House of Spies Read online

  She went into the walk-in closet. Her clothing for the day lay folded on a shelf. Otherwise, her bags were packed. So were Mikhail’s. The labels spoke of exclusive manufacture, but the luggage, like Dmitri Antonov himself, was counterfeit. The smallest contained a false bottom. In the hidden compartment were a Beretta 92FS, two magazines loaded with 9mm rounds, and a sound suppressor.

  After Natalie agreed to work for the Office, Mikhail had trained her to properly load and discharge a firearm. Now, crouched on the floor of the closet, she quickly threaded the aluminum suppressor into the end of the barrel, rammed one of the magazines into the grip, and chambered the first round. Then she raised the weapon, holding it with two hands, the way Mikhail had taught her, and took aim at the man holding her head in his hand.

  Go ahead, Maimonides, make a liar of me . . .

  “What are you doing?” came a voice from behind her.

  Startled, Natalie pivoted and pointed the gun at Mikhail’s chest. She was breathing heavily; the grip of the Beretta was wet in her trembling hands. Mikhail stepped forward and slowly, gently, lowered the barrel of the gun toward the floor. Natalie relaxed her grip and watched while he swiftly returned the Beretta to its original state and placed it in the hidden compartment of the counterfeit bag.

  Rising, he placed a forefinger to Natalie’s lips and pointed toward the ceiling to indicate the presence of Moroccan DST transmitters. Then he led her outside, onto the terrace, and held her close.

  “Who are you?” he whispered into her ear, in Russian-accented English.

  “I’m Sophie Antonov,” she answered dully.

  “What are you doing in Morocco?”

  “My husband is putting together a deal with Jean-Luc Martel.”

  “What kind of business is your husband in?”

  “He used to do minerals. Now he’s an investor.”

  “And Jean-Luc Martel?”

  She didn’t answer. She felt suddenly cold.

  “Would you like to explain to me what that was all about?”

  “Nightmares.”

  “What kind of nightmares?”

  She told him.

  “It was just a dream.”

  “It almost happened once.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said. “You don’t know how good he is.”

  “We’re better.”

  “Are we really?”

  There was a silence.

  “Send a message to the command post,” Natalie whispered finally. “Tell them I can’t do it. Tell them I can’t be around him. I’m afraid I’ll bring down the entire operation.”

  “No,” said Mikhail. “I will send no such message.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re the only one who can identify him.”

  “You saw him, too. In the restaurant in Georgetown.”

  “Actually,” replied Mikhail, “I was trying very hard not to look at him. I barely remember his face.”

  “What about the security video from the Four Seasons?”

  “It’s not good enough.”

  “I can’t be in his presence,” she said after a moment. “He’ll remember me. Why wouldn’t he? I was the one who saved his miserable life.”

  “Yes,” said Mikhail. “And now you’re going to help us kill him.”

  He took her back to bed and did his best to make her forget the dream. Afterward, they showered together and dressed. Natalie spent a long time arranging and rearranging her hair in the mirror.

  “How do I look?” she asked.

  “Like a Jew from Marseilles,” said Mikhail with a smile.

  Upstairs, the hotel staff was clearing away the last of the breakfast buffet. Over coffee and bread, Mikhail read the morning papers on his tablet while Natalie, affecting tedium, contemplated the ancient chaos of the medina. Finally, shortly before eleven, they went downstairs to the lobby, where Martel and Christopher Keller were seeing to the bill. Outside, Olivia was watching the porters tossing luggage into the waiting cars.

  “Sleep well?” she asked.

  “Never better,” said Natalie.

  She ducked into the back of the second car and took her place next to the window. A face she did not recognize stared back at her in the glass.

  Maimonides . . . So good to see you again . . .

  52

  Langley, Virginia

  The Counterterrorism Center had once been located in a single room on Corridor F on the sixth floor of CIA Headquarters. With its televisions and ringing telephones and stacks of files, it had looked like the newsroom of a failing metropolitan daily. Its officers worked in small teams dedicated to specific targets: the Red Army Faction, the Irish Republican Army, the Palestine Liberation Organization, Abu Nidal, Hezbollah. There was also a unit, formed in 1996, that focused on a little-known Saudi extremist named Osama bin Laden and his burgeoning network of Islamic terror.

