The Secret Servant (8 page)

L
ater, during the inevitable Congressional inquiry, much emphasis would be placed on determining precisely when and how the intelligence services of the United States first became aware of the calamity about to befall London. The answer was 2:32
A.M
. local time, when a telephone call from an individual identified only as an FIS, or “foreign intelligence source,” arrived on an emergency line in the seventh-floor executive suite of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The foreign intelligence source, though never identified, was Gabriel, and the emergency line he dialed belonged to none other than Adrian Carter, the CIA’s deputy director of operations. In normal times, the call would have been automatically transferred to Carter’s home in nearby McLean. But these were hardly normal times, and, in spite of the appalling hour, Carter was standing in the window of his office anxiously awaiting word on the outcome of a sensitive operation under way in the mountains of Pakistan.

Aside from the grand view toward the Potomac, there was little about Carter’s lair to suggest it belonged to one of the most powerful members of Washington’s vast intelligence establishment. Nor would one have guessed as much from Carter’s rather churchy appearance. Only a handful of people in Washington knew that Adrian Carter spoke seven languages fluently and could understand at least seven more. Or that Carter, before his ascension to the rarified atmosphere of Langley’s seventh floor, had been one of his nation’s most faithful clandestine warriors. His fingerprints were on every major American covert operation of the last generation. He’d tinkered with the odd election, toppled the odd government, and turned a blind eye to more executions and murders than he could count. Morality had rarely entered into Carter’s calculus. Carter was Operations. Carter didn’t make policy, he simply carried it out. How else to explain that, within the span of a single year, he’d done the Lord’s work in Poland and propped up the Devil’s regime in Salvador? Or that he’d showered dollars and Stingers on the Muslim holy warriors in Afghanistan, even though he knew one day they would rain fire and death on him.

These days, longevity was Carter’s most notable achievement. The sages of Langley liked to joke that the war on terror had claimed more lives in the Operations Directorate than in the top ranks of al-Qaeda. Not Carter’s, though. He had survived the blood purges and the nights of long knives and even the horrors of reorganization. The secret to his endurance lay in the fact that he had been right far more often than he had been wrong. In the summer of 2001, he had warned that al-Qaeda was planning a major attack on American soil. In the winter of 2003, he had cautioned that some of the sources regarding Iraq’s weapons program were suspect, only to be overruled by his director. And as war loomed in Mesopotamia, he had written a secret memorandum forecasting that Iraq would become another Afghanistan, a proving ground for the next generation of jihadists, a generation that would ultimately be more violent and unpredictable than the last. Carter laid claim to no special powers of analysis, only a clarity of thinking when it came to the intentions of his enemy. Fifteen years earlier, in a mud hut outside Peshawar, a man with a turban and a beard had told him that one day the forces of Islam would turn America to ashes. Carter had believed him.

And so it was this Carter—Carter the secret warrior, Carter the survivor, Carter the pessimist—who, in the early morning of that ill-fated Friday in December, wearily brought his telephone to his ear expecting news from a distant land. Instead he heard the voice of Gabriel, warning that there was about to be an attack in London. And Carter believed him.

Carter jotted down Gabriel’s number, then severed the connection and immediately dialed the operations desk at the National Counterterrorism Center.

“How credible is the information?” the duty officer asked.

“Credible enough for me to be calling you at two thirty-four in the morning.” Carter tried to keep his temper in check. “Get the RSO at the embassy on the phone immediately and tell him to put the entire compound and staff on lockdown until we get a better handle on the situation.”

Carter hung up before the duty officer could pose another inane question and sat there for a moment, feeling utterly helpless.
To hell with the NCTC
, he thought. He would take matters into his own hands. He dialed the CIA station at the London embassy and a moment later was talking directly to Kevin Barnett, the deputy COS. Barnett, when he spoke for the first time, sounded deeply shaken.

“There’s a group of embassy personnel that does a run in Hyde Park every morning.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m usually one of them.”

“Who else goes?”

