7
HEATHROW AIRPORT, LONDON
Gabriel had spent much of his life eluding the police forces and security services of Europe, and so it was with considerable reluctance that he agreed to be met at Heathrow Airport the following afternoon by MI5.
He spotted the three-man reception team as he came into the arrivals hall. It was not difficult; they were wearing matching mackintosh raincoats, and one was holding Gabriel’s photograph. He had been instructed to let the MI5 men make the approach, so he went to the information kiosk and spent several minutes pretending to scrutinize a list of London hotels. Finally, anxious to deliver his briefing before the terrorists struck, he walked over and introduced himself. The officer with the photograph took him by the arm and led him outside to a waiting Jaguar limousine. Gabriel smiled. He had always harbored a secret envy of British spies and their cars.
The rear window slid down a few inches and a long, boney hand beckoned him over. The hand was attached to none other than Graham Seymour, MI5’s long-serving and highly regarded deputy director general. He was in his late fifties now and had aged like fine wine. His Savile Row pin-striped suit fit him to perfection, and his full head of blond hair had a silvery cast to it that gave him the look of those male models one sees in advertisements for costly but needless trinkets. As Gabriel climbed into the car, Seymour appraised him silently for a moment with a pair of granite-colored eyes. He did not look pleased, but then few men in his position would. The Netherlands, France, Germany, and Spain all had their fair share of Muslim radicals, but among intelligence professionals there was little disagreement over which country was the epicenter of European Islamic extremism. It was the country Graham Seymour was sworn to protect: the United Kingdom.
Gabriel knew that the crisis now facing Britain was many years in the making and, to a large degree, self-inflicted. For two decades, beginning in the 1980s and continuing even after the attacks of 9/11, British governments both Labour and Tory had thrown open their doors to the world’s most hardened holy warriors. Cast out by countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria, they had come to London, where they were free to publish, preach, organize, conspire, and raise money. As a result, Great Britain, the land of John Locke, William Shakespeare, and Winston Churchill, had unwittingly allowed itself to become the primary incubator of a violent ideology that sought to destroy everything for which it had once stood. The British security and intelligence services, confronted by a gathering storm, had responded by choosing the path of accommodation rather than resistance. Extremism was tolerated so long as it was directed outward, toward the secular Arab regimes, America, and, of course, Israel. The failure of this policy of appeasement had been held up for all the world to see on July 7, 2005, when three bombs exploded inside the London Underground and a fourth tore a London city bus to shreds in Russell Square. Fifty-two people were killed and seven hundred more wounded. The perpetrators of this bloodbath were not destitute Muslims from abroad but middle-class British boys who had turned on the country of their birth. And all evidence suggested it was only their opening salvo. Her Majesty’s security services estimated the number of terrorists residing in Britain at sixteen thousand—three thousand of whom had actually trained in al-Qaeda camps—and recent intelligence suggested that the United Kingdom had eclipsed America and Israel as al-Qaeda’s primary target.
“It’s funny,” said Seymour, “but when we checked the manifest for the flight from Amsterdam we didn’t see anyone on the list named Gabriel Allon.”
“Obviously you didn’t look hard enough.”
The MI5 man held out his hand.
“Let’s not do this, Graham. Haven’t we more pressing matters to deal with than the name on my passport?”
“Give it to me.”
Gabriel surrendered his passport and stared out the window at the traffic rushing along the A4. It was 3:30 in the afternoon and already dark. No wonder the Arabs turned to radicals when they moved here, he thought. Perhaps it was light deprivation that drove them to jihad and terror.
Graham Seymour opened the passport and recited the particulars. “Heinrich Kiever. Place of birth, Berlin.” He looked up at Gabriel. “East or West?”
“Herr Kiever is definitely a man of the West.”
“We had an agreement, Allon.”
“Yes, I know.”
“It stated that we would grant you absolution for your multitude of sins in exchange for a simple commitment on your part—that you would inform us when you were coming to our fair shores and that you would refrain from conducting operations on our soil without obtaining our permission and cooperation beforehand.”
“I’m sitting in the back of an MI5 limousine. How much more cooperation and notification do you require?”
“What about the passport?”
“It’s nice, isn’t it?”
“Do the Germans know you’re abusing their travel documents?”
“We abuse yours, too, Graham. It’s what we do.”
