Now, over coffee in the salon of the Weinberg family apartment on the rue Pavée, Gabriel and Rousseau set out to repair, at least temporarily, the legacy of mistrust. Their first order of business was to hammer out a basic operational accord, a blueprint for how the two services would work together, a division of labor and authority, the rules of the road. It was to be a true partnership, though for obvious reasons Rousseau would retain preeminence over any aspects of the operation that touched French soil. In return, Gabriel would be granted complete and total access to France’s voluminous files on the thousands of Islamic extremists living within its borders: the watch reports, the e-mail and phone intercepts, the immigration records. That alone, he would say much later, had been worth the price of admission.
There were bumps in the road, but for the most part the negotiations went more smoothly than either Gabriel or Rousseau could have imagined. Perhaps it was because the two men were not so different. They were men of the arts, men of culture and learning who had devoted their lives to protecting their fellow citizens from those who would shed the blood of innocents over ideology or religion. Each had lost a spouse — one to illness, the other to terror — and each was well respected by their counterparts in Washington and London. Rousseau was no Gabriel Allon, but he had been fighting terrorists almost as long, and had the notches in his belt to prove it.
“There are some in the French political establishment,” said Gabriel, “who would like to see me behind bars because of my previous activities.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“If I am to function here without cover, I require a document giving me blanket immunity, now and forever, amen.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“And I’ll see if I can find Saladin before he attacks again.”
Rousseau frowned. “Too bad you weren’t the one to negotiate the Iran nuclear deal.”
“Too bad,” agreed Gabriel.
By then, it was approaching four o’clock. Rousseau stood, yawned elaborately, stretched his arms wide, and suggested a walk. “Doctor’s orders,” he said. “It seems I’m too fat for my own good.” They slipped from the entrance of Hannah Weinberg’s apartment house and, with Bouchard and Gabriel’s bodyguard in tow, walked along the Seine embankments toward Notre-Dame. They were a mismatched pair, the lumpy, tweedy former professor from the Sorbonne, the smallish figure in leather who seemed to float slightly above the surface of the paving stones. The sun was low in the western sky, blazing through a slit in the clouds. Rousseau shaded his eyes.
“Where do you intend to start?”
“The files, of course.”
“You’ll need help.”
“Obviously.”
“How many officers do you intend to bring into the country?”
“The exact number I need.”
“I can give you a room in our headquarters on the rue de Grenelle.”
“I prefer something a bit more private.”
“I can arrange a safe house.”
“So can I.”
Gabriel paused at a news kiosk. On the front page of Le Monde were two photographs of Safia Bourihane, the Frenchwoman of Muslim heritage, the veiled killer from the caliphate. The headline was one word in length: CATASTROPHE!
“Whose catastrophe was it?” asked Gabriel.
“The inevitable inquiry will undoubtedly find that elements of my service made terrible mistakes. But are we truly to blame? We, the humble secret servants who stand with our fingers in the dike? Or does the blame lie elsewhere?”
“Where?”
“In Washington, for example.” Rousseau set off along the embankment. “The invasion of Iraq turned the region into a cauldron. And when the new American president decided the time had come to withdraw, the cauldron boiled over. And then there was this folly we called the Arab Spring. Mubarak must go! Gaddafi must go! Assad must go!” He shook his head slowly. “It was madness, absolute madness. And now we are left with this. ISIS controls a swath of territory the size of the United Kingdom, right on the doorstep of Europe. Even Bin Laden would have never dared to dream of such a thing. And what does the American president tell us? ISIS is not Islamic. ISIS is the jayvee team.” He frowned. “What does this mean? Jayvee?”
“I think it has something to do with basketball.”
“And what does basketball have to do with a subject as serious as the rise of the caliphate?”
Gabriel only smiled.
“Does he truly believe this drivel, or is it an ignorantia affectata?”
“A willful ignorance?”
“Yes.”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“Do you know him?”
“We’ve met.”
Rousseau was obviously tempted to ask Gabriel about the circumstances of his one and only meeting with the American president, but he carried on with his lecture on ISIS instead. “The truth is,” he said, “ISIS is indeed Islamic. And it has more in common with Muhammad and his earliest followers—al salaf al salih—than some of the so-called experts care to admit. We are horrified when we read accounts of ISIS using crucifixion. We tell ourselves that these are the actions of barbarians, not men of faith. But ISIS doesn’t crucify only because it is cruel. It crucifies because, according to the Koran, crucifixion is one of the proscribed punishments for the enemies of Islam. It crucifies because it must. We civilized Westerners find this almost impossible to comprehend.”
“We don’t,” said Gabriel.
“That’s because you live in the region. You are a people of the region,” Rousseau added. “And you know full well what will happen if the likes of ISIS are ever let loose within the walls of your fortress. It will be. .”
“A holocaust,” said Gabriel.
Rousseau nodded thoughtfully. Then he led Gabriel across the Pont Notre-Dame, to the Île de la Cité. “So in the words of Lenin,” he asked, “what is to be done?”
“I am merely a spy, Monsieur Rousseau, not a general or a prime minister.”
“And if you were?”
“I would tear them out root and branch. I would turn them into losers instead of winners. Take away the land,” Gabriel added, “and there can be no Islamic State. And if there is no state, the caliphate will recede once more into history.”
“Invasion didn’t work in Iraq or Afghanistan,” replied Rousseau, “and it won’t work in Syria. Better to chip away at them from the air and with the help of regional allies. In the meantime, contain the infection so it doesn’t spread to the rest of the Middle East and Europe.”
“It’s too late for that. The contagion is already here.”
They crossed another bridge, the Petit Pont, and entered the Latin Quarter. Rousseau knew it well. He walked now with a purpose other than his health, down the boulevard Saint-Germain, into a narrow side street, until finally he stopped outside the doorway of an apartment building. It was as familiar to Gabriel as the entrance of Hannah Weinberg’s building on the rue Pavée, though it had been many years since his last visit. He glanced at the intercom. Some of the names were still the same.
Presently, the door swung open and two people, a man and a woman in their mid-twenties, emerged. Rousseau caught the door before it could close and led Gabriel into the half-light of the foyer. A passageway gave onto the shadowed internal courtyard, where Rousseau paused for a second time and pointed toward a window on the uppermost floor.
“My wife and I lived right there. When she died I gave up the apartment and headed south. There were too many memories, too many ghosts.” He pointed toward a window overlooking the opposite side of the courtyard. “A former student of mine lived over there. She was quite brilliant. Quite radical, too, as were most of my students in those days. Her name,” he added, with a sidelong glance at Gabriel, “was Denise Jaubert.”