The Secret Servant

1

It was Professor Solomon Rosner who sounded the first alarm, though his name would never be linked to the affair except in the secure rooms of a drab office building in downtown Tel Aviv. Gabriel Allon, the legendary but wayward son of Israeli intelligence, would later observe that Rosner was the first asset in the annals of Office history to have proven more useful to them dead than alive. Those who overheard the remark found it uncharacteristically callous but in keeping with the bleak mood that by then had settled over them all.

The backdrop for Rosner’s demise was not Israel, where violent death occurs all too frequently, but the normally tranquil quarter of Amsterdam known as the Old Side. The date was the first Friday in December, and the weather was more suited to early spring than the last days of autumn. It was a day to engage in what the Dutch so fondly refer to as gezelligheid, the pursuit of small pleasures: an aimless stroll through the flower stalls of the Bloemenmarkt, a lager or two in a good bar in the Rembrandtplein, or, for those so inclined, a bit of fine cannabis in the brown coffeehouses of the Haarlemmerstraat. Leave the fretting and the fighting to the hated Americans, stately old Amsterdam murmured that golden late-autumn afternoon. Today we give thanks for having been born blameless and Dutch.

Solomon Rosner did not share the sentiments of his countrymen, but then he seldom did. Though he earned a living as a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, it was Rosner’s Center for European Security Studies that occupied the lion’s share of his time. His legion of detractors saw evidence of deception in the name, for Rosner served not only as the center’s director but was its only scholar in residence. Despite those obvious shortcomings, the center had managed to produce a steady stream of authoritative reports and articles detailing the threat posed to the Netherlands by the rise of militant Islam within its borders. Rosner’s last book, The Islamic Conquest of the West, had argued that Holland was now under a sustained and systematic assault by jihadist Islam. The goal of this assault, he maintained, was to colonize the Netherlands and turn it into a majority Muslim state, where, in the not-too-distant future, Islamic law, or sharia, would reign supreme. The terrorists and the colonizers were two sides of the same coin, he warned, and unless the government took immediate and drastic action, everything the freethinking Dutch held dear would soon be swept away.

The Dutch literary press had been predictably appalled. Hysteria, said one reviewer. Racist claptrap, said another. More than one took pains to note that the views expressed in the book were all the more odious given the fact that Rosner’s grandparents had been rounded up with a hundred thousand other Dutch Jews and sent off to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. All agreed that what the situation required was not hateful rhetoric like Rosner’s but tolerance and dialogue. Rosner stood steadfast in the face of the withering criticism, adopting what one commentator described as the posture of a man with his finger wedged firmly in the dike. Tolerance and dialogue by all means, Rosner responded, but not capitulation. “We Dutch need to put down our Heinekens and hash pipes and wake up,” he snapped during an interview on Dutch television. “Otherwise, we’re going to lose our country.”

The book and surrounding controversy had made Rosner the most vilified and, in some quarters, celebrated man in the country. It had also placed him squarely in the sights of Holland ’s homegrown Islamic extremists. Jihadist websites, which Rosner monitored more closely than even the Dutch police, burned with sacred rage over the book, and more than one forecast his imminent execution. An imam in the neighborhood known as the Oud West instructed his flock that “Rosner the Jew must be dealt with harshly” and pleaded for a martyr to step forward and do the job. The feckless Dutch interior minister responded by proposing that Rosner go into hiding, an idea Rosner vigorously refused. He then supplied the minister with a list of ten radicals he regarded as potential assassins. The minister accepted the list without question, for he knew that Rosner’s sources inside Holland ’s extremist fringe were in most cases far better than those of the Dutch security services.

At noon on that Friday in December, Rosner was hunched over his computer in the second-floor office of his canal house at Groenburgwal 2A. The house, like Rosner himself, was stubby and wide, and tilted forward at a precarious angle, which some of the neighbors saw as fitting, given the political views of its occupant. If it had one serious drawback it was its location, for it stood not fifty yards from the bell tower of the Zuiderkirk church. The bells tolled mercilessly each day, beginning at the stroke of noon and ending forty-five minutes later. Rosner, sensitive to interruptions and unwanted noise, had been waging a personal jihad against them for years. Classical music, white-noise machines, soundproof headphones-all had proven useless in the face of the onslaught. Sometimes he wondered why they were rung at all. The old church had long ago been turned into a government housing office, a fact that Rosner, a man of considerable faith, saw as a fitting symbol of the Dutch morass. Confronted by an enemy of infinite religious zeal, the secular Dutch had turned their churches into bureaus of the welfare state. A church without faithful, thought Rosner, in a city without God.

At ten minutes past twelve he heard a faint knock and looked up to find Sophie Vanderhaus leaning against the doorjamb with a batch of files clutched to her breast. A former student of Rosner’s, she had come to work for him after completing a graduate degree on the impact of the Holocaust on postwar Dutch society. She was part secretary and research assistant, part nursemaid and surrogate daughter. She kept his office in order and typed the final drafts of all his reports and articles. She was the minder of his impossible schedule and tended to his appalling personal finances. She even saw to his laundry and made certain he remembered to eat. Earlier that morning she had informed him that she was planning to spend a week in Saint-Maarten over the New Year. Rosner, upon hearing the news, had fallen into a profound depression.

“You have an interview with De Telegraaf in an hour,” she said. “Maybe you should have something to eat and focus your thoughts.”

“Are you suggesting my thoughts lack focus, Sophie?”

“I’m suggesting nothing of the sort. It’s just that you’ve been working on that article since five-thirty this morning. You need something more than coffee in your stomach.”

“It’s not that dreadful reporter who called me a Nazi last year?”

“Do you really think I’d let her near you again?” She entered the office and started straightening his desk. “After the interview with De Telegraaf, you go to the NOS studios for an appearance on Radio One. It’s a call-in program, so it’s sure to be lively. Do try not to make any more enemies, Professor Rosner. It’s getting harder and harder to keep track of them all.”

“I’ll try to behave myself, but I’m afraid my forbearance is now gone forever.”

She peered into his coffee cup and pulled a sour face. “Why do you insist on putting out your cigarettes in your coffee?”

“My ashtray was full.”

“Try emptying it from time to time.” She poured the contents of the ashtray into his rubbish bin and removed the plastic liner. “And don’t forget you have the forum this evening at the university.”

Rosner frowned. He was not looking forward to the forum. One of the other panelists was the leader of the European Muslim Association, a group that campaigned openly for the imposition of sharia in Europe and the destruction of the State of Israel. It promised to be a deeply unpleasant evening.

“I’m afraid I’m coming down with a sudden case of leprosy,” he said.

“They’ll insist that you come anyway. You’re the star of the show.”

He stood and stretched his back. “I think I’ll go to Café de Doelen for a coffee and something to eat. Why don’t you have the reporter from De Telegraaf meet me there?”

“Do you really think that’s wise, Professor?”

It was common knowledge in Amsterdam that the famous café on the Staalstraat was his favorite haunt. And Rosner was hardly inconspicuous. Indeed, with his shock of white hair and rumpled tweed wardrobe, he was one of the most recognizable figures in Holland. The geniuses in the Dutch police had once suggested he utilize some crude disguise while in public, an idea Rosner had likened to putting a hat and a false mustache on a hippopotamus and calling it a Dutchman.

“I haven’t been to the Doelen in months.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s any safer.”

“I can’t live my life as a prisoner forever, Sophie.” He gestured toward the window. “Especially on a day like today. Wait until the last possible minute before you tell the reporter from De Telegraaf where I am. That will give me a jump on the jihadists.”

“That isn’t funny, Professor.” She could see there was no talking him out of it. She handed him his mobile phone. “At least take this so you can call me in an emergency.”

Rosner slipped the phone into his pocket and headed downstairs. In the entry hall he pulled on his coat and trademark silk scarf and stepped outside. To his left rose the spire of the Zuiderkirk; to his right, fifty yards along a narrow canal lined with small craft, stood a wooden double drawbridge. The Groenburgwal was a quiet street for the Old Side: no bars or cafés, only a single small hotel that never seemed to have more than a handful of guests. Directly opposite Rosner’s house was the street’s only eyesore, a modern tenement block with a lavender-and-lime pastel exterior. A trio of housepainters dressed in smudged white coveralls was squatting outside the building in a patch of sunlight.

Rosner glanced at the three faces, committing each to memory, before setting off in the direction of the drawbridge. When a sudden gust of wind stirred the bare tree limbs along the embankment, he paused for a moment to bind his scarf more tightly around his neck and watch a plump Vermeer cloud drift slowly overhead. It was then that he noticed one of the painters walking parallel to him along the opposite side of the canal. Short dark hair, a high flat forehead, a heavy brow over small eyes: Rosner, connoisseur of immigrant faces, judged him to be a Moroccan from the Rif Mountains. They arrived at the drawbridge simultaneously. Rosner paused again, this time to light a cigarette he did not want, and watched with relief as the man turned to the left. When he disappeared round the next corner, Rosner headed in the opposite direction toward the Doelen.

He took his time making his way down the Staalstraat, now dawdling in the window of his favorite pastry shop to gaze at that day’s offerings, now sidestepping to avoid being run down by a pretty girl on a bicycle, now pausing to accept a few words of encouragement from a ruddy-faced admirer. He was about to step through the entrance of the café when he felt a tug at his coat sleeve. In the few remaining seconds he had left to live, he would be tormented by the absurd thought that he might have prevented his own murder had he resisted the impulse to turn around. But he did turn around, because that is what one does on a glorious December afternoon in Amsterdam when one is summoned in the street by a stranger.

He saw the gun only in the abstract. In the narrow street the shots reverberated like cannon fire. He collapsed onto the cobblestones and watched helplessly as his killer drew a long knife from the inside of his coveralls. The slaughter was ritual, just as the imams had decreed it should be. No one intervened-hardly surprising, thought Rosner, for intervention would have been intolerant-and no one thought to comfort him as he lay dying. Only the bells spoke to him. A church without faithful, they seemed to be saying, in a city without God.

2

What are you doing here, Uzi?” Gabriel asked. “You’re the boss now. Bosses don’t make midnight airport runs. They leave that sort of work to the flunkies in Transport.”

“I had nothing better to do.”

“Nothing better to do than hang around the airport waiting for me to come off a plane from Rome? What’s wrong? You didn’t think I’d really come back this time?”

Uzi Navot didn’t respond. He was now peering through the one-way glass window of the VIP reception room into the arrivals hall, where the other passengers from the Rome flight were queuing up at passport control. Gabriel looked around: the same faux-limestone walls, the same tired-looking leather couches, the same smell of male tension and burnt coffee. He had been coming to this room, or versions of it, for more than thirty years. He had entered it in triumph and staggered into it in failure. He had been fêted in this room and consoled by a prime minister; and once, he had been wheeled into it with a bullet wound in his chest. But it never changed.

“Bella needed an evening to herself,” Navot said, still facing the glass. He looked at Gabriel. “Last week she confessed that she liked it better when I was in the field. We saw each other once a month, if we were lucky. Now…” He frowned. “I think Bella’s starting to have buyer’s remorse. Besides, I miss hanging around in airport lounges. By my calculation I’ve spent two-thirds of my career waiting in airport terminals, train stations, restaurants, and hotel rooms. They promise you glamour and excitement, but it’s mostly mind-numbing boredom with brief interludes of sheer terror.”

“I like the boring parts better. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a boring country?”

“But then it wouldn’t be Israel.”

Navot relieved Gabriel of his leather garment bag and led him out into a long, harshly lit corridor. They were roughly equal in height and walked with the same purposeful gait, but the similarities ended there. Where Gabriel was angular and narrow, Navot was squat and powerfully built, with a round, turretlike head mounted atop wrestler’s shoulders and a thick waist that attested to an affinity for heavy food. For years Navot had roamed western Europe as a katsa, an undercover case officer. He was now chief of Special Operations. In the words of the celebrated Israeli spymaster Ari Shamron, Special Ops was “the dark side of a dark service.” They were the ones who did the jobs no one else wanted, or dared, to do. They were executioners and kidnappers, buggers and blackmailers; men of intellect and ingenuity with a criminal streak wider than the criminals themselves; multilinguists and chameleons who were at home in the finest hotels and salons in Europe or the worst back alleys of Beirut and Baghdad. Navot was new to the job and had been granted the promotion only because Gabriel had turned it down. There was no animosity between them. Navot was the first to admit he was a mere field hand. Gabriel Allon was a legend.

The corridor led to a secure door, and the door to a restricted area just off the main traffic circle outside the terminal. A dented Renault sedan stood in the reserved parking place. Navot opened the trunk and tossed Gabriel’s bag inside. “I gave my driver the night off,” he said. “I wanted a word in private. You know how the drivers can be. They sit around down there in the motor pool all day with nothing to do but gossip. They’re worse than a sewing circle.”

Gabriel got into the passenger seat and closed the door. He looked into the backseat. It was stacked with Bella’s books and files. Bella was an academic who specialized in Syria and drifted in and out of government service. She was far more intelligent than Navot, an openly acknowledged fact that had been a source of considerable tension in their long and turbulent relationship. Navot started her car with a hostile twist of the key and drove it too hard toward the airport exit ramp.

