Direct Action

11

19 OCTOBER 2003

4:35P.M.

BEN-GURION AIRPORT, ISRAEL

AIR FRANCE 1620 ARRIVED HALF AN HOUR LATE.As the plane emerged from the opaque wall of cloud cover, MJ pressed her nose against the window listening to the whine as the pilot extended his flaps and descended quickly over an Israeli coast lit brilliant orange red by the setting sun. She’d expected…well, she hadn’t known what to expect. Camels and tents maybe, or some sort of Mediterranean Lower East Side. Certainly not the seawall of high-rises and glass-and-steel skyscrapers that looked a lot more Miami than her mind’s eye picture of Tel Aviv. Then the plane banked sharply over scrub-covered hills, descended rapidly, and landed. They rode a jam-packed shuttle bus to the terminal, passed without incident through passport control, claimed their baggage, then fought their way through the crowd into the bustling terminal itself.

Tom guided her through double doors, then steered her around a squad of soldiers, M-16s slung over their shoulders, along a wide swath of sidewalk that smelled of diesel fumes, sweat, and smoke. At the far end of the terminal they bumped their wheeled suitcases over the curb and scampered across three lanes of fast-moving traffic to a small asphalt island on the far side of the roadway. There, in a clearly marked no-parking zone, sat a white Jeep Cherokee trimmed in gold.

The driver saw them coming. He extracted himself from the vehicle, strode toward them, threw his arms around Tom, and kissed him thrice in the Arab fashion. “Ahlan,Tom,” he said. “Ahlan wahsalan. Welcome back to Israel, my friend.”

“Reuven. Good to see you.” Tom put his hand on MJ’s back and propelled her forward. “Reuven, this is my friend MJ.”

The Israeli’s eyes scanned her professionally and his expression left no doubt he’d sensed her shock. He took her hand and kissed it in the European fashion. She couldn’t help but notice that he favored a lot of sweet and slightly citrus-scented cologne.

He slowly withdrew his lips from her hand but never let it go. “I am Reuven Ayalon.” The Israeli smiled warmly, his dark eyes locked with hers. His accent was unmistakably French. “You are most welcome to Israel, beautiful MJ.”

She blushed. The intensity of his gaze was making her uneasy. “Thank you,” she stammered. MJ couldn’t help but stare back at him. He was a fascinating picture; almost a caricature. Tall and dark, but soft around the middle, he was dressed entirely in black: black silk shirt open halfway down his chest, baggy black trousers, and shiny black tasseled loafers. His coal-black hair was, on second glance, a perfectly coiffed and hugely expensive hairpiece, which was balanced below by the same sort of well-manicured mustache and triangular goatee favored by Saudi royalty. Around Reuven’s neck hung a heavy-linked gold chain. His left wrist held a thick gold Rolex whose bezel was implanted with diamonds at the three-, six-, nine-, and twelve-o’clock positions. On Reuven’s right wrist was an oversize diamond-accented gold ID bracelet with Hebrew lettering.

Tom opened the rear door for her and helped her in as Reuven tossed their suitcases in the back and slammed the cargo door shut. Tom eased into the shotgun seat and cinched his seat belt. “I know Reuven from Paris,” he explained. “He was with the Israeli embassy. We covered some of the same ground. Now he works for 4627.”

“Uh-huh.” It wasn’t what MJ wanted to hear. The fact that she was in Israel was bad enough. Israel wasn’t on the itinerary Mrs. SJ required her to file before she’d left Coppermine. And now she’d met an Israeli foreign intelligence officer. It didn’t matter that he was retired, either. In fact, just sitting in his car was enough of a no-no to jeopardize her Top Secret clearance.

Tom swiveled. “Hey…just relax and enjoy the scenery. You’re gonna love this place.” It was as if he’d read her mind.

And of course he was right. What’s done is done, is what her father always said. Besides, this was all her own doing. Her clearance was already in jeopardy-hadn’t she removed the Gaza photographs from the office? Hadn’t she brought them for Tom to see? Hadn’t-her reverie was shattered as Reuven Ayalon slammed the Jeep into gear, smacked pedal to metal, and fishtailed toward the airport exit, cutting off a huge bus without a second thought or any hint of a glance at the rearview mirror.

The Israeli raced past a security checkpoint manned by khaki-clad troops and in a matter of seconds the Jeep was on a modernistic four-lane highway bordered by cotton fields and orange groves. The Jeep flew west into the disappearing light, Reuven signaling with his horn and weaving in and out of the thick evening traffic as if he were drunk-driving the Daytona500. MJ glanced at the dash. Mother of God, he was doing 155 kilometers an hour. Instinctively, she reached over her right shoulder for the seat belt. There was no seat belt.

They hurtled through a long underpass and came out under Tel Aviv. Reuven passed a police car on the right, veered into an exit lane, and steered the Jeep onto another freeway. MJ saw a solid wall of brake lights ahead. The gridlock didn’t faze Reuven, who steered the Jeep onto the narrow shoulder of the road, leaned on the horn, and just kept going. When the Jeep skidded on some loose gravel, fishtailed, and almost hit the guardrail, she actually screamed. When Tom caught a glimpse of her horrified expression, he laughed out loud.

5:55P.M. Reuven Ayalon sped north along the Herzlyia beachfront, swerved right, and accelerated into a narrow side street past a sign that bore the words KEDOSHAI HASHOAH. Two hundred feet later he pulled up onto the garage apron of a walled three-story villa. A foot-square antique tile set into the wall next to the mail slot was emblazoned with the number 71 and Hebrew lettering.

Reuven switched off the lights and set the parking brake. “Home sweet home.”

Tom looked confused. “I thought you told me you’d made us reservations.”

“I did,” the Israeli said. “At the Ayalon Hilton. You get your own suite.”

“We don’t want to put you out.”

“Out? Me? I welcome the company. Ever since Leah died, I’ve becomeun reclus.” He turned toward MJ. “A bit of a hermit. You know she was killed in a homicide bombing last year.”

“Tom told me. I’m so sorry.”

He nodded. “Thank you. It was why when Tom asked me to join his firm I couldn’t say no.” Reuven opened the Jeep’s rear gate, yanked MJ’s suitcase onto the concrete, and extended the handle. “So you’re staying here-I don’t accept arguments. My boys are both married. They have their own lives. Believe me, I crave adult company.” He waited as Tom retrieved his own suitcase. “Look-for the last ten days or so, I’ve begun asking the dogs for investment advice. What worries me is that they’re starting to make sense.”

To the sound of muffled barking, Reuven led the way to a tall, wide, eggplant-colored metal gate. He punched a code into the keypad that sat at eye level, waited until the gate lock buzzed, then nudged it with his shoulder. “Bou-come. Follow me.”

He led the way. MJ was impressed. The thick, razor-wire-topped wall was covered in bougainvillea and wild roses. The pathway from the gate to the front door was made of textured stones and bordered in ground cover. There were palm trees and lemon trees and Roman columns all lit by accent lights. A millstone, also beautifully illuminated, rested against the far end of the garden wall. To its right, near a huge dining table protected by a tent-like covering, sat a terra-cotta urn that had to be six feet high. MJ was entranced. “This is breathtaking, Reuven.”

“Thank you. Believe me, I didn’t do anything. It was all Leah.” The Israeli pushed open the ornate wooden front door, and they made their way into a marble-floored foyer. To their left was a wide marble staircase. MJ could see what looked like a living room up the half-dozen steps. At the top of the steps, two huge black Bouviers des Flandres poked their square muzzles around the wall, Totem-pole fashion. They saw the strangers and barked.

“Sheket, klavim.”Reuven gathered Tom and MJ in his arms and squeezed them close to him. He machine-gunned Hebrew at the dogs, who trotted down the stairs and sniffed the visitors.

“Let them smell your hands, MJ,” Reuven instructed. “Tom they’ll remember.”

And indeed, the smaller of the two Bouviers was already standing on its hind legs, forepaws on Tom’s shoulders, licking his face.

Tom laughed and ruffled the dog’s ears. “This is Cleo, right?”

“Of course. Your girlfriend.” Reuven made a clicking sound and the dogs sat obediently. He turned to MJ. “Cleo likes to sleep with Tom when he visits.” He looked at Tom reprovingly. “Not that he visits very often. The big male is named Bilbo.”

Cleo nudged Tom, herding him up against a wall until he scratched behind her ears then transferred his attention to her rump, grinning when her stump of a tail vibrated with pleasure. “How’re the boys?”

Reuven extracted a treat from his pocket and tossed it at Bilbo, who caught it midair. “Like I said, married. They have their families and big success in business. In the summer, they go to Turkey on the weekends. In the winter, Switzerland to ski.” He glanced at Tom. “Take your bags upstairs-you know where to go-and then come down. I’ll open a bottle of wine. We can sit outside and catch up, and I’ll cook us some dinner later.”

10:35P.M. MJ sat on the wide marble balcony, her feet propped on the low wall, and stared westward toward the high-rise buildings that rimmed the coast road. The clouds had blown out to sea and the night was brilliant-the moon huge and golden. At 8:30, Reuven had cooked a simple dinner of omelets filled with onions, goat cheese, and wonderful Russian sausage, along with green salad and an extraordinary red wine. They ate outside, and it was chilly enough for MJ to run upstairs for a sweater.

Now she drained the glass of mellow red, padded inside to the kitchen, and poured herself another two fingers’ worth. She stared at the label. It was unintelligible-entirely in Hebrew. Well, that made sense because the wine was Israeli. Reuven had said it was a Merlot-he’d called it a Kfira Merlot to be precise. Well, this Israeli Kfira Merlot was as good as any she’d ever tasted. Cleo at her side, she headed back to the balcony. She’d already had three glasses tonight and she was slightly tipsy.

She sat, sipped, then let her head loll back against the chair while her left hand played with the Bouvier’s rough coat. There’d be time tomorrow to call the office and explain the fact that she wasn’t going to be back for a few more days. But that would be tomorrow. Tonight, she was content to sit and stare into space while Tom and Reuven jabbered at each other in a bewildering mixture of Arabic and French with an English word thrown in every now and then. She guessed they were talking about the materials she’d brought to Paris. So what? No one at Coppermine cared enough to give her work a second thought. Tom had found it valuable enough to bring it here.

He was a complex man, was Tom. So different. He’d grown up overseas. His mother had died of cancer when Tom was ten. His father, who’d never remarried, worked for the State Department. They’d lived in France, and Belgium, and Germany, and Morocco, and Tunisia, and Italy. By the time Tom was fifteen, he spoke three languages fluently and “got along,” as he put it, in what he’d called kitchen Arabic.

He’d been educated in a series of French, German, and Swiss boarding schools, and finally at St. Paul’s and Dartmouth. She’d grown up on Long Island and gone to parochial schools. Tom had skied at Gstaad and climbed the Matterhorn. She’d summered on Long Beach, learned to eat steamed clams at Lundy’s in Sheepshead Bay, and ridden the Ferris wheel at Coney Island. Tom’s idea of fun was skiing downhill or riding his motorcycle at some obscene speed. She’d ridden with him-twice. After the first episode, her fingers had taken half an hour to unclench. And yet, when she curled up with theNew York Times crossword puzzle, he’d sit and watch her noodle the words, and tease that they’d make love as soon as she finished-which she always did.

They were so different. And yet so good together. Opposites do attract. Because, underneath it all, they weren’t that opposite. They were both pretty conservative. They both loved their country. For both of them, their lives revolved around public service, something that had been inculcated into them by their parents.

Even MJ’s father, who was hugely protective of her, had been charmed and impressed with Tom. MJ had been nervous about bringing Tom home. She’d finally been browbeaten into doing it only the previous Thanksgiving.

Sitting in the Great Neck living room after the turkey, and the two kinds of dressing, and the mash (which is what they called the potatoes in the house of O’Connor)-after the overcooked vegetables, the three kinds of home-baked pie, and the Folgers brewed in an old-fashioned Farberware percolator, Michael O’Connor poured Tom a healthy tumbler of twelve-year-old Jameson and, as the grandkids squalled and played, took the younger man aside and asked what he was doing to dismember al-Qa’ida and defeat Islamist terror against the West.

“I went to seventy-eight funerals, Tom,” Michael O’Connor growled. “Seventy-eight funerals and seventy-eight wakes. And then I had to stop, because there were no more tears in me. Just rage, Tom. White-hot, searing rage.”

Tom had looked her father square in the face and said, “I’m going to bring as many of them as I can to justice to avenge the people you lost at the WTC, Chief O’Connor. And believe me, when I can’t do that where I’m working now, I’ll do it somewhere else.”

“God bless you, then,” Michael John O’Connor had said, and then he’d looked over at his daughter. “Marilyn Jean, the man’s a keeper,” he’d shouted above the din, bringing silence to the room and a blush to her cheeks. “Always welcome in my house he is.”

She hadn’t understood the significance of Tom’s remark back then. Later, she’d realized it was the first hint that he’d been talking to Tony Wyman about leaving CIA, taking over the Paris office of 4627, and turning their lives-and their relationship-upside down.

She looked up as she heard Tom’s distinctive laugh. It was good to see him laugh. Those last months at CTC had been hell for him. From the little he’d said, the director had thrown money and people into counterterrorism willy-nilly. There had been no plan. There had been no thought. Tom fought for a comprehensive strategy instead of the Band-Aid approach ordered by the seventh floor. He’d been overruled, and then when he’d protested to his superiors, he’d been increasingly shut out of the decision-making process.

Of course he had. At George Tenet’s CIA, dissent was not allowed. Hadn’t she learned that only a few days ago.

Oh boy, had she ever. MJ drained the glass, stood up, wobbled just a little, and looked down at the two men, smoking cigars and conversing in the garden below. “G’night all,” she mumbled, her voice slurring from the effects of the wine. “I’m going to bed.”

From below, Tom waved offhandedly. “I’ll be up soon.” He tapped his cigar on the edge of the ashtray that sat between him and Reuven and swiveled toward the Israeli.

Reuven waited until MJ disappeared from the balcony. The guest room faced the street. There was no way for her to eavesdrop-and besides, he and Tom habitually talked business either in Arabic or French and she spoke neither.

