Daniel Silva - The Fallen Angel

It seemed that David Girard, aka Daoud Ghandour, had popped up on the DAP’s internal radar not long after he was granted the bright red Swiss passport that allowed him to enter and leave the countries of the Middle East at will. Included in the material was the original memo from the chief of Onyx, Switzerland’s sophisticated electronic eavesdropping service, raising concerns about the phone and e-mail traffic of the Galleria Naxos, not to mention its financial transactions. The DAP was good enough to include the attached report, along with all subsequent updates from Onyx. When added to the intelligence already in the team’s possession, the material provided incontrovertible proof that Galleria Naxos had been little more than a fund-raising front for Hezbollah. Just as clear, however, was the link between the gallery and Carlo Marchese. The team was able to trace no fewer than fifty wire transfers that had flowed from David Girard, through the Lebanon Byzantine Bank, and eventually to accounts controlled by Carlo at the Vatican Bank. Here was the cordata that Gabriel had been looking for—the rope linking Carlo to the terrorists of Hezbollah. The Swiss had the proof all along. They simply didn’t possess the key to unlock the code.

For the moment, however, Carlo was of secondary concern to the team, because with each passing day it became evident that David Girard had been involved in more than just fund-raising. There was the phone call he made, six months earlier, to a number in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon that the Office had linked to a local Hezbollah chieftain. And the one he made, two weeks after that, to a number in Cairo linked to one of the numerous Hezbollah cells that had taken root in chaotic postrevolutionary Egypt. And the two hundred thousand dollars he paid to a dealer of Thai antiquities in Bangkok, a hotbed of Hezbollah activity in Southeast Asia.

“If I had to guess,” said Dina, “the late David Girard was a postman. He was using his job in the antiquities biz as cover to deliver secret mail to Hezbollah cells scattered around the world.”

“So why would the Iranians want him dead?”

“Maybe the mail he was carrying had something to do with the attack that’s coming. Or maybe . . .”

“What, Dina?”

“Maybe it had a Tehran postmark.”

In the end, it was not Swiss high technology that would provide the answer, but a good old-fashioned surveillance photograph. Snapped with a concealed camera, it showed David Girard riding a streetcar in Zurich, apparently alone. For three days, it hung on a cluttered wall in Room 456C, more for decoration than anything else, until Dina passed by it on her way to the file rooms and froze suddenly in her tracks. Ripping the photo from the wall, she stared not at Girard but at the lightly bearded figure seated next to him. The man’s head was turned away from Girard, as were his powerfully built shoulders, and the sun streaming through the streetcar’s windows appeared to set fire to the crystal of the heavy dive watch he was wearing on his right wrist. As a result, it drew Dina’s eyes to the back of his hand, and it was then she noticed the bandage. “It’s him,” she whispered. “It’s none other than the devil himself.”

They compared the photograph of the man on the Zurich streetcar to every known image they had of him in the library, but the computers said there was insufficient data to make a positive identification. Dina lifted her delicate chin resolutely and declared the computers mistaken. It was him; she was certain of it. She would stake her career on it. “Besides,” she added, “don’t look at the face. Look at the hand.” The hand that had been pierced by an Israeli round in Lebanon when he was helping to turn a ragtag bunch of Shiites into the world’s most formidable terrorist force. The hand that was drenched in blood. It was Massoud, she said. Massoud, the lucky one.

And so Gabriel marched her upstairs and allowed her to state her case directly to Uzi Navot. Her words drained the color from his face and caused his eyes to move involuntarily toward the latest stack of intelligence suggesting an attack was imminent. At the conclusion of the briefing, Navot asked for recommendations, and Gabriel gave him only one. There were obvious risks, he said, but they far outweighed the risks of doing nothing.

Navot hurried up the hill to Jerusalem to seek the approval of the prime minister, and within an hour he had his operational charter. All that remained was the obligatory courtesy call on the Americans, a job he happily assigned to Gabriel. “Whatever you do,” he said during the drive to Ben Gurion, “don’t ask for their permission. Just find out whether there are any landmines that are going to blow up in our face. This is not some faction of the PLO we are talking about. This is the fucking Persian Empire.”

IT HAD BEEN FARMLAND ONCE, but long ago it had been swallowed up by metropolitan Washington’s seemingly unstoppable westward expansion. Now the only things that grew there were large tract homes of shrinking value and wholesome-looking children who spent far too much time roaming the darkest corners of the Internet. The names of the meandering cul-de-sacs spoke of boundless American optimism—Sunnyside and Apple Blossom, Fairfield and Crest View—but they could not conceal the fact that America, Israel’s last friend in the world, had entered a state of decline.

The two-story brick home near the end of Stillwater Court differed from the adjacent residences only in that its windows were bulletproof. For many years, the neighbors had been led to believe that the man who lived there worked in one of the high-tech companies that lined the Dulles Corridor. Then came the promotion that required him to travel in an armored Escalade, and before long the neighbors realized they had a spy in their midst. But not just any spy; Adrian Carter was the chief of the National Clandestine Service, the CIA’s operational division. In fact, Carter had served in the post longer than any of his predecessors, a feat he attributed more to stubbornness than talent. But then, that was typical of Carter. One of the last Agency executives to come from New England Protestant stock, he believed vanity was a sin exceeded only by cheating at golf.

Despite the fact it was only March, a warm sun baked Gabriel’s neck as he crossed Carter’s broad lawn, a CIA minder at his side. Carter was waiting in the open doorway. He had the tousled, thinning hair of a university professor and a mustache that had gone out of fashion with disco music, Crock-Pots, and the nuclear freeze. His tan chinos were in need of a pressing. His cotton crewneck pullover was starting to fray at the elbow.

“Forgive me for dragging you to my home,” he said, shaking Gabriel’s hand, “but this is my first day off in a month, and I couldn’t face going to Langley or to one of our safe houses.”

“I’d be happy to never see the inside of another safe house again.”

“So why are you back?” Carter asked seriously. “And what the hell happened to your face?”

“I was standing too close to a Swiss antiquities gallery when a bomb exploded inside.”

“St. Moritz?”

Gabriel nodded.

“I knew this was going to be good.”

“You haven’t heard the best part yet.”

Carter smiled. “Come inside,” he said, closing the door behind them. “I sent my wife out for a long walk. And don’t worry. She took Molly with her.”

“Who’s Molly?”

“Woof, woof.”

A buffet lunch waited on the screened-in porch overlooking Carter’s green patch of the American dream. Gabriel dutifully filled his plate with cold cuts and pasta salad but left it untouched as he recounted the strange journey that had taken him from St. Peter’s Basilica to the home of America’s most senior spy. At the conclusion of the briefing, he handed over two photographs. The first showed Ali Montazeri and the El Greco girl departing the Galleria Naxos in St. Moritz. The second showed the gallery’s owner sitting in the carriage of a Zurich streetcar, apparently alone.