Daniel Silva: Portrait of a Spy

Gabriel checked his digital watch. It was now a few seconds past 2:35. Looking up, he saw the man in the gray overcoat was once again moving at a brisk pace, hands in his pockets, seemingly oblivious to the people around him. As Gabriel followed, his mobile began to vibrate again. This time, he answered and heard the voice of Chiara. He told her that a suicide bomber was about to detonate himself in Covent Garden and instructed her to make contact with MI5. Then he slipped the phone back into his pocket and began closing the distance between himself and the target. He feared that many innocent people were about to die. And he wondered whether there was anything he could do to stop it.

THERE WAS ONE OTHER POSSIBILITY, of course—the possibility that the man walking several paces ahead of Gabriel had nothing beneath his coat but a few extra pounds of body fat. Inevitably, Gabriel recalled the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian-born electrician who was shot to death by British police in London’s Stockwell tube station after being mistaken for a wanted Islamic militant. British prosecutors declined to bring charges against the officers involved in the killing, a decision that provoked outrage among human rights activists and civil libertarians around the world. Gabriel knew that, under similar circumstances, he could expect no such leniency. It meant he would have to be certain before acting. He was confident of one thing. He believed the bomber, like a painter, would sign his name before pressing his detonator switch. He would want his victims to know that their imminent deaths were not without purpose, that they were being sacrificed in the name of the sacred jihad and in the name of Allah.

For the moment, though, Gabriel had no choice but to follow the man and wait. Slowly, carefully, he closed the gap, making small adjustments in his own course to maintain an unobstructed firing lane. His eyes were focused on the lower portion of the man’s skull. A few centimeters beneath it was the brain stem, essential for controlling the motor and sensory systems of the rest of the body. Destroy the brain stem with several rounds of ammunition, and the bomber would lack the means to press his detonator button. Miss the brain stem, and it was possible the martyr could carry out his mission with a dying twitch. Gabriel was one of the few men in the world who had actually killed a terrorist before he could carry out his attack. He knew the difference between success and failure would come down to a fraction of a second. Success meant only one would die. Failure would result in the deaths of scores of innocent people, perhaps even Gabriel himself.

The dead man passed through the doorway leading to the piazza. It was far more crowded now. A cellist was playing a suite by Bach. A Jimi Hendrix impersonator was grappling with an amplified electric guitar. A well-dressed man standing atop a wooden crate was shouting something about God and the Iraq War. The dead man headed directly toward the center of the square, where the comedian’s performance had sunk to new depths of depravity, much to the delight of the large crowd of spectators. Using techniques learned in his youth, Gabriel mentally silenced the noises around him one by one, starting with the faint strains of the Bach suite and ending with the uproarious laughter of the crowd. Then he glanced one last time at his wristwatch and waited for the dead man to sign his name.

It was 2:36. The dead man had reached the outer edge of the large crowd. He paused for a few seconds, as if searching for a weak point to make his entry, then shouldered his way between two startled women. Gabriel entered at a different spot several yards to the man’s right, slipping virtually unnoticed through a family of American tourists. The crowd was four-deep in most places and tightly packed, which presented Gabriel with yet another dilemma. The ideal ammunition for a situation like this was a hollow-point round, which would inflict greater tissue damage on the target and substantially reduce the risk of collateral casualties due to over-penetration. But Gabriel’s Beretta pistol was loaded with ordinary 9mm Parabellum rounds. As a result, he would have to position himself to fire at an extreme downward trajectory. Otherwise, there was a high probability he might inadvertently take innocent life in an attempt to save it.

The dead man had breached the inner wall of the crowd and was now headed directly toward the street comedian. The eyes had taken on the glassy thousand-yard stare. The lips were moving. Final prayers . . . The street comedian wrongly assumed the dead man wished to take part in the performance. Smiling, he took two steps toward him but froze when he saw the hands emerge from the pockets of the overcoat. The left was slightly open. The right was bunched into a fist, with the thumb cocked at a right angle. Still, Gabriel hesitated. What if there was no detonator? What if it was a pen or a cylinder of lip balm? He had to be sure. Tell me your intentions , he thought. Sign your name .

The dead man turned to face the market. The patrons looking down from the balcony of the Punch and Judy laughed nervously, as did a few of the spectators gathered in the piazza. In his mind, Gabriel silenced the laughter and froze the image. The scene appeared to him as though painted by the hand of Canaletto. The figures were stock-still; only Gabriel, the restorer, was free to move among them. He slipped through the front row of the spectators and focused his gaze on the spot at the back of the skull. Firing at a downward angle was not possible. But there was another potential solution to prevent collateral casualties: an upward line of fire would carry Gabriel’s round safely over the heads of the spectators and into the façade of the adjacent building. He pictured the maneuver in sequence—the cross-handed draw, the crouch, the shot, the advance—and waited for the dead man to sign his name.

The silence in Gabriel’s head was broken by a drunken shout from the balcony of the Punch and Judy—a command for the martyr to move out of the way and allow the performance to continue. The dead man responded by lifting his arms above his head like a long-distance runner breaking the finishing tape. On the inside of the right wrist was a thin wire leading from the detonator switch to the explosives. It was all the evidence Gabriel needed. He reached into his jacket and seized the butt of his Beretta. Then, as the dead man screamed “Allahu Akbar,” Gabriel dropped to one knee and leveled the weapon toward his target. Remarkably, the shot was clear, with no chance of secondary casualties. But as Gabriel was about to squeeze the trigger, two powerful hands pulled the gun downward, and the weight of two men drove him toward the paving stones.

At the instant he hit the ground, he heard a sound like the crack of thunder and felt a wave of scorching air wash over him. For a few seconds, Gabriel heard nothing more. Then the screaming started, a single shriek, followed by an aria of wailing. Gabriel lifted his head and saw a scene from his nightmares. It was body parts and blood. It was Baghdad on the Thames.

THERE ARE FEW MORE GRIEVOUS sins for a professional intelligence officer, even a retired one, than to land in the custody of the local authorities. Because Gabriel had long occupied a nether region between the overt and secret worlds, he had suffered such a fate more often than most of his fellow travelers. Experience had taught him there was an established ritual for such occasions, a sort of Kabuki dance that must be allowed to reach its conclusion before higher authority can intervene. He knew the steps well. Fortunately, so did his hosts.