The Secret Servant (6 page)

I
was really looking forward to that Thai food,” said Eli Lavon.

“I’ll get you Thai food after we break into Samir’s apartment.”

“Please tell me where you’re going to get me Thai food at three in the morning.”

“I’m very resourceful.”

Gabriel rubbed a porthole in the fogged windshield and peered out toward the entrance of the Hudsonstraat. Lavon looked down and tugged at the buttons of his overcoat.

“We’re not supposed to use rental cars in operational situations unless they’re procured from clean sources.”

“I know, Eli.”

“We’re also not supposed to conduct break-ins and crash searches without proper backup or approval from King Saul Boulevard.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that.”

“You’re bending too many rules. That’s how mistakes happen. I was looking forward to spending the night at the Hotel Europa, not a Dutch holding cell.”

“Please tell me where I’m supposed to get a clean car and proper backup at three o’clock in the morning in Amsterdam.”

“So much for your resourcefulness.” Lavon stared gloomily out the window. “Look around, Gabriel. Have you ever seen so many satellite dishes?” He shook his head slowly. “They’re monuments to European naïveté. The Europeans thought they could take in millions of immigrants from the poorest regions of the Muslim world and turn them into good little social democrats in a single generation. And look at the results. For the most part the Muslims of Europe are ghettoized and seething with anger.”

Trapped between two worlds, thought Gabriel. Not fully Arab. Not quite Dutch. Lost in the land of strangers.

“This place has always been an incubator for violent ideologies,” Gabriel said. “Islamic extremism is just the latest virus to thrive in Europe’s nurturing environment.”

Lavon nodded thoughtfully and blew into his hands. “You know, for a long time after I came back to Israel, I missed Vienna. I missed my coffeehouses. I missed walking down my favorite streets. But I’ve come to realize that this continent is dying a slow death. Europe is receding quietly into history. It’s old and tired, and its young are so pessimistic about the prospects of the future they refuse to have enough children to ensure their own survival. They believe in nothing but their thirty-five-hour workweek and their August vacation.”

“And their anti-Semitism,” said Gabriel.

“That’s the one thing about Vienna I never miss,” Lavon said. “The virus of modern anti-Semitism started here in Europe, but after the war it spread to the Arab world, where it mutated and grew stronger. Now Europe and the radical Muslims are passing it back and forth, infecting one another.” He looked at Gabriel. “And so here we are again, two nice Jewish boys sitting on a European street corner at three o’clock in the morning. My God, when will it end?”

“It’s never going to end, Eli. This is forever.”

Lavon pondered this notion in silence for a moment. “Have you given any thought to how you’re going to get into the apartment?” he asked.

Gabriel reached into his coat pocket and produced a small metal tool.

“I could never use one of those things,” Lavon said.

“I have better hands than you do.”

“Best hands in the business—that’s what Shamron always said. But I still don’t know what you think you’re going to find inside. If Samir and his cell are truly operational, the apartment will be sanitized.”

“You’d be surprised, Eli. Their masterminds are brilliant, but some of their foot soldiers aren’t exactly brain surgeons. They’re sloppy. They leave things laying around. They make little mistakes.”

“So do intelligence officers,” Lavon said. “Have you at least considered the possibility that we’re about to walk straight into a trap?”

“That’s what Berettas are for.”

Gabriel opened the door before Lavon could object again and climbed out of the car. They crossed the boulevard at an angle, pausing once to allow an empty streetcar to rattle past, and rounded the corner into the Hudsonstraat. It was a narrow side street lined with terraces of small tenement buildings. They were two levels in height and Orwellian in their uniformity and ugliness. At the front of each building was a small semicircular alcove with four separate doors, two leading to the apartments on the first floor and two leading to the apartments upstairs.

Gabriel stepped immediately into the alcove of Number 37 and, with Lavon at his back, went to work on the standard five-pin lock on the door for Apartment D. It surrendered ten seconds later. He slipped the lockpick into his pocket and removed the Beretta, then turned the latch and stepped inside. He stood motionless for a moment in the darkness, gun leveled in his outstretched hands, listening for the faintest sound or slightest suggestion of movement. Hearing nothing, he motioned for Lavon to come inside.

Lavon switched on a small Maglite and led the way into the sitting room. The furnishings were of flea market quality, the floor was cracked linoleum, and the walls were bare except for a single travel poster depicting the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Gabriel walked over to the long trestle table that served as Samir’s desk. It was empty except for a single yellow legal pad and a cheap desk lamp.

He switched on the lamp and examined the pad. Two-thirds of it had been used and the top page was blank. He moved his fingers over the surface and felt impressions. An amateur’s mistake. He handed the pad to Lavon, then took hold of the flashlight and shone it at an angle over the surface of the table. It was covered in a fine layer of dust except for a precise square in the center—the spot, Gabriel reckoned, where Samir’s computer had been before his flight from Amsterdam.