“The chief press officer, the FBI liaison, the Regional Security Officer…”

“Jesus Christ,” Carter snapped.

“It gets worse.”

“How much worse?”

“Elizabeth Halton.”

“The ambassador’s daughter?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“What time do they leave?”

“Seven-fifteen sharp.”

Carter looked at his watch. It was 7:36 in London.

“Get them back inside the embassy, Kevin. Run over to Hyde Park and do it yourself if you have to.”

The next sound Carter heard was the sound of the deputy COS in London slamming down the phone. Carter hung up, waited ten seconds, and called Gabriel back.

“I think I may have a group of diplomats running in Hyde Park at the moment,” he said. “How quickly can you get down there?”

Carter heard another click.

They had entered the park through Brook Gate, headed south along Broad Walk to Hyde Park Corner, then westward along Rotten Row, past the Rose Garden and the Dell. Elizabeth Halton moved to the front of the pack when they reached the Albert Memorial; then, with a DS agent at her side, she steadily increased the pace as they headed north up Lancaster Walk to Bayswater Road. Jack Hammond, the embassy spokesman, slipped past Elizabeth and pushed the pace hard to Victoria Gate, then down the West Carriage Drive to the shore of the Serpentine. As they approached the boathouses, a mobile phone began to ring. It belonged to Chris Petty, the RSO.

They looked like ordinary rolling suitcases. They were not. The sides and wheels had been reinforced to accommodate the weight of the explosives, and the buttons on the collapsible handles had been wired to the detonators. The bags were now in the possession of four men who, at that moment, were approaching four separate targets: the Underground stations at Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, Charing Cross, and Marble Arch. The men knew nothing of each other but had much in common. All four were Egyptian. All four were
takfiri
Muslims who embraced death as much as the infidels loved life. And all four were wearing Seiko digital watches that would sound an alarm at precisely 7:40
A.M
.

It took two minutes for Gabriel to dress and get the Beretta and another minute to make his way downstairs to the street. The traffic signal along the Bayswater Road was blinking red when he arrived. He ignored it and sprinted through the oncoming traffic into the park. Just then he heard the rumble of an explosion deep underground and felt the earth shift suddenly beneath his feet. He stopped for a moment, uncertain of what he had just heard and felt, then turned and raced toward the center of the park.

Chris Petty slowed to a stop and pulled the phone out of the clip attached to the waist of his sweatpants.

“You guys go ahead,” he called out. “Take the usual route. I’ll catch up if I can.”

The rest of the group turned away from the shore of the Serpentine and headed into the stand of trees north of the lake. Petty looked at the caller ID screen. It was his office inside the embassy. He opened the phone and brought it quickly to his ear.

“Petty.”

Static
…

“This is Chris Petty. Can you hear me?”

Silence
…

“Shit.”

He killed the connection and set off after the others. Twenty seconds later the phone rang again. This time, when he raised it to his ear, the connection was perfect.

The man in the Addison & Hodge uniform collecting rubbish along the pathway looked up as the group of runners turned onto the footpath leading from the Old Police House to the Reformers’ Tree. The second false Addison & Hodge van was parked on the opposite side of the path, and another uniformed man was scratching at the earth with a rake. They had been preparing for this moment for over a year.
Thirty seconds
, the operational planner had said.
If it lasts more than thirty seconds, you’ll never make it out of the park alive
. The man reached into the plastic rubbish bag he was holding in his hand and felt something metallic and cold: a Heckler & Koch MP7 machine pistol, loaded with forty armor-piercing rounds. He blindly thumbed the fire-selector switch to the proper setting and counted slowly to ten.

