by Daniel Silva
They ate outside on the terrace, watched over by Reema’s portrait. The meal was a sumptuous affair of Israeli and Arab cuisine, including Gilah Shamron’s famous chicken with Moroccan spices, which Khalid decreed the finest dish he had ever tasted. Discreetly, he declined Gabriel’s offer of wine. He would soon be the custodian of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina, he explained. His days of even moderate alcohol consumption were over.
Surrounded by Gabriel and his division chiefs, Khalid spoke not of the past but the future. The road ahead, he cautioned, would be difficult. For all its riches, his country was traditional, backward, and in many ways barbaric. What’s more, another Arab Spring was stirring. He made it clear he would never tolerate an open rebellion against his rule. He asked them to be patient, to maintain realistic expectations, and to make life bearable for the Palestinians. Somehow, someday, the occupation of Arab land had to end.
Shortly before eleven o’clock, sirens sounded along the lakeshore. A moment later a Hezbollah rocket arced over the Golan, and from an Iron Dome battery in the Galilee a missile rose to meet it. Afterward, Gabriel and Khalid stood alone along the balustrade of the terrace, watching a single craft beating up the lake, its stern aglow with a green running light.
“It’s rather small,” said Khalid.
“The lake?”
“No, the boat.”
“It probably doesn’t have a discotheque.”
“Or a snow room.”
Gabriel laughed quietly. “Do you miss it?”
Khalid shook his head. “I only miss my daughter.”
“I hope the portrait helps.”
“It’s the most beautiful painting I’ve ever seen. But you have to let me pay for it.”
Gabriel waved his hand dismissively.
“Then allow me to give you this.” Khalid held up a flash drive.
“What is it?”
“A bank account in Switzerland with one hundred million dollars in it.”
“I have a better idea. Use the money to establish the Omar Nawwaf School of Journalism in Riyadh. Train the next generation of Arab reporters, editors, and photographers. Then give them the freedom to write and publish whatever they want, regardless of whether it hurts your feelings.”
“Is that really all you want?”
“No,” said Gabriel. “But it’s a good place to start.”
“Actually, I was planning to start somewhere else.” Khalid returned the flash drive to the pocket of his blazer. “There’s something I must do before I become king. I was hoping you might be willing to play the role of intermediary.”
“What did you have in mind?”
Khalid explained.
“She’s not terribly hard to find,” said Gabriel. “Just send her an e-mail.”
“I have. Several, in fact. She doesn’t respond. She doesn’t answer my calls, either.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
“Perhaps you can approach her on my behalf.”
“Why me?”
“You seem to have something of a rapport with her.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Can you arrange it?”
“A meeting?” Gabriel shook his head. “Bad idea, Khalid.”
“My specialty.”
“She’s too angry. Let a little more time pass. Or better yet, let me handle it for you.”
“You don’t know much about Arabs, do you?”
“I’m learning more every day.”
“It is an essential part of our culture,” said Khalid. “I must personally make restitution.”
“Blood money?”
“An unfortunate turn of phrase. But, yes, blood money.”
“What you need to do,” said Gabriel, “is accept full responsibility for what happened in Istanbul and see that it never happens again.”
“It won’t.”
“Tell that to her, not me.”
“I intend to.”
“In that case,” said Gabriel, “I’ll do it. But let it be on your head if anything goes wrong.”
“Is that a Jewish proverb?” Khalid glanced at his watch. “It’s late, my friend. Perhaps it’s time for me to be leaving.”
83
Berlin
Gabriel rang her the next morning and left a message on her voice mail. A week passed before she bothered to call him back, hardly a promising beginning. Yes, she said after hearing his proposal, she would be willing to hear Khalid out. But the last thing he should expect from her was a grant of absolution. She wasn’t interested in his blood money, either. When Gabriel told her about his idea, she was skeptical. “The Palestinians will have an independent state,” she said, “before Khalid opens a journalism school in Riyadh with Omar’s name on it.”
