“Close your eyes,” was all he said.
The fingers moved a few inches lower down her back. She laid her palm flat against his thigh and squeezed gently.
“Don’t.” Then he said, “Not now.”
She removed her hand and placed it beneath her chin while his fingers strolled the length of her spine. Sleep stalked her. She kept it at bay.
“Tell him I can’t go through with it,” she said drowsily. “Tell him I want to go home.”
“Sleep, Leila,” was all he said, and she slept. And in the morning, when she awoke, he was gone.
The sugar-cube dwellings of Thera were still pink with the sunrise when Natalie and Miranda Ward stepped into the quiet street at seven fifteen. They walked to the nearest taxi stand, each towing a rolling suitcase, and hired a car to take them down the coast to the ferry terminal in Athinios. The eastward crossing to Kos was four and a half hours; they passed it on the sun-drenched observation deck or in the ship’s café. Forsaking her training, Natalie actively searched for watchers among the faces of her fellow passengers, hoping Mikhail might be among them. She recognized no one. It seemed she was alone now.
At Kos they had to wait an hour for the next ferry to the Turkish port of Bodrum. It was a shorter journey, less than an hour, with strict passport control at both ends. Miranda Ward gave Natalie a Belgian passport and instructed her to hide her French passport deep within her luggage. The photograph in the Belgian passport was of a thirtysomething woman of Moroccan ethnicity. Dark hair, dark eyes, not ideal but close enough.
“Who is she?” asked Natalie.
“She’s you,” answered Miranda Ward.
The Greek border policeman in Kos seemed to think so, too, as did his Turkish counterpart in Bodrum. He stamped the passport after a brief inspection and with a frown invited Natalie to enter Turkey. Miranda followed a few seconds later, and together they made their way to the bedlam of the car park, where a line of taxis smoked in the scalding midafternoon sun. Somewhere a horn sounded, and an arm gestured from the front window of a dusty cream-colored Mercedes. Natalie and Miranda Ward hoisted their bags into the boot and climbed in, Miranda in front, Natalie in the backseat. She opened her handbag, withdrew her favorite green hijab, and pinned it piously into place. She was Leila from Sumayriyya. Leila who loved Ziad. Leila who wanted vengeance.
Contrary to her assumptions, Natalie had not made the crossing from Santorini to Bodrum alone. Yaakov Rossman had accompanied her on the first leg of the journey; Oded, the second. In fact, he had snapped a photo of her climbing into the back of the Mercedes, which he transmitted to King Saul Boulevard and the safe house in Seraincourt.
Within minutes of leaving the terminal, the car was headed east on the D330 motorway, watched over by an Ofek 10 Israeli spy satellite. Shortly after two the next morning, the car arrived at the border town of Kilis, where the satellite’s infrared camera observed two figures, both women, entering a small house. They did not remain there long—two hours and twelve minutes, to be precise. Afterward, they crossed the porous border on foot, accompanied by four men, and slipped into another vehicle in the Syrian town of A’zaz. It bore them southward to Raqqa, the unofficial capital of the caliphate. There, cloaked in black, they entered an apartment building near al-Rasheed Park.
By then, it was approaching four a.m. in Paris. Sleepless, Gabriel slipped behind the wheel of a rented car and drove to Charles de Gaulle Airport, where he boarded a flight to Washington. It was time to have a word with Langley, and thus make the disaster complete.
34
N STREET, GEORGETOWN
RAQQA? ARE YOU OUT OF your fucking mind?”
It was uncharacteristic of Adrian Carter to use profanity, especially of the Anglo-Saxon copulatory variety. He was the son of an Episcopal minister from New England. He regarded foul language as the refuge of lesser minds, and those who used it in his presence, even powerful politicians, were rarely invited back to his office on the seventh floor of the CIA’s Langley headquarters. Carter was the chief of the Agency’s Directorate of Operations, the longest serving in the Agency’s history. For a brief period after 9/11, Carter’s kingdom had been known as the National Clandestine Service. But his new director, his sixth in just ten years, had decided to call it by its old name. That’s what the Agency did when it made mistakes; it swapped nameplates and moved desks. Carter’s fingerprints were on many of the Agency’s greatest failures, from the failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union to the botched National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and yet somehow he endured. He was the man who knew too much. He was untouchable.
Like Paul Rousseau, he did not look the role of spymaster. With his tousled hair, outdated mustache, and underpowered voice, he might have been mistaken for a therapist who passed his days listening to confessions of affairs and inadequacies. His unthreatening appearance, like his flair for languages, had been a valuable asset, both in the field, where he had served with distinction in several postings, and at headquarters. Adversaries and allies alike tended to underestimate Carter, a blunder Gabriel had never made. He had worked closely with Carter on several high-profile operations—including the one in which Hannah Weinberg had played a small role—but America’s nuclear deal with Iran had altered the dynamics of their relationship. Where once Langley and the Office had worked hand-in-glove to sabotage Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the United States, under the deal’s provisions, was now sworn to protect what remained of Tehran’s atomic infrastructure. Gabriel planned to spy the daylights out of Iran to make sure it was not violating the agreement’s provisions. And if he saw any evidence that the mullahs were still enriching uranium or building delivery systems, he would advise his prime minister to strike militarily. And under no circumstances would he consult first with his good friend and ally Adrian Carter.
“Is he one of theirs,” asked Carter now, “or one of yours?”
“She,” said Gabriel. “And she’s one of ours.”