The Secret Servant (12 page)

“Someone knows,” Gabriel said. “Someone has to know.”

“The Sphinx knows. Find the Sphinx and you’ll find the girl.” The Egyptian put his hand on the grip of the briefcase. “So have I earned my fifty thousand yet?”

“I want everything you have on the Sword of Allah,” Gabriel said. “Case files, membership rolls, known front organizations in Europe. Names, addresses, telephone numbers.”

“It’s in a suitcase in the trunk of my car,” the Egyptian said. “But it’s going to cost you.”

Gabriel sighed. “How much, Wazir?”

“Another fifty thousand.”

“I don’t happen to have another fifty thousand on me.”

The Egyptian smiled. “I’ll take an IOU,” he said. “I know you’re good for it.”

The Samsonite suitcase that Wazir al-Zayyat produced from the trunk of his rented Volkswagen contained the lifeblood of one of the world’s most violent terror organizations and was therefore a steal at fifty thousand. When the Egyptian was gone, Gabriel opened a directory of known Sword members and started reading. Five minutes later he came across a name that was familiar to him. He located a photocopy of the corresponding file and examined the photograph. It was dated and of poor quality; even so, Gabriel could tell it was the same man he had encountered a week earlier in Amsterdam.
I’m the person you’re looking for in Solomon Rosner’s files
, the man had said to him that night.
And I’ve come to help you
.

T
he knock was cautious and contrite. Dr. Yusuf Ramadan, professor of Near Eastern history at American University in Cairo, looked up from his work and saw a woman standing in the doorway of his office. Like all female employees of the Institute of Islamic Studies, she was veiled. Even so, the professor averted his eyes slightly as she spoke.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Professor, but if it’s all right with you, I’ll be leaving now.”

“Of course, Atifah.”

“Can I get you anything before I go? More tea, perhaps?”

“I’ve had too much already.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “In fact, I’m going to be leaving soon myself. I’m meeting a colleague from the Sorbonne for coffee at four-thirty.”

“Don’t forget your umbrella. It’s still raining.”

“It’s been raining for five days.”

“Welcome to Paris. Peace be upon you, Professor Ramadan.”

“And you, Atifah.”

The woman slipped out of the office and quietly closed the door. Ramadan spent another ten minutes tapping away at the keyboard of his laptop computer, then placed the computer and his research files into his briefcase and stood up. He was slender and bearded, with receding curly hair, soft brown eyes, and the fine aquiline features often associated with Egyptian aristocracy. He was not of aristocratic birth; indeed, the man now regarded as one of Egypt’s most influential intellectuals and writers was born the son of a postal clerk in a poor village at the edge of the Fayoum Oasis. Brilliant, charismatic, and a self-professed political moderate, he had taken a leave of absence from the university eighteen months earlier and signed on as a visiting scholar in residence with the institute. The ostensible purpose of his stay in Paris was to complete his masterwork, a critical reexamination of the Crusades that promised to be the standard against which all future books on the subject would be measured. When he was not writing, Professor Ramadan could often be seen in the lecture halls of the Sorbonne, or on French television, or even in the corridors of government power. Embraced wholeheartedly by the intelligentsia and media of Paris, his opinions were much in demand on matters ranging from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the American occupation of Iraq and, of course, the scourge of Islamic terror, a topic with which he was intimately familiar.

He walked over to his narrow window and looked down into the boulevard de la Chapelle. Dark and raw, a halfhearted drizzle: Paris in winter. It had been many days since the sun had made its last appearance, and even then it was only a furtive peak from behind the blanket of cloud. Ramadan longed to be back in Cairo: the thunder of the traffic, the smells both putrid and magical, the music of a thousand muezzins, the kiss of the desert wind at night…It had been six months since his last visit.
Soon
, he thought. Soon it would be over and he would go home again. And if things went according to plan, the country to which he would return would be very different from the one he had left behind. Strange to think that it had all been set in motion here, in dreary Paris, from his tiny office in the eighteenth arrondissement.

He pulled on his overcoat and hat, then snatched up his briefcase and umbrella and stepped into the corridor. As he passed by the staff lounge he saw several colleagues gathered around the television, watching a briefing by the commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police. Mahmoud Aburish, the tubby, owl-like director of the institute, motioned for Ramadan to join him. Ramadan walked over and looked up at the screen.

“What’s he saying?”

“No word yet from the kidnappers,” said Aburish. “And no clues about the woman’s whereabouts.”

