The Secret Servant

tribe.”
    “And what do we do about Elizabeth Halton? Let her die?”
    “If it is the only way to end this madness, then the answer is yes.”
    “And if it were your daughter, Ari? If it were Ronit?”
    “Then I would shake hands with the Devil himself in order to get her back again. But I wouldn’t ask the Americans to do it for me. Blue and white, Gabriel. Blue and white. We do things for ourselves, and we do not help others with problems of their own making. The Americans threw in their lot with the secular dictatorships of the Middle East a long time ago, and now the oppressed are rising up and taking their revenge on symbols of American power. On September eleventh it was the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Now it is the innocent daughter of the American ambassador to London.”
    “And next it will be us .”
    “And we will fight them— alone .” Shamron managed a faint smile of reminiscence. “I remember a boy who came home from Europe in 1975, a boy who looked twenty years older than he really was. A boy who wanted nothing more do to with this life in the shadows, nothing more to do with fighting and killing. What happened to this boy?”
    “He became a man, Ari. And he is sick to death of this shit. And he will not let this woman be murdered because the Americans refuse to release a dying sheikh from prison.”
    “And is this man prepared to die on behalf of this cause?” He looked at Chiara. “Is he prepared to give up his life with this beautiful woman in order to save one he does not know?”
    “Trust me, Ari, I’m not a martyr, and the only people who are going to die are the terrorists. When we lost Ibrahim, we lost our only way into the conspiracy. Now, by demanding that I deliver the money, they’ve opened the door to us again. And we’re all going to walk through it, together.”
    “You’re telling me that I should think of you as nothing more than an agent of penetration?”
    Gabriel nodded. “Taking possession of money will be a major operational undertaking for them. It will expose their operatives and their means of communication. And if they do seize me, it will expose some of their hideouts and safe properties, which will give us additional names and telephone numbers. The British and the Americans have agreed to stay away and leave it to us. We’re going to fight them, Ari, right here on British soil, just the way we’ve always fought them. We’re going to kill them, and we’re going to bring that girl home to her father alive.” Gabriel paused, then added: “And then maybe they will stop blaming us for all their problems.”
    “I don’t care what they say about us. You are like a son to me, Gabriel, and I cannot afford to lose you. Not now.”
    “You won’t.”
    Shamron appeared suddenly fatigued by the confrontation. Gabriel used his silence as an opportunity to close the door on the debate and press forward.
    “Where’s the rest of my team?”
    “They returned to Amsterdam after the debacle in Denmark,” Shamron said. “They can all be here by morning.”
    “I’m going to need Mikhail and his gun.”
    Shamron smiled. “Gabriel and Michael: the angel of death and the angel of destruction. If you two can’t bring the woman out alive, then I don’t suppose anyone can.”
    “So you’ll give me your blessing?”
    “Only my prayers,” he said. “Get some sleep, my son. You’re going to need it. We’ll assemble here at nine in the morning and start planning. Let us hope we are not planning a funeral.”
     
     
     
    The apartment on the Bayswater Road was precisely as he had left it the morning of the attack. His half-drunk cup of coffee stood on the desk by the window, next to the London A–Z atlas, which was still open to map number 82. In the bedroom his clothes lay scattered about, evidence of the haste with which he had dressed in the moments before disaster had struck. Samir al-Masri’s notebook, with his mountaintops and sand dunes and spider web of intersecting lines, lay on the unmade bed next to the woman with riotous auburn hair. A Beretta pistol protruded from the front of her faded blue jeans. Gabriel removed the weapon and placed his hand softly against her abdomen.
    “Why are you doing this?” she asked.
    “An insatiable desire to touch something beautiful.”
    “You know what I’m asking you, Gabriel. Why did you agree to the demands of the kidnappers?”
    Gabriel, silent, deftly unsnapped Chiara’s jeans. Chiara pushed