The Messenger Page 11

  “I want everything you have on bin Shafiq and al-Bakari.”

  “Within reason,” Carter said. “I’m not going to give you a truckload of dirt on prominent figures in Washington.”

  “I want protection,” Gabriel said. “When this thing goes down, we’ll be the number-one suspect. We always are, even when we’re not responsible. We’re going to need your help weathering the storm.”

  “I can speak only for the DO,” said Carter. “And I can assure you that we’ll be there for you.”

  “We take out bin Shafiq at the time and place of our choosing, with no interference from Langley.”

  “The president would be grateful if you could avoid doing it on American soil.”

  “There are no guarantees in our business, Adrian.”

  “Touché.”

  “You might find this hard to believe, but I can’t make this decision on my own. I need to speak to Amos and the prime minister.”

  “Amos and the prime minister will do what you tell them.”

  “Within reason.”

  “So what are you going to tell them?”

  “That the American president needs a favor,” Gabriel said. “And I want to help him.”

  12.

  Tel Megiddo, Israel

  THE PRIME MINISTER GRANTED Gabriel his operational charter at two-thirty the following afternoon. Gabriel headed straight for Armageddon. He reckoned it was a fine place to start.

  The weather seemed perversely glorious for such an occasion: cool temperatures, a pale blue sky, a soft Judean breeze that plucked at his shirt-sleeves as he sped along the Jaffa Road. He switched on the radio. The mournful music that had saturated the airwaves in the hours after the attempt on Shamron’s life was now gone. A news bulletin came suddenly on the air. The prime minister had promised to do everything in his power to track down and punish those responsible for the attempt on Shamron’s life. He made no mention of the fact that he already knew who was responsible, or that he had granted Gabriel the authority to kill him.

  Gabriel plunged down the Bab al-Wad toward the sea, weaving impatiently through the slower traffic, then raced the setting sun northward along the Coastal Plain. There was a security alert near Hadera—according to the radio, a suspected suicide bomber had managed to slip through a crossing in the Separation Fence near Tulkarm—and Gabriel was forced to wait by the side of the road for twenty minutes before heading into the Valley of Jezreel. Five miles from Afula a rounded hillock appeared on his left. In Hebrew it was known as Tel Megiddo, or the Mound of Megiddo. The rest of the world knew it as Armageddon, forecast in the Book of Revelation to be the site of the final earthly confrontation between the forces of good and evil. The battle had not yet begun, and the parking lot was empty except for a trio of dusty pickup trucks, a sign that the archaeological team was still at work.

  Gabriel climbed out of his car and headed up the steep footpath to the summit. Tel Megiddo had been under periodic archaeological excavation for more than a century, and the top of the hill was cut by a maze of long, narrow trenches. Evidence of more than twenty cities had been discovered beneath the soil atop the tel, including one believed to have been built by King Solomon.

  He stopped at the edge of a trench and peered down. Crouched on all fours was a small figure in a tan bush jacket, picking at the soil with a hand trowel. Gabriel thought of the last time he had stood over a man in an excavation pit and felt as though a lump of ice had been placed suddenly at the back of his neck. The archaeologist looked up and regarded him with a pair of clever brown eyes, then looked down again and resumed his work. “I’ve been waiting for you,” said Eli Lavon. “What took you so long?”

  Gabriel sat in the dirt at the edge of the pit and watched Lavon work. They had known each other since the Black September operation. Eli Lavon had been an ayin, a tracker. His job was to follow the terrorists and learn their habits. In many respects his assignment had been more dangerous even than Gabriel’s, for Lavon had sometimes been exposed to the terrorists for days and weeks on end with no backup. After the unit disbanded, he’d settled in Vienna and opened a small investigative bureau called Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Operating on a shoestring budget, he had managed to track down millions of dollars’ worth of looted Jewish assets and had played a significant role in prying a multibillion-dollar settlement from the banks of Switzerland. These days Lavon was working the dig at Megiddo and teaching archaeology part-time at Hebrew University.

  “What have you got there, Eli?”

  “A piece of pottery, I suspect.” A gust of wind took his wispy, unkempt hair and blew it across his forehead. “What about you?”

