The Secret Servant (17 page)

“You were in the army in sixty-seven?”

He shook his head. “I’d done my army service already. I was at Cairo University in sixty-seven. Within weeks of the war ending, we organized an illegal Islamist cell there. I was one of its leaders until 1969, when I completed my doctorate in economics. Upon graduation, I had two choices: go to work as a bureaucrat in Pharaoh’s bureaucracy or take a job teaching in Pharaoh’s schools. I chose the latter and accepted a position at the University of Minya in Middle Egypt. Six months later Nasser was dead.”

“And everything changed,” said Gabriel.

“Almost overnight,” Ibrahim said in agreement. “Sadat encouraged us. He granted us freedom and money to organize. We grew our beards. We established youth organizations and charities to help the poor. We did paramilitary training at desert camps funded by the government and Sadat’s wealthy patrons. We lived our lives according to God’s law and we wanted God’s laws to be the laws of Egypt. Sadat promised us that he would institute
sharia
. He broke his promise, and then he compounded his sins by signing a peace treaty with the Devil, and for that he paid with his life.”

“You approved of Sadat’s assassination?”

“I fell to my knees and thanked God for striking him down.”

“And then the roundups began.”

“Almost immediately,” Ibrahim said. “The state feared that Sadat’s death was only the opening shot of an Islamic revolution that was about to sweep the country. They were wrong, of course, but that didn’t stop them from using the mailed fist against anyone whom they believed was part of the conspiracy or conspiracies to come.”

“They came for you at the university?”

He shook his head. “I left the university at sundown and went home to my apartment. When I arrived no one was there. I asked the neighbors if they had seen my wife and children. They told me they’d been taken into custody. I went to the police station, but they weren’t there, and the police said there was no record of their arrest. Then I went to the Minya headquarters of the SSI.” His voice trailed off, and he looked down at the file in front of him. “Do you know about the bridge over Jahannam, my friend? It is the bridge all Muslims must cross in order to reach Paradise.”

“Narrower than a spider web and sharper than a sword,” Gabriel said. “The good cross swiftly and are rewarded, but the wicked lose their footing and are plunged into the fires of Hell.”

Ibrahim looked up from the file, clearly impressed by Gabriel’s knowledge of Islam. “I’m one of the unfortunate few who’s actually seen the bridge over Jahannam,” he said. “I was made to walk it that night in October 1981 and I’m afraid I lost my footing.”

Gabriel removed Ibrahim’s handcuffs and told him to keep talking.

He was taken to a cell and beaten mercilessly for twelve hours. When the beatings finally ceased, he was brought to an interrogation room and placed before a senior SSI man, who ordered him to reveal everything he knew about planned Islamist terror operations in the Minya region. He answered the question truthfully—that he knew of no plans for any attacks—and was immediately returned to the cell, where he was beaten on and off for several days. Again he was brought before the senior officer and again he denied knowledge of future attacks. This time the SSI man led him to a different cell, where an adolescent girl, naked and unconscious, hung by her hands from a hook in the ceiling. She had been flogged and slashed to ribbons with a razor and her face was distorted by swelling and bleeding. It took Ibrahim a moment to realize that the young girl was his daughter, Jihan.

“They revived her with several buckets of cold water,” he said. “She looked at me and for a moment didn’t recognize me either. The senior man whipped her savagely for several minutes, then the others took her down from the hook and raped her in front of me. My daughter looked at me while she was being mauled by these animals. She pleaded with me to help her. ‘Please, Papa,’ she said. ‘Tell them what they want to know. Make them stop.’ But I couldn’t make them stop. I didn’t have anything to tell them.”

He began to shiver violently. “May I have my clothing now?”

“Keep talking, Ibrahim.”

He lapsed into a long silence. For a moment Gabriel feared he had lost him, but eventually, after another spasm of trembling, he began to speak again.

“They placed me in the cell next door, so that I was forced to endure the screams of my daughter all through that long night. When I was brought before the senior officer for a third time, I told him anything I could think of to ease her suffering. I gave him crumbs from my table, but then crumbs were all I had to give. I gave him the names of other Sword members. I gave him the addresses of apartments where we had met. I gave him the names of students at the university who I believed might be involved in radical activities. I told him what he wanted to hear, even though I knew I was condemning innocent friends and colleagues to the same suffering I had endured. He seemed satisfied with my confession. Even so, I was given one more beating that night. When it was over, I was tossed into a cell and left for dead. For the first time, I was not alone. There was another prisoner there.”

“You recognized him?” Gabriel asked.

