The Secret Servant (14 page)

“I assume you’ve told the Egyptians about the video and the demands?”

“We felt we had no choice,” Carter said. “They’ve pledged their full support, and they’ve also made it clear to us that caving in to the Sword’s demands would be a very bad idea. The Egyptian foreign minister is traveling to Washington secretly later today to reinforce that point with the secretary of state and the president. He’s bringing along a team from the Interior Ministry and representatives of all the Egyptian security and intelligence services. We’re adding Egyptian components to our task force here and in London.”

“Just make sure no one mentions our little
black
operation in front of them. The Islamists have penetrated every level of Egyptian society and government, including the security services. You can be sure the Sphinx has contacts inside the SSI.”

“Your operation does not exist, and no one will know about it but me.” Carter looked at his watch. “How long will it take you to deploy in Amsterdam?”

“I have a man there already who can begin surveillance of the target immediately.”

“One man? I hope’s he’s good.”

“He is.”

“And the rest of your team?”

“Forty-eight hours.”

“That leaves only five days before the deadline.” Carter said. “Take my plane back to Ben-Gurion. That will save you several critical hours. We’ll need someone from the Agency on your team in order to coordinate your activities with the larger effort. Otherwise we run the risk of tripping over each other in the field.”

“I don’t want anyone from the CIA on my team. He’ll just get in the way. And besides, I fully anticipate we’ll be doing things that violate American law. I can’t have him stopping every five minutes to consult with his Washington lawyer.”

“I’m afraid I have to insist.”

“All right, Adrian, we’ll let you come along.”

“Nothing would make me happier, but leaving Headquarters is not an option, at least not at the moment. I do have another candidate in mind, someone who’s experienced in the field and has been forged by fire. And the best part is you trained her.”

Gabriel stopped walking. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m quite serious.”

“Where is she?”

“The Saudi desk at the Counterterrorism Center.”

“How soon can she be ready to leave?”

“I’ll make one phone call and she’s yours.”

T
he lights of the French coastline pricked the darkness off the prow of the Portsmouth–to–Le Havre ferry. The man seated near the observation windows in the upper lounge glanced at his wristwatch. Thirty minutes remained of the five-hour crossing. He signaled the waitress and, with a small gesture of his hand, ordered another Carlsberg, his fourth of the journey. She brought it a moment later and placed it suggestively on his table. She had bleached-blond hair and a jeweled stud in her lower lip. Her name tag said
CHRISTINE
. The man stared directly at her, the way infidel men always stared at their women, and allowed his eyes to wander over her breasts.

“You have a name?” she asked.

“Thomas,” he said.

It wasn’t his real name. It was borrowed, like his borrowed driver’s license and borrowed British passport. His Yorkshire accent was the real thing. He was a Yorkshire lad, born and bred.

“I could be wrong, Thomas, but I think you have an admirer.”

“Oh, really? Who?”

The waitress glanced toward the other side of the lounge. Seated alone at a table near the opposite window was a small woman in her mid-twenties with short dark hair and stormy black eyes. She was dressed in tight jeans and a snug-fitting pullover embroidered with the word
OUI
.

“She’s been looking at you ever since we left Portsmouth,” the waitress said. “Can’t keep her eyes off you, actually.”

“Not my type.”

“What is your type?”

He remembered the words his controller had spoken during the final briefing.
Whatever you do, don’t sit by yourself looking as though you are a terrorist. Strike up a conversation. Buy someone a drink. Flirt with a girl if there’s a girl to flirt with
.

“I like girls named Christine who serve drinks on Channel ferries.”

“You don’t say.”

She smiled at him. He felt his stomach churn with rage.

“When are you going back to England?” she asked.

“Tomorrow, midday.”

“What a coincidence. I’m going back on the same boat. I’ll see you then, I hope.”

“Cheers to that.”

