Daniel Silva - Portrait of a Spy

“Any candidates?”

“Just one,” she said. “Rashid al-Husseini.”

“Why Paris?”

“The ban on the facial veil.”

“Copenhagen?”

“They’re still seething over the cartoons.”

“And London?”

“London is low-hanging fruit. London can be attacked at will.”

“Not bad for a former curator at the Phillips Collection.”

“I’m an art historian, Gabriel. I know how to connect dots. I can connect a few more, if you like.”

“Please do.”

“Your presence in Washington means the rumors are true.”

“What rumors are those?”

“The ones about Rashid being on the Agency’s payroll after 9/11. The ones about a good idea that went very bad. Adrian believed in Rashid and Rashid repaid that trust by building a network right under our noses. Now I suppose Adrian would like you to take care of the problem for him—off the books, of course.”

“Is there any other way?”

“Not where you’re concerned,” she said. “What does this have to do with me?”

“Adrian needs someone to spy on me. You were the obvious candidate.” Gabriel hesitated, then said, “But if you think it would be too awkward . . .”

“Because of Mikhail?”

“It’s possible you’ll be working together again, Sarah. I wouldn’t want personal feelings to interfere with the smooth functioning of the team.”

“Since when has your team ever functioned smoothly? You’re Israelis. You fight with one another constantly.”

“But we never allow personal feelings to influence operational decisions.”

“I’m a professional,” she said. “Given our history together, I shouldn’t think I’d need to remind you of that.”

“You don’t.”

“So where do we start?”

“We need to get to know Rashid a bit better.”

“How are we going to do that?”

“By reading his Agency files.”

“But they’re filled with lies.”

“That’s correct,” said Gabriel. “But those lies are like layers of paint on a canvas. Peel them away, and we might find ourselves staring directly at the truth.”

“No one ever speaks that way at Langley.”

“I know,” Gabriel said. “If they did, I’d still be in Cornwall working on a Titian.”

GABRIEL AND SARAH TOOK UP residence at the house on N Street at nine the following morning. The first batch of files arrived one hour later—six stainless steel crates, all sealed with digital locks. For some unfathomable reason, Carter entrusted the combinations only to Sarah. “Rules are rules,” he said, “and Agency rules state that officers of foreign intelligence services are never to be given the combinations of document receptacles.” When Gabriel pointed out that he was being allowed to see some of the Agency’s dirtiest laundry, Carter was unyielding. Technically speaking, the material was to remain in Sarah’s possession. The taking of notes was to be kept to a minimum and photocopying was forbidden. Carter personally removed the secure fax machine and requested Gabriel’s mobile phone—a request Gabriel politely declined. The phone had been issued to him by the Office and contained several features not available commercially. In fact, he had used it the previous evening to sweep the house for listening devices. He had found four. Obviously, interservice cooperation only went so far.

The initial shipment of files all focused on Rashid’s time in America before 9/11 and his connections, nefarious or serendipitous, to the plot itself. Most of the material had been generated by Langley’s unglamorous rival, the FBI, and had been shared during the brief period when, by presidential order, the two agencies were supposed to be cooperating. It revealed that Rashid al-Husseini popped up on the Bureau’s radar within weeks of his arrival in San Diego and was the target of somewhat apathetic surveillance. There were transcripts from the court-approved wiretaps on his phones and surveillance photos shot during the brief periods when the San Diego and Washington field offices had the time and manpower to follow him. There was also a copy of the classified interagency review that officially cleared Rashid of playing any role in the 9/11 plot. It was, thought Gabriel, a profoundly naïve piece of work that chose to portray the cleric in the kindest possible light. Gabriel believed a man was the company he kept, and he had been around terror networks long enough to know an operative when he saw one. Rashid al-Husseini was almost certainly a messenger or an innkeeper. At the very least, he was a fellow traveler. And, in Gabriel’s opinion, fellow travelers should rarely be taken on by intelligence services as paid agents of influence. They should be watched and, if necessary, dealt with harshly.

The next shipment contained the transcripts and recordings of Rashid’s interrogation by the CIA, followed soon after by the detritus of the ill-fated operation in which he had played a starring role. The material concluded with a despairing after-action postmortem, written in the days following Rashid’s defection in Mecca. The operation, it said, had been poorly conceived from the outset. Much of the blame was placed squarely at the feet of Adrian Carter, who was faulted for lax oversight. Attached was Carter’s own assessment, which was scarcely less scathing. Predicting there would be blowback, he recommended a thorough review of Rashid’s contacts in the United States and Europe. Carter’s director had overruled him. The Agency was stretched too thin to go chasing after shadows, the director said. Rashid was back in Yemen where he belonged. Good riddance.

“Not exactly the Agency’s finest hour,” Sarah declared late that evening, during a break in the proceedings. “We were fools to ever use him.”

“The Agency began with the correct assumption, that Rashid was bad, but somewhere along the line it fell under his spell. It’s easy to see how it happened. Rashid was very persuasive.”

“Almost as persuasive as you.”

“But I don’t send my recruits into crowded streets to carry out acts of indiscriminate murder.”

“No,” said Sarah, “you send them onto secret battlefields to smite your enemies.”

“It’s not as biblical as all that.”

“Yes, it is. Trust me, I should know.” She looked wearily at the stacks of files. “We still have a mountain of material to go through, and it’s only the beginning. The floodgates are about to open.”

“Don’t worry,” Gabriel said, smiling. “Help is on the way.”

They arrived at Dulles Airport late the following afternoon under false names and with false passports in their pockets. They were not punished for their sins; quite the opposite, a team of Agency minders whisked them through customs and then herded them into a fleet of armored Escalades for the drive into Washington. Per Adrian Carter’s instructions, the Escalades departed Dulles at fifteen-minute intervals. As a result, the most storied team of operatives in the intelligence world settled into the house on N Street that evening with the neighbors being none the wiser.

Chiara arrived first, followed a moment later by an Office terrorism expert named Dina Sarid. Petite and dark-haired, Dina knew the horrors of extremist violence all too well. She had been standing on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street on October 19, 1994, when a Hamas suicide bomber turned the Number 5 bus into a coffin for twenty-one people. Her mother and two of her sisters were among the dead; Dina was seriously injured and still walked with a slight limp. Upon her recovery, she vowed to defeat the terrorists not with force but with her brain. A human database, she was capable of reciting the time, place, perpetrators, and casualty toll of every act of terrorism committed against Israeli and Western targets. Dina had once told Gabriel that she knew more about the terrorists than they knew about themselves. And Gabriel had believed her.