IT WAS AFTER nine o’clock by the time they arrived at King Saul Boulevard. Lavon was long retired from the Office but still gave the odd lecture at the Academy and still had credentials to enter the building whenever he pleased. Gabriel cleared him into the file rooms of the Research division, then headed down to a gloomy corridor two levels belowground. At the end of the hall was Room 456C. Affixed to the door was a paper sign, written in Gabriel’s own stylish Hebrew hand: TEMPORARY COMMITTEE FOR THE STUDY OF TERROR THREATS IN WESTERN EUROPE. He decided to leave it for now.
He opened the combination lock, switched on the lights, and went inside. The room seemed frozen in time. They’d had several names for it: the Pod, the Quad, the Tank. Yaakov, a pockmarked tough from the Arab Affairs Department of Shabak, had christened it the Hellhole. Yossi from Research had called it the Village of the Damned, but then Yossi had read classics at Oxford and always brought an air of erudition to his work, even when the subjects weren’t worthy of it.
Gabriel paused at the trestle table that Dina and Rimona had shared. Their constant squabbling over territory had driven him to near madness. The separation line he had drawn down the center of the table was still there, along with the warning Rimona had written on her side of the border:
He continued his slow tour of the room. In the corner stood the same pile of outmoded computer equipment that no one had ever bothered to remove. Before becoming the headquarters of Group Khaled, Room 456C had been nothing more than a dumping ground for old furniture and obsolete electronics, often used by the members of the night staff as a spot for romantic trysts. Gabriel’s chalkboard was still there, too. He could scarcely decipher the last words he had written. He gazed up at the walls, which were covered with photographs of young Palestinian men. One photograph seized his attention, a boy with a beret on his head and a kaffiyeh draped over his shoulders, seated on the lap of Yasir Arafat: Khaled al-Khalifa at the funeral of his father, Sabri. Gabriel had killed Sabri, and he had killed Khaled as well.
He cleared the walls of the old photographs and put two new ones in their place. One showed a man in a kaffiyeh in the mountains of Afghanistan. The other showed the same man in a cashmere overcoat and trilby hat standing before a billionaire’s home in Paris.
Group Khaled was now Group bin Shafiq.
FOR THE FIRST forty-eight hours Gabriel and Lavon worked alone. On the third day they were joined by Yossi, a tall balding man with the bearing of an English intellectual. Rimona came on the fourth day, as did Yaakov, who arrived from Shabak headquarters carrying a box filled with material on the terrorists who had attacked Shamron’s car. Dina was the last to arrive. Small and dark-haired, she had been standing in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street on October 19, 1994, when a Hamas suicide bomber had turned the Number 5 bus into a coffin for twenty-one people. Her mother and two of her sisters were among those killed; Dina had been seriously wounded and now walked with a slight limp. She had dealt with the loss by becoming an expert in terrorism. Indeed, Dina Sarid could recite the time, place, and butcher’s bill of every act of terror ever committed against the State of Israel. She had once told Gabriel she knew more about the terrorists than they knew about themselves. Gabriel had believed her.
They divided into two areas of responsibility. Ahmed bin Shafiq and the Brotherhood of Allah became the province of Dina, Yaakov, and Rimona, while Yossi joined Lavon’s excavation of AAB Holdings. Gabriel, at least for the moment, worked largely alone, for he had given himself the unenviable task of attempting to identify every painting ever acquired or sold by Zizi al-Bakari.
As the days wore on, the walls of Room 456C began to reflect the operation’s unique nature. Upon one wall slowly appeared the murky outlines of a lethal new terrorist network led by a man who was largely a ghost. To the best of their ability they retraced bin Shafiq’s long journey through the bloodstream of Islamic extremism. Wherever there had been trouble, it seemed, there had been bin Shafiq, handing out Saudi oil money and Wahhabi propaganda by the fistful: Afghanistan, Lebanon, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Pakistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, and, of course, the Palestinian Authority. They were not without significant leads, however, because in carrying out two major attacks, bin Shafiq and the Brotherhood had surrendered more than a dozen names that could be investigated for connections and associations. And then there was Ibrahim el-Banna, the Egyptian imam of death, and Professor Ali Massoudi, the recruiter and talent spotter.
