Daniel Silva - Portrait of a Spy

It did not take long for the FBI to connect al-Hazmi and Hanjour to the Falls Church mosque, said Carter, or for the news media to beat a path to Rashid’s door. What they discovered was an eloquent and enlightened young cleric, a man of moderation who condemned the attacks of 9/11 without equivocation and urged his Muslim brethren to forsake violence and terrorism in all its forms. The White House was so impressed with the charismatic imam that he was invited to join several other Muslim scholars and clerics for a private meeting with the president. The State Department thought Rashid might be the perfect sort of figure to help build a bridge between America and one and a half billion skeptical Muslims. The Agency, however, had another idea.

“We thought Rashid could help us to penetrate the camp of our new enemy,” said Carter. “But before we made our approach, we had to answer a few questions. Namely, was he somehow involved in the 9/11 plot, or were his contacts with the three hijackers purely coincidental? We looked at him from every conceivable angle, starting from the assumption that he had a great deal of American blood on his hands. We looked at timetables. We looked at who was where and when. And at the end of the process, we concluded that Imam Rashid al-Husseini was clean.”

“And then?”

“We dispatched an emissary to Falls Church to see whether Rashid might be willing to put his words into action. His response was positive. We picked him up the next day and took him to a secure location near the Pennsylvania border. And then the real fun began.”

“You started the assessment process all over again.”

Carter nodded. “But this time, we had the subject seated before us, strapped to a polygraph. We questioned him for three days, pulling apart his past and his associations, piece by piece.”

“And his story held up.”

“He passed with flying colors. So we placed our proposition on the table, accompanied by a great deal of money. It was a simple operation. Rashid would tour the Islamic world, preaching tolerance and moderation while at the same time supplying us with the names of other potential recruits to our cause. In addition, he was to be on the lookout for angry young men who appeared vulnerable to the siren song of the jihadis. We took him on a domestic test drive, working closely with the FBI. And then we went international.”

Operating from a base in a predominately Muslim neighborhood in East London, Rashid spent the next three years crisscrossing Europe and the Middle East. He spoke at conferences, preached in mosques, and sat for interviews with fawning journalists. He denounced Bin Laden as a murderer who had violated the laws of Allah and the teachings of the Prophet. He recognized the right of Israel to exist and called for a negotiated peace with the Palestinians. He condemned Saddam Hussein as thoroughly un-Islamic, though, on the advice of his CIA handlers, he stopped short of endorsing the American invasion. His message did not always go over well with his audiences, nor were his activities confined to the physical world. With CIA assistance, Rashid built a presence on the Internet, where he attempted to compete with the jihadist propaganda of al-Qaeda. Visitors to the site were identified and tracked as they moved through cyberspace.

“The operation was regarded as one of our most successful efforts to penetrate a world that, for the most part, we had found almost entirely opaque. Rashid fed his handlers a steady stream of names, good guys and potential bad guys, and even tipped them off about some plots that were brewing. At Langley, we spent a great deal of time marveling at our cleverness. We thought it would go on forever. But it all ended rather suddenly.”

The setting, fittingly enough, was Mecca. Rashid had been invited to speak at the university, a high honor for a cleric who had been cursed with an American passport. Given the fact that Mecca is closed to infidels, the CIA had no choice but to allow him to go alone. He flew from Amman to Riyadh, where he met a final time with one of his CIA handlers, then boarded an internal Saudia Airlines flight to Mecca. His speech was scheduled for eight that evening. Rashid never showed up. He had vanished without a trace.

“At first, we feared he’d been kidnapped and killed by a local branch of al-Qaeda. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case. Our prized possession resurfaced on the Internet a few weeks later. The eloquent, enlightened young man of moderation was gone. He’d been replaced by a raving fanatic who preached that the only way to deal with the West was to destroy it.”

“He deceived you.”

“Obviously.”

“For how long?”

“That remains an open question,” said Carter. “There are some at Langley who believe Rashid was bad from the beginning, others who theorize he was driven over the edge by the guilt of working as a spy for the infidels. Whatever the case, one thing is beyond dispute. During the time he was traveling the Islamic world on my dime, he recruited an impressive network of operatives, right under our noses. He’s the ultimate talent spotter and skilled in the art of deception and misdirection. We hoped he would stick to preaching and recruiting, but that hope turned out to be misplaced. The attacks in Europe were Rashid’s coming-out party. He wants to replace Osama Bin Laden as leader of the global jihadist movement. He also wants to do something Bin Laden was never able to accomplish after 9/11.”

“Strike the Far Enemy in his homeland,” said Gabriel. “Shed American blood on American soil.”

“With a network bought and paid for by the Central Intelligence Agency,” Carter added soberly. “How would you like that chiseled on your headstone? If it were ever made public that Rashid al-Husseini was once on our payroll . . .” Carter’s voice trailed off. “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”

“What do you want from me, Adrian?”

“I want you to make the bombing in Covent Garden the last attack Rashid al-Husseini ever carries out. I want you to smash his network before anyone else dies because of my folly.”

“Is that all?”

“No,” said Carter. “I want you to keep the entire operation secret from the president, James McKenna, and the rest of the American intelligence community.”

ADRIAN CARTER WAS DOCTRINAIRE WHEN it came to matters of tradecraft, which meant he could not talk for too long within the confines of a safe house, even if it was one of his own. They descended the curved front steps and, with a single CIA security man in tow, headed westward along N Street. It was a few minutes after nine o’clock. Carter’s penny loafers tapped rhythmically on the redbrick sidewalk, but Gabriel seemed to move without a sound. A Metro bus rumbled past, filled to capacity. Gabriel pictured the same bus torn in half and engulfed in flames.

“Where did he go after leaving Mecca?”

“We believe he’s living under the protection of tribal elements in the Rafadh Valley of Yemen. It’s a completely lawless place, without schools, paved roads, or even a reliable supply of water. In fact, the entire country is dry as a bone. Sana might be the first capital city on Earth to actually run out of water.”

“But not Islamic militants,” said Gabriel.

“Oh, no,” Carter agreed. “Yemen is well on its way to becoming the next Afghanistan. For now, we’ve been content to lob the occasional Hellfire missile over the border. But it’s only a matter of time before we have to put boots on the ground and drain the swamp.” He glanced at Gabriel and added, “There actually are swamps in Yemen, by the way—a string of marshes along the coastline that produce malarial mosquitoes the size of buzzards. My God, what a dreadful place.”