The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,116

visible through the thinning clouds. Gabriel wanted to walk to the Four Seasons for his dinner with Paul Rousseau, but his CIA security detail prevailed upon him to take the SUV instead. It dropped him outside the hotel’s covered entrance and, trailed by a single bodyguard, he entered the lobby. Several bleary-eyed French officials, their suits wrinkled by transatlantic travel, waited at reception, behind a tall, broad-shouldered man, Arab in appearance, who looked as though he had borrowed Fareed Barakat’s London tailor. Only the Arab-looking man took note of the thin Israeli who was accompanied by an American security guard. Their eyes met briefly. Then the tall Arab-looking man turned his gaze once more toward the woman behind the desk. Gabriel inspected his back as he passed. He appeared to be unarmed. A leather attaché case stood upright next to his right shoe. And leaning against the front of the reception desk, black and polished, was an elegant walking stick.

Gabriel continued across the lobby and entered the restaurant. It seemed the bar had been commandeered by a convention of the hard of hearing. He gave the maître d’ a name not his own and was shown to a table overlooking Rock Creek Parkway. Better still, it had an unobstructed view of the lobby, where the tall, impeccably clad Arab was now limping slowly toward the elevators.

He had requested a suite on the uppermost floor of the hotel. His request had been granted, in no small part because the hotel’s management believed him to be a distant relative of the king of Saudi Arabia. A moment after he entered the room, there was a discreet knock at the door. It was the porter with his luggage. The tall Arab admired the vista from his window while the porter, an African, hung his garment bag in the closet and placed his suitcase on a stand in the bedroom. The usual pre-tip banter ensued, with its many offers of additional assistance, but a crisp twenty-dollar bill sent the porter gratefully toward the door. It closed softly and once again the tall Arab was alone.

His eyes were fixed on the traffic rushing along Rock Creek Parkway. His thoughts, however, were on the man whom he had seen downstairs in the lobby—the man with gray temples and distinctive green eyes. He was almost certain he had seen the man before, not in person but in photographs and news accounts. It was possible he was mistaken. In fact, he thought, it was likely the case. Even so, he had learned long ago to trust his instincts. They had been sharpened to a razor’s edge during the many years he served the Arab world’s cruelest dictator. And they had helped him to survive the long fight against the Americans, when many other men like him had been vaporized by weapons that struck from the sky with the suddenness of lightning.

He removed a laptop computer from his attaché case and connected it to the hotel’s wireless Internet system. Because the Four Seasons was popular with visiting dignitaries, the NSA had undoubtedly penetrated its network. It was no matter; the hard drive of his computer was a blank page. He opened the Internet browser and typed a name into the search box. Several photos appeared on the screen, including one from London’s Telegraph newspaper that showed a man running along a footpath outside Westminster Abbey, a gun in his hand. Linked to the photo was an article by a reporter named Samantha Cooke concerning the man’s violent death. It seemed the reporter was mistaken, because the subject of her article had just crossed the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington.

There was another knock at the door, soft, almost apologetic—the obligatory fruit plate, along with a note addressed to Mr. Omar al-Farouk, promising to fulfill his every wish. At the moment he wanted only a few minutes of uninterrupted solitude. He typed an address for the dark net, picked the lock of a password-protected door, and entered a virtual room where all was encrypted. An old friend was waiting there for him.

The old friend asked, HOW WAS YOUR TRIP?

He typed, FINE BUT YOU WILL NEVER GUESS WHO I JUST SAW.

WHO?

He typed the first and last name—the name of an archangel followed by a rather common Israeli surname. The response was a few seconds longer in coming.

YOU SHOULDN’T JOKE ABOUT THINGS LIKE THAT.

I’M NOT.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IT MEANS?

A very good question indeed. He logged off the Internet, shut