“How did the painting turn out?” he asked.

“It turned out just fine, Uzi.”

“It was a Botticelli, wasn’t it?”

“Bellini,” Gabriel corrected him. “Lament over the Dead Christ.” He might have added that the sublime panel had once formed the cyma of Bellini’s remarkable altarpiece in the Church of San Francesco in Pesaro, but he didn’t. The fact that Gabriel was one of the world’s finest art restorers had always made him the target of professional envy among his colleagues. He rarely discussed his work with them, even with Navot, who had become a close friend.

“Botticelli, Bellini-it’s all the same to me.” Navot shook his head. “Imagine, a nice Jewish boy like you restoring a Bellini masterpiece for the pope. I hope he paid you well.”

“He paid me the standard fee-and then a little more.”

“It’s only fair,” Navot said. “After all, you did save his life.”

“You had a hand in it, too, Uzi.”

“But I wasn’t the one who got his picture in the paper doing it.”

They came to the end of the ramp. Overhead was a blue-and-white traffic sign. To the left was Tel Aviv, to the right, Jerusalem. Navot turned to the right and headed toward the Judean Hills.

“How’s the mood at King Saul Boulevard?” Gabriel asked.

King Saul Boulevard was the longtime address of Israel ’s foreign intelligence service. The service had a long name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Men like Gabriel and Uzi Navot referred to it as “the Office” and nothing else.

“Consider yourself fortunate you’ve been away.”

“That bad?”

“It’s the night of the long knives. Our adventure in Lebanon was an unmitigated disaster. None of our institutions came out of it with their reputations intact, including the Office. You know how these things work. When mistakes of this magnitude are made, heads must roll, the more the better. No one is safe, especially Amos. The Commission of Inquiry wants to know why the Office didn’t realize Hezbollah was so well armed and why our vast network of well-paid collaborators couldn’t seem to find Hezbollah’s leadership once the fighting started.”

“The last thing the Office needs now is another power struggle and battle for succession-not with Hezbollah gearing up for another war. Not with Iran on the verge of a nuclear weapon. And not with the territories about to explode.”

“The decision has already been made by Shamron and the rest of the wise men that Amos must die. The only question is, will it be an execution, or will Amos be allowed to do the deed himself after a decent interval?”

“How do you know where Shamron stands on all this?”

Navot, by his edgy silence, made clear that his source was Shamron himself. It had been years now since Shamron had done his last tour as chief, yet the Office was still very much his private fiefdom. It was filled with officers like Gabriel and Navot, men who had been recruited and groomed by Shamron, men who operated by a creed, even spoke a language, written by him. Shamron was known in Israel as the Memuneh, the one in charge, and he would remain so until the day he finally decided the country was safe enough for him to die.

“You’re playing a dangerous game, Uzi. Shamron is getting on. That bomb attack on his motorcade took a lot out of him. He’s not the man he used to be. There’s no guarantee he’ll prevail in a showdown with Amos, and I don’t need to remind you that the door to King Saul Boulevard for men like you is one way. If you and Shamron lose, you’ll be the one who ends up on the street hawking your services to the highest bidder, just like the rest of the Office’s washed-up field men.”

Navot nodded his head in agreement. “And I won’t have a pope to throw me a little work on the side.”

They started the ascent into the Bab al-Wad, the staircaselike gorge that leads from the Coastal Plain to Jerusalem. Gabriel felt his ears pop from the altitude change.

“Does Shamron have a successor in mind?”

“He wants the Office to be run by someone other than a soldier.”

It was one of the many peculiarities about the Office that made little sense to outsiders. Like the Americans, the Israelis nearly always chose men with no intelligence experience to be their chief spies. The Americans preferred politicians and party apparatchiks, while in Israel the job usually went to an army general like Amos. Shamron was the last man to ascend to the throne from the ranks of Operations, and he had been manipulating every occupant since.

“So that’s why you’re conspiring with Shamron? You’re angling for Amos’s job? You and Shamron are using the debacle in Lebanon as grounds for a coup d’état. You’ll seize the palace, and Shamron will pull the strings from his villa in Tiberias.”

“I’m flattered you think Shamron would trust me with the keys to his beloved Office, but that’s not the case. The Memuneh has someone else in mind for the job.”

“Me?” Gabriel shook his head slowly. “I’m an assassin, Uzi, and they don’t make assassins the director.”

“You’re more than just an assassin.”

Gabriel looked silently out the window at the orderly yellow streetlights of a Jewish settlement spreading down the hillside toward the flatlands of the West Bank. In the distance a crescent moon hung over Ramallah. “What makes Shamron think I’d want to be the chief?” he asked. “I wriggled off the hook when he wanted to make me chief of Special Ops.”

“Are you trying to drop a not-so-subtle reminder that I got the job only because you didn’t want it?”

“What I’m trying to say, Uzi, is that I’m not fit for Headquarters-and I certainly don’t want to spend my life in endless Security Cabinet meetings in the Prime Minister’s Office. I don’t play well with others, and I won’t be a party to your little conspiracy against Amos.”

“So what do you intend to do? Sit around and wait for the pope to give you more work?”

“You’re starting to sound like Shamron.”

Navot ignored the remark. “Sit around while the missiles rain down on Haifa? While the mullahs in Tehran build their nuclear bomb? Is that your plan? To leave the fighting to others?” Navot took a long look into the rearview mirror. “But why should you be any different? At the moment it’s a national affliction. Fortress Israel is cracking under the strain of this war without end. The founding fathers are dying off, and the people aren’t sure they trust the new generation of leaders with their future. Those with the resources are creating escape hatches for themselves. It’s the Jewish instinct, isn’t it? It’s in our DNA because of the Holocaust. One hears things now that one didn’t hear even ten years ago. People wonder openly whether the entire enterprise was a mistake. They delude themselves into thinking that the Jewish national home is not in Palestine but in America.”

“ America?”

Navot fixed his eyes back on the road. “My sister lives in Bethesda, Maryland. It’s very nice there. You can eat your lunch in an outdoor café without fear that the next person who walks by your table is a shaheed who’s going to blow you to bits.” He glanced at Gabriel. “Maybe that’s why you like Italy so much. You want to make a new life for yourself away from Israel. You want to leave the blood and tears to mere mortals.”

Gabriel’s dark look made clear he had shed more blood and tears for his country than most. “I’m an art restorer who specializes in Italian Old Masters. The paintings are in Italy, Uzi, not here.”

“Art restoration was your cover job, Gabriel. You are not an art restorer. You are a secret servant of the State of Israel, and you have no right to leave the fighting to others. And if you think you’re going to find a quiet life for yourself in Europe, forget it. The Europeans condemned us for Lebanon, but what they don’t understand is that Lebanon is merely a preview of coming attractions. The movie will soon be showing in theaters all across Europe. It’s the next battleground.”

The next battleground? No, thought Gabriel, it had been his battleground for more than thirty years. He looked up at the looming shadow of Mount Herzl, where his former wife resided in a psychiatric hospital, locked in a prison of memory and in a body destroyed by Gabriel’s enemies. His son was on the other side of Jerusalem, in a hero’s grave on the Mount of Olives. Between them lay the Valley of Hinnom, an ancient burning ground believed by both Jews and Muslims to be the fiery place where the wicked are punished after death. Gabriel had spent the better part of his life traversing the valley. It was clear that Uzi Navot wanted him to return again.

“What’s on your mind, Uzi? Surely you didn’t come all the way to the airport just to ask me to join your plot against Amos.”

“We have an errand we’d like you to run for us,” Navot said.

“I’m not an errand boy.”

“No offense, Gabriel.”

“None taken. Where’s the errand?”

“ Amsterdam.”

“Why Amsterdam?”

“Because we’ve had a death in the family there.”

“Who?”

“Solomon Rosner.”

“Rosner? I never knew Rosner was ours.”

“He wasn’t ours,” said Navot. “He was Shamron’s.”

3

They drove to Narkiss Street, a quiet, leafy lane in the heart of Jerusalem, and parked outside the limestone apartment house at Number 16. It was three floors in height and largely concealed by a towering eucalyptus tree growing in the front garden. Gabriel led Navot through the small foyer and mounted the stairs. Despite his long absence he didn’t bother to check the postbox. He never received mail, and the name on the box was false. As far as the bureaucracy of the State of Israel was concerned, Gabriel Allon did not exist. He lived only in the Office, and even there he was a part-time resident.

His flat was on the top floor. As always he hesitated before opening the door. The room that greeted him was not the same one he had walked out of six months earlier. It had been a small but fully functioning art studio; now it was meticulously decorated in the subtle beiges and soft whites that Chiara Zolli, his Venetian-born fiancée, so adored. She’d been busy while he was away. Somehow she’d neglected to mention the redecoration during her last visit to Italy.

“Where are my things?”

“Housekeeping has them in storage until you can find some proper studio space.” Navot smiled at Gabriel’s discomfort. “You didn’t expect your wife to live in an apartment without furniture, did you?”

“She’s not my wife yet.” He laid his bag on the new couch. It looked expensive. “Where is she?”

“She didn’t tell you where we were sending her?”

“She takes rules of compartmentalization and need to know very seriously.”

“So do I.”

“Where is she, Uzi?”

Navot opened his mouth to reply, but a voice from the kitchen answered for him. It was familiar to Gabriel, as was the elderly figure who emerged a moment later, dressed in khaki trousers and a leather bomber jacket with a tear in the left breast. His head was shaped like a bullet and bald, except for a monkish fringe of cropped white hair. His face was more gaunt than Gabriel remembered, and his ugly wire-framed spectacles magnified pale blue eyes that were no longer clear. He was leaning heavily on a handsome olive-wood cane. The hand that held it seemed to have been borrowed from a man twice his size.

“ Argentina,” said Ari Shamron for a second time. “Your wife-to-be is in Argentina.”

“What type of job is it?”

“Surveillance of a known terrorist operative.”

Gabriel didn’t have to ask the affiliation of the operative. The answer lay in the location of the operation. Argentina, like the rest of South America, was a hotbed of Hezbollah activity.

“We think it’s only a matter of time before Hezbollah tries to take its revenge for the damage we inflicted on them in Lebanon. A terror attack that leaves no fingerprints is the most likely scenario. The only question in our mind is the target. Will it be us or our supporters in America?”

“When will she be finished?”

Shamron shrugged noncommittally. “This is a war without end, Gabriel. It is forever. But then you know that better than any of us, don’t you?” He touched Gabriel’s face. “See if you can find us some coffee. We need to talk.”

Gabriel found a tin of coffee in the pantry. The seal had been broken and a single sniff of the grinds confirmed his suspicions that it was long past its prime. He poured some into the French press and set a kettle of water to boil, then returned to the sitting room. Navot was pondering a ceramic dish on the end table; Shamron had settled himself into an armchair and was in the process of lighting one of his vile-smelling Turkish cigarettes. Gabriel had been gone six months, but in his absence it seemed nothing had changed but the furniture.

“No coffee?” Shamron asked.

“It takes more than a minute to make coffee, Ari.”

Shamron glared at his big stainless-steel wristwatch. Time had always been his enemy, but now more so than ever. It was the bombing, Gabriel thought. It had finally forced Shamron to confront the possibility of his own mortality.

“Solomon Rosner was an Office asset?” Gabriel asked.

“A very valuable one, actually.”

“How long?”

Shamron tilted his head back and blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling before answering. “Back in the mid-nineties, during my second tour as chief, we began to realize the Netherlands was going to be a problem for us down the road. The demographics of the country were changing rapidly. Amsterdam was well on its way to becoming a Muslim city. The young men were unemployed and angry, and they were being fed a steady diet of hate by their imams, most of whom were imported and funded by our friends in Saudi Arabia. There were a number of attacks against the local community. Small stuff, mostly-a broken window, a bloody nose, the odd Molotov cocktail. We wanted to make sure those small incidents didn’t turn into something more serious. We also wanted to know whether any of our more determined enemies were using Amsterdam as a base of operations for major attacks against Israeli targets in Europe. We needed eyes and ears on the ground, but we didn’t have the resources to mount any sort of operation on our own.”

Gabriel opened the doors leading onto his small balcony. The smell of the eucalyptus tree in the front garden filled the apartment. “So you turned to Rosner?”

“Not right away. We tried the traditional route first, a liaison relationship with the AIVD, the Dutch security service. We courted them for months, but the Dutch at that time weren’t interested in dancing with us. After the last rejection, I authorized an attempt to get into the AIVD through the back door. Our local chief of station made a rather clumsy pass at the AIVD deputy in charge of monitoring the Muslim community and it blew up in our faces. You remember the scandal, don’t you, Gabriel?”

He did. The affair had been splashed all over the pages of the Dutch and Israeli newspapers. There had been heated exchanges between the foreign ministries of both countries and angry threats of expulsions.

“When the storm died down, I decided to try again. This time, though, I chose a different target.”

“Rosner,” Gabriel put in, and Shamron nodded his head in agreement.

