House of Spies Read online

  “Apparently,” added Rimona, “a fragrance is in development.”

  “What does it smell like?” asked Gabriel.

  “Hashish,” she quipped.

  But was there another side to JLM Enterprises? A side other than hospitality and drugs? The case of Nouredine Zakaria suggested it was so. The Moroccan had managed to insert at least fifteen Kalashnikov assault rifles into the United Kingdom, an impressive feat of smuggling and logistics. Undoubtedly, he had used a portion of the network that moved Martel’s drugs to Britain and the rest of Europe. But was Nouredine the exception, or were there others? Fortunately, the Office had in its possession several thousand French intelligence documents that Paul Rousseau had handed over after the attack on the Weinberg Center in Paris. With the help of an Alpha Group analyst in Paris, Dina Sarid compared the names in the database with known or reputed members of Jean-Luc Martel’s army of dealers and enforcers, most of whom were of North African descent. Six names appeared on both lists: three Moroccans, two Algerians, and a Tunisian. Four of the men had served time in French prisons for drug offenses; two were thought to have spent time in Syria fighting for ISIS. But when Dina broadened the parameters to include second- and third-degree levels of association, the results were even more alarming. “JLM Enterprises,” she concluded, “is an ISIS battalion in waiting.”

  Gabriel forwarded Dina’s analysis to Paul Rousseau in Paris, and Rousseau put the worst of the worst under Alpha Group watch. That same evening the last member of the Barak team arrived in Tel Aviv aboard a flight from Zurich, where he had spent the past several days on a wholly unrelated matter. Entering Room 456C, he paused briefly before the enlarged photograph of Saladin, bade him an unpleasant evening, and sat down at his old desk, where Gabriel had personally placed two towering stacks of files. He opened the first and frowned. “Ivan Kharkov,” he murmured. “Long time no see, you miserable son of a bitch.”

  It was Ari Shamron who once described Mikhail Abramov as “Gabriel without a conscience.” It was not an altogether fair characterization, but nor was it far from the truth. Born in Moscow to a pair of dissident Soviet academics, Mikhail had served in the elite Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s version of the British SAS, before joining the Office. His enormous talents, however, were not limited to the gun, thus the two stacks of files Gabriel had placed on his desk.

  In appearance, he was Gabriel’s opposite. Tall and lanky, with a bloodless pallor and colorless gray eyes, he was the prince of ice to Gabriel’s prince of fire. During those intense days of preparation, he all but ignored Jean-Luc Martel and Olivia Watson. They were lights on a distant shore—or, as Gabriel liked to say, on the other side of a horseshoe bay. Mikhail had only one assignment, to prepare himself for the role he would soon be playing. Not by coincidence, the character whose life he would inhabit had much in common with his quarry. Like Jean-Luc Martel, he was a man of two faces, one he showed to the rest of the world, the other he kept carefully hidden from view.

  Much of Mikhail’s course of study was self-directed, as it involved Russian armaments, a subject he knew well. But Gabriel, in yet another departure from Office tradition, personally oversaw the rest. On the evening Martel and Olivia Watson departed Saint Barthélemy, he summoned Mikhail to his suite for a final examination. Gabriel stood before a video monitor, a clicker in his hand, while Mikhail sat on the executive leather couch, his long legs propped on the coffee table, his eyes half closed with affected boredom, his default expression.

  “Tintoretto,” he said.

  Gabriel pressed the clicker, and another image appeared on the screen.

  “Titian,” said Mikhail, suppressing an elaborate yawn.

  The image changed.

  “Rembrandt, for heaven’s sake. Next.”

  When the image appeared, he placed a hand to his forehead in a show of deep thought. “Is that a Parmigianino or a Perugino?”

  “Which is it?” asked Gabriel.

  “Parmigianino.”

  “Right again.”

  “Why don’t you give me something a bit more challenging?”

  “How about this?”

  Another image appeared on the screen. This time it was not a painting, but the face of a woman.

  “Natalie Mizrahi,” said Mikhail.

