“A wise prince chooses the time and place of the battle, and this is not the time to tear down the House of Saud.”

Gabriel lapsed into a moody silence. Carter was peering into the bowl of his pipe and making minor adjustments in the disposition of his tobacco, like a don waiting for an answer from a dull student.

“Do I need to remind you that they targeted Shamron?”

Gabriel gave Carter a dark look that said he most certainly did not.

“Then why the hesitation? I would have thought you’d be straining at the leash to get bin Shafiq after what he did to the old man.”

“I want him more than anyone, Adrian, but I never strain at the leash. This is a dangerous operation—too dangerous for you even to attempt. If something goes wrong, or if we’re caught in the act, it will end badly—for all three of us.”

“Three?”

“You, me, and the president.”

“So obey Shamron’s Eleventh Commandment, and you’ll be fine. Thou shalt not get caught.”

“Bin Shafiq is a ghost. We don’t even have a picture.”

“That’s not entirely true.” Carter reached into his manila file folder again and came out with another photograph, which he dropped onto the coffee table for Gabriel to see. It showed a man with narrow black eyes, his face partially concealed by a kaffiyeh. “That’s bin Shafiq, almost twenty years ago, in Afghanistan. He was our friend then. We were on the same side. We supplied the weapons. Bin Shafiq and his masters in Riyadh supplied the money.”

“And the Wahhabi ideology that helped give birth to the Taliban,” Gabriel said.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” said Carter contritely. “But we have something more valuable than a twenty-year-old photograph. We have his voice.”

Carter picked up a small black remote, aimed it at a Bose Wave radio, and pressed the Play button. A moment later two men began to converse in English: one with the accent of an American, the other of an Arab.

“I take it the Saudi is bin Shafiq?”

Carter nodded.

“When was it recorded?”

“In 1988,” Carter said. “In a safe house in Peshawar.”

“Who’s the American?” Gabriel asked, though he knew the answer already. Carter hit the Stop button and looked into the fire. “Me,” he said distantly. “The American at the CIA safe house in Peshawar was me.”

“Would you recognize bin Shafiq if you saw him again?”

“I might, but our sources tell us he had several rounds of plastic surgery before going operational. I would recognize the scar on his right forearm, though. He got hit by a piece of shrapnel during a trip to Afghanistan in 1985. The scar runs from just above the wrist to just below the elbow. No plastic surgeon could have done anything about that.”

“Inside the arm or outside?”