The one place where no members of the team were present was Dilbeek. Though scarcely a mile from the center of Brussels, it was a decidedly rural suburb ringed by small farms. “In other words,” declared Eli Lavon, who reconnoitered the drop site on the morning after Nabil Awad’s interrogation, “it’s a spy’s nightmare.” A fixed observation point was out of the question. Nor was it possible to surveil the target from a parked car or a café. Parking was not permitted on that stretch of the Kerselaarstraat, and the only cafés were in the center of the village.
The solution was to conceal a miniature camera in the patch of overgrown weeds on the opposite side of the road. Mordecai monitored its heavily encrypted transmission from a hotel room in central Brussels and routed the signal onto a secure network, which allowed the other members of the team to watch it, too. It was soon appointment viewing, a ratings bonanza. In London, Tel Aviv, Amman, and Paris, highly trained and motivated professional intelligence officers stood motionless before computer screens, staring at a tangle of gorse at the base of a concrete power pole. Occasionally, a vehicle would pass, or a cyclist, or a pensioner from the village out for a morning constitutional, but for the most part the image appeared to be a still photograph rather than a live video feed. Gabriel monitored it from the makeshift op center at Chateau Treville. He thought it the most unsightly thing he had ever produced. He referred to it as Can by a Pole and cursed himself inwardly for having chosen the Dilbeek drop site over the other three options. Not that they were any better. Clearly, Jalal Nasser had not selected the sites with aesthetics in mind.
The wait was not without its lighter moments. There was the Belgian shepherd, a colossal wolflike creature, which shat in the gorse bush daily. And the metal-detecting pensioner who unearthed the can and, after a careful inspection, dropped it where he had found it. And the biblical thunderstorm, four hours in duration, that threatened to wash away the can and its contents, not to mention the village itself. Gabriel ordered Mordecai to check on the condition of the flash drive, but Mordecai convinced him it wasn’t necessary. He had placed it inside two watertight ziplock plastic baggies, Nabil Awad’s usual technique. Besides, Mordecai argued, a check was far too risky. There was always the possibility that the courier might arrive at the very moment of the inspection. There was also the possibility, he added, that they were not the only ones watching the drop site.
The target of this undertaking, Jalal Nasser, Saladin’s director of European operations, provided no clue as to his intentions. By then, it was early summer, and Jalal had been freed from his backbreaking course load at King’s College—a single seminar having something to do with the impact of Western imperialism on the economies of the Arab world—which left him free to pursue jihad and terrorism to his heart’s content. By all outward appearances, however, he was a man of taxpayer-financed leisure. He dawdled over his morning coffee at his favorite café on the Bethnal Green Road, he shopped in Oxford Street, he visited the National Gallery to view forbidden art, he watched an American action film at a theater in Leicester Square. He even took in a musical—Jersey Boys, of all things—which left the London teams wondering whether he planned to bomb the production. They saw no evidence that he was under British surveillance, but in Orwellian London looks could be deceiving. MI5 didn’t have to rely solely on watchers to surveil suspected terrorists. The eyes of CCTV never blinked.
His bachelor flat in Chilton Street had been entered, searched, and compromised in every conceivable way. They watched him eat, they watched him sleep, they watched him pray, and they peered quietly over his shoulder with the silence of curious children while he toiled late into the night at his computer. He had not one laptop but two, one that was connected to the Internet and an identical model with no links to the cyber universe whatsoever, or so he believed. If he was communicating with elements of Saladin’s network, it was not readily apparent. Jalal Nasser might have been a committed jihadist terrorist, but online he was a model resident of Great Britain and a loyal subject of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
But was he aware of the flash drive that lay at the base of a power pole in a pastoral suburb of Brussels called Dilbeek? And did he know that the man who had supposedly placed it there was now in Jordan tending to a gravely ill father? And did he find the confluence of events—the dead drop and the sudden travel of a trusted lieutenant—a bit too coincidental for comfort? Gabriel was certain it was so. And the proof, he declared, was the failure of the courier to clean out the drop site. Gabriel’s mood darkened with each passing hour. He stalked the many rooms of Chateau Treville, he walked the footpaths of the gardens, he scoured the watch reports. Mainly, he stared at a computer screen, at an image of a concrete power pole rising from a tangle of gorse bush, quite possibly the most hideous image in the history of a proud service.
Late in the afternoon of the third day, the deluge that had flooded Dilbeek laid siege to the banlieues north of Paris. Eli Lavon had been caught on the streets of Aubervilliers, and when he returned to Chateau Treville he might have been mistaken for a lunatic who had decided to take a swim fully clothed. Gabriel was standing before his computer as though he had been bronzed. His green eyes, however, were burning brightly.
“Well?” asked Lavon.
Gabriel reached down, tapped a few keys on the keyboard, and clicked on the play icon on the screen. A few seconds later a motorcyclist flashed across it, right to left, in a black blur.
“Do you know how many motorcyclists have passed by that spot today?” asked Lavon.
“Thirty-eight,” answered Gabriel. “But only one did this.”
He replayed the video in slow motion and then clicked on the pause icon. At the instant the image froze, the visor of the motorcyclist’s helmet was pointed directly at the base of the power pole.
“Maybe he was distracted by something,” said Lavon.
“Like what?”
“A beer can with a flash drive inside it.”
Gabriel smiled for the first time in three days. He tapped a few keys on the computer, and the live image reappeared on the screen. Can by a Pole, he thought. It was suddenly the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.