Portrait of a Spy

him.”
    Gabriel was silent. Dina raised an eyebrow and asked, “No more comments about coincidences?”
    Gabriel ignored the remark. “What was his last known location?”
    “There were some unconfirmed reports he was back in Zarqa, and our station chief in Turkey heard a nasty rumor he was living in grand fashion in Istanbul. The rumor turned out to be false. As far as the Office is concerned, Malik is a ghost.”
    “Even a ghost needs a passport.”
    “We believe he’s carrying a Syrian passport that was personally given to him by the great reformer in Damascus. Unfortunately, we have no idea what name he’s using or what he looks like. The last known photograph of Malik was taken more than twenty years ago. It’s useless.”
    “Is there someone close to Malik that we can get to? A relative? A friend? An old comrade from his days in Hamas?”
    “We tried when Malik was bombing the daylights out of us during the Second Intifada,” Dina said, shaking her head. “There are no al-Zubairs left in Israel or the territories, and the ones in the camp at Zarqa are far too committed to the struggle to collaborate with us.” She paused for a moment. “We might have one thing working in our favor, though.”
    “What’s that?”
    “I think his network might be running out of money.”
    “Says who?”
    Dina pointed toward a photograph of Farid Khan, the Covent Garden bomber.
    “Says him.”

Chapter 18
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

    I N THE FINAL WEEKS OF his brief but portentous life, Farid Khan, murderer of eighteen innocent souls in the land of his birth, left a series of increasingly desperate postings on an Islamic Internet message board lamenting the fact he didn’t have enough money to buy a proper wedding present for his sister. Apparently, he was considering skipping the wedding to avoid embarrassment. But there was just one problem with the story, Dina pointed out. Allah had blessed the Khan family with four boys, but no girls.
    “I believe he was referring to a martyrdom payment—a payment he’d been promised by Malik. That’s the Hamas way. Hamas always looks after the posthumous financial needs of its shahid s.”
    “Did he ever get the money?”
    “A week before the attack, he made one final posting saying that he had been granted the means to buy his sister a gift. He would be able to attend the wedding after all, thanks be to Allah.”
    “So Malik eventually kept his word.”
    “That’s true, but only after his shahid threatened not to go ahead with the mission. The network might have enough cash on hand to fund another round of attacks, but if Rashid and Malik are going to become the next Bin Laden and Zawahiri—”
    “They’re going to need an infusion of working capital.”
    “Exactly.”
    Gabriel stepped forward and gazed at Dina’s galaxy of names, phone numbers, and faces. Then he turned to Lavon and asked, “How much do you think it would take to create a new jihadist terror group with a truly global reach?”
    “Twenty million should do it,” Lavon replied. “Maybe a bit more if you want to give them first-class accommodations and travel.”
    “That’s a lot of money, Eli.”
    “Terror doesn’t come cheap.” Lavon gave Gabriel a sidelong look. “What are you thinking?”
    “I’m thinking we have two choices. We can sit here staring at our telephone and e-mail matrixes, hoping a piece of actionable intelligence falls into our lap, or . . .” Gabriel’s voice trailed off.
    “Or what?”
    “Or we can go into the terrorism business ourselves.”
    “And how would we do that?”
    “We give them the money, Eli. We give them the money.”
    There are two basic types of intelligence, Gabriel needlessly reminded his team. There is human intelligence, or “humint” in the jargon of the trade, and signals intelligence, also known as “sigint.” But the ability to track the flow of money in real time through the global banking system had given spies a powerful third form of intelligence gathering sometimes referred to as “finint,” or financial intelligence. For the most part, finint was highly reliable. Money didn’t lie; it simply went where it was told to go. What’s more, the electronic trail of intelligence left by its movements was predictive in nature. The Islamic terrorists had learned long ago how to deceive Western spy agencies with false chatter, but rarely did they invest precious financial resources in deception. Money usually went to real