The Secret Servant

looked down at the images of mayhem on the television screen.
    “I was sent here to fire you and now I find myself volunteering for a suicide mission.” He shut off the television and looked at Gabriel. “All right, you win. We actually gave NSA the telephone number last night. Assuming that Ishaq is calling from a cell phone, NSA says it will take roughly one hour to pin down the approximate location. At that point we’ll notify the relevant local authorities and start looking.”
    “Just make sure those relevant local authorities know that they’ll kill her if anyone tries to rescue her.”
    “We’ve already made it clear to our friends here in Europe that if there’s any rescuing to be done, we intend to do it. In fact, we’ve already moved four Delta Force teams into various European capitals for just this scenario. They’re on hot standby. If we come up with hard intelligence on Elizabeth Halton’s whereabouts, those Delta Forces will go in and get her, and we’ll worry about assuaging hurt Euro-feelings later.”
    “We have an entire division that deals with that sort of thing, Adrian. If you need any advice, just let us know.”
    “You have enough to worry about.” Carter frowned and looked at his watch. “You and your team are now responsible for physical surveillance of the wife and son here in Copenhagen. I’m going to London to explain why I disobeyed a direct order to terminate your involvement in his operation. The fate of Elizabeth Halton is in your hands, Gabriel, along with my career. Please do your best not to drop us.”

30
     
    T ORAH P RISON, E GYPT : 4:19 P.M. , T UESDAY
     
    T he Scorpion: Hell on earth, thought Wazir al-Zayyat. One hundred squalid cells containing the most dangerous Islamic radicals and jihadists in Egypt, a dozen interrogation chambers where even the most hardened of Allah’s holy warriors vomited their secrets after just a few hours of “questioning” at the hands of Egypt’s secret police. Few who entered the Scorpion emerged with their souls or their body intact. Those who encountered Wazir al-Zayyat face-to-face rarely lived to talk about it.
    The Scorpion was more crowded that afternoon than it had been in many years. Al-Zayyat did not find this particularly remarkable, since he was the man most responsible for the sudden surge of new arrivals. The prisoner now under interrogation in Room 4 was among the most promising: Hussein Mandali, a middle school teacher from the Sword of Allah stronghold of Imbaba. He had been captured twelve hours earlier on suspicion of distributing a recorded sermon by Sheikh Tayyib Abdul Razzaq. That in itself was hardly a novel offense—the sheikh’s scorching sermons were the hip-hop of Egypt’s downtrodden masses—but the content of the sermon found on Mandali was highly significant. In it the sheikh had made reference to the abduction of the American woman in London and had called for a popular uprising against the regime, a set of circumstances that suggested the sermon had been recorded very recently. Al-Zayyat knew that tapes did not appear by magic or by the divine will of Allah. He was convinced that Hussein Mandali was the break he had been looking for.
    Al-Zayyat pushed open the door and went inside. Three interrogators were leaning against the gray walls, sleeves rolled up, faces glistening with sweat. Hussein Mandali was seated at the metal table, his face bloodied and swollen, his body covered with welts and burns. A good start, thought al-Zayyat, but not enough to break a boy from the slums of Imbaba.
    Al-Zayyat sat down opposite Mandali and pressed the PLAY button on the tape recorder resting in the center of the table. A moment later, the thin, reedy voice of Sheikh Tayyib was reverberating off the walls of the interrogation room. Al-Zayyat allowed the sermon to go on for several minutes before finally reaching down and jabbing the STOP button with his thick forefinger.
    “Where did you get this tape?” he asked calmly.
    “It was given to me by a man in a coffeehouse in Imbaba.”
    Al-Zayyat sighed heavily and glanced at the three interrogators. The beating they administered was twenty minutes in duration and, even by Egyptian standards, savage in its intensity. Mandali, when he was returned to his seat at the interrogation table, was barely conscious and weeping like a child. Al-Zayyat pressed the PLAY button for a second time.
    “Where did you get this tape?”
    “From a man in—”
    Al-Zayyat