by Daniel Silva
“I seem to remember a conversation we had a few days ago during which you berated me for interrupting your honeymoon. Now you want to run an open-ended operation against Ivan Kharkov?”
“Let’s just say I have a personal stake in the outcome of the case.”
Shamron sipped his coffee. “Something tells me your new wife isn’t going to be pleased with you.”
“She’s Office. She’ll understand.”
“Just don’t let her anywhere near Ivan,” Shamron said. “Ivan likes to break pretty things.”
22
JERUSALEM
Is this some sort of sick fantasy of yours, Gabriel? Watching a stewardess remove her clothing?”
"I’ve never really been attracted to girls in uniform. And they’re called flight attendants now, Chiara. A woman in your line of work should know that.”
“You could have at least flirted with me a little bit. All men flirt with flight attendants, don’t they?”
“I didn’t want to blow your cover. You seemed to be having enough trouble as it was.”
“I don’t know how they can wear these uniforms. Help me with my zipper.”
“With pleasure.”
She turned around and pulled aside her hair. Gabriel lowered the zipper and kissed the nape of her neck.
“Your beard tickles.”
“I’ll shave.”
She turned around and kissed him. “Leave it for now. It makes you look very distinguished.”
“I think it makes me look like Abraham.” He sat on the edge of the bed and watched Chiara wriggle out of the dress. “This is certainly better than spending another night in Lubyanka.”
“I should hope so.”
“You were supposed to be keeping an eye on the Poussin. Please tell me you didn’t leave it unguarded.”
“Monsignor Donati took it back to the Vatican.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that. How long do I have before he gives it to one of the butchers from the Vatican’s restoration department? ”
“The end of September.” She reached behind her back and loosened the clasp on her brassiere. “Is there any food in this house? I’m famished. ”
“You didn’t eat anything on the flight?”
“We were too busy. How was Gilah’s chicken?”
“Delicious.”
“It looked a lot better than the food we were serving.”
“Is that what you were doing?”
“Was I that bad?”
“Let’s just say the first-class passengers were less than pleased by the level of service. If that flight had lasted another hour, you would have had an intifada on your hands.”
“They didn’t give us adequate training to accomplish our mission. Besides, Jewish girls shouldn’t be flight attendants.”
“Israel is the great equalizer, Chiara. It’s good for Jews to be flight attendants and farmers and garbagemen.”
“I’ll tell Uzi to keep that in mind the next time he’s handing out field assignments.”
She gathered up her clothing. “I need to take a shower. I smell like bad food and other people’s cologne.”
“Welcome to the glamorous world of air travel.”
She leaned down and kissed him again. “Maybe you should shave after all, Gabriel. I really can’t make love to a man who looks like Abraham.”
“He fathered Isaac at a very old age.”
“With help from God. I’m afraid you’re on your own tonight.” She touched the bruise on his cheek. “Did they hurt you?”
“Not really. We spent most of the night playing gin rummy and swapping stories about the good old days before the Wall came down.”
“You’re upset about something. I can always tell when you’re upset. You make terrible jokes to cover it up.”
“I’m upset because it appears a Russian arms trafficker named Ivan Kharkov is planning to sell some very dangerous weapons to al-Qaeda. And because the woman who risked her life to tell us about it is now in very serious danger.” He hesitated, then added, “And because it’s going to be a while before we can resume our honeymoon in Umbria.”
“You’re not thinking about going back to Russia?”
“Just Washington.”
She stroked his beard and said, “Have a nice trip, Abraham.”
Then she walked into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.
She’s Office, he told himself. She’ll understand.
Eventually.
23
GEORGETOWN
The CIA sent a plane for him, a Gulfstream G500, with leather club chairs, in-flight action movies, and a galley stocked with a vast amount of unwholesome snack food. It touched down at Andrews Air Force Base in the equatorial heat of midday and was met in a secure hangar by a pair of Agency security agents. Gabriel recognized them; they were the same two officers who had dragged him against his will to CIA Headquarters during his last visit to Washington. He feared a return engagement now but was pleasantly surprised when their destination turned out to be a graceful redbrick town house in the 3300 block of N Street in Georgetown. Waiting in the entrance hall was a man of retirement age, dressed in a navy blue blazer and crumpled gabardine trousers. He had the tousled thinning hair of a university professor and a mustache that had gone out of fashion with disco music, Crock-Pots, and the nuclear freeze. “Gabriel,” said Adrian Carter as he extended his hand. “So good of you to come.”
