House of Spies Page 9

  Gabriel took down a wineglass from the cabinet and filled it with some of the rosé. Then he switched off the kitchen lights and carried the wine upstairs to the drawing room. It was furnished with only a single chair and ottoman and a billboard-size television. Gabriel moved to the window and, parting the curtains, peered into the street, where an expensively overcoated man was at that moment stepping from the back of a taxi. The man started up the front steps of the house but froze suddenly and shot a glance toward the window where Gabriel stood. Then he turned abruptly and descended the flight of steps toward the basement entrance.

  A few seconds later Gabriel heard the sound of a door opening and closing, the flip of a switch, and a curse whispered in the dialect of those native to the island of Corsica. It was the foil wrapper from the bottle of rosé. Gabriel had left it in plain view on the counter. An amateur’s mistake, he thought.

  A bit of light was leaking up the stairwell from the kitchen, enough to silhouette the man who appeared in the entrance of the drawing room a moment later, a gun in his outstretched hands. At the end of the room where Gabriel stood, however, the darkness was absolute. He watched as the man pivoted left and then right with the compact movements of one who knew how to clear a room of well-armed adversaries. Then the man crept forward and with a flip of a switch flooded the room with light. He pivoted one final time, aiming the gun in Gabriel’s direction, before quickly lowering the barrel toward the floor.

  “You damn fool,” said Christopher Keller. “You’re lucky I didn’t kill you.”

  “Yes,” said Gabriel, smiling. “Not for the first time.”

  15

  Kensington, London

  “A Walther PPK,” said Gabriel, admiring Keller’s gun. “How Bond-like of you.”

  “It’s easy to conceal and packs quite a punch.” Keller smiled. “A brick through a plate-glass window.”

  “I didn’t realize MI6 officers were allowed to carry firearms.”

  “We’re not.” Keller filled a wineglass with the rosé and then offered the bottle to Gabriel. “You?”

  “I’m driving.”

  Keller frowned and filled Gabriel’s glass to within a centimeter of the rim. “How did you get in here?”

  “You left the door unlocked.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Gabriel answered truthfully.

  “Someday,” said Keller, “you’re going to have to teach me how to do that.”

  He removed his Crombie overcoat and tossed it carelessly onto the countertop. His suit was charcoal, his necktie was the color of tarnished silver. He almost looked respectable.

  “Where were you?” asked Gabriel. “A funeral?”

  “A meeting with my investment adviser. He took me to lunch at the Royal Exchange and informed me that the value of my portfolio had fallen by more than a million pounds. Thanks to Brexit, I’ve been taking quite a beating lately.”

  “The world is a dangerous and unpredictable place.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Keller. “Your neck of the woods is starting to look like an island of peace and tranquillity, especially now that you’re the one running the place. Sorry I couldn’t make it to your little swearing-in party. I was tied up at the time and couldn’t get away.”

  “The IONEC?”

  Keller nodded. “Three months of unremitting boredom by the sea.”

  “But successful,” said Gabriel. “Ran the watchers of A4 ragged. Record scores on the final exam. Too bad about France, though. That was no way to start a career.”

  “You’re one to talk. Your career has been a series of disasters interspersed with the occasional calamity. And look what it got you. You’re the chief now.”

  “Shamron always said that a career without controversy is not a proper career at all.”

  “How is the old man?”

  “He endures,” said Gabriel.

  “He’s rather like Israel, isn’t he?”

  “Shamron? He is Israel.”

  Keller lit a cigarette and blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling.

  “A new lighter?” asked Gabriel.

  “You don’t miss much.”

  Gabriel took the lighter from Keller’s hand and read the inscription. “He must have worked very hard on that one.”

  “It’s the thought that counts,” said Keller. Then he asked, “How much did he tell you?”

  “He told me that he sent you to France to track down the Moroccan who supplied the Kalashnikovs for the London attack. He said you managed to find this Moroccan in a matter of days despite the fact the DGSI never was able to learn his name. He suggested your former employer, the inimitable Don Anton Orsati, might have provided valuable assistance. He didn’t go into detail.”

