The Secret Servant

  “Perhaps you and Chiara should consider something smaller and more intimate.”

  “We already have.”

  “Do you have a date in mind?”

  Gabriel told him.

  “May? Why are you waiting until May? Did you learn nothing from this affair? Life is precious, Gabriel, and terribly short. I may not even be alive in May.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll just have to hang in there, Ari. Chiara needs time to plan the reception. We can’t do it any sooner.”

  “Plan? What plan? You and I could do it in an afternoon.”

  “Weddings aren’t operations, Ari.”

  “Whoever said that?”

  “Chiara.”

  “Of course weddings are operations.” He brought his fist down on the arm of the chair. “Chiara has had to put up with considerable dithering and nonsense on your part. If I were you, I’d plan the wedding myself and surprise her.”

  “She’s an Italian Jew, Ari. She has something of a temper and doesn’t like surprises.”

  “All women like surprises, you dolt.”

  Gabriel had to admit he liked the idea. “I’ll need help,” he said.

  “So we’ll get you some help.”

  “Where?”

  Shamron smiled. “Silly boy.”

  They were the dark side of a dark service, the ones who did the jobs no one else wanted, or dared, to do. But never before in the storied history of Special Ops had they ever planned a wedding, at least not a real one.

  They gathered the following morning in Room 456C, Gabriel’s subterranean lair at King Saul Boulevard: Yaakov and Yossi, Dina and Rimona, Mordecai and Oded, Mikhail and Eli Lavon. Gabriel walked to the front of the room and tacked a photograph of Chiara to his bulletin board. “Ten days from now, I am going to marry this woman,” he said. “The wedding must be everything she wants and she must not know or suspect a thing. We must work quickly and we will make no mistakes.”

  Like all good operations it started with intelligence gathering. They scoured her bridal magazines for telltale markings and interrogated Gabriel carefully about everything she had ever said to him. Alarmed by the poor quality of his answers, Dina and Rimona scheduled a crash luncheon meeting with Chiara the following afternoon at a trendy Tel Aviv restaurant. They returned to King Saul Boulevard slightly drunk but armed with all the information they needed to proceed.

  The following morning Gabriel and Chiara were awakened at Narkiss Street by an officer from Personnel who informed Chiara that she was alarmingly overdue for a complete physical. There was an opening that morning, said the man from Personnel. Could she come to King Saul Boulevard immediately? Having nothing better to do that day, she complied with the request and by ten o’clock was being subjected to rather close scrutiny by two Office-affiliated physicians—one of whom was not a physician at all but a tailor from Identity. He was less interested in matters such as blood pressure and heart rate and more concerned with the length of her arms and legs and the size of her waist and bust. Later that afternoon he slipped down to Room 456C to ask Gabriel whether he was to leave room in the garment for a weapon. Gabriel said that would not be necessary.

  With three days remaining, everything was in place with one notable exception: Chiara herself. For this phase of the operation Gabriel drafted none other than Gilah Shamron, who telephoned Chiara later that evening and asked whether they could come to Tiberias for a surprise birthday party for Shamron that Saturday. She agreed to Gilah’s request without even bothering to check with Gabriel and told him about their plans for the weekend that night over dinner.

  “How old is he going to be?” she asked.

  “It’s a carefully guarded state secret, but rumor has it he fought in the rebellion against Roman rule.”

  “Did you know his birthday was in March?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” he said hastily.

  It was in late August, actually, and the last person who had tried to throw Shamron a surprise party still walked with a limp. But Chiara didn’t know that. Chiara didn’t know anything.

  It had rained steadily all week, a contingency for which they had not planned, but by midmorning Saturday the sun was shining brightly and the newly washed air was scented with stone pine and jasmine and eucalyptus. They slept late and ate a leisurely breakfast on the balcony, then packed a few things into an overnight bag and set out for the Galilee.

