Daniel Silva: The Secret Servant

“What’s this? An invitation to a White House barbecue?”

“It’s a note,” said Carter, then he added somewhat pedantically: “From the president of the United States.”

“Yes, I can see that, Adrian. What’s the topic of the letter?”

“I’m not in the habit of reading other people’s mail.”

“You should be.”

“I assume the president wrote to you in order to thank you for what you did in London.”

“It might have been helpful if he had said something publicly a month ago, while I was twisting in the wind.”

“Trust me, Gabriel. If he had spoken out on your behalf, you would have been in more trouble than you are now. These things have a way of blowing themselves out, and sometimes the best course of action is to take no action at all.”

A cloud passed in front of the sun, and for a moment it seemed several degrees colder. Gabriel opened the note, read it quickly, and slipped it into his coat pocket.

“What does it say?”

“It is private, Adrian, and it will remain so.”

“Good man,” said Carter.

“Did you get one, too?”

“A note from the president?” Carter shook his head. “I’m afraid that my position is somewhat tenuous at the moment. Isn’t it amazing? We got Elizabeth back and now we are under siege.”

“This, too, shall pass, Adrian.”

“I know,” he said. “But it doesn’t make it any more pleasant to go through. There are a band of Young Turks at Langley who think I’ve been running the DO for too long. They say I’ve lost a step. They say I should have never agreed to turn over so much of the operation to you.”

“Do you have any intention of ceding power?”

“None,” said Carter forcefully. “The world is too dangerous a place to be left to Young Turks. I intend to stay until this war against terrorism is won.”

“I hope longevity runs in your family.”

“My grandfather lived to be a hundred and four.”

“What about Sarah? Has she been hurt by this in any way?”

“None whatsoever,” Carter replied. “Only a handful of people even knew she was a part of it.”

The sun emerged from behind the clouds again. Gabriel slipped on his wraparound glasses while Carter pulled a second envelope from the pocket of his blazer. “This is from Robert Halton,” he said. “I’m afraid I know what’s inside that one.”

Gabriel withdrew the contents: a brief handwritten note and a check made out in Gabriel’s name for the sum of ten million dollars. Gabriel kept the letter and handed the check back to Carter.

“Are you sure you don’t want to think about that for a minute?” Carter asked.

“I don’t want his money, Adrian.”

“You’re entitled to it. You risked your life to save his daughter’s-not once but twice .”

“It’s what we do,” Gabriel said. “Tell him thanks but no thanks.”

Carter left the check on the table.

“You have anything else in your pocket for me, Adrian?”

Carter turned his gaze toward the Old City walls. “I have a name,” he said.

“The Sphinx?”

Carter nodded. The Sphinx.

His voice, already underpowered, fell to an almost inaudible level. It seemed that Carter, before coming to Israel for Gabriel’s wedding, had made a brief stopover in the South of France, not for the purposes of recreation-Carter hadn’t taken a proper holiday since 9/11-but for an operation. The target of this operation was none other than Prince Rashid bin Sultan, who had come to the French Riviera himself for a spot of gambling in the casinos of Monaco. The prince had played poorly and lost mightily, a fact the puritanical Carter seemed to find most offensive, and upon returning to the airport at Nice early the next morning in a highly inebriated state had found Carter and a team of CIA paramilitary officers relaxing in the luxurious confines of his private 747. Carter had presented the prince, now irate, with a CIA dossier detailing his many sins-sins that included financial support for al-Qaeda, the foreign fighters and Sunni insurgents in Iraq, and a militant Egyptian group called the Sword of Allah, which had just carried out the abduction of the goddaughter of the president of the United States. Carter had then given the prince a choice of destinations: Riyadh or Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“That sounds like something we would do,” Gabriel said.

“Yes, it did have a very Office-like quality to it.”

“I take it the prince chose Riyadh as his destination.”

“It was the only wise bet he made all night.”

“How much did the ride home cost him?”

“A name,” Carter said. “The question now is, what do we do with this name? Option one, we work with our Egyptian brethren and bring this fellow to trial in United States. Justice will be served if we follow this course but at a considerable price. A trial will expose the underside of our relationship with the Egyptian security services. It will also leave us saddled with another Sword of Allah prisoner whom they will almost certainly attempt to get back, thus placing American lives at risk.”

“And we can’t have that.”

“No, we can’t,” agreed Carter. “Which brings us to option number two: dealing with the matter quietly.”

“Our preferred method.”

“Indeed.”

Gabriel held out his hand. Carter delved into his pocket again and came out with a slip of paper. Gabriel read what was written there and smiled.

“Can you make him go away?” asked Carter.

“It shouldn’t be a problem,” Gabriel said. “But I’m afraid we’ll have to spread a little money around Cairo to make it happen.”

Carter held up Robert Halton’s check. “Will this be enough to get the job done?”

“More than enough. But what should I do with the change?”

“Keep it.”

“Can I kill the prince, too?”

“Maybe next time,” said Carter. “More coffee?”

He left Jerusalem for Cyprus three days later. Chiara pleaded with him to take her along but he refused. He had lost one wife to his enemies and had no intention of losing another.

He entered the country on an Israeli passport bearing the name Gideon Argov and told the Cypriot customs officers that the purpose of his visit was vacation. After collecting his rental car, a C-Class Mercedes that he subjected to a thorough inspection, he set out along the south coast toward the whitewashed villa by the sea. Wazir al-Zayyat had been vague about when he might appear, so Gabriel stopped briefly in a small village market and bought enough food to last him three days.

The March weather was unseasonably mild and he spent the first day relaxing on the terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, guilt-ridden for having abandoned Chiara to Jerusalem. By the second day he was restless with boredom, so he searched the Internet for a decent art-supply shop and found one a few miles up the coast. He spent the remainder of the afternoon producing sketches of the villa, and, late in the afternoon of the third day, he was working on a decent watercolor seascape when he spotted al-Zayyat’s car coming up the road from Larnaca.

Their encounter was conducted at a leisurely pace and in the cool sunshine on the terrace. Al-Zayyat worked his way slowly through the bottle of single malt while Gabriel sipped mineral water with wedges of lemon and lime. For a long time they talked in generalities about the situation inside Egypt, but as the sun was sinking slowly into the sea Gabriel brought the topic of conversation around to the real reason why he had asked al-Zayyat to come to Cyprus: the name he had been given in Jerusalem earlier that week by Adrian Carter. Upon hearing it, al-Zayyat smiled and nipped at his whisky.