Portrait of a Spy ga-11

by Daniel Silva

  As usual, Mikhail Abramov arrived last. Lanky and fair, with a fine-boned face and eyes the color of glacial ice, he had immigrated to Israel from Russia as a teenager and joined the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s elite special operations unit. Once described as “Gabriel without a conscience,” he had personally assassinated several of the top terror masterminds from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Burdened with two heavy cases filled with electronic gear, he greeted Sarah with an unambiguously frigid kiss. Eli Lavon would later describe it as the frostiest embrace since Shamron, during the halcyon days of the peace process, had been forced to shake the hand of Yasser Arafat.

  Known by the code name Barak, the Hebrew word for lightning, the nine men and women of Gabriel’s team had many idiosyncrasies and many traditions. Among the idiosyncrasies was a ritual childlike squabble over room assignments. Among the traditions was a lavish first-night planning meal prepared by Chiara. The one that occurred at N Street was more poignant than most, in that it was never supposed to take place. Like everyone else at King Saul Boulevard, the team had expected the operation against the Iranian nuclear program to be Gabriel’s last. They had been told as much by their chief in name only, Uzi Navot, who was not altogether displeased, and by Shamron, who was distraught. “I had no choice but to set him free,” Shamron said after his fabled encounter with Gabriel atop the cliffs of Cornwall. “This time it’s for good.”

  It might have been for good if Gabriel had not spotted Farid Khan walking along Wellington Street with a bomb beneath his overcoat. The men and women gathered around the dining room table understood the toll Covent Garden had taken on Gabriel. Many years earlier, in another lifetime, under another name, he had failed to prevent a bombing in Vienna that forever altered the course of his life. On that occasion, the bomb had been hidden not beneath the overcoat of a shahid but in the undercarriage of Gabriel’s car. The victims were not strangers but loved ones—his wife, Leah, and his only son, Dani. Leah lived now in a psychiatric hospital atop Mount Herzl in Jerusalem in a prison of memory and a body destroyed by fire. She had only a vague sense that Dani was buried not far from her, on the Mount of Olives.

  The members of Gabriel’s team did not mention Leah and Dani that evening, nor did they dwell long on the chain of events that led Gabriel to be an unwilling witness to Farid Khan’s martyrdom. Instead, they spoke of friends and family, of books they had read and movies they had seen, and of the remarkable changes currently sweeping the Arab world. In Egypt, Pharaoh had finally fallen, unleashing a wave of protest that was threatening to topple the kings and secular dictators who had ruled the region for generations. Whether the changes would bring Israel greater security or place it in greater peril was a topic of hot debate inside the Office and around the dinner table that night. Yossi, an optimist by nature, believed the Arabs, if given the opportunity to govern themselves, would have no truck with those who wished to make war with Israel. Yaakov, who had spent years running spies against hostile Arab regimes, declared Yossi dangerously delusional, as did nearly everyone else. Only Dina refused to venture an opinion, for her thoughts were focused on the crates of files waiting in the living room. She had a clock ticking in her formidable brain and believed that a minute wasted was a minute left to terrorists to plot and plan. The files held the promise of lives saved. They were sacred texts that contained secrets only she could decode.

  It was approaching midnight by the time the meal finally came to an end. It was followed by the traditional spat over who would clear the dishes, who would wash, and who would dry. After recusing himself, Gabriel acquainted Dina with the files, then showed Chiara upstairs to their room. It was on the third floor, overlooking the rear garden. The red aircraft warning lights atop the spires of Georgetown University winked softly in the distance, a reminder of the city’s vulnerability to aviation-based terrorism.

  “I suppose there are worse places to spend a few days,” Chiara said. “Where did you put Mikhail and Sarah?”

  “As far apart as possible.”

  “What are the chances this operation might bring them back together?”

  “About the same that the Arab world is suddenly going to recognize our right to exist.”

  “That bad?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Gabriel lifted Chiara’s bag and placed it at the end of the bed. It sagged beneath the weight. “What have you got in here?”

  “Gilah sent along a few things for you.”

  “Rocks?”

  “Food,” Chiara said. “You know how Gilah is. She always thought you were too thin.”

  “How is she?”

  “Now that Ari isn’t spending so much time around the house, she seems to be doing much better.”

  “Did he finally sign up for that pottery course he’s always wanted to take?”

  “Actually, he’s back at King Saul Boulevard.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Uzi thought he needed something to keep him occupied, so he made him your operational coordinator. He’d like you to call him first thing in the morning.” Chiara kissed his cheek and smiled. “Welcome home, darling.”

  Chapter 16

  Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

  THERE IS A TRUISM ABOUT terror networks: putting the pieces in place is not as difficult as one might imagine. But once the mastermind pulls the trigger and carries out his first attack, the element of surprise is lost and the network exposes itself. In the earliest years of the conflict against terrorism—when Black September and Carlos the Jackal were running amok, aided by useful leftist Euro-idiots such as the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Brigades—intelligence officers mainly used physical surveillance, hard wiretaps, and good old-fashioned detective work to identify the members of a cell. Now, with the advent of the Internet and global satellite communications, the contours of the battlefield had been altered. The Internet had given the terrorists a powerful tool to organize, inspire, and communicate, but it had also provided intelligence services with a means of tracking their every move. Cyberspace was like a forest in winter. The terrorists could hide there for a time, hatching their plots and organizing their forces, but they could not come or go without leaving footprints in the snow. The challenge for the counterterrorism officer was to follow the right set of tracks, for the virtual forest was a dark and confusing place where one could wander aimlessly while innocents died.