“Eventually.”

“Who was it?”

“It was Sheikh Abdullah. He recited the words of the Prophet to me. ‘Rely on God. Don’t be defeated.’ He soothed my wounds and prayed over me for the next two days. I am alive because of him.”

“And your daughter?”

Ibrahim glanced at Gabriel’s wristwatch. “How much time do I have left before I am handed over to the Americans?”

Gabriel removed the watch and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

“May I have my clothing now?”

Gabriel leaned back in his chair and hammered twice on the double doors.

T
he same bright moon that hung over the plains of northern Germany was visible in the skies above the Norfolk coast that evening as Marcia Cromwell, an unmarried woman of thirty-six, headed down the sandy pathway to the beach at Walcott with Ginger, her Welsh springer spaniel, following closely at her heels. Questions about the morality of torture or even the fate of the missing American woman were of no concern to her at that moment. She had just been informed by her latest lover that, after much deliberation, he had decided not to leave his wife and children for her after all. Marcia Cromwell, a lifelong resident of Norfolk, had decided to deal with the pain the same way she had dealt with every other setback, by taking a late-night walk along the North Sea.

At the end of the pathway the beach opened suddenly before her, flat and seemingly limitless in the darkness, with wind-driven waves breaking in a phosphorous arc along the crest of hard dark sand. Ginger was behaving oddly. Usually he was straining at his leash at this point, anxious to be let loose on the beach so he could torment the gulls and sandpipers. Now he was sitting warily at her feet, peering intently into the grove of pine trees at the base of the dunes. Marcia Cromwell removed his leash and encouraged him to head down to the water’s edge. Instead, he immediately trotted off into the trees.

Marcia Cromwell hesitated before going after him. The police had recently uncovered an encampment of vagrant travelers there, and the trees were always strewn with empty beer cans and litter. She called out to Ginger several times, then removed a flashlight from her coat pocket and went in search of him. She spotted him a moment later, pawing at something on the ground at the base of one of the trees. Marcia Cromwell walked over to investigate. Then she began to scream.

The discovery of a corpse on the beach at Walcott immediately triggered activation of the Norfolk Constabulary’s Major Investigation Team. Established in September 2004 to conduct probes into crimes such as homicide, manslaughter, and rape, each team consists of a senior investigating officer, his deputy, an exhibits officer who processes crime-scene evidence, and an inquiry officer who interviews witnesses and suspects. Within thirty minutes of receiving Marcia Cromwell’s call, all four officers were on scene. Only two, the SIO and the exhibits officer, entered the trees at the base of the dunes. They wore yellow protective shoe covers in order to preserve any forensic evidence and examined the corpse by flashlight.

“How long has he been here?” asked the SIO.

“Between forty-eight and seventy-two hours, I’d say.”

“Preliminary cause of death?”

“Single gunshot wound to the back of the head. Execution-style, by the looks of it. But here’s the interesting thing.”

The crime-scene analyst shone a small Maglite at the lower right leg of the corpse.

“A splint?”

“Quite a good one, actually. But look at the wound. The coroner will have to make the final determination, but I’d be willing to wager it was caused by a bullet.”

“Caliber?”

“Looks like a nine-millimeter to me, but that’s not the interesting part. It’s several days older than the head wound, and whoever treated it knew exactly what she was doing?”

“She?”

“Elizabeth Halton is an emergency-room surgeon from Denver, Colorado. I could be wrong, but I think this corpse could well be one of the terrorists from Hyde Park. Didn’t COBRA and the Home Office tell us to be on the lookout for unexplained bullet wounds?”

“Yes, they did,” the SIO said.

“The wound and surrounding tissue exhibit signs of severe infection. I’d say our man was wounded by that Israeli chap during the actual kidnapping. His comrades tried to keep him alive, but apparently they finally gave up and put him out of his misery with a neat bullet in the back of the head. He probably suffered terribly. I suppose there is some justice in the world after all.”

SIO crouched next to the body and examined the lower leg of the corpse, then began searching the corpse itself for evidence. The coat pockets were empty, as were the front pockets of his trousers, but in the back right pocket he found a single sheet of paper, folded in quarters and flattened by many days of pressure. The SIO unfolded it carefully and read it by the beam of his flashlight.

“Draw me up a list of supplies one would need to treat a bullet wound in the field—things that can be purchased over the counter at an ordinary chemist’s shop. And put a very wide cordon around this scene. If your theory about this chap is correct, this beach is going to be invaded soon by several hundred men from the Anti-Terrorist Branch, MI5, the FBI, and the CIA.”

