by Daniel Silva
They were approaching the port of Jebel Ali. They shot past the glittering Ibn Battuta theme park and shopping mall, then a desalinization plant: Dubai in a snapshot. Gabriel scarcely noticed the landmarks. He was watching the carefully choreographed maneuver occurring on the road directly ahead. Four of the SUVs were now side by side across the four lanes of traffic. They had reduced their speed and were engaged in a blocking tactic. The fifth, the Denali in which Malik was riding, was accelerating rapidly.
“He’s getting away, Chiara. You have to get past them.”
“Where?”
“Find a way.”
Chiara swerved hard to the left. Then to the right. Each time an SUV blocked the way.
“Force your way between them.”
“Gabriel!”
“Do it!”
She tried. There was no way through.
They were nearing the end of the Jebel Ali Free Zone. Beyond it lay the expanse of desert separating Dubai from the emirate of Abu Dhabi. Gabriel could no longer see Malik’s Denali; it was but a distant star in a galaxy of other taillights. Directly ahead, a stoplight switched from green to amber. The four SUVs slowed instantly, surely a first in Dubai, and came to a stop. As car horns began to sound, one of the Malik replicas stepped out and stared at Gabriel for a long moment before dragging his thumb knifelike across his own throat. Gabriel took a quick radio roll call of the team and determined all were safe and accounted for. Then he dialed Nadia’s BlackBerry. There was no answer.
Chapter 61
Dubai
THE BOEING BUSINESS JET OWNED and operated by AAB Holdings departed Dubai International Airport at 10:40 that evening. All available evidence suggested that Nadia al-Bakari, the company’s chairwoman, was not on board at the time.
Her BlackBerry had gone off the air at 10:14 p.m., as her car was crossing Dubai Creek, and was no longer emitting a signal of any kind. In the moments preceding the break, she had been chatting amiably with Rafiq al-Kamal. The last audio captured by the device was a muffled thumping that could have been anything from a death struggle to the sound of Nadia tapping her forefinger on the screen, something she often did while riding in cars. The transmitters hidden in her handbag and clothing were, at the moment of the disruption, far beyond the range of the listening posts inside the Burj Al Arab and therefore provided no clues as to what had transpired.
Only the GPS beacons remained functional. Eventually, they ceased moving at an empty lot along the Dubai-Hatta Road, not far from the polo club. Gabriel found the Chanel suit at 10:53 p.m. and the watch a few minutes later. He carried the items over to the Land Cruiser and examined them in the light of the dash. The fabric of the suit was torn in several places and there were bloodstains on the collar. The crystal of the watch was smashed, though the inscription on the back remained clearly legible. To the future, Thomas.
He told Chiara to start back to the hotel, then sent a message to Langley on his BlackBerry. The reply came two minutes later. Gabriel swore softly as he read it.
“What does it say?”
“They want us to leave for the airport immediately.”
“What about Nadia?”
“There is no Nadia,” Gabriel said, slipping the BlackBerry into his coat pocket. “Not as far as Langley and Shamron are concerned. Not anymore.”
“So we leave her behind?” asked Chiara angrily, her eyes on the road. “Is that what they want us to do? Use her money and her name and then throw her to the wolves? Do you know what they’re going to do to her?”
“They’re going to kill her,” Gabriel said. “And she won’t be given the courtesy of a decent death. That’s not the way they conduct their business.”
“Maybe she’s already dead,” Chiara said. “Maybe that’s what Malik’s friend was trying to tell you.”
“She might be,” Gabriel conceded, “but I doubt it. They wouldn’t have bothered to remove her clothing and her jewelry if they intended to kill her quickly. It suggests they wanted to have a word with her in private, which is understandable. After all, they lost their network because of her.”
Gabriel’s BlackBerry chimed a second time. It was Langley again, asking for confirmation he had received the message to abort. Gabriel ignored it and stared sullenly out the window at the lights of the financial district.
“Is there anything we can do for her?” asked Chiara.
“I suppose that depends entirely on Malik.”
