“Sleeping? I was never really good at it, even before the operation. Besides,” she added with a glance toward the exterior of the bungalow, “it’s not exactly a house of secrets, is it? Every room is wired, and every move I make is recorded and analyzed by your psychiatrists.”
Gabriel didn’t bother with a denial. The bungalow was indeed wired for both audio and video, and a team of Office physicians had charted every facet of Natalie’s recovery. Their assessments painted a portrait of an officer who was still struggling with the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder. The officer suffered from prolonged periods of insomnia, night terrors, and bouts of severe depression. Her daily training runs in the valley had improved her overall health and tempered her mood swings. So, too, had her romantic relationship with Mikhail, who was a regular visitor to Nahalal. All in all, it was the opinion of Natalie’s doctors—and Mikhail—that she was ready to return to limited duty. Limited duty, however, was not what Gabriel had in mind. He had Saladin in his sights.
He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Natalie frowned.
“At least drink some of the wine. It might take the edge off the pain.”
He did. It didn’t.
“He was the same way,” said Natalie.
“Who?”
“Saladin. He didn’t want pain medication. I practically had to torture him to convince him he needed it. And every time I fed morphine into his drip he fought to remain conscious. If only I’d—”
“You did the right thing.”
“I’m not sure the victims in London would agree. Or Paris,” she added. “You’re lucky to be alive. And none of it would have happened if I’d killed him when I had the chance.”
“We’re not like them, Natalie. We don’t do suicide missions. Besides,” Gabriel went on, “someone else would have taken his place.”
“There is no one else like Saladin. He’s special. Trust me, I know.”
She warmed her hand over the candle that burned between them. The direction of the wind shifted subtly, bringing with it the acrid scent of the fires. Gabriel preferred it to the smell of the valley. Even as a child he had hated it.
Natalie removed her hand from the flame. “I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about me.”
“Not for a minute. And I haven’t forgotten what you went through, either.”
“That makes two of us.”
She reached for her wine but stopped. Leila’s temperance, it seemed, had reclaimed her.
“Mikhail assures me that one day I won’t remember any of it, that it will be like an unpleasant memory from childhood, like the time I almost sliced my finger off playing with one of my mother’s kitchen knives.” She raised a hand in the darkness. “I still have the scar.”
The wind died, the flame of the candle burned straight.
“Do you approve of him?” she asked.
“Mikhail?”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“Of course it does. You’re the chief.”
He smiled. “Yes, Natalie, I approve. Wholeheartedly, in fact.”
“And did you approve of that American girl he was involved with? The one who worked for the CIA? Her name,” added Natalie coolly, “escapes me.”
“Her name was Sarah.”
“Sarah Bancroft,” she added, stressing the first syllable of the rather patrician-sounding family name.
“Yes,” said Gabriel. “Sarah Bancroft.”
“It doesn’t sound Jewish, Bancroft.”
“With good reason. And no,” said Gabriel, “I did not approve of the relationship. At least not in the beginning.”
“Because she wasn’t Jewish?”
“Because relationships between intelligence officers are inherently complicated. And relationships between officers who work for services from different countries are unheard of.”
“But she was close to the Office.”
“Very.”
“And you were fond of her.”
“I was.”
“Who ended it?”
“I wasn’t privy to all the details.”
“Please,” she said dismissively.
“I believe,” he said guardedly, “it was Mikhail.”
Natalie appeared to consider his last statement carefully. Gabriel hoped he hadn’t spoken out of turn. One never really knew what passed between lovers, especially where old relationships were concerned. It was possible Mikhail had portrayed himself as the aggrieved party. No, he thought, that wasn’t Mikhail’s style. He had many fine qualities, but his heart was fashioned of cast iron.
“I suppose he’ll be leaving soon,” she said.
“I have a few more pieces to put into place.”
“Operational spadework?”
He smiled.
“And how long do you suppose he’ll be away?”
“Hard to say.”
“I hear you’re turning him into an arms dealer.”
“A very rich one.”
“He’ll need a girl. Otherwise, Jean-Luc Martel won’t believe he’s real.”
“Know much about him?”
“JLM?” She shrugged. “Only what I used to read in the newspapers.”
“Think he’s involved in drugs?”
“That was the rumor. I grew up in Marseilles, you know.”
“Yes,” said Gabriel flatly. “I think I might have read something about that once in your file.”
“And I treated my fair share of heroin overdoses when I was working there,” Natalie went on. “The word on the street was that it was Martel’s heroin. But I suppose you can’t believe everything.”
“Sometimes you can.”
A silence fell between them.
“So who’s the lucky girl?” asked Natalie at last.
“Mikhail’s girl? I have someone in mind for the part,” said Gabriel, “but I’m not sure she wants it.”
“Have you asked her?”
“Not yet.”
“What are you waiting for?”
“Forgiveness.”
“For what?”
Just then, a gust of wind rose suddenly and extinguished the flame. They sat alone in the darkness, saying nothing at all, and watched the mountains burn.