  Not surprisingly, the CTC had expanded in size since the attacks of 9/11. It now occupied a half acre of prime Agency real estate on the ground floor of the New Headquarters Building, and was accessed through its own lobby and security turnstiles. Owing to security concerns, the real name of the CTC’s chief was no longer a matter of public record. He was known to the outside world, and to the rest of Langley, only as “Roger.” Kyle Taylor liked the name. No one, he reckoned, was afraid of a man named Kyle. But a Roger was someone to be feared, especially if he commanded a fleet of armed drones and had the power to vaporize a man for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Uzi Navot had first encountered Kyle Taylor a decade earlier, when Taylor was working at the CIA’s station in London. Their dislike of one another was mutual and instantaneous. Navot viewed Taylor—who was fluent in no language other than English, and therefore unsuited for work in the field—as little more than an indoor spy and a boardroom warrior. And Taylor, who harbored a traditional CIA resentment of the Office and Israel, and perhaps a little more, regarded Navot as conniving and not to be trusted. Otherwise, they got on famously.

  “Your first time in the Center?” asked Taylor after easing Navot’s path through security.

  “No. But it’s been a while.”

  “We’ve probably grown since the last time you were here. We had to. On any given day we’re running ops in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Libya.”

  He sounded like a corporate salesman talking about his firm’s unprecedented third-quarter expansion. “And now Morocco,” said Navot quietly, egging Taylor on.

  “Actually, given the political sensitivity of the mission, very few people in the building know about it. Even here in the Center,” Taylor added. “It’s special access only. We’re using one of our smaller op rooms. We’ll be totally black.”

  Taylor led Navot along a corridor lined with numbered doors, behind which nameless, faceless analysts and operators tracked terrorists and plots around the globe. At the end of the hall was a short flight of metal stairs and another checkpoint, through which Taylor and Navot passed without scrutiny. Beyond it was an ill-lit foyer and a cipher-protected door. Taylor punched the code rapidly into the keypad and stared directly into the lens of the biometric reader. A few seconds later the door opened with a snap.

  “Welcome to the Black Hole,” he said, leading Navot inside. “The others are already here.” Taylor introduced Navot to Graham Seymour, perhaps forgetting they were well acquainted, perhaps not, and then to Paul Rousseau. “And Adrian I assume you know.”

  “Very well,” said Navot, accepting Carter’s outstretched hand. “Adrian and I have been through the wars together, and we have the scars to prove it.”

  It took a moment for Navot’s eyes to fully adjust to the gloom. Outside, it was early morning of what promised to be an oppressive summer’s day, but in the restricted ops room deep inside Langley it was a permanent night. At desks around the perimeter sat several technicians, their youthful faces lit by the glow of computer screens. Tw
o wore flight suits, the two who were piloting the pair of drones now loitering above eastern Morocco without the knowledge of the Moroccan government. Images from the aircraft’s high-resolution cameras flickered on the screens at the front of the room. The Predator, with its two Hellfire missiles, was already above Erfoud. But the Sentinel stealth drone was southeast of Fez, thus granting its camera an unobstructed view of the Palais Faraj. Navot watched as Christopher Keller and Jean-Luc Martel stepped into the hotel’s forecourt. A few seconds later, two Mercedes sedans slipped beneath an archway and turned south toward the mountains.

  Navot sat down next to Graham Seymour. Kyle Taylor had pulled Adrian Carter into a corner of the room for a private consultation. The tension between them was obvious.

  “Any idea who’s running the show?” asked Navot.

  “For the moment,” replied Graham Seymour, “I’d say the ball is in Gabriel’s court.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until the minute Saladin shows his face. If that happens,” said Seymour, “all bets are off.”

