London
The evacuation of Westminster and Whitehall was far shorter in duration than Saladin might have hoped, but traumatic all the same. For nine long days, the beating heart of British politics, the religious and political epicenter of a once-glorious civilization and empire, was cordoned off from the rest of the realm and closed for business. The dead zone stretched from Trafalgar Square in the north to Milbank in the south, and eastward into Victoria to New Scotland Yard. The great ministries sat empty, as did the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. Prime Minister Lancaster and his staff left 10 Downing Street and relocated to an undisclosed country house. The Queen, against her wishes, was moved to Balmoral Castle in Scotland. Only the CBRN teams were allowed to enter the restricted area, and only for limited periods. They moved about the deserted streets and squares in their lime-green hazmat suits, sniffing the air for any lingering traces of radioactivity, while the mournful tolling of Big Ben marked the passage of time.
The reopening was a joyless affair. The prime minister and his wife, Diana, stole into Number 10 as though they were breaking into their own home, while up and down the length of Whitehall civil servants and permanent secretaries returned quietly to their desks. In the House of Commons there was a moment of silence; in the Abbey, a prayer service. London’s mayor claimed the city would emerge stronger as a result of the near disaster, though he offered no explanation as to why that was the case. A headline of a leading conservative tabloid read welcome to the new normal.
It was a Wednesday, which meant the prime minister was obliged to rise before the Commons at noon and field questions from the political opposition. They were deferential at first, but not for long. Mainly, they wanted to know how it was possible that, just six months after the devastating attack in the West End, ISIS had managed to smuggle the makings of a dirty bomb into the United Kingdom. And how, given the elevated threat level, the security services had been unable to identify the bomber before the morning of the planned attack. The prime minister was tempted to say that the near-impossible security situation confronting Britain was the result of mistakes made by a generation of leaders—mistakes that had turned the land of Shakespeare, Locke, Hume, and Burke into the world’s preeminent center of Salafist-jihadi ideology. But he did not rise to the bait. “The enemy is determined,” he declared, “but so are we.”
“And the manner in which the suspect was neutralized?” wondered the MP from the Washwood Heath section of Birmingham, a heavily Muslim city in the British West Midlands that had produced numerous terrorists and plots.
“He wasn’t a suspect,” interjected the prime minister. “He was a terrorist armed with a bomb and several grams of radioactive cesium chloride.”
“But was there really no other way to deal with him other than a cold-blooded execution?” the MP persisted.
“It was no such thing.”
The stated position of Her Majesty’s Government and New Scotland Yard was that the two men who prevented the terrorist from detonating his dirty bomb were members of Met’s SCO19 special firearms division. The Met refused to make public their names. Nor did it agree to the media’s request to release CCTV images of the operation. Somehow, there was only a single video of the incident, shot by an American tourist who happened to be standing at the security gate of Downing Street at nine o’clock. Out of focus and tremulous, it showed one man firing several rounds into the terrorist’s head while another man held the detonator switch in the terrorist’s left hand. The shooter immediately left the scene in the back of a car. As it raced up Whitehall, he could be seen embracing a woman in the backseat. His face was not visible, only a patch of gray, like a smudge of ash, at his left temple.
But it was his partner, the one who held the terrorist’s thumb to the detonator for three hours while technicians disarmed the dirty bomb, who received most of the media’s attention. Overnight, he became a national hero; he was the man who had selflessly risked his own life for Queen and country. But such stories rarely survive long—not in the graceless age of twenty-four-hour news and social media—and soon there appeared numerous stories calling into question his identity and affiliation. The Independent claimed he was a former member of the Special Air Service who had served notably in Northern Ireland and the first Iraq War. The Guardian, however, weighed in with a dubious claim that he was actually an officer of MI6. Lines had been blurred, the newspaper said, or perhaps even crossed. Graham Seymour took the unusual step of issuing a denial. Officers of the Secret Intelligence Service, he said, did not engage in law-enforcement activities, and few ever bothered to carry a firearm. “The allegation,” he declared, “is laughable on its face.”
