The Secret Servant Page 28

  50

  HAMPSTEAD HEATH: 10:25 P.M., CHRISTMAS EVE

  He parked where they told him to park, in the Constantine Road at the southern tip of Hampstead Heath. There was no other traffic moving in the street, and Gabriel, as he had made his final approach, detected no signs of surveillance, opposition or friendly. He shut off the engine and pressed the interior trunk release, then opened the center console hatch and dropped the keys inside. A gentle rain had started to fall. As he stepped outside, he cursed himself for failing to bring a hat.

  He walked to the back of the car and removed the first duffel. As he was reaching for the second, he heard noises at his back and wheeled around to find a pack of young carolers advancing festively toward him. For a mad instant he wondered whether they might be the Sphinx’s watchers but quickly dismissed that notion as they bade him a Happy Christmas and paraded obliviously by. He placed the second bag in the street and closed the trunk. The carolers were now singing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” outside a small brick cottage strung with holiday lights. A sign in the window read: GIVE US PEACE IN OUR TIME.

  Gabriel towed the duffel bags a few yards along the street, then crossed a footbridge over a set of sunken railroad tracks and entered the heath. To his right was a darkened running track. In the cement esplanade outside the padlocked gate, four immigrant men in their twenties were kicking a football about beneath the amber glow of a sodium lamp. They appeared to pay Gabriel no heed as he labored past and started up the slope of Parliament Hill, toward the bench where they had told him to wait for their next contact. He arrived to find it occupied by a small man with a frayed coat and matted beard. His accent, when he spoke to Gabriel, was East London and leaden with drink.

  “Happy Christmas, mate. What can I do for you?”

  “You can get off the bench.”

  “It’s my bench tonight.”

  “Not anymore,” said Gabriel. “Move.”

  “Piss off.”

  Gabriel drew Adrian Carter’s Browning Hi-Power and leveled it at the man’s head. “Get the fuck out of here and forget you ever saw me. Do you understand?”

  “Loud and fucking clear.”

  The man got quickly to his feet and melted into the darkness of the Heath. Gabriel ran his hand along the back and underside of the bench and found a mobile phone taped to the bottom of the seat on the left side. He quickly removed the battery and searched the phone for any concealed explosive charges. Then he reconnected the battery and pressed the POWER button. When the telephone was back online, he spoke quietly into his throat microphone.

  “Nokia E50.”

  “Number?” asked Uzi Navot.

  Gabriel recited it.

  “Any recent activity.”

  “It’s clean.”

  “Text activity?”

  “Nothing.”

  Gabriel stared down at the lights of London and waited for the phone to ring. Fifteen minutes later, he heard a thin, tinny version of the Adhan, the Muslim call to prayer. He silenced it with a press of a button and raised the phone to his ear. It took them only thirty seconds to deliver the next set of instructions. Gabriel dropped the phone into the rubbish bin next to the bench, then took hold of the duffel bags and started walking.

  At the makeshift command center inside the Israeli embassy, Uzi Navot laid down the handset of his secure radio and snatched up the receiver of his telephone. He quickly dialed a number for Thames House, the riverfront headquarters of MI5, and ten seconds later heard the voice of Graham Seymour.

  “Where is he now?” Seymour asked.

  “Heading across Hampstead Heath toward Highgate. They just told him that if he has a radio or a weapon on him at the next stop, Elizabeth Halton will be executed immediately. In a few seconds he’s going to be off the air.”

  “What can we do for you?”

  “Trace a telephone.”

  “Give me everything you have on it.”

  Navot gave Seymour the model and telephone number.

  “I don’t suppose they were foolish enough to leave any information in the calling history.”

  “The phone was clean, Graham.”

  “We’ll run it and see if we come up with anything. But I wouldn’t hold out much hope. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of jihadists in our local telecommunications industry. They’re damned clever when it comes to covering their tracks with phones.”

  “Just give us anything you come up with.”

