House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(79)

The delay weighed heavily on them both, especially Gabriel, who had watched Saladin’s retouched face emerge from the labors of his own hand. He carried the sketch with him always, even to his bed in Jerusalem, where he passed four restless nights at the side of his wife. At King Saul Boulevard he sat through endless briefings on matters he had left in the capable hands of Uzi Navot, but everyone could see his thoughts were elsewhere. During a meeting of the Cabinet his mind drifted as the ministers bickered endlessly. In his notebook he sketched a face. A face partially concealed by the hood of a djellaba.

Rousseau woke Gabriel early the next morning with news that the Mediterranean Dream had left Tunis overnight and was now in international waters. But did it contain a concealed shipment of hashish from Morocco? Only one source said it would, the man who lived across the Baie de Cavalaire from Dmitri and Sophie Antonov. The man whose many sins had been officially forgiven and who was now under the complete and total control of a consortium of three intelligence services.

To the uninitiated eye, however, there appeared to be no outward change in his conduct, save for the constant presence at his side of Christopher Keller. Indeed, everywhere Martel went, Keller was sure to follow. To Monaco and Madrid for a pair of previously scheduled business meetings. To Geneva for an eye-opening session with a Swiss banker of questionable ethics. And finally to Marseilles, from which the chief of Martel’s illicit narcotics division had vanished without a trace, leaving behind two dead bodyguards in his electronics shop overlooking the Place Jean Jaurès. The Marseilles police were under the impression René Devereaux had been killed by an underworld rival. Devereaux’s associates, including one Henri Villard, were of the same opinion. During a meeting with Martel and Keller in a safe flat near the Gare Saint-Charles, Villard was on edge about the upcoming shipments. He was afraid, rightly, that there had been a leak. Martel calmed his fears and instructed him to collect the cargo in the usual manner. Close scrutiny of the recording produced by the phone in Keller’s pocket—and of Villard’s movements and communications after the meeting—suggested Martel had not tried to send a clandestine warning to his old network. The hashish was on its way, the payment was loaded into the pipeline. For both the drug dealers and the spymasters, all systems appeared to be go.

The message that would set the next act in motion was delivered through the usual channel, interior minister to interior minister, with no undue sense of urgency. A paid informant inside one of France’s most prominent drug gangs claimed that a large shipment of North African hashish would be arriving in Genoa the following day, aboard the Maltese-registered Mediterranean Dream. The Italians, if they didn’t have anything better to do, might want to check it out. They did indeed. In fact, units of the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian law-enforcement agency responsible for combating drug trafficking, boarded the vessel within minutes of its arrival and began breaking open the containers. Their search would eventually yield four metric tons of Moroccan hashish, not a record by any means but a respectable haul. Afterward, the Italian minister rang his French counterpart and thanked him for the information. The French minister said he was pleased to have been of assistance.

While major news in Italy, the seizure attracted little notice in France, least of all in the former fishing village of Saint-Tropez. But when French customs police raided two ships the following day—the Toulon-bound Africa Star and the Marseilles-bound Caribbean Endeavor—even sleepy Saint-Tropez was impressed. The Africa Star would yield three metric tons of hashish, the Caribbean Endeavor only two. But it would also surrender something that Gabriel and Paul Rousseau had not anticipated: a lead cylinder, forty centimeters in height, twenty in diameter, concealed inside a spool of insulated wire manufactured by a plant in an industrial quarter of Tripoli.

The cylinder bore no markings of any kind. Still, the French customs police, who were trained in how to handle potentially hazardous material, knew better than to open it. Calls were made, alarm bells rung, and by early evening the container had been transported securely to a French government laboratory outside Paris, where technicians analyzed the talcum-like powder they found inside. In short order they determined it was the highly radioactive substance cesium-137, or cesium chloride. Paul Rousseau and the interior minister were told of the discovery at eight that evening, and at twenty minutes past, with Gabriel trailing a step behind, they were rushing through the doors of the élysée Palace to break the news to the president of the Republic. Saladin was coming for them once again, this time with a dirty bomb.





Part Three

The Darkest Corner





43





Surrey, England



Precisely how the Americans learned of the concealed shipment of cesium would never be determined to anyone’s satisfaction, least of all the French. It was one of those mysteries that would linger long after the operational dust had settled. Nevertheless, they did hear about it—that very night, in fact—and before the sun had risen they demanded that all the relevant parties traipse to Washington for an emergency summit. Graham Seymour and Amanda Wallace, the cousins, politely demurred. Faced with the prospect of a radiological dispersion device in the hands of Saladin’s network, they could not afford to be seen running off to the former colonies for help. They were all for transatlantic cooperation—in fact, they were dangerously dependent on it—but for them it was a simple matter of national pride. And when Gabriel and Paul Rousseau added their objections, the Americans quickly capitulated. Gabriel had been confident of such an outcome; he had a good idea of what the Americans were ultimately after. They wanted Saladin’s head on a pike, and the only way they were going to get it was by taking control of Gabriel’s operation. It was better to deny them a home-field advantage. The five-hour time difference alone would be enough to keep them off balance.