“Do you believe him?”

“The British are very good, but judging from the expression on that man’s face, he’s not holding any cards up his sleeve.” Aburish regarded Ramadan through his smudged eyeglasses. “You’re the resident expert on matters like these, Yusuf. Who do you think has kidnapped this woman? And what on earth do they want?”

“I suppose we’ll know soon enough,” Ramadan said.

“How goes the writing?”

“It goes, Mahmoud, just not as quickly as I had hoped. In fact, I’m having drinks with my French publisher in a few minutes to tell him I won’t be able to deliver the manuscript on time. He’s not going to be pleased. Neither are my British and American publishers.”

“Is there anything the institute can do?”

“You’ve done more than you’ll ever know, Mahmoud.”

Aburish gazed toward the television as Dame Eleanor McKenzie, the director general of MI5, stepped before the television cameras. Yusuf Ramadan, the man known to the Egyptian security services only as the Sphinx, slipped silently from the lounge and headed downstairs.

Though Yusuf Ramadan had been far from forthright during his brief encounter with Mahmoud Aburish, he had been truthful about one thing. He was indeed having drinks with his French publisher that evening—at Fouquet’s on the Champs-Elysées, to be precise—but not until five o’clock. He had one appointment before then, however, on the Quai de Montebello directly across the Seine from Notre-Dame. The man waiting for him there was tall and heavily built, dressed in a dark cashmere overcoat with a silk scarf knotted rakishly at his throat. His real name was Nidal Mutawalli, though Ramadan referred to him only as Abu Musa. Like Ramadan, he was from the Fayoum Oasis. They had grown up together, attended school together, and then gone their separate ways—Ramadan into the world of books and writing, Abu Musa into the world of finance and money. The jihad and their shared hatred of the Egyptian regime and its American backers had reunited them. It was Abu Musa, Yusuf Ramadan’s childhood friend, who allowed him to keep his identity a secret from the Egyptian security services. They were, quite literally, two of the most dangerous men on earth.

A light drizzle was drifting through the lamplight along the Seine embankments and beading like teardrops on the plastic sheets covering the stalls of the
bouquinistes
. Ramadan wandered over to a trestle table stacked with books and thumbed a worn volume of Chekhov. Abu Musa joined him a moment later and picked up a copy of
L’Etranger
by Camus.

“Have you read him?” Abu Musa asked.

“Of course,” said Ramadan. “I’m sure you’ll find it to your liking.”

Ramadan moved on to the next table of books. Abu Musa joined him again a moment later, and again they exchanged a few harmless-sounding words. On it went like this for the next ten minutes as they moved slowly together down the row of booksellers, Ramadan leading, Abu Musa trailing after him.
I’ve always enjoyed the poetry of Dryden…. I saw this play the last time I was in London…. The DVD has been shot and is ready to be handed over…. We’re ready to make the phone call on your orders….

Ramadan picked up a copy of Hemingway and held it up for Abu Musa to see. “This has always been one of my favorites,” he said. “Allow me to give it to you as a gift.”

He handed the bookseller a five-euro note, then, after jotting a brief inscription on the title page of the volume, presented it formally to Abu Musa with his hand over his heart. They parted a moment later as Emmanuel, the thirteen-ton bell in Notre-Dame’s south tower, tolled five o’clock. Abu Musa disappeared into the streets of the Latin Quarter; Yusuf Ramadan crossed to the other side of the river and walked in the Tuileries gardens, thinking about the question Mahmoud Aburish had posed to him earlier that afternoon.
Who do you think has kidnapped this woman? And what on earth do they want?
Because of the meeting that had just transpired in plain sight along the banks of the Seine, the Americans soon would be told the answers to those questions. Whether they chose to inform the rest of the world was none of Professor Ramadan’s concern—at least not yet.

He walked for several minutes more in the gardens, checking his tail for signs of surveillance and thinking about his pending meeting with his French publisher on the Champs-Elysées. He supposed he had to come up with some suitable explanation as to why his book was now hopelessly behind schedule. He would think of something. The Sphinx was an extremely good liar.

T
here was one telephone in the makeshift operations center that was never used for outgoing calls. It was attached to a sophisticated digital recording device and linked to the call-tracing network of the Metropolitan Police. The receiver itself was red, and the ringer volume was set to foghorn level. Only one person was allowed to touch it: Supervisory Special Agent John O’Donnell, head of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group and the Bureau’s chief hostage negotiator.