On the opposite wall there appeared another network: AAB Holdings. Using open sources and some that were not so open, Lavon painstakingly sifted through the layers of Zizi’s financial empire and assembled the disparate pieces like bits of an ancient artifact. At the top of the structure was AAB itself. Beneath it was an intricate financial web of subholding companies and corporate shells that allowed Zizi to extend his influence to nearly every corner of the globe under conditions of near-perfect corporate secrecy. With most of his companies registered in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, Lavon likened Zizi to a financial stealth fighter, capable of striking at will while avoiding detection by enemy radar. Despite the opaque nature of Zizi’s empire, Lavon came to the conclusion the numbers didn’t add up. “Zizi couldn’t possibly have earned enough from his early investments to justify the size of his later acquisitions,” he explained to Gabriel. “AAB Holdings is a front for the House of Saud.” As for trying to find Ahmed bin Shafiq anywhere within Zizi’s financial octopus, Lavon likened it to finding a needle in the Arabian Desert. “Not impossible,” he said, “but you’re likely to die of thirst trying.”
Yossi saw to Zizi’s personnel. He focused on the relatively small team that worked inside Zizi’s Geneva headquarters, along with companies wholly owned or controlled by AAB. Most of his time, though, was devoted to Zizi’s large personal entourage. Their photographs soon covered the wall above Yossi’s workspace and stood in stark contrast to those of bin Shafiq’s terror network. New photographs arrived each day as Yossi monitored Zizi’s frenetic movements around the globe. Zizi arriving for a meeting in London. Zizi consulting with German automakers in Stuttgart. Zizi enjoying the view of the Red Sea from his new hotel in Sharm el-Sheik. Zizi conferring with the king of Jordan about a possible construction deal. Zizi opening a desalination plant in Yemen. Zizi collecting a humanitarian award from an Islamic group in Montreal whose Web site, Yossi pointed out, contained an open call for the destruction of the State of Israel.
As for Gabriel’s corner of the room, it was a sanctuary from the realms of terror and finance. His wall was covered not with the faces of terrorists or business executives but with dozens of photographs of French Impressionist prints. And while Lavon and Yossi spent their days digging through dreary ledger sheets and computer printouts, Gabriel could often be seen leafing through old catalogs, Impressionist monographs, and press clippings describing Zizi’s exploits on the world art scene.
By the end of the tenth day, Gabriel had decided how he was going to slip an agent into Jihad Incorporated. He walked over to Yossi’s collage of photographs and gazed at a single image. It showed a gaunt, gray-haired Englishman, seated next to Zizi six months earlier at the Impressionist and Modern Art auction at Christie’s in New York. Gabriel removed the photograph and held it up for the others to see. “This man,” he said. “He has to go.” Then he called Adrian Carter on a private secure number at Langley and told him how he planned to penetrate the House of Zizi. “All you need now is a painting and a girl,” Carter said. “You find the painting. I’ll get you the girl.”
GABRIEL LEFT King Saul Boulevard a little earlier than usual and drove to Ein Kerem. There were still security guards posted outside the intensive care unit of the Hadassah Medical Center, but Shamron was alone when Gabriel entered his room. “The prodigal son has decided to pay me a visit,” he said bitterly. “It’s a good thing we’re a desert people. Otherwise you would put me on an ice floe and cast me out to sea.”
Gabriel sat down next to the bed. “I’ve been here at least a half dozen times.”
“When?”
“Late at night when you’re asleep.”
“You hover over me? Like Gilah and the doctors? Why can’t you come during the day like a normal person?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“The prime minister isn’t too busy to come see me at a reasonable hour.” Shamron, his injured neck