“Malik is a monster. And you can be sure he knows you’re here in Dubai.”
“Even monsters can be reasoned with.”
“Not jihadists. They’re beyond reason.” She drove in silence for a moment with one hand on the wheel and the other clutching the fabric of Nadia’s bloodstained suit. “I know you made her a promise,” she said finally, “but you made a promise to me, too.”
“Should I let her die, Chiara?”
“God, no!”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Why do I have to make this decision?”
“Because you’re the only one who can.”
Chiara was wrenching at the fabric of Nadia’s suit, tears streaming down her cheeks. Gabriel asked whether she wanted him to drive. She seemed not to hear him.
Gabriel’s message flashed across the screens of Rashidistan thirty seconds later. Shamron stared at it in consternation. Then he lit a cigarette in violation of Langley’s draconian no-smoking policy and said, “Now might be a good time to put some birds in the air and boots on the ground.” Carter and Navot responded by reaching simultaneously for their phones. Within a few minutes, the birds were taking off from a secret CIA installation in Bahrain, and the boots were headed silently across the black waters of the Gulf toward the beach at Jebel Ali.
By the time Gabriel and Chiara returned to the hotel, the rest of the team was already engaged in a hasty but methodical evacuation. It had commenced upon receipt of Shamron’s order and was being conducted under the auspices of one Thomas Fowler, newly minted partner in the venture capital firm of Rogers & Cressey. The hotel’s management had been led to believe the sudden checkout was the result of a health emergency suffered by one of Mr. Fowler’s employees. The fixed-base operator at Dubai International Airport had been told the same story. It was preparing Mr. Fowler’s private aircraft for a two a.m. departure. The crew had been told to anticipate no delays.
Despite the urgency of the situation, the team managed to maintain strict operational discipline inside the hotel. In rooms they assumed to be bugged, they referred to one another by false names and spoke mainly of business and finance. Only their stricken expressions betrayed the anguish they were all feeling, and only when they were beneath the protective shroud of the chuppah did they dare to speak the truth. Shielded from the Ruler’s listening devices, Gabriel conducted a tense call with Shamron and Navot at Rashidistan. He also spoke face-to-face with the members of his team. Most of the encounters were businesslike; a few were confrontational. Chiara came to him last. Alone, she reminded him of the afternoon they had made love in the safe house by Lake Zurich, when her body had burned as if from fever. Then she kissed his lips one final time before collecting her luggage and heading to the lobby.
Shamron had always believed careers were defined less by the successes achieved than the calamities survived. “Any fool can take a victory lap,” he once famously remarked during a lecture at the Academy, “but only a truly great officer can maintain his composure and his cover when his heart is breaking.” If that were indeed the case, Shamron would have witnessed the very definition of greatness that night as Gabriel’s fabled team filed out of the Burj Al Arab and set off for the airport. Only Chiara appeared distraught, in part because her heart truly was breaking, but also because she had volunteered to play the role of the seriously ill employee. Management wished her well as they helped her into the back of a hotel limousine. Mr. Fowler tipped the valets lavishly before climbing in after her.
They followed the same route Nadia had
taken earlier that evening but arrived at the airport without incident. After a cursory check of their passports, they chose to board the aircraft immediately rather than wait in the luxuriously appointed VIP lounge. A cancellation allowed them to depart earlier than expected, and by one thirty, they were rising over the blackness of the Empty Quarter.
Two members of the team were not on board. Mikhail was headed toward an isolated beach west of Jebel Ali; Gabriel, to the old quarter of Dubai known as Deira. After leaving his Toyota Land Cruiser along the Corniche, he walked to the shabby little apartment house near the Gold Souk and climbed the staircase that stank of chickpeas and cumin. Alone in the apartment, he sat at the peeling kitchen table, staring at the screen of his BlackBerry. To help pass the time, he replayed the operation in his mind. Somewhere along the line, there had been a leak or an act of betrayal. He was going to find the person responsible. And then he was going to kill him.
