House of Spies Read online

  “Well?” asked Shamron.

  “It seems Mohammad Bakkar would like a word with Jean-Luc Martel about those missing drugs. He was wondering whether he could come to Morocco early next week.”

  “Will he be free?”

  “Martel? I think we can fit it into his schedule.”

  Smiling, Shamron plugged the radio into the power strip on his worktable and switched it on. A moment later, after adjusting the tuning dial, he found a bit of music.

  “I don’t recognize it,” said Gabriel.

  “You wouldn’t, you’re too young. It’s Artie Shaw. The first time I heard this . . .” He left the thought unfinished.

  “What’s it called?” asked Gabriel.

  “‘You’re a Lucky Guy.’”

  Just then, the radio died and the music fell silent.

  Shamron frowned. “Or maybe not.”

  46

  Casablanca, Morocco

  The road linking Casablanca’s Mohammed V International Airport with the center of Morocco’s largest city and financial hub was four lanes of smooth coal-black asphalt, along which Dina Sarid, a reckless motorist by nature and nationality, drove with extraordinary care.

  “What are you so worried about?” asked Gabriel.

  “You,” she replied.

  “What have I done now?”

  “Nothing. I’ve just never driven a chief before.”

  “Well,” he said, staring out his window, “there’s a first time for everything.”

  Gabriel’s overnight bag lay on the backseat, his attaché case was balanced on his knees. In it was the American passport that had allowed him to sail unmolested through Moroccan border control and customs. Things might have changed in Washington, but in much of the world it was still good to be an American.

  All at once the traffic slowed to a halt.

  “A checkpoint,” explained Dina. “They’re everywhere.”

  “What do you suppose they’re looking for?”

  “Maybe the chief of Israeli intelligence.”

  A line of orange pylons guided the traffic onto the shoulder of the road, where a pair of gendarmes was inspecting the vehicles and their occupants, watched over by a DST tough in plainclothes and sunglasses. While lowering her window, Dina spoke a few words to Gabriel in fluent German—German being the language of her cover identity and false passport. The bored gendarmes waved her forward, as though they were chasing away the flies. The DST man’s thoughts were clearly elsewhere.

  Dina quickly raised her window against the heavy, merciless heat and turned the air conditioner on full. They passed a large military installation. Then it was farmland again, small plots of rich dark earth, tended mainly by inhabitants of the surrounding villages. The stands of eucalyptus reminded Gabriel of home.

  At last, they reached the ragged edges of Casablanca, North Africa’s second-largest city, eclipsed only by the megalopolis of Cairo. The farmland did not surrender entirely; there were patches of it between the smart new apartment blocks and the shantytowns of corrugated metal-and-cinderblock shacks that were home to hundreds of thousands of Casablanca’s poorest residents.

  “They call them Bidonvilles,” said Dina, pointing out one of the shantytowns. “I suppose it sounds better than a slum. The people there have nothing. No running water, barely enough to eat. Every once in a while the government tries to clear away the Bidonvilles with bulldozers, but the people come back and rebuild. What choice do they have? They have nowhere else to go.”

  They passed a plot of thin brown grass where two barefoot boys were watching over a flock of skinny goats.

  “The one thing they do have in the Bidonvilles,” Dina was saying, “is Islam. And thanks to Wahhabi and Salafist preachers, it’s getting more and more extreme. Do you remember the attack in 2003? All those boys who blew themselves up came from the Bidonvilles of Sidi Moumen.”