  The traffic in the Ville Nouvelle was a nightmare. Even in ancient Fez there seemed to be no escaping it. Eventually, the commercial buildings receded and small plots of cultivated farmland appeared, along with new apartment buildings. They were three-level blockhouses, old before their time, with garages on the ground level. Most of the garages had been converted into tiny restaurants and shops, or were being used as pens for animals. Sheep and goats grazed among newly planted olive trees. Families shared picnic lunches in whatever shade they could find.

  Gradually, the land tilted toward the distant peaks of the Middle Atlas, and the olive trees gave way to dense groves of carob and argan and Aleppo pine. Eagles circled overhead, searching for jackals. And above the eagles, thought Christopher Keller, the drones were searching for Saladin.

  The first town of any significance was Imouzzer. Built by the French, it was inhabited by some thirteen thousand members of the Aït Seghrouchen, a prominent Berber tribe that spoke a distinct dialect of the ancient Berber tongue. The air was several degrees cooler—they were now above four thousand feet in elevation—and the souks and male-only cafés along the main street were crowded. Keller scanned the faces of the young and old alike. They were noticeably different from the faces he had seen in Casablanca and Fez. European features, fairer hair and eyes. It was as if they had crossed an invisible border.

  Just then, Keller’s mobile phone pulsed with an incoming message. He read it and then looked at Martel.

  “Our friends are under the impression we’re being followed again. They think it might be the same man who was with us yesterday in Meknes and Volubilis. They’d like us to get a better photo of him.”

  “What do they have in mind?”

  Keller instructed the driver to pull over at a kiosk at the far end of town. The car carrying Mikhail, Natalie, and Olivia stopped behind them, as did a dusty Renault. In the side-view mirror, Keller could see the passenger—cropped dark hair, wide cheekbones, sunglasses, American baseball cap—but the driver was obscured.

  “Get us a couple bottles of water,” he told Martel.

  “It’s not the friendliest of towns.”

  “I’m sure you can take care of yourself.”

  Martel climbed out and walked over to the kiosk. Keller peered into the side-view mirror and saw the passenger stepping from the Renault. Through the heavily tinted rear window of the Mercedes, Keller snapped a photo of the passing figure. The result was a useless blurred profile. But a moment later, when the man returned to the Renault, Keller captured a clear three-quarter image of the man’s face. He showed it to Martel when the Frenchman slid into the backseat with two sweating bottles of Sidi Ali mineral water.

  “That’s definitely him,” said Martel. “He’s the one I saw in the Rif last winter with Khalil.”

  As the car eased away from the curb, Keller sent the photo to the Casablanca command post. Then he checked the side-view mirror. The second Mercedes was directly behind them. And behind the Mercedes was a dusty Renault with two men inside.

  Many years of close and sometimes controversial cooperation between the CIA and the Moroccan DST had earned Langley access to Morocco’s long list of known jihadists and fellow travelers. As a result, it took the analysts in the Counterterrorism Center a matter of minutes to identify the man in Keller’s photograph. He was Nazir Bensaïd, a former member of the Moroccan Salafia Jihadia who was jailed after the Casablanca suicide bombings in 2003. Released in 2012, Bensaïd made his way to Turkey and eventually to the caliphate of ISIS. The government of Morocco was under the impression that he was still there. Obviously, that was not the case.

  A photo of Bensaïd taken at the time of his imprisonment soon appeared on the display screens of the Black Hole in the CTC, along with another photo snapped in 2012 during the Moroccan’s arrival at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport. Both photos were forwarded to Gabriel, who sent them on to Keller. Keller confirmed that Nazir Bensaïd was the man he had just seen.

  But what was Nazir Bensaïd doing in a town of thirteen thousand Berbers in the Middle Atlas Mountains? And why was he now following Keller and the others toward Erfoud? It was possible that Bensaïd had slipped back into Morocco to work in the hashish business of Mohammad Bakkar. But the more likely explanation was that he was looking after the interests of Bakkar’s partner, the tall Iraqi who called himself Khalil and walked with a limp.