He topped off the Napoleon cognac in the crystal bell glass sitting at his own elbow, did the same for Tom’s, then picked up his cigar, stuck it in his mouth, puffed on it, exhaled a perfect smoke ring that hung in the cool air for almost five seconds. “Ah,” Reuven said. “The perfect combination: a Romeo and Julieta Churchill, and Paul Giraud’s twenty-year-old cognac from Caves Auge.Merci mille fois, Tom.Shukran. Todah rabbah. Cheinchein. Thank you.” He saluted the American with his glass then sipped.

He set the cognac down, stroked his beard, and spoke in French. “There is no news on Shafiq, McGee’s Palestinian. He has disappeared. My guess is he’s dead. And the body already in pieces in the Mediterranean. If he was a double, then he was a loose end. And they don’t like loose ends any more than we do. But I’ll stay on the case. I know someone who knows someone who can sniff around the family-see if they’ve been paid off.”

“Good. And the plastique?”

“I will check in the morning. I can’t believeShabak¹² didn’t run anything more than a swab test-at the very least a spectrograph to check the tagants. But if what you say turns out to be correct, Tom, then sooner or later we’re going to have to hunt him down, this Ben Said. He cannot be permitted to continue.”

“I understand.” Even though he did understand, Tom still felt a little out of his depth. He was a capable case officer. Which meant he had honed all the talents necessary to spot, assess, develop, and recruit agents to spy on behalf of the United States. He’d had successful tours in Egypt, France, Sudan, and Dubai. In that last post, he’d actually recruited an agent who had access to one of the bankers who helped funnel al-Qa’ida money in and out of the Emirates. Later, as a branch chief at the Counterterrorism Center, he’d specialized in identifying the links between certain members of the Saudi royal family and the private charities that through monetary sleight of hand bankrolled Islamist terrorists around the globe. But when it came to dealing with terrorists-reallydealing with them, as in eliminating them-Tom was ill-equipped.

Reuven was different. Before going to Mossad, he’d served in Sayeret Mat’kal, the Israeli Defense Force’s most elite special-operations unit. A Moroccan-born Jew who’d emigrated to Israel as an eleven-year-old in 1956, Reuven spoke native Arabic, as well as fluent French, German, Turkish, and passable Farsi. As a soldier, he had penetrated terrorist camps in Syria and Jordan, identifying, stalking, and single-handedly killing more than half a dozen of Israel’s most wanted enemies. As Mossad chief in Ankara-his final posting-he had helped the Turks eliminate a score of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) terrorists who had allied themselves with radical Islamist groups and helped attack Jewish targets in Turkey.

In April 1988, as a senior-level Mossad officer, Reuven spent nineteen harrowing days performing advance reconnaissance on PLO operations chief Abu Jihad’s home in the Tunis suburb of Sidi Bou Said. Working solo, under Lebanese cover, he flew to Tunisia. There, he researched and mapped the infiltration and exfiltration routes to be used by the Sayeret Mat’kal shooters who on the night of April 15-16, would execute the man who’d helped form Black September and was responsible for hundreds of Israeli deaths. Six weeks later, Reuven was presented Israel’s second highest award for valor, the Ott Ha’Oz, for his bravery and initiative.

It wasn’t his only award. On June 8, 1992, as Mossad’s deputy station chief in Paris, Reuven had led a quickly mounted operation to kill Atif B’sisou, the acting head of Fatah’s intelligence organization, as B’sisou drove his brand-new Mercedes SUV through Paris on the way to the Marseille- Tunis ferry.

B’sisou’s last-minute schedule changes were betrayed to Mossad’s Paris station by Mahmoud Yassin, a Tunis-based midranking PLO intelligence official. Reuven had recruited Yassin in 1990 when the Palestinian brought his wife to Paris for medical treatment. So when Atif B’sisou called Tunis from Frankfurt to tell his office he was going to stop over a day in Paris, Yassin immediately burst-transmitted the news to his Mossad control officer. By the time Atif arrived in Paris midafternoon on June 8 and checked into the Méridien Montparnasse under an assumed name, Reuven was ready and waiting.

Atif was kept under constant surveillance. He was tracked as he and his Paris station chief, S R,¹³drove to dinner at the Montparnasse branch of Hippopotamus, the steak-and-frites chain, in R ’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle convertible. And just after 1A.M., when the VW pulled up under the Méridien’s low-slung marquee, Reuven had watched from two hundred yards away through night-vision binoculars as two of his young paramilitary officers slung B’sisou across the hood of a Volkswagen Beetle, pumped three 9mm bullets into his head from a Browning High Power concealed in a backpack, and vanished into the Méridien’s catacomblike garage.

Six weeks later, in the Mossad headquarters building that sits across the main highway from the Tel Aviv Country Club, Reuven had been presented with Mossad’s Israel Prize, given only to those few combatants who lead the most successful and high-risk operations.

Tom could claim no similar background. As a case officer trainee, he’d had a total of three weeks of paramilitary training. He’d jumped out of a plane-from twelve hundred feet. He’d taken a one-week course in land navigation skills. He’d been given the basic explosives course in North Carolina. And he’d had the Agency’s weapons familiarity courses on pistols, rifles, and automatic weapons. But all of that had been before three years of Arabic language training and his first posting, to the consulate in Cairo. He hadn’t touched a weapon in more than a decade.

Indeed, like most of the case officers of his generation, Tom Stafford had never served in the military. His old boss in Paris, Sam Waterman, was a former Marine who’d served in Vietnam. So had the CEO of the 4627 Company, Antony Wyman. And of course there was Rudy-the paramilitary veteran with whom Tom had recruited Jim McGee. Rudy was a Navy veteran who’d seen combat in Vietnam, too.

And it wasn’t that Tom felt incapable of violence. Two deaths in less than three days had taken their emotional toll on him. There was a new-found fury in Tom’s gut-MJ’s father had called it white heat and the phrase stuck with him-that burned for revenge. It was simply that CIA had never trained him in the way Israel had trained Reuven. Sure, CIA engaged in what was euphemistically and neutrally termeddirect action. But direct action-DA, as it was usually called-was the rare exception to the hard-and-fast rule: thou shalt not kill thy country’s enemies without a Lethal Finding signed by the president, and a ton of paperwork.

He’d never thought much about it before, but now he realized that the whole goddamn American intelligence community was built around strictures-thousands upon thousands of thou-shalt-nots. There was Executive Order 12333, which prohibited the Agency from carrying out political assassinations. There were still Clinton-era rules of engagement in force that prevented case officers from pursuing Russian targets. There were Kafkaesque guidelines governing the development and recruiting of agents. And there was an ever-expanding catalog of preposterous controls, absurd limitations, and cartoonish constraints imposed by the dithering, idiotic dilettantes of the congressional intelligence oversight committees.

Even now, when, in the midst of the global war on terror, the Agency needed more flexibility, nimbleness, and lethality than ever, the numbskulls up on Capitol Hill were trying to add new layers of management to CIA’s already top-heavy bureaucracy and dummkopf rules that would, in effect, add hundreds of hours of case officer record keeping for every new agent spotted, assessed, developed, recruited, and run.

That’s what had made such sense about the 4627 Company: 4627 was built like OSS during World War II. It was lean. It relied on inventiveness and ingenuity. It was mission-driven. At 4627, Tom’s marching orders could be reduced to one biblically simple commandment: “thou shalt not fail.”

Like the old Mossad. The way Tom saw it, Mossad had historically operated under two succinct rules of engagement. The first was “thou shalt have no limits” and the second was “thou shalt not get caught.”

Even now, more than two years after 9/11, the American intelligence community leadership was still refusing to think that way. But changing CIA’s modus operandi was like turning a supertanker around. You couldn’t do it overnight. Not without the right personnel. And CIA just didn’t have enough experienced old hands to do the human intelligence gathering, fight the global war on terror, and supply the military with the kind of actionable intelligence it needed to fight the two-front war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Indeed, limits, constrictions, and lack of competent personnel were three of the reasons Langley was forced to subcontract such a sizable chunk of CIA’s historic responsibilities to outside firms these days. Some independent contractors, or ICs, provided security for CIA case officers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others provided CIA with language-capable interrogators and translators to accompany the junior case officers who’d been pushed through training without the ability to speak anything except Gringo.

And then there were the black-ops ICs. International Alternatives, one of 4627’s main K Street competitors, for example, was currently running a covert program for Langley and DOD, sending sheep-dipped Delta operators into Iran with teams from the Mujahedin-e Khalq (the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK), a group listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization, in the hope of providing eyes-on information about Iran’s nuclear weapons development program. And a precious few ICs, firms like 4627, were paid extravagantly to covertly collect, interpret, analyze, and then disseminate the holy of holies, intelligence product itself, to Langley.

Intelligence product because CIA lacked the capabilities to fulfill many of its obligations these days. CIA was peopled with so many layers of managerial deadwood it simply did not have enough qualified personnel to get the job done. And then there was the deniability angle. In the politically correct world of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, outsourcing gave CIA deniability. That was because the Agency’s major ICs, firms like 4627, were, in point of fact, cutouts.

ICs operated in the black. More to the point, private contractors were under no obligation to inform the House and Senate intelligence committees about what they did-and to whom. There was huge potential for abuse, of course. Not at 4627, where Tony Wyman, Charlie Hoskinson, and Bronco Panitz maintained a strong chain of command. But other ICs weren’t so well run. Tom had already heard gossip about abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And what if something did go wrong-what if Tom mucked up? Well, as Tony had said more than once, the bottom line is that 4627 and all its people were disposables. He had said as much to Tom the day he’d recruited him. “We can’t afford to screw up,” is what Tony said. “Because unlike your time at Langley, we work out here without a net. Just like the guys inMission: Impossible, ‘The secretary will deny any knowledge…’ You know how the mantra goes.”

Which was one reason the thought of hunting and killing made Tom Stafford just a little uncomfortable.Well, he didn’t have to like it.

Besides, they weren’t anywhere near the direct-action stage yet. “There’s a lot to nail down before the hunting season opens, Reuven.” Tom took a long pull on the cigar. “First things first. Check with Shin Bet on the explosives-see if they’ll run supplemental tests for you. And Shin Bet is holding two prisoners I want to interrogate. The ones Shahram told me about. The guy from Jerusalem-the one with no hands. Then the bomber from Tel Aviv. Set it up for me first thing in the morning.”

“First thing in the morning?” Reuven drained the cognac and poured himself another. “First thing in the morning, my friend, I am going to drive you and your lady friend to Jerusalem so she can walk through the Old City and feel some of the magic of this country-and tell her not to worry about the Intifada because she’ll be a lot safer in Jerusalem than she would be in much of Washington, D.C. Then we’ll drive back to Tel Aviv so I can take the two of you to a great fish restaurant in Jaffa for lunch. After lunch, we go up the coast to the Roman ruins in Caesarea. And for dinner, I have a friend from Shayetet 13-the Israeli SEALs-who opened the best restaurant in Herzlyia.”

“Reuven-”

The Israeli’s hand went up like a traffic cop’s. He cocked his head toward the second floor of the house. “Look,” he said in Arabic, “Imad Mugniyah is long gone. Zip-zip through the Rafah tunnels to Egypt, and from there, who knows where-maybe Tehran, maybe back to Beirut. Ben Said no doubt used the same route, although now that I have a name and a picture, maybe I can pick up a scent.” He shot the American a look that preempted any objections “That’s that, Tom. So, tomorrow we go sightseeing. The whole day. Tuesday afternoon, your friend, she goes on a plane back to Washington, full of stories about her wonderful surprise trip to the Holy Land.”

The Israeli knocked an inch and a half of ash off his cigar. “Frankly, I think you should propose.”

Reuven saw the shocked expression on Tom’s face and cocked his head in the American’s direction. “What’s the problem? You love this woman, right?”

“For sure, Reuven.”

“So in Tel Aviv I know a place you can find an engagement ring for her. He’s a diamond merchant. I served with him overseas. He has only the best. And I can get you a great price.”

“Reuven-”

“Look, I’m thinking only professionally. Engaged. That would give her real-how do you Americans say it-cover for status for being here.” He laughed. “Cover for status. Perfect.”

“Marriage isn’t a game, Reuven.”

“I’m not playing games. You love this woman, right?”

“Yes, I do.”

“So do the right thing. Don’t make trouble for her-marry her, Tom.” The Israeli’s face clouded over. “If I had it to do all over again, I’d marry Leah five years earlier than I did. That would have given us five more years, Tom. We had thirty-six years together. I can tell you now it wasn’t enough.”

“I’m sorry, Reuven.”

“Believe me, Tom, I am sorrier than you. So give your MJ a good time, buy her a ring, then put her on the plane home. No business, Tom. Not a hint of it. After she’s safely away, ecstatic with a diamond she can show all her colleagues-that’s when we do business. Then-I’ll arrange for you to debrief the scum who came here so they could kill women and children. Then we can start the hunt.”

12

26 OCTOBER 2003

10:02A.M.

SEVEN KILOMETERS NORTHWEST OF QADIMA

IT WAS THE SMELL,more than anything, that had made Tom uneasy; an ineffable but palpable mélange of disinfectant, urine, sweat, must, and fear. The result of this assault on his senses-and this took place even though Tom knew intellectually he was just a visitor here-was a huge and totally unexpected psychological tsunami. It sucked Tom into an emotional undertow that combined apprehension, anxiety, and, as much as he tried to fight against it, complete and utter heart-palpitating dread. He couldn’t help himself. Dread was…just in the air.

They’d left at nine. Reuven had taken the coast road. Just north of Udim, opposite a Toys “R” Us superstore that would have done justice to the Paramus Mall, he’d swerved off the highway, drove down the exit ramp, and continued north on a dusty track that ran parallel to the highway. Two kilometers on, he’d made a sharp turn onto a potholed, single-lane road bordered on both sides by denuded cotton fields. There would be only one interview today. Reuven told Tom that Heinrich Azouz, the Jerusalem bomber, had died of his wounds. But he’d pulled enough strings to get Tom granted permission to interrogate Dianne Lamb. It was a one-shot deal.

They’d driven due east, followed the browntop as it turned north then east again, crossed the tracks of the main Tel Aviv-Haifa rail line, and continued another three kilometers past brick factories, concrete plants, and quarries until they intersected a four-lane blacktop road so new that the center line hadn’t been painted yet. Tom caught glimpses, but he was focused on the work at hand.

