by Daniel Silva
The danger of an ISIS safe haven in North Africa, Rousseau continued, was obvious. It would allow the terrorists to infiltrate fighters and weaponry into Western Europe and attack virtually at will. But within months of ISIS’s arrival in Libya, police forces from Greece to Spain noticed another disturbing trend. The flow of narcotics from North Africa, especially hashish from Morocco, rose to unprecedented levels. What’s more, there was a change in the traditional smuggling routes. Where once the drug gangs were content to move their product across the Strait of Gibraltar one small boat or Jet Ski at a time—or overland to Egypt and then the Balkans—it was now coming across the water in massive cargo ships.
“Take, for example, the case of the Apollo, a Greek-registered rust bucket seized by the Italian navy off Sicily not long after ISIS set up shop in nearby Libya. The Italians had received a tip from a North African–based informant that the vessel contained an unusually large shipment of hashish. Even so, they were shocked by what they found. Seventeen metric tons, a record seizure.”
But the Apollo, explained Rousseau, was only the beginning. Over the next three years, European authorities made several more stunning seizures. All the vessels had one thing in common; they had called on Libyan ports. And all the raids were based on tips from well-placed North African informants. All totaled, more than three hundred metric tons of narcotics, with an estimated street value of three billion dollars, were taken off the market. Then the informants suddenly stopped talking, and the seizures slowed to a trickle.
“But why? Why the sudden change in the smuggling route? Why were the producers suddenly forcing massive quantities of merchandise onto the market? And why,” asked Rousseau, “did the informants go silent? Here in France we concluded there was a powerful new player on the scene. Someone with the muscle to seize control of the smuggling routes. Someone whose methods frightened the informants into silence. Someone who was willing to risk the loss of tons of precious cargo because they were more interested in making a great deal of money as quickly as possible. We determined there was only one group that fit that profile.”
“ISIS.”
Rousseau nodded slowly. “The marriage between hashish and terrorism,” he said, “is as old as time itself. As you know, the word assassin is derived from the Arabic hashashin, the Shia killers who acted under the influence of hashish. Hezbollah, their descendants in Lebanon, finance their operations in part through the sale of hashish, much of it to customers in your country. And almost since its inception, ISIS has been an active player in the drug world, mainly by imposing taxes on product that moves through territory it controls. We now believe the Islamic State has taken over much of the European trade in illicit narcotics. And most of those drugs flow through the organization of one man. The man your friend works for,” he added, tapping the photograph of Nouredine Zakaria.
Rousseau’s pipe had gone dead. Much to Gabriel’s disappointment, the Frenchman reached for his pouch.
“My greatest fear,” Rousseau continued, “was that the relationship was more than financial, that ISIS would use the infrastructure of this man’s distribution network to carry out attacks in Europe. If your British friend is correct, if Nouredine Zakaria supplied the weapons used in London, then it appears my fears have been realized. The question is, was Nouredine operating on his own? Or did he do it with his boss’s blessing?”
“Maybe we should ask him.”
“Nouredine’s boss? Easier said than done. You see,” explained Rousseau, “he’s a very popular man here in France, especially among the rich and well connected. They dine in his restaurants and drink and dance in his nightclubs. They sleep in his hotels, shop in his boutiques, and adorn their fingers and necks with items from his exclusive line of jewelry. And, yes, on occasion, they smoke or snort or inject his drugs. The current president of the Republic is a personal friend. So are the interior minister and a good many others inside French law enforcement. They make certain that uncomfortable questions are never asked and that investigations never stray too close to his business empire.”
“Does he have a name?”
“Jean-Luc Martel.”
“JLM?”
Rousseau appeared genuinely surprised. “You know the name?”
“I’ve spent a lot time in your country over the years. Jean-Luc Martel is rather hard to miss.”