It was another twenty minutes before Mikhail heard the crackle of a voice in his earpiece. It spoke a word or two, no more. Even so, he recognized it. He had heard it many times before—in the hellholes of Gaza, in the hills of southern Lebanon, in the alleyways of Jericho and Nablus and Hebron. He flashed his headlights twice, briefly illuminating the chalky white beach, and drummed his fingers anxiously on the steering wheel as a blacked-out Zodiac bobbed ashore. Four men slipped out, each carrying nylon gear bags. They looked like Arabs. They moved like Arabs. They even wore cologne that made them smell like Arabs. But they were not Arabs. They were members of the elite Sayeret Matkal. And one of them, Yoav Savir, was Mikhail’s former commanding officer.
“Long time no see,” Yoav said as he climbed into the front passenger seat. “What happened?”
“We lost someone very important.”
“What’s his name?”
“Her,” said Mikhail. “Her name is Nadia.”
“Who’s got her?”
“Malik.”
“Which Malik?”
“The only Malik that matters.”
“Shit.”
The lights of the giant Shaybah oil-drilling facility glowed like neon green embers on the wall monitors of Rashidistan. The image was being transmitted live by an unmanned Predator drone, now under the control of a crew at Langley. At Carter’s direction, the aircraft banked eastward, over the string of oases along the Saudi-Emirates border, then followed the main highway back toward Dubai city, its night-vision and thermal-imaging cameras searching the desert floor for any sign of life where ordinarily there was none. As the Predator approached the port of Jebel Ali, its cameras settled briefly on a small Zodiac heading back out to sea, a single figure aglow in the stern. No one in Rashidistan paid much attention to the image because they were monitoring a conversation on Gabriel’s BlackBerry. The computers recognized the number of the caller. They also recognized his voice. It was Malik al-Zubair. The only Malik that mattered.
Chapter 62
Deira, Dubai
“I’M SURPRISED YOU ANSWERED. PERHAPS it’s true what they say about you.”
“What’s that, Malik?”
“That you are courageous. That you are a man of your word. Personally, I remain skeptical. I’ve never met a Jew who was not a coward and a liar.”
“I never realized Zarqa had such a large Jewish community.”
“Thankfully, there are no Jews in Zarqa, only victims of the Jews.”
“Where is she, Malik?”
“Who?”
“Nadia,” said Gabriel. “What have you done with her?”
“Why would you assume we have her?”
“Because there’s only one place where you could have gotten this telephone number.”
“Clever Jew.”
“Let her go.”
“You’re not in a position to make demands at the moment.”
“I’m not demanding anything,” Gabriel said calmly. “I’m asking you to let her go.”
“As a humanitarian gesture?”
“Call it whatever you like. Just do the decent thing.”
“You murdered her father in front of her and you’re asking me to do the decent thing?”
“What do you want, Malik?”
“We demand that you release all the brothers who were arrested by the Americans and their allies after your little deception. In addition, we demand that you free the brothers being held illegally at Guantánamo Bay.”
“No Palestinian prisoners? You disappoint me.”
“I wouldn’t want to interfere with the ongoing negotiations between you and the brothers of Hamas.”
“Ask for something reasonable, Malik—something I can actually give you.”
“We never negotiate with terrorists. Release our brothers, and we will release your spy with no further harm.”
“What have you done to her?”
“I can assure you it was nothing compared to the pain suffered by our brothers each and every day in the torture chambers of Cairo and Amman and Riyadh.”
“Haven’t you been reading the papers, Malik? The Arab world is changing. Pharaoh is gone. The House of Saud is cracking. The little Hashemite king of Jordan is frightened for his life. The decent people of the Arab world have achieved in a matter of months what al-Qaeda and its ilk couldn’t accomplish with years of senseless slaughter. Your time has passed, Malik. The Arab world doesn’t want you. Let her go.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Allon.” He paused for a moment, as if pondering a way out of the impasse he had created. “But there is one other possibility.”
Gabriel listened to Malik’s instructions. So did Shamron, Navot, and Adrian Carter.