  “That’s not what I’m asking.”

  “Is she ready? Is that what you want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want me to talk to her?”

  Gabriel switched off the video monitor and shook his head slowly. It wasn’t the sort of job for a lover, he thought. Only a chief could ask such a thing.

  20

  Jezreel Valley, Israel

  Early the following afternoon, having cleared his in-box and returned the necessary phone calls, Gabriel eased into the back of his armored SUV and set out for the valley of his youth. The landscape beyond his window was yellowed like an old photograph. Overnight, a Palestinian arsonist had set fire to the Carmel Ridge. Whipped by high winds, the flames had consumed three thousand acres of highly combustible Aleppo pine and were now advancing toward the outskirts of Haifa. Israel’s firefighters had proven themselves incapable of containing the blaze, leaving the prime minister no choice but to request international assistance. Economically crippled Greece had dispatched two hundred men; Russia had agreed to send a tanker aircraft. Even the ruler of Syria, who was battling for his very survival, had mockingly offered to come to Israel’s aid. Gabriel found his country’s impotence deeply unsettling. The Jewish people had drained the malarial swamps, watered the deserts, and prevailed in three existential conflicts against an enemy far greater in number. And yet a Palestinian with a pack of matches could bring the northwest corner of the country to a standstill and threaten its third-largest city.

  Highway 6, Israel’s main north-south motorway, was blocked at the Iron Interchange. Gabriel’s motorcade turned onto Highway 65 and followed it eastward to Megiddo, the hillock where, according to the Book of Revelation, Christ and Satan would wage a climactic duel that would bring about the end of days. The ancient mound appeared peaceful, though it was shrouded in a sepia-toned veil of smoke from the distant fires on the ridge. They headed northward into the Valley of Jezreel, keeping to the side roads to avoid the diverted traffic, until finally a security gate, metal and spiked, blocked their path. Beyond it was Nahalal, a cooperative agricultural settlement, or moshav, founded by Jews from Eastern Europe in 1921, when Palestine was still in the hands of the British Empire. It was not the first Nahalal but the second. The first Jewish settlement on this plot of land had been established not long after the conquest of Canaan. As recorded in the nineteenth chapter of Joshua, it belonged to the tribe of Zebulun, one of the twelve tribes of ancient Israel.

  Gabriel leaned out his window and jabbed the code into the keypad, and the security gate rolled open. Oleander and eucalyptus lined the gently curved lane that stretched before them. Modern Nahalal was circular in layout. Bungalows fronted the road, and behind the houses, like the folds of a hand fan, lay pastures and cultivated cropland. The children filing out of the cooperative’s only school paid scant attention to Gabriel’s large black SUV. Several of Nahalal’s residents served in the security services or the IDF. Moshe Dayan, perhaps Israel’s most famous general, was buried in Nahalal’s cemetery.

  At the southern end of the moshav, the SUV turned into the drive of a contemporary-looking house. A security guard in a khaki vest appeared instantly on the shaded veranda and, seeing Gabriel emerge slowly from the vehicle, raised a hand in greeting. In the other he gripped the stock of an automatic weapon.

  “You just missed her.”

  “Where is she?”

  The bodyguard inclined his head toward the farmland.

  “How long ago did she leave?”

  “Twenty minutes. Maybe a half hour.”

  “Please tell me she’s not alone.”

  “She tried, but I sent a couple of the boys with her. They took one of the ATVs. None of us
can keep up with her.”

  Smiling, Gabriel entered the bungalow. Its furnishings were spare and functional, more office than home. Once, the walls had been hung with outsize black-and-white photographs of Palestinian suffering—the long dusty walk into exile, the wretched camps, the weathered faces of the old ones dreaming of paradise lost. Now there were paintings. Some were Gabriel’s, youthful works, derivative. The rest were his mother’s. They were Cubist and Abstract Expressionist, full of fire and pain, produced by an artist at the height of her power. One depicted a woman in semi-profile, gaunt, lifeless, draped in rags. He recalled the week she had painted it; it was the week of Eichmann’s execution. The effort had left her exhausted and bedridden. Many years later, Gabriel would discover the testimony his mother had recorded and then locked away in the archives of Yad Vashem. Only then would he understand that the Cubist depiction of an emaciated woman in rags was a self-portrait.