The waitress walked back to the bar. The man with the Yorkshire accent raised his beer to his lips and, before taking a swallow, begged Allah for forgiveness. He had done other things during the past few days for which he had sought Allah’s pardon. He had shaved his beard for the first time since he was a teenager and had dyed his dark hair platinum blond to look more like a native European. He had eaten pork sausage in a roadside café in Britain and had spoken to many women with unveiled faces. He had sought no absolution, however, for his role in the kidnapping of the American woman. Her father served the Crusader regime—a regime that oppressed Muslims around the world, a regime that supported Israel while the Palestinians suffered, a regime that supported an apostate thug like Hosni Mubarak who grew rich while the Egyptian people slipped deeper into poverty and despair with each passing day. The American woman was nothing more than a tool to be used to secure the release of Sheikh Abdullah from the Crusader jail, an infidel cow that could be taken to market and, if necessary, slaughtered without mercy and without fear of Allah’s retribution.

A voice crackled over the ship’s loudspeaker. It was the captain informing the passengers that the ferry would soon make landfall. The man in the bar finished the rest of his beer, then headed down a flight of stairs to the vehicle-loading deck. The silver LDV Maxus panel van was parked in the center column, three rows from the stern. He opened the rear doors and peered into the darkened cargo area. Inside were several dozen large crates that bore the markings of a fine bone china from a manufacturer in Yorkshire. The shipment, which was fully documented, was bound for an exclusive shop in the French city of Strasbourg—a shop that happened to be owned by an Egyptian with close links to the Sword of Allah. Several of the crates had been opened by British police at the Portsmouth ferry terminal, presumably in an effort to locate the missing American woman. Their search had uncovered nothing besides fine bone china from Yorkshire.

The man closed the rear doors, then walked around to the driver’s side and climbed behind the wheel. The dark-haired girl from the lounge bar was now seated in the passenger seat, her snug-fitting pullover concealed by a heavy leather jacket.

“It looked to me like you actually enjoyed flirting with that infidel cow,” the girl said.

“I wanted to slap her face the entire time.”

“She’s definitely going to remember you,” the girl said. “In fact, she’s going to remember us both.”

He smiled. That was exactly the point.

Five minutes later the ferry eased into the landing at Le Havre. The man with platinum blond hair and a Yorkshire accent guided the van onto French soil and headed for Rennes.

S
o whose bright idea was this anyway?” asked Sarah Bancroft. “Yours or Adrian’s?”

Gabriel looked at the woman seated opposite him in the passenger cabin of the CIA Gulfstream V. She had shoulder-length blond hair, skin the color of alabaster, and eyes like a cloudless summer sky. Dressed as she was now, in a cashmere pullover, trim faded jeans, and shapely leather boots, she was dangerously attractive.

“It was definitely Adrian’s.”

“You, of course, balked at the suggestion.”

“Absolutely.”

“Why did you cave?”

“It was either a knuckle dragger from the Clandestine Service or you. Naturally I chose you.”

“It’s good to know one is wanted.”

“I didn’t
want
anyone. Adrian insisted we include someone from the Agency and you seemed like the least harmful option. After all, we trained you. You know some of our personnel and you know how we operate. You know the difference between a
bodel
and a
neviot
officer. You speak our language.” He frowned. “Well, almost. I suppose the fact you don’t speak Hebrew is an advantage. It means we can still talk about you behind your back.”

“I can only imagine the things you all said about me.”

“Rest assured it was all complimentary, Sarah. You were the quickest study any of us had ever seen. But then we always knew you would be. That’s why we chose you in the first place.”

Actually, it was Adrian Carter who had chosen her.
You find the painting
, Carter had said.
I’ll get you the girl
. The painting Gabriel had found was a lost masterpiece by van Gogh called
Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table
, which had vanished after Vincent’s death into the private collection of a Paris lawyer. Carter had managed to find a lost masterpiece of his own, a European-educated, multilingual art historian who was working as a curator at the Phillips Collection museum in Washington, D.C. Gabriel had used her to penetrate the business entourage of a Saudi billionaire terrorist financier named Zizi al-Bakari, and her life had never been the same since.

