The Secret Servant Read online

  “We wait for the shaheeds to arrive, Graham. And then we kill them before they can kill Elizabeth.”

  “We?”

  “What do you think you’re going to do? Shoot them like snipers from a long way off? Shoot them like gentlemen from twenty paces? You have to let them get close. And then you have to kill them before they can hit their detonator switches. That means headshots at close range. It’s not pleasant, Graham. And if the gunmen hesitate for an instant, it will end in disaster.”

  “The Met has a unit called SO19: the Blue Berets. They’re special firearms officers, trained for this very sort of thing. If memory serves, we sent them to Israel for training.”

  “You did,” said Shamron. “And they’re very good. But they’ve never been placed in a live situation like this. You need gunmen who’ve done something like this before—gunmen who aren’t going to fold under the pressure.” Shamron paused, then added: “You need gunmen like Gabriel and Mikhail.”

  “Gabriel can barely stand up,” Seymour said.

  “Gabriel will be fine,” Shannon said without bothering to consult him. “Let us finish what we started.”

  “How are you going to be sure it’s really her?”

  Gabriel looked at Robert Halton. “If anyone can tell, it’s her own father. Put him in the yard on the north side of the Abbey with a miniature radio. He’ll be able to see anyone approaching from Whitehall or Victoria. When he sees Elizabeth, send the signal to us. Mikhail and I will take care of the rest.”

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Seymour said. “How are they going to get Elizabeth to walk to her own execution?”

  Gabriel thought of what Ibrahim had said the night of his death in Denmark. “They’ll tell her she’s about to be released,” he said. “That way she’ll go willingly and do exactly what they tell her.”

  “Bastards,” Seymour said softly. He glanced at his watch. “I take it you have all the firearms and ammunition you need?”

  Gabriel nodded slowly.

  “What about communications?”

  “They can borrow radios from our embassy security staff,” Carter said. “Our DS agents work routinely with the Met on protective details. We can all tie in on the same secure frequency.”

  Seymour looked at Gabriel. “What do we do about him? He can’t go to Westminster looking like that?”

  “I’m sure we can find something for him to wear here,” Carter said. “We have two hundred people down in the basement who came to London from Washington with suitcases filled with clothing.”

  “What about his face? He looks bloody awful.”

  “Fixing his face, I’m afraid, would require a Christmas miracle.”

  Graham Seymour frowned, walked over to the ambassador’s desk, and dialed the phone.

  “I need to speak to the prime minister,” he said. “Now.”

  59

  WESTMINSTER ABBEY: 9:45 A.M., CHRISTMAS DAY

  The Gothic towers of Westminster Abbey—England’s national house of worship, setting for royal coronations since William the Conqueror, and burial ground for British monarchs, statesmen, and poets—sparkled in the crisp winter sunlight. The bright interval promised by the forecasters the previous morning had finally materialized.

  Gabriel did not wonder if it was a good omen or bad. He was only pleased to have the radiant warmth of the sun against his swollen cheek. He was seated on a bench in Parliament Square, dressed in borrowed clothes and borrowed wraparound sunglasses over his battered eyes. The doctors at the embassy had given him enough codeine to temporarily dull the pain of his injuries. Even so, he was leaning slightly against Mikhail for support. The younger man’s leather jacket was still damp from a night pursuing Gabriel across Essex by motorcycle. His right hand was tapping a nervous rhythm against his faded blue jeans.

  “Stop,” said Gabriel. “You’re giving me a fucking headache.”

  Mikhail stopped for a moment, then started up again. Gabriel stared toward the triangular-shaped lawn on the north side of the Abbey. Adrian Carter was standing beneath a bare-limbed tree along Victoria Street, wearing the ushanka hat he had worn the afternoon they had walked together in the Tivoli gardens of Copenhagen. Standing next to him, with a fedora on his head, dark glasses over his eyes, and a wire in his ear, was Ambassador Robert Halton. And next to Halton was Sarah Bancroft, formerly of the Phillips Collection museum in Washington, D.C., lately of the Central Intelligence Agency, and now a fully indoctrinated citizen of the night. Of all those present, only Sarah truly had a sense of the atrocity that was about to occur. Would she watch? Gabriel wondered. Or this time would she take the opportunity to look the other way?