“He’s quite the celebrity, I’ll grant you that. One of our most successful entrepreneurs. At least that’s what they write about him. But it’s all a sham. Martel’s real business is drugs.” Rousseau was silent for a moment. “And if I were to speak these words in my minister’s office, he would laugh me out of the room. And then he would hurry off to dinner at Martel’s new restaurant on the boulevard Saint-Germain. It’s all the rage.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Rousseau smiled in spite of himself.
“Perhaps Martel can be reasoned with,” said Gabriel. “An appeal to his patriotism.”
“Jean-Luc Martel? Not possible.”
“Then I suppose we’ll have to turn him the old-fashioned way.”
“How?”
“Leave that to me.”
There was a silence.
“And if we can?” asked Rousseau.
“It might very well lead us to the one we’re both looking for.”
“Yes,” said Rousseau. “It might indeed. But my minister will never approve.”
“What your minister doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
The Frenchman gave a mischievous smile. “And the ground rules?”
“The same as last time. An equal partnership. I have autonomy abroad, you have veto power over anything that happens on French soil.”
“What about the British?”
“I’ll require the services of the one who speaks French like a Corsican.”
“How much do I know about what really happened with Nouredine Zakaria and those guns?”
“About fifty percent.”
“Do I want to know the rest?”
“Not a chance.”
“In that case,” said Rousseau, “I believe we have a deal.”
Rousseau rang the Interior Ministry and ordered copies of two files, one bearing the name Nouredine Zakaria, the other the name of the man he worked for. The chief of the Registry, a fonctionnaire in the finest French tradition, immediately took issue with the request. Why was Rousseau, whose brief was restricted to jihadist terrorism, suddenly interested in a low-level Moroccan criminal and one of France’s most celebrated businessmen? It was, the registrar pointed out, a rather odd pairing, like red wine and oysters. To his credit, Rousseau did not tell his nemesis that he found the analogy infantile at best. Instead, he pointed out that, as chief of a DGSI division, even a division that did not officially exist, he was entitled to see virtually every file in the French system. The registrar quickly capitulated, though he hinted at a delay of several hours, as the files were quite voluminous. Wasting the valuable time of others, thought Rousseau, was a bureaucrat’s ultimate revenge.
As it turned out, it took slightly less than an hour to locate and copy the files in question. An Alpha Group motorcycle courier collected the documents at 4:52 and by a small miracle delivered them to the rue de Grenelle at eleven minutes past five. There was no disputing the time; the security guard, a recent addition, made a note of it in his logbook, as mandated by the Alpha Group’s new protocols. The guard gave the documents a quick inspection—five hundred pages bound by a pair of metallic clips—before waving the courier into the building. For the sake of his fitness he took the stairs instead of the fickle lift, and at thirteen minutes past he placed the documents on the desk of Madame Treville. Here again, there was absolute certainty regarding the time. Madame Treville made a note of it in her desk diary, which was later recovered.
It was at this point that Christian Bouchard, ever alert to danger or opportunity, poked his well-groomed head from the door of his lair and, seeing the stack of recently delivered files on Mada
me Treville’s desk, wandered over to have a look.
“JLM? Who ordered these?”
“Monsieur Rousseau.”
“Why?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“Where is he?”
“The secure conference room.” She lowered her voice and added, “With the Israeli.”
“Allon?”
Madame Treville nodded gravely.
“Why wasn’t I included?”
“You were at lunch when he arrived.” She made this sound like an accusation. “Monsieur Rousseau asked me to deliver the files the moment they arrived. Perhaps you would like to do it for me.”
Bouchard seized the stack of paper and carried it along the corridor to the secure conference room, where he found Gabriel and Rousseau behind a wall of soundproof glass, deep in conversation. He punched the code into the cipher lock, entered, and dropped the heavy files onto the table as though they were proof of a conspiracy.
