House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(86)
“Will he be free?”
“Martel? I think we can fit it into his schedule.”
Smiling, Shamron plugged the radio into the power strip on his worktable and switched it on. A moment later, after adjusting the tuning dial, he found a bit of music.
“I don’t recognize it,” said Gabriel.
“You wouldn’t, you’re too young. It’s Artie Shaw. The first time I heard this . . .” He left the thought unfinished.
“What’s it called?” asked Gabriel.
“‘You’re a Lucky Guy.’”
Just then, the radio died and the music fell silent.
Shamron frowned. “Or maybe not.”
46
Casablanca, Morocco
The road linking Casablanca’s Mohammed V International Airport with the center of Morocco’s largest city and financial hub was four lanes of smooth coal-black asphalt, along which Dina Sarid, a reckless motorist by nature and nationality, drove with extraordinary care.
“What are you so worried about?” asked Gabriel.
“You,” she replied.
“What have I done now?”
“Nothing. I’ve just never driven a chief before.”
“Well,” he said, staring out his window, “there’s a first time for everything.”
Gabriel’s overnight bag lay on the backseat, his attaché case was balanced on his knees. In it was the American passport that had allowed him to sail unmolested through Moroccan border control and customs. Things might have changed in Washington, but in much of the world it was still good to be an American.
All at once the traffic slowed to a halt.
“A checkpoint,” explained Dina. “They’re everywhere.”
“What do you suppose they’re looking for?”
“Maybe the chief of Israeli intelligence.”
A line of orange pylons guided the traffic onto the shoulder of the road, where a pair of gendarmes was inspecting the vehicles and their occupants, watched over by a DST tough in plainclothes and sunglasses. While lowering her window, Dina spoke a few words to Gabriel in fluent German—German being the language of her cover identity and false passport. The bored gendarmes waved her forward, as though they were chasing away the flies. The DST man’s thoughts were clearly elsewhere.
Dina quickly raised her window against the heavy, merciless heat and turned the air conditioner on full. They passed a large military installation. Then it was farmland again, small plots of rich dark earth, tended mainly by inhabitants of the surrounding villages. The stands of eucalyptus reminded Gabriel of home.
At last, they reached the ragged edges of Casablanca, North Africa’s second-largest city, eclipsed only by the megalopolis of Cairo. The farmland did not surrender entirely; there were patches of it between the smart new apartment blocks and the shantytowns of corrugated metal-and-cinderblock shacks that were home to hundreds of thousands of Casablanca’s poorest residents.
“They call them Bidonvilles,” said Dina, pointing out one of the shantytowns. “I suppose it sounds better than a slum. The people there have nothing. No running water, barely enough to eat. Every once in a while the government tries to clear away the Bidonvilles with bulldozers, but the people come back and rebuild. What choice do they have? They have nowhere else to go.”
They passed a plot of thin brown grass where two barefoot boys were watching over a flock of skinny goats.
“The one thing they do have in the Bidonvilles,” Dina was saying, “is Islam. And thanks to Wahhabi and Salafist preachers, it’s getting more and more extreme. Do you remember the attack in 2003? All those boys who blew themselves up came from the Bidonvilles of Sidi Moumen.”
Gabriel did remember the attacks, of course, but in much of the West they were largely forgotten: fourteen bombings against mainly Western and Jewish targets, forty-five dead, more than a hundred wounded. They were the work of an al-Qaeda affiliate known as Salafia Jihadia, which in turn had ties to the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group. For all its natural beauty and Western tourism, Morocco remained a hotbed of radical Islam where ISIS had managed to establish deep roots and numerous cells. More than thirteen hundred Moroccans had traveled to the caliphate to fight for ISIS—along with several hundred more ethnic Moroccans from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands—and Moroccans had played an outsize role in ISIS’s recent terror campaign in Western Europe. And then there was Mohammed Bouyeri, the Dutch Moroccan who shot and stabbed filmmaker and writer Theo van Gogh on a street in Amsterdam. The killing was not the spontaneous act of one troubled man; Bouyeri was a member of a cell of radical North African Muslims based in The Hague known as the Hofstad Network. For the most part, Morocco’s security services had managed to deflect the country’s extremism outward. Still, there were plenty of plots at home. Morocco’s interior ministry had boasted recently that it had broken up more than three hundred terror plots, including one involving mustard gas. There were some things, thought Gabriel, that were better left unsaid.
They breasted a hill and the pale blue Atlantic opened before them. The Morocco Mall, with its futuristic IMAX movie theater and Western boutiques, occupied a newly developed stretch of land along the coast. Dina followed the Corniche toward downtown, past beach clubs and restaurants and sparkling white seafront villas. One was the size of a commercial building.