Nearly lost in the finger-pointing was the fact that Saladin, the author of a transatlantic trail of bloodshed and broken buildings, was no more. At first, his legion of followers, including some who openly walked the streets of London, refused to believe he was really gone. Surely, they claimed, it was nothing more than a piece of black American propaganda designed to weaken ISIS’s grip on a generation of young Islamic radicals. The photograph of Saladin’s lifeless, retooled face didn’t help matters, for it bore little resemblance to the original. But when ISIS confirmed his passing on one of its primary social media channels, even his most ardent supporters seemed to accept the fact he was truly gone. His closest lieutenants had no time to mourn; they were too busy dodging American bombs and missiles. London was the last straw. The final battle—the one ISIS hoped would lead to the return of the Mahdi and commence the countdown to the end of days—had begun.
But what were the exact circumstances of Saladin’s death at the compound in the Middle Atlas Mountains of Morocco? The White House—and the president himself—gave several conflicting versions of the story. Complicating the issue further was a report from an independent Moroccan news site concerning three Toyota Land Cruisers found in the southeast corner of the country, not far from the sand sea at Erg Chebbi. One of the SUVs appeared to have crashed, but the other two were burned-out shells. The Web site claimed they were destroyed by an American Predator drone, a claim supported by an accompanying photograph of Hellfire missile fragments. The White House denied the report in the strongest possible language. So, too, did the government of Morocco. Then, for good measure, it shut down the Web site that had published the photos and tossed its editor in jail.
The allegation of an American drone strike on Moroccan soil ignited protests across the country, especially in the Bidonvilles where the ISIS recruiters plied their deadly trade. The unrest nearly overshadowed the brutal killing of Mohammad Bakkar, Morocco’s largest producer of hashish, the self-proclaimed king of the Rif Mountains. The deplorable condition of the body, said the gendarmes, suggested Bakkar had been the target of a drug-related vendetta. Harder to explain was the fact that Jean-Luc Martel, the wildly successful French hotelier and restaurateur, had been found lying a few feet away, with two neat bullet holes in the face. The Moroccans were not terribly interested in trying to determine how Martel had met his fate or why; they wanted only to move the matter off their plate as quickly as possible. They delivered his body to the French Embassy, signed the necessary paperwork, and bid JLM a fond adieu.
In France, though, Jean-Luc Martel’s violent end was an occasion for serious investigation, both by the press and the authorities, and no small amount of soul-searching. The circumstances surrounding his death suggested that the rumors about him had been true after all, that he was not a businessman with a golden touch but an international drug trafficker in disguise. As details found their way onto the pages of Le Monde and Le Figaro, once-promising political careers crumbled. The French president was forced to issue a statement of regret over his friendship with Martel, as were the interior minister and half the members of the National Assembly. As usual, the French press approached the matter philosophically. Jean-Luc Martel was viewed as a metaphor for all that was ailing modern France. His sins were France’s sins. He was evidence that something, somewhe
re, was amiss with the Fifth Republic.
Arrests soon followed, from the headquarters of JLM Enterprises in Geneva to the streets of Marseilles. His hotels were padlocked, his restaurants and retail outlets shuttered, his properties and bank accounts seized and frozen. In fact, the only thing the French government didn’t lay claim to was his corpse, which languished for several days in a Paris morgue before a distant family member from his village in Provence finally requested it for burial. The funeral and graveside services were poorly attended. Notably absent was Olivia Watson, the beautiful former fashion model who was Martel’s companion and business partner. All efforts to locate Miss Watson, by the French authorities and the media, were without success. Her gallery in Saint-Tropez remained closed for business, its display window overlooking the Place de l’Ormeau empty of paintings. The same was true of her clothing boutique on the rue Gambetta. The villa she shared with Martel appeared deserted. Curiously, so, too, did the garish palace on the opposite side of the bay.
