Portrait of a Spy

a laborer and the black veil of a woman. Then he told it to himself again and again, until he believed every word of it to be true.
    On the giant plasma screens of Langley, Gabriel was but a smudge of winking green light making its way across the Empty Quarter. A cluster of five more lights blinked near the oasis town of Liwa. They represented the positions of Mikhail Abramov and the Sayeret Matkal team.
    “There’s no way they’re going to get through that border checkpoint,” said Carter.
    “So they’ll go around it,” said Shamron.
    “There’s a fence along the entire border.”
    “Fences mean nothing to the Sayeret.”
    “How are they going to get a Land Cruiser over it?”
    “They have two Land Cruisers,” said Shamron, “but I’m afraid neither one is going over that fence.”
    “What are you saying?”
    “We wait until Gabriel stops moving.”
    “And then?”
    “They walk.”
    “In the Empty Quarter?” Carter asked incredulously.
    “That’s what they’re trained to do.”
    “What happens if they run into a Saudi military patrol?”
    “Then I suppose we’ll have to say Kaddish for the patrol,” said Shamron. “Because if they bump into Mikhail Abramov and Yoav Savir, they will cease to exist.”
    There was an all-night gas station and market in Liwa that catered to foreign laborers and truck drivers. The Indian behind the counter looked as though he hadn’t slept in a month. Yoav, the Arab who was not an Arab, bought enough food and water for a small army, along with a few cheap ghutra s and some loose-fitting cotton clothing favored by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. He told the Indian that he and his friends planned to spend a day or two in the dunes communing with God and nature. The night manager told him about a particularly inspiring formation north of Liwa, along the Saudi border. “But be careful,” he said. “The area is full of smugglers and al-Qaeda. Very dangerous.” Yoav thanked the Indian for the warning. Then he paid the bill without haggling and headed outside to the Land Cruisers.
    They started northward as the Indian had suggested, but once clear of the town, made an abrupt turn to the south. The dunes were the color of rose and as high as the Judean Hills. They drove for an hour, keeping always to the hard sand flats, before coming to a stop near the Saudi border fence. With dawn fast approaching, they covered the Land Cruisers in camouflage netting and changed into the clothing they had bought in Liwa. Yoav and the other Sayeret men looked like Arabs, but Mikhail looked like a Western explorer who had come in search of the lost city of Arabia. His expedition commenced thirty minutes later, when the green smudge of light that was Gabriel Allon finally stopped moving at a point forty miles due west of the team’s position. They loaded their packs with as much weaponry and water as they could carry. Then they scaled the Saudi border fence and started walking.

Chapter 64
The Empty Quarter, Saudi Arabia

    T HE TENT HAD BEEN ERECTED in the cleft of an enormous horseshoe-shaped dune. It was made of black goat hair in the tradition of the Bedouin and surrounded by several sun-bleached pickup trucks and jeeps. A few feet from the entrance, four veiled women with henna tattoos on their hands brewed coffee with cardamom seeds around a small fire. None seemed to notice the beaten man in blue coveralls who stumbled from the back of a Denali SUV, shivering in the cold morning air.
    The cleft of the dune was still in darkness, but light glowed faintly above its ridgeline and the stars were in full retreat. Prodded by al-Kamal, Gabriel started unsteadily toward the tent. His head throbbed but his thoughts remained clear. They were focused on a lie. He would pay it out slowly, morsel by morsel, like cakes sweetened with honey. He would make himself irresistible to them. He would buy time for Mikhail and the Sayeret team to home in on the signal emanating from the device in his bowels. He pushed the beacon from his thoughts. There was no beacon, he reminded himself. There was only Nadia al-Bakari, a woman of impeccable jihadist credentials whom Gabriel had blackmailed into doing his bidding.
    Malik was now standing in the opening of the tent. He had traded his gleaming white kandoura for a gray thobe . His feet were bare, though his head was wrapped in a red-checkered ghutra . He regarded Gabriel menacingly, as though debating where to place the first blow, then stepped to