  Navot slammed down the phone and picked up the radio handset again. He grunted a few words in terse Hebrew, then looked at Shamron. He was pacing the room slowly, leaning heavily on his cane.

  “You’re wasting your time chasing that phone, Uzi. You should be chasing the watchers instead.”

  “I know, boss. But where are the watchers?”

  Shamron stopped in front of a computer monitor and peered at a grainy night-vision image of four young men playing football outside the padlocked Hampstead Heath running track.

  “At least one of them is right there in front of you, Uzi.”

  “We’ve had them under watch since before Gabriel arrived. No phone calls. No text messaging. Only football.”

  “Then you should assume that’s what the Sphinx told him to do,” Shamron said. “That’s the way I would have done it—an old-school, physical signal. If Gabriel is clean, keep playing football. If Gabriel is being followed, have an argument of some sort. If Gabriel has a radio, take a cigarette break.” Shamron poked at the screen. “Like that boy is doing right there.”

  “You think one of them is a spotter?”

  “I’d bet my life on it, Uzi.”

  “That means that there’s someone else in the heath who can see him—someone with a cell phone or a two-way pager.”

  “Exactly,” said Shamron. “But you’re never going to find him. He’s already gone by now. Your only option is to follow the spotter.”

  Navot looked at the screen. “I don’t have the resources to follow four men.”

  “You don’t have to follow four. You only have to follow one. Just make sure you pick the right one.”

  “Which one is that?”

  “Eli has good instincts about these things,” Shamron said. “Let Eli decide. And whatever you do, make sure you get another beacon on Gabriel before he leaves Highgate. If we lose him now, we might never find him again.”

  Navot reached for his radio. Shamron started pacing again.

  Gabriel jettisoned the Browning and the radio in a stand of trees at the center of the heath, then crossed the levee between the Highgate Ponds and made his way to Millfield Lane. Taped to the nearest lamppost was a snapshot of a dark blue BMW station wagon. The car itself was fifty yards farther along the lane, outside a large freestanding brick house with a string of smiling reindeer on the lawn. Gabriel opened the rear hatch and peered inside. The keys lay in plain sight, in the center of the cargo area. He removed them, placed the bags inside, then subjected the vehicle to a thorough inspection before climbing behind the wheel and tentatively turning the key.

  The engine started right away. Gabriel opened the glove box and saw a single sheet of paper, which he examined by the ambient light of the dashboard. Listed on the page was a detailed set of driving instructions—a journey that would take him from Highgate to a headland for the distant reaches of Essex appropriately named Foulness Point. On the passenger seat was a well-thumbed Bartholomew Road Atlas. It was dated 1995 and opened to map number 25. The drop site was was marked with an X. The surrounding waters were labeled in red: DANGER ZONE.

  Gabriel slipped the car into gear and eased away from the curb under the watchful gaze of the smiling reindeer. He turned right into Merton Lane, just as they instructed him to do, and headed east along the edge of the Highgate Cemetery. In Hornsey Lane, a male pedestrian in a shoddy mackintosh raincoat stepped in his path. Gabriel put his foot hard on the brake, too late to avoid a minor collision that sent the pedestrian tumbling to the asphalt. The man bounced quickly to h
is feet and pounded his fist on the hood in a rage; then, after reaching briefly beneath the passenger side wheel well, he stormed off. Gabriel watched him go, then made his way to the Archway Road. He turned left and headed for the M25.

  At that same moment in Hampstead Heath, the vagrant returned to his encampment atop Parliament Hill. He spent a few seconds picking through the rubbish bin, as if looking for a morsel of something edible, then settled himself once more on his bench overlooking the cityscape of London. His thoughts were focused not on food or even drink but on the four young men now filing over the footbridge to the Constantine Road. We think one of them is the spotter, Uzi Navot had said. The Memuneh wants you to decide. He already had. It was the one in the denim jacket, black high-top Converse sneakers, and Bob Marley knit cap. He was good for so young a man, but Lavon was better. Lavon was the best there ever was. He waited until the four men were out of sight, then he removed his false beard and tattered overcoat and started after them.

