The Secret Servant (11 page)

“I’m not sure I want the prime minister to attend my wedding.”

“You’re afraid of being overshadowed by a chubby octogenarian?”

“Yes.”

“The prime minister has three daughters of his own. He’ll make certain not to steal the limelight on your big day.”

“
Our
big day, Gabriel.” The water began to boil over. She stood up and walked back over to the stove. “Are you sure you have to go to Cyprus tomorrow?”

“I want to hear what the Egyptian has to say with my own ears.”

“But you’ve only just come home.”

“It’s just for a day or two. Why don’t you come with me? You can work on that suntan of yours.”

“It’s cold in Cyprus this time of year.”

“So you want me to go alone?”

“I’ll come,” she said. “You didn’t say anything about the way I decorated the apartment. Do you like it?”

“Oh, yes,” he said hastily. “It’s lovely.”

“I found a ring on the coffee table. Did you put a hot drink on it without a coaster?”

“It was Uzi,” Gabriel said.

Chiara poured the fettuccine into a colander and frowned. “He’s such a slob,” she said. “I don’t know how Bella can live with him.”

T
he items she had requested lay arranged on an adjacent cot: isopropyl alcohol, cotton swabs, rubber gloves, tweezers, needle-nose pliers, a straight razor, codeine and cephalin tablets, four-by-four sterile pads, medical tape, two eighteen-inch strips of wood, two rolls of bandaging, and two liters of bottled water. She held out her cuffed hands to the one she thought of as Cain. He shook his head.

“I can’t do this with my hands cuffed.”

He hesitated, then removed them.

“The drugs you gave me after you kidnapped me—you have more, I assume.”

Another hesitation, then a reluctant nod.

“I need them. Otherwise, your friend is going to suffer terribly.”

He walked over to the van and returned a moment later with a syringe wrapped in plastic and a vial of clear liquid. Elizabeth looked at the label:
KETAMINE
. No wonder she’d suffered such terrible hallucinations while the drug was in her system. Anesthesiologists almost never used ketamine without a secondary sedative such as Valium. These idiots had given her several injections of the drug with nothing to blunt its side effects.

She loaded an appropriate dosage, two hundred and fifty milligrams, and injected it into the wounded man’s upper arm. As he slipped slowly into unconsciousness, she broke the needle off the syringe and placed it in the plastic sack from the chemist shop where Cain had purchased the medical supplies. The name and address of the shop were written on the bag in blue lettering. Elizabeth recognized the village. It was located on the Norfolk coastline, northeast of London.

She lifted the blanket and adjusted the lamp, so that the light shone directly into the wound. The round was lodged within the fracture fragments. She opened the bottle of rubbing alcohol and poured a generous amount directly into the wound, then wiped away the puss and other infectious material with a cotton swab. When the wound was sufficiently clean, she sterilized the straight razor and used it to debride the ragged necrotic material along the edges. Then she sterilized the tweezers and spent the next twenty minutes carefully removing fragments of shattered bone and filaments of embedded fabric. Finally, she sterilized the needle-nose pliers and slipped them carefully into the wound. The round was out a moment later, deformed from its impact with the terrorist’s tibia but intact.

She gave the bullet to Cain as a souvenir and prepared for the final stage of the procedure: the dressing and the splint. First she flushed the wound thoroughly with the sterile water, then covered it with a four-by-four sterile pad. Last, she laid the two strips of wood along each side of his lower leg from the knee to the ankle and bound the splint tightly with the rolls of bandaging. When she was finished, she propped the leg on a pillow and looked at Cain.

“When he wakes up, give him two of the cephalin tablets. Then give him one tablet every four hours. Keep the leg elevated. I’d like to see him every two hours, if that’s possible. If not, I’ve given you seventy-two hours at the most. After that he’s going to need to go into a hospital.”

She held out her hands. Cain applied the cuffs and led her downstairs to her cell. As she lay down on her cot, she felt an almost drunken sense of elation. The crude surgery, the brisk commands: she had been in control, if only for a few moments. And she had managed to uncover a single piece of valuable information. She was still in England, still within reach of the British police and intelligence services.

She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but an hour later she was jolted by a knock at the door.
We have a present for you
, the note said.
Lay down on your cot
. She did as she was told and watched as Cain and Abel entered her cell. They put packing tape across her mouth and a hood over her head. She fought them. She fought them even after they gave her the needle.

