“You planned it all from here?”

He nodded his head slowly. She looked around the room with her eyes narrowed in disbelief.

“Somehow I expected something more…” Her voice trailed off, then she added: “Something more impressive.”

“This is the Office, Sarah, not Langley. We like to do things the old-fashioned way.”

“Obviously.” She looked at his chalkboard. “I haven’t seen one of those since I was in grade school.”

Gabriel smiled, then began removing the debris of the al-Bakari operation from the walls of the room as the other members of his team trickled slowly through the door. No introductions were necessary, for Sarah knew and adored them all. The first to arrive was Yossi, a tall, balding intellectual from the Office’s Research division who had read classics at Oxford and still spoke Hebrew with a pronounced British accent. Next came Dina Sarid, a veritable encyclopedia of terrorism from the History division who could recite the time, place, and casualty count of every act of violence ever committed against the State of Israel. Ten minutes later came Yaakov, a battle-hardened case officer from the Arab Affairs Department of Shabak, followed by Rimona, an IDF major who served as an analyst for AMAN, Israel ’s military intelligence service. Oded, a brooding, all-purpose field operative who specialized in snatches, arrived at eight with breakfast for everyone, and Mordecai, a wispy figure who dealt in all things electronic, stumbled in fifteen minutes later looking as though he had not slept the night before. The last to arrive was Mikhail, a gray-eyed gunman of Russian birth, who had single-handedly killed half of the terrorist infrastructure of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It was because of Mikhail and his proficiency with a handgun that Sarah was alive. She kissed his cheek as Gabriel walked to the front of the room and pinned Lavon’s surveillance photographs to the bulletin board.

“Now tat we’re all reacquainted,” he said, “it’s time to get to work. This is the man who’s going to lead us to Elizabeth Halton. He is a founding member of Sword of Allah, currently living in Amsterdam. We’re going to make him vanish into thin air, then we’re going to squeeze him dry. We have to work quickly, and we’re not going to make any mistakes.”

The Office prided itself on its ability to improvise in times of crisis, but even the vaunted Office chafed under the pressure of Gabriel’s demands. Safe accommodations were his biggest concern, and Housekeeping, the division that maintained and acquired Office properties, was his most stubborn opponent. Unlike cities such as Paris, London, and Rome, where the Office maintained dozens of safe flats, Amsterdam had no standing inventory of secure lodging. That meant accommodations had to be acquired quickly and on the open market, something the notoriously deliberate Housekeeping never liked to do. By ten o’clock they had taken a six-month lease on a two-bedroom apartment on the Herengracht canal, and by eleven they had secured a luxury houseboat on the Prinsengracht called the Heleen . That left only a site for the interrogation. Gabriel needed something large enough for his entire team and remote enough so that their presence would go undetected. He had a property in mind-a tumbledown country house outside Oldenburg that they had used during the Wrath of God operation-and eventually he was able to pry it from Housekeeping’s grasp.

Once Housekeeping capitulated, the rest fell like dominoes. By noon Travel had lined up a string of untraceable rental cars, and by one Identity had coughed up enough clean passports to allow every member of the team to travel as a European. Banking section initially balked at Gabriel’s request for a briefcase filled with petty cash, but at one-thirty he staged what amounted to an armed stickup and left Banking ten minutes later carrying a handsome attaché case filled with fifty thousand dollars and another fifty thousand in well-circulated euros.

By the middle of the afternoon the first members of his team were slipping quietly from King Saul Boulevard and heading off to Ben-Gurion. Oded, Mordecai, and Rimona left at three-thirty and boarded a flight to Brussels. Yossi, Yaakov, and Dina left an hour later on a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. Gabriel and Sarah left last and, shortly after eight o’clock, they were taking their seats in the first-class section of El Al’s evening flight to Paris. As the rest of the passengers filed on board, Gabriel telephoned Chiara to tell her he had been in the country and was leaving again. She didn’t ask where he was going. She didn’t need to know.