“Search the furniture cushions,” Gabriel said. “I’ll have a look around the rest of the flat.”

He went through a doorway into the kitchen. The debris of Samir’s final gathering with his acolytes from the al-Hijrah Mosque lay strewn across the linoleum countertops: empty takeaway containers, greasy paper plates, discarded plastic utensils, squashed teabags. Gabriel opened the refrigerator, a favorite terrorist storage space for explosives, and saw that it was empty. The same was true of all the cabinets. He looked in the cupboard beneath the sink and found nothing but an unopened container of kitchen cleaner. Samir, Islamic theoretician and spokesman for the jihadi cause, was a typical bachelor slob.

Gabriel paused for a moment in the sitting room to check on Lavon’s progress, then headed down a short hallway toward the back of the apartment. Samir’s bathroom was as appalling as the kitchen. Gabriel gave it a rapid search, then entered the bedroom. A stripped mattress lay slightly askew on the metal frame and the three drawers of the dresser were all partially open. Samir, it seemed, had packed in a hurry.

Gabriel removed the top drawer and dumped the remaining contents onto the bed. Threadbare underwear, mismatched socks, a book of matches from a discotheque in London’s Leicester Square, an envelope from a photo-processing shop around the corner. Gabriel slipped the matches into his pocket, then opened the envelope and leafed through the prints. He saw Samir in Trafalgar Square and Samir with a member of the Queen’s Life Guard outside Buckingham Palace; Samir riding the Millennium Wheel and Samir outside the Houses of Parliament. The last photograph, Samir posing with four friends in front of the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, caused Gabriel’s heart to skip a beat.

Five minutes later he was walking calmly along the empty pavements of the Hudsonstraat, with the photographs in his pocket and Lavon at his side. “If the dates on the pictures are correct, it means Samir and his friends were in London four months ago,” he said. “Someone should probably go to London to have a word with our friends at MI5.”

“I can see where this is heading,” Lavon said. “You get to go to ride into London like a knight on a white horse and I get to go blind reading the rest of Solomon Rosner’s files.”

“At least you get to have your Thai food.”

“Why did you have to mention the Thai food?”

G
abriel had spent much of his life eluding the police forces and security services of Europe, and so it was with considerable reluctance that he agreed to be met at Heathrow Airport the following afternoon by MI5.

He spotted the three-man reception team as he came into the arrivals hall. It was not difficult; they were wearing matching mackintosh raincoats, and one was holding Gabriel’s photograph. He had been instructed to let the MI5 men make the approach, so he went to the information kiosk and spent several minutes pretending to scrutinize a list of London hotels. Finally, anxious to deliver his briefing
before
the terrorists struck, he walked over and introduced himself. The officer with the photograph took him by the arm and led him outside to a waiting Jaguar limousine. Gabriel smiled. He had always harbored a secret envy of British spies and their cars.

The rear window slid down a few inches and a long, boney hand beckoned him over. The hand was attached to none other than Graham Seymour, MI5’s long-serving and highly regarded deputy director general. He was in his late fifties now and had aged like fine wine. His Savile Row pin-striped suit fit him to perfection, and his full head of blond hair had a silvery cast to it that gave him the look of those male models one sees in advertisements for costly but needless trinkets. As Gabriel climbed into the car, Seymour appraised him silently for a moment with a pair of granite-colored eyes. He did not look pleased, but then few men in his position would. The Netherlands, France, Germany, and Spain all had their fair share of Muslim radicals, but among intelligence professionals there was little disagreement over which country was the epicenter of European Islamic extremism. It was the country Graham Seymour was sworn to protect: the United Kingdom.

Gabriel knew that the crisis now facing Britain was many years in the making and, to a large degree, self-inflicted. For two decades, beginning in the 1980s and continuing even after the attacks of 9/11, British governments both Labour and Tory had thrown open their doors to the world’s most hardened holy warriors. Cast out by countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria, they had come to London, where they were free to publish, preach, organize, conspire, and raise money. As a result, Great Britain, the land of John Locke, William Shakespeare, and Winston Churchill, had unwittingly allowed itself to become the primary incubator of a violent ideology that sought to destroy everything for which it had once stood. The British security and intelligence services, confronted by a gathering storm, had responded by choosing the path of accommodation rather than resistance. Extremism was tolerated so long as it was directed
outward
, toward the secular Arab regimes, America, and, of course, Israel. The failure of this policy of appeasement had been held up for all the world to see on July 7, 2005, when three bombs exploded inside the London Underground and a fourth tore a London city bus to shreds in Russell Square. Fifty-two people were killed and seven hundred more wounded. The perpetrators of this bloodbath were not destitute Muslims from abroad but middle-class British boys who had turned on the country of their birth. And all evidence suggested it was only their opening salvo. Her Majesty’s security services estimated the number of terrorists residing in Britain at sixteen thousand—three thousand of whom had actually trained in al-Qaeda camps—and recent intelligence suggested that the United Kingdom had eclipsed America and Israel as al-Qaeda’s primary target.

