Daniel Silva - Portrait of a Spy

It was now half past six. Thinking of anything but the throbbing in her head, she closed her eyes and willed herself into a gauzy half sleep, which was disturbed thirty minutes later by the butterfly knock of her longtime housekeeper, Esmeralda. As was her custom, Nadia remained in bed until Esmeralda had departed. Then she pulled on a dressing gown and, under the watchful gaze of her father, padded barefoot into her office.

The smell of freshly brewed coffee greeted her. She poured a cup, added milk and three spoonfuls of sugar, and sat down at her desk. On the television screen were images of mayhem in Islamabad, the aftermath of yet another powerful al-Qaeda car bombing that had killed more than a hundred people, nearly all of them Muslims. Nadia left the volume on mute and lifted the leather cover of her itinerary. It was strikingly benign. After two hours of private time, she was scheduled to depart her residence and fly to Zurich. There, in a conference room at the Dolder Grand Hotel, she and her closest aides would meet with executives from a Zug-based optical firm owned in large part by AAB Holdings. Immediately afterward, she would conduct a second meeting, without aides present. The topic was listed as “private,” which was always the case when Nadia’s personal finances were involved.

She closed the leather folder and, as was her custom, spent the next hour reading the newspapers over coffee and toast. Shortly after eight, she logged on to her computer to check the status of the Asian markets, then spent several minutes switching among the various cable news networks. Her tour ended with Al Jazeera, which had moved on from the carnage in Islamabad to report an Israeli military strike in the Gaza Strip that had killed two top Hamas terror planners. Describing the strike as “a crime against humanity,” the Turkish prime minister called on the United Nations to punish Israel with economic sanctions—a call rejected, in the next segment, by an important Saudi cleric. “The time for diplomacy has ended,” he told the fawning Al Jazeera questioner. “It is now time for all Muslims to join the armed struggle against the Zionist interlopers. And may God punish those who dare to collaborate with the enemies of Islam.”

Switching off the television, Nadia returned to her bedroom and changed into exercise clothing. She had never cared for physical activity, and since turning thirty she cared for it even less. She dutifully elevated her heart rate and strained her limbs each morning because it was something that, as a modern businesswoman who lived mainly in the West, she was expected to do. Still suffering from a mild headache, she shortened her already-brief daily routine. After a leisurely stroll atop the conveyor belt of her treadmill, she stretched for several minutes on a rubber yoga mat. Then she lay on her back very still, with her ankles pressed together and her arms extended from her sides. As always, the pose created a sensation of weightlessness. On that morning, however, it also produced a shockingly clear revelation of her future. She lay there for several moments, her pose unchanged, and debated whether to go through with the trip to Zurich. One phone call is all it would take, she thought. One phone call and the burden would be lifted. It was a call she could not bring herself to make. She believed she had been put on earth, in this time and place, for a reason. She believed the same was true for the man who had killed her father, and she did not want to disappoint him.

Nadia stood and, fighting off a wave of dizziness, returned to her bedroom. After bathing and perfuming her body, she entered her dressing room and selected her clothing, forsaking the light colors that she preferred for more somber shades of gray and black. Her hair she arranged piously. Her face, as she glided past Rafiq al-Kamal into the back of her limousine thirty minutes later, was set in the juhayman of the Bedouin. The transformation was nearly complete. She was a wealthy Saudi woman plotting to avenge the murder of her father.

The car slipped through the front gate of the mansion and turned into the street. As it headed along the Bois de Boulogne, Nadia noticed the man she knew as Max walking a few paces behind a woman who may or may not have been Sarah. Just then, a motorcycle appeared briefly next to her window, ridden by a slender, helmeted figure in a black leather jacket. Something about him made Nadia feel a sudden painful stab of memory. It was probably nothing, she told herself as the bike vanished into a side street. Just a touch of last-minute nerves. Just her mind playing tricks.

At the behest of the al-Saud, Nadia had been compelled to keep more than just her father’s old security detail. The basic structure of the company remained the same, as did most of the senior personnel. Daoud Hamza, a Stanford-educated Lebanese, still ran the day-to-day operations. Manfred Wehrli, a granite-calm Swiss moneyman, still managed the finances. And the legal team known as Abdul & Abdul still kept things reasonably above board. Accompanied by twenty additional aides, footmen, factotums, and assorted hangers-on, they were all gathered in the VIP lounge of Le Bourget Airport by the time Nadia arrived. At the stroke of ten, they filed onto AAB’s Boeing Business Jet, and by 10:15 they were Zurich bound. They spent the hour-long flight crunching numbers around the conference table and upon arrival at Kloten Airport piled into a convoy of Mercedes sedans. It bore them at considerable speed up the wooded slopes of the Zürichberg to the graceful entrance of the Dolder Grand Hotel, where management escorted them to a conference room with an Alpine-sounding name and a view of the lake that was worth the outrageous price of admission. The delegation from the Swiss optical firm had already arrived and was partaking freely of the lavish buffet. The AAB team sat down and began opening their briefcases and laptops. AAB personnel never ate during meetings. Zizi’s rules.

The meeting had been scheduled to last two hours. It ran thirty minutes over and concluded with a pledge by Nadia to invest an additional twenty million francs in the Swiss company to help it upgrade its factories and product line. After a few benedictory remarks, the Swiss delegation departed. Crossing the elegant lobby, they passed a thin, lightly bearded Arab in his early forties sitting alone with his briefcase at his side. Five minutes later, a phone call summoned him to the conference room the Swiss had just vacated. Waiting there alone was a beautiful woman of unimpeachable jihadist credentials.

“May God’s blessings be upon you,” she said in Arabic.

“And upon you as well,” Samir Abbas responded in the same language. “I trust your meeting with the Swiss went well.”

“Earthly matters,” said Nadia with a dismissive wave of her hand.

“God has been very generous to you,” Abbas said. “I’ve put together some proposals on how I think your money should be invested.”

“I don’t need investment advice from you, Mr. Abbas. I do quite well on my own.”

“Then how might I be of service, Miss al-Bakari?”

“You may begin by having a seat. And then you can switch off your BlackBerry. One can never be too careful these days when it comes to electronic devices. You never know who might be listening.”

“I understand completely.”

She managed to smile. “I’m sure you do.”

THEY SAT ON OPPOSITE SIDES of the conference table, with no refreshment other than bottles of Swiss mineral water, which neither of them touched. Between them lay two smart phones, screens dark, SIM cards removed. Having averted his gaze from Nadia’s unveiled face, Samir Abbas appeared to be studying the chandelier above his head. Concealed amid the lights and crystal was a miniature short-range transmitter installed earlier that morning by Mordecai and Oded. They were now monitoring its signal from a room on the fourth floor, all charges paid in full by the National Clandestine Service of the Central Intelligence Agency. Gabriel was listening at the safe house on the opposite shore of the lake via a secure microwave link. His lips were moving slightly, as if he were trying to feed Nadia her next line.