“We don’t do it. SIS makes a point of traveling only on British or Commonwealth passports.”
“How sporting of them,” Gabriel said. “But it’s far easier to travel the world on a British passport than it is on an Israeli one. Safer, too. Take a trip to Syria or Lebanon some time on an Israeli passport. It’s an experience you’ll never forget.”
“Smart-ass.” Seymour handed the passport to Gabriel. “What were you doing in Amsterdam?”
“Some personal business.”
“Elaborate, please.”
“I’m afraid I can’t.”
“Did the Dutch know you were there?”
“Not exactly.”
“I’ll take that as a no.”
“I always heard you were good, Graham.”
Seymour pulled his face into a fatigued frown, a sign that he’d had enough of the verbal sparring match. The inhospitality of his reception came as little surprise to Gabriel. The British services did not care much for the Office. They were Arabists by education, anti-Semites by breeding, and still resented the Jews for driving the Empire out of Palestine.
“What have you got for me, Gabriel?”
“I think an al-Qaeda cell from Amsterdam might have entered Britain in the last forty-eight hours with the intention of carrying out a major attack.”
“Just one cell?” Seymour quipped. “I’m sure they’ll feel right at home.”
“That bad, Graham?”
Seymour nodded his gray head. “At last count we were monitoring more than two hundred networks and separate groupings of known terrorists. Half our Muslim youth profess admiration for Osama bin Laden, and we estimate that more than one hundred thousand supported the attacks on the London transport system, which means they have a very large pool of potential recruits from which to draw in the future. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t sound the alarm just because another cell of Muslim fanatics has decided to put ashore.”
“Maybe it isn’t just another cell, Graham. Maybe they’re the real thing.”
“They’re all the real thing,” Seymour said. “You said you think they’re here. Does that mean you’re not sure?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“So let me make sure I understand correctly. I have sixteen thousand known Islamic terrorists residing in my country, but I’m supposed to divert manpower and resources into finding a cell that you think might be in Britain?” Greeted by silence, Graham Seymour answered his own question. “If it were anyone but you, I’d pull over and let him out. But you do have something of a track record, don’t you? What makes you think they might be here?”
Gabriel handed him the envelope of photographs.
“This is all you have? Some snapshots of Ahmed’s holiday in London? No train tickets? No rental car receipts? No e-mail intercepts? No visual or audio surveillance?”
“They were here on a surveillance mission four months ago. And his name isn’t Ahmed. It’s Samir.”
“Samir what?”
“Samir al-Masri, Hudsonstraat 37, Oud West, Amsterdam.”
Seymour looked at the photo of Samir standing in front of the Houses of Parliament. “Is he Dutch?”
“Egyptian, as far we know.”
“As far as you know? What about the other members of this phantom cell? You have any names?”
Gabriel handed him a slip of paper with the other names Ibrahim Fawaz had given him in Amsterdam. “Based on what we know, the cell was operating out of the al-Hijrah Mosque on the Jan Hazenstraat in west Amsterdam.”
“And you’re sure he’s Egyptian?”
“That’s the flag he was flying in Amsterdam. Why?”
“Because we’ve been picking up some chatter recently among some of our more radical Egyptian countrymen.”
“What sort of chatter?”
“Blowing up buildings, bringing down bridges and airplanes, killing a few thousand people on the Underground—you know, the usual things people discuss over tea and biscuits.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
Seymour hesitated, then said, “Finsbury Park.”
“But of course.”
There was perhaps no more appropriate symbol of Britain’s current predicament than the North London Central Mosque, known commonly as the Finsbury Park mosque. Built in 1990 with money donated by the king of Saudi Arabia, it was among the most radical in Europe. Richard Reid, the infamous shoe-bomber, had passed through its doors; so had Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called twentieth hijacker, and Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian terrorist who was arrested shortly before the millennium for plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. British police raided the mosque in January 2003—inside they discovered such sacred items as forged passports, chemical-protective suits, and a stun gun—and eventually it was turned over to new leadership. It was later revealed that one member of the new board of trustees was a former Hamas terror mastermind from the West Bank. When the former terrorist gave the British government assurances that he was now a man of peace, he was permitted to remain in his post.
“So you think Samir is the cell leader?”
“That’s what my source tells me.”
“Has your source ever been right in the past?”
