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

by Daniel Silva

  62

  JERUSALEM

  You and your team ran a very nice operation,” said Adrian Carter.

  “Which one?”

  “The wedding, of course. Too bad London didn’t go as smoothly.”

  “If it had gone smoothly, we wouldn’t have gotten Elizabeth back.”

  “This is true.”

  A waiter approached their table and freshened Carter’s coffee. Gabriel turned and looked toward the walls of the Old City, which were glowing softly in the gentle sunlight. It was Monday morning. Carter had rung Gabriel’s apartment at seven on the off chance he was free for breakfast. Gabriel had agreed to meet him here, the terrace restaurant of the King David Hotel, knowing full well that Adrian Carter never did anything on the off chance.

  “Why are you still in Jerusalem, Adrian?”

  “Officially, I am here to conduct meetings with our generously staffed CIA station. Unofficially, I stayed in order to see you.”

  “Is Sarah still here?”

  “She left yesterday. Poor thing had to fly commercial.” Carter raised his coffee cup to his lips and stared at Gabriel for a moment without drinking. “Did anything ever happen between you two that I should know about?”

  “No, Adrian, nothing happened between us, during this operation or the last one.” Gabriel made swirls in his Israeli yogurt. “Is that why you stayed in Jerusalem? To ask me whether I slept with one of your officers?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why are you here, Adrian?”

  He reached into the breast pocket of his Brooks Brothers blazer, withdrew an envelope, and handed it to Gabriel. The front bore no markings, but when he turned it over he saw THE WHITE HOUSE printed on the flap in simple lettering.

  “What’s this? An invitation to a White House barbecue?”

  “It’s a note,” said Carter, then he added somewhat pedantically: “From the president of the United States.”

  “Yes, I can see that, Adrian. What’s the topic of the letter?”

  “I’m not in the habit of reading other people’s mail.”

  “You should be.”

  “I assume the president wrote to you in order to thank you for what you did in London.”

  “It might have been helpful if he had said something publicly a month ago, while I was twisting in the wind.”

  “Trust me, Gabriel. If he had spoken out on your behalf, you would have been in more trouble than you are now. These things have a way of blowing themselves out, and sometimes the best course of action is to take no action at all.”

  A cloud passed in front of the sun, and for a moment it seemed several degrees colder. Gabriel opened the note, read it quickly, and slipped it into his coat pocket.

  “What does it say?”

  “It is private, Adrian, and it will remain so.”

  “Good man,” said Carter.

  “Did you get one, too?”

  “A note from the president?” Carter shook his head. “I’m afraid that my position is somewhat tenuous at the moment. Isn’t it amazing? We got Elizabeth back and now we are under siege.”

  “This, too, shall pass, Adrian.”

  “I know,” he said. “But it doesn’t make it any more pleasant to go through. There are a band of Young Turks at Langley who think I’ve been running the DO for too long. They say I’ve lost a step. They say I should have never agreed to turn over so much of the operation to you.”

  “Do you have any intention of ceding power?”

  “None,” said Carter forcefully. “The world is too dangerous a place to be left to Young Turks. I intend to stay until this war against terrorism is won.”

  “I hope longevity runs in your family.”

  “My grandfather lived to be a hundred and four.”

  “What about Sarah? Has she been hurt by this in any way?”

  “None whatsoever,” Carter replied. “Only a handful of people even knew she was a part of it.”

  The sun emerged from behind the clouds again. Gabriel slipped on his wraparound glasses while Carter pulled a second envelope from the pocket of his blazer. “This is from Robert Halton,” he said. “I’m afraid I know what’s inside that one.”

  Gabriel withdrew the contents: a brief handwritten note and a check made out in Gabriel’s name for the sum of ten million dollars. Gabriel kept the letter and handed the check back to Carter.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to think about that for a minute?” Carter asked.

  “I don’t want his money, Adrian.”

  “You’re entitled to it. You risked your life to save his daughter’s—not once but twice.”

  “It’s what we do,” Gabriel said. “Tell him thanks but no thanks.”

  Carter left the check on the table.

  “You have anything else in your pocket for me, Adrian?”

  Carter turned his gaze toward the Old City walls. “I have a name,” he said.

  “The Sphinx?”

  Carter nodded. The Sphinx.

  His voice, already underpowered, fell to an almost inaudible level. It seemed that Carter, before coming to Israel for Gabriel’s wedding, had made a brief stopover in the South of France, not for the purposes of recreation—Carter hadn’t taken a proper holiday since 9/11—but for an operation. The target of this operation was none other than Prince Rashid bin Sultan, who had come to the French Riviera himself for a spot of gambling in the casinos of Monaco. The prince had played poorly and lost mightily, a fact the puritanical Carter seemed to find most offensive, and upon returning to the airport at Nice early the next morning in a highly inebriated state had found Carter and a team of CIA paramilitary officers relaxing in the luxurious confines of his private 747. Carter had presented the prince, now irate, with a CIA dossier detailing his many sins—sins that included financial support for al-Qaeda, the foreign fighters and Sunni insurgents in Iraq, and a militant Egyptian group called the Sword of Allah, which had just carried out the abduction of the goddaughter of the president of the United States. Carter had then given the prince a choice of destinations: Riyadh or Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

  “That sounds like something we would do,” Gabriel said.