It was then, the instant the five hundred pages landed with a leaden thud, that the bomb detonated. In fact, the timing was such that Gabriel initially thought the documents themselves had somehow exploded. Mercifully, he would have only a vague memory of what came next. He was aware that he was falling through a blizzard of glass and masonry and human blood, and that Paul Rousseau and Christian Bouchard were falling with him. When finally he came to rest, he felt as though he were in the confines of his own coffin. His last conscious thoughts were of his funeral, a knot of mourners surrounding an open grave on the Mount of Olives, two young children, a daughter who was called Irene after her grandmother, a boy who bore the name of a great painter. They would have no memory of him, his children. To them he was a man who had come and gone in darkness. And it was to the darkness he returned.
Part Two
A Girl Like That
18
Paris—Jerusalem
It was the paper—the dossiers, the watch reports, the intercepted text messages and e-mails, the case histories—that would expose the true nature of the secretive enterprise housed inside the graceful old building on the rue de Grenelle. For several hours after the attack it swirled through the streets of the seventh arrondissement, from the Eiffel Tower to Les Invalides to the gardens of the Musée Rodin, adrift on an uncertain wind. There were numerous reports of uniformed police officers and agents in plain clothes frantically collecting the documents, even as rescue workers and paramedics were pulling stunned survivors from the rubble. By early evening, however, photographs of recovered documents, each bearing the logo of the DGSI, began appearing on Twitter and other social media. Le Monde broke the story first, followed soon after by the rest of the mainstream French media. Finally, having no other recourse but the truth, the interior minister confirmed the obvious. The target of the second major bombing in Paris in less than a year was not an obscure society dedicated to the promotion of French literature; it was an elite unit of the DGSI whose very existence the minister had recently denied. He then asked the citizens of the Republic to surrender all recovered documents to the authorities and to cease posting images of them on the Internet. Compliance with the request was despairingly low.
Regrettably, the ensuing political scandal, and the many questions surrounding the Alpha Group’s tactics, would overshadow the coldly calculated precision and brutality of the bombing itself. There was symbolism not only in the target but in the mode of delivery for the bomb—a white Renault Trafic transit van, the same model used in the attack on the Isaac Weinberg Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism in France ten months earlier. At just two hundred kilograms, however, it was far smaller than the Weinberg Center device. Even so, it was comparable in explosive power, which suggested to the experts that Saladin’s bomb maker, whomever he was, had perfected his craft. The force of the blast left the Alpha Group headquarters in ruins and damaged buildings for several hundred meters up and down the length of the rue de Grenelle. Four pedestrians who happened to be walking past the van when it exploded were killed instantly, as were a mother and her six-year-old daughter who were entering the pharmacy across the street. Otherwise, the only fatalities were officers of the Alpha Group.
Of the van itself, almost nothing remained. A door came to rest near a boucherie in the rue Cler; a portion of the roof, in a playground in the Champ de Mars. Later, it would be established that the vehicle had been reported stolen three weeks earlier in a suburb of Brussels and that it had entered Paris from the northwest on the A13. Where the bomb had been assembled would never be reliably determined. Nor would the French authorities ever identify the man who parked the van directly beneath the window of Paul Rousseau’s fifth-floor office. He was last seen climbing onto a motorcycle left for him in the Square de la Tour-Maubourg. The motorcycle, like the man, would never be found.
Fortunately, half of the Alpha Group’s staff were off duty or in the field when the bomb exploded. Hardest hit were the technical staff and the watchers, whose workspaces occupied the basement and ground floor. Two young women from Registry were lost, as were nine of the Alpha Group’s most experienced agent-runners. Paul Rousseau and Christian Bouchard suffered only moderate injuries, due in part to the fact they were in the secure conference room when the bomb exploded. Sadly, Madame Treville had chosen that very moment to tidy up Rousseau’s cluttered office and was exposed to the full force of the detonation. She was pulled from the rubble alive, but died later that night as the rest of France wallowed in political intrigue.
