The message that would set the next act in motion was delivered through the usual channel, interior minister to interior minister, with no undue sense of urgency. A paid informant inside one of France’s most prominent drug gangs claimed that a large shipment of North African hashish would be arriving in Genoa the following day, aboard the Maltese-registered Mediterranean Dream. The Italians, if they didn’t have anything better to do, might want to check it out. They did indeed. In fact, units of the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian law-enforcement agency responsible for combating drug trafficking, boarded the vessel within minutes of its arrival and began breaking open the containers. Their search would eventually yield four metric tons of Moroccan hashish, not a record by any means but a respectable haul. Afterward, the Italian minister rang his French counterpart and thanked him for the information. The French minister said he was pleased to have been of assistance.
While major news in Italy, the seizure attracted little notice in France, least of all in the former fishing village of Saint-Tropez. But when French customs police raided two ships the following day—the Toulon-bound Africa Star and the Marseilles-bound Caribbean Endeavor—even sleepy Saint-Tropez was impressed. The Africa Star would yield three metric tons of hashish, the Caribbean Endeavor only two. But it would also surrender something that Gabriel and Paul Rousseau had not anticipated: a lead cylinder, forty centimeters in height, twenty in diameter, concealed inside a spool of insulated wire manufactured by a plant in an industrial quarter of Tripoli.
The cylinder bore no markings of any kind. Still, the French customs police, who were trained in how to handle potentially hazardous material, knew better than to open it. Calls were made, alarm bells rung, and by early evening the container had been transported securely to a French government laboratory outside Paris, where technicians analyzed the talcum-like powder they found inside. In short order they determined it was the highly radioactive substance cesium-137, or cesium chloride. Paul Rousseau and the interior minister were told of the discovery at eight that evening, and at twenty minutes past, with Gabriel trailing a step behind, they were rushing through the doors of the élysée Palace to break the news to the president of the Republic. Saladin was coming for them once again, this time with a dirty bomb.
Part Three
The Darkest Corner
43
Surrey, England
Precisely how the Americans learned of the concealed shipment of cesium would never be determined to anyone’s satisfaction, least of all the French. It was one of those mysteries that would linger long after the operational dust had settled. Nevertheless, they did hear about it—that very night, in fact—and before the sun had risen they demanded that all the relevant parties traipse to Washington for an emergency summit. Graham Seymour and Amanda Wallace, the cousins, politely demurred. Faced with the prospect of a radiological dispersion device in the hands of Saladin’s network, they could not afford to be seen running off to the former colonies for help. They were all for transatlantic cooperation—in fact, they were dangerously dependent on it—but for them it was a simple matter of national pride. And when Gabriel and Paul Rousseau added their objections, the Americans quickly capitulated. Gabriel had been confident of such an outcome; he had a good idea of what the Americans were ultimately after. They wanted Saladin’s head on a pike, and the only way they were going to get it was by taking control of Gabriel’s operation. It was better to deny them a home-field advantage. The five-hour time difference alone would be enough to keep them off balance.
A small delegation was too much to hope for. They arrived on a Boeing jetliner emblazoned with the official seal of the United States and traveled to the site of the conference—a disused MI6 training facility located in a rambling Victorian manor house in Surrey—in a long noisy motorcade that slashed its way through the countryside as though it were dodging IEDs in the Sunni Triangle of occupied Iraq. From one of the vehicles emerged Morris Payne, the Agency’s new director. Payne was West Point, Ivy League law, private enterprise, and a former deeply conservative member of Congress from one of the Dakotas. He was big and bluff, with a face like an Easter Island statue and a baritone voice that rattled the beams in the old house’s vaulted entrance hall. He greeted Graham Seymour and Amanda Wallace first—they were the hosts after all, not to mention distant family—before turning the full force of his water-cannon personality on Gabriel.
“Gabriel Allon! So good to finally meet you. One of the greats. A legend, truly. We should have done this a long time ago. Adrian tells me you slipped into town without coming to see me. I won’t hold that against you. I know you and Adrian go way back. You’ve done good work together. I hope to continue that tradition.”
Gabriel reclaimed his hand and looked at the men surrounding the new director of the world’s most powerful intelligence service. They were young and lean and hard, ex-military like their boss, all well schooled in the sharp elbows of Washington bureaucratic combat. The change from the previous administration was striking. If there was a silver lining it was that they were reasonably fond of Israel. Perhaps too fond, thought Gabriel. They were proof that one needed to be careful what one wished for.
Tellingly, Adrian Carter was not among those in the director’s close orbit. He was at that moment crawling out of an SUV along with the rest of the senior operators. Most were unfamiliar to Gabriel. One, however, he recognized. He was Kyle Taylor, the chief of the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center. Taylor’s presence was a troubling gauge of Langley’s intentions; it was said of Taylor that he would drone his mother if he thought it would earn him Carter’s job and his seventh-floor office. He wore his relentless ambition like a carefully knotted necktie. Carter, however, looked as though he had just been awakened from a nap. He walked past Gabriel with only the smallest of nods.
“Don’t get too close,” Carter whispered. “I’m contagious.”
“What do you have?”
“Leprosy.”
Morris Payne was now pumping Paul Rousseau’s hand as though trying to earn his vote. At Graham Seymour’s prompting, he moved into the old house’s formal dining room, which long ago had been converted into a safe-speech facility. There was a basket at the entrance for mobile phones and, on the Victorian sideboard, an array of refreshments that no one touched. Morris Payne sat down at the long rectangular table, flanked on one side by his hard young aides and on the other by Kyle Taylor, the drone master. Adrian Carter was relegated to the far end—the spot, thought Gabriel, where he could doodle to his heart’s content and dream of a job in the private sector.
Gabriel lowered himself into his assigned seat and promptly turned over the little name placard that some industrious MI6 functionary had placed there. To his left, and directly across from Morris Payne, was Graham Seymour. And to Seymour’s left was Amanda Wallace, who looked as though she feared being splattered by blood. Morris Payne’s reputation preceded him. During his brief tenure he had largely completed the task of transforming the CIA from an intelligence service into a paramilitary organization. The language of espionage bored him. He was a man of action.