25

NORTHERN FRANCE

PAUL ROUSSEAU’S PARTICIPATION IN WHAT came next was limited to the acquisition of a safe property near the Belgian border, the cost of which he buried deep within his operating budget. He warned Gabriel and Fareed Barakat to avoid using any tactic on their prisoner that might remotely be construed as torture. Even so, Rousseau was flying dangerously close to the sun. There was no provision in French law to allow for the extrajudicial capture of a Belgian resident from Belgian soil, even if the Belgian resident was suspected of involvement in an act of terror committed in France. Were the operation ever to become public, Rousseau would surely perish in the resulting scandal. It was a risk he was willing to take. He regarded his counterparts in the Belgian Sûreté as incompetent fools who had countenanced the establishment of an ISIS safe haven in the heart of Europe. On numerous occasions, the Sûreté had failed to pass along vital intelligence regarding threats against French targets. As far as Rousseau was concerned, he was merely returning the favor.

The safe property was a small isolated farmhouse near Lille. Nabil Awad did not know this, for he had passed the journey blinded by a hood and deafened by earplugs. The cramped dining room had been prepared for his arrival—a metal table, two chairs, a lamp with a bulb like the sun, nothing more. Mikhail and Yaakov secured Nabil Awad to one of the chairs with duct tape, and on Fareed Bakarat’s signal, a barely perceptible nod of his regal head, they removed the hood. Instantly, the young Jordanian recoiled in fear of the dreaded Mukhabarat man seated calmly on the opposite side of the table. For someone like Nabil Awad, a Jordanian from a modest family, it was the worst place in the world to be. It was the end of the line.

The ensuing silence was several minutes in length and unnerved even Gabriel, who was watching from the darkened corner of the room with Eli Lavon at his side. Nabil Awad was already trembling with fear. That was the thing about the Jordanians, thought Gabriel. They didn’t have to torture; their reputation preceded them. It allowed them to think themselves superior to their kindred service in Egypt. The Egyptian version of the Mukhabarat hung its prisoners on hooks before bothering to say hello.

With another small nod, Fareed instructed Mikhail to return the hood to the prisoner’s head. The Jordanians, Gabriel knew, were great believers in sensory deprivation. A man deprived of the ability to see and hear becomes disoriented very quickly, sometimes in mere minutes. He grows anxious and depressed, he hears voices and experiences hallucinations. Soon, he suffers from a kind of madness. With a whisper, he can be convinced of almost anything. His flesh is melting from his bones. His arm is missing. His father, long dead, is sitting beside him, watching his humiliation. And all of this can be accomplished without beatings, without electricity, without water. All that is required is a bit of time.

But time, thought Gabriel, was not necessarily on their side. Nabil Awad was at that moment on another bridge, a bridge separating his old life from the life he would soon be living on behalf of Fareed Barakat. He had to cross that bridge quickly, without the knowledge of the other members of the network. Otherwise, this phase of the operation—the phase that had the potential to derail all that had come before—would be a colossal waste of time, effort, and valuable resources. For now, Gabriel was reduced to the role of spectator. His operation was in the hands of his former enemy.

At last, Fareed spoke, a brief question, delivered in a rich baritone that seemed to shake the very walls of the little French dining room. There was no menace in the voice, for none was necessary. It said that he was powerful, privileged, and moneyed. It said that he was a relative of His Majesty and, as such, was a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. It said that you, Nabil Awad, are nothing. And if I should choose to take your life, I will do so without batting an eye. And then I will enjoy a nice cup of tea.

“Who is he?” was the question Fareed posed.

“Who?” came the weak and defeated voice from beneath the hood.

“Saladin,” answered Fareed.

“He recaptured Jerusalem from the—”

“No, no,” said Fareed, interrupting, “not that Saladin. I’m talking about the Saladin who ordered you to bomb the Jewish target in Paris and the market in Amsterdam.”

“I had nothing to do with those attacks! Nothing! I swear it.”

“That’s not what Jalal told me.”

“Who’s Jalal?”

“Jalal Nasser, your friend from London.”

“I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“Of course you do, habibi. Jalal has told me everything already. He said you were the operational planner for both Paris and Amsterdam. He said you are Saladin’s trusted lieutenant in Western Europe.”

“That’s not true!”

“Which part?”

“I don’t know anyone named Jalal Nasser, and I’m not an operational planner. I work in a print shop. I’m no one. Please, you have to believe me.”

“Are you sure, habibi?” asked Fareed softly, as though disappointed. “Are you sure that’s your answer?”

From beneath the hood there was only silence. With a glance, Fareed instructed Mikhail and Yaakov to remove the prisoner. Gabriel, from his post in the corner of the room, watched as his two trusted officers obeyed Fareed’s command. For now, it was the Jordanian’s operation. Gabriel was only a bystander.

