The Secret Servant

cupboard beneath the sink and found nothing but an unopened container of kitchen cleaner. Samir, Islamic theoretician and spokesman for the jihadi cause, was a typical bachelor slob.
    Gabriel paused for a moment in the sitting room to check on Lavon’s progress, then headed down a short hallway toward the back of the apartment. Samir’s bathroom was as appalling as the kitchen. Gabriel gave it a rapid search, then entered the bedroom. A stripped mattress lay slightly askew on the metal frame and the three drawers of the dresser were all partially open. Samir, it seemed, had packed in a hurry.
    Gabriel removed the top drawer and dumped the remaining contents onto the bed. Threadbare underwear, mismatched socks, a book of matches from a discotheque in London’s Leicester Square, an envelope from a photo-processing shop around the corner. Gabriel slipped the matches into his pocket, then opened the envelope and leafed through the prints. He saw Samir in Trafalgar Square and Samir with a member of the Queen’s Life Guard outside Buckingham Palace; Samir riding the Millennium Wheel and Samir outside the Houses of Parliament. The last photograph, Samir posing with four friends in front of the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, caused Gabriel’s heart to skip a beat.
    Five minutes later he was walking calmly along the empty pavements of the Hudsonstraat, with the photographs in his pocket and Lavon at his side. “If the dates on the pictures are correct, it means Samir and his friends were in London four months ago,” he said. “Someone should probably go to London to have a word with our friends at MI5.”
    “I can see where this is heading,” Lavon said. “You get to go to ride into London like a knight on a white horse and I get to go blind reading the rest of Solomon Rosner’s files.”
    “At least you get to have your Thai food.”
    “Why did you have to mention the Thai food?”

7
     
    H EATHROW A IRPORT, L ONDON
     
    G abriel had spent much of his life eluding the police forces and security services of Europe, and so it was with considerable reluctance that he agreed to be met at Heathrow Airport the following afternoon by MI5.
    He spotted the three-man reception team as he came into the arrivals hall. It was not difficult; they were wearing matching mackintosh raincoats, and one was holding Gabriel’s photograph. He had been instructed to let the MI5 men make the approach, so he went to the information kiosk and spent several minutes pretending to scrutinize a list of London hotels. Finally, anxious to deliver his briefing before the terrorists struck, he walked over and introduced himself. The officer with the photograph took him by the arm and led him outside to a waiting Jaguar limousine. Gabriel smiled. He had always harbored a secret envy of British spies and their cars.
    The rear window slid down a few inches and a long, boney hand beckoned him over. The hand was attached to none other than Graham Seymour, MI5’s long-serving and highly regarded deputy director general. He was in his late fifties now and had aged like fine wine. His Savile Row pin-striped suit fit him to perfection, and his full head of blond hair had a silvery cast to it that gave him the look of those male models one sees in advertisements for costly but needless trinkets. As Gabriel climbed into the car, Seymour appraised him silently for a moment with a pair of granite-colored eyes. He did not look pleased, but then few men in his position would. The Netherlands, France, Germany, and Spain all had their fair share of Muslim radicals, but among intelligence professionals there was little disagreement over which country was the epicenter of European Islamic extremism. It was the country Graham Seymour was sworn to protect: the United Kingdom.
    Gabriel knew that the crisis now facing Britain was many years in the making and, to a large degree, self-inflicted. For two decades, beginning in the 1980s and continuing even after the attacks of 9/11, British governments both Labour and Tory had thrown open their doors to the world’s most hardened holy warriors. Cast out by countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria, they had come to London, where they were free to publish, preach, organize, conspire, and raise money. As a result, Great Britain, the land of John Locke, William Shakespeare, and Winston Churchill, had unwittingly allowed itself to become the primary incubator of a violent ideology that sought to