The Secret Servant (5 page)

“I’ll go,” said Gabriel. “There’s someone I need to have a word with.”

A gentle snow was falling when Gabriel stepped outside five minutes later. He stood for a moment atop Rosner’s iron steps, buttoning his overcoat against the cold, while scanning the street for signs of surveillance. It was deserted except for a single bundled soul, perched on a public bench on the opposite bank of the canal. He wore a threadbare woolen overcoat and a black-and-white checkered kaffiyeh for a scarf. His gray beard was unkempt and atop his head was the white
kufi
skullcap of a devout Muslim. Gabriel descended the steps and walked to the drawbridge at the end of the street. As he turned into the Staalstraat, he could hear footfalls on the cobblestones behind him. He swiveled his head deliberately and took a long, highly unprofessional look over his shoulder. The Muslim man who had been seated on the bench was now thirty yards behind and walking in the same direction. Two minutes later, as Gabriel passed Rosner’s memorial outside Café de Doelen, he looked over his shoulder a second time and saw that the man with the
kufi
and the kaffiyeh had cut the distance between them in half. He thought of the words Lavon had spoken to him earlier that afternoon at the Hotel Europa.
Just try not to kill anyone while we’re in Amsterdam
, Lavon had said. Gabriel had no intention of killing the man. He just wanted answers to two simple questions. Why had a devout Muslim spent the better part of the evening sitting outside Solomon Rosner’s house? And why was he now following Gabriel through the dark streets of Amsterdam?

The restaurant where Sophie Vanderhaus had placed the takeaway order was in the Leidsestraat, not far from the Koningsplein. Gabriel, after crossing the Amstel, should have gone to the right. He went left instead, into a narrow pedestrian lane lined with sex shops, American fast-food restaurants, and tiny Middle Eastern cafés. It was crowded in spite of the hour; even so, Gabriel had no trouble keeping track of his pursuer in the garish neon light.

The street emptied into the Rembrandtplein, but twenty yards before the busy square Gabriel turned into a darkened shoulder-width alley that led back to the river. The man with the kaffiyeh and the
kufi
paused at the mouth of the alley, as though reluctant to enter, then followed after him.

Gabriel removed the Beretta from its resting place at the small of his back and chambered a round. As he did so, he could almost hear Shamron’s voice echoing in his head:
We do not wave our guns around in public like gangsters and make idle threats. When we take out our weapons we do so for one reason and one reason only. We start shooting. And we keep shooting until the target is dead
. He slipped the gun into the pocket of his overcoat and walked on.

At the midpoint of the alley, the darkness was nearly impenetrable. Gabriel turned into a bisecting passageway and waited there with his hand wrapped around the butt of the Beretta. As the bearded man came past, Gabriel stepped from the alley and delivered a knifelike blow to his left kidney. The man’s legs buckled instantly, but before he could crumple to the ground, Gabriel seized hold of the kaffiyeh and hurled him hard against a graffiti-spattered brick wall. The look in the man’s eyes was one of genuine terror. Gabriel struck him again, this time in the solar plexus. As the man doubled over, Gabriel quickly searched him for weapons but found only a billfold and a small copy of the Quran.

“What do you want with me?” Gabriel asked in rapid Arabic.

The man managed only a single, wet cough.

“Answer me,” Gabriel said, “or I’ll keep hitting you until you do.”

The man lifted his hand and pleaded with Gabriel not to strike him again. Gabriel let go of him and took a step back. The man leaned against the wall and fought for breath.

“Who are you?” Gabriel asked. “And why are you following me?”

“I’m the person you’re looking for in Solomon Rosner’s files,” he said. “And I’ve come to help you.”

M
y name is Ibrahim.”

“Ibrahim what?”

“Ibrahim Fawaz.”

“You were a fool to follow me like that, Ibrahim Fawaz.”

“Obviously.”

They were walking along the darkened embankment of the Amstel River. Ibrahim had one hand pressed to his kidney and the other wrapped around Gabriel’s arm for support. A gritty snow had begun to fall and the air was suddenly brittle with the cold. Gabriel pointed to an open café and suggested they talk there. “Men like me don’t have coffee in places like that, especially in the company of men like you. This is not America. This is Amsterdam.” He swiveled his head a few degrees and glanced at Gabriel out of the corner of his eye. “You speak Arabic like a Palestinian. I suppose the rumors about Professor Rosner were true.”