T he Cairo slum known as Imbaba is one of the most desperately poor places on earth. Located just across the Nile from the fashionable island district of Zamalek, Imbaba is so crowded its rickety tenement buildings often collapse beneath the weight of their occupants. The alleys are unpaved, without names, and in perpetual darkness. They run with raw sewage and are choked with mounds of uncollected garbage. At night they are ruled by packs of wild dogs. The children of Imbaba wear rags, drink from cesspools, and live in fear of being eaten alive by the rats. There is little running water, only brief interludes of electricity, and even less hope. Only Islam. Radical Islam. It is written on the crumbling walls in green spray paint: ISLAM IS THE ANSWER … ONLY THE SWORD CAN SAVE US …

The mood in Imbaba that morning was more tense than usual. Riot police were roaming the alleyways and SSI men in plain clothes were surveying their surroundings from coffee shops and falafel stands. Hussein Mandali, a fourth-grade teacher at the Imbaba middle school, had seen it like this before. The security forces were about to move in for a sweep. Any man with a beard and a galabiya-or any woman in a niqab -would be arrested and thrown into the Scorpion, the dreaded facility inside Cairo’s Torah Prison complex reserved for Islamists. Everyone, regardless of sex, would spend at least a few minutes on the torture table. Pharaoh’s secret police did not concern themselves much with laws or rules of evidence. Their task was to instill fear, and they did so with ruthless efficiency.

Hussein Mandali did not wear a beard, though he did dress in the galabiya, the only garment he could afford on his pittance of a salary. Egypt ’s education system, like nearly everything else in the country, was crumbling. Teachers earned nothing and students learned little. For many years the country’s twenty-five thousand public schools had been under the control of Islamists. As a result they were little more than factories that each year churned out thousands of young men and women committed to the destruction of the regime and its supporters in the West. Hussein Mandali knew this phenomenon all too well. He lectured his students daily on the rewards of jihad and martyrdom, and told them it was their sacred duty to kill Americans and Jews and topple their puppet, Hosni Mubarak. The children of Imbaba were always willing recruits. The proof of Pharaoh’s indifference to their plight was all around them.

A group of police officers was standing guard at the end of the street. They eyed Mandali suspiciously as he slipped past without a word and set out along the cacophonous boulevard overlooking the western bank of the Nile. Two minutes later he turned left onto a bridge and crossed over onto Zamalek. How different it was here, he thought. Zamalek was an island of privilege surrounded by a sea of misery, a place where the vast majority of Egypt ’s population could not afford to buy a pastry or a cup of coffee. Zamalek would soon feel the wrath of Egypt ’s legions of downtrodden Muslims, Mandali thought. So would the entire world.

He followed July 26 Street across the island, then wandered for a time through the quiet side streets north of the Gezira Sporting Club to make certain he wasn’t being followed. Thirty minutes after leaving Imbaba, he approached a luxury high-rise apartment house called the Ramses Towers. The tall Sudanese standing guard over the entrance was a member of the Sword of Allah. He guided Mandali into the marble lobby and instructed him to use the back staircase so that none of the other tenants would see a poor man in their gilded elevator. As a result, Mandali was heavily winded when he presented himself at the door of Apartment 2408 and knocked in the prescribed fashion: two knocks, followed by a brief pause, then three more knocks.

The door was opened a few seconds later by a man dressed in a pale gray galabiya. He admitted Mandali into a formal entrance hall, then showed him into a magnificent sitting room overlooking the Nile. Seated cross-legged on the floor, dressed in a white galabiya and a crocheted white skullcap, was an elderly man with a long gray beard. Hussein Mandali kissed the old man’s leathery cheeks and sat before him.

“You have news from the street?” asked Sheikh Tayyib Abdul-Razzaq.

“Mubarak’s forces have surrounded Imbaba and have started to infiltrate the district. In other parts of the country, the army and the police are hitting us very hard. Fayoum, Minya, Asyut, and Luxor have all seen heavy raids. The situation is tense. One spark and it could explode.”

The sheikh fingered his prayer beads and looked at the other man. “Bring me a tape recorder,” he said, “and I’ll give you a spark.”

The man laid the recorder at the feet of the sheikh and switched it on. One hour later Hussein Mandali was once again picking his way through the alleys of Imbaba, this time with a cassette tape concealed inside his sock. By nightfall the sermon would be circulating through a network of popular mosques and underground jihadists cells. After that it would be in the hands of Allah. Hussein Mandali was sure of only one thing. The open sewers of Imbaba would soon be flowing red with the blood of Pharaoh’s soldiers.

H eleen was squat and boxy, painted chocolate brown and trimmed in red. Flower boxes lined her gunwales, and a skiff with an outboard motor bobbed at her stern. Her interior had been recently renovated; stainless-steel appliances shone in the small but sophisticated kitchen, and Scandinavian-style furniture adorned the comfortable sitting room. Three modern paintings of questionable taste had been removed from the walls and in their place hung a large-scale map of Amsterdam and several dozen surveillance photographs of a Muslim man of late middle age. A notebook computer with secure communications software stood on the glass dining-room table, and before it sat a small figure who seemed to be wearing all of his clothing at once. Gabriel pleaded with him to extinguish his cigarette. The overnight drive from Paris had left him with a splitting headache.