LITMIR.BIZ

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lips were moving. Final prayers . . . The street comedian wrongly assumed the dead man wished to take part in the performance. Smiling, he took two steps toward him but froze when he saw the hands emerge from the pockets of the overcoat. The left was slightly open. The right was bunched into a fist, with the thumb cocked at a right angle. Still, Gabriel hesitated. What if there was no detonator? What if it was a pen or a cylinder of lip balm? He had to be sure. Tell me your intentions, he thought. Sign your name.

      The dead man turned to face the market. The patrons looking down from the balcony of the Punch and Judy laughed nervously, as did a few of the spectators gathered in the piazza. In his mind, Gabriel silenced the laughter and froze the image. The scene appeared to him as though painted by the hand of Canaletto. The figures were stock-still; only Gabriel, the restorer, was free to move among them. He slipped through the front row of the spectators and focused his gaze on the spot at the back of the skull. Firing at a downward angle was not possible. But there was another potential solution to prevent collateral casualties: an upward line of fire would carry Gabriel’s round safely over the heads of the spectators and into the façade of the adjacent building. He pictured the maneuver in sequence—the cross-handed draw, the crouch, the shot, the advance—and waited for the dead man to sign his name.

      The silence in Gabriel’s head was broken by a drunken shout from the balcony of the Punch and Judy—a command for the martyr to move out of the way and allow the performance to continue. The dead man responded by lifting his arms above his head like a long-distance runner breaking the finishing tape. On the inside of the right wrist was a thin wire leading from the detonator switch to the explosives. It was all the evidence Gabriel needed. He reached into his jacket and seized the butt of his Beretta. Then, as the dead man screamed “Allahu Akbar,” Gabriel dropped to one knee and leveled the weapon toward his target. Remarkably, the shot was clear, with no chance of secondary casualties. But as Gabriel was about to squeeze the trigger, two powerful hands pulled the gun downward, and the weight of two men drove him toward the paving stones.

      At the instant he hit the ground, he heard a sound like the crack of thunder and felt a wave of scorching air wash over him. For a few seconds, Gabriel heard nothing more. Then the screaming started, a single shriek, followed by an aria of wailing. Gabriel lifted his head and saw a scene from his nightmares. It was body parts and blood. It was Baghdad on the Thames.

      Chapter 7

      New Scotland Yard, London

      THERE ARE FEW MORE GRIEVOUS sins for a professional intelligence officer, even a retired one, than to land in the custody of the local authorities. Because Gabriel had long occupied a nether region between the overt and secret worlds, he had suffered such a fate more often than most of his fellow travelers. Experience had taught him there was an established ritual for such occasions, a sort of Kabuki dance that must be allowed to reach its conclusion before higher authority can intervene. He knew the steps well. Fortunately, so did his hosts.

      He had been taken into custody within minutes of the attack and driven at high speed to New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of London’s Metropolitan Police Service. Upon arrival, he was delivered to a windowless interrogation room where he was treated for numerous cuts and abrasions and given a cup of tea, which he left untouched. A detective superintendent from the Counterterrorism Command arrived in short order. He examined Gabriel’s identification with the skepticism it deserved and then tried to determine the chain of events that led “Mr. Rossi” to draw a concealed firearm in Covent Garden the instant before a terrorist detonated his suicide belt. Gabriel had been tempted to pose a few questions of his own. Namely, he wanted to know why two Special Firearms Officers of the Met’s SO19 division had chosen to neutralize him rather than an obvious terrorist about to commit an act of indiscriminate mass murder. Instead, he responded to each of the detective’s inquiries by reciting a telephone number. “Call it,” he said, tapping the spot where the detective had written the number in his notebook. “It will ring in a very large building not far from here. You’ll know the name of the man who answers. At least you should.”

      Gabriel did not know the identity of the officer who finally dialed the number, nor did he know precisely when the call was placed. He only knew that his internment inside New Scotland Yard lasted far longer than was necessary. Indeed, it was approaching midnight by the time the detective escorted him down a series of brightly lit corridors toward the entrance of the building. In the detective’s left hand was a manila envelope filled with Gabriel’s possessions. Judging from the size and shape, it did not contain a 9mm Beretta pistol.

      Outside, the pleasant weather of the afternoon had given way to a driving rain. Waiting beneath the shelter of the glass portico, engine idling softly, was a dark Jaguar limousine. Gabriel accepted the envelope from the detective and opened the rear door of the car. Seated inside, one leg crossed elegantly over the other, was a man who looked as though he had been designed for the task. He wore a perfectly fitted charcoal gray suit and a silver necktie that matched the color of his hair. Normally, his pale eyes were inscrutable, but now they revealed the strain of a long and difficult night. As deputy director of MI5, Graham Seymour bore a heavy responsibility for protecting the British mainland from the forces of extremist Islam. And once again, despite the best efforts of his department, extremist Islam had won.

      Though the two men had a long professional history, Gabriel knew little of Graham Seymour’s personal life. He knew that Seymour was married to a woman named Helen whom he adored and that he had a son who managed other people’s money for the New York branch of an important British financial house. Beyond that, Gabriel’s knowledge of Seymour’s private affairs was drawn from the Office’s voluminous file. He was a relic of Britain’s glorious past, a by-product of the upper middle classes who had been bred, educated, and programmed to lead. He believed in God but not with much fervor. He believed in his country but wasn’t blind to its shortcomings. He was good at golf and other games but was willing to lose to a lesser opponent in service of a worthy cause. He was a man admired and, most important, a man who could be trusted—an attribute rare among spies and secret policemen.

      Graham Seymour was not, however, a man with unlimited patience, as evidenced by his dour expression as the Jaguar pulled into the street. He removed a copy of the next morning’s Telegraph from the seatback pocket and dropped it in Gabriel’s lap. The headline read REIGN OF TERROR. Beneath it were three photographs depicting the aftermath of the three attacks. Gabriel searched the photo of Covent Garden for any sign of his presence but saw only the victims. It was a picture of failure, he thought—eighteen people dead, dozens more critically injured, including one of the officers who had tackled him. And it was all because of the shot Gabriel had not been allowed to take.

      “Bloody awful day,” Seymour said wearily. “I suppose the only way it could get any worse is if the press finds out about you. By the time the conspiracy theorists are finished, they’ll have the Islamic world believing that the attacks were plotted and carried out by the Office.”

      “You can be sure that’s already the case.” Gabriel returned the newspaper and asked, “Where’s my wife?”

      “She’s at your hotel. I have a team staying just down the hall.” Seymour paused, then added, “Needless to say, she’s not terribly pleased with you.”

      “How can you tell?” Gabriel’s ears were still ringing from the concussion of the blast. He closed his eyes and asked how the SO19 teams had been able to locate him so quickly.

      “As you might imagine, we have a wide array of technical means at our disposal.”

      “Such as my mobile phone and your network of CCTV cameras?”

      “Precisely,” Seymour said. “We were able to pinpoint you within a few seconds of receiving Chiara’s call. We forwarded the information to Gold Command, the Met’s operational crisis center, and they immediately dispatched two teams of Specialist Firearms Officers.”

      “They must have been in the vicinity.”

      “They were,” Seymour confirmed. “We were on high alert after the attacks in Paris and Copenhagen. A number of teams were already deployed in the financial district and spots where tourists tend to congregate.”

      “So

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