The New Girl (Gabriel Allon #19)(57)

In fairness, it was not entirely David Price’s fault the evening had not gone well. Sarah had been preoccupied by Khalid’s sudden request to once again place him in touch with Gabriel. It was the first contact she had had with either man since returning to New York. She had learned of Khalid’s abdication by watching CNN and had assumed that Reema had been returned safely. Gabriel, however, had told her the truth. Sarah knew that such an act would not go unpunished. The people responsible would be hunted down, there would be an operation of retribution. All the more reason why her mind had wandered during the play—she could scarcely recall a line the actors spoke—and over dinner at Joe Allen. She wanted to be back in the field with Gabriel and Mikhail and the mysterious Englishman named Christopher Keller, not making small talk over liver and onions with a divorced hedgie from Connecticut.

And so Sarah was not at all displeased when three days later she woke to find in her in-box a boarding pass for that evening’s Lufthansa flight to Berlin. She informed her staff of her travel plans, inaccurately, and saw herself to Newark Airport. It seemed her seatmate, an investment banker from Morgan Stanley, had vowed to drink the aircraft dry. Sarah picked at her dinner and then slept until a snow-dusted German field appeared beneath her window. A courier from the Office’s Berlin Station approached her in the arrivals hall and directed her to a waiting BMW sedan. Mikhail was behind the wheel.

“At least it’s not another damn Passat,” she said as she slid into the passenger seat.

Mikhail followed the airport exit ramp to the autobahn and headed into Charlottenburg. Sarah knew the neighborhood well. While still at the CIA, she had spent six months in Berlin working with the German BfV against an al-Qaeda cell plotting another 9/11 from an apartment on Kantstrasse. Mikhail had secretly visited Sarah several times during her assignment.

“It’s good to be back,” said Sarah provocatively. “I’ve always enjoyed Berlin.”

“Especially in late winter.” The guardrails were spattered with dirty snow, and at half past eight in the morning the sky was still dark. “I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky she isn’t living in Oslo.”

“Who?”

Mikhail didn’t answer.

“Were you there when Reema was killed?”

“Close enough,” answered Mikhail. “Keller, too.”

“Is he in Berlin?”

“Keller?” Mikhail shot her a sidelong glance. “Why do you ask?”

“Just curious, that’s all.”

“Christopher is otherwise engaged at the moment. It’s just the three of us again.”

“Where’s Gabriel?”

“The safe flat.”

Mikhail turned onto Bundesstrasse and followed it to the Tiergarten. There was a demonstration at the Brandenburg Gate, a couple of hundred people, mainly in their twenties, wearing jeans and Scandinavian-style woolen sweaters. They looked like Green Party stalwarts or peace protesters. Their signs, however, betrayed their true political convictions.

“They’re from a group called Generation Identity,” explained Mikhail. “They look quite harmless, but they espouse the same ideology as the skinheads and the rest of the neo-Nazis.”

He made a right turn into Ebertstrasse and lapsed into silence as they passed Berlin’s stark Holocaust memorial, with its twenty-seven hundred slabs of gray concrete arranged on a plot of land the size of a city block. Sarah had taken Mikhail to the memorial during one of his secret visits to Berlin. It had ruined the weekend.

At Potsdamer Platz, once a Cold War wasteland, now a glass-and-steel monument to German economic might, Mikhail headed eastward into the district of Mitte. He made a series of consecutive right turns, a time-tested countersurveillance maneuver, before abruptly pulling to the curb on Kronenstrasse and switching off the engine.

“How much do you know about Gabriel’s family?” he asked.

“The basics, I suppose.”

“He’s a German Jew, our Gabriel. Even though he was born in Israel, he learned to speak German before Hebrew. That’s why he has such a pronounced Berlin accent. He picked it up from his mother.” Mikhail pointed toward a modern apartment block with windows that shone like polished onyx. “When she was a child, she lived in a building that stood right there. In the autumn of 1942, she was shipped to Auschwitz in a cattle car along with the rest of her family. She was the only one to survive.”

A tear spilled onto Sarah’s cheek. “Is there a reason you wanted me to see this?”

“Because the safe flat is right there.” Mikhail pointed toward the building opposite. “Gabriel took out a long-term lease when he became chief.”

“Does he come often?”

“To Berlin?” Mikhail shook his head. “He hates the place.”

“So why are we here?”

“Hanifa,” answered Mikhail as he opened the car door. “We’re here because of Hanifa.”





42

Berlin


It was 8:15 p.m. when Hanifa Khoury, a veteran field producer for the German state broadcaster ZDF, stepped onto the damp pavements of Unter den Linden. A cold wind blew through the leafless trees that gave the famous boulevard its name. Shivering, Hanifa wrapped a black-and-white checkered keffiyeh tightly around her neck. Unlike most Germans, she did not wear the garment for reasons of fashion or anti-Israeli politics; Hanifa was of Palestinian lineage. Her eyes scanned the street in both directions. Having worked as a journalist throughout the Middle East, she was adept at spotting surveillance, especially when carried out by fellow Arabs. She saw nothing suspicious. In fact, it had been several weeks since she had noticed anyone watching her. Perhaps, she thought, they had finally decided to leave her alone.