by Daniel Silva
“Smart-ass.” Seymour handed the passport to Gabriel. “What were you doing in Amsterdam?”
“Some personal business.”
“Elaborate, please.”
“I’m afraid I can’t.”
“Did the Dutch know you were there?”
“Not exactly.”
“I’ll take that as a no.”
“I always heard you were good, Graham.”
Seymour pulled his face into a fatigued frown, a sign that he’d had enough of the verbal sparring match. The inhospitality of his reception came as little surprise to Gabriel. The British services did not care much for the Office. They were Arabists by education, anti-Semites by breeding, and still resented the Jews for driving the Empire out of Palestine.
“What have you got for me, Gabriel?”
“I think an al-Qaeda cell from Amsterdam might have entered Britain in the last forty-eight hours with the intention of carrying out a major attack.”
“Just one cell?” Seymour quipped. “I’m sure they’ll feel right at home.”
“That bad, Graham?”
Seymour nodded his gray head. “At last count we were monitoring more than two hundred networks and separate groupings of known terrorists. Half our Muslim youth profess admiration for Osama bin Laden, and we estimate that more than one hundred thousand supported the attacks on the London transport system, which means they have a very large pool of potential recruits from which to draw in the future. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t sound the alarm just because another cell of Muslim fanatics has decided to put ashore.”
“Maybe it isn’t just another cell, Graham. Maybe they’re the real thing.”
“They’re all the real thing,” Seymour said. “You said you think they’re here. Does that mean you’re not sure?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“So let me make sure I understand correctly. I have sixteen thousand known Islamic terrorists residing in my country, but I’m supposed to divert manpower and resources into finding a cell that you think might be in Britain?” Greeted by silence, Graham Seymour answered his own question. “If it were anyone but you, I’d pull over and let him out. But you do have something of a track record, don’t you? What makes you think they might be here?”
Gabriel handed him the envelope of photographs.
“This is all you have? Some snapshots of Ahmed’s holiday in London? No train tickets? No rental car receipts? No e-mail intercepts? No visual or audio surveillance?”
“They were here on a surveillance mission four months ago. And his name isn’t Ahmed. It’s Samir.”
“Samir what?”
“Samir al-Masri, Hudsonstraat 37, Oud West, Amsterdam.”
Seymour looked at the photo of Samir standing in front of the Houses of Parliament. “Is he Dutch?”
“Egyptian, as far we know.”
“As far as you know? What about the other members of this phantom cell? You have any names?”
Gabriel handed him a slip of paper with the other names Ibrahim Fawaz had given him in Amsterdam. “Based on what we know, the cell was operating out of the al-Hijrah Mosque on the Jan Hazenstraat in west Amsterdam.”
“And you’re sure he’s Egyptian?”
“That’s the flag he was flying in Amsterdam. Why?”
“Because we’ve been picking up some chatter recently among some of our more radical Egyptian countrymen.”
“What sort of chatter?”
“Blowing up buildings, bringing down bridges and airplanes, killing a few thousand people on the Underground—you know, the usual things people discuss over tea and biscuits.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
Seymour hesitated, then said, “Finsbury Park.”
“But of course.”
There was perhaps no more appropriate symbol of Britain’s current predicament than the North London Central Mosque, known commonly as the Finsbury Park mosque. Built in 1990 with money donated by the king of Saudi Arabia, it was among the most radical in Europe. Richard Reid, the infamous shoe-bomber, had passed through its doors; so had Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called twentieth hijacker, and Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian terrorist who was arrested shortly before the millennium for plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. British police raided the mosque in January 2003—inside they discovered such sacred items as forged passports, chemical-protective suits, and a stun gun—and eventually it was turned over to new leadership. It was later revealed that one member of the new board of trustees was a former Hamas terror mastermind from the West Bank. When the former terrorist gave the British government assurances that he was now a man of peace, he was permitted to remain in his post.
“So you think Samir is the cell leader?”
“That’s what my source tells me.”
“Has your source ever been right in the past?”
“Do you remember that plot to shoot down an El Al jetliner at Schiphol last year?”
“The one that the Dutch broke up?”
“The Dutch didn’t break it up, Graham. We broke it up, with the help of this same source.”
Seymour looked down at the photographs. “It’s not much to go on,” he said, “but I’m afraid it does fit the profile of a major attack scenario we’ve developed.”
“What sort of scenario?”
“An action cell based abroad, working with surveillance and support cells buried within the local community here. The action cell members train and prepare in a place where we can’t monitor them, then come ashore at the last minute, so we have no time to find them and disrupt their plans. Obviously it would take complex planning and a skilled mastermind to pull it off.” He held up the snapshots. “Can I keep these?”
“They’re yours.”
“I’ll have Immigration run the names and see if your boys have actually entered the country, and I’ll give copies of the pictures to our colleagues in the Anti-Terrorist Branch of Scotland Yard. If the Metropolitan Police deem the threat credible, they might put a few more men at some of the sites al-Masri visited.”
“What about raising the overall threat level?” Gabriel asked. “What about stepping up the surveillance of your local Egyptian radicals in Finsbury Park?”