  “A Saudi billionaire who’s trying to destroy the civilized world.”

  “Haven’t they already done that?”

  Gabriel smiled. “I need you, Eli. You know how to read balance sheets. You know how to follow the trail of money without anyone else knowing it.”

  “Who’s the Saudi?”

  “The chairman and CEO of Jihad Incorporated.”

  “Does the chairman have a name?”

  “Abdul Aziz al-Bakari.”

  “Zizi al-Bakari?”

  “One and the same.”

  “I suppose this has something to do with Shamron?”

  “And the Vatican.”

  “What’s Zizi’s connection?”

  Gabriel told him.

  “I guess I don’t need to ask what you intend to do with bin Shafiq,” Lavon said. “Zizi’s business empire is enormous. Bin Shafiq could be operating from anywhere in the world. How are we going to find him?”

  “We’re going to put an agent into Zizi’s inner circle and wait for bin Shafiq to walk into it.”

  “An agent in Zizi’s camp?” Lavon shook his head. “Can’t be done.”

  “Yes, it can.”

  “How?”

  “I’m going to find something Zizi wants,” Gabriel said. “And then I’m going to give it to him.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Gabriel sat down at the edge of the excavation trench with his legs dangling over the side and explained how he planned to penetrate Jihad Incorporated. From the bottom of the trench came sound of Lavon’s work—pick, pick, brush, brush, blow…

  “Who’s the agent?” he asked when Gabriel had finished.

  “I don’t have one yet.”

  Lavon was silent for a moment—pick, pick, brush, brush, blow…

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Turn Zizi al-Bakari and AAB Holdings inside out. I want a complete breakdown of every company he owns or controls. Profiles of all his top executives and the members of his personal entourage. I want to know how each person got there and how they’ve stayed. I want to know more about Zizi than Zizi knows about himself.”

  “And what happens when we go operational?”

  “You’ll go, too.”

  “I’m too old and tired for any rough stuff.”

  “You’re the greatest surveillance artist in the history of the Office, Eli. I can’t do this without you.”

  Lavon sat up and brushed his hands on his trousers. “Run an agent into Zizi al-Bakari’s inner circle? Madness.” He tossed Gabriel a hand trowel. “Get down here and help me. We’re losing the light.”

  Gabriel climbed down into the pit and knelt beside his old friend. Together they scratched at the ancient soil, until night fell like a curtain over the valley.

  IT WAS AFTER nine o’clock by the time they arrived at King Saul Boulevard. Lavon was long retired from the Office but still gave the odd lecture at the Academy and still had credentials to enter the building whenever he pleased. Gabriel cleared him into the file rooms of the Research division, then headed down to a gloomy corridor two levels belowground. At the end of the hall was Room 456C. Affixed to the door was a paper sign, written in Gabriel’s own stylish Hebrew hand: TEMPORARY COMMITTEE FOR THE STUDY OF TERROR THREATS IN WESTERN EUROPE. He decided to leave it for now.

  He opened the comb
ination lock, switched on the lights, and went inside. The room seemed frozen in time. They’d had several names for it: the Pod, the Quad, the Tank. Yaakov, a pockmarked tough from the Arab Affairs Department of Shabak, had christened it the Hellhole. Yossi from Research had called it the Village of the Damned, but then Yossi had read classics at Oxford and always brought an air of erudition to his work, even when the subjects weren’t worthy of it.

  Gabriel paused at the trestle table that Dina and Rimona had shared. Their constant squabbling over territory had driven him to near madness. The separation line he had drawn down the center of the table was still there, along with the warning Rimona had written on her side of the border: Cross at your own risk. Rimona was a captain in the IDF and worked for Aman, military intelligence. She was also Gilah Shamron’s niece. She believed in defensible borders and had responded with retaliatory raids each time Dina had strayed over the line. At Dina’s place now was the short note she had left there on the final day of the operation: May we never have to return here again. How naïve, thought Gabriel. Dina, of all people, should have known better.

