The Secret Servant

it?”
    “Yes, that’s it. You’re my wife. You do as I say.”
    “No, Ishaq. Tell me when I’m going to hear from you again or I’m not getting on that plane.”
    “I’ll call tomorrow night.”
    “When?”
    “When it’s convenient.”
    “No, not when it’s convenient. I want to know when you’re going to call.”
    “Nine-thirty.”
    “Whose time, yours or mine?”
    “Nine-thirty Copenhagen time.”
    “At nine thirty-one, I stop answering the phone. Do you understand me, Ishaq?”
    “I have to go now, Hanifah.”
    “Ishaq, wait.”
    “I love you, Hanifah.”
    “Ishaq—”
    Click.
    “What have you done, Ishaq? My God, what have you done?”
    STOP. REWIND. PLAY.
    “I want to know when you’re going to call.”
    “Nine-thirty.”
    “Who’s time, yours or mine?”
    “Nine-thirty Copenhagen time.”
    “At nine thirty-one, I stop answering the phone. Do you understand me, Ishaq?”
    STOP.
    Gabriel looked at Mordecai. “I’m going to listen to the spot where Ishaq asks Hanifah to go get the tickets and money. Can you turn down the room coverage so I can hear only Ishaq?”
    Mordecai nodded and did as Gabriel asked. The interlude was twenty-three seconds. Gabriel listened to it three times, then removed his headphones and looked at Sarah.
    “Tell Adrian not to wait for NSA,” he said. “Tell him that Ishaq is calling from a highway rest stop in Germany—the northwest, judging by the accents of the people I can hear in the background. Tell him he’s traveling with at least one other man. They’re moving her around in a cargo truck or a transit van. He won’t be stopping again for several hours. He just filled the tank with gas.”

34
     
    A BOVE C OLORADO : 3:28 P.M. , T UESDAY
     
    T he Falcon 2000 executive jet began to pitch as it sank into the storm clouds above the plains of eastern Colorado. Lawrence Strauss removed his reading glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. One of Washington’s most powerful lawyers, he was a nervous flier by nature and avoided planes whenever he could—especially private planes, which he regarded as little more than death traps with wings. Given the nature of his current case, Strauss’s client had mandated he fly from Washington, D.C., to Colorado on a borrowed jet under conditions of extreme secrecy. Usually Lawrence Strauss didn’t permit clients to dictate his personal schedule or method of travel, but in this case he had made an exception. The client was a personal friend who also happened to be the president of the United States—and the mission he had given Strauss was so sensitive that only the president and his attorney general knew it existed.
    The Falcon came out of the clouds and settled into a stratum of smoother air. Strauss slipped his glasses back on and looked down at the file open on the worktable in front of him: The United States v. Sheikh Abdullah Abdul-Razzaq . It had been given to him late the previous evening inside the White House by the president himself. Strauss had learned much by reading the government’s case against the Egyptian cleric, mainly that it had been a house of cards. In the hands of a good defense lawyer, it could have been toppled with the flick of a well-presented motion to dismiss. But the sheikh hadn’t had a good defense lawyer; instead he had enlisted the services of a grandstanding civil rights warrior from Manhattan who had walked straight into the prosecutor’s trap. If Lawrence Strauss had been the sheikh’s lawyer, the case would never have gone to trial. Abdullah would have pleaded down to a much less serious offense or, in all likelihood, walked out of the courtroom a free man.
    But Lawrence Strauss didn’t take cases like Sheikh Abdullah’s. In fact, he rarely took cases at all. In Washington he was known as the lawyer no one knew but everyone wanted. He never spoke to the press, stayed clear of Washington cocktail parties, and the only time he had been inside a courtroom in the last twenty years was to testify against a man who assaulted him during an early-morning run through northwest Washington’s Battery Kemble Park. Strauss had never won a major trial, and no groundbreaking appeal bore his name. He operated in Washington’s shadows, where political connections and personal friendships counted for more than legal brilliance, and, unlike most of his brethren in the Washington legal community, he possessed the ability to cross political lines.