The Secret Servant

sites al-Masri visited.”
    “What about raising the overall threat level?” Gabriel asked. “What about stepping up the surveillance of your local Egyptian radicals in Finsbury Park?”
    “We’re not like our American brethren. We don’t like to move the needle on the threat meter each time we get nervous. We find it only serves to make the British public more cynical. As for our local Egyptians, we’re watching them closely enough already.”
    “I hope so.”
    “How long are you planning to stay in London?”
    “Just tonight.”
    Seymour handed him a business card. It had nothing on it but a telephone number. “It’s for my mobile. Call me if you pick up anything else in Amsterdam. Can I drop you at your hotel?”
    “No thanks, Graham.”
    “How about your safe flat?”
    “Our embassy would be fine. I’m going to have a quiet word with our local chief of station and the head of embassy security to make sure we take appropriate measures.”
    “Give my best to your station chief. And tell him to behave himself.”
    “Is it your intention to follow me after I leave the embassy?”
    “I don’t have the spare manpower or I would.”
    He was lying, of course. Honor among spies went only so far.
     
     
     
    Gabriel’s meetings at the embassy ran longer than expected. The chief of security had turned what should have been a five-minute briefing into an hour-long question-and-answer period, while the Office’s chief of station had used a routine courtesy call as an opportunity to try to impress the man he clearly assumed would one day be his boss. The debacle was made complete at six, when the ambassador appeared without warning and insisted Gabriel accompany him to dinner in Knightsbridge. Gabriel had no excuse at the ready and was forced to endure a painfully boring evening discussing the intricacies of Israel’s ties to the United Kingdom. Throughout the meal he thought often of Eli Lavon quietly reading files in snowy Amsterdam and wished that he was still there with him.
    It was after ten o’clock by the time he finally entered the Office safe flat on the Bayswater Road overlooking Hyde Park. He left his bag in the entrance hall and quickly took stock of his surroundings. It was simply furnished, as most safe flats were, and rather large by London standards. Housekeeping had left food in the fridge and a 9mm Beretta in the pantry, along with a spare magazine and two boxes of ammunition.
    Gabriel loaded the gun and carried it with him into the bedroom. It had been three days since he’d had a proper night’s sleep and it had taken all his training and substantial powers of concentration to get through dinner with the ambassador without falling asleep over his coq au vin. He undressed quickly and climbed into bed, then switched on the television and turned the volume down very low so that if there was an attack in the night he would be awakened by the news bulletins. He wondered whether the Metropolitan Police had acted yet on the information he’d brought from Amsterdam. Two hundred active terror networks, sixteen thousand known terrorists, three thousand men who had been through the training camps of al-Qaeda… MI5 and the Met had more to worry about than five boys from Amsterdam. He’d sensed something in Graham Seymour’s demeanor that afternoon, a resignation that it was only a matter of time before London was hit again.
    Gabriel was reaching for the light when he noticed Samir’s yellow legal pad poking from the side flap of his overnight bag. Probably nothing there, he thought, but he knew himself well enough to realize that he would never be able to sleep unless he made certain. He found a pencil in the top drawer of the bedside table and spent the next ten minutes rubbing it gently over the surface of the pad. Samir’s secrets came slowly to life before his eyes. Pine trees on a mountaintop, sand dunes in a desert, a spider web of bisecting lines. Samir al-Masri, jihadist and bachelor slob, was a doodler.

8
     
    B AYSWATER, L ONDON : 7:02 A.M. , F RIDAY
     
    T he telephone woke him. Like all phones in Office safe flats, it had a flashing light to indicate incoming calls. This one was luminous blue. It was as if a squad car had driven into his bedroom on silent approach.
    “Are you awake?” asked Ari Shamron.
    “I am now.”
    “Sleeping in?”
    Gabriel squinted at his wristwatch. “It’s seven in the morning.”
    “It’s nine here.”
    The vagaries of international time