Portrait of a Spy
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“Oh, no,” Carter agreed. “Yemen is well on its way to becoming the next Afghanistan. For now, we’ve been content to lob the occasional Hellfire missile over the border. But it’s only a matter of time before we have to put boots on the ground and drain the swamp.” He glanced at Gabriel and added, “There actually are swamps in Yemen, by the way—a string of marshes along the coastline that produce malarial mosquitoes the size of buzzards. My God, what a dreadful place.”
Carter walked in silence for a moment with his hands clasped behind his back and his head down. Gabriel deftly sidestepped a tree root that had risen through the sidewalk and asked how Rashid managed to communicate with his network from so remote a place.
“We haven’t been able to figure that out,” Carter replied. “We assume he’s using local tribesmen to ferry messages to Sana or perhaps across the Gulf of Aden to Somalia, where he’s forged a relationship with the al-Shabaab terror group. We’re certain of one thing, though. Rashid spends no time on the phone, satellite or otherwise. He learned a great deal about American capabilities when he was on our payroll. And now that he’s gone over to the other side, he’s put that knowledge to good use.”
“I don’t suppose you also taught him how to plan and execute a synchronized series of attacks in three European countries.”
“Rashid is a talent spotter and a source of inspiration,” said Carter, “but he’s no operational mastermind. He’s clearly working with someone good. If I had to guess, the three attacks in Europe were carried out by someone who cut his teeth in—”
“Baghdad,” Gabriel said, finishing Carter’s thought for him.
“The MIT of terrorism,” Carter added, nodding in agreement. “Its graduates are all PhDs, and they served their internships by matching wits with the Agency and the American military.”
“All the more reason why you should deal with them.”
Carter made no reply.
“Why us, Adrian?”
“Because the American counterterrorism apparatus has grown so large we can’t seem to get out of our own way. At last count, we had more than eight hundred thousand people with top-secret clearances. Eight hundred thousand,” Carter repeated incredulously, “and yet we still weren’t able to prevent a single Islamic militant from planting a bomb in the heart of Times Square. Our ability to collect information is unrivaled, but we’re too big and far too redundant to be effective. We are Americans, after all, and when confronted with a threat, we throw large amounts of money at it. Sometimes, it’s better to be small and ruthless. Like you.”
“We warned you about the perils of reorganizing.”
“And we would have been wise to listen,” said Carter. “But our unwieldy size is only part of the problem. After 9/11, the gloves came off, and we adopted a whatever-it-takes attitude when it came to dealing with the enemy. These days, we try not to mention the enemy by name, lest we offend him. At Langley, counterterrorism jobs are considered politically risky. All the best officers in the Clandestine Service are learning to speak Mandarin.”
“The Chinese aren’t actively plotting to kill Americans.”
“But Rashid is,” Carter said, “and our intelligence suggests he’s planning something spectacular in the very near future. We need to break his network, and we need to do it quickly. But we can’t do that if we’re forced to operate under the new rules put in place by President Hope and his well-intentioned accomplice James McKenna.”
“So you want us to do your dirty work for you.”
“I’d do the same for you,” Carter said. “And don’t try to tell me that you lack the capability. The Office was the first Western-oriented intelligence service to establish an analytical unit dedicated to the global jihadist movement. You were also first to identify Osama Bin Laden as a major terrorist, and the first to have a go at killing him. If you’d succeeded, it’s highly likely that 9/11 would never have happened.”
They arrived at the corner of Thirty-fifth Street. The next block was closed to traffic by a barricade. On the opposite side, children from the Holy Trinity School skipped rope and tossed balls in the street, their joyous screams reverberating off the façades of the surrounding buildings. It was an idyllic scene, full of charm and life, but it made Carter visibly uneasy.
“Homeland security is a myth,” he said, gazing at the children. “It’s a bedtime story we tell our people to make them feel safe at night. Despite all our best efforts and all our billions spent, the United States is largely indefensible. The only way to prevent attacks on American soil is to snuff them out before they reach our shores. We have to rip apart their networks and kill their operatives.”
“Killing Rashid al-Husseini might not be a bad idea, either.”
“We’d love to,” said Carter. “But that won’t be possible until we can find some way into his inner circle.”