  Gabriel and his team cautiously set foot there the next morning when British intelligence, under standing agreement, shared with their American cousins the preliminary results of the inquiry into the Covent Garden bombing. Included in the material were the contents of Farid Khan’s computers at home and work, a printout of every number he had dialed from his mobile phone, and a list of known Islamic extremists he had encountered while he was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun. There was also a copy of the suicide tape, along with several hundred still images captured by CCTV during the final months of his life. The last photo showed him standing in Covent Garden, his arms raised above his head, a bloom of fire erupting from the explosives belt around his waist. Lying on the ground a few feet away, shielded by two men, was Gabriel. When the picture was magnified, it was possible to see the shadow of a gun in his left hand.

  Carter had distributed the material to the CTC at Langley and the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland. Then, without the knowledge of either, he delivered a third copy to the house on N Street. The next day, he dropped off a remarkably similar package from the Danish, but an entire week would elapse before he appeared with the material from Paris. “The French still haven’t quite figured out that we’re all in this together,” Carter said. “They view the attack as a failure of their intelligence system, which means you can be sure we’re getting only part of the story.”

  Gabriel and his team worked through the material as quickly as possible, but with the patience and attention to detail required in such an endeavor. Instinctively, Gabriel told them to approach the case as if it were an enormous canvas that had suf
fered extensive losses. “Don’t stand off at a distance and try to see everything at once,” he warned. “It will only drive you mad. Work your way in slowly from the edges. Focus on small details—a hand, an eye, the hem of a garment, a single thread running through each of the three attacks. You won’t be able to see it at first, but it’s there, I promise you.”

  With the help of the NSA and the government data miners who worked in faceless office blocks ringing the Capital Beltway, the team burrowed deep into the memory of mainframe computers and servers scattered around the world. Phone numbers begot phone numbers, e-mail accounts begot e-mail accounts, names begot names. They read a thousand instant messages in a dozen different languages. Browsing histories were scoured for intent, photographs for evidence of target casing, search histories for secret desires and forbidden passions.

  Gradually, the faint outline of a terror network began to take shape. It was scattered and diffuse—here the name of a potential operative in Lyon; here the address of a possible safe flat in Malmö; here a phone number in Karachi; here a Web site of uncertain origin that offered downloadable videos of bombings and beheadings, the pornography of the jihadist world. Friendly Western intelligence services, believing they were dealing with the CIA, happily supplied material they would have normally withheld. So, too, did the secret policemen of the Islamic world. Before long, the walls of the drawing room were covered with a mind-numbing matrix of intelligence. Eli Lavon likened it to gazing upon the heavens without the aid of a star chart. It was pleasant, he said, but hardly productive when lives were at stake. Somewhere out there was an organizing principle, a guiding hand of terror. Rashid, the charismatic cleric, had built the network with his beautiful and seductive tongue, but someone else had primed it to carry out three attacks in three European cities, each at a precise moment in time. He was no amateur, this man. He was a professional terror mastermind.

  Putting a name and face to this monster became Dina’s obsession. Sarah, Chiara, and Eli Lavon worked tirelessly at her side while Gabriel was content to play the role of errand-runner and messenger. Twice each day, Dina supplied him with a list of questions requiring urgent answers. Sometimes, Gabriel would make his way up to the Israeli Embassy in far northwest Washington and transmit them to Shamron over the secure link. Other times, he would give them to Adrian Carter, who would then make a pilgrimage to Fort Meade to have a quiet word with the data miners. On Halloween night, as children roamed Georgetown dressed as ghosts and goblins and superheroes, Carter summoned Gabriel to a coffee shop on Thirty-fifth Street to deliver a thick packet of material.

  “Where’s Dina going with this?” Carter asked, prying the lid from a caffè Americano he had no intention of drinking.

  “Even I’m not sure,” Gabriel replied. “She has her own methodology. I just try to stay out of the way.”

  “She’s beating us, you know. The intelligence services of the United States have two hundred analysts trying to crack this case, and they’re being beaten by a single woman.”

  “That’s because she knows exactly what will happen if we don’t shut them down. And she doesn’t seem to need sleep.”

  “Does she have a theory about who it might be?”

  “She feels like she knows him.”

  “Personally?”

  “It’s always personal with Dina, Adrian. That’s why she’s so good at what she does.”

  Though Gabriel would not admit it, the case had become personal for him as well. Indeed, when he was not at the embassy or meeting with Carter, he could usually be found in “Rashidistan,” which is how the team referred to the cramped library of the house on N Street. Photographs of the telegenic cleric covered the four walls. Arranged chronologically, they charted his unlikely rise from an obscure local preacher in San Diego to the leader of a jihadist terror network. His appearance had changed little during that time—the same thin beard, the same bookish eyeglasses, the same benevolent expression in his tranquil brown eyes. He did not look like a man capable of mass murder, or even like someone who could inspire it. Gabriel was not surprised; he had been tortured by men with the hands of priests and had once killed a Palestinian master terrorist who had the face of a child. Even now, more than twenty years later, Gabriel struggled to reconcile the sweetness of the man’s lifeless features with the appalling amount of blood on his hands.