“What rumors?”

“That he was a pawn of the Zionists and their Jewish supporters in America. That he was an Israeli spy.”

“Who said things like that?”

“The angry boys,” said Ibrahim. “And the imams, too. They’re worse than the young hotheads. They come from the Middle East. From Saudi Arabia. They preach Wahhabi Islam. The imam in our mosque told us that Professor Rosner deserved to die for what he had written about Muslims and the Prophet. I warned him to go into hiding, but he refused. He was very stubborn.”

Ibrahim stopped and leaned against the balustrade overlooking the sluggish black river. Gabriel looked at the Arab’s right hand and saw it was missing the last two fingers.

“Are you going to be sick?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Can you walk, Ibrahim? It’s better if we walk.”

The Arab nodded and they set off slowly along the riverbank. “I suppose you were the professor’s handler? That’s why you and your friend are digging frantically through his files.”

“What I’m doing inside his house is no business of yours.”

“Just do me a favor,” the Arab said. “If you come across my name, please do me the courtesy of dropping the document in question into the nearest shredder. I respected Professor Rosner very much, but I don’t want to end up like him. There are men in Amsterdam who will slit my throat if they knew I was helping him.”

“How long did you work for him?”

“A long time,” said Ibrahim. “But it wasn’t
work
. We were partners, Professor Rosner and I. We shared the same beliefs. We both believed the jihadists were destroying my religion. We both knew that if they weren’t stopped, they would destroy Holland, too.”

“Why work for Rosner? Why not the police?”

“Perhaps you can tell from my accent that I am Egyptian by birth. When one comes from Egypt, one has a natural fear of the police, secret or otherwise. I’ve lived in Holland for twenty-five years now. I am a citizen of this country, as are my wife and son. But to the Dutch police, and the rest of my countrymen, I will always be an
allochtoon
. An alien.”

“But you must have guessed Rosner was passing along some of your information to the police and the Dutch security service.”

“And to the Israeli secret service as well—or so it appears.” He looked at Gabriel and managed a sage smile. “I must confess that Israelis are not terribly popular in my home. My wife is a Palestinian. She fled to Egypt with her family in 1948 after
al-Nakba
and settled in Cairo. I’ve heard about the suffering of the Palestinian people every night at my dinner table for thirty-five years now. My son drank it with his mother’s milk. He is Egyptian and Palestinian, a volatile mix.”

“Is this the reason you followed me tonight, Ibrahim—to engage in a debate about the Palestinian Diaspora and the crimes of Israel’s founders?”

“Perhaps another time,” the Egyptian said. “Forgive me, my friend. Now that you are no longer striking me, I was just trying to make polite conversation. I was a professor in Egypt before I immigrated to Holland. My wife and son accuse me of being a professor still. They’ve spent their lives listening to me lecture. I’m afraid they no longer tolerate me. When I get a chance to teach, I take it.”

“You were a teacher in Holland, too?”

“In Holland?” He shook his head. “No, in Holland I was a tool. We decided to leave Egypt in 1982 because we thought our son would have more opportunities here in the West. I was an educated man, but my education was an Egyptian education and so it was worthless here. I built roads until I ruined my back, then I got a job sweeping the streets of Rotterdam. Eventually, when I could no longer even push a broom, I went to work in a furniture factory in west Amsterdam. The plant supervisor made us work fourteen hours a day. Late one night, when I was falling asleep on my feet, I made a mistake with the circular saw.” He lifted his ruined hand for Gabriel to see. “During my recuperation I decided to put my time to good use by learning to speak proper Dutch. When the factory manager heard what I was doing, he told me not to waste my time, because one day soon all the
allochtoonen
would be going home. He was wrong, of course.”

A gust of wind blew pellets of snow into their faces. Gabriel turned up his coat collar. Ibrahim slipped his hand back into the pocket of his overcoat.

“Our children heard all the insults that were hurled at us by our Dutch hosts, too. They spoke better Dutch than we did. They were more attuned to the subtleties of Dutch culture. They saw the way the Dutch treated us and they were humiliated. They became angry and resentful, not only at the Dutch but at us, their parents. Our children are trapped between two worlds, not fully Arab, not quite Dutch. They inhabit the
ghurba
, the land of strangers, and so they seek shelter in a safe place.”