  Gabriel did remember the attacks, of course, but in much of the West they were largely forgotten: fourteen bombings against mainly Western and Jewish targets, forty-five dead, more than a hundred wounded. They were the work of an al-Qaeda affiliate known as Salafia Jihadia, which in turn had ties to the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group. For all its natural beauty and Western tourism, Morocco remained a hotbed of radical Islam where ISIS had managed to establish deep roots and numerous cells. More than thirteen hundred Moroccans had traveled to the caliphate to fight for ISIS—along with several hundred more ethnic Moroccans from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands—and Moroccans had played an outsize role in ISIS’s recent terror campaign in Western Europe. And then there was Mohammed Bouyeri, the Dutch Moroccan who shot and stabbed filmmaker and writer Theo van Gogh on a street in Amsterdam. The killing was not the spontaneous act of one troubled man; Bouyeri was a member of a cell of radical North African Muslims based in The Hague known as the Hofstad Network. For the most part, Morocco’s security services had managed to deflect the country’s extremism outward. Still, there were plenty of plots at home. Morocco’s interior ministry had boasted recently that it had broken up more than three hundred terror plots, including one involving mustard gas. There were some things, thought Gabriel, that were better left unsaid.

  They breasted a hill and the pale blue Atlantic opened before them. The Morocco Mall, with its futuristic IMAX movie theater and Western boutiques, occupied a newly developed stretch of land along the coast. Dina followed the Corniche toward downtown, past beach clubs and restaurants and sparkling white seafront villas. One was the size of a commercial building.

  “It belongs to a Saudi prince. And over there,” said Dina, “is the Four Seasons.”

  She slowed so Gabriel could have a look. At the gated entrance to the grounds, two security guards in dark suits were searching the undercarriage of an arriving car for explosives. Only if it passed inspection would it be allowed to proceed along the drive to the hotel’s covered motor court.

  “There’s a magnetometer just inside the door,” said Dina. “All bags and guests, no exceptions. We’ll have to bring the guns in from the beach. It won’t be a problem.”

  “Think the boys from Salafia Jihadia know that, too?”

  “I hope not,” said Dina with a rare smile.

  They continued along the Corniche past the massive Hassan II Mosque, the outer walls of the ancient medina, and the sprawling port. Finally, they entered Casablanca’s old French colonial center, with its wide curving boulevards and its unique blend of Moorish, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco architecture. It had once been a place where cosmopolitan Casablancans strolled elegant colonnades dressed in the latest fashions from Paris, and dined in some of the world’s finest restaurants. Now it was a monument to decay and danger. Soot blackened the floral stucco facades; rust rotted the wrought-iron balustrades. The smart set kept to the trendy quartiers of Gauthier and Maarif, leaving old Casablanca to the robed, the veiled, and the street vendors who sold spoiled fruit and cheap cassettes of sermons and Koranic verses.

  The one sign of progress was the shining new streetcar that snaked along the boulevard Mohammed V, past the boarded-up shops and the arcades where the homeless dozed on beds of cardboard. Dina followed a tram for several blocks and then turned into a narrow side street and parked. On one side was an eight-story apartment building that looked as though it were about to collapse beneath the weight of the satellite dishes sprouting like mushrooms from the balconies. On the other was a crumbling, vine-covered wall with a once-ornate cedar door. Guarding it was a panting feral dog.

  “Why are we stopping?” asked Gabriel.

  “We’re here.”

  “Where?”

  “The command post.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No.”

  Gabriel eyed the canine warily. “What about him?”

  “He’s harmless. It’s the rats you have to worry about.”

  Just then, one scurried past along the pavement. It was the size of a raccoon. The dog recoiled in fear. So did Gabriel.

  “
Maybe we should go back to the Four Seasons.”

  “It’s not safe.”

  “Neither is this place.”

  “It’s not so bad once you get used to it.”

  “What’s it like on the inside?”

  Dina switched off the engine. “It’s haunted. But otherwise it’s quite nice.”

  They sidestepped the panting dog and passed through the cedar doorway, into a hidden paradise. There was an azure-blue swimming pool, a red clay tennis court, and a seemingly endless garden of bougainvillea, hibiscus, banana trees, and date palms. The immense house was built in the Moroccan tradition, with tiled interior courtyards where the incessant murmur of Casablanca faded to silence. The labyrinthine rooms seemed frozen in time. It might have been 1967, the year the owner tossed a few belongings into a bag and fled to Israel. Or perhaps, thought Gabriel, it was a more genteel age. An age when everyone in the neighborhood spoke French and worried about how long it would be before the Germans were parading down the Champs-Élysées.

