it with water from the bathroom tap and joined Fareed in the window. Directly opposite the hotel, on the ground floor of a modern seven-story office block, was XTC Printing and Copying.
“What time did he arrive?” asked the Jordanian.
“Promptly at ten.”
“A model employee.”
“So it would seem.”
The Jordanian’s dark eyes swept the street, a falcon looking for prey.
“Don’t bother, Fareed. You’ll never find them.”
“Mind if I try?”
“Be my guest.”
“The blue van, the two men in the parked car at the end of the block, the girl sitting alone in the window of the coffeehouse.”
“Wrong, wrong, and wrong.”
“Who are the two men in the car?”
“They’re waiting for their friend to come out of the pharmacy.”
“Or maybe they’re from the Belgian security service.”
“The last thing we need to worry about is the Sûreté. Unfortunately,” added Gabriel gloomily, “neither do the terrorists who live in Molenbeek.”
“Tell me about it,” muttered Fareed. “They produce more terrorists here in Belgium than we do.”
“Now that’s saying something.”
“You know,” said Fareed, “we wouldn’t have this problem if it wasn’t for you Israelis. You upended the natural order of things in the Middle East, and now we are all paying the price.”
Gabriel stared into the street. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, after all,” he said quietly.
“You and I working together?”
Gabriel nodded.
“You need friends wherever you can find them, habibi. You should consider yourself lucky.”
The water boiled, the kettle shut down with a click.
“Would you mind terribly?” asked the Jordanian. “I’m afraid I’m helpless in the kitchen.”
“Sure, Fareed. It’s not as if I have anything better to do.”
“Sugar, please. Lots of sugar.”
Gabriel poured water into a mug, dropped a stale teabag into it, and added three packets of sugar. The Jordanian blew on the tea furtively before raising the mug to his lips.
“How is it?” asked Gabriel.
“Ambrosia.” Fareed started to light a cigarette but stopped when Gabriel pointed toward the NO SMOKING sign. “Couldn’t you have booked a smoking room?”
“They were sold out.”
Fareed returned the cigarette to his gold case and the case to the pocket of his blazer. “Maybe you’re right,” he said with a frown. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.”
They saw him at eleven that morning when he left the shop to collect four takeaway coffees for his colleagues, and again at one that afternoon when he took his lunch break at a café around the corner. Finally, at six, they watched as he left the shop for the last time, trailed by the meekest-looking soul in all of Brussels and by a couple—a tall tweedy man and a woman with childbearing hips—who could scarcely keep their hands off one another. Though he did not know it, his life as he knew it was almost at its end. Soon, thought Gabriel, he would exist only in cyberspace. He would be a virtual person, ones and zeros, digital dust. But only if they could get him cleanly, without the knowledge of his comrades or the Belgian police, without a trace. It would be no easy feat in a city like Brussels, a city of irregular streets and dense population. But as the great Ari Shamron once said, nothing worth doing is ever easy.
Six bridges span the wide industrial canal that separates the center of Brussels from Molenbeek. To cross any of them is to leave the West and enter the Islamic world. As usual, Nabil Awad made the passage over a graffiti-sprayed pedestrian footbridge upon which few native Belgians ever dared to set foot. On the Molenbeek side, parked along an unsightly quay, was a battered van, formerly white, with a sliding side door. Nabil Awad seemed not to notice it; he had eyes only for the lanky man, a non-Arab, walking along the pea-soup-green waters of the canal. It was rare to see a Western face in Molenbeek at night, and rarer still that the owner of the face did not have a friend or two for protection.
Nabil Awad, ever vigilant, paused next to the van to allow the man to pass, which was his mistake. For at that instant the side door slid open on well-greased runners, and two pairs of trained hands wrenched him inside. The man with the non-Arab face climbed into the front passenger seat, the van eased away from the curb. As it passed through the Muslim village known as Molenbeek, past sandaled men and veiled women, past halal markets and Turkish pizza stands, the man in back, now blindfolded and bound, struggled for his life. It