  He went into the garden. Smoke rose above the Carmel Ridge like the plume of an erupting volcano, but the skies above the valley were clear and perfumed with the smell of earth and bovine excrement. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder and saw he was alone; his security detail seemed to have forgotten about him. He followed a dusty track past the animal enclosure, watched by blank-eyed dairy cows. The farm’s pie slice of cropland stretched before him. The portion nearest the bungalow was under cultivation of some sort—Gabriel affected a resentful ignorance of all matters farming—but the distant section of the parcel lay tilled and fallow and awaiting the seed. Beyond the outer boundary was Ramat David, the kibbutz where Gabriel had been born and raised. It was established a few years after Nahalal, in 1926, and derived its name not from the ancient Jewish king but from David Lloyd George, the British prime minister whose government had looked favorably upon the idea of establishing a Jewish national home in the land of Palestine.

  The residents of Ramat David were not from the East; they were largely German Jews. Gabriel’s mother arrived there in the autumn of 1948. Her name was Irene Frankel then, and she soon met a man from Munich, a writer, an intellectual, who had taken the Hebrew name Allon. She had hoped to have six children, one child for each million lost to the Holocaust, but one was all her womb would bear, a boy she named Gabriel, the messenger of God, the defender of Israel, the interpreter of Daniel’s visions. Their home, like most in Ramat David, was a place of sadness—of candles burning for parents and siblings who had not survived, of terrified screams in the night—and so Gabriel passed his days wandering the ancient valley of the tribe of Zebulun. As a child he had thought of it as his valley. And now it was his to watch over and protect.

  The sun had slipped behind the burning ridge; daylight was in retreat. Just then, Gabriel heard what sounded like a distant cry for help. It was only the first notes of the call to prayer drifting down from the Arab village perched on the slopes of the hills to the east. As a child, Gabriel had known a boy from the village named Yusuf. Yusuf had referred to him as Jibril, the Arabic version of his name, and had told him stories of what it was like in the valley before the return of the Jews. Their friendship was a closely guarded secret. Gabriel never went to Yusuf’s village, Yusuf never came to his. The divide had been unbridgeable. It was still.

  The call to prayer slowly faded, along with the last of the light. Gabriel gazed across the darkening fields toward the bungalow. Where the hell were his bodyguards? He was grateful for the reprieve; he could not remember the last time he had been completely alone. All at once he heard the voice of a woman calling his name. For an instant he imagined it was his mother. Then, turning, he glimpsed a slender figure bounding toward him along the track, pursued by two men in an ATV. Suddenly, he felt a stab of pain at the small of his back. Or was it guilt? It’s what we do, he reassured himself as he rubbed away the pain. It is our punishment for having survived in this land.

  21

  Nahalal, Israel

  Like Gabriel, Dr. Natalie Mizrahi had had the distinct displeasure of seeing Saladin in the flesh. Gabriel’s encounter with the monster had been fleeting, but Natalie had been obliged to spend several days with him in a great house of many rooms and courts near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. There she had treated Saladin for two serious wounds suffered in an American air strike, one to his chest, the other to his right leg. Unfortunately, Natalie and Saladin had met again, in a tiny A-frame cabin in rural Northern Virginia. A Caravaggesque painting depicting the instant before her rescue hung in Gabriel’s appalling gallery of memory. Try as he might, he had been unable to remove it. This, too, was something he and Natalie had in common.

