The Secret Servant Read online

“Islam,” said Gabriel.

  Ibrahim nodded his head and repeated, “Islam.”

  “You still make furniture for a living, Ibrahim?”

  He shook his head. “I retired several years ago. The Dutch state pays me a generous pension and even a bit of disability because of my two missing fingers. I manage to do a little work on the side. It’s good for my self-respect. It keeps me from growing old.”

  “Where do you work now?”

  “Three years ago the state gave us funding to open an Islamic community center in the Oud West section of the city. I took a part-time job there as counselor. I help new arrivals find their footing. I help our people learn to speak proper Dutch. And I keep an eye on our angry young men. That’s where I first heard the rumor about a plot to shoot down a Jewish airplane.” He glanced at Gabriel to see his reaction. “When I looked into the matter further, I found out it was more than just a rumor, and so I told Professor Rosner. You have me to thank for the fact that two hundred and fifty Jews weren’t blown to pieces over Schiphol Airport.”

  A pair of middle-aged homosexual men came toward them along the embankment. Ibrahim slowed his pace and lowered his gaze reflexively toward the paving stones.

  “I have another job as well,” he said when the men were gone. “I work for a friend in the Ten Kate Market selling pots and pans. He pays me a share of what I take in and lets me leave the stall to pray. There’s a small mosque around the corner on the Jan Hazenstraat. It’s called the al-Hijrah Mosque. It has a well-deserved reputation for the extremism of its imam. There are many young men at the al-Hijrah. Young men whose minds are filled with images of jihad and terror. Young men who speak of martyrdom and blood. Young men who look to Osama bin Laden as a true Muslim. These young men believe in takfir. You know this term? Takfir?”

  Gabriel nodded. Takfir was a concept developed by Islamists in Egypt in the nineteen seventies, a theological sleight of hand designed to give the terrorists a sacred license to kill almost anyone they pleased in order to achieve their goals of imposing sharia and restoring the Caliphate. Its primary target was other Muslims. A secular Muslim leader who did not rule by sharia could be killed under takfir for having turned away from Islam. So could a citizen of a secular Islamic state or a Muslim residing in a Western democracy. To the takfiri, democracy was a heresy, for it supplanted the laws of God with the laws of man; therefore, Muslim citizens of a democracy were apostates and could be put to the sword. It was the concept of takfir that gave Osama bin Laden the right to fly airplanes into buildings or blow up embassies in Africa, even if many of his victims were Muslims. It gave the Sunni terrorists of Iraq the right to kill anyone they wanted in order to prevent democracy from taking root in Baghdad. And it gave Muslim boys born in Britain the right to blow themselves up on London subways and buses, even if some of the people they were taking to Paradise with them happened to be other Muslims who wished to remain on earth a little longer.

  “There is a leader of these young men,” Ibrahim resumed. “He has not been in Amsterdam long—eighteen months, maybe a bit more. He is an Egyptian. He works in an Internet shop and phone center in the Oud West, but he likes to think of himself as an Islamist theoretician and a journalist. He claims to be a writer for Islamist magazines and websites.”

  “His name?”

  “Samir al-Masri—at least that’s what he calls himself. He claims to have connections to the mujahideen in Iraq. He tells our boys it is their sacred duty to go there and kill the infidels who have defiled Muslim lands. He lectures them about takfir and jihad. At night they gather in his apartment and read Sayyid Qutb and Ibn Taymiyyah. They download videos from the Internet and watch infidels being beheaded. They have taken trips together. A few of them went to Egypt with him. There is talk about Samir in the al-Hijrah. There usually is talk in the mosque, but this is different. Samir al-Masri is a dangerous man. If he is not al-Qaeda, then he is a close relative.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “On the Hudsonstraat. Number thirty-seven. Apartment D.”

  “Alone?”

  Ibrahim tugged thoughtfully at his beard and nodded his head.

  “You told Solomon about Samir?”

  “Yes, many months ago.”

  “So why follow me tonight?”

  “Because two days ago Samir and four other young men from the al-Hijrah Mosque disappeared.”