But there was more intrigue to come. Indeed, on the day after the bombing, questions arose over whether the casualties inside the building were restricted solely to officers of the Alpha Group. The source of the controversy was a report that witnesses had seen two men—young, sturdy, and armed with pistols—frantically scouring the rubble in the immediate aftermath while repeatedly shouting a name. The name was Gavriel, which happened to be the Hebrew version of the name of the current chief of the Israeli secret intelligence service. This gave rise to speculation that the man in question, whose history in France was long and sordid, had been inside the building when the bomb detonated. The interior minister and the chief of the DGSI denied he had been present, or that he had even been in France. Given their recent track record, the statements were met with the skepticism they deserved.
In point of fact the man in question had indeed been inside the Alpha Group headquarters at the time of the attack and had spent forty-five long minutes buried in the rubble, bent and twisted like a contortionist, before finally being pried loose by his bodyguards and a French rescue team. Bloodied and coated in dust, he was taken to the nearby Val-de-Grâce military hospital, where he was sewn and patched and treated for several badly broken ribs, two fractured vertebrae in his lower back, and a severe concussion. Doctors would recall that he spoke fluent if slightly accented French, had been unfailingly polite if somewhat dazed, and had refused all pain medication despite the intense discomfort of his injuries. Later, however, after a visit from French intelligence officials, the doctors and attending nurses would deny all knowledge of him.
In truth, he remained at the hospital for three days, in a room next to the one occupied by Paul Rousseau and Christian Bouchard, cared for by a joint French-Israeli team of doctors and watched over by an identically composed team of bodyguards. Finally, after a round of X-rays and MRIs confirmed it was safe to move him, he was dressed in a clean suit and shirt and driven by ambulance to Charles de Gaulle Airport. There, after refusing all offers of assistance, he climbed a steep flight of stairs, stopping several times to rest and regain his balance, and entered the first-class cabin of an El Al jetliner. It was empty except for a beautiful woman with riotous dark hair. He lowered himself into the seat next to hers, rested his head on her shoulder, and closed his eyes. The woman’s hair smelled of vanilla. Only then was he certain he was still alive.
Upon his return to Israel, Gabriel went directly to Narkiss Street and remained there, hidden from view, for the better part of the next week.
At first, he kept mainly to his bed, rising only to catch the few minutes of late-winter sun that fell each afternoon on the little terrace. The pain of his injuries, while manageable, was immense. Each breath was an ordeal and even the smallest movement seemed to drive a hot iron spike into the base of his spine. And then there were the lingering effects of the concussion—the chronic headache, the sensitivity to light and sound, the inability to concentrate for more than a minute or two. He was most comfortable in a darkened room, behind a closed door. Alone, with only his muddled thoughts for company, he fretted that his condition was permanent, that he had suffered one wound too many, that he had exhausted his allotted ability to heal. No amount of retouching could restore him. He was a canvas beyond repair.
The rest of Israel, however, was blissfully unaware of the fact that its legendary intelligence chief was lying incapacitated in his bed, with four broken ribs, two cracked vertebrae, and a catastrophic headache without end. True, there were rumors, fed mainly by the press in France, but they were put to rest by fourteen seconds of video released by the prime minister’s office and broadcast on Israeli television. It purported to show a meeting at Kaplan Street. In it, the prime minister wore a satisfied smile and a blue necktie; Gabriel wore gray and looked none the worse for wear. The video had been shot not long after he became chief and put in cold storage for an occasion such as this. There were other videos as well, different clothing, altered lighting conditions, lest Gabriel ever find it necessary to spend a significant period out of the public eye. He reckoned that time had come, though it had arrived far earlier in his tenure than he ever imagined. The chief of the Office had nearly died in a coldly calculated attack on the headquarters of a trusted friend and ally in the war on terror. Therefore, the chief had no recourse but to respond in kind. Such were the rules of the neighborhood. Gabriel would not delegate the task of vengeance to others. Nor would he lash out against meaningless targets in the deserts of Iraq and Syria. His target was a man. A man who had built a network of death that had laid siege to the great cities of the civilized world. A man who was financing his operations through the sale of narcotics in Western Europe. He was going to find this man and wipe him from the face of the earth. He would be painstaking in his approach, meticulous. For there was nothing more dangerous, he thought, than a patient man.