M
uch can be gleaned about the value of a source by the accommodations that are made to handle him. For the debriefings of Wazir al-Zayyat, the Office had purchased a lovely whitewashed villa on the southern coast of Cyprus with a small swimming pool and a shaded terrace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Gabriel and Chiara arrived several hours before the Egyptian was due. Gabriel had hoped to spend the time relaxing, but Chiara, alone with him for the first time in weeks, wanted to use the opportunity to discuss wedding plans. Place settings and flowers, guest lists and music—this is how Israel’s legendary secret agent passed the time before the arrival of the Egyptian spy. He wondered what
Haaretz
and the rest of the Israeli newspapers would write about him if they knew the truth.

Shortly after two in the afternoon, Gabriel glimpsed a Volkswagen sedan speeding along the coast road. It passed by the villa and disappeared around a bend, then, five minutes later, approached from the opposite direction. This time it slowed and turned into the drive. Gabriel looked at Chiara. “You’d better wait upstairs in the bedroom,” he said. “From what I’ve read about Wazir, your presence will only be a distraction.”

Chiara gathered up her papers and bridal magazines and vanished. Gabriel went into the kitchen and opened one of the cabinets. Inside was the control panel for the built-in recording system. He put in a fresh set of tapes and pressed the
RECORD
button, then went into the entrance hall and opened the front door as al-Zayyat was coming up the steps. The Egyptian froze and regarded Gabriel suspiciously for a moment through the lenses of his mirrored sunglasses. Then a trace of a smile appeared beneath his dense mustache and he extended a clublike hand in Gabriel’s direction.

“To what do I owe the honor, Mr. Allon?”

“Something came up in Rome,” Gabriel said. “Shimon asked me to fill in.”

The Egyptian pushed his sunglasses onto his forehead and studied Gabriel again, this time with obvious skepticism. His eyes were dark and bottomless. They were not a pair of eyes Gabriel would ever want to see on the other side of an interrogation table.

“Or maybe you volunteered to come here to see me,” the Egyptian said.

“Now, why would I do that, Wazir?”

“Because if what I read in the newspapers is true, you now have something of a personal stake in the outcome of this case.”

“You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the newspapers.”

“At least not the Egyptian papers.”

Al-Zayyat followed Gabriel into the villa, then walked over to the drinks cabinet with a proprietary air and loosened the cap on a new bottle of single-malt Scotch. “You’ll join me?” he asked, waving the bottle at Gabriel.

“I’m driving,” Gabriel replied.

“What is it with you Jews and alcohol?”

“It makes us do silly things with lampshades.”

“What kind of agent-runner doesn’t have a drink with a source?” Al-Zayyat poured himself a very large glass and put the cap back on the bottle without tightening it. “But then you’re not an agent-runner, are you, Allon?” He drank half the whisky in a single swallow. “How’s the old man? Back on his feet?”

“Shamron is fine,” Gabriel said. “He sends his regards.”

“I hope he sent more than regards.”

Gabriel looked at the leather briefcase laying in a rectangle of sunlight on the sailcloth couch. Al-Zayyat sat next to it and popped the latches. Satisfied by the contents, he closed the briefcase and looked at Gabriel.

“I know who kidnapped the ambassador’s daughter,” he said. “And I know why they did it. Where would you like me to start?”

“The beginning,” said Gabriel. “It tends to put things in proper perspective.”

“You’re just like Shamron.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that.”

The Egyptian’s gaze wandered over the bag again. “There’s fifty thousand, right?”

“You can count it if you like.”

“That won’t be necessary. Do you want me to sign a receipt?”

“You sign the receipt when you get your money,” Gabriel said. “And you get your money after I hear the information.”

“Shimon always gave me the money first.”

“I’m not Shimon.”

The Egyptian swallowed the rest of his whisky. Gabriel refilled his glass and told him to start talking.

The beginning, the Egyptian said, was the day in September 1970 when Nasser died and his vice president, Anwar Sadat, came to power in Egypt. Nasser had regarded Egypt’s Islamic radicals, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, as a grave threat to his regime and had used mass arrests, executions, and torture to keep them in their place. Sadat had tried a different approach.