  “With good reason.”

  “It seems you met with this Moroccan, whose name was Nouredine Zakaria, at a café in Nice and led him to believe you were a Corsican arms dealer. To prove your bona fides, you agreed to sell him ten Kalashnikovs and ten Heckler & Koch MP7s for the very reasonable price of sixty thousand euros. Unfortunately, the deal didn’t go down as planned, and you found it necessary to kill Zakaria and two of his associates, thus eliminating the only known link between Saladin’s network and the attack on London. All things considered,” said Gabriel, “I’d say you overstepped your brief.”

  “Shit happens.”

  “Quite. And now it’s up to me to clean up the mess.”

  “For the record,” said Keller, “it wasn’t my idea to send you cap in hand to the French.”

  “You have me confused with someone else.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Someone who removes his hat when he enters a room.”

  “So how do you intend to play it?”

  “First, I’m going to ask the French for everything they have on Nouredine Zakaria. And then,” said Gabriel, “I’m going to invite them to join my operation to find Saladin.”

  “Your operation? The French will never go for it. And neither will Graham.”

  “Graham signed off on it this afternoon. He also agreed to let me borrow you. You’re working for me now.”

  “Bastard,” said Keller, crushing out his cigarette. “I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

  They dined that evening in a small Italian restaurant near Sloane Square where neither of them was known. Afterward, Gabriel rode in a taxi alone to the Israeli Embassy, which was located in a quiet corner of Kensington just off the High Street. The ambassador and the station chief were inordinately pleased to see him, as were his bodyguards. Downstairs in the secure communications room—in the lexicon of the Office it was known as the Holy of Holies—he rang the private number of the man he needed to see in Paris. The call found him in his bed, in his sad little bachelor’s apartment on the rue Saint-Jacques. He was not at all displeased to hear the sound of Gabriel’s voice.

  “I was wondering whether you might be able to spare a minute or two sometime tomorrow.”

  “I’m meeting with my minister all morning.”

  “My condolences. What about the afternoon?”

  “I’m free after two.”

  “Where?”

  “The rue de Grenelle.”

  Next Gabriel rang King Saul Boulevard and informed the Operations Desk that he would be extending his stay abroad by at least a day. Travel saw to his arrangements. He was tempted to spend the night in the old safe flat on Bayswater Road, but his bodyguards prevailed upon him to remain inside the station instead. Like most Office outposts, it contained a small bedroom for times of crisis. Gabriel stretched out on the hateful cot but sleep eluded him. It was the pull of an operation, the small thrill of being back in the field, even if “the field” was at that moment an embassy in one of the world’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

  Finally, in the hours before dawn, sleep claimed him. He rose at eight, took his breakfast with the officers of London Station, and at nine climbed into the back of an MI6 Jaguar bound for Heathrow Airport. His flight wa
s British Airways 334. He boarded at the last minute, accompanied by his bodyguards, and took his seat next to the window in first class. As the aircraft rose over southeast England, he peered down at the gray-green fields sinking away beneath him. Inwardly, however, he was watching a large, powerfully built man, Arab in appearance, limping across a hotel lobby in Washington. Hair could be cut or dyed, a face could be altered with plastic surgery. But a limp like that, thought Gabriel, was forever.

  16

  Rue de Grenelle, Paris

  It was said of Paul Rousseau that he had plotted more bombings than Osama bin Laden. He did not dispute the claim, though he was quick to point out that none of his bombs actually exploded. Paul Rousseau was a skilled practitioner in the art of deception who had been granted authority to take “active measures” to remove potential terrorists from circulation before the terrorists could take active measures against the Republic or its citizenry. The eighty-four officers of the Alpha Group, Rousseau’s elite unit of the DGSI, did not waste precious resources tailing suspected terrorists, listening to their phone calls, or monitoring their maniacal musings on the Internet. Instead, they shook the tree and waited for the poisonous fruit to fall into their hands. In another country, in another time, a civil libertarian might have condemned their methods as bordering on entrapment. Paul Rousseau would not have disputed that claim, either.