“He monitored what was being said in the mosques when no one else in Amsterdam was listening, and read the filth running through the sewers of the Internet when everyone else averted their eyes. On more than one occasion, he supplied information to the police that prevented violence. He also happened to be Jewish. As far as the Office was concerned, Rosner was the answer to our prayers.”

“Who handled the recruitment?”

“I did,” Shamron said. “After the AIVD scandal, I wasn’t about to entrust the job to anyone else.”

“And besides,” said Gabriel, “there’s nothing you love better than a good recruitment.”

Shamron responded with a seductive smile, the same smile he had used on a searing afternoon in September 1972, when he had come to see Gabriel at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem. Gabriel had been a promising young painter; Shamron was a brash operations man who had just been ordered by Prime Minister Golda Meir to hunt down and kill the members of Black September, perpetrators of the Munich Massacre. The operation was code-named Wrath of God, but in reality it was the Wrath of Gabriel. Of the twelve members of Black September killed by the Office, six were dispatched by Gabriel at close range with a.22 caliber Beretta.

“I flew to Amsterdam and took Rosner to dinner in a quiet restaurant overlooking the Amstel. I told stories about the old days-the War of Independence, the Eichmann capture. You know the ones, Gabriel, the stories you and Uzi have heard a thousand times before. At the end of the evening, I laid a contract on the table. He signed without reservation.”

Shamron was interrupted by the sudden scream of the teakettle. Gabriel went into the kitchen and prepared the coffee. When he returned, he placed the French press on the coffee table, along with three mugs and a sugar bowl. Navot gave him a disapproving look. “You’d better put something under that,” he said. “If you leave a ring, Chiara will kill you.”

“I’ll take my chances, Uzi.” Gabriel looked at Shamron. “Who serviced him? You, I suppose.”

“Rosner was my creation,” Shamron said somewhat defensively. “Naturally I was reluctant to turn over the reins to anyone else. I gave him a bit of money to hire an assistant, and when Rosner had something to report I was the one who went to see him.”

“In Amsterdam?”

“Never,” said Shamron. “Usually we met across the border, in Antwerp.”

“And when they ran you out of the Office for the second time?”

“I hung onto a few bits and pieces to keep me occupied in my dotage. Rosner was one of those bits. Another was you, of course. I didn’t trust you with anyone else.” He spooned sugar into his coffee and gave it a melancholy stir. “When I went to work for the prime minister as his senior security adviser, I had to surrender control of Rosner.” He glanced at Navot. “I entrusted him to Uzi. After all, he was our western European katsa.”

“And your protégé,” Gabriel added.

“It wasn’t exactly heavy lifting,” Navot conceded. “Ari had already done all that. I just had to handle Rosner’s reports. Eighteen months ago, he gave me a nugget of pure gold. According to one of Rosner’s sources inside the Muslim community, an al-Qaeda-affiliated cell operating in west Amsterdam had got their hands on a missile and was planning to shoot down an El Al jetliner on approach at Schiphol Airport. That evening we diverted the flight to Brussels and tipped off the Dutch. They arrested four men sitting in a parked car at the end of the runway. In the trunk was an antiaircraft missile that had been smuggled into Amsterdam from Iraq.”

“How did Rosner know about the plot?”

“He had sources,” said Shamron. “Very good sources. I tried on a number of occasions to convince him to turn them over to us, but he always refused. He said his sources talked to him because he wasn’t a professional. Well, not quite a professional, but no one else in Holland knew that.”

“And you’re sure about that?” asked Gabriel. “You’re certain Rosner didn’t die because of his links to us?”

“Unfortunately, there was no shortage of people in Amsterdam who wanted Solomon dead. Some of the city’s most prominent jihadist imams had been openly calling for a volunteer to step forward. They finally found their man in Muhammad Hamza, a housepainter from north Amsterdam who just happened to be working on a project across the street from Rosner’s home. The Amsterdam police found a videotape inside Hamza’s apartment after his arrest. It was shot the morning of Rosner’s murder. On it Hamza calmly says that today would be the day he killed his Jew.”

“So what type of errand do you want me to run in Amsterdam?”

Navot and Shamron looked at each other, as if trying to get their story straight. Shamron let Navot answer. He was, after all, chief of Special Ops.

“We’d like you to go to Amsterdam and clean out his files. We want the names of all those golden sources, of course, but we also want to make sure there’s nothing there that might link him to us.”

“It would be deeply embarrassing if our ties to Solomon were ever exposed,” Shamron added. “And it would also make it more difficult for us to recruit sayanim from the Jewish communities around the world. We’re a small service. We can’t function without them.”

The sayanim were a worldwide network of volunteer Jewish helpers. They were the bankers who supplied Office agents with cash in emergencies; the doctors who treated them in secret when they were wounded; the hoteliers who gave them rooms under false names, and the rental-car agents who supplied them with untraceable vehicles. The vast majority of the sayanim had been recruited and nurtured by Shamron himself. He devotedly referred to them as the secret fruit of the Diaspora.

“It also has the potential to make a volatile situation in the Netherlands much worse,” Gabriel said. “Solomon Rosner was one of the most well-known critics of militant Islam in Europe. If it ever came out that he was our paid mouthpiece, the Jewish community in Holland might find itself at risk.”

“I disagree with your characterization,” said Shamron, “but your point is duly noted.”

“How am I supposed to get into Rosner’s office?”

It was Navot who answered. “About a year ago, when the threats against Rosner started coming fast and furious, we knew we had to make plans for just such a contingency. Rosner told his assistant, a young woman named Sophie Vanderhaus, that, in the event of his death, she would be contacted by a gentleman named Rudolf Heller and given a set of instructions she was to follow to the letter.”

Herr Rudolf Heller, venture capitalist for Zurich, was one of Shamron’s many false identities.

“I contacted Sophie last night,” Shamron said. “I told her that a colleague of mine would be arriving in Amsterdam tomorrow afternoon and that he was to be given complete access to all of Professor Rosner’s files.”

“Tomorrow afternoon?”

“There’s an El Al flight that leaves Ben-Gurion at six forty-five and arrives in Amsterdam at two. Sophie will meet you in front of the Café de Doelen at four.”

“It could take me days to go through all of Rosner’s files.”

“Yes,” Shamron said, as though he were glad the task had not been inflicted on him. “That’s why we’ve decided to send along some help. He’s already in Europe on a personal matter. He’ll be there when you arrive.”

Gabriel raised his coffee cup to his lips and eyed Shamron over the rim. “And what about the promises we made to the European security services? The covenant we signed in blood in exchange for getting them to drop all the charges and lawsuits against me?”

“You mean the covenant that forbids you from operating on European soil without first obtaining permission from the security service of the country involved?”

“Yes, that one.”

They all three shared a conspiratorial silence. Making promises they had no intention of keeping was what they did best. They abused the passports of other nations, recruited agents from allied security and intelligence services, and routinely ran operations on foreign soil forbidden by long-standing accords. They did this, they told themselves, because they had no choice; because they were surrounded by enemies who would stop at nothing to ensure their destruction; and because the rest of the world, blinded by their hatred of Zionism and the Jews, would not allow them to fight back with the full force of their military might. They lied to everyone but each other and were truly at ease only in each other’s company.

“You’re not going behind the Iron Curtain,” Shamron said. “With proper cover and a bit of work on that now-famous face of yours, you’ll have no problems getting into the country. The new realities of European travel have made life much easier for Office agents-and, unfortunately, for the terrorists as well. Osama bin Laden could be living quietly in a cottage by the North Sea and the Dutch would never know it.”

Navot reached into his attaché case. The envelope he removed was an old-fashioned model, with a string instead of an aluminum clasp. The Office was one of the most technologically advanced services in the world, but it still used envelopes from the days when Israel had no television.

“It’s an in-and-out job,” Shamron said. “You’ll be home by the weekend. Who knows? Perhaps your wife will be, too.”

“She’s not my wife yet.”

Gabriel took the envelope from Navot’s grasp. An in-and-out job, he thought. It sounded nice, but somehow it never turned out that way.

4

Name, please?” asked the front-desk clerk at the Hotel Europa.

“Kiever,” Gabriel replied in German-accented English. “Heinrich Kiever.”

“Ah, yes, here it is. Your room is ready.” There was genuine surprise in her voice. “You have a message, Herr Kiever.”

Gabriel, playing the role of the travel-weary businessman, accepted the small slip of paper with a frown. It stated that his colleague from Heller Enterprises in Zurich had already checked into the hotel and was awaiting his call. Gabriel squeezed the message into a ball and shoved it into the pocket of his overcoat. It was cashmere. The girls in Identity had spared no expense on his wardrobe.

“Your room is on the sixth floor. It’s one of our premier suites.” She handed him an electronic card key and recited a long list of luxurious hotel amenities Gabriel had no intention of using. “Do you require assistance with your bag?”

Gabriel glanced at the bellman, an emaciated youth who looked like he had spent his lunch hour in one of Amsterdam ’s notorious brown cafés. “I think I can manage, thank you.”

He boarded a waiting elevator and rode it up to the sixth floor. The door to Suite 612 was located at the end of a corridor, in a small, private alcove. Gabriel ran his fingertips around the jamb, searching for any sign of a foreign object such as a fragment of loose wiring, and held his breath as he inserted the card key into the electronic lock. There was little “premier” about the room he entered, though the view of the canal houses along the Amstel River was one of the finest in the city. A bottle of mediocre champagne was sweating in an ice bucket on the coffee table. The handwritten note said: Welcome back to the Europa, Herr Kiever. Strange, because, to the best of Gabriel’s recollection, Herr Kiever had never stayed there before.

He removed a Nokia mobile phone from his coat pocket. It was indeed a telephone, but it contained several features unavailable on ordinary commercial models, such as a device capable of detecting the signals and electrical impulses of concealed transmitters. He held the phone in front of his face and spent the next five minutes padding slowly round the rooms of the suite, watching the power meter for subtle fluctuations. Satisfied the room had not been bugged, he conducted a second search, this one for evidence of a bomb or any other lethal device. Only then did he pick up the phone on the bedside table and dial Room 611. “I’m here,” he said in German, and immediately set down the receiver.

A moment later there was a gentle knock at the door. The man who entered was several years older than Gabriel, small and bookish, with wispy, unkempt gray hair and quick brown eyes. As usual he seemed to be wearing all his clothing at once: a button-down shirt with ascot, a cardigan sweater, a rumpled tweed jacket. “Lovely accommodations,” said Eli Lavon. “Better than that pensione where we stayed in Rome the night before the Zwaiter hit in seventy-two. Do you remember it, Gabriel? My God, what a dump.”

“We were posing as university students,” Gabriel reminded him. “We can’t pose as students anymore. I suppose that’s one of the few fringe benefits of growing old.”

Lavon gave Gabriel an elusive smile and lowered himself wearily into an armchair. Even Gabriel, who had known Lavon more than thirty years, sometimes found it hard to imagine that this fussy hypochondriacal little man was without question the finest street surveillance artist the Office had ever produced. They had worked together for the first time during the Wrath of God operation. Lavon, an archaeologist by training, had been an ayin, a tracker. When the unit disbanded, he had settled in Vienna and opened a small investigative bureau called Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Operating on a shoestring budget, he had managed to track down millions of dollars in looted Jewish assets and had played a significant role in prying a multibillion-dollar settlement from the banks of Switzerland. He had recently returned to Israel and was teaching biblical archaeology at Hebrew University. In his spare time he lectured on the fine art of physical surveillance at the Academy. No Office recruit ever made it into the field without first spending a few days with the great Eli Lavon.

“Your disguise is quite effective,” Lavon said with professional admiration. “For an instant even I didn’t recognize you.”

Gabriel looked at his reflection in the mirror over the dressing table. He wore a pair of black-framed eyeglasses, contact lenses that turned his green eyes to brown, and a false goatee that accentuated his already-narrow features.

“I would have added a bit more gray to your hair,” Lavon said.

“I have enough already,” Gabriel said. “How did you get roped into this affair?”

“Proximity, I suppose. I was at a conference in Prague delivering a lecture on our dig at Tel Megiddo. As I came off the stage my mobile phone was ringing. You’ll never guess who it was.”

“Trust me, Eli-I can guess.”

“I hear that voice, the voice of God with a murderous Polish accent, telling me to leave Prague for Amsterdam at once.” Lavon shook his head slowly. “Does Shamron really have nothing better to do at his age than worry about a dead sayan? He’s lucky to be alive. He should be enjoying his last few years on this earth, but instead he clings to the Office like a drowning man grasping at a life ring.”

“Rosner was his sayan,” Gabriel said. “And I’m sure he feels partly responsible for his death.”

“He could have let Uzi handle it. But he doesn’t fully trust Uzi, does he, Gabriel? The old man wanted you in Special Ops, not Uzi, and he’s never going to rest until you’re running the place.” Lavon pushed up the sleeve of his tweed jacket and looked at his watch. “Sophie Vanderhaus awaits us. Have you given much thought to how you’re going to play it with her?”

“She’s an intelligent woman. I suspect she already has a good idea about Herr Heller’s true affiliation-and why Rosner always met with him outside the country.”

