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Chapter 25 Seraincourt, France

ZOE’S CALL TO NEW YORK sounded in the high-ceilinged rooms of Château Treville like a fanfare of trumpets. Gabriel responded by immediately dispatching a secure cable to Adrian Carter, whereupon AAB Holdings and its owner, Nadia al-Bakari, became the target of NSA surveillance. It meant that Carter now knew the name of the wealthy Muslim with unimpeachable jihadist credentials whom Gabriel wanted to fund Rashid’s network. It also meant that, at any given moment, several dozen other members of the sprawling American intelligence community knew it, too. It was a risk Gabriel had no choice but to take. Israel’s signals intelligence service was formidable, but its capabilities paled in comparison to those of the NSA. America’s mastery of the digital world was unrivaled. It was the human factor—the ability to recruit spies and to penetrate the courts of their enemies—that eluded the Americans, and for that they had turned to the Office.

At Gabriel’s request, Carter went to great lengths to conceal Nadia’s name from the rest of official Washington. Despite the obvious potential implications for American-Saudi relations, he neglected to mention it to either the president or James McKenna at the weekly White House counterterrorism meeting. He also took care to safeguard the identity of the party who would be reviewing the NSA intercepts. They were sent first to Carter’s personal attention at Langley and then routed to the CIA station in Paris. The deputy chief, a man who owed his career to Carter, drove them personally to the grand manor house at Seraincourt, where they were signed over to Sarah Bancroft. Of particular interest to Gabriel and the team was the telephone and e-mail account of Rafiq al-Kamal, Nadia’s chief of security. Despite numerous calls placed to contacts inside the Saudi GID and Interior Ministry, al-Kamal never once mentioned the name Zoe Reed. That was not true, however, of Madame Dubois, who spent much of the next seventy-two hours burning up the lines between Paris and London, searching for dirt and gossip in Zoe’s professional past. Gabriel took this as an encouraging sign. It meant that, as far as AAB was concerned, the investigative reporter from CNBC was a public-relations problem, not a security threat.

Zoe remained blissfully unaware of the intrigue swirling around her. Following Gabriel’s carefully prepared script, she refrained from further contact with AAB or its employees. To help fill the empty hours, she visited museums and took long walks along the Seine, which allowed Eli Lavon and the rest of the field operatives to determine that she was free of any surveillance. As two more days slipped past with no word from Nadia, Zoe’s producer in New York began to grow impatient. “I want you back in the States on Monday at the latest,” he told her by telephone, “with or without the exclusive. It’s simply a question of money. Nadia has barrels full of it. We’re pinching every penny.”

The call darkened the mood at the Seraincourt safe house, as did the speech given by the French president that afternoon to an emergency session of the National Assembly. “It is not a question of whether France will be attacked by terrorists again,” the president warned, “but only a question of when and where. It is a sad fact that more lives will be lost to the fires of extremism. Regrettably, this is what it means to be a citizen of Europe in the twenty-first century.”

A few minutes after the speech ended, a message arrived from the Operations Desk at King Saul Boulevard. It was just four characters in length—two letters followed by two numbers—but its meaning was unambiguous. God was cooling his heels in a Montmartre safe flat. And God wanted a word with Gabriel in private.