Daniel Silva - The Secret Servant

So it comes down to the two of us once again,” Ibrahim said. “I suppose that’s fitting.”

Gabriel cleared the windshield of his Audi A8 sedan with a flick of the wiper blades. The King’s New Square appeared before him, shrouded in a bridal veil of snowfall. Ibrahim was sitting silently in the passenger seat, freshly scrubbed and dressed for his own funeral in a borrowed gray suit and overcoat. His hands were folded primly in his lap, good hand atop ruined hand, and his eyes were on his shoes. Gabriel’s telephone lay in the console. Its signal was being monitored inside the CIA station at the American embassy and at NSA headquarters.

“You’re not going to give me another one of your lectures, are you, Ibrahim?”

“I’m still a professor at heart,” he said. “I can’t help it.”

Gabriel decided to indulge him. A lecture was better than silence.

“Why do you suppose it’s fitting?”

“We have both seen the worst this life has to offer. Nothing can frighten us, and nothing that happens today will surprise us.” He looked up from his shoes and gazed at Gabriel for a moment. “The things they wrote about you in the newspapers after London-it was all true? You were the one who killed the members of Black September?”

Ibrahim interpreted Gabriel’s silence as affirmation the newspapers accounts were all true.

“I remember Munich so clearly,” Ibrahim said. “We spent that day standing around our televisions and radios. It electrified the Arab world. We cheered the capture of your athletes, and when they were massacred at the airport we danced in the streets. In retrospect, our reaction was appalling, but completely understandable. We were weak and humiliated. You were strong and rich. You had beaten us many times. We had finally beaten you, in Germany of all places, land of your greatest catastrophe.”

“I thought you Islamists didn’t believe in the Holocaust. I thought you regarded it as a great lie, foisted upon the world by clever Jews so we could rob the Arabs of their land.”

“I’ve never been one to dabble in self-delusion and conspiracy theory,” Ibrahim said. “You Jews deserve a national home. God knows you need one. But the sooner you give the Palestinians a state in the West Bank and Gaza, the better for all of us.”

“And if that means giving it to your spiritual brethren in Hamas?”

“At the rate we’re going, Hamas will look like moderates soon,” Ibrahim said. “And when the Palestinian issue is finally removed from the table, the Arabs will have no one else to blame for their miserable condition. We will be forced to take a hard look in the mirror and solve our problems for ourselves.”

“That’s just one of the reasons why there will never be peace. We’re the scapegoat for Arab failings-the pressure valve for Arab unrest. The Arabs loathe us, but they cannot live without us.”

Ibrahim nodded in agreement and resumed the study of his shoes. “Is it also true that you are a famous art restorer?”

This time Gabriel nodded slowly. Ibrahim pulled his lips into an incredulous frown.

“Why, if you have the ability to heal beautiful paintings, do you engage in work such as this?”

“Duty,” said Gabriel. “I feel an obligation to protect my people.”

“The terrorists would say the same thing.”

“Perhaps, but I don’t murder the innocent.”

“You just threaten to send them to Egypt to be tortured.” Ibrahim looked at Gabriel. “Would you have done it?”

Gabriel shook his head. “No, Ibrahim, I wouldn’t have sent you back.”

Ibrahim looked out his window. “The snow is beautiful,” he said. “Is it a good omen or bad?”

“A friend of mine calls weather like this operational weather.”

“That’s good?”

Gabriel nodded. “It’s good.”

“You’ve done this kind of thing before?”

“Only once.”

“How did it end?”

With the Gare de Lyon in rubble, thought Gabriel. “I got the hostage back,” he said.

“This street that he wants us to walk down-do you know it?”

Gabriel lifted his hand from the wheel and pointed across the square. “It’s called Strøget. It’s a pedestrian mall lined with shops and restaurants, two miles long-the longest in Europe, if the hotel brochures are to be believed. It empties into a square called the Rådhuspladsen.”

“We walk and they watch-is that how it works?”

“That’s exactly how it works. And if they like what they see, someone will phone me when we reach the Rådhuspladsen and tell me where to go next.”

“When do we start?”

“Three o’clock.”

“Three o’clock,” Ibrahim repeated. “The hour of death-at least that’s what the Christians believe. Why do you think they chose three o’clock?”

“It gives them a few minutes of daylight to see us properly in Strøget. After that, it will be dark. That gives them the advantage. It makes it harder for me to see them.”

“What about your little helpers?” Ibrahim asked. “The ones who plucked me from that street corner in Amsterdam?”

“Ishaq says if he detects surveillance, the deal is off and Elizabeth Halton dies.”

“So we go alone?”

Gabriel nodded and looked at his watch. It was 2:59. “It’s not too late to back out, you know. You don’t have to do this.”

“I made you a promise in that house two nights ago-a promise that I would help you get the American woman back. It is a promise I intend to keep.” He squeezed his face into a quizzical frown. “Where were we, by the way?”

“We were in Germany.”

“A Jew threatening to torture an Arab in Germany,” Ibrahim replied. “How poetic.”

“You’re not going to give me another one of your lectures, are you, Ibrahim?”

“I’m inclined to, but I’m afraid there isn’t time.” He pointed to the dashboard clock. “The hour of death is upon us.”…

The atmosphere along Strøget was one of feverish festivity. To Gabriel it seemed like the last night before the start of a long-feared war, the night when fortunes are spent and love is made with headlong abandon. But there was no war coming, at least not for the shoppers along Copenhagen’s most famous street, only the holidays. Gabriel had been so absorbed in the search for Elizabeth Halton he had forgotten it was nearly Christmas.

They drifted through this joyous streetscape like detached spirits of the dead, hands thrust into coat pockets, elbows touching, silent. Ishaq had decreed that their journey would be a straight line and would include no stops. That meant that Gabriel was unable to conduct even the most basic countersurveillance maneuvers. It had been more than thirty years since he had walked a European street without checking his tail and to do so now made him feel as though he were trapped in one of those anxiety dreams where he was naked in a world of the fully clothed. He saw enemies everywhere, old and new. He saw men who might be Sword of Allah terrorists and men who might be Danish security-and, in the shelter of a storefront, he swore he saw Eli Lavon playing Christmas carols on a violin. It wasn’t Lavon, only his doppelgänger. Besides, Gabriel remembered suddenly, Lavon couldn’t play the violin. Lavon, for all his gifts, had an ear of stone.

They paused for the first time at the intersection of a cross street and waited for the light to change. A Bengali man pressed a flyer into Gabriel’s palm with such urgency that Gabriel nearly drew his Beretta from his coat pocket. The flyer was for a restaurant near the Tivoli gardens. Gabriel read it carefully to make sure it contained no hidden instructions, then crushed it into a ball and dropped it into a rubbish bin. The light turned to green. He hooked Ibrahim by the elbow and walked on.