Lavon frowned. “I must confess I’m not really looking forward to this. I suppose there’s a ritual to these things. When agents die, their secrets have to go with them to the grave. It’s like tahara, the washing of the dead. Next time it could be one of us.”

“Promise me something, Eli.”

“Anything.”

“Promise me that if anything happens to me, you’ll be the one who buries all my secrets.”

“It would be my honor.” Lavon patted the pocket of his jacket. “Oh, I nearly forgot this. A bodel gave this to me at the airport this morning after I arrived.”

The bodelim were Office couriers. The item Lavon had been given was a Beretta 9mm pistol. Gabriel took it from his grasp and slipped it into the waistband of his trousers at the small of his back.

“You’re not really going to bring that, are you?”

“I have enemies, Eli-lots of enemies.”

“Obviously, so did Solomon Rosner.”

“And one of them might still be hanging around his house.”

“Just try not to kill anyone while we’re in Amsterdam, Gabriel. Dead bodies have a way of spoiling an otherwise uneventful trip.”

It was beginning to get dark when Gabriel stepped out of the hotel. He turned to the right and, with Lavon trailing several paces behind, walked the length of the narrow street until he came to an iron bridge. On the opposite side stood Café de Doelen. It was open for business again, and the spot where Solomon Rosner had been standing at the time of his murder was piled high with tulips. There were no mourners or protesters condemning the ritual slaughter of their fellow countryman, only a single banner, hung from the façade of the café, that read ONE AMSTERDAM, ONE PEOPLE.

“I’ve been staring at it for two days now and I still don’t quite know what it means.”

Gabriel turned around. The words had been spoken by a woman in her late twenties with sandstone-colored hair and pale blue eyes that shone with a calm intelligence.

“I’m Sophie Vanderhaus.” She extended her hand and added primly: “Professor Rosner’s assistant.” She released his hand and gazed at the makeshift memorial. “Quite moving, don’t you think? Even the Dutch press are treating him like a hero now. Too bad they weren’t so glowing in their praise when he was alive. For years they attacked him, all because he had the courage to say the things they chose to ignore. In my judgment they are complicit in his murder. They are as guilty as the extremist imams who filled Muhammad Hamza’s head with hate.” She turned and looked at Gabriel. “Come,” she said. “The house is this way.”

They set off down the Staalstraat together. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder and saw Lavon start after them. Sophie Vanderhaus gazed down at the cobbles, as if organizing her thoughts.

“It’s been five days since his murder,” she said, “and not a single Muslim leader has bothered to condemn it. In fact, given a chance to do so by the Dutch media, they have chosen to blame it on him. Where are these so-called moderate Muslims one always hears about in the press? Do they exist or are they merely figments of our imagination? If one insults the Prophet Muhammad, our Muslim countrymen pour into the streets in a sacred rage and threaten us with beheading. But when one of them commits murder in the Prophet’s name…”

Her voice trailed off. Gabriel completed the thought for her.

“The silence is deafening.”

“Well put,” she said. “But you didn’t come to Amsterdam to listen to a lecture by me. You have a job to do.” She scrutinized him carefully for a moment while they walked side by side in the narrow street. “Do you know, Herr Kiever, it was exactly a year ago that Professor Rosner first told me about his relationship with a man named Rudolf Heller and what I was to do in the event anything ever happened to him. Needless to say, I hoped this day would never come.”

“I understand you and Professor Rosner were very close.”

“He was like a father to me. I had a dozen other job offers when I completed my degree-jobs that paid much more than the Center for European Security Studies-but I chose to work for Professor Rosner for a pittance instead.”

“You’re a historian?”

She nodded. “While I was researching my thesis, I learned that we Dutch have a habit of trying to reach accommodation with murderous ideologies, be it National Socialism or Islamic fascism. I wanted to help break that cycle. Working for Professor Rosner gave me that chance.” She pushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead and looked at Gabriel. “I was at Professor Rosner’s side for five years, Herr Kiever. I had to endure the taunts and threats as well. And I believe that entitles me to ask a few questions before we start.”

“I’m afraid asking too many questions about who I am and why I’m here will make your life more complicated and dangerous than it already is.”

“Will you permit me to posit a hypothesis?”

“If you insist.”

“I don’t believe Herr Rudolf Heller is Swiss. And I certainly don’t believe he’s a venture capitalist who had an interest in supporting the work of a terrorism analyst in Amsterdam.”

“Really?”

“Professor Rosner didn’t talk much about his feelings toward Israel. He knew it would only make him more radioactive in Amsterdam than he already was. But he was a Zionist. He believed in Israel and the right of the Jewish people to a homeland. And I suspect that if a clever Israeli intelligence officer came along and made him the right sort of offer, he would have done almost anything to help.”

She stopped walking and looked at Gabriel for a moment with one eyebrow raised, as if giving him a chance to respond.

“My name is Heinrich Kiever,” he said. “I’m a colleague of Herr Rudolf Heller from Zurich, and I’ve come to Amsterdam to review the private papers of Professor Solomon Rosner.”

She capitulated, though judging from her expression she remained deeply skeptical of his cover story. Gabriel didn’t blame her. It was hardly airtight.

“I hope you’re not planning on leaving Amsterdam any time soon,” she said. “At last estimate, we had more than a hundred thousand pages of documents in our archives.”

“I brought help.”

“Where?”

Gabriel nodded toward Lavon, who was gazing into a shopwindow twenty yards behind them.

“Since when do Zurich venture capitalists employ professional surveillance men?” She set off down the Groenburgwal. “Come on, Herr Kiever. You have a long night ahead of you.”

Her original estimate of Rosner’s archives proved wildly optimistic. Gabriel, after conducting a brief tour of the canal house, reckoned the true number of pages ran closer to a quarter million. There were files in Rosner’s office and files in Sophie’s. Files lined the hallway, and there was a dank chamber filled with files in the cellar. And then, of course, there was all the material contained on the hard drive of Rosner’s computer. So much for Shamron’s prediction that they would be back in Jerusalem by the weekend.

They started in Rosner’s office and worked as a threesome. Gabriel and Lavon, the restorer and the archaeologist, sat side by side at Rosner’s desk, while Sophie placed the files before them one by one, providing a bit of background where appropriate, translating the odd passage when necessary. Files of interest or of a sensitive nature were separated out and packed into cardboard boxes for shipment to King Saul Boulevard. By nine o’clock they had filled four boxes and found not a single reference to Ari Shamron, Herr Rudolf Heller, or the Office. Rosner, it seemed, had been a careful asset. He also had been a meticulous researcher and collector of intelligence. Contained in the rooms of the old canal house on the Groenburgwal was a remarkably detailed and frightening portrait of the radical Islamic networks operating in Amsterdam and beyond.

By ten o’clock they were all famished. Unwilling to suspend work, they decided on takeaway. Gabriel voted for kebabs, Sophie for Indonesian, and Lavon for Thai. After ten minutes of spirited debate, they resorted to drawing a name from one of Rosner’s old felt hats. Sophie did the honors. “Thai,” she said, smiling at Lavon. “Shall we draw again to see who has to go pick it up?”

“I’ll go,” said Gabriel. “There’s someone I need to have a word with.”

A gentle snow was falling when Gabriel stepped outside five minutes later. He stood for a moment atop Rosner’s iron steps, buttoning his overcoat against the cold, while scanning the street for signs of surveillance. It was deserted except for a single bundled soul, perched on a public bench on the opposite bank of the canal. He wore a threadbare woolen overcoat and a black-and-white checkered kaffiyeh for a scarf. His gray beard was unkempt and atop his head was the white kufi skullcap of a devout Muslim. Gabriel descended the steps and walked to the drawbridge at the end of the street. As he turned into the Staalstraat, he could hear footfalls on the cobblestones behind him. He swiveled his head deliberately and took a long, highly unprofessional look over his shoulder. The Muslim man who had been seated on the bench was now thirty yards behind and walking in the same direction. Two minutes later, as Gabriel passed Rosner’s memorial outside Café de Doelen, he looked over his shoulder a second time and saw that the man with the kufi and the kaffiyeh had cut the distance between them in half. He thought of the words Lavon had spoken to him earlier that afternoon at the Hotel Europa. Just try not to kill anyone while we’re in Amsterdam, Lavon had said. Gabriel had no intention of killing the man. He just wanted answers to two simple questions. Why had a devout Muslim spent the better part of the evening sitting outside Solomon Rosner’s house? And why was he now following Gabriel through the dark streets of Amsterdam?

The restaurant where Sophie Vanderhaus had placed the takeaway order was in the Leidsestraat, not far from the Koningsplein. Gabriel, after crossing the Amstel, should have gone to the right. He went left instead, into a narrow pedestrian lane lined with sex shops, American fast-food restaurants, and tiny Middle Eastern cafés. It was crowded in spite of the hour; even so, Gabriel had no trouble keeping track of his pursuer in the garish neon light.

The street emptied into the Rembrandtplein, but twenty yards before the busy square Gabriel turned into a darkened shoulder-width alley that led back to the river. The man with the kaffiyeh and the kufi paused at the mouth of the alley, as though reluctant to enter, then followed after him.

Gabriel removed the Beretta from its resting place at the small of his back and chambered a round. As he did so, he could almost hear Shamron’s voice echoing in his head: We do not wave our guns around in public like gangsters and make idle threats. When we take out our weapons we do so for one reason and one reason only. We start shooting. And we keep shooting until the target is dead. He slipped the gun into the pocket of his overcoat and walked on.

At the midpoint of the alley, the darkness was nearly impenetrable. Gabriel turned into a bisecting passageway and waited there with his hand wrapped around the butt of the Beretta. As the bearded man came past, Gabriel stepped from the alley and delivered a knifelike blow to his left kidney. The man’s legs buckled instantly, but before he could crumple to the ground, Gabriel seized hold of the kaffiyeh and hurled him hard against a graffiti-spattered brick wall. The look in the man’s eyes was one of genuine terror. Gabriel struck him again, this time in the solar plexus. As the man doubled over, Gabriel quickly searched him for weapons but found only a billfold and a small copy of the Quran.

“What do you want with me?” Gabriel asked in rapid Arabic.

The man managed only a single, wet cough.

“Answer me,” Gabriel said, “or I’ll keep hitting you until you do.”

The man lifted his hand and pleaded with Gabriel not to strike him again. Gabriel let go of him and took a step back. The man leaned against the wall and fought for breath.

“Who are you?” Gabriel asked. “And why are you following me?”

“I’m the person you’re looking for in Solomon Rosner’s files,” he said. “And I’ve come to help you.”

5

My name is Ibrahim.”

“Ibrahim what?”

“Ibrahim Fawaz.”

“You were a fool to follow me like that, Ibrahim Fawaz.”

“Obviously.”

They were walking along the darkened embankment of the Amstel River. Ibrahim had one hand pressed to his kidney and the other wrapped around Gabriel’s arm for support. A gritty snow had begun to fall and the air was suddenly brittle with the cold. Gabriel pointed to an open café and suggested they talk there. “Men like me don’t have coffee in places like that, especially in the company of men like you. This is not America. This is Amsterdam.” He swiveled his head a few degrees and glanced at Gabriel out of the corner of his eye. “You speak Arabic like a Palestinian. I suppose the rumors about Professor Rosner were true.”

“What rumors?”

“That he was a pawn of the Zionists and their Jewish supporters in America. That he was an Israeli spy.”

“Who said things like that?”

“The angry boys,” said Ibrahim. “And the imams, too. They’re worse than the young hotheads. They come from the Middle East. From Saudi Arabia. They preach Wahhabi Islam. The imam in our mosque told us that Professor Rosner deserved to die for what he had written about Muslims and the Prophet. I warned him to go into hiding, but he refused. He was very stubborn.”

Ibrahim stopped and leaned against the balustrade overlooking the sluggish black river. Gabriel looked at the Arab’s right hand and saw it was missing the last two fingers.

“Are you going to be sick?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Can you walk, Ibrahim? It’s better if we walk.”

The Arab nodded and they set off slowly along the riverbank. “I suppose you were the professor’s handler? That’s why you and your friend are digging frantically through his files.”

“What I’m doing inside his house is no business of yours.”

“Just do me a favor,” the Arab said. “If you come across my name, please do me the courtesy of dropping the document in question into the nearest shredder. I respected Professor Rosner very much, but I don’t want to end up like him. There are men in Amsterdam who will slit my throat if they knew I was helping him.”

“How long did you work for him?”

“A long time,” said Ibrahim. “But it wasn’t work. We were partners, Professor Rosner and I. We shared the same beliefs. We both believed the jihadists were destroying my religion. We both knew that if they weren’t stopped, they would destroy Holland, too.”

“Why work for Rosner? Why not the police?”

“Perhaps you can tell from my accent that I am Egyptian by birth. When one comes from Egypt, one has a natural fear of the police, secret or otherwise. I’ve lived in Holland for twenty-five years now. I am a citizen of this country, as are my wife and son. But to the Dutch police, and the rest of my countrymen, I will always be an allochtoon. An alien.”

“But you must have guessed Rosner was passing along some of your information to the police and the Dutch security service.”

