Gabriel rose and led Carter across the park to a second bench overlooking the playground. Leaning close to Carter’s ear, he outlined the plan while a childless swing squeaked faintly in the gentle breeze.
“This smells like Ari Shamron to me.”
“With good reason.”
“What do you have in mind? An anonymous donation to the Islamic charity of your choice?”
“Actually, we were thinking about something a bit more targeted in nature.”
“A direct donation to Rashid’s coffers?”
“Something like that.”
Wind moved in the trees surrounding the playground, unleashing a downpour of leaves. Carter brushed one from his shoulder and said, “It will take too much time.”
“Patience is a virtue, Adrian.”
“Not in Washington. We like to do things in a hurry.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
With his heavy silence, Carter made clear he didn’t. “It’s interesting,” he conceded. “Better still, it’s devious as hell. If we can actually become the primary source of funding for Rashid’s network . . .”
“Then we would own them, Adrian.”
Carter rapped his pipe against the side of the bench and slowly reloaded the bowl. “Let’s not get carried away just yet. This conversation is totally moot unless you can convince a well-to-do Muslim with jihadist street cred to work with you.”
“I never said it would be easy.”
“But you obviously have a candidate in mind.”
Gabriel glanced toward the basketball court where a member of Carter’s security detail was pacing slowly.
“What’s wrong?” Carter asked. “You don’t trust me?”
“It’s not you, Adrian. It’s the eight hundred thousand other people in your intelligence community who have top-secret clearances.”
“We still know how to compartmentalize information.”
“Tell that to your friends and allies who allowed you to put black sites on their soil. I’m sure you promised them the program would remain secret. But it didn’t. In fact, it was splashed across the front page of the Washington Post.”
“Yes,” Carter said morosely, “I seem to remember reading something about that.”
“The person we have in mind comes from a country with close ties to yours. If it ever became known that this individual was working on our behalf . . .” Gabriel’s voice trailed off. “Let’s just say the damage would not be limited to an embarrassing newspaper story. People would die, Adrian.”
“At least tell me what you’re planning next.”
“I need to look up a friend in New York.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Only by reputation. She used to be a hotshot investigative reporter for the Financial Journal in London. Now she’s working for CNBC.”
“We have a rule against using reporters.”
“But we don’t. And as we both know, this is an Israeli operation.”
“Just watch your step up there. We don’t want you ending up on the evening news.”
“Any other helpful advice?”
“The chatter we’ve been picking up might be harmless or deceptive,” Carter said, rising to his feet. “But then again . . . it might not be.”
He turned away without another word and headed back to his Escalade, trailed by the security man. Gabriel remained on the bench, watching the childless swing moving in the wind. After a few minutes, he left the park and walked south down the gentle slope of Thirty-fourth Street. A pair of motorcycles ridden by slender men in black helmets roared past and disappeared into the darkness. Just then, an image flashed in Gabriel’s memory—a distraught raven-haired woman, kneeling over the body of her father on the Quai Saint-Pierre in Cannes. The sound of the motorcycles dissipated, along with the memory of the woman. Gabriel thrust his hands into his coat pockets and walked on, thinking of nothing at all, as the trees wept leaves of gold.
Chapter 20 The Palisades, Washington, D.C.
AT THAT SAME MOMENT, a car pulled to the curb in front of a clapboard house located in the Washington neighborhood known as the Palisades. The car, a Ford Focus, was owned by Ellis Coyle of the CIA, as was the clapboard house. A tiny structure, more cottage than home, it had pushed Coyle’s finances to the breaking point. After many years overseas, he had wanted to settle down in one of the affordable suburbs of northern Virginia, but Norah had insisted on living in the District in order to be closer to her practice. Coyle’s wife was a child psychologist, an odd career choice, he always thought, for a woman whose barren womb had yielded no young. Her idyllic commute, a pleasant four-block stroll along MacArthur Boulevard, stood in stark contrast with Coyle’s twice-daily crossing of the Potomac River. For a while, he had tried listening to New Age music to calm his nerves but found it made him only angrier. These days, it was books on tape. He had recently completed Martin Gilbert’s masterpiece on Winston Churchill. In fact, due to repair work on Chain Bridge, it had taken him scarcely a week. Coyle had always admired Churchill’s decisiveness. Lately, Coyle had been decisive, too.
He switched off the engine. He was forced to park on the street because the home for which he had paid close to a million dollars had no garage. He had hoped the cottage would serve as a beachhead in the District, a starter home that he could use to trade up for a larger property in Kent or Spring Valley or perhaps even Wesley Heights. Instead, he had watched in frustration as prices spiraled far beyond the reach of his government salary. Only the wealthiest of Washington’s residents—the bloodsucking lawyers, the corrupt lobbyists, the celebrity journalists who ran down the Agency at every turn—could afford mortgages in those neighborhoods now. Even in the Palisades, the quaint wooden cottages were being torn down and replaced by mansions. Coyle’s neighbor, a successful lawyer named Roger Blankman, had recently built himself an Arts and Crafts monstrosity that cast a long shadow into Coyle’s formerly sunlit breakfast nook. Blankman’s ill-mannered children routinely strayed onto Coyle’s property, as did his army of landscapers, who were constantly making small improvements to the shape of Coyle’s junipers and hedges. Coyle returned the favor by poisoning Blankman’s impatiens. Coyle believed in the efficacy of covert action.
Now he sat motionless behind the wheel, staring at the light burning in his kitchen window. He could imagine the scene that would be played out next, for it changed little from night to night. Norah would be sitting at the kitchen table with her first glass of Merlot, leafing through the mail and listening to some dreadful program on public radio. She would give him a distracted kiss and remind him that Lucy, their black Labrador retriever, needed to be taken out for her nightly constitutional. The dog, like the house in the Palisades, had been Norah’s idea, yet it had somehow become Coyle’s task to oversee its bowel movements. Lucy usually found inspiration in Battery Kemble Park, a hillside of thick woods that was best avoided by unaccompanied women. Sometimes, when Coyle was feeling particularly rebellious, he would leave Lucy’s feces in the park rather than carry it home. Coyle committed other acts of rebellion as well—acts that he kept secret from Norah and his colleagues at Langley.
One of his secrets was Renate. They had met a year earlier in the bar of a Brussels hotel. Coyle had come from Langley to attend a gathering of Western counterterrorism officials; Renate, a photographer, had come from Hamburg to take pictures of a human rights campaigner for her magazine. The two nights they spent together were the most passionate of Ellis Coyle’s life. They saw each other again three months later, when Coyle invented an excuse to travel