The Secret Servant

a diagram of a global business empire, and a third by a collection of Impressionist prints. Gabriel’s chalkboard stood forlornly in the corner, its surface bare except for a single name: SARAH BAN - CROFT . She followed him inside tentatively, as though entering a forgotten room from her childhood, and stared at the photographs: Zizi al-Bakari with his spoiled daughter, Nadia, at his side; Abdul and Abdul, his American-educated lawyers; Herr Wehrli, his Swiss banker; Mr. bin Talal, his chief of security; Jean-Michel, his French personal trainer and Sarah’s main tormentor. She turned around and looked at Gabriel.
    “You planned it all from here?”
    He nodded his head slowly. She looked around the room with her eyes narrowed in disbelief.
    “Somehow I expected something more…” Her voice trailed off, then she added: “Something more impressive.”
    “This is the Office, Sarah, not Langley. We like to do things the old-fashioned way.”
    “Obviously.” She looked at his chalkboard. “I haven’t seen one of those since I was in grade school.”
    Gabriel smiled, then began removing the debris of the al-Bakari operation from the walls of the room as the other members of his team trickled slowly through the door. No introductions were necessary, for Sarah knew and adored them all. The first to arrive was Yossi, a tall, balding intellectual from the Office’s Research division who had read classics at Oxford and still spoke Hebrew with a pronounced British accent. Next came Dina Sarid, a veritable encyclopedia of terrorism from the History division who could recite the time, place, and casualty count of every act of violence ever committed against the State of Israel. Ten minutes later came Yaakov, a battle-hardened case officer from the Arab Affairs Department of Shabak, followed by Rimona, an IDF major who served as an analyst for AMAN, Israel’s military intelligence service. Oded, a brooding, all-purpose field operative who specialized in snatches, arrived at eight with breakfast for everyone, and Mordecai, a wispy figure who dealt in all things electronic, stumbled in fifteen minutes later looking as though he had not slept the night before. The last to arrive was Mikhail, a gray-eyed gunman of Russian birth, who had single-handedly killed half of the terrorist infrastructure of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It was because of Mikhail and his proficiency with a handgun that Sarah was alive. She kissed his cheek as Gabriel walked to the front of the room and pinned Lavon’s surveillance photographs to the bulletin board.
    “Now tat we’re all reacquainted,” he said, “it’s time to get to work. This is the man who’s going to lead us to Elizabeth Halton. He is a founding member of Sword of Allah, currently living in Amsterdam. We’re going to make him vanish into thin air, then we’re going to squeeze him dry. We have to work quickly, and we’re not going to make any mistakes.”
     
     
     
    The Office prided itself on its ability to improvise in times of crisis, but even the vaunted Office chafed under the pressure of Gabriel’s demands. Safe accommodations were his biggest concern, and Housekeeping, the division that maintained and acquired Office properties, was his most stubborn opponent. Unlike cities such as Paris, London, and Rome, where the Office maintained dozens of safe flats, Amsterdam had no standing inventory of secure lodging. That meant accommodations had to be acquired quickly and on the open market, something the notoriously deliberate Housekeeping never liked to do. By ten o’clock they had taken a six-month lease on a two-bedroom apartment on the Herengracht canal, and by eleven they had secured a luxury houseboat on the Prinsengracht called the Heleen . That left only a site for the interrogation. Gabriel needed something large enough for his entire team and remote enough so that their presence would go undetected. He had a property in mind—a tumbledown country house outside Oldenburg that they had used during the Wrath of God operation—and eventually he was able to pry it from Housekeeping’s grasp.
    Once Housekeeping capitulated, the rest fell like dominoes. By noon Travel had lined up a string of untraceable rental cars, and by one Identity had coughed up enough clean passports to allow every member of the team to travel as a European. Banking section initially balked at Gabriel’s request for a briefcase filled with petty cash, but at one-thirty he