Just beyond the village, in a river valley of manicured farms and groomed woods, stood Chateau Treville. Shielded from prying eyes by twelve-foot walls, it had a heated swimming pool, two clay tennis courts, fourteen ornate bedrooms, and thirty-two acres of gardens where, if one were so inclined, one could pace with worry. Housekeeping, the Office division that acquired and maintained safe properties, was on good, if entirely deceptive, terms with the chateau’s owner. The deal—six months, with an option to extend—was concluded with a swift exchange of faxes and a wire transfer of several thousand well-disguised euros. The team moved in the same day that Dr. Leila Hadawi settled into her modest little flat in Aubervilliers. Most stayed only long enough to drop their bags and then headed straight into the field.
They had operated in France many times before, even in tranquil Seraincourt, but never with the knowledge and approval of the French security service. They assumed the DGSI was looking over their shoulders at all times and listening to their every word, and so they behaved accordingly. Inside the chateau they spoke a terse form of colloquial Office Hebrew that was beyond the reach of mere translators. And on the streets of Aubervilliers, where they kept a vigilant watch on Natalie, they did their best not to betray family secrets to their French allies, who were watching her, too. Rousseau acquired an apartment directly opposite Natalie’s where rotating teams of operatives, one Israeli, the other French, maintained a constant presence. At first, the atmosphere in the flat was chilly. But gradually, as the two teams became better acquainted, the mood warmed. For better or worse, they were in this fight together now. All past sins were forgiven. Civility was the new order of the day.
The one member of the team who never set foot in the observation post or on the streets of Aubervilliers was its founder and guiding light. His movements were unpredictable, Paris one day, Brussels or London the next, Amman when he needed to consult with Fareed Barakat, Jerusalem when he needed the touch of his wife and children. Whenever he slipped into Chateau Treville, he would sit up late with Eli Lavon, his oldest friend in the world, his brother-in-arms from Operation Wrath of God, and scour the watch reports for signs of trouble. Natalie was his masterpiece. He had recruited her, trained her, and hung her in a gallery of religious madness for the monsters to see. The viewing period was nearing its end. Next would come the sale. The auction would be rigged, for Gabriel had no intention of selling her to anyone but Saladin.
And so it was that, two months to the day after the Clinique Jacques Chirac opened its doors, Gabriel found himself in Paul Rousseau’s office on the rue de Grenelle. The first phase of the operation, declared Gabriel, batting away another onslaught of pipe smoke, was over. It was time to put their asset into play. Under the rules of the Franco-Israeli operational accord, the decision to proceed was supposed to be a joint one. But the asset was Gabriel’s, and therefore the decision was his, too. He spent that evening at the safe house in Seraincourt in the company of his team, and in the morning, with Mikhail at his side and Eli Lavon watching his back, he boarded a train at the Gare du Nord and headed for Brussels. Rousseau made no attempt to follow them. This was the part of the operation he didn’t want to know about. This was the part where things would get rough.
24
RUE DU LOMBARD, BRUSSELS
DURING ONE OF HIS MANY visits to GID headquarters in Amman, Gabriel had taken possession of several portable hard drives. On them were the contents of Jalal Nasser’s notebook computer, downloaded during his return visits to Jordan or during secret raids on his flat in the Bethnal Green section of East London. The GID had found nothing suspicious—no known jihadists in his contacts, no visits to jihadist Web sites in his browsing history—but Fareed Barakat had agreed to let the Office have a second look. It had taken the cybersleuths of King Saul Boulevard less than an hour to find a clever trapdoor concealed within an innocuous-looking gaming application. It led to a heavily encrypted cellar filled with names, numbers, e-mail addresses, and casing photographs, including several of the Weinberg Center in Paris. There was even a shot of Hannah Weinberg leaving her apartment on the rue Pavée. Gabriel broke the news to Fareed gently, so as not to bruise his valuable partner’s enormous ego.
“Sometimes,” said Gabriel, “it helps to have a fresh pair of eyes.”
“Or a smart Jewish boy with a PhD from Caltech,” said Fareed.
“That, too.”
Among the names that featured most prominently in this hidden trove was Nabil Awad, originally from the northern Jordanian city of Irbid, lately of the Molenbeek district of Brussels. Separated from the elegant city center by an industrial canal, Molenbeek had once been occupied by Roman Catholic Walloons and Protestant Flemings who worked in the district’s many factories and warehouses. The factories were a memory, as were Molenbeek’s original inhabitants. It was now essentially a Muslim village of one hundred thousand people, where the call to prayer echoed five times each day from twenty-two different mosques. Nabil Awad lived on the rue Ransfort, a narrow street lined with terraces of flaking nineteenth-century brick houses that had been carved into crowded tenements. He worked part-time in a copy center in central Brussels, but like many young men who lived in Molenbeek, his primary occupation was radical Islam. Among security professionals, Molenbeek was known as the jihadi capital of Europe.
The neighborhood was not the sort of place for a man with the refined tastes of Fareed Barakat. Nor, for that matter, was the sixty-euro-a-night hotel on the rue du Lombard where he met Gabriel. He had toned down his clothing for the occasion—an Italian blazer, dove-gray trousers, a dress shirt with French cuffs, no tie. After being admitted to the cramped little room on the hotel’s third floor, he contemplated the electric teakettle as though he had never laid eyes on such a contraption. Gabriel filled it with water from the bathroom tap and joined Fareed in the window. Directly opposite the hotel, on the ground floor of a modern seven-story office block, was XTC Printing and Copying.
“What time did he arrive?” asked the Jordanian.
“Promptly at ten.”
“A model employee.”
“So it would seem.”
The Jordanian’s dark eyes swept the street, a falcon looking for prey.
“Don’t bother, Fareed. You’ll never find them.”
“Mind if I try?”
“Be my guest.”
“The blue van, the two men in the parked car at the end of the block, the girl sitting alone in the window of the coffeehouse.”
“Wrong, wrong, and wrong.”
“Who are the two men in the car?”
“They’re waiting for their friend to come out of the pharmacy.”
“Or maybe they’re from the Belgian security service.”
“The last thing we need to worry about is the S?reté. Unfortunately,” added Gabriel gloomily, “neither do the terrorists who live in Molenbeek.”
“Tell me about it,” muttered Fareed. “They produce more terrorists here in Belgium than we do.”
“Now that’s saying something.”
“You know,” said Fareed, “we wouldn’t have this problem if it wasn’t for you Israelis. You upended the natural order of things in the Middle East, and now we are all paying the price.”
Gabriel stared into the street. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, after all,” he said quietly.
“You and I working together?”
Gabriel nodded.
“You need friends wherever you can find them, habibi. You should consider yourself lucky.”