Reuven turned north. Tom looked up. The highway was bordered by cypress groves. About three-quarters of a kilometer north of the intersection, Reuven turned onto an unmarked gravel road bulldozed into the wall of trees. He headed west, toward the sea. For the first half kilometer, the road ascended. Then it crested and dipped. As they descended, the tree line opened slightly and Tom saw an old British fort in the distance. It was a squat, square three-story affair built of thick Jerusalem stone, with crenellated watchtowers that looked like old-fashioned chess pieces at each corner.

Reuven pulled up at a rudimentary roadblock manned by half a dozen troops armed with M-16s. Tom glanced into the woods and was surprised to see four olive-drab Jeeps with pintle-mounted.50-caliber machine guns and three camouflaged APCs close at hand. He waited while Reuven palavered with the guards, then watched as a soldier pulled a twenty-foot length of tire spikes out of the way so they could proceed.

The heavy weapons had gotten Tom’s attention, and he scanned carefully as they drove the last half klik to the old fort. In the sixty seconds it took them to do so, he identified five layers of defensive countermeasures: raked cordons sanitaires, surveillance cameras, infrared sensors, K-9 teams, and razor wire. He wondered what he’d missed.

As they pulled onto the small parking lot Reuven turned to him, his face serious. “Listen carefully. This place does not exist. So far as I know, you’re the first foreigner ever allowed inside. Point of fact, Tom, I was surprised when they said yes. So treat what you see and hear here accordingly, okay?”

Tom’s expression showed that he understood the gravity of what he was being told. “Got it, Reuven. And thank you.”

10:12A.M. In a sterile, windowless interrogation room holding a metal desk and two metal chairs bolted to the concrete floor, he stripped down to his underwear and was given a set of utilitarian olive-drab coveralls and a pair of scuffed black leather boots that looked about half a size too small. He’d even had to hand over his watch, which along with his other personal belongings were sealed into a heavy brown envelope then taken away to be stored in a safe in the commandant’s office. The only thing he carried was the handkerchief he’d transferred from his trouser pocket.

When he’d asked why he couldn’t keep the watch, he was told the prisoners were allowed no sense of time. It was an integral part of the interrogation process. The cells were lit by artificial light, which could be regulated to disorient and throw their biometric schedules and thinking processes into chaos. Some “days” were eight hours in length; others might last thirty-six.

“We do not use physical abuse,” the officer in charge of his visit explained. He was a diminutive man who looked to be in his mid- to late sixties and who spoke to Tom in Kurdish-accented Arabic. The left arm of his olive-drab coveralls was folded neatly and attached by the cuff just below the epaulet. From what Tom could make out, the man’s whole left arm had been taken off at the shoulder.

The Israeli introduced himself as Salah and volunteered no further information as to his rank or position. When Tom asked how the prisoners were treated, Salah cocked his head defensively. “There are no stress positions, hooding, or coercion used here.”

“Why not? That’s how our detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq are being treated.”

“Of course.” Salah rubbed his pencil-thin mustache with the edge of his right hand. “They are effective techniques in the acquiring of actionable intelligence. Quick results for immediate needs. A slap in the face, a threat, the pit-of-stomach claustrophobia from being hooded sometimes works to jar loose information about an imminent operation. That’s fear, my friend. You can extract information by using fear-I believe you Americans teach a technique at Fort Huachuca called ‘fear up/fear down.’ But fear is short-lived. I prefer dread. Day-in, day-out, marrow-of-the-bone angst is what I want to produce. Our prisoners know we have a reputation for ruthlessness. It doesn’t matter whether that reputation is true or not. What matters is the psychological effect it has on them. Let me tell you something, my friend: dread works. Dread works very well.”

Tom remembered how he’d felt when they’d come through the gates. The unpleasant sensations that had been prodded by what he’d smelled. “Including sensory exploitation, right?”

A sly smile crossed Salah’s face. “How do you mean?”

“What I smelled when we came into the facility. It made me react viscerally.”

“Ah,le parfum pénitentiaire. It took us months to develop. What did you think?”

“I was impressed. It made me extremely…apprehensive.”

“You felt dread, correct?”

“Precisely.”

“That’s why it works. Look-I throw into a cell a man. He’s no hard-liner, but let’s say he was standing close by when two Israeli reservists are attacked, beaten, then thrown out of the second-story window of a Palestinian Authority police station, then stomped to death by the crowd the Palestinian police have assembled below. There is video-a Western camera crew was rolling during the incident, so we have lots of faces but no names. This guy, we think he has names.”

“Why?”

“Because in the video he’s a part of the crowd. He looks like he knows the people around him-the same animals who tore our soldiers apart limb from limb and then turned to the camera to show off their bloody hands. Either they’re his neighbors or he’s a part of one of the murderers’ extended families. I have to fracture that clan loyalty and get him to name names before Arafat ships the scum with the blood on their hands out to Gaza or Egypt or Syria, where it’s harder for us to lay our hands on them. So Shabak noses around until they find him, scoop him up, and bring him to me. Not here. To another place. Things are abrupt, quick. He has no time to think or react. He’s yanked into a truck, and the next thing he knows he’s smelling what you smelled-and all of a sudden he is afraid. He is very, very afraid. Then he loses his clothes. He’s handed dirty, anonymous over-alls that smell of someone else’s sweat and urine. He’s alone. He’s frightened. He’s been separated from his family, his village, all his friends. He’s pushed into a cell. A very spartan cell. Then I start the disorientation and, more important, the anticipation of dread. A few slaps in the face-whapwhap. A cuff or two on the back of the head-smack-smack. Then he’s left alone to wonder what’s coming next. Then I use heat. Followed by cold. Then sleep deprivation. During this time, he’s hooded for what he thinks is a day, maybe even two.”

“How does he know?”

“Because we designed the hoods so he can see just enough to know when the lights go on and when they go off. Because he can hear the other prisoners being served breakfast or dinner.” Salah’s eyes narrowed. “His senses tell him what’s what.”

“And how long are we really talking about?”

“Nine to thirteen hours tops. Sometimes much less.”

Tom pursed his lips. Impressive.

Salah continued. “He can hear things but not see anything. He hears someone being taken away. He hears screams-I mean serious. Like fingernails being pulled out, or hot irons burning flesh or electroshock. Sometime later-he has no idea how long-he hears the sound of a body being dragged down the corridor and thrown into the adjacent cell. If he listens very carefully, he can make out excruciating moans. It may all be role-playing or sound effects coming from a compact disc and a very sophisticated speaker system-sophisticated enough to make the walls of his cell rumble if we have to. But my target doesn’t know that. All he knows is what his buddies have told him and what he’s picked up on the street about how ruthless we are-and what he’s just gone through. Believe me, by the time I ask him the first question, he is already putty.”

“But what you’re talking aboutis ruthless.”

“Ruthless works, my friend. You have to be pragmatic. Flexible. You Americans forget you are at war. That’s because you think you are eight thousand miles from it, even though you’re not. We live in the middle of the battlefield, my friend.” Salah pulled a pack of Jordanian cigarettes from his pocket, shook one into his mouth, and lit it with a disposable lighter. “That’s how you get actionable intelligence. Stuff you use today, tomorrow, this week.”

“But you said you don’t use those techniques at Qadima.”

“Correct. Here we are interested in the long term. To learn how these people think and why. This woman you came to see-she is no terrorist. We know that. But we want to learn about the man she traveled with. We want to be able to give our security services information that will help them uncover developing capabilities, impending objectives, future trends. And so, we prefer psychological means-yes, we still use light, heat, and cold, sound or the absolute lack of it. But the key is long, intensive, almost psychoanalytic sessions.”

“But she’s British. What about the British consul? Didn’t he demand to see her?”

Salah put his right hand on the edge of the metal desk and exhaled smoke through his nose. “That is not my concern. When those in a position to grant the British consul permission to see this woman do so, she will be moved to another facility.” He swiveled toward Tom. “Our goals here are different. Time is of no concern. We want to extract information right down to the subconscious level. To understand what attracted these people to terrorism-to comprehend not only their motives, but get inside their psyches.”

“When you say long…”

The Israeli switched into French. “Twenty-two, twenty-three hours is common. I have seen interrogations that last more than thirty-two hours-almost a day and a half. And believe me, they are just as hard on the interrogator as they are on the subject.”

Tom followed suit, speaking French. “You don’t tag-team?”

“It doesn’t work if you switch boats in midstream. There has to be a real line of communication developed. Something akin to trust. Like I said, in many ways the process here resembles psychoanalysis. You get inside their heads. You take them back, get them almost fetal, and then bring them forward step-by-step.”

Tom understood Salah’s modus operandi. The agent recruitment process operated under many of the same precepts. The case officer controls the situation by creating and subsequently encouraging the kind of rapport in which the agent quickly becomes dependent on the case officer. Through the ability to read people, the force of personality, and the exploitation of vulnerabilities, the case officer creates a Potemkin Village relationship in which he or she becomes the agent’s best friend, surrogate parent, trusted confessor, and shrink. “Potemkin Village” because it is all an act. The case officer’s every emotion is feigned, every response choreographed in order to manipulate, steer, and influence the target in a certain prescribed direction. At the end of the process, which is called “getting close,” the target will trust the case officer more than he or she will trust their own husbands or wives, families, or the groups to which they belong.

Indeed, if the case officers are sophisticated enough, and flexible enough, and know enough about the culture, mores, and psychological quirks of the target, they can even run this mind game on individuals whose religious and political beliefs might at first appear to be impenetrable and unshakable. Like members of the Muslim Brotherhood or the Da’wa, for example. Tom had recruited members of both vehemently anti-Western Islamist factions as agents. It hadn’t been an overnight process. It had taken more than half a year in one case-that had been a false-flag recruitment-and a local access agent to act as an intermediary in the other. But he had pulled them off.

He looked at the one-armed man who flicked the cigarette from his lips and ground it out with the toe of his boot. This guy knew whereof he spoke.

“Why was I allowed to come here?”

“You are here because Reuven Ayalon vouches for you, and because Reuven has a lot of friends.” He gave Tom a sidelong glance. “I was against it at first. It breaks the rhythm, and we’re almost finished with her. But I was finally convinced that in the long term your visit will bear valuable fruit for us as well as you.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t be so quick to thank. Besides, Reuven or no Reuven, you are here because I was told you are able to ask questions exactly the way we do-in Arabic or French that doesn’t sound as if it’s being spoken by a Yankee Doodle dandy.”

The words came out “Yenki Duudul dendi.” The Israeli looked at Tom, his face serious. “You speak even your French with a slight Tunisian accent. There is no hint of American in your speech.”

“Is that important?”

Salah shook another cigarette out, put it to his lips, and replaced the pack in his pocket. “It is critical. It is important for some of the detainees to believe they have been shipped somewhere that is not Israel. And so there is no Hebrew spoken anywhere in this facility. No English either. Arabic, French, and sometimes Farsi, Russian, or German.”

“Isn’t that skirting the ethical edge?”

“Ethical? It’s not ethical to murder civilians, my friend. I told you: I am against torture. I am against abuse. But I’ve already been condemned to fight with one sleeve pinned to my shoulder, my friend. I’m not willing to tie my only good hand behind my back, too.” Salah withdrew a greenish bandanna from his coveralls, blew his nose loudly, then stuffed the handkerchief back in his back pocket. “So, we can-and we do without apology-hold detainees in solitary confinement for years if we feel it is necessary. Just like the French, incidentally. In fact, a major factor in our high success rate is the complete isolation in which these terrorists are kept. You Americans tend to coddle prisoners-even terrorists. You cave in to human rights organizations. You allow lawyers, family visits, and other amenities. I cannot believe what I saw when I visited high-security facilities in the United States some years ago. Cable television. Gyms. Libraries. It was like sending your criminals to college.”

“That was a civilian prison.”

“But your so-called white supremacists were incarcerated there alongside rapists and bank robbers. You treat your own terrorists as if they were burglars or carjackers.” Salah’s hand made a dismissive gesture. “Terrorists are not criminals. They are enemy combatants, and they deserve no coddling. You Americans often ignore the realities. That kind of fuzzy thinking pervades your abilities, especially in this kind of total war.” He exhaled smoke through his nose. “Jihad, they call it. All-out effort, remember? Sometimes I think you Americans forget that when you deal with enemy combatants.”

“That’s not what I hear about the ones being held in Afghanistan and Guantánamo.”

“For you, Iraq and Afghanistan are the exceptions to the rule, believe me.” Salah pulled on the collar of his sterile coveralls. “Besides, you Americans have very few trained interrogators.” His black eyes flashed in Tom’s direction. “You had to send more than fifty of your paramilitary people here just after the Kandahar and Baghram facilities were established in Afghanistan because your CIA didn’t have any qualified personnel.Any. Unbelievable. So we had to teach them the basics, believe me. But it didn’t matter, because they all lacked Arabic, not to mention Pashto, or Urdu, or Uzbek. A friend of mine at AMAN¹⁴told me when the 9/11 attacks occurred, there were less than a hundred Arabic-speaking interrogators in your entire army-and perhaps another hundred and fifty in the reserves. And CIA? It was a joke. At the military interrogation center in Kandahar, not a single CIA officer had sufficient Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, or Farsi to do proper interrogations. And yet the most critical element is the ability to speak in the detainee’s native tongue and understand his culture. You cannot do the job using an interpreter.”

Well, Salah was right about that. The 4627 Company had more Top Secret-cleared four-plus Uzbek speakers than CIA did these days. In fact, in the spring of 2002, CIA had approached 4627 to recruit, vet, and hire language-capable interrogators for Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Langley was offering $2,500 a day plus expenses for ninety-day deployments, and they wanted a minimum of a dozen people. The math was great: 4627’s profit on two ninety-day cycles would be $3.2 million-and Langley wanted a minimum of six ninety-day cycles. But Tony Wyman turned the Agency down cold. It was a slippery slope, he said. One bad apple-one case of prisoner abuse in the newspapers-and the firm’s credibility worldwide would be jeopardized. Let some other contractor take the money and run.

And yet Tom understood the need. It often took Americans weeks to accomplish what trained native speakers could do in a matter of days because the Americans too often had to rely on interpreters-linguists, they were euphemistically called by the Pentagon. It was like trying to play the old kids’ game of telephone. Tom knew it was impossible to recruit an agent using an interpreter. So why the hell did the numbskulls at DOD and Langley believe it would be productive to interrogate hard-core al-Qa’ida militants-Wahabists who were willing to die for their beliefs-that way? It made no sense at all.

