The Secret Servant

shot of the ketamine, then she would awaken in a new room with new smells. Thus far she had been given three meals in her current location. Her fourth would be coming soon. Elizabeth knew that, in all likelihood, it would be followed several hours later by an injection of ketamine. She would struggle, but her struggle would quickly turn to submission in the face of greater strength and numbers.
    Submission …
    That was their goal. Submission was the overall goal of the global jihadists and it was the goal of Elizabeth’s captors as well. The global jihadists wanted the West to submit to the will of violent Salafist Islam. Elizabeth’s captors wanted her to submit to the needle and the mind-numbing rhythm of their movements and their notes. They wanted her weak and compliant, a sheep that offers its throat willingly to the ritual knife. Elizabeth had decided that her days of submission were over. She had decided to stage a rebellion, a rebellion she hoped would provide her with information as to her whereabouts, a rebellion fought with the only two weapons available to her—her own life and her knowledge of medicine. She closed her eyes and inhaled the pleasant aroma of coffee and cinnamon. And she waited for Cain to open the door and present her with her fourth meal.

38
     
    C OPENHAGEN : 2:52 P.M. , T HURSDAY
     
    S o it comes down to the two of us once again,” Ibrahim said. “I suppose that’s fitting.”
    Gabriel cleared the windshield of his Audi A8 sedan with a flick of the wiper blades. The King’s New Square appeared before him, shrouded in a bridal veil of snowfall. Ibrahim was sitting silently in the passenger seat, freshly scrubbed and dressed for his own funeral in a borrowed gray suit and overcoat. His hands were folded primly in his lap, good hand atop ruined hand, and his eyes were on his shoes. Gabriel’s telephone lay in the console. Its signal was being monitored inside the CIA station at the American embassy and at NSA headquarters.
    “You’re not going to give me another one of your lectures, are you, Ibrahim?”
    “I’m still a professor at heart,” he said. “I can’t help it.”
    Gabriel decided to indulge him. A lecture was better than silence.
    “Why do you suppose it’s fitting?”
    “We have both seen the worst this life has to offer. Nothing can frighten us, and nothing that happens today will surprise us.” He looked up from his shoes and gazed at Gabriel for a moment. “The things they wrote about you in the newspapers after London—it was all true? You were the one who killed the members of Black September?”
    Ibrahim interpreted Gabriel’s silence as affirmation the newspapers accounts were all true.
    “I remember Munich so clearly,” Ibrahim said. “We spent that day standing around our televisions and radios. It electrified the Arab world. We cheered the capture of your athletes, and when they were massacred at the airport we danced in the streets. In retrospect, our reaction was appalling, but completely understandable. We were weak and humiliated. You were strong and rich. You had beaten us many times. We had finally beaten you, in Germany of all places, land of your greatest catastrophe.”
    “I thought you Islamists didn’t believe in the Holocaust. I thought you regarded it as a great lie, foisted upon the world by clever Jews so we could rob the Arabs of their land.”
    “I’ve never been one to dabble in self-delusion and conspiracy theory,” Ibrahim said. “You Jews deserve a national home. God knows you need one. But the sooner you give the Palestinians a state in the West Bank and Gaza, the better for all of us.”
    “And if that means giving it to your spiritual brethren in Hamas?”
    “At the rate we’re going, Hamas will look like moderates soon,” Ibrahim said. “And when the Palestinian issue is finally removed from the table, the Arabs will have no one else to blame for their miserable condition. We will be forced to take a hard look in the mirror and solve our problems for ourselves.”
    “That’s just one of the reasons why there will never be peace. We’re the scapegoat for Arab failings—the pressure valve for Arab unrest. The Arabs loathe us, but they cannot live without us.”
    Ibrahim nodded in agreement and resumed the study of his shoes. “Is it also true that you are a famous art restorer?”
    This time Gabriel nodded slowly. Ibrahim pulled his lips into an incredulous frown.
    “Why, if you have the ability to