On the wall above John O’Donnell’s workstation was a large digital clock with red numerals set against a black background. Gabriel, however, had eyes only for the telephone. It was a modern device, with access to twenty lines, including extension 7512, which was available nowhere else in the building. Extension 7512 was O’Donnell’s private reserve. Now it belonged to Gabriel, along with O’Donnell’s warm chair and O’Donnell’s wrinkled legal pad.
The clock rolled over to 17:59 and the seconds began their methodical march from :00 to :59. Gabriel kept his eyes on the phone—on the green light in the box marked 7512, and on the small crack in the receiver, inflicted by O’Donnell during a blind rage early in the crisis. A minute later, when the clock rolled over to 18:00:00, there was an audible gasp in the room. Then, at 18:01:25, Gabriel heard one of O’Donnell’s team members begin to weep. He did not share the pessimism of his audience. He knew the terrorists were cruel bastards who were just using the opportunity of the deadline to have a spot of fun at the expense of their American and Israeli opponents.
At 18:02:17, the telephone finally rang. Gabriel, unwilling to cause his audience any additional stress, answered before it could ring a second time. He spoke in English, with his heavy Hebrew accent, so there would be no misunderstanding about who was on the line.
“The answer is yes,” he said.
“Be ready at ten o’clock tomorrow night. We’ll give you the instructions then.”
Under normal circumstances, a professional negotiator like O’Donnell would have begun the delay tactics: trouble assembling the money, trouble getting the permission of local authorities for the handover, anything to keep the hostage alive and the kidnappers talking. But this was not a normal situation—the terrorists wanted Gabriel—and there was no point delaying the inevitable. The sooner it started, the sooner it would be over.
“You’ll call on this number?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I look forward to hearing from you.”
Click.
Gabriel stood, pulled on his leather jacket, and started toward the stairs.
“Where do you think you’re going?” asked Carter.
“I’m leaving.”
“You can’t just leave.”
“I can’t stay here, Adrian. I have work to do.”
“Let us give you a lift. We can’t have you wandering around London unprotected.”
“I think I can look after myself, Adrian.”
“At least let me rustle you up a gun.”
“What are you boys carrying these days?”
“Browning Hi-Power,” said Carter. “It doesn’t have the grace and beauty of your Berettas, but it’s quite lethal. Would you like one magazine or two?”
Gabriel frowned.
“I’ll bring you two,” said Carter. “And an extra box of ammo for laughs.”
Five minutes later, with Carter’s loaded Browning pressing against the base of his spine, Gabriel slipped past the Marine guard at the North Gate and turned into Upper Brook Street. The sidewalk along the embassy fence was closed to pedestrian traffic and lined with Metropolitan Police officers in lime green jackets. Gabriel crossed to the opposite side of the street and headed toward Hyde Park. He spotted the motorcyclist two minutes later as he rounded the corner into Park Lane. The bike was a powerful BMW and the figure seated atop it was long-legged and helmeted. Gabriel noticed the bulge beneath the leather jacket—the left side, for the right-handed cross draw. He continued north to Marble Arch, then headed west along the Bayswater Road. As he was approaching Albion Gate he heard the roar of the BMW bike at his back. It came alongside him and braked to an abrupt stop. Gabriel swung his leg over the back and wrapped his arms around the rider’s waist. As the bike shot forward he heard the sound of a woman singing. Chiara always sang when she was at the controls of a motorcycle.
48
KENSINGTON, LONDON: 6:28 P.M., FRIDAY
She drove for fifteen minutes through the streets of Belgravia and Brompton to make certain they were not being followed, then made her way to the Israeli embassy, located in Old Court Place just off Kensington High Street. Shamron was waiting for them in the office of the station chief, a foul-smelling Turkish cigarette in one hand and a handsome olive-wood cane in the other. He was angrier than Gabriel had seen him in many years.
“Hello, Ari.”
“What do you think you’re playing at?”
“How did you get here so quickly?”
“I left Ben-Gurion this morning after learning about your exploits in Denmark. It was my intention to ease your way through Heathrow and bring you home again. But when I placed a call to the station to let them know I had arrived, I was told you had just left Downing Street.”
“I tried to steal some matches for you, but I was never alone.”
