House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(77)
For now, Rousseau held his nose and put Martel through his paces. They went over it all again, slowly, meticulously, forward, backward, sideways, and every other way that Rousseau, who was looking for any inconsistency, any reason to question the authenticity of his source, could imagine. Particular attention was paid to the agenda of the winter meeting where Khalil the Iraqi had been present, especially the schedule for upcoming deliveries. Three large shipments were due in the next ten days. All would be concealed inside cargo ships bound from Libya. Two would be arriving at French ports—Marseilles and nearby Toulon—but the third would dock in the Italian port of Genoa.
“If those drugs go missing,” said Martel, “there’s going to be hell to pay.”
“Oranges,” said Rousseau. “Oranges.”
It was at this point that Gabriel interjected himself into the proceedings for the first time. He did so with only the thinnest of introductions, and bearing several blank sheets of paper and a pencil and sharpener. For the better part of the next hour, he sat at the side of the man whose life he had turned inside out, and with his help produced composite sketches of the two versions of Khalil the Iraqi—the 2012 version who wore Western clothing, and the version who appeared in Morocco after the attacks on Washington wearing a traditional djellaba and walking with a noticeable limp. Martel had a famous eye for detail—he had said so himself many times in press interviews—and claimed to never forget a face. He was demanding, too, a trait he revealed fully when Gabriel could not produce a suitable chin for the surgically retooled version of Khalil. They went through three drafts before Martel, with unexpected enthusiasm, gave his approval.
“That’s him. That’s the man I saw last December.”
“You’re sure?” pressed Gabriel. “There’s no rush. We can do another draft, if you like.”
“It’s not necessary. That’s exactly how he looked.”
“And the limp?” asked Gabriel. “You never said which leg was injured.”
“It was the right.”
“You’re positive about that?”
“No question.”
“Did he offer any explanation?”
“He said he’d been in a car accident. He didn’t say where.”
Gabriel studied the finished sketches for a long moment before holding them up for Natalie to see. Her eyes widened involuntarily. Then, regaining her composure, she looked away and nodded slowly. Gabriel set aside the first sketch and contemplated the second at length. It was the new face of terror. It was the face of Saladin.
They dragged him upstairs to Madame Sophie’s bedroom, smeared the side of his neck with Madame Sophie’s blood-red lipstick, and hosed him down with enough of Madame Sophie’s perfume that he left a vapor trail as he drove through the early-morning light, beaten and burned, toward his villa on the other side of the Baie de Cavalaire. He did not go alone. Nicolas Carnot, otherwise known as Christopher Keller, sat in the passenger seat, Martel’s mobile in one hand, a gun in the other. Behind them, in a second vehicle, were four officers of the Alpha Group. Previously, they had been employed by Dmitri Antonov at Villa Soleil. Now, like Nicolas Carnot, they were working for Martel. The exact circumstances surrounding their decision to forsake one master for another were cloudy, but such things were liable to happen in Saint-Tropez in the summertime.
It was twelve minutes past five exactly when the two vehicles turned into the drive of Martel’s villa. Olivia Watson knew this because she had lain awake all night and had rushed to the bedroom window at the sound of car doors opening and closing in the forecourt. Now, she feigned sleep as the bed shifted beneath the weight of her errant lover. She rolled over, their eyes met in the half-light.
“Where have you been, Jean-Luc?”
“Business,” he murmured. “Go back to sleep.”
“Is there a problem?”
“Not anymore.”
“I tried to call you but my phone isn’t working. There’s no Internet either, and our landline is dead.”
“There must be an outage.” His eyes closed.
“Why is Nicolas downstairs? And who are those other men?”
“I’ll explain everything in the morning.”
“It is the morning, Jean-Luc.”
He was silent. Olivia moved closer.
“You smell like another woman.”
“Olivia, please.”
“Who was she, Jean-Luc? Where have you been?”
42
Paris
The reckoning Paul Rousseau had been dreading occurred early that afternoon at the Interior Ministry in Paris. Like Jean-Luc Martel, he did not meet his fate alone; Gabriel went with him. They crossed the courtyard shoulder to shoulder and marched up the grand staircase to the minister’s imposing office, where Rousseau, never one for polite small talk, immediately confessed his operational sins. British intelligence, he said, had identified the source of the assault rifles used in the London attack as a French Moroccan named Nouredine Zakaria, a career criminal connected to one of France’s largest drug-trafficking networks. Without the authorization of his chief or the Interior Ministry, Rousseau and the Alpha Group had worked with two allied services—the British and, quite obviously, the Israelis—to penetrate the aforementioned network and turn its leader into an asset. The operation, he went on, had proven successful. Based on intelligence provided by the source, the Alpha Group and its partners could say with moderate confidence that ISIS had seized control of a significant portion of the illicit trade in North African hashish and that Saladin, the mysterious Iraqi mastermind of the group’s external operations division, was likely hiding in Morocco, a former French protectorate.