  For the first ninety minutes of Gabriel’s journey, the weather had held to a persistent drizzle, but as he crossed the drawbridge leading to Foulness Island, God in His infinite wisdom unleashed a torrential downpour that turned the road into a river. There were no headlamps in his rearview mirror and none coming toward him from the opposite direction. Gabriel, as he sped past dormant farms and grassy tidal creeks, allowed himself to wonder if this would be his last earthly vision—not the Jezreel Valley of his birth, not Jerusalem or the narrow streets of his beloved Venice, but this windswept headland at the edge of the North Sea.

  Five miles beyond the drawbridge, Gabriel glimpsed a sign amidst the deluge, warning that soon the road would end. For reasons known only to himself, he took careful note of the time, which was 12:35. A quarter-mile later he turned into an abandoned car park at Foulness Point and, as instructed, switched off the engine. Leave the keys in the ignition, the voice had said to him in Hampstead Heath. Take the bags out to the point and place them on the beach. For a few desperate seconds he considered hurling the money into the car park and driving at the speed of light back to London. Instead he extracted the bags slowly, then dragged them through an opening in the earthen seawall and down a sandy path to the narrow beach.

  As he was nearing the water’s edge he heard a noise that sounded like the wind in the dune grass. Then, from the corner of his eye, he noticed the movement of something black which, on a clear night, he might have mistaken for a passing moon shadow. He never saw the one who delivered a sledgehammer blow to the side of his head, nor did he ever see the needle that was rammed into the side of his neck. Chiara appeared, dressed in a white gown stained with blood, and pleaded with him not to die. Then she receded into flashing blue light and was gone.

  Shamron and Navot stood side by side in the command post, staring wordlessly at the flashing green light. It had not moved for ten minutes. Shamron knew it never would.

  “You’d better send someone out there to have a look,” he said, “just to make sure.”

  Navot raised the handset of his radio to his lips.

  Yossi had followed Gabriel’s beacon as far as Southend-on-Sea and was sheltering in an all-night café overlooking the Thames Estuary when he received Navot’s urgent call. Thirty seconds later, he was behind the wheel of his Renault sedan and driving at a thoroughly unsafe speed toward Foulness Point. When he turned into the car park, he saw the BMW station wagon standing alone with its rear hatch open and the keys still in the ignition. He drew a flashlight from the glove box and followed a set of fresh footprints down to the beach. There were more footprints there of varying sizes, along with a set of parallel grooves that led from the center of the beach to the water’s edge. The grooves had been left by the toes of a man, Yossi thought—a man who was unconscious or worse. He brought his radio to his lips and raised Navot at the command post. “He’s gone,” Yossi said. “And it looks like they took him away by boat.”

  Navot lowered his handset and looked at Shamron.

  “I doubt these lads took him into the North Sea on a night like this, Uzi.”

  “I agree, boss. But where did they take him?”

  Shamron walked over to the map. “Here,” he said, poking at a spot on the other side of the river Crouch. “It’s lined with marinas and other places to land small craft. And the only way to get across it at this time of night is by boat, which means we’re going to have to take the long way around.”

  Navot returned to the radio and ordered his teams to give chase. Then he picked up the phone and broke the news to Graham Seymour at MI5 Headquarters.