“And to the Israeli secret service as well-or so it appears.” He looked at Gabriel and managed a sage smile. “I must confess that Israelis are not terribly popular in my home. My wife is a Palestinian. She fled to Egypt with her family in 1948 after al-Nakba and settled in Cairo. I’ve heard about the suffering of the Palestinian people every night at my dinner table for thirty-five years now. My son drank it with his mother’s milk. He is Egyptian and Palestinian, a volatile mix.”

“Is this the reason you followed me tonight, Ibrahim-to engage in a debate about the Palestinian Diaspora and the crimes of Israel ’s founders?”

“Perhaps another time,” the Egyptian said. “Forgive me, my friend. Now that you are no longer striking me, I was just trying to make polite conversation. I was a professor in Egypt before I immigrated to Holland. My wife and son accuse me of being a professor still. They’ve spent their lives listening to me lecture. I’m afraid they no longer tolerate me. When I get a chance to teach, I take it.”

“You were a teacher in Holland, too?”

“In Holland?” He shook his head. “No, in Holland I was a tool. We decided to leave Egypt in 1982 because we thought our son would have more opportunities here in the West. I was an educated man, but my education was an Egyptian education and so it was worthless here. I built roads until I ruined my back, then I got a job sweeping the streets of Rotterdam. Eventually, when I could no longer even push a broom, I went to work in a furniture factory in west Amsterdam. The plant supervisor made us work fourteen hours a day. Late one night, when I was falling asleep on my feet, I made a mistake with the circular saw.” He lifted his ruined hand for Gabriel to see. “During my recuperation I decided to put my time to good use by learning to speak proper Dutch. When the factory manager heard what I was doing, he told me not to waste my time, because one day soon all the allochtoonen would be going home. He was wrong, of course.”

A gust of wind blew pellets of snow into their faces. Gabriel turned up his coat collar. Ibrahim slipped his hand back into the pocket of his overcoat.

“Our children heard all the insults that were hurled at us by our Dutch hosts, too. They spoke better Dutch than we did. They were more attuned to the subtleties of Dutch culture. They saw the way the Dutch treated us and they were humiliated. They became angry and resentful, not only at the Dutch but at us, their parents. Our children are trapped between two worlds, not fully Arab, not quite Dutch. They inhabit the ghurba, the land of strangers, and so they seek shelter in a safe place.”

“Islam,” said Gabriel.

Ibrahim nodded his head and repeated, “Islam.”

“You still make furniture for a living, Ibrahim?”

He shook his head. “I retired several years ago. The Dutch state pays me a generous pension and even a bit of disability because of my two missing fingers. I manage to do a little work on the side. It’s good for my self-respect. It keeps me from growing old.”

“Where do you work now?”

“Three years ago the state gave us funding to open an Islamic community center in the Oud West section of the city. I took a part-time job there as counselor. I help new arrivals find their footing. I help our people learn to speak proper Dutch. And I keep an eye on our angry young men. That’s where I first heard the rumor about a plot to shoot down a Jewish airplane.” He glanced at Gabriel to see his reaction. “When I looked into the matter further, I found out it was more than just a rumor, and so I told Professor Rosner. You have me to thank for the fact that two hundred and fifty Jews weren’t blown to pieces over Schiphol Airport.”

A pair of middle-aged homosexual men came toward them along the embankment. Ibrahim slowed his pace and lowered his gaze reflexively toward the paving stones.

“I have another job as well,” he said when the men were gone. “I work for a friend in the Ten Kate Market selling pots and pans. He pays me a share of what I take in and lets me leave the stall to pray. There’s a small mosque around the corner on the Jan Hazenstraat. It’s called the al-Hijrah Mosque. It has a well-deserved reputation for the extremism of its imam. There are many young men at the al-Hijrah. Young men whose minds are filled with images of jihad and terror. Young men who speak of martyrdom and blood. Young men who look to Osama bin Laden as a true Muslim. These young men believe in takfir. You know this term? Takfir?”

Gabriel nodded. Takfir was a concept developed by Islamists in Egypt in the nineteen seventies, a theological sleight of hand designed to give the terrorists a sacred license to kill almost anyone they pleased in order to achieve their goals of imposing sharia and restoring the Caliphate. Its primary target was other Muslims. A secular Muslim leader who did not rule by sharia could be killed under takfir for having turned away from Islam. So could a citizen of a secular Islamic state or a Muslim residing in a Western democracy. To the takfiri, democracy was a heresy, for it supplanted the laws of God with the laws of man; therefore, Muslim citizens of a democracy were apostates and could be put to the sword. It was the concept of takfir that gave Osama bin Laden the right to fly airplanes into buildings or blow up embassies in Africa, even if many of his victims were Muslims. It gave the Sunni terrorists of Iraq the right to kill anyone they wanted in order to prevent democracy from taking root in Baghdad. And it gave Muslim boys born in Britain the right to blow themselves up on London subways and buses, even if some of the people they were taking to Paradise with them happened to be other Muslims who wished to remain on earth a little longer.

“There is a leader of these young men,” Ibrahim resumed. “He has not been in Amsterdam long-eighteen months, maybe a bit more. He is an Egyptian. He works in an Internet shop and phone center in the Oud West, but he likes to think of himself as an Islamist theoretician and a journalist. He claims to be a writer for Islamist magazines and websites.”

“His name?”

“Samir al-Masri-at least that’s what he calls himself. He claims to have connections to the mujahideen in Iraq. He tells our boys it is their sacred duty to go there and kill the infidels who have defiled Muslim lands. He lectures them about takfir and jihad. At night they gather in his apartment and read Sayyid Qutb and Ibn Taymiyyah. They download videos from the Internet and watch infidels being beheaded. They have taken trips together. A few of them went to Egypt with him. There is talk about Samir in the al-Hijrah. There usually is talk in the mosque, but this is different. Samir al-Masri is a dangerous man. If he is not al-Qaeda, then he is a close relative.”

“Where does he live?”

“On the Hudsonstraat. Number thirty-seven. Apartment D.”

“Alone?”

Ibrahim tugged thoughtfully at his beard and nodded his head.

“You told Solomon about Samir?”

“Yes, many months ago.”

“So why follow me tonight?”

“Because two days ago Samir and four other young men from the al-Hijrah Mosque disappeared.”

Gabriel stopped walking and looked at the Egyptian. “Where did they go?”

“I’ve been asking around, but no one seems to know.”

“Do you have the names of the other four men?”

The Egyptian handed Gabriel a slip of paper. “Find them,” he said. “Otherwise, I’m afraid buildings are going to fall.”

6

I was really looking forward to that Thai food,” said Eli Lavon.

“I’ll get you Thai food after we break into Samir’s apartment.”

“Please tell me where you’re going to get me Thai food at three in the morning.”

“I’m very resourceful.”

Gabriel rubbed a porthole in the fogged windshield and peered out toward the entrance of the Hudsonstraat. Lavon looked down and tugged at the buttons of his overcoat.

“We’re not supposed to use rental cars in operational situations unless they’re procured from clean sources.”

“I know, Eli.”

“We’re also not supposed to conduct break-ins and crash searches without proper backup or approval from King Saul Boulevard.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that.”

“You’re bending too many rules. That’s how mistakes happen. I was looking forward to spending the night at the Hotel Europa, not a Dutch holding cell.”

“Please tell me where I’m supposed to get a clean car and proper backup at three o’clock in the morning in Amsterdam.”

“So much for your resourcefulness.” Lavon stared gloomily out the window. “Look around, Gabriel. Have you ever seen so many satellite dishes?” He shook his head slowly. “They’re monuments to European naïveté. The Europeans thought they could take in millions of immigrants from the poorest regions of the Muslim world and turn them into good little social democrats in a single generation. And look at the results. For the most part the Muslims of Europe are ghettoized and seething with anger.”

Trapped between two worlds, thought Gabriel. Not fully Arab. Not quite Dutch. Lost in the land of strangers.

“This place has always been an incubator for violent ideologies,” Gabriel said. “Islamic extremism is just the latest virus to thrive in Europe ’s nurturing environment.”

Lavon nodded thoughtfully and blew into his hands. “You know, for a long time after I came back to Israel, I missed Vienna. I missed my coffeehouses. I missed walking down my favorite streets. But I’ve come to realize that this continent is dying a slow death. Europe is receding quietly into history. It’s old and tired, and its young are so pessimistic about the prospects of the future they refuse to have enough children to ensure their own survival. They believe in nothing but their thirty-five-hour workweek and their August vacation.”

“And their anti-Semitism,” said Gabriel.

“That’s the one thing about Vienna I never miss,” Lavon said. “The virus of modern anti-Semitism started here in Europe, but after the war it spread to the Arab world, where it mutated and grew stronger. Now Europe and the radical Muslims are passing it back and forth, infecting one another.” He looked at Gabriel. “And so here we are again, two nice Jewish boys sitting on a European street corner at three o’clock in the morning. My God, when will it end?”

“It’s never going to end, Eli. This is forever.”

Lavon pondered this notion in silence for a moment. “Have you given any thought to how you’re going to get into the apartment?” he asked.

Gabriel reached into his coat pocket and produced a small metal tool.

“I could never use one of those things,” Lavon said.

“I have better hands than you do.”

“Best hands in the business-that’s what Shamron always said. But I still don’t know what you think you’re going to find inside. If Samir and his cell are truly operational, the apartment will be sanitized.”

“You’d be surprised, Eli. Their masterminds are brilliant, but some of their foot soldiers aren’t exactly brain surgeons. They’re sloppy. They leave things laying around. They make little mistakes.”

“So do intelligence officers,” Lavon said. “Have you at least considered the possibility that we’re about to walk straight into a trap?”

“That’s what Berettas are for.”

Gabriel opened the door before Lavon could object again and climbed out of the car. They crossed the boulevard at an angle, pausing once to allow an empty streetcar to rattle past, and rounded the corner into the Hudsonstraat. It was a narrow side street lined with terraces of small tenement buildings. They were two levels in height and Orwellian in their uniformity and ugliness. At the front of each building was a small semicircular alcove with four separate doors, two leading to the apartments on the first floor and two leading to the apartments upstairs.

Gabriel stepped immediately into the alcove of Number 37 and, with Lavon at his back, went to work on the standard five-pin lock on the door for Apartment D. It surrendered ten seconds later. He slipped the lockpick into his pocket and removed the Beretta, then turned the latch and stepped inside. He stood motionless for a moment in the darkness, gun leveled in his outstretched hands, listening for the faintest sound or slightest suggestion of movement. Hearing nothing, he motioned for Lavon to come inside.

Lavon switched on a small Maglite and led the way into the sitting room. The furnishings were of flea market quality, the floor was cracked linoleum, and the walls were bare except for a single travel poster depicting the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Gabriel walked over to the long trestle table that served as Samir’s desk. It was empty except for a single yellow legal pad and a cheap desk lamp.

He switched on the lamp and examined the pad. Two-thirds of it had been used and the top page was blank. He moved his fingers over the surface and felt impressions. An amateur’s mistake. He handed the pad to Lavon, then took hold of the flashlight and shone it at an angle over the surface of the table. It was covered in a fine layer of dust except for a precise square in the center-the spot, Gabriel reckoned, where Samir’s computer had been before his flight from Amsterdam.

“Search the furniture cushions,” Gabriel said. “I’ll have a look around the rest of the flat.”

He went through a doorway into the kitchen. The debris of Samir’s final gathering with his acolytes from the al-Hijrah Mosque lay strewn across the linoleum countertops: empty takeaway containers, greasy paper plates, discarded plastic utensils, squashed teabags. Gabriel opened the refrigerator, a favorite terrorist storage space for explosives, and saw that it was empty. The same was true of all the cabinets. He looked in the cupboard beneath the sink and found nothing but an unopened container of kitchen cleaner. Samir, Islamic theoretician and spokesman for the jihadi cause, was a typical bachelor slob.

Gabriel paused for a moment in the sitting room to check on Lavon’s progress, then headed down a short hallway toward the back of the apartment. Samir’s bathroom was as appalling as the kitchen. Gabriel gave it a rapid search, then entered the bedroom. A stripped mattress lay slightly askew on the metal frame and the three drawers of the dresser were all partially open. Samir, it seemed, had packed in a hurry.

Gabriel removed the top drawer and dumped the remaining contents onto the bed. Threadbare underwear, mismatched socks, a book of matches from a discotheque in London ’s Leicester Square, an envelope from a photo-processing shop around the corner. Gabriel slipped the matches into his pocket, then opened the envelope and leafed through the prints. He saw Samir in Trafalgar Square and Samir with a member of the Queen’s Life Guard outside Buckingham Palace; Samir riding the Millennium Wheel and Samir outside the Houses of Parliament. The last photograph, Samir posing with four friends in front of the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, caused Gabriel’s heart to skip a beat.

Five minutes later he was walking calmly along the empty pavements of the Hudsonstraat, with the photographs in his pocket and Lavon at his side. “If the dates on the pictures are correct, it means Samir and his friends were in London four months ago,” he said. “Someone should probably go to London to have a word with our friends at MI5.”

