51
He was lost in a gallery of memory hung with portraits of the dead. They spoke to him as he drifted slowly past—Zwaiter and Hamidi; the brothers al-Hourani; Sabri and Khaled al-Khalifa, father and son of terror. They welcomed him to the land of martyrs and celebrated his death with sweets and song. At the end of the gallery, a bloodless boy with bullet holes in his face guided Gabriel through the doors of a church in Venice. The nave was hung with a cycle of paintings depicting scenes from his life and above the main altar was an unfinished canvas, clearly painted by the hand of Bellini, portraying Gabriel’s death. The master himself was standing in the sanctuary. He took Gabriel by the hand and led him into a garden in Jerusalem, where a woman scarred by fire sat in the shade of an olive tree with a cherubic boy on her lap. Look at the snow, the woman was saying to the child. The snow absolves Vienna of its sins. The snow falls on Vienna while the missiles rain on Tel Aviv. He heard someone calling his name. He went into the church but found it empty. When he returned to the garden, the woman and the boy were gone.
When finally he woke, it was with the sensation that he had drunk himself sick. His headache was catastrophic, his mouth felt as though it were filled with a wad of cotton wool, and he feared he might throw up, even though it had been many hours since he had taken food. He opened his eyes slowly and, without moving a muscle, took stock of his situation. He lay on his back atop a narrow camp bed, in a small chamber with walls as white as porcelain. His hands were cuffed and the cuffs were attached to an iron loop in the wall behind his head so that his arms were stretched painfully backward. His clothing and wristwatch had been removed; his mouth had been taped closed. A searing white light shone fiercely into his face.
He closed his eyes, fought off a wave of nausea, and shivered violently from the cold. A good hiding place, this. Surely much planning and enterprise had gone into creating it. Despite the almost clinical cleanliness of the chamber, there were foul smells on the air, the smell of feces and body odor, the odor of a woman held for a long time in captivity. Elizabeth Halton had been here before him—he was certain of it. Was she still close by, he wondered, or had they moved her to another location to make way for the new tenant?
There were noises beyond the door. Gabriel turned his head a few degrees and saw an eye glaring at him through the peephole. Next he heard the sound of a padlock opening, followed by the groan of the cold hinges. A single man entered his cell. He was no more than thirty, slightly built and dressed in a collared shirt with a burgundy V-necked pullover. He gazed at Gabriel quizzically for a long moment through a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, as if he had been looking for a library or bookshop and had stumbled onto this scene instead. Gabriel found something familiar in the arrangement of the man’s features. Only when he tore the tape from Gabriel’s face and in Arabic wished him a pleasant evening did he understand why. The voice belonged to a young man from the Oud West in Amsterdam—a young man who was half Egyptian and half Palestinian, a volatile mix.
It belonged to Ishaq Fawaz.
He vanished as quickly as he had appeared. A few minutes later, four men entered his cell. They hit him several times in the abdomen before uncuffing his hands, then, after lifting him to his feet, hit him some more. The chamber was too small for a proper beating and so, after a brief conference, they dragged him naked up a flight of stairs and into a darkened warehouse space. Gabriel struck first, a move that seemed to catch them off guard. He managed to incapacitate one of them temporarily before the other three jumped onto his back and drove him onto the cold cement floor. There they throttled, kicked, and pounded on him for several minutes until, from somewhere in the warehouse, came an order to cease and desist. They let him lay there for some time, vomiting his own blood, before finally returning him to his cell and securing his hands to the wall again. He fought to remain conscious but could not. The door of the church in Venice was still ajar. He slipped inside and saw Bellini standing atop his work platform high above the main altar, putting the finishing touches on the canvas depicting Gabriel’s death. Gabriel climbed slowly upward and, with Bellini at his side, began to paint.
52
WALTHAMSTOW, LONDON: 2:15 A.M., CHRISTMAS DAY
The spotter was good. Cairo good. Baghdad good.
The route he had taken from Hampstead Heath had been long and needlessly complicated: four different buses, two long hikes, and a final tube ride on the Victoria Line from King’s Cross to Walthamstow Central. Now he was walking up the Lea Bridge Road with a mobile phone pressed to his ear and Eli Lavon trailing a hundred yards behind him. He turned into Northumberland Road and thirty seconds later entered a small terraced house with a pebble dash exterior. There were lights burning in the windows on the second floor, evidence of other operatives inside.
Lavon circled around the block and made his way back to Lea Bridge Road. On the opposite side of the road was an empty bus shelter with an adequate view of the target house. As he lowered himself wearily onto the bench, he could hear Uzi Navot relaying the address to Graham Seymour at MI5 Headquarters. Lavon waited until Navot was finished, then murmured into his throat mic: “I can’t stay here for long, Uzi.”
“You won’t have to. The cavalry is on the way.”
“Just tell them to come quietly,” Lavon said. “But hurry. I’m about to freeze to death.”
It took MI5 and the Anti-Terrorist Branch of Scotland Yard just ten minutes to produce a list of the four men now using 23 Northumberland Road as a legal address and just twenty minutes to acquire the records of every telephone call placed from the residence for the previous two years. Calls placed to numbers that appeared on government watch lists, or to phones located in areas known for the extremism of their Islam, were automatically flagged for additional scrutiny. The records of calls placed from those numbers during the past two years were pulled as well. As a result, within an hour of Lavon’s first contact, MI5 and Scotland Yard had constructed a matrix of several thousand numbers and more than five hundred corresponding names.
Shortly after three A.M., a copy of the matrix was placed before the special MI5 task force that had been working around the clock since Elizabeth Halton’s disappearance. Five minutes later Graham Seymour personally delivered a second copy of the document to the fourth-floor conference room, which was occupied at that moment by three rather young women. One was an attractive American in her early thirties with shoulder-length blond hair and skin the color of alabaster. The other two were both Israelis, a curt Rubenesque woman with the bearing of a soldier and a small dark-haired girl who walked with a slight limp. Though all three had entered the United Kingdom on false passports, Seymour had agreed to let them into Thames House on the condition they did so under their real names. The Rubenesque Israeli was Major Rimona Stern of AMAN, the Israeli military intelligence service. The quiet girl was an analyst for the Israeli foreign intelligence service named Dina Sarid. The American’s credentials identified her as Irene Moore, a CIA desk officer attached to the Counterterrorism Center at Langley..
They accepted the document gratefully, then divided it among themselves. The American and the Rubenesque Israeli took the telephone numbers. The girl with the slight limp handled the names. She was good with names—Graham Seymour could see that. But there was something else: the intense seriousness of purpose, the stain of early widowhood in her dark eyes. She had been touched by terror, he thought. She was both victim and survivor. And she had a mind like a mainframe computer. Graham Seymour was convinced the matrix of names and numbers contained a valuable clue. And he had no doubt who would find it first.
He slipped out of the conference room and returned to the ops center. Waiting on his desk when he arrived was a dispatch from the Essex Police Headquarters in Chelmsford. A shallow-bottomed craft had been discovered abandoned along the northern banks of the river Crouch near Holliwell Point. Based on the condition of the outboard engine, it appeared that the boat had been used that evening. Graham Seymour picked up the phone and dialed Uzi Navot’s line at the Israeli command post in Kensington.
Thirty seconds later, Navot hung up the phone and relayed the news to Shamron.
“It looks like you were right about them taking him over the river.”
“You doubted me, Uzi?”
“No, boss.”
“He’s alive,” Shamron said, “but he won’t be for long. We need a break. One name. One telephone number. Something.”
“The girls are looking for it.”
“Let’s hope they find it, Uzi. Soon.”