by Daniel Silva
“You’re the ones occupying their land!”
He didn’t bother to offer a reply, for he had learned long ago that such debates almost always assumed the quality of a cat chasing its own tail. Instead, he switched off the engine and swiveled his chair around to face her.
“Take off that disguise,” she said. “Let me see your face.”
He removed the false eyeglasses.
“Now the wig.”
He did as she asked. She leaned forward and stared into his face.
“Take out those contact lenses. I want to see your eyes.”
He removed the lenses in turn and flicked them into the lake.
“Satisfied, Jihan?”
“Why do you speak German so well?”
“My ancestors were from Berlin. My mother was the only one to survive the Holocaust. When she arrived in Israel, she didn’t speak Hebrew. German was the first language I ever heard.”
“What about Ingrid?”
“Her parents had six children, one for each million murdered in the Holocaust. Her mother and two of her sisters were killed by a Hamas suicide bomber. Ingrid was severely wounded. That’s why she walks with a limp. That’s why she never wears shorts or a dress.”
“What’s her real name?”
“It’s not important.”
“What’s yours?”
“What difference does it make? You hate me because of who I am. You hate me because of what I am.”
“I hate you because you lied to me.”
“I had no choice.”
The wind stirred and brought with it the scent of roses.
“Did you really never suspect we were from Israel?”
“I did,” she admitted.
“Why didn’t you ask?”
She made no reply.
“Maybe you didn’t ask because you didn’t want to know the answer. And maybe now that you’ve had a chance to yell at me and call me names, we can get back to work. I’m going to turn the butcher of Damascus into a pauper. I’m going to see to it he never uses poison gas against his own people again, that he never turns another city into rubble. But I can’t do it alone. I need your help.” He paused, then asked, “Will you help me, Jihan?”
She was trailing her hand, childlike, in the water. “Where will I go when it’s over?”
“Where do you think?”
“I couldn’t possibly live there.”
“It’s not as bad as you’ve been led to believe. In fact, it’s rather nice. But don’t worry,” he added, “you won’t have to stay long. As soon as it’s safe to leave, you can live wherever you want.”
“Are you telling me the truth this time, or is this another one of your lies?”
Gabriel said nothing. Jihan scooped water from the lake and allowed it to run through her fingers. “I’ll do it,” she said at last, “but I need something from you in return.”
“Anything, Jihan.”
She looked at him for a moment in silence. Then she said, “I need to know your name.”
“It’s not important.”
“It is to me,” she replied. “Tell me your name, or you can find someone else to collect those documents in Geneva.”
“It’s not the way things are done in our business.”
“Tell me your name,” she said again. “I’ll write it in the water, and then I’ll forget it.”
He smiled at her and spoke his name.
“Like the archangel?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Like the archangel.”
“And your last name?”
He told her that, too.
“It’s familiar to me.”
“It should be.”
She leaned over the side of the boat and carved his name into the black surface of the lake. Then a gust of wind swept down from the Mountains of Hell and it was gone.
51
THE ATTERSEE—GENEVA
WHEN IT WAS OVER, GABRIEL would be able to recall little of the next twenty-four hours, for they were a whirlwind of planning, heated family quarrels, and tense conversations carried out over secure channels. At King Saul Boulevard, his emergency demand for additional safe properties and clean transport caused a brief rebellion, which Uzi Navot managed to suppress with a hard glare and a few stern words. Only Banking did not bristle at Gabriel’s request for more funding. His operation was already running at a substantial profit, with windfall earnings expected in the fourth quarter.
Jihan Nawaz would know nothing of the internecine battles raging within the Office, only the requirements of her last assignment on its behalf. She returned to the Attersee safe house Sunday afternoon for a final preoperational briefing, and to rehearse photographing documents under Gabriel’s unique brand of simulated pressure. Afterward, she gathered with the team for a luncheon on the lawn overlooking the lake. The false flag they had flown since her recruitment had been lowered and packed away for good. They were Israelis now, operatives of an intelligence service that most Arabs regarded with a paradoxical mixture of hatred and awe. There was the bookish Yossi, the false bureaucrat from Britain’s Revenue and Customs service. There was the rumpled little figure who had first come to her as Feliks Adler. There were Mikhail, Yaakov, and Oded, her three guardians on the streets of Linz. And there was Ingrid Roth, her neighbor, her confidante, her wounded secret sharer, who had suffered a loss that Jihan understood only too well.
And at the far end of the table, silent and watchful, was the green-eyed man whose name she had written on the water. He was not the monster the Arab press had made him out to be; none of them were. They were charming. They were witty. They were intelligent. They loved their country and their people. They were deeply sorry for what had happened to Jihan and her family at Hama. Yes, they admitted, Israel had made mistakes since its founding, terrible mistakes. But it wanted nothing more than to live in peace and to be accepted by its neighbors. The Arab Spring had briefly held the promise of change in the Middle East, but sadly it had reverted into a death struggle between Sunni and Shiite, between the global jihadists and the old order of Arab strongmen. Surely, they agreed, there was a middle ground, a modern Middle East where religious and tribal ties were less important than decent governance and progress. For a few hours that afternoon on the shores of the Attersee, it seemed anything was possible.