“I can see where this is heading,” Lavon said. “You get to go to ride into London like a knight on a white horse and I get to go blind reading the rest of Solomon Rosner’s files.”

“At least you get to have your Thai food.”

“Why did you have to mention the Thai food?”

7

Gabriel had spent much of his life eluding the police forces and security services of Europe, and so it was with considerable reluctance that he agreed to be met at Heathrow Airport the following afternoon by MI5.

He spotted the three-man reception team as he came into the arrivals hall. It was not difficult; they were wearing matching mackintosh raincoats, and one was holding Gabriel’s photograph. He had been instructed to let the MI5 men make the approach, so he went to the information kiosk and spent several minutes pretending to scrutinize a list of London hotels. Finally, anxious to deliver his briefing before the terrorists struck, he walked over and introduced himself. The officer with the photograph took him by the arm and led him outside to a waiting Jaguar limousine. Gabriel smiled. He had always harbored a secret envy of British spies and their cars.

The rear window slid down a few inches and a long, boney hand beckoned him over. The hand was attached to none other than Graham Seymour, MI5’s long-serving and highly regarded deputy director general. He was in his late fifties now and had aged like fine wine. His Savile Row pin-striped suit fit him to perfection, and his full head of blond hair had a silvery cast to it that gave him the look of those male models one sees in advertisements for costly but needless trinkets. As Gabriel climbed into the car, Seymour appraised him silently for a moment with a pair of granite-colored eyes. He did not look pleased, but then few men in his position would. The Netherlands, France, Germany, and Spain all had their fair share of Muslim radicals, but among intelligence professionals there was little disagreement over which country was the epicenter of European Islamic extremism. It was the country Graham Seymour was sworn to protect: the United Kingdom.

Gabriel knew that the crisis now facing Britain was many years in the making and, to a large degree, self-inflicted. For two decades, beginning in the 1980s and continuing even after the attacks of 9/11, British governments both Labour and Tory had thrown open their doors to the world’s most hardened holy warriors. Cast out by countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria, they had come to London, where they were free to publish, preach, organize, conspire, and raise money. As a result, Great Britain, the land of John Locke, William Shakespeare, and Winston Churchill, had unwittingly allowed itself to become the primary incubator of a violent ideology that sought to destroy everything for which it had once stood. The British security and intelligence services, confronted by a gathering storm, had responded by choosing the path of accommodation rather than resistance. Extremism was tolerated so long as it was directed outward, toward the secular Arab regimes, America, and, of course, Israel. The failure of this policy of appeasement had been held up for all the world to see on July 7, 2005, when three bombs exploded inside the London Underground and a fourth tore a London city bus to shreds in Russell Square. Fifty-two people were killed and seven hundred more wounded. The perpetrators of this bloodbath were not destitute Muslims from abroad but middle-class British boys who had turned on the country of their birth. And all evidence suggested it was only their opening salvo. Her Majesty’s security services estimated the number of terrorists residing in Britain at sixteen thousand-three thousand of whom had actually trained in al-Qaeda camps-and recent intelligence suggested that the United Kingdom had eclipsed America and Israel as al-Qaeda’s primary target.

“It’s funny,” said Seymour, “but when we checked the manifest for the flight from Amsterdam we didn’t see anyone on the list named Gabriel Allon.”

“Obviously you didn’t look hard enough.”

The MI5 man held out his hand.

“Let’s not do this, Graham. Haven’t we more pressing matters to deal with than the name on my passport?”

“Give it to me.”

Gabriel surrendered his passport and stared out the window at the traffic rushing along the A4. It was 3:30 in the afternoon and already dark. No wonder the Arabs turned to radicals when they moved here, he thought. Perhaps it was light deprivation that drove them to jihad and terror.

Graham Seymour opened the passport and recited the particulars. “Heinrich Kiever. Place of birth, Berlin.” He looked up at Gabriel. “East or West?”

“Herr Kiever is definitely a man of the West.”

“We had an agreement, Allon.”

“Yes, I know.”

“It stated that we would grant you absolution for your multitude of sins in exchange for a simple commitment on your part-that you would inform us when you were coming to our fair shores and that you would refrain from conducting operations on our soil without obtaining our permission and cooperation beforehand.”

“I’m sitting in the back of an MI5 limousine. How much more cooperation and notification do you require?”

“What about the passport?”

“It’s nice, isn’t it?”

“Do the Germans know you’re abusing their travel documents?”

“We abuse yours, too, Graham. It’s what we do.”

“We don’t do it. SIS makes a point of traveling only on British or Commonwealth passports.”

“How sporting of them,” Gabriel said. “But it’s far easier to travel the world on a British passport than it is on an Israeli one. Safer, too. Take a trip to Syria or Lebanon some time on an Israeli passport. It’s an experience you’ll never forget.”

“Smart-ass.” Seymour handed the passport to Gabriel. “What were you doing in Amsterdam?”

“Some personal business.”

“Elaborate, please.”

“I’m afraid I can’t.”

“Did the Dutch know you were there?”

“Not exactly.”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“I always heard you were good, Graham.”

Seymour pulled his face into a fatigued frown, a sign that he’d had enough of the verbal sparring match. The inhospitality of his reception came as little surprise to Gabriel. The British services did not care much for the Office. They were Arabists by education, anti-Semites by breeding, and still resented the Jews for driving the Empire out of Palestine.

“What have you got for me, Gabriel?”

“I think an al-Qaeda cell from Amsterdam might have entered Britain in the last forty-eight hours with the intention of carrying out a major attack.”

“Just one cell?” Seymour quipped. “I’m sure they’ll feel right at home.”

“That bad, Graham?”

Seymour nodded his gray head. “At last count we were monitoring more than two hundred networks and separate groupings of known terrorists. Half our Muslim youth profess admiration for Osama bin Laden, and we estimate that more than one hundred thousand supported the attacks on the London transport system, which means they have a very large pool of potential recruits from which to draw in the future. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t sound the alarm just because another cell of Muslim fanatics has decided to put ashore.”

“Maybe it isn’t just another cell, Graham. Maybe they’re the real thing.”

“They’re all the real thing,” Seymour said. “You said you think they’re here. Does that mean you’re not sure?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“So let me make sure I understand correctly. I have sixteen thousand known Islamic terrorists residing in my country, but I’m supposed to divert manpower and resources into finding a cell that you think might be in Britain?” Greeted by silence, Graham Seymour answered his own question. “If it were anyone but you, I’d pull over and let him out. But you do have something of a track record, don’t you? What makes you think they might be here?”

Gabriel handed him the envelope of photographs.

“This is all you have? Some snapshots of Ahmed’s holiday in London? No train tickets? No rental car receipts? No e-mail intercepts? No visual or audio surveillance?”

“They were here on a surveillance mission four months ago. And his name isn’t Ahmed. It’s Samir.”

“Samir what?”

“Samir al-Masri, Hudsonstraat 37, Oud West, Amsterdam.”

Seymour looked at the photo of Samir standing in front of the Houses of Parliament. “Is he Dutch?”

“Egyptian, as far we know.”

“As far as you know? What about the other members of this phantom cell? You have any names?”

Gabriel handed him a slip of paper with the other names Ibrahim Fawaz had given him in Amsterdam. “Based on what we know, the cell was operating out of the al-Hijrah Mosque on the Jan Hazenstraat in west Amsterdam.”

“And you’re sure he’s Egyptian?”

“That’s the flag he was flying in Amsterdam. Why?”

“Because we’ve been picking up some chatter recently among some of our more radical Egyptian countrymen.”

“What sort of chatter?”

“Blowing up buildings, bringing down bridges and airplanes, killing a few thousand people on the Underground-you know, the usual things people discuss over tea and biscuits.”

“Where’s it coming from?”

Seymour hesitated, then said, “ Finsbury Park.”

“But of course.”

There was perhaps no more appropriate symbol of Britain ’s current predicament than the North London Central Mosque, known commonly as the Finsbury Park mosque. Built in 1990 with money donated by the king of Saudi Arabia, it was among the most radical in Europe. Richard Reid, the infamous shoe-bomber, had passed through its doors; so had Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called twentieth hijacker, and Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian terrorist who was arrested shortly before the millennium for plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. British police raided the mosque in January 2003-inside they discovered such sacred items as forged passports, chemical-protective suits, and a stun gun-and eventually it was turned over to new leadership. It was later revealed that one member of the new board of trustees was a former Hamas terror mastermind from the West Bank. When the former terrorist gave the British government assurances that he was now a man of peace, he was permitted to remain in his post.

“So you think Samir is the cell leader?”

“That’s what my source tells me.”

“Has your source ever been right in the past?”

“Do you remember that plot to shoot down an El Al jetliner at Schiphol last year?”

“The one that the Dutch broke up?”

“The Dutch didn’t break it up, Graham. We broke it up, with the help of this same source.”

Seymour looked down at the photographs. “It’s not much to go on,” he said, “but I’m afraid it does fit the profile of a major attack scenario we’ve developed.”

“What sort of scenario?”

“An action cell based abroad, working with surveillance and support cells buried within the local community here. The action cell members train and prepare in a place where we can’t monitor them, then come ashore at the last minute, so we have no time to find them and disrupt their plans. Obviously it would take complex planning and a skilled mastermind to pull it off.” He held up the snapshots. “Can I keep these?”

“They’re yours.”

“I’ll have Immigration run the names and see if your boys have actually entered the country, and I’ll give copies of the pictures to our colleagues in the Anti-Terrorist Branch of Scotland Yard. If the Metropolitan Police deem the threat credible, they might put a few more men at some of the sites al-Masri visited.”

“What about raising the overall threat level?” Gabriel asked. “What about stepping up the surveillance of your local Egyptian radicals in Finsbury Park?”

“We’re not like our American brethren. We don’t like to move the needle on the threat meter each time we get nervous. We find it only serves to make the British public more cynical. As for our local Egyptians, we’re watching them closely enough already.”

“I hope so.”

“How long are you planning to stay in London?”

“Just tonight.”

Seymour handed him a business card. It had nothing on it but a telephone number. “It’s for my mobile. Call me if you pick up anything else in Amsterdam. Can I drop you at your hotel?”

“No thanks, Graham.”

“How about your safe flat?”

“Our embassy would be fine. I’m going to have a quiet word with our local chief of station and the head of embassy security to make sure we take appropriate measures.”

“Give my best to your station chief. And tell him to behave himself.”

“Is it your intention to follow me after I leave the embassy?”

“I don’t have the spare manpower or I would.”

He was lying, of course. Honor among spies went only so far.

Gabriel’s meetings at the embassy ran longer than expected. The chief of security had turned what should have been a five-minute briefing into an hour-long question-and-answer period, while the Office’s chief of station had used a routine courtesy call as an opportunity to try to impress the man he clearly assumed would one day be his boss. The debacle was made complete at six, when the ambassador appeared without warning and insisted Gabriel accompany him to dinner in Knightsbridge. Gabriel had no excuse at the ready and was forced to endure a painfully boring evening discussing the intricacies of Israel ’s ties to the United Kingdom. Throughout the meal he thought often of Eli Lavon quietly reading files in snowy Amsterdam and wished that he was still there with him.

It was after ten o’clock by the time he finally entered the Office safe flat on the Bayswater Road overlooking Hyde Park. He left his bag in the entrance hall and quickly took stock of his surroundings. It was simply furnished, as most safe flats were, and rather large by London standards. Housekeeping had left food in the fridge and a 9mm Beretta in the pantry, along with a spare magazine and two boxes of ammunition.

Gabriel loaded the gun and carried it with him into the bedroom. It had been three days since he’d had a proper night’s sleep and it had taken all his training and substantial powers of concentration to get through dinner with the ambassador without falling asleep over his coq au vin. He undressed quickly and climbed into bed, then switched on the television and turned the volume down very low so that if there was an attack in the night he would be awakened by the news bulletins. He wondered whether the Metropolitan Police had acted yet on the information he’d brought from Amsterdam. Two hundred active terror networks, sixteen thousand known terrorists, three thousand men who had been through the training camps of al-Qaeda… MI5 and the Met had more to worry about than five boys from Amsterdam. He’d sensed something in Graham Seymour’s demeanor that afternoon, a resignation that it was only a matter of time before London was hit again.

Gabriel was reaching for the light when he noticed Samir’s yellow legal pad poking from the side flap of his overnight bag. Probably nothing there, he thought, but he knew himself well enough to realize that he would never be able to sleep unless he made certain. He found a pencil in the top drawer of the bedside table and spent the next ten minutes rubbing it gently over the surface of the pad. Samir’s secrets came slowly to life before his eyes. Pine trees on a mountaintop, sand dunes in a desert, a spider web of bisecting lines. Samir al-Masri, jihadist and bachelor slob, was a doodler.

8

The telephone woke him. Like all phones in Office safe flats, it had a flashing light to indicate incoming calls. This one was luminous blue. It was as if a squad car had driven into his bedroom on silent approach.

“Are you awake?” asked Ari Shamron.

“I am now.”

“Sleeping in?”

Gabriel squinted at his wristwatch. “It’s seven in the morning.”