Carter led Gabriel northward along Thirty-fifth Street. He removed his pipe from the pocket of his coat and began absently loading the bowl with tobacco.
“You’ve been fighting the terrorists longer than anyone else in the business, Gabriel—anyone but Shamron, of course. You know how to penetrate their networks, something we’ve never been very good at, and you know how to turn them inside out. I want you to get inside Rashid’s network and destroy it. I want you to make it go away.”
“Penetrating jihadist terror networks isn’t the same as penetrating the PLO. They’re far too clannish to accept outsiders into their midst, and their members are largely immune to earthly temptations.”
“A rose is a rose is a rose. And a network is a network is a network.”
“Meaning?”
“I’ll grant you there are differences between jihadist and Palestinian terror networks, but the basic structure is the same. There are planners and foot soldiers, paymasters and quartermasters, couriers and safe houses. And at the points where all these pieces intersect, there is vulnerability just waiting to be exploited by someone as clever as you.”
A breath of wind carried the pipe smoke into Gabriel’s face. Blended exclusively for Carter by a tobacconist in New York, it smelled of burning leaves and wet dog. Gabriel waved it away and asked, “How would it work?”
“Does that mean you’ll do it?”
“No,” said Gabriel, “it means I want to know exactly how it would work.”
“You would operate as a virtual station of the Counterterrorism Center, in much the same way the Bin Laden Unit functioned before 9/11, but with one important difference.”
“The rest of the CTC won’t know I’m there.”
Carter nodded. “All document requests will be handled by my staff and me. And when it’s time for you to go operational, I’ll act as a clandestine traffic cop to make sure you don’t trip over any ongoing Agency operations, and they don’t trip over you.”
“I would need to see everything you have. Everything, Adrian.”
“You’ll be given access to the most sensitive intelligence available to the government of the United States, including the case files on Rashid and all the NSA intercepts. You’ll also be allowed to see all the intelligence on the three attacks that’s flowing to us from our sister services in Europe.” Carter paused. “I would think that information alone would be tempting enough for you to accept the assignment. After all, your liaison relationships with the Europeans aren’t terribly good at the moment.”
Gabriel didn’t respond directly. “It’s too much material to review on my own. I’d need help.”
“You can import as much help as you want, within reason. Given the sensitive nature of the intelligence, I’ll also need someone from the Agency looking over your shoulder. Someone who knows your mischievous ways. I have a candidate in mind.”
“Where is she?”
“Waiting in a café on Wisconsin Avenue.”
“You’re very sure of yourself, Adrian.”
Carter stopped walking and checked his pipe. “Were I to stoop to raw sentimentality,” he said after a moment, “I would remind you of the carnage you witnessed last Friday afternoon in Covent Garden and ask you to imagine it played out over and over again. But I won’t do that, because it would be unprofessional. Instead, I will tell you that Rashid has an army of martyrs just like Farid Khan waiting to do his bidding, an army he recruited with my help. I made Rashid. He’s my mistake. And I need you to destroy him before anyone else has to die.”
“You might find this difficult to believe, but I actually don’t have the authority to say yes to you. Uzi would have to sign off on it first.”
“He already has. So has your prime minister.”
“I suppose you’ve also had a quiet word with Graham Seymour.”
Carter nodded. “For obvious reasons, Graham would like to be kept abreast of your progress. He would also like advance warning if your operation happens to wash ashore in the British Isles.”
“You misled me, Adrian.”
“I’m a spy,” Carter said, relighting his pipe. “I lie as a matter of course. So do you. Now you just have to figure out a way to lie to Rashid. Just be careful how you go about it. He’s very good, our Rashid. I have the scars to prove it.”
Chapter 14
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
THE CAFÉ WAS LOCATED AT the northern end of Georgetown, at the foot of Book Hill Park. Gabriel ordered a cappuccino from the bar and carried it through a pair of open French doors into a small garden with vine-covered walls. Three of the tables were in shadow; the fourth, in brilliant sunlight. A woman sat there alone, reading a newspaper. She wore a black running suit that clung tightly to her slender frame, and a pair of spotless white training shoes. Her shoulder-length blond hair was brushed straight back from her forehead and held in place by an elastic band at the nape of her neck. Sunglasses concealed her eyes but not her remarkable beauty. She removed the glasses as Gabriel approached and tilted her face to be kissed. She seemed surprised to see him.