  51

  He was lost in a gallery of memory hung with portraits of the dead. They spoke to him as he drifted slowly past—Zwaiter and Hamidi; the brothers al-Hourani; Sabri and Khaled al-Khalifa, father and son of terror. They welcomed him to the land of martyrs and celebrated his death with sweets and song. At the end of the gallery, a bloodless boy with bullet holes in his face guided Gabriel through the doors of a church in Venice. The nave was hung with a cycle of paintings depicting scenes from his life and above the main altar was an unfinished canvas, clearly painted by the hand of Bellini, portraying Gabriel’s death. The master himself was standing in the sanctuary. He took Gabriel by the hand and led him into a garden in Jerusalem, where a woman scarred by fire sat in the shade of an olive tree with a cherubic boy on her lap. Look at the snow, the woman was saying to the child. The snow absolves Vienna of its sins. The snow falls on Vienna while the missiles rain on Tel Aviv. He heard someone calling his name. He went into the church but found it empty. When he returned to the garden, the woman and the boy were gone.

  When finally he woke, it was with the sensation that he had drunk himself sick. His headache was catastrophic, his mouth felt as though it were filled with a wad of cotton wool, and he feared he might throw up, even though it had been many hours since he had taken food. He opened his eyes slowly and, without moving a muscle, took stock of his situation. He lay on his back atop a narrow camp bed, in a small chamber with walls as white as porcelain. His hands were cuffed and the cuffs were attached to an iron loop in the wall behind his head so that his arms were stretched painfully backward. His clothing and wristwatch had been removed; his mouth had been taped closed. A searing white light shone fiercely into his face.

  He closed his eyes, fought off a wave of nausea, and shivered violently from the cold. A good hiding place, this. Surely much planning and enterprise had gone into creating it. Despite the almost clinical cleanliness of the chamber, there were foul smells on the air, the smell of feces and body odor, the odor of a woman held for a long time in captivity. Elizabeth Halton had been here before him—he was certain of it. Was she still close by, he wondered, or had they moved her to another location to make way for the new tenant?

  There were noises beyond the door. Gabriel turned his head a few degrees and saw an eye glaring at him through the peephole. Next he heard the sound of a padlock opening, followed by the groan of the cold hinges. A single man entered his cell. He was no more than thirty, slightly built and dressed in a collared shirt with a burgundy V-necked pullover. He gazed at Gabriel quizzically for a long moment through a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, as if he had been looking for a library or bookshop and had stumbled onto this scene instead. Gabriel found something familiar in the arrangement of the man’s features. Only when he tore the tape from Gabriel’s face and in Arabic wished him a pleasant evening did he understand why. The voice belonged to a young man from the Oud West in Amsterdam—a young man who was half Egyptian and half Palestinian, a volatile mix.

  It belonged to Ishaq Fawaz.

  He vanished as quickly as he had appeared. A few minutes later, four men entered his cell. They hit him several times in the abdomen before uncuffing his hands, then, after lifting him to his feet, hit him some more. The chamber was too small for a proper beating and so, after a brief conference, they dragged him naked up a flight of stairs and into a darkened warehouse space. Gabriel struck first, a move tha
t seemed to catch them off guard. He managed to incapacitate one of them temporarily before the other three jumped onto his back and drove him onto the cold cement floor. There they throttled, kicked, and pounded on him for several minutes until, from somewhere in the warehouse, came an order to cease and desist. They let him lay there for some time, vomiting his own blood, before finally returning him to his cell and securing his hands to the wall again. He fought to remain conscious but could not. The door of the church in Venice was still ajar. He slipped inside and saw Bellini standing atop his work platform high above the main altar, putting the finishing touches on the canvas depicting Gabriel’s death. Gabriel climbed slowly upward and, with Bellini at his side, began to paint.

  52

  WALTHAMSTOW, LONDON: 2:15 A.M., CHRISTMAS DAY

  The spotter was good. Cairo good. Baghdad good.

  The route he had taken from Hampstead Heath had been long and needlessly complicated: four different buses, two long hikes, and a final tube ride on the Victoria Line from King’s Cross to Walthamstow Central. Now he was walking up the Lea Bridge Road with a mobile phone pressed to his ear and Eli Lavon trailing a hundred yards behind him. He turned into Northumberland Road and thirty seconds later entered a small terraced house with a pebble dash exterior. There were lights burning in the windows on the second floor, evidence of other operatives inside.