop on the domestic life of its spy chief. For the moment it emitted only a low electrical hum.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked.
“I’m going to eat every bite of this delicious food. And then I’m going to soak up every last drop of juice in that pot.”
“I was talking about Paris.”
“Obviously, we have two choices.”
“You have two choices, darling. I have two children.”
Gabriel laid down his fork and stared levelly at his beautiful young wife. “Either way,” he said after a conciliatory silence, “my paternity leave is over. I can assume my duties as chief, or I can work with the French.”
“And thus take possession of a van Gogh painting worth at least a hundred million dollars.”
“There is that,” said Gabriel, picking up his fork again.
“Why do you suppose she decided to leave it to you?”
“Because she knew I would never do anything foolish with it.”
“Like what?”
“Put it up for sale.”
Chiara made a face.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“One can dream, can’t one?”
“Only about osso buco and risotto.”
Rising, Gabriel went to the counter and helped himself to another portion. Then he doused both rice and meat in juice, until his plate was in jeopardy of brimming over. Behind his back, Chiara hissed in disapproval.
“There’s one more,” he said, gesturing toward the casserole.
“I still have five kilos to lose.”
“I like you the way you are.”
“Spoken like a true Italian husband.”
“I’m not Italian.”
“What language are you speaking to me right now?”
“It’s the food talking.”
Gabriel sat down again and laid siege to the veal. From the monitor came the short cry of a child. Chiara cocked a vigilant ear toward the device and listened intently, as if to the footsteps of an intruder. Then, after a satisfactory interlude of silence, she relaxed again.
“So you intend to take the case—is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m inclined to,” answered Gabriel judiciously.
Chiara shook her head slowly.
“What have I done now?”
“You’ll do anything to avoid taking over the Office, won’t you?”
“Not anything.”
“Running an operation isn’t exactly a nine-to-five job.”
“Neither is running the Office.”
“But the Office is in Tel Aviv. The operation is in Paris.”
“Paris is a four-hour flight.”
“Four and a half,” she corrected him.
“Besides,” Gabriel plowed on, “just because the operation starts in Paris, that doesn’t mean it will end there.”
“Where will it end?”
Gabriel tilted his head to the left.
“In Mrs. Lieberman’s apartment?”
“Syria.”
“Ever been?”
“Only to Majdal Shams.”
“That doesn’t count.”
Majdal Shams was a Druze town in the Golan Heights. Along its northern edge was a fence topped by swirls of razor wire, and beyond the fence was Syria. Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate, controlled the territory along the border, but a two-hour car ride to the northeast was ISIS and the caliphate. Gabriel wondered how the American president would feel if ISIS were two hours from Indiana.
“I thought,” said Chiara, “that we were going to stay out of the Syrian civil war. I thought we were going to sit by and do nothing while all our enemies killed each other.”
“The next chief of the Office feels that policy would be unwise in the long term.”
“Does he?”
“Have you ever heard of a man named Arnold Toynbee?”
“I have a master’s degree in history. Toynbee was a British historian and economist, one of the giants of his day.”
“And Toynbee,” said Gabriel, “believed there were two great pivot points in the world that influenced events far beyond their borders. One was the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin in modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, or Af-Pak as our friends in America are fond of calling it.”
“And the other?”
Again, Gabriel tilted his head to the left. “We hoped the problems of Syria would remain in Syria, but I’m afraid hope is not an acceptable strategy when it comes to national security. While we’ve been twiddling our thumbs, ISIS has been developing a sophisticated terror network with the ability to strike in the heart of the West. Maybe it’s led by a man who calls himself Saladin. Maybe it’s someone else. Either way, I’m going to tear the network to pieces, hopefully before they can strike again.”
Chiara started to respond but was interrupted by the cry of an infant. It was Irene; her two-note wail was as familiar to Gabriel as the sound of a French siren on a wet Paris night. He started to rise but Chiara was on her feet first.
“Finish your dinner,” she said. “I hear the food in Paris is terrible.”
Gabriel heard her voice next over the monitor, speaking soothingly in Italian to an infant who was no longer crying. Alone, he switched on the television and finished his supper while, four and a half hours to the northwest by airplane, Paris burned.
For thirty minutes she did not return. Gabriel saw to the dishes and wiped down the kitchen counters, thoroughly, so that Chiara would not feel it necessary to reprise his efforts, which was usually the case. He added coffee and water to the automatic maker and then stole softly down the hall to the master bedroom. There he found his wife and daughter, Chiara supine atop the bed, Irene prone across her breasts, both sleeping soundly.
Gabriel stood in the doorway, his shoulder leaning against the woodwork, and allowed his eyes to travel slowly across the walls of the room. They were hung with paintings—three paintings by Gabriel’s grandfather, the only three he had been able to track down, and several more by his mother. There was also a large portrait of a young man with prematurely gray temples and a gaunt, weary face haunted by the shadow of death. One day, thought Gabriel, his children would ask him about the troubled young man depicted in the portrait, and about the woman who had painted it. It was not a conversation he was looking forward to. Already, he feared their reaction. Would they pity him? Would they fear him? Would they think him a monster, a murderer? It was no matter; he had to tell them. It was better to hear the unhappy details of such a life from the lips of the man who had led it rather than from someone else. Mothers often portrayed fathers in too flattering a light. Obituaries rarely told the whole story, especially when their subjects led classified lives.
Gabriel lifted his daughter from Chiara’s breast and carried her into the nursery. He placed her gently in her crib, covered her with a blanket, and stood over her for a moment until he was sure she was settled. Finally, he returned to the master bedroom. Chiara was still sleeping soundly, watched over by the brooding young man in the portrait. It’s not me, he would tell his children. It’s just someone I had to become. I am not a monster or a murderer. You exist in this place, you sleep peacefully in this land tonight, because of people like me.
9 (#ulink_30cb09d6-fd29-5c65-b7b7-c58e48490781)
THE MARAIS, PARIS (#ulink_30cb09d6-fd29-5c65-b7b7-c58e48490781)
AT TWENTY MINUTES PAST TEN the following morning, Christian Bouchard was standing in the arrivals hall of Charles de Gaulle, a tan raincoat over his crisp suit, a paper sign in his hand. The sign read SMITH. Even Bouchard found it less than convincing. He was watching the conveyor belt of humanity flowing into the hall from passport control—the international peddlers of goods and services, the seekers of asylum and employment, the tourists who had come to see a country that no longer existed. It was the job of the DGSI to sift through this daily deluge, identify the potential terrorists and agents of foreign intelligence, and monitor their movements until they left French soil. It was a near-impossible task. But for men such as Christian Bouchard, it meant there was no shortage of work or opportunities for career advancement. For better or worse, security was one of the few growth industries in France.
Just then, Bouchard’s mobile vibrated in his coat pocket. It was a text message stating that the reason for his visit to Charles de Gaulle had just been admitted into France on an Israeli passport bearing the name Gideon Argov. Two minutes later Bouchard spotted the selfsame Monsieur Argov, black leather jacket, black nylon overnight bag, adrift on the current of arriving passengers. Bouchard had seen him in surveillance photographs—there was that famous shot taken in the Gare de Lyon a few seconds before the explosion—but never had he seen the legend in the flesh. Bouchard had to admit he was sorely disappointed. The Israeli was five foot nothing and maybe, maybe, a hundred and fifty pounds. Still, there was a predatory swiftness in his gait and a slight outward bend to his legs that suggested speed and agility in his youth, which, thought Bouchard with misplaced arrogance, was quite some time ago.
Two paces behind him was a much younger man of nearly identical height and weight: dark hair, dark skin, the alert dark eyes of a Jew whose ancestors had lived in Arab lands. An employee of the Israeli Embassy was there to greet them, and together the three men—legend, bodyguard, and embassy functionary—filed outside to a waiting car. It headed directly into the center of Paris, followed by a second car in which Bouchard was the only passenger. He had anticipated his quarry would proceed directly to Madame Weinberg’s apartment on the rue Pavée, where Paul Rousseau was at that moment waiting. Instead, the legend made a stop on the rue des Rosiers. At the far western end of the street was a barricade. Behind it were the ruins of the Weinberg Center.