“You’re looking well, Adrian.”
“And you’re still a terrible liar.” He looked at Gabriel’s face and frowned. “I assume that lovely bruise on your cheek is a souvenir of your night in Lubyanka?”
“I wanted to bring you something, but the gift shop was closed.”
Carter gave a faint smile and took Gabriel by the elbow. “I thought you might be hungry after your travels. I’ve arranged for some lunch. How was the flight, by the way?”
“It was very considerate of you to send your plane on such short notice.”
“That one isn’t mine,” Carter said without elaboration.
“Air Guantánamo?”
“And points in between.”
“So that explains the handcuffs and the hypodermics.”
“It beats having to listen to them talk. Your average jihadi makes a damn lousy traveling companion.”
They entered the living room. It was a formal Georgetown salon, rectangular and high-ceilinged, with French doors overlooking a small terrace. The furnishings were costly but in poor taste, the sort of pieces one finds in the hospitality suite of a luxury business hotel. The impression was made complete by the catered buffet-style meal that had been laid upon the sideboard. All that was missing was a pretty young hostess to offer Gabriel a glass of mediocre chardonnay.
Carter wandered over to the buffet and selected a ham sandwich and a ginger ale. Gabriel drew a cup of black coffee from a silver pump-action thermos and sat in a wing chair next to the French doors. Carter sat down next to him and balanced his plate on his knees.
“Shamron tells me Ivan has been a bad boy again. Give me everything you’ve got. And don’t spare me any of the details.” He cracked open his soft drink. “I happen to love stories about Ivan. They serve as helpful reminders that there are some people in this world who will do absolutely anything for money.”
It wasn’t long after Gabriel began his briefing that Carter seemed to lose his appetite. He placed his partially eaten sandwich on the table next to his chair and sat motionless as a statue, with his legs crossed and his hands bunched thoughtfully beneath his chin. It had been Gabriel’s experience that any decent spy was at his core a good listener. It came naturally to Carter, like his gift for languages, his ability to blend into his surroundings, and his humility. Little about Carter’s clinical demeanor suggested that he was one of the most powerful members of Washington’s intelligence establishment—or that before his ascension to the rarified atmosphere of Langley’s seventh floor, where he served as director of the CIA�
�s national clandestine service, he had been a field man of the highest reputation. Most mistook him for a therapist of some sort. When one thought of Adrian Carter, one pictured a man enduring confessions of affairs and inadequacies, not tales of terrorists and Russian arms dealers.
“I wish I could say your story sounded like the ravings of an angry wife,” Carter said. “But I’m afraid it dovetails nicely with some rather alarming intelligence we’ve been picking up over the past few months.”
“What sort of intelligence?”
“Chatter,” said Carter. “More to the point, a specific phrase that has popped several times over the past few weeks—so many times, in fact, that our analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center are no longer willing to dismiss it as mere coincidence.”
“What’s the phrase?”
“The arrows of Allah. We’ve seen it about a half-dozen times now, most recently on the computer of a jihadi who was arrested by our friend Lars Mortensen in Copenhagen. You remember Lars, don’t you, Gabriel?”
“With considerable fondness,” Gabriel replied.
“Mortensen and his technicians at the Danish PET found the phrase in an old e-mail that the suspect had tried to delete. The e-mail said something about ‘the arrows of Allah piercing the hearts of the infidels, ’ or sentiments to that effect.”
“What’s the suspect’s name?”
“Marwan Abbas. He’s a Jordanian now residing in the largely immigrant quarter of Copenhagen known as Nørrebro—a quarter you know quite well, if I’m not mistaken. Mortensen says Abbas is a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the radical Islamist political movement. The Jordanian GID told us he was also an associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, may he rest in peace.”
“If I were you, Adrian, I’d send that Gulfstream of yours to Copenhagen to take possession of Marwan for a private chat.”
“I’m afraid Mortensen is in no position to play ball with us at the moment. PET and the Danish government still have bruised feelings over our actions during the Halton affair. I suppose, in hindsight, we should have signed the guestbook on the way into Denmark. We told the Danes about our presence on their soil after the fact. It’s going to take a while for them to forgive us our sins.”
“Mortensen will come around eventually. The Danes need you. So do the rest of the Europeans. In a world gone mad, America is still the last best hope.”