  “Yes, it did have a very Office-like quality to it.”

  “I take it the prince chose Riyadh as his destination.”

  “It was the only wise bet he made all night.”

  “How much did the ride home cost him?”

  “A name,” Carter said. “The question now is, what do we do with this name? Option one, we work with our Egyptian brethren and bring this fellow to trial in United States. Justice will be served if we follow this course but at a considerable price. A trial will expose the underside of our relationship with the Egyptian security services. It will also leave us saddled with another Sword of Allah prisoner whom they will almost certainly attempt to get back, thus placing American lives at risk.”

  “And we can’t have that.”

  “No, we can’t,” agreed Carter. “Which brings us to option number two: dealing with the matter quietly.”

  “Our preferred method.”

  “Indeed.”

  Gabriel held out his hand. Carter delved into his pocket again and came out with a slip of paper. Gabriel read what was written there and smiled.

  “Can you make him go away?” asked Carter.

  “It shouldn’t be a problem,” Gabriel said. “But I’m afraid we’ll have to spread a little money around Cairo to make it happen.”

  Carter held up Robert Halton’s check. “Will this be enough to get the job done?”

  “More than enough. But what should I do with the change?”

  “Keep it.”

  “Can I kill the prince, too?”

  “Maybe next time,” said Carter. “More coffee?”

  63

  CYPRUS

  He left Jerusalem for Cyprus three days later. Chiara pleaded with him to take her along but he refused. He had lost one wife to his enemies and had no intention of losing
another.

  He entered the country on an Israeli passport bearing the name Gideon Argov and told the Cypriot customs officers that the purpose of his visit was vacation. After collecting his rental car, a C-Class Mercedes that he subjected to a thorough inspection, he set out along the south coast toward the whitewashed villa by the sea. Wazir al-Zayyat had been vague about when he might appear, so Gabriel stopped briefly in a small village market and bought enough food to last him three days.

  The March weather was unseasonably mild and he spent the first day relaxing on the terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, guilt-ridden for having abandoned Chiara to Jerusalem. By the second day he was restless with boredom, so he searched the Internet for a decent art-supply shop and found one a few miles up the coast. He spent the remainder of the afternoon producing sketches of the villa, and, late in the afternoon of the third day, he was working on a decent watercolor seascape when he spotted al-Zayyat’s car coming up the road from Larnaca.

  Their encounter was conducted at a leisurely pace and in the cool sunshine on the terrace. Al-Zayyat worked his way slowly through the bottle of single malt while Gabriel sipped mineral water with wedges of lemon and lime. For a long time they talked in generalities about the situation inside Egypt, but as the sun was sinking slowly into the sea Gabriel brought the topic of conversation around to the real reason why he had asked al-Zayyat to come to Cyprus: the name he had been given in Jerusalem earlier that week by Adrian Carter. Upon hearing it, al-Zayyat smiled and nipped at his whisky.

  “We’ve had our suspicions about the professor for some time,” he said.

  “He was in Paris for the last year working on a book at something called the Institute for Islamic Studies. It’s a well-known front for jihadist activities, funded in part by Prince Rashid. He left Paris the day after Christmas and came back to Cairo, where he resumed his teaching duties at the American University.”

  “I take it you’d like to grant the good professor a sabbatical?”

  “A permanent one.”

  “It’s going to cost you.”

  “Trust me, Wazir—money is no obstacle.”

  “When would you like to do it?”

  “Late spring,” he said. “Before the weather gets too hot.”

  “Just make sure it’s a clean job. I don’t want you making a mess in my town.”

  One hour later al-Zayyat left the villa with a briefcase containing half a million dollars. The next morning Gabriel burned his sketches and the watercolor and flew home to Chiara.

  64

  CAIRO

  The name on the reservation list sent a chill down the neck of Mr. Katubi, the chief concierge of Cairo’s InterContinental Hotel. Surely there was a glitch in the computer reservation system, he thought as he stared at it in disbelief. Surely it had to be a different Herr Johannes Klemp. Surely he hadn’t decided to come back for a return engagement. Surely it was all some sort of terrible misunderstanding. He picked up his house phone and dialed Reservations to see if the guest had made any special requests. The list was so long and detailed it took three minutes for the girl to recite them all.

  “How long is he planning to be with us?”

  “A week.”

  “I see.”

  He hung up the phone, then spent the remainder of the morning giving serious thought to taking the week off. In the end he decided that such a course of action would be cowardly and would inflict undue hardship on his colleagues. And so at 3:30 that afternoon he was planted firmly at the center of the glossy lobby, hands behind his back and chin raised like a defiant soldier before a firing squad, as Herr Klemp came whirling through the revolving doors, dressed head to toe in Euro black, sunglasses shoved into his head of silver hair. “Katubi!” he called brightly as he advanced on the steadfast little concierge with his hand extended like a bayonet. “I was hoping you would still be here.”