  Inside the Black Hole the technicians digitally marked the Renault sedan and its two occupants, while at Fort Meade in Maryland the NSA locked onto the signals being emitted by their mobile phones. Adrian Carter rang the seventh floor to break the news to CIA Director Morris Payne, who quickly relayed it to the White House. By seven thirty Washington time, the president and his senior national security team were gathered in the Situation Room complex, watching the video feeds from the two drones.

  At the House of Spies in Casablanca, Gabriel and Yaakov Rossman watched the video, too, while down the hall two caretakers prayed for deliverance from demons fashioned of fire. Through the speakers of his laptop computer, Gabriel could hear the excited chatter at the CTC in Langley. He wished he could share their optimism, but he could not. The entire operation was now in the hands of a man whom he had deceived and blackmailed into doing his bidding. We don’t always get to choose our assets, he reminded himself. Sometimes they choose us.

  53

  Erfoud, Morocco

  The four-wheel drives were waiting in a hot, dusty square outside the Café Dakar in Erfoud. They were Toyota Land Cruisers, newly washed, white as bone. The drivers wore cotton trousers and khaki vests, and conducted themselves with the smiling efficiency of professional tour guides. They were not. They were Mohammad Bakkar’s boys.

  South of Erfoud was the great Tafilalt Oasis, with its endless groves of date palms—eight hundred thousand in all, according to the French-language guidebook Natalie clutched tightly in her hand. Gazing out her window, she thought again of that night in Palmyra, and of her dream that morning. Saladin walking beside her in the light of a violent moon, her head in his hand . . . She looked away and saw Olivia watching her intently from the opposite side of the Toyota’s backseat.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  Silent, Natalie stared straight ahead. Mikhail was in the passenger seat next to the driver. The second Toyota, the one carrying Keller and Jean-Luc Martel, was about a hundred meters ahead. Behind them the road was empty. Even the Renault, the one that had been following them since Fez, was nowhere to be seen.

  The palm groves receded, the landscape turned harsh and rocky. At Rissani the paved road ended, and soon the great sand sea of Erg Chebbi appeared. The village of Khamlia, a cluster of low mud-colored houses, lay at the southern end of the dunes. There they left the main road and turned onto a pitted desert track. Natalie monitored their progress on her mobile; they were a blue dot moving eastward across an uninhabited land toward the Algerian border. Then suddenly the b
lue dot froze as they ventured beyond cellular service. Mikhail had brought a satellite phone for just such an eventuality. It was behind Natalie, in the same bag as the Beretta.

  For half an hour they drove as all around them the great wind-sculpted dunes turned brick-red with the gathering dusk. They passed a small encampment of nomadic Berbers who were boiling water for tea at the entrance of a black camel-hair tent. Otherwise, there was not another living soul. Only the mountainous dunes and the vast sheltering sky. The emptiness was unbearable; Natalie, despite the close proximity of Olivia and Mikhail, felt painfully alone. She scrolled through the photos on her phone, but they were Madame Sophie’s memories, not hers. She could scarcely recall the farm at Nahalal. Hadassah Medical Center, her former place of employment, was all but lost to her.

  At last, the camp appeared, a cluster of colorful tents arranged in the cleft of a dune. Another white Land Cruiser had arrived before them; Natalie supposed it was for the staff. She allowed one of the robed porters to take her bags, but Mikhail, adopting the supercilious manner of Dmitri Antonov, succeeded in carrying his into the camp unassisted. There were three tents arranged around a central court, and a fourth a short distance away with showers and toilets. The court was carpeted and adorned with large pillows and a pair of couches along a low-slung table. The tents were carpeted, too, and furnished with proper beds and writing tables. There was no evidence of electricity, only candles and a large fire in the court that threw shadows on the face of the dune. Natalie counted six staff in all. Two were visibly armed with automatic rifles. She suspected the others were armed as well.

  With sunset, the air turned cooler. In her tent Natalie slipped on a fleece pullover and then went to wash for dinner. Olivia joined her a moment later.

  Quietly, she asked, “Why are we here?”