Besides, interrogating terrorists was an art as well as a science. The Israelis had perfected it out of necessity. In the United States, until 9/11 at least, terrorism had been largely considered a criminal activity not an act of war. The FBI’s techniques for interrogating terrorists were exactly the same as they were for interrogating bank robbers or mafiosi. Christ, the Bureau was surveilling potential militants at Washington, D.C.’s Massachusetts Avenue mosque the same way they’d taped comings and goings at the old Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street. Sure, they had audio as well as video from bugs planted inside the Mosque and adjacent grounds. But rumor was, translation lag time at SIOP¹⁵was about nine months.

In the military, interrogator trainees at Fort Huachuca were still using Cold War scenarios. The only change was that instead of calling the role-players Boris, they were calling them Muhammad. At CIA, the subject of prisoner interrogation still took up less than six hours of the basic intelligence operations course taken by trainees at the Farm. Didn’tanybody Get It? Tom zipped the coveralls up to his throat. “Will there be a transcript available to me?”

“We will give you a DVD-full audio and video, as well as a transcript, in Microsoft Word format.” He watched as the American sat on the edge of the straight-backed chair and pulled on the scuffed black leather boots. “Obviously, you will not possess these materials unilaterally.”

“I understand.” Tom yanked the laces secure and tied them in a double bow. “How long can I have with her?”

“As much time as you need. But I don’t think you’ll need a lot of time.”

“Why is that?”

“I believe we were pretty thorough. Reuven has made the interrogation transcripts available, yes?”

“He has-except for the summary and several pages that were redacted.”

“That was because I wanted you to come to your own conclusions. Afterward, we’ll compare notes. You will give me your evaluation of the situation, and I will give you mine.”

“That’s fair.”

“Thank you.” Salah spat the cigarette from his lips and ground it out against the floor. “Remember: you’ll interrogate the woman in French, please.”

“Will do.” Tom looked at Salah. “I could even use a Marseille accent if you think it would be effective.” The accent was something he’d worked on as he created the persona he’d use during the interrogation.

The Israeli cocked his head in Tom’s direction with newfound respect. “Yes,” he said. “It is a good idea.”

“Then I’m ready.”

Salah examined Tom up and down. Tom started for the door, but Salah cut him off. “Wait-” The Israeli slapped the file folder he was carrying onto the chair, rummaged through the drawer of the steel desk, pulled out a wrinkled olive-drab barracks cap, shook it energetically, then slapped it against Tom’s upper arm. “Here-put this on,” he said brusquely. “You have an American-style haircut.”

13

10:26A.M. Tom pulled the cap on and followed the Israeli. They walked down a long corridor, turned right, descended a flight of stairs, and turned left, entering another ominous, dimly lit corridor lined with heavy gray steel doors.

Interesting. The room where Tom had changed clothes had a concrete floor. So did the corridor. The steps he’d just descended were also concrete, with steel edges. But the floor in this corridor was covered in inch-thick, hard rubber-like the nonslip pads sometimes used in restaurant kitchens. Their footfalls made no noise whatsoever.

Tom worked to keep his emotions under control. It was difficult. He had actually run agents who were terrorists. His first had been a courier for Al Jihad-a handover on his first overseas tour when he’d worked under consular cover in Cairo. There’d been a car bomber in Sudan-a worker bee in the Muslim Brotherhood who was occasionally loaned out to al-Qa’ida. And of course there was Rashid in Paris. Rashid had what-half a dozen Israeli scalps on his belt. But this was different. He’d never interrogated a jailed terrorist before, never got up close and personal.

More pertinent: Tom had had only three days in which to prepare for this one-shot deal. That was like having no time at all. Prior to agent meetings, you often went back over months and months of reports, memorizing the tiniest details, so that if there were contradictions or fabrications, your internal b.s. detector sounded and they could be identified, highlighted, and probed. You asked your developmentals the same question twenty different ways, perpetually searching for minute inconsistencies or tiny discrepancies, because one word could make the difference between success and failure; between a unilateral asset and a double agent; between that agent’s life and their death.

That’s why the bloody recruitment process took so long. Tom shook his head. God-the damn 9/11 Commission was already leaking stories about putting more CIA agents, as they often incorrectly called them, on the street. Either the commission was made up of ignoramuses, or they’d all seen too much TV or read too much Tom Clancy.

The way they talked, all you had to do was hire someone, give him or her six months of training, andpoof, presto change-o, a full-grown case officer-Smiley out of the head of Zeus. It didn’t work that way. It could take years to learn the ropes, even if you were talented. You needed mentoring. There wasn’t a day that Tom didn’t silently thank Sam Waterman for taking the time to inculcate the dark arts of tradecraft into him.

The commission acted as if you could stroll into a bar in London’s Shepherd’s Market, spot a suspicious-looking Yemenite Arab sipping a bourbon daiquiri, sidle up next to him, have a ten-minute conversation, and all of a sudden said Arab tells you precisely where Saddam Hussein has cached his weapons of mass destruction, or in precisely which cave in Tora Bora Usama Bin Laden is currently hanging his kaffiyeh.

Jeezus. Didn’t anybody realize it doesn’t work that way? First of all, for every ten pitches you make, you strike out nine times. In Cairo, Tom had botched his first attempt to recruit an agent. He’d pitched an Egyptian Army major attached to the Mukhabarat el-Khabeya (military intelligence service) whom he’d cultivated for more than six months. The officer had looked at him as if he were crazy, stood up, and said, “Do not ever try to contact me again or I will have you arrested.” Recruiting was a risk-intensive business. And when you did finally snare a target, the information you received most of the time was piecemeal-a fragment of a puzzle, not the whole thing.

Didn’t people understand that HUMINT-for HUMan INTelligence gathering-was like paleontology? You probed and you dug and you prodded and you excavated for what seemed like forever. And then, after an excruciatingly and often interminable period of time, you might-if you’re smart, and talented, and above all lucky-you might discover a tiny intelligence fossil that is, perhaps, a single part of a much-larger life-form. And yet from this microscopic shard-which may, by the way, have been planted by an evil archaeologist working for one of your adversaries-Congress and the 9/11 Commission, and, for that matter, the misguided and ill-informed American public insist it is not only possible to divine what sort of creature the fossil could have come from, but also tell you exactly where the entire skeleton of the creature can be found.

In real life, the recruitment process could take months of careful gumshoeing to make sure the opposition wasn’t screwing with you. In the field, you had to watch your emotions so you didn’t get sucked in. In the field, enthusiasm was the enemy of thoroughness. You developed a mental sonar that was never turned off. That’s what had killed McGee. He lacked the sensors to realize he was developing a double. Or a dangle. Or a provocateur. Or an assassin. Achieving that highly developed defensive awareness took years.

It looked easy in the movies. Or in fiction. But in real life, becoming a productive, streetwise case officer doesn’t happen overnight. And spotting, assessing, developing, and then recruiting a single agent is a laborious, time-intensive, painstaking process. Charlie Hoskinson, who’d recruited the of the Syrian president, said it had taken him the better part of his three-year-tour in Damascus to do so. Bronco Panitz, who was 4627’s CEO, had been promoted to the Senior Intelligence Service on the strength of two Soviet recruitments, a process that had taken him more than four years on two continents-only to lose them both to Aldrich Ames.

So when the 9/11 Commission or the fools on the House or Senate intelligence oversight committees wrote reports with prose that readit is imperative for CIA to increase its human intelligence capabilities immediately, Tom and the rest of his fellow intelligence professionals had to laugh. George Tenet-a disaster as DCI-had boldly told Congress that the DO wouldn’t be up to speed for another five years. Everyone at Langley who had an ounce of sense knew Tenet grossly understated the case to make himself look better. The evidence? Tom’s own curriculum vitae belied the DCI’s assertion.

Tom had spent seventeen years and seven months at CIA. He’d entered training just after Labor Day of 1985, recruited straight out of Dartmouth College. In late March 1986, he’d been assigned to headquarters-spending seven months at NE Division as a desk officer trainee to learn the bureaucratic ropes. During that time, he managed to take a number of the advanced tradecraft courses offered in Washington: lock-picking, secure communications, and the “guerrilla driving course” out in West Virginia at Bill Scott Raceway, where he learned how to run roadblocks and make bootlegger’s and J-turns. Then it had been a year at the Foreign Service Institute’s language school in Rosslyn, Virginia, followed by nineteen months in Tunis, in FSI’s immersion Arabic program.

Tom’s first overseas tour hadn’t commenced until June 1989, when he began work under consular cover at the Cairo embassy. And even then he was a greenhorn with no field experience. And little chance of receiving much in the immediate future.

His chief in Cairo, John, was a prissy, non-Arab speaker who’d spent eighteen years as a reports officer before being brought into the Directorate of Operations under DCI Robert Gates’s “cross-fertilization” program that larded DO with inexperienced analysts, academic reports officers, and secretaries-all in the name of EEO diversification. A GS-15 on his second (and final) go-round for promotion to the Senior Intelligence Service, got so fidgety when the subject of recruitments was brought up he was known around the embassy as Twitch. The situation wasn’t improved by Tom’s immediate superior, a chronic alcoholic named McWhirter who signed out to interview developmentals but actually spent his afternoons sipping vodkas on the rocks in the bar of the Méridien.

No one in Cairo showed any inclination to mentor the first-time case officer. So Tom sat in his teller’s cage and stamped visas, learned as much about Cairo as he could, worked hard to improve his conversational Arabic, and pursued his spycraft through trial and error-mostly, he realized later, through error.

In point of fact, Tom didn’t receive any decent mentoring until after he’d arrived in Paris in July 1992. There, the deputy chief, Sam Waterman, took the youngster under his wing. He taught Tom how to go black-slip out from under DST surveillance-by exploiting the seams in the French domestic security agency’s rigidly defined regional areas of coverage. He allowed Tom the freedom to occasionally push the edge of the envelope when it came to recruiting and running agents with less-than-squeaky-clean backgrounds. And perhaps most important, he’d forced Tom to spend long hours working on his reporting and interrogation skills.

Waterman had schoolmarmishly insisted that Tom spend every bit of his spare time-and there wasn’t a lot of it-reading old reports so that he’d have absorbed all the background he needed for his agent handovers. Long before Tom met his first handover, he’d memorized three years of reporting about the man. Waterman had grilled him on the material before he’d allowed the handover to proceed. The interrogation hadn’t been pleasant, either.

It didn’t stop there. Under Waterman’s incessant tutelage, Tom wrote and then rewrote every report half a dozen times-sometimes more. Waterman was merciless. “You’re not providing any frigging details, Tom.” Waterman would pound the desk. He was a big man and he knew how to use his size to intimidate “You were in a restaurant. What did it look like? What were the surroundings? Was there any sign of DST? Your developmental was ten minutes late. Why? Did his explanation satisfy you? Was he hiding something? What did your developmental wear? Was he wearing anything he hadn’t worn before? What about new jewelry? How did he appear to you? What emotional traits did he display? What did his body language tell you? Did he show any of the physical signs of deception or guilt? Dry mouth? Was his face pale? Did you see any throbbing in the vein on his neck or the backs of his hands? Was his voice steady? What were his feet doing while the two of you were speaking? I don’t see any frigging hints about any of those reactions in your reporting.”

Now he’d had a mere three days to prepare-to construct a scenario, develop a persona, get all his physical and mental ducks in the proverbial row. Not enough time. Not by far, given the stakes. But it was all the time there was.

He’d followed Reuven’s advice to the letter. Popped the question at six Monday morning. By eight that night, MJ was sporting a magnificent two-point-three-carat diamond set off by two quarter-carat baguettes, all in a regal but simple platinum setting. She couldn’t stop looking at the damn thing and smiling.

Tuesday afternoon, Reuven had used his connections to put MJ on the overbooked Air France flight to Paris-bumped to first class. She’d spend the night at rue Raynouard, get the rest of her stuff, then continue on to Washington Thursday. The radiant look on her face as she went through the departure gate was ample evidence that Tom had indeed provided her with perfect cover for status.

While he was at Ben Gurion with MJ, Reuven had obtained copies of the pertinent debriefs. They were in Hebrew, of course, and so he’d had to translate while Tom made his own notes. It had taken the better part of two days to go through the hundreds of pages of transcripts. Then he and Reuven worked on interrogation scenarios. They’d gone for almost twenty hours straight. Reuven had finally insisted that Tom get enough rest so he’d be sharp the next day.

The next day-today. Today was what Sam Waterman used to call “showtime.”

10:31A.M. Salah stopped in front of a gray steel door with a full length sealed pin hinge. He opened the file and displayed the cover page for Tom to see. Attached to the Hebrew typing was a full-face-slash-profile mug shot of a dark-haired woman. She was plain as a sparrow. Not physically unattractive, but exceedingly ordinary. Not like Malik. Tom had seen pictures of Malik. He was an Islamic Tom Cruise.

“She’s waiting for you in there.” Salah flipped the file closed, turned to Tom, and nodded for him to enter. “Rap twice on the door,” he said in French. “I will come for you.”

“Agreed.”

Tom sneaked a quick look at the inside of his left wrist. His pulse was racing. He paused and stared at the gray door, taking a couple of seconds to clear his mind of all extraneous information, focus his concentration on the interrogation, and slow his respiration.Show nothing. Give away nothing. Display nothing.

And yet…there was so damn much to remember-so many details, factoids, info-bits. Pieces of a puzzle in a pile on a table. And you had to assemble them blindfolded. With the clock running. And lives at stake. The task was staggering. Daunting. Overwhelming.

And all in a day’s work. He put his hand on the heavy steel handle, pushed it downward, and pulled the thick door toward him.

Her name was Dianne Lamb. She was twenty-seven years old. She had been extremely easy to crack. At least that’s what the transcripts indicated. It had bothered him at first that she was a woman, because that fact indicated that the bad guys were taking things to a whole new level. In fact, not only was she a woman, but she was an educated woman-a modern, educated Western woman. This was not somebody who acted in order to secure the twenty-five-thousand-dollar onetime payment for homicide bombers from the Saudi royals (money washed through Wahabist charities), the twenty-five-thousand-dollar homicide-bomber payments Saddam Hussein skimmed off the UN’s Oil for Food Program or the blood money Arafat paid through a series of middlemen.

