The Secret Servant (29 page)

T
he spotter was good. Cairo good. Baghdad good.

The route he had taken from Hampstead Heath had been long and needlessly complicated: four different buses, two long hikes, and a final tube ride on the Victoria Line from King’s Cross to Walthamstow Central. Now he was walking up the Lea Bridge Road with a mobile phone pressed to his ear and Eli Lavon trailing a hundred yards behind him. He turned into Northumberland Road and thirty seconds later entered a small terraced house with a pebble dash exterior. There were lights burning in the windows on the second floor, evidence of other operatives inside.

Lavon circled around the block and made his way back to Lea Bridge Road. On the opposite side of the road was an empty bus shelter with an adequate view of the target house. As he lowered himself wearily onto the bench, he could hear Uzi Navot relaying the address to Graham Seymour at MI5 Headquarters. Lavon waited until Navot was finished, then murmured into his throat mic: “I can’t stay here for long, Uzi.”

“You won’t have to. The cavalry is on the way.”

“Just tell them to come quietly,” Lavon said. “But hurry. I’m about to freeze to death.”

It took MI5 and the Anti-Terrorist Branch of Scotland Yard just ten minutes to produce a list of the four men now using 23 Northumberland Road as a legal address and just twenty minutes to acquire the records of every telephone call placed from the residence for the previous two years. Calls placed to numbers that appeared on government watch lists, or to phones located in areas known for the extremism of their Islam, were automatically flagged for additional scrutiny. The records of calls placed from
those
numbers during the past two years were pulled as well. As a result, within an hour of Lavon’s first contact, MI5 and Scotland Yard had constructed a matrix of several thousand numbers and more than five hundred corresponding names.

Shortly after three
A.M
., a copy of the matrix was placed before the special MI5 task force that had been working around the clock since Elizabeth Halton’s disappearance. Five minutes later Graham Seymour personally delivered a second copy of the document to the fourth-floor conference room, which was occupied at that moment by three rather young women. One was an attractive American in her early thirties with shoulder-length blond hair and skin the color of alabaster. The other two were both Israelis, a curt Rubenesque woman with the bearing of a soldier and a small dark-haired girl who walked with a slight limp. Though all three had entered the United Kingdom on false passports, Seymour had agreed to let them into Thames House on the condition they did so under their real names. The Rubenesque Israeli was Major Rimona Stern of AMAN, the Israeli military intelligence service. The quiet girl was an analyst for the Israeli foreign intelligence service named Dina Sarid. The American’s credentials identified her as Irene Moore, a CIA desk officer attached to the Counterterrorism Center at Langley..

They accepted the document gratefully, then divided it among themselves. The American and the Rubenesque Israeli took the telephone numbers. The girl with the slight limp handled the names. She was good with names—Graham Seymour could see that. But there was something else: the intense seriousness of purpose, the stain of early widowhood in her dark eyes. She had been touched by terror, he thought. She was both victim and survivor. And she had a mind like a mainframe computer. Graham Seymour was convinced the matrix of names and numbers contained a valuable clue. And he had no doubt who would find it first.

He slipped out of the conference room and returned to the ops center. Waiting on his desk when he arrived was a dispatch from the Essex Police Headquarters in Chelmsford. A shallow-bottomed craft had been discovered abandoned along the northern banks of the river Crouch near Holliwell Point. Based on the condition of the outboard engine, it appeared that the boat had been used that evening. Graham Seymour picked up the phone and dialed Uzi Navot’s line at the Israeli command post in Kensington.

Thirty seconds later, Navot hung up the phone and relayed the news to Shamron.

“It looks like you were right about them taking him over the river.”

“You doubted me, Uzi?”

“No, boss.”

“He’s alive,” Shamron said, “but he won’t be for long. We need a break. One name. One telephone number. Something.”

“The girls are looking for it.”

“Let’s hope they find it, Uzi.
Soon
.”

T
he next time Gabriel awakened, his body was being washed. For an instant he feared they had killed him and that he was witnessing the ritual cleansing of his own corpse. Then, as he passed through another layer of consciousness, he realized it was only his captors trying to clean up the mess they had made of him.

When they were finished, they unchained his hands long enough to clothe him in a tracksuit and a pair of slip-on sandals, then withdrew without further violence. Some time later, a half hour perhaps, Ishaq returned. He regarded Gabriel with a perverted calmness for several moments before posing his first question.

“Where are my wife and son?”

“Why are you still here? I would have thought you would have been long gone by now.”

“To Pakistan? Or Afghanistan? Or Wherever-the-fuck-istan?”

“Yes,” said Gabriel. “Back to the House of Islam, refuge of murderers.”

“I was planning to go there,” Ishaq said with a smile, “but I asked to come back here to deal with you, and my request was granted.”

“Lucky you.”

“Now, tell me where my wife and son are.”