“Sadat had none of Nasser’s charisma and no popular base of support,” al-Zayyat said. “He was also a rather religious man. He was more afraid of the Communists and the Nasserites than the Brothers, and so he made what would turn out to be a fatal reversal of Egypt’s approach to Islamic extremism. He branded the Communists and the Nasserites as enemies of his new regime and let the Brothers out of jail.”

And then he compounded the mistake, al-Zayyat explained. He allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to operate openly and encouraged them to spread their fiery brand of Islam abroad, especially into the newly occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. He also encouraged and funded the creation of groups that were even more radical than the Brotherhood. One was al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Group. Another was al-Jihad. In October 1981, al-Jihad turned on the man who had helped bring it into existence, assassinating Sadat as he stood on a military reviewing stand outside Cairo. In the eyes of the Islamists, Sadat’s sins were many, but none so egregious as his peace treaty with Israel. Before opening fire, Sadat’s assassin, Lieutenant Khaled Islambouli, screamed: “I have killed Pharaoh, and I do not fear death.”

“The Gama’a and al-Jihad, of course, are with us still,” al-Zayyat said. “Their goal is to destroy the Mubarak regime, replace it with an Islamic republic, and then use Egypt as a base of operations to wage a global jihad against the West and Israel. Both groups are signatories of al-Qaeda’s declaration of war against the Crusaders and the Jews, and both are formally under the umbrella of Osama bin Laden’s command structure. Egyptians make up more than half of al-Qaeda’s core personnel, and they hold five of the nine positions in the ruling Shura Council. And, of course, Osama’s right-hand man is Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Jihad.”

“So Egypt is no different than the Saudis,” Gabriel said. “You thought you could reach accommodation with the Islamic terrorists by giving them money and encouragement and deflecting their rage outward. And now they’re threatening to destroy you.”

“You did the same thing, my friend. Don’t forget that the Office and Shabak gave money and support to Hamas in the early days because you thought the Islamists were a good counterweight to the secular leftists of the PLO.”

“Point taken,” Gabriel said. “But please don’t tell me I’m supposed to pay you fifty thousand dollars to tell me that al-Qaeda is responsible for kidnapping the daughter of the American ambassador to London. I could have saved my money and just turned on CNN instead. They have lots of experts saying the same thing.”

“It’s not just al-Qaeda,” al-Zayyat said. “It’s a joint operation, a merging of assets, if you will.”

“Who’s the other partner?”

The Egyptian walked over to the drinks cabinet and refilled his glass. “There were other groups besides the Gama’a and al-Jihad that formed in the seventies. More than fifty in all. Some were just cells of university students that couldn’t organize a bucket brigade. Others were good.
Very
good.” He took a drink of the whisky. “Unfortunately, a group that sprang up at the University of Minya was one of the good ones. They called themselves the Sword of Allah.”

The Sword of Allah…
Gabriel knew the name, of course. Anyone who worked in the field of Islamic terrorism did. In the late 1970s, after Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem, a group of university students, professors, and civil servants from the Upper Egyptian town of Minya had coalesced around a fiery Islamist cleric named Sheikh Tayyib Abdul-Razzaq. Sheikh Tayyib adopted a simple program for seizing power in Egypt: inflict as much terror and bloodshed on Egyptian society as possible and the regime would collapse under its own weight. In the early 1990s, he nearly succeeded. Flushed with the prospects of success, the sheikh decided to take his campaign global, long before there was such a thing known as al-Qaeda. He sent emissaries to Europe to open branch offices of the Sword among the burgeoning Muslim communities there and dispatched his older brother and closest advisor, Sheikh Abdullah Abdul-Razzaq, to suburban Washington to wage jihad against the most important patron of the Egyptian regime: the government of the United States. In 1998, Sheikh Abdullah was found guilty on charges of conspiring to bomb the State Department, the Capitol, and the headquarters of the FBI and was sentenced to life in prison. He had recently been diagnosed with cancer. Freeing the sheikh before his death was now one of the Sword’s top priorities.

“Al-Qaeda has been itching to hit London again for a long time,” al-Zayyat said. “And, of course, Sheikh Tayyib wants to get his brother back from the Americans. They decided to merge the two priorities into a single terror spectacular. Al-Qaeda handled the bombings, while the Sword and its European networks saw to the hostage-taking side of the operation.”

