The Secret Servant (Gabriel Allon #7)(16)

“I think an al-Qaeda cell from Amsterdam might have entered Britain in the last forty-eight hours with the intention of carrying out a major attack.”

“Just one cell?” Seymour quipped. “I’m sure they’ll feel right at home.”

“That bad, Graham?”

Seymour nodded his gray head. “At last count we were monitoring more than two hundred networks and separate groupings of known terrorists. Half our Muslim youth profess admiration for Osama bin Laden, and we estimate that more than one hundred thousand supported the attacks on the London transport system, which means they have a very large pool of potential recruits from which to draw in the future. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t sound the alarm just because another cell of Muslim fanatics has decided to put ashore.”

“Maybe it isn’t just another cell, Graham. Maybe they’re the real thing.”

“They’re all the real thing,” Seymour said. “You said you think they’re here. Does that mean you’re not sure?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“So let me make sure I understand correctly. I have sixteen thousand known Islamic terrorists residing in my country, but I’m supposed to divert manpower and resources into finding a cell that you think might be in Britain?” Greeted by silence, Graham Seymour answered his own question. “If it were anyone but you, I’d pull over and let him out. But you do have something of a track record, don’t you? What makes you think they might be here?”

Gabriel handed him the envelope of photographs.

“This is all you have? Some snapshots of Ahmed’s holiday in London? No train tickets? No rental car receipts? No e-mail intercepts? No visual or audio surveillance?”

“They were here on a surveillance mission four months ago. And his name isn’t Ahmed. It’s Samir.”

“Samir what?”

“Samir al-Masri, Hudsonstraat 37, Oud West, Amsterdam.”

Seymour looked at the photo of Samir standing in front of the Houses of Parliament. “Is he Dutch?”

“Egyptian, as far we know.”

“As far as you know? What about the other members of this phantom cell? You have any names?”

Gabriel handed him a slip of paper with the other names Ibrahim Fawaz had given him in Amsterdam. “Based on what we know, the cell was operating out of the al-Hijrah Mosque on the Jan Hazenstraat in west Amsterdam.”

“And you’re sure he’s Egyptian?”

“That’s the flag he was flying in Amsterdam. Why?”

“Because we’ve been picking up some chatter recently among some of our more radical Egyptian countrymen.”

“What sort of chatter?”

“Blowing up buildings, bringing down bridges and airplanes, killing a few thousand people on the Underground—you know, the usual things people discuss over tea and biscuits.”

“Where’s it coming from?”

Seymour hesitated, then said, “Finsbury Park.”

“But of course.”

There was perhaps no more appropriate symbol of Britain’s current predicament than the North London Central Mosque, known commonly as the Finsbury Park mosque. Built in 1990 with money donated by the king of Saudi Arabia, it was among the most radical in Europe. Richard Reid, the infamous shoe-bomber, had passed through its doors; so had Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called twentieth hijacker, and Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian terrorist who was arrested shortly before the millennium for plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. British police raided the mosque in January 2003—inside they discovered such sacred items as forged passports, chemical-protective suits, and a stun gun—and eventually it was turned over to new leadership. It was later revealed that one member of the new board of trustees was a former Hamas terror mastermind from the West Bank. When the former terrorist gave the British government assurances that he was now a man of peace, he was permitted to remain in his post.

“So you think Samir is the cell leader?”

“That’s what my source tells me.”

“Has your source ever been right in the past?”

“Do you remember that plot to shoot down an El Al jetliner at Schiphol last year?”

“The one that the Dutch broke up?”

“The Dutch didn’t break it up, Graham. We broke it up, with the help of this same source.”

Seymour looked down at the photographs. “It’s not much to go on,” he said, “but I’m afraid it does fit the profile of a major attack scenario we’ve developed.”

“What sort of scenario?”

“An action cell based abroad, working with surveillance and support cells buried within the local community here. The action cell members train and prepare in a place where we can’t monitor them, then come ashore at the last minute, so we have no time to find them and disrupt their plans. Obviously it would take complex planning and a skilled mastermind to pull it off.” He held up the snapshots. “Can I keep these?”

“They’re yours.”

“I’ll have Immigration run the names and see if your boys have actually entered the country, and I’ll give copies of the pictures to our colleagues in the Anti-Terrorist Branch of Scotland Yard. If the Metropolitan Police deem the threat credible, they might put a few more men at some of the sites al-Masri visited.”