Daniel Silva 2-Book Thriller Collection: Portrait of a Spy, The Fallen Angel. Daniel Silva
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casing, search histories for secret desires and forbidden passions.
Gradually, the faint outline of a terror network began to take shape. It was scattered and diffuse—here the name of a potential operative in Lyon; here the address of a possible safe flat in Malmö; here a phone number in Karachi; here a Web site of uncertain origin that offered downloadable videos of bombings and beheadings, the pornography of the jihadist world. Friendly Western intelligence services, believing they were dealing with the CIA, happily supplied material they would have normally withheld. So, too, did the secret policemen of the Islamic world. Before long, the walls of the drawing room were covered with a mind-numbing matrix of intelligence. Eli Lavon likened it to gazing upon the heavens without the aid of a star chart. It was pleasant, he said, but hardly productive when lives were at stake. Somewhere out there was an organizing principle, a guiding hand of terror. Rashid, the charismatic cleric, had built the network with his beautiful and seductive tongue, but someone else had primed it to carry out three attacks in three European cities, each at a precise moment in time. He was no amateur, this man. He was a professional terror mastermind.
Putting a name and face to this monster became Dina’s obsession. Sarah, Chiara, and Eli Lavon worked tirelessly at her side while Gabriel was content to play the role of errand-runner and messenger. Twice each day, Dina supplied him with a list of questions requiring urgent answers. Sometimes, Gabriel would make his way up to the Israeli Embassy in far northwest Washington and transmit them to Shamron over the secure link. Other times, he would give them to Adrian Carter, who would then make a pilgrimage to Fort Meade to have a quiet word with the data miners. On Thanksgiving night, as an air of sudden desertion hung over Georgetown, Carter summoned Gabriel to a coffee shop on Thirty-fifth Street to deliver a thick packet of material.
“Where’s Dina going with this?” Carter asked, prying the lid from a caffè Americano he had no intention of drinking.
“Even I’m not sure,” Gabriel replied. “She has her own methodology. I just try to stay out of the way.”
“She’s beating us, you know. The intelligence services of the United States have two hundred analysts trying to crack this case, and they’re being beaten by a single woman.”
“That’s because she knows exactly what will happen if we don’t shut them down. And she doesn’t seem to need sleep.”
“Does she have a theory about who it might be?”
“She feels like she knows him.”
“Personally?”
“It’s always personal with Dina, Adrian. That’s why she’s so good at what she does.”
Though Gabriel would not admit it, the case had become personal for him as well. Indeed, when he was not at the embassy or meeting with Carter, he could usually be found in “Rashidistan,” which is how the team referred to the cramped library of the house on N Street. Photographs of the telegenic cleric covered the four walls. Arranged chronologically, they charted his unlikely rise from an obscure local preacher in San Diego to the leader of a jihadist terror network. His appearance had changed little during that time—the same thin beard, the same bookish eyeglasses, the same benevolent expression in his tranquil brown eyes. He did not look like a man capable of mass murder, or even like someone who could inspire it. Gabriel was not surprised; he had been tortured by men with the hands of priests and had once killed a Palestinian master terrorist who had the face of a child. Even now, more than twenty years later, Gabriel struggled to reconcile the sweetness of the man’s lifeless features with the appalling amount of blood on his hands.
Rashid’s greatest asset was not his banal appearance but his voice. Gabriel listened to Rashid’s sermons—both in Arabic and in his colloquial American English—and to the many thoughtful interviews he gave to the press after 9/11. Mainly, he reviewed the recordings of Rashid matching wits with his CIA interrogators. Rashid was part poet, part preacher, part professor of jihad. He warned the Americans that the demographics were stacked decidedly in favor of their enemies, that the Islamic world was young, growing, and seething with a potent mix of anger and humiliation. “Unless something is done to alter the equation, my dear friends, an entire generation will be lost to the jihad.” What America needed was a bridge to the Muslim world—and Rashid al-Husseini offered to play the part.
Weary of Rashid’s insidious presence, the rest of the team insisted that Gabriel keep the door of the library tightly closed whenever he was listening to the recordings. But late at night, when most of the others had gone off to bed, he would disobey their order, if only to relieve the feeling of claustrophobia produced by the sound of Rashid’s voice. Invariably, he would find Dina staring at the puzzle arrayed on the walls of the drawing room. “Go to sleep, Dina,” he would say. And Dina would respond, “I’ll sleep when you sleep.”
On the first Friday of December, as snow flurries whitened the streets of Georgetown, Gabriel listened again to Rashid’s final debriefing with his Agency handlers. It was the night before his defection. He seemed more excited than usual and slightly on edge. At the conclusion of the encounter, he gave his case officer the name of an Oslo-based imam who, in Rashid’s opinion, was raising money for the resistance fighters in Iraq. “They’re not resistance fighters, they’re terrorists,” the CIA man said pointedly. “Forgive me, Bill,” Rashid replied, using the officer’s pseudonym, “but I sometimes find it hard to remember which side I’m on.”
Gabriel switched off his computer and slipped quietly into the drawing room. Dina stood silently before her matrix, rubbing at the spot on her leg that always pained her when she was fatigued.
“Go to sleep, Dina,” Gabriel said.
“Not tonight,” she replied.
“You’ve got him?”
“I think so.”
“Who is it?”
“It’s Malik,” she said softly. “And may God have mercy on us all.”
Chapter 17 Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
IT WAS A FEW MINUTES past two a.m., a dreadful hour, Shamron once famously said, when brilliant schemes are rarely hatched. Gabriel suggested waiting until morning, but the clock in Dina’s head was ticking far too loudly for that. She personally roused the others from bed and paced the drawing room anxiously while waiting for the coffee to brew. When finally she spoke, her tone was urgent but respectful. Malik, the master of terror, had earned it.
She began her account by reminding the team of Malik’s lineage—a lineage that had but one possible outcome. A descendant of the al-Zubair clan—a mixed Palestinian-Syrian family that hailed from the village of Abu Ghosh, on the western approaches to Jerusalem—he had been born in the Zarqa refugee camp in Jordan. Zarqa was a wretched place, even by the deplorable standards of the camps, and a breeding ground for Islamic extremism. An intelligent but aimless young man, Malik spent a great deal of time at the al-Falah Mosque. There he fell under the spell of an incendiary Salafist imam who guided him into the arms of the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas. Malik joined the group’s military wing, the Izzaddin al-Qassam Brigades, and studied the craft of terror with some of the deadliest practitioners in the business. A natural leader and skilled organizer, he rose quickly through the ranks and by the onset of the Second Intifada was a top Hamas terror mastermind. From the safety of the Zarqa camp, he plotted some of the deadliest attacks of the period, including a suicide bombing at a nightclub in Tel Aviv that claimed thirty-three lives.
“After that attack,” Dina said, “the prime minister signed an order authorizing Malik’s assassination. Malik concealed himself deep inside the Zarqa camp and plotted what would be his biggest strike yet—a bombing at the Western Wall. Fortunately, we managed to arrest the three shahids before they could reach their target. It’s believed to be Malik’s one and only failure.”
By the summer of 2004, Dina continued, it was clear that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was too small a stage for Malik. Inspired by 9/11, he slipped