By Bouchard’s wristwatch, the Israeli remained at the barricade for three minutes. Then he headed eastward along the street, trailed by his bodyguard. After a few paces he paused in a shop window, a crude but effective touch of tradecraft that compelled Bouchard, who was discreetly following, to seek shelter in the boutique opposite. Instantly, a cloying saleswoman accosted him, and by the time he’d managed to extricate himself, the Israeli and his bodyguard had vanished. Bouchard stood frozen for a moment, staring up the length of the street. Then he wheeled round and saw the Israeli standing behind him, one hand pressed to his chin, head tilted to one side.
“Where’s your sign?” he asked finally in French.
“My what?”
“Your sign. The one you were holding at the airport.” The green eyes probed. “You must be Christian Bouchard.”
“And you must be—”
“I must be,” he interrupted with the terseness of a nail gun. “And I was assured there would be no surveillance.”
“I wasn’t watching you.”
“Then what were you doing?”
“Rousseau asked me to make sure you arrived safely.”
“You’re here to protect me—is that what you’re saying?”
Bouchard was silent.
“Allow me to make one thing clear from the outset,” said the legend. “I don’t need protection.”
They walked side by side along the pavement, Bouchard in his smart suit and raincoat, Gabriel in his leather jacket and his grief, until they arrived at the entrance of the apartment house at Number 24. When Bouchard opened the outer door, he inadvertently opened a door in Gabriel’s memory, too. It was ten years ago, early evening, a light rain falling like tears from the sky. Gabriel had come to Paris because he needed a van Gogh as bait in order to insert an agent into the entourage of Zizi al-Bakari, and he had heard from an old friend in London, a wildly eccentric art dealer named Julian Isherwood, that Hannah Weinberg was in possession of one. He had approached her without introduction on the very spot where he and Christian Bouchard stood now. She was holding an umbrella in one hand and with the other was stretching a key toward the lock. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she had lied with admirable composure, “but I don’t have a van Gogh. If you’d like to see some paintings by Vincent, I suggest you visit the Musée d’Orsay.”
The memory dissipated. Gabriel followed Bouchard across an internal courtyard, into a foyer, and up a flight of carpeted stairs. On the fourth floor, nickeled light leaked weakly through a soiled window, illuminating two stately mahogany doors facing each other like duelists across the chessboard floor of the landing. The door on the right was absent a nameplate. Bouchard unlocked it and, stepping to one side, motioned for Gabriel to enter.
He paused in the formal entrance hall and surveyed his surroundings, as if for the first time. The room was decorated precisely as it had been on the morning of Jeudi Noir: stately brocaded furniture, heavy velvet curtains, an ormolu clock, still ticking away five minutes slow on the mantel. Again, the door to Gabriel’s memory opened, and he glimpsed Hannah seated on the couch in a rather dowdy woolen skirt and thick sweater. She had just handed him a bottle of Sancerre and was watching intently as he removed the cork—watching his hands, he remembered, the hands of the avenger. “I’m very good at keeping secrets,” she was saying. “Tell me why you want my van Gogh, Monsieur Allon. Perhaps we can reach some accommodation.”
From the adjoining library there came the faint rustle of paper, like the turning of a page. Gabriel peered inside and saw a rumpled figure standing before a bookcase, a large leather-bound volume in his hand. “Dumas,” the figure said without looking up. “And quite valuable.”
He closed the book, returned it to the shelf, and studied Gabriel as if contemplating a rare coin or a cage bird. Gabriel returned the gaze without expression. He had expected another version of Bouchard, a slick, cocky bastard who took wine with his midday meal and left the office promptly at five so he could spend an hour with his mistress before rushing home to his wife. Therefore, Paul Rousseau was a pleasant surprise.
“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” he said. “I only wish the circumstances were different. Madame Weinberg was a friend, was she not?”
Gabriel was silent.
“Is something wrong?” asked Rousseau.
“I’ll let you know when I see the van Gogh.”
“Ah, yes, the van Gogh. It’s in the room at the end of the hall,” said Rousseau. “But I suppose you already knew that.”
She had kept a key, Gabriel recalled, in the top drawer of the desk. Obviously, Rousseau and his men had not discovered it, because the lock had been dismantled. Otherwise, the room was as Gabriel remembered it: the same bed with a lace canopy, the same toys and stuffed animals, the same provincial dresser, above which hung the same painting, Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table, oil on canvas, by Vincent van Gogh. Gabriel had carried out the painting’s only restoration, in a rambling Victorian safe house outside London, shortly before its sale—private, of course—to Zizi al-Bakari. His work, he thought now, had held up well. The painting was perfect except for a thin horizontal line near the top of the image that Gabriel had made no attempt to repair. The line was Vincent’s fault; he had leaned another canvas against poor Marguerite before she was sufficiently dry. Zizi al-Bakari, a connoisseur of art as well as jihadist terror, had regarded the line as proof of the painting’s authenticity—and of the authenticity of the beautiful young American woman, a Harvard-educated art historian, who had sold it to him.
Of this, Paul Rousseau knew nothing. He was staring not at the painting but at Gabriel, his cage bird, his curio. “One wonders why she chose to hang it here rather than in her parlor,” he said after a moment. “And why, in death, she chose to leave it to you, of all people.”
Gabriel lifted his eyes from the painting and fixed them squarely on the face of Paul Rousseau. “Perhaps we should make one thing clear at the outset,” he said. “We’re not going to be closing out old accounts. Nor are we going to take any strolls down memory lane.”
“Oh, no,” Rousseau agreed hastily, “we haven’t time for that. Still, it would be an interesting exercise, if only for its entertainment value.”
“Be careful, Monsieur Rousseau. Memory lane is just around the next corner.”
“So it is.” Rousseau gave a capitulatory smile.
“We had a deal,” said Gabriel. “I come to Paris, you give me the picture.”
“No, Monsieur Allon. First you help me find the man who bombed the Weinberg Center, and then I give you the painting. I was very clear with your friend Uzi Navot.” Rousseau looked quizzically at Gabriel. “He is a friend of yours, is he not?”
“He used to be,” said Gabriel coolly.
They fell into a comfortable silence, each staring at the van Gogh, like strangers in a gallery.
“Vincent must have loved her very much to paint something so beautiful,” Rousseau said at last. “And soon it will belong to you. I’m tempted to say you’re a very lucky man, but I won’t. You see, Monsieur Allon,” he said, smiling sadly, “I’ve read your file.”
10 (#ulink_cd8e2346-1de6-567d-9a4d-9e96c5e9f2c3)
RUE PAVÉE, PARIS (#ulink_cd8e2346-1de6-567d-9a4d-9e96c5e9f2c3)
INTELLIGENCE SERVICES FROM DIFFERENT NATIONS do not cooperate because they enjoy it. They do so because, like divorced parents of small children, they sometimes find it necessary to work together for the greater good. Old rivalries do not vanish overnight. They slumber just beneath the surface, like the wounds of infidelities, forgotten anniversaries, and unmet emotional needs. The challenge for the two intelligence services is to create a zone of trust, a room where there are no secrets. Outside that room they are free to pursue their own interests. But once inside, each is compelled to lay bare its most cherished sources and methods for the other to see. Gabriel had much experience in this realm. A natural restorer, he had repaired the Office’s relations with both the CIA and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. France, however, was a more difficult proposition. It had long been an important operational theater for the Office, especially for Gabriel, whose litany of secret sins on French soil was long. What’s more, France was an unabashed supporter of many of Israel’s most implacable foes. In short, the intelligence services of Israel and France did not like each other much.
It was not always so. France armed Israel in its infancy, and without French help Israel would have never developed the nuclear deterrent that allowed it to survive in the hostile Middle East. But in the 1960s, after the disastrous war in Algeria, Charles de Gaulle set out to repair France’s strained relations with the Arab world—and when Israel, largely with French aircraft, launched the Six-Day War with a surprise attack on Egypt’s airfields, de Gaulle condemned it. He referred to Jews as “an elite people, sure of itself, domineering,” and the rupture was complete.