  He glanced around the sunlit streets of Westminster. Eli Lavon and Dina Sarid were loitering in Great George Street, Yaakov and Yossi were flirting with Major Rimona Stern outside the Houses of Parliament, and Mordecai was standing in the shadow of Big Ben with a tourist guidebook open in his hands. Graham Seymour was in an unmarked command vehicle on the other side of Victoria Street in Storey’s Gate, along with the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the chief of SO19, the special operations division. Twenty of SO19’s best gunmen had been summoned at short notice and were now scattered around the Abbey and the surrounding streets of Westminster. Gabriel could hear their clipped communications in his ear, but thus far he had only been able to pick out a half dozen of them. It didn’t matter if he knew their identities. It only mattered that they knew his.

  “Was it bad?” Mikhail asked. “The beatings, I mean.”

  “They were just having a bit of fun,” said Gabriel dismissively. He was in no mood to relive the previous night. “It was nothing compared to what Ibrahim endured at the hands of the Egyptian secret police.”

  “Did it feel good to shoot him like that?”

  “Ishaq?”

  The younger man nodded.

  “No, Mikhail, it didn’t feel good. But then, it didn’t feel bad either.” Gabriel lifted his hand and pointed toward the north entrance of the Abbey. “Look at all those people over there. Many of them would soon be dead if I hadn’t acted the way I did.”

  “If we don’t hit our targets, they still may die.” Mikhail looked at Gabriel. “You sound as if you’re trying to convince yourself that you were morally justified in torturing him.”

  “I suppose I am. I crossed a line. But then we’ve all crossed a line. The Americans crossed a line after 9/11, and now they’re trying to find their way back to the other side. Unfortunately, the goals of the terrorists haven’t changed—and the generation soon to emerge from the killing fields of Iraq is going to be much more violent and volatile than the ones who came out of Afghanistan.”

  “We dare to fight back, and the terrorists accuse us of being the real terrorists.”

  “It’s their secret weapon, Mikhail. Get used to it.”

  Gabriel heard a crackle in his earpiece. He looked toward the north entrance of the Abbey and saw the vast doors swing slowly open. Graham Seymour had arranged for the Abbey’s staff to admit the Christmas worshippers earlier than was customary, a simple maneuver that would drastically reduce the number of potential targets. Gabriel only hoped the shaheeds didn’t deduce from the change that they were walking into a trap.

  “Where was I?” Gabriel asked.

  “You were talking about secret weapons.”

  “Last night, Mikhail. Where was I last night?”

  “Harwich.”

  “I’ve always wanted to visit Harwich,” Gabriel said. “How much did Chiara see?”

  “Only the end, when they were loading you into the van.” Mikhail put a hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “I wish you would have let me shoot that bastard for you.”

  “Relax, Mikhail. It’s Christmas.”

  “Not for us,” Mikhail said. “I only hope Ishaq wasn’t lying.”

  “He wasn’t,” said Gabriel.

  “What if they bring her somewhere else?”

  “They won’t. You have your ciga
rettes?”

  Mikhail tapped the left-hand pocket of his jacket.

  “And your lighter?” asked Gabriel.

  “I have everything. We just need Elizabeth.”

  “She’s coming,” said Gabriel. “It will be over soon.”

  The car was a Ford Fiesta, pale gray and well worn. Abel, the one with green eyes, handled the driving, while Cain sat next to her in the backseat. Absent their balaclava masks, she saw their faces for the first time and was shocked by their youth. They wore heavy coats, were carefully shaven, and smelled of sandalwood cologne. Cain was squeezing her arm with his left hand and holding a gun in his right. Elizabeth tried not to look at the weapon or to even think about it. Instead she stared silently out her window. It had been more than two weeks since she had been outside; two weeks since she had seen another human other than Cain and Abel and their masked accomplices; two weeks since she had seen the sun or had possessed even the most basic sense of time. The window was her portal on reality. Cain and Abel were from the world of the damned, she thought. On the other side of the glass was the land of the living.