“Done.”

The SIO turned and walked quickly out of the trees. Two minutes later he was behind the wheel of his car, speaking by radio to the duty officer in the Operations and Communications Center. “It looks like the body might be linked to the missing American woman,” he said. “Get the chief constable on the phone immediately and bring him into the picture.”

“Anything else, sir?”

“I found a receipt in his pocket for the Portsmouth–to–Le Havre ferry. If this chap is really one of the terrorists, it could mean that the American girl is now in France.”…

The series of events that occurred next unfolded with precision and remarkable swiftness. The Operations and Communications Center immediately located the Norfolk chief constable, who was dining with friends and family in Norwich, and told him of the discovery. The chief constable stepped away from the table and quietly relayed the information to his superiors at the Home Office, who in turn informed the COBRA committee and the Police Nationale of France. Fifteen minutes after the SIO’s initial dispatch from the beach, news of the discoveries reached the American team at Grosvenor Square. A secure cable was sent priority status from the embassy to all federal agencies involved in the search for Elizabeth Halton, including the CIA.

At 6:18
P.M
. Eastern time, a copy reached the hands of Adrian Carter, who at that moment was seated in his regular chair in the CIA’s Global Ops Center, monitoring a highly illegal clandestine interrogation now taking place at a derelict farmhouse in the plains of northern Germany. He read the note quickly and for the first time in more than a week felt a fleeting sense of hope. Then he set the cable aside and stared at his monitor. The feed had been silent for five minutes. Gabriel, it seemed, had taken a break for dinner.

T
hey brought his clothing, then they brought him food: rice and beans, hard-boiled eggs and feta cheese, flatbread and sweet tea. He took a single bite, then pushed the plate a few inches toward Gabriel. Gabriel refused at first, but Ibrahim insisted, and so they sat there for several moments, prisoner and interrogator, sharing a simple meal in silence.

“We Muslims have a tradition called Eid,” Ibrahim said. “If a sheep is to be slaughtered, it is given one final meal.” He looked up from his food at Gabriel. “Is that what you are doing now, my friend? Giving your sacrificial lamb one final taste of life?”

“How long did they hold you?” Gabriel asked.

“Six months,” said Ibrahim. “And my release was as undignified as my arrest and incarceration. They turned me onto the streets of Minya in rags and ordered me to go home. When I entered my apartment, my wife screamed. She thought I was an intruder. She didn’t recognize me.”

“I take it your daughter wasn’t there when you arrived.”

Ibrahim tore off a piece of the flatbread and pushed it around the rice for a moment. “She died that night in the torture chambers of Minya. She was raped to death by Mubarak’s secret policemen. They buried her body in a criminal’s grave on the edge of the desert and refused to let me even see it. For them it was just another form of torture.”

He sipped at his tea contemplatively. “My wife blamed me for Jihan’s death. It was her right, of course. If I hadn’t joined the Sword of Allah, Jihan never would have been taken. For many days, my wife refused even to look at me. A week later I was informed by the university that my services were no longer needed. I was a broken man. I’d lost everything. My job. My daughter. My dignity.”

“And so you decided to leave Egypt?”

“I had no choice. To remain would have meant living underground. I wanted to sever my ties with the Sword. I wanted no part of jihadist politics. I wanted a new life, in a place where men did not murder little girls in torture chambers.”

“Why Amsterdam?”

“My wife had family living in the Oud West. They told us that the Muslim community in Holland was growing and that for the most part the Dutch were welcoming and tolerant. I applied for a visa at the Dutch embassy and was granted one straightaway.”

“I take it you neglected to inform the Dutch of your connection to the Sword of Allah.”

“It might have slipped my mind.”

“And the rest of the story you told me that night in Amsterdam?”

“It was all true. I built roads, then I swept them. I made furniture.” He held up his ruined hand. “Even after I lost my fingers.”

“And you had no contact with other Sword members?”

“Most of those who fled Egypt settled in America or London. Occasionally one would blow through Amsterdam with the wind.”

“And when they did?”

“They tried to draw me back into the fight, of course. I told them I was no longer interested in Islamic politics. I told them I wanted to live an Islamic life on my own and leave matters of governance and state to others.”

“And the Sword abided by your wishes?”

“Eventually,” Ibrahim said. “My son wasn’t so accommodating, however.”

“It is because of your son that we’re here tonight.”

Ibrahim nodded.

“A son who is half Egyptian and half Palestinian—a volatile mix.”

