The Secret Servant (15 page)

T
he Cairo slum known as Imbaba is one of the most desperately poor places on earth. Located just across the Nile from the fashionable island district of Zamalek, Imbaba is so crowded its rickety tenement buildings often collapse beneath the weight of their occupants. The alleys are unpaved, without names, and in perpetual darkness. They run with raw sewage and are choked with mounds of uncollected garbage. At night they are ruled by packs of wild dogs. The children of Imbaba wear rags, drink from cesspools, and live in fear of being eaten alive by the rats. There is little running water, only brief interludes of electricity, and even less hope. Only Islam. Radical Islam. It is written on the crumbling walls in green spray paint:
ISLAM IS THE ANSWER
…
ONLY THE SWORD CAN SAVE US
…

The mood in Imbaba that morning was more tense than usual. Riot police were roaming the alleyways and SSI men in plain clothes were surveying their surroundings from coffee shops and falafel stands. Hussein Mandali, a fourth-grade teacher at the Imbaba middle school, had seen it like this before. The security forces were about to move in for a sweep. Any man with a beard and a galabiya—or any woman in a
niqab
—would be arrested and thrown into the Scorpion, the dreaded facility inside Cairo’s Torah Prison complex reserved for Islamists. Everyone, regardless of sex, would spend at least a few minutes on the torture table. Pharaoh’s secret police did not concern themselves much with laws or rules of evidence. Their task was to instill fear, and they did so with ruthless efficiency.

Hussein Mandali did not wear a beard, though he did dress in the galabiya, the only garment he could afford on his pittance of a salary. Egypt’s education system, like nearly everything else in the country, was crumbling. Teachers earned nothing and students learned little. For many years the country’s twenty-five thousand public schools had been under the control of Islamists. As a result they were little more than factories that each year churned out thousands of young men and women committed to the destruction of the regime and its supporters in the West. Hussein Mandali knew this phenomenon all too well. He lectured his students daily on the rewards of jihad and martyrdom, and told them it was their sacred duty to kill Americans and Jews and topple their puppet, Hosni Mubarak. The children of Imbaba were always willing recruits. The proof of Pharaoh’s indifference to their plight was all around them.

A group of police officers was standing guard at the end of the street. They eyed Mandali suspiciously as he slipped past without a word and set out along the cacophonous boulevard overlooking the western bank of the Nile. Two minutes later he turned left onto a bridge and crossed over onto Zamalek. How different it was here, he thought. Zamalek was an island of privilege surrounded by a sea of misery, a place where the vast majority of Egypt’s population could not afford to buy a pastry or a cup of coffee. Zamalek would soon feel the wrath of Egypt’s legions of downtrodden Muslims, Mandali thought. So would the entire world.

He followed July 26 Street across the island, then wandered for a time through the quiet side streets north of the Gezira Sporting Club to make certain he wasn’t being followed. Thirty minutes after leaving Imbaba, he approached a luxury high-rise apartment house called the Ramses Towers. The tall Sudanese standing guard over the entrance was a member of the Sword of Allah. He guided Mandali into the marble lobby and instructed him to use the back staircase so that none of the other tenants would see a poor man in their gilded elevator. As a result, Mandali was heavily winded when he presented himself at the door of Apartment 2408 and knocked in the prescribed fashion: two knocks, followed by a brief pause, then three more knocks.

The door was opened a few seconds later by a man dressed in a pale gray galabiya. He admitted Mandali into a formal entrance hall, then showed him into a magnificent sitting room overlooking the Nile. Seated cross-legged on the floor, dressed in a white galabiya and a crocheted white skullcap, was an elderly man with a long gray beard. Hussein Mandali kissed the old man’s leathery cheeks and sat before him.

“You have news from the street?” asked Sheikh Tayyib Abdul-Razzaq.

“Mubarak’s forces have surrounded Imbaba and have started to infiltrate the district. In other parts of the country, the army and the police are hitting us very hard. Fayoum, Minya, Asyut, and Luxor have all seen heavy raids. The situation is tense. One spark and it could explode.”

The sheikh fingered his prayer beads and looked at the other man. “Bring me a tape recorder,” he said, “and I’ll give you a spark.”