“You should have consulted with us before agreeing to this!”
“There wasn’t time.”
“There was abundant time! You see, Gabriel, it would have been a very short consultation. You would have asked for clearance to undertake this mission and I would have told you no. End of consultation.” He crushed out his cigarette and looked at Gabriel malevolently for a long moment without speaking. “But to back out of this arrangement now is not an option. Can you imagine the headlines? Vaunted Israeli intelligence service, afraid to rescue the American girl. You’ve left us no choice but to proceed. But that’s exactly what you intended, isn’t it? You are a manipulative little bastard.”
“I learned from the master.”
Shamron stuck another cigarette between his lips, cocked the lid of his old Zippo lighter, and fired. “I held my tongue when you decided to return to Amsterdam to kidnap and interrogate this man Ibrahim Fawaz. I held my tongue again when you went to Copenhagen and tried to negotiate with his son. If I had obeyed my first instinct, which was to bring you home, it wouldn’t have come to this. You had no right to agree to this assignment without first obtaining the permission of your director and your prime minister. If it were anyone but you, I would bring you up on charges and throw you into the Judean Wilderness to atone for your sins.”
“You can do that when I get home.”
“You’re liable to come home in a box. You don’t need to commit suicide in order to get out of being the next chief, Gabriel. If you don’t want the job, just say so.”
“I don’t want the job.”
“I know you don’t really mean that.”
“God, but you’re sounding more and more like a Jewish mother every day.”
“And you are providing me ample proof that you are not up to the job. By way of deception, thou shalt do war—this is our creed. We are not shaheeds, Gabriel. We leave the suicide missions to Hamas and all the other Islamic psychopaths who wish to destroy us. We move like shadows, strike like lightning, and then we vanish into thin air. We do not volunteer to serve as delivery boys for rich Americans, and we certainly don’t sacrifice ourselves for no good reason. You are one of the elite. You are a prince of a very small tribe.”
“And what do we do about Elizabeth Halton? Let her die?”
“If it is the only way to end this madness, then the answer is yes.”
“And if it were your daughter, Ari? If it were Ronit?”
“Then I would shake hands with the Devil himself in order to get her back again. But I wouldn’t ask the Americans to do it for me. Blue and white, Gabriel. Blue and white. We do things for ourselves, and we do not help others with problems of their own making. The Americans threw in their lot with the secular dictatorships of the Middle East a long time ago, and now the oppressed are rising up and taking their revenge on symbols of American power. On September eleventh it was the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Now it is the innocent daughter of the American ambassador to London.”
“And next it will be us.”
“And we will fight them—alone.” Shamron managed a faint smile of reminiscence. “I remember a boy who came home from Europe in 1975, a boy who looked twenty years older than he really was. A boy who wanted nothing more do to with this life in the shadows, nothing more to do with fighting and killing. What happened to this boy?”
“He became a man, Ari. And he is sick to death of this shit. And he will not let this woman be murdered because the Americans refuse to release a dying sheikh from prison.”
“And is this man prepared to die on behalf of this cause?” He looked at Chiara. “Is he prepared to give up his life with this beautiful woman in order to save one he does not know?”
“Trust me, Ari, I’m not a martyr, and the only people who are going to die are the terrorists. When we lost Ibrahim, we lost our only way into the conspiracy. Now, by demanding that I deliver the money, they’ve opened the door to us again. And we’re all going to walk through it, together.”
“You’re telling me that I should think of you as nothing more than an agent of penetration?”
Gabriel nodded. “Taking possession of money will be a major operational undertaking for them. It will expose their operatives and their means of communication. And if they do seize me, it will expose some of their hideouts and safe properties, which will give us additional names and telephone numbers. The British and the Americans have agreed to stay away and leave it to us. We’re going to fight them, Ari, right here on British soil, just the way we’ve always fought them. We’re going to kill them, and we’re going to bring that girl home to her father alive.” Gabriel paused, then added: “And then maybe they will stop blaming us for all their problems.”
“I don’t care what they say about us. You are like a son to me, Gabriel, and I cannot afford to lose you. Not now.”
“You won’t.”
Shamron appeared suddenly fatigued by the confrontation. Gabriel used his silence as an opportunity to close the door on the debate and press forward.