“Very volatile.”

“Tell me his name.”

“Ishaq,” the Egyptian said. “My son’s name is Ishaq.”

“It began with harmless questions, the kind of questions any curious adolescent boy might ask of his father. Why did we leave our home in Egypt to come to Europe? Why, if you were once a university professor, do you sweep streets? Why do we live in the land of strangers instead of the House of Islam? For many years, I told him only lies. But when he was fifteen, I told him the truth.”

“You told him you were a member of the Sword of Allah?”

“I did.”

“You told him about your arrest and torture? And about the death of Jihan?”

Ibrahim nodded. “I hoped that by telling Ishaq the truth, I would snuff out any jihadist embers that might be smoldering inside him. But my story had precisely the opposite effect. Ishaq became
more
interested in Islamic politics, not less. It also turned him into an extremely angry young man. He began to hate. He hated the Egyptian regime and the Americans who supported it.”

“And he wanted revenge.”

“It is something you and the Americans never seem to fully comprehend about us,” Ibrahim said. “When we are wronged, we
must
seek revenge. It is in our culture, our bloodstream. Each time you kill or torture one of us, you are creating an extended family of enemies that is honor bound to take retribution.”

Gabriel knew of this phenomenon better than most. He scooped up a bit of rice and beans with the bread and motioned Ibrahim to keep talking.

“Ishaq began to withdraw from Dutch society,” he said. “He no longer maintained friendships with Dutch boys and started routinely referring to Dutch girls as temptresses and whores. He wore a
kufi
and galabiya. He listened only to Arabic music and stopped drinking beer. When he was eighteen, he was arrested for assaulting a homosexual man outside a bar in the Leidseplein. The charges were dropped after I went to the injured man and offered to make restitution.”

“Did he go to university?”

Ibrahim nodded. “At nineteen he was accepted into the school of information and computer sciences at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. I hoped that the demands of his studies would temper his Islamic fervor, but once he settled in Rotterdam he became
more
Islamic in his outlook, not less. He fell in with a group of like-minded young jihadists. He traveled constantly to various marches and meetings. He grew his beard. It was as if my youth were being played out in front of me all over again.” He ate in silence for a moment. “I came to Europe to get away from Islamic politics. I wanted a new life, for myself and for my son. But by the mid-nineties radical Islamist politics had come to the West. And in many ways it was more radical and toxic than the Islam of the Orient. It had been tainted by Saudi money and Saudi imams. It was Wahhabi and Salafist in its outlook. It was toxic and violent.”

“Was he involved in terrorist activities then?”

Ibrahim shook his head. “He was too confused to make a commitment to any one group or idea. He wasn’t sure if he was an Egyptian or a Palestinian. One day he was with the friends of Hamas, the next he was singing the praises of the mujahideen in Afghanistan.”

“So what happened?”

“Osama bin Laden flew airplanes into buildings in New York and Washington,” Ibrahim said. “And everything changed.”

Gabriel was not ready to relinquish the illusion of a waiting American airplane just yet, and so he summoned Sarah with two firm raps on the dining-room door and murmured a few barely intelligible words into her ear about delaying its departure for a few minutes. Then he looked at Ibrahim and said, “You were telling me about 9/11. Please, continue.”

“It was an earthquake, a tear in the fabric of history—not only for the West but for us.”

“Muslims?”

“Islamists,”
he said, correcting Gabriel. “The Americans made a terrible miscalculation after 9/11. They saw Muslims dancing in the streets across the Arab world and in Europe and therefore assumed that all Muslims and Islamists supported Osama. They lumped us all together with the global jihadists like bin Laden and Zawahiri. They didn’t realize that for someone like me, a moderate Islamist, the attacks of 9/11 were just as unconscionable and barbaric as they were to the civilized world. We moderate Islamists believed that Osama and al-Qaeda made a terrible tactical blunder by attacking the United States and by picking a fight it could not possibly win. We believed that Osama was an Islamic charlatan who had done more to hurt the cause of Islamism than all the secular apostate regimes combined. What’s more, we believed that the massacre of thousands of innocent people was a decidedly un-Islamic act that violated Islamic law and custom. The nineteen hijackers were invited
guests
in America and, as such, they were honor bound to behave accordingly. Instead, they slaughtered their hosts. Regardless of how you feel about us and our religion, we Muslims are hospitable people. We do not slaughter our hosts.”

He pushed his plate toward Gabriel again. Gabriel took half of a hard-boiled egg and a lump of feta.

“I take it Ishaq didn’t see it that way.”

