Gabriel Allon: Prince of Fire, the Messenger, the Secret Servant

by Daniel Silva

  “Give your friend a call now. Let it leak that I’m about to make an offer to the kidnappers.”

  “What sort of offer?”

  “One they can’t refuse.”

  “Is there something else I should know, Mr. Ambassador?”

  “I’m resigning my post, Steve. You can call me Bob.”

  “Yes, Mr. Ambassador.”

  Halton hung up the phone, then stood up and headed toward his bedroom to shower and change. He was no longer Ambassador Robert Halton, the desperate and broken American diplomat who had no choice but to watch his daughter die. He was once again Robert Carlyle Halton, multibillionaire and kingmaker, and he was going to get Elizabeth back, even if it took every penny he had.

  44

  AALBORG, DENMARK: 12:15 P.M., FRIDAY

  Your chariot has arrived, Mr. Allon.”

  Lars Mortensen lifted his hand and pointed toward the heavy gray sky. Gabriel looked up and watched a Gulf stream V sinking slowly toward the end of the runway at Aalborg Airport. The slight movement caused his head to begin throbbing again. It had taken eighteen sutures, administered by a sleepy Skagen doctor, to close the three wounds in his scalp. His face bore a crosshatched pattern of tiny cuts, inflicted by the exploding safety glass of the windshield. Somehow he had managed to shield his eyes at the instant of detonation, though he had no memory of doing it.

  He could recall the events of the rest of the evening, however, with faultless clarity. Ordered by the kidnappers to relinquish his telephone in Funen, he had been forced to drive the crippled Audi with its blasted-out windshield three miles in order to find a public phone. He had rung Carter and Mortensen from the parking lot of a small market on the outskirts of Skagen and, in language fit for an insecure line, had told them what had transpired. Then he had driven back to the dunes and watched the cottage burn slowly to the ground. Twenty more minutes would elapse before he heard the distant scream of the sirens and saw the first police and firefighters stumble bewildered onto the scene. A uniformed policeman had peppered Gabriel with questions while an ambulance attendant wiped the blood from his face. Talk to Lars Mortensen of the PET, was all Gabriel said. Mortensen will explain everything.

  “You’re sure about the body count in the cottage?” Gabriel asked Mortensen now.

  “You’ve asked me that ten times.”

  “Answer it again.”

  “There were only three—the two terrorists and the old man. No Elizabeth Halton.” Mortensen fell silent as the Gulfstream set down on the runway and flashed past their position with the roar of reversing engines. “Not exactly the way the story of Abraham and Isaac turned out in the Bible. I still can’t quite believe he actually set up his own father to be killed.”

  “It’s the al-Qaeda version,” said Gabriel. “Murder anyone who dares to oppose you, even your own flesh and blood.”

  The Gulfstream had reached the end of the runway and was now taxiing back toward their position on the tarmac.

  “You’ll do your best to keep my role in this affair a secret?” Gabriel asked.

  “There’s always a chance it could leak out up here. Unfortunately, you came in contact with many people last night. But as far as my service is concerned, you and your team were never here.”

  Gabriel zipped his leather jacket and extended his hand. “Then it was a pleasure not meeting you.”

  “The pleasure was mine.” Mortensen gave Gabriel’s hand an admonitory squeeze. “But the next time you come to Denmark, do me the courtesy of telling me first. We’ll have lunch. Who knows? Maybe we’ll actually have something pleasant to talk about.”

  “I suppose anything’s possible.” Gabriel climbed out of the car, then peered at Mortensen through the open door. “I nearly forget something.”

  “What’s that?”

  He told him about the Beretta he had been forced to leave at the rest stop on Funen. Mortensen frowned and murmured something in Danish under his breath.

  “I’m sorry,” Gabriel said. “It slipped my mind.”

  “I don’t suppose you removed the bullets before throwing it into that rubbish bin.”

  “Actually, it was quite loaded.”

  “If I were you, I’d get on that plane before I change my mind about covering up your hand in this mess.”

