The Spy House

by Matthew Dunn

“Like what? Run around America, trying to find an Arab kid before he does something bad in the next twenty-four hours? Your job’s done. And technically you’re once again unemployed. So here’s what I’m thinking: Would you be interested in consulting for me, only me, same deal as you had with Alistair and Patrick?”

  “Off the books, deniable?”

  “Hard, complex work on issues that could damage Western interests and security.” The admiral held out his hand.

  I gripped it and answered, “Yes.”

  I was about to leave when Mason said, “The Agency and its allies will do everything they can to find Monsieur de Guise. Do you have any ideas about where they might start looking?”

  I could have told him that my starting point would be northern France. And given Antaeus’s suspicion that de Guise had some connection to mathematics due to his Thales code name, I could have added that I’d look at the staff list of every French university and school. Instead, I answered, “One thing you’ll learn about working with me is that there are some things you’re better off not asking.”

  I smiled and left the room.

  FORTY-THREE

  Police estimated that at least five thousand Orthodox Jews were in the parade. They were men, women, and children of all ages, the men wearing skullcaps or black hats, the women tichel scarves or sheitel wigs. Dotted alongside them at various positions in the procession were cops on horses, and at the front and rear of the demonstration were squad cars with flashing emergency lights. Many of the people were holding banners or placards with slogans such as JEWS AGAINST WAR. Intermingled in the crowd were people of other ethnicities and creeds, including Palestinian Americans who were holding hands with their Jewish friends and walking with them in solidarity. The demonstration had been planned weeks earlier, when it looked like Israel was going to unleash hell against its terrorist neighbors. Because Israel had delayed its decision to go to war due to new evidence that suggested Hamas wasn’t behind the attack on its ambassador, the mood in the procession was considerably more jovial than it might otherwise have been. Slogans were chanted, but they were coming from people with smiles and looks of relief on their faces. People were singing, and some of the kids were spinning around and dancing. New Yorkers who were not part of the demonstration for peace stood and watched the procession, some calling out their support from the sidewalk and cheering them on. It was afternoon, and the sun was shining. There was a palpable sense of optimism.

  As the procession turned onto Fifth Avenue, Safa moved into the ranks of the parade and walked alongside a Jewish man who was marching with his wife and kids. “Sir, I’m from Gaza. May I hold your hand?”

  The man smiled. “Today we are all brothers.” He gripped Safa’s hand and held it aloft. “A new beginning,” he shouted.

  Safa’s jacket felt tight and very heavy. The men who’d brought him to New York had made him drink odd-tasting water that made his head feel weird; the effect was identical to how he’d felt after Monsieur de Guise had administered his medication. The sounds of people around him seemed to ebb and flow in volume, like the noise of seawater advancing and retreating on a beach. His vision was blurred, and the movement of people seemed erratic, as if they were moving fast and then not moving at all. The horses ridden by the police officers looked as big as elephants, their tails slashing the air like whips. And de Guise had been right about the smell here; it was as rotten as decaying corpses in the Jabalia refugee camp.

  He was surrounded by people his guardian had warned him about. Safa didn’t understand what was wrong with their desire for peace, and they didn’t look bad. But de Guise was always right, so Safa told himself to stop thinking and keep walking.

  His free hand was inside his jacket pocket, clutching a cylindrical metal object the size of a tiny flashlight. At its end was a button. The men who’d fitted the jacket on him had told him not to press the button until he was several blocks down Fifth Avenue. When he did, he’d move faster than all the bad people. That was the truth, de Guise had told him, though what it meant was beyond Safa’s confused and heavily drugged brain.

  His legs were stiff; they’d been so cramped when he was traveling in a box to the States. He felt a sharp pain behind his eyes, and the noise in his ears now resembled that of a buzz saw. Under his jacket, his torso was covered in sweat, though he didn’t know why because he wasn’t particularly hot. Nobody took any notice of him. He guessed he looked normal; maybe people thought he was the Jewish man’s son.