She left them for the last time in early evening and, accompanied by her friend Ingrid, returned to her apartment. Keller alone watched over her that night, for the rest of the team had commenced a hurried battlefield transition that one Office wit would later refer to as the great westward migration. Gabriel and Eli Lavon traveled by car together, Gabriel driving, Lavon fretting and worrying, the same way they had done it a thousand times before. But that night was different. Their target was not a terrorist with Israeli blood on his hands; it was billions of dollars that rightfully belonged to the people of Syria. Lavon the asset hunter could scarcely contain his excitement. Control the butcher’s money, he said, and they could bend him to their will. They could own him.
They arrived in Geneva in the uncertain hour between darkness and dawn and made their way to an old Office safe flat on the boulevard de Saint-Georges. Mordecai had been there before them, and in the sitting room he had constructed a command post, complete with computers and a secure radio. Gabriel sent a brief activation message to the Ops Center at King Saul Boulevard. Then, shortly before seven, he listened to a weary-sounding Waleed al-Siddiqi boarding Austrian Air Flight 411 at Vienna’s Schwechat Airport. As his plane was passing over Linz, a black sedan eased to the curb outside an apartment house on the fringes of the Innere Stadt. And five minutes after that, Jihan Nawaz, the child of Hama, stepped into the street.
For the next three hours, Gabriel’s world shrank to the fifteen luminous inches of his computer screen. There was no war in Syria, no Israel, no Palestine. His wife was not pregnant with twins. In fact, he did not have a wife. There were only the winking red lights depicting the positions of Jihan Nawaz and
Waleed al-Siddiqi, and the winking blue lights depicting the positions of his team. It was ordered, sanitary, a world without danger. It seemed nothing could go wrong.
At eight fifteen, Jihan’s red light arrived at Vienna’s Schwechat Airport, and at nine it went dark as she dutifully obeyed the flight attendant’s instructions to switch off all electronic devices. Gabriel then turned his full attention to Waleed al-Siddiqi, who at that moment was entering the Paris offices of a prominent French bank where he had secretly deposited several hundred million dollars in Syrian assets. The bank was located along an elegant stretch of the rue Saint-Honoré, in the First Arrondissement. Al-Siddiqi’s black Mercedes sedan remained parked outside in the street. An Office surveillance team from Paris Station had identified the driver as an asset of Syrian intelligence in France—security, mainly, but occasionally rough stuff, too. Gabriel requested a photo and was rewarded five minutes later with a shot of a thick-necked man grimly clutching a luxury steering wheel.
At ten minutes past nine Paris time, al-Siddiqi entered the office of Monsieur Gérard Beringer, one of the bank’s vice presidents. The Syrian did not remain there for long, because at 9:17 he received a call on his mobile phone that took him into the corridor in search of privacy. The call was from a number in Damascus; the baritone voice at the other end was male, a person of authority. At the conclusion of the conversation—which was just twenty seconds in length and conducted in the Alawite dialect of Syrian Arabic—al-Siddiqi switched off his phone, and his red light disappeared from the computer screen.
Gabriel listened to the recording of the conversation five times and was unable to determine exactly what was being said. Then he asked King Saul Boulevard for a translation and was told that the baritone caller had instructed al-Siddiqi to ring him back on another device. Voice analysis turned up no matches on the caller’s identity. The eavesdroppers at Unit 8200 were trying to pinpoint the location of the number in Damascus.
“People turn off their cell phones all the time,” said Eli Lavon. “Especially people like Waleed al-Siddiqi.”
“True,” replied Gabriel. “But they generally do it when they fear someone is listening.”
“Someone is listening.”
Gabriel said nothing. He was staring at the computer screen as if he were trying to will al-Siddiqi’s light back into life.
“The call probably had something to do with the man sitting in the Hotel Métropole,” Lavon said after a moment.
“That’s what concerns me.”
“It’s not too late to cash out, Gabriel. You can make eight billion dollars disappear. And you can make the girl disappear, too.”
“What if there’s another eight billion out there, Eli? What if there’s eighty billion?”
Lavon said nothing for a moment. Then, finally, he asked, “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to consider all the reasons why Waleed al-Siddiqi might have just turned off his phone. And then I’m going to make a decision.”
“I’m afraid there isn’t time for that.”
Gabriel looked at the computer again. The child of Hama had just arrived in Geneva.
The arrivals hall at Geneva Airport was more crowded than usual: diplomats, reporters, extra police and security, a knot of Syrian exiles singing the song of protest that was written by a man whose throat had been cut out by the secret police. As a result, it took Jihan a moment to spot her driver. He was in his mid-thirties, dark-haired and olive-skinned, a bit too intelligent-looking to be working as a chauffeur. His gaze turned toward her as she approached—he had obviously been shown her photograph—and he flashed a smile, exposing a row of even white teeth. He spoke to her in Arabic, with a Syrian accent.
“I hope you had a good flight, Miss Nawaz.”
“It was fine,” she replied coolly.
“The car is outside. Follow me, please.”
