Daniel Silva 2-Book Thriller Collection: Portrait of a Spy, The Fallen Angel. Daniel Silva

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СКАЧАТЬ I’m not sure,” Gabriel replied. “She has her own methodology. I just try to stay out of the way.”

      “She’s beating us, you know. The intelligence services of the United States have two hundred analysts trying to crack this case, and they’re being beaten by a single woman.”

      “That’s because she knows exactly what will happen if we don’t shut them down. And she doesn’t seem to need sleep.”

      “Does she have a theory about who it might be?”

      “She feels like she knows him.”

      “Personally?”

      “It’s always personal with Dina, Adrian. That’s why she’s so good at what she does.”

      Though Gabriel would not admit it, the case had become personal for him as well. Indeed, when he was not at the embassy or meeting with Carter, he could usually be found in “Rashidistan,” which is how the team referred to the cramped library of the house on N Street. Photographs of the telegenic cleric covered the four walls. Arranged chronologically, they charted his unlikely rise from an obscure local preacher in San Diego to the leader of a jihadist terror network. His appearance had changed little during that time—the same thin beard, the same bookish eyeglasses, the same benevolent expression in his tranquil brown eyes. He did not look like a man capable of mass murder, or even like someone who could inspire it. Gabriel was not surprised; he had been tortured by men with the hands of priests and had once killed a Palestinian master terrorist who had the face of a child. Even now, more than twenty years later, Gabriel struggled to reconcile the sweetness of the man’s lifeless features with the appalling amount of blood on his hands.

      Rashid’s greatest asset was not his banal appearance but his voice. Gabriel listened to Rashid’s sermons—both in Arabic and in his colloquial American English—and to the many thoughtful interviews he gave to the press after 9/11. Mainly, he reviewed the recordings of Rashid matching wits with his CIA interrogators. Rashid was part poet, part preacher, part professor of jihad. He warned the Americans that the demographics were stacked decidedly in favor of their enemies, that the Islamic world was young, growing, and seething with a potent mix of anger and humiliation. “Unless something is done to alter the equation, my dear friends, an entire generation will be lost to the jihad.” What America needed was a bridge to the Muslim world—and Rashid al-Husseini offered to play the part.

      Weary of Rashid’s insidious presence, the rest of the team insisted that Gabriel keep the door of the library tightly closed whenever he was listening to the recordings. But late at night, when most of the others had gone off to bed, he would disobey their order, if only to relieve the feeling of claustrophobia produced by the sound of Rashid’s voice. Invariably, he would find Dina staring at the puzzle arrayed on the walls of the drawing room. “Go to sleep, Dina,” he would say. And Dina would respond, “I’ll sleep when you sleep.”

      On the first Friday of December, as snow flurries whitened the streets of Georgetown, Gabriel listened again to Rashid’s final debriefing with his Agency handlers. It was the night before his defection. He seemed more excited than usual and slightly on edge. At the conclusion of the encounter, he gave his case officer the name of an Oslo-based imam who, in Rashid’s opinion, was raising money for the resistance fighters in Iraq. “They’re not resistance fighters, they’re terrorists,” the CIA man said pointedly. “Forgive me, Bill,” Rashid replied, using the officer’s pseudonym, “but I sometimes find it hard to remember which side I’m on.”

      Gabriel switched off his computer and slipped quietly into the drawing room. Dina stood silently before her matrix, rubbing at the spot on her leg that always pained her when she was fatigued.

      “Go to sleep, Dina,” Gabriel said.

      “Not tonight,” she replied.

      “You’ve got him?”

      “I think so.”

      “Who is it?”

      “It’s Malik,” she said softly. “And may God have mercy on us all.”

       Chapter 17 Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

      IT WAS A FEW MINUTES past two a.m., a dreadful hour, Shamron once famously said, when brilliant schemes are rarely hatched. Gabriel suggested waiting until morning, but the clock in Dina’s head was ticking far too loudly for that. She personally roused the others from bed and paced the drawing room anxiously while waiting for the coffee to brew. When finally she spoke, her tone was urgent but respectful. Malik, the master of terror, had earned it.

      She began her account by reminding the team of Malik’s lineage—a lineage that had but one possible outcome. A descendant of the al-Zubair clan—a mixed Palestinian-Syrian family that hailed from the village of Abu Ghosh, on the western approaches to Jerusalem—he had been born in the Zarqa refugee camp in Jordan. Zarqa was a wretched place, even by the deplorable standards of the camps, and a breeding ground for Islamic extremism. An intelligent but aimless young man, Malik spent a great deal of time at the al-Falah Mosque. There he fell under the spell of an incendiary Salafist imam who guided him into the arms of the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas. Malik joined the group’s military wing, the Izzaddin al-Qassam Brigades, and studied the craft of terror with some of the deadliest practitioners in the business. A natural leader and skilled organizer, he rose quickly through the ranks and by the onset of the Second Intifada was a top Hamas terror mastermind. From the safety of the Zarqa camp, he plotted some of the deadliest attacks of the period, including a suicide bombing at a nightclub in Tel Aviv that claimed thirty-three lives.

      “After that attack,” Dina said, “the prime minister signed an order authorizing Malik’s assassination. Malik concealed himself deep inside the Zarqa camp and plotted what would be his biggest strike yet—a bombing at the Western Wall. Fortunately, we managed to arrest the three shahids before they could reach their target. It’s believed to be Malik’s one and only failure.”

      By the summer of 2004, Dina continued, it was clear that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was too small a stage for Malik. Inspired by 9/11, he slipped out of the camp and, disguised as a woman, traveled to Amman to meet with an al-Qaeda recruiter. After reciting the bayat, the personal oath of allegiance to Osama Bin Laden, Malik was smuggled across the border into Syria. Six weeks later, he slipped into Iraq.

      “Malik was far more sophisticated than the other members of al-Qaeda in Iraq,” Dina said. “He’d spent years perfecting his craft against the most formidable counterterrorism forces in the world. Not only was he an expert bomb-maker, he knew how to slip his shahids through even the toughest security. He was thought to have been the mastermind behind some of the insurgency’s deadliest and most spectacular attacks. His crowning achievement was a one-day wave of bombings in the Shiite quarter of Baghdad that killed more than two hundred people.”

      Malik’s final attack in Iraq was a bombing of a Shiite mosque that left fifty worshippers dead. By then, he was the target of a massive search operation being carried out by Task Force 6-26, the joint U.S. special operations and intelligence unit. Ten days after the bombing, the task force learned that Malik was hiding in a safe house ten miles north of Baghdad, along with two other senior al-Qaeda figures. That night American F-16 jets attacked the house with a pair of laser-guided bombs, but a search of the ruins produced only two sets of remains. Neither belonged to Malik al-Zubair.

      “Apparently, he slipped out of the house a few minutes before the bombs fell,” Dina said. “Later, СКАЧАТЬ