“What happens if we don’t accept?” Gabriel asked.
“Then she will suffer the traditional punishment for apostasy. But don’t worry. You’ll be able to watch her death on the Internet. The Yemeni plans to use it as a recruiting device to replace all the operatives we lost because of her.”
“I need proof she’s still alive.”
“I’m afraid you’ll just have to trust me,” Malik said. And then the line went dead.
Gabriel’s BlackBerry rang a few seconds later. It was Adrian Carter.
“He’s definitely still in the Emirates.”
“Where?”
“NSA hasn’t been able to triangulate it yet, but they think he might be out in the western desert, near the Liwa oasis. We have a bird over the area now and two more headed that way.”
Gabriel removed a small device from an internal pouch of his overnight bag. It was about the size of an average antibiotic tablet. On one side was a miniature metallic switch. He flipped it, then asked, “Can you see the signal?”
“Got it,” said Carter.
Gabriel swallowed the device. “Can you still see it?”
“Got it.”
“The Fish Souk, ten minutes.”
“Got it.”
Gabriel was still wearing the business attire of his cover identity. He briefly considered changing into something more appropriate for a night in the desert, but realized that wouldn’t be necessary. His captors would surely do that for him. He placed his wristwatch in his bag along with his BlackBerry, wallet, passport, weapon, and a few meaningless scraps of pocket litter. He was no longer in possession of syringes or suxamethonium chloride, only Advil and anti-diarrhea medicine. He took enough Advil to temporarily dull the pain of any injuries he might suffer in the next few hours and enough of the anti-diarrhea medicine to turn his bowels to concrete for a month. Then he locked the bag in the closet and headed downstairs to the street.
Six minutes remained for Gabriel to make the short walk to the Fish Souk. It was located near the mouth of Dubai Creek along the Corniche. Despite the late hour, there were groups of young men taking the night air along the waterfront—Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Filipinos, and four Arabs who were not Arabs at all. Gabriel stood next to a streetlamp to make himself clearly visible, and within a few seconds, a Denali SUV stopped directly in front of him. Behind
the wheel was one of the Malik clones. Another was seated in the back. So was Rafiq al-Kamal, Nadia al-Bakari’s former chief of security.
It was al-Kamal who gestured for Gabriel to climb in and al-Kamal, thirty seconds later, who delivered the first blow—an elbow to Gabriel’s chest that nearly stopped his heart. Then they forced him to the floor and pummeled him until there was no strength left in their arms. The harvest was over, thought Gabriel, as he slipped into unconsciousness. Now it was time for the feast.
Chapter 63
The Empty Quarter, Saudi Arabia
THE MAPS REFER TO IT ominously as the Rub’ al-Khali—literally, the Quarter of Emptiness. The Bedouin, however, know it by another name. They call it the Sands. Covering an area the size of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, it stretches from Oman and the Emirates, across Saudi Arabia, and into portions of Yemen. Dunes the size of mountains roam the desert floor in the relentless wind. Some stand alone. Others link themselves into chains that meander for hundreds of miles. In summer the temperature routinely exceeds one hundred forty degrees, cooling to a hundred degrees at night. There is almost no rain, little in the way of plant or animal life, and few people other than the Bedouin and the bandits and the terrorists from al-Qaeda who move freely across the borders. Time matters little in the Sands. Even now, it is measured in the length of the walk to the next well.
Like most Saudis, Nadia al-Bakari had never set foot in the Empty Quarter. That changed three hours after her abduction, though Nadia was unaware of it. Having been injected with the general anesthetic ketamine, she believed herself to be wandering lost through the gilded rooms of her youth. Her father appeared to her briefly; he wore the traditional robes of a Bedouin and the angry face known as the juhayman. His body had been pierced by bullets. He made her touch his wounds, then chided her for conspiring with the very men who had inflicted them. She would have to be punished, he said, just as Rena had been punished for bringing dishonor upon her family. It was the will of God. There was nothing to be done.