Daniel Silva - Portrait of a Spy

Weary of Rashid’s insidious presence, the rest of the team insisted that Gabriel keep the door of the library tightly closed whenever he was listening to the recordings. But late at night, when most of the others had gone off to bed, he would disobey their order, if only to relieve the feeling of claustrophobia produced by the sound of Rashid’s voice. Invariably, he would find Dina staring at the puzzle arrayed on the walls of the drawing room. “Go to sleep, Dina,” he would say. And Dina would respond, “I’ll sleep when you sleep.”

On the first Friday of December, as snow flurries whitened the streets of Georgetown, Gabriel listened again to Rashid’s final debriefing with his Agency handlers. It was the night before his defection. He seemed more excited than usual and slightly on edge. At the conclusion of the encounter, he gave his case officer the name of an Oslo-based imam who, in Rashid’s opinion, was raising money for the resistance fighters in Iraq. “They’re not resistance fighters, they’re terrorists,” the CIA man said pointedly. “Forgive me, Bill,” Rashid replied, using the officer’s pseudonym, “but I sometimes find it hard to remember which side I’m on.”

Gabriel switched off his computer and slipped quietly into the drawing room. Dina stood silently before her matrix, rubbing at the spot on her leg that always pained her when she was fatigued.

“Go to sleep, Dina,” Gabriel said.

“Not tonight,” she replied.

“You’ve got him?”

“I think so.”

“Who is it?”

“It’s Malik,” she said softly. “And may God have mercy on us all.”

IT WAS A FEW MINUTES past two a.m., a dreadful hour, Shamron once famously said, when brilliant schemes are rarely hatched. Gabriel suggested waiting until morning, but the clock in Dina’s head was ticking far too loudly for that. She personally roused the others from bed and paced the drawing room anxiously while waiting for the coffee to brew. When finally she spoke, her tone was urgent but respectful. Malik, the master of terror, had earned it.

She began her account by reminding the team of Malik’s lineage—a lineage that had but one possible outcome. A descendant of the al-Zubair clan—a mixed Palestinian-Syrian family that hailed from the village of Abu Ghosh, on the western approaches to Jerusalem—he had been born in the Zarqa refugee camp in Jordan. Zarqa was a wretched place, even by the deplorable standards of the camps, and a breeding ground for Islamic extremism. An intelligent but aimless young man, Malik spent a great deal of time at the al-Falah Mosque. There he fell under the spell of an incendiary Salafist imam who guided him into the arms of the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas. Malik joined the group’s military wing, the Izzaddin al-Qassam Brigades, and studied the craft of terror with some of the deadliest practitioners in the business. A natural leader and skilled organizer, he rose quickly through the ranks and by the onset of the Second Intifada was a top Hamas terror mastermind. From the safety of the Zarqa camp, he plotted some of the deadliest attacks of the period, including a suicide bombing at a nightclub in Tel Aviv that claimed thirty-three lives.

“After that attack,” Dina said, “the prime minister signed an order authorizing Malik’s assassination. Malik concealed himself deep inside the Zarqa camp and plotted what would be his biggest strike yet—a bombing at the Western Wall. Fortunately, we managed to arrest the three shahid s before they could reach their target. It’s believed to be Malik’s one and only failure.”

By the summer of 2004, Dina continued, it was clear that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was too small a stage for Malik. Inspired by 9/11, he slipped out of the camp and, disguised as a woman, traveled to Amman to meet with an al-Qaeda recruiter. After reciting the bayat , the personal oath of allegiance to Osama Bin Laden, Malik was smuggled across the border into Syria. Six weeks later, he slipped into Iraq.

“Malik was far more sophisticated than the other members of al-Qaeda in Iraq,” Dina said. “He’d spent years perfecting his craft against the most formidable counterterrorism forces in the world. Not only was he an expert bomb-maker, he knew how to slip his shahid s through even the toughest security. He was thought to have been the mastermind behind some of the insurgency’s deadliest and most spectacular attacks. His crowning achievement was a one-day wave of bombings in the Shiite quarter of Baghdad that killed more than two hundred people.”

Malik’s final attack in Iraq was a bombing of a Shiite mosque that left fifty worshippers dead. By then, he was the target of a massive search operation being carried out by Task Force 6-26, the joint U.S. special operations and intelligence unit. Ten days after the bombing, the task force learned that Malik was hiding in a safe house ten miles north of Baghdad, along with two other senior al-Qaeda figures. That night American F-16 jets attacked the house with a pair of laser-guided bombs, but a search of the ruins produced only two sets of remains. Neither belonged to Malik al-Zubair.

“Apparently, he slipped out of the house a few minutes before the bombs fell,” Dina said. “Later, he told his comrades that Allah had instructed him to leave. The incident only reaffirmed his belief that he had been chosen by God to do great things.”

It was then Malik decided it was time to go international. He had developed a taste for killing Americans in Iraq and wanted to kill them in their homeland, so he traveled to Pakistan to seek funding and support from al-Qaeda’s front office. Bin Laden listened carefully. Then he sent Malik packing.

“Actually,” Dina added hastily, “it’s believed Ayman al-Zawahiri was behind the decision to turn Malik away empty-handed. The Egyptian had several plots under way against the West and didn’t want them threatened by an upstart Palestinian from Zarqa.”

“So Malik went to Yemen and offered his services to Rashid instead?” asked Gabriel.

“Exactly.”

“Proof,” said Gabriel. “Where’s the proof?”

“I’m an intelligence analyst,” Dina said unapologetically. “I rarely have the luxury of absolute proof. What I’m offering you is conjecture, supported by a handful of pertinent facts.”

“For example?”

“Damascus,” she said. “In the autumn of 2008, the Office got a tip from an asset inside Syrian intelligence that Malik was hiding there, moving constantly among a number of safe houses owned by various members of the al-Zubair clan. At Shamron’s urging, the prime minister authorized us to begin planning for Malik’s long-overdue demise. Uzi was still the chief of Special Ops then. He dispatched a team of field operatives to Damascus—a team that included one Mikhail Abramov,” Dina added, with a glance in his direction. “Within a few days, they had Malik under full-time surveillance.”

“Go on, Dina.”

“Malik wasn’t so easy to follow, as Mikhail will tell you. He changed his appearance constantly—facial hair, glasses, hats, clothing, even the way he walked—but the team managed to maintain contact with him. And late on the evening of October 23, they observed Malik entering an apartment owned by a man called Kemel Arwish. Arwish liked to portray himself as a Westernized moderate who wanted to drag his people kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. In truth, he was an Islamist who dabbled at the fringes of al-Qaeda and its affiliates. His ability to travel between the Middle East and the West without suspicion made him valuable as a courier and runner of assorted errands.” Dina looked directly at Gabriel. “Since you’ve been spending a great deal of time familiarizing yourself with Rashid’s CIA files, I trust Kemel’s name and address are familiar to you.”