Daniel Silva - Portrait of a Spy

“What happens if she gets angry and decides to tell my bosses I’m working on behalf of Israeli intelligence?”

“She has far too much to lose to pull a stunt like that. Besides, who would ever believe such a wild accusation? Zoe Reed is one of the world’s most respected journalists.”

“There’s a certain Swiss businessman who might not agree with that statement.”

“He’s the least of our worries.”

Zoe lapsed into a thoughtful silence, which was interrupted by the pinging of her BlackBerry. She fished it from her handbag, then stared at the screen in silence, her face distraught. A few seconds later, Gabriel’s own BlackBerry vibrated in his coat pocket. He managed to keep a blank expression on his face as he read it.

“Looks like it wasn’t harmless chatter after all,” he said. “Do you still think we should fight these monsters in ways that don’t compromise your core values? Or would you like to return briefly to the real world and help us save innocent lives?”

“There’s no guarantee she’ll even take my call.”

“She will,” Gabriel said. “Everyone does.”

He asked for Zoe’s BlackBerry. Two minutes later, after downloading a file from a Web site claiming to offer discount travel to the Holy Land, he returned it.

“Conduct all your negotiations using this device. If there’s something you need to say to us directly, just say it near the phone. We’ll be listening all the time.”

“Just like last time?”

Gabriel nodded. “Just like last time.”

Zoe slipped the BlackBerry into her handbag and rose. Gabriel watched as she walked away, followed by Lavon and Chiara. He sat alone for several minutes, reading the first news bulletins. It appeared as though Rashid and Malik had just taken another step closer to America.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

THE OLD COMPLACENCY HAD RETURNED to Madrid, but this was to be expected. It had been seven years since the deadly train bombings, and memories of that terrible morning had long since faded. Spain had responded to the massacre of its citizens by withdrawing its troops from Iraq and launching what it described as “an alliance of civilizations” with the Islamic world. Such action, said the political commentators, had succeeded in redirecting Muslim rage from Spain to America, where it rightly belonged. Submission to the wishes of al-Qaeda would protect Spain from another attack. Or so they thought.

The bomb exploded at 9:12 p.m., at the intersection of two busy streets near Puerta del Sol. It had been assembled at a rented garage in an industrial quarter south of the city and concealed in a Peugeot van. Owing to its ingenious construction, the initial force of the blast was directed leftward into a restaurant popular with Spanish governing elites. There would be no firsthand account of precisely what occurred inside, for no one lived to describe it. Had there been a survivor, he would have recounted a brief but terrible instant of airborne bodies adrift in a lethal cloud of glass, cutlery, ceramic, and blood. Then the entire building collapsed, entombing the dead and dying together beneath a mountain of shattered masonry.

The damage was greater than even the terrorist had hoped. Façades were ripped from apartment buildings for an entire block, exposing lives that, until a few seconds earlier, had been proceeding peacefully. Several nearby shops and cafés suffered damage and casualties while the small trees lining the street were shorn of their leaves or uprooted entirely. There were no visible remnants of the Peugeot van, only a large crater in the street where it once had been. For the first twenty-four hours of the investigation, the Spanish police were convinced the bomb had been detonated remotely. Later, they discovered traces of the shahid ’s DNA sprayed amid the ruins. He was just twenty, an unemployed Moroccan carpenter from the Lavapiés district of Madrid. In his suicide video, he spoke fondly of Yaqub al-Mansur, the twelfth-century Almohad caliph known for his bloody raids into Christian lands.

It was against this dreadful backdrop that Zoe Reed of the American business news network CNBC placed her first call to the publicity department of AAB Holdings, formerly of Riyadh and Geneva, lately of the Boulevard Haussmann, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. The time was ten past four in the afternoon, the weather in Paris predictably overcast. The inquiry received no immediate response, per standing AAB protocol.

Annually cited by Forbes magazine as one of the most successful and innovative investment firms in the world, the company was founded in 1979 by Abdul Aziz al-Bakari. Known to friends and detractors alike as Zizi, he was the nineteenth son of a prominent Saudi merchant who had served as the personal banker and financial adviser to Ibn Saud, the Kingdom’s founder and first absolute monarch. AAB’s holdings were as extensive as they were lucrative. AAB did shipping and mining. AAB did chemicals and drugs. AAB had major stakes in American and European banks. AAB’s real estate and hotel division was one of the world’s largest. Zizi traveled the world on a gold-plated 747, owned a string of palaces stretching from Riyadh to the French Riviera to Aspen, and sailed the seas on a battleship-sized yacht called the Alexandra . His collection of Impressionist and Modern art was thought to be among the largest in private hands. For a short period, it included Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table by Vincent van Gogh, purchased from Isherwood Fine Arts, 7–8 Mason’s Yard, St. James’s, London. The sale had been brokered by a young American named Sarah Bancroft, who went on to serve, briefly, as Zizi’s primary art consultant.

He was the target of many rumors, particularly regarding the source of his enormous fortune. AAB’s glossy prospectus claimed it had been built entirely from the modest inheritance Zizi received from his father, a claim that an authoritative American business journal, after a careful investigation, found wanting. AAB’s extraordinary liquidity, it said, could be explained by only one thing: it was being used as a front for the House of Saud to quietly reinvest its petrodollars around the world. Outraged by the article, Zizi threatened to sue. Later, on the advice of his lawyers, he had a change of heart. “The best revenge is living well,” he told a reporter from the Wall Street Journal . “And that is something I know how to do.”

Perhaps, but the handful of Westerners who were granted entrée into Zizi’s inner circle always sensed a certain restlessness in him. His parties were lavish affairs, yet Zizi seemed to take no pleasure in them. He neither smoked nor drank alcohol and refused to be in the presence of dogs or pork. He prayed five times a day; each winter, when the rains made the Saudi desert bloom, he retreated to an isolated encampment in the Nejd to meditate and hunt with his falcons. He claimed to be a descendant of Muhammad Abdul Wahhab, the eighteenth-century preacher whose austere, puritanical version of Islam became the official creed of Saudi Arabia. He built mosques around the world, including several in America and Western Europe, and gave generously to the Palestinians. Firms looking to do business with AAB knew better than to send a Jew to meet with Zizi. According to the rumor mill, Zizi liked Jews even less than he liked losses on his investments.

As it turned out, Zizi’s charitable activities extended far beyond what was publicly known. He also gave generously to charities associated with Islamic extremism and even directly to al-Qaeda itself. Eventually, he crossed the thin but bright line separating the financiers and enablers of terrorism from the terrorists themselves. The result was an attack on the Vatican that left more than seven hundred people dead and the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica in ruins. With Sarah Bancroft’s help, Gabriel hunted down the man who planned the attack—a renegade Saudi intelligence officer named Ahmed Bin Shafiq—and killed him in a hotel room in Istanbul. A week later, on the Quai Saint-Pierre in Cannes, he killed Zizi, too.