  Gabriel drove down the Bab al-Wad to the Coastal Plain, then north to the Valley of Jezreel. They stopped there for a few minutes to collect Eli Lavon from the dig atop Tel Megiddo, then continued on to Tiberias. Shamron’s honey-colored villa was just a few miles north of the city, on a ledge overlooking the Sea of Galilee. Two dozen cars lined the steep drive, and in the forecourt was a large American Suburban with diplomatic license plates. Adrian Carter and Sarah Bancroft were standing at the balustrade of Shamron’s terrace, chatting with Uzi Navot and Bella.

  “Gilah never told me Carter was coming,” Chiara said.

  “She must have forgotten to mention it.”

  “How do you forget to mention that the deputy director of the CIA is coming all the way from Washington? And what is Sarah doing here?”

  “Gilah’s old, Chiara. Give her a break.”

  Gabriel climbed out before she could pose another question, then retrieved the overnight bag from the trunk and led her up the steps. Gilah was standing in the entrance hall as they came inside. The large rooms had been emptied of their furniture and several round tables put in their place. Chiara stared at the place settings and the flower arrangements, then walked past Gilah and stepped on the terrace, where a hundred white chairs stood in neat rows around a chuppah hung with flowers. She spun round, mouth open, and looked at Gabriel.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Gabriel held up the overnight bag and said, “I’m going to take this up to our room.”

  “Gabriel Allon, come back here.”

  She followed quickly after him and chased him down the corridor to their room. As she stepped inside, she saw the dress laid out on the bed.

  “My God, Gabriel, what have you done?”

  “Made amends for all my mistakes, I hope.”

  She threw her arms around him and kissed him, then ran a hand through her hair.

  “It’s a mess. What am I going to do?”

  “We brought a hair stylist from Tel Aviv. A very good one.”

  “What about my family?”

  He looked at his watch. “We flew them out of Venice aboard a charter. They landed at Ben-Gurion twenty minutes ago. We’re bringing them up here by helicopter.”

  “And the rings?”

  He pulled a small jewelry box from his coat pocket and opened it.

  “They’re beautiful,” she said. “You thought of everything.”

  “Weddings are operations.”

  “No, they’re not, you dolt.” She slapped his arm playfully. “What time is the ceremony?”

  “Whenever you want it to be.”

  “What time is sundown?”

  “Five-oh-eight.”

  “We’ll start at five-oh-nine.” She kissed him again. “And don’t be late.”

  62

  JERUSALEM

  You and your team ran a very nice operation,” said Adrian Carter.

  “Which one?”

  “The wedding, of course. Too bad London didn’t go as smoothly.”

  “If it had gone smoothly, we wouldn’t have gotten Elizabeth back.”

  “This is true.”

  A waiter approached their table and freshened Carter’s coffee. Gabriel turned and looked toward the walls of the Old City, which were glowing softly in the gentle sunlight. It was Monday morning. Carter had rung Gabriel’s apartment at seven on the off chance he was free for breakfast. Gabriel had agreed to meet him here, the terrace restaurant of the King David Hotel, knowing full well that Adrian Carter never did anything on the off chance.

  “Why are you still in Jerusalem, Adrian??
??

  “Officially, I am here to conduct meetings with our generously staffed CIA station. Unofficially, I stayed in order to see you.”

  “Is Sarah still here?”

  “She left yesterday. Poor thing had to fly commercial.” Carter raised his coffee cup to his lips and stared at Gabriel for a moment without drinking. “Did anything ever happen between you two that I should know about?”

  “No, Adrian, nothing happened between us, during this operation or the last one.” Gabriel made swirls in his Israeli yogurt. “Is that why you stayed in Jerusalem? To ask me whether I slept with one of your officers?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why are you here, Adrian?”

  He reached into the breast pocket of his Brooks Brothers blazer, withdrew an envelope, and handed it to Gabriel. The front bore no markings, but when he turned it over he saw THE WHITE HOUSE printed on the flap in simple lettering.

  “What’s this? An invitation to a White House barbecue?”

