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Chapter 16 Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

THERE IS A TRUISM ABOUT terror networks: putting the pieces in place is not as difficult as one might imagine. But once the mastermind pulls the trigger and carries out his first attack, the element of surprise is lost and the network exposes itself. In the earliest years of the conflict against terrorism—when Black September and Carlos the Jackal were running amok, aided by useful leftist Euro-idiots such as the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Brigades—intelligence officers mainly used physical surveillance, hard wiretaps, and good old-fashioned detective work to identify the members of a cell. Now, with the advent of the Internet and global satellite communications, the contours of the battlefield had been altered. The Internet had given the terrorists a powerful tool to organize, inspire, and communicate, but it had also provided intelligence services with a means of tracking their every move. Cyberspace was like a forest in winter. The terrorists could hide there for a time, hatching their plots and organizing their forces, but they could not come or go without leaving footprints in the snow. The challenge for the counterterrorism officer was to follow the right set of tracks, for the virtual forest was a dark and confusing place where one could wander aimlessly while innocents died.

Gabriel and his team cautiously set foot there the next morning when British intelligence, under standing agreement, shared with their American cousins the preliminary results of the inquiry into the Covent Garden bombing. Included in the material were the contents of Farid Khan’s computers at home and work, a printout of every number he had dialed from his mobile phone, and a list of known Islamic extremists he had encountered while he was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun. There was also a copy of the suicide tape, along with several hundred still images captured by CCTV during the final months of his life. The last photo showed him standing in Covent Garden, his arms raised above his head, a bloom of fire erupting from the explosives belt around his waist. Lying on the ground a few feet away, shielded by two men, was Gabriel. When the picture was magnified, it was possible to see the shadow of a gun in his left hand.

Carter had distributed the material to the CTC at Langley and the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland. Then, without the knowledge of either, he delivered a third copy to the house on N Street. The next day, he dropped off a remarkably similar package from the Danish, but an entire week would elapse before he appeared with the material from Paris. “The French still haven’t quite figured out that we’re all in this together,” Carter said. “They view the attack as a failure of their intelligence system, which means you can be sure we’re getting only part of the story.”

Gabriel and his team worked through the material as quickly as possible, but with the patience and attention to detail required in such an endeavor. Instinctively, Gabriel told them to approach the case as if it were an enormous canvas that had suffered extensive losses. “Don’t stand off at a distance and try to see everything at once,” he warned. “It will only drive you mad. Work your way in slowly from the edges. Focus on small details—a hand, an eye, the hem of a garment, a single thread running through each of the three attacks. You won’t be able to see it at first, but it’s there, I promise you.”

With the help of the NSA and the government data miners who worked in faceless office blocks ringing the Capital Beltway, the team burrowed deep into the memory of mainframe computers and servers scattered around the world. Phone numbers begot phone numbers, e-mail accounts begot e-mail accounts, names begot names. They read a thousand instant messages in a dozen different languages. Browsing histories were scoured for intent, photographs for evidence of target casing, search histories for secret desires and forbidden passions.

Gradually, the faint outline of a terror network began to take shape. It was scattered and diffuse—here the name of a potential operative in Lyon; here the address of a possible safe flat in Malmö; here a phone number in Karachi; here a Web site of uncertain origin that offered downloadable videos of bombings and beheadings, the pornography of the jihadist world. Friendly Western intelligence services, believing they were dealing with the CIA, happily supplied material they would have normally withheld. So, too, did the secret policemen of the Islamic world. Before long, the walls of the drawing room were covered with a mind-numbing matrix of intelligence. Eli Lavon likened it to gazing upon the heavens without the aid of a star chart. It was pleasant, he said, but hardly productive when lives were at stake. Somewhere out there was an organizing principle, a guiding hand of terror. Rashid, the charismatic cleric, had built the network with his beautiful and seductive tongue, but someone else had primed it to carry out three attacks in three European cities, each at a precise moment in time. He was no amateur, this man. He was a professional terror mastermind.

Putting a name and face to this monster became Dina’s obsession. Sarah, Chiara, and Eli Lavon worked tirelessly at her side while Gabriel was content to play the role of errand-runner and messenger. Twice each day, Dina supplied him with a list of questions requiring urgent answers. Sometimes, Gabriel would make his way up to the Israeli Embassy in far northwest Washington and transmit them to Shamron over the secure link. Other times, he would give them to Adrian Carter, who would then make a pilgrimage to Fort Meade to have a quiet word with the data miners. On Thanksgiving night, as an air of sudden desertion hung over Georgetown, Carter summoned Gabriel to a coffee shop on Thirty-fifth Street to deliver a thick packet of material.

“Where’s Dina going with this?” Carter asked, prying the lid from a caffè Americano he had no intention of drinking.

“Even 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.”