It was after ten o’clock by the time he finally entered the Office safe flat on the Bayswater Road overlooking Hyde Park. He left his bag in the entrance hall and quickly took stock of his surroundings. It was simply furnished, as most safe flats were, and rather large by London standards. Housekeeping had left food in the fridge and a 9mm Beretta in the pantry, along with a spare magazine and two boxes of ammunition.

Gabriel loaded the gun and carried it with him into the bedroom. It had been three days since he’d had a proper night’s sleep and it had taken all his training and substantial powers of concentration to get through dinner with the ambassador without falling asleep over his coq au vin. He undressed quickly and climbed into bed, then switched on the television and turned the volume down very low so that if there was an attack in the night he would be awakened by the news bulletins. He wondered whether the Metropolitan Police had acted yet on the information he’d brought from Amsterdam. Two hundred active terror networks, sixteen thousand known terrorists, three thousand men who had been through the training camps of al-Qaeda… MI5 and the Met had more to worry about than five boys from Amsterdam. He’d sensed something in Graham Seymour’s demeanor that afternoon, a resignation that it was only a matter of time before London was hit again.

Gabriel was reaching for the light when he noticed Samir’s yellow legal pad poking from the side flap of his overnight bag. Probably nothing there, he thought, but he knew himself well enough to realize that he would never be able to sleep unless he made certain. He found a pencil in the top drawer of the bedside table and spent the next ten minutes rubbing it gently over the surface of the pad. Samir’s secrets came slowly to life before his eyes. Pine trees on a mountaintop, sand dunes in a desert, a spider web of bisecting lines. Samir al-Masri, jihadist and bachelor slob, was a doodler.

Chapter 8

8

BAYSWATER, LONDON: 7:02 A.M., FRIDAY

The telephone woke him. Like all phones in Office safe flats, it had a flashing light to indicate incoming calls. This one was luminous blue. It was as if a squad car had driven into his bedroom on silent approach.

“Are you awake?” asked Ari Shamron.

“I am now.”

“Sleeping in?”

Gabriel squinted at his wristwatch. “It’s seven in the morning.”

“It’s nine here.”

The vagaries of international time zones had always meant little to Shamron. He assumed every Office employee, no matter his location on the planet, rose and slept in harmony with him. Inside the Office the phenomenon was known as “Shamron Central Time.”

“How did your meeting with Graham Seymour go?”

“Remind me never to use my Heinrich Kiever passport to enter Britain again.”

“Did he act on the information you gave him?”