  A small part of his mind assumed he was carrying a bomb and that when he pressed the button he’d die along with everyone close to him. But he couldn’t process that thought, and the rest of his brain was telling him that nothing was real. It was like he was in two dreams at the same time, one of them bad, the other good.

  His part of the procession drew close to a shop on the avenue. According to the monsieur’s associates, this shop was his goal.

  A few more paces and he’d be there.

  He moved his thumb closer to the button in his pocket.

  He tried to think clearly, but even his memories of the monsieur’s French home were now distant and intangible. Though he could remember Monsieur de Guise’s observation.

  When you are standing in the crowd and press the pen, you will be imparting divine wisdom.

  What was it that Safa had to say before he did that? Oh, yes: Death to Israel.

  He was so close now and felt a pang of fear. He didn’t know why he suddenly felt scared, but the emotion brought back the memory of his father dying on his bed in Gaza. Did his father feel fear at the end? Was that why this memory had come to him? He frowned, sweat from his forehead entering his eyes and causing them to screw up in discomfort. His father had passed to heaven with no drama, no complaints, and no evident pain. Despite everything that had happened to him, he’d left this world with dignity.

  Safa was alongside the shop.

  His father’s dying words suddenly entered the boy’s mind.

  Evil lurks on both sides of the border, but it isn’t and cannot be pervasive.

  Safa had a moment of clarity, as if someone had thrown a bucket of ice-cold water over his face, or tossed him into a fire and told him to burn.

  Panic overwhelmed him. He released the Jewish man’s hand and shouted in the little English he had, “Bomb! I have a bomb!”

  At first, no one heard him. There was too much noise from the crowds, too many people singing and chanting. Safa shouted again, and this time people near him took notice. Horrified, they relayed what they heard, turning to others and shouting the word, “bomb.” People screamed, ran while telling others why they were doing so, parents grabbed their kids, some people dove for cover or just threw themselves to the ground by their feet, others ran over them. Police horses were unsteady on their feet as officers tried to guide them toward Safa through the people along the avenue.

  Safa pulled out the metal object, attached to which was a cable. “I don’t want to die!” He held the object up. “I don’t want you to die!”

  Cops on foot were walking slowly to the boy, their sidearms unholstered and pointing at Safa’s head, the nearest to him yelling, “Drop it, now!”

  Safa started crying uncontrollably. In Arabic he asked, “What is this? What has happened to me?” He remained the only person standing amid a mass of bodies that stretched for hundreds of yards along the avenue.

  The approaching cops had looks of urgency on their faces, each step toward the boy taking them closer to the possibility of their own deaths. “Let it go!” said one of them.

  Safa’s body was shaking, and tears flooded down his smooth face.

  A hand touched his shoulder. It belonged to the Jewish man he’d walked next to.

  “Get away from him,” barked a cop.

  But the man stayed still, nodding at Safa, making no attempt to grab the device from his hand.

  Safa knew with all of his heart that the man was wholly good. De Guise had lied. Everything had been a lie.
Safa fell to his knees, let go of the device, and grabbed the Jewish man’s lower legs, hugging them. He was a boy who wanted his mommy and daddy back. Why was he here? His cries of anguish were so loud they echoed off the buildings.

  The police rushed to him, grabbed his arms, and put them behind his back, where they were cuffed. One of the cops radioed for bomb disposal units. Other officers grabbed people onto their feet and led them away from Safa.

  The officers with Safa were in a state of near panic, yet managed to prioritize professionalism and bravery. One of them asked in English, “Will it detonate if we remove the jacket?”

  Safa didn’t understand his words.

  Another officer tried to get the Jewish man away from the scene.

  But instead the man crouched before the boy, and said, “I know a bit of Arabic. They’re asking if the bomb will blow up if they take the jacket off you.”

  Safa started crying again. “He made my mind go strange.”

  “What is your name?”