  “It’s a note,” said Carter, then he added somewhat pedantically: “From the president of the United States.”

  “Yes, I can see that, Adrian. What’s the topic of the letter?”

  “I’m not in the habit of reading other people’s mail.”

  “You should be.”

  “I assume the president wrote to you in order to thank you for what you did in London.”

  “It might have been helpful if he had said something publicly a month ago, while I was twisting in the wind.”

  “Trust me, Gabriel. If he had spoken out on your behalf, you would have been in more trouble than you are now. These things have a way of blowing themselves out, and sometimes the best course of action is to take no action at all.”

  A cloud passed in front of the sun, and for a moment it seemed several degrees colder. Gabriel opened the note, read it quickly, and slipped it into his coat pocket.

  “What does it say?”

  “It is private, Adrian, and it will remain so.”

  “Good man,” said Carter.

  “Did you get one, too?”

  “A note from the president?” Carter shook his head. “I’m afraid that my position is somewhat tenuous at the moment. Isn’t it amazing? We got Elizabeth back and now we are under siege.”

  “This, too, shall pass, Adrian.”

  “I know,” he said. “But it doesn’t make it any more pleasant to go through. There are a band of Young Turks at Langley who think I’ve been running the DO for too long. They say I’ve lost a step. They say I should have never agreed to turn over so much of the operation to you.”

  “Do you have any intention of ceding power?”

  “None,” said Carter forcefully. “The world is too dangerous a place to be left to Young Turks. I intend to stay until this war against terrorism is won.”

  “I hope longevity runs in your family.”

  “My grandfather lived to be a hundred and four.”

  “What about Sarah? Has she been hurt by this in any way?”

  “None whatsoever,” Carter replied. “Only a handful of people even knew she was a part of it.”

  The sun emerged from behind the clouds again. Gabriel slipped on his wraparound glasses while Carter pulled a second envelope from the pocket of his blazer. “This is from Robert Halton,” he said. “I’m afraid I know what’s inside that one.”

  Gabriel withdrew the contents: a brief handwritten note and a check made out in Gabriel’s name for the sum of ten million dollars. Gabriel kept the letter and handed the check back to Carter.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to think about that for a minute?” Carter asked.

  “I don’t want his money, Adrian.”

  “You’re entitled to it. You risked your life to save his daughter’s—not once but twice.”

  “It’s what we do,” Gabriel said. “Tell him thanks but no thanks.”

  Carter left the check on the table.

  “You have anything else in your pocket for me, Adrian?”

  Carter turned his gaze toward the Old City walls. “I have a name,” he said.

  “The Sphinx?”

  Carter nodded. The Sphinx.

  His voice, already underpowered, fell to an almost inaudible level. It seemed that Carter, before coming to Israel for Gabriel’s wedding, had made a brief stopover in the South of France, not for the purposes of recreation—Carter hadn’t taken a proper holiday since 9/11—but for an operation. The target of this operation was none other than Prince Rashid bin Sultan, who had come to the French Riviera himself for a spot of gambling in the casinos of Monaco. The prince had played poorly and lost mightily, a fact the puritanical Carter seemed to find most offensive, and upon returning to the airport at Nice early the next morning in a highly inebriated state had found Carter and a team of CIA paramilitary officers relaxing in the luxurious confines of his private 747. Carter had presented the prince, now irate, with a CIA dossier detailing his many sins—sins that included financial support for al-Qaeda, the foreign fighters and Sunni insurgents in Iraq, and a militant Egyptian group called the Sword of Allah, which had just carried out the abduction of the goddaughter of the president of the United States. Carter had then given the prince a choice of destinations: Riyadh or Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

  “That sounds like something we would do,” Gabriel said.

  “Yes, it did have a very Office-like quality to it.”

  “I take it the prince chose Riyadh as his destination.”

  “It was the only wise bet he made all night.”

  “How much did the ride home cost him?”