But was there a connection between the death of Jean-Luc Martel and the killing of the ISIS terror mastermind known as Saladin? A connection other than a similar time and place? Even the most conspiratorially minded journalists thought it unlikely. Still, there were enough tenuous links to merit a second look, and look they did—from the West End of London, to the seventh arrondissement of Paris, to an empty art gallery in Saint-Tropez, to a patch of blood-soaked pavement near the entrance of Downing Street. Reporters who specialized in matters related to security and intelligence thought they could detect a pattern. There was smoke, they said. And where there was smoke there was usually the prince of fire.
In time, even the most carefully woven lies unravel. All it takes is a loose thread. Or a man who feels compelled, for reasons of honor, or perhaps out of a sense of debt, to bring the truth to light. Not all of it, of course, for that would have been insecure. Only a small slice of it, enough to keep a promise. He gave the story to Samantha Cooke of London’s Telegraph, who crashed it in time for the Sunday edition. Within hours, it had set four distant capitals ablaze. The Americans ridiculed the account as pure fantasy, and the reviews from the British and the French were only slightly less caustic. Only the Israelis refused to comment, but then that was their standard procedure when it came to intelligence operations. They had learned the hard way that it was better to say nothing at all than issue a denial no one would believe anyway. In this case, at least, their reputation was well deserved.
The officer at the center of the story was spotted at the weekly meeting of the prime minister’s fractious cabinet and, later that evening, with his wife and two young children at Focaccia restaurant on Rabbi Akiva Street in Jerusalem. As for Olivia Watson, the former fashion model, gallerist, and not-quite wife of the disgraced Jean-Luc Martel, her whereabouts remained a mystery. A prominent French crime reporter wondered whether she was dead. And though the reporter had no way of knowing it, Olivia was wondering the very same thing.
71
Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor
They locked her away at Wormwood Cottage with only Miss Coventry the housekeeper for company and a couple of bodyguards to watch over her. And old Parish the caretaker, of course, but Parish kept his distance. He’d looked after all sorts during the many years he’d worked at the facility—defectors, traitors, blown field agents, even the odd Israeli—but there was something about the new arrival that rubbed him the wrong way. As usual, for reasons of security, Vauxhall Cross had withheld the guest’s name. Even so, Parish knew exactly who she was. Hard not to; her face was splashed across the pages of every newspaper in the country. Her body, too, but only in the racier tabloids. She was the pretty girl from Norfolk who’d gone to America to become a fashion model. The girl who’d been mixed up with the Formula One drivers and the rock stars and the actors and that horrible drug dealer from the south of France. She was the one the French police were supposedly searching for high and low. She was JLM’s girl.
She was a wreck the night she arrived and remained one for a long time after. Her blond hair hung long and limp, and in her blue Nordic eyes was a haunted look that told Parish she had seen something she should not have. Thin as a rail already, she lost weight. Miss Coventry tried to cook for her—proper English fare—but she turned up her nose at it. Mainly, she sat in her room upstairs, smoking one cigarette after the next and staring out at the bleak moorland. First thing each morning, Miss Coventry placed a stack of newspapers outside her door. Invariably, when she collected the papers later in the day, several pages would be torn out. And on the day her face appeared in the Sun beneath a deeply unflattering headline, the entire paper was ripped to ribbons. Only a photograph survived. It had been taken many years earlier, before the fall. Written across the forehead, in blood-red ink, were the words JLM’s Girl.
“Serves her right to get mixed up with a drug dealer,” said Parish judgmentally. “And a Frog drug dealer at that.”
She had no clothing to speak of, only the clothes on her elegant back, so Miss Coventry offered to make a run to M&S to pick up a few things to tide her over. It was not what she was used to, mind you—she had her own clothing line, after all—but it was better than nothing. Much better, as it turned out. In fact, everything Miss Coventry selected looked as though it had been designed and tailored to fit her long, slender frame.
“What I wouldn’t give to have a body like that for just five minutes.”