The man laid the recorder at the feet of the sheikh and switched it on. One hour later Hussein Mandali was once again picking his way through the alleys of Imbaba, this time with a cassette tape concealed inside his sock. By nightfall the sermon would be circulating through a network of popular mosques and underground jihadists cells. After that it would be in the hands of Allah. Hussein Mandali was sure of only one thing. The open sewers of Imbaba would soon be flowing red with the blood of Pharaoh’s soldiers.

H
eleen
was squat and boxy, painted chocolate brown and trimmed in red. Flower boxes lined her gunwales, and a skiff with an outboard motor bobbed at her stern. Her interior had been recently renovated; stainless-steel appliances shone in the small but sophisticated kitchen, and Scandinavian-style furniture adorned the comfortable sitting room. Three modern paintings of questionable taste had been removed from the walls and in their place hung a large-scale map of Amsterdam and several dozen surveillance photographs of a Muslim man of late middle age. A notebook computer with secure communications software stood on the glass dining-room table, and before it sat a small figure who seemed to be wearing all of his clothing at once. Gabriel pleaded with him to extinguish his cigarette. The overnight drive from Paris had left him with a splitting headache.

“If Ibrahim Fawaz is a terrorist, he certainly doesn’t act like one,” Eli Lavon said. “He doesn’t engage in anything that might be construed as a rudimentary countersurveillance, and his movements are predictable and direct.”

Gabriel looked up at the map of Amsterdam on the wall, where Ibrahim’s daily routine was represented by a thick red line. It ran from his apartment in the August Allebéplein to the West Amsterdam Islamic Community Center, then to the Ten Kate Market, and finally to the al-Hijrah Mosque. Times of arrival and departure were meticulously noted and supported by photographic evidence.

“Where?” Gabriel asked. “Where should we take him?”

Lavon stood and walked over to the map. “In my learned opinion, there’s only one spot that’s suitable. Here”—he stabbed the map twice with his stubby forefinger—“at the end of the Jan Hazenstraat. He walks by there on the way home from evening prayers at the mosque. It’s reasonably quiet for Amsterdam, and if we can take out the streetlamps he’ll never see us coming.” He turned and looked at Gabriel. “When are you thinking about doing it?”

The answer came from the kitchen, where Sarah was making a fresh pot of coffee. “Tonight,” she said. “We have no choice but to take him tonight and start the interrogation.”

“Tonight?”
Lavon looked at Gabriel and gave him an incredulous smile. “A year ago I was teaching this child how to walk the street like a professional. Now she is telling me that I have to kidnap a man from a densely populated European city after watching him for less than forty-eight hours.”

“Unfortunately, the child is right, Eli. We have to do it tonight and get started.”

Lavon sat down again and folded his arms. “Do you remember how long I watched Zwaiter in Rome before we even began talking about how to kill him? Three weeks. And that was for an assassination, not a kidnapping. And you know what Shamron always says about kidnap operations.”

“He says it’s much easier to leave a dead man on a sidewalk than it is to get a live one into a getaway car.” Gabriel smiled. “Shamron
does
have a way with words, doesn’t he?”

Sarah brought the pot of coffee to the table and sat down next to Gabriel. Lavon lit a cigarette and blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling in frustration.

“The police in this city are on high alert because of the links between the Amsterdam cell and the attack in London,” he said. “We need to watch Ibrahim for at least another week. We have to plan a primary escape route, a backup escape route, and a backup to the backup escape route. We have to put the snatch zone under twenty-four-hour surveillance, so we know there won’t be any surprises on the night of the operation. Have I forgotten anything?”

“The dry runs,” said Gabriel. “We should make at least three dry runs. And in a perfect world we would do all those things. But in the real world, Elizabeth Halton has less than five days to live. We prepare as much as we can, but we take him tonight.”

“And we pray to God we all don’t end up in jail, which is what’s going to happen if we make a mistake.” Lavon gazed despondently at his wristwatch. “Let’s take a walk over to the Oud West. Who knows? It might be our last opportunity for a very long time.”

