The Secret Servant

wait. The call, according to the clock above John O’Donnell’s workstation, came at 20:00:14. Gabriel reached for it instantly, though he remembered thinking as he did so that he would be happy never to speak into a telephone again for as long as he lived. His greeting was calm and somewhat vague; his demeanor, as he listened to the instructions, was that of a traffic officer recording the details of a minor accident. He posed no questions, and his face registered no emotion other than profound irritation. At 20:00:57, he was heard to murmur: “I’ll be there.” Then he stood and pulled on his coat. This time Carter made no attempt to stop him as he started toward the stairs.
    He paused for a moment in the ground-floor atrium to slip on his miniature earpiece and throat microphone, then nodded silently to the Marine guard as he exited the embassy grounds through the North Gate. Carter’s Vauxhall sedan was parked in a flagrantly illegal space on the corner of North Audley Street. The keys resided in Gabriel’s coat pocket, along with a GPS beacon the size of a five-pence coin. He opened the trunk and quickly inspected the cargo before adhering the beacon near the driver’s-side taillight. Then he climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. A moment later he was turning into Oxford Street and marveling at the crush of last minute shoppers. Carter’s watchers followed him as far as Albany Street, where they photographed him making a left turn and heading north. That would be their last contact with him. As far as the Americans and British were concerned, Gabriel had now disappeared from radar.
    That was not the case, however, at the Israeli embassy in South Kensington, where, in one of the more bizarre coincidences of the entire affair, a group of well-meaning Christians had chosen that night to conduct a candlelight vigil calling for peace in the Holy Land. Inside the building, Ari Shamron and Uzi Navot were holding a vigil of their own. Their thoughts were not of peace or the holidays or even of home. They were huddled round a smoky table in the makeshift operations room, moving their forces into place, and watching a winking green light heading along the eastern fringe of Regent’s Park toward Hampstead.

50
     
    H AMPSTEAD H EATH : 10:25 P.M. , C HRISTMAS E VE
     
    H e parked where they told him to park, in the Constantine Road at the southern tip of Hampstead Heath. There was no other traffic moving in the street, and Gabriel, as he had made his final approach, detected no signs of surveillance, opposition or friendly. He shut off the engine and pressed the interior trunk release, then opened the center console hatch and dropped the keys inside. A gentle rain had started to fall. As he stepped outside, he cursed himself for failing to bring a hat.
    He walked to the back of the car and removed the first duffel. As he was reaching for the second, he heard noises at his back and wheeled around to find a pack of young carolers advancing festively toward him. For a mad instant he wondered whether they might be the Sphinx’s watchers but quickly dismissed that notion as they bade him a Happy Christmas and paraded obliviously by. He placed the second bag in the street and closed the trunk. The carolers were now singing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” outside a small brick cottage strung with holiday lights. A sign in the window read: GIVE US PEACE IN OUR TIME .
    Gabriel towed the duffel bags a few yards along the street, then crossed a footbridge over a set of sunken railroad tracks and entered the heath. To his right was a darkened running track. In the cement esplanade outside the padlocked gate, four immigrant men in their twenties were kicking a football about beneath the amber glow of a sodium lamp. They appeared to pay Gabriel no heed as he labored past and started up the slope of Parliament Hill, toward the bench where they had told him to wait for their next contact. He arrived to find it occupied by a small man with a frayed coat and matted beard. His accent, when he spoke to Gabriel, was East London and leaden with drink.
    “Happy Christmas, mate. What can I do for you?”
    “You can get off the bench.”
    “It’s my bench tonight.”
    “Not anymore,” said Gabriel. “Move.”
    “Piss off.”
    Gabriel drew Adrian Carter’s Browning Hi-Power and leveled it at the man’s head. “Get the fuck out of here and forget you ever saw me. Do you understand?”
    “Loud and fucking clear.”
    The