She insisted the meeting take place in Berlin. The embassy, of course, was out of the question, and she wasn’t comfortable with the idea of going to the ambassador’s residence or even a hotel. It was Khalid who suggested the apartment she had once shared with Omar in the old East Berlin neighborhood of Mitte. His agents had been regular visitors and knew it well. Even so, a thorough search—a ransacking, actually—would be required before his arrival. There would be no recording of the encounter, and no public statements afterward. And, no, he would not be taking refreshment of any kind. He was worried the Russians were plotting to kill him the same way they had killed his uncle. His fears, thought Gabriel, were entirely justified.
And so it was that on a warm and windless Berlin afternoon in early July, with the leaves hanging limply on the linden trees and the clouds low and dark, a line of black Mercedes motorcars arrived like a funeral procession in the street beneath Hanifa Khoury’s window. Frowning, she checked the time. It was half past three. He was an hour and a half late.
KBM time . . .
Several car doors opened. From one emerged Khalid. As he crossed the pavement to the entrance of the building, he was trailed by a single bodyguard. He wasn’t afraid, thought Hanifa. He trusted her, the way she had trusted him that afternoon in Istanbul. The afternoon she had seen Omar for the last time.
She stepped away from the window and surveyed the sitting room of the apartment. There were photographs of Omar everywhere. Omar in Baghdad. Omar in Cairo. Omar with Khalid.
Omar in Istanbul . . .
That morning, a team from the Saudi Embassy had torn the apartment to pieces, looking for what, they did not say. They had neglected to check the large clay flowerpot on the terrace overlooking the internal courtyard. Oh, they had brutalized Hanifa’s geraniums, but they had failed to probe the damp soil beneath.
The object she had hidden there, wrapped in an oily cloth, zipped into a waterproof plastic bag, was now in the palm of her hand. She had acquired it from Tariq, a troubled kid from the Palestinian community, a petty criminal, a failed rapper, a thug. She had told Tariq it was for a story she was working on for ZDF. He hadn’t believed her.
Her building was old and the lift was fickle. Two or three minutes passed before she finally heard heavy male footfalls in the corridor. A male voice, too. The voice of the devil. It sounded as though he was on his phone. She only hoped he was talking to the Israeli. Such perfect poetry, she thought. Darwish himself could not have written it any better.
As she moved into the entrance hall, she saw Omar walking into the consulate at 1:14 p.m. She could only imagine what had happened next. Had they feigned a brief moment of cordiality, or had they set upon him instantly like wild beasts? Did they wait until he was dead before taking him apart, or was he still alive and conscious when the blade carved into his flesh? Such an act could not be forgiven, only avenged. Khalid knew this better than anyone. He was an Arab, after all. A son of the desert. And yet he was walking toward her with only a single bodyguard to protect him. Perhaps he was still the same reckless KBM after all.
At last, the knock. Hanifa reached for the latch. The bodyguard lunged, the devil shielded his face. Omar, thought Hanifa as she raised the gun and fired. The passwo
rd is Omar . . .
Author’s Note
The New Girl is a work of entertainment and should be read as nothing more. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in the story are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously.
The International School of Geneva portrayed in The New Girl does not exist and should in no way be confused with Ecole Internationale Genève, the institution founded in 1924 with the help of the League of Nations. Visitors to the Museum of Modern Art in New York will see countless extraordinary works of art, including Van Gogh’s Starry Night, but nothing called the Nadia al-Bakari Collection. The stories of Zizi and Nadia al-Bakari are told in The Messenger, published in 2006, and its 2011 sequel, Portrait of a Spy, both of which feature Sarah Bancroft. Sarah also appears in The Secret Servant, Moscow Rules, and The Defector. I enjoyed her return to the secret world as much as she did.