  “There are things about Cairo that never change, Herr Klemp.”

  “That’s what I love about the place. It does get under your skin, doesn’t it?”

  “Just like the dust,” said Mr. Katubi. “If there’s anything I can do to make your stay more enjoyable, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I know.”

  Mr. Katubi braced himself and his staff for a sandstorm of complaints, tirades, and lectures about Egyptian incompetence. But within forty-eight hours of Herr Klemp’s arrival, it had become clear to Mr. Katubi that the German was a changed man. His accommodations—an ordinary single room high on the north side of the building overlooking Tahrir Square and the campus of the American University—he declared to be Paradise on earth. The food, he announced, was ambrosia. The service, he raved, was second to none. He did his sightseeing in the morning, while it was still cool, and spent his afternoons relaxing by the pool. By dusk each day, he was resting quietly in his room. Mr. Katubi found himself longing for a flash of the old Herr Klemp, the one who berated the maids for making his bed improperly or lashed out at the valet staff for ruining his clothing. Instead, there was only the silence of a contented customer.

  At 6:30 on the penultimate day of his scheduled stay, Herr Klemp appeared in the lobby, dressed for dinner. He asked Mr. Katubi to book a table for him at a French bistro on Zamalek for eight o’clock, then darted through the revolving doors and disappeared into the Cairo dusk. Mr. Katubi watched him go, then reached for the telephone, not knowing then that he would never see Herr Klemp again.

  The silver Mercedes sedan was parked in Muhammad Street, within sight of the staff parking lot at the American University. Mordecai was seated calmly behind the wheel. Mikhail sat next to him in the front passenger seat, drumming his fingers nervously against his thigh. Gabriel climbed into the backseat and quietly closed the door. Mikhail drummed on, even after Gabriel told him to stop.

  Five minutes later, Mikhail said, “There’s your boy.”

  Gabriel watched as a tall, thin Egyptian in Western clothing handed a few piastres to the Nubian attendant and climbed behind the wheel of a Fiat sedan. Thirty seconds later he sped past their position and headed toward Tahrir Square. The traffic light on the edge of the square turned red. The Fiat came to a stop. The Sphinx was a careful man.

  “Do it now,” Gabriel said.

  Mikhail offered Gabriel the detonator switch. “You sure you don’t want him?”

  “Just do it, Mikhail—before the light changes.”

  Mikhail pressed the switch. An instant later the small, focused charge of explosives concealed inside the headrest exploded in a brilliant white flash. Mikhail started drumming his fingers again. Mordecai slipped the car into gear and headed for Sinai.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Secret Servant is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in this novel 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. The al-Hijrah Mosque does not exist, though no visit to Amsterdam would be complete without a walk through the lively outdoor market on the Ten Kate Straat. To the best of my knowledge there is no Institute for Islamic Studies in Paris and no Islamic Affairs Council in Copenhagen. Visitors to Parliament Square in London will search in vain for a bench upon which to sit, for no such bench exists. Christmas services at Westminster Abbey are usually held in the afternoon, not the morning. Foulness Island, though inhabited by two hundred rugged souls, is actually a restricted military zone and thus hardly an ideal place to leave thirty million dollars’ ransom. Those wishing to visit Foulness can do so by obtaining a pass from the Ministry of Defence or by booking a table for lunch at the George & Dragon pub in Church End. Deepest apologies to the management of the Europa and d’Angleterre hotels for running intelligence operations from their fine establishments without obtaining prior consent.

  The Sword of Allah is entirely fictitious, though its background, creed, and operations are consistent with a
ctual Egyptian terrorist groups such as al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya and al-Jihad. Anwar Sadat did indeed provide material and other support to Egyptian Islamists shortly after assuming power in an ill-considered gambit designed to bolster his base of popular support. The descriptions of torture as practiced by the Egyptian security services are based on accounts provided by victims who have lived to tell about it. The CIA program known as “extraordinary rendition,” the practice of clandestinely transferring suspected terrorists from one country to another for the purposes of incarceration or interrogation, has been well documented. It was put into place not by President George W. Bush but by his predecessor, Bill Clinton.

  The statistics used to illustrate the terrorist threat now confronting the United Kingdom are based on reports by the British police and intelligence services, as is the contention that Great Britain has supplanted the United States as al-Qaeda’s top target. The rise of militant Islam across Europe and the Continent’s rapidly changing demographics are, of course, factual. Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton has estimated that Europe will have a Muslim majority by the end of the century, and Zachary Shore, in his thoughtful study of Europe’s future titled Breeding Bin Ladens, stated that “America may not recognize Europe in a few short decades.” Whether Europe will remain a strategic ally of the United States or become a staging ground for future attacks on American soil is not yet known. What is clear, however, are the intentions of al-Qaeda and the global jihadists. Mohammed Bouyeri, the unemployed Dutch-Moroccan immigrant from Amsterdam who murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, stated them unambiguously in the manifesto he adhered to his victim’s body with the point of a knife: “I surely know that you, O America, will be destroyed. I surely know that you, O Europe, will be destroyed. I surely know that you, O Holland, will be destroyed.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS