House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(117)
Beyond the entrance was an ornate Moorish courtyard, blue with moonlight, with cedar doors on all four sides. Keller and Mikhail pivoted through the doorway on the right and crossed a foyer to a stone flight of steps. Instantly, they were met with automatic weapons fire from above. The two operatives dived for cover, right and left, while Gabriel remained pinned down outside in the courtyard. When the gunfire ceased, he slipped into the foyer and sheltered next to Mikhail. Keller, directly opposite, wedged his Kalashnikov into the stairwell and blindly fired several shots into the darkness. Then Mikhail did the same.
When they paused to reload, there was only silence from above. Gabriel peered around the edge of the wall. The landing at the top of the steps appeared empty, but in the darkness he couldn’t be sure. Finally, Keller and Mikhail mounted the first step. At once, there was a piercing scream. A woman’s scream, thought Gabriel—two religiously significant Arabic words that left little doubt as to what would occur next. He grabbed the back of Mikhail’s shirt and pulled with every bit of strength he had left in his body while Keller hurled himself down the steps toward safety. A second too late, the bomb exploded. Saladin, it seemed, had lost his sense of timing.
Gabriel was carrying two mobile phones in the pocket of his jacket, one connected to Adrian Carter, the other to Natalie and Dina. Carter and the rest of the officers gathered in the Black Hole had the advantage of the satellite’s cameras and sensors, but Natalie and Dina had been privy only to the audio. The quality was muted. Even so, they had no trouble making out what was taking place inside the compound. A brief but intense firefight, a woman screaming “Allahu Akbar,” the unmistakable sound of a bomb exploding. After that, there was only silence. Dina quickly started the engine. A moment later they were racing along the main street of Zaida. The little town in the shadow of the Middle Atlas Mountains was now wide awake.
The steps were strewn with the tattered remnants of a woman—smallish, about twenty or twenty-five, pretty once. Here a leg, here a portion of a torso, here a hand, the right, still clutching a detonator switch. The head had rolled to the bottom of the steps and come to rest at Gabriel’s feet. He lifted the black veil from the face and saw a set of delicate features arranged in a mask of religious madness. The eyes were blue—the blue of a mountain lake. Was she a wife or concubine? Or a daughter perhaps? Or was she just another black widow, a lost girl to whom Saladin had strapped a bomb and an ideology of death?
Gabriel closed the blue eyes and covered the face, and followed Keller and Mikhail silently up the stairs. A Kalashnikov lay on the upper landing where it had fallen from the woman’s hands, along with a magazine’s worth of shell casings. To the right a hallway stretched into the darkness. At the end of it was a door—and behind the door, thought Gabriel, was a room at the southeast corner of the house. A room facing Mecca. A room where an injured man now lay alone with no one to protect him.
They picked their way carefully across the landing so as not to disturb the shell casings and moved silently along the corridor. When they reached the door, Keller tested the latch. It was locked. He exchanged a few quick hand signals with Mikhail and motioned for Gabriel to move away, but Gabriel quickly overruled him with a signal of his own. He was an operational chief, and he preferred to deal with his enemies at a meter rather than a mile.
Keller didn’t argue, there wasn’t time. Instead, he kicked down the door and then followed Gabriel and Mikhail inside. Saladin lay on a bare mattress in the darkest corner, his face lit by the glow of a mobile phone. Startled, he reached for the Kalashnikov at his side. Gabriel sprinted toward him, the Jericho in his outstretched hands, and fired eleven shots into Saladin’s heart. Then he reached down and snatched up the fallen phone. It was vibrating with an incoming message.
inshallah, it will be done . . .
66
Morocco–London
Saladin had made his last stand not with a gun but with a Nokia 5 Android phone. There were more scattered around him, along with several Samsung Galaxies and iPhones, eight laptop computers, and dozens of flash drives. Mikhail and Keller quickly loaded the devices into a duffel bag while Gabriel snapped a photo of Saladin’s lifeless face. It was not a trophy. He wanted to prove definitively that the monster was gone and thus deliver a body blow not only to the Islamic State but to the entire global jihadist movement.
Dina and Natalie were turning through the open gate of the compound when Gabriel, Mikhail, and Keller exited the house. Yaakov was digging another Nokia 5 from the pocket of Nazir Bensa?d. The rented Peugeot was not fit for the road, not with the blown-out windscreen and the bullet holes from stem to stern, so they all piled into the Jeep Cherokee instead. In total, from forceful entry to hasty departure, they were inside the compound for less than five minutes.
Evidently, the sound of the gunfire and the explosion had reached the center of Zaida. As they sped along the town’s main street, they were met by a few stares, some curious, others manifestly hostile, but no one tried to stop them. It was not until they reached the tiny Berber hamlet of A?t Oufella, some ten miles down the mountain, that they spotted the first gendarmes coming up the valley.
The units swept past without slowing and continued on toward Zaida. In twenty minutes, perhaps less, they would enter the compound. And in a room on the second floor of the house they would find a large, powerfully built Arab lying alone, with eleven bullet holes in the front of his djellaba. Had he been capable of speech, he would have done so with a distinct Iraqi accent, and had he been ambulatory, he would have walked with a limp. He had lived a life of violence, and had died accordingly. But had he, in his final seconds, ordered another attack? One last curtain call.