I have manipulated airline and rail schedules to suit the needs of my story, along with the timing of certain real-world events. The New Girl’s depiction of the Mossad’s astonishing theft of the Iranian nuclear archives is entirely speculative and not based on any information I received from Israeli or American sources. I am certain the Mossad did not plan or oversee the real operation from an anonymous building located on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv, as it is the headquarters only of my fictitious “Office.” Chapter 7 of The New Girl contains a not-so-veiled reference to the true location of Mossad headquarters, which, like Gabriel Allon’s address on Narkiss Street, is one of the worst-kept secrets in Israel.
There is no French counterterrorism unit known as the Alpha Group, at least not one that I know of. A fine establishment called Brasserie Saint-Maurice occupies the ground floor of an old house in medieval Annecy, and the popular Café Remor overlooks the Place du Cirque in Geneva. Both are typically free of intelligence operatives and assassins, as is the charming Plein Sud on the avenue du Général Leclerc in Carcassonne. Natural High is the name of the beach pavilion in the lovely Dutch resort town of Renesse. To the best of my knowledge, neither Gabriel Allon nor Rebecca Philby have ever set foot there.
One should not attempt to book a room at the Bedford House Hotel or the East Anglia Inn in Frinton-on-Sea, for they do not exist. There is indeed a marina on the banks of the river Twizzle in Essex, but Nikolai Azarov’s brutal murder of the security guard might well have been witnessed by customers of the Harbour Lights restaurant. Shortly before entering the Dorchester Hotel in London, Christopher Keller borrowed a line from the film version of Dr. No to describe the stopping power of a Walther PPK pistol. Devotees of F. Scott Fitzgerald surely noticed that Gabriel and Sarah Bancroft exchanged two lines from The Great Gatsby while dining in an Italian restaurant near the corner of Second Avenue and East Sixty-Fourth Street in Manhattan. Rumor has it the restaurant was Primola, my favorite on the Upper East Side.
It is true that visitors to 10 Downing Street often spot a brown-and-white tabby cat lurking near the famous black door. His name is Larry, and he has been granted the title Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. Apologies to the owner of 7 St. Luke’s Mews in Notting Hill for turning the dwelling into an MI6 safe house, and to the occupants of 70 and 71 Eaton Square for using the exclusive properties as the setting for a Russian assassination. I am confident no British prime minister or MI6 chief, had they known of such a plot, would have allowed it to go forward, even if the end result was a strategic and public-relations disaster for the Russian president and his intelligence services.
I chose not to identify the radioactive poison wielded by my fictitious Russian assassins. Its deadly properties, however, were clearly similar to polonium-210, the highly radioactive chemical element used in the November 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a dissident former Russian intelligence officer living in London. Britain’s feeble response to the use of a weapon of mass destruction on its soil undoubtedly emboldened the Kremlin to target a second Russian living in Britain, Sergei Skripal, in March 2018. A former GRU officer and double agent, Skripal survived after being exposed to the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. But Dawn Sturgess, a forty-four-year-old mother of three who lived near Skripal in the cathedral city of Salisbury, died four months after the initial attack, a collateral casualty in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s war on dissent. Not surprisingly, Putin ignored a request by the woman’s son to allow British authorities to question the two suspected Russian assassins.
There is no such thing as the Royal Data Center in Riyadh, but there is something very much like it: the ridiculously named Center for Studies and Media Affairs. Run by Saud al-Qahtani, a courtier and close confidant of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the center obtained its initial arsenal of sophisticated cyberweapons from an Italian firm called Hacking Team. It then acquired software and expertise from the Emirates-based DarkMatter and from NSO Group, an Israeli company that reportedly employs veterans of Intelligence Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence service. According to the New York Times, DarkMatter has also hired graduates of Unit 8200, along with several Americans once employed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. Indeed, one of DarkMatter’s top executives reportedly worked on some of the NSA’s most advanced cyberoperations.