  Gabriel stopped walking and looked at the Egyptian. “Where did they go?”

  “I’ve been asking around, but no one seems to know.”

  “Do you have the names of the other four men?”

  The Egyptian handed Gabriel a slip of paper. “Find them,” he said. “Otherwise, I’m afraid buildings are going to fall.”

  6

  OUD WEST, AMSTERDAM

  I was really looking forward to that Thai food,” said Eli Lavon.

  “I’ll get you Thai food after we break into Samir’s apartment.”

  “Please tell me where you’re going to get me Thai food at three in the morning.”

  “I’m very resourceful.”

  Gabriel rubbed a porthole in the fogged windshield and peered out toward the entrance of the Hudsonstraat. Lavon looked down and tugged at the buttons of his overcoat.

  “We’re not supposed to use rental cars in operational situations unless they’re procured from clean sources.”

  “I know, Eli.”

  “We’re also not supposed to conduct break-ins and crash searches without proper backup or approval from King Saul Boulevard.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that.”

  “You’re bending too many rules. That’s how mistakes happen. I was looking forward to spending the night at the Hotel Europa, not a Dutch holding cell.”

  “Please tell me where I’m supposed to get a clean car and proper backup at three o’clock in the morning in Amsterdam.”

  “So much for your resourcefulness.” Lavon stared gloomily out the window. “Look around, Gabriel. Have you ever seen so many satellite dishes?” He shook his head slowly. “They’re monuments to European naïveté. The Europeans thought they could take in millions of immigrants from the poorest regions of the Muslim world and turn them into good little social democrats in a single generation. And look at the results. For the most part the Muslims of Europe are ghettoized and seething with anger.”

  Trapped between two worlds, thought Gabriel. Not fully Arab. Not quite Dutch. Lost in the land of strangers.

  “This place has always been an incubator for violent ideologies,” Gabriel said. “Islamic extremism is just the latest virus to thrive in Europe’s nurturing environment.”

  Lavon nodded thoughtfully and blew into his hands. “You know, for a long time after I came back to Israel, I missed Vienna. I missed my coffeehouses. I missed walking down my favorite streets. But I’ve come to realize that this continent is dying a slow death. Europe is receding quietly into history. It’s old and tired, and its young are so pessimistic about the prospects of the future they refuse to have enough children to ensure their own survival. They believe in nothing but their thirty-five-hour workweek and their August vacation.”

  “And their anti-Semitism,” said Gabriel.

  “That’s the one thing about Vienna I never miss,” Lavon said. “The virus of modern anti-Semitism started here in Europe, but after the war it spread to the Arab world, where it mutated and grew stronger. Now Europe and the radical Muslims are passing it back and forth, infecting one another.” He looked at Gabriel. “And so here we are again, two nice Jewish boys sitting on a European street corner at three o’clock in the morning. My God, when will it end?”

  “It’s never going to end, Eli. This is forever.”

  Lavon pondered this notion in silence for a moment. “Have you given any thought to how you’re going to get into the apartment?” he asked.

  Gabriel reached into his coat pocket and produced a small metal tool.

  “I could never use one of those things,” Lavon said.


  “I have better hands than you do.”

  “Best hands in the business—that’s what Shamron always said. But I still don’t know what you think you’re going to find inside. If Samir and his cell are truly operational, the apartment will be sanitized.”

  “You’d be surprised, Eli. Their masterminds are brilliant, but some of their foot soldiers aren’t exactly brain surgeons. They’re sloppy. They leave things laying around. They make little mistakes.”

  “So do intelligence officers,” Lavon said. “Have you at least considered the possibility that we’re about to walk straight into a trap?”

  “That’s what Berettas are for.”

  Gabriel opened the door before Lavon could object again and climbed out of the car. They crossed the boulevard at an angle, pausing once to allow an empty streetcar to rattle past, and rounded the corner into the Hudsonstraat. It was a narrow side street lined with terraces of small tenement buildings. They were two levels in height and Orwellian in their uniformity and ugliness. At the front of each building was a small semicircular alcove with four separate doors, two leading to the apartments on the first floor and two leading to the apartments upstairs.

