The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,70

searched, and compromised in every conceivable way. They watched him eat, they watched him sleep, they watched him pray, and they peered quietly over his shoulder with the silence of curious children while he toiled late into the night at his computer. He had not one laptop but two, one that was connected to the Internet and an identical model with no links to the cyber universe whatsoever, or so he believed. If he was communicating with elements of Saladin’s network, it was not readily apparent. Jalal Nasser might have been a committed jihadist terrorist, but online he was a model resident of Great Britain and a loyal subject of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

But was he aware of the flash drive that lay at the base of a power pole in a pastoral suburb of Brussels called Dilbeek? And did he know that the man who had supposedly placed it there was now in Jordan tending to a gravely ill father? And did he find the confluence of events—the dead drop and the sudden travel of a trusted lieutenant—a bit too coincidental for comfort? Gabriel was certain it was so. And the proof, he declared, was the failure of the courier to clean out the drop site. Gabriel’s mood darkened with each passing hour. He stalked the many rooms of Château Treville, he walked the footpaths of the gardens, he scoured the watch reports. Mainly, he stared at a computer screen, at an image of a concrete power pole rising from a tangle of gorse bush, quite possibly the most hideous image in the history of a proud service.

Late in the afternoon of the third day, the deluge that had flooded Dilbeek laid siege to the banlieues north of Paris. Eli Lavon had been caught on the streets of Aubervilliers, and when he returned to Château Treville he might have been mistaken for a lunatic who had decided to take a swim fully clothed. Gabriel was standing before his computer as though he had been bronzed. His green eyes, however, were burning brightly.

“Well?” asked Lavon.

Gabriel reached down, tapped a few keys on the keyboard, and clicked on the play icon on the screen. A few seconds later a motorcyclist flashed across it, right to left, in a black blur.

“Do you know how many motorcyclists have passed by that spot today?” asked Lavon.

“Thirty-eight,” answered Gabriel. “But only one did this.”

He replayed the video in slow motion and then clicked on the pause icon. At the instant the image froze, the visor of the motorcyclist’s helmet was pointed directly at the base of the power pole.

“Maybe he was distracted by something,” said Lavon.

“Like what?”

“A beer can with a flash drive inside it.”

Gabriel smiled for the first time in three days. He tapped a few keys on the computer, and the live image reappeared on the screen. Can by a Pole, he thought. It was suddenly the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

They saw him for a second time at seven that evening and again at half past eight, as dusk was darkening the image like a painting being slowly devoured by surface grime and yellowed varnish. On both occasions he swept across the screen from left to right. And both times, upon slow-motion reexamination, his head turned almost imperceptibly toward the gorse bush at the base of the concrete power pole. When he returned for a third time it was long past dark, and the image was black as pitch. This time, he stopped and killed the bike’s lights. Mordecai switched the camera from optical to infrared, and a moment later Gabriel and Eli Lavon watched as a yellow-and-red man-shaped blob slipped quickly in and out of the gorse at the edge of the Kerselaarstraat.

The USB flash drive was identical to the model used by Nabil Awad for previous communications, with one critical additional feature: its printed circuit board had been fitted with a tracking device that allowed the team to monitor its movements. From Dilbeek it moved to the city center of Brussels, where it spent a restful evening in a rather good hotel. Then, in the morning, it boarded the 8:52 Eurostar at Brussels Midi, and by ten o’clock it was moving along a platform at St. Pancras International in London. Yaakov Rossman managed to snap a photo of the courier as he crossed the arrivals hall. Later, they would identity him as an Egyptian national who lived off the Edgware Road and worked as a production assistant