The Messenger

please have the courtesy to not smoke.” Gabriel picked up the saucer by the edge and poured the cigarette butts into the garbage. “What’s so urgent it couldn’t wait till the morning?”
    “Another Saudi link to the attack on the Vatican.”
    Gabriel looked up at Shamron. “What is it?”
    “Ibrahim el-Banna.”
    “The Egyptian cleric? Why am I not surprised.”
    Gabriel sat down at the table.
    “Two nights ago our station chief in Cairo held a secret meeting with one of our top sources inside the Egyptian Mukhabarat. It seems Professor Ibrahim el-Banna had a well-established militant pedigree, long before he went to the Vatican. His older brother was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and was a close associate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number-two man in al-Qaeda. A nephew went to Iraq to fight the Americans and was killed in the siege of Fallujah. Apparently tapes of the imam’s sermons are required listening among Egyptian Islamic militants.”
    “Too bad our friend in the Mukhabarat didn’t tell the Vatican the truth about el-Banna. Seven hundred people might be alive—and the Dome of the Basilica might not have a hole in it.”
    “The Egyptians knew something else about Professor el-Banna,” Shamron said. “Throughout much of the eighties and nineties, when the problem of Islamic fundamentalism was exploding in Egypt, Professor el-Banna received regular cash payments and instructions from a Saudi who posed as an official of the International Islamic Relief Organization, one of the main Saudi charities. This man called himself Khalil, but Egyptian intelligence knew his real name: Ahmed bin Shafiq. What makes this even more interesting is bin Shafiq’s occupation at that time.”
    “He was GID,” said Gabriel.
    “Exactly.”
    The GID, or General Intelligence Department, was the name of the Saudi intelligence service.
    “What do we know about him?”
    “Until four years ago, bin Shafiq was chief of a clandestine GID unit code-named Group 205, which was responsible for establishing and maintaining links between Saudi Arabia and Islamic militant groups around the Middle East. Egypt was one of Group 205’s top priorities, along with Afghanistan, of course.”
    “What’s the significance of the number?”
    “It was the extension of bin Shafiq’s office in GID Headquarters.”
    “What happened four years ago?”
    “Bin Shafiq and his operatives were funneling matériel and money to the terrorists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. A Palestinian informant told us about the operation, and we told the Americans. The American president showed our evidence to the king and brought pressure on him to shut down Group 205. That was six months after 9/11, and the king had no choice but to accede to the president’s wishes, much to the dismay of bin Shafiq and other hardliners inside the kingdom. Group 205 was terminated, and bin Shafiq was run out of the GID.”
    “Has he gone over to the other side of the street?”
    “Are you asking whether he’s a terrorist? The answer is, we don’t know. What we do know is that Islamic militancy is in his blood. His grandfather was a commander of the Ikhwan, the Islamic movement created by Ibn Saud at the turn of the nineteenth century in the Najd.”
    Gabriel knew the Ikhwan well. In many respects they were the prototype and spiritual precursor of today’s Islamic militant groups.
    “Where else did bin Shafiq operate when he was with Group 205?”
    “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria. We even suspect he’s been in the West Bank.”
    “So it’s possible we’re dealing with someone who has terrorist contacts ranging from al-Qaeda to Hamas to the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. If bin Shafiq has gone over to the other side, he’s the nightmare scenario. The perfect terrorist mastermind.”
    “We found another interesting tidbit in our own files,” Shamron said. “About two years ago we were receiving reports of a Saudi trolling the camps of southern Lebanon looking for experienced fighters. According to the reports, this Saudi called himself Khalil.”
    “The same name bin Shafiq used in Cairo.”
    “Unfortunately, we didn’t pursue it. Frankly, if we chased down every moneyed Saudi who was trying to raise an army to wage jihad, we wouldn’t get much else done. Hindsight, as they say, is twenty-twenty.”
    “How much more do we have on bin Shafiq?”
    “Precious little, I’m afraid.”
    “What about a photograph?”
    Shamron shook his