  Gabriel set out across the tarmac toward the Gulfstream. The airstair had been lowered; Sarah was leaning against the side of the open doorway, hands in the pockets of her jeans, legs crossed at the ankles. Carter was seated at the front of the cabin and was deep in conversation on the telephone. He nodded Gabriel into the opposite seat, then hung up and regarded him speculatively as the plane rose once more into the slate gray sky.

  “Where’s my team?” asked Gabriel.

  “They slipped quietly out of Copenhagen early this morning. They were understandably vague about their destination. I assume they were headed toward Amsterdam.”

  “And us?”

  “The British have granted us landing rights at London City Airport. I’m going to the embassy to wait out the deadline. You will be escorted to Heathrow, no questions asked. I assume you can find your own way home from there.”

  Gabriel nodded slowly.

  “Consider yourself fortunate, Gabriel. You get to go home. I get to go to London and face the music for our failure here last night. You’re not exactly popular in Washington at the moment. In fact, there are a good many people baying for your blood, the president included. And this time I’m in the shit with you.”

  “A career free of scandal is not a proper career at all, Adrian.”

  “Shakespeare?”

  “Shamron.”

  Carter managed a weak smile. “The Office operates by a different set of standards than the Agency. You accept the occasional mistake if it occurs in the service of a noble cause. We don’t tolerate failure. Failure is not an option.”

  “If that were the case, they would have turned the lights out at Langley a long time ago.”

  Carter squinted as a sudden burst of sunlight came slanting through the cabin window. He pulled down the shade and stared at Gabriel for a long moment in silence.

  “She wasn’t there, Adrian. She was never there. In all likelihood she’s still somewhere in Britain. It was all an elaborate deception orchestrated by the Sphinx. They planted that ferry reservation number on the body of the man I wounded in Hyde Park and left him in the dunes of Norfolk for the British to find. The Sphinx instructed Ishaq to remain in touch with his wife in Copenhagen, knowing that eventually NSA, or someone else, would overhear him and make the connection. And when we did make the connection, the Sphinx played it out slowly, so there would be almost no time left before the deadline. He wants you frustrated and dejected and tearing yourself to shreds behind the scenes. He wants you to feel you have no choice but to release Sheikh Abdullah.”

  “Fuck Sheikh Abdullah,” said Carter with uncharacteristic venom. He quickly regained his composure. “Do you think Ibrahim was a part of this grand illusion?”

  “Ibrahim was the real thing, Adrian. Ibrahim was the answer to our prayers.”

  “And you got him killed.”

  “You’re tired, Adrian. You haven’t slept in a long time. I’m going to do my best to forget you ever said that.”

  “You’re right, Gabriel. I haven’t slept.” Carter glanced at his watch. “Seven hours is all we have—seven hours until an extraordinary young woman is put to death. And for what?”

  Carter was interrupted by the ringing of his phone. He brought it to his ear, listened in silence, then rang off.

  “Robert Halton just faxed his letter of resignation to the White House Situation Room,” he said. “I suppose the pressure finally got to him.”

  “Wrong, Adrian.”

  “You can think of another explanation?”

  “He’s going to try to save his daughter’s life by negotiating directly with the kidnappers.”

  Carter snatched up the telephone again and quickly dialed. Gabriel
reclined his seat and closed his eyes. His head began to throb. A preview of coming attractions, he thought.

  45

  PARIS: 2:17 P.M., FRIDAY

  There was a small Internet café around the corner from the Islamic Affairs Institute with decent coffee and pastries and even better jazz on the house sound system. Yusuf Ramadan ordered a café crème and thirty minutes of Web time, then he sat down at a vacant computer terminal in the window overlooking the street. He typed in the address for the home page of the BBC and read about the developments in London, where Ambassador Robert Halton had just resigned his post and offered twenty million dollars in exchange for his daughter’s release. While the news appeared to have come as a shock to the BBC, it was no surprise to the Egyptian terrorist known as the Sphinx. The perfectly executed operation in Denmark had no doubt broken the ambassador’s will to resist. He had now decided to take matters into his own hands, just as Yusuf Ramadan had always known he would. Robert Halton was a billionaire from Colorado—and billionaires from Colorado did not allow their daughters to be sacrificed on the altar of American foreign policy.

