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Chapter 22 Madrid-Paris

THE OLD COMPLACENCY HAD RETURNED to Madrid, but this was to be expected. It had been seven years since the deadly train bombings, and memories of that terrible morning had long since faded. Spain had responded to the massacre of its citizens by withdrawing its troops from Iraq and launching what it described as “an alliance of civilizations” with the Islamic world. Such action, said the political commentators, had succeeded in redirecting Muslim rage from Spain to America, where it rightly belonged. Submission to the wishes of al-Qaeda would protect Spain from another attack. Or so they thought.

The bomb exploded at 9:12 p.m., at the intersection of two busy streets near Puerta del Sol. It had been assembled at a rented garage in an industrial quarter south of the city and concealed in a Peugeot van. Owing to its ingenious construction, the initial force of the blast was directed leftward into a restaurant popular with Spanish governing elites. There would be no firsthand account of precisely what occurred inside, for no one lived to describe it. Had there been a survivor, he would have recounted a brief but terrible instant of airborne bodies adrift in a lethal cloud of glass, cutlery, ceramic, and blood. Then the entire building collapsed, entombing the dead and dying together beneath a mountain of shattered masonry.

The damage was greater than even the terrorist had hoped. Façades were ripped from apartment buildings for an entire block, exposing lives that, until a few seconds earlier, had been proceeding peacefully. Several nearby shops and cafés suffered damage and casualties while the small trees lining the street were shorn of their leaves or uprooted entirely. There were no visible remnants of the Peugeot van, only a large crater in the street where it once had been. For the first twenty-four hours of the investigation, the Spanish police were convinced the bomb had been detonated remotely. Later, they discovered traces of the shahid’s DNA sprayed amid the ruins. He was just twenty, an unemployed Moroccan carpenter from the Lavapiés district of Madrid. In his suicide video, he spoke fondly of Yaqub al-Mansur, the twelfth-century Almohad caliph known for his bloody raids into Christian lands.

It was against this dreadful backdrop that Zoe Reed of the American business news network CNBC placed her first call to the publicity department of AAB Holdings, formerly of Riyadh and Geneva, lately of the Boulevard Haussmann, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. The time was ten past four in the afternoon, the weather in Paris predictably overcast. The inquiry received no immediate response, per standing AAB protocol.

Annually cited by Forbes magazine as one of the most successful and innovative investment firms in the world, the company was founded in 1979 by Abdul Aziz al-Bakari. Known to friends and detractors alike as Zizi, he was the nineteenth son of a prominent Saudi merchant who had served as the personal banker and financial adviser to Ibn Saud, the Kingdom’s founder and first absolute monarch. AAB’s holdings were as extensive as they were lucrative. AAB did shipping and mining. AAB did chemicals and drugs. AAB had major stakes in American and European banks. AAB’s real estate and hotel division was one of the world’s largest. Zizi traveled the world on a gold-plated 747, owned a string of palaces stretching from Riyadh to the French Riviera to Aspen, and sailed the seas on a battleship-sized yacht called the Alexandra. His collection of Impressionist and Modern art was thought to be among the largest in private hands. For a short period, it included Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table by Vincent van Gogh, purchased from Isherwood Fine Arts, 7–8 Mason’s Yard, St. James’s, London. The sale had been brokered by a young American named Sarah Bancroft, who went on to serve, briefly, as Zizi’s primary art consultant.

He was the target of many rumors, particularly regarding the source of his enormous fortune. AAB’s glossy prospectus claimed it had been built entirely from the modest inheritance Zizi received from his father, a claim that an authoritative American business journal, after a careful investigation, found wanting. AAB’s extraordinary liquidity, it said, could be explained by only one thing: it was being used as a front for the House of Saud to quietly reinvest its petrodollars around the world. Outraged by the article, Zizi threatened to sue. Later, on the advice of his lawyers, he had a change of heart. “The best revenge is living well,” he told a reporter from the Wall Street Journal. “And that is something I know how to do.”

Perhaps, but the handful of Westerners who were granted entrée into Zizi’s inner circle always sensed a certain restlessness in him. His parties were lavish affairs, yet Zizi seemed to take no pleasure in them. He neither smoked nor drank alcohol and refused to be in the presence of dogs or pork. He prayed five times a day; each winter, when the rains made the Saudi desert bloom, he retreated to an isolated encampment in the Nejd to meditate and hunt with his falcons. He claimed to be a descendant of Muhammad Abdul Wahhab, the eighteenth-century preacher whose austere, puritanical version of Islam became the official creed of Saudi Arabia. He built mosques around the world, including several in America and Western Europe, and gave generously to the Palestinians. Firms looking to do business with AAB knew better than to send a Jew to meet with Zizi. According to the rumor mill, Zizi liked Jews even less than he liked losses on his investments.

As it turned out, Zizi’s charitable activities extended far beyond what was publicly known. He also gave generously to charities associated with Islamic extremism and even directly to al-Qaeda itself. Eventually, he crossed the thin but bright line separating the financiers and enablers of terrorism from the terrorists themselves. The result was an attack on the Vatican that left more than seven hundred people dead and the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica in ruins. With Sarah Bancroft’s help, Gabriel hunted down the man who planned the attack—a renegade Saudi intelligence officer named Ahmed Bin Shafiq—and killed him in a hotel room in Istanbul. A week later, on the Quai Saint-Pierre in Cannes, he killed Zizi, too.