Whether it was by design or accident, Chris Petty failed to terminate the telephone call from the embassy before setting off in pursuit of his colleagues. He saw them almost immediately after making the turn at the Old Police House. They had covered about half the distance to the Reformers’ Tree and were approaching a pair of forest green Ford Transit vans parked along the edge of the path. It was not unusual to see workmen in the park early in the morning—Hyde Park was 350 acres in size and required near-constant care and maintenance—but their true purpose was revealed a few seconds later when the rear cargo doors swung open and eight well-armed men in black jumpsuits and balaclava hoods poured out. Petty’s futile warning shouts were heard and recorded inside the RSO ops center, as was the sound of gunfire and screaming that followed. Petty was hit ten seconds after the initial burst and his death agonies were captured on the center’s digital recorders. He managed to say only one word before succumbing to his wounds, though it would be several minutes before his stricken colleagues inside the embassy understood its meaning.
Gardeners
…

Gabriel heard the first shots while he was still in the open ground at the northern edge of the park. He drew his Beretta as he sprinted into the trees, then stopped on the footpath and looked in the direction of the Reformers’ Tree. Fifty yards away was a scene from his nightmares: bodies on the ground, men in black jumpsuits pulling a struggling woman toward the back of a waiting van. He raised the gun but stopped himself. Was this truly the attack or had he stumbled into a police drill or the set of an action film? Were the men in black really terrorists or were they police officers or actors? The closest body lay thirty yards away. On the ground next to the man were a mobile phone and a SIG-Sauer P226 9mm pistol. Gabriel crept quickly to the fallen man’s side and knelt beside him. The blood and bullet wounds were real, as was the look of death in the man’s frozen eyes. He knew then that this was not a drill or a film set. It was the attack he had feared, and it was unfolding before his eyes.

The terrorists had not noticed him. Gabriel, still on one knee, leveled the Beretta in both hands and took aim at one of the black-suited men pulling the woman toward the van. It was thirty yards, a shot he had made countless times before. He squeezed his trigger twice in quick succession,
tap-tap
, just as he had been trained to do. An instant later there was a flash of pink and the man spiraled lifelessly to the ground, like a toy released by the hand of a child. Gabriel moved his aim a degree to the right and fired again. Another flash of blood and brain tissue. Another attacker gone.

This time there was answering fire. Gabriel rolled off the footpath and took cover behind the trunk of a tree as a hailstorm of gunfire tore the bark to shreds. When the firing stopped, he pivoted from behind the tree and saw that the terrorists had succeeded in getting the woman into the back of the van. One was closing the rear cargo door; the others were scurrying toward the second van. Gabriel took aim at the one closing the door and fired. The first shot hit the terrorist in the left shoulder blade, spinning him around. The second struck in the center of the chest.

The vans shot forward and started across the broad green, toward Marble Arch and the busy intersection at the northeast corner of the park. Gabriel rose to his feet and sprinted after them, then stopped and fired several shots into the back of the van that he knew contained only terrorists. The vans continued toward the perimeter of the park. Gabriel gave chase for a few more seconds; then, realizing he could not possibly close the gap, he turned and ran back to the site of the assault.

Nine bodies lay scattered over the blood-soaked footpath. The six Americans were all dead, as were the two terrorists that Gabriel had taken down with head shots. The one who a moment ago had been forcing the woman into the back of the van now lay gasping for breath, blood pouring from the mouth of his balaclava. Gabriel kicked the machine pistol from his grasp and tore the hood from his head. The face staring up at him was vaguely familiar. Then he realized it was Samir al-Masri, the Egyptian from west Amsterdam.

The Egyptian’s eyes were beginning to lose focus. Gabriel wanted something from him before he died. He lifted the Egyptian by the front of his jumpsuit and slapped him hard across the face.

“Where are they taking her, Samir? Tell me what you’re going to do with the girl!”

The eyes focused for a moment.

“How do you know my name?”

“I know everything, Samir. Where are they taking the girl?”

He managed a mocking smile. “If you know everything, then why are you asking me?”

Gabriel hit him again, harder this time, and shook him so violently he feared he may have broken his neck. It didn’t matter. Samir was dying. Gabriel pointed the gun into his face and screamed, “Where are they taking her, you motherfucker! Tell me before I blow your head off!”