Known by the code name Barak, the Hebrew word for lightning, the nine men and women of Gabriel’s team had many idiosyncrasies and many traditions. Among the idiosyncrasies was a ritual childlike squabble over room assignments. Among the traditions was a lavish first-night planning meal prepared by Chiara. The one that occurred at N Street was more poignant than most, in that it was never supposed to take place. Like everyone else at King Saul Boulevard, the team had expected the operation against the Iranian nuclear program to be Gabriel’s last. They had been told as much by their chief in name only, Uzi Navot, who was not altogether displeased, and by Shamron, who was distraught. “I had no choice but to set him free,” Shamron said after his fabled encounter with Gabriel atop the cliffs of Cornwall. “This time it’s for good.”
It might have been for good if Gabriel had not spotted Farid Khan walking along Wellington Street with a bomb beneath his overcoat. The men and women gathered around the dining room table understood the toll Covent Garden had taken on Gabriel. Many years earlier, in another lifetime, under another name, he had failed to prevent a bombing in Vienna that forever altered the course of his life. On that occasion, the bomb had been hidden not beneath the overcoat of a shahid but in the undercarriage of Gabriel’s car. The victims were not strangers but loved ones—his wife, Leah, and his only son, Dani. Leah lived now in a psychiatric hospital atop Mount Herzl in Jerusalem in a prison of memory and a body destroyed by fire. She had only a vague sense that Dani was buried not far from her, on the Mount of Olives.
The members of Gabriel’s team did not mention Leah and Dani that evening, nor did they dwell long on the chain of events that led Gabriel to be an unwilling witness to Farid Khan’s martyrdom. Instead, they spoke of friends and family, of books they had read and movies they had seen, and of the remarkable changes currently sweeping the Arab world. In Egypt, Pharaoh had finally fallen, unleashing a wave of protest that was threatening to topple the kings and secular dictators who had ruled the region for generations. Whether the changes would bring Israel greater security or place it in greater peril was a topic of hot debate inside the Office and around the dinner table that night. Yossi, an optimist by nature, believed the Arabs, if given the opportunity to govern themselves, would have no truck with those who wished to make war with Israel. Yaakov, who had spent years running spies against hostile Arab regimes, declared Yossi dangerously delusional, as did nearly everyone else. Only Dina refused to venture an opinion, for her thoughts were focused on the crates of files waiting in the living room. She had a clock ticking in her formidable brain and believed that a minute wasted was a minute left to terrorists to plot and plan. The files held the promise of lives saved. They were sacred texts that contained secrets only she could decode.
It was approaching midnight by the time the meal finally came to an end. It was followed by the traditional spat over who would clear the dishes, who would wash, and who would dry. After recusing himself, Gabriel acquainted Dina with the files, then showed Chiara upstairs to their room. It was on the third floor, overlooking the rear garden. The red aircraft warning lights atop the spires of Georgetown University winked softly in the distance, a reminder of the city’s vulnerability to aviation-based terrorism.
“I suppose there are worse places to spend a few days,” Chiara said. “Where did you put Mikhail and Sarah?”
“As far apart as possible.”
“What are the chances this operation might bring them back together?”
“About the same that the Arab world is suddenly going to recognize our right to exist.”
“That bad?”
“I’m afraid so.” Gabriel lifted Chiara’s bag and placed it at the end of the bed. It sagged beneath the weight. “What have you got in here?”
“Gilah sent along a few things for you.”
“Rocks?”
“Food,” Chiara said. “You know how Gilah is. She always thought you were too thin.”
“How is she?”
“Now that Ari isn’t spending so much time around the house, she seems to be doing much better.”
“Did he finally sign up for that pottery course he’s always wanted to take?”
“Actually, he’s back at King Saul Boulevard.”
“Doing what?”
“Uzi thought he needed something to keep him occupied, so he made him your operational coordinator. He’d like you to call him first thing in the morning.” Chiara kissed his cheek and smiled. “Welcome home, darling.”
Chapter 16 Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
THERE IS A TRUISM ABOUT terror networks: putting the pieces in place is not as difficult as one might imagine. But once the mastermind pulls the trigger and carries out his first attack, the element of surprise is lost and the network exposes itself. In the earliest years of the conflict against terrorism—when Black September and Carlos the Jackal were running amok, aided by useful leftist Euro-idiots such as the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Brigades—intelligence officers mainly used physical surveillance, hard wiretaps, and good old-fashioned detective work to identify the members of a cell. Now, with the advent of the Internet and global satellite communications, the contours of the battlefield had been altered. The Internet had given the terrorists a powerful tool to organize, inspire, and communicate, but it had also provided intelligence services with a means of tracking their every move. Cyberspace was like a forest in winter. The terrorists could hide there for a time, hatching their plots and organizing their forces, but they could not come or go without leaving footprints in the snow. The challenge for the counterterrorism officer was to follow the right set of tracks, for the virtual forest was a dark and confusing place where one could wander aimlessly while innocents died.
Gabriel and his team cautiously set foot there the next morning when British intelligence, under standing agreement, shared with their American cousins the preliminary results of the inquiry into the Covent Garden bombing. Included in the material were the contents of Farid Khan’s computers at home and work, a printout of every number he had dialed from his mobile phone, and a list of known Islamic extremists he had encountered while he was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun. There was also a copy of the suicide tape, along with several hundred still images captured by CCTV during the final months of his life. The last photo showed him standing in Covent Garden, his arms raised above his head, a bloom of fire erupting from the explosives belt around his waist. Lying on the ground a few feet away, shielded by two men, was Gabriel. When the picture was magnified, it was possible to see the shadow of a gun in his left hand.
Carter had distributed the material to the CTC at Langley and the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland. Then, without the knowledge of either, he delivered a third copy to the house on N Street. The next day, he dropped off a remarkably similar package from the Danish, but an entire week would elapse before he appeared with the material from Paris. “The French still haven’t quite figured out that we’re all in this together,” Carter said. “They view the attack as a failure of their intelligence system, which means you can be sure we’re getting only part of the story.”
Gabriel and his team worked through the material as quickly as possible, but with the patience and attention to detail required in such an endeavor. Instinctively, Gabriel told them to approach the case as if it were an enormous canvas that had suffered extensive losses. “Don’t stand off at a distance and try to see everything at once,” he warned. “It will only drive you mad. Work your way in slowly from the edges. Focus on small details—a hand, an eye, the hem of a garment, a single thread running through each of the three attacks. You won’t be able to see it at first, but it’s there, I promise you.”
With the help of the NSA and the government data miners who worked in faceless office blocks ringing the Capital Beltway, the team burrowed deep into the memory of mainframe computers and servers scattered around the world. Phone numbers begot phone numbers, e-mail accounts begot