  For the first six years of its existence, the Alpha Group was one of official France’s most closely held secrets, and its agents operated with impunity. That changed in the aftermath of ISIS’s attack on Washington, when press reports in America revealed that Rousseau had been wounded in the truck bombing of the National Counterterrorism Center in suburban Northern Virginia. Subsequent reports, mainly in the French media, went on to detail some of the Alpha Group’s more unsavory methods. Operations were compromised, assets identified. The interior minister and the chief of the DGSI responded by categorically denying that there was any such unit called the Alpha Group. But it was too late; the damage was done. Quietly, they urged Rousseau to forsake his anonymous headquarters on the rue de Grenelle and move his operation behind the walls of the DGSI’s headquarters in Levallois-Perret. Rousseau, however, refused to budge. He had never been fond of the Paris suburbs. Nor could his agent-runners carry out their duties properly if they were seen entering and leaving a walled compound bearing a sign that read ministère de l’intérieur.

  And so, despite the elevated threat, Paul Rousseau and the Alpha Group continued to wage their quiet war on the forces of radical Islam from an elegant nineteenth-century building in the exclusive seventh arrondissement. A discreet brass plaque proclaimed that the building housed something called the International Society for French Literature, a particularly Rousseauian touch. Inside, however, all subterfuge ended. The technical support staff occupied the basement; the watchers, the ground floor. On the second floor was the Alpha Group’s overflowing Registry—Rousseau preferred old-fashioned paper dossiers to digital files—and the third and fourth floors were the preserve of the agent-runners. Most came and went through the heavy black gate on the rue de Grenelle, either on foot or by car. Others entered through a secret passageway linking the building and the dowdy little antique shop next door, which was owned by an elderly Frenchman who had served in a secret capacity during the war in Algeria. Rousseau was the only member of the Alpha Group who had been allowed to read the shopkeeper’s appalling file.

  The fifth floor was somber and shadowed and quiet, save for the Chopin that occasionally drifted through Rousseau’s open door. Madame Treville, his long-suffering secretary, occupied an orderly desk in the anteroom, and at the opposite end of a narrow hall was the office of Rousseau’s ambitious young deputy, Christian Bouchard. It was an article of faith within the French security establishment that Bouchard would assume control of the Alpha Group if and when Rousseau ever decided to retire. He had tried that once before, after the death of his beloved Colette. The book he hoped to write, a multivolume biography of Proust, was but a pile of handwritten notes. He was now resigned to the fact that the fight against radical Islamic terrorism would be his life’s work. It was not a fight France could lose. Rousseau believed the very survival of the Republic was at stake.

  In Gabriel Allon, he had found a willing if unlikely partner. Their alliance had been formed in the wake of Saladin’s Paris debut, the deadly bombing of the Isaac Weinberg Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism in France. Saladin had not chosen the target lightly; he had known of Gabriel’s secret ties to the woman who ran it. So, too, had Paul Rousseau, and together he and Gabriel had placed an agent of penetration in Saladin’s court. The operation had failed to prevent the attack on Washington, but it had all but ended decades of animosity and mistrust between the Office and the intelligence services of France. A welcome consequence of the new relationship was that Gabriel was now free to travel in France without fear of arrest and prosecution. His litany of sins on French soil, the killings, the collateral damage, had been officially forgiven. He was as legitimate as a career spy could possibly be.

  The Alpha Group’s stringent new security measures required Gabriel to shed his motorcade and protection detail near the Eiffel Tower and to walk the remainder of the way alone. Usually, he entered the building through the gate on the rue de Grenelle, but at Rousseau’s request he came through the passage in the antique shop instead. Rousseau was waiting for him upstairs on the fifth floor, in the glass-walled, soundproof conference room. He wore a crumpled tweed jacket that Gabriel had seen many times before and, as usual, was smoking a pipe in violation of French laws banning the use of tobacco in the workplace. Gabriel was a devout nonsmoker. Still, there was something about Rousseau’s private rebellion he found reassuring.

