by Daniel Silva
“It’s much nicer than Sophie’s, don’t you think?”
“Oh, yes,” said Gabriel hastily. “Much.”
“Did you have anything to do with this?”
“Only by offering you a job no woman in her right mind would ever have taken.”
“And now I’m one of you,” she said, holding up the ring. “Till death do us part.”
The occasion lacked the debauchery of the Antonovs’ notorious parties at Villa Soleil, and for that everyone in attendance was grateful. Truth be told, none of them were real drinkers. Unlike their allies the British, they did not utilize heavy consumption of alcohol as part of their tradecraft. What’s more, it was a school night, as they liked to say, and most would be back at their desks in the morning, save for Mikhail, who was leaving at dawn for an operation in Budapest. Office doctrine dictated he spend the night in a jump site in Tel Aviv. Gabriel and Yaakov Rossman, who was going with him, had granted Mikhail a reprieve.
Still, there was music and laughter and more food than anyone could possibly eat. Saladin, however, was not far from their thoughts. They spoke of him with respect and, even in death, with a trace of foreboding. Dina Sarid’s dark prediction of the future—a future of endless cyberjihad—was coming to pass before their eyes. The caliphate of ISIS was slipping away. Too slowly, it was true, but it was dying nonetheless. But that did not mean the end of ISIS was at hand. In all likelihood, it would become just another Salafist-jihadi terrorist group, a first among equals with adherents around the globe who were willing to take up a knife or a bomb or an automobile in hatred’s name. Saladin was now their patron saint. And thanks to the story in the Telegraph, the story Gabriel had planted, Israel and the Jews of the diaspora were their primary targets.
“It was,” intoned Shamron, “a grave mistake on your part.”
“It wasn’t my first,” answered Gabriel. “And I’m certain it won’t be my last.”
“I hope she was worth it.”
“Olivia Watson? She was.”
Shamron didn’t appear convinced.
“Perhaps you merely used her as an excuse to justify that reckless leak to that British reporter friend of yours.”
“Why would I have done something like that?”
“Maybe you wanted Saladin’s followers to know that you were the one who killed him. Maybe,” said Shamron, “you wanted to sign your name.”
They had withdrawn from the party to Shamron’s favorite spot on the terrace. The lake shone silver in the moonlight, the skies above the Golan Heights flashed yellow and white with American ordnance. They were hitting targets all over Syria.
With his old Zippo lighter, Shamron ignited a cigarette. “Do they know what they’re doing?”
“The Americans?”
Shamron nodded slowly.
“To be determined,” said Gabriel.
“That doesn’t sound hopeful.”
“I’ve never cared for the word.”
“Optimistic,” suggested Shamron.
“There’s little reason for it,” said Gabriel. “Let’s assume the Americans and their allies eventually defeat ISIS and roll back the caliphate. What then? Will Syria be put back together again? Will Iraq? Will the Americans stay this time to ensure the peace? Unlikely, which means there’s going to be several million disaffected and disenfranchised Sunni Muslims living between the Tigris and the Euphrates. They will be a source of regional instability for generations to come.”
“They were artificial countries to begin with, Iraq and Syria. Maybe it’s time to draw new lines in the sand.”
“Another failed Arab state in the making,” said Gabriel. “Just what the Middle East needs.”
“Perhaps now that Saladin is gone, they might actually stand a chance.” Shamron gave Gabriel a sidelong look. “I must say, my son, you took the concept of operational chiefdom rather too far.”
“You were the one who gave me that speech about walking and chewing gum at the same time.”
“That didn’t mean I wanted you to rush headlong into a room and personally kill Saladin. What if he had been holding a gun instead of a cell phone?”
“The result would have been the same.”
“I hope so.”
“There’s that word again.”
Shamron smiled. “I hope you saved some of that money.”
“The Butcher of Damascus,” said Gabriel, “will be funding Office covert operations for many years to come.”
“You gave an awful lot to help care for his victims.”
“It will pay dividends down the road.”
“Charity begins at home,” said Shamron in disapproval.
“Is that a Corsican proverb?”
“Actually,” said Shamron, “I’m fairly certain I coined it.”
“One-fourth of the Syrian population is living outside Syria’s borders,” explained Gabriel. “And most are Sunni Muslims. Helping to care for them is smart policy.”
“One-fourth,” repeated Shamron, “and hundreds of thousands more are dead. And yet we are the ones the world blames for the suffering of the Arabs. As if the creation of a Palestinian state would magically solve all the many problems of the Arab world. The lack of education and jobs, the brutal dictators, the repression of women.”
“It’s a party, Ari. Try to enjoy yourself.”
“There isn’t time. Not for me at least.” Shamron slowly crushed out his cigarette. “This horrible war in Syria should make it abundantly clear what would happen if our enemies ever managed to breach our defenses. If the Butcher of Damascus is willing to slaughter his own people, what would he do to ours? If ISIS is willing to kill other Muslims, what would they do if they could get their hands on the Jews?” He patted Gabriel’s knee paternally. “But these are your problems now, my son. Not mine.”
They watched the light show in the sky, the former chief, the current chief, while behind them their friends and colleagues and loved ones forgot for a few moments the world of trouble that surrounded them.