Dianne Lamb was a graduate of Cambridge, with a respectable second in French literature. She worked as a copy editor for the BBC’s book-publishing division, where she specialized at nitpicking typos and misprints in BBC’s profitable cook-book series. Twenty-seven years old, she lived a spinster’s life in the chic northern London neighborhood of Islington, where she shared a tiny two-bedroom flat with a forty-five-year-old bookkeeper who worked three floors below her at the Beeb. She hadn’t dated much. There’d been one serious and devastating relationship at Cambridge, and nothing since. Her family was upper middle class and professional. They lived in Surrey. Her father, Nigel, was a vice president at an international banking house who commuted to an office in the City every day. Her mother, Stephanie, who’d been born in France but brought to the UK as a three-year-old, did volunteer work at the local hospital. Neither, according to the intelligence reporting, was connected either financially or ideologically with any Islamist terrorist movement or anything that might even come close.

Nine months ago, in January, Dianne met Malik Suleiman. He was the Sorbonne-educated London-based correspondent forAl Arabia, which he’d described to her as a small Paris-based Arab-language weekly. He was tall, good-looking, and secular.

They’d met at a bar in Knightsbridge and quickly become involved. In March, he took her to Paris for a long weekend. They’d traveled on the Chunnel train, stayed at the George V, and spent their time in two-star restaurants and exclusive clubs. Malik obviously came from a wealthy family. In July and August, they returned to Paris for two more long weekends. Again, they stayed at the George V. And then, in September, Malik invited Dianne to visit the Holy Land with him. He said the magazine wanted a piece from him on how ordinary Israelis were coping with the Intifada. Once again, he would pay all the expenses. Think of it, he’d said, as an engagement trip. Once they’d returned, they’d visit his parents in Morocco and break the good news.

It was an offer she couldn’t refuse. But two days after he’d booked their flights, Malik’s publisher demanded he fly to Paris and undertake a special interview. It took some jiggling, but Malik was able to fix things. Dianne would fly directly from London. He’d take the train to Paris, do the interview, drop the tape off at the magazine, then catch the first available flight and meet her at the Tel Aviv Hilton.

But there was a problem. Because Malik was jumping from point to point, he wanted to take only carry-on luggage. Dianne had a big suitcase. Could she take a few things for him-so he’d have enough clothes for their week in Israel and the West Bank? And also his portable radio and some other personal effects?

Of course she could. And so, she flew to Israel on a Monday-the British Air flight. She took a cab from Ben Gurion and checked into the Hilton.

The room was perfect: on the eighth floor, with a broad ocean view. Malik arrived Wednesday evening from Paris, with his rolling leather carry-on and a present for her: a fabulous Louis Vuitton backpack. It was his apology for being tardy.

They made love twice. Afterward, Malik took the radio from her bag and turned it on so he could listen to BBC World News. He was, she’d told the interrogators, a real news freak-had been for as long as she’d known him.

When the radio didn’t work, he’d checked the batteries and discovered they were dead. So he’d sent her out to buy fresh ones at the newsstand in the lobby while he unpacked.

They’d traveled all over, Malik making lots of notes and taking lots of digital photographs for his article. They visited Jaffa and walked all around Tel Aviv. They took a bus all the way to Haifa and Acre. They visited Tiberias and swam in the Sea of Galilee. They stayed in a beachfront hotel in Netanya and wandered past the tourist restaurants. They spent two days in Jerusalem, staying at the American Colony Hotel, an old Arab palace on the Nablus Road. On the second day, the hotel concierge hired an Arab taxi for them and they drove through the occupied territories to visit Jericho, and then Ramallah.

In Ramallah, in a restaurant, they’d met by chance a PLO security officer who’d invited them to see evidence of how badly the Palestinians were being treated by the Israelis. He’d taken them to the Fatah offices and played a video: a long montage of photographs showing dead Palestinian children, all murdered, he said, by criminal Israeli settlers. Dianne admitted Malik had spent some time alone with the Palestinian while she looked at the video.

After one more night in Jerusalem, they took a cab to Tel Aviv and reregistered at the Hilton. They ate dinner in the room, then made love. Afterward, Malik suggested they go nightclubbing. They started at Montana, a crowded beer bar on the northern edge of Old Tel Aviv. From there, they went on to a number of clubs, working their way south, toward the Hilton. Then Malik suggested they try to get into what he called the hottest club in Tel Aviv: Michael’s Pub. It was on the waterfront, a block and a half from the American embassy.

They’d taken a cab. They were sufficiently fashionable to be allowed through the rope line after Dianne’s backpack was checked by the security guard. They’d found a table near the dance floor, ordered a couple of whiskey sours and a plate ofmezze, and gotten up to dance. They’d danced two dances, and Dianne excused herself to go to the loo. That’s where she was when Malik blew himself up.

10:31A.M.Showtime. Tom stepped through the doorway. His face a neutral mask, he reached behind himself and pulled on the handle until he heard the heavy bolt snap shut.

14

10:31A.M. The interrogation room was bare and palpably cool-at least fifteen degrees cooler than the corridor. There was something else in evidence, too: the faint but unmistakable scent of Salah’sparfum pénitentiaire.

She was tiny-fragile as a soft-boned baby chick and obviously as vulnerable. Not more than five two or five three. She stood, fists clenched, behind a metal table. She had the sort of delicately featured yet hugely plain face that made her look ten years older than her actual age. Her appearance certainly wasn’t helped by the shapeless gray prison shift and dirty tennis shoes with no laces.

She looked at Tom with wide-eyed apprehension. Under his relentless gaze, her right hand jerked upward in order to smooth down her uncombed, short, mouse-brown hair. She was largely unsuccessful. An absurd, recalcitrant cowlick completed her hapless and wretched appearance.

Her body language readexhausted written in capital letters, but her brown eyes were clear, even-Tom found this surprising-piercing. Equally promising, she displayed neither the zombie look, the loony’s smile, or the thousand-yard stare. Salah had done well. He’d wrung her dry, yet been careful not to break her into unusable emotional shards.

Tom slipped into character and kept his voice neutral but commanding.“Assieds-toi.” It was the way you told a dog or a naughty child to sit.

She slipped demurely onto a straight-backed chair that was bolted to the concrete. She looked like a schoolgirl: knees pressed together under her shift, ankles locked. She raised her hands from her lap and clasped them together, interlocking her fingers as if she were about to play the old nursery game. “This is the church, this is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people.”

Tom allowed himself a quick scan of the room. The cameras had to be behind him. And the microphones? There were probably three or four of them, spread out so nothing would be missed.

He looked down at her.“Parle-moi de Mal-ik,” he said, speaking in a slow, almost pedantic Marseillaise accent. “Tell me everything the two of you did on that first”-he punched the word-“wonderfultrip to Paris last March.”

She cocked her head as a child would do and looked up at him for fifteen, perhaps twenty seconds. He could see the gears engaging. She was trying to figure out what he wanted, where he was going.

He gave her nothing. “Paris. Last March.”

Finally, a single tear formed in the corner of her right eye. When it had built up enough mass, it rolled down her cheek and plopped from her chin onto the front of her shift. “Oh, Malik,” she said. “Poor, silly, romantic Malik. I loved him so.”

She started to blubber and tugged at the sleeve of her shift so she could wipe her nose. Then she caught herself and stopped, muffling a huge sob.

“Here. Use this.” Reaching into the pocket of his coveralls, Tom played with the fresh, starched handkerchief he’d brought until it released what he’d hidden inside its opaque folds. He extracted the hankie, shook it out, advanced, reached over the chair that had been placed for him, and dropped it onto the surface of the table.

She picked it up. It was an oversize gentleman’s handkerchief made of French linen. It had hand-rolled edges and it smelled ever so faintly of Givenchy Gentleman. Tom knew Malik had used the same cologne. And just like Salah, he understood sensory triggers can often help interrogators prime the pump, so to speak, when they’re dealing with emotionally frail personalities.

He watched her body language. He silently counted the seconds-one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three-until the emotional tidal wave washed over her.

Fire in the hole!She held the handkerchief to her face and silent-screamed, caught her breath, silent-screamed again, and collapsed on the tabletop, her arms splayed out around her head.

He waited until the dry-heaving finally abated. “Dianne,” he said. “Dianne, we have to talk.”

Her shoulders pumped up and down. She pressed the handkerchief to her face like a talisman. “Have to talk.”

“Paris. The George V. Malik.”

She swallowed hard. “We took the Friday train from Waterloo. We…we’d…” She bit her lips, then wiped at her nose, which was wet.

Tom said nothing. There were perhaps eight, nine, ten seconds of silence. And then she inhaled deeply to get herself under control, wiped her nose with her sleeve, and began again. “We’d decided to take the day off. We met on the platform. I’d come from my flat by subway.” Her French was perfectly enunciated and unmistakably upper-crust British in its inflection. She sounded somewhat like the late and unlamented Princess Di-the same nasal, stiff-upper-lip Sloane Ranger tone.

“Where is your flat?”

She held the handkerchief to her face and inhaled deeply. “I live in Islington. On Gerrard Road-just above the canal.” She looked at him strangely. “I’ve been over this material before.”

Tom ignored her. “Of which canal do you speak?”

Her eyes were eloquent. They said,You absolute shit. You are doing this for no reason at all other than you can. But still, she responded to his question. “The Grand Union.”

“How long is the walk from your flat to the Metro stop?” He purposely misspoke.

She gave him a reproving glance. “We call it the Underground in Britain.”

Tom rephrased the question.

“About four blocks.”

“And you carried your baggage the whole distance?”

“I had a carry-on. I could wheel it.”

“And the train took you directly to Waterloo Station?”

“I had to change once-at Euston.”

“What underground did you travel?”

“The Northern Line.”

“The whole time?”

“The whole time.”

Tom adjusted the straight-backed chair on his side of the table, then dropped onto it. “And you met Malik at Waterloo.”

She put the handkerchief to her face and inhaled again. “Yes.”

“Who arrived first?”

“I did.”

“Where did you meet?”

“There is a board, showing all the departing trains.”

“Yes?”

“We met in front of it.”

“When did you buy your tickets?”

“Malik had bought them.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. He had them when he arrived.”

“So you went directly to the train?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you sit?”

“In first class.”

Tom nodded. What he’d just done was to pose a series of neutral “control questions,” in order to gauge her physical reactions under nonthreatening conditions. She’d responded as he’d hoped she would: breathing even, eye contact steady and nonevasive, and hand-and-foot movement minimal.

He was taking her back to the Paris trips for another reason. The Israelis had been interested in her relationship with Malik because they were deconstructing the bombing. Reverse-engineering everything leading up to the event so they could see where the chinks were, and how they could be closed.

Tom had his own ideas about Malik. The obvious thing was that he’d recruited her as a mule, to carry the explosives. Virtually all agent recruitments are based on four behavioral elements: ego, money, sex, or ideology. EMSI, pronounced “emcee,” was the abbreviation they taught at the Farm. Dianne’s was a classic sex recruitment. The scenario with plain-Jane targets usually followed similar patterns: a taste of the good life-a few bottles of the bubbly, followed shortly by a romantic French dinner, followed thereafter by a healthy bout of the old in-and-out at a stylish bachelor flat. Tom’s eyes scanned the prisoner, read her body language, demeanor, and aura. She was an open book. One great, sweaty orgasm and she’d be wrapped around Malik’s little finger forever.

“How did you meet Malik?”

“It was an accident.”

“An accident.”

“I was having a drink with a friend. We’d been to Beauchamp Street. The sales, you know-the January sales? And we’d stopped at this pub for a glass of wine.”

“Which pub?”

“The Bunch of Grapes. It’s on Brompton Road.”

“Who were you with?”

“Deirdre. Deirdre Ludlow. We’d gone to school together. Known one another since we were eight.” Dianne gave Tom a wistful look. “She was always the pretty one. I was always the bright one.”

“You say you’d been shopping?”

“We’d been in and out of stores for at least two hours.”

“And?”

“Malik spilled a glass of champagne all over my arm.”

Tom thought, I wonder where he spotted her. It was obvious to him that Malik had been trolling. Knightsbridge during the January sales was the perfect place to target young women. It was all becoming clear now: the plain wren with her beautiful friend. But what was it Malik had seen? What scent had Dianne thrown off that the predator knew she was the weak one?

Tom already knew the answer. All Malik had had to do was look at the two of them. That was hint enough if he was the pro Tom believed he’d been. He’d probably spotted Dianne by appearance alone. Her clothes were expensive but frumpy. Salah had displayed them to Tom. The labels came from the best shops in Knightsbridge. So having spotted her, Malik had watched from afar and assessed. She wore no engagement or wedding ring. Her beverage of choice? Safe white wine. He’d confirm his first impressions by reading her body language. She was no type A personality. No alpha bitch. She obviously did as she was told, something he was able to confirm by the manner in which she constantly deferred to her better-looking companion. There was more: her eyes always downcast. That meant she was probably submissive.

The recruitment planets aligned, Malik stalked until the time was right. Then he pounced, utilizing an inventive but not unexpected form of cold pitch. “You said Malik spilled his drink on you.”

“Yes, and he was so apologetic. He bought us a bottle of champagne. He ran outside and found a flower seller and bought me roses. He was just so…effusive.”

“How long was it before you went to bed with him?”

Her cheeks grew red. “That night,” she said. Her eyes fell and she focused on the table in front of her. “He asked if he could take me to dinner as a way of apologizing. He took me to Che, on St. James’s Street.”

“And?”

“Che,”she said earnestly. “One reads about the people who go there. You have to bookweeks ahead. But Malik didn’t. We took a cab to St. James’s and strolled in as if he owned the place. The manager, who was as pretty as any movie star, kissed him on the lips, gave him a big hug, took us right up the escalator, and gave us the best table in the house.”

“And?”

“And?”She looked at him as if he were an idiot. “What do you think? We had champagne. And dinner with wine. He was charming and delightful and extremely attentive. We were sitting next to one another on a banquette. We started holding hands. And then all of a sudden, just before they brought coffee and cognac, he started rubbing the top of my thigh, and then he…he, well you know, put his hand underneath my skirt. No one had ever done anything that…risky before. It made me tremendously excited.” She looked at Tom. “He leaned over and kissed me-a passionate kiss, I can assure you. He told me I excited him. ThatI excitedhim. And that I could, you know, feel him to see. And I did. And hewas.” Another huge tear rolled from the corner of her eye down her cheek and droppedplop off her chin.