He raised a manicured hand toward the appropriate door. Their route took them past the protesters, who were still singing their song of defiance, and past the small square Israeli who looked as though he could bend steel bars. Jihan looked through him as though he were invisible and stepped outside. A black Mercedes S-Class sedan with heavily tinted windows and diplomatic plates idled curbside. When the driver opened the rear passenger-side door, Jihan hesitated before climbing inside. She waited until the door was closed again before turning her head and looking at the man seated next to her. He was several years older than the driver, with thinning black hair, a heavy mustache, and the hands of a bricklayer.
“Who are you?” asked Jihan.
“Security,” he answered.
“Why do I need security?”
“Because you are about to meet with an official of the Syrian foreign ministry. And because there are many enemies of the Syrian government in Geneva at the moment, including that rabble inside,” he added with a sidelong nod toward the terminal building. “It is important that you reach your destination safely.”
The driver climbed behind the wheel and closed his door. “Yallah,” said the one in the backseat, and the car shot forward.
It was not until they had left the airport that he bothered to offer a name. He called himself Mr. Omari. He worked, or so he said, as a senior security officer for Syrian diplomatic posts in Western Europe—a difficult job, he added with a burdened nod, given the political tensions of the time. It was clear from his accent he was an Alawite. It was also clear that the driver, who seemed to have no name at all, was taking anything but the direct route into central Geneva. He wandered through an estate of low-rise industrial buildings for several minutes, glancing constantly into his rearview mirror, before finally making his way to the route de Meyrin. It bore them through a leafy residential quarter and, eventually, to the shore of the lake. As they sped across the Pont du Mont-Blanc, Jihan realized she was clutching her handbag so tightly her knuckles had gone white. She forced herself to relax her hand and to smile slightly as she looked out her window at the beautiful sunlit city. The sight of Swiss policemen lining the ramparts of the bridge gave her a moment of comfort; and when they reached the opposite shore of the lake, she saw the Israeli with pockmarked cheeks peering through the window of an Armani boutique on the Quai du Général-Guisan. The car slid past him and stopped outside the gray-green facade of the Métropole. Mr. Omari waited a moment before speaking.
“I assume Mr. al-Siddiqi told you the name of the man waiting for you upstairs?”
“Mr. al-Farouk.”
He nodded gravely. “He’s staying in Room 312. Please go directly to his room. Do not talk to the concierge or anyone else in the hotel. Is that clear, Miss Nawaz?”
She nodded.
“Once you have the documents, you are to leave his room and return directly to this car. Do not make any stops along the way. Do not speak to anyone. Understood?”
Another nod. “Is there anything else?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, holding out his hand. “Please give me your mobile phone, along with any other electronic device you might have in your bag.”
Ten seconds later, the red light from Jihan’s phone vanished from Gabriel’s computer screen. He immediately radioed Yaakov, who had followed her into the hotel, and ordered him to abort the operation. But by then it was too late; Jihan was marching across the crowded lobby at a parade-ground clip, her chin raised defiantly, her handbag over one shoulder. Then she slipped between a pair of closing elevator doors and was gone from his sight.
Yaakov quickly boarded the next elevator and pressed the call button for the third floor. The journey seemed to take an eternity; and when the doors finally opened he saw a Syrian security man standing in the vestibule, hands clasped, feet shoulder-width, as though he were bracing himself for a frontal assault. The two men exchanged a long, cold stare. Then the doors rattled shut, and the elevator sank slowly toward the lobby.
52
HOTEL MÉTROPOLE, GENEVA
SHE KNOCKED LIGHTLY—TOO LIGHTLY, it seemed, beca
use for several long seconds no one answered. Then the door retreated a few inches, and a pair of dark eyes regarded her warily over the security bar. The eyes belonged to yet another security man. He was more like Jihan’s driver than the implacable Mr. Omari, young, immaculately groomed and attired, a killer in a presentable wrapper. In the entrance hall he ransacked her handbag to make certain she hadn’t brought a pistol or a suicide vest. Then he invited her to follow him into the sitting room of the luxurious suite. There were four more security men just like him scattered about the perimeter; and seated on the couch was Kemel al-Farouk, deputy minister of foreign affairs, former officer of the Mukhabarat, friend and trusted adviser of the ruler. He was balancing a cup and saucer in one hand and shaking his head at something a reporter from Al Jazeera was saying on the television. Files lay scattered about him on the couch and the coffee table. Jihan could only wonder at the contents. Position papers regarding the upcoming peace talks? An account of recent battlefield victories? A list of newly dead opposition figures? Finally, he swiveled his head a few degrees and, with a nod, invited her to sit. He neither stood nor offered his hand. Men like Kemel al-Farouk were too powerful to worry about good manners.
“Your first time in Geneva?” he asked.
“No,” she answered.
“You’ve come here before on behalf of Mr. al-Siddiqi?”
“On holiday, actually.”
“When did you come here on holiday, Jihan?” He smiled suddenly and asked, “Is it all right if I call you Jihan?”
“Of course, Mr. al-Farouk.”
His smile faded. He asked again about the circumstances of her holiday in Geneva.
“I was a child,” she said. “I really don’t remember much about it.”