Despite his adherence to Saudi traditions, Zizi had but two wives, both of whom he had divorced, and a single child—a beautiful daughter named Nadia. She buried her father in the Wahhabi tradition, in an unmarked desert grave, and immediately consolidated her hold on his assets. She moved AAB’s European headquarters from Geneva, which bored her, to Paris, where she was more comfortable. A few of the firm’s more pious employees refused to work for a woman—especially one who shunned the veil and consumed alcohol—but most stayed on. Under Nadia’s guiding hand, the company entered previously uncharted territories. She acquired a famous French fashion company, an Italian maker of luxury leather goods, a substantial portion of an American investment bank, and a German motion picture production company. She also made significant changes to her personal holdings. Her father’s many homes and estates were quietly put up for sale, as was the Alexandra and his 747. Nadia now traveled on a more modest Boeing Business Jet and owned just two homes—a graceful mansion on the Avenue Foch in Paris and a lavish palace in Riyadh that she rarely saw. Despite her lack of formal business training, she had proved to be an adept and skillful manager. The total value of the assets now under AAB’s control was higher than at any point in company history, and Nadia al-Bakari, at just thirty-three, was regarded as one of the richest women in the world.

AAB’s media relations, such as they were, fell under the purview of Nadia’s executive assistant, a well-preserved Frenchwoman of fifty named Yvette Dubois. Madame Dubois rarely bothered to acknowledge requests from reporters, especially those employed by American companies. But upon receiving a follow-up call from the famous Zoe Reed, she decided a response was in order. She allowed another day to elapse, then, for good measure, she placed the call in the middle of the night, New York time, when she assumed Ms. Reed would be sleeping. For reasons not known to Madame Dubois, that turned out not to be the case. The conversation that followed was cordial but hardly promising. Madame Dubois explained that the offer of a one-hour prime-time special, while flattering, was entirely beyond the realm of possibility. Ms. al-Bakari was traveling constantly and had several large deals pending. More to the point, Ms. al-Bakari simply didn’t do the kind of interview Ms. Reed had in mind.

“Will you at least give her the request?”

“I’ll give it to her,” the Frenchwoman said, “but the chances are not good.”

“But not zero?” Zoe asked, probing.

“Let’s not play little word games, Ms. Reed. They’re beneath us.”

Madame Dubois’s concluding remark produced an outburst of much-needed laughter at Château Treville, an eighteenth-century French manor house located north of Paris, just beyond the village of Seraincourt. Shielded from prying eyes by twelve-foot walls, it had a heated swimming pool, two clay tennis courts, thirty-two acres of manicured gardens, and fourteen ornate bedrooms. Gabriel had rented it in the name of a German high-tech firm that existed only in the imagination of an Office corporation lawyer and promptly sent the bill along to Ari Shamron at King Saul Boulevard. Under normal circumstances, Shamron would have balked at the exorbitant price tag. Instead, with no small amount of pleasure, he forwarded the bill to Langley, which had assumed responsibility for all operational expenses.

For the next several days, Gabriel and his team spent most of their time monitoring the feed from Zoe’s BlackBerry, which was now functioning as a tireless little electronic spy in her pocket. They knew her precise latitude and longitude, and, when she was in motion, they knew the speed at which she was traveling. They knew when she was buying her morning coffee at Starbucks, when she was stuck in New York traffic, and when she was annoyed with her producers, which was often. By monitoring her Internet activity, they knew she was planning to remodel her Upper West Side apartment. By reading her e-mail, they knew she had many romantic suitors, including a millionaire bond trader who, despite heavy losses, somehow found the time to drop her at least two missives a day. They sensed, in spite of all her success, that Zoe was not altogether happy in America. She whispered coded greetings to them often. At night, her sleep was made restless by nightmares.

To the rest of the world, however, she projected an air of cool indomitability. And to the select few who were privileged to witness her seduction of the French publicist, she provided yet more proof that she was the greatest natural spy any of them had ever encountered. Her tradecraft was a textbook combination of sound technique matched with unyielding persistence. Zoe flattered, Zoe cajoled, and, at the end of one particularly contentious phone call, Zoe even managed a few tears. Even so, Madame Dubois proved to be more than a worthy opponent. After a week, she declared the negotiations at an impasse, only to reverse course two days later by unexpectedly sending Zoe a detailed questionnaire. Zoe completed the document in perfect French and returned it the following morning, at which point Madame Dubois adopted a posture of radio silence. At Château Treville, Gabriel’s team lapsed into an uncharacteristic despair as several precious days slipped past with no further contact. Only Zoe was optimistic. She had been through many such seductions in the past and knew when the hook had been set. “I’ve got her, darling,” she murmured to Gabriel late one night, as the BlackBerry was recharging on her bedside table. “It’s only a question of when she capitulates.”

Zoe’s prediction proved correct, though the Frenchwoman would allow an additional twenty-four hours to elapse before announcing her conditional surrender. It came in the form of a grudging invitation. It seemed that, owing to an unexpected cancellation, Ms. al-Bakari was free for lunch in two days’ time. Would Ms. Reed be willing to make the trip to Paris on such short notice? The consummate professional, Zoe waited ninety annoying minutes before returning the call and accepting.

“Let me be clear about one thing,” Madame Dubois said. “This is not an interview. The luncheon will be completely off the record. If Ms. al-Bakari feels comfortable in your presence, she will consider taking the next step.”

“Where shall I meet her?”

“As you might expect, Ms. al-Bakari finds it difficult to conduct business in restaurants. We’ve taken the liberty of booking the Louis XV Suite at the Hôtel de Crillon. She’s expecting you at one-thirty. Ms. al-Bakari insists on paying. It’s one of her rules.”

“Does she have any others I should know about?”

“Ms. al-Bakari is sensitive about questions concerning the death of her father,” Madame Dubois said. “And I wouldn’t dwell on the subject of Islam and terrorism. She finds it terribly boring. À tout à l’heure, Ms. Reed.”