“Oh, my God. It was the first time in my life I’d ever caused that reaction on a man that good-looking and that sophisticated and that attentive.” She looked at Tom coldly. “Of course I went to bed with him that night. I’d have done anything he wanted me to.”

Yes, it was a classic sex recruitment. Absolutely textbook. The KGB had used the technique successfully for years. Ravens and Swallows, they’d called them. Soviet Swallows were particularly effective against young Marine embassy security guards. Tom remembered one, Clayton Lonetree, a Moscow embassy security guard who’d actually stolen secrets for his Soviet lover.

During Tom’s Paris tour, Er Bu, the Chinese intelligence service, employed a Raven-Beijing actually called them Cormorants-to successfully seduce a female CIA case officer at Paris station. The case officer had simultaneously been having an affair with the station chief, and so the whole untidy mess had been covered up. Currently, the female officer served under diplomatic cover at United Nations headquarters in New York, where her Chinese lover was posted as a diplomat. Go figure.

In the last few months, he’d read about another Swallow-a double agent-who’d seduced not one but two FBI counterintelligence special agents and kept the simultaneous relationships going for more than a decade while the G-men leaked secret after secret during pillow talk. Oh, yes: sex was an integral part of basic spycraft. Part of the EMSI system. An effective way to exploit your target’s vulnerabilities to your advantage.

Besides, Dianne Lamb was prime target material. She was plain. She radiated prim. She was sexually starved and was hungry for a relationship with a man. And of course those qualities made her both vulnerable and valuable.

Valuable, hell: she was worth her weight in gold. A proper Brit from a family of Tories, she would set off none of the alarms that Malik would. Not at Heathrow. Not at de Gaulle. Not even in Tel Aviv. She was the perfect candidate to become Malik’s mule and carry Ben Said’s explosive to Tel Aviv. And if that worked, they’d no doubt send her on another trip-a one-way magic carpet ride with one of the assassin’s bombs packed in her suitcase. Given the range of cell phones these days, Ben Said could set it off from virtually anywhere.

That was the obvious scenario-the one that made the most sense. And if Tom hadn’t known a little bit about Tariq Ben Said, he might have pursued things no further. But it was plain to Tom while going over Dianne’s interrogation transcripts that the Israelis had never probed beyond the obvious. They’d had a problem to solve: How did Malik get the explosives into the country?

The obvious answer was that he’d used Dianne to carry them. But what if Dianne hadn’t been the mule. What if she’d been recruited to play another role: the role of suicide bomber.

That thought had occurred to Tom when Reuven, reading from the pages of Hebrew transcript, said in passing that Malik had given Dianne a backpack-the damn thing had been totally destroyed in the explosion. From the lack of fragments, forensics indicated that was where the bomb had been hidden. It wasn’t just any backpack, either. It was a Louis Vuitton Montsouris, which cost about a thousand dollars these days, given the euro’s rapid rise against the dollar and the French VAT. Tom knew how much Vuitton backpacks cost because he’d purchased one for MJ not even a week ago.

Malik had bought aMontsouris for Dianne, too. But he’d lied about where he’d gotten it. That’s what had Tom concerned.

15

12:56P.M. “Tell me again about the backpack.”

She blinked. Her eyes shifted up and to the left, a sign that she was probably going to tell the truth. “It was beautiful. I saw it in the window of the Vuitton store-the one at the corner of avenue George V and the Champs-Élysées-on our first trip. It was on display. I made some comment to Malik-you know, that it was the sort of thing I’d always wanted, but never had the nerve to buy for myself, and that was that. And then, when he arrived in August, he was carrying it with him, and he gave it to me.”

“The last night-the night of the bombing-did Malik suggest that you take the backpack?”

“No-I loved it. Loved the way people admired it. I carried it everywhere. I stored the camera in it, and my makeup, and our street maps. It was very handy.”

“When Malik brought the backpack from Paris, how was it wrapped?”

“He carried it in a big Vuitton shopping bag.”

“And inside the bag?”

“I told you last time we covered this ground.” She shrugged. “Inside the shopping bag was the backpack. Malik bought it at the duty-free.”

That was what had struck Tom as odd. First, there was no Vuitton duty-free shop at de Gaulle. And second, Vuitton wrapped its backpacks like the treasures they were. They put them inside sturdy cardboard boxes and protected them with tissue paper.

The Israeli assumption was that Malik slipped the bomb into the backpack and set it off when Dianne went to the bathroom. The interrogation verified that he’d had the opportunity to do so before they’d left the hotel, even though her debriefings indicated that Dianne had not seen Malik slip something into her backpack, nor had he asked her to carry any of his belongings that night. Nor had the security guard at Mike’s seen anything suspicious when Dianne and Malik entered the club.

Tom had his own ideas. Shahram had emphasized that Tariq was always pushing the envelope when it came to explosives. Like Richard Reid’s sneaker bombs. What had Shahram said? Al-Qa’ida had pushed Ben Said to use a prototype fusing and detonator. If they’d waited, Reid would have brought the aircraft down.

Tom focused on Dianne. “Did he say that?”

“Yes.”

“Said he bought it at the duty-free.”

“Yes.”

Now Tom abruptly shifted gears. “Which of Malik’s friends did you see in Paris on the March trip?”

She paused. “March? None. We spent all our time alone together.”

“And in July?”

“Malik had some sort of business to do. I visited the Louvre while he met with his editor.”

“That was the only time you were apart?”

She thought about Tom’s question for about ten seconds. “No.”

“Tell me.”

“He went out one morning. To buy a newspaper, he said. Something they didn’t have at the kiosk in the hotel.”

“How long was he gone?”

She paused. “About forty-five minutes.”

“And?”

“I asked him where he’d been. He told me he’d run into an old friend and they’d stopped for a cup of coffee.”

“And the friend’s name?”

“I didn’t ask.”

Tom nodded. But his mind was racing. “Now let’s fast-forward to August.”

“We were by ourselves, except one evening we had a drink with Malik’s editor fromAl Arabia.”

“What was his name?”

“Talal Massoud.”

“Describe him.”

“He’s-” She brought herself up short. “I’ve been over this material many times before, you know.”

“Not with me,” Tom said. He’d saved this part for last. “Describe him, please.”

“Average. Your height-maybe a bit taller. Overweight. Thick black hair, very curly-” She ran her hand from her brow across the top of her head. “Dark eyes.”

It wasn’t much of a description and Tom said so.

“He was pretty nondescript.”

“Dressed how?”

“Cheap white shirt open at the neck. It was so thin you could see the singlet underneath. Light-colored suit coat and trousers-tannish. And brown loafers.”

“Did he wear jewelry or a watch?”

“Not that I remember. He wore some kind of plastic disposable watch.”

“Glasses?”

“Oh, yes. Heavy black-framed glasses with tinted lenses.” She paused and looked up at the ceiling. It was a sign she was remembering a detail. “The lenses were rose-colored.”

“Did he use them to read the menu?”

“He didn’t read the menu. He ordered off the top of his head.”

“Did he carry a cell phone?”

“I think there was one clipped to his belt.”

“Did Talal take any calls?”

“Not until just before he left.”

“How was his French?”

“Good, I guess, since he lives there.”

“You guess?”

“He spoke to me in English, and to Malik in Arabic. He spoke to the waiters in Arabic, too.”

“And the phone call?”

“Arabic.”

“You met where?”

“A Lebanese restaurant in the seventeenth.”

“What was its name?”

She frowned. “I don’t recall.”

“Where is it?”

“About a block from the Villiers metro stop.”

“How did you get there?”

“From George V, by metro. We changed at Étoile.”

“Describe the restaurant.”

“It’s nothing special to look at.”

“Don’t be nonspecific, Dianne. You edit cookbooks. You deal with this sort of material every day.”

She shot Tom a sharp look. “There were Formica tables and white tablecloths-the inexpensive kind. They used paper napkins. It was nothing special. There were posters-Lebanese tourist posters-on the walls. No unique decor; no style. It was just another neighborhood place. We went there because Malik saidAl Arabia ’s offices were nearby. The restaurant sits at the intersection of boulevard Courcelles and boulevard Malesherbes. There were tables on an enclosed veranda adjacent to the sidewalk-the kind of thing you can enclose during the winter. The main dining room was raised off street level by two or three steps. I can’t really recall.”

“And the editor? What direction did he come from?”

“He was waiting for us.”

Tom nodded. “Where did he sit? Where did you sit?”

“He and Malik sat next to one another. They sat with their backs to the sidewalk. I sat facing the intersection.”

“And behind you?”

“There was a wall-a divider, really, about four feet high. Malik said he wanted me to have the view.”

Tom was familiar with the intersection and there wasn’t much of a view. Not that it wasn’t good tradecraft. With their backs to the sidewalk, a lip-reader in a surveillance vehicle wouldn’t be able to follow Malik’s conversation with Talal. And with the wall behind Dianne, eavesdropping would be nigh on impossible from over her shoulder without being very obvious about it. “What did you talk about?”

“It was small talk mostly. Talal asked a lot of questions about me. About my family, and my job, where I’d gone to college, where I lived in London-that sort of stuff.”

“Did he know London?”

“I’m not sure. He said he came to London occasionally.”

“Did he say why?”

“He mentioned he had a friend in Finsbury.”

Tom blinked. Mentioning Finsbury had been a tactical error on Talal’s part.Finsbury was a trigger word. The Finsbury Park mosque in a northern London neighborhood was riddled with al-Qa’ida sympathizers.

Dianne seemed to be unaware of its significance. “Did that mean anything to you?”

Hands clasped, she said, “No.”

Her tone told him the Israelis had probed the area and come up empty. He decided to leave the subject. “How long did you spend with him?”

“Talal? About an hour. We had somemezze -it was quite spectacular, actually-and a half bottle of Moroccan wine. Talal and Malik talked business for about a quarter hour. Then he got a call on his cell phone. He paid the bill, excused himself, and left us to ourselves.”

There were no inconsistencies or contradictions from the interrogation transcripts. She had seen nothing passed between Malik and Talal. Tom was convinced she was telling him the truth as best she could remember it.

It was time to wind things up. Time to play out the hunch that had smacked him upside the head when he’d read about the Vuitton backpack. Tom slid his hand into the pocket of the coveralls and felt for the first of the three photographs he’d concealed in the handkerchief. The one he’d decided to show her first had one of its corners folded back so he could identify it by feel.

He slid the small black-and-white rectangle with Imad Mugniyah’s likeness across the table. “Do you recognize this man?”

Dianne squinted down at the small picture. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. I’ve never seen him in my life.”

Tom picked up the photo of Imad Mugniyah, stuck it back in his pocket, and replaced it with the second picture, which he’d cropped from Shahram Shahristani’s surveillance photo of Tariq Ben Said. “What about him?”

She pulled the image across the table. “No.”

He retrieved Ben Said and pulled a third photo from his pocket-it was a crop of Yahia Hamzi’s passport picture. Reuven had made sure to remove the stamp in the bottom corner so its origin would be obscured.

She glanced at the photo then looked over at Tom. “That’s Talal Massoud-Malik’s editor atAl Arabia. His hair is longer, his face is a little bit rounder, and he’s wearing different glasses. But it’s Talal.”

Tom reclaimed the picture and returned it to his coveralls, fighting to keep his composure so that he’d give off no hint of the excitement he felt. The pulse racing in his temples, he stared at her coolly and spoke in laconic Marseillaise. “Thank you, Dianne. We’re done.”

He rose, walked to the door, and rapped twice sharply on the cold metal. The pieces of the puzzle were coming together and it was time that he and Reuven called Tony Wyman on the secure phone and laid things out.

They-whoever they were-had been worried enough about Jim McGee to murder him. Blew up the Suburban and killed Jim and two others because they believed McGee knew something he shouldn’t have known: that Imad Mugniyah was in Gaza.

Except McGeehadn’t known it was Mugniyah. All he knew was that there was a mysterious individual who moved frequently and who was protected by an imported crew of bodyguards, some of whom were Hezbollah, others possibly Iranians-the Seppah.

Those revelations hadn’t killed McGee. What had set the ambush in motion was Shafiq Tubaisi’s offhand comment that Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the godfather of Hamas, had kissed the man’s hands.Yassin kissed both his hands and asked for his blessing.

That was what Shafiq told McGee. Tom had read it in McGee’s penultimate message. He’d understood the significance of the act, even if McGee hadn’t. Which was why he’d tasked McGee to order Shafiq to get a picture.

Because of that tasking, McGee was dead-and so was Shafiq. They were dead because somewhere, in somebody’s head, an operational clock was ticking. And the bad guys out there, the ones President Bush had so accurately termed the evildoers-accurate because Tom knew that was precisely how the Koran referred to criminals, murderers, and assassins-were about to stage a major hit.

The evildoers were gearing up for something big. Something spectacular. The evildoers’ version of shock and awe.

There was, Tom understood all too well, a particular rhythm-a cadence if you will-to megaterror. Megaterror is not impetuous, seat-of-the-pants stuff. It is well planned, highly organized, and above all disciplined. The bad guys plot, probe, and test. They take months performing target assessments in order to weed out the harder-to-strike targets in favor of the softer ones. This very week in New York, Boston, Washington, D.C.; Orlando, and Miami, there are al-Qa’ida sleepers posing as tourists. They visit Universal Studios, Capitol Hill, Faneuil Hall, or South Beach and take thousands of digital photographs, which are passed on to al-Qa’ida analysts who pore over them in order to identify security flaws.

Other sleepers-just like Ramzi Yousef in 1992-find jobs as taxi drivers or commercial messengers. What better way to learn the ebbs and flows of a city and uncover its vulnerabilities? Still others find work on the hundreds of minimum-wage crews who spend their nights scrubbing office-building bathrooms and waxing corporate headquarters’ lobbies and corridors. When’s the last time anyone paid much attention to the anonymous peons who clean Citigroup’s offices at night? Or Merrill Lynch’s? Or GM’s? Yet what better way to discover the best places to preposition blocks of C4 or Semtex; to disable the elevators; to cause the largest number of casualties.

Still other sleepers gauge first-responder reaction time by phoning in bogus threats and videoing the results. Tom knew that for the past ninety days, there had been a precipitous rise in the number of false alarms in New York, Paris, London, and Madrid. That told him that at least one of those cities had been targeted.

