Daniel Silva - Portrait of a Spy

“Adrian.”

“What does he want?”

“He’d like us to come down to Langley.”

“When?”

“Now.”

RASHID HAD BEEN CARTER’S FOLLY, Carter’s bright idea gone terribly wrong. Gabriel had cleaned up the worst of the mess. Khalid the falcon, with his parting gift, had given Carter the means to sweep up the rest.

The gift had been a young Saudi jihadi named Yusuf. Langley and the NSA had been tracking his phone for several months. Yusuf was now one of Rashid’s most trusted couriers. Rashid gave Yusuf coded messages; Yusuf delivered the messages to the faithful. He was expecting a phone call that evening from a man in Germany. Yusuf believed the man was the leader of a new cell in Hamburg. But there was no new cell in Hamburg. Carter and the team at Rashidistan had invented it.

“He’s sitting in the front passenger seat of that Daihatsu,” Carter explained, nodding toward one of the giant display screens in the Rashidistan op center. “At the moment, they’re traveling on a remote road in the Rafadh Valley of Yemen. They picked up two men about an hour ago. We believe one of them is Rashid. In ten minutes, our phantom cell leader from Hamburg is going to call Yusuf. We’ve asked him to keep Yusuf talking for as long as possible. If we get lucky, Rashid will say something while the call is hot. As you know, Rashid is a bit on the loquacious side. He used to drive his Agency handlers crazy. He never shuts his damn mouth.”

“Who makes the decision whether to take the shot?” Gabriel asked.

“NSA will tell me if they can pick up any other voices in the background and whether they can make a positive match. If the computers say he’s there, we hit him. If there’s even a sliver of doubt, we hold our fire. Remember, the last thing we want to do is kill Yusuf before he can lead us to the prize.”

“I want to listen,” Gabriel said.

“That’s why you’re here.”

Gabriel slipped on a set of headphones. Ten minutes crawled past. Then the agent in Hamburg dialed. Two men began conversing in Arabic. In his mind, Gabriel set them aside. They were unimportant now. They were but a doorway to the man with a beautiful and seductive tongue. Talk to me , thought Gabriel. Tell me something important, even if it’s only another lie .

Yusuf and the ersatz Hamburg cell leader were still speaking, but the conversation was clearly starting to wind down. Thus far, there had been no sound in the background other than the rattle of the SUV over the pitted Yemeni road. Finally, Gabriel heard what he had been waiting for. It was an offhand remark, nothing more. He didn’t bother to mentally translate it; he was listening only to the tone and timbre of the voice. He knew it well. It was the voice that had condemned him to death in the Empty Quarter.

Do you wish to submit to the will of Islam and become a Muslim?

Gabriel turned to Adrian Carter. He was speaking tensely into the phone connected to the NSA. Gabriel was tempted to ask what they were waiting for, but he knew the answer. They were waiting for the computers to tell them what he already knew, that the voice in the background was Rashid’s. He watched the SUV careening along the road in Yemen and listened as the two jihadis, one real, the other a clever forgery, concluded their call. Carter slammed down the phone in a flash of uncharacteristic anger. “Sorry to bring you all the way down here for nothing,” he said. “Maybe next time.”

“There’s not going to be a next time, Adrian.”

“Why not?”

“Because it ends here, right now.”

Carter hesitated. “If I order the Predator to fire,” he said, “four people will die, including Yusuf.”

“They’re four terrorists,” said Gabriel. “And one of them is Rashid al-Husseini.”

“Are you sure?” Carter asked one last time.

“Take the shot, Adrian.”

Carter reached for the phone connected to the Predator control room, but Gabriel stopped him.

“What’s wrong?” asked Carter.

“Nothing,” said Gabriel. “Just wait a minute.”

He was staring at the clock. Thirty seconds later, he nodded his head and said, “Now.” Carter relayed the order, and the Daihatsu disappeared in a flash of brilliant white. A few members of the Rashidistan team began to applaud, but Carter sat with his hands over his face, saying nothing at all.

“I’ve done this a hundred times,” he said finally, “and each time I still feel like I’m going to be sick.”

“He deserved to die—for Nadia, if nothing else.”

“So why do I feel this way?”

“Because, in the end, it’s never clean or smart or forward-leaning, even when you take the shot from a room on the other side of the world.”

“Why did you make me wait?”

“Look at the time in Yemen.”

It was 10:03 a.m., the moment United Airlines Flight 93 plunged into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, instead of its likely target, the dome of the U.S. Capitol. Carter said nothing more. His right hand was shaking.

After that, there was just one last issue still to be resolved. In the end, it came down to a simple business transaction: five million dollars for a name. It was provided by Faisal Qahtani, Shamron’s old source from the Saudi GID. Fittingly enough, the five million dollars were deposited into the Zurich branch of TransArabian Bank.

They put the target under surveillance and spent weeks debating what to do. From his lakeside throne in Tiberias, Shamron decreed that only biblical justice would suffice. But Uzi Navot, in a sign of his rising influence, managed to overrule him. Gabriel had nearly given up his life in a quest for American equity, and under no circumstances would Navot squander it on an ill-advised covert operation in the heart of the American capital. Besides, he said, giving the Americans the name of a traitor would add still more value to King Saul Boulevard’s side of the ledger.

Navot waited until his next official visit to Washington to whisper the name to Adrian Carter. In return, he made only one request. Carter readily agreed. It was, he said, the least they could do.

The Bureau took over the surveillance and started tearing through phone records, credit card bills, and computer hard drives. Before long, they had more than enough to proceed to the next stage. They sent a plane to Cornwall. Then they put a chalk mark at the base of the brown wooden sign along MacArthur Boulevard and waited.

The chalk mark was in the shape of a cross. It intrigued Ellis Coyle, because it was the first time it had been used. It meant Coyle’s handler wished to conduct a crash face-to-face meeting. It was risky—any direct contact between source and case officer was inherently dangerous—but it was also a rare opportunity.

Coyle rubbed out the mark with the toe of his shoe and entered the park with Lucy at his heels. The leash was still attached to the dog’s collar. Coyle didn’t dare remove it. A bitter old dowager from Spring Valley had confronted him recently about his failure to collect Lucy’s droppings. There had been threats of community sanction, perhaps even a word with the authorities. The last thing Coyle needed now was an encounter with the police, not when he was just a few weeks from retirement. He promised to end his rebellious ways and began secretly plotting the demise of the dowager’s hateful little pug.

It was a few minutes past nine, and the clearing at the top of the trail was in darkness. Coyle glanced toward the picnic tables and saw the dark silhouette of a man seated alone. He led Lucy around the perimeter of the clearing, checking for evidence of surveillance, before walking over. Only when he was a few feet away did he realize that the man was not his usual handler from Saudi intelligence. He had gray temples and green eyes that seemed to glow in the dark. He looked at the dog in a way that made Coyle shiver.