“It’s funny,” said Seymour, “but when we checked the manifest for the flight from Amsterdam we didn’t see anyone on the list named Gabriel Allon.”

“Obviously you didn’t look hard enough.”

The MI5 man held out his hand.

“Let’s not do this, Graham. Haven’t we more pressing matters to deal with than the name on my passport?”

“Give it to me.”

Gabriel surrendered his passport and stared out the window at the traffic rushing along the A4. It was 3:30 in the afternoon and already dark. No wonder the Arabs turned to radicals when they moved here, he thought. Perhaps it was light deprivation that drove them to jihad and terror.

Graham Seymour opened the passport and recited the particulars. “Heinrich Kiever. Place of birth, Berlin.” He looked up at Gabriel. “East or West?”

“Herr Kiever is definitely a man of the West.”

“We had an agreement, Allon.”

“Yes, I know.”

“It stated that we would grant you absolution for your multitude of sins in exchange for a simple commitment on your part—that you would inform us when you were coming to our fair shores and that you would refrain from conducting operations on our soil without obtaining our permission and cooperation beforehand.”

“I’m sitting in the back of an MI5 limousine. How much more cooperation and notification do you require?”

“What about the passport?”

“It’s nice, isn’t it?”

“Do the Germans know you’re abusing their travel documents?”

“We abuse yours, too, Graham. It’s what we do.”

“
We
don’t do it. SIS makes a point of traveling only on British or Commonwealth passports.”

“How sporting of them,” Gabriel said. “But it’s far easier to travel the world on a British passport than it is on an Israeli one. Safer, too. Take a trip to Syria or Lebanon some time on an Israeli passport. It’s an experience you’ll never forget.”

“Smart-ass.” Seymour handed the passport to Gabriel. “What were you doing in Amsterdam?”

“Some personal business.”

“Elaborate, please.”

“I’m afraid I can’t.”

“Did the Dutch know you were there?”

“Not exactly.”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“I always heard you were good, Graham.”

Seymour pulled his face into a fatigued frown, a sign that he’d had enough of the verbal sparring match. The inhospitality of his reception came as little surprise to Gabriel. The British services did not care much for the Office. They were Arabists by education, anti-Semites by breeding, and still resented the Jews for driving the Empire out of Palestine.

“What have you got for me, Gabriel?”

“I think an al-Qaeda cell from Amsterdam might have entered Britain in the last forty-eight hours with the intention of carrying out a major attack.”

“Just one cell?” Seymour quipped. “I’m sure they’ll feel right at home.”

“That bad, Graham?”

Seymour nodded his gray head. “At last count we were monitoring more than two hundred networks and separate groupings of known terrorists. Half our Muslim youth profess admiration for Osama bin Laden, and we estimate that more than one hundred thousand supported the attacks on the London transport system, which means they have a very large pool of potential recruits from which to draw in the future. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t sound the alarm just because another cell of Muslim fanatics has decided to put ashore.”

“Maybe it isn’t
just
another cell, Graham. Maybe they’re the real thing.”

“They’re all the real thing,” Seymour said. “You said you
think
they’re here. Does that mean you’re not sure?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“So let me make sure I understand correctly. I have sixteen thousand
known
Islamic terrorists residing in my country, but I’m supposed to divert manpower and resources into finding a cell that you
think
might be in Britain?” Greeted by silence, Graham Seymour answered his own question. “If it were anyone but you, I’d pull over and let him out. But you do have something of a track record, don’t you? What makes you think they might be here?”

Gabriel handed him the envelope of photographs.

“This is all you have? Some snapshots of Ahmed’s holiday in London? No train tickets? No rental car receipts? No e-mail intercepts? No visual or audio surveillance?”

“They were here on a surveillance mission four months ago. And his name isn’t Ahmed. It’s Samir.”

“Samir what?”

“Samir al-Masri, Hudsonstraat 37, Oud West, Amsterdam.”

Seymour looked at the photo of Samir standing in front of the Houses of Parliament. “Is he Dutch?”

“Egyptian, as far we know.”

“As far as you know? What about the other members of this phantom cell? You have any names?”

Gabriel handed him a slip of paper with the other names Ibrahim Fawaz had given him in Amsterdam. “Based on what we know, the cell was operating out of the al-Hijrah Mosque on the Jan Hazenstraat in west Amsterdam.”

“And you’re sure he’s Egyptian?”

“That’s the flag he was flying in Amsterdam. Why?”

“Because we’ve been picking up some chatter recently among some of our more radical Egyptian countrymen.”

“What sort of chatter?”

