She had finished her vodka and was drinking Mikhail’s. “I have a class tomorrow morning.”
“A class?”
She explained.
“What time?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“Save a spot for me.”
She smirked.
“Any scheduled deliveries from Rebecca?”
“I just serviced her. I probably won’t hear from her for another week or two.”
“Actually,” said Mikhail, “you’ll be hearing from her a lot sooner than you think.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow night, I suspect.”
“And after I take delivery?”
“Poof,” said Mikhail.
Eva raised her glass. “To one more night at Brussels Midi. You wouldn’t believe the customers I had tonight.”
“Bartholomew, party of two, eight o’clock.”
“How did you know?”
Mikhail picked up the polished metal device. “Maybe you should show me how this thing works.”
“It’s easy, actually.”
Mikhail flipped one of the switches. “Like this?”
“No, you idiot. Like this.”
57
Forest Hills, Washington
Forest Hills is a moneyed enclave of colonial, Tudor, and Federal-style homes located in far Northwest Washington between Connecticut Avenue and Rock Creek. The house on Chesapeake Street, however, bore little resemblance to its stately neighbors. A postmodern slab of gray perched atop its own leafy promontory, it looked more like a gun emplacement than a dwelling. The high brick wall and formidable iron gate only added to the air of belligerence.
The owner of this neighborhood eyesore was none other than the State of Israel, and the unlucky occupant was its ambassador to the United States. The current envoy, a man with many children, had forsaken the official residence for a home in an affluent golfing community in Maryland. Unoccupied, the house on Chesapeake Street had fallen into a state of disrepair, thus making it entirely suitable for use as a forward command post for a large operational team. From adversity, believed Gabriel, came unit cohesion.
For better or worse, the crumbling old house was laid out on a single level. There was a large open sitting room at the center, with a kitchen and dining room on one side and several bedrooms on the other. Gabriel established his office in the comfortable study. Yossi and Rimona—known at Brussels Midi as Simon and Vanessa Bartholomew—worked at a folding trestle table outside his door, along with Eli Lavon and Yaakov Rossman. Ilan the computer geek inhabited a private island at the opposite end of the room. The walls were covered with large-scale maps of Washington and the surrounding suburbs. There was even a rolling whiteboard for Gabriel’s personal use. On it, in his elegant Hebrew script, he had written the words of Shamron’s Eleventh Commandment.Don’t get caught...
Gabriel had accepted Shamron’s suggestion of a routine meeting to explain the presence of the team in Washington. He had not, however, informed the Americans about the “meeting” directly. Instead, he had made enough noise through insecure phone calls and e-mails to let them know he was coming. The NSA and Langley had picked up on his signals. In fact, Adrian Carter, the CIA’s longtime deputy director for operations, sent Gabriel an e-mail a few minutes after he arrived at Dulles, wondering if he was free for a drink. Gabriel told Carter he would try to squeeze him into his busy schedule but wasn’t optimistic. Carter’s sarcastic response—Who’s the lucky girl?—nearly led Gabriel to get back on his plane.
The house on Chesapeake Street was the target of NSA surveillance whenever an ambassador was present, and Gabriel and his team assumed the NSA was eavesdropping on them now. While inside the house, they maintained a benign background chatter—in the jargon, it was known as “talking to the walls”—but all operationally sensitive information they exchanged by hand signals, in writing on the whiteboard, or in muted conversations conducted outside in the garden. One such conversation occurred shortly after 2:00 a.m., when a courier arrived at the residence bearing Eva Fernandes’s SVR communications hardware, along with Mikhail’s operating instructions. Gabriel surrendered the device to Ilan, who reacted as though he had just been handed a day-old copy of theWashington Postrather than the crown jewels of the SVR.
By four that morning, Ilan had yet to crack the device’s formidable encryption firewall. Gabriel, who was watching over him with the anxiety of a parent at a recital, decided his time would be better spent catching a few hours of rest. He stretched out on the couch in the study and, lulled by the sound of tree limbs scratching against the side of the house, fell into a dreamless sleep. He woke to the sight of Ilan’s pasty face floating above him. Ilan was the cyber equivalent of Mozart. First computer code at five, first hack at eight, first covert op against the Iranian nuclear program at twenty-one. He had worked with the Americans on a malware virus code-named Olympic Games. The rest of the world knew the worm as Stuxnet. Ilan didn’t get outside much.
“Is there a problem?” asked Gabriel.