Now, over coffee in the salon of the Weinberg family apartment on the rue Pavée, Gabriel and Rousseau set out to repair, at least temporarily, the legacy of mistrust. Their first order of business was to hammer out a basic operational accord, a blueprint for how the two services would work together, a division of labor and authority, the rules of the road. It was to be a true partnership, though for obvious reasons Rousseau would retain preeminence over any aspects of the operation that touched French soil. In return, Gabriel would be granted complete and total access to France’s voluminous files on the thousands of Islamic extremists living within its borders: the watch reports, the e-mail and phone intercepts, the immigration records. That alone, he would say much later, had been worth the price of admission.
There were bumps in the road, but for the most part the negotiations went more smoothly than either Gabriel or Rousseau could have imagined. Perhaps it was because the two men were not so different. They were men of the arts, men of culture and learning who had devoted their lives to protecting their fellow citizens from those who would shed the blood of innocents over ideology or religion. Each had lost a spouse—one to illness, the other to terror—and each was well respected by their counterparts in Washington and London. Rousseau was no Gabriel Allon, but he had been fighting terrorists almost as long, and had the notches in his belt to prove it.
“There are some in the French political establishment,” said Gabriel, “who would like to see me behind bars because of my previous activities.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“If I am to function here without cover, I require a document giving me blanket immunity, now and forever, amen.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“And I’ll see if I can find Saladin before he attacks again.”
Rousseau frowned. “Too bad you weren’t the one to negotiate the Iran nuclear deal.”
“Too bad,” agreed Gabriel.
By then, it was approaching four o’clock. Rousseau stood, yawned elaborately, stretched his arms wide, and suggested a walk. “Doctor’s orders,” he said. “It seems I’m too fat for my own good.” They slipped from the entrance of Hannah Weinberg’s apartment house and, with Bouchard and Gabriel’s bodyguard in tow, walked along the Seine embankments toward Notre-Dame. They were a mismatched pair, the lumpy, tweedy former professor from the Sorbonne, the smallish figure in leather who seemed to float slightly above the surface of the paving stones. The sun was low in the western sky, blazing through a slit in the clouds. Rousseau shaded his eyes.
“Where do you intend to start?”
“The files, of course.”
“You’ll need help.”
“Obviously.”
“How many officers do you intend to bring into the country?”
“The exact number I need.”
“I can give you a room in our headquarters on the rue de Grenelle.”
“I prefer something a bit more private.”
“I can arrange a safe house.”
“So can I.”
Gabriel paused at a news kiosk. On the front page of Le Monde were two photographs of Safia Bourihane, the Frenchwoman of Muslim heritage, the veiled killer from the caliphate. The headline was one word in length: CATASTROPHE!
“Whose catastrophe was it?” asked Gabriel.
“The inevitable inquiry will undoubtedly find that elements of my service made terrible mistakes. But are we truly to blame? We, the humble secret servants who stand with our fingers in the dike? Or does the blame lie elsewhere?”
“Where?”
“In Washington, for example.” Rousseau set off along the embankment. “The invasion of Iraq turned the region into a cauldron. And when the new American president decided the time had come to withdraw, the cauldron boiled over. And then there was this folly we called the Arab Spring. Mubarak must go! Gaddafi must go! Assad must go!” He shook his head slowly. “It was madness, absolute madness. And now we are left with this. ISIS controls a swath of territory the size of the United Kingdom, right on the doorstep of Europe. Even Bin Laden would have never dared to dream of such a thing. And what does the American president tell us? ISIS is not Islamic. ISIS is the jayvee team.” He frowned. “What does this mean? Jayvee?”
“I think it has something to do with basketball.”
“And what does basketball have to do with a subject as serious as the rise of the caliphate?”
Gabriel only smiled.
“Does he truly believe this drivel, or is it an ignorantia affectata?”
“A willful ignorance?”
“Yes.”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“Do you know him?”
“We’ve met.”
Rousseau was obviously tempted to ask Gabriel about the circumstances of his one and only meeting with the American president, but he carried on with his lecture on ISIS instead. “The truth is,” he said, “ISIS is indeed Islamic. And it has more in common with Muhammad and his earliest followers—al salaf al salih—than some of the so-called experts care to admit. We are horrified when we read accounts of ISIS using crucifixion. We tell ourselves that these are the actions of barbarians, not men of faith. But ISIS doesn’t crucify only because it is cruel. It crucifies because, according to the Koran, crucifixion is one of the proscribed punishments for the enemies of Islam. It crucifies because it must. We civilized Westerners find this almost impossible to comprehend.”
“We don’t,” said Gabriel.
“That’s because you live in the region. You are a people of the region,” Rousseau added. “And you know full well what will happen if the likes of ISIS are ever let loose within the walls of your fortress. It will be …”
“A holocaust,” said Gabriel.
Rousseau nodded thoughtfully. Then he led Gabriel across the Pont Notre-Dame, to the Île de la Cité. “So in the words of Lenin,” he asked, “what is to be done?”
“I am merely a spy, Monsieur Rousseau, not a general or a prime minister.”
“And if you were?”
“I would tear them out root and branch. I would turn them into losers instead of winners. Take away the land,” Gabriel added, “and there can be no Islamic State. And if there is no state, the caliphate will recede once more into history.”
“Invasion didn’t work in Iraq or Afghanistan,” replied Rousseau, “and it won’t work in Syria. Better to chip away at them from the air and with the help of regional allies. In the meantime, contain the infection so it doesn’t spread to the rest of the Middle East and Europe.”
“It’s too late for that. The contagion is already here.”
They crossed another bridge, the Petit Pont, and entered the Latin Quarter. Rousseau knew it well. He walked now with a purpose other than his health, down the boulevard Saint-Germain, into a narrow side street, until finally he stopped outside the doorway of an apartment building. It was as familiar to Gabriel as the entrance of Hannah Weinberg’s building on the rue Pavée, though it had been many years since his last visit. He glanced at the intercom. Some of the names were still the same.
Presently, the door swung open and two people, a man and a woman in their mid-twenties, emerged. Rousseau caught the door before it could close and led Gabriel into the half-light of the foyer. A passageway gave onto the shadowed internal courtyard, where Rousseau paused for a second time and pointed toward a window on the uppermost floor.
“My wife and I lived right there. When she died I gave up the apartment and headed south. There were too many memories, too many ghosts.” He pointed toward a window overlooking the opposite side of the courtyard. “A former student of mine lived over there. She was quite brilliant. Quite radical, too, as were most of my students in those days. Her name,” he added, with a sidelong glance at Gabriel, “was Denise Jaubert.”
Gabriel stared without expression at Rousseau, as though the name meant nothing to him. In truth, he suspected he knew more about Denise Jaubert than did her former professor. She was indeed a radical. More important, she was the occasional lover of one Sabri al-Khalifa, leader of the Palestinian terror group Black September, mastermind of the Munich Olympics massacre.
“Late one afternoon,” Rousseau resumed, “I was working at my desk when I heard laughter in the courtyard. It was Denise. She was with a man. Black hair, pale skin, strikingly handsome. Walking a few steps behind them was a smaller fellow with short hair. I couldn’t see much of his face. You see, in spite of the overcast weather he was wearing dark glasses.”
Rousseau looked at Gabriel, but Gabriel, in his thoughts, was walking across a Parisian courtyard, a few paces behind the man for whom the Office had spent seven long years searching.
“I wasn’t the only one who noticed the man in the sunglasses,” Rousseau said after a moment. “Denise’s handsome companion noticed him, too. He tried to draw a pistol, but the smaller man drew first. I’ll never forget how he moved forward while he was firing. It was … beautiful. There were ten shots. Then he inserted a second magazine into his weapon, placed the barrel of the gun against the man’s ear, and fired one last shot. It’s odd, but I don’t recall him leaving. He just seemed to vanish.” Rousseau looked at Gabriel. “And now he stands beside me.”
Gabriel said nothing. He was staring down at the cobbles of the courtyard, the cobbles that had once run red with the blood of Sabri al-Khalifa.
