“I’ll give you an advance of one hundred thousand.”
“In that case, I can start right away.”
“I’ll send it to Cornwall the day after tomorrow,” Isherwood said. “The question is, when will I have it back?”
Gabriel made no response. He stared at his wristwatch for a moment, as though it were no longer keeping proper time, then tilted his face thoughtfully toward the skylight.
Isherwood placed a hand gently on his shoulder. “It’s not your problem, petal,” he said. “Not anymore.”
Chapter 4
Covent Garden, London
A POLICE CHECKPOINT NEAR LEICESTER SQUARE had brought the traffic on Charing Cross Road to a standstill. Gabriel and Chiara hurried through a fogbank of exhaust fumes and set out along Cranbourn Street. It was lined with pubs and coffee bars catering to the herds of tourists who seemed to wander aimlessly through Soho at all hours, regardless of the season. For now, Gabriel seemed oblivious to them. He was staring at the screen of his mobile phone. The death tolls in Paris and Copenhagen were rising.
“How bad?” asked Chiara.
“Twenty-eight on the Champs-Élysées and another thirty-seven at the Tivoli Gardens.”
“Do they have any idea who’s responsible?” asked Chiara.
“It’s still too early,” Gabriel said, “but the French think it might be al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.”
“Could they have pulled off a pair of coordinated attacks like this?”
“They have cells scattered across Europe and North America, but the analysts at King Saul Boulevard have always been skeptical of their ability to carry out a Bin Laden–style spectacular.”
King Saul Boulevard was the address of Israel’s foreign intelligence service. It had a long and deliberately misleading name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Those who worked there referred to it as the Office and nothing else. Even retired agents like Gabriel and Chiara never uttered the organization’s real name.