“It’s nine here.”

The vagaries of international time zones had always meant little to Shamron. He assumed every Office employee, no matter his location on the planet, rose and slept in harmony with him. Inside the Office the phenomenon was known as “Shamron Central Time.”

“How did your meeting with Graham Seymour go?”

“Remind me never to use my Heinrich Kiever passport to enter Britain again.”

“Did he act on the information you gave him?”

“He seems to have bigger headaches than a few boys from west Amsterdam.”

“He does.”

“We’re going to have to bring the Dutch into the picture at some point.”

“As soon as Eli is finished purging Rosner’s archives, we’ll summon the Dutch liaison officer in Tel Aviv and have a quiet word with him.”

“Just make sure we protect our source. He’s someone we need to slip in our back pocket for a rainy day.”

“Don’t worry-it will be a very quiet word.”

“My plane arrives in Amsterdam in the early afternoon. If Eli and I work through the night, we should be finished by morning.”

“I’m afraid Eli will have to finish the job without you. You’re not going back to Amsterdam.”

“Where am I going?”

“Home,” said Shamron. “A bodel will collect you in an hour and take you to Heathrow. And don’t get off the plane looking like something the cat dragged in, the way you usually do. We’re having dinner together tonight at Kaplan Street.”

Kaplan Street was the address of the Prime Minister’s Office.

“Why are we having dinner there?”

“If it’s all the same with you, I’d rather not discuss our highest affairs of state and intelligence while the eavesdroppers of MI5 and GCHQ are trying to listen in.”

“It’s a secure phone.”

“There’s no such thing,” Shamron said. “Just make sure you’re on that plane. If you get stuck in traffic, call me from the car. I’ll have El Al hold the plane for you.”

“You wouldn’t.”

The line went dead. Gabriel placed the receiver back in the cradle. We’re having dinner together tonight at Kaplan Street… He supposed he knew what the topic of conversation would be. Apparently Amos didn’t have long to live. He looked at the television screen. Three telegenic young people were engaged in a deeply serious discussion about the sexual antics of Britain ’s most famous footballer. Gabriel groped for the remote control and instead found Samir’s legal pad. Then he remembered waking in the middle of the night and gazing at the image-not the pine trees and the sand dunes but the pattern of crisscrossing lines.

He looked at it again now. Gabriel had been blessed with near-perfect visual recall, a skill enhanced by his study of art history and his work as a restorer. He had hundreds of thousands of paintings stored in the file rooms of his memory and could authenticate a work simply by examining a few brushstrokes. He was convinced the lines were not random but part of a pattern-and he was certain he had seen the pattern somewhere before.

He went into the kitchen and made coffee, then carried his cup over to the window. It was beginning to get light, and the London morning rush was in full force. A woman who looked too much like his former wife was standing on the corner, waiting for the light to change. When it did, she crossed the Bayswater Road and disappeared into Hyde Park.

Hyde Park …

He looked at the notepad, then looked out the window again.

Was it possible?

He walked over to the desk and opened the top drawer. Inside was a London A-Z street atlas. He took it out and opened it to map number 82. It showed the northeast corner of Hyde Park and the surrounding streets of Mayfair, Marylebone, Bayswater, and St. John’s Wood. The footpaths of the park were represented with dotted lines. Gabriel compared the pattern to Samir’s markings on the legal pad.

They matched perfectly.

Hyde Park …

But why would a terrorist want to attack a park?

He thought of the pictures he’d found in Samir’s flat: Samir in Trafalgar Square. Samir with a member of the Queen’s Life Guard outside Buckingham Palace. Samir riding the Millennium Wheel. Samir outside the Houses of Parliament. Samir with four friends posing in front of the American embassy in Grosvenor Square…

He looked at the map in the London A-Z again. Grosvenor Square was two blocks east of the park in Mayfair. He picked up the telephone and dialed.

“Graham Seymour.”

“I want you to warn the Americans about the Amsterdam cell.”

“What Amsterdam cell?”

“Come on, Graham-there isn’t time.”

“Immigration spent the night looking for them. So far they’ve come up with no evidence to suggest any of the men whose names you gave me are even in the country.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re not here.”

“Why do you think they’re going to go after the Americans?”

Gabriel told him.

“You want me to sound the alarm at Grosvenor Square because of some lines on a legal pad?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not going to do that. There’s not enough evidence to support making a call like that. Besides, have you been to Grosvenor Square lately? It’s an American fortress now. A terrorist can’t get close to that building.”

“Call them, Graham. If you don’t, I will.”

“Listen to me, Allon, and listen very carefully. If you make a mess of my town, so help me God, I’ll-”

Gabriel severed the connection and dialed another number.

9

The streets at the northern end of posh Mayfair have a distinctly American flavor. Tucked amid the stately Georgian buildings one can find the headquarters of the American Chamber of Commerce, the American Club, the American Church, the American Society, and the Society of American Women. Along the northern side of Grosvenor Square is the U.S. Navy building, and on the western side stands the American embassy. Nine stories in height and adorned by a monstrous gilded eagle, it is one of the largest American diplomatic missions in the world and the only one to reside on land not owned by the federal government. The Duke of Westminster, who owns most of Mayfair, leases the property to the American government for the very reasonable sum of a single peppercorn a year. There is little danger the Americans will be evicted from their patch of Mayfair any time soon, since the lease on the property does not expire until Christmas Day in the year 2953.

Fifty-eight men and a single woman have served as the American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s-including five who would become president-but only one has ever come from the ranks of the career Foreign Service. The rest have been political appointees and diplomatic debutants, known more for their money and connections than their foreign policy expertise. Their names read like an honor roll of American high society and wealth: Mellon, Kennedy, Harriman, Aldrich, Bruce, Whitney, and Annenberg.

The current American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Robert Carlyle Halton, was not born to wealth, and few Americans knew his name, though he was by far the richest man to ever occupy the post and his political connections were second to none. The president and CEO of the Denver-based Red Mountain Energy, Halton’s personal fortune exceeded five billion dollars at last estimate. He also happened to be a lifelong friend of the president of the United States and his largest political donor. The Washington Post, in a rather unflattering profile of Halton published shortly after his nomination, declared that he “had pulled off the extraordinary political feat of putting his best friend in the White House.” When asked about the accuracy of the report during his confirmation hearings, Halton said he only wished he had been able to give the president more money, a remark that had cost him several Democratic votes.

Despite the fact Robert Halton was no longer responsible for a global energy empire, he remained an early riser and kept a rigorous daily schedule that was far more punishing than those of his predecessors. As usual that morning, he had left Winfield House, his official residence in Regent’s Park, at the thoroughly undiplomatic hour of 6:45, and by seven he was leafing through the London papers at his desk overlooking Grosvenor Square. The pages were filled with dire news from Iraq. Halton was convinced the British, who had already made drastic cuts to their troop levels in Iraq, would soon be looking for the exits entirely, an assessment he had given directly to the president during their last meeting at Halton’s sprawling Owl Creek estate in Aspen. Halton hadn’t minced words during the meeting. He rarely did.

At 7:10, a tall young woman dressed in a cold-weather tracksuit and fleece headband appeared in his doorway. She had long dark hair, pale green eyes set in an attractive face, and a trim athletic figure. Without waiting for permission to enter, she crossed the room and sat on the arm of Halton’s chair. It was a gesture of obvious intimacy, one that might have raised eyebrows among the embassy staff were it not for the fact that the attractive woman’s name was Elizabeth Halton. She kissed the ambassador’s cheek and smoothed his head of thick gray hair.

“Good morning, Daddy,” she said. “Anything interesting in the papers?”

Robert Halton held up the Times. “The mayor of London is angry at me again.”

“What’s eating Red Ken now?”

Halton’s relations with London’s infamously left-wing mayor were frosty at best-hardly surprising, given the fact that the mayor had expressed compassion for the suicide bombers of Hamas and had once publicly embraced a Muslim Brotherhood leader who had called for the murder of Jews and other infidels.

“He says our security is causing major disruptions to the flow of traffic throughout Mayfair,” Robert Halton said. “He wants us to pay a congestion tax. He’s suggesting I pay for it out of my personal funds. He’s quite sure I won’t miss the money.”

“You won’t.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Shall I have a word with him?”

“I wouldn’t inflict that on my worst enemy.”

“I can be a charmer.”

“He doesn’t deserve you, darling.”

Robert Halton smiled and stroked his daughter’s cheek. The two had been nearly inseparable since the death of Halton’s wife five years earlier in a private-plane crash in northern Alaska -so inseparable, in fact, that Halton had refused to accept the president’s offer to become his envoy to London until first making certain Elizabeth would accompany him. While most young women would have leaped at the chance to live in London as the daughter of the American ambassador, Elizabeth had been reluctant to leave Colorado. She was one of the most highly regarded emergency-room surgeons in Denver and was discussing marriage with a successful real estate developer. She had wavered for several weeks, until one evening, while on duty at Denver ’s Rose Medical Center, she had received a call from the White House on her mobile phone. “I need your father in London,” the president had said. “What do I have to say to you to make that happen?”

Few people were better positioned to turn down a request from the commander in chief than Elizabeth Halton. She had known the president her entire life. She had skied with him in Aspen and hunted deer with him in Montana. She had been toasted by him on the day she graduated from medical school and comforted by him on the day her mother was buried. But she had not turned him down, of course, and upon her arrival in London had thrown herself into the assignment with the same determination and skill with which she approached every other challenge in life. She ruled Winfield House with an iron hand and was nearly always on her father’s arm at official events and important social affairs. She did volunteer work in London hospitals-especially those that served the poor immigrant communities-and was a skillful public advocate for American policy in Iraq and the broader war on terror. She was as popular with the London press as her father was loathed, despite the fact that the Guardian had published a little-known fact that Elizabeth, for reasons of security, had tried to keep secret. The president of the United States was her godfather.

“Why don’t you skip the newspapers this morning and come out for a run with us?” She patted his midsection. “You’re starting to put on weight again.”

“I’m having coffee with the foreign secretary at nine. And don’t forget we’re having drinks at Downing Street tonight.”

“I won’t forget.”

Robert Halton folded his newspaper and looked at his daughter seriously.

“I want you and your friends to be careful out there. NCTC raised the threat level in Europe yesterday.”

NCTC was the National Counterterrorism Center.

“Anything specific?”

“It was vague. Heightened activity among known al-Qaeda cells. The usual crap. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore it. Take a couple Marines with you for good measure.”

“The Marines are only supposed to guard the embassy itself. If they start leaving the premises, Scotland Yard will throw a fit. And I’ll be back on the treadmill in the gym.”

“There’s no law against American Marines running in Hyde Park -at least, not yet. I suppose if Red Ken has his way there will be soon.” He tossed the newspaper onto his desk. “What’s on your calendar for today?”

“A conference on African health care issues and afternoon tea at the Houses of Parliament.”

“Still glad we came to London?”

“I wouldn’t have traded it for the world.” She stood up and headed toward the door. “Give my best to the foreign secretary.”

“Don’t forget drinks at Downing Street.”

“I won’t forget.”

Elizabeth left her father’s office and rode the elevator down to the atrium. Four other people, attired as she was in cold-weather athletic suits, were already there: Jack Hammond, the embassy’s public affairs officer; Alex Baker, an FBI special agent who served as legal affairs liaison, Paul Foreman from Consular, and Chris Petty from the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Petty served as London ’s Regional Security Officer, which meant he was responsible for the safety of the embassy and its staff. Two of Petty’s assistant RSOs arrived a moment later. Their matching blue tracksuits did little to conceal the fact that they were powerfully built and well armed.

“Where’s Kevin?” Elizabeth asked.

Kevin Barnett, the CIA’s deputy chief of station, rarely missed the morning run when he was in town.

“Stuck in his office,” said Chris Petty.

“Anything to do with that NCTC alert?”

Petty smiled. “How did you know about that?”

“I’m the ambassador’s daughter, Chris.”

Alex Baker looked at his watch. “Let’s get rolling. I have a nine o’clock at New Scotland Yard.”

They headed outside and slipped through a gate in the north fence reserved for embassy personnel. A moment later they were jogging west along Upper Brook Street, heading for Hyde Park.

The Ford Transit panel van was painted forest green and bore a stencil on the side that read: ADDISON amp; HODGE LTD. ROYAL PARKS CON-TRACTORS. The van did not belong to Addison amp; Hodge but was a meticulously produced forgery, just like a second one already inside Hyde Park. As the group of Americans came trotting along Upper Brook Street, the man behind the wheel watched them calmly, then pressed a button on his mobile phone and brought it to his ear. The conversation he conducted was coded and brief. When it was over he slipped the phone into the pocket of his coverall-also a forgery-and started the engine. He entered the park through a restricted access point and made his way to a stand of trees north of the Serpentine lake. A sign read AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY, and warned of heavy fines for violators. The man behind the wheel climbed out and started collecting rubbish, praying softly to himself while he worked. In the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful…master of the day of judgment…show us the straight path…

10

Later, during the inevitable Congressional inquiry, much emphasis would be placed on determining precisely when and how the intelligence services of the United States first became aware of the calamity about to befall London. The answer was 2:32 A.M. local time, when a telephone call from an individual identified only as an FIS, or “foreign intelligence source,” arrived on an emergency line in the seventh-floor executive suite of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The foreign intelligence source, though never identified, was Gabriel, and the emergency line he dialed belonged to none other than Adrian Carter, the CIA’s deputy director of operations. In normal times, the call would have been automatically transferred to Carter’s home in nearby McLean. But these were hardly normal times, and, in spite of the appalling hour, Carter was standing in the window of his office anxiously awaiting word on the outcome of a sensitive operation under way in the mountains of Pakistan.