“I was hoping it would be you,” said Sarah Bancroft.
“Adrian didn’t tell you I was coming?”
“He’s much too old-fashioned for that,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. She had a voice and manner of speech from another age. It was like listening to a character from a Fitzgerald novel. “He dropped me a secure e-mail last night and told me to be here at nine. I was to stay until ten-thirty. If no one appeared, I was to leave and go to work as normal. It’s a good thing you came. You know how much I hate being stood up.”
“I see you brought reading material,” Gabriel said, glancing at the newspaper.
“You disapprove?”
“Office doctrine forbids agents to read newspapers in cafés. It’s far too obvious.” He paused, then added, “I thought we trained you better than that, Sarah.”
“You did. But on occasion, I like to behave like a normal person. And a normal person sometimes finds it pleasurable to read a newspaper in a café on a sunny autumn morning.”
“With a Glock concealed at the small of her back.”
“Thanks to you, it’s my constant companion.”
Sarah gave a melancholy smile. The daughter of a wealthy Citibank executive, she had spent much of her childhood in Europe, where she had acquired a Continental education along with Continental languages and impeccable Continental manners. She had returned to America to attend Dartmouth, and later, after spending a year at the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art in London, she became the youngest woman ever to earn a PhD in art history at Harvard.
But it was Sarah Bancroft’s love life, not her sterling education, that led her into the world of intelligence. While finishing her dissertation, she began dating a young lawyer named Ben Callahan who had the misfortune of boarding United Airlines Flight 175 on the morning of September 11, 2001. He managed to make one telephone call before the plane plunged into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. That call was to Sarah. With Adrian Carter’s blessing, and with the help of a lost van Gogh, Gabriel inserted her into the entourage of a Saudi billionaire named Zizi al-Bakari in a daring bid to find the terrorist mastermind lurking within it. At the conclusion of the operation, she had joined the CIA and was assigned to the Counterterrorism Center. Since then, she had maintained close contact with the Office and had worked with Gabriel and his team on numerous occasions. She had even taken an Office lover, an assassin and field operative named Mikhail Abramov. Judging by the absence of a ring on her finger, the relationship was proceeding at a slower pace than she had hoped.
“We’ve been on-again-off-again for a while,” she said, as if reading Gabriel’s thoughts.
“And at the moment?”
“Off,” she said. “Definitely off.”
“I told you not to become involved with a man who kills for his country.”
“You were right, Gabriel. You’re always right.”
“So what happened?”
“I’d rather not go into all the sordid details.”
“He told me he was in love with you.”
“He told me the same thing. Funny how that works.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“I don’t think I’m capable of being hurt any longer.” It took a moment for Sarah to smile. She wasn’t being honest; Gabriel could see that.
“Do you want me to have a word with him?”
“Heavens, no,” she said. “I’m more than capable of screwing up my life completely on my own.”
“He’s been through a couple of difficult operations, Sarah. The last one was—”
“He told me all about it,” she said. “I sometimes wish he hadn’t come out of the Alps alive.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“No,” she said grudgingly, “but it felt good to say it.”
“Maybe it’s for the better. You should find someone who doesn’t live on the other side of the world. Someone here in Washington.”
“And how should I respond when they ask me where I work?”
Gabriel said nothing.
“I’m not getting any younger, you know. I just turned—”
“Thirty-seven,” said Gabriel.
“Which means I’m rapidly approaching old-maid status,” Sarah said, frowning. “I suppose the best I can hope for at this point is a comfortable but passionless marriage to an older man of means. If I’m lucky, he’ll permit me to have a child or two, whom I’ll be forced to raise on my own because he’ll have no interest in them.”
“Surely it’s not as depressing as all that.”
She shrugged and sipped her coffee. “How are things between you and Chiara?”
“Perfect,” said Gabriel.
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Sarah murmured archly.
“Sarah . . .”
“Don’t worry, Gabriel, I got over you a long time ago.”