  The boy stuttered, “Safa, Safa.”

  The Orthodox man smiled. “A good name. It means innocent, does it not?”

  Safa nodded.

  “Did you put the jacket on?”

  “No. Men . . . men put it on me.”

  Officers in bomb-disposal suits arrived on the scene. The regular cops withdrew, pulling the Jewish man with them.

  But the man kept eye contact with Safa as he was walked quickly backward. “God saved you, little man. And that means He loves you. And in the end, you were strong enough to save us.”

  The experts analyzed and safely removed the jacket and placed the garment and its contents into a bombproof container. Police helicopters with marksmen hovered overhead as sirens wailed in all directions. As far as the eye could see, all civilians had been evacuated out of the area; only emergency services personnel and their vehicles remained on the scene.

  “We need to get the boy down to the station,” said one of the bomb-disposal officers.

  Another disagreed. “He needs medical attention. Look at his eyes. He’s been drugged.”

  For now, Safa’s future was uncertain. But in time, it grew to be one of redemption and joy. His identity was withheld from the media, and the authorities rejected the option of putting him in a juvenile detention center in favor of giving him quality medical rehabilitation, a state education, and a visa to stay in the States. Safa never knew that a powerful admiral named Tobias Mason had ensured the Palestinian boy’s new path. Nor did he know that Mason had handpicked the foster parents who cared for him until he graduated from college. Within a few years he became a professor at his alma mater.

  One day, a Jewish man came to visit Safa after a classroom lecture. After much petitioning with the police to establish Safa’s identity, the man’s inquiries had come to the attention of Mason. The admiral made an exception to the rule of Safa’s anonymity, and told the man Safa’s whereabouts. When Safa saw him at the back of the lecture hall, he noted that the man’s hair was grayer than when he’d held his hand on Fifth Avenue all those years ago. But his smile was just the same—good. They became friends, and remained friends thereafter.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Monsieur de Guise was, as ever, elegantly dressed as he walked along the cobbled streets of Rennes, though today he was wearing a thick woolen overcoat, scarf, and wide-brimmed hat over his expensive clothes, for it was early winter and there was a bite in the air. With each step, he jabbed the tip of his maplewood cane against the road, a slight smile on his face, placing his fingers at the tip of his hat as he passed women walking in the opposite direction. Some of them smiled, probably thinking he was like an old-fashioned Victorian gentleman who was inspired by the civility, academic culture, and regal architecture of the city’s old quarter.

  He took his usual route toward the Thabor district, walking past restaurants and cafés that were making preparations for their evening service.

  For weeks, Thales hadn’t thought about his failure to successfully conduct the Israeli project. That was in the past; he had other projects planned. And in any case, Bäcklund had paid him up front and handsomely for his attempts to get Israel to go to war. She wouldn’t be asking for a refund, given that she was in solitary confinement and had more pressing concerns. The fact that Safa had failed to detonate his bomb vest and remobilize Israel’s military machine was no longer of consequence to him. If Israel was prepared to risk leaving its dangerous neighbors unchecked, that was its decision, not his. And Safa had simply been a pawn. Thales had no further need for him, nor would punishing the boy’s failure in any way benefit Thales.

  De Guise turned off a main thoroughfare into a cobbled side street containing more eighteenth-century half-timbered houses. He was pleased to be alone on the street, heading home to a warm fire where he’d listen to Chopin or Mozart while preparing his evening meal of filet de boeuf grillé, purée d’épinards, and poêlée de champignons. He wanted to cook a good meal because it would be his last in Rennes for some time. Tomorrow, he would advise his students that he was taking a sabbatical and departing for other shores for an undisclosed period. He hoped they’d miss the magic tricks he performed for them, though no doubt they wouldn’t miss his subsequent explorations of obscure mathematical theorems. That was their loss, not his.

  He turned into another narrow and empty side street.