“I must admit,” said Rousseau, “that for a long time I thought you a murderer. The civilized world condemned your actions. But now the civilized world finds itself in the very same fight, and we are using the very same tactics. Drones, missiles, men in black in the middle of the night.” He paused, then added, “It seems history has absolved you of your sins.”
“I committed no sins,” said Gabriel. “And I seek no absolution.”
Just then, Rousseau’s mobile chimed in his coat pocket, followed a few seconds later by Gabriel’s. Once again, it was Gabriel who drew first. It was a priority message from King Saul Boulevard. The DGSI had sent a similar message to Rousseau.
“It appears the attack on the Weinberg Center was only the beginning.” Rousseau returned the phone to his coat pocket and stared at the cobbles where Sabri al-Khalifa had fallen. “Will it end the same way for the one they call Saladin?”
“If we’re lucky.”
“How soon can you start?”
“Tonight.”
11 (#ulink_4b609465-44c3-5bf3-9f74-b7327c1da6df)
AMSTERDAM—PARIS (#ulink_4b609465-44c3-5bf3-9f74-b7327c1da6df)
LATER, IT WOULD BE DETERMINED with near certainty that the Paris and Amsterdam bombs were the lethal handiwork of the same man. Once again the mode of delivery was an ordinary white panel van, though in Amsterdam it was a Ford Transit rather than a Renault. It detonated at half past four precisely, in the center of Amsterdam’s bustling Albert Cuyp Market. The vehicle had entered the market early that morning and had remained there undetected throughout the day as thousands of shoppers strolled obliviously past through the pale spring sunshine. The driver of the van was a woman, approximately thirty years of age, blond hair, long legs, narrow hips, blue jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, a fleece vest. This was established not with the help of witnesses but with closed-circuit video surveillance cameras. Police found no one among the living who could recall seeing her.
The market, regarded as Europe’s largest, is located in the Old Side of the city. Opposing rows of stalls line the street, and behind the stalls are terraces of saddle-brown brick houses with shops and restaurants on the ground floor. Many of the vendors are from the Middle East and North Africa, a fact that several reporters and terrorism analysts were quick to point out during the first hours of the coverage. They saw it as evidence that the perpetrators were inspired by a creed other than radical Islam, though when pressed to name one, they could not. Finally, a scholar of Islam from Cambridge explained the seeming paradox. The Muslims of Amsterdam, she said, were living in a city of legalized drugs and prostitution where the laws of men held sway rather than the laws of Allah. In the eyes of the Muslim extremists, they were apostates. And the only punishment for apostasy was death.
Witnesses would recall not the thunderous bellow of the explosion but the deep, wintry silence that followed. In time, there was a moan, and a childlike sob, and the electronic pulse of a mobile phone pleading to be answered. For several minutes thick black smoke obscured the horror. Then, gradually, the smoke lifted and the devastation was revealed: the limbless and the lifeless, the sooty-faced survivors wandering dazed and partially disrobed through the debris, the shoes of a vendor scattered among the shoes of the dead. Everywhere there was split fruit and spilled blood and the aroma, suddenly nauseating, of roasted lamb seasoned with cumin and turmeric.
The claims of responsibility were not long in coming. The first was from an obscure cell in lawless Libya, followed soon after by al-Shabaab, the Somalia-based group that had terrorized East Africa. Finally, there appeared a video on a popular social media site. In it, a black-hooded man who spoke English with an East London accent declared that the attack was the work of ISIS, and that more attacks were to come. He then embarked, in a mixture of English and Arabic, on a rambling homily about the armies of Rome and a Syrian village called Dabiq. The television commentators were perplexed. The learned expert from Cambridge was not.
The reaction ranged from outrage to disbelief to smug recriminations. In Washington the American president condemned the bombing as “a wanton act of murder and barbarism,” though, curiously, he made no mention of the perpetrators’ motives or of Islam, radical or otherwise. His congressional opponents quickly laid blame for the attack squarely at his feet. Had he not precipitously withdrawn American troops from Iraq, they said, ISIS would never have taken root in neighboring Syria. The president’s spokesman later dismissed suggestions that the time had come for American ground troops to take the fight directly to ISIS. “We have a strategy,” he said. Then, with a straight face, he added, “It is working.”
In the Netherlands, however, Dutch authorities had no interest in apportioning blame, for they were far too busy searching for survivors amid the rubble, and for the woman, approximately thirty years of age, blond hair, long legs, narrow hips, blue jeans, hooded sweatshirt, fleece vest, who had driven the bomb van into the market. For two days her name remained a mystery. Then a second video appeared on the same social media Web site, narrated by the same man who spoke with an East London accent. This time, he was not alone. Two veiled women stood next to him. One remained silent, the other spoke. She identified herself as Margreet Janssen, a convert to Islam from the Dutch coastal city of Noordwijk. She had planted the bomb, she said, to punish the blasphemers and the infidels in the name of Allah and Muhammad, peace be upon him.
Later that day the AIVD, the Dutch security and intelligence service, confirmed that Margreet Janssen had traveled to Syria eighteen months previously, had remained there for approximately six months, and had been allowed to return to the Netherlands after convincing the Dutch authorities that she had renounced her ties to ISIS and the global jihadist movement. The security service placed the woman under electronic and physical surveillance, but the surveillance was subsequently dropped when she exhibited no signs of continued involvement in radical Islamic activities. Obviously, said an AIVD spokesman, it was an error in judgment.
Within minutes the cyberrooms of the digital caliphate were ablaze with excited chatter. Margreet Janssen was suddenly the new symbol of the global jihad, a former Christian from a European country who was now a lethal member of the community of believers. But who was the other woman in the video? The one who did not speak? The answer came not from Amsterdam but from a fortress-like building in the Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret. The second woman, said the chief of the DGSI, was Safia Bourihane, one of the perpetrators of the attack on the Weinberg Center.
Before terminating its surveillance of Margreet Janssen, the AIVD had assembled a dense dossier of watch reports, photographs, e-mails, text messages, and Internet browsing histories, along with secondary files on friends, family members, associates, and fellow travelers in the global jihadist movement. Paul Rousseau received a copy of the dossier during a meeting at AIVD headquarters in The Hague, and upon his return to Paris he presented it to Gabriel in a quiet brasserie on the rue de Miromesnil, in the Eighth Arrondissement. The dossier had been digitized and stored on a secure flash drive. Rousseau slid it across the table beneath a napkin, with all the discretion of a gunshot in an empty chapel. It was no matter; the brasserie was deserted except for a small bald man wearing a well-cut suit and a lavish lavender necktie. He was drinking a glass of Côtes du Rhone and reading a copy of Le Figaro. It was filled with the news from Amsterdam. Gabriel slipped the flash drive into his coat pocket, making no effort to conceal his action, and asked Rousseau about the mood at AIVD headquarters.
“Somewhere between panic and resignation,” answered Rousseau. “They’re ramping up their surveillance of known Islamic extremists and searching for the man who built the bomb and the other elements of the network.” He lowered his voice and added, “They were wondering whether I had any ideas.”
“Did you mention Saladin?”
“It might have slipped my mind,” said Rousseau with a sly smile. “But at some point we’re going to have to go on the record with our friends here in Europe.”
“They’re your friends, not mine.”
“You have a history with the Dutch services?”
“I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting the Netherlands.”
“Somehow, I find that difficult to believe.” Rousseau glanced at the small bald man sitting on the other side of the brasserie. “A friend of yours?”
“He runs a shop across the street.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw him leave and lock the door.”
“How observant of you.” Rousseau peered into the darkening street. “Antiquités Scientifiques?”
“Old microscopes and the like,” explained Gabriel.
“Interesting.” Rousseau contemplated his coffee cup. “It seems I wasn’t the only foreign visitor to AIVD headquarters yesterday. An American came, too.”
“Agency?”
Rousseau nodded.
“Local or Langley?”
“The latter.”
“Did he have a name?”
“Not one that my Dutch hosts wished to share with me. They did suggest, however, that American interest was high.”
“How refreshing.”
“Apparently, the White House is concerned that an attack on the American homeland this late in the president’s second term might prove injurious to his legacy. The Agency is under enormous pressure to make sure it doesn’t happen.”