  For a few minutes her surroundings were unfamiliar. Then the entrance of the Camden Town Underground station flashed past, and from there she was able to track their route south across London. Despite the pleasant weather, the streets were oddly quiet. In the Tottenham Court Road she saw holiday wreaths and realized it was probably Christmas morning.

  They crossed Oxford Street and headed down Charing Cross to Trafalgar Square, then made their way along Whitehall to Westminster. As they turned into Victoria Street, Elizabeth saw a crowd milling about beneath the North Tower of the Abbey. Standing beneath a leafless tree, next to a tired-looking man in an ushanka hat, was a tall, distinguished-looking figure in a fedora who bore a sharp resemblance to her father. It wasn’t her father, of course. Her Colorado-born father would never be caught dead in a hat like that.

  A moment later they turned into Abbey Orchard Street. Abel pulled into an illegal spot and shut down the engine. Cain slipped the gun into his coat pocket and squeezed her arm tightly.

  “We’re going to take a very short walk,” he said. “At the end of it, you will be released. Get out of the car slowly and put both your hands in the pockets of your raincoat. We will lead you where we want you to go. Keep your eyes on the ground and don’t say a word. If you don’t do exactly what we tell you, I’ll shoot you in the heart. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” she said calmly.

  Cain reached across Elizabeth Halton’s lap and opened her door. She swung her legs out of the car and stepped into the street, her first step toward freedom.

  The hands of Big Ben lay at 9:57 when Gabriel’s earpiece crackled. The voice he heard was Adrian Carter’s.

  “Victoria Street,” said Carter calmly. “She’s about to cross Storey’s Gate into the Sanctuary. She’s wearing a blond wig and a tan raincoat.”

  “Shaheeds?”

  “One on each arm.”

  “Halton has just condemned two men to death, Adrian. Is he sure?”

  “He’s sure.”

  “Get him out of there. Now.”

  Carter took Robert Halton by the elbow and led him toward Great George Street, with Sarah trailing two paces behind. Gabriel and Mikhail stood in unison and started walking. Sarah was watching them. Look away, he thought. Keep walking and look away.

  They paused for a few seconds on the corner of Parliament Square to allow a London bus to rattle past, then quickly crossed the street and entered the grounds of the Abbey. Mikhail walked on Gabriel’s left, his breath shallow and fast, the footfalls sharp and crisp, like an echo of Gabriel’s own. Gabriel’s Beretta was on his left hip and the butt was pressing painfully against a broken rib. A split second is all he would have. A split second to get his weapon off his hip and into firing position. When he was a boy, like Mikhail, he could do it in the time it took most men to clap their hands. And now? He walked on.

  They passed through the thin shadows beneath the trees where Carter and Halton had been standing a few seconds earlier. When they emerged again into the sunlight, they saw Elizabeth and her escorts for the first time, moving deliberately along the sidewalk close to the northern façade of the Abbey. Her eyes were concealed behind a large pair of movie-starlet sunglasses, and her hands were in her coat pockets. A shaheed was holding each arm. Their free hands were shoved into the outward-facing pockets of their heavy jackets.

  “They’ve got their fingers on the detonator switches, Mikhail. You see it?”

  “I see it.”

  “Do you see the people behind them? When we start shooting, you can’t miss.”

  “I won’t miss.”

  “You have your cigarettes?”

  “I’m ready.”

  “Keep walking.”

  Two hundred worshippers were still standing outside the North Tower, waiting patiently to be admitted. Gabriel put a hand on Mikhail’s elbow and nudged him along the fringes of the crowd, onto the intersecting walkway. Elizabeth and the terrorists were directly in front of them, forty yards away and closing fast. One second, thought Gabriel. One second.

