Gabriel Allon: The Black Widow Part 32

"I need in on that, too."

"Three's a crowd, Adrian."

"I don't give a s.h.i.t." Carter frowned at his wrist.w.a.tch. It was half past eight on a Sat.u.r.day morning. "Why do these things always seem to break on the weekend?" Greeted by silence, he looked at Gabriel. "In a few minutes, several hundred employees of my government are going to learn that the Office has an agent deep inside ISIS. Are you prepared for that?"

"I wouldn't be here otherwise."

"Once she gets off that plane, she's no longer your agent. She'll be our agent, and it will be our operation. Are we clear?"

"Perfectly," said Gabriel. "But whatever you do, make d.a.m.n sure nothing happens to her."

Carter reached for the phone and dialed. "I need to speak to the director. Now."

48.

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA.

Qa.s.sAM EL-BANNA WOKE TO THE call to prayer. He had been dreaming, about what he could not recall-his dreams, like contentment, eluded him. From an early age, while still a boy in the Nile Delta of Egypt, he believed he was destined for greatness. He had studied hard in school, won admission to a mildly prestigious university in the eastern United States, and after a lengthy struggle had convinced the Americans to let him remain in the country to work. And for all his efforts he had been rewarded with a life of uninterrupted tedium. It was a distinctly American tedium of traffic jams, credit card debt, fast food, and weekend trips to the Tysons Corner mall to push his son past shop windows hung with photographs of unveiled, half-naked women. For a long time he blamed Allah for his plight. Why had he given him visions of greatness, only to make him ordinary? What's more, Qa.s.sam was now forced by the folly of his ambition to reside in the House of War, in the land of the unbelievers. After much reflection he had come to the conclusion that Allah had placed him in America for a reason. Allah had provided Qa.s.sam el-Banna with a path to greatness. And with greatness would come immortality.

Qa.s.sam lifted his Samsung from the bedside table and silenced the muezzin's tinny nasally wail. Amina had slept through it. Amina, he had discovered, could sleep through anything-the cry of a child, thunder, fire alarms, the tap of his fingers on the keyboard of his laptop. Amina, too, was disappointed, not with Allah but with Qa.s.sam. She had come to America with reality-TV visions of a life in Bel Air, only to find herself living around the corner from a 7-Eleven off Carlin Springs Road. She berated Qa.s.sam daily for failing to earn more money and consoled herself by driving them deeper into debt. Her latest acquisition was a new luxury car. The dealership had approved the sale despite their abysmal credit rating. Only in America, thought Qa.s.sam.

He slipped soundlessly from bed, unfurled a small mat, and prayed for the first time that day. He pressed his forehead only lightly to the floor to avoid giving himself a dark callused prayer mark-it was known as a zabiba, the Arabic word for raisin-like the marks on the religious men from his village. Islam had left no visible marks on Qa.s.sam. He did not pray in any of the Northern Virginia mosques and avoided other Muslims as much as possible. He even tried to play down his Arabic name. At his last place of employment, a small IT consulting firm, he had been known as Q or Q-Ban, which he liked because of its vaguely Hispanic and hip-hop sensibilities. He was not one of those Muslims with his face on the ground and his a.s.s in the air, he would say to his colleagues over beers in his faintly accented English. He came to America because he wanted to escape all that. Yes, his wife wore a hijab, but that had more to do with tradition and fashion than faith. And, yes, he had named his son Mohamed, but it had nothing to do with the Prophet. That much, at least, was true. Qa.s.sam el-Banna had named his son after Mohamed Atta, the operational leader of the 9/11 plot. Atta, like Qa.s.sam, was a son of the Nile Delta. It was not the only trait they had in common.

His prayers complete, Qa.s.sam rose and went quietly downstairs to the kitchen, where he popped a capsule of French roast into the Keurig. Then, in the living room, he performed two hundred push-ups and five hundred abdominal crunches. His twice-daily workouts had reshaped his body. He was no longer the skinny kid from the Delta; he had the body of a cage fighter. In addition to his exercises, he had become a master of both karate and Brazilian jujitsu. Qa.s.sam el-Banna, Q-Ban, was a killing machine.

He finished the workout with a few lethal movements of each discipline and then headed back upstairs. Amina was still sleeping, as was Mohamed. Qa.s.sam used the third bedroom of the little duplex as his office. It was a hacker's paradise. Entering, he sat down at one of the three computers and quickly surfed a dozen e-mail accounts and social media pages. A few more keystrokes took him to a doorway of the dark net, the murky Internet world hidden beneath the surface Web that can be accessed only if the user has the proper protocol, ports, pa.s.swords, and software applications. Qa.s.sam, an IT professional, had everything he needed-and more.