They were probing the airports, too. A three-week-old memo from 4627’s Washington office reported that al-Qa’ida was currently identifying chinks and weak spots in domestic U.S. airline security by sending easily identifiable Muslims on cross-country flights with orders to act suspiciously and thus identify the federal air marshals on the flight. Other, less noticeable sleepers were photographing the incidents with cell-phone cams. The air marshals’ faces went into an al-Qa’ida database. Interpol reports from Brussels indicated similar occurrences on domestic flights all over Europe. But no one had any inkling what al-Qa’ida was planning-with or without Tehran’s help, with or without Fatah’s diplomatic pouches.

That was why the megaterror process often took years to identify and target, why it was so hard to go proactive. The first al-Qa’ida reconnaissance of U.S. embassies in Africa that resulted in the 1998 attacks in Kenya and Tanzania took place in 1993. The planning for the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USSCole began four years earlier. Plotting for 9/11 also began in 1996, more than half a decade before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammad first suggested training terrorists to fly hijacked aircraft into buildings in the U.S.

But in each case, the pace accelerated inexorably in the period running up to the attack itself. There was always a palpable quickening of tempo. Intensified message traffic, multiple probes and/or dry runs, and increased target assessments always-always-indicated that al-Qa’ida had started its countdown.

The Big Question, as the pundits always said on those long-winded Washington talk shows, was: Countdown to what? To that, Tom hadn’t an answer.

But then, neither did CIA. CIA was dysfunctional these days. That’s why the Company, as it was sometimes called, was currently reduced to hiring private firms like 4627 to gather human-source intelligence on its behalf. And 4627 was hiring people like Jim McGee because CIA was incapable of completing the mission it had been created to do. CIA was in a shambles. The Agency was clueless.

Of course Tom hadn’t a clue either. But he knew a lot more than CIA did.

• Tom knew that Imad Mugniyah and Tariq Ben Said had been on-site when Jim McGee was killed in Gaza. CIA, in the person of Mrs. Portia M. ST. JOHN, had rejected that possibility out of hand.

• Tom knew that Ben Said the master bombmaker was about to perfect a new, sophisticated, and undetectable remote detonator for his IEDs. CIA had no inkling Tariq Ben Said even existed.

• And finally, Tom understood that if he could OODA-loop¹⁶Ben Said, he could disorient the assassin, disrupt his plans, and neutralize him before he killed anyone else.

The heavy steel door in front of his nose opened outward and Tom stepped ecstatically onto the rubber pad of the corridor, where Salah was waiting for him, a reproachful look on his face. Obviously, Salah was kicking himself for not having Tom shake his handkerchief out before he’d been allowed to bring it into the interrogation room.

Tom was sweating heavily. He looked down at his hands. They were shaking. And as quickly as it had come on, his excitement was replaced by a sudden gnawing pain in the pit of his gut. That spasm reinforced Tom’s gloomy acknowledgment that even though he understood the clock was ticking, he had absolutely no idea how much time was left before the attack would occur.

Tom had always been told knowledge was power. If that was true, and given all he knew right now, why did he feel as helpless as a drowning man?

16

6:35P.M. Tom looked around Reuven’s garden, the Bouviers stretched out, snoring, at his feet, the lanterns providing soft light as dusk settled over Herzlyia. He felt a lot better and guessed that the surroundings had a lot to do with the fact that his earlier spasm of panic and helplessness had largely subsided. Reuven’s housekeeper had set out a huge earthenware bowl of fresh figs for them. Reuven had augmented the fragrant fruit with a large slab of Morbier and a chunk ofsaucisson de Lyon sec on a white Limoges platter.

Now the Israeli emerged from the kitchen and made his way down the marble steps carrying a 1960s-vintage Chemex and a round cork trivet. He set the trivet on the table and poured Nescafé into three mugs emblazoned with the CIA seal.

Three mugs because Tom and Reuven weren’t alone. They’d been joined by a third man. Amos Aricha was a former assistant director of Shin Bet. Aricha was a lifelong counterterrorist who had commanded the agency’s selected targeting task force. His job: arresting or eliminating the individuals who built the explosive vests and car bombs and the masterminds who dispatched homicide bombers against Israeli civilians. These days, he said, he was a partner in a private company that trained security personnel and did risk assessments. He gave Tom his business card. On it was engraved a bird of prey in flight. Below, in Hebrew, was his old task force’s motto, adapted from the old American TV showHill Street Blues. It read,Let’s Do It to Them Before They Do It to Us.

But doing it to them was becoming more and more difficult, what with the media’s bias against Israel and the pressure to wage politically correct warfare against enemies who didn’t give a damn about humane rules of engagement. “I feel like a whatchamacallit sal-o-mon swimming upstream.” Aricha dropped heavily onto a chair. “And believe me, kiddo, I seen sal-o-mon. I’ve done my share of white-water rafting all around your wild, wild west.”

Amos had gone through basic training with Reuven. They’d both served in Sayeret Mat’kal, and after active duty they’d done theirmeluim¹⁷ in the same unit. Which meant the two men had known each other virtually since they’d been teenagers. Tom sneaked a look at the interaction between the Israelis. Their easy relationship-the inside jokes, the back-and-forth bantering, the way they dealt with each other-made him envious. He was a Foreign Service brat. He’d grown up in seven different countries and had attended sixteen different schools before he’d settled down at Dartmouth for four straight years in the same place.

Afterward, at CIA, he’d resumed his peripatetic lifestyle with three- and four-year tours. He hadn’t ever lived in one place long enough to make the sorts of friends one keeps for a lifetime. Until he’d returned to Paris.

Aricha reached across the table for the small earthenware pitcher of milk and poured some into his coffee. He was, Tom had to admit, an unlikely-looking manhunter. A big-boned man in his late sixties with a shock of curly white hair tied back into a 1960s-style ponytail, Aricha wore faded Levi’s cinched by a tooled rodeo belt with a silver-and-turquoise buckle the size of a horseshoe, topped by a matching denim shirt whose mother-of-pearl-topped snaps were open halfway down his hairy chest. His sleeves were rolled up past the elbows to display muscular, suntanned arms and a gold Rolex on his left wrist. The ragged cuffs of his jeans fell onto scuffed brown sharkskin Tony Lama cowboy boots. All he lacked, Tom thought, was the Colt Peacemaker on his hip and the tin star on his chest.

“My boy,” Aricha said to Tom in thickly accented English, “you have what we callbalagan gadol -a big problem-and so do we.”

It all made such perfect sense in hindsight. On the way back from the prison, Tom had called his office and had one of his people check on whether there had been multiple sales of Vuitton Montsouris backpacks in August 2003. It took less than two hours for the results to come in from Paris. Malik and Dianne had met with his “editor” on Saturday, August 15. On Monday the eighteenth, twelve Vuitton backpacks-the entire stock in Vuitton’s Champs-Élysées store-had been ordered by telephone. A commercial messenger had picked them up, paying in cash. There was no record of where they’d been delivered.

But there was a signature from the messenger on the receipt. Using the secure phone at Reuven’s office, Tom had called one of 4627’s Parisian gumshoes and had him wash the name through the police computer. By four o’clock Tel Aviv time, the private investigator had the name of the messenger service and verified the delivery address: Boissons Maghreb. By 4:30, 4627’s Paris office had used one of its technical employees to set up a phone tap and begun the slightly more intricate arrangements to intercept Yahia Hamzi’s cell-phone transmissions. There was no jumping through hoops to satisfy a station chief, no waiting for ambassadorial approval, no back-and-forth with Langley.

More to the point, Tom understood there’d been no explosives in the radio Dianne Lamb had brought from London at Malik’s request. Malik had carried the bomb. Tariq Ben Said had somehow incorporated the plastique into the lining of the Vuitton backpack and done it in a way that still allowed the explosive to have the same lethal effect as a shaped charge.

God, how sophisticated things had become. When Tom had gone through case officer training in the 1980s, IEDs were relatively simple. You had your pipe bombs. You had your car bombs. You had your Molotov cocktails. You had your basic explosives: PETN, RDX, dynamite, or plastique-C3, C4, or Semtex. There were homemade mortars (the IRA favored those) and there were the occasional remotely detonated devices used by the ETA Basque separatists against the Spanish. But they were the exceptions to the rule.

Nope. In the 1980s, IEDs were all pretty basic, keep-it-simple-stupid bombs. Tom, for example, had been taught to make a cone charge powerful enough to blast through three inches of armor plate using a wine bottle and a one-pound block of C4. Today, he’d need less than a quarter of that amount. Today, it was all miniature devices and remote control. Explosives were now so concentrated that you could build a bomb powerful enough to bring down a 747 and conceal it in a tennis shoe. You could set off an IED planted in a car on a street in Haifa by making a cell-phone call from a café on the rue du Midi in Brussels. And you could-if you were Tariq Ben Said-create a totally unidentifiable bomb capable of killing sixteen and wounding scores more by transmogrifying the lining of a Louis Vuitton backpack into a weapon of mass destruction. The stuff was frigging invisible. Malik Suleiman had carried the goddamn backpack right past the baggage inspectors at de Gaulle and subsequently slipped it through Israel’s vaunted security systems. What would happen when he brought it throughU.S. airports, whose ineffective TSA (Transportation Security Administration) personnel were known derogatorily as “thousands standing around”?

Tom popped a chunk of sausage into his mouth. “Which brings me to point number two. Why did Malik ask Dianne Lamb to bring his radio in her suitcase? After all, the explosives were in the backpack.”

“There was a radio involved in the Jerusalem explosion.” Aricha sipped his coffee. “So there’s got to be a reason.” He set the mug on the table. “But let me tell you, I still talk to Shin Bet. And their forensics people have been over the goddamn thing top to whatchamacallit bottom. They haven’t found anything. There were never any explosives concealed in either one of the radios.”

“These people never do anything without a reason.” Reuven picked up his mug and sipped. “There had to be explosives somewhere.”

“No there didn’t, goddamnit-” Tom almost choked on his sausage. “Don’t you see, Reuven?”

“See what?”

“It’s always been the assumption that Dianne unwittingly carried the explosives.”

Amos nodded. “That’s the pattern. The Irish woman flying from Heathrow, the-”

“I know about all those cases. But there was no trace of explosives in anything Dianne brought from London.”

“So far. We also know the man you call Ben Said and we call Bomber-X-he had to make small whatchamacallit batches of a new formula.”

That Aricha knew Ben Said’s formula was made in small quantities was surprising because Tom hadn’t mentioned that fact to Reuven, or anyone else. He decided to elicit. “Are you sure, Amos?”

Tom caught a flicker of motion in the Shin Bet man’s eyes. And then Amos deflected the question. “It’s not impossible there were explosives in the radio as well as the backpack.”

Tom decided not to follow up the elicitation. It would be too obvious. So he deflected back. “What’s the point?”

Aricha looked at Tom. “The point is, one plus one equals two. Two radios. Two bombs. The point is that this Ben Said has come up with a new way of targeting Israel.”

“Hold it.” Tom scampered from the patio up to the living room, where he’d left his interrogation notes. He flipped through the sheets until he found what he wanted and charged back downstairs. “The batteries were dead, Amos. The radio batteries were dead.”

The Israeli shrugged. “So,nu?”

“Don’t you see? They weren’t dead-they were something else. Dummies. Containers for some critical element of his bomb. Malik sent Dianne to buy new batteries. He got her out of the room while he did whatever he had to do. Removed whatever was concealed in the batteries. There had to be something in the batteries.”

Amos frowned. “When you go through security at Heathrow,” he said, “especially when it’s a Tel Aviv flight, they make you turn on all your electronic devices. No exceptions. They would have done the same at de Gaulle, or Dulles, or wherever. That’s the standard practice these days.”

“But Malik’s radio was in Dianne’s suitcase, not her hand luggage,” Tom said. “It would never have been inspected. Not in Europe. In Europe, you can lock your luggage. Only in the U.S. is luggage for the hold hand-inspected.”

“This has nothing to do with the U.S. He was trying to launch attacks here in Israel.”

Tom ignored the Shin Bet man. “There had to be something concealed in the batteries. I think Dianne carried detonators. They spent all their time together on the August trip. But in July, Malik was by himself twice in three days. Once for a meeting with his editor-who we know works with Ben Said. And once for a meeting with ‘an old friend’ whom he met while buying a newspaper. My guess is that Malik picked the detonators up in Paris on the previous trip.”

Reuven shrugged. “What’s your point?”

“My point is that maybe they were Ben Said’s prototype detonators. We can’t discount that, can we?”

Amos gave Tom a dismissive stare. “Prototype-schmototype. I don’t think it makes much difference at this point.”

“I do. I think we’ve been focusing on the wrong target. We’re thinking inside the box. We’re no better than Langley.”

He got blank stares from the two Israelis. “Look,” he said, gulping some coffee to wash the sausage down. “There’s this old shaggy-dog story about a guy who goes through a diamond-mine gate every night for a week with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. The security guard sifts the dirt. He searches the guy-even puts on rubber gloves and does a body-cavity search. Nothing. Bubkes. The guard never finds a thing. After two weeks of this, he pulls the fellow aside. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘I know you’re stealing diamonds. I just can’t figure out how you’re doing it.’ And the fellow looks at the guard and says, ‘Since this is my last day on this job, I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing. I’ve been stealing wheelbarrows.’”

“That’s supposed to be funny?” Amos shrugged. “What’s the point?”

“Let me put it another way.”

“Maybe you’d better, because you’re confusing me good.”

“We’ve all been trying to analyze the situation so we can solve the Ben Said problem, right?”

“Of course.” Aricha set his coffee down. “The goal must be to stop or prevent the megaterror he is planning to commit on Israeli soil.”

“That’s always been the assumption.”

“But you also contend, Tom, that the ambush ten days ago in Gaza in which three American embassy employees were killed, and the two bombings-Heinrich Azouz, the German national in the Nablus Road Hotel, and Malik Suleiman at Mike’s Bar in Tel Aviv-are all related equally to the planning for this megaterror.”

“I do.”

Aricha cracked his knuckles. “I can tell you for sure Shin Bet doesn’t see it.”

“See what?”

