Portrait of a Spy

requested Gabriel’s mobile phone—a request Gabriel politely declined. The phone had been issued to him by the Office and contained several features not available commercially. In fact, he had used it the previous evening to sweep the house for listening devices. He had found four. Obviously, interservice cooperation only went so far.
    The initial shipment of files all focused on Rashid’s time in America before 9/11 and his connections, nefarious or serendipitous, to the plot itself. Most of the material had been generated by Langley’s unglamorous rival, the FBI, and had been shared during the brief period when, by presidential order, the two agencies were supposed to be cooperating. It revealed that Rashid al-Husseini popped up on the Bureau’s radar within weeks of his arrival in San Diego and was the target of somewhat apathetic surveillance. There were transcripts from the court-approved wiretaps on his phones and surveillance photos shot during the brief periods when the San Diego and Washington field offices had the time and manpower to follow him. There was also a copy of the classified interagency review that officially cleared Rashid of playing any role in the 9/11 plot. It was, thought Gabriel, a profoundly naïve piece of work that chose to portray the cleric in the kindest possible light. Gabriel believed a man was the company he kept, and he had been around terror networks long enough to know an operative when he saw one. Rashid al-Husseini was almost certainly a messenger or an innkeeper. At the very least, he was a fellow traveler. And, in Gabriel’s opinion, fellow travelers should rarely be taken on by intelligence services as paid agents of influence. They should be watched and, if necessary, dealt with harshly.
    The next shipment contained the transcripts and recordings of Rashid’s interrogation by the CIA, followed soon after by the detritus of the ill-fated operation in which he had played a starring role. The material concluded with a despairing after-action postmortem, written in the days following Rashid’s defection in Mecca. The operation, it said, had been poorly conceived from the outset. Much of the blame was placed squarely at the feet of Adrian Carter, who was faulted for lax oversight. Attached was Carter’s own assessment, which was scarcely less scathing. Predicting there would be blowback, he recommended a thorough review of Rashid’s contacts in the United States and Europe. Carter’s director had overruled him. The Agency was stretched too thin to go chasing after shadows, the director said. Rashid was back in Yemen where he belonged. Good riddance.
    “Not exactly the Agency’s finest hour,” Sarah declared late that evening, during a break in the proceedings. “We were fools to ever use him.”
    “The Agency began with the correct assumption, that Rashid was bad, but somewhere along the line it fell under his spell. It’s easy to see how it happened. Rashid was very persuasive.”
    “Almost as persuasive as you.”
    “But I don’t send my recruits into crowded streets to carry out acts of indiscriminate murder.”
    “No,” said Sarah, “you send them onto secret battlefields to smite your enemies.”
    “It’s not as biblical as all that.”
    “Yes, it is. Trust me, I should know.” She looked wearily at the stacks of files. “We still have a mountain of material to go through, and it’s only the beginning. The floodgates are about to open.”
    “Don’t worry,” Gabriel said, smiling. “Help is on the way.”
    They arrived at Dulles Airport late the following afternoon under false names and with false passports in their pockets. They were not punished for their sins; quite the opposite, a team of Agency minders whisked them through customs and then herded them into a fleet of armored Escalades for the drive into Washington. Per Adrian Carter’s instructions, the Escalades departed Dulles at fifteen-minute intervals. As a result, the most storied team of operatives in the intelligence world settled into the house on N Street that evening with the neighbors being none the wiser.
    Chiara arrived first, followed a moment later by an Office terrorism expert named Dina Sarid. Petite and dark-haired, Dina knew the horrors of extremist violence all too well. She had been standing on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street on October 19, 1994, when a Hamas suicide bomber turned the Number 5 bus into a coffin for twenty-one people. Her mother and two of her