  The story of her journey into the dark heart of the caliphate of ISIS was one of the most remarkable in the annals of the Office. Indeed, even Saladin, who knew only part of it, predicted that one day someone would write a book about it. Born and educated in France, fluent in the Algerian dialect of Arabic, she immigrated to Israel with her parents to escape the rising tide of anti-Semitism in her homeland and took a position in the emergency room at the Hadassah Medical Center in West Jerusalem. Her arrival in Israel did not escape the notice of the talent spotters of the Office. And when Gabriel was searching for an agent to feed into Saladin’s network, it was to Natalie he turned. At the little farmhouse in Nahalal, he peeled away the many layers of her identity and transformed her into Leila Hadawi, an Arab woman of Palestinian lineage, a black widow bent on vengeance. Then, with the help of Paul Rousseau and the Alpha Group, he fed her into the pipeline of French and other European Muslims heading to Syria to fight for ISIS.

  She spent nearly a month in the caliphate, in an apartment house near al-Rasheed Park in downtown Raqqa, in a training camp in the ancient city of Palmyra, and, finally, at the house near Mosul where, threatened with death, she had saved the life of the greatest terror mastermind since Osama bin Laden. During the period of his recovery, he had shown her great kindness. He had referred to her only as Maimonides, the philosopher and Talmudic scholar who served as one of the real Saladin’s court physicians in Cairo, and allowed her to be in his presence without veiling her face. Never once did she leave his side. She had monitored his vital signs, changed his bloody dressings, and muted his pain with injections of morphine. Many times she considered shoving him through death’s door with an overdose. Instead, bound by her oath as a doctor and her belief that it was essential she report what she had witnessed, she had nursed Saladin back to health, an act of mercy he repaid by dispatching her to Washington on a suicide mission.

  It had been three months since that night, and yet even now Gabriel noticed remnants of Leila Hadawi in Natalie’s bearing and in her dark eyes. She had shed Leila’s veil and Leila’s rage, but not her quiet piety or her dignity. Otherwise, there was no visible trace of the ordeal she had suffered in the Islamic caliphate or in the cabin in Virginia, where Saladin had personally subjected her to a brutal interrogation. It had been his intention to execute Natalie in ISIS’s preferred manner, by taking her head, and her imminent death had the effect of loosening his tongue. He admitted he had served in the Iraqi Mukhabarat under Saddam Hussein, that he had supplied material and logistical support to rejectionist Palestinian terrorists such as Abu Nidal, and that he had joined the Iraq insurgency after the American invasion of 2003. Those three elements of his curriculum vitae represented the sum total of what the intelligence services of the West knew of him. Even his real name remained a mystery. Natalie, however, had been granted access to Saladin’s inner court, at a time when he was physically enfeebled. She knew every inch of his tall, powerful body, every mole and birthmark, every scar. It was only one of the reasons why Gabriel had come to the farm in Nahalal, in the valley of his birth.

  The evening turned cold quickly, as it always did in the Galilee. Nevertheless, they sat outside in the garden, at the same table where ten months earlier Gabriel had conducted Natalie’s initial recruitment. Now, as then, she sat very straight, with her hands folded neatly in her lap. She wore a snug-fitting blue tracksuit and neon-gr
een trainers, soiled by the dust of the farm roads. Her dark hair was drawn away from her face and constrained at the base of her neck by an elastic band. Her wide, sensuous mouth was set in a half-smile. She looked happy for the first time in many months. Suddenly, Gabriel felt another stab of pain. This time it was real.

  “You know,” said Natalie, her expression serious, “you’ll heal faster if you take something.”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “You’re leaning to one side to keep pressure off the fractures.”

  Grimacing, Gabriel tried to imitate Natalie’s erect posture.

  “And your respiration,” she said, “is very shallow.”

  “That’s because it hurts to breathe. And every time I cough or sneeze I see stars.”

  “Are you getting any sleep?”

  “Enough.” Then he asked quietly, “You?”

  Natalie drew the cork from a bottle of Galilean white and poured two glasses. She drank only a small amount from hers and then returned the glass to the tabletop. During the many months she had lived as a radicalized Muslim, she had largely abstained from alcohol. Her daily consumption of white wine—the Office talent spotters had regarded it as her one and only vice—had fallen sharply since her return to Israel.

  “Are you?” asked Gabriel a second time.