Aside from the grand view toward the Potomac, there was little about Carter’s lair to suggest it belonged to one of the most powerful members of Washington ’s vast intelligence establishment. Nor would one have guessed as much from Carter’s rather churchy appearance. Only a handful of people in Washington knew that Adrian Carter spoke seven languages fluently and could understand at least seven more. Or that Carter, before his ascension to the rarified atmosphere of Langley ’s seventh floor, had been one of his nation’s most faithful clandestine warriors. His fingerprints were on every major American covert operation of the last generation. He’d tinkered with the odd election, toppled the odd government, and turned a blind eye to more executions and murders than he could count. Morality had rarely entered into Carter’s calculus. Carter was Operations. Carter didn’t make policy, he simply carried it out. How else to explain that, within the span of a single year, he’d done the Lord’s work in Poland and propped up the Devil’s regime in Salvador? Or that he’d showered dollars and Stingers on the Muslim holy warriors in Afghanistan, even though he knew one day they would rain fire and death on him.

These days, longevity was Carter’s most notable achievement. The sages of Langley liked to joke that the war on terror had claimed more lives in the Operations Directorate than in the top ranks of al-Qaeda. Not Carter’s, though. He had survived the blood purges and the nights of long knives and even the horrors of reorganization. The secret to his endurance lay in the fact that he had been right far more often than he had been wrong. In the summer of 2001, he had warned that al-Qaeda was planning a major attack on American soil. In the winter of 2003, he had cautioned that some of the sources regarding Iraq ’s weapons program were suspect, only to be overruled by his director. And as war loomed in Mesopotamia, he had written a secret memorandum forecasting that Iraq would become another Afghanistan, a proving ground for the next generation of jihadists, a generation that would ultimately be more violent and unpredictable than the last. Carter laid claim to no special powers of analysis, only a clarity of thinking when it came to the intentions of his enemy. Fifteen years earlier, in a mud hut outside Peshawar, a man with a turban and a beard had told him that one day the forces of Islam would turn America to ashes. Carter had believed him.

And so it was this Carter-Carter the secret warrior, Carter the survivor, Carter the pessimist-who, in the early morning of that ill-fated Friday in December, wearily brought his telephone to his ear expecting news from a distant land. Instead he heard the voice of Gabriel, warning that there was about to be an attack in London. And Carter believed him.

Carter jotted down Gabriel’s number, then severed the connection and immediately dialed the operations desk at the National Counterterrorism Center.

“How credible is the information?” the duty officer asked.

“Credible enough for me to be calling you at two thirty-four in the morning.” Carter tried to keep his temper in check. “Get the RSO at the embassy on the phone immediately and tell him to put the entire compound and staff on lockdown until we get a better handle on the situation.”

Carter hung up before the duty officer could pose another inane question and sat there for a moment, feeling utterly helpless. To hell with the NCTC, he thought. He would take matters into his own hands. He dialed the CIA station at the London embassy and a moment later was talking directly to Kevin Barnett, the deputy COS. Barnett, when he spoke for the first time, sounded deeply shaken.

“There’s a group of embassy personnel that does a run in Hyde Park every morning.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m usually one of them.”

“Who else goes?”

“The chief press officer, the FBI liaison, the Regional Security Officer…”

“Jesus Christ,” Carter snapped.

“It gets worse.”

“How much worse?”

“Elizabeth Halton.”

“The ambassador’s daughter?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“What time do they leave?”

“Seven-fifteen sharp.”

Carter looked at his watch. It was 7:36 in London.

“Get them back inside the embassy, Kevin. Run over to Hyde Park and do it yourself if you have to.”

The next sound Carter heard was the sound of the deputy COS in London slamming down the phone. Carter hung up, waited ten seconds, and called Gabriel back.

“I think I may have a group of diplomats running in Hyde Park at the moment,” he said. “How quickly can you get down there?”

Carter heard another click.

They had entered the park through Brook Gate, headed south along Broad Walk to Hyde Park Corner, then westward along Rotten Row, past the Rose Garden and the Dell. Elizabeth Halton moved to the front of the pack when they reached the Albert Memorial; then, with a DS agent at her side, she steadily increased the pace as they headed north up Lancaster Walk to Bayswater Road. Jack Hammond, the embassy spokesman, slipped past Elizabeth and pushed the pace hard to Victoria Gate, then down the West Carriage Drive to the shore of the Serpentine. As they approached the boathouses, a mobile phone began to ring. It belonged to Chris Petty, the RSO.

They looked like ordinary rolling suitcases. They were not. The sides and wheels had been reinforced to accommodate the weight of the explosives, and the buttons on the collapsible handles had been wired to the detonators. The bags were now in the possession of four men who, at that moment, were approaching four separate targets: the Underground stations at Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, Charing Cross, and Marble Arch. The men knew nothing of each other but had much in common. All four were Egyptian. All four were takfiri Muslims who embraced death as much as the infidels loved life. And all four were wearing Seiko digital watches that would sound an alarm at precisely 7:40 A.M.

It took two minutes for Gabriel to dress and get the Beretta and another minute to make his way downstairs to the street. The traffic signal along the Bayswater Road was blinking red when he arrived. He ignored it and sprinted through the oncoming traffic into the park. Just then he heard the rumble of an explosion deep underground and felt the earth shift suddenly beneath his feet. He stopped for a moment, uncertain of what he had just heard and felt, then turned and raced toward the center of the park.

Chris Petty slowed to a stop and pulled the phone out of the clip attached to the waist of his sweatpants.

“You guys go ahead,” he called out. “Take the usual route. I’ll catch up if I can.”

The rest of the group turned away from the shore of the Serpentine and headed into the stand of trees north of the lake. Petty looked at the caller ID screen. It was his office inside the embassy. He opened the phone and brought it quickly to his ear.

“Petty.”

Static…

“This is Chris Petty. Can you hear me?”

Silence…

“Shit.”

He killed the connection and set off after the others. Twenty seconds later the phone rang again. This time, when he raised it to his ear, the connection was perfect.

The man in the Addison amp; Hodge uniform collecting rubbish along the pathway looked up as the group of runners turned onto the footpath leading from the Old Police House to the Reformers’ Tree. The second false Addison amp; Hodge van was parked on the opposite side of the path, and another uniformed man was scratching at the earth with a rake. They had been preparing for this moment for over a year. Thirty seconds, the operational planner had said. If it lasts more than thirty seconds, you’ll never make it out of the park alive. The man reached into the plastic rubbish bag he was holding in his hand and felt something metallic and cold: a Heckler amp; Koch MP7 machine pistol, loaded with forty armor-piercing rounds. He blindly thumbed the fire-selector switch to the proper setting and counted slowly to ten.

Whether it was by design or accident, Chris Petty failed to terminate the telephone call from the embassy before setting off in pursuit of his colleagues. He saw them almost immediately after making the turn at the Old Police House. They had covered about half the distance to the Reformers’ Tree and were approaching a pair of forest green Ford Transit vans parked along the edge of the path. It was not unusual to see workmen in the park early in the morning-Hyde Park was 350 acres in size and required near-constant care and maintenance-but their true purpose was revealed a few seconds later when the rear cargo doors swung open and eight well-armed men in black jumpsuits and balaclava hoods poured out. Petty’s futile warning shouts were heard and recorded inside the RSO ops center, as was the sound of gunfire and screaming that followed. Petty was hit ten seconds after the initial burst and his death agonies were captured on the center’s digital recorders. He managed to say only one word before succumbing to his wounds, though it would be several minutes before his stricken colleagues inside the embassy understood its meaning. Gardeners…

Gabriel heard the first shots while he was still in the open ground at the northern edge of the park. He drew his Beretta as he sprinted into the trees, then stopped on the footpath and looked in the direction of the Reformers’ Tree. Fifty yards away was a scene from his nightmares: bodies on the ground, men in black jumpsuits pulling a struggling woman toward the back of a waiting van. He raised the gun but stopped himself. Was this truly the attack or had he stumbled into a police drill or the set of an action film? Were the men in black really terrorists or were they police officers or actors? The closest body lay thirty yards away. On the ground next to the man were a mobile phone and a SIG-Sauer P226 9mm pistol. Gabriel crept quickly to the fallen man’s side and knelt beside him. The blood and bullet wounds were real, as was the look of death in the man’s frozen eyes. He knew then that this was not a drill or a film set. It was the attack he had feared, and it was unfolding before his eyes.

The terrorists had not noticed him. Gabriel, still on one knee, leveled the Beretta in both hands and took aim at one of the black-suited men pulling the woman toward the van. It was thirty yards, a shot he had made countless times before. He squeezed his trigger twice in quick succession, tap-tap, just as he had been trained to do. An instant later there was a flash of pink and the man spiraled lifelessly to the ground, like a toy released by the hand of a child. Gabriel moved his aim a degree to the right and fired again. Another flash of blood and brain tissue. Another attacker gone.

This time there was answering fire. Gabriel rolled off the footpath and took cover behind the trunk of a tree as a hailstorm of gunfire tore the bark to shreds. When the firing stopped, he pivoted from behind the tree and saw that the terrorists had succeeded in getting the woman into the back of the van. One was closing the rear cargo door; the others were scurrying toward the second van. Gabriel took aim at the one closing the door and fired. The first shot hit the terrorist in the left shoulder blade, spinning him around. The second struck in the center of the chest.

The vans shot forward and started across the broad green, toward Marble Arch and the busy intersection at the northeast corner of the park. Gabriel rose to his feet and sprinted after them, then stopped and fired several shots into the back of the van that he knew contained only terrorists. The vans continued toward the perimeter of the park. Gabriel gave chase for a few more seconds; then, realizing he could not possibly close the gap, he turned and ran back to the site of the assault.

Nine bodies lay scattered over the blood-soaked footpath. The six Americans were all dead, as were the two terrorists that Gabriel had taken down with head shots. The one who a moment ago had been forcing the woman into the back of the van now lay gasping for breath, blood pouring from the mouth of his balaclava. Gabriel kicked the machine pistol from his grasp and tore the hood from his head. The face staring up at him was vaguely familiar. Then he realized it was Samir al-Masri, the Egyptian from west Amsterdam.

The Egyptian’s eyes were beginning to lose focus. Gabriel wanted something from him before he died. He lifted the Egyptian by the front of his jumpsuit and slapped him hard across the face.

“Where are they taking her, Samir? Tell me what you’re going to do with the girl!”

The eyes focused for a moment.

“How do you know my name?”

“I know everything, Samir. Where are they taking the girl?”

He managed a mocking smile. “If you know everything, then why are you asking me?”

Gabriel hit him again, harder this time, and shook him so violently he feared he may have broken his neck. It didn’t matter. Samir was dying. Gabriel pointed the gun into his face and screamed, “Where are they taking her, you motherfucker! Tell me before I blow your head off!”

But Samir only smiled again, not a mocking smile but the sublime grin of a man who had achieved his desire to die. Gabriel had brought him to death’s doorway and was only too happy to see him through to the other side. He placed the barrel of the Beretta to the terrorist’s face and was about to pull the trigger when he heard a voice behind him shouting: “Drop the gun and put your hands in the air.”

Gabriel released the Egyptian, then laid the Beretta on the ground and slowly raised his hands. His memory of what transpired next would be vague at best. He remembered being driven forward into the ground and could recall the sight of Samir’s dead eyes staring into this own. Then someone hit him in the back of the head, a heavy blow that seemed to split his skull in two. He felt a burst of excruciating pain and saw a flash of brilliant light. Then he saw a woman, a woman in a dark blue tracksuit, being led into a valley of ashes by murderers in black hoods.

The telephone call arrived in the Family Quarters on the second floor of the White House at 3:14 A.M. The president snatched the receiver from the cradle after the first ring and brought it quickly to his ear. He immediately recognized the voice at the other end of the line: Cyrus Mansfield, his national security advisor.

“I’m afraid there’s been another attack in London, Mr. President.”

“How bad?”

Mansfield answered the question to the best of his ability. The president closed his eyes and whispered, “My God.”

“The British are doing everything they can to seal off London and prevent them from escaping,” Mansfield said. “But as you might expect, the situation is extremely chaotic.”

“Activate the Situation Room. I’ll be downstairs in five minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

The president hung up the phone and sat up in bed. When he switched on the bedside lamp, his wife stirred and looked at his face. She had seen the expression before.

“How bad?” she asked.

“ London has been hit again.” He hesitated. “And Elizabeth Halton has been taken hostage.”