  Rashid’s greatest asset was not his banal appearance but his voice. Gabriel listened to Rashid’s sermons—both in Arabic and in his colloquial American English—and to the many thoughtful interviews he gave to the press after 9/11. Mainly, he reviewed the recordings of Rashid matching wits with his CIA interrogators. Rashid was part poet, part preacher, part professor of jihad. He warned the Americans that the demographics were stacked decidedly in favor of their enemies, that the Islamic world was young, growing, and seething with a potent mix of anger and humiliation. “Unless something is done to alter the equation, my dear friends, an entire generation will be lost to the jihad.” What America needed was a bridge to the Muslim world—and Rashid al-Husseini offered to play the part.

  Weary of Rashid’s insidious presence, the rest of the team insisted that Gabriel keep the door of the library tightly closed whenever he was listening to the recordings. But late at night, when most of the others had gone off to bed, he would disobey their order, if only to relieve the feeling of claustrophobia produced by the sound of Rashid’s voice. Invariably, he would find Dina staring at the puzzle arrayed on the walls of the drawing room. “Go to sleep, Dina,” he would say. And Dina would respond, “I’ll sleep when you sleep.”

  On the first Friday of December, as snow flurries whitened the streets of Georgetown, Gabriel listened again to Rashid’s final debriefing with his Agency handlers. It was the night before his defection. He seemed more excited than usual and slightly on edge. At the conclusion of the encounter, he gave his case officer the name of an Oslo-based imam who, in Rashid’s opinion, was raising money for the resistance fighters in Iraq. “They’re not resistance fighters, they’re terrorists,” the CIA man said pointedly. “Forgive me, Bill,” Rashid replied, using the officer’s pseudonym, “but I sometimes find it hard to remember which side I’m on.”

  Gabriel switched off his computer and slipped quietly into the drawing room. Dina stood silently before her matrix, rubbing at the spot on her leg that always pained her when she was fatigued.

  “Go to sleep, Dina,” Gabriel said.

  “Not tonight,” she replied.

  “You’ve got him?”

  “I think so.”

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Malik,” she said softly. “And may God have mercy on us all.”

  Chapter 17

  Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

  IT WAS A FEW MINUTES past two a.m., a dreadful hour, Shamron once famously said, when brilliant schemes are rarely hatched. Gabriel suggested waiting until morning, but the clock in Dina’s head was ticking far too loudly for that. She personally roused the others from bed and paced the drawing room anxiously while waiting for the coffee to brew. When finally she spoke, her tone was urgent but respectful. Malik, the master of terror, had earned it.

  She began her account by reminding the team of Malik’s lineage—a lineage that had but one possible outcome. A descendant of the al-Zubair clan—a mixed Palestinian-Syrian family that hailed from the village of Abu Ghosh, on the western approaches to Jerusalem—he had been born in the Zarqa refugee camp in Jordan. Zarqa was a wretched place, even by the deplorable standards of the camps, and a breeding ground for Islamic extremism. An intelligent but aimless young man, Malik spent a great deal of time at the al-Falah Mosque. There he fell under the spell of an incendiary Salafist imam who guided him into the arms of the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas. Malik joined the group’s military wing, the Izzaddin al-Qassam Brigades, and studied the craft of terror with some of the deadliest practitioners in the business. A natural leader and skilled organizer, he rose quickly through the
ranks and by the onset of the Second Intifada was a top Hamas terror mastermind. From the safety of the Zarqa camp, he plotted some of the deadliest attacks of the period, including a suicide bombing at a nightclub in Tel Aviv that claimed thirty-three lives.

  “After that attack,” Dina said, “the prime minister signed an order authorizing Malik’s assassination. Malik concealed himself deep inside the Zarqa camp and plotted what would be his biggest strike yet—a bombing at the Western Wall. Fortunately, we managed to arrest the three shahids before they could reach their target. It’s believed to be Malik’s one and only failure.”

  By the summer of 2004, Dina continued, it was clear that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was too small a stage for Malik. Inspired by 9/11, he slipped out of the camp and, disguised as a woman, traveled to Amman to meet with an al-Qaeda recruiter. After reciting the bayat, the personal oath of allegiance to Osama Bin Laden, Malik was smuggled across the border into Syria. Six weeks later, he slipped into Iraq.

  “Malik was far more sophisticated than the other members of al-Qaeda in Iraq,” Dina said. “He’d spent years perfecting his craft against the most formidable counterterrorism forces in the world. Not only was he an expert bomb-maker, he knew how to slip his shahids through even the toughest security. He was thought to have been the mastermind behind some of the insurgency’s deadliest and most spectacular attacks. His crowning achievement was a one-day wave of bombings in the Shiite quarter of Baghdad that killed more than two hundred people.”