“When I was a boy,” said Shamron at last, “I used to have dreams.”
“I had them, too,” said Gabriel. “I still do.”
The wind blew softly from the west, from the ancient battlefield of Hittin.
“Do you hear that?” asked Shamron.
“Hear what?”
“The clashing of the swords, the screams of the dying.”
“No, Ari, I only hear the music.”
“You’re a lucky guy.”
“Yes,” said Gabriel. “I suppose I am.”
Author’s Note
House of Spies is a work of entertainment and should be read as nothing more. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in the story are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
There are many graceful old buildings on the rue de Grenelle in Paris, entirely intact, but none house an elite counterterrorism unit of the DGSI called the Alpha Group, for no such unit exists. Also, one will search in vain for the headquarters of the Israeli secret intelligence service on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv; it was moved long ago to a spot north of the city. The Liberty Crossing Intelligence Campus in McLean, Virginia—home of the National Counterterrorism Center and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—was destroyed in a terrorist attack in The Black Widow but, fortunately, not in real life. Employees of the two agencies work day and night to keep the American homeland safe.
Gabriel Allon and his family do not reside at 16 Narkiss Street in Jerusalem, but occasionally they can be spotted at Focaccia or Mona, two of their favorite neighborhood restaurants. There are several art galleries in the centre ville of Saint-Tropez, some better than others, but none bear the name Olivia Watson. Nor will visitors to the St. James’s section of London find an Old Master art gallery owned by anyone named Julian Isherwood, Oliver Dimbleby, or Roddy Hutchin
son. The paintings referenced in House of Spies were quite obviously used fictitiously. The author has no comment on the manner in which they were acquired. Nor does he wish to imply that the murderous ruler of Syria maintains an account at the esteemed Bank of Panama.
The title of part 3 of House of Spies was suggested by a line from The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles’s masterwork. The line also appears in the text of my novel, along with a portion of the subsequent sentence and one of Bowles’s part titles. In addition, I borrowed iconography from Bowles—and poetry from Sting, also an admirer of The Sheltering Sky—in my depiction of Natalie Mizrahi’s brief moonlit foray into the sand dunes of the Sahara. Obviously, Gabriel plundered F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night when devising his operation, and it was more elegant as a result. Fans of the film version of Dr. No will doubtless recognize where Christopher Keller found his inspiration when describing the stopping power of a Walther PPK pistol.
I completed the first draft of House of Spies, with its depiction of two ISIS terrorist attacks in London, one successful, one foiled, on March 15, 2017. At 2:40 p.m. on March 22, Khalid Masood, a fifty-two-year-old convert to Islam, turned onto Westminster Bridge in a rented Hyundai. While crossing the Thames River at speeds reaching seventy-six miles per hour, he mowed down several helpless pedestrians on the southern pavement and then crashed the car into a railing in Bridge Street, outside the Houses of Parliament. There he stabbed to death forty-eight-year-old police constable Keith Palmer before being shot by an armed officer from the Metropolitan Police Service’s close protection command. In all, the attack lasted eighty-two seconds. Six people died, including Masood, and more than fifty were wounded, some with catastrophic injuries.
The threat level at the time was “severe,” meaning an attack was “highly likely.” Four months earlier, however, Andrew Parker, director general of MI5, was even more blunt in his assessment. “There will be terrorist attacks in Britain,” he told the Guardian newspaper. “It is an enduring threat and it’s at least a generational challenge for us to deal with.” ISIS’s tactics differ from those of al-Qaeda. A suicide vest, a gun, a knife, an automobile, a truck: these are the weapons of the new jihadist terrorist. But ISIS has loftier ambitions. The group’s external operations division is feverishly attempting to build a bomb that can be smuggled onto a commercial airliner without detection. And there is ample evidence to suggest ISIS has been trying to acquire the ingredients for a radiological dispersion device, or “dirty bomb.”
With the caliphate of ISIS under siege from the United States and its coalition partners, the flow of foreign fighters from the West and other Middle Eastern countries has slowed to a trickle. Still, ISIS has proven adept at recruiting new members to its ranks. Oftentimes, they come with a criminal past. ISIS does not shun them. Quite the opposite: it is actively recruiting new members with criminal records, especially in Western Europe. “Sometimes people with the worst pasts create the best futures.” So read a social media posting issued by Rayat al-Tawheed, a group of ISIS fighters from London. The message was clear. ISIS is willing to employ criminals to fulfill its dream of building a worldwide Islamic caliphate.
The nexus between crime and radical Islam is one of the most disturbing emerging trends confronting U.S. and Western European counterterrorism officials. Take, for example, the case of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the presumed operational mastermind of ISIS’s attack on Paris in November 2015. Born in Belgium and raised in the Molenbeek section of Brussels, he served terms in at least three prisons for assault and other crimes before joining ISIS. Salah Abdeslam, Abaaoud’s accomplice and childhood friend, was also a petty criminal; in fact, they were once arrested together for breaking into a parking garage. Ibrahim El Bakraoui, who detonated a suicide bomb inside Brussels Airport in March 2016, fired on police with a Kalashnikov assault rifle during a 2010 attempted robbery of a currency exchange bureau. His younger brother, Khalid, who detonated a suicide device at a Brussels metro station, had a long criminal past that included convictions for several carjackings, a bank robbery, kidnapping, and weapons charges.
Numerous ISIS operatives have come from the world of illicit drugs, and ISIS has been linked to drug smuggling in the eastern Mediterranean almost since its inception. But there is now evidence to suggest that the group, with its finances under strain, is involved in North Africa’s lucrative hashish trade. Not long after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011, Western European police noticed a sharp increase in the flow of hashish from Morocco, along with a change in the traditional smuggling route, with Libyan ports serving as the primary point of departure. Had ISIS, which had established a presence in post-Gaddafi Libya, somehow attached itself to the hashish trade? European police couldn’t say for certain. But they received a piece of welcome news in late 2016 when Moroccan authorities arrested Ziane Berhili, allegedly one of the world’s largest producers of hashish. Berhili was the owner of a large dessert company in Morocco. But according to Italian authorities, he made most of his money by smuggling an estimated four hundred metric tons of hashish into Europe each year. The street value of those drugs would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 billion.
Morocco exports more than just drugs to Europe; it also exports terrorists. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, Salah Abdeslam, and Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui have more in common than a criminal past. All are of Moroccan ethnicity. More than thirteen hundred Moroccans have joined ISIS, along with several hundred ethnic Moroccans from Western Europe, mainly from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. During a research trip to Morocco in the winter of 2017, I saw a country on high alert. And with good reason. The chief of Morocco’s counterterrorism service warned in April 2016 that his unit had broken up twenty-five ISIS plots in Morocco in the last year alone, one involving mustard gas. Morocco’s vital tourism industry, which draws thousands of Westerners to the country each year, is a primary target.
Presumably, the United States and its partners will prevail in their campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. But will the loss of the caliphate mean the end of ISIS-inspired or -directed terrorism? The answer is likely to be no. Already, the physical caliphate is being replaced by a digital one where virtual plotters recruit and plan in the security and anonymity of cyberspace. But the blood will flow in the real world, in the rail stations, airports, cafés, and theaters of the West. The global jihadist movement has proven itself uncannily adaptable. The West must adapt, too. And quickly. Otherwise, it will be left to ISIS and its inevitable offspring to determine the quality and security of our lives in “the new normal.”
Acknowledgments
I am enormously grateful for the love and support of my wife, Jamie Gangel, who helped with the conception of House of Spies, contributed numerous plot points, and skillfully edited my manuscript, which was completed only minutes before its deadline. My children, Lily and Nicholas, were a constant source of love and inspiration, especially during my research trip to Morocco, where they helped me chart the twists and turns of the novel’s long climactic sequence.
I spoke to numerous spies, counterterrorism officials, and politicians involved in homeland security, and I will thank them now in anonymity, which is how they would prefer it. Louis Toscano, my dear friend and longtime editor, made countless improvements to the novel, large and small. Kathy Crosby, my eagle-eyed personal copy editor, made certain the text was free of typographical and grammatical errors. Any mistakes that slipped through their formidable gauntlet are mine, not theirs.
I consulted hundreds of books, newspaper and magazine articles, and Web sites while preparing this manuscript, far too many to name here. I would be remiss, however, if I did not mention The Caliph’s House by Tahir Shah and A House in Fez by Suzanna Clarke. A special thanks to Michael Gendler, Linda Rappaport, Michael Rudell, and Eric Brown for their support and wise counsel.
The staffs of the Four Seasons Hotel in Casablanca and the Palais Faraj in Fez took wonderful care of us during our stay in Morocco, and our
guides, M and S, gave us a glimpse of their remarkable country we will never forget. Stories of their travails against the jinns, told during a daylong drive through the snowy cedar forests of the Middle Atlas Mountains, found their way into my manuscript. So, too, did their generosity and kindness.
I am forever indebted to David Bull for his expert advice on all matters related to art and restoration. Each year, David grants me several hours of his valuable time to make certain my novels are free of errors. And for his punishment, he is now known throughout the art world as “the real Gabriel Allon.” Finally, the inimitable Patrick Matthiesen took time out of a recent trip to America to regale me with stories of his experiences in a changing art market. Patrick’s extraordinary Old Master gallery shares an address with the perpetually troubled establishment owned by the fictitious Julian Isherwood. Otherwise, they have in common only their deep love and knowledge of art, their sense of humor, and their humanity.
About the Author
Daniel Silva is the award-winning, #1 New York Times best-selling author of twenty novels, including The Confessor, The Messenger, Moscow Rules, The English Girl, and The Black Widow. His books are published in more than thirty countries and are best sellers around the world. He lives in Florida with his wife, CNN Special Correspondent Jamie Gangel, and their two children, Lily and Nicholas.
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Also by Daniel Silva
The Black Widow
The English Spy
The Heist
The English Girl
The Fallen Angel
Portrait of a Spy
The Rembrandt Affair
The Defector
Moscow Rules
The Secret Servant
The Messenger
Prince of Fire
A Death in Vienna