Qa.s.sam pa.s.sed easily through the door and soon found himself standing before another. The proper pa.s.sword admitted him, a line of text wished him peace and inquired as to his business. He typed his answer into the designated box and after a brief delay was presented with a waiting message.

"Alhamdulillah," he said softly.

His heart beat faster-faster than during his rigorous workout. Twice, he had to reenter the pa.s.sword because in his haste he had typed it incorrectly. At first, the message appeared as gibberish-lines, letters, and numbers, with no apparent purpose-but the proper pa.s.sword instantly turned the gibberish into clear text. Qa.s.sam read it slowly, for the message could not be printed, saved, copied, or retrieved. The words themselves were coded, too, though he knew precisely what they meant. Allah had finally put him on the path to greatness. And with greatness, he thought, would come immortality.

Gabriel declined Carter's invitation to accompany him to the White House. His only previous meeting with the president had been a tense affair, and his presence in the West Wing now would only be an unhelpful distraction. It was far better to let Adrian tell the administration that the American homeland was about to be attacked by a group that the president had once written off as weak and ineffectual. To hear such news from the mouth of an Israeli would only invite skepticism, something they could not afford.

Gabriel did, however, accept Carter's offer of the N Street safe house and an Agency SUV and security detail. After leaving Langley, he headed to the Israeli Emba.s.sy in far Northwest Washington. There, in the Office's secure communications crypt, he checked in with his teams in Paris and London before ringing Paul Rousseau at his office on the rue de Grenelle. Rousseau had just returned from the elysee Palace, where he had delivered the same message that Adrian Carter was conveying to the White House. ISIS was planning an attack on American soil, in all likelihood while the French president was in town.

"What else has he got on his schedule other than the White House meeting with the president and the state dinner?"

"A c.o.c.ktail reception at the French Emba.s.sy."

"Cancel it."

"He refuses to make any changes in his schedule."

"How courageous of him."

"He seems to think so."

"How soon can you get here?"

"I arrive Monday night with the advance team. We're staying at the Four Seasons."

"Dinner?"

"Done."

From the emba.s.sy Gabriel headed to the safe house for a few hours of badly needed sleep. Carter woke him in late afternoon.

"We're on," was all he said.

"Did you speak to Mr. Big?"

"For a minute or two."

"How did he take the news?"

"As well as you might expect."

"Did my name come up?"

"Oh, yes."

"And?"

"He says h.e.l.lo."

"Is that all?"

"At least he knows your name. He still calls me Andrew."

Gabriel tried to sleep again but it was no good, so he showered and changed and with an Agency security team in tow slipped from the safe house in the last minutes of daylight. The air was heavy with a coming storm; leaves of copper and gold littered the redbrick pavements. He drank a cafe creme in a patisserie on Wisconsin Avenue and then wandered through the East Village of Georgetown to M Street, with its parade of shops, restaurants, and hotels. Yes, he thought, there would be other teams and other targets. And even if they managed to stop Dr. Leila Hadawi's attack, it was likely that in a few days' time Americans would once again die in their own country because of an ideology, and a faith, born of a region that most could not find on a map. The enemy could not be reasoned with or dismissed; it could not be appeased by an American withdrawal from the Islamic world. America could leave the Middle East, thought Gabriel, but the Middle East would follow it home.

At once, the skies erupted and a downpour sent the pedestrians along M Street scurrying for cover. Gabriel watched them for a moment, but in his thoughts they were running from something else-men with long hair and beards, their surnames taken from their hometowns. The appearance of an SUV curbside wrenched him back to the present. He climbed inside, his leather jacket sodden, and rode back to N Street through the rain.

49.

ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA.

THE SAME RAIN THAT DRENCHED Georgetown beat down upon Qa.s.sam el-Banna's modest Korean sedan as he drove along a tree-lined section of Route 7. He had told Amina that he had to make a work call. It was an untruth, but only a small one.