“No, he didn’t,” Ibrahim said. “Nine-eleven pushed him to the edge of the precipice.”

“What pushed him over the edge?”

“Iraq.”

“Where was he recruited?”

“He was living in Amsterdam at the time with his wife, an Egyptian girl named Hanifah, and their son, Ahmed. Within days of the American invasion, he traveled to Egypt, where he made contact with the Sword of Allah. The Sword gave him elementary training in their clandestine schools and desert camps, then helped him to travel to Iraq, where he trained and practiced his craft with al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. He left Iraq after six months and returned to Amsterdam, where he was in close contact with this man Samir al-Masri. A month later, he moved his family to Copenhagen, where he took a job at something called the Islamic Affairs Council of Denmark. The Council, I’m afraid, is nothing more than a front for jihadist activities.”

“Your son organized a second cell from Copenhagen?”

“So it would appear.”

“And so when Samir and his cell vanished from Amsterdam a few days before the attack, you decided to approach me. You gave me just enough information in hopes of derailing the operation, so that your son might not be caught up in it.”

Ibrahim gave a stoic nod of his head.

“You lied to me,” Gabriel said. “You deceived me in order to save your son’s life.”

“Any decent father would have done the same.”

“No, Ibrahim, not when innocent human lives are at stake. More than three hundred people are dead because of you and your son. If you had told me the truth—the entire truth—we could have stopped the attack together. Instead you gave me crumbs, the same bread crumbs you gave the SSI twenty-five years ago when you tried to save your daughter’s life.”

“And if I’d told you more that night? Where would I have ended up? The Americans would have assumed I was a terrorist. They would have placed me on a plane and shipped me back to Egypt to be tortured again.”

“Did you know London was the target? Did you know they were planning to kidnap Elizabeth Halton and ransom her for your friend, Sheikh Abdullah?”

“I knew nothing of their plans. These boys are extremely well trained. Someone highly skilled is pulling the strings.”

“Someone is.” Gabriel hesitated. “Maybe that someone is
you
, Ibrahim. Maybe you’re the one who masterminded the entire operation. Maybe you’re the one they call the Sphinx.”

“The willingness to believe outlandish things is an Arab disease, Mr. Allon, not a Zionist one. The more time you waste pursuing silly notions like that, the less time we have to find the ambassador’s daughter and bring her home alive.”

Gabriel seized on a single word of Ibrahim’s last answer, the word
we
.

“And how are
we
going to do that?”

“I believe Ishaq is one of the terrorists holding the American woman hostage.”

Gabriel leaned forward in his chair. “Why would you think that?”

“Ishaq left Copenhagen two weeks ago. He told Hanifah that he was going to the Middle East for a research trip on behalf of the Islamic Affairs Council. In order to maintain that fiction, he telephones the apartment every evening at Ahmed’s bedtime.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Hanifah has told me so.”

“Have you spoken to him yourself?”

“I’ve left messages for him, but he never calls me.”

Gabriel placed a notepad and pen on the table and slid them toward Ibrahim.

“I need the address of the apartment in Copenhagen. And I need the telephone number.”

“Hanifah and Ahmed have nothing to do with this.”

“Then they have nothing to fear.”

“I want you to promise me that no harm will come to them.”

“You’re in no position to ask for anything, Ibrahim.”

“Promise me, Mr. Allon. Promise me you won’t harm them.”

Gabriel nodded once. Ibrahim wrote down the information, then pushed the pad toward Gabriel and recited two lines from the twenty-second chapter of Genesis:

“‘So early the next morning, Abraham saddled his ass and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. He split the wood for the burnt offering, and he set out for the place of which God had told him.’”

“You know your Hebrew scripture,” said Gabriel. “But he’s no longer your son, Ibrahim. He’s infected with the virus of jihad. He’s a monster.”

“Perhaps, but he’ll always be my son.” He looked down at the notepad in shame. “If I remember correctly, the Jews believe that Abraham went to Beersheba after passing God’s test. But what will happen to me? Will I be shipped to Egypt for further questioning or do I remain here?” He looked around the room. “Wherever
here
is.”

“I suppose that depends on the Americans.”

The disdainful look in Ibrahim’s eyes made it clear how he felt about Americans. “I suggest leaving the Americans out of this,” he said. “It would be better for you and I to cross the bridge over Jahannam alone. Whatever you decide, do it quickly. The ambassador’s daughter is in the hands of a young man whose sister was murdered by Pharaoh’s henchman. If he is ordered to kill her, he will not hesitate.”