At that same moment in Hampstead Heath, the vagrant returned to his encampment atop Parliament Hill. He spent a few seconds picking through the rubbish bin, as if looking for a morsel of something edible, then settled himself once more on his bench overlooking the cityscape of London. His thoughts were focused not on food or even drink but on the four young men now filing over the footbridge to the Constantine Road.
For the first ninety minutes of Gabriel’s journey, the weather had held to a persistent drizzle, but as he crossed the drawbridge leading to Foulness Island, God in His infinite wisdom unleashed a torrential downpour that turned the road into a river. There were no headlamps in his rearview mirror and none coming toward him from the opposite direction. Gabriel, as he sped past dormant farms and grassy tidal creeks, allowed himself to wonder if this would be his last earthly vision-not the Jezreel Valley of his birth, not Jerusalem or the narrow streets of his beloved Venice, but this windswept headland at the edge of the North Sea.
Five miles beyond the drawbridge, Gabriel glimpsed a sign amidst the deluge, warning that soon the road would end. For reasons known only to himself, he took careful note of the time, which was 12:35. A quarter-mile later he turned into an abandoned car park at Foulness Point and, as instructed, switched off the engine.
As he was nearing the water’s edge he heard a noise that sounded like the wind in the dune grass. Then, from the corner of his eye, he noticed the movement of something black which, on a clear night, he might have mistaken for a passing moon shadow. He never saw the one who delivered a sledgehammer blow to the side of his head, nor did he ever see the needle that was rammed into the side of his neck. Chiara appeared, dressed in a white gown stained with blood, and pleaded with him not to die. Then she receded into flashing blue light and was gone.
Shamron and Navot stood side by side in the command post, staring wordlessly at the flashing green light. It had not moved for ten minutes. Shamron knew it never would.
“You’d better send someone out there to have a look,” he said, “just to make sure.”
Navot raised the handset of his radio to his lips.
Yossi had followed Gabriel’s beacon as far as Southend-on-Sea and was sheltering in an all-night cafe overlooking the Thames Estuary when he received Navot’s urgent call. Thirty seconds later, he was behind the wheel of his Renault sedan and driving at a thoroughly unsafe speed toward Foulness Point. When he turned into the car park, he saw the BMW station wagon standing alone with its rear hatch open and the keys still in the ignition. He drew a flashlight from the glove box and followed a set of fresh footprints down to the beach. There were more footprints there of varying sizes, along with a set of parallel grooves that led from the center of the beach to the water’s edge. The grooves had been left by the toes of a man, Yossi thought-a man who was unconscious or worse. He brought his radio to his lips and raised Navot at the command post. “He’s gone,” Yossi said. “And it looks like they took him away by boat.”
Navot lowered his handset and looked at Shamron.
“I doubt these lads took him into the North Sea on a night like this, Uzi.”
“I agree, boss. But where
Shamron walked over to the map. “Here,” he said, poking at a spot on the other side of the river Crouch. “It’s lined with marinas and other places to land small craft. And the only way to get across it at this time of night is by boat, which means we’re going to have to take the long way around.”
Navot returned to the radio and ordered his teams to give chase. Then he picked up the phone and broke the news to Graham Seymour at MI5 Headquarters.
51
He was lost in a gallery of memory hung with portraits of the dead. They spoke to him as he drifted slowly past-Zwaiter and Hamidi; the brothers al-Hourani; Sabri and Khaled al-Khalifa, father and son of terror. They welcomed him to the land of martyrs and celebrated his death with sweets and song. At the end of the gallery, a bloodless boy with bullet holes in his face guided Gabriel through the doors of a church in Venice. The nave was hung with a cycle of paintings depicting scenes from his life and above the main altar was an unfinished canvas, clearly painted by the hand of Bellini, portraying Gabriel’s death. The master himself was standing in the sanctuary. He took Gabriel by the hand and led him into a garden in Jerusalem, where a woman scarred by fire sat in the shade of an olive tree with a cherubic boy on her lap.
When finally he woke, it was with the sensation that he had drunk himself sick. His headache was catastrophic, his mouth felt as though it were filled with a wad of cotton wool, and he feared he might throw up, even though it had been many hours since he had taken food. He opened his eyes slowly and, without moving a muscle, took stock of his situation. He lay on his back atop a narrow camp bed, in a small chamber with walls as white as porcelain. His hands were cuffed and the cuffs were attached to an iron loop in the wall behind his head so that his arms were stretched painfully backward. His clothing and wristwatch had been removed; his mouth had been taped closed. A searing white light shone fiercely into his face.
He closed his eyes, fought off a wave of nausea, and shivered violently from the cold. A good hiding place, this. Surely much planning and enterprise had gone into creating it. Despite the almost clinical cleanliness of the chamber, there were foul smells on the air, the smell of feces and body odor, the odor of a woman held for a long time in captivity. Elizabeth Halton had been here before him-he was certain of it. Was she still close by, he wondered, or had they moved her to another location to make way for the new tenant?
There were noises beyond the door. Gabriel turned his head a few degrees and saw an eye glaring at him through the peephole. Next he heard the sound of a padlock opening, followed by the groan of the cold hinges. A single man entered his cell. He was no more than thirty, slightly built and dressed in a collared shirt with a burgundy V-necked pullover. He gazed at Gabriel quizzically for a long moment through a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, as if he had been looking for a library or bookshop and had stumbled onto this scene instead. Gabriel found something familiar in the arrangement of the man’s features. Only when he tore the tape from Gabriel’s face and in Arabic wished him a pleasant evening did he understand why. The voice belonged to a young man from the Oud West in Amsterdam-a young man who was half Egyptian and half Palestinian, a volatile mix.
It belonged to Ishaq Fawaz.
He vanished as quickly as he had appeared. A few minutes later, four men entered his cell. They hit him several times in the abdomen before uncuffing his hands, then, after lifting him to his feet, hit him some more. The chamber was too small for a proper beating and so, after a brief conference, they dragged him naked up a flight of stairs and into a darkened warehouse space. Gabriel struck first, a move that seemed to catch them off guard. He managed to incapacitate one of them temporarily before the other three jumped onto his back and