The bustling outdoor market that ran for several blocks along the Ten Kate Straat reflected the altered demographics of Amsterdam’s Oud West neighborhood. There were dates and lentils, barrels filled with olives and chickpeas, shwarma stands and falafel vendors, and three different halal butchers. Gabriel paused briefly in the open-air shoe store and picked through a pile of counterfeit American basketball shoes, the ultimate status symbol of the young, even among the street toughs of west Amsterdam. At the stall on the opposite side of the street, Sarah was scrutinizing a canvas book bag emblazoned with the face of Che Guevara, while Lavon was feigning interest in a hooded sweatshirt that proclaimed
FREE PALESTINE NOW
!

Lavon looked at Gabriel and gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head, the signal that he had detected no surveillance. A moment later they were all three walking side by side toward the far end of the market. The stall where Ibrahim Fawaz worked in the afternoon was occupied by an elderly Moroccan man in a white djellaba. Sarah paused to examine an electric teakettle while Gabriel and Lavon walked on to the end of the market. On the opposite side of the street, in a drab, postwar building, was the al-Hijrah Mosque. Two bearded men were conversing outside on the pavement, under the watchful gaze of two uniformed Amsterdam policemen. Twenty yards away was a dark van with blacked out windows.

“It hasn’t moved in forty-eight hours,” Lavon said.

“Dutch security?”

Lavon nodded. “If I had to guess, I’d say they have a static post in the building across the street as well.”

Gabriel looked back toward the kitchen supplies stall and motioned for Sarah to join them. Then they turned to the left and walked along the Jan Hazenstraat. It was a quiet street lined with squat, mismatched tenement buildings and small storefronts. At the far end, overlooking a broad canal, was a tiny park with a few benches, a swing set, and a pair of rusted hobbyhorses on steel springs. Gabriel rounded the corner to the left and paused: more apartment blocks, but no storefronts or cafés, nothing that would be open after dark.

“Evening prayers begin tonight at six thirty-seven,” Lavon said. “Which means that Ibrahim will be passing by this spot at approximately seven o’clock. Once he comes around the corner, no one in the van or the static post will be able to see him. We just have to make sure we get him without making any noise. I recommend we put the getaway vehicle on this corner where the Dutch agents can’t see it. Then we have to do something that makes Ibrahim slow down long enough so that we can get him cleanly.”

Gabriel thought of the night he and Ibrahim had walked along the Amstel River together and a single image flashed in his memory—Ibrahim Fawaz lowering his gaze in disgust as two men strolled toward them arm in arm.

“He doesn’t like homosexuals,” Gabriel said.

“Few Islamists do,” Lavon replied. “What do you have in mind?”

Gabriel told him. Lavon smiled.

“To whom do you intend to give this assignment?”

“Mikhail and Yaakov,” Gabriel said without hesitation.

“Perfect,” said Eli Lavon. “But you tell them. Those boys make me nervous.”

T
here was no mistaking the perpetrator of the assault on the door of Nicholas Scanlon’s office. Two knocks, sharp as a tack hammer. The White House press secretary allowed ten uncomfortable seconds to elapse before looking up from his work. Melissa Stewart, NBC’s chief White House correspondent, was leaning against the doorjamb, her arms folded defiantly, her newly tinted hair tousled from her last live shot on the North Lawn.

“What’s on your mind, Melissa?”

“We need to talk.”

“No paper in the ladies’ room again?”

Stewart stepped inside the office and closed the door.

“Please come in, Melissa,” Scanlon said sarcastically. “Have a seat.”

“I’d love to, Nick, but I’m in a bit of a rush.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Confirm a story.”

Scanlon shuffled the papers on his desk and played for time. “What have you got?”

“I know who’s holding Elizabeth Halton hostage.”

“Do tell, Melissa. We’d all like to know.”

“It’s the Sword of Allah, Nick. A few days ago a DVD of Elizabeth was left in the countryside of southern England. They want Sheikh Abdullah back, and if we don’t have him on a plane bound for Egypt by Friday night, they’re going to kill her.”

“What’s your source?”

“That doesn’t sound like a denial.”

“Answer the question, please.”

“You don’t really expect me to divulge my source, do you?”

“At least characterize the nature of the source for me.”

“Law enforcement,” she said. “But that’s as far as I go.”

