House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(27)
“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 was 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.