Daniel Silva - Portrait of a Spy

It was dark in the trees, but Coyle had no need of a flashlight; he knew the footpath the way a blind man knows the streets around his home. From MacArthur Boulevard, it ran flat for only a few paces before rising sharply up the slope of the hill. At the top of the park was a clearing where the hundred-pound guns of the old battery had once stood. To the right was a narrow tributary spanned by a wooden footbridge. Drop site number three was just beyond the bridge beneath a fallen oak tree. It was difficult to access, especially for a man of early middle age with chronic back problems, but not for Lucy. She knew each of the drop sites by the sound of its spoken number, and could clean them out in a matter of seconds. What’s more, unless the Bureau had discovered some way to speak to dogs, she could never be called to testify. Lucy was a perfect field agent, thought Coyle: smart, capable, fearless, and utterly loyal.

Coyle paused for a moment to listen for the sound of footfalls or voices. Hearing nothing, he gave Lucy the command to empty drop site three. She darted into the woods, her black coat rendering her all but invisible, and splashed into the streambed. A moment later, she came scrambling up the embankment with a stick in her mouth and dropped it obediently at Coyle’s feet.

It was about a foot in length and approximately two inches in diameter. Coyle took hold of each end and gave a sharp twist. It came apart easily, revealing a hidden compartment. Inside the compartment was a small slip of paper. Coyle removed it, then reassembled the stick and gave it to Lucy to return to the drop site. In all likelihood, Coyle’s handler would collect it before dawn. He wasn’t the smartest intelligence officer Coyle had ever encountered, but he was thorough in a plodding sort of way, and he never made Coyle wait for his money. That was hardly surprising. The officer’s service faced many threats, both internal and external, but a shortage of money was not one of them.

Coyle read the message by the glow of his mobile phone and then dropped the slip of paper into a plastic Safeway bag. It was the same bag he used five minutes later to collect Lucy’s nightly offering. Tightly knotted, it swung like a pendulum, beating warmly against Coyle’s wrist, as he strode down the footpath toward home. It wouldn’t be long now, he thought. A few more secrets, a few more trips into the park with Lucy at his side. He wondered whether he would really have the nerve to leave. Then he thought of Norah’s dowdy eyeglasses, and his neighbor’s enormous house, and the book about Winston Churchill he had listened to while stuck in traffic. Coyle had always admired Churchill’s decisiveness. In the end, Coyle would be decisive, too.

Across the river at Langley, the party continued for much of the next week. They celebrated their hard work. They celebrated the superiority of their technology. They celebrated the fact that they had finally managed to outwit their enemy. Mainly, though, they celebrated Adrian Carter. The operation, they said, would surely be regarded as one of Carter’s finest. The black marks had been erased; the sins had been forgiven. Never mind that Rashid and Malik were still out there somewhere. For now, they were terrorists without a network, and it was all Carter’s doing.

Rashidistan remained open for business, but its ranks were thinned by a wave of hasty reassignments. What had begun as a highly secretive intelligence-gathering endeavor was now a matter largely for policemen and prosecutors. The team no longer tracked the flow of money through a terror network. Instead, it engaged in heated debates with lawyers from the Justice Department over what evidence was admissible and what should never see the light of day. None of the lawyers bothered to ask the opinion of Gabriel Allon, the legendary but wayward son of Israeli intelligence, because none knew he was there.

With the operation winding down, Gabriel devoted most of his time and energy to leaving it. At the request of King Saul Boulevard, he conducted a series of exit briefings and negotiated a permanent system of sharing the intelligence harvest, knowing full well the Americans would never live up to the terms. The accord was signed with great fanfare in a sparsely attended ceremony in the director’s office, after which Gabriel proceeded to the Office of Personnel to hand in his green credentials. What should have taken five minutes consumed more than an hour as he was forced to sign countless written promises, none of which he had any intention of keeping. When Personnel’s lust for ink had finally been satisfied, a uniformed guard escorted Gabriel down to the lobby. He remained there for a few minutes to watch a new star being carved into the CIA’s Memorial Wall, then headed into the first violent thunderstorm of Washington’s all-too-brief spring.

By the time Gabriel reached Georgetown, the rain had ended and the sun was again shining brightly. He met Chiara for lunch at a quaint outdoor café near American University, then walked her back to Tunlaw Road to pack for the flight home. Arriving at the apartment building, they found an armored black Escalade waiting outside the entrance, its tailpipe gently smoking. A hand beckoned. It belonged to Adrian Carter.

“Is there a problem?” asked Gabriel.

“I suppose that depends entirely on how you look at it.”

“Can you get to the point, Adrian? We have a plane to catch.”

“Actually, I’ve taken the liberty of canceling your reservations.”

“How thoughtful of you.”

“Get in.”

THE HOUSE STOOD ON THE highest point of the land, shaded by a coppice of oak and elm. It had a tarnished copper roof and a handsome double-decker porch overlooking a green pasture. The neighbors had been led to believe that the owner was a wealthy Washington lobbyist named Hewitt. There was no Washington lobbyist named Hewitt, at least not one associated with the charming forty-acre gentleman’s farm located two miles east of The Plains on Country Road 601. The name had been chosen randomly by the computers of the Central Intelligence Agency, which owned and operated the farm through a front company. The Agency also owned the John Deere tractor, the Ford pickup truck, the Bush Hog rotary cutter, and a pair of bay horses. One was named Colby; the other was called Helms. According to Agency wits, they were subjected, like all CIA employees, to annual polygraphs to make certain they hadn’t switched sides, whatever side that might be.

The following afternoon, both horses were nibbling on the new grass in the lower pasture as the Escalade bearing Gabriel and Chiara came churning up the long gravel drive. A CIA security man admitted them into the house, then, after relieving them of their coats and mobile devices, pointed them toward the great room. Entering, they saw Uzi Navot peering longingly at the buffet and Ari Shamron attempting to coax a cup of coffee from the pump-action thermos. Seated near the dormant fireplace, dressed for a long weekend in the English countryside, was Graham Seymour. Adrian Carter sat next to him, frowning at something James McKenna was whispering urgently in his ear.

The men gathered in the room represented a secret brotherhood of sorts. Since the attacks of 9/11, they had worked together on numerous joint operations, most of which the public knew nothing about. They had fought for one another, killed for one another, and in some cases bled for one another. Despite the occasional disagreement, their bond had managed to transcend time and the fickle whims of their political masters. They saw their mission in stark terms—they were, to borrow a phrase from their enemy, the “Shura Council” of the civilized world. They took on the unpleasant chores no one else was willing to perform and worried about the consequences later, especially when lives were at stake. James McKenna was not a member of the council, nor would he ever be. He was a political animal, which meant by definition he was part of the problem. His presence promised to be a complicating factor, especially if he planned to spend the entire time whispering in Carter’s ear.