Scanlon swiveled his chair around and gazed through his bulletproof window toward the North Lawn.
A fucking leak…
It was a miracle they had managed to keep a lid on it this long. It had been just six months since Scanlon had left his lucrative job as a lobbyist and public relations executive to come to work for the president, but in that time he had been given ample evidence of Washington’s proclivity to leak. And the worse the news, the faster it gushed out. He wondered what would possibly motivate a federal law enforcement official to slip a piece of news like this to a reporter. He rotated his chair around and looked into Melissa Stewart’s large blue eyes.
But of course,
he thought.

“You still sleeping with that guy from the Bureau?”

“Stay out of my personal life, Nick.”

“I’m going to give you a piece of advice, and I hope you take it in the spirit it is offered. This is not a story you want to be first on.”

“That doesn’t sound like a denial either.”

“As you can imagine, we are in the middle of some very delicate operations around the globe right now—operations that will be placed in jeopardy if this news is revealed before we’re ready.”

“I’m sorry, Nick, but this is just too big to sit on. If it’s true, we have to go with it. The American people deserve to know who’s holding Ambassador Halton’s daughter.”

“Even if it gets her killed?”

“You’ve sunk into the depths before, but that’s the lowest.”

“I can go much lower, Melissa. I’ll deny it’s true, and then I’ll denounce you from the podium.”

She turned and reached for the doorknob.

“Wait,” Scanlon said, his tone suddenly conciliatory. “Perhaps we can reach an accommodation.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“How long can you give me?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Twenty,” Scanlon countered.

“Fifteen.”

Scanlon nodded in agreement. Stewart looked at her watch.

“If the phone in my booth doesn’t ring in fifteen fucking minutes,” she said, “I’m going to march out to the lawn and tell the world who’s holding Elizabeth Halton.”

The president was seated at his desk when Nicholas Scanlon entered the Oval Office three minutes later, accompanied by White House Chief of Staff William Burns and National Security Advisor Cyrus Mansfield.

“Why the long faces, gentlemen?” the president asked.

“There’s been a leak, Mr. President,” Scanlon said. “NBC knows who’s holding Elizabeth.”

The president closed his eyes in frustration. For more than a week now, he had been walking a fine line, attempting to show appropriate concern in public for the fate of his friend’s daughter while at the same time making it clear to the terrorists that they had not managed to incapacitate the most powerful man on the planet. Only those closest to the president knew the physical and emotional toll the kidnapping had taken on him.

“What do you suggest, Nick?”

“Taking the bull by the horns, sir. I think it would be better for the country and the rest of the world to hear the news from your mouth than Melissa Stewart’s.”

“How long do we have before she goes on the air with it?”

Scanlon looked at his watch. “Nine minutes, sir.”

The president looked from his press secretary to his national security advisor. “I need to know whether I’m going to be placing any sensitive operations in jeopardy if I go public now. Get the director of the CIA on the line. The secretary of state, too.”

“Yes, sir.”

The president looked at Scanlon again. “Assuming no one has any objections, where would you like to do this?”

“The Briefing Room feels appropriate to me.”

“No questions, though.”

“I’ll make that clear to the reporters beforehand.”

“How are you going to handle Melissa Stewart?”

“We’ll have to promise her something,” Scanlon said. “Something big.”

“Couldn’t we just appeal to her sense of decency and patriotism?”

“We’re talking about Melissa Stewart, Mr. President. I’m not sure she has a pulse, let alone a sense of patriotism.”

The president exhaled heavily. “You can tell her the first interview I do after this is over will be with NBC News. That should make her happy.”

“That’s going to cause me problems elsewhere in the press room, sir.”

“I’m afraid that those are
your
problems, Nick, not mine.”

“Would you like me to draft a statement for you, sir?”

The president shook his head. “This is one I can handle on my own.”

Melissa Stewart was pulling on her overcoat and preparing to head for the North Lawn when the telephone in her booth rang.

“Cutting it close, don’t you think?”

“I’m sorry, Melissa. For a moment I forgot that you’re the center of the universe.”

“I’m late for an important live shot, Nick.”

“Cancel it.”

“What have you got for me?”