  The two caretakers were named Tarek and Hamid. They had purchased the job from the previous caretakers, who had grown too old to look after the place. They avoided the interior of the house, keeping to the gardens and the small guest cottage instead. Their wives, children, and grandchildren lived in a nearby Bidonville.

  “We’re the new owners,” said Gabriel. “Why can’t we just fire them?”

  “Bad idea,” said Yaakov Rossman. Before transferring to the Office, Yaakov had worked for Shabak, Israel’s internal security service, running agents in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He spoke fluent Arabic and was an expert on Arab and Islamic cultures. “If we try to let them go, it will cause an uproar. It would be bad for our cover.”

  “So we’ll give them a generous severance package.”

  “That’s an even worse idea. Every relative they have from every corner of the country will be pouring through our door looking for money.” Yaakov shook his head reproachfully. “You really don’t know much about these people, do you?”

  “So we keep the caretakers,” said Gabriel. “But what’s this nonsense about the place being haunted?”

  They were standing in the cool silence of the house’s main internal courtyard. Yaakov glanced nervously at Dina, who in turn looked at Eli Lavon. It was Lavon, Gabriel’s oldest friend in the world, who eventually answered.

  “Her name is Aisha.”

  “Muhammad’s wife?”

  “Not that Aisha. Different Aisha.”

  “Different how?”

  “Aisha is a jinn.”

  “A what?”

  “A demon.”

  Gabriel looked to Yaakov for a fuller explanation.

  “Muslims believe that Allah fashioned man out of clay. The jinns he made from fire.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Very. By day the jinns live among us in inanimate objects, leading lives quite like ours, but they come out after dark in any form they desire.”

  “They’re shape-shifters,” said Gabriel dubiously.

  “And wicked,” said Yaakov, nodding gravely. “Nothing gives them more pleasure than harming humans. Belief in the jinns is particularly strong here in Morocco. It’s probably a holdover from the pre-Islamic beliefs of the traditional Berber religion.”

  “Just because Moroccans believe it doesn’t mean it’s true.”

  “It’s in the Koran,” said Yaakov defensively.

  “That doesn’t make it true, either.”

  There was another exchange of nervous glances between the three veteran Office agents.

  Gabriel frowned. “You don’t actually believe this drivel, do you?”

  “We heard a lot of strange noises in the house last night,” said Dina.

  “It’s probably infested with rats.”

  “Or jinns,” said Yaakov. “The jinns sometimes come in the form of rats.”

  “I thought we only had one jinn.”

  “Aisha is their leader. Apparently, there are many others.”

  “Says who?”

  “Hamid. He’s an expert.”

  “Really? And what does Hamid suggest we do about it?”

  “An exorcism. The ceremony takes a couple of days and involves the slaughter of a goat.”

  “It could interfere with the operation,” said Gabriel after giving the idea due consideration.

  “It could,” agreed Yaakov.

  “Aren’t there countermeasures we can deploy short of a full-blown exorcism?”

  “All we can do is try not to make her angry.”

  “Aisha?”

  “Who else?”

  “What makes her angry?”

  “We can’t open the windows, sing, or laugh. We’re also not allowed to raise our voices.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Hamid sprinkled salt, blood, and milk in the corners of all the rooms.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “He also told us not to shower at night or use the toilet.”

  “Why not?”

  “The jinns live just beneath the surface of water. If we disturb them . . .”

  “What?”

  “Hamid says we will suffer a great tragedy.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.” Gabriel looked around the beautiful courtyard. “Does this place have a name?”

  “Not that anyone can remember,” said Dina.

  “So what shall we call it?”

  “The Dar al-Jinns,” said Lavon gloomily.

  “That might upset Aisha,” said Gabriel. “Something else.”

  “How about the Dar al-Jawasis?” asked Yaakov.

  Yes, that was better, thought Gabriel. The Dar al-Jawasis.

  The House of Spies.