“The relationship. In the first incident, the bomb went off prematurely while Azouz was affixing the detonator. That’s what you call operator error. We were able to prove conclusively that the explosion was caused by static electricity. End of story. In the second, a survivor swears he heard Malik, the perpetrator, exclaim,‘Allah akbar!’ just before the explosion went off. We are convinced he detonated the bomb after having second thoughts about killing his girlfriend. No operator error, no static. Full stop. And the Gaza incident was Arafat’s way of sending a signal to the Bush administration to back off its support of Sharon.”

Aricha rapped scarred knuckles on the tabletop. “I accept that incidents one and two are related. I accept your theory that the man you call Ben Said and we refer to as Bomber-X is working on a new form of undetectable explosive. I accept that he was a participant in the Gaza incident, by which I mean he supplied the plastique and was on-site for its detonation so he could watch firsthand its effects. But that’s the extent of it, Tom. Gaza is a whole other whatchamacallit-kettle from fish. Full stop again. End of story, kiddo.”

Tom said, “Wheelbarrows, Amos. Think wheelbarrows.”

The Israeli scratched his head. “Reuven, what’s with these wheelbar-rows?”

Reuven toyed with the heavy gold chain around his neck. “Pay attention, Grandfather,” he said in Hebrew. “Maybe even you will learn something from the youngster.”

Tom caught the look that passed between the old soldiers. He swiveled toward Aricha. “You’re basing your conclusions on two common threads: the explosives, and the fact that there’s a plan to wage megaterror against Israel sometime in the near term.”

“Because those are the logical conclusions to draw from what we know about the events. We look at what happened, and we draw conclusions from our experience. We rely on”-he fought for the word in English-“empirical logic.”

“Precisely.” Tom noted the look of confusion on Aricha’s face. “But, Amos, too often, when we analyze a problem, we begin the process by formulating our conclusions. I think that’s what happened in Shin Bet.”

“You say we start with conclusions? I think not.” Aricha folded his arms on his chest. “Shabak started with explosions.”

It was a defensive position. Tom extended his legs, shifting his own body into a nonthreatening attitude. He softened his tone. “I’m not talking about you personally. It’s a problem that’s endemic to the whole intelligence community-you, us, everybody.” He paused as he caught the confused look on the Israeli’s face. “A natural mistake, if you will. In this case, Amos, the conclusion Shin Bet drew-and it’s a perfectly logical one to reach-is that two of the three incidents are directly related to explosives and evidence of a mega-attack on Israel in the near future.” He looked at Aricha. “Am I correct in the way I characterized the situation?”

The Shin Bet man’s head bobbed up and down. “On the money.”

“What I’m saying is that if that’s how you see things, then all of your analysis-all the evidence-tends to support that predetermined conclusion-this is all about megaterror directed at Israel.”

Aricha frowned at Reuven. “Again he thinks our evidence is wrong.”

“No.” Tom began again. “Your evidence is accurate. But I think by focusing on theliteral substance of the problem-the evidence, the arguments pro and con, the conclusions-we’re missing the point. We all missed the point. That’s what I mean by wheelbarrows, Amos. The security guard reached a logical conclusion: since it was a diamond mine, the guy had to be stealing diamonds. That was a logical assumption, right?”

“From a diamond mine you don’t steal rubies. Yes-logical.”

“But incorrect. Bad analysis. If the guard had approached the problem with an open mind-if he hadn’t boxed himself in by not considering any other conclusion than ‘diamonds are being stolen,’ he might have included the possibility that something else was being taken. Like wheelbarrows.”

Tom watched as Aricha stroked his chin. Warily, the Israeli said, “Go on.”

“We’ve been focusing on explosives for use in attacks against Israel. I think these people solved the explosives problem a long time ago. I think Ben Said has a formula that worked-until now. Why now? Because now we can all start devising countermeasures.” He paused, gratified to see Amos nodding in agreement. “I think what Ben Said’s been working on since August…isdetonators.” Tom took another swallow of coffee. “Jerusalem-the German Arab. He blew himself up arming the detonator, right?”

“Yes.”

“And Malik. What was he doing? He was attaching the detonator to the bomb, or arming it, or something. Because the idea was for him to go to the restroom and detonate the device remotely. He was going to be a lucky survivor. Dianne was going to take the fall.”

Aricha cut one of the figs in half, speared a piece, and put it in his mouth. “So how did the device go off prematurely, kiddo?”

“It could have been a faulty detonator,” Tom said. “It also could have been the embassy-set off by one of the variable-frequency oscillators mounted on the embassy building.”

“Mike’s is two hundred and five meters from the northwest corner of the embassy,” Reuven said. “I paced it off yesterday.”

Aricha frowned. “Wouldn’t they know that? These people do target assessments, Reuven.”

“It’s common knowledge the ambassador has forbidden VFOs on embassy vehicles, Amos,” Tom continued. “The embassy’s devices have been camouflaged to look like TV satellite dishes. No different than hundreds of others.”

“Go on.”

“But I decided the explosion wasn’t set off by the embassy devices. It was Malik’s carelessness. Or, the detonator was faulty. Possibly the remote-maybe there’s something awry in the circuitry. I don’t know-I’m not an explosives expert. Which brought me to the third incident: Gaza. It was an anomaly.”

Aricha frowned. “Anomaly?”

“There was something about Gaza that didn’t fit. I can accept that our man was killed because of the information about Imad Mugniyah. I think that’s pretty clear. But it doesn’t explain Ben Said’s presence.”

Amos cocked his head in Tom’s direction. “A meeting with Arafat perhaps.”

“Unlikely. Ben Said likes his anonymity. His pattern all along has been to work through middlemen. No: I believe he was here because he was fine-tuning his detonators. Two of them had failed. He came here so he could make adjustments-do the last-minute work before he puts his latest generation of IEDs into play-against the West, not against Israel.”

Now it was Reuven who shook his head. “He came to Israel to perfect detonators? Tom, that’s preposterous.”

“No, it’s not.” Tom was insistent. “Shahram Shahristani said as much to me last week and it totally went out of my head until now. Shahram claimed Ben Said was using Israel as his weapons lab-his test kitchen. I thought he’d gone off the deep end. But he was on the money. Spot on.”

Amos Aricha looked skeptically at Tom. “Used Israel to perfect his explosive devices.”

“And his detonators.”

“Whatever. So, what’s the reason this man, who knows that if we laid hands on him he’d never get out of prison, and who knows that we have, shall I say, an extremely effective internal security apparatus-and yet still he chooses to bless us with his presence? Why is that, kiddo, since you seem to be so knowledgeable in this area?”

Tom paid no attention to Aricha’s sarcasm. “Ben Said was testing his weapons here in Israel because he could.”

Aricha scowled at Reuven Ayalon. “The kid’s crazy,” he said in Hebrew. Then he looked at Tom. “Listen, kiddo-”

“Amos,” Tom interrupted, “let me posit that Ben Said is working on detonators, not explosives. Okay, so he wants to make tests-not in a lab, but under real-life conditions. Two detonators have exploded prematurely. So he wants to do some reverse engineering. See which of the steps caused the problems. He needs volunteers to assemble bombs. He won’t tell them that it could be dangerous work, that they could get killed. He doesn’t say, ‘If the detonators don’t blow up in your face, then you get to use the bombs.’ He gives them instructions and turns them loose. If the detonators fail, too bad-one or two people are killed and it’s back to the drawing board.”

As Tom caught his breath he saw Amos Aricha give Reuven a “this guy is nuts” look. Undeterred, Tom pressed on. “Okay-what better place than Israel, or the West Bank, or Gaza, where there are hundreds of willing guinea pigs to build bombs to use against Israeli targets. Plus this: if he did his real-life testing in Paris, or London, or Madrid, or Washington, or anywhere else,” Tom said, “it would make waves.”

Aricha interrupted him. “What about Iraq or Afghanistan?”

“I thought about that,” Tom said. “In Iraq and Afghanistan, the situation is too uncontrolled, too chaotic. In Israel, you have a unique societal situation. The country is basically stable, but there’s also an environment in which terror organizations exist-Hamas, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Fatah. Plus, there’s the media factor. If Ben Said tried this in Europe there’d be headlines. Governments would ratchet up the threat levels. An explosion in Israel-even if it kills someone-is a one-day story.” He looked at the Shin Bet man. “Sorry, Amos, but it’s true.”

“Living with terrorism is an everyday fact of life here.” The Israeli nodded in mournful agreement. “We even came up with a word for it-ha’matzav-the situation.”

“So-can you check to see whether there were any bombings between the last week of September and the October fifteenth explosion in Gaza?”

“I certainly don’t recall any.” Aricha extracted a cell phone from his shirt pocket, punched a number into it, machine-gunned ten seconds of rapid Hebrew. He tucked the cell phone between his shoulder and neck, cut himself some Morbier, sliced a thin piece of sausage, and set it atop the cheese. But before he could eat, he set it on the table, grabbed the phone, and listened intently for about half a minute, pausing only to grunt in monosyllables from time to time.

Finally, the Shin Bet man turned off the phone. He ate the cheese and sausage and washed it down with a swallow of coffee. “It was a quiet holiday season-we stopped about sixteen, seventeen individuals before they made it across the Green Line.”

“What were they carrying?”

“The usual,” Amos said. “Explosive vests filled with nails and bolts and nuts and screws dipped in rat poison.”

“And the detonation devices?”

“Batteries and a push button.”

“No remotes? No cell phones attached just in case the perps had second thoughts?”

“No.”

“Can you ask anyone about remote detonations, Amos?”

Aricha gave Tom a jaundiced look. But he retrieved the cell phone and made another call.

6:55P.M. Amos Aricha laid the cell phone on the table. “Just as I remembered, gentlemen,” he said. “No homicide bombings during the holidays.” He looked at Tom. “And not a single vest attached to a cell phone-or other electronic device.”

Tom shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“What doesn’t?”

“Ben Said’s presence. I don’t believe he’d put himself at risk for more than two weeks just to watch the Gaza operation.”

“Wheelbarrows, Tom.” Reuven Ayalon slapped the tabletop.

“Huh?”

“Wheelbarrows. Amos, what about explosions in the Territories? In Gaza and the Territories?”

“I told you: none.”

Hadn’t McGee written something about Gaza explosions during the holidays in one of his memos? “Explosions, Amos,” Tom interrupted. “We’re not talking about attacks, just explosions. Unexplained explosions. Accidents.”

Amos Aricha got Tom’s meaning. “Fine-tuning?”

“Exactly.”

The Shin Bet man’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll check.”

They had the answer sixteen minutes later. There had been four incidents during the High Holidays. All had occurred in a remote section of southwestern Gaza that was under the control of the Bedouin Semal-Duma clan. Amos blinked and cupped his hand over the phone. “Shabak was inactive in that part of the Strip because things had been quiet.” Moreover, Amos reported, the Palestinian Authority, which routinely claimed such explosions were Israeli assassinations-targeted killings-had raised no protests, even though a total of eleven individuals had been killed-a significant number of Palestinian fatalities.

“Press coverage?”

“Minimal. The incidents were reported in the news roundup of what happens in the Territories.”

Tom gave Aricha an “I told you so” look. “Anything else, Amos?”

“By the time the Army arrived, the locations had been hosed down, swept, totally cleaned out, and the bodies removed.”

Tom asked, “By Fatah?”

Aricha shook his head. “No. Mohammad Dahlan’s people were nowhere to be seen.” Then he realized what he’d just said. The Shin Bet man smacked his own forehead hard.“Tembel,”¹⁸ he said. “I’m a whatchamacallit, a dumbkin.”

Tom turned to Reuven Ayalon. “Fine-tuning. Exactly. Amos’s information supports what Shahram told me.” He looked at his colleague. “I think we have to move.”

“Paris.” Reuven nodded in agreement.

“Paris,” Tom echoed. Yes. Paris was the key. Paris was where Shahram had photographed Imad Mugniyah and Tariq Ben Said together. Paris was the base of Ben Said’s support network coordinator, Yahia Hamzi.

Tom glanced at his watch. It was just after noon in Washington. Plenty of time for tony Tony to assemble a crash team and get them on the evening flight to Paris. He pushed his chair away from the table and stood. “You’ll have to excuse me, Amos-I’ve got to make a few calls.”

“To whom?” Reuven’s expression displayed uncharacteristic concern. “What’s going on?”

“I’ll explain later.” The plan had come to Tom in an epiphany. It was complicated; it was risky, but it might work. And he wasn’t about to say anything in front of Amos Aricha. “I’ll tell you later. I’m going to call Washington. I want them to send us a crash team.”

The Israeli shook his head. “Not yet.”

“Why? For what I’m contemplating, we’ll need lots of backup. Eight, ten people at least. There’s communications, transport, security, counter-surveillance-”

“Tom, grab hold from yourself.” The Israeli looked at his old comrade in arms almost apologetically. “That’s the Americans for you, Amos.”

“Always calling in the whatchamacallit-the cavalry.” Amos laughed.

Tom scowled. Reuven didn’t even know what he was thinking and already he was criticizing. “What’s your problem?”

“Less is sometimes more,” Reuven said. “I’m a big believer in thinking small.”

“We’re going to need support,” Tom said adamantly.

“Don’t fly off the handle yet. We have our locals. There are half a dozen freelancers under contract we can call on. I still have a few friends left in the City of Light-people who know how to get things done without making ripples. Whatever it is you want to do, we can handle everything right out of the 4627 office. Believe me, boychik, two of us can make more progress-and do it a lot more unobtrusively-than a bunch of outsiders.”

“But-”

Amos Aricha broke in. “When you were in Paris, how many case officers at your station?”

“About three dozen.”

“Mossad had two-Reuven and another who’s now dead, God rest his soul. And they did pretty damn good. I think better than you most of the time.”

Tom’s voice displayed impatience. “What’s your point, Amos?”

“That Reuven’s right: sometimes less is more, my boy.”

“We go to Paris,” Reuven said. “We work on whatever it is you want to do. Without attracting a lot of attention. You can always add people, Tom. It’s harder to take them out of the picture once they’re on-site. The bigger the crowd, the more attention you attract.”

When Tom thought about it, Reuven was making sense. “But we tell Washington what we’re doing, right? Keep Tony Wyman and Charlie Hoskinson informed.”

“Of course.” Reuven smiled. “Every step of the way. Despite how my friend here dresses, we’re not all cowboys in Israel.”