A pair of middle-aged women entered the garden and sat at the opposite end. Sarah leaned forward in feigned intimacy and, in French, asked Gabriel what he was doing in town. He responded by tapping the front page of her newspaper.
“Since when is our soaring national debt a problem for Israeli intelligence?” she asked playfully.
Gabriel pointed toward the front-page story about the debate raging within the American intelligence community about the provenance of the three attacks in Europe.
“How did you get dragged into it?”
“Chiara and I decided to take a stroll through Covent Garden last Friday afternoon on our way to lunch.”
Sarah’s expression darkened. “So the reports about an unidentified man drawing a weapon a few seconds before the attack—”
“Are true,” said Gabriel. “I could have saved eighteen lives. Unfortunately, the British wouldn’t hear of it.”
“So who do you think was responsible?”
“You’re the terrorism expert, Sarah. You tell me.”
“It’s possible the attacks were masterminded by the old-line al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan,” she said. “But in my opinion, we’re dealing with an entirely new network.”
“Led by whom?”
“Someone with the charisma of Bin Laden who could recruit his own operatives in Europe and call upon cells from other terror groups.”
“Any candidates?”
“Just one,” she said. “Rashid al-Husseini.”
“Why Paris?”
“The ban on the facial veil.”
“Copenhagen?”
“They’re still seething over the cartoons.”
“And London?”
“London is low-hanging fruit. London can be attacked at will.”
“Not bad for a former curator at the Phillips Collection.”
“I’m an art historian, Gabriel. I know how to connect dots. I can connect a few more, if you like.”
“Please do.”
“Your presence in Washington means the rumors are true.”
“What rumors are those?”
“The ones about Rashid being on the Agency’s payroll after 9/11. The ones about a good idea that went very bad. Adrian believed in Rashid and Rashid repaid that trust by building a network right under our noses. Now I suppose Adrian would like you to take care of the problem for him—off the books, of course.”
“Is there any other way?”
“Not where you’re concerned,” she said. “What does this have to do with me?”
“Adrian needs someone to spy on me. You were the obvious candidate.” Gabriel hesitated, then said, “But if you think it would be too awkward . . .”
“Because of Mikhail?”
“It’s possible you’ll be working together again, Sarah. I wouldn’t want personal feelings to interfere with the smooth functioning of the team.”
“Since when has your team ever functioned smoothly? You’re Israelis. You fight with one another constantly.”
“But we never allow personal feelings to influence operational decisions.”
“I’m a professional,” she said. “Given our history together, I shouldn’t think I’d need to remind you of that.”
“You don’t.”
“So where do we start?”
“We need to get to know Rashid a bit better.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“By reading his Agency files.”
“But they’re filled with lies.”
“That’s correct,” said Gabriel. “But those lies are like layers of paint on a canvas. Peel them away, and we might find ourselves staring directly at the truth.”
“No one ever speaks that way at Langley.”
“I know,” Gabriel said. “If they did, I’d still be in Cornwall working on a Titian.”
Chapter 15
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
GABRIEL AND SARAH TOOK UP residence at the house on N Street at nine the following morning. The first batch of files arrived one hour later—six stainless steel crates, all sealed with digital locks. For some unfathomable reason, Carter entrusted the combinations only to Sarah. “Rules are rules,” he said, “and Agency rules state that officers of foreign intelligence services are never to be given the combinations of document receptacles.” When Gabriel pointed out that he was being allowed to see some of the Agency’s dirtiest laundry, Carter was unyielding. Technically speaking, the material was to remain in Sarah’s possession. The taking of notes was to be kept to a minimum and photocopying was forbidden. Carter personally removed the secure fax machine and requested Gabriel’s mobile phone—a request Gabriel politely declined. The phone had been issued to him by the Office and contained several features not available commercially. In fact, he had used it the previous evening to sweep the house for listening devices. He had found four. Obviously, interservice cooperation only went so far.