“You know, Gabriel, if I’m not mistaken, that might well have been the first compliment you ever paid me. During my preparation for the al-Bakari operation you barely said a word to me. You left me in the hands of your instructors and the other members of your team. Why was that?” Greeted by silence, she answered her own question. “Maybe you had to keep your distance. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been able to send me into Zizi’s camp. Who knows? Maybe you liked me a little too much.”

“My feelings for you were strictly professional, Sarah.”

“I wasn’t suggesting otherwise.” She was silent for a moment. “You know, after the operation ended, I missed you all terribly. You were the first real family I ever had.” She hesitated, then added: “I even missed
you
, Gabriel.”

“I almost got you killed.”

“Oh, that.” She looked down and made a church steeple of her ringless fingers. “It wasn’t your fault. It was mine. It was a beautiful operation. I’ll let you in on a little secret. The Agency isn’t as good as the Office. Our operations are like bricks and mortar. Yours are like…” She paused, searching for the right word. “Like art,” she said. “They’re like one of your grandfather’s paintings.”

“My grandfather was a German Expressionist,” Gabriel said. “Some of his paintings were rather chaotic and violent.”

“And so are your operations.”

Sarah reclined her seat and propped one boot on the armrest of Gabriel’s chair. An image flashed in Gabriel’s memory: Sarah, in a black veil, chained to a torturer’s table in a chalet in the mountains of Switzerland.

“You’re looking at me that way again,” she said.

“Which way is that?”

“The way you used to look at that van Gogh we sold Zizi. You used to look at me and Marguerite Gachet the same way. You’re assessing me. You’re looking for losses and abrasions. You’re wondering whether the canvas can be brought back to life or whether it’s beyond repair.”

“What’s the answer?”

“The canvas is fine, Gabriel. It doesn’t need any work at all. In fact, it’s quite suitable for hanging just as it is.”

“No more nightmares? No more sessions with the Agency psychologists?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.” She looked down again, and a shadow seemed to pass over her eyes. “No one at Langley knows what Elizabeth Halton is going through better than I do. Maybe that’s why Adrian chose me for this assignment. He’s a former case officer. He knows how to push buttons.”

“I’ve noticed that.”

She looked up at him as the Gulfstream swept down the runway. “So where are we going?”

“First we’re going to make a brief stop in Tel Aviv to assemble my team. Then we’re going to Amsterdam to have a quiet word with a man who’s going to help us find Elizabeth Halton.”

“Anyone I know?”

“Probably not.”

“Tell me about him,” she said.

Gabriel waited until the plane was airborne. Then he told her everything.

It was shortly after dawn the next morning when they arrived at King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. Gabriel stopped briefly at the Operations Desk to collect Eli Lavon’s first surveillance photographs and watch reports from Amsterdam, then led Sarah along a subterranean corridor to a doorway marked 456C. For many years the room was nothing but a dumping ground for obsolete computers and worn-out office furniture, often used by the night staff as a place for romantic trysts. Now it was known throughout King Saul Boulevard as Gabriel’s Lair. Affixed to the door was a faded paper sign, written in his own stylish Hebrew hand, that read:
TEMPORARY COMMITTEE FOR THE STUDY OF TERROR THREATS IN WESTERN EUROPE
. The sign had served him well through two tumultuous operations. Gabriel decided to leave it for now.

He opened the combination lock, then switched on the fluorescent lights and stepped inside. The room was precisely as he had left it a year earlier. One wall was covered by surveillance photographs, another by a diagram of a global business empire, and a third by a collection of Impressionist prints. Gabriel’s chalkboard stood forlornly in the corner, its surface bare except for a single name:
SARAH BAN
-
CROFT
. She followed him inside tentatively, as though entering a forgotten room from her childhood, and stared at the photographs: Zizi al-Bakari with his spoiled daughter, Nadia, at his side; Abdul and Abdul, his American-educated lawyers; Herr Wehrli, his Swiss banker; Mr. bin Talal, his chief of security; Jean-Michel, his French personal trainer and Sarah’s main tormentor. She turned around and looked at Gabriel.