  He produced a photograph from his attaché case and slid it across the tabletop. Rousseau glanced at the face of the subject and then looked up sharply.

  “Nouredine Zakaria?”

  “You know him?”

  “By reputation only.” Rousseau held up the photograph. “Where did you get this?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Oh, but it is.”

  “It comes from the British,” conceded Gabriel.

  “Which branch?”

  “MI6.”

  “And why is MI6 suddenly interested in Nouredine Zakaria?”

  “Because Nouredine is the one who supplied the Kalashnikovs for the attack in London. Nouredine is the one they call the Scorpion.”

  There is no worse feeling for a professional spy than to be told something by an officer from another service that he should have already known himself. Paul Rousseau endured this indignity while slowly reloading his pipe.

  “How much do you know about him?” asked Gabriel.

  “He works for the largest drug-trafficking network in Europe.”

  “Doing what?”

  “The polite way of saying it is that he handles security.”

  “And the impolite way?”

  “He’s an enforcer and assassin. The Police Nationale believes he’s personally killed at least twelve people. Not that they can prove it,” added Rousseau. “Nouredine is as careful as they come. So is his boss.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “First things first.” Rousseau held up the photo again. “Where did you get this?”

  “I told you, from the British.”

  “Yes, I heard you the first time. But where did the British get it?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Oh,” said Rousseau, “but it is.”

  17

  Rue de Grenelle, Paris

  “Exactly how many guns are we talking about?”

  “I believe it was twenty.”

  “And where did this operative of British intelligence lay his hands on twenty Kalashnikovs and HKs?”

  Gabriel’s expression managed to convey both ignorance and indifference or something in between.

  “And he posed as a Corsican?” asked Rousseau. “Y
ou’re sure of it?”

  “Is that noteworthy?”

  “It might be. You see, only someone who’s lived on the island for many years can imitate their speech.”

  Gabriel said nothing.

  “He is a friend of yours, this British agent?”

  “We’re acquainted.”

  “He must be very well connected to have pulled off something like this. And quite talented.”

  “He has much to learn.”

  “What is your interest in this shabby affair?” asked Rousseau.

  “My interest,” said Gabriel, “is Saladin.”

  “Mine, too. Which is why I’m going to count to ten and restrain my anger. Because it’s quite possible this British friend of yours has managed to prove something I’ve suspected for a long time.”

  “What’s that?”

  But Rousseau did not answer, at least not directly. Instead, adopting the demeanor of a professor, he took a detour backward in time, to the hopeful winter of 2011. In Tunisia and Egypt, a pair of oppressive regimes had been swept away by a sudden wave of popular anger and resentment. Libya was next. In January there were a smattering of protests over housing shortages and political corruption, protests that soon spiraled into a nationwide uprising. It quickly became apparent that Muammar Gaddafi, Libya’s tyrannical ruler, would not follow the example of his counterparts in Tunis and Cairo and go quietly into the Arab night. He had ruled Libya with an iron fist for more than four decades, stealing its oil riches and murdering his opponents, sometimes only for the sake of his own entertainment. A man of the desert, he knew the fate that awaited him if he fell. And so he plunged his backward nation into a full-fledged civil war. Fearing a bloodbath, the West intervened militarily, with France taking a leading role. By October, Gaddafi was dead, and Libya was free.

  “And what did we do? Did we flood Libya with money and other forms of assistance? Did we hold its hand while it tried to make the transition from a tribal society to a Western-style democracy? No,” said Rousseau, “we did none of those things. In fact, we did almost nothing at all. And what happened as a result of our inaction? Libya became yet another failed state, and ISIS moved into the void.”