“What time is it?”

“Five minutes till midnight,” said Ishaq, proud of his wit. Then he gave his watch an exaggerated glance. “
Four
minutes, actually. Your time is running out. Now, answer my question.”

“I suspect they’re in the Negev by now. We have a secret prison there for the worst of the worst. It is the equivalent of a galactic black hole. Those who enter are never heard from again. Hanifah and Ahmed will be well taken care of.”

“You’re lying.”

“You’re probably right, Ishaq.”

“When we were negotiating over the phone, you told me you were an American. You told me that my family was going to Egypt to be tortured. Now you tell me they are in Israel. You see my point?”

“Have you attempted to make one?”

“You are not to be trusted—that is my point. But, then, that is not surprising. You are, after all, a Jew.”

“The patricide lectures me about the immorality of deceit.”

“No, Allon, it was
you
who murdered my father. I saved him.”

“I know my brain is a little fuzzy at the moment, Ishaq, but you’re going to have to explain that one to me.”

“My father was once a member of the Sword of Allah, but he turned his back on jihad and lived the life of an apostate in the land of strangers. Then he compounded his offenses by throwing in his lot with you, the Jewish murderer of Palestinian mujahideen. Under the laws of Islam my father was condemned to Hell for his actions. I gave him a martyr’s death. My father is now a
shaheed
and therefore he is guaranteed a place in Paradise.”

The words had been spoken with such a profound seriousness that Gabriel knew further debate was pointless. It would be like arguing with a man who believed the earth was flat or that American astronauts had never landed on the moon. He felt suddenly like Winston Smith in Room 101 of the Ministry of Love. Freedom is slavery. Two and two make five. Murder of one’s father is divine duty.

“You were good in Denmark,” Gabriel said. “Very professional. You must have been planning that for a long time. I don’t suppose killing your own father was part of the original plan, but you improvised extraordinarily well.”

“Thank you,” Ishaq said earnestly.

“Why weren’t you there for the finale? And why wasn’t I killed along with him?”

Ishaq smiled calmly but made no response. Gabriel answered his own question.

“You and the Sphinx had other plans for me, didn’t you—plans that were laid the moment my picture appeared in the London papers after the kidnapping?”

“Who is this person you refer to as the Sphinx?”

Gabriel ignored him and pushed on. “The Sphinx knew that if the Americans didn’t release Elizabeth, eventually her father would take matters into his own hands. He knew that Robert Halton would offer the only thing he had: money. He also knew that someone would have to deliver the money. He waited for Halton to make the offer, then he seized the opportunity to take his revenge.”

“And yet you came anyway.” Ishaq was unable to prevent a note of astonishment from creeping into his voice. “Surely you knew this would be your fate. Why would you do such a thing? Why would you be willing to trade your life for another—for the spoiled daughter of an American billionaire?”

“Where is she, Ishaq?”

“Do you really think I would tell you, even if I knew where she was?”

“You know exactly where she is. She’s an innocent, Ishaq. Even under your perverted notion of
takfir
, you have no right to kill her.”

“She is the daughter of the American ambassador, the goddaughter of the American president, and spoke out in favor of the war in Iraq. She is a legitimate target, under our laws or anyone else’s.”

“Only a terrorist would consider Elizabeth Halton a legitimate target. We had a deal. Thirty million dollars for Elizabeth’s life. I expect you to live up to that deal.”

“You are in no position to make demands, Allon. Besides, our laws permit us to lie to infidels when necessary and to take the infidels’ money when it suits our needs. Thirty million dollars will go a very long way toward funding our global jihad. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll even be able to use it to buy a nuclear weapon—a weapon we can use to wipe your country off the map.”

“Keep the money. Buy your fucking weapon. But let her go.”

Ishaq pulled a frown, as if bored by the topic. “Let us return to my original question,” he said. “Where are Hanifah and Ahmed?”

“They were in custody in Copenhagen. When you demanded that I deliver the money, we went to the Danes and asked for your wife and son as collateral. The Danes, of course, granted our request without hesitation. If I don’t come back alive from this—and if Elizabeth Halton is not freed—your family will disappear from the face of the earth.”

He appeared shaken but put on a defiant face. “You’re lying.”

“Whatever you say, Ishaq. But trust me, if anything happens to me, you’ll never see them again.”

“Even if it is true that you have taken them to Israel as
collateral
, once the world learns they are being held, great pressure will be brought to bear in order to secure their release. Your government will have no recourse but to bend.” He stood abruptly and looked at his watch. “It is now two minutes to midnight. We have something we need from you before your execution. Give it to us without a struggle and your death will be relatively painless. If you insist on fighting us again, the boys will have their way with you. And this time, I won’t call them off.”

He opened the door and took a step outside, then turned and looked at Gabriel once more. “It occurs to me that soon you will be a
shaheed,
too. If you convert to Islam before your death, your place in Paradise will be assured. I can help, if you wish. The procedure is really quite simple.”