  Gabriel stepped immediately into the alcove of Number 37 and, with Lavon at his back, went to work on the standard five-pin lock on the door for Apartment D. It surrendered ten seconds later. He slipped the lockpick into his pocket and removed the Beretta, then turned the latch and stepped inside. He stood motionless for a moment in the darkness, gun leveled in his outstretched hands, listening for the faintest sound or slightest suggestion of movement. Hearing nothing, he motioned for Lavon to come inside.

  Lavon switched on a small Maglite and led the way into the sitting room. The furnishings were of flea market quality, the floor was cracked linoleum, and the walls were bare except for a single travel poster depicting the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Gabriel walked over to the long trestle table that served as Samir’s desk. It was empty except for a single yellow legal pad and a cheap desk lamp.

  He switched on the lamp and examined the pad. Two-thirds of it had been used and the top page was blank. He moved his fingers over the surface and felt impressions. An amateur’s mistake. He handed the pad to Lavon, then took hold of the flashlight and shone it at an angle over the surface of the table. It was covered in a fine layer of dust except for a precise square in the center—the spot, Gabriel reckoned, where Samir’s computer had been before his flight from Amsterdam.

  “Search the furniture cushions,” Gabriel said. “I’ll have a look around the rest of the flat.”

  He went through a doorway into the kitchen. The debris of Samir’s final gathering with his acolytes from the al-Hijrah Mosque lay strewn across the linoleum countertops: empty takeaway containers, greasy paper plates, discarded plastic utensils, squashed teabags. Gabriel opened the refrigerator, a favorite terrorist storage space for explosives, and saw that it was empty. The same was true of all the cabinets. He looked in the cupboard beneath the sink and found nothing but an unopened container of kitchen cleaner. Samir, Islamic theoretician and spokesman for the jihadi cause, was a typical bachelor slob.

  Gabriel paused for a moment in the sitting room to check on Lavon’s progress, then headed down a short hallway toward the back of the apartment. Samir’s bathroom was as appalling as the kitchen. Gabriel gave it a rapid search, then entered the bedroom. A stripped mattress lay slightly askew on the metal frame and the three drawers of the dresser were all partially open. Samir, it seemed, had packed in a hurry.

  Gabriel removed the top drawer and dumped the remaining contents onto the bed. Threadbare underwear, mismatched socks, a book of matches from a discotheque in London’s Leicester Square, an envelope from a photo-processing shop around the corner. Gabriel slipped the matches into his pocket, then opened the envelope and leafed through the prints. He saw Samir in Trafalgar Square and Samir with a member of the Queen’s Life Guard outside Buckingham Palace; Samir riding the Millennium Wheel and Samir outside the Houses of Parliament. The last photograph, Samir posing with four friends in front of the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, caused Gabriel’s heart to skip a beat.

  Five minutes later he was walking calmly along the empty pavements of the Hudsonstraat, with the photographs in his pocket and Lavon at his side. “If the dates on the pictures are correct, it means Samir and his friends were in London four months ago,” he said. “Someone should probably go to London to have a word with our friends at MI5.”

  “I can see where this is heading,” Lavon said. “You get to go to ride into London like a knight on a white horse and I get to go blind reading the rest of Solomon Rosner’s files.”

  “At least you get to have your Thai food.”

  “Why did you have to mention the Thai food?”

  7

  HEATHROW AIRPORT, LONDON

  Gabriel had spent much of his life eluding the police forces and security services of Europe, and so it was with considerable reluctance that he agreed to be met at Heathrow Airport the following afternoon by MI5.

  He spotted the three-man reception team as he came into the arrivals hall. It was not difficult; they were wearing matching mackintosh raincoats, and one was holding Gabriel’s photograph. He had been instructed to let the MI5 men make the approach, so he went to the information kiosk and spent several minutes pretending to scrutinize a list of London hotels. Finally, anxious to deliver his briefing before the terrorists struck, he walked over and introduced himself. The officer with the photograph took him by the arm and led him outside to a waiting Jaguar limousine. Gabriel smiled. He had always harbored a secret envy of British spies and their cars.