It had been more than a year since Qa.s.sam had left his old IT consulting firm. He had told his colleagues and his wife that he was striking out on his own, a risky move in Northern Virginia's crowded tech world. The real reasons for his career change, however, lay elsewhere. Qa.s.sam had left his previous place of employment because he needed something more precious than money. He needed time. He could not be at the beck and call of Larry Blackburn, his old supervisor-Larry of the sewer breath, the secret addiction to painkillers, and the taste for cheap Salvadoran hookers. Qa.s.sam was now beholden to a man of far greater ambitions. He did not know the man's real name, only his nom de guerre. He was the one from Iraq, the one they called Saladin.

Not surprisingly, Qa.s.sam's journey had begun in cybers.p.a.ce, where, his ident.i.ty carefully shielded, he had indulged in his unquenchable appet.i.te for the blood and bombs of jihadist p.o.r.n-an appet.i.te he had developed during the American occupation of Iraq, when he was still at university. One evening, after a miserable day at work and a nightmarish commute home, he had knocked on the cyberdoor of an ISIS recruiter and inquired about traveling to Syria to become a fighter. The ISIS recruiter had made inquiries of his own and had convinced Qa.s.sam to remain in suburban Washington. Not long after, a month or so, he realized he was being followed. At first, he feared it was the FBI, but it soon became clear he was seeing the same man again and again. The man finally approached Qa.s.sam in a Starbucks near Seven Corners and introduced himself. He was a Jordanian who lived in London. His name was Jalal Na.s.ser.

The rain was coming down in torrents, more like a summer thunderstorm than a slow and steady autumn soaker. Perhaps the doomsday scenarios were true after all, he thought. Perhaps the earth was irrevocably broken. He continued along Route 7 into the center of Alexandria and made his way to an industrial park on Eisenhower Avenue. Wedged between a transmission repair shop and a shooting range were the offices of Dominion Movers. Two of the company's American-made Freightliner trucks were parked outside. Two more were parked on the floor of the warehouse, where they had been for the past six months. Qa.s.sam el-Banna was the moving company's nominal owner. He had twelve employees. Seven were recent arrivals in America, five were citizens. All were members of ISIS.

Qa.s.sam el-Banna did not enter the premises of his moving enterprise. Instead, he engaged the stopwatch function on his mobile and headed back to Eisenhower Avenue. His Korean sedan was quick and nimble, but now he drove it at the slow, lumbering pace of a fully loaded moving truck. He followed the Eisenhower Avenue Connector to the Capital Beltway and the Beltway in a clockwise direction to Route 123 in Tysons. As he was approaching Anderson Road, the traffic light turned to amber. Normally, Qa.s.sam would have put his foot to the floor. But now, imagining he were behind the wheel of a laden truck, he slowed to a stop.

When the light turned green, Qa.s.sam accelerated so slowly that the driver behind him flashed his headlamps and sounded his horn. Undeterred, he proceeded at five miles below the speed limit to Lewinsville Road, where he made a left. It was less than a quarter mile to the intersection of Tysons McLean Drive. To the left, the road rose gently into what appeared to be the campus of a high-tech firm. Qa.s.sam turned to the right and stopped next to a bright yellow road sign that read WATCH FOR CHILDREN. Qa.s.sam watched his phone instead: 24:23:45 . . . 24:23:46 . . . 24:23:47 . . . 24:23:48 . . .

When it reached twenty-five minutes exactly, he smiled and whispered, "Boom."

50.

GEORGETOWN.

THE RAIN POURED STEADILY DOWN for the remainder of the weekend, returning Washington to the swamp it had once been. Gabriel was largely a prisoner of the N Street safe house. Once each day he journeyed to the Israeli Emba.s.sy to check in with his field teams and with King Saul Boulevard, and once each day Adrian Carter rang him with an update. The FBI and the other agencies of American homeland security were closely monitoring more than a thousand known or suspected members of ISIS. "And not one of them," said Carter, "appears to be in the final preparations for an attack."

"There's just one problem, Adrian."

"What's that?"

"The FBI is watching the wrong people."

By Monday afternoon the rains began to slow, and by that evening a few stars were visible through the thinning clouds. Gabriel wanted to walk to the Four Seasons for his dinner with Paul Rousseau, but his CIA security detail prevailed upon him to take the SUV instead. It dropped him outside the hotel's covered entrance and, trailed by a single bodyguard, he entered the lobby. Several bleary-eyed French officials, their suits wrinkled by transatlantic travel, waited at reception, behind a tall, broad-shouldered man, Arab in appearance, who looked as though he had borrowed Fareed Barakat's London tailor. Only the Arab-looking man took note of the thin Israeli who was accompanied by an American security guard. Their eyes met briefly. Then the tall Arab-looking man turned his gaze once more toward the woman behind the desk. Gabriel inspected his back as he pa.s.sed. He appeared to be unarmed. A leather attache case stood upright next to his right shoe. And leaning against the front of the reception desk, black and polished, was an elegant walking stick.