“We’re not like our American brethren. We don’t like to move the needle on the threat meter each time we get nervous. We find it only serves to make the British public more cynical. As for our local Egyptians, we’re watching them closely enough already.”
“I hope so.”
“How long are you planning to stay in London?”
“Just tonight.”
Seymour handed him a business card. It had nothing on it but a telephone number. “It’s for my mobile. Call me if you pick up anything else in Amsterdam. Can I drop you at your hotel?”
“No thanks, Graham.”
“How about your safe flat?”
“Our embassy would be fine. I’m going to have a quiet word with our local chief of station and the head of embassy security to make sure we take appropriate measures.”
“Give my best to your station chief. And tell him to behave himself.”
“Is it your intention to follow me after I leave the embassy?”
“I don’t have the spare manpower or I would.”
He was lying, of course. Honor among spies went only so far.
Gabriel’s meetings at the embassy ran longer than expected. The chief of security had turned what should have been a five-minute briefing into an hour-long question-and-answer period, while the Office’s chief of station had used a routine courtesy call as an opportunity to try to impress the man he clearly assumed would one day be his boss. The debacle was made complete at six, when the ambassador appeared without warning and insisted Gabriel accompany him to dinner in Knightsbridge. Gabriel had no excuse at the ready and was forced to endure a painfully boring evening discussing the intricacies of Israel’s ties to the United Kingdom. Throughout the meal he thought often of Eli Lavon quietly reading
files in snowy Amsterdam and wished that he was still there with him.
It was after ten o’clock by the time he finally entered the Office safe flat on the Bayswater Road overlooking Hyde Park. He left his bag in the entrance hall and quickly took stock of his surroundings. It was simply furnished, as most safe flats were, and rather large by London standards. Housekeeping had left food in the fridge and a 9mm Beretta in the pantry, along with a spare magazine and two boxes of ammunition.
Gabriel loaded the gun and carried it with him into the bedroom. It had been three days since he’d had a proper night’s sleep and it had taken all his training and substantial powers of concentration to get through dinner with the ambassador without falling asleep over his coq au vin. He undressed quickly and climbed into bed, then switched on the television and turned the volume down very low so that if there was an attack in the night he would be awakened by the news bulletins. He wondered whether the Metropolitan Police had acted yet on the information he’d brought from Amsterdam. Two hundred active terror networks, sixteen thousand known terrorists, three thousand men who had been through the training camps of al-Qaeda… MI5 and the Met had more to worry about than five boys from Amsterdam. He’d sensed something in Graham Seymour’s demeanor that afternoon, a resignation that it was only a matter of time before London was hit again.
Gabriel was reaching for the light when he noticed Samir’s yellow legal pad poking from the side flap of his overnight bag. Probably nothing there, he thought, but he knew himself well enough to realize that he would never be able to sleep unless he made certain. He found a pencil in the top drawer of the bedside table and spent the next ten minutes rubbing it gently over the surface of the pad. Samir’s secrets came slowly to life before his eyes. Pine trees on a mountaintop, sand dunes in a desert, a spider web of bisecting lines. Samir al-Masri, jihadist and bachelor slob, was a doodler.
8
BAYSWATER, LONDON: 7:02 A.M., FRIDAY
The telephone woke him. Like all phones in Office safe flats, it had a flashing light to indicate incoming calls. This one was luminous blue. It was as if a squad car had driven into his bedroom on silent approach.
“Are you awake?” asked Ari Shamron.
“I am now.”
“Sleeping in?”
Gabriel squinted at his wristwatch. “It’s seven in the morning.”
“It’s nine here.”
The vagaries of international time zones had always meant little to Shamron. He assumed every Office employee, no matter his location on the planet, rose and slept in harmony with him. Inside the Office the phenomenon was known as “Shamron Central Time.”
“How did your meeting with Graham Seymour go?”
“Remind me never to use my Heinrich Kiever passport to enter Britain again.”
“Did he act on the information you gave him?”
“He seems to have bigger headaches than a few boys from west Amsterdam.”
“He does.”
“We’re going to have to bring the Dutch into the picture at some point.”
“As soon as Eli is finished purging Rosner’s archives, we’ll summon the Dutch liaison officer in Tel Aviv and have a quiet word with him.”
“Just make sure we protect our source. He’s someone we need to slip in our back pocket for a rainy day.”
“Don’t worry—it will be a very quiet word.”
“My plane arrives in Amsterdam in the early afternoon. If Eli and I work through the night, we should be finished by morning.”
“I’m afraid Eli will have to finish the job without you. You’re not going back to Amsterdam.”
“Where am I going?”
“Home,” said Shamron. “A bodel will collect you in an hour and take you to Heathrow. And don’t get off the plane looking like something the cat dragged in, the way you usually do. We’re having dinner together tonight at Kaplan Street.”
Kaplan Street was the address of the Prime Minister’s Office.
“Why are we having dinner there?”
“If it’s all the same with you, I’d rather not discuss our highest affairs of state and intelligence while the eavesdroppers of MI5 and GCHQ are trying to listen in.”