“I guess ISIS isn’t the jayvee team after all.”
“To that end,” Rousseau continued, “the Agency is expecting full and complete cooperation from America’s friends and partners here in Europe. The man from Langley is due in Paris tomorrow morning.”
“It might be wise for you to spend some time with him.”
“My name is already on the guest list.”
Gabriel handed Rousseau a slip of paper, folded in quarters.
“What’s this?”
“A list of additional files we need.”
“How much longer?”
“Soon,” said Gabriel.
“That’s what you said yesterday, and the day before.” Rousseau slipped the list into the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. “Are you ever going to tell me where you and your helpers are working?”
“You mean you haven’t figured it out yet?”
“We haven’t tried.”
“Somehow,” said Gabriel, “I find that difficult to believe.”
He rose without another word and went into the street. Rousseau watched him walk away along the darkened pavement, followed discreetly by two of Alpha Group’s best surveillance men. The little bald man with the lavender necktie laid a few bills on his table and departed, leaving Rousseau alone in the brasserie with no company other than his mobile phone. Five minutes elapsed before it finally illuminated. It was a text message from Christian Bouchard. “Merde,” said Rousseau softly. Allon had lost them again.
12 (#ulink_85e1463d-0d45-5608-beb6-674787191220)
PARIS (#ulink_85e1463d-0d45-5608-beb6-674787191220)
IT WAS WITH A PAIR of routine countersurveillance moves—a reversal of course along a one-way street, a brief stop in a bistro that had a rear service exit off the kitchen—that Gabriel slipped away from the finest watchers of Paul Rousseau’s Alpha Group. Afterward, he made his way, on foot, by Métro, and in a taxi, to a small apartment building along the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. According to the intercom panel, the occupant of 4B was someone named Guzman. Gabriel thumbed the button, waited for the snap of the automatic locks, and entered.
Upstairs, Mikhail Abramov unchained the door to him. The air was bitter with smoke. Gabriel peered into the kitchen and saw Eli Lavon attempting to extinguish a fire he had started in the microwave. Lavon was a diminutive figure, with a head of wispy unkempt hair and a face that was entirely forgettable. His looks, like most things about him, were deceiving. A natural predator and chameleon, Lavon was regarded as the finest street surveillance artist the Office ever produced. Ari Shamron had famously said of Lavon that he could disappear while shaking your hand. It wasn’t far from the truth.
“How long did it take you to lose them this time?” Lavon asked as he tossed a misshapen lump of charred plastic into the sink.
“Less time than it took you to burn down the safe flat.”
“A small mix-up with the time setting. You know me, I’ve never really been good with numbers.”
Which wasn’t true. Lavon also happened to be a skilled financial investigator who singlehandedly had managed to track down millions of dollars’ worth of looted Holocaust assets. An archaeologist by training, he was a natural digger.
Gabriel entered the sitting room. Yaakov Rossman, a veteran agent runner and a fluent speaker of Arabic, appeared to be contemplating an act of violence against his notebook computer. Yossi Gavish and Rimona Stern were sprawled on the couch like a couple of undergraduates. Yossi was a top officer in Research, which is how the Office referred to its analytical division. Tall, tweedy, and balding, he had read classics at All Souls and spoke Hebrew with a pronounced English accent. He had also done a bit of acting—Shakespearean, mainly—and was a gifted cellist. Rimona served in the Office unit that spied on Iran’s nuclear program. She had sandstone-colored hair, childbearing hips, and a temper she had inherited from Ari Shamron, who was her uncle. Gabriel had known her since she was a small 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.
The five field agents and analysts were members of an elite team of operatives known as Barak, the Hebrew word for lightning, for their ability to gather and strike quickly. They had fought and sometimes bled together on a string of secret battlefields stretching from Moscow to the Caribbean, and in the process had carried out some of the most fabled operations in the history of Israeli intelligence. Gabriel was the team’s founder and leader, but a sixth member, Dina Sarid, was its conscience and institutional memory. Dina was the Office’s top terrorism specialist, a human database who could recite the time, place, perpetrators, and casualty toll of every act of Palestinian or Islamic terrorism committed against Israel and the West. Her talent was to see connections where others saw only a blizzard of names, numbers, and words.
She was small in stature, with coal-black hair that fell about a soft, childlike face. At present, she was standing before a seemingly haphazard collage of surveillance photos, e-mails, text messages, and phone conversations. It was the same place she had been standing, three hours earlier, when Gabriel had left the safe flat for his meeting with Paul Rousseau. Dina was in the grip of the fever, the frightful creative rage that came over her each time a bomb exploded. Gabriel had induced the fever many times before. Judging by her expression, it was about to break. He crossed the room and stood beside her.
“What are you looking at?” he asked after a moment.
Dina took two steps forward, limping slightly, and pointed toward a surveillance photo of Safia Bourihane. It had been taken before her first trip to Syria, in an Arab-style café in the heavily immigrant Paris banlieue of Saint-Denis. Safia had recently taken the veil. Her companion, a young woman, was veiled, too. There were several other women in the café, along with four men, Algerians, Moroccans, sharing a table near the counter. Another man, angular face, clean-shaven, slightly out of focus, sat alone. He wore a dark business suit, no tie, and was working on a notebook computer. He might have been an Arab—or he might have been a Frenchman or an Italian. For the moment he was of no concern to Dina Sarid. She was gazing, spellbound, at the face of Safia Bourihane.
“She looks normal, doesn’t she? Happy, even. You’d never suspect she’d spent the entire morning talking to an ISIS recruiter on the Internet. The recruiter asked her to leave her family and travel to Syria to help build the caliphate. And what do you suppose Safia told him?”
“She said she wanted to stay in France. She said she wanted to marry a nice boy from a good family and have children who would grow up to be fully assimilated French citizens. She said she wanted no part of a caliphate run by men who behead and crucify and burn their enemies alive.”
“Isn’t it pretty to think so.” Dina shook her head slowly. “What went wrong, Gabriel? Why have more than five hundred young Western women joined the ranks of ISIS? Why are the bearded ones the new rock stars of Islam? Why are killers cool?” Dina had devoted her life to the study of terrorism and Islamic extremism, and yet she had no answers. “We thought they would be repulsed by the violence of ISIS. We were wrong. We assumed assimilation was the answer. But the more they assimilated, the less they liked what they saw. And so when a recruiter from ISIS comes knocking on their digital door, they’re vulnerable.”
“You’re too charitable, Dina.”
“They’re children.” She paused, then added, “Impressionable girls.”
“Not all of them.”
“That’s true. Many are educated, much more educated than the men who’ve joined ISIS. They’re forbidden to fight, the women, so they take on important support roles. In many respects, it’s the women who are actually building the caliphate. Most of them will also take a husband—a husband who’s likely to soon be a martyr. One in four women will become widows. Black widows,” she added. “Indoctrinated, embittered, vengeful. And all it takes is a good recruiter or talent spotter to turn them into ticking time bombs.” She pointed toward the slightly-out-of-focus figure seated alone in the Arab-style café. “Like him. Unfortunately, the French never noticed him. They were too busy looking at Safia’s friend.”
“Who is she?”
“She’s a girl who watched a few beheading videos on the Internet. She’s a waste of time, money, and manpower. But not Safia. Safia was trouble waiting to happen.” Dina took a step to the right and indicated a second photograph. “Three days after Safia had coffee with her friend in Saint-Denis, she came to the center of Paris to do a bit of shopping. This picture was taken as she was walking along the arcades of the rue de Rivoli. And look who’s walking a few steps behind her.”
It was the same man from the café, the clean-shaven man with an angular face who might have been an Arab or a Frenchman or an Italian.
“How did they miss him?”
“Good question. And they missed him here, too.”
Dina pointed toward a third photograph, the same day, an hour later. Safia Bourihane was leaving a women’s clothing store on the Champs-Élysées. The same man was waiting outside on the pavement, pretending to consult a tourist guidebook.
“Send the photos to King Saul Boulevard,” said Gabriel. “See if anything turns up.”
“I already have.”
