Portrait of a Spy

“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.

Yaakov Rossman, a pockmarked veteran agent-runner, appeared next, followed by a pair of all-purpose field hands named Oded and Mordecai. Then came Rimona Stern, a former military intelligence officer who now dealt with issues related to Iran’s disabled nuclear program. A Rubenesque woman with sandstone-colored hair, Rimona also happened to be Shamron’s niece. Gabriel had known her since she was a child—indeed, his fondest memories of Rimona were of a fearless young girl on a kick scooter careening down the steep drive of her famous uncle’s house. On her generous left hip was the faded scar of a wound suffered during a particularly violent spill. Gabriel had applied the field dressing; Gilah had dried Rimona’s tears. Shamron had been far too distraught to offer any assistance. The only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, he could not bear to witness the suffering of loved ones.

A few minutes behind Rimona was Yossi Gavish. A tall, balding figure dressed in corduroy and tweed, Yossi was a top officer in Research, which is how the Office referred to its analytical division. Born in London, he had read classics at All Souls and spoke Hebrew with a pronounced English accent. He had also done a bit of acting—his portrayal of Iago was still recalled with great fondness by the critics in Stratford—and was a gifted cellist as well. Gabriel had yet to exploit Yossi’s musical talents, but his skills as an actor had on more than one occasion proven useful in the field. There was a beachside café in St. Barts where the waitresses thought him a dream and a hotel in Geneva where the concierge had taken a private vow to shoot him on sight.

As usual, Mikhail Abramov arrived last. Lanky and fair, with a fine-boned face and eyes the color of glacial ice, he had immigrated to Israel from Russia as a teenager and joined the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s elite special operations unit. Once described as “Gabriel without a conscience,” he had personally assassinated several of the top terror masterminds from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Burdened with two heavy cases filled with electronic gear, he greeted Sarah with an unambiguously frigid kiss. Eli Lavon would later describe it as the frostiest embrace since Shamron, during the halcyon days of the peace process, had been forced to shake the hand of Yasser Arafat.

Known by the code name Barak, the Hebrew word for lightning, the nine men and women of Gabriel’s team had many idiosyncrasies and many traditions. Among the idiosyncrasies was a ritual childlike squabble over room assignments. Among the traditions was a lavish first-night planning meal prepared by Chiara. The one that occurred at N Street was more poignant than most, in that it was never supposed to take place. Like everyone else at King Saul Boulevard, the team had expected the operation against the Iranian nuclear program to be Gabriel’s last. They had been told as much by their chief in name only, Uzi Navot, who was not altogether displeased, and by Shamron, who was distraught. “I had no choice but to set him free,” Shamron said after his fabled encounter with Gabriel atop the cliffs of Cornwall. “This time it’s for good.”

It might have been for good if Gabriel had not spotted Farid Khan walking along Wellington Street with a bomb beneath his overcoat. The men and women gathered around the dining room table understood the toll Covent Garden had taken on Gabriel. Many years earlier, in another lifetime, under another name, he had failed to prevent a bombing in Vienna that forever altered the course of his life. On that occasion, the bomb had been hidden not beneath the overcoat of a shahid but in the undercarriage of Gabriel’s car. The victims were not strangers but loved ones—his wife, Leah, and his only son, Dani. Leah lived now in a psychiatric hospital atop Mount Herzl in Jerusalem in a prison of memory and a body destroyed by fire. She had only a vague sense that Dani was buried not far from her, on the Mount of Olives.

The members of Gabriel’s team did not mention Leah and Dani that evening, nor did they dwell long on the chain of events that led Gabriel to be an unwilling witness to Farid Khan’s martyrdom. Instead, they spoke of friends and family, of books they had read and movies they had seen, and of the remarkable changes currently sweeping the Arab world. In Egypt, Pharaoh had finally fallen, unleashing a wave of protest that was threatening to topple the kings and secular dictators who had ruled the region for generations. Whether the changes would bring Israel greater security or place it in greater peril was a topic of hot debate inside the Office and around the dinner table that night. Yossi, an optimist by nature, believed the Arabs, if given the opportunity to govern themselves, would have no truck with those who wished to make war with Israel. Yaakov, who had spent years running spies against hostile Arab regimes, declared Yossi dangerously delusional, as did nearly everyone else. Only Dina refused to venture an opinion, for her thoughts were focused on the crates of files waiting in the living room. She had a clock ticking in her formidable brain and believed that a minute wasted was a minute left to terrorists to plot and plan. The files held the promise of lives saved. They were sacred texts that contained secrets only she could decode.

It was approaching midnight by the time the meal finally came to an end. It was followed by the traditional spat over who would clear the dishes, who would wash, and who would dry. After recusing himself, Gabriel acquainted Dina with the files, then showed Chiara upstairs to their room. It was on the third floor, overlooking the rear garden. The red aircraft warning lights atop the spires of Georgetown University winked softly in the distance, a reminder of the city’s vulnerability to aviation-based terrorism.

“I suppose there are worse places to spend a few days,” Chiara said. “Where did you put Mikhail and Sarah?”

“As far apart as possible.”

“What are the chances this operation might bring them back together?”

“About the same that the Arab world is suddenly going to recognize our right to exist.”

“That bad?”

“I’m afraid so.” Gabriel lifted Chiara’s bag and placed it at the end of the bed. It sagged beneath the weight. “What have you got in here?”

“Gilah sent along a few things for you.”

“Rocks?”

“Food,” Chiara said. “You know how Gilah is. She always thought you were too thin.”

“How is she?”

“Now that Ari isn’t spending so much time around the house, she seems to be doing much better.”

“Did he finally sign up for that pottery course he’s always wanted to take?”

“Actually, he’s back at King Saul Boulevard.”

“Doing what?”

“Uzi thought he needed something to keep him occupied, so he made him your operational coordinator. He’d like you to call him first thing in the morning.” Chiara kissed his cheek and smiled. “Welcome home, darling.”

Chapter 16

Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

THERE IS A TRUISM ABOUT terror networks: putting the pieces in place is not as difficult as one might imagine. But once the mastermind pulls the trigger and carries out his first attack, the element of surprise is lost and the network exposes itself. In the earliest years of the conflict against terrorism—when Black September and Carlos the Jackal were running amok, aided by useful leftist Euro-idiots such as the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Brigades—intelligence officers mainly used physical surveillance, hard wiretaps, and good old-fashioned detective work to identify the members of a cell. Now, with the advent of the Internet and global satellite communications, the contours of the battlefield had been altered. The Internet had given the terrorists a powerful tool to organize, inspire, and communicate, but it had also provided intelligence services with a means of tracking their every move. Cyberspace was like a forest in winter. The terrorists could hide there for a time, hatching their plots and organizing their forces, but they could not come or go without leaving footprints in the snow. The challenge for the counterterrorism officer was to follow the right set of tracks, for the virtual forest was a dark and confusing place where one could wander aimlessly while innocents died.

Gabriel and his team cautiously set foot there the next morning when British intelligence, under standing agreement, shared with their American cousins the preliminary results of the inquiry into the Covent Garden bombing. Included in the material were the contents of Farid Khan’s computers at home and work, a printout of every number he had dialed from his mobile phone, and a list of known Islamic extremists he had encountered while he was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun. There was also a copy of the suicide tape, along with several hundred still images captured by CCTV during the final months of his life. The last photo showed him standing in Covent Garden, his arms raised above his head, a bloom of fire erupting from the explosives belt around his waist. Lying on the ground a few feet away, shielded by two men, was Gabriel. When the picture was magnified, it was possible to see the shadow of a gun in his left hand.