  He continued his slow tour of the room. In the corner stood the same pile of outmoded computer equipment that no one had ever bothered to remove. Before becoming the headquarters of Group Khaled, Room 456C had been nothing more than a dumping ground for old furniture and obsolete electronics, often used by the members of the night staff as a spot for romantic trysts. Gabriel’s chalkboard was still there, too. He could scarcely decipher the last words he had written. He gazed up at the walls, which were covered with photographs of young Palestinian men. One photograph seized his attention, a boy with a beret on his head and a kaffiyeh draped over his shoulders, seated on the lap of Yasir Arafat: Khaled al-Khalifa at the funeral of his father, Sabri. Gabriel had killed Sabri, and he had killed Khaled as well.

  He cleared the walls of the old photographs and put two new ones in their place. One showed a man in a kaffiyeh in the mountains of Afghanistan. The other showed the same man in a cashmere overcoat and trilby hat standing before a billionaire’s home in Paris.

  Group Khaled was now Group bin Shafiq.

  FOR THE FIRST forty-eight hours Gabriel and Lavon worked alone. On the third day they were joined by Yossi, a tall balding man with the bearing of an English intellectual. Rimona came on the fourth day, as did Yaakov, who arrived from Shabak headquarters carrying a box filled with material on the terrorists who had attacked Shamron’s car. Dina was the last to arrive. Small and dark-haired, she had been standing in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street on October 19, 1994, when a Hamas suicide bomber had turned the Number 5 bus into a coffin for twenty-one people. Her mother and two of her sisters were among those killed; Dina had been seriously wounded and now walked with a slight limp. She had dealt with the loss by becoming an expert in terrorism. Indeed, Dina Sarid could recite the time, place, and butcher’s bill of every act of terror ever committed against the State of Israel. She had once told Gabriel she knew more about the terrorists than they knew about themselves. Gabriel had believed her.

  They divided into two areas of responsibility. Ahmed bin Shafiq and the Brotherhood of Allah became the province of Dina, Yaakov, and Rimona, while Yossi joined Lavon’s excavation of AAB Holdings. Gabriel, at least for the moment, worked largely alone, for he had given himself the unenviable task of attempting to identify every painting ever acquired or sold by Zizi al-Bakari.

  As the days wore on, the walls of Room 456C began to reflect the operation’s unique nature. Upon one wall slowly appeared the murky outlines of a lethal new terrorist network led by a man who was largely a ghost. To the best of their ability they retraced bin Shafiq’s long journey through the bloodstream of Islamic extremism. Wherever there had been trouble, it seemed, there had been bin Shafiq, handing out Saudi oil money and Wahhabi propaganda by the fistful: Afghanistan, Lebanon, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Pakistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, and, of course, the Palestinian Authority. They were not without significant leads, however, because in carrying out two major attacks, bin Shafiq and the Brotherhood had surrendered more than a dozen names that could be investigated for connections and associations. And then there was Ibrahim el-Banna, the Egyptian imam of death, and Professor Ali Massoudi, the recruiter and talent spotter.

  On the opposite wall there appeared another network: AAB Holdings. Using open sources and some that were not so open, Lavon painstakingly sifted through the layers of Zizi’s financial empire and assembled the disparate pieces like bits of an ancient artifact. At the top of the structure was AAB itself. Beneath it was an intricate financial web of subholding companies and corporate shells that allowed Zizi to extend his influence to nearly every corner of the globe under conditions of near-perfect corporate secrecy. With most of his companies registered in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, Lavon likened Zizi to a financial stealth fighter, capable of striking at will while avoiding detection by enemy radar. Despite the opaque nature of Zizi’s empire, Lavon came to the conclusion the numbers didn’t add up. “Zizi couldn’t possibly have earned enough from his early investments to justify the size of his later acquisitions,” he explained to Gabriel. “AAB Holdings is a front for the House of Saud.” As for trying to find Ahmed bin Shafiq anywhere within Zizi’s financial octopus, Lavon likened it to finding a needle in the Arabian Desert. “Not impossible,” he said, “but you’re likely to die of thirst trying.”