“Where’s the rest of my team?”
“They returned to Amsterdam after the debacle in Denmark,” Shamron said. “They can all be here by morning.”
“I’m going to need Mikhail and his gun.”
Shamron smiled. “Gabriel and Michael: the angel of death and the angel of destruction. If you two can’t bring the woman out alive, then I don’t suppose anyone can.”
“So you’ll give me your blessing?”
“Only my prayers,” he said. “Get some sleep, my son. You’re going to need it. We’ll assemble here at nine in the morning and start planning. Let us hope we are not planning a funeral.”
The apartment on the Bayswater Road was precisely as he had left it the morning of the attack. His half-drunk cup of coffee stood on the desk by the window, next to the London A–Z atlas, which was still open to map number 82. In the bedroom his clothes lay scattered about, evidence of the haste with which he had dressed in the moments before disaster had struck. Samir al-Masri’s notebook, with his mountaintops and sand dunes and spider web of intersecting lines, lay on the unmade bed next to the woman with riotous auburn hair. A Beretta pistol protruded from the front of her faded blue jeans. Gabriel removed the weapon and placed his hand softly against her abdomen.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
“An insatiable desire to touch something beautiful.”
“You know what I’m asking you, Gabriel. Why did you agree to the demands of the kidnappers?”
Gabriel, silent, deftly unsnapped Chiara’s jeans. Chiara pushed his hand away, then reached up to his face. He recoiled from her touch. His skin was throbbing again.
“It’s because of Dani, isn’t it? You know what it’s like to lose a child to the terrorists. You know how it makes you hate, how it can destroy your life.” She ran her fingers through the ash-colored hair at his temples. “Everyone always thought it was Leah who made you burn. They seemed to forget that you lost a son. It’s Dani who drives you. And it’s Dani who’s telling you to take this insane assignment.”
“There’s nothing insane about it.”
“Am I the only person to at least consider the possibility that these terrorists have no intention of releasing Elizabeth Halton—that they will take Ambassador Halton’s money and then kill her?”
“No,” said Gabriel. “That is exactly what they’re going to do.”
“Then why are we engaging in this folly of a ransom payment?”
“Because it is the only way to save her. They’re not going to kill her in some cellar where no one can see it. They kidnapped her in a terrorist spectacular and they’ll kill her in one.” He paused, then added: “And me with her.”
“We are not shaheeds,” she said, parroting the words of Shamron. “We leave the suicide missions to Hamas and all the other Islamic psychopaths who wish to destroy us.”
Gabriel tugged at the zipper of her jeans. Once again she pushed his hand away.
“Did you enjoy working with Sarah again?”
“She performed better than I expected.”
“You trained her, Gabriel. Of course she performed well.”
Chiara lapsed into silence.
“Is there something you want to know?” Gabriel asked.
“Whose idea was it for her to work with you on this operation?”
“It was Carter’s. And it wasn’t an idea. It was a demand. They wanted an American component to our team.”
“He could have picked someone else.” She paused. “Someone who didn’t happen to be in love with you.”
“What are you talking about, Chiara?”
“She’s in love you, Gabriel. Everyone could see it during the al-Bakari operation—everyone but you, that is. You’re rather thick when it comes to matters of the heart.” She looked at him in the darkness. “Or maybe you’re not so thick after all. Maybe you’re secretly in love with her, too. Maybe you want Sarah watching your back tomorrow instead of me.”
His third attempt to remove her jeans met no resistance. The cashmere sweater was a joint operation. Chiara dealt with the brassiere alone and guided his hands to her breasts.
“Fraternization between employees in Office safe houses is strictly forbidden,” she said through his kisses.
“Yes, I know.”
“You’re going to be a terrible chief.”
He was about to take issue with her statement when the blue light on the telephone flashed. When Gabriel reached for it, Chiara seized his hand.
“What if it’s the Memuneh?” he asked.
She rolled on top of him. “Now I’m the Memuneh.”
She pressed her mouth against his. The blue light flashed unanswered.
“Marry me,” she said.
“I’ll marry you.”
“Now, Gabriel. Marry me now.”
“I do,” he said.
“Don’t die on me tomorrow night.”
“I won’t die.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise you.”