Portrait of a Spy

as though he had been designed for the task. He wore a perfectly fitted charcoal gray suit and a silver necktie that matched the color of his hair. Normally, his pale eyes were inscrutable, but now they revealed the strain of a long and difficult night. As deputy director of MI5, Graham Seymour bore a heavy responsibility for protecting the British mainland from the forces of extremist Islam. And once again, despite the best efforts of his department, extremist Islam had won.
    Though the two men had a long professional history, Gabriel knew little of Graham Seymour’s personal life. He knew that Seymour was married to a woman named Helen whom he adored and that he had a son who managed other people’s money for the New York branch of an important British financial house. Beyond that, Gabriel’s knowledge of Seymour’s private affairs was drawn from the Office’s voluminous file. He was a relic of Britain’s glorious past, a by-product of the upper middle classes who had been bred, educated, and programmed to lead. He believed in God but not with much fervor. He believed in his country but wasn’t blind to its shortcomings. He was good at golf and other games but was willing to lose to a lesser opponent in service of a worthy cause. He was a man admired and, most important, a man who could be trusted—an attribute rare among spies and secret policemen.
    Graham Seymour was not, however, a man with unlimited patience, as evidenced by his dour expression as the Jaguar pulled into the street. He removed a copy of the next morning’s Telegraph from the seatback pocket and dropped it in Gabriel’s lap. The headline read REIGN OF TERROR . Beneath it were three photographs depicting the aftermath of the three attacks. Gabriel searched the photo of Covent Garden for any sign of his presence but saw only the victims. It was a picture of failure, he thought—eighteen people dead, dozens more critically injured, including one of the officers who had tackled him. And it was all because of the shot Gabriel had not been allowed to take.
    “Bloody awful day,” Seymour said wearily. “I suppose the only way it could get any worse is if the press finds out about you. By the time the conspiracy theorists are finished, they’ll have the Islamic world believing that the attacks were plotted and carried out by the Office.”
    “You can be sure that’s already the case.” Gabriel returned the newspaper and asked, “Where’s my wife?”
    “She’s at your hotel. I have a team staying just down the hall.” Seymour paused, then added, “Needless to say, she’s not terribly pleased with you.”
    “How can you tell?” Gabriel’s ears were still ringing from the concussion of the blast. He closed his eyes and asked how the SO19 teams had been able to locate him so quickly.
    “As you might imagine, we have a wide array of technical means at our disposal.”
    “Such as my mobile phone and your network of CCTV cameras?”
    “Precisely,” Seymour said. “We were able to pinpoint you within a few seconds of receiving Chiara’s call. We forwarded the information to Gold Command, the Met’s operational crisis center, and they immediately dispatched two teams of Specialist Firearms Officers.”
    “They must have been in the vicinity.”
    “They were,” Seymour confirmed. “We were on high alert after the attacks in Paris and Copenhagen. A number of teams were already deployed in the financial district and spots where tourists tend to congregate.”
    “So why did they take me down instead of the suicide bomber?”
    “Because neither Scotland Yard nor the Security Service wanted a rerun of the Menezes fiasco. As a result of his death, a number of new guidelines and procedures were put in place to make sure nothing like it ever happens again. Suffice it to say a single warning does not meet the threshold for taking lethal action—even if the source happens to be named Gabriel Allon.”
    “So eighteen innocent people died as a result?”
    “What if he wasn’t a terrorist? What if he was another street performer, or someone with mental problems? We would have been burned at the stake.”
    “But he wasn’t a street performer or a mental patient, Graham. He was a suicide bomber. And I told you so.”
    “How did you know?”
    “He might as well have been wearing a sign declaring his intentions.”
    “Was it that obvious?”
    Gabriel listed the attributes that first raised his suspicions and then explained the