Saud al-Qahtani oversaw more than the Center for Studies and Media Affairs. He also led the Saudi Rapid Intervention Group, the clandestine unit responsible for the brutal murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist and columnist for the Washington Post. Eleven Saudis face criminal charges in the killing, which was carried out inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. Saudi officials have claimed, among other things, that the operatives acted unilaterally. The CIA, however, concluded that the murder was ordered by none other than Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Not for the first time, President Donald Trump disagreed with the findings of his intelligence community. In a written statement, he repeated Saudi claims that Khashoggi was an “enemy of the state” and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood before seeming to absolve MBS of complicity in the journalist’s death. “It could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event—maybe he did and maybe he didn’t.” The president went on to say: “In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”
But Saudi Arabia is not a democracy with entrenched institutions. It is one of the world’s last absolute monarchies. And unless there is another change to the line of succession, it will be ruled, perhaps for decades, by the provenly reckless Mohammed bin Salman. My fictitious Saudi crown prince—the Western-educated, English-speaking KBM—ultimately was a redeemable figure. But I’m afraid Mohammed bin Salman is probably beyond restoration. Yes, he has delivered modest reforms, including granting women the right to drive, long forbidden in the backward-looking Kingdom. But he has also imposed an iron-fisted crackdown on dissent unparalleled in recent Saudi history. MBS promised change. Instead, he has delivered instability to the region and repression at home.
For now, the U.S.-Saudi relationship appears frozen, and MBS is trotting the globe in search of friends. China’s Xi Jinping entertained him in Beijing in early 2019. And at a G20 summit in Buenos Aires, MBS exchanged an unseemly high five with Vladimir Putin. A source close to the crown prince told me the exuberant greeting was a message to MBS’s critics in the U.S. Congress. Saudi Arabia, he was saying, no longer had to depend only on the Americans for protection. Putin’s Russia was waiting in the wings, no questions asked.
A decade ago, such an implicit warning would have been toothless. But no more. Putin’s intervention in Syria has once again made Russia a power to be reckoned with in the Middle East, and America’s traditional friends have taken notice. MBS’s father, King Salman, has made a single overseas trip. It was to Moscow. The emir of Qatar embarrassed the Trump administration by stopping in Moscow on the eve of a visit to Washington. Egypt’s al-Sisi has visited Moscow four times. So, too, has Benjamin Netanyahu. Even Israel, Ame
rica’s closest ally in the Middle East, is hedging its regional bets. Putin’s Russia is too powerful to be ignored.
But would a Saudi leader ever break the historic bond with America and tilt toward Russia? A version of the tilt has already begun, and it is Mohammed bin Salman who is leaning Moscow’s way. The U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia was never based on shared values, only on oil. MBS knows full well that the United States, now a major energy producer, no longer needs Saudi Arabian petroleum the way it once did. In Putin’s Russia, however, he has found a partner to help manage the global supply of oil and its all-important price. He has also found, if need be, a source of weapons and a valuable conduit to the Shiite Iranians. And perhaps most important, MBS can rest assured his new friend will never criticize him for killing a meddlesome journalist. After all, the Russians are rather good at that, too.
Acknowledgments
I am eternally grateful to my wife, Jamie Gangel, who listened patiently while I worked out the plot and larger themes of The New Girl and then expertly edited my first draft—all while covering the extraordinary events in Washington as special correspondent for CNN. I would not have completed the manuscript before my deadline were it not for her support and attention to detail. My debt to her is immeasurable, as is my love.
I spoke to several American and Israeli intelligence officers, policy makers, and politicians about the rapidly unfolding events in Saudi Arabia. I also received invaluable guidance from several sources close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. I thank them now in anonymity, which is how they would prefer it.
I am forever indebted to David Bull for his advice on all matters related to art and restoration. Bob Woodward helped me to better understand the tangled relationship between the Trump White House and Saudi Arabia’s capricious crown prince. Andrew Neil was an indispensable source on Britain’s broken politics and emerging trends in the Middle East. Tim Collins explained the economic challenges facing Saudi Arabia in language even I could comprehend.