  Cain’s fingers were digging into her upper arm and his hand was shaking with fear. She wondered why they had decided to release her in a crowded public place like Westminster Abbey. Then Cain murmured something to Abel in Arabic that made her feel as though a stone had been laid over her heart and Elizabeth realized that she had been brought to this place not to be freed but to be executed.

  She glanced from one terrorist to the other. The heavy coats, the look of death in their eyes, the trembling hands…They were going to die here, too, she thought. They were shaheeds wrapped in suicide belts. And in a few seconds she would be a shaheed, too.

  She looked toward the crowd of people gathered outside the Abbey’s North Tower. They were the real targets. Elizabeth had been kidnapped in a bloodbath and it appeared they planned to execute her in one as well. She couldn’t allow more innocent blood to be shed because of her. She had to do something to save as many lives as she could.

  “Look down,” Cain snapped.

  No, Elizabeth thought. I will not look down. I will not submit.

  And then she saw him…

  The angular man of medium height with wraparound sunglasses and ash-colored temples. The man walking along the edge of the crowd with a younger pale man at his side. It was the same man who had tried to save her in Hyde Park—she was sure of it. And he was going to try to save her again now.

  But how could he possibly do it?

  Cain and Abel had their hands in their pockets. It would only take them an instant to hit their detonators. It was an instant Elizabeth had to take from the terrorists and give to the two men advancing toward her—the two men who had just stopped walking and were in the process of lighting cigarettes. I will not submit, she thought. Then she drove the toe of her left foot into her right heel and felt herself falling to the pavement.

  Cain caught her, a single reflexive act of kindness that would cost him his life. When she was upright again, she saw the two men draw their guns like twin flashes of lightning and start shooting. Cain’s face disappeared behind a blossom of blood and brain tissue, while Abel’s green eyes simultaneously exploded inside their sockets. The gunmen streaked past her in a blur, guns in their outstretched hands, as if they were chasing after their own bullets. Cain fell to the ground first, and the man with gray temples leaped onto his chest and fired several more rounds into his head, as though he were trying to shoot him into the ground. Then he tore Cain’s hand from his coat pocket and yelled at Elizabeth to run away. Model prisoner to the end, she sprinted across the lawn of the Abbey toward Victoria Street, where the distinguished-looking man with the fedora hat was suddenly standing with his arms open to receive her. She hurled herself against his chest and wept uncontrollably. “It’s all right, Elizabeth,” said Robert Halton. “I’ve got you now. You’re safe, my love.”

  PART FIVE
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br />   A WEDDING BY THE LAKE

  60

  JERUSALEM

  Two homecomings of note occurred the day after Christmas. The first had for its backdrop Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington and was broadcast live around the world. A president was in attendance, as was his entire national security team and most of the Congress. A Marine band played; a country-music star sang a patriotic song. Speeches were made about American determination and resolve. Praise was heaped upon the men and women of American and British intelligence who had made this day possible. No mention was made of ransom or negotiation and the name Israel was not uttered. Elizabeth Halton, still traumatized by her captivity and the circumstances of her rescue, attempted to address the crowd, but managed only a few words before breaking down. She was immediately placed aboard a waiting helicopter and flown under heavy guard to a secret location to begin her recovery.

  The second homecoming took place at Ben-Gurion Airport and, by coincidence, occurred at precisely the same moment. There were no politicians in attendance and no television cameras present to record the event for posterity. No patriotic music was performed, no speeches were made; indeed, there was no official reception of any kind. As far as the State of Israel was concerned, the twenty-six men and women aboard the arriving charter from London did not exist. They were nonpersons. Ghosts. Lies. They disembarked in darkness and, despite the lateness of the hour, were shuttled immediately to an anonymous office block in Tel Aviv’s King Saul Boulevard, where they endured the first of what would be many debriefings. There was nothing pro forma about these sessions; they knew that once the celebrations had ended the questions would begin. A storm was coming. Shelters would have to be hastily constructed. Provisions set aside. Cover stories made straight.