A room had been prepared in the cellar. It was small and cold and damp and stank of mildew. Mikhail and Yaakov chained Nabil Awad to the cot and locked the reinforced soundproof door. An overhead light, protected by a metal cage, burned brightly. It was no matter; the sun had set on Nabil Awad. With the opaque hood shielding his eyes, he lived in a world of permanent night.

It did not take long for the darkness and the silence and the fear to bore a hole in Nabil Awad’s brain. Fareed monitored the feed from the camera inside the makeshift cell. He was looking for the telltale signs—the fidgeting, the squirming, the sudden starts—that signaled the onset of emotional distress and confusion. He had personally conducted countless interrogations in the bleak cellars of GID headquarters, and he knew when to ask questions and when to let the darkness and the silence do their work for him. Some of the terrorists Fareed had interrogated had refused to break, even under brutal questioning, but he judged Nabil Awad to be fashioned of weaker stuff. There was a reason he was in Europe instead of bombing and killing and cutting off heads in the caliphate. Awad was no action-figure jihadist. He was a cog, which is precisely what they needed.

After two hours Fareed requested that the prisoner be brought up from the cellar. He posed three questions. What was your precise role in the Paris and Amsterdam attacks? How do you communicate with Jalal Nasser? Who is Saladin? Again, the young Jordanian claimed to know nothing about terrorism or Jalal Nasser or the mysterious man who called himself Saladin. He was a loyal Jordanian subject. He did not believe in terrorism or jihad. He did not go to the mosque with any regularity. He liked girls, smoked cigarettes, and drank alcohol. He worked in a copy shop. He was a nothing man.

“Are you sure, habibi?” asked Fareed before returning Nabil Awad to his cell. “Are you sure that’s your answer?”

And on it went, all through the long night, every two hours, sometimes a quarter-hour less, sometimes more, so that Nabil Awad could not set an internal clock and thus prepare himself for Fareed’s quiet onslaught. With each appearance the young Jordanian was more skittish, more disoriented. Each time, he was asked the same three questions. What was your precise role in the Paris and Amsterdam attacks? How do you communicate with Jalal Nasser? Who is Saladin? His answers never varied. He was nothing. He was no one.

And all the while the jihadist’s mobile phone pinged and flared with incoming traffic from a half-dozen different messaging and social media feeds. The phone was in the capable hands of Mordecai, a specialist in all things electronic, who was systematically mining its memory for valuable content. Two teams, one at GID headquarters, the other at King Saul Boulevard, were rapidly analyzing the intelligence haul. Together, they were drafting the responses that Mordecai sent from the phone itself, responses that would keep Nabil Awad alive in the minds of his friends, family, and fellow travelers in the global jihadist movement. One misstep, one stray word, could doom the entire operation.

It was high-wire work and a remarkable display of interservice cooperation. But then, the global war against Islamic extremism made for strange bedfellows, none stranger than Gabriel Allon and Fareed Barakat. In their youth they had been on opposite sides of the great Arab–Israeli divide, and their countries had fought a terrible conflict in which the goal of Fareed’s side was to slaughter as many Jews as possible and drive the rest into the sea. Now they were allies in a new kind of war, a war against those who killed in the name of Fareed’s ancient ancestor. It was a long war, perhaps a war without end.

On that night the war was being waged not in Yemen or Pakistan or Afghanistan but in a small isolated farmhouse near Lille, not far from the Belgian border. It was fought at two-hour intervals—sometimes two and a quarter, sometimes less—and three questions at a time. What was your precise role in the Paris and Amsterdam attacks? How do you communicate with Jalal Nasser? Who is Saladin?

“Are you sure, habibi? Are you sure that’s your answer?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

But he was not sure, not at all, and with each hooded appearance before Fareed Barakat his confidence weakened. So, too, did his will to resist. By morning he was talking to a cellmate who did not exist, and by early afternoon he could no longer walk the flight of steep stairs leading from the cellar. It was then Fareed removed the hood from his captive’s head and laid before him a photograph of a round-faced, veiled woman. Other photos followed—a weathered man wearing a black-and-white keffiyeh, a boy of sixteen or so, a beautiful young girl. They were the ones who would pay the price for Nabil Awad’s actions. The old ones would die in shame, the young ones had no future. That was the other thing about the Jordanians, thought Gabriel. They had the power to ruin lives. Not just the life of a terrorist but generations of lives. No one knew this better than Nabil Awad, who was soon sobbing in Fareed’s powerful embrace. Fareed promised to make everything all right. But first, he said gently, they were going to have a little talk.