The initial shipment of files all focused on Rashid’s time in America before 9/11 and his connections, nefarious or serendipitous, to the plot itself. Most of the material had been generated by Langley’s unglamorous rival, the FBI, and had been shared during the brief period when, by presidential order, the two agencies were supposed to be cooperating. It revealed that Rashid al-Husseini popped up on the Bureau’s radar within weeks of his arrival in San Diego and was the target of somewhat apathetic surveillance. There were transcripts from the court-approved wiretaps on his phones and surveillance photos shot during the brief periods when the San Diego and Washington field offices had the time and manpower to follow him. There was also a copy of the classified interagency review that officially cleared Rashid of playing any role in the 9/11 plot. It was, thought Gabriel, a profoundly naïve piece of work that chose to portray the cleric in the kindest possible light. Gabriel believed a man was the company he kept, and he had been around terror networks long enough to know an operative when he saw one. Rashid al-Husseini was almost certainly a messenger or an innkeeper. At the very least, he was a fellow traveler. And, in Gabriel’s opinion, fellow travelers should rarely be taken on by intelligence services as paid agents of influence. They should be watched and, if necessary, dealt with harshly.
The next shipment contained the transcripts and recordings of Rashid’s interrogation by the CIA, followed soon after by the detritus of the ill-fated operation in which he had played a starring role. The material concluded with a despairing after-action postmortem, written in the days following Rashid’s defection in Mecca. The operation, it said, had been poorly conceived from the outset. Much of the blame was placed squarely at the feet of Adrian Carter, who was faulted for lax oversight. Attached was Carter’s own assessment, which was scarcely less scathing. Predicting there would be blowback, he recommended a thorough review of Rashid’s contacts in the United States and Europe. Carter’s director had overruled him. The Agency was stretched too thin to go chasing after shadows, the director said. Rashid was back in Yemen where he belonged. Good riddance.
“Not exactly the Agency’s finest hour,” Sarah declared late that evening, during a break in the proceedings. “We were fools to ever use him.”
“The Agency began with the correct assumption, that Rashid was bad, but somewhere along the line it fell under his spell. It’s easy to see how it happened. Rashid was very persuasive.”
“Almost as persuasive as you.”
“But I don’t send my recruits into crowded streets to carry out acts of indiscriminate murder.”
“No,” said Sarah, “you send them onto secret battlefields to smite your enemies.”
“It’s not as biblical as all that.”
“Yes, it is. Trust me, I should know.” She looked wearily at the stacks of files. “We still have a mountain of material to go through, and it’s only the beginning. The floodgates are about to open.”
“Don’t worry,” Gabriel said, smiling. “Help is on the way.”
They arrived at Dulles Airport late the following afternoon under false names and with false passports in their pockets. They were not punished for their sins; quite the opposite, a team of Agency minders whisked them through customs and then herded them into a fleet of armored Escalades for the drive into Washington. Per Adrian Carter’s instructions, the Escalades departed Dulles at fifteen-minute intervals. As a result, the most storied team of operatives in the intelligence world settled into the house on N Street that evening with the neighbors being none the wiser.
Chiara arrived first, followed a moment later by an Office terrorism expert named Dina Sarid. Petite and dark-haired, Dina knew the horrors of extremist violence all too well. She had been standing on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street on October 19, 1994, when a Hamas suicide bomber turned the Number 5 bus into a coffin for twenty-one people. Her mother and two of her sisters were among the dead; Dina was seriously injured and still walked with a slight limp. Upon her recovery, she vowed to defeat the terrorists not with force but with her brain. A human database, she was capable of reciting the time, place, perpetrators, and casualty toll of every act of terrorism committed against Israeli and Western targets. Dina had once told Gabriel that she knew more about the terrorists than they knew about themselves. And Gabriel had believed her.
Next came a man of late middle age named Eli Lavon. Small and disheveled, with wispy gray hair and intelligent brown eyes, Lavon was regarded as the finest street surveillance artist the Office had ever produced. Blessed with a natural anonymity, he appeared to be one of life’s downtrodden. In reality, he was a predator who could follow a highly trained intelligence officer or a hardened terrorist along any street in the world without arousing a flicker of interest. Lavon’s ties to the Office, like Gabriel’s, were now tenuous at best. He still lectured at the Academy—no Office recruit was ever sent into the field without first spending a few hours at Lavon’s feet—but these days, his primary work address was Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, where he taught archaeology. With but a handful of broken pottery, Eli Lavon could unlock the darkest secrets of a Bronze Age village. And given a few strands of relevant intelligence, he could do the same for a terror network.