“What evidence do you have of Sword involvement?”

“You had the proof in your own hands for a few seconds in Hyde Park,” the Egyptian said. “Samir al-Masri, former student of engineering at the University of Minya, is a member of the Sword of Allah and one of its more talented terrorist operatives.”

“It would have been helpful, Wazir, if you’d told the Dutch he was living quietly in west Amsterdam.”

“We didn’t know he was in Holland or we would have.” The Egyptian sat down on the couch next to his bag of money. “Samir left Egypt a few months after the Americans went into Iraq. When the insurgency started up, he joined forces with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and perfected his craft. Apparently he slipped out of Iraq shortly before Zarqawi’s death and made his way to Europe via Damascus. If you want to blame anyone for the fact that Samir was living quietly in west Amsterdam, blame the Syrians. And the Dutch, of course. Christ, they’ll let anyone into their country.”

“What else do you have besides Samir’s connection?”

“The al-Hijrah Mosque.”

“What about it?”

“The imam there is a graduate of al-Azhar in Cairo and a member of the Sword of Allah.”

“That’s still not enough.”

“This discussion is academic,” al-Zayyat said. “In twenty-four hours you’ll have proof the Sword of Allah is behind this. That’s when they’ll offer to trade Elizabeth Halton for Sheikh Abdullah.”

“How can you be so sure about the timing?”

“The Sword has carried out a number of kidnappings inside Egypt. Most of the time the outside world doesn’t even hear about them. Their method of operation is always the same. They wait one week before making demands. And if they set a deadline for killing the girl, they’ll do it when the second hand reaches twelve. And there won’t be any extensions or delays.”

“The Americans will never release Sheikh Abdullah.”

“If they don’t, the Sword of Allah and al-Qaeda are going to send the American president’s goddaughter home in a bag—or what’s left of her, I should say. They’ll kill her the same way they took her. With a great deal of bloodshed.”

“Have you told the Americans about any of this?”

Al-Zayyat shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Orders from on high,” said al-Zayyat. “Our fearless leader is afraid his patrons in Washington will be angry when they find out the plot to kidnap the ambassador’s daughter originated in Egypt. He’s trying to delay the day of reckoning as long as possible. In the meantime, he’s directed the SSI and the other security services to gather as much intelligence as possible.”

“Who’s the mastermind?”

“If I had to guess, it goes all the way to the top.”

“Zawahiri?”

The Egyptian nodded.

“But surely there’s someone between him and the operatives,” Gabriel said. “Someone like Khaled Sheikh Mohammad. Someone who made the trains run on time.”

“There is.” Al-Zayyat held his tumbler of whisky up to the sunlight and contemplated its color for a moment without speaking. “And if I had to venture a guess as to his identity, I’d say it’s almost certainly the work of the Sphinx.”

“Who’s the Sphinx?”

“We’re not sure who he is, but we know his handiwork all too well. All told, he’s killed more than a thousand people inside Egypt—tourists, government ministers, wealthy friends of the regime. We assume he’s highly educated and very well connected. We believe he has agents of influence and spies at the highest level of Egyptian society and government, including inside my service. He operates through cutouts like Samir. We’ve never been able to get close to him.”

“Could he have planned something like this from Egypt?”

“Highly unlikely,” al-Zayyat said. “He’s probably in Europe. In fact, I’d be willing to wager a fair amount of money that he is. The Sword has been very quiet in Egypt for the last year. Now we know why.”

“Where’s Sheikh Tayyib?”

“The same place he’s been for the last fifteen years: underground. He moves between a string of hideouts in Upper Egypt and the oasis towns of the Western Desert. We also think he moves in and out of Libya and the Sudan.”

“Find him,” Gabriel said.

“Elizabeth Halton will be dead long before we ever find the sheikh.”

“Start rounding up Sword operatives and bringing them in for quiet chats. That’s your specialty, isn’t it, Wazir? Quiet chats with Islamic extremists?”

“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” al-Zayyat replied. “Trust me, Allon, we’re kicking down doors as we speak, but the Sphinx knew we would. No one in Egypt knows where the girl is. I doubt even Sheikh Tayyib knows the operational details. Your best chance at finding her alive died with Samir al-Masri. The Sword is good at hiding people.”