“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Seymour said. “How are they going to get Elizabeth to walk to her own execution?”
Gabriel thought of what Ibrahim had said the night of his death in Denmark. “They’ll tell her she’s about to be released,” he said. “That way she’ll go willingly and do exactly what they tell her.”
“Bastards,” Seymour said softly. He glanced at his watch. “I take it you have all the firearms and ammunition you need?”
Gabriel nodded slowly.
“What about communications?”
“They can borrow radios from our embassy security staff,” Carter said. “Our DS agents work routinely with the Met on protective details. We can all tie in on the same secure frequency.”
Seymour looked at Gabriel. “What do we do about him? He can’t go to Westminster looking like that?”
“I’m sure we can find something for him to wear here,” Carter said. “We have two hundred people down in the basement who came to London from Washington with suitcases filled with clothing.”
“What about his face? He looks bloody awful.”
“Fixing his face, I’m afraid, would require a Christmas miracle.”
Graham Seymour frowned, walked over to the ambassador’s desk, and dialed the phone.
“I need to speak to the prime minister,” he said. “Now.”
59
The Gothic towers of Westminster Abbey-England’s national house of worship, setting for royal coronations since William the Conqueror, and burial ground for British monarchs, statesmen, and poets-sparkled in the crisp winter sunlight. The bright interval promised by the forecasters the previous morning had finally materialized.
Gabriel did not wonder if it was a good omen or bad. He was only pleased to have the radiant warmth of the sun against his swollen cheek. He was seated on a bench in Parliament Square, dressed in borrowed clothes and borrowed wraparound sunglasses over his battered eyes. The doctors at the embassy had given him enough codeine to temporarily dull the pain of his injuries. Even so, he was leaning slightly against Mikhail for support. The younger man’s leather jacket was still damp from a night pursuing Gabriel across Essex by motorcycle. His right hand was tapping a nervous rhythm against his faded blue jeans.
“Stop,” said Gabriel. “You’re giving me a fucking headache.”
Mikhail stopped for a moment, then started up again. Gabriel stared toward the triangular-shaped lawn on the north side of the Abbey. Adrian Carter was standing beneath a bare-limbed tree along Victoria Street, wearing the ushanka hat he had worn the afternoon they had walked together in the Tivoli gardens of Copenhagen. Standing next to him, with a fedora on his head, dark glasses over his eyes, and a wire in his ear, was Ambassador Robert Halton. And next to Halton was Sarah Bancroft, formerly of the Phillips Collection museum in Washington, D.C., lately of the Central Intelligence Agency, and now a fully indoctrinated citizen of the night. Of all those present, only Sarah truly had a sense of the atrocity that was about to occur. Would she watch? Gabriel wondered. Or this time would she take the opportunity to look the other way?
He glanced around the sunlit streets of Westminster. Eli Lavon and Dina Sarid were loitering in Great George Street, Yaakov and Yossi were flirting with Major Rimona Stern outside the Houses of Parliament, and Mordecai was standing in the shadow of Big Ben with a tourist guidebook open in his hands. Graham Seymour was in an unmarked command vehicle on the other side of Victoria Street in Storey’s Gate, along with the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the chief of SO19, the special operations division. Twenty of SO19’s best gunmen had been summoned at short notice and were now scattered around the Abbey and the surrounding streets of Westminster. Gabriel could hear their clipped communications in his ear, but thus far he had only been able to pick out a half dozen of them. It didn’t matter if he knew their identities. It only mattered that they knew his.
“Was it bad?” Mikhail asked. “The beatings, I mean.”
“They were just having a bit of fun,” said Gabriel dismissively. He was in no mood to relive the previous night. “It was nothing compared to what Ibrahim endured at the hands of the Egyptian secret police.”
“Did it feel good to shoot him like that?”
“Ishaq?”
The younger man nodded.
“No, Mikhail, it didn’t feel good. But then, it didn’t feel bad either.” Gabriel lifted his hand and pointed toward the north entrance of the Abbey. “Look at all those people over there. Many of them would soon be dead if I hadn’t acted the way I did.”
“If we don’t hit our targets, they still may die.” Mikhail looked at Gabriel. “You sound as if you’re trying to convince yourself that you were morally justified in torturing him.”
“I suppose I am. I crossed a line. But then we’ve all crossed a line. The Americans crossed a line after 9/11, and now they’re trying to find their way back to the other side. Unfortunately, the goals of the terrorists haven’t changed-and the generation soon to emerge from the killing fields of Iraq is going to be much more violent and volatile than the ones who came out of Afghanistan.”
“We dare to fight back, and the terrorists accuse us of being the real terrorists.”
“It’s their secret weapon, Mikhail. Get used to it.”
Gabriel heard a crackle in his earpiece. He looked toward the north entrance of the Abbey and saw the vast doors swing slowly open. Graham Seymour had arranged for the Abbey’s staff to admit the Christmas worshippers earlier than was customary, a simple maneuver that would drastically reduce the number of potential targets. Gabriel only hoped the shaheeds didn’t deduce from the change that they were walking into a trap.
“Where was I?” Gabriel asked.
“You were talking about secret weapons.”
“Last night, Mikhail. Where was I last night?”
“Harwich.”
“I’ve always wanted to visit Harwich,” Gabriel said. “How much did Chiara see?”
“Only the end, when they were loading you into the van.” Mikhail put a hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “I wish you would have let me shoot that bastard for you.”
“Relax, Mikhail. It’s Christmas.”
“Not for us,” Mikhail said. “I only hope Ishaq wasn’t lying.”
“He wasn’t,” said Gabriel.
“What if they bring her somewhere else?”
“They won’t. You have your cigarettes?”
Mikhail tapped the left-hand pocket of his jacket.
“And your lighter?” asked Gabriel.
“I have everything. We just need Elizabeth.”
“She’s coming,” said Gabriel. “It will be over soon.”
The car was a Ford Fiesta, pale gray and well worn. Abel, the one with green eyes, handled the driving, while Cain sat next to her in the backseat. Absent their balaclava masks, she saw their faces for the first time and was shocked by their youth. They wore heavy coats, were carefully shaven, and smelled of sandalwood cologne. Cain was squeezing her arm with his left hand and holding a gun in his right. Elizabeth tried not to look at the weapon or to even think about it. Instead she stared silently out her window. It had been more than two weeks since she had been outside; two weeks since she had seen another human other than Cain and Abel and their masked accomplices; two weeks since she had seen the sun or had possessed even the most basic sense of time. The window was her portal on reality. Cain and Abel were from the world of the damned, she thought. On the other side of the glass was the land of the living.
For a few minutes her surroundings were unfamiliar. Then the entrance of the Camden Town Underground station flashed past, and from there she was able to track their route south across London. Despite the pleasant weather, the streets were oddly quiet. In the Tottenham Court Road she saw holiday wreaths and realized it was probably Christmas morning.