  Ramadan watched a brief clip of the ambassador’s Winfield House news conference, then visited the home pages of the Telegraph, Times, and Guardian to read what they had to say. Finally, with ten minutes to spare on his thirty-minute chit, he typed in the address of a Karachi-based site that dealt with Islamic issues. The site was administered by an operative of the Sword of Allah, though its content was so benign it never attracted more than a passing glance from the security services of America and Europe. Ramadan entered a chat room as DESMOND826. KINKYKEMEL324 was waiting for him. Ramadan typed: “I think the Sword of Allah should take the deal. But they should definitely ask for more money. After all, the ambassador is a billionaire.”

  KINKYKEMEL324: How much more?

  DESMOND826: Thirty million feels right.

  KINKYKEMEL324: I think the Zionist oppressor should pay, too.

  DESMOND826: The ultimate price, just as we discussed during our last conversation.

  KINKYKEMEL324: Then it will be done, in the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful.

  DESMOND826: Master of the day of judgment.

  KINKYKEMEL324: Show us the straight path.

  DESMOND826: Peace be upon you, KK.

  KINKYKEMEL324: Ciao, Dez.

  Ramadan logged out and drank his café crème. “Ruby, My Dear,” by Coltrane and Monk, was now playing on the stereo. Too bad all Americans weren’t so sublime, he thought. The world would be a much better place.

  46

  GROSVENOR SQUARE, LONDON: 2:10 P.M., FRIDAY

  The first calls arrived at the embassy switchboard before Ambassador Halton disappeared through the doorway of Winfield House. FBI hostage negotiator John O’Donnell, who had been given just five minutes’ warning of the pending statement, had hastily broken the staff of the ops center into two teams: one to dispense with obvious charlatans and criminal conmen, another to conduct additional screening of any call that sounded remotely legitimate. It was O’Donnell himself who assigned the calls to the appropriate teams. He did so after a brief conversation, usually thirty seconds in length or less. His instincts told him that none of the callers he had spoken to thus far were the real kidnappers, even the callers he had passed along to the second team for additional vetting. He did not share this belief with any of the exhausted men and women gathered around him in the embassy basement.

  Two hours after Robert Halton’s appearance before the cameras, O’Donnell picked up a separate line and dialed the switchboard. “How many do you have on hold?”

  “Thirty-eight,” the operator said. “Wait…make that forty-two…forty-four…forty-seven. You see my point.”

  “Keep them coming.”

  O’Donnell hung up and quickly worked his way through ten more calls. He assigned seven to team number one, the team that dealt with obvious cranks, and three to the second team, though he knew that none of the callers represented the real captors of Elizabeth Halton. He was about pick up another call when his private line rang. He answered that line instead and heard the voice of the switchboard operator.

  “I think I’ve got the call you’re looking for.”

  “Voice modifier?”

  “Yep.”

  “Send him down on this line after I hang up.”

  “Got it.”

  O’Donnell hung up the phone. When it rang ten seconds later, he brought the receiver swiftly to his ear.

  “This is John O’Donnell of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. How can I help you?”

  “I’ve been trying to get through to you for a half hour,” said the electronically modified voice.

  “We’re doing the best we can, but when twenty million is on the table, the nutcases tend to come out of the woodwork.”

  “I’m not a nutcase. I’m the one you want to talk to.”

  “Prove it to me. Tell me where you left the DVD of Elizabeth Halton.”

  “We left it under the rowboat on the beach at Beacon Point.”

  O’Donnell covered the mouthpiece of the receiver and pleaded for quiet. Then he looked at Kevin Barnett of the CIA and motioned for him to pick up the extension.

  “I take it you’re interested in taking the deal,” O’Donnell said to the caller.

  “I wouldn’t be calling otherwise.”

  “You have our girl?”