“And?”
“King Saul Boulevard has never made his acquaintance.”
“Maybe this will help.” Gabriel held up the flash drive.
“What is it?”
“The life and times of Margreet Janssen.”
“I wonder how long it will take to find Safia’s secret admirer.”
“I’d hurry if I were you. The Americans have her file, too.”
“I’ll beat them,” she said. “I always do.”
It took Dina fewer than thirty minutes to find the first surveillance photograph of Margreet Janssen and the man who had shadowed Safia Bourihane in Paris. An AIVD team had snapped the picture at a quaint Italian restaurant in central Amsterdam where Margreet, having left her dreary home in Noordwijk, was waiting tables for starvation wages. It wasn’t difficult to spot him; he was dining alone with a volume of Sartre for protection. This time, the camera managed to capture him in focus, though he was somewhat different in appearance. A pair of round eyeglasses had softened the sharp edges of his face; a cardigan sweater lent him a librarian’s unthreatening air. Margreet was his server, and judging from her wide smile she found him attractive—so attractive, in fact, that she agreed to meet him for drinks later at a bar on the edge of the red-light district. The evening ended with a well-executed slap, delivered with Margreet’s right hand to the man’s left cheek and witnessed by the same surveillance team. It was, thought Gabriel, a nice touch of tradecraft. The Dutch wrote the man off as a cad and never tried to establish his identity.
But what was the connection between the two women, other than the man who might have been an Arab or a Frenchman or an Italian? Dina found that, too. It was a Web site based in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar that sold clothing for Muslim women of piety and taste. Safia Bourihane had surfed it three weeks before the man’s visit to Paris. Margreet Janssen had stopped there just ten days before the slap in Amsterdam. Dina suspected that the site contained a password-protected room where ISIS recruiters could invite promising young women for a private chat. These encrypted rooms had so far proved almost impenetrable to the intelligence services of Israel and the West. Even the mighty National Security Agency, America’s omniscient signals intelligence service, was struggling to keep pace with ISIS’s digital hydra.
There is no worse feeling for a professional spy than to be told something by an officer from another service that he should have already known himself. Paul Rousseau endured this indignity in a small café on the rue Cler, a fashionable pedestrian shopping street not far from the Eiffel Tower. The French police had erected barricades at the intersections of the cross streets and were checking the handbags and backpacks of everyone who dared to enter. Even Gabriel, who had nothing in his possession other than a manila envelope filled with photographs, was thoroughly searched before being allowed to pass.
“If this were ever to become public,” said Rousseau, “it would be deeply embarrassing for my service. Heads would roll. Remember, this is France.”
“Don’t worry, Paul, your secret is safe with me.”
Rousseau leafed again through the photos of Safia Bourihane and the man who for two days had followed her around Paris undetected by the DGSI.
“What do you suppose he was doing?”
“Watching her, of course.”
“Why?”
“To make sure she was the right kind of girl. The question is,” said Gabriel, “can you find him?”
“These photographs were taken more than a year ago.”
“Yes?” asked Gabriel leadingly.
“It will be difficult. After all,” said Rousseau, “we still haven’t been able to find out where your team is working.”
“That’s because we’re better than he is.”
“Actually, his track record is rather good, too.”
“He didn’t travel to the café in Saint-Denis on a magic carpet,” said Gabriel. “He took a train, or a bus, or he walked along a street with security cameras.”
“Our network of CCTV cameras is nowhere near as extensive as yours or the British.”
“But it exists, especially in a place like Saint-Denis.”
“Yes,” said Rousseau. “It exists.”
“So find out how he got there. And then find out who he is. But whatever you do,” Gabriel added, “do it quietly. And don’t mention any of this to our friend from Langley.”
Rousseau consulted his wristwatch.
“What time are you seeing him?”
“Eleven. His name is Taylor, by the way. Kyle Taylor. He’s the chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Apparently, Monsieur Taylor is very ambitious. He’s droned many terrorists. One more scalp, and he might be the next director of operations. At least, that’s the rumor.”
“That would come as news to the current director.”
“Adrian Carter?”
Gabriel nodded.
“I’ve always liked Adrian,” said Rousseau. “He’s a decent soul, and rather too honest for a spy. One wonders how a man like that could survive so long in a place like Langley.”
As it turned out, it took Rousseau’s Alpha Group just forty-eight hours to determine that the man from the café in Saint-Denis had traveled to Paris from London aboard a Eurostar high-speed train. Surveillance photographs showed him disembarking at the Gare du Nord in late morning and boarding a Métro a few minutes later, bound for the northern suburbs of Paris. He departed Paris the morning after he was photographed on the rue de Rivoli and the Champs-Élysées, also aboard a Eurostar train, this one bound for London.
Unlike most international trains in Western Europe, the Eurostar requires passengers to clear passport control before boarding. Alpha Group quickly found their man in the manifests. He was Jalal Nasser, born in Amman, Jordan, in 1984, currently residing in the United Kingdom, address unknown. Rousseau dispatched a cable to MI5 in London and, in the dullest language possible, asked whether the British security service had a place of residence for one Jalal Nasser and whether it had reason to suspect his involvement in any form of Islamic extremism. His address arrived two hours later: 33 Chilton Street, Bethnal Green, East London. And, no, said MI5, it had no evidence to suggest that Nasser was anything more than what he claimed to be, which was a graduate student in economics at King’s College. He had been enrolled there, on and off, for seven years.
Gabriel dispatched Mikhail to London, along with a pair of all-purpose field hands named Mordecai and Oded, and within a few hours of their arrival they managed to acquire a small flat in Chilton Street. They also managed to snap a photograph of Jalal Nasser, the eternal student, walking along Bethnal Green Road with a book bag over one shoulder. It appeared on Gabriel’s mobile phone that evening as he was standing in the nursery of his apartment in Jerusalem, staring down at the two children sleeping peacefully in their cribs.
“They missed you terribly,” said Chiara. “But if you wake them …”
“What?”
She smiled, took him by the hand, and led him into their bedroom.
“Quietly,” she whispered as she loosened the buttons on her blouse. “Very quietly.”
13 (#ulink_65b1bac1-0602-5eba-91d2-59e0fe783d71)
AMMAN, JORDAN (#ulink_65b1bac1-0602-5eba-91d2-59e0fe783d71)
EARLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING Gabriel slipped from the apartment while Chiara and the children were still sleeping and climbed into the back of his armored SUV. His motorcade contained two additional vehicles filled with well-armed Office security agents. And instead of heading west toward Tel Aviv and King Saul Boulevard, it skirted the gray Ottoman walls of the Old City and spilled down the slopes of the Judean Hills, into the unforgiving flatlands of the West Bank. Stars clung to the cloudless sky above Jerusalem, oblivious to the sun that lay low and fiery above the cleft of the Jordan Valley. A few miles before Jericho was the turnoff for the Allenby Bridge, the historic crossing between the West Bank and the British-created Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The ramp on the Israeli half had been cleared of traffic for Gabriel’s arrival; on the other side idled an impressive motorcade of Suburbans filled with mustachioed Bedouin soldiers. The head of Gabriel’s security detail exchanged a few words with his Jordanian counterpart. Then the two motorcades merged into one and set off across the desert toward Amman.
Their destination was the headquarters of Jordan’s General Intelligence Department, also known as the Mukhabarat, the Arabic word used to describe the all-pervasive secret services that safeguarded the fragile kingdoms, emirates, and republics of the Middle East. Surrounded by concentric rings of security men, a locked stainless steel attaché case in one hand, Gabriel strode swiftly across the marble lobby, up a flight of curved stairs, and into the office of Fareed Barakat, the GID’s chief. It was a vast room, four or five times the size of the director’s suite at King Saul Boulevard, and decorated with somber curtains, overstuffed chairs and couches, lustrous Persian carpets, and expensive trinkets that had been bestowed on Fareed by admiring spies and politicians around the world. It was the sort of place, thought Gabriel, where favors were dispensed, judgments were passed, and lives were destroyed. He had upgraded his usual attire for the occasion, exchanging his denim and leather for a trim gray suit and white shirt. Even so, his clothing paled in comparison to the worsted sartorial splendor that hung from the tall slender frame of Fareed Barakat. Fareed’s suits were handmade for him by Anthony Sinclair in London. Like the current king of Jordan, the man he was sworn to protect, he had been expensively educated in Britain. He spoke English like a news presenter from the BBC.