“But look at what it’s got her,” murmured Parish.
“Yes, look.”
By the end of the first week, the walls were beginning to close in on her. At Miss Coventry’s suggestion, she went for a short walk across the moor, accompanied by a pair of bodyguards who looked far happier than normal. Afterward, she took a bit of sun in the garden. Once again, it was not what she was used to, the sun of Dartmoor being rather different than Saint-Tropez’s, but it did wonders for her appearance. That evening she ate most of the lovely chicken pie Miss Coventry placed before her and then spent several hours in the sitting room watching the news on television. It was the night CNN broadcast the cell phone video shot by the American tourist outside Downing Street. When a grainy close-up appeared on the screen—a close-up of the officer who had held the terrorist’s thumb to the detonator—she leapt suddenly to her feet.
“My God, that’s him!”
“Who?” asked Miss Coventry.
“The man I met in France. He called himself Nicolas Carnot. But he’s not a police officer. He’s—”
“We do not speak of such things,” said Miss Coventry, cutting her off. “Even in this house.”
The beautiful blue eyes moved from the television screen to Miss Coventry’s face. “You know him, too?” she asked.
“The man in the video? Oh, heavens no. How could I? I’m only the cook.”
The next day she walked a little longer, and upon her return to Wormwood Cottage she asked to speak to someone in authority about the status of her case. Promises were made, she insisted. Assurances had been given. She insinuated they had come directly from “C” himself, a claim Parish found hard to believe. As if “C” would ever trouble himself with the likes of her! Miss Coventry, however, did not dismiss the idea out of hand. Like Parish, she had witnessed many peculiar events at the cottage, such as the night a rather notorious Israeli intelligence officer was handed a copy of a newspaper that declared he was dead. An Israeli intelligence officer who, come to think of it, bore more than a passing resemblance to the man who’d fired several shots into the head of a terrorist on the pavements of Whitehall. No, thought Miss Coventry, it wasn’t possible.
But even Miss Coventry, who occupied the lowliest rung on the ladder of Western intelligence, knew that it was possible. And so she was not at all surprised to find, on the front page of Sunday’s edition of the Telegraph newspaper, a lengthy exposé regarding the operation that had led to the killing of the ISIS terror mastermind known as Saladin. It seemed Jean-Luc Martel, the now-deceased French drug tra
fficker and former companion of Wormwood Cottage’s current occupant, was connected to the case after all. In fact, in the opinion of the Telegraph, he was the operation’s unsung hero.
Miss Coventry placed the newspaper outside the woman’s bedroom door, along with her coffee. And later that morning, while straightening the room, she found the article, intact and neatly clipped, resting on the bedside table. That evening, as a gale blew hard across Dartmoor, a man scaled the security gate without a sound and hiked up the gravel drive to the front door of the cottage. Entering, he wiped his feet and hung his sodden coat on the rack.
“What’s for dinner?” he asked.
“Cottage pie,” said Miss Coventry, smiling. “A nice cup of tea, Mr. Marlowe? Or would you like something stronger?”
She served them dinner at the little table in the alcove and then pulled on her raincoat and knotted a scarf beneath her chin. “You’ll see to the dishes, won’t you, Mr. Marlowe? And use soap this time, my love. It helps.” A moment later the front door closed with a gentle thump and they were finally alone. Olivia smiled for the first time in many days.
“Mr. Marlowe?” she asked incredulously.
“I’ve grown rather fond of it.”
“What’s your first name?”
“Peter, apparently.”
“It’s not the name you were born with?”
He shook his head.
“And Nicolas Carnot?” she asked.
“He was just a part I played briefly to moderate acclaim.”
“You played him well. Very well, actually.”
“I take it you’ve met others like him.”
“Jean-Luc seemed to attract them like flies.” She studied Keller carefully. “So how did you do it? How did you get the part so right?”
“It’s the little touches that count.” He shrugged. “Hair, wardrobe, that sort of thing.”