It took Natalie only a few minutes to toss her belongings into a bag. Then, still dressed in her tracksuit, she settled into the back of Gabriel’s SUV and rode with him back to Tel Aviv. Doctrine dictated that she take up residence at a “jump site,” a safe flat where Office agents assumed the identities they would carry with them into the field. Instead, Gabriel dropped her at Mikhail’s flat off HaYarkon Street. He reckoned it wasn’t a complete breach of protocol; after all, Mikhail and Natalie would be posing as husband and wife. With a bit of luck, they might even learn to dislike each other a little bit. Then no one would doubt the authenticity of their cover.
It was approaching nine o’clock by the time Gabriel’s SUV started the long climb up the Bab al-Wad toward Jerusalem. Provided there were no accidents or security alerts—or calls from the prime minister—he would be at Narkiss Street by half past at the latest. The children would likely be asleep, but at least he could share a quiet meal with Chiara. But as they were approaching the western edge of the city, his mobile phone flared with an incoming message. He stared at it for a long moment, wondering whether he could pretend it had somehow been lost in transmission. Regrettably, he could not. He was about to make his second trip abroad as chief. But this time he was going to America.
22
Lincoln Memorial, Washington
Langley sent a plane for him, never a good sign. It was a Gulfstream G650 with a leather-and-teak interior, a large selection of in-flight movies, and baskets filled with unwholesome snack food. In the aft of the aircraft was a private stateroom. Gabriel stretched out on the narrow bed but could find no arrangement of his torso and limbs that did not cause him pain. The sky beyond his window never grew light; he was chasing the night westward. Sleepl
ess, he had little else to do but wonder about the reason for his unexpected summons to Washington. He doubted it was social in nature. The new crowd in the White House wasn’t in the business of playing nice.
The plane touched down at Dulles Airport at half past three and taxied to a private hangar where a convoy of three armor-plated Suburbans waited, tailpipes gently smoking in the cold, damp air. The early hour meant that for once the traffic was light. As they crossed the Capital Beltway, Gabriel glanced toward the Liberty Crossing Intelligence Campus, the former headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center. A thicket of trees blocked the view of the devastation. As yet, Congress had not allocated the billions of dollars necessary to rebuild Liberty Crossing, once a shining symbol of the chaotic post–9/11 expansion of the American national security state. Like the members of Paul Rousseau’s Alpha Group, the staffs of the ODNI and NCTC had been forced to seek accommodations elsewhere. Saladin, if nothing else, had made a lot of spies and analysts homeless.
The caravan of SUVs turned onto Route 123 and headed into McLean. Gabriel feared he was being taken to CIA Headquarters—he avoided it when he could—but they sped past the entrance without so much as slowing and made their way to the George Washington Memorial Parkway. It carried them along the Virginia side of the Potomac, to the glass-and-steel towers of Rosslyn. On the other side of the river rose the graceful spires of Georgetown University, but Gabriel’s eye was drawn to the ugly rectangular slab of the Key Bridge Marriott, where Natalie had spent many hours trapped in a room with a French-Algerian terrorist named Safia Bourihane. Through a concealed video camera, Gabriel had watched Natalie record a martyrdom video and then wrap her body in a suicide vest. Only later, at the cabin in Virginia, would she learn the vest was inoperative. Saladin had deceived her. And Gabriel, too.
They continued southward along the river, past the fringes of Arlington National Cemetery, and turned onto Memorial Bridge. On the opposite bank, aglow as though lit from within, was the Lincoln Memorial. Normally, traffic flowing from Virginia to Washington was routed onto Twenty-Third Street. But the three SUVs of Gabriel’s motorcade eased slowly over a concrete median and then parked in the esplanade on the memorial’s southern flank. A few uniformed U.S. Park Police officers stood in the darkness, but otherwise the space was deserted. Just then, Gabriel’s phone pulsed with an incoming text. He exited the SUV, made his way to the base of the memorial’s steps, and with one hand pressed to the small of his back began to climb.
A heavy tarpaulin, moving in the faint wind, stretched across the entrance. Gabriel shouldered his way through the breach and stepped hesitantly into the central chamber. Lincoln peered down contemplatively from his marble throne, as though aggrieved by the damage around him. The base of the statue was pockmarked with tiny craters. So were the murals by Jules Guérin and the Ionic columns separating the central chamber from the side chambers, north and south. One of the columns had suffered significant structural damage at its base. It was there that a member of Saladin’s network had placed a backpack filled with explosives and ball bearings. The blast had been powerful enough to send a shiver through the White House. Twenty-one people had died inside the memorial, another seven on the steps, where the terrorist opened fire with a handgun. And it was only the beginning.
Gabriel passed between a pair of scarred columns and entered the north chamber, where Adrian Carter, his face tilted upward, was reading the words of Lincoln’s second inaugural address. He lowered his gaze toward Gabriel’s face and frowned.
“It seems the rumors were true after all,” he said.
“What rumors are those?”
“About you being inside the headquarters of the Alpha Group when that bomb went off.”
“Bad timing on my part.”
“Your specialty.”
