You are very brave, Maimonides. Too brave for your own good . . .
If only that were true, she thought. How many might still be alive if she had found the courage to let him die? Washington, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Antwerp, and all the others. Yes, the Americans wanted him. But Natalie wanted him, too.
She went into the walk-in closet. Her clothing for the day lay folded on a shelf. Otherwise, her bags were packed. So were Mikhail’s. The labels spoke of exclusive manufacture, but the luggage, like Dmitri Antonov himself, was counterfeit. The smallest contained a false bottom. In the hidden compartment were a Beretta 92FS, two magazines loaded with 9mm rounds, and a sound suppressor.
After Natalie agreed to work for the Office, Mikhail had trained her to properly load and discharge a firearm. Now, crouched on the floor of the closet, she quickly threaded the aluminum suppressor into the end of the barrel, rammed one of the magazines into the grip, and chambered the first round. Then she raised the weapon, holding it with two hands, the way Mikhail had taught her, and took aim at the man holding her head in his hand.
Go ahead, Maimonides, make a liar of me . . .
“What are you doing?” came a voice from behind her.
Startled, Natalie pivoted and pointed the gun at Mikhail’s chest. She was breathing heavily; the grip of the Beretta was wet in her trembling hands. Mikhail stepped forward and slowly, gently, lowered the barrel of the gun toward the floor. Natalie relaxed her grip and watched while he swiftly returned the Beretta to its original state and placed it in the hidden compartment of the counterfeit bag.
Rising, he placed a forefinger to Natalie’s lips and pointed toward the ceiling to indicate the presence of Moroccan DST transmitters. Then he led her outside, onto the terrace, and held her close.
“Who are you?” he whispered into her ear, in Russian-accented English.
“I’m Sophie Antonov,” she answered dully.
“What are you doing in Morocco?”
“My husband is putting together a deal with Jean-Luc Martel.”
“What kind of business is your husband in?”
“He used to do minerals. Now he’s an investor.”
“And Jean-Luc Martel?”
She didn’t answer. She felt suddenly cold.
“Would you like to explain to me what that was all about?”
“Nightmares.”
“What kind of nightmares?”
She told him.
“It was just a dream.”
“It almost happened once.”
“It won’t happen again.”
“You don’t know that,” she said. “You don’t know how good he is.”
“We’re better.”
“Are we really?”
There was a silence.
“Send a message to the command post,” Natalie whispered finally. “Tell them I can’t do it. Tell them I can’t be around him. I’m afraid I’ll bring down the entire operation.”
“No,” said Mikhail. “I will send no such message.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re the only one who can identify him.”
“You saw him, too. In the restaurant in Georgetown.”
“Actually,” replied Mikhail, “I was trying very hard not to look at him. I barely remember his face.”
“What about the security video from the Four Seasons?”
“It’s not good enough.”
“I can’t be in his presence,” she said after a moment. “He’ll remember me. Why wouldn’t he? I was the one who saved his miserable life.”
“Yes,” said Mikhail. “And now you’re going to help us kill him.”
He took her back to bed and did his best to make her forget the dream. Afterward, they showered together and dressed. Natalie spent a long time arranging and rearranging her hair in the mirror.
“How do I look?” she asked.
“Like a Jew from Marseilles,” said Mikhail with a smile.
Upstairs, the hotel staff was clearing away the last of the breakfast buffet. Over coffee and bread, Mikhail read the morning papers on his tablet while Natalie, affecting tedium, contemplated the ancient chaos of the medina. Finally, shortly before eleven, they went downstairs to the lobby, where Martel and Christopher Keller were seeing to the bill. Outside, Olivia was watching the porters tossing luggage into the waiting cars.
“Sleep well?” she asked.
“Never better,” said Natalie.
She ducked into the back of the second car and took her place next to the window. A face she did not recognize stared back at her in the glass.
Maimonides . . . So good to see you again . . .
52
Langley, Virginia
The Counterterrorism Center had once been located in a single room on Corridor F on the sixth floor of CIA Headquarters. With its televisions and ringing telephones and stacks of files, it had looked like the newsroom of a failing metropolitan daily. Its officers worked in small teams dedicated to specific targets: the Red Army Faction, the Irish Republican Army, the Palestine Liberation Organization, Abu Nidal, Hezbollah. There was also a unit, formed in 1996, that focused on a little-known Saudi extremist named Osama bin Laden and his burgeoning network of Islamic terror.
Not surprisingly, the CTC had expanded in size since the attacks of 9/11. It now occupied a half acre of prime Agency real estate on the ground floor of the New Headquarters Building, and was accessed through its own lobby and security turnstiles. Owing to security concerns, the real name of the CTC’s chief was no longer a matter of public record. He was known to the outside world, and to the rest of Langley, only as “Roger.” Kyle Taylor liked the name. No one, he reckoned, was afraid of a man named Kyle. But a Roger was someone to be feared, especially if he commanded a fleet of armed drones and had the power to vaporize a man for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Uzi Navot had first encountered Kyle Taylor a decade earlier, when Taylor was working at the CIA’s station in London. Their dislike of one another was mutual and instantaneous. Navot viewed Taylor—who was fluent in no language other than English, and therefore unsuited for work in the field—as little more than an indoor spy and a boardroom warrior. And Taylor, who harbored a traditional CIA resentment of the Office and Israel, and perhaps a little more, regarded Navot as conniving and not to be trusted. Otherwise, they got on famously.
“Your first time in the Center?” asked Taylor after easing Navot’s path through security.
“No. But it’s been a while.”
“We’ve probably grown since the last time you were here. We had to. On any given day we’re running ops in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Libya.”
He sounded like a corporate salesman talking about his firm’s unprecedented third-quarter expansion. “And now Morocco,” said Navot quietly, egging Taylor on.