  He’d been here before with Safa, swinging his cane, educating the boy about the city’s history and adding that in this very street a witch had once been dragged from her home and taken to the city outskirts where crowds watched her be consumed by fire. De Guise missed the time he’d had with Safa. No doubt, what he’d done to the boy was awful, but in other ways he believed he’d saved the boy from a less noble death in Gaza. And along the way he’d given him schooling, dignity, and health, in what were to be his final days. That was a good and unusual thing. Practitioners of death rarely get the chance to better their victims’ lives before obliterating them.

  It was time to move on. He put all thoughts of Safa out of his mind and smiled because Thales had outwitted everyone. He continued walking.

  That’s when the sniper round hit him in the gut. He gasped and staggered on the cobblestones, fruitlessly trying to use his cane to stay on his feet. After collapsing to the ground, he lay in the middle of the street, blood dripping out of one corner of his mouth, a look of utter surprise on his face.

  At the end of the street, Michael Stein smiled as he collapsed his rifle and left the empty building. His work was done.

  A big man walked fast out of an alley and stood over de Guise. He was wearing a suit and overcoat and pointing a pistol at de Guise’s head, his expression cold and focused. “It took me a while, but I found you.”

  “Who . . . ?”

  “I’ve lost dear friends because of you. Did you think your actions would go unpunished? That wasn’t ever going to happen, Thales.”

  De Guise wheezed and said, “My name—”

  “Is William de Guise, lately a mathematics professor in one of this city’s universities. It took me a while to track you down and establish with certainty that you weren’t who you claimed to be.”

  “William de Guise,” he rasped, his life ebbing away. “Thales.”

  “Thales.”

  “I played those parts well, I believe. Even so, my employer was clear about the risks I was taking.”

  “It seems you didn’t heed Mae Bäcklund’s advice.”

  “Bäcklund?” De Guise laughed, then coughed blood out of his mouth and onto his chin. “Bäcklund.”

  “You should have been more prudent.”

  “I . . .” De Guise winced as he gripped his cane. “. . . was simply told what to do. To . . .”

  “Murder.”

  “Maybe. Yes, I suppose I was involved in that. Who are you?”

  “You should know who I am.”

  De Guise nodded. “Of course. You are Will Cochrane.”

  “Correct.” The man shot
de Guise in the head.

  In the distance, a man watched the former MI6 officer walk fast away from the dead body and disappear into the labyrinth of streets. He lowered his binoculars and smiled. Poor Monsieur de Guise. He’d done what he’d been paid to do with verve and creativity. And he had carried off the observer’s sleight of hand with poise, a sleight of hand that included pretending to be Thales.

  The mastermind called Thales turned and walked away.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With thanks to Judith; my two brilliant mentors, David Highfill and Luigi Bonomi, and their second-to-none teams at William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers and LBA Literary Agency respectively; and Sam Reynolds of www.samreynolds.co.uk.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  As an MI6 field officer, MATTHEW DUNN recruited and ran agents, coordinated and participated in special operations, and acted in deep-cover roles throughout the world. He operated in environments where, if captured, he would have been executed. Dunn was trained in all aspects of intelligence collection, deep-cover deployments, small arms, explosives, military unarmed combat, surveillance, and infiltration.

  Medals are never awarded to modern MI6 officers, but Dunn was the recipient of a rare personal commendation from the secretary of state for work he did on one mission, which was deemed so significant that it directly influenced the success of a major international incident.

  During his time in MI6, Matthew conducted approximately seventy missions. All of them were successful. He currently lives in England, where he is at work on his next novel.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  ALSO BY MATTHEW DUNN

  Dark Spies

  Slingshot

  Sentinel

  Spycatcher

  Novella

  Counterspy

  CREDITS

  COVER DESIGN BY RICHARD YOO

  COVER, TITLE PAGE, AND PART OPENER PAGE PHOTOGRAPHS © BY PGIAM / GETTY IMAGES (CAPITOL BUILDING);