“It’s a secure phone.”
“There’s no such thing,” Shamron said. “Just make sure you’re on that plane. If you get stuck in traffic, call me from the car. I’ll have El Al hold the plane for you.”
“You wouldn’t.”
The line went dead. Gabriel placed the receiver back in the cradle. We’re having dinner together tonight at Kaplan Street… He supposed he knew what the topic of conversation would be. Apparently Amos didn’t have long to live. He looked at the television screen. Three telegenic young people were engaged in a deeply serious discussion about the sexual antics of Britain’s most famous footballer. Gabriel groped for the remote control and instead found Samir’s legal pad. Then he remembered waking in the middle of the night and gazing at the image—not the pine trees and the sand dunes but the pattern of crisscrossing lines.
He looked at it again now. Gabriel had been blessed with near-perfect visual recall, a skill enhanced by his study of art history and his work as a restorer. He had hundreds of thousands of paintings stored in the file rooms of his memory and could authenticate a work simply by examining a few brushstrokes. He was convinced the lines were not random but part of a pattern—and he was certain he had seen the pattern somewhere before.
He went into the kitchen and made coffee, then carried his cup over to the window. It was beginning to get light, and the London morning rush was in full force. A woman who looked too much like his former wife was standing on the corner, waiting for the light to change. When it did, she crossed the Bayswater Road and disappeared into Hyde Park.
Hyde Park…
He looked at the notepad, then looked out the window again.
Was it possible?
He walked over to the desk and opened the top drawer. Inside was a London A–Z street atlas. He took it out and opened it to map number 82. It showed the northeast corner of Hyde Park and the surrounding streets of Mayfair, Marylebone, Bayswater, and St. John’s Wood. The footpaths of the park were represented with dotted lines. Gabriel compared the pattern to Samir’s markings on the legal pad.
They matched perfectly.
Hyde Park…
But why would a terrorist want to attack a park?
He thought of the pictures he’d found in Samir’s flat: Samir in Trafalgar Square. Samir with a member of the Queen’s Life Guard outside Buckingham Palace. Samir riding the Millennium Wheel. Samir outside the Houses of Parliament. Samir with four friends posing in front of the American embassy in Grosvenor Square…
He looked at the map in the London A–Z again. Grosvenor Square was two blocks east of the park in Mayfair. He picked up the telephone and dialed.
“Graham Seymour.”
“I want you to warn the Americans about the Amsterdam cell.”
“What Amsterdam cell?”
“Come on, Graham—there isn’t time.”
“Immigration spent the night looking for them. So far they’ve come up with no evidence to suggest any of the men whose names you gave me are even in the country.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re not here.”
“Why do you think they’re going to go after the Americans?”
Gabriel told him.
“You want me to sound the alarm at Grosvenor Square because of some lines on a legal pad?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not going to do that. There’s not enough evidence to support making a call like that. Besides, have you been to Grosvenor Square lately? It’s an American fortress now. A terrorist can’t get close to that building.”
“Call them, Graham. If you don’t, I will.”
“Listen to me, Allon, and listen very carefully. If you make a mess of my town, so help me God, I’ll—”
Gabriel severed the connection and dialed another number.
&nb
sp; 9
GROSVENOR SQUARE, LONDON: 7:13 A.M., FRIDAY
The streets at the northern end of posh Mayfair have a distinctly American flavor. Tucked amid the stately Georgian buildings one can find the headquarters of the American Chamber of Commerce, the American Club, the American Church, the American Society, and the Society of American Women. Along the northern side of Grosvenor Square is the U.S. Navy building, and on the western side stands the American embassy. Nine stories in height and adorned by a monstrous gilded eagle, it is one of the largest American diplomatic missions in the world and the only one to reside on land not owned by the federal government. The Duke of Westminster, who owns most of Mayfair, leases the property to the American government for the very reasonable sum of a single peppercorn a year. There is little danger the Americans will be evicted from their patch of Mayfair any time soon, since the lease on the property does not expire until Christmas Day in the year 2953.
Fifty-eight men and a single woman have served as the American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—including five who would become president—but only one has ever come from the ranks of the career Foreign Service. The rest have been political appointees and diplomatic debutants, known more for their money and connections than their foreign policy expertise. Their names read like an honor roll of American high society and wealth: Mellon, Kennedy, Harriman, Aldrich, Bruce, Whitney, and Annenberg.
The current American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Robert Carlyle Halton, was not born to wealth, and few Americans knew his name, though he was by far the richest man to ever occupy the post and his political connections were second to none. The president and CEO of the Denver-based Red Mountain Energy, Halton’s personal fortune exceeded five billion dollars at last estimate. He also happened to be a lifelong friend of the president of the United States and his largest political donor. The Washington Post, in a rather unflattering profile of Halton published shortly after his nomination, declared that he “had pulled off the extraordinary political feat of putting his best friend in the White House.” When asked about the accuracy of the report during his confirmation hearings, Halton said he only wished he had been able to give the president more money, a remark that had cost him several Democratic votes.
