House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(98)
The first town of any significance was Imouzzer. Built by the French, it was inhabited by some thirteen thousand members of the A?t Seghrouchen, a prominent Berber tribe that spoke a distinct dialect of the ancient Berber tongue. The air was several degrees cooler—they were now above four thousand feet in elevation—and the souks and male-only cafés along the main street were crowded. Keller scanned the faces of the young and old alike. They were noticeably different from the faces he had seen in Casablanca and Fez. European features, fairer hair and eyes. It was as if they had crossed an invisible border.
Just then, Keller’s mobile phone pulsed with an incoming message. He read it and then looked at Martel.
“Our friends are under the impression we’re being followed again. They think it might be the same man who was with us yesterday in Meknes and Volubilis. They’d like us to get a better photo of him.”
“What do they have in mind?”
Keller instructed the driver to pull over at a kiosk at the far end of town. The car carrying Mikhail, Natalie, and Olivia stopped behind them, as did a dusty Renault. In the side-view mirror, Keller could see the passenger—cropped dark hair, wide cheekbones, sunglasses, American baseball cap—but the driver was obscured.
“Get us a couple bottles of water,” he told Martel.
“It’s not the friendliest of towns.”
“I’m sure you can take care of yourself.”
Martel climbed out and walked over to the kiosk. Keller peered into the side-view mirror and saw the passenger stepping from the Renault. Through the heavily tinted rear window of the Mercedes, Keller snapped a photo of the passing figure. The result was a useless blurred profile. But a moment later, when the man returned to the Renault, Keller captured a clear three-quarter image of the man’s face. He showed it to Martel when the Frenchman slid into the backseat with two sweating bottles of Sidi Ali mineral water.
“That’s definitely him,” said Martel. “He’s the one I saw in the Rif last winter with Khalil.”
As the car eased away from the curb, Keller sent the photo to the Casablanca command post. Then he checked the side-view mirror. The second Mercedes was directly behind them. And behind the Mercedes was a dusty Renault with two men inside.
Many years of close and sometimes controversial cooperation between the CIA and the Moroccan DST had earned Langley access to Morocco’s long list of known jihadists and fellow travelers. As a result, it took the analysts in the Counterterrorism Center a matter of minutes to identify the man in Keller’s photograph. He was Nazir Bensa?d, a former member of the Moroccan Salafia Jihadia who was jailed after the Casablanca suicide bombings in 2003. Released in 2012, Bensa?d made his way to Turkey and eventually to the caliphate of ISIS. The government of Morocco was under the impression that he was still there. Obviously, that was not the case.
A photo of Bensa?d taken at the time of his imprisonment soon appeared on the display screens of the Black Hole in the CTC, along with another photo snapped in 2012 during the Moroccan’s arrival at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport. Both photos were forwarded to Gabriel, who sent them on to Keller. Keller confirmed that Nazir Bensa?d was the man he had just seen.
But what was Nazir Bensa?d doing in a town of thirteen thousand Berbers in the Middle Atlas Mountains? And why was he now following Keller and the others toward Erfoud? It was possible that Bensa?d had slipped back into Morocco to work in the hashish business of Mohammad Bakkar. But the more likely explanation was that he was looking after the interests of Bakkar’s partner, the tall Iraqi who called himself Khalil and walked with a limp.
Inside the Black Hole the technicians digitally marked the Renault sedan and its two occupants, while at Fort Meade in Maryland the NSA locked onto the signals being emitted by their mobile phones. Adrian Carter rang the seventh floor to break the news to CIA Director Morris Payne, who quickly relayed it to the White House. By seven thirty Washington time, the president and his senior national security team were gathered in the Situation Room complex, watching the video feeds from the two drones.
At the House of Spies in Casablanca, Gabriel and Yaakov Rossman watched the video, too, while down the hall two caretakers prayed for deliverance from demons fashioned of fire. Through the speakers of his laptop computer, Gabriel could hear the excited chatter at the CTC in Langley. He wished he could share their optimism, but he could not. The entire operation was now in the hands of a man whom he had deceived and blackmailed into doing his bidding. We don’t always get to choose our assets, he reminded himself. Sometimes they choose us.
53
Erfoud, Morocco
The four-wheel drives were waiting in a hot, dusty square outside the Café Dakar in Erfoud. They were Toyota Land Cruisers, newly washed, white as bone. The drivers wore cotton trousers and khaki vests, and conducted themselves with the smiling efficiency of professional tour guides. They were not. They were Mohammad Bakkar’s boys.
South of Erfoud was the great Tafilalt Oasis, with its endless groves of date palms—eight hundred thousand in all, according to the French-language guidebook Natalie clutched tightly in her hand. Gazing out her window, she thought again of that night in Palmyra, and of her dream that morning. Saladin walking beside her in the light of a violent moon, her head in his hand . . . She looked away and saw Olivia watching her intently from the opposite side of the Toyota’s backseat.