  Yossi saw to Zizi’s personnel. He focused on the relatively small team that worked inside Zizi’s Geneva headquarters, along with companies wholly owned or controlled by AAB. Most of his time, though, was devoted to Zizi’s large personal entourage. Their photographs soon covered the wall above Yossi’s workspace and stood in stark contrast to those of bin Shafiq’s terror network. New photographs arrived each day as Yossi monitored Zizi’s frenetic movements around the globe. Zizi arriving for a meeting in London. Zizi consulting with German automakers in Stuttgart. Zizi enjoying the view of the Red Sea from his new hotel in Sharm el-Sheik. Zizi conferring with the king of Jordan about a possible construction deal. Zizi opening a desalination plant in Yemen. Zizi collecting a humanitarian award from an Islamic group in Montreal whose Web site, Yossi pointed out, contained an open call for the destruction of the State of Israel.

  As for Gabriel’s corner of the room, it was a sanctuary from the realms of terror and finance. His wall was covered not with the faces of terrorists or business executives but with dozens of photographs of French Impressionist prints. And while Lavon and Yossi spent their days digging through dreary ledger sheets and computer printouts, Gabriel could often be seen leafing through old catalogs, Impressionist monographs, and press clippings describing Zizi’s exploits on the world art scene.

  By the end of the tenth day, Gabriel had decided how he was going to slip an agent into Jihad Incorporated. He walked over to Yossi’s collage of photographs and gazed at a single image. It showed a gaunt, gray-haired Englishman, seated next to Zizi six months earlier at the Impressionist and Modern Art auction at Christie’s in New York. Gabriel removed the photograph and held it up for the others to see. “This man,” he said. “He has to go.” Then he called Adrian Carter on a private secure number at Langley and told him how he planned to penetrate the House of Zizi. “All you need now is a painting and a girl,” Carter said. “You find the painting. I’ll get you the girl.”

  GABRIEL LEFT King Saul Boulevard a little earlier than usual and drove to Ein Kerem. There were still security guards posted outside the intensive care unit of the Hadassah Medical Center, but Shamron was alone when Gabriel entered his room. “The prodigal son has decided to pay me a visit,” he said bitterly. “It’s a good thing we’re a desert people. Otherwise you would put me on an ice floe and cast me out to sea.”

  Gabriel sat down next to the bed. “I’ve been here at least a half dozen times.”

  “When?”

  “Late at night when you’re asleep.”

  “You hover over me? Like Gilah and the doctors? Why can�
��t you come during the day like a normal person?”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “The prime minister isn’t too busy to come see me at a reasonable hour.” Shamron, his injured neck immobilized by a heavy plastic brace, gave Gabriel a vindictive sideways glance. “He told me he’s allowing Amos to find his own man for Special Ops so that you can run this fool’s errand for Adrian Carter and the Americans.”

  “I take it you disapprove.”

  “Vehemently.” Shamron closed his eyes for a long moment—long enough for Gabriel to cast a nervous glance at the bank of monitors next to his bed. “Blue and white,” he said finally. “We do things for ourselves. We don’t ask others for help, and we don’t help others with problems of their own making. And we certainly don’t volunteer to serve as a patsy for Adrian Carter.”

  “You’re in this hospital bed instead of at your desk in the Prime Minister’s Office. That makes Zizi al-Bakari and Ahmed bin Shafiq my problem, too. Besides, the world has changed, Ari. We need to work together to survive. The old rules don’t apply.”

  Shamron lifted his heavily veined hand and pointed toward the plastic water cup on his bedside table. Gabriel held it to Shamron’s lips while he sipped water through the straw.

  “At whose request are you undertaking this errand?” Shamron asked. “Is it Adrian Carter, or higher up the chain of command?” Greeted by Gabriel’s silence, Shamron angrily pushed the water cup away. “Is it your intention to treat me as some sort of invalid? I’m still the prime minister’s special adviser on all matters dealing with security and intelligence. I’m still the…” His voice trailed off with a sudden fatigue.

  “You’re still the memuneh,” Gabriel said, finishing the sentence for him. In Hebrew, memuneh meant the one in charge. For many years the title had been reserved for Shamron.

  “You’re not going after some kid from Nablus, Gabriel. You have Ahmed bin Shafiq and Zizi al-Bakari in your sights. If something goes wrong, the world will fall on you from a very great height. And your friend Adrian Carter won’t be there to help scrape you up. You might want to consider taking me into your confidence. I’ve done this sort of thing a time or two.”