The New Girl (Gabriel Allon #19)(59)

43

Berlin


Hanifa Khoury did not scream, but she dropped the bag of takeaway sushi and emitted a sharp gasp that the neighbors might well have heard had Mikhail not closed the door behind her. Startled by the sound, she glared at him for a moment before turning her gaze once more to Gabriel. A range of expressions passed like the shadow of a cloud over her face. The last was an unmistakable look of recognition.

“My God, it’s—”

“Yes,” said Gabriel, cutting her off. “It’s me.”

She reached for the door, but Mikhail was leaning against it in the manner of a man waiting for a bus. Then she dug a phone from her handbag and tried to dial a number.

“I wouldn’t bother,” said Gabriel. “The service is terrible in this building.”

“Or maybe you’re blocking it so I can’t call for help.”

“You’re perfectly safe, Hanifa. In fact, you’re much safer now than you’ve been in some time.”

Gabriel glanced at Mikhail, who plucked the phone from Hanifa’s grasp. Next he took her handbag and searched its contents.

“What’s he looking for?”

“A suicide vest, an AK-47 . . .” Gabriel shrugged. “The usual.”

Mikhail kept the phone but returned the handbag. Hanifa looked at Sarah. “Is she Israeli, too?”

“What else would she be?”

“She speaks English like an American.”

“The diaspora gives us a decided advantage when recruiting officers.”

“The Jews are not the only people who were scattered to the four winds.”

“No,” agreed Gabriel. “The Palestinians have suffered, too. But they have never been the target of an organized campaign of physical annihilation like the Shoah. That is why we must have a state of our own. We cannot count on Germans or Poles or Hungarians or Latvians to protect us. That is history’s lesson.”

Gabriel spoke these words not in English but in German. Hanifa replied in the same language. “Is that why you’ve kidnapped me? To once again throw the Holocaust in my face to justify turning me into an exile?”

“We haven’t kidnapped you.”

“The Bundespolizei might see it differently.”

“They might,” replied Gabriel. “But I have a very good relationship with the chief of the BfV, mainly because I provide him with a great deal of intelligence about threats to German security. Oh, I suppose you could cause me a bit of embarrassment, but you would be missing out on an important opportunity.”

“What kind of opportunity?”

“To change the course of events in the Middle East.”

She regarded him inquiringly. Her eyes were almost black and prominently lidded. It was like being contemplated by Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer. “How?” she asked at last.

“By giving me the story Omar was working on before he was killed.” Receiving no answer, Gabriel said, “Omar wasn’t murdered in that consulate because of the things he was writing on social media. He was killed because he tried to warn Khalid about a plot against him.”

“Says who?”

“Khalid.”

Hanifa’s eyes narrowed. “As usual,” she said bitterly, “Khalid is mistaken.”

“How so?”

“Omar wasn’t the one who tried to warn him about the plot.”

“Who was it?”

Hanifa hesitated, then said, “It was me.”





44

Berlin


The sushi lay scattered over the floor of the entrance hall, so Mikhail went downstairs to the local Persian takeaway and picked up several orders of grilled meat and rice. They ate at the flat’s small rectangular table, which was set against a window overlooking Kronenstrasse. Gabriel sat with his back to the street, with Hanifa Khoury, his new recruit, at his left hand. Throughout the meal, she scarcely looked in Sarah’s direction. It was obvious she had not forgiven her for using a volume of Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s literary treasure, as bait to ensnare her. It was obvious, too, that she did not believe Sarah to be a citizen of the state she wished to inundate beneath a sea of returning Palestinian exiles.

All Hanifa Khoury had to do to prove her point was to ask Sarah to speak a few words in Hebrew. Instead, she used the occasion to berate the legendary chief of Israeli intelligence for the crimes he and his people had committed against hers. Gabriel suffered through the tirade largely in silence. He had learned long ago that most debates over the Arab-Israeli conflict quickly took on the quality of a cat chasing its own tail. Besides, he did not want to lose Hanifa as a temporary ally. The Jews had prevailed in the contest for Palestine, the Arabs had lost. They had been outsmarted and outfought at every turn. They had been ill served by their leaders. Hanifa was entitled to her pain and anger, though her lecture might have been more tolerable had it not been delivered in German in the city where Hitler and the Nazis had conceived and executed their plan to rid Europe of the Jews. There was nothing to be done about the setting. The great roulette wheel of providence had placed Gabriel Allon and Hanifa Khoury, both children of Palestine, in Berlin that night.

Over coffee and baklava, Hanifa attempted to draw out Gabriel on some of his exploits. And when he gently fended her off, she trained her rhetorical fire on the Americans and their disastrous intervention in Iraq. She had entered Baghdad behind the advancing Coalition forces and had chronicled Iraq’s rapid descent into insurgency and sectarian civil war. In the autumn of 2003, during the bloody Ramadan Offensive, she met a tall, handsome Saudi journalist in the bar of the Palestine Hotel, where she had taken up residence. The Saudi, while not well known to most Western reporters, was one of the most influential and best-sourced journalists in the Arab world.