“Do you remember that plot to shoot down an El Al jetliner at Schiphol last year?”
“The one that the Dutch broke up?”
“The Dutch didn’t break it up, Graham. We broke it up, with the help of this same source.”
Seymour looked down at the photographs. “It’s not much to go on,” he said, “but I’m afraid it does fit the profile of a major attack scenario we’ve developed.”
“What sort of scenario?”
“An action cell based abroad, working with surveillance and support cells buried within the local community here. The action cell members train and prepare in a place where we can’t monitor them, then come ashore at the last minute, so we have no time to find them and disrupt their plans. Obviously it would take complex planning and a skilled mastermind to pull it off.” He held up the snapshots. “Can I keep these?”
“They’re yours.”
“I’ll have Immigration run the names and see if your boys have actually entered the country, and I’ll give copies of the pictures to our colleagues in the Anti-Terrorist Branch of Scotland Yard. If the Metropolitan Police deem the threat credible, they might put a few more men at some of the sites al-Masri visited.”
“What about raising the overall threat level?” Gabriel asked. “What about stepping up the surveillance of your local Egyptian radicals in Finsbury Park?”
“We’re not like our American brethren. We don’t like to move the needle on the threat meter each time we get nervous. We find it only serves to make the British public more cynical. As for our local Egyptians, we’re watching them closely enough already.”
“I hope so.”
“How long are you planning to stay in London?”
“Just tonight.”
Seymour handed him a business card. It had nothing on it but a telephone number. “It’s for my mobile. Call me if you pick up anything else in Amsterdam. Can I drop you at your hotel?”
“No thanks, Graham.”
“How about your safe flat?”
“Our embassy would be fine. I’m going to have a quiet word with our local chief of station and the head of embassy security to make sure we take appropriate measures.”
“Give my best to your station chief. And tell him to behave himself.”
“Is it your intention to follow me after I leave the embassy?”
“I don’t have the spare manpower or I would.”
He was lying, of course. Honor among spies went only so far.
Gabriel’s meetings at the embassy ran longer than expected. The chief of security had turned what should have been a five-minute briefing into an hour-long question-and-answer period, while the Office’s chief of station had used a routine courtesy call as an opportunity to try to impress the man he clearly assumed would one day be his boss. The debacle was made complete at six, when the ambassador appeared without warning and insisted Gabriel accompany him to dinner in Knightsbridge. Gabriel had no excuse at the ready and was forced to endure a painfully boring evening discussing the intricacies of Israel’s ties to the United Kingdom. Throughout the meal he thought often of Eli Lavon quietly reading files in snowy Amsterdam and wished that he was still there with him.
It was after ten o’clock by the time he finally entered the Office safe flat on the Bayswater Road overlooking Hyde Park. He left his bag in the entrance hall and quickly took stock of his surroundings. It was simply furnished, as most safe flats were, and rather large by London standards. Housekeeping had left food in the fridge and a 9mm Beretta in the pantry, along with a spare magazine and two boxes of ammunition.
Gabriel loaded the gun and carried it with him into the bedroom. It had been three days since he’d had a proper night’s sleep and it had taken all his training and substantial powers of concentration to get through dinner with the ambassador without falling asleep over his coq au vin. He undressed quickly and climbed into bed, then switched on the television and turned the volume down very low so that if there was an attack in the night he would be awakened by the news bulletins. He wondered whether the Metropolitan Police had acted yet on the information he’d brought from Amsterdam. Two hundred active terror networks, sixteen thousand known terrorists, three thousand men who had been through the training camps of al-Qaeda… MI5 and the Met had more to worry about than five boys from Amsterdam. He’d sensed something in Graham Seymour’s demeanor that afternoon, a resignation that it was only a matter of time before London was hit again.
Gabriel was reaching for the light when he noticed Samir’s yellow legal pad poking from the side flap of his overnight bag. Probably nothing there, he thought, but he knew himself well enough to realize that he would never be able to sleep unless he made certain. He found a pencil in the top drawer of the bedside table and spent the next ten minutes rubbing it gently over the surface of the pad. Samir’s secrets came slowly to life before his eyes. Pine trees on a mountaintop, sand dunes in a desert, a spider web of bisecting lines. Samir al-Masri, jihadist and bachelor slob, was a doodler.