Then she walked into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

She’s Office, he told himself. She’ll understand.

Eventually.

23 GEORGETOWN

The CIA sent a plane for him, a Gulfstream G500, with leather club chairs, in-flight action movies, and a galley stocked with a vast amount of unwholesome snack food. It touched down at Andrews Air Force Base in the equatorial heat of midday and was met in a secure hangar by a pair of Agency security agents. Gabriel recognized them; they were the same two officers who had dragged him against his will to CIA Headquarters during his last visit to Washington. He feared a return engagement now but was pleasantly surprised when their destination turned out to be a graceful redbrick town house in the 3300 block of N Street in Georgetown. Waiting in the entrance hall was a man of retirement age, dressed in a navy blue blazer and crumpled gabardine trousers. He had the tousled thinning hair of a university professor and a mustache that had gone out of fashion with disco music, Crock-Pots, and the nuclear freeze. “Gabriel,” said Adrian Carter as he extended his hand. “So good of you to come.”

“You’re looking well, Adrian.”

“And you’re still a terrible liar.” He looked at Gabriel’s face and frowned. “I assume that lovely bruise on your cheek is a souvenir of your night in Lubyanka?”

“I wanted to bring you something, but the gift shop was closed.”

Carter gave a faint smile and took Gabriel by the elbow. “I thought you might be hungry after your travels. I’ve arranged for some lunch. How was the flight, by the way?”

“It was very considerate of you to send your plane on such short notice.”

“That one isn’t mine,” Carter said without elaboration.

“Air Guantánamo?”

“And points in between.”

“So that explains the handcuffs and the hypodermics.”

“It beats having to listen to them talk. Your average jihadi makes a damn lousy traveling companion.”

They entered the living room. It was a formal Georgetown salon, rectangular and high-ceilinged, with French doors overlooking a small terrace. The furnishings were costly but in poor taste, the sort of pieces one finds in the hospitality suite of a luxury business hotel. The impression was made complete by the catered buffet-style meal that had been laid upon the sideboard. All that was missing was a pretty young hostess to offer Gabriel a glass of mediocre chardonnay.

Carter wandered over to the buffet and selected a ham sandwich and a ginger ale. Gabriel drew a cup of black coffee from a silver pump-action thermos and sat in a wing chair next to the French doors. Carter sat down next to him and balanced his plate on his knees.

“Shamron tells me Ivan has been a bad boy again. Give me everything you’ve got. And don’t spare me any of the details.” He cracked open his soft drink. “I happen to love stories about Ivan. They serve as helpful reminders that there are some people in this world who will do absolutely anything for money.”

It wasn’t long after Gabriel began his briefing that Carter seemed to lose his appetite. He placed his partially eaten sandwich on the table next to his chair and sat motionless as a statue, with his legs crossed and his hands bunched thoughtfully beneath his chin. It had been Gabriel’s experience that any decent spy was at his core a good listener. It came naturally to Carter, like his gift for languages, his ability to blend into his surroundings, and his humility. Little about Carter’s clinical demeanor suggested that he was one of the most powerful members of Washington’s intelligence establishment-or that before his ascension to the rarified atmosphere of Langley’s seventh floor, where he served as director of the CIA’s national clandestine service, he had been a field man of the highest reputation. Most mistook him for a therapist of some sort. When one thought of Adrian Carter, one pictured a man enduring confessions of affairs and inadequacies, not tales of terrorists and Russian arms dealers.

“I wish I could say your story sounded like the ravings of an angry wife,” Carter said. “But I’m afraid it dovetails nicely with some rather alarming intelligence we’ve been picking up over the past few months.”

“What sort of intelligence?”

“Chatter,” said Carter. “More to the point, a specific phrase that has popped several times over the past few weeks-so many times, in fact, that our analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center are no longer willing to dismiss it as mere coincidence.”

“What’s the phrase?”

“The arrows of Allah. We’ve seen it about a half-dozen times now, most recently on the computer of a jihadi who was arrested by our friend Lars Mortensen in Copenhagen. You remember Lars, don’t you, Gabriel?”

“With considerable fondness,” Gabriel replied.

“Mortensen and his technicians at the Danish PET found the phrase in an old e-mail that the suspect had tried to delete. The e-mail said something about ‘the arrows of Allah piercing the hearts of the infidels, ’ or sentiments to that effect.”

“What’s the suspect’s name?”

“Marwan Abbas. He’s a Jordanian now residing in the largely immigrant quarter of Copenhagen known as Nørrebro-a quarter you know quite well, if I’m not mistaken. Mortensen says Abbas is a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the radical Islamist political movement. The Jordanian GID told us he was also an associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, may he rest in peace.”

“If I were you, Adrian, I’d send that Gulfstream of yours to Copenhagen to take possession of Marwan for a private chat.”

“I’m afraid Mortensen is in no position to play ball with us at the moment. PET and the Danish government still have bruised feelings over our actions during the Halton affair. I suppose, in hindsight, we should have signed the guestbook on the way into Denmark. We told the Danes about our presence on their soil after the fact. It’s going to take a while for them to forgive us our sins.”

“Mortensen will come around eventually. The Danes need you. So do the rest of the Europeans. In a world gone mad, America is still the last best hope.”

“I hope you’re right, Gabriel. It’s become popular in Washington these days to think that the threat of terrorism has receded-or that we can somehow live with the occasional loss of national monuments and American life. But when the next attack comes-and I do mean when, Gabriel-those same freethinkers will be the first to fault the Agency for failing to stop it. We can’t do it without the cooperation of the Europeans. And you, of course. You’re our secret servant, aren’t you, Gabriel? You’re the one who does the jobs we’re unwilling, or unable, to do for ourselves. I’m afraid Ivan falls into that category.”

Gabriel recalled the words Shamron had spoken the previous evening in Jerusalem: The Americans love to monitor problems but do nothing about them…

“Ivan’s main stomping ground is Africa,” Carter said. “But he’s made lucrative forays into the Middle East and Latin America as well. In the good old days, when the Agency and the KGB played the various factions of the Third World against one another for our own amusement, we were judicious with the flow of arms. We wanted the killing to remain at morally acceptable levels. But Ivan tore up the old rule book, and he’s torn up many of the world’s poorest places in the process. He’s willing to provide the dictators, the warlords, and the guerrilla fighters with whatever they want, and, in turn, they’re willing to pay him whatever he asks. He’s a vulture, our Ivan. He preys on the suffering of others and makes millions in the process. He’s responsible for more death and destruction than all the Islamic terrorists of the world combined. And now he trots around the playgrounds of Russia and Europe, safe in the knowledge that we can’t lay a finger on him.”