The telephone had rung forty-seven times since the disappearance of Elizabeth Halton. Thus far none of the calls had been deemed credible by O’Donnell or his counterparts at the Met, though the demands of some of the callers had managed to provide a few brief interludes of comedy in what were otherwise very dark days. One caller said he would release Elizabeth Halton in exchange for the sum of one hundred thousand British pounds. O’Donnell agreed to the deal, and the man was arrested later that evening in the parking lot of a pub in West Sussex. One demanded a date with a famous American actress of questionable talent. One said he would free his American captive in exchange for tickets to that weekend’s Arsenal–Chelsea football match. One called because he was depressed and needed someone to talk to. O’Donnell chatted with him for five minutes to make sure Scotland Yard had a good trace and bade the man good evening as officers moved in for the arrest.

The call that arrived at the embassy’s main switchboard shortly after six that evening was different from the start. The voice was male and electronically disguised, the first caller to employ such a device. “I have information about Elizabeth Halton,” he calmly told the switchboard operator. “Transfer me to the appropriate individual. If more than five seconds elapse, I will hang up and she will die. Do you understand me?”

The operator made it clear that she did indeed understand and politely asked the caller to stand by. Two seconds later, O’Donnell’s phone sounded in the ops center. He snatched the red receiver from the cradle and brought it quickly to his ear. “This is John O’Donnell of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said crisply. “How can I help you?”

“The beach at Beacon Point,” the electronically altered voice said. “Look beneath the overturned rowboat. This will be our first and only contact.”

The line went dead.

O’Donnell hung up the phone and listened to the call again on his recorder, then picked up the receiver of a separate dedicated line that rang automatically at Scotland Yard.

“That sounded legit to me,” O’Donnell said.

“I concur,” said the Met officer at the other end of the line.

“Did you get a trace?”

“It was placed with a mobile phone. Something tells me we’re not going to catch this one. He sounded like a real pro.”

“Where’s Beacon Point?”

“The south coast, about ten miles east of Plymouth.”

“How far from central London?”

“About a hundred and fifty miles.”

“I want to be on site for the retrieval—whatever it is.”

“The Royal Navy has been kind enough to leave a Sea King at the London Heliport for just this kind of scenario.”

“Where’s the heliport?”

“South bank of the Thames between the Battersea and Wandsworth bridges.”

“Tell them to warm up the engines. Can you give me a lift through town?”

“I’ll have a pair of patrol cars outside the embassy in two minutes.”

“Send them to Upper Brook Street,” O’Donnell said. “There are no reporters back there.”

“Right.”

The flight to the south coast was ninety minutes in duration and thoroughly unpleasant because of high winds swirling ahead of a strong Atlantic storm front. As the Sea King swooped down toward Beacon Point, O’Donnell looked out his window and saw arc lamps blazing away on the little sand beach and blue police lights flashing along roads linking the surrounding villages of Kingston, Houghton, and Ringmore. The landing zone was a small patch of moorland behind the beach. O’Donnell was met there by the officer in charge, a stubby deputy chief constable from the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary aptly named Blunt. He briefed the FBI man as they walked down a sandy pathway to the beach.

“We’ve determined that the beach and surrounding grounds are free of bombs or any other weaponry,” he said. “About twenty minutes ago we used a remote-control robotic device to have a look under the overturned boat.”

“Anything there?” O’Donnell asked.

“Nothing that we could see with the camera, but it’s possible something could be buried beneath it. We decided to wait until you arrived before moving the boat.”

They clambered out of the dunes and stopped about twenty yards from the boat. An eight-foot dinghy with peeling gray and white paint, it was surrounded by a half-dozen policemen in blast-protection suits and visors. With a terse nod, Blunt spurred them into action, and the boat was soon resting on its hull. Taped to the seat in the stern was a DVD in a clear plastic case. Blunt retrieved it and immediately handed it to O’Donnell, who carried it back to the helicopter and inserted it into a laptop computer. As the image flickered to life on the screen, O’Donnell swore beneath his breath and looked at the British police official.

“I need a favor from you.”

“Anything,” said Blunt, his tone grave.

“Tell your men it was just a hoax. Apologize to them for the inconvenience, and thank them on behalf of the American people and Ambassador Halton for their fine work tonight.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, Mr. O’Donnell.”

O’Donnell glanced at the screen. “This DVD does not exist. Now do you understand?”

Blunt nodded. He understood perfectly.