The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,64

was no use; his life as he knew it was over.

At half past six that evening, two men of late middle age, one an elegantly dressed Arab with a bird-of-prey face, the other vaguely Jewish in appearance, departed the hotel on the rue du Lombard and climbed into a car that seemed to materialize from thin air. The hotel’s housekeeping staff entered the room a few minutes later, expecting the usual disaster after a brief stay by two men of suspect appearance. Instead, they found it in pristine condition, save for two dirty cups resting on the windowsill, one stained with tea, the other filled with cigarette butts, a clear violation of hotel policy. Management was furious, but not surprised. This was Brussels, after all, the crime capital of Western Europe. Management added one hundred euros to the bill for additional cleaning and spitefully tacked on a hefty room-service charge for food and drink that had never been ordered. Management was confident there would be no complaints.

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