  “We have her.”

  “I’m going to need proof.”

  “There isn’t time.”

  “So we’ll have to make some time. Just answer one question for me. It will just take a minute.”

  Silence, then: “Give me the question.”

  “When Elizabeth was a little girl, she had a favorite stuffed animal. I need you to tell me what kind of animal it was and what she called it. I’m going to give you a separate number. You call me back when you’ve got the answer. Then we’ll discuss how to make the exchange.”

  “Make sure you pick up the phone. Otherwise, your girl dies.”

  The line went dead. O’Donnell hung up the phone and looked at Barnett.

  “I’m almost certain that was our boy.”

  “Thank God,” said Barnett. “Let’s just hope he has our girl.”

  She woke with the knock, startled and damp with sweat, and stared at the blinding white lamp over her cot. She had been dreaming, the same dream she always had whenever she managed to sleep. Men in black hoods. A video camera. A knife. She raised her cuffed hands to her throat and found that the tissue of her neck was still intact. Then she looked at the cement floor and saw the note. An eye was glaring at her through the spy hole as if willing her to move. It was dark and brutal: the eye of Cain.

  She sat up and swung her shackled feet to the floor, then stood and shuffled stiffly toward the door. The note lay faceup and was composed in a font large enough for her to read without bending down to pick it up. It was a question, as all their communications were, but different from any other they had put to her. She answered it in a low, evenly modulated voice, then returned to her cot and wept uncontrollably. Don’t hope, she told herself. Don’t you dare hope.

  John O’Connell’s private number in the ops center rang at 3:09. This time he didn’t bother identifying himself.

  “Do you have the information I need?”

  “The animal was a stuffed whale.”

  “What did she call it?”

  “Fish,” the man said. “She called it Fish and nothing else.”

  O’Donnell closed his eyes and pumped his fist once.

  “Right answer,” he said. “Let’s put a deal together. Let’s bring my girl home in time for Christmas.”

  The man with the modified voice listed his demands, then said: “I’m going to call back at five fifty-nine London time. I want a one-word answer: yes or no. That’s it: yes or no. Do you understand me?”

  “I understand perfectly.”

  The line went dead again. O’Donnell looked at Kevin Barnett. />
  “They’ve got her,” he said. “And we are completely fucked.”

  A Jaguar limousine was waiting at the edge of the tarmac as Adrian Carter’s Gulfstream V touched down at London City Airport. As Gabriel, Carter, and Sarah came down the airstair, a long, boney hand poked from the Jaguar’s rear passenger-side window and beckoned them over.

  “Graham Seymour,” said Gabriel theatrically. “Don’t tell me they sent you all the way out here to give me a lift to Heathrow.”

  “They sent me out here to give you a lift,” Seymour said, “but we’re not going to Heathrow.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Seymour left the question momentarily unanswered and instead gazed quizzically at Gabriel’s face. “What in God’s name happened to you?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “It usually is,” he said. “Get in. We don’t have much time.”

  47

  10 DOWNING STREET: 4:15 P.M., FRIDAY

  Graham Seymour’s limousine turned into Whitehall and stopped a few seconds later at the security gates of Downing Street. He lowered his window and flashed his identification to the uniformed Metropolitan Police officer standing watch outside the fence. The officer examined it quickly, then signaled to his colleagues to open the gate. The Jaguar eased forward approximately fifty yards and stopped again, this time before the world’s most famous door.

  Gabriel emerged from the limousine last and followed the others into the entrance hall. To their right was a small fireplace and next to the fireplace an odd-looking Chippendale hooded leather chair once used by porters and security men. To their left was a wooden traveling chest, believed to have been taken by the Duke of Wellington into battle at Waterloo in 1815, and a grandfather clock by Benson of Whitehaven that so annoyed Churchill he ordered its chimes silenced. And standing in the center of the hall, in an immaculately tailored suit, was a handsome man with pale skin and black hair shot with gray at the temples. He advanced on Gabriel and cautiously extended his hand. It was cold to the touch.