“Blowing up buildings, bringing down bridges and airplanes, killing a few thousand people on the Underground—you know, the usual things people discuss over tea and biscuits.”

“Where’s it coming from?”

Seymour hesitated, then said, “Finsbury Park.”

“But of course.”

There was perhaps no more appropriate symbol of Britain’s current predicament than the North London Central Mosque, known commonly as the Finsbury Park mosque. Built in 1990 with money donated by the king of Saudi Arabia, it was among the most radical in Europe. Richard Reid, the infamous shoe-bomber, had passed through its doors; so had Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called twentieth hijacker, and Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian terrorist who was arrested shortly before the millennium for plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. British police raided the mosque in January 2003—inside they discovered such sacred items as forged passports, chemical-protective suits, and a stun gun—and eventually it was turned over to new leadership. It was later revealed that one member of the new board of trustees was a former Hamas terror mastermind from the West Bank. When the former terrorist gave the British government assurances that he was now a man of peace, he was permitted to remain in his post.

“So you think Samir is the cell leader?”

“That’s what my source tells me.”

“Has your source ever been right in the past?”

“Do you remember that plot to shoot down an El Al jetliner at Schiphol last year?”

“The one that the Dutch broke up?”

“The
Dutch
didn’t break it up, Graham.
We
broke it up, with the help of this same source.”

Seymour looked down at the photographs. “It’s not much to go on,” he said, “but I’m afraid it does fit the profile of a major attack scenario we’ve developed.”

“What sort of scenario?”

“An action cell based abroad, working with surveillance and support cells buried within the local community here. The action cell members train and prepare in a place where we can’t monitor them, then come ashore at the last minute, so we have no time to find them and disrupt their plans. Obviously it would take complex planning and a skilled mastermind to pull it off.” He held up the snapshots. “Can I keep these?”

“They’re yours.”

“I’ll have Immigration run the names and see if your boys have actually entered the country, and I’ll give copies of the pictures to our colleagues in the Anti-Terrorist Branch of Scotland Yard. If the Metropolitan Police deem the threat credible, they might put a few more men at some of the sites al-Masri visited.”

“What about raising the overall threat level?” Gabriel asked. “What about stepping up the surveillance of your local Egyptian radicals in Finsbury Park?”

“We’re not like our American brethren. We don’t like to move the needle on the threat meter each time we get nervous. We find it only serves to make the British public more cynical. As for our local Egyptians, we’re watching them closely enough already.”

“I hope so.”

“How long are you planning to stay in London?”

“Just tonight.”

Seymour handed him a business card. It had nothing on it but a telephone number. “It’s for my mobile. Call me if you pick up anything else in Amsterdam. Can I drop you at your hotel?”

“No thanks, Graham.”

“How about your safe flat?”

“Our embassy would be fine. I’m going to have a quiet word with our local chief of station and the head of embassy security to make sure
we
take appropriate measures.”

“Give my best to your station chief. And tell him to behave himself.”

“Is it your intention to follow me after I leave the embassy?”

“I don’t have the spare manpower or I would.”

He was lying, of course. Honor among spies went only so far.

Gabriel’s meetings at the embassy ran longer than expected. The chief of security had turned what should have been a five-minute briefing into an hour-long question-and-answer period, while the Office’s chief of station had used a routine courtesy call as an opportunity to try to impress the man he clearly assumed would one day be his boss. The debacle was made complete at six, when the ambassador appeared without warning and insisted Gabriel accompany him to dinner in Knightsbridge. Gabriel had no excuse at the ready and was forced to endure a painfully boring evening discussing the intricacies of Israel’s ties to the United Kingdom. Throughout the meal he thought often of Eli Lavon quietly reading files in snowy Amsterdam and wished that he was still there with him.

It was after ten o’clock by the time he finally entered the Office safe flat on the Bayswater Road overlooking Hyde Park. He left his bag in the entrance hall and quickly took stock of his surroundings. It was simply furnished, as most safe flats were, and rather large by London standards. Housekeeping had left food in the fridge and a 9mm Beretta in the pantry, along with a spare magazine and two boxes of ammunition.

Gabriel loaded the gun and carried it with him into the bedroom. It had been three days since he’d had a proper night’s sleep and it had taken all his training and substantial powers of concentration to get through dinner with the ambassador without falling asleep over his coq au vin. He undressed quickly and climbed into bed, then switched on the television and turned the volume down very low so that if there was an attack in the night he would be awakened by the news bulletins. He wondered whether the Metropolitan Police had acted yet on the information he’d brought from Amsterdam.
Two hundred active terror networks, sixteen thousand known terrorists, three thousand men who had been through the training camps of al-Qaeda…
MI5 and the Met had more to worry about than five boys from Amsterdam. He’d sensed something in Graham Seymour’s demeanor that afternoon, a resignation that it was only a matter of time before London was hit again.