Portrait of a Spy

taken another step closer to America.
    Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Chapter 22
Madrid-Paris

    T HE OLD COMPLACENCY HAD RETURNED to Madrid, but this was to be expected. It had been seven years since the deadly train bombings, and memories of that terrible morning had long since faded. Spain had responded to the massacre of its citizens by withdrawing its troops from Iraq and launching what it described as “an alliance of civilizations” with the Islamic world. Such action, said the political commentators, had succeeded in redirecting Muslim rage from Spain to America, where it rightly belonged. Submission to the wishes of al-Qaeda would protect Spain from another attack. Or so they thought.
    The bomb exploded at 9:12 p.m., at the intersection of two busy streets near Puerta del Sol. It had been assembled at a rented garage in an industrial quarter south of the city and concealed in a Peugeot van. Owing to its ingenious construction, the initial force of the blast was directed leftward into a restaurant popular with Spanish governing elites. There would be no firsthand account of precisely what occurred inside, for no one lived to describe it. Had there been a survivor, he would have recounted a brief but terrible instant of airborne bodies adrift in a lethal cloud of glass, cutlery, ceramic, and blood. Then the entire building collapsed, entombing the dead and dying together beneath a mountain of shattered masonry.
    The damage was greater than even the terrorist had hoped. Façades were ripped from apartment buildings for an entire block, exposing lives that, until a few seconds earlier, had been proceeding peacefully. Several nearby shops and cafés suffered damage and casualties while the small trees lining the street were shorn of their leaves or uprooted entirely. There were no visible remnants of the Peugeot van, only a large crater in the street where it once had been. For the first twenty-four hours of the investigation, the Spanish police were convinced the bomb had been detonated remotely. Later, they discovered traces of the shahid ’s DNA sprayed amid the ruins. He was just twenty, an unemployed Moroccan carpenter from the Lavapiés district of Madrid. In his suicide video, he spoke fondly of Yaqub al-Mansur, the twelfth-century Almohad caliph known for his bloody raids into Christian lands.
    It was against this dreadful backdrop that Zoe Reed of the American business news network CNBC placed her first call to the publicity department of AAB Holdings, formerly of Riyadh and Geneva, lately of the Boulevard Haussmann, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. The time was ten past four in the afternoon, the weather in Paris predictably overcast. The inquiry received no immediate response, per standing AAB protocol.
    Annually cited by Forbes magazine as one of the most successful and innovative investment firms in the world, the company was founded in 1979 by Abdul Aziz al-Bakari. Known to friends and detractors alike as Zizi, he was the nineteenth son of a prominent Saudi merchant who had served as the personal banker and financial adviser to Ibn Saud, the Kingdom’s founder and first absolute monarch. AAB’s holdings were as extensive as they were lucrative. AAB did shipping and mining. AAB did chemicals and drugs. AAB had major stakes in American and European banks. AAB’s real estate and hotel division was one of the world’s largest. Zizi traveled the world on a gold-plated 747, owned a string of palaces stretching from Riyadh to the French Riviera to Aspen, and sailed the seas on a battleship-sized yacht called the Alexandra . His collection of Impressionist and Modern art was thought to be among the largest in private hands. For a short period, it included Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table by Vincent van Gogh, purchased from Isherwood Fine Arts, 7–8 Mason’s Yard, St. James’s, London. The sale had been brokered by a young American named Sarah Bancroft, who went on to serve, briefly, as Zizi’s primary art consultant.
    He was the target of many rumors, particularly regarding the source of his enormous fortune. AAB’s glossy prospectus claimed it had been built entirely from the modest inheritance Zizi received from his father, a claim that an authoritative American business journal, after a careful investigation, found wanting. AAB’s extraordinary liquidity, it said, could be explained by only one thing: it was being used as a front for the House of Saud to quietly reinvest its