“You planned it all from here?”

He nodded his head slowly. She looked around the room with her eyes narrowed in disbelief.

“Somehow I expected something more…” Her voice trailed off, then she added: “Something more impressive.”

“This is the Office, Sarah, not Langley. We like to do things the old-fashioned way.”

“Obviously.” She looked at his chalkboard. “I haven’t seen one of those since I was in grade school.”

Gabriel smiled, then began removing the debris of the al-Bakari operation from the walls of the room as the other members of his team trickled slowly through the door. No introductions were necessary, for Sarah knew and adored them all. The first to arrive was Yossi, a tall, balding intellectual from the Office’s Research division who had read classics at Oxford and still spoke Hebrew with a pronounced British accent. Next came Dina Sarid, a veritable encyclopedia of terrorism from the History division who could recite the time, place, and casualty count of every act of violence ever committed against the State of Israel. Ten minutes later came Yaakov, a battle-hardened case officer from the Arab Affairs Department of Shabak, followed by Rimona, an IDF major who served as an analyst for AMAN, Israel’s military intelligence service. Oded, a brooding, all-purpose field operative who specialized in snatches, arrived at eight with breakfast for everyone, and Mordecai, a wispy figure who dealt in all things electronic, stumbled in fifteen minutes later looking as though he had not slept the night before. The last to arrive was Mikhail, a gray-eyed gunman of Russian birth, who had single-handedly killed half of the terrorist infrastructure of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It was because of Mikhail and his proficiency with a handgun that Sarah was alive. She kissed his cheek as Gabriel walked to the front of the room and pinned Lavon’s surveillance photographs to the bulletin board.

“Now tat we’re all reacquainted,” he said, “it’s time to get to work. This is the man who’s going to lead us to Elizabeth Halton. He is a founding member of Sword of Allah, currently living in Amsterdam. We’re going to make him vanish into thin air, then we’re going to squeeze him dry. We have to work quickly, and we’re not going to make any mistakes.”

The Office prided itself on its ability to improvise in times of crisis, but even the vaunted Office chafed under the pressure of Gabriel’s demands. Safe accommodations were his biggest concern, and Housekeeping, the division that maintained and acquired Office properties, was his most stubborn opponent. Unlike cities such as Paris, London, and Rome, where the Office maintained dozens of safe flats, Amsterdam had no standing inventory of secure lodging. That meant accommodations had to be acquired quickly and on the open market, something the notoriously deliberate Housekeeping never liked to do. By ten o’clock they had taken a six-month lease on a two-bedroom apartment on the Herengracht canal, and by eleven they had secured a luxury houseboat on the Prinsengracht called the
Heleen
. That left only a site for the interrogation. Gabriel needed something large enough for his entire team and remote enough so that their presence would go undetected. He had a property in mind—a tumbledown country house outside Oldenburg that they had used during the Wrath of God operation—and eventually he was able to pry it from Housekeeping’s grasp.

Once Housekeeping capitulated, the rest fell like dominoes. By noon Travel had lined up a string of untraceable rental cars, and by one Identity had coughed up enough clean passports to allow every member of the team to travel as a European. Banking section initially balked at Gabriel’s request for a briefcase filled with petty cash, but at one-thirty he staged what amounted to an armed stickup and left Banking ten minutes later carrying a handsome attaché case filled with fifty thousand dollars and another fifty thousand in well-circulated euros.

By the middle of the afternoon the first members of his team were slipping quietly from King Saul Boulevard and heading off to Ben-Gurion. Oded, Mordecai, and Rimona left at three-thirty and boarded a flight to Brussels. Yossi, Yaakov, and Dina left an hour later on a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. Gabriel and Sarah left last and, shortly after eight o’clock, they were taking their seats in the first-class section of El Al’s evening flight to Paris. As the rest of the passengers filed on board, Gabriel telephoned Chiara to tell her he had been in the country and was leaving again. She didn’t ask where he was going. She didn’t need to know.