House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(95)

“You speak French very well.”

“I can’t tell you how much that means to me, Jean-Luc.”

“Where did you learn it?”

“My mother was French. I spent a lot of time there when I was young.”

“Where?”

“Normandy, mainly, but Paris and the south, too.”

“Everywhere but Corsica.”

Gabriel clicked pause.

“He was bound to make the connection at some point,” said Yaakov. “They come from the same world. They’re two sides of the same coin.”

“Keller was never involved in the drug trade.”

“No,” said Yaakov archly. “He just killed people for a living.”

“I believe in redemption.”

“I should hope so.”

Gabriel frowned and clicked play.

“But you must have had another source. Someone who knew about my ties to René. Someone close to me.”

“We didn’t need a source. We were listening to your phone calls and reading your e-mails.”

“There were no phone calls or e-mails. I suppose all it took was a bit of money. That’s how I got her, too. Olivia loves money.”

Gabriel paused the recording.

“He was bound to make that connection, too,” said Yaakov.

In the House of Spies there was silence, but in the Royal Suite of the Palais Faraj the inhabitants of Gabriel’s operation were now quarreling about whether to dine in the hotel or at a restaurant in the medina. They did so in the manner of the bored and very rich. So convincing was their performance that even Gabriel, who had created them, could not tell whether the row was genuine or staged for the benefit of the Moroccan DST, which surely was listening, too.

“Maybe we’ve lost Martel,” said Gabriel at last. “Who knows? Maybe we never had him in the first place.”

“Is that the jinns talking again?”

Gabriel said nothing.

“He’s been under our control from the moment we burned him. Blanket coverage. Physical, electronic, cyber. Keller’s practically been sleeping in the same room with him. We own him body and soul.”

“Maybe we missed something.”

“Like what?”

“A missing telephone patter or some sort of impersonal communication.”

“Newspaper, no newspaper? Umbrella, no umbrella?”

“Exactly.”

“No one reads newspapers anymore, and it doesn’t rain in Morocco this time of year. Besides,” said Yaakov, “if Mohammad Bakkar thought Martel had switched sides, he would have never summoned him in the first place.”

In Fez, the argument over dinner had grown genuinely heated. Exasperated, Gabriel settled the matter for them, with a terse text to Mikhail. JLM and party would be dining at the hotel that evening.

“Wise move,” said Yaakov. “Better to make an early night of it. Tomorrow’s likely to be a long day.”

Gabriel was silent.

“You’re not thinking about aborting, are you?”

“Of course I am.”

“You’ve come too far,” objected Yaakov. “Send them to the camp, have the meeting. Identify Saladin and light him up. And when he leaves, let the Americans drop some ordnance on him and turn him into a puff of smoke.”

“Sounds so easy.”

“It is. The Americans do it every day.”

Gabriel said nothing.

“What are you going to do?” asked Yaakov.

Gabriel reached down and clicked play.

“You’ll arrive around sunset. The staff will prepare a meal for you. Very traditional Moroccan. Very nice. Mohammad will come after dark . . .”





51





Fez, Morocco



Natalie awoke in sheets drenched with sweat, blinded by sunlight. Squinting, she gazed out at the patch of sky framed by the window, momentarily confused as to her whereabouts. Was she in Fez or Casablanca or Saint-Tropez? Or was she back in the large house of many rooms and courts near Mosul? You are my Maimonides . . . She rolled over and stretched a hand toward the drawstring for the blinds, but it was just beyond her reach. Mikhail’s half of the bed was still in shadow. Shirtless, he slept undisturbed.

She closed her eyes tightly against the sun and tried to gather up the fragments of the morning’s last dream. She had been walking through a garden of ruins—Roman ruins, she was certain of it. They were not the ruins of Volubilis, which they had visited the previous day, but of Palmyra in Syria. Natalie was certain of this, too. She was one of the few Westerners to visit Palmyra after its capture by the Islamic State, and had seen with her own eyes the devastation the holy warriors of ISIS had inflicted there. She had toured the ruins by moonlight, accompanied by an Egyptian jihadist called Ismail who was training at the same camp. But in her dream another man had been at her side. He was tall and powerfully built, and walked with a slight limp. An object of some sort, dripping and mangled, hung from his right hand. Only now, in the heat haze of morning, did Natalie comprehend that the object was her head.

She sat up in bed, slowly, so as not to wake Mikhail, and placed her feet on the bare floor. The tiles felt as though they had just come out of a kiln. All at once she felt nauseated. She supposed it was the dream that had sickened her. Or perhaps it was something she had eaten at dinner, some Moroccan delicacy that had not agreed with her.