He was lame and sickly, watched over constantly by a team of twenty-one doctors, including the philosopher and Talmudic scholar Maimonides, who was appointed his court physician in Cairo. Lacking in personal vanity—in Jerusalem he once laughed uproariously when a courtier splashed his silk robes with mud—he had little interest in personal riches or earthly delights. He was happiest when surrounded by poets and men of learning, but mainly it was the concept of jihad, or holy war, that consumed him. He built mosques and Islamic centers of learning across his lands and lavished money and favors on preachers and religious scholars. His goal was to re-create the zeal that had allowed Islam’s earliest followers to conquer half of the known world. And once the sacred rage had been rekindled, he focused it on the one prize that had eluded him: Jerusalem.
A smallish outpost fed by springs, the city occupied a strategic high ground at the crossroads of three continents, a geographical sin for which it would be punished throughout the ages. Besieged, plundered, captured and recaptured, Jerusalem had been ruled by Jebusites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and, of course, the Jews. When Omar al-Khattab, a close confidant of Muhammad, conquered Jerusalem in 639 with a small band of Arab cameleers from the Hejaz and Yemen, it was a predominantly Christian city. Four and a half centuries later, Pope Urban II would dispatch an expeditionary force numbering several thousand European Christians to reclaim Jerusalem from the Muslims, whom he regarded as a people “alien to God.” The Christian soldiers, who would one day be known as Crusaders, breached the city’s defenses on the night of July 13, 1099, and slaughtered its inhabitants, including three thousand men, women, and children who had taken shelter inside the great al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount.
It was Saladin, the son of a Kurdish soldier of fortune from Tikrit, who would return the favor. After humiliating the thirst-crazed Crusader force at the Battle of Hattin near Tiberias—Saladin personally sliced off the arm of Raynald of Chatillon—the Muslims reclaimed Jerusalem after a negotiated surrender. Saladin tore down the large cross that had been erected atop the Dome of the Rock, scrubbed its courts with Damascene rosewater to remove the last foul traces of the infidel, and sold thousands of Christians into slavery or the harem. Jerusalem would remain under Islamic control until 1917, when the British seized it from the Ottoman Turks. And when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1924, so, too, did the last Muslim caliphate.
But now ISIS had declared a new caliphate. At present, it included only portions of western Iraq and eastern Syria, with Raqqa as its capital. Saladin, the new Saladin, was ISIS’s chief of external operations—or so believed Fareed Barakat and the Jordanian General Intelligence Department. Unfortunately, the GID knew almost nothing else about Saladin, including his real name.
“Is he Iraqi?”
“He might be. Or he might be a Tunisian or a Saudi or an Egyptian or an Englishman or one of the other lunatics who’ve rushed to Syria to live in this new Islamic paradise of theirs.”
“Surely, the GID doesn’t believe that.”
“We don’t,” Fareed conceded. “We think he’s probably a former Iraqi military officer. Who knows? Maybe he’s from Tikrit, just like Saladin.”
“And Saddam.”
“Ah, yes, let’s not forget Saddam.” Fareed exhaled a lungful of smoke toward the high ceiling of his office. “We had our problems with Saddam, but we warned the Americans they would rue the day they toppled him. They didn’t listen, of course. Nor did they listen when we asked them to do something about Syria. Not our problem, they said. We’re putting the Middle East in our rearview mirror. No more American wars in Muslim lands. And now look at the situation. A quarter of a million dead, hundreds of thousands more streaming into Europe, Russia and Iran working together to dominate the Middle East.” He shook his head slowly. “Have I left anything out?”
“You forgot Saladin,” said Gabriel.
“What do you want to do about him?”
“I suppose we could do nothing and hope he goes away.”
“Hope is how we ended up with him in the first place,” said Fareed. “Hope and hubris.”
“So let’s put him out of business, sooner rather than later.”
“What about the Americans?”
“What about them?” asked Gabriel.
“They’ll want a role.”
“They can’t have one, at least not yet.”
“We could use their technology.”
“We have technology, too.”
“Not like the Americans,” said Fareed. “They own cyber, cellular, and satellite.”
“None of that means a thing if you don’t know the target’s real name.”
“Point taken. So we work together? The Office and the GID?”
“And the French,” added Gabriel.
“Who runs the show?”
When Gabriel offered no reply, Fareed frowned. The Jordanian didn’t like diktats. But he also wasn’t in the mood for a quarrel with the man who in all likelihood would be running the Office for a very long time.
“I won’t be treated like a domestic servant. Do you understand me? I get enough of that from the Americans. Too often, they think of us as a branch office of Langley.”
“I would never dream of it, Fareed.”
“Very well.” He gave a concierge smile. “Then please tell me how the GID can be of service.”
“You can start by giving me everything you’ve got on Jalal Nasser.”
“And then?”
“Stay away from him. Jalal belongs to me now.”
“He’s all yours. But no collateral damage.” The Jordanian patted the back of Gabriel’s hand. “His Majesty doesn’t like collateral damage. And neither do I.”
When Gabriel arrived at King Saul Boulevard, he found Uzi Navot alone in his office joylessly consuming a lunch of steamed white fish and wilted gray-green vegetables. He was using a pair of lacquered chopsticks rather than a knife and fork, which slowed his rate of intake and, theoretically, made the unappetizing meal more satisfying. It was Bella, his demanding wife, who had inflicted this indignity upon him. Bella kept track of every scrap of food that entered her husband’s mouth and monitored his weight with the care of a geologist watching a rumbling volcano. Twice each day, when he rose and before he crawled exhausted into his bed, Navot was made to stand upon Bella’s precise bathroom scale. She recorded the fluctuations in a leather-bound logbook and punished or rewarded him accordingly. When Navot had been good for an appropriate period of time, he was allowed a meal of stroganoff, goulash, schnitzel, or one of the other heavy Eastern European dishes he craved. And when he was bad, it was boiled fish and chopsticks. Clearly, thought Gabriel, watching him, Navot was paying the price for a dietary infidelity.
“It sounds to me as if you and Fareed really hit it off,” he said after Gabriel described his visit to Amman. “The only thing Fareed ever gave me is candy and baklava. Bella can always tell when I’ve been to see him. It’s rarely worth the trip.”
“I tried to give back the pearls, but he wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Make sure you go on the record with Personnel. Heaven knows you’re completely incorruptible, but we wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about your newfound love affair with the GID.”
Navot pushed away his plate. Nothing edible remained. Gabriel was surprised he hadn’t eaten the chopsticks and the paper sleeve in which they had been presented.
“Do you really think that Fareed will back off Jalal Nasser?”
“Not in a million years.”
“Which means Jordanian intelligence is going to have a front-row seat on your operation.”
“With an obstructed view.”