“I hope you’re right, Gabriel. It’s become popular in Washington these days to think that the threat of terrorism has receded—or that we can somehow live with the occasional loss of national monuments and American life. But when the next attack comes—and I do mean when, Gabriel—those same freethinkers will be the first to fault the Agency for failing to stop it. We can’t do it without the cooperation of the Europeans. And you, of course. You’re our secret servant, aren’t you, Gabriel? You’re the one who does the jobs we’re unwilling, or unable, to do for ourselves. I’m afraid Ivan falls into that category.”
Gabriel recalled the words Shamron had spoken the previous evening in Jerusalem: The Americans love to monitor problems but do nothing about them . . .
“Ivan’s main stomping ground is Africa,” Carter said. “But he’s made lucrative forays into the Middle East and Latin America as well. In the good old days, when the Agency and the KGB played the various factions of the Third World against one another for our own amusement, we were judicious with the flow of arms. We wanted the killing to remain at morally acceptable levels. But Ivan tore up the old rule book, and he’s torn up many of the world’s poorest places in the process. He’s willing to provide the dictators, the warlords, and the guerrilla fighters with whatever they want, and, in turn, they’re willing to pay him whatever he asks. He’s a vulture, our Ivan. He preys on the suffering of others and makes millions in the process. He’s responsible for more death and destruction than all the Islamic terrorists of the world combined. And now he trots around the playgrounds of Russia and Europe, safe in the knowledge that we can’t lay a finger on him.”
“Why didn’t you ever go after him?”
“We tried during the nineties. We noticed that much of the Third World was burning, and we started asking ourselves a single question: Who was pouring the gasoline on the flames? The Agency started tracking the movement of suspicious cargo planes around Africa and the Middle East. NSA started listening to telephone and radio conversations. Before long, we had a good idea where all the weapons were coming from.”
“Ivan Kharkov.”
Carter nodded. “We established a working group at NSC to come up with a strategy for dealing with the Kharkov network. Since he had violated no American laws, our options were extremely limited. We started looking for a country to issue an indictment but got no takers. By the end of the millennium, the situation was so bad we even considered using a novel concept known as extraordinary rendition to get Ivan’s operatives off the streets. It came to nothing, of course. When the administration left town, the Kharkov network was still in business. And when the new crowd settled into the White House, they barely had time to figure out where the bathrooms were before they were hit with 9/11. Suddenly, Ivan Kharkov didn’t seem so important anymore.”
“Because you needed Russia’s help in the fight against al-Qaeda.”
“Exactly,” said Carter. “Ivan is former KGB. He has powerful benefactors. To be fair, even if we had pressed the Kremlin on the Kharkov issue, it probably wouldn’t have done any good. On paper, there are no legal or financial ties between Ivan Kharkov the legitimate oligarch and Ivan Kharkov the international arms trafficker. Ivan is a master of the corporate front and the offshore account. The network is completely quarantined.”
Carter fished a pipe and a pouch of tobacco from the flap pocket of his jacket. “There’s something else we need to keep in mind: Ivan has a long track record of selling his wares to unsavory elements in the Middle East. He sold weapons to Gadhafi. He smuggled arms to Sad-dam in violation of UN sanctions. He armed Islamic radicals in Somalia and Sudan. He even sold weapons to the Taliban.”
“Don’t forget Hezbollah,” said Gabriel.
“How could we forget our good friends at Hezbollah?” Carter methodically loaded tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. “In a perfect world, I suppose we would go to the Russian president and ask him for help. But this world is far from perfect, and the current president of Russia is anything but a trustworthy ally. He’s a dangerous man. He wants his empire back. He wants to be a superpower again. He wants to challenge American supremacy around the globe, especially in the Middle East. He’s sitting atop a sea of oil and natural gas, and he’s willing to use it as a weapon. And the last thing he’s going to do is intervene on our behalf against a protected oligarch by the name of Ivan Kharkov. I lived through the end of the first Cold War. We’re not there yet, but we’re definitely heading in that direction. I’m certain of one thing, though. If we’re going to track down those weapons, we’re going to have to do it without Russia’s help.”
“I prefer it that way, Adrian. We Jews have a long history of dealing with Russians.”
“So how do you suggest we proceed?”
“I want to arrange a meeting with Elena Kharkov.”
Carter raised an eyebrow. “I suggest you proceed carefully, Gabriel. Otherwise, you might get her killed.”
“Thank you, Adrian. That really hadn’t occurred to me.”
“Forgive me,” said Carter. “How can I help?”