“Gabriel Allon, at long last.” Fareed’s small black eyes shone like polished onyx. His nose was like the beak of a bird of prey. “It’s good to finally meet you. After reading those stories about you in the newspaper, I was convinced I’d missed my chance.”
“Reporters,” said Gabriel disdainfully.
“Quite,” agreed Fareed. “Your first time in Jordan?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“No quiet visits to Amman on a borrowed passport? No operations against one of your many enemies?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Wise man,” said Fareed, smiling. “Better to play by the rules. You’ll discover soon enough that I can be very helpful to you.”
Israel and Jordan had more in common than a border and a shared British colonial past. They were both westward-looking countries trying to survive in a Middle East that was spinning dangerously out of control. They had fought two wars, in 1948 and 1967, but had formally made peace in the afterglow of the Oslo peace process. Even before that, however, the Office and the GID had maintained close, if cautious, ties. Jordan was universally considered the most fragile of the Arab states, and it was the job of the GID to keep the king’s head on his shoulders and the chaos of the region at bay. Israel wanted the same thing, and in the GID had found a competent and reliable partner with whom they could do business. The GID was a bit more civilized than its brutal Iraqi and Egyptian counterparts, though no less ubiquitous. A vast network of informers watched over the Jordanian people and monitored their every word and deed. Even a stray unkind remark about the king or his family could result in a sojourn of indeterminate length in the GID’s labyrinth of secret detention centers.
Uzi Navot had warned Gabriel about the rituals that accompanied any visit to Fareed’s gilded lair: the endless cups of sticky-sweet Arab coffee, the cigarettes, the long stories of Fareed’s many conquests, both professional and romantic. Fareed always spoke as though he couldn’t quite believe his own luck, which added to his considerable charm. Where some men wearied under the burden of responsibility, Fareed thrived. He was the lord of a vast empire of secrets. He was a deeply contented man.
Throughout Fareed’s monologue, Gabriel managed to keep a placid, attentive smile fixed firmly on his face. He laughed when appropriate and posed a leading question or two, and yet all the while his thoughts wandered to the photographs contained in the locked stainless steel briefcase at his ankle. He had never carried a briefcase before—not willingly at least, only for the sake of his cover. It felt like a ball and chain, an anvil. He supposed he should find someone to carry it for him. But inwardly he feared that such a move might nurture in him a taste for privilege that would spiral, inevitably, to a valet, a food taster, and a standing appointment at an exclusive Tel Aviv hair salon. Already, he missed the small thrill of piloting his own automobile down the ski-slope grade of Highway 1. Fareed Barakat would surely have found such sentiments curious. It was said of Fareed that he once jailed his own butler for allowing the Earl Grey tea to steep a minute too long.
At length, Fareed brought the topic of conversation around to the situation at King Saul Boulevard. He had heard about Gabriel’s pending promotion, and Uzi Navot’s impending demise. He had also heard—from where he refused to say—that Gabriel intended to keep Navot around in some capacity. He thought this a very bad idea, horrendous actually, and told Gabriel so. “Better to sweep the decks and make a fresh start of it.” Gabriel smiled, praised Fareed for his shrewdness and wisdom, and said nothing more on the subject.
The Jordanian had also heard that Gabriel had recently become a father again. With the press of a button he summoned an aide, who entered the office bearing two gift-wrapped boxes, one enormous, the other quite small. Fareed insisted that Gabriel open both in his presence. The large box contained a motorized Mercedes toy car; the second box, the smaller, a strand of pearls.
“I hope you’re not offended because the car is German.”
“Not at all.”
“The pearls are from Mikimoto.”
“That’s good to know.” Gabriel closed the box. “I can’t possibly accept these.”
“You must. Otherwise, I’ll be deeply offended.”
Gabriel was suddenly sorry he had come to Amman without gifts of his own. But what was one supposed to give a man who jailed his butler for misbrewing a pot of tea? He had only the photographs, which he retrieved from the attaché case. The first showed a man walking along an East London street, a book bag over one shoulder, a man who might have been an Arab or a Frenchman or an Italian. Gabriel handed the photograph to Fareed Barakat, who gave it a brief glance. “Jalal Nasser,” he said, returning the photograph to Gabriel with a smile. “What took you so long, my friend?”
14 (#ulink_d2d3c0f7-75f3-5ffc-bec6-ccf511e7628e)
GID HEADQUARTERS, AMMAN (#ulink_d2d3c0f7-75f3-5ffc-bec6-ccf511e7628e)
FAREED BARAKAT KNEW MORE ABOUT ISIS than any other intelligence officer in the world, and with good reason. The movement had its roots in the grim Amman suburb of Zarqa, where, in a two-story house overlooking a derelict cemetery, there had once lived a man named Ahmad Fadil Nazzal al-Khalayleh, a heavy drinker, a vandal, a vicious street brawler who had so many tattoos the neighborhood children referred to him as “the green man.” His mother was a devout Muslim who believed that only Islam could save her troubled son. She enrolled him for religious instruction at the al-Hussein Ben Ali Mosque, and it was there al-Khalayleh found his true calling. He quickly became a radical and a committed enemy of the Jordanian monarchy, which he was determined to topple with force. He spent several years inside the GID’s secret prisons, including a stint in the notorious desert fortress at al-Jafr. The leader of his cellblock was Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a firebrand preacher who was one of the foremost theoreticians of jihadism. In 1999, when a young, untested king ascended to the throne after the death of his father, he decided to release more than a thousand criminals and political prisoners in a traditional gesture of goodwill. Two of the men he freed were al-Maqdisi and his violent pupil from Zarqa.
By then, the former street brawler with many tattoos was known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Not long after his release, he made his way to Afghanistan and pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden. And in March 2003, with the American invasion of Iraq looming, he slipped into Baghdad and formed the resistance cells that would eventually come to be known as al-Qaeda in Iraq. The wave of beheadings and spectacular sectarian bombings carried out by Zarqawi and his associates pushed the country to the brink of all-out civil war. He was the prototype of a new kind of Islamic extremist, willing to use horrifying violence to shock and terrify. Even Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, rebuked him.
An American air strike ended Zarqawi’s life in June 2006, and by the end of the decade al-Qaeda in Iraq had been decimated. But in 2011 two events conspired to revive its fortunes: the outbreak of civil war in Syria and the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq. Now known as ISIS, the group rose from the ashes and rushed into the power vacuum along the Syria–Iraq border. The land under its control stretched from the cradle of civilization to the doorstep of Europe. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was squarely in its sights. So, too, was Israel.
Among the thousands of young Muslims from the Middle East and Europe who were drawn to the siren song of ISIS was a young Jordanian named Jalal Nasser. Like Zarqawi, Nasser was from a prominent East Bank tribe, the Bani Hassan, though his family was better off than the Khalaylehs of Zarqa. He attended a private secondary school in Amman and King’s College in London. Soon after the outbreak of civil war in Syria, however, he met with an ISIS recruiter in Amman and inquired about making his way to the caliphate. The recruiter advised Jalal that he could be more useful elsewhere.
“In Europe?” asked Gabriel.
Fareed nodded.
“How do you know this?”
“Sources and methods,” said Fareed, which meant he had no interest in answering Gabriel’s question.
“Why not take him off the streets?”
“Jalal is from a good family, a family that has been loyal to the monarchy for a long time. If we had arrested him, it would have caused problems.” A careful smile. “Collateral damage.”
“So you put him on an airplane to London and waved good-bye.”
“Not entirely. Every time he comes back to Amman, we bring him in for a little chat. And we watch him from time to time in England to make certain he isn’t plotting against us.”
“Did you tell the British about him?”
Silence.
“What about your friends at Langley?”
More silence.
“Why not?”
“Because we didn’t want to turn a small problem into a big problem. These days, that seems to be the American way.”