“The president is going into the Briefing Room in twenty minutes to tell the world that the Sword of Allah is holding Elizabeth Halton hostage and is demanding the release of Sheikh Abdullah. Before his appearance, you may report that NBC News has learned that Elizabeth Halton is being held by Egyptian militants and that the president is expected to say more on the situation. If you stick to the script, your network will get the first exclusive with the president when this affair is over. If you don’t, I’ll devote the rest of my time at the White House to making your life miserable. Do we have a deal?”

“I believe we do.”

“See you in the Briefing Room in ten minutes. And don’t try to slip one past me, Melissa. I’ll be listening carefully.”

The president of the United States stepped to the podium in the White House Briefing Room at precisely 1:30
P.M
. Eastern time and informed the world that his goddaughter had been taken hostage by the Egyptian terror group known as the Sword of Allah. In exchange for Elizabeth’s release, said the president, the terrorists had demanded that the United States free Sheik Abdullah Abdul-Razzaq. It was a demand, the president made clear, that would never be met. He called on the terrorists to release Elizabeth immediately, warned them and their sponsors that they would be brought to justice, and thanked the American people for their prayers and support.

At 1:32, the president stepped away from the podium and left Nicholas Scanlon, his press secretary, to face the stunned press corps alone. Adrian Carter pressed the
MUTE
button on his remote control and looked toward the door of his office, where Shepard Cantwell, the deputy director for intelligence, was standing in his shirtsleeves and suspenders.

“What did you think?” Cantwell asked.

Carter hesitated before answering. Shepard Cantwell only asked questions of others when he wanted to venture an opinion of his own. Cantwell couldn’t help it. He was Analysis.

“I thought he did as well as expected under the circumstances,” Carter said. “He made it clear to the Sword that we won’t be held hostage and that we won’t negotiate.”

“You’re assuming that’s what the Sword really wants: to negotiate. I’m not so sure about that.” Cantwell came into Carter’s office and sat down. “Our analysts have been poring over every word Sheikh Tayyib Abdul-Razzaq has ever written or said publicly: sermons, fatwas, transcripts of interviews, anything we can lay our hands on. A couple of years ago he gave an interview to an Arabic-language newspaper from London under conditions of extreme secrecy somewhere inside Egypt. During the interview the sheikh was asked to name the most likely scenario under which the Islamists might seize power in Egypt—an election, a coup, or a popular uprising. The sheikh was very clear in his response. He said the
only
way the Islamists will ever seize power in Egypt is by inciting the masses to rise up against their oppressors. Demonstrations, rioting, clashes in the street with the army: an intifada of sorts, from the Nile Delta to Upper Egypt.”

“What’s your point, Shep?”

“Sheikh Tayyib is a religious fanatic and mass murderer who also happens to be a very shrewd and clever character. The fact that he is still alive after all these years is proof of that. He had to know we would never bow to his demands to release his brother in exchange for Elizabeth Halton. But maybe he doesn’t really want his brother. Maybe what he really wants is his uprising.”

“And he gets his uprising by provoking a confrontation with us?”

“At this moment the Egyptian security services are tearing the country to pieces in order to help the infidel Americans find the daughter of a billionaire ambassador,” Cantwell said. “Think how that must look to an Egyptian Islamist who lives in desperate poverty, who’s lost a brother or a father to Mubarak’s torture chambers. Those torture chambers are filling up as we speak, and they’re filling because the regime is looking for
one
American woman.”

“How bad is the situation in Egypt right now?”

“The reports we’re getting from Cairo Station say it’s extremely bad. In fact, it’s worse than anyone there has ever seen it. If this goes on much longer, Sheikh Tayyib is going to get his uprising. And history is going to remember our president as the man who lost Egypt.”

Cantwell stood and started to leave, then stopped and turned suddenly. “One more thing,” he said. “The president just sent our friend the Sphinx a very clear message. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Sphinx sent one in return. If I were you, I’d get on the phone to Homeland Security and raise the National Threat Advisory immediately.”

“How high?”

“Red,” said Cantwell as he slipped from the room. “
Blood
red.”

Carter looked at his watch. It was 1:37
P.M
. The Muslim evening prayer had just begun in Amsterdam. He stared at his telephone and waited for it to ring.