Carter resumed his study of the towering panel. He wore a toggle coat, wrinkled chinos, and shoes that looked as though they had been designed for walking in the woods of New England. The attire, combined with his tousled thinning hair and unfashionable mustache, gave him the air of a professor from a minor university, the sort who championed noble causes and was a constant thorn in the side of his dean. In truth, Carter was the chief of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, the longest serving in Agency history. His summons of Gabriel was a violation of protocol; generally speaking, the ramsad did not meet with deputies. Adrian Carter, however, was a special case. He was a spy’s spy, a legend who in the dark days after 9/11 had drawn up the Agency’s plan to destroy al-Qaeda and roll up its global networks. The black sites, the renditions, the enhanced interrogation methods—they all bore his fingerprints. For a decade and a half he had been able to tell himself, and his critics, that for all his many sins he had managed to protect the American homeland from a second terror spectacular. And in the blink of an eye, Saladin had made a liar of him.
“My father brought me here to see Dr. King in sixty-three,” Carter said. “He was involved in the civil rights movement, my father. He was an Episcopal minister.” He glanced at Gabriel. “Did I ever mention that?”
“Once or twice.”
“I remember being very proud of my country that day,” Carter went on. “I felt anything was possible. And I was proud when we elected our first African American president, despite all the nasty things he said about the Agency during the campaign. He and I had our disagreements over the years, but I never forgot what he represented. His election was a miracle. And it never would have happened were it not for the words Martin Luther King spoke here that day. This is our sacred space, our hallowed ground. Which is why I’ll never forgive Saladin for what he did.”
Carter turned away from the panel and moved slowly into the central chamber, where he paused at the feet of Lincoln.
“You’re the expert. Can it be restored?”
“Marble isn’t my medium,” replied Gabriel. “But, yes, almost anything can be restored.”
“And what about my country?” asked Carter suddenly. “Can it be fixed?”
“Your divisions are hairline cracks compared to ours. America will find its way.”
“Will it? I’m not so sure.” Carter took Gabriel by the arm. “Come with me. There’s something I want to show you.”
23
Georgetown, Washington
It is not easy for the chief of the Office and the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency to stroll unnoticed in Washington, even in the hour before dawn, but they did their best. Only a single bodyguard trailed them along the footpath at the edge of the Potomac; the rest were confined to the constellation of black Suburbans that moved in their orbit. Carter’s pace was deliberate, thoughtful. For that much at least, Gabriel was grateful. His back was ablaze with pain, a fact he could not hide from his old friend.
“How bad is it?” asked Carter.
“Unfortunately, they say I’m going to live.”
“I hope the flight wasn’t too hard on you.”
“The Gulfstream made it tolerable.”
“It belongs to a friend of mine named Bill Blackburn. Bill used to work in the Special Activities Division. He was a real knuckle-dragger back in the day. Central America, mainly. Did a final lap in Afghanistan after nine-eleven. He owns a private intelligence shop now. Calls it Black Ops.”
“Clever.”
“He is, actually. Bill does quite well for himself. I use him for jobs that require a bit of extra discretion.”
“I thought you used me for those kinds of jobs.”
“Bill and his men are down and dirty,” explained Carter. “I save you for the ones that demand a little finesse.”
“It’s nice to have one’s work appreciated.”
They walked in silence for a moment. All around them the city groaned and stirred.
“Bill’s been pestering me for years to come in with him,” said Carter at last. “Says he’d pay me seven figures the first year. Apparently, I wouldn’t have to do
much. Bill wants to use me as a rainmaker to guarantee that the lucrative contracts keep flowing his way. The global war on terror has been very profitable for a lot of people in this town. I’m the only idiot who hasn’t cashed in.”
“You’ve earned it, Adrian.”
“Would you take a job like that?”
“Not in a million years.”
“Neither would I. Besides, I have more important things to do before they show me the door at Langley.”
“Like what?”
“Like getting the man who did that.”
Carter raised his eyes toward the Kennedy Center. A few minutes after the attack on the Lincoln Memorial, a suicide bomber had detonated his device in the Hall of States. Then three more terrorists had moved methodically through the rest of the complex—the Eisenhower Theater, the Opera House, the Concert Hall—slaughtering all those they encountered.
“I knew two of the victims,” said Carter. “A young couple who lived around the corner from me out in Herndon. He did something in tech, she was a financial planner. They had life by the tail. Good careers, a mortgage, two beautiful kids. The house is for sale now and the kids live with their aunt in Baltimore. That’s what happens when people like us make mistakes. People die. Lots of people.”
“We did everything we could to stop the attacks, Adrian.”
“My new director doesn’t see it that way. He’s a real hard-ass, a true believer. Personally, I’ve always thought it was dangerous to mix ideology and intelligence,” said Carter. “It clouds one’s thinking and makes one see exactly what one wants to see. My new director begs to differ. So do the earnest young men he’s brought with him to the Agency. They think of me as a loser, which in their world is the worst thing a man can be. When I urge operational caution, they accuse me of weakness. And when I offer an assessment that’s at variance with their worldview, they accuse me of disloyalty.”
“Elections have consequences,” said Gabriel.
“So do successful terrorist attacks on American soil. Apparently, it’s all my fault despite the fact that I told anyone who would listen that ISIS was plotting to hit us with something big. According to the rumor mill, I’m yesterday’s man.”