“Careful, Fareed. You never know who’s listening.”
“Not here,” he said, glancing around his vast office. “It’s perfectly secure.”
“Says who?”
“Langley.”
Gabriel smiled.
“So why are you so interested in Jalal?” asked Fareed.
Gabriel handed him another photograph.
“The woman from the Paris attack?”
Gabriel nodded. Then he instructed Fareed to look carefully at the man seated alone in the corner of the café, with an open laptop computer.
“Jalal?”
“In the flesh.”
“Any chance it’s a coincidence?”
Gabriel handed the Jordanian two more photos: Safia Bourihane and Jalal Nasser on the rue de Rivoli, Safia Bourihane and Jalal Nasser on the Champs-Élysées.
“I guess not.”
“There’s more.”
Gabriel gave Fareed two more photos: Jalal Nasser with Margreet Janssen at a restaurant in Amsterdam, Jalal Nasser holding his recently slapped cheek on a street in the red-light district.
“Shit,” said Fareed softly.
“The Office concurs.”
Fareed returned the photos. “Who else knows about this?”
“Paul Rousseau.”
“Alpha Group?”
Gabriel nodded.
“They’re quite good.”
“You’ve worked with them?”
“On occasion.” Fareed shrugged. “As a rule, France’s problems come from other parts of the Arab world.”
“Not anymore.” Gabriel returned the photos to his briefcase.
“I assume you have Jalal under watch.”
“As of last night.”
“Have you had a chance to peek at that laptop?”
“Not yet. You?”
“We drained it the last time we brought him in for a chat. It was clean as a whistle. But that doesn’t mean anything. Jalal is very good with computers. They’re all very good. And getting better by the day.”
Fareed started to light one of his English cigarettes but stopped. It seemed that Gabriel’s aversion to tobacco was well known to the GID.
“I don’t suppose you’ve mentioned any of this to the Americans.”
“Who?”
“What about the British?”
“In passing.”
“There’s no such thing when it comes to the British. Furthermore,” said Fareed with his newsreader formality, “I know for a fact they’re terrified that they’re going to be hit next.”
“They should be terrified.”
Fareed ignited his gold lighter and touched his cigarette to the slender flame. “So what was Jalal’s connection to Paris and Amsterdam?”
“I’m not sure yet. He might be just a recruiter or talent spotter. Or he might be the project manager.” Gabriel was silent for a moment. “Or maybe,” he said finally, “he’s the one they call Saladin.”
Fareed Barakat looked up sharply.
“Obviously,” said Gabriel, “you’ve heard the name.”
“Yes,” conceded Fareed, “I’ve heard it.”
“Is he?”
“Not a chance.”
“Does he exist?”
“Saladin?” Fareed nodded slowly. “Yes, he exists.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s our worst nightmare. Other than that,” said Fareed, “I haven’t a clue.”
15 (#ulink_45a92ee5-b2cd-54d1-a125-91139c19d43f)
GID HEADQUARTERS, AMMAN (#ulink_45a92ee5-b2cd-54d1-a125-91139c19d43f)
OF THE TERRORIST’S NAMESAKE, HOWEVER, the GID chief knew a great deal. Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, or Saladin, was born into a prominent family of Kurds, in the town of Tikrit, in approximately 1138. His father was a soldier of fortune. Young Saladin lived for a time in Baalbek, in present-day Lebanon, and in Damascus, where he drank wine, pursued women, and played polo by candlelight. Damascus was the city he preferred over all others. Later, he would describe Egypt, the financial hub of his empire, as a whore who tried to separate him from his faithful wife Damascus.
His realm stretched from Yemen to Tunisia and north to Syria. It was ruled over by a hodgepodge of princes, emirs, and greedy relatives, all held together by Saladin’s diplomatic skills and considerable charisma. He used violence to great effect, but found it distasteful. To his favorite son, Zahir, he once remarked: “I warn you against shedding blood, indulging in it and making a habit of it, for blood never sleeps.”
He was lame and sickly, watched over constantly by a team of twenty-one doctors, including the philosopher and Talmudic scholar Maimonides, who was appointed his court physician in Cairo. Lacking in personal vanity—in Jerusalem he once laughed uproariously when a courtier splashed his silk robes with mud—he had little interest in personal riches or earthly delights. He was happiest when surrounded by poets and men of learning, but mainly it was the concept of jihad, or holy war, that consumed him. He built mosques and Islamic centers of learning across his lands and lavished money and favors on preachers and religious scholars. His goal was to re-create the zeal that had allowed Islam’s earliest followers to conquer half of the known world. And once the sacred rage had been rekindled, he focused it on the one prize that had eluded him: Jerusalem.
A smallish outpost fed by springs, the city occupied a strategic high ground at the crossroads of three continents, a geographical sin for which it would be punished throughout the ages. Besieged, plundered, captured and recaptured, Jerusalem had been ruled by Jebusites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and, of course, the Jews. When Omar al-Khattab, a close confidant of Muhammad, conquered Jerusalem in 639 with a small band of Arab cameleers from the Hejaz and Yemen, it was a predominantly Christian city. Four and a half centuries later, Pope Urban II would dispatch an expeditionary force numbering several thousand European Christians to reclaim Jerusalem from the Muslims, whom he regarded as a people “alien to God.” The Christian soldiers, who would one day be known as Crusaders, breached the city’s defenses on the night of July 13, 1099, and slaughtered its inhabitants, including three thousand men, women, and children who had taken shelter inside the great al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount.
It was Saladin, the son of a Kurdish soldier of fortune from Tikrit, who would return the favor. After humiliating the thirst-crazed Crusader force at the Battle of Hattin near Tiberias—Saladin personally sliced off the arm of Raynald of Châtillon—the Muslims reclaimed Jerusalem after a negotiated surrender. Saladin tore down the large cross that had been erected atop the Dome of the Rock, scrubbed its courts with Damascene rosewater to remove the last foul traces of the infidel, and sold thousands of Christians into slavery or the harem. Jerusalem would remain under Islamic control until 1917, when the British seized it from the Ottoman Turks. And when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1924, so, too, did the last Muslim caliphate.
But now ISIS had declared a new caliphate. At present, it included only portions of western Iraq and eastern Syria, with Raqqa as its capital. Saladin, the new Saladin, was ISIS’s chief of external operations—or so believed Fareed Barakat and the Jordanian General Intelligence Department. Unfortunately, the GID knew almost nothing else about Saladin, including his real name.
“Is he Iraqi?”
“He might be. Or he might be a Tunisian or a Saudi or an Egyptian or an Englishman or one of the other lunatics who’ve rushed to Syria to live in this new Islamic paradise of theirs.”
“Surely, the GID doesn’t believe that.”
“We don’t,” Fareed conceded. “We think he’s probably a former Iraqi military officer. Who knows? Maybe he’s from Tikrit, just like Saladin.”
“And Saddam.”
“Ah, yes, let’s not forget Saddam.” Fareed exhaled a lungful of smoke toward the high ceiling of his office. “We had our problems with Saddam, but we warned the Americans they would rue the day they toppled him. They didn’t listen, of course. Nor did they listen when we asked them to do something about Syria. Not our problem, they said. We’re putting the Middle East in our rearview mirror. No more American wars in Muslim lands. And now look at the situation. A quarter of a million dead, hundreds of thousands more streaming into Europe, Russia and Iran working together to dominate the Middle East.” He shook his head slowly. “Have I left anything out?”
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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: No. 1 New York Times bestselling author Daniel Silva delivers another stunning thriller in his latest tale of high-stakes international intrigue featuring the inimitable Gabriel Allon.Legendary spy Gabriel Allon is poised to become the chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service. But on the eve of his promotion, ISIS detonate a massive bomb in the Marais district of Paris, and a desperate French government wants Gabriel to eliminate the man responsible.They call him Saladin…He is a terrorist mastermind, whose network communicates in total secrecy, leaving Gabriel no choice but to insert an agent into the most dangerous terrorist group the world has ever known. An extraordinary young doctor, she must pose as an ISIS recruit in waiting, a ticking time bomb, a black widow out for blood.