Gabriel continued across the lobby and entered the restaurant. It seemed the bar had been commandeered by a convention of the hard of hearing. He gave the matre d' a name not his own and was shown to a table overlooking Rock Creek Parkway. Better still, it had an un.o.bstructed view of the lobby, where the tall, impeccably clad Arab was now limping slowly toward the elevators.

He had requested a suite on the uppermost floor of the hotel. His request had been granted, in no small part because the hotel's management believed him to be a distant relative of the king of Saudi Arabia. A moment after he entered the room, there was a discreet knock at the door. It was the porter with his luggage. The tall Arab admired the vista from his window while the porter, an African, hung his garment bag in the closet and placed his suitcase on a stand in the bedroom. The usual pre-tip banter ensued, with its many offers of additional a.s.sistance, but a crisp twenty-dollar bill sent the porter gratefully toward the door. It closed softly and once again the tall Arab was alone.

His eyes were fixed on the traffic rushing along Rock Creek Parkway. His thoughts, however, were on the man whom he had seen downstairs in the lobby-the man with gray temples and distinctive green eyes. He was almost certain he had seen the man before, not in person but in photographs and news accounts. It was possible he was mistaken. In fact, he thought, it was likely the case. Even so, he had learned long ago to trust his instincts. They had been sharpened to a razor's edge during the many years he served the Arab world's cruelest dictator. And they had helped him to survive the long fight against the Americans, when many other men like him had been vaporized by weapons that struck from the sky with the suddenness of lightning.

He removed a laptop computer from his attache case and connected it to the hotel's wireless Internet system. Because the Four Seasons was popular with visiting dignitaries, the NSA had undoubtedly penetrated its network. It was no matter; the hard drive of his computer was a blank page. He opened the Internet browser and typed a name into the search box. Several photos appeared on the screen, including one from London's Telegraph newspaper that showed a man running along a footpath outside Westminster Abbey, a gun in his hand. Linked to the photo was an article by a reporter named Samantha Cooke concerning the man's violent death. It seemed the reporter was mistaken, because the subject of her article had just crossed the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington.

There was another knock at the door, soft, almost apologetic-the obligatory fruit plate, along with a note addressed to Mr. Omar al-Farouk, promising to fulfill his every wish. At the moment he wanted only a few minutes of uninterrupted solitude. He typed an address for the dark net, picked the lock of a pa.s.sword-protected door, and entered a virtual room where all was encrypted. An old friend was waiting there for him.

The old friend asked, HOW WAS YOUR TRIP?

He typed, FINE BUT YOU WILL NEVER GUESS WHO I JUST SAW.

WHO?.

He typed the first and last name-the name of an archangel followed by a rather common Israeli surname. The response was a few seconds longer in coming.

YOU SHOULDN'T JOKE ABOUT THINGS LIKE THAT.

I'M NOT.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IT MEANS?.

A very good question indeed. He logged off the Internet, shut down the computer, and limped slowly to the window. He felt as though a dagger were lodged in the thigh of his right leg, his chest throbbed. He watched the traffic moving along the parkway, and for a few seconds the pain seemed to diminish. Then the traffic blurred and in his thoughts he was astride a mighty Arabian horse on a mountaintop near the Sea of Galilee, gazing down at a sunbaked place called Hattin. The vision was not new to him; it came often. Usually, two mighty armies-one Muslim, the other Crusader, the army of Rome-were arrayed for battle. But now only two men were present. One was an Israeli named Gabriel Allon. And the other was Saladin.

Paul Rousseau was still on Paris time, and so they did not linger long over dinner. Gabriel bade him good night at the elevators and, trailed by his bodyguard, headed across the lobby. The same woman was behind the reception desk.

"May I help you?" she asked as Gabriel approached.

"I certainly hope so. Earlier this evening I saw a gentleman checking in. Tall, very well dressed, walked with a cane."

"Mr. al-Farouk?"

"Yes, that's him. We used to work together a long time ago."

"I see."

"Do you know how long he's staying?"

"I'm sorry, but I'm not-"

He held up a hand. "Don't apologize. I understand your rules."

"I'd be happy to give him a message."