“Islam,” said Gabriel.

Ibrahim nodded his head and repeated, “Islam.”

“You still make furniture for a living, Ibrahim?”

He shook his head. “I retired several years ago. The Dutch state pays me a generous pension and even a bit of disability because of my two missing fingers. I manage to do a little work on the side. It’s good for my self-respect. It keeps me from growing old.”

“Where do you work now?”

“Three years ago the state gave us funding to open an Islamic community center in the Oud West section of the city. I took a part-time job there as counselor. I help new arrivals find their footing. I help our people learn to speak proper Dutch. And I keep an eye on our angry young men. That’s where I first heard the rumor about a plot to shoot down a Jewish airplane.” He glanced at Gabriel to see his reaction. “When I looked into the matter further, I found out it was more than just a rumor, and so I told Professor Rosner. You have me to thank for the fact that two hundred and fifty Jews weren’t blown to pieces over Schiphol Airport.”

A pair of middle-aged homosexual men came toward them along the embankment. Ibrahim slowed his pace and lowered his gaze reflexively toward the paving stones.

“I have another job as well,” he said when the men were gone. “I work for a friend in the Ten Kate Market selling pots and pans. He pays me a share of what I take in and lets me leave the stall to pray. There’s a small mosque around the corner on the Jan Hazenstraat. It’s called the al-Hijrah Mosque. It has a well-deserved reputation for the extremism of its imam. There are many young men at the al-Hijrah. Young men whose minds are filled with images of jihad and terror. Young men who speak of martyrdom and blood. Young men who look to Osama bin Laden as a true Muslim. These young men believe in
takfir
. You know this term?
Takfir?
”

Gabriel nodded.
Takfir
was a concept developed by Islamists in Egypt in the nineteen seventies, a theological sleight of hand designed to give the terrorists a sacred license to kill almost anyone they pleased in order to achieve their goals of imposing
sharia
and restoring the Caliphate. Its primary target was other Muslims. A secular Muslim leader who did not rule by
sharia
could be killed under
takfir
for having turned away from Islam. So could a citizen of a secular Islamic state or a Muslim residing in a Western democracy. To the
takfiri
, democracy was a heresy, for it supplanted the laws of God with the laws of man; therefore, Muslim citizens of a democracy were apostates and could be put to the sword. It was the concept of
takfir
that gave Osama bin Laden the right to fly airplanes into buildings or blow up embassies in Africa, even if many of his victims were Muslims. It gave the Sunni terrorists of Iraq the right to kill anyone they wanted in order to prevent democracy from taking root in Baghdad. And it gave Muslim boys born in Britain the right to blow themselves up on London subways and buses, even if some of the people they were taking to Paradise with them happened to be other Muslims who wished to remain on earth a little longer.

“There is a leader of these young men,” Ibrahim resumed. “He has not been in Amsterdam long—eighteen months, maybe a bit more. He is an Egyptian. He works in an Internet shop and phone center in the Oud West, but he likes to think of himself as an Islamist theoretician and a journalist. He claims to be a writer for Islamist magazines and websites.”

“His name?”

“Samir al-Masri—at least that’s what he calls himself. He claims to have connections to the mujahideen in Iraq. He tells our boys it is their sacred duty to go there and kill the infidels who have defiled Muslim lands. He lectures them about
takfir
and jihad. At night they gather in his apartment and read Sayyid Qutb and Ibn Taymiyyah. They download videos from the Internet and watch infidels being beheaded. They have taken trips together. A few of them went to Egypt with him. There is talk about Samir in the al-Hijrah. There usually is talk in the mosque, but this is different. Samir al-Masri is a dangerous man. If he is not al-Qaeda, then he is a close relative.”

“Where does he live?”

“On the Hudsonstraat. Number thirty-seven. Apartment D.”

“Alone?”

Ibrahim tugged thoughtfully at his beard and nodded his head.

“You told Solomon about Samir?”

“Yes, many months ago.”

“So why follow me tonight?”

“Because two days ago Samir and four other young men from the al-Hijrah Mosque disappeared.”

Gabriel stopped walking and looked at the Egyptian. “Where did they go?”

“I’ve been asking around, but no one seems to know.”

“Do you have the names of the other four men?”

The Egyptian handed Gabriel a slip of paper. “Find them,” he said. “Otherwise, I’m afraid buildings are going to fall.”