Ishaq, receiving no answer, closed the door and secured it with a padlock. Gabriel closed his eyes.
Two and two make four,
he thought.
Two and two make four.

I
think I may have found something.”

Graham Seymour looked up. It was the Israeli girl with dark hair and a limp: Dina Sarid. He gestured toward the empty chair next to his desk in the operations room. The girl remained standing.

“According to British Telecom records, twenty-seven calls have been placed from the telephone in the Northumberland Road residence to a phone located at Number Fourteen Reginald Street in Luton during the past eighteen months. Five of these calls were placed
after
the disappearance of Elizabeth Halton.”

Seymour frowned. Luton, a heavily Muslim suburb north of London, was one of MI5’s worst problems.

“Go on,” he said.

“According to your matrix, the telephone in Luton is located in the home of a man named Nabil Elbadry. Mr. Elbadry runs an import-export business and several other enterprises. He does not appear on any of your lists of known terrorist sympathizers or jihadi activists.”

“So what’s the problem?” Seymour asked.

“When I saw the name a few minutes ago, I knew I’d seen it somewhere before.”

“Where?”

“In a cache of Sword of Allah files we obtained from the Egyptian SSI.”

Seymour felt his stomach begin to burn. “Keep going, Miss Sarid.”

“Five years ago, the Egyptians arrested a man named Kemel Elbadry in Cairo. Under interrogation at the Torah Prison complex, he admitted to taking part in several Sword of Allah operations inside Egypt.”

“What does this have to do with Nabil Elbadry from Luton?”

“According to Kemel’s file, he had a brother named Nabil who immigrated to England in 1987. That corresponds exactly with the details on Nabil Elbadry’s immigration records.”

“Is Kemel still in custody?”

“He’s dead.”

“Executed?”

“Unclear.”

Graham Seymour stood up and called for quiet in the operations room.

“Nabil Elbadry,” he shouted. “Number Fourteen Reginald Street, Luton. I want to know everything there is to know about this man and his business interests and I want to know it in five minutes or less.”

He looked at the girl. She nodded her head once and limped slowly back to the conference room.

The boys in black came for him ten minutes after Ishaq left the cell. As they led him up the narrow stairs, Gabriel prepared himself for another beating. Instead, upon his arrival in the warehouse, he was lowered rather cordially into a folding aluminum chair.

He looked straight ahead and saw the lens of a video camera. Ishaq, now playing the role of director and cinematographer, ordered the four men in black to stand at Gabriel’s back. Three held Heckler & Koch compact submachine guns. One held a knife ominously. Gabriel knew his time had not yet come. His hands were cuffed in front. Infidels about to suffer the profound indignity of beheading always had their hands bound in back.

Ishaq made a few minor changes to the arrangement of his props, then stepped from behind his camera and handed Gabriel his script. Gabriel looked down. Then, like an actor unhappy with his lines, he tried to hand it back.

“Read it!” Ishaq demanded.

“No,” replied Gabriel calmly.

“Read it or I’ll kill you now.”

Gabriel let the script fall from his hands.

It took Graham Seymour’s task force only ten minutes to assemble a detailed inventory of all business interests and properties registered to Nabil Elbadry of Reginald Street, Luton. His eyes stopped halfway down the list. A company in which Elbadry was a minority partner owned a warehouse in West Dock Street in Harwich, not far from the ferry port. Seymour stood and went quickly to the map. Harwich was approximately forty miles from the spot where the Essex police had discovered the abandoned boat. He walked back to his desk and dialed the Israeli command post in Kensington.

Ishaq snatched up the fallen pages, then, after composing himself, read the statement on Gabriel’s behalf. Gabriel had committed many crimes against Palestinians and Muslims, Ishaq declared, and for these crimes he would soon face the justice of the sword. Gabriel did not listen to the entire recitation of his sins. Instead he looked down at the floor of the warehouse and wondered why Ishaq had not bothered to obscure his face before stepping in front of the camera. He knew the answer, of course: Ishaq was a martyr in the making and they were going to die together. When Ishaq was finished reading Gabriel’s death sentence, he walked over to the camera and checked to make certain it had recorded properly. Satisfied, he signaled the boys in black to commence their next beating. It seemed to last an eternity. The stab of the needle was an act of mercy. Gabriel’s eyes fell shut and he felt himself drowning in black water.

“How long will it take you to get your teams in place, Uzi?”

“I moved everyone that way after the Essex police found the boat. I can have three teams in Harwich in twenty minutes or less. The question is, what do we do when we get there?”

“First we determine whether he’s really there and, if so, whether he is still alive. Then we wait.”

“
Wait?
For what, boss?”

“We came here to get the American girl, Uzi. And we’re not leaving without her.”