  “A name,” Carter said. “The question now is, what do we do with this name? Option one, we work with our Egyptian brethren and bring this fellow to trial in United States. Justice will be served if we follow this course but at a considerable price. A trial will expose the underside of our relationship with the Egyptian security services. It will also leave us saddled with another Sword of Allah prisoner whom they will almost certainly attempt to get back, thus placing American lives at risk.”

  “And we can’t have that.”

  “No, we can’t,” agreed Carter. “Which brings us to option number two: dealing with the matter quietly.”

  “Our preferred method.”

  “Indeed.”

  Gabriel held out his hand. Carter delved into his pocket again and came out with a slip of paper. Gabriel read what was written there and smiled.

  “Can you make him go away?” asked Carter.

  “It shouldn’t be a problem,” Gabriel said. “But I’m afraid we’ll have to spread a little money around Cairo to make it happen.”

  Carter held up Robert Halton’s check. “Will this be enough to get the job done?”

  “More than enough. But what should I do with the change?”

  “Keep it.”

  “Can I kill the prince, too?”

  “Maybe next time,” said Carter. “More coffee?”

  63

  CYPRUS

  He left Jerusalem for Cyprus three days later. Chiara pleaded with him to take her along but he refused. He had lost one wife to his enemies and had no intention of losing another.

  He entered the country on an Israeli passport bearing the name Gideon Argov and told the Cypriot customs officers that the purpose of his visit was vacation. After collecting his rental car, a C-Class Mercedes that he subjected to a thorough inspection, he set out along the south coast toward the whitewashed villa by the sea. Wazir al-Zayyat had been vague about when he might appear, so Gabriel stopped briefly in a small village market and bought enough food to last him three days.

  The March weather was unseasonably mild and he spent the first day relaxing on the terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, guilt-ridden for having abandoned Chiara to Jerusalem. By the second day he was restless with boredom, so he searched the Internet for a decent art-supply shop and found one a few miles up the coast. He spent the remainder of the afternoon producing sketches of the vil
la, and, late in the afternoon of the third day, he was working on a decent watercolor seascape when he spotted al-Zayyat’s car coming up the road from Larnaca.

  Their encounter was conducted at a leisurely pace and in the cool sunshine on the terrace. Al-Zayyat worked his way slowly through the bottle of single malt while Gabriel sipped mineral water with wedges of lemon and lime. For a long time they talked in generalities about the situation inside Egypt, but as the sun was sinking slowly into the sea Gabriel brought the topic of conversation around to the real reason why he had asked al-Zayyat to come to Cyprus: the name he had been given in Jerusalem earlier that week by Adrian Carter. Upon hearing it, al-Zayyat smiled and nipped at his whisky.

  “We’ve had our suspicions about the professor for some time,” he said.

  “He was in Paris for the last year working on a book at something called the Institute for Islamic Studies. It’s a well-known front for jihadist activities, funded in part by Prince Rashid. He left Paris the day after Christmas and came back to Cairo, where he resumed his teaching duties at the American University.”

  “I take it you’d like to grant the good professor a sabbatical?”

  “A permanent one.”

  “It’s going to cost you.”

  “Trust me, Wazir—money is no obstacle.”

  “When would you like to do it?”

  “Late spring,” he said. “Before the weather gets too hot.”

  “Just make sure it’s a clean job. I don’t want you making a mess in my town.”

  One hour later al-Zayyat left the villa with a briefcase containing half a million dollars. The next morning Gabriel burned his sketches and the watercolor and flew home to Chiara.

  64

  CAIRO

  The name on the reservation list sent a chill down the neck of Mr. Katubi, the chief concierge of Cairo’s InterContinental Hotel. Surely there was a glitch in the computer reservation system, he thought as he stared at it in disbelief. Surely it had to be a different Herr Johannes Klemp. Surely he hadn’t decided to come back for a return engagement. Surely it was all some sort of terrible misunderstanding. He picked up his house phone and dialed Reservations to see if the guest had made any special requests. The list was so long and detailed it took three minutes for the girl to recite them all.