  The rear window slid down a few inches and a long, boney hand beckoned him over. The hand was attached to none other than Graham Seymour, MI5’s long-serving and highly regarded deputy director general. He was in his late fifties now and had aged like fine wine. His Savile Row pin-striped suit fit him to perfection, and his full head of blond hair had a silvery cast to it that gave him the look of those male models one sees in advertisements for costly but needless trinkets. As Gabriel climbed into the car, Seymour appraised him silently for a moment with a pair of granite-colored eyes. He did not look pleased, but then few men in his position would. The Netherlands, France, Germany, and Spain all had their fair share of Muslim radicals, but among intelligence professionals there was little disagreement over which country was the epicenter of European Islamic extremism. It was the country Graham Seymour was sworn to protect: the United Kingdom.

  Gabriel knew that the crisis now facing Britain was many years in the making and, to a large degree, self-inflicted. For two decades, beginning in the 1980s and continuing even after the attacks of 9/11, British governments both Labour and Tory had thrown open their doors to the world’s most hardened holy warriors. Cast out by countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria, they had come to London, where they were free to publish, preach, organize, conspire, and raise money. As a result, Great Britain, the land of John Locke, William Shakespeare, and Winston Churchill, had unwittingly allowed itself to become the primary incubator of a violent ideology that sought to destroy everything for which it had once stood. The British security and intelligence services, confronted by a gathering storm, had responded by choosing the path of accommodation rather than resistance. Extremism was tolerated so long as it was directed outward, toward the secular Arab regimes, America, and, of course, Israel. The failure of this policy of appeasement had been held up for all the world to see on July 7, 2005, when three bombs exploded inside the London Underground and a fourth tore a London city bus to shreds in Russell Square. Fifty-two people were killed and seven hundred more wounded. The perpetrators of this bloodbath were not destitute Muslims from abroad but middle-class British boys who had turned on the country of their birth. And all evidence suggested it was only their opening salvo. Her Majesty’s security services estimated the number of terrorists residing in Britain at sixteen thousand—three
thousand of whom had actually trained in al-Qaeda camps—and recent intelligence suggested that the United Kingdom had eclipsed America and Israel as al-Qaeda’s primary target.

  “It’s funny,” said Seymour, “but when we checked the manifest for the flight from Amsterdam we didn’t see anyone on the list named Gabriel Allon.”

  “Obviously you didn’t look hard enough.”

  The MI5 man held out his hand.

  “Let’s not do this, Graham. Haven’t we more pressing matters to deal with than the name on my passport?”

  “Give it to me.”

  Gabriel surrendered his passport and stared out the window at the traffic rushing along the A4. It was 3:30 in the afternoon and already dark. No wonder the Arabs turned to radicals when they moved here, he thought. Perhaps it was light deprivation that drove them to jihad and terror.

  Graham Seymour opened the passport and recited the particulars. “Heinrich Kiever. Place of birth, Berlin.” He looked up at Gabriel. “East or West?”

  “Herr Kiever is definitely a man of the West.”

  “We had an agreement, Allon.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “It stated that we would grant you absolution for your multitude of sins in exchange for a simple commitment on your part—that you would inform us when you were coming to our fair shores and that you would refrain from conducting operations on our soil without obtaining our permission and cooperation beforehand.”

  “I’m sitting in the back of an MI5 limousine. How much more cooperation and notification do you require?”

  “What about the passport?”

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  “Do the Germans know you’re abusing their travel documents?”

  “We abuse yours, too, Graham. It’s what we do.”

  “We don’t do it. SIS makes a point of traveling only on British or Commonwealth passports.”

  “How sporting of them,” Gabriel said. “But it’s far easier to travel the world on a British passport than it is on an Israeli one. Safer, too. Take a trip to Syria or Lebanon some time on an Israeli passport. It’s an experience you’ll never forget.”