  They arranged for the wives and eldest daughters of Tarek and Hamid to come to the house and prepare a traditional Moroccan meal. They arrived in short order, two plump veiled women and four beautiful young girls, laden with straw baskets overflowing with meat and vegetables from the markets of the old medina. They spent the entire afternoon cooking in the huge kitchen, chattering softly in Darija to avoid disturbing the jinns. Soon the entire house smelled of cumin and ginger and coriander and cayenne.

  Gabriel poked his head through the kitchen door around seven o’clock and saw endless platters of Moroccan salads and appetizers, and huge clay pots of couscous and tagine. There was enough to feed a village, so at Gabriel’s insistence the women invited the rest of their relatives from the Bidonville to partake of the feast. They ate together in the largest of the courtyards—the destitute Moroccans and the four strangers whom they assumed to be Europeans—beneath a canopy of diamond-white stars. To conceal their facility with Arabic, Gabriel and the others spoke only in French. They talked of the jinns, of the broken promises of the Arab Spring, and of the murderous band of killers who called themselves the Islamic State. Tarek said that several young men from his Bidonville, including the son of a distant cousin, had gone to the caliphate. The DST staged raids in the Bidonville from time to time and carted off the Salafis to the Temara interrogation center to be tortured.

  “They have stopped many attacks,” he said, “but one day soon there’s going to be another big attack like the one in 2003. It’s only a matter of time.”

  It was on that note that the meal concluded. The women and their relatives returned to the Bidonville, taking all the leftover food with them, while Tarek and Hamid went into the garden to keep watch for the jinns. Gabriel, Yaakov, Dina, and Eli Lavon bade one another good night and retired to their separate rooms. Gabriel’s overlooked the sea. One of the guardians had etched a circle around the bed in coal to protect it from the demons, and in the four corners were salted droplets of blood and milk. Exhausted, Gabriel fell instantly into a deep sleep, but shortly before dawn he awoke with a desperate urge to relieve himself. He lay in bed for a long time debating what to do before finally checking the time on his mobile. It was a few minutes after five o’clock. Sunrise was at 6:49. He closed his eyes. Better not to
tempt fate, he thought. Better to leave Aisha and her friends undisturbed.

  47

  Casablanca, Morocco

  Later that morning Jean-Luc Martel, hotelier, restaurateur, clothier, jeweler, international dealer of illicit narcotics, and asset of French and Israeli intelligence, boarded his private Gulfstream aircraft, JLM Deux, at Nice’s Côte d’Azur Airport and flew to Casablanca. He was accompanied by his not-quite wife, his not-quite friends who lived in the monstrous villa on the other side of the bay, and a British spy who until recently had earned his living as a professional assassin. In the annals of the global war against Islamic terrorism, no operation had ever had such a beginning. It was a first, everyone agreed. Against all reason, and with no justification, they hoped it would be the last.

  Martel had arranged for a pair of Mercedes limousines to ferry the party from the airport to the Four Seasons. They roared past the flashy new apartment blocks and the squalor of the Bidonvilles before turning onto the seafront Corniche and making their way at motorcade speed to the hotel’s heavily defended entrance. JLM and party were expected. As a result, the cars received only a cursory inspection before being waved into the motor court, where a small battalion of bellmen waited to receive them. Doors were flung open, and a mountain of matching luggage was loaded onto the waiting trolleys. Then the baggage and its owners squeezed through the choke point of the magnetometer. All were admitted without delay, save for Christopher Keller, who twice set off the alarm. The hotel’s chief of security, after finding no prohibited objects on Keller’s person, joked that he must have been made out of metal. Keller’s tight, unfriendly smile did nothing to allay his suspicions.

  A chapel silence hung over the cool of the refrigerated lobby, it being high summer in Morocco and therefore the low season for beachfront hotels. Followed by their caravan of belongings, JLM and party flowed toward reception, Martel and Olivia Watson dazzling in white, Mikhail and Natalie feigning boredom, Keller still smarting over his treatment at the door. The hotel’s general